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Little Blackfly posted:Yeah, but the whole point of a reputation economy is to do away with the need for something like a currency. Networked reputation allows people to barter goods and services directly, trading favours in big chains of reputable parties without the need of a stable unit of value that people can count on. A reputation based economy like what RA seems to be pushing for would basically work on the premise that the more networked someone was, the more valuable a favour owed from them would be. You would do things for people because everybody could be trusted due to available information. So why even bother with the coins at all? Oh, that's what I'm saying: it doesn't make any sense, the reputation stuff is what it's been shoehorned into once it became clear how terrible the idea was when it started. I think the idea is more of a nebulous "ah, you are associated with local growers I trust, so I'll buy from you: you, on the other hand, murder people in Bengladesh to make your sweatpants, peace out rear end in a top hat" kind of thing. Definitely a chicken-and-egg problem, though, considering that there was a whole thread on attention economy.
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May 2, 2014 04:59
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RealityApologist posted:I'm just running with the view because I think it's right. Consequently, it isn't particularly surprising to see structurally similar networks appear across both the hard and special sciences, and applying at nearly all scales. For example, natural human foraging patterns mathematically resemble the foraging patterns of other animals. In light of this, it's not unreasonable to expect other organizational dynamics would be similar as well. Not necessarily so, but it's not unreasonable place to start, especially since the division of labor in ants is so much easier to study. I don't think people fundamentally have an issue with the existence of mathematical models underlying the collective behaviour of animals (aside from objections stemming from misunderstandings of biology). Neither of those papers relate in any way to the features of strangecoin that you describe in your proposal. Are you using these papers as examples of effects that you want to see from the strangecoin model? Because the papers use mathematical formulations that are completely at odds with your current proposal. The issues you have in coming up with a description of coupling is a big source of your troubles. You want to describe things in an 'economically intuitive' way, but that doesn't square with the complexities encountered in a real economic model. If the model is simple enough for the average person to comprehend and apply, it is probably a gross simplification of what you want really want to model. Those two papers are the perfect example of expressing something interesting, yet can not be expressed in a manner to be of any utility to the average person. If your proposals were written with a similar amount of depth and rigour, I doubt you'd find many detractors. In fact, people would mostly be asking questions about your system and would be happy for you to respond with lengthy analogies and philosophical implications. However, you haven't earned it yet, or from your current trajectory likely to earn it. RealityApologist posted:I think the reason for this sentiment is that there's been frighteningly little discussion concerning the actual transaction types in the proposal. I suspect talking about transactions more will show this line of criticism to be misguided. No, you aren't sure about these things; your struggle to elucidate them without having the work done for you is why the only thing people have to discuss are social castes and ant pheromones. SurgicalOntologist posted:That might not be so crazy. Some of my colleagues study self-organization of living things from the perspective of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, asking questions like "what makes some dissipative structures (e.g. bacteria) fundamentally different from others (e.g. hurricanes) in terms of energy flows?" This approach could reasonably be applied to governments as well. In terms of thermodynamics, are governments more like living things, weather systems, or are they more like televisions (i.e. not dissipative structures)? Why do you think I brought up Econophysics in the first place? This is clearly what he is trying to accomplish, except he is cooking up his own mathematical model in order to get desirable effects. Unfortunately he professes that it isn't something he is particularly knowledgeable about. So he throws together a bunch of assumptions that sound good, and ask others to model them and refine them for him. When people criticise that they aren't very good he complains that we are ignoring the bigger picture (that it can be accomplished at all). If you can't build a bridge to the big picture (or take steps towards), why should people trust that you can even reach the big picture in the first place?
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May 2, 2014 05:05
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I kind of feel bad when people ask Eripsa to be consistent with things he said a week ago because if you read the whole thread you can see thats a patent impossibility.
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May 2, 2014 05:27
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The ultimate problem with the strangecoin proposal is that it's a "currency" for a post scarcity society, without the admission that it needs post scarcity to work.
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May 2, 2014 05:51
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edit: incomplete post, sorry
crusader_complex fucked around with this message at 10:23 on May 2, 2014 |
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May 2, 2014 10:06
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RealityApologist, are you capable of describing a situation where someone with more connections than me on the strangenet could impact me, and what that impact would entail?
