|
PaulC posted:So what? What does McDonald's care if you have to send them 500 coins or 5 coins to pay for their 50-coin burger? What do you care if a universal account is paying out the 500 when you don't have enough? It's just a game, even though burgers were mentioned in the initial example this would all be in the context of the game. Donald Sutherland would come down on a platform like "LET STRANGECOIN BEGIN"  e: VVV my calling out Eripsa on his starcraft analogy is the highlight of the hangout IMO woke wedding drone fucked around with this message at 17:33 on May 1, 2014 |
#
?
May 1, 2014 17:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? Oct 3, 2024 12:34 |
|
|
The answer to "why would anyone want to play chess" is not "to keep themselves and their families from starving in the street", hope that helps explains the difference between chess and economic systems.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 17:32
|
|
|
Wee Tinkle Wand posted:I am not sure you understand how temporal caste progression works. Ants in a temporal caste follow a set progression as they age. It's nothing at all like social mobility. While the progression can vary from ant to ant (though usually it doesn't and is a fairly set path) it seems to just be based on what the hive happens to need at that time which is a quite a bit different from what you make it out to be. You need to defend the bold claim. I think you're aware of that because you're pre-edit post was a lot shorter. So yes, an ant in a temporal caste is a worker from the day it is born to the day it dies, but in this case the worker is contrasted with the reproductives; so either you're a worker or you're part of the colony genitals, and that's not the really interesting distinction. It is the workers who organize a division of labor to conduct the rest of the colony work, in many cases without input or control from the reproductives. Some of the workers take care of the young in the nest, some of them tend to the gardens, some of them perform maintenance or cleaning work, others forage, etc. Although time is a strong predictor of caste assignment (you start off in the nest and work your way out into the world; once you've left the nest you typically don't return to the colony center. These changes in behavior are sensitive not just to time but also to environmental and colony conditions. So for instance, if you start removing nest workers from the colony then foragers will start reverting to nest work (see also). The point is that changing castes aren't determined genetically, but are sensitive to colony conditions, and moreover that these colony conditions are assessed by individual ants tracking their individual interactions, absent any overarching central control. I'll not make a habit of posting TED talks, but Deborah Gordon's talk (from 2003, when TED was still cool) is absolutely fascinating and a must-watch for anyone whose made it this far in the thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukS4UjCauUs Gordon makes as good a case as any about the importance of network signals for shaping colony organization. Caste changes aren't carried out by some master blue-print or some central authority governing the behavior of all ants simultaneously; the ants change their behavior far too quickly for signals to propagate from the queen or any other central source. When ants change their caste, they are doing it on the basis of their own assessment of the situation, given their distinct preferences and history. Yes, of course, human social systems are much more complicated than any colonies. But both social systems are self-organizing, meaning that individuals in both systems are deciding for themselves the role they play in that system, and the system-wide features emerge as a product of those individual interactions. Eusociality among insects is one of the most sophisticated form of self-organization in the animal kingdom, and in some cases provides a model of self-organization and individual autonomy that any self-respecting anarchist would be proud to emulate. The idea that the two systems are so utterly alien that even formal comparisons of structure (at the level of "what if we introduce a network signal into the transaction?") are inappropriate is simply false. Because ~networks~.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 17:38
|
|
|
RealityApologist, please describe a situation where someone with more connections than me on the strangenet could impact me, and what that impact would entail.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 17:39
|
|
|
RealityApologist posted:
Defend this point. When does the Dalit man decide that he wants to be the poo poo shoveler for the Brahmins? When does the black man decide that he wants to be the slave for the white man? When does the poor woman decide that she wants to be the below-subsistence level retail worker for the rich? E: Do you actually believe that the majority of people choose the position they occupy in society in any meaningful way? Political Whores fucked around with this message at 18:01 on May 1, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 17:41
|
|
|
I like that even the bitcoin losers can answer "why should I use this?", even if their reasons are totally stupid, but Eripsa can't. Does he realize that people use currency not because it's interesting or fun, but because it beneficial to do so?
