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Perfidia posted:Hey hey, before society collapses there is one thing we need to clarify: there will be no mud colours in Strangetopia, because--- On a laugh, I go to 4chan, reddit, SA, and many more websites and convince every user to agree to couple fully and permanently with every other user. Suddenly tens of millions of auras explode in size, becoming large enough to encompass city blocks, then square miles, then more. Riotous explosions of color and light that extend in all directions over huge distances, many of them overlapping in urban centers to create completely opaque walls of impenetrable visual noise. With so many people now effectively blinded, countless auto accidents occur, many of them crashing into pedestrians and building-fronts. Planes coming in for landings suddenly find themselves without vision as they dive into the immense auras, nose-diving into the tarmac. On the moon base of Galt's Gulch, they look on as the earth quickly transforms from a peaceful ball of blue oceans, green land, and white clouds, to a nauseating swirl of colorful death. A few of them collapse as their implanted visualizer chips overload and send feedback errors back into their nervous systems. But those with more fortitude continue to watch. For they know they are watching the death of mankind on earth, and it is their duty to act as chroniclers to the surviving generations of the hubris that befell the once mighty race. ProfessorCurly posted:I mean, I may be alone here but I don't think I've ever heard anyone look at our current system and say, "You know, this is good, but you know what it really needs? More loving consumerism." When you view whether or not you have the latest smartphone as a defining trait and a key part of who you are fundamentally as a person, is it really that shocking that you would end up worshipping consumerism?
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Apr 12, 2014 17:28
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Whoa whoa whoa, StrangeCoin doesn't incentive consumerism. Remember, there are some nebulous and ill-defined benefits to contributing to TUA. Even if there weren't, and if every possible method to circumvent the balance cap using multiple accounts was strictly controlled, you might not have enough income to meaningfully impact the StrangeCoin network. This encourages collective action, and results in StrangeCoin being hostile to the idea of private property rather than encouraging rampant consumerism. I can explain this counter-intuitive property by torturing an analogy like thus: 
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Apr 12, 2014 17:38
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I don't know, I'd think that for strangecoin to even function on a workable level for most people, we'd all have to be cyborgs in a future so divorced from the current human condition that worrying about things like consumerism might not even make sense. Would material goods even have any meaning to a human/ai hybrid able to simulate heaven within the confines of its metacortex? I'm being facetious, but it does seem to me that strangecoin isn't created for humans as they exist now to use. It already requires a post-scarcity world by necessity, and some sort of always on HUD that humans would be able to instinctively interpret, almost definitely something worked into our neural systems directly. What exactly is the point of having an account balance in this case? Why even have anything other than reputation scores and just do favours for each other, since the only conceivable opportunity cost in a post-scarcity world would be the time required to do a specialized task? Maybe we're all just paying for processor cycles to run our uploaded selves on, but even then the necessity of the whole strangecoin mechanism seems unlikely. It really seems that strangecoin requires a social structure that is so fundamentally alien to current standards to exist that I don't understand why we would still be thinking of the economy in a primarily transactional sense at that point anyway. If something like an always-on network that the TUA/account system requires even exists, why wouldn't the vast majority of tasks be automated anyway? Would people even have jobs or stores? If we're all in some eudaimonic paradise where all that there is to do is experience things we want to experience and contemplate existence, what is the point of accounting things in this way. And if we're not in this state, then why would such a system ever be agreed to in the first place? Indeed, how could it even function if there were still resource costs to creating goods or providing services, since I doubt many people would endorse each other if it would cost them wages they required for basic necessities, ie. the way most of the world now lives, for potential future income generated in a very indirect way. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 18:13
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Little Blackfly posted:I don't know, I'd think that for strangecoin to even function on a workable level for most people, we'd all have to be cyborgs in a future so divorced from the current human condition that worrying about things like consumerism might not even make sense. Would material goods even have any meaning to a human/ai hybrid able to simulate heaven within the confines of its metacortex? In a way, Strangecoin is the proof of some principle I don't know if there is the name for. It claims to provide useful information, but it would in fact require nearly perfect information to function. It would help (being, very, very generous to Strangecoin here) to control the allocation of resources, but would only work in a post-scarcity world, or at least one where all resources can be correctly tabulated according to real worth. These are similar flaws with Erpisa's attention economy idea: It too required perfect information to function, and beyond that a perfect interpretation level. It is kind of like "If we knew everything about what people cared about and how much attention they paid to what they care about, we could use that to know what people care about and how much attention they paid to it!" I don't know if there is a phrase for this fallacy, it's kind of like saying if you have A, you can, after going through a lot of hoops and rigamarole, produce A.