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May 2, 2014 15:11
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ProfessorProf posted:RealityApologist, are you capable of describing a situation where someone with more connections than me on the strangenet could impact me, and what that impact would entail? Well, considering that he has yet to articulate what "impact" could possibly entail in the strangenet, I sincerely doubt it.
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May 2, 2014 15:18
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All we know is that more endorsements mean you have more power. What this power is and what you can do with it is still unknown, but we know that people will want it because it is power.
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May 2, 2014 15:19
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It is similar to the power a chess player gains after winning chess. Are chess groupies a thing? Maybe it's strangecoin groupies.
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May 2, 2014 15:25
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Install Windows posted:The ultimate problem with the strangecoin proposal is that it's a "currency" for a post scarcity society, without the admission that it needs post scarcity to work. It's warmed over 'attention society'. Strangecoin seems to actually have fuckall to do with it and is just another 'oh hey neat, cryptocurrencies are future stuff that surely must be better than current stuff because it's future' that Eripsa just takes up like anything else future. Basically it seems Eripsa is miserable about the present (and hey, that's not totally irrational) and escapes into fantasy. That's a total guess, I'm no psychomijist but after so many pages and years of this poo poo honestly he's either a troll or needs help. Even if a troll, this is way beyond the kind of effort that's sane for anyone to make for a joke so probably needs help anyway. I would love to read his actual doctoral thesis on Turing though. Would be really interesting to see actual academic writing from him. Also I apologise because of course now I'll be quoted as an attack on him so he can shrug off other people's more substantiated arguments but this is partly out of despair and also I'm starting to feel it's no longer funny for someone to paint what now appears to be general mental issues over kilometers of virtual wall. I don't think it's ever an attack to advise someone to talk to someone professional though it can seem like it, especially in cold print. There's a distinct lack of empathy that's worrying and should at least be talked about with someone, quite aside from anything else. This thread has been a guilty pleasure for me, thanks for the good comments and long suffering effort. NLJP fucked around with this message at 15:44 on May 2, 2014 |
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May 2, 2014 15:26
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Little Blackfly posted:It is similar to the power a chess player gains after winning chess. Are chess groupies a thing? Maybe it's strangecoin groupies. The unending thrill that TLO feels after having thoroughly obliterated his foe's pixelated forces on the main stage at the Starcraft II Invitational XXLVII, tens of pasty neckbeards cheering in the stand—THAT is the foundation of strangegroin.
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May 2, 2014 15:30
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NLJP posted:I would love to read his actual doctoral thesis on Turing though. Would be really interesting to see actual academic writing from him. Prepare to be disappointed quote:1. Taking autonomous machines seriously
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May 2, 2014 15:54
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Well, to be honest that's at least a lot more coherent than anything I've seen from him in this thread. It does still smack of wishes and rainbows, seemingly with reluctance to get into anything technical sometime down the line but can't judge that from such a small snippet really. I do love the 'Skeptics!!!!' bogeyman though. Yes everyone is a big mean ol' Skeptic because they don't put on their rose tinted glasses and just Believe in the magic tech future. edit: I meant this part in particular: quote:As a philosophical project, taking autonomous machines seriously requires an address to the skeptic, who unfortunately occupies the majority position with respect to technology. Skeptic should be a neutral term and skepticism, with a small 's', the default position in research anyway, surely. NLJP fucked around with this message at 18:38 on May 2, 2014 |
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May 2, 2014 16:02
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Could someone explain what the hell this is supposed to mean?Eripsa posted:However, the very idea of autonomous artifacts is suspiciously paradoxical, and little philosophical work has been done to provide a general account of machine autonomy that is sensitive to both philosophical concerns and the current state of technological development.
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May 2, 2014 20:59
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Could someone explain what the hell this is supposed to mean? Hes trying to find the correct buzzword incantation that will make him stop looking like an idiot through brute force.
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May 2, 2014 21:11
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SperginMcBadposter posted:Hes trying to find the correct buzzword incantation that will make him stop looking like an idiot through brute force. Come on guys, as much as I enjoy making fun of Eripsa's feverish techno-utopianism, that's really just academic-speak for "this thing I want to explore hasn't really been explored before, so Imma do that now."