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 17:49
|
|
|
RealityApologist posted:You need to defend the bold claim. I think you're aware of that because you're pre-edit post was a lot shorter. no he doesn't, you made a stupid assertion and he denied it that doesn't shift the burden to him to explain why your stupid assertion was wrong
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 17:56
|
|
|
ProfessorProf posted:RealityApologist, please describe a situation where someone with more connections than me on the strangenet could impact me, and what that impact would entail. He won't give a real answer to this because he'd rather focus on minor tangents that no one loving cares about instead of actual issues. It's a defense mechanism.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 17:59
|
|
|
RA, I need to ask you this. Do you seriously believe that the ants you're talking about are deciding to change caste? That they are, to use your example, seeing that there are no nest workers, and deciding they'd be better off going back to that role rather than continuing to forage? Because they're not. Individual ants do not have the intelligence to make decisions like that. Environmental factors (counting the colony as part of the environment) trigger changes in behavior. The ants are changing roles because they are incapable of not changing roles under those circumstances. Ants have no sense of self; all their 'decisions' are predetermined by instincts, and those instincts evolved to support the colony as a whole, not the individual ants that compose it. When I changed jobs recently, I didn't do it because of some instinctual pressure that compelled me to change. The switch may or may not benefit human society as a whole; I'd like to think it does, but that wasn't my primary motivation. I changed jobs because the new job was better for me as a person. I made a decision, using my ability to think and compare different potential futures, evaluating them both objectively and subjectively, and selected the one I felt was the superior choice. Ants cannot do any of those things, and yet they are fundamental to human behavior. To model human behavior in terms of ants is to abstract away literally everything that matters about humans. The only way you could possibly make it work is to lay so many restrictions upon your model that the participants no longer have any freedom to make decisions on their own. Which, I might add, is exactly what you've been doing with Strangecoin (EDIT: and the attention economy et al.), except that you never make the restrictions explicit - either because you're aware that's what you're doing, or because you know that making them explicit exposes them to criticism. For instance, your claims that people will shun those who abuse the TUA is completely unsupported in the specs you've provided, and amounts to an implicit restriction on the behavior of participants (i.e. that they must seek to minimize their connections to TUA-abusers).
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:10
|
|
|
Alien Arcana posted:When I changed jobs recently, I didn't do it because of some instinctual pressure that compelled me to change. The switch may or may not benefit human society as a whole; I'd like to think it does, but that wasn't my primary motivation. I changed jobs because the new job was better for me as a person. I made a decision, using my ability to think and compare different potential futures, evaluating them both objectively and subjectively, and selected the one I felt was the superior choice. Ants cannot do any of those things, and yet they are fundamental to human behavior. Ah but how do you know that your thoughts don't manifest as post-hoc rationalizations of your instinctive actions? Maybe ants think they're switching careers to shorten their commute.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:14
|
|
|
Mods shouldn't this be moved to Games?
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:15
|
|
|
Cool, a ted talk from someone who actually performs research, tests hypotheses, and don't just bullshit meaningless jargon.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:19
|
|
|
SedanChair posted:Ah but how do you know that your thoughts don't manifest as post-hoc rationalizations of your instinctive actions? Maybe ants think they're switching careers to shorten their commute. That sounds like epiphenomenalism to me, mister.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:29
|
|
|
evilweasel posted:no he doesn't, you made a stupid assertion and he denied it You know a thread is poo poo when evilweasel starts using all lowercase. JawnV6 posted:
You're absolutely right that it's the same idea. Sorry if I stole your thunder. If I had to guess why RA didn't pay attention to your question when you asked it, it's because you framed it as a question of spec instead as an alternative formulation to RA's original idea. Which shows how little thought went into RA's original idea that he didn't consider that. RealityApologist posted:And his second (and Cantordust's) question about this: Okay, price fixing round two: I forgot to take into account seller modifiers. So now it's [Seller receives] = Price and [Buyer pays] = Price / ( [Buyer's purchasing modifiers] * [Seller's selling modifiers] ) Why do I think it's so important that the seller receives a constant price? A couple reasons. First, just from a practical perspective, I as a seller don't particularly care about "discriminating among buyers." I'll sell it to whoever has the cash to cover my costs + my fair share of profit, limited only by legal restrictions. The only time I would care about discriminating among buyers would be if selling to a buyer would affect my bottom line. It would only affect my bottom line if a large number of other customers banded together to boycott me for it or if suppliers started boycotting me for it. But boycotts are hard to accomplish, since it requires many people working together for no obvious benefit to