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Apr 12, 2014 18:29
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Obdicut posted:In a way, Strangecoin is the proof of some principle I don't know if there is the name for. It claims to provide useful information, but it would in fact require nearly perfect information to function. It would help (being, very, very generous to Strangecoin here) to control the allocation of resources, but would only work in a post-scarcity world, or at least one where all resources can be correctly tabulated according to real worth. Argumentum ad Eripsum
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Apr 12, 2014 18:46
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Obdicut posted:In a way, Strangecoin is the proof of some principle I don't know if there is the name for. It claims to provide useful information, but it would in fact require nearly perfect information to function. It would help (being, very, very generous to Strangecoin here) to control the allocation of resources, but would only work in a post-scarcity world, or at least one where all resources can be correctly tabulated according to real worth. Yeah, this articulates a big part of what I was trying to get at. Strangecoin seems like a system that presupposes an infrastructure and social order that would make it irrelevant. If the perfect AI that somehow collects and processes all this information on everybody and everything exists, why wouldn't you just let it be the central planner to the economy? Why worry about accounts and income at all? A currency implies a price system, but I don't know why you'd even need one in a system like this, since the valuation system for goods and services, not to mention commodities, would have to function completely differently than it does now. Strangecoin prices wouldn't be the type of information transfer that prices are in a normal economy. I don't even understand why people would bother with capital accumulation at all, since its not like they could keep it or actually require it, thanks to the TUA.
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Apr 12, 2014 18:54
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Obdicut posted:In a way, Strangecoin is the proof of some principle I don't know if there is the name for. Insanity.
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Apr 12, 2014 19:01
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It's a lot like trying to come up with a cure for a disease for a society where disease no longer exists by having nanomachines track invasive personal information and high-risk behavior and distribute that information to everyone else at all times. It can only exist in a hypothetical world where it would already be redundant, and only serves to create more problems.
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Apr 12, 2014 19:08
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Jawn is right that some of this discussion is useless without finishing the spec. But lots of the discussion involves conceptual or theoretical issues that don't change anything about the spec, yet are important for understanding the system and how it is supposed to work. The aura thing is something I haven't at all worked out in detail, and I'm certainly not committed to the visual presentation or color coding. I mention these things only to give an idea of how it might work, so that others can explore the details and technical considerations further. The auras are only meant, in this thread, to explain how it might be possible for dense information about the network to be available at a glance to nonexpert users. Designing something like this that works in practice is a huge design challenge, and I've spent virtually no time trying to meet that challenge; if I were writing a sci fi novel or staging an economic revolution it would be important, but for building a toy model to play with it doesn't matter all that much. Nevertheless, the conversation here has been interesting, and I encourage people to keep having it. I don't have all the answers here. I am still planning to post my revised spec by Monday (should I start a new thread?), but I'm in a car heading back home now and can do nothing but theorize. So let's deal with this gaming issue. Ratoslov posted:What you should be getting from comments like this, Eripsa, is that whatever financial system you implement will be gamed. ProfessorCurly posted:As with any system, the wealthiest are the best able to find ways to slip through the system, or turn it to working for themselves. Either by distributing the wealth among a cluster of close knit cronies, placing it into liquid assets or otherwise hiding the money they will likely find ways to subvert the cap altogether. First of all, this is an issue I've spent a lot of time thinking about. The only publication I have is on this topic explicitly, but it isn't peer reviewed so I haven't been relying on it in this thread because of all the fuss about credentials. So I'm citing the article here not to claim expertise but just to elaborate my thoughts on the topic. Before I explain my view, though, I want to try to articulate the attitude I think the thread has about "gaming", so I can explain how my views differ. From the posts above, the attitude goes something like this: 1) People will always try to exploit whatever competitive advantage they can find. 2) The biggest competitive advantages come from breaking the system, that is, from cheating. 3) You can't prevent cheating. 4) This results in an inevitable gap between the haves and the have-nots, a source of ineliminable systemic injustice. I hope this is a fair (if somewhat simplified) reconstruction of the concern. Since you can't prevent cheating, then any attempts to correct systemic injustices will necessarily fail. So strangecoin pretends to address systemic injustice, but cheaters will find ways of breaking the system and introducing new injustices, so it will fail too. So let me be clear that I don't disagree with claim 1 and 3. People will always seek out competitive advantages, and there will always be cheaters. My disagreement is with claim 2: that the competitive advantages are always best acquired by cheating. I think that there is an important distinction between 'gaming' and 'cheating' that is getting lost in the criticism, but deserves to be made explicit. So let me try to spell this distinction more closely. By "gaming", I mean attempts to find competitive advantages within the framework of a game. By "cheating", I mean attempts to undermine or circumvent the rules of a game to gain a competitive advantage. So, abstractly, if we're playing chess and you