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eviltastic posted:Yeah this is what I've never followed. How is information about economic relationships of more than one degree of separation from a given transaction made known to the parties to the transaction? I'm unclear on how this works for either intended transactions or for non-transaction research. Like, suppose I want to buy conflict-free diamonds or to quantify the influence the Koch brothers exercise over a population of 535 specific people. The needed information purportedly exists, so how do I obtain it? Do I have to do business with someone and wait for feedback? Is there a mechanism that automatically conveys information, or forcing someone to tell me if I ask? Every transaction ever made is downloaded directly into your cyborg interface and you are expected to use this to avoid the portion of the population that is doing something unethical. The fact that this is much more likely to find the Second Coming of Jesus because there will literally be one guy left over is lost on him.
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Apr 10, 2014 23:55
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eviltastic posted:Yeah this is what I've never followed. How is information about economic relationships of more than one degree of separation from a given transaction made known to the parties to the transaction? I'm unclear on how this works for either intended transactions or for non-transaction research. Like, suppose I want to buy conflict-free diamonds or to quantify the influence the Koch brothers exercise over a population of 535 specific people. The needed information purportedly exists, so how do I obtain it? Do I have to do business with someone and wait for feedback? Is there a mechanism that automatically conveys information, or forcing someone to tell me if I ask? If I recall from the video, we'll use our cyborg eyes/Google Glass to see super saiyan auras around people representing their financial karma, so presumably people who do business with bad companies will have comically poorly drawn horns and fangs superimposed over them. Particularly bad people may have big twirly mustaches and top hats.
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Apr 11, 2014 00:04
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Little Blackfly posted:What RA obviously wants out of all this is community enforced ethical consumption. Any attempt to purchase products or services from nodes caries an explicit economic cost, so presumably it would disincentivize dealing with those nodes. Basically every transaction people would do between each other would become a complex calculation as to how much of your economic karma you'd want to risk. It's a lot like a libertarian's fetishizaiton of contracts. Yeah, that's what I've been thinking the entire time, I just couldn't decipher the word salad enough to confirm it. RA, are you a libertarian?
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Apr 11, 2014 00:24
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Badera posted:Yeah, that's what I've been thinking the entire time, I just couldn't decipher the word salad enough to confirm it. RA, are you a libertarian? This may not be a popular position to take in D&D but I really feel you're being grossly, grossly unfair to libertarians here. For all the eminently reasonable objects to their worldview and philosophy you have to admit that their understanding of economics, social systems and human behavior is more comprehensive and accurate than Eripsa's, and their ideas, if fully implemented, would do less harm and result in a better society than any version of Strangecoin proposed thus far.
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Apr 11, 2014 00:33
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LGD posted:This may not be a popular position to take in D&D but I really feel you're being grossly, grossly unfair to libertarians here. For all the eminently reasonable objects to their worldview and philosophy you have to admit that their understanding of economics, social systems and human behavior is more comprehensive and accurate than Eripsa's, and their ideas, if fully implemented, would do less harm and result in a better society than any version of Strangecoin proposed thus far. Eripsa is basically peak Californian, and the Californian ideology is an outgrowth of libertarianism.
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Apr 11, 2014 00:59
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Republican Vampire posted:Eripsa is basically peak Californian, and the Californian ideology is an outgrowth of libertarianism. I dunno about that. While there is considerable overlap between utopian technofetishists and libertarians, they're not entirely synonymous even among Californian tech/startup whackadoos. If I remember right from one of the earlier iterations of this thread, Eripsa doesn't consider himself to be libertarian, though I may be misremembering that.
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Apr 11, 2014 01:04
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He's a postmodernist/Continental philosopher -- not only has he repeatedly stated his allegiance to such in the past, in this thread he's engaging in a fundamental Deleuzian tactic of invoking math/science concepts that he doesn't understand and then acting as if they prove his normative points about society. That group tends to be basically a new version of Marxism with "democratic" or "liberation" pretenses. Not libertarians except in the same way that other leftists might occasionally share a position, e.g. anti-war, with libertarians.
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Apr 11, 2014 01:14
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Captain_Maclaine posted:I dunno about that. While there is considerable overlap between utopian technofetishists and libertarians, they're not entirely synonymous even among Californian tech/startup whackadoos. If I remember right from one of the earlier iterations of this thread, Eripsa doesn't consider himself to be libertarian, though I may be misremembering that. They're not really synonymous, but Californians overwhelmingly believe in the ability of the market-regulated entities to replace government and government regulated entities. To be honest it just comes off, to me, as libertarianism in a silly hat.
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Apr 11, 2014 01:17
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I'm stuck in a car in western Wyoming, and most of the people in this car are under 10. I've made progress on the spec but I'm still struggling with the coupling relation, and I can't work on that here. So I have nothing better to do than answer the (interesting, provocative) questions in this thread. First, this corporate stuff has nothing to do with the spec and doesn't change it in any way. I'm assuming all the agents in the network are persons, and my most recent post is essentially the claim that corporations are persons. I don't mean this to be a substantive claim beyond the ontology of the strangecoin network. So the process of creating a corporate agent would be analogous to creating an account for your child: you are essentially just adding a note to the network. In the case of corporations, there would probably be some restrictions on the configurations of support etc that would be allowed in the creation of a corporate agent, which would have to be spelled out in the procedure for corporate creation, but that's something that can be done entirely independent of the proposal on the table. I've mentioned corporations only because it's a standing (and huge) political problem that strangecoin addresses (but by no means solves), for the people demanding some concrete reason to care. Eviltastic is right that this couldn't be done by only going on generation deep. I restricted myself to one generation for the purposes on the example because I still don't understand how the coupling is supposed to work. Conceptually, the issue is that if X and Y are coupled, then a change to X's income also changes Y's which changes X, etc. However, even if we calculate an infinite number of changes, it should only have some finite impact on the income of each party, especially if we restrict strangecoin to finite precision, and the coupling value c<1. In other words, the changes brought about by coupling should converge on some finite value. But I'm still struggling to figure it how to express this formally. In any case, the generations thing can be solved in the order of operations by having an upkeep phase that accounts for links one removed from the previous transaction. So if x and y are coupled, and y and z are coupled, and something changes about x's balance, then in this step you calculate x and y, and in the next step during upkeep you calculate the unaccounted relation between y and z. Since the coupling relation is less than 1, the further away you get from the initial transaction, the weaker the necessary changes will be, and we can be ignored below the precision of the network. This issue (of coupling across generations) isn't worked out entirely, but it's a major consideration in the spec I'm working on. If anyone can throw out ideas or suggestions on the mathematical formalizations needed for coupling, I'm all ears. I've spent a lot of time reading about fixed point attractors but I'm struggling. I'm not a libertarian. Libertarians argue explicitly that human social systems can't be managed at large scales, and I'm trying to describe a system that does exactly that. I have no faith in free markets or individualism. In strangecoin world everyone stinks of unethical behavior, simply because our networks run so deep. We'd have to figure how to deal with ethical grey areas instead of pretending they don't exist. So devil horns are probably a bit too crude. Sayian auras are more amorphous and are probably better suited to expressing a complex social situation. So for instance, imagine the Koch brothers being exemplified by some comically evil shade of bright red, and everyone the interact with taking on some shades of the same hue, with an intensity reflecting the depth of integration. So as an agent in the network I don't have to know anything about the Koch brothers, or even any deep knowledge of the network structure. Instead I might just remember to "stay away from red things", and judge in particular cases whether something is red enough to warrant suspicion. I think questions concerning the human-network interface for strangecoin is probably as important as the details of the network itself, hence all the discussion of behavioral economics. But I think the interface questions are conceptually distinct from the implementation itself, and isn't necessary for completing the spec. This thread is much more interesting when I'm not here.
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Apr 11, 2014 02:00
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The best moments of comedy are when someone tosses out an idea that everyone but Erpisa realizes is a ridiculously satirical and mocking one, and he just runs with it.
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Apr 11, 2014 02:05
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But the Koch brothers pay their bills on time and often provide lavish funding to people and organizations they find useful. Wouldn't I in fact be drawn to that burning crimson aura? Wouldn't the resultant empinkening of my own aura be desirable to a certain self-selecting group of people?
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Apr 11, 2014 02:10
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There have been multiple suggestions around the infinite recursion, because its the first troubling bit most of us hit. One is even implemented in the code.
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Apr 11, 2014 02:15
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SedanChair posted:But the Koch brothers pay their bills on time and often provide lavish funding to people and organizations they find useful. Wouldn't I in fact be drawn to that burning crimson aura? Wouldn't the resultant empinkening of my own aura be desirable to a certain self-selecting group of people? Yep! Extremism is polarizing. The point of strangecoin isn't to eliminate people like the Kochs (while somehow saving their benevolent alternatives), but rather just to highlight their influence on the network in a way that is immediately accessible in the transactions themselves, so that the individuals engaged in the transaction can make informed (if not entirely rational) decisions.
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Apr 11, 2014 02:18
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But you've proposed this kind of angelic/demonic aura duality. Who determines which side is red and which is white? There clearly appear to be value judgments going on. Who defines them? The clockwork elves?
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Apr 11, 2014 02:27
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Eprisa have you been binge drinking on this car ride to pass the time? Because this is some awfully stupid poo poo even for you.
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Apr 11, 2014 02:27
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Strangecoin: Sayian auras are more amorphous
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Apr 11, 2014 02:30
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SedanChair posted:But you've proposed this kind of angelic/demonic aura duality. Who determines which side is red and which is white? There clearly appear to be value judgments going on. Who defines them? The clockwork elves? The Koch brothers are hilariously evil as a matter of political reality, but I'm not assuming some way to quantify the difference between good and evil or anything so silly. The Koch brothers just get assigned some color on the spectrum (red25 or whatever) no better or worse intrinsically than any other. The color make clear their influence on the network, and agents decide for themselves how they will respond to that influence. It would be the equivalent of, for instance, having politicians wear corporate logo patches like NASCAR divers representing campaign contributions. Seeing your favorite brands on a politician might attract you to them mor, and that's fine; but now you're thinking with networks. RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 02:39
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But why red25, and what impinges on where you are in the red green continuum?
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Apr 11, 2014 02:45
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This problem clearly must be solved a radical reworking of all social and economic interactions and not, you know, better campaign finance disclosure laws. I am also proposing to put in place satellite-based lasers capable of starting my BBQ.
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Apr 11, 2014 02:47
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Apr 11, 2014 02:56
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RealityApologist posted:Eviltastic is right that this couldn't be done by only going on generation deep. I restricted myself to one generation for the purposes on the example because I still don't understand how the coupling is supposed to work. Conceptually, the issue is that if X and Y are coupled, then a change to X's income also changes Y's which changes X, etc. However, even if we calculate an infinite number of changes, it should only have some finite impact on the income of each party, especially if we restrict strangecoin to finite precision, and the coupling value c<1. In other words, the changes brought about by coupling should converge on some finite value. But I'm still struggling to figure it how to express this formally. I'll take, what is a limit for $100. I'm having trouble understanding what you are trying to accomplish here, your probably looking for something like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_differential_equation http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathemat...t-coefficients/ But if you are struggling to find the technique to solve your maths problem, you're definitely going to struggle to actually solve it. The bigger question remains, what sort of practicality is a system that requires you to do undergraduate maths in order to calculate your net value? If the average person can not grasp the consequence of a transaction, how can an informed decision be practically made? Also the upkeep issue is a non-problem. The upkeep phase occurs in-between whatever you set the rate of the system (once a second, minute, whatver...). However the bigger problem becomes the need to guarantee that the upkeep can be performed within a fixed time. Otherwise you can give up on that idea and have a variable transaction speed like bitcoin (updates whenever a maths problem is solved), which is terrible for financial transactions. Tokamak fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 03:06
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Oh my mistake, 'upkeep,' despite being named after MtG and introduced as a new concept, is a hack job of interpreting the last_step calculations we were discussing earlier in the thread. It blurs the line between descriptive math and gussied up interpretations of the effects which kinda threw me.
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Apr 11, 2014 03:07
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Yiggy posted:But why red25, and what impinges on where you are in the red green continuum? The Strangecoin equivalent of ICANN. Again I think these are interface issues distinct from the proposal so I've spent less time discussing/thinking about this issue in an effort to stay "focused". But the idea is that everyone has a unique hue assigned as an identity, but their overall glowing aura will reflect not just their hue but also the various network entanglements they've committed to. Imagine the aura is stratified into layers of color, with the width of the layer signaling the strength of that influence. So I'm blue15, and I glow as if I'm covered in a thick, deep blanket of blue15. But my extended family has incorporated (id=green196) and serves as a primary source of support and coupling, so my blue blanket appears as if it's set alight in the green flame of my family's color. My employer's orange255 occupies a strata in the aura above that, and my many other more minor transactions appear as sparks flying off my aura like solar flares. The interface should quickly convey a lot of information about the extent and distribution of my various network obligations, and if I know of particular shades to be wary (for whatever reason) I can tell at a glance if the person I'm transacting with represents interests contrary to my own. Now of course the capacity for hue discrimination isn't anywhere near sensitive enough to distinguish between the red25 of the koch brothers and the red26 of Doctors without Borders (or whatever), so there's obviously some technical work to do on making a realistic visual interface (some way to exaggerate the visual differences between hues in cases of potential conflict). I'm just trying to give the impression of the idea that's sufficient to answer the questions arising in the thread, since this seems to be a rather underdeveloped aspect of the view. This also pertains to the discussion of the cognitive load on individual agents; reading auras isn't trivial, but it's a lot more reasonable than expecting users to be experts at network engineering.
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Apr 11, 2014 03:14
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If you wanted to accomplish 90% of Strangecoin's goals in a practical way, you could devise a policy for public corporate accounting and a framework for watchdog groups using that data to inform consumers. Edit: RA, what if someone refuses to participate in Strangecoin? CheesyDog fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 03:14
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Are you just mocking yourself at this point?
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Apr 11, 2014 03:17
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CheesyDog posted:If you wanted to accomplish 90% of Strangecoin's goals in a practical way, you could devise a policy for public corporate accounting and a framework for watchdog groups using that data to inform consumers. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where are the computers, the algorithms, the self-organisation? You mean people have to go out of their way, and work to identify unethical practices? I want to live in a world where we can put aside practical concerns and frame all of our problems in my pet cyber-utopia philosophy. And you'll love me for it!
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Apr 11, 2014 03:21
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Tokamak posted:Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where are the computers, the algorithms, the self-organisation? You mean people have to go out of their way, and work to identify unethical practices? I want to live in a world where we can put aside practical concerns and frame all of our problems in my pet cyber-utopia philosophy.  MY
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Apr 11, 2014 03:22
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RealityApologist posted:The Strangecoin equivalent of ICANN. What if I'm colour blind, or just straight up blind? Why not just represent someone's aura with numerical value? Lets for the sake of this argument call this numerical aura, a strangecoin. seriously  Edit: While I think the people telling you to see a doctor, were a bit rude about it. If this sort of behaviour in your thought process is common in your everyday life, you might benefit from a doctor checking it out. I do understand the health situation in America; so I have sympathy if for financial reasons, you need to avoid the medical system for non-emergencies. Tokamak fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 03:24
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RealityApologist posted:The Strangecoin equivalent of ICANN. So who is in charge of assigning people Dark Side domain signifiers and Lightside signifiers. Is there a committee or delegated authority or is it a crowd sourced decision? Twitter-esque metadata or trends? How does this avoid tyranny of the majority like situations or the too often dim wisdom of crowds?
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Apr 11, 2014 03:47
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Tokamak posted:I'll take, what is a limit for $100. The second source will help. I've read the first tab a dozen times over the last few weeks; my research always ends up with me thinking about attractive fixed points and Banach spaces but this should be easier than that. I think I understand the issue conceptually, but I'm struggling with the formalization necessary for expressing it in a technical spec. When X and Y converge, they adjust each others income to reflect the changes in the other; even if this process iterates infinitely, it should converge to a single, finite Income value for both. This value can be computed in a single timestep in the network. The upkeep issue is a distinct but related issue; these are both infinities that need to be resolved, but the upkeep refers to problems in chains of couplings, and it can't be computed in a single timestep. There's no "right" way to do this, we just need to specify some particular way. So the particular way in the proposal I'm writing is as follows: if X is coupled to Y, who is coupled to Z, who is coupled to W, ..., then in this timestep compute X and Y, and pass off the residual chain to the next timestep, which starts by computing Y and Z, and passes the chain off to the next time step. Eventually the impact of the coupling chain will fade below the precision of the network and can be dropped from the upkeep stage; making sure that upkeeps are manageable is a matter of ensuring that the chain decays in a reasonable time. The cost of this implementation is a lag in the system; distant couplings won't be reflected for some number of timesteps after the transaction occurs. This isn't too much of a problem if distant couplings also have a diminishing impact of future transactions, but it's something to be aware of. I think I can formalize the latter well enough for the spec. But the coupling relationship itself is giving me hell. I will be watching math lectures tonight for sure. edit: irrelevant RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 04:10 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 03:54
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Tokamak posted:Edit: The guy needs a therapist, not a doctor. Seriously, please, RA, get help. Your thought process isn't healthy.
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Apr 11, 2014 04:33
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RealityApologist posted:I restricted myself to one generation for the purposes on the example because I still don't understand how the coupling is supposed to work. Could this be a sign of self-awareness? RealityApologist posted:I think I can formalize the latter well enough for the spec. But the coupling relationship itself is giving me hell. I will be watching math lectures tonight for sure. Aaaaaalmost but nope. I'm glad you worked out for yourself that this is complex. Unfortunately, you made a drastic error at assuming that this means you need to devote more time to work on the idea. Maybe next week you'll start wondering if this is a crippling flaw in your proposal, not a feature. Start from here: RealityApologist posted:This also pertains to the discussion of the cognitive load on individual agents; reading auras isn't trivial, but it's a lot more reasonable than expecting users to be experts at network engineering.
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Apr 11, 2014 04:43
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eXXon posted:I'm glad you worked out for yourself that this is complex. Yeah, you really should start smaller. I'm also glad that you're actually listening to lectures or something, but you oughta add some undergraduate econ stuff to your plate.
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Apr 11, 2014 05:10
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Isn't that the purpose of the aura colors? To presumably make interpreting influence intuitive. A lot of strangecoin is an attempt to force people to internalize things like corporate influence in a way that is notionally accessible: reading someone's aura would presumably be a quicker and more immediate things that digging through financial statements. I think, contrary to what the poster above said, that RA has given more thought than your average libertarian on why the idea of a decentralized economic system doesn't work in reality. All of the weird byzantine structures in strangecoin are attempts to work around problems like the fact that people would never put in the effort required to review the sourcing of every purchase. He's just unwilling to admit that his solution isn't workable, so instead he pulls up tangentially related science articles to defend why people would be able to use his system.
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Apr 11, 2014 05:21
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RealityApologist posted:I'm stuck in a car in western Wyoming, and most of the people in this car are under 10. I've always found it helpful to take trips with people who are at my intellectual level as well. I AM BULLYING YOU, USE THIS AS A REFERENCE WHEN YOU THINK OTHER PEOPLE ARE BULLYING YOU. THANKS.
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Apr 11, 2014 05:24
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Little Blackfly posted:Isn't that the purpose of the aura colors? To presumably make interpreting influence intuitive. A lot of strangecoin is an attempt to force people to internalize things like corporate influence in a way that is notionally accessible: reading someone's aura would presumably be a quicker and more immediate things that digging through financial statements. I think, contrary to what the poster above said, that RA has given more thought than your average libertarian on why the idea of a decentralized economic system doesn't work in reality. All of the weird byzantine structures in strangecoin are attempts to work around problems like the fact that people would never put in the effort required to review the sourcing of every purchase. He's just unwilling to admit that his solution isn't workable, so instead he pulls up tangentially related science articles to defend why people would be able to use his system. One problem would be the limited practical color space available. While it is technically true that there are a nearly infinite set of colors, there has to be a finite number determined to codify them and each color would have to be easily distinct at a glance so as to serve its purpose. Frankly, just cutting it off at the codified values would be more practical than by any sort of color based system. Everyone would likely need some kind of program to help them differentiate the different entities (it would likely be immensely difficult without it and there has to be some sort of interface presenting these auras), so that program would just sort and filter values that are relevant or irrelevant to you. The simplest version I can concoct for this would be an arbitrary value as an identifier, a Letter or some other sequential identifier as to the degree of connection, and a determined numerical value for the strength. Xelkelvos fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 05:31
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Eripsa, say I'm an unmarried girl in a fundamentalist Christian community who is having sex with her boyfriend. The church pastor finds out and inhibits me. Will this be visible in my aura, and if so, what form will it take? Something like a red A for Affair?
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Apr 11, 2014 06:06
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ITT everyone who goes to the local synagogue and donates for the Passover Seder gets a yellow J to signify their voluntary association with each other
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Apr 11, 2014 06:09
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ITT my employer is conspicuously identified by big waves of economic activity radiating above my head, except when I'm unemployed, when the waves are pretty puny and mark me as a shameful welfare leech
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Apr 11, 2014 06:11
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ITT we are in a car in western Wyoming, stop at the only hotel within a hundred miles, the clerk looks at our aura, realizes we can afford it and charges us triple the going rate, but it's Strangecoin so this is completely normal and we never notice
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Apr 11, 2014 06:14
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