themselves. So, like in real life, I rarely have to worry about a boycott. So, like in real life, I will sell to whoever and don't need a tool for "buyer discrimination." Second, it becomes really hard to predict the future or do any sort of business planning if there are no set prices to plan around. I'm a hamburger vendor that sells burgers to buyers A, B, and C for revenue B_A + B_B + B_C. Now, have I made a profit? I don't know yet, let's check my supplier's prices. Well, what prices? Wait, how much did I pay last time for a burger? The problem arises when, if every person has different modifiers, translating between all these modified interactions becomes increasingly difficult. You would be better to "translate" each Strangecoin amount into a Unmodified Equivalent Value (UEV). That is, someone with [Buyer's purchasing modifiers] = 2 and 50 Strangecoins has a UEV of 100. That way, at least everyone has a common reference point for pricing they can refer to. A seller can say "I need to get a UEV of 500 from this sale." Then everyone's wallet software would calculate how much a buyer would have to pay based on the seller's modifiers and the buyer's modifiers. And you have a very strange sense of buyer "discrimination." A buyer need not be told outright that he or she can't shop here. But if they lack modifiers, then for the same UEV price the buyer will have to pay more than a buyer with many modifiers. That's still discrimination. Likewise, a buyer can also discriminate among sellers. The seller with the best [Seller's selling modifiers] means that for the same UEV price, it's cheaper to shop there. Everything still works, and existing economics concepts can be applied to the UEV price. Examples: There are two sellers. Seller A has modifier 2, and Seller B has modifier 1. There are also 2 buyers. Buyer C has modifier 2, and Buyer D has modifier 1. Let's run some transactions. Both sellers are selling hamburgers at a UEV price of 100. For Buyer C, the real prices appear as follows: Hamburger from Seller A price = 100 / (2 * 2) = 25 Strangecoin. Hamburger from Seller B price = 100 / (2 * 1) = 50 Strangecoin. For Buyer D, the real prices appear as Hamburger from A price = 100 / (1 * 2) = 50 Strangecoins Hamburger from B price = 100 / (1 * 1) = 100 Strangecoins. On the sellers' end, Sellers A and B would both receive exactly 100 strangecoins from any of these sales. So, prices for Buyer C are lower across the board, making it easier for C to buy burgers from anyone. Similarly, prices from Seller A are lower, making Seller A the preferred burger joint among buyers. In this way, modified pricing has allowed for both buyer and seller discrimination without requiring strict prohibition of buying and while maintaining a price point that humans can understand and plan around. edit: Okay, now things are gonna get weird. I realized from my last calculation about real price to the buyer that real value matters to the seller as well. The seller's purchasing modifier should actually have an affect on the prices they charge. Why? Because if two sellers receive 100 Strangecoins in a sale, their respective purchasing powers will still differ. That is, if Seller A's buying modifier is twice that of Seller B's buying modifier, Seller A can afford to charge half the price of Seller B. Why? Because with double the purchasing power, Seller A can still buy as much as Seller B can with twice the money. So it looks like this: Same example as before, the sale has been completed. Sellers A and B both received 100 Strangecoin in their wallet. But Seller A has a buying modifier of 2, while Seller B has a buying modifier of 1. Now Seller A has a UEV of 200, not 100. So maybe UEV prices should be Price / ( [Buyer's purchase modifier] * [Seller's sale modifier] * [Seller's purchase modifier] ) ? Now prices reflect the real purchasing power that the buyer's coins give to the seller. Sellers with greater purchasing power now reflect by passing those savings onto the consumer. Cantorsdust fucked around with this message at 18:44 on May 1, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:33
|
|
|
Muscle Tracer posted:How does "influence" allow you to capitalize on advantages, or give you flexibility? It's been demonstrated numerous times that wealth is infinite and infinitely accessible in SC. But you've claimed that "influence" is important anyway, somehow. Given that, how does being able to distribute more of it come to mean anything at all? How does anything denominated in an infinite, valueless commodity somehow bestow power or weakness on others? I liked someones analogy from earlier where strange coin is essentially an economy based on air where some people have hand fans and other people have leaf blowers. None of it matters. Everyone just goes around blowing each other for goods and services
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:46
|
|
|
Cantorsdust posted:[Seller receives] = Price and [Buyer pays] = Price / ( [Buyer's purchasing modifiers] * [Seller's selling modifiers] ) I'm going the Eripsa route and just quoting this one line, but it's a response to your whole post. The thing is, while this all may seem correct, within the Strangecoinverse it's actually almost completely meaningless. Eripsa is espousing a complete paradigm shift where the question of a businessman is not "how much did I pay for hamburgers last week," but rather "how much impact did I have on the network by paying for hamburgers last week," which is apparently a both quantitatively and qualitatively different question. What that entails, what the ramifications of this are, because Eripsa hasn't actually given any information about how any of this is intrinsically valuable, except by translating it back into increased profit / decreased expense (in, again, limitless and valueless coins). Impact on the economy is supposed to be the end, intrinsic goal of a transaction, the way that an individual or business maximizes their utility, NOT accumulation or distribution of wealth. Somehow. Good Citizen posted:I liked someones analogy from earlier where strange coin is essentially an economy based on air where some people have hand fans and other people have leaf blowers. Hey, that was my analogy too, glad you liked it  Shame Eripsa still hasn't decided to address this absolutely basic flaw in the system in any meaningful or descriptive way! ---  Eripsa IIRC you like sirens seriously, the fundamental issue here is that somehow units of exchange aren't how users maximize their utility, network impact is. But how network impact is achieved in a system where units of currency are without value has not even been approached, much less established. Absolutely all other speculation is pretty much meaningless until this point gets addressed, because it's the basic use case and it has zero elaboration. Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 18:51 on May 1, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:46
|
|
|
Good Citizen posted:I liked someones analogy from earlier where strange coin is essentially an economy based on air where some people have hand fans and other people have leaf blowers. I'm pretty sure in Eripsa's world blowjobs would wind up more valuable than the actual currency by far.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:47
|
|
|
Ahem Little Blackfly posted:Just an example. Bonobos have very unique forms of social organization and behavior among primates. They operate in very cooperative and communitarian ways, and seem to forge social links via sexual contact between troop members, of both same and opposite sex. Given that we share numerous genetic and behavioral linkages with Bonobos, should I then be predict that humans in a altered network structure would all become bisexual for the sake of securing blowjobcoins? Does that seem like a reasonable assumption? If not, why not, given the much more obvious simian common ancestry provides a much better rationale than an appeal to the age of the species and the wide variation in eukaryotic life. What is your reasoning for the choice of ants specifically? The only reason I can see is that you came across a paper that interested you; there's no framework or system informing the choice. I'll take my cut as idea guy now, thank you very much.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:51
|
|
|
Muscle Tracer posted:I'm going the Eripsa route and just quoting this one line, but it's a response to your whole post. I agree that it only addresses individual pricing without considering the network. But I don't particularly care about the network as a seller, and I doubt anyone else would in a "real" Strangecoin world. Because unless we've hit post-scarcity, businesses are still going have to follow the basic economics of supply and demand. I'm really just trying to imagine what a day to day business working in Strangecoinland might look like. I still think Eripsa's proposal is fundamentally flawed because there's no way to get anyone to care about "the strength/health of the network" unless it directly benefits them. Tragedy of the commons and so on. So you need to structure your incentives so that building the strength of the network does benefit the individual. One way to do this would be to tie buying power to your relations to the network, like I posted. It's still weird to have such a focus on impact on the economy. No one in real life considers the impact of the economy before they do something, and for the vast majority of people that's okay because their individual actions have no way of impacting the economy. And for the 0.1% that can, there are/should be laws in place to govern what they can do.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:55
|
|
|
Cantorsdust posted:I agree that it only addresses individual pricing without considering the network. But I don't particularly care about the network as a seller, and I doubt anyone else would in a "real" Strangecoin world. Because unless we've hit post-scarcity, businesses are still going have to follow the basic economics of supply and demand. I'm really just trying to imagine what a day to day business working in Strangecoinland might look like. The issue is that with TUA, funds are limitless. You can draw an infinity of money out of TUA and there is literally no mechanism to stop you from doing this. So it doesn't really matter to your burger merchant how much she can buy or sell a burger from: she will in absolutely no circumstance be out of funds. Eripsa swept this under the rug by saying that it wasn't the actual money, but the INFLUENCE, that would matter. Instead your burger merchant worried about endorsers or something. Who knows? Not us, and not Eripsa. Why this is, or what that would look like, or how that could possibly be measurable in such a system, is something I've been trying to wring from this stone for like 20 pages or something.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 18:58
|
|
|
Muscle Tracer posted:The issue is that with TUA, funds are limitless. You can draw an infinity of money out of TUA and there is literally no mechanism to stop you from doing this. So it doesn't really matter to your burger merchant how much she can buy or sell a burger from: she will in absolutely no circumstance be out of funds. Oh I agree that with drawing from TUA added everything becomes an unworkable, meaningless mess. I took that for granted all along 
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:01
|
|
|