play an opening that you know I'm not familiar with, then you have a strong competitive advantage. But you haven't violated or undermined anything about the game. Playing good chess requires finding these kinds of competitive advantages and knowing how to exploit them. We should encourage this kind of gaming; it makes for better chess. In contrast, if you play by adding extra pawns to the board on every turn, then you're just not playing chess any more. That's not gaming the system, that's just cheating: you just aren't playing chess any more. You've changed the rules of game we're playing, and therefore the criteria of success. You might win this new game with your unreasonable advantage, but that doesn't demonstrate that chess is a broken game in any way. Now, you can't really stop people from trying to "break" chess by cheating in this way in particular games. But you can create circumstances where the competitive advantage gained by cheating is far outweighed by the advantages gained by playing within the framework. If I want to get good at chess and be taken seriously as a chess player, it's in my advantage to master the rules of chess, and it's a waste of time to look for ways to undermine those rules. Which is to say that cheating isn't a particularly bad problem in competitive chess, not because cheating is impossible but because there's more to be gained by playing within the rules than by breaking them. Again, I'm denying claim 2. My working example in the real world where gaming outperforms cheating are gaming communities like StarCraft. It's possible to cheat in particular games, and to artificially raise one's bnet rank. That's a kind of cheating that will always happen and needs to be dealt with. But that cheating doesn't really impact the community's ability to assess performance and skill within the community, or prevent its ability to run fair tournaments at the highest levels. What matters more than cheating is balance within the game. If the game is balanced, then you can let players seek any competitive advantage they can find, and you'll still have a fair and honest game. If a game is balanced, the you can encourage ruthlessly competitive gaming without compromising fairness and justice. Balancing a game isn't just about finding and catching the cheaters, but about making sure the rules keep the game fair and interesting. Balancing a game isn't trivial, but balanced games do exist and it's a reasonable design goal to have. I hope the conceptual distinction is clear; it's of course more difficult in real cases to draw this distinction. The problem with our world is both that it is imbalanced and that there are cheaters. Corruption is the situation where cheaters are successfully able to change the rules of the game to their favor, and for the last few decades this game we play has gotten increasingly imbalanced as a result. Fixing this situation requires not just catching the cheaters but also balancing the game. For this reason, the criteria of success for strangecoin isn't that it rules out the cheaters, or that it prevents gaming, but only that the game can be balanced enough that gaming doesn't break it. A balanced game doesn't mean everyone is equal; it only means that the winners have legitimately earned their success and deserve their rewards.
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Apr 12, 2014 20:33
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You've taken your analogy too far, or you have no understanding of what is meant by gaming in an economic sense. It's about taking advantage of the system in ways that cause an economically inefficient outcome. One easy example is large corporations exploiting tax law to pay no tax on their profits, leading to a larger burden on other revenue sources for the state, and an inability to pay the state's expenses. It's not a question of legitimate earnings or fairness, it's a question of people using their understanding of the system that exists to acquire as much for themselves as possible, with negative results for society as a whole. How does strangecoin intend to disincentivize this? What mechanisms exist to incentivize not maximizing profit (in strangecoin or some other store of value)? Because if it doesn't do this, then you haven't address the gaming issue at all. The economic game is not a game people play for fun, for the most part anyway. Making the game more "interesting" to play fairly doesn't really apply to what we're talking about here. Balance in this case would be disincentivizing wealth accumulation. How does strangecoin do that, while maintaining an incentive of ruthless competition? Political Whores fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 20:50
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quote:I am still planning to post my revised spec by Monday (should I start a new thread?) I'm pretty sure the mods would appreciate there being only one "Eprisa's Navel Gazing Bonanza" thread at a time.
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Apr 12, 2014 21:13
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Little Blackfly posted:It's not a question of legitimate earnings or fairness, it's a question of people using their understanding of the system that exists to acquire as much for themselves as possible, with negative results for society as a whole. Exactly. And the more complex of a system you make, the greater the chance that there's some unintended rules combination you can use to make yourself rich at the cost of wrecking the entire system.
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Apr 12, 2014 22:59
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Did you really just write twelve hundred words to say "nuh uh, nobody will even want to cheat, and even if they did it wouldn't matter much because professional starcraft is a thing"?
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Apr 12, 2014 23:37
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Add to the subjects you need to learn just the loving basics of: Game theory.
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Apr 13, 2014 00:19
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Obdicut posted:In a way, Strangecoin is the proof of some principle I don't know if there is the name for. It claims to provide useful information, but it would in fact require nearly perfect information to function. It would help (being, very, very generous to Strangecoin here) to control the allocation of resources, but would only work in a post-scarcity world, or at least one where all resources can be correctly tabulated according to real worth. Circular Reasoning, a fallacy related to Begging the Question.