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May 2, 2014 21:12
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Come on guys, as much as I enjoy making fun of Eripsa's feverish techno-utopianism, that's really just academic-speak for "this thing I want to explore hasn't really been explored before, so Imma do that now." No, academics would have already moved past the need to pad their sentences with a bunch of faux-intellectual horseshit and would have just said what you said. People who put a lot of effort into sounding intelligent rarely are.
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May 2, 2014 21:35
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Who What Now posted:No, academics would have already moved past the need to pad their sentences with a bunch of faux-intellectual horseshit and would have just said what you said. People who put a lot of effort into sounding intelligent rarely are. I'd like to agree, both as it would make my profession sound better and give me more reason to mock Eripsa, but I've read far too many genuinely accomplished thinkers who can't resist drenching their writing down with theory-wank bullshit. I mean yeah, in this instance in context we know Eripsa uses poor communication to obscure his paucity of actual thought, but that sort of thing on its own terms isn't exactly unknown in thesis statements.
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May 2, 2014 21:40
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Come on guys, as much as I enjoy making fun of Eripsa's feverish techno-utopianism, that's really just academic-speak for "this thing I want to explore hasn't really been explored before, so Imma do that now." That's not "academic-speak".
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May 2, 2014 21:42
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Who What Now posted:No, academics would have already moved past the need to pad their sentences with a bunch of faux-intellectual horseshit and would have just said what you said. You'd think so wouldn't you. Actually, one of the biggest problems in all kinds of research is how poor your average academic is at actually communicating.
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May 2, 2014 21:42
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Dusseldorf posted:That's not "academic-speak". I beg to differ, much as I wish I couldn't. He's an extreme example of a problem that does exist within the academy, and one I try my level best to avoid when writing myself as I hate being that stereotype.
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May 2, 2014 21:43
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Yeah the problem is not the language (though it's a chore as usual) it's the fact that once you've boiled it down there's no non-trivial "there" there. Again.
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May 2, 2014 22:19
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Tokamak posted:I don't think people fundamentally have an issue with the existence of mathematical models underlying the collective behaviour of animals (aside from objections stemming from misunderstandings of biology). Neither of those papers relate in any way to the features of strangecoin that you describe in your proposal. Tokamak the post below is mostly a response to you, but there's a lot of other loose threads in this discussion that I'm also trying to tie up in this post too. Specifically, a lot of people are accusing me of: - imposing ant behaviors on humans - thinking ants are as simple as humans - failing to model any existing behavior in humans - trying to model the behavior of one species by imposing it on another - making up emergent behaviors and trying to jerry-rig them into a social order - arbitrarily picking and choosing ideas I like with no rhyme or reason I think at least some of these accusations come from people who genuinely don't understand scientific explanation and mathematical modeling, and are genuinely offended at the suggestion that organization in ant communities can tell us anything interesting about organization in human communities. The point of the digression into digital philosophy and network theory is to justify the structural analogy and the reasons it might be genuinely informative as a source of inspiration in thinking about human organization. The point wasn't to justify the particular transaction types in Strangecoin, but rather to justify the general approach of looking for structural similarities between different organizations (even at different scales and contexts). Objections have been raised that these similarities are merely superficial, or uninteresting, or imply dictatorial oppression, but all of these reactions are wrong. I appreciate that SurgicalOntologist stepped in to help with some of these issues. He can also probably confirm that the complexity sciences communities bleed off into the new age mysticism communities pretty quickly, and the thought experiments I've offered in this thread really pale in comparison to the degrees of crazy actually out at the fringes. I'm not appealing to Gaia or vorticies. Cranky or not, I'm working quite a good deal away from the fringes. The particular lesson I took from the ants was at a very abstract level: that ants are tracking features of the network composition in their individual interactions. I've given multiple citations and explanations but apparently the lesson hasn't stuck so I'll try to tell the story simply as possible. But to be clear, this is not merely a simplification; it's also an abstract feature of the organizational structure, and constitutes an explanation of the behavior at that level of abstraction. In any case, here's the simple story. Say the ant colony has 3 castes, A, B, and C, each doing distinct kinds of work. I'm an ant and I go around the colony doing whatever the gently caress I want. But my ant-nature tells me two things: first, that I like doing A most of all and B less so and C not really at all, and second that I think the ideal ratio of colony workers is A=80%, B=15%, and C=5%. So I'm going about my world looking for A work to do because that's what I like. And in the process, I run into a bunch of