Little Blackfly posted:E: Do you actually believe that the majority of people choose the position they occupy in society in any meaningful way? Alien Arcana posted:Ants cannot do any of those things, and yet they are fundamental to human behavior. It's nice to see two different posters give exactly contradictory response to my post. A fracture in the consensus view of the thread means we're hitting interesting on interesting issues of substantive disagreement where hopefully people can engage in discussion independent of me. About 20 pages ago I was worried the thread was dying, but the last few have been really interesting. Good work everyone. My description of ant "choice" was in the spirit of Gordon's discussion of ants. If you didn't bother to watch the lecture, here's the transcript with some of the key findings: quote:And the second result, which was surprising to a lot of people, was that ants actually switch tasks. The same ant doesn't do the same task over and over its whole life. So for example, if I put out extra food, everybody else -- the midden workers stop doing midden work and go get the food, they become foragers. The nest maintenance workers become foragers. The patrollers become foragers. But not every transition is possible. And this shows how it works. Like I just said, if there is more food to collect, the patrollers, the midden workers, the nest maintenance workers will all change to forage. If there's more patrolling to do -- so I created a disturbance, so extra patrollers were needed -- the nest maintenance workers will switch to patrol. But if more nest maintenance work is needed -- for example, if I put out a bunch of toothpicks -- then nobody will ever switch back to nest maintenance, they have to get nest maintenance workers from inside the nest. So foraging acts as a sink, and the ants inside the nest act as a source. And finally, it looks like each ant is deciding moment to moment whether to be active or not. Ants keep track of how many ants of each caste type it interacts with, and when those numbers cross some internal threshold it adjusts its behavior. Each ant employs a unique threshold informed by combinations of their age and life history, which includes their transactions with other ants. This is how ants decide. Yes, ants make choices. I don't believe in "choice" as ex nihilo action in the sense of libertarian freedom. I believe the behavior of individuals is a product of their internal state and their environmental influences. Making a "choice" means selecting among the available behaviors given the information at your disposal. Human decision making is different than ant decision making because the range of internal states I can occupy and environmental influences I am sensitive to is much more complicated than the ants, and that means the decision making process is more complicated too. That doesn't mean that humans are making decisions and ants are mere machines following a biologically determined protocol. We are both complex biological machines operating according to natural organizational dynamics. And ants in at least some colonies demonstrate a surprising degree of individual autonomy in that decision making process. You might expect something as efficiently operated as an ant colony to be the result of an oppressive dictatorship, but they are actually exemplars of cooperative self-organized anarchy within an predominately female agricultural community as a successful organizational strategy. Look to the ant thou sluggard, indeed. I believe that human decision making is a result of state, circumstance, and history too, although I certainly acknowledge that a lot of human behaviors aren't done as the result of any decision making but as the result of coercion and oppression. Nevertheless, I don't think there's some vast divide between human and ant organization such that it's preposterous to hope to draw inspiration from one to the other. The analogies I'm drawing occur at a fairly abstract level (I'm not suggesting we hook people up to pheromone machines, I'm only suggesting that we introduce a network signal into the transaction), but one that is nevertheless both explanatory and suggestive given a range of political interests and ends.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:11
|
|
|
I don't actually read any of Eripsa's posts anymore because it's so much easier when they're presented in bite-sized portions in the teardowns. But it looks like he's now saying that a social structure that completely eliminates human emotions and desires from the equation would be super neat. Which makes sense for him, I guess, since he has this weird "citizen of the Internet" thing going on, but it doesn't really do anything for me. At least Little Blackfly's model gets me blowjobs.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:11
|
|
|
RealityApologist posted:It's nice to see two different posters give exactly contradictory response to my post. A fracture in the consensus view of the thread means we're hitting interesting on interesting issues of substantive disagreement where hopefully people can engage in discussion independent of me. About 20 pages ago I was worried the thread was dying, but the last few have been really interesting. Good work everyone. You're really reading waaaay too much into this ant thing. Ants have no emotions and virtually no thoughts. None. They are little organic robots following built-in rules. Are they a good example of organization and complex behavior coming from a few simple rules? Yes. Does ant behavior match human behavior on some deep level? No, because humans actually think. You're falling back into this semi-mystical thought process that people pointed out before. Just because two things appear superficially similar doesn't mean they share some deep connection underneath. That's exactly what the alchemists thought, too.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:15
|
|
|
This entire thread is an exercise in useless mental masturbation.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:24
|
|
|
RealityApologist posted:It's nice to see two different posters give exactly contradictory response to my post. A fracture in the consensus view of the thread means we're hitting interesting on interesting issues of substantive disagreement where hopefully people can engage in discussion independent of me. About 20 pages ago I was worried the thread was dying, but the last few have been really interesting. Good work everyone. They're making unrelated points. Blackfly says that people aren't given the opportunity, though they are capable of thought (they are prevented by the system). Arcana is saying ants aren't even capable of the thought. Every time you post about others' reading comprehension or thought continuity, the CIA's experimental iron-o-meter short circuits and they just can't figure out why.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:29