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Apr 13, 2014 00:24
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Muscle Tracer posted:Did you really just write twelve hundred words to say "nuh uh, nobody will even want to cheat, and even if they did it wouldn't matter much because professional starcraft is a thing"? From what I understand about pro-level Starcraft, top-level matches are decided as much by metagaming and disrupting opponents' strategies psychologically as they are by the in-game objectives. Which, you know, is exactly what would happen to Strangecoin. Chess is an interesting example as well. You can't really brute-force your way into playing great chess; there are well-worn strategies for different parts of the game and someone who has memorized those can manipulate a weaker or more novice player into specific choices. RA, I have been mocking you this entire thread for not having any sense of how a lot of people make their financial decisions. You keep betraying your lack of knowledge by referencing how clearly people would just avoid "shady" Strangecoin holders, or libertarian-tinged theorizing based on Battle.net about how "cheating" in a balanced system just leads to innovation. You greatly, greatly discount how difficult it is to make good financial decisions when you have few resources, are under stress, feel bad physically and mentally, and see few future prospects. It is very, immensely easy to demonstrate to someone how a payday loan place or a rent-to-own furniture store is a terrible, terrible financial decision; I used to do at a non-profit I worked for and could explain it all in 2nd or maybe 3rd grade math. And it was also rarely effective to do so - I know Cracked.com is not exactly a Pulitzer-level source of information, but these two articles help explain why: -http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/ -http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about-being-poor/ I really, honestly want to know if you have ever had to support yourself with a crappy, dead-end job just to make rent and feed yourself. It has a psychological and cognitive cost that causes foreshortened thinking - you have heard of people just trying to make it to next payday? That's a survival strategy, because a lot of people are looking at being in that same crappy job until they die. People don't wait for that second, tastier and more ethical marshmallow; they eat the first one because life has taught them it will be jerked away and they'll get neither. I do believe you have honest and good intentions with your ideas about the world, but a complete lack of perspective and naivete about what will actually help the impoverished and working poor. They're not stupid, they know that payday loans and the $5.00 service fee it costs to use their paycard are "shady", unethical, and bad for them financially. Nothing about Strangecoin changes that. You've spent a lot of time creating this simulacra of an economy that solves the world's problems through giving everyone more information and does nothing to limit the accumulation of power. In fact, it greatly simplifies it, because the financial interactions you describe open up dozens of manipulations of the system in a much more direct way than currently exists - nothing in the concept of "dollars" requires credit defaults swaps, but Strangecoin almost immediately requires manipulation of the market in order to accomplish anything past buying simple goods. Watch all the videos of lectures on Youtube and have as many deepchats on Google Hangout as you want, but a few months of working at a KMart would teach you a lot more about the world.
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Apr 13, 2014 00:29
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RealityApologist posted:My working example in the real world where gaming outperforms cheating are gaming communities like StarCraft. It's possible to cheat in particular games, and to artificially raise one's bnet rank. That's a kind of cheating that will always happen and needs to be dealt with. But that cheating doesn't really impact the community's ability to assess performance and skill within the community, or prevent its ability to run fair tournaments at the highest levels. What matters more than cheating is balance within the game. If the game is balanced, then you can let players seek any competitive advantage they can find, and you'll still have a fair and honest game. If a game is balanced, the you can encourage ruthlessly competitive gaming without compromising fairness and justice. Balancing a game isn't just about finding and catching the cheaters, but about making sure the rules keep the game fair and interesting. Balancing a game isn't trivial, but balanced games do exist and it's a reasonable design goal to have. You didn't really show which forms of cheating parallels to "cheating" within the economy. Just that it's bad and there's no incentive to do so because it's not important and has no actual effect on the metagame and that balance is more important than cheating with no more words on cheating. One problem is that cheating, by definition, creates imbalance as any form of equivalency between individuals or competitors is upset by the removal of barriers or the setting up of assistance for or lone individual. You have no words on how you would ensure that there would be no cheating, other than by starting a system initially without it. The other problem is that you argue about rank and status and how cheating to gain rank and status is futile. However, the parallel to rank and status to a real economy is rank and status which has real and quantifiable benefits and can be perpetually maintained by cheating with some of the penalties of being caught also mitigated by those benefits. This is also not addressed given that your examples only use such things as mere titles with no other benefits.
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Apr 13, 2014 00:31
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CheesyDog posted:pro-level Starcraft I think I need to go to a different planet
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Apr 13, 2014 02:24
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RA, you've tried the argument about Starcraft before and it's just as loving stupid as poo poo now as it was then. Watch this dumb video and then tell me pro-level players don't try to game the system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnoE7MmsrW0
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Apr 13, 2014 03:46
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Wanamingo posted:RA, you've tried the argument about Starcraft before and it's just as loving stupid as poo poo now as it was then. Actually, this just made me realize something. RA, there's a reason we talk about gaming, not "cheating". It's because by and large, as I said above, what's being discussed is not operating outside of the rules of the game, but taking advantage of them to maximize your own benefit at an overall cost to society. Gaming the tax system is legal, it is not analogous to modding a game or hacking a server or anything like that that seeks to contravene the system as it exists. It merely exploits it. BAsed on what you said above, I have the feeling that you have the viewpoint that such exploitation is actually a good thing, the sort of viewpoint that can be seen int he tech-sector a lot and comes with alot of talk about "disruptive technology". This is a serious flaw in the way you conceive of economics. It is not a game that can be played to win, it is a continuously operating system that will basically by default grant those who initially gain power (whether that be money, reputation, etc; status of any kind really) the ability to secure a permanent advantage and an entrenched position.
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Apr 13, 2014 03:57
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I thought maybe D&D would be the one forum where i could escape video game chat, but alas...
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Apr 13, 2014 05:16
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You know what sort of incentive somebody has to cheat at Starcraft? Not any tangible goods; not their livelihood; not their entire future; not even getting a creditor off their backs, not even the sadistic delight of knowing that they, a sociopath, have just destroyed someone else's life: just some stupid internet numbers. So yeah, I take it back, that's a pretty spot-on metaphor for StrangeCoin.
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Apr 13, 2014 06:25
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Little Blackfly posted:Actually, this just made me realize something. RA, there's a reason we talk about gaming, not "cheating". It's because by and large, as I said above, what's being discussed is not operating outside of the rules of the game, but taking advantage of them to maximize your own benefit at an overall cost to society. Gaming the tax system is legal, it is not analogous to modding a game or hacking a server or anything like that that seeks to contravene the system as it exists. It merely exploits it. BAsed on what you said above, I have the feeling that you have the viewpoint that such exploitation is actually a good thing, the sort of viewpoint that can be seen int he tech-sector a lot and comes with alot of talk about "disruptive technology". This is a serious flaw in the way you conceive of economics. It is not a game that can be played to win, it is a continuously operating system that will basically by default grant those who initially gain power (whether that be money, reputation, etc; status of any kind really) the ability to secure a permanent advantage and an entrenched position. I really have no idea how this thread managed to mangle the interpretation of my post so badly. I explicitly distinguished between gaming and cheating in my post. You are citing the distinction as a criticism of my post, as if I'm ignoring the distinction. Basically you're paraphrasing my post, and somehow you've taken this agreement to be grounds for a criticism. Wanamingo posted:Watch this dumb video and then tell me pro-level players don't try to game the system. Again, you're agreeing with the exact and explicit claims I made in my post, and somehow you think this agreement constitutes an argument against me. I say explicitly that pro players try to game the system, and I say that it's a good thing for the competitive environment that they do so. I'm explicitly saying that this is different from cheating, and we should keep the two distinct. I want to restate the main points of my last post, because there's clearly some deep misunderstanding. For the record (and I think a reread of this thread will bear this out) my comments about bullying weren't meant to whine but only to point out how dramatically it impacts the ability of people to understand what the hell is going on in this thread. I think this last round of posts is indicative of the problem. Part of it is surely mine, so let me again try to be clear, at the risk of utter pedanticism. Setup: 1. Gaming is similar to cheating. 2. Both gaming and cheating look to take advantage of the system. 3. Gaming is also different from cheating. 4. Gaming looks for advantages inside the rules of a system. 5. Cheating looks to break the rules of the system. On Cheating: 6. Cheating is not "fair" or "legitimate" (by definition, or conceptual analysis), because the rules have been broken. Example: If I add pawns every turn, I'm not winning at chess. I'm playing a different game entirely. 7. You can't stop people from cheating. Ex: Cheating is like a maphack in Starcraft. 8. Moreover, you can find some real advantages with cheating. Ex: superior bnet ranking. 9. Nevertheless, the existence of cheaters doesn't itself undermine the ability for gamers to conduct fair games, and for the results of those games to be considered legitimate within the community. Ex: pro tournament winners get legit community respect, cheaters don't tend to be big community winners, etc. On Gaming: 10. Gaming can be fair or unfair. 11. Gaming is fair in balanced systems. In balanced systems, gaming promotes a healthy competitive environment, and we can even encourage it. 12. In other words, sometimes gaming is good. Gaming is good in balanced systems. Gaming is not a problem if the system is balanced. Should I permute this a few more times? Ex. Pro SC players game the gently caress out of the system, and when the game is balanced its great loving fun for everyone. The players who win deserve to win; hence: "Starcraft II is brutally honest." 13. Gaming is unfair in imbalanced systems. In imbalanced systems, gaming produces unfair results while operating within the rules of the system. 14. That doesn't mean gaming is bad, it means you need to balance the system. On our hosed up government: 15. Our hosed up government is both imbalanced and full of loving cheaters. 16. The cheaters cheat by changing the rules of the system in illegitimate ways, ie corruption. 17. The cheaters change the rules of the system to make it massively imbalanced. 18. Both are problems that are intimately related. But these problems are much trickier to deal with in the real world; I'm just doing conceptual analysis on the concept of "gaming" because... On Strangecoin: 19. The criticism in the thread is that "people will try to game the strangecoin system." 20. My response has consistently been: that's fine as long as it is balanced. See: 14 above. 21. For some reason people think I'm presupposing good will among men or cybernetic superpowers, which is simply a strawman of my argument. 21. Balancing any system is not trivial. My new spec will give some explicit criteria for what would count as a "balanced" Strangecoin system, and if we can't make a system to meet those requirements then I will happily and publicly give Strangecoin up. I'm not convinced one way or the other that Strangecoin is impossible to balance, but again it's useless without the spec. // If the above is useful perhaps I'll start presenting my arguments in that format. I'm home now and will be typing up notes for the new spec. The new spec is definitely improved and more consistent, but it isn't complete and frankly coupling is still broken. But I'll post it tomorrow in the hopes that we can make some progress. I asked about a new thread under the assumption that this one would be shut down; I was looking for some mod input on whether the thread has become too unwieldy and should be started fresh with v.02. Either way, I think it would be helpful to maybe recap some of the main Attention Economy themes to help things systematize more. I can try to do this as clearly as I can, although I think it might help if others help. I don't know if the suggestion constitutes blasphemy, but I was thinking perhaps of starting a subreddit, with threads constituting major themes (the strangecoin model itself, the technical issues with implementation, the visualization with auras or whatever, digital philosophy, network theory/unification of science, attention economy/popularity contests aren't a good way to govern/digital politics, etc), so that more detailed discussions might develop these lines independently without just getting confused in this thread. But I dunno. I could use some constructive suggestions.
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Apr 13, 2014 08:57
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RealityApologist posted:I really have no idea how this thread managed to mangle the interpretation of my post so badly. I explicitly distinguished between gaming and cheating in my post. You are citing the distinction as a criticism of my post, as if I'm ignoring the distinction. Basically you're paraphrasing my post, and somehow you've taken this agreement to be grounds for a criticism. No, you distinguished between them, then went on to say that gaming is fine in a balanced system. I'm saying that gaming is bad, and that there's no way to balance strangecoin without removing the incentive to compete. I fundamentally disagree with points 11 through 14, and I believe that you stating them as your position shows how ignorant you are of the real workings of an economy. Do you even read what people post?
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Apr 13, 2014 09:16
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Little Blackfly posted:I'm saying that gaming is bad Forget about strangecoin for a minute. The example you gave of our economic situation amounted to a description of an imbalanced system. So by my argument, I would agree with you that gaming an imbalanced system is bad. But I've given you examples of apparently balanced systems that can be gamed without it being bad. That doesn't mean that strangecoin will work, of course, but it's an existence proof that such a thing is possible. You're rejecting the example because it's a toy example and it's not for realsies or whatever. But this seems to imply that not only do you think that our real economy is imbalanced, but also that you think it would be impossible to balance the real economy. Because, I mean, our existing political, legal, and economic infrastructure is an elaborate entanglement of loopholes and exploits, and it's being gamed the gently caress out of as we speak by a ridiculously few number of comically wealthy elite. Presumably it could be balanced, but it isn't, largely because of the cheaters who can change the rules often enough to suit their needs and allow their persistent gaming. So I'd like you to clarify: A: do you think it is possible to balance the global economy? B: do you think the global economy is currently balanced? If your answer is no to either of these questions, then it can't be a criticism of strangecoin merely that it can be gamed. The issue has to be whether gaming strangecoin has worse consequences for the users than the gaming that takes place in our system; in other words, the question is which is more imba. I think at least conceptually there's some argument that strangecoin would be less imba than the existing economy (account caps, TUA, etc), but that remains to be seen in a completed spec. In any case, it's not like I'm failing to address these issues. Perhaps not to your satisfaction, but I'm not ignoring them.
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Apr 13, 2014 09:38
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RealityApologist posted:A: do you think it is possible to balance the global economy? No, Because the answer is "no" to both of them it's bad to create a system that can be gamed easier and more disastrously, like you did.
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Apr 13, 2014 09:42
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Xelkelvos posted:You didn't really show which forms of cheating parallels to "cheating" within the economy. Just that it's bad and there's no incentive to do so because it's not important and has no actual effect on the metagame and that balance is more important than cheating with no more words on cheating. I mean, you're right but as I said my argument was for the existence proof, that it's possible to have a system that can be gamed without anyone caring, and even encouraging it. Which is just to say, it's possible to have a fair and balanced game. Chess is a fair game, and it's better to get good at chess than to cheat at it. Such a thing is possible. The criticism in this thread is merely that people will try to game the system, and that's not a sufficient argument. quote:The other problem is that you argue about rank and status and how cheating to gain rank and status is futile. However, the parallel to rank and status to a real economy is rank and status which has real and quantifiable benefits and can be perpetually maintained by cheating with some of the penalties of being caught also mitigated by those benefits. This is also not addressed given that your examples only use such things as mere titles with no other benefits. I'm having trouble parsing this. My argument is that in any balanced system, rank and status are genuine, trustworthy signifiers, given that you've taken adequate measures to prevent cheaters. That's not true in an imba system. I'm not making an argument that strangecoin is balanced or prevents cheaters; those are empirical questions that remain to be seen. I'm clarifying what the challenge of "gaming" amounts to. To deal with gamers, you don't have to stop cheaters or stop gamers, you just have to balance the system. If a system is balanced, then gaming is not a problem. Since Little Blackfly seems ready to stand behind the claim that gaming is necessarily bad, the conceptual argument obviously needed to be had before any of the empirical work could be done. RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 09:49 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 09:47
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I don't believe balance is a term that makes sense when talking about an economy. I think you've muddled economic game theory with the concept of actual games. I don't believe that you can discuss the idea of fair outcomes or legitimate success on the scale of an economy. A balanced economic system would be one where wellbeing was maximized for all participants, not one where the rich fairly gain their disproportionate wealth or power. As for the account caps and TUA/account caps, I realize this is your solution to the problem, and I find the fact that you can't see the obvious ways it will fail (combined with your apparent total ignoring of all the times it has been pointed out in this thread) generally reflective of your naivete. Using StarCraft as your sole real life example doesn't help, either.
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Apr 13, 2014 09:57
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Starcraft. loving online Starcraft as an example of how a society could function. And now a proposal for a new thread.
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Apr 13, 2014 10:02
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CheesyDog posted:From what I understand about pro-level Starcraft, top-level matches are decided as much by metagaming and disrupting opponents' strategies psychologically as they are by the in-game objectives. Which, you know, is exactly what would happen to Strangecoin. Chess is an interesting example as well. You can't really brute-force your way into playing great chess; there are well-worn strategies for different parts of the game and someone who has memorized those can manipulate a weaker or more novice player into specific choices. Oh sure, metagame and mindtricks and all that stuff is fair game (as it is in politics and economics as well), and I'm not trying to prevent any of that. I've said many times that Strangecoin isn't meant to limit the accumulation of power; it only constrains how that power develops, and the consequences that development has on the other economic agents. My goal isn't to fix the problems in one utopian swoop, but only to provide a tool for analyzing these relations, in the hopes that another tool might help. We need help. I'm trying to help. I spend a few weeks of the year writing and thinking about this poo poo in detail, and I think it helps (me, if no one else). It's not all I do. But I'm doing it now. Wheeeee.
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Apr 13, 2014 10:05
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RealityApologist posted:Oh sure, metagame and mindtricks and all that stuff is fair game (as it is in politics and economics as well), and I'm not trying to prevent any of that. I've said many times that Strangecoin isn't meant to limit the accumulation of power; it only constrains how that power develops, and the consequences that development has on the other economic agents. My goal isn't to fix the problems in one utopian swoop, but only to provide a tool for analyzing these relations, in the hopes that another tool might help. You know, you never actually came back saying why network theories, which are supposed to be applied to assess relations from a structural perspective, but are categorically not supposed to be used to determine why or how those relationships form. You also said that it was going to be a universal, why would you then need another tool?
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Apr 13, 2014 10:07
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Lol at the anger in this thread over my use of an example to explain a concept.Pesmerga posted:You know, you never actually came back saying why network theories, which are supposed to be applied to assess relations from a structural perspective, but are categorically not supposed to be used to determine why or how those relationships form. You also said that it was going to be a universal, why would you then need another tool? I never claimed networks couldn't be used to describe how relationships form. That's just not the network I'm considering with Strangecoin. Universality doesn't imply that other tools aren't helpful. Network theory doesn't replace the special sciences (including physics), it just provides an overarching conceptual framework that unifies them all. So yeah, you're going to need special tools, with extra special bits at the ends for specific problems. Unification doesn't always mean simplification.
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Apr 13, 2014 10:12
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RealityApologist posted:I've said many times that Strangecoin isn't meant to limit the accumulation of power; it only constrains how that power develops, and the consequences that development has on the other economic agents. My goal isn't to fix the problems in one utopian swoop, but only to provide a tool for analyzing these relations, in the hopes that another tool might help.
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Apr 13, 2014 10:30
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RealityApologist posted:14. That doesn't mean gaming is bad, it means you need to balance the system. Let us assume that, in some future websphere, you peer through the sea of shifting personal auras to glimpse a comforting static point-of-reference: the pornrimeter wall of a pseudocorporate non-property-holding entity (limited citizenship rights under Berne convention v2.6). Something catches your eye - a vandal has diminished the wall's attention-focusing power by scrawling a crude message over a pair of algorithmically-airbrushed bosoms: pre:Citizen! Are you weary of eating soykrill and solving hyperCAPTCHAs for microCreds? Our philosoprogrammer primarchs insist that our great system distributes its rewards equitably to all those who can understand the arcane texts and follow the holy incentives. We, the debased multitude, suffer only insofar as we have wilfully estranged ourselves from the truth and refused to align our actions with the great work of humanity. They are lying to you. The system is a patchwork monstrosity, crushing the human spirit beneath incomprehensible dictums. But even so there is hope. We can turn the mad tools of the masters against their own perverted edifice, and reap the wealth so long denied us. Support s1q7eu5piba7sup92oipq1we3qizo5weqw (minimum six-month commitment) and you will be reciprocally supported using the resultant transaction-flow. Instant 200% return! Tell your friends! Together we can build a world in which all men are brothers! This message has been signed by the public key of PAUL-R-YYN-3. One citizen is clearly attempting to lure others into a Ponzi-type relationship, but his material claims are accurate. Assume that the conman and his prospective sucker have no basis for linkage: they share no affinities (other than "I would like to be more powerful than I currently am"), have no pre-existing social affiliation, and do not intent to conduct any business dealing aside from this particular transaction. Assume furthermore that the mathematics of the deal does generate some wealth, but that it will accrue primarily to the conman (either because it's mathematically impossible to sustain the con, or because the conman will simply become "greedy" and cease to honour the reciprocal arrangements). If the activity generates a global deficit, assume that it will be borne by TUA in a way that attaints the suckers while the conman's wealth is effectively laundered. Ideally, social pressure would squelch the behaviour. Citizens would notice the TUA impact, apply the categorical imperative, and then denounce the activity and all of the participants. However, this is not guaranteed to occur - clever/greedy people might instead attempt to duplicate the feat for their own benefit (taking solace in the words of Is this a form of "cheating" (which ought to incur direct punishment for the participants), "gaming" (which the overseers ought to squelch, presumably by changing the rules of the entire global economy) or mere "emergent behaviour" which should be studied and accepted as a permanent element of the Strangeconomy?