other ants, each doing their own work. I don't really care about them individually, but I am interested in what caste they're in to make sure that the overall colony ratios are to my liking. So basically I'm expecting 80% of the ants I run into to be As, and 15% Bs, and 5% Cs. If that's what I find as I'm walking around, then everything's good and I'll just keep doing A. But if I'm walking around and I see 90% of the other ants doing A, and only 5% Bs and Cs, then things must be hosed up somewhere. So even though I normally prefer doing As, I'll switch my task to doing Bs in order to compensate for the perceived colony deficiency. This is, roughly, how ants make decisions. They have some preferences (dispositions) and some stimuli, and they react to those stimuli given their dispositions. The real story is of course more complicated than that. For one thing, the preferences of the ant change over time as it ages. But more interestingly (and this is the point of the Deborah Gordon video), the ant's preference for colony structure changes as a function of the number of individuals in the colony. So when a colony is young and there are only dozens of individuals the division of labor is much different than in a mature colony with tens of thousands of individuals. This sensitivity of individual ants to colony size allows the colony itself to change its behavior as it ages. And of course the whole thing is made more complicated by the fact that ants share these signals not just through direct interaction, but also by changing their environment in ways that influence other members of the species across time. But even in the simple story it's clear that ant preferences are not just targeted at features of the interactions but also at features of the structure of the network, and it's this insight (at this level of abstraction) that is providing the inspiration for Strangecoin. This is a perfectly abstract feature of the ant organization, and one that might be reasonably imported to questions concerning human organization without assuming that humans should behave like ants or anything so silly. Of course everyone is right to suggest that there's interesting work to do modeling existing human behaviors; I've linked to plenty of literature in agent-based modeling (especially Axelrod) so the idea isn't lost on me. I suspect that the abstract character of ant organization described above does actually describe some existing human organizational structures, and so one approach at this point would be to build a formal model to confirm or deny this possibility given data on exiting human communities. But if we're talking about the division of labor in human communities generally that's a discussion of economics, and the primary signal for economic organization is money. There's plenty of other signals too, of course, and the whole thing is a massively complex clusterfuck. But money is pretty clearly a major signal in organizing the economy, and one of the primary vehicles by which agents engage in their economic transactions. And it's also quite clear to even a novice that while price incorporates features of the economic network (the cost of production, etc), the resulting transactions almost exclusively pertains to considerations of local value (ie, value to the buyer and seller, given their particular economic commitments) and not of overall economic structure or composition. I'm not (typically) considering my purchases in light of the employment rate or the distribution of wealth. On the occasions when I am interested in network structure (for ethical reasons, say), the economic framework conceals information I might otherwise consider important in making the purchase. People have suggested taxes as a kind of modifier to a signal, but taxes can't be interpreted meaningfully by the agents to determine anything about the health and composition of the network. Of course, human beings aren't just economic agents, and are processing signals that indicate network structure from lots of different sources. But money isn't serving that role for our economic organization. So ants organize by attending to information about network structure, and the primary way that humans organize their economy is with a signal that obliterates that information. Hmm, that's funny, innit? It raises an obvious question about what would happen in an economic context where transactions demand explicit consideration about network structure. Well, but what network structure? One way to try would be to arbitrarily define some network structure (assign everyone to one of three castes, say), and give everyone preferences about that structure so they have some idea of how to respond to it, basically repeating the example of the ant from above. The Strangecoin network adopts the considerably more difficult approach of allowing castes to spontaneously emerge from a general-purpose transaction network. So in the examples above I explain how people might distinguish between groups with distinct modifier ranges, without assuming in advance what those groups, their composition, and the methods for distinguishing them are. The transaction types are meant to be very general and support a broad range of organizing behavior, without making assumptions about what shape it might eventually take. The point is not to specify that the network be structured in any particular way, but rather to see what happens to the system when its structure is salient in each transaction. I think that's been pretty clearly the point in the original proposal (and what drew its initial interest), so it's disappointing that 60 pages in the thread still pretends that the basic idea under consideration is to be so poorly defined as to be utterly empty. There have been plenty of examples discussed in the thread, and although the idea is still far from complete, I think the basic premise of modifying transaction values with network modifiers has been established and motivated clearly enough. One feature of the Strangecoin network missing from most of the discussions over the last few dozen pages is that people want balanced accounts, and not just large balances. So the fact that I can arrange some transaction that maxes my balance isn't doing