|
|
|
Mercury_Storm posted:This entire thread is an exercise in useless mental masturbation. Yeah, I just click this thread waiting for some kind of public mental breakdown. Maybe next time/thread.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:32
|
|
|
RealityApologist posted:Yeah, sometimes the mistakes are quite unbelievable. Depending on the species, there's an incredible amount of social mobility in ant organizational dynamics. Some ant species form what are called "physical castes", where members of the different caste demonstrate morphological differences (strong jaws on the soldiers, for instance) that distinguish them from birth. But other species of ant demonstrate what are called "temporal caste systems", wherein an individual changes their caste repeatedly over the course of their lifetimes. Importantly, in temporal caste systems movement from one caste to another is not "hard-coded"; the ant is continually adjusting its behavior in response to its environment and light of its various interactions with other ants. The point of the division of labor/perceptual landscape papers cited in my last post was that these organizational dynamics aren't the result of central control or biological determinism, but are the result of the complexity of interaction among the community members. Deborah Gordon, one of the leading researchers on organization in ant communities, makes incredibly clear throughout her work that ants organize without centralized control It's hard-coded, dude, into their genetics, because ants aren't sentient. It doesn't matter if they can change 'castes' when given the appropriate stimuli; it has nothing to do with volition on the part of the ant. They aren't 'actor's in the system, as human beings are. Gosh, you're bad at thinking about things. Cantorsdust posted:You're really reading waaaay too much into this ant thing. Ants have no emotions and virtually no thoughts. None. They are little organic robots following built-in rules. Are they a good example of organization and complex behavior coming from a few simple rules? Yes. Does ant behavior match human behavior on some deep level? No, because humans actually think. You're falling back into this semi-mystical thought process that people pointed out before. Just because two things appear superficially similar doesn't mean they share some deep connection underneath. That's exactly what the alchemists thought, too. Exactly. And moreover, there's actual morphological differences between us and ants, and differences in the purposes for which we organize, etc. etc. All analogies are flawed, but human behavior resembling ant behavior is grossly flawed, and there's no reason to even pick it; if you want to examine animals, then you start at human and look at our closest relatives, because that stretches the analogy the least and has the highest amount of relationship. That's why Sapolsky is awesome, and Eripsa isn't, to put it mildly. Edit: Oh wow, Eripsa says: quote:Gordon makes as good a case as any about the importance of network signals for shaping colony organization. Caste changes aren't carried out by some master blue-print or some central authority governing the behavior of all ants simultaneously; the ants change their behavior far too quickly for signals to propagate from the queen or any other central source. When ants change their caste, they are doing it on the basis of their own assessment of the situation, given their distinct preferences and history. There was never a claim of central authority governing the ants. I didn't say that, at any point. What is true is that ants' behavior is caused by their genetics--in interaction with environment, but each of them does have a 'master blueprint' of stimuli/response. Their 'preferences' and 'histories' are just the contingent paths of stimuli response. Even if you think that human consciousness is an illusion, that you think it's just along for the ride, and that free will doesn't exist, there is the very, very clear loving fact that human beings act as though there is free will. Ants don't. You can predict when an individual ant will or will not change castses. You cannot do so for a human. The analogy is so godawful. One of your worst attributes is how tightly you cling to particular ideas, even when they've been shown to be horribly useless. This is because you're a cargo-cult thinker, not actually interested in discovering anything, but instead of creating a reality. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 19:50 on May 1, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:38
|
|
|
/\ /\ I don't think sentience per se has anything to do with it. In either case at the proper level of abstraction we're only talking about factors that influence behavior, whatever they may be. It's really an issue of scale--Eripsa is taking inspiration from a simpler system and wants to improve a more complex system by adding rules from the simpler system. It's completely backwards, but it's not really about what is or isn't sentient.RealityApologist posted:I'm not suggesting we hook people up to pheromone machines, I'm only suggesting that we introduce a network signal into the transaction Ant behavior shows interesting self-organizing patterns from simple rules. Human behavior presumably does too, it's just that there are so goddamn many such rules it's not really fair to call it simple anymore. My point is, for ant behavior we can identify these countably few signals and describe their effects on the system. For human behavior, such signals already exist. Except instead of 5 or 10, there are uncountable such signals that influence our behavior. So "introducing" a network signal is strange. Human social structure emerges from more signals than in ants, not less. So why introduce more? I suggest you spend your time researching what signals already exist in human social systems, what their effects are. Come up with a simple model including some of these. Then you can start to think about what would you happen if you amplified some or removed others. SurgicalOntologist fucked around with this message at 19:44 on May 1, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:40
|
|
|
RealityApologist posted:It's nice to see two different posters give exactly contradictory response to my post. Okay, first of all, I wasn't contradicting what Little Blackfly said. They were talking about social mobility, I was talking about personal choice. Humans choose the best option available to them, and the available choices depend heavily upon factors beyond their control. EDIT: What Muscle Tracer said, in other words. Second. I'm not a libertarian, I'm not talking about some magical ~free will~ nonsense. I'm saying that human beings possess the ability to remember past events, use those memories to envision potential future events, and evaluate those potential events in terms of desirability. In doing so, they are making decisions in a way that ants are not. That is a qualitative difference between people and ants. When ants make 'choices' as you define them, they are reacting in a predetermined way to the situation they are faced with. Even if the decision takes into account their past history, that's still not the same method that humans use. An ant does not switch back to a nest-worker role because it thinks that will be good for the hive, it does so because its instincts tell it to. The fact that its instincts are usually correct is the result of millions of years of evolution carefully selecting exactly those instincts that generate the desired emergent behavior. Third... RealityApologist posted:You might expect something as efficiently operated as an ant colony to be the result of an oppressive dictatorship, but they are actually exemplars of cooperative self-organized anarchy within an predominately female agricultural community as a successful organizational strategy. Is this a joke, or are you actually talking about ant colonies like they were some kind of primitive human culture? Ants do not require oppressive dictators because they do not have the choice between submission and resistance, obedience or rebellion. They do not employ an organizational strategy. They do not employ ANY strategy, because they do not make conscious decisions! And I have no idea what "predominately female" has to do with anything. Alien Arcana fucked around with this message at 19:51 on May 1, 2014 |
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:42
|
|
|
So what I'm seeing after all this walkback from OP is that Strangecoin isn't just a new form of currency but would be a social and economic revolution that would change things for the better by doing...something that OP doesn't actually understand and knows very little about, would involve something that OP doesn't actually understand and knows very little about, is implemented by something that OP doesn't actually understand and knows nothing about, but he does know it will involve restructuring society somehow, and he's not even thought about how, to be more like Ants even though he knows that doesn't make sense because people are so vastly different than ants but no trust him it will work. So Eripsa, are you just some undergrad stoner? Because these are the ramblings of someone not in their right mind. To think this thread started off as a dumb thing about New Bitcoins. What a trip it's been.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:46
|
|
|
Mercury_Storm posted:This entire thread is an exercise in useless mental masturbation. I guess talking about things in concrete terms could get in the way of  .
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:47
|
|
|
nebby posted:I think it's funny that even after two separate people posted implementations in both python and haskell I have yet to see anyone mention actually running those simulations, finding bugs in them, coming up with testable examples, etc. You must have missed some of Jawn's posts then, because he did, and ran up against problems Eripsa would need to clarify before the system could progress.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:49
|
|
|
You guys are attacking for the wrong reasons. In cases of both ants and humans you can predict their behavior based on various factors. It's what biologists and psychologists do. You can try to understand larger social structures based on these factors that influence individual behavior. This is what ecologists and sociologists do. There are more factors for humans than for ants, making it very difficult to do so for humans than for ants. But it doesn't matter that some of these factors involve memory or decisions or evolution or are "predetermined". If they are predetermined they only seem to be because they are easier to predict. There are tons of issues here, mostly stemming from not acknowledging the difficulties that stem from one system (human society) being way more complex than the other. But saying that humans choose and ants don't is a reductionist and ultimately unhelpful way of drawing this distinction. There are interesting connections that can be made between the two, it's just that Eripsa hasn't been able to make any because the problem is framed backwards. nebby posted:I think it's funny that even after two separate people posted implementations in both python and haskell I have yet to see anyone mention actually running those simulations, finding bugs in them, coming up with testable examples, etc. I made my implementation hoping that Eripsa would try to use it and be forced to start thinking about the interesting part of the problem, the part he hasn't thought about--the factors that influence individual behavior. But instead there were just some words about "math is hard".
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:52
|
|
|
Cantorsdust posted:You know a thread is poo poo when evilweasel starts using all lowercase. I legitimately like this thread, and I want to see it Goldmined or stickied forever as a warning to others that grad school can become a black hole into which all coherence and rational thought can disappear forever. No ditch digger would ever write something as obtuse, nonsensical, and just plain pointless as Eripsa without the benefit of a severe head injury or full-blown schizophrenia.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 19:59
|
|
|
Seriously guys, if you haven't look up Whuffies. It's clearly what he's trying to describe, only he's slapped on (valueless coin) and a bunch if half-understood theories so his idea can be an original one.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 20:01
|
|
|
SurgicalOntologist posted:You guys are attacking for the wrong reasons. In cases of both ants and humans you can predict their behavior based on various factors. It's what biologists and psychologists do. But it's important that there's no 'ant psychologists'. You need both biologists and psychologists--or psychologists who are aware of biology--to predict human behavior. But not for ants. quote:You can try to understand larger social structures based on these factors that influence individual behavior. This is what ecologists and sociologists do. Biologists do that too, actually, for ants anyway. quote:There are more factors for humans than for ants, making it very difficult to do so for humans than for ants. But it doesn't matter that some of these factors involve memory or decisions or evolution or are "predetermined". If they are predetermined they only seem to be because they are easier to predict. It does matter a lot if an individual is capable of resistance, dissemblance, etc. or not. quote:There are tons of issues here, mostly stemming from not acknowledging the difficulties that stem from one system (human society) being way more complex than the other. But saying that humans choose and ants don't is a reductionist and ultimately unhelpful way of drawing this distinction. There are interesting connections that can be made between the two, it's just that Eripsa hasn't been able to make any because the problem is framed backwards. It is important that humans exercise choice in a way that ants do not. It's not reductionist, it's just a fact you've got to deal with, whether or not that choice is 'real' or not. Likewise, baboons exercise choice in a way that ants do not. This may not be the distinction you want to draw, but it is an important distinction to draw between ants and humans--there are a million reasons the analogy is terrible, but the phenomenon of consciousness and choice is one of them. quote:I made my implementation hoping that Eripsa would try to use it and be forced to start thinking about the interesting part of the problem, the part he hasn't thought about--the factors that influence individual behavior. But instead there were just some words about "math is hard". An interesting (and so far unanswered) question is what it would take Erispa to actually think critically about any of his own ideas, but I think that the answer would have more to do with emotions than anything else, and doubt it's something that can be achieved by what you're trying, noble as it is. I think that--barring some actual neurons-firing-all-whacky problem--Eripsa has emotional reasons for thinking the way he does; his goal is not to improve his thinking.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 20:07
|
|
|
Obdicut sort of beat me to it, but anyway:SurgicalOntologist posted:There are tons of issues here, mostly stemming from not acknowledging the difficulties that stem from one system (human society) being way more complex than the other. But saying that humans choose and ants don't is a reductionist and ultimately unhelpful way of drawing this distinction. There are most certainly distinctions between human 'choice' and ant 'choice'. Humans, for instance, can imagine. We can actively predict the future. We can communicate our predictions to one another, to arbitrary levels of abstraction. We can actively decide to screw over society for our own benefit. There's nothing *magical* about humans that let us do these things; they are possible because, as you say, because we are way more complex. But saying that the difference between human and ant brains is purely a matter of size and complexity is ignoring the emergent behavior (oho!) that our brains display and ant brains do not.
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 20:09
|
|
|
When there is a gap this large between Eripsa's posts in the middle of the day you just know he's writing some 12 paragraph epic in response to a minor comment or criticism (never the important ones), in which he misses the point completely by the 3rd sentence and spends the rest twisting arguments made by him and others in the thread into unrecognizability, before finally ending with a bunch of completely unfounded assertions about something he really thinks will be true (because the alternative is dealing with the fact that you should never start with a conclusion and work backwards to try to invent premises).
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 20:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? Oct 3, 2024 12:34 |
|
|
God it's almost like emergent behavior is really hard to predict!
|
|
#
?
May 1, 2014 20:10
|
|