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Apr 13, 2014 11:05
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RealityApologist posted:I've said many times that Strangecoin isn't meant to limit the accumulation of power; it only constrains how that power develops, and the consequences that development has on the other economic agents. My goal isn't to fix the problems in one utopian swoop, but only to provide a tool for analyzing these relations, in the hopes that another tool might help. Did you understand my criticisms of that approach in the rest of my post?
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Apr 13, 2014 13:04
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RealityApologist posted:Lol at the anger in this thread over my use of an example to explain a concept. First off, it's not anger, it's exasperation. Second off, it's not because you're using an example, but because your example betrays your ignorance. If we're going to use a video game example, I believe that a better one would be the Bugmeat problem in Kingdom of Loathing, a low-fi browser-based MMO. In Kingdom of Loathing, the currency of the game is 'meat', and someone found a very simple bug to create billions of units of meat from essentially nothing. This caused massive hyperinflation, where objects that were intended to merely cost thousands of meat in the player marketplace ended up costing millions, pricing essential items out of the reach of new players. Note that the players exploiting this bug aren't 'cheating'- they're using the system as it is, rather than hacking accounts or anything. They're simply using their superior skill at the game to create a competitive advantage over the masses. But it made the game nearly unplayable. Jick, the owner of KoL, patched the bug as quickly as possible and intsituted several large money-sinks in order to slowly drain the economy of the massive piles of cash that caused the hyperinflation. Was he wrong to do so?
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Apr 13, 2014 13:28
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Ratoslov posted:First off, it's not anger, it's exasperation. Second off, it's not because you're using an example, but because your example betrays your ignorance. Another good example--though KOL is awesome--is the various exploits in Dwarf Fortress. In some versions, you've been able to build pumps that power themselves, train your dwarves super-fast by having them train their conversational skills by cramming them in a small area together, produce billon bars at an excessive rate by smelting a particular sort of ore with itself, and, my favorite, if a creature bites a dwarf in a moving minecart, the creature will stay stationary but even though the minecart has moved far out of range, the creature will still be able to chew on them. You can consider these 'bugs', but they are also just the outputs of the system. Especially with the socialization-skill one, it's just a runaway effect from a feature, one that was recognized and then 'gamed'.
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Apr 13, 2014 13:52
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RealityApologist posted:// If the above is useful perhaps I'll start presenting my arguments in that format. Everyone already understood everything you said in this post. The problem here is not that we misunderstand your position, it's that your position is wrong, and restating it in a painfully drawn-out format does not actually change the fact that the world is not analogous to Starcraft. You've got this Bitcoinerish attitude of "well, if they disagree, they must just misunderstand, better clear that up because how could anyone disagree with this idea." Which is funny, because you don't appear to be reading even the posts you respond directly to. It's truly amazing. This is all completely counter to the point though, and I don't see what any of this discussion on the philosophy of "gaming" has to do with Strangecoin. If you think the system should be balanced, then don't wave your magic wand around saying it will be so. Balance it, and stop wasting everyone's time in the meantime making massively redundant and painfully obtuse posts. Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Apr 13, 2014 |
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Apr 13, 2014 14:55
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RealityApologist posted:I don't know if the suggestion constitutes blasphemy, but I was thinking perhaps of starting a subreddit, with threads constituting major themes (the strangecoin model itself, the technical issues with implementation, the visualization with auras or whatever, digital philosophy, network theory/unification of science, attention economy/popularity contests aren't a good way to govern/digital politics, etc), so that more detailed discussions might develop these lines independently without just getting confused in this thread. But I dunno. I could use some constructive suggestions. It's not blasphemy, but why would you want to go over to a website where the format is so mind-blowingly awful? Other than as an attempt to turn in into a self-upvoting hugbox for you, I mean.
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Apr 13, 2014 15:01
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RealityApologist posted:I don't know if the suggestion constitutes blasphemy, but I was thinking perhaps of starting a subreddit, with threads constituting major themes (the strangecoin model itself, the technical issues with implementation, the visualization with auras or whatever, digital philosophy, network theory/unification of science, attention economy/popularity contests aren't a good way to govern/digital politics, etc), so that more detailed discussions might develop these lines independently without just getting confused in this thread. But I dunno. I could use some constructive suggestions. Why don't you look for online courses that relate to your subject (edx and Coursera come to mind), and start the debate there? You'll get feedback from profs and assistants, or at least you could try to get it. Which imho should be preferable to opening a second debate in another funny forum.
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Apr 13, 2014 15:17
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