to break the system. A maxed balance means any modifiers that might apply to my income transactions are voided; in other words, it effectively sets my income modifier to 1, equivalent to trading with TUA, as if I have no connections at all. The same happens to my expenses if my balance is at zero. Any additional expenses I accrue come from TUA, which looks unattractive relative to a well-connected person. So my goal is to balance income and expenses, because I'll sacrifice my network position if I don't. The incentive for a balanced account means the incentives are different for buyers and sellers than in a traditional economy. I want to pay high prices for things if I also have high income, and I want to pay lower prices for things if I have a low income, not due to my ability to afford the thing but rather because it keeps my account balanced from approaching its limits and the penalties accruing. So in the above examples we've assumed that buyers want to minimize the coin they're paying, and sellers want to maximize their coin, but that's not really true in general. In general, they want to balance their impact. That still gives them reasons to discriminate as the examples suggest, but their goals aren't to maximize coins so the reasoning is slightly different. Their goal is for a stable account balance, period. So if a seller wants 100 coin income for selling a burger, it's because they generates 100 coin expenses acquiring the material and labor. The seller sets the price at 100 coin and uses this to discriminate among potential buyers not because he wants as much coin as possible but to offset his acquired expenses to avoid hitting the limits. So the seller can still plan and budget for their various income and expenses given an intended customer base, but his goal in the transaction isn't to take the coin of his customer so that he has a lot of coin; if everything works well for the seller he'll end up with just as much coin as he started with. If you expect the goal to be acquiring coins, then it looks like the seller would have been better off just staying home. But what the seller gains from running the business well is not coin but influence on the network, and that's something he couldn't have acquired by just staying home. If they want influence in the network, then they want a high throughput of coin, or in other words lots of network connections. As has been discussed elsewhere in the thread, it might be trivial for a few people to set up connections among themselves to generate arbitrarily high throughput of coin, but since that activity is isolated it's irrelevant to the kind of influence I'm talking about. Someone whose throughput of coin is drawn from sources all across the network has a huge amount of influence on the direction coin flows. If, for instance, I control the endorsements of a million people, then huge shifts in the economy could occur every time I buy a hamburger, even though my own account changes relatively little. Since Strangecoin transactions require consideration of network structure, these aspects of one's position in the network become a limiting factor on economic organization, rather than the coin at one's disposal (which is effectively limitless). RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 00:22 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 00:14
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"our best machines" 
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May 3, 2014 00:17
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Numerical Anxiety posted:"our best machines" FWIW It's an allusion to Haraway: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/donna-haraway/articles/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto/ quote:Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile — a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.
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May 3, 2014 00:22
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RealityApologist posted:Any additional expenses I accrue come from TUA, which looks unattractive relative to a well-connected person. So my goal is to balance income and expenses, because I'll sacrifice my network position if I don't. So your ridiculous economy actually just favors whatever can be sold as fast as possible, because velocity of money is everything. quote:The point is not to specify that the network be structured in any particular way, but rather to see what happens to the system when its structure is salient in each transaction. You're now using structure in a really hosed-up way, meaning not the structure (these stupid transaction types and the TUA) but the relationships between people. Please stop, it making your horrible ideas even harder to follow. In addition, you continually predict what would happen--like people trying to balance their accounts. Why are you predicting that? Do you really, really not get that the point of a model would be to see what emerged? If you want to make a hypothesis about what will emerge, that'd be okay, but you just predict it (and different things on different days, as you rearrange your terms, your ideas, vacillate between whether this is a currency or a game or a rough idea or well-worked out in the OP, and if we're assholes who are loving idiots or if we're the ones who can immanentize your eschaton. Please get therapy. quote:If, for instance, I control the endorsements of a million people, then huge shifts in the economy could occur every time I buy a hamburger, even though my own account changes relatively little. You always find a new way to make your system more dystopic and stupider. It's kind of amazing. A system whereby the guy who Antonio Banderas buys a burger from is going to be a million times wealthier than the guy who saves an elderly woman's life when she collapses in her apartment. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 00:32 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 00:30
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Slanderer posted: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). Right on the money. RA, I really couldn't care less about your dumb ant anologies or your whuffie plagiarism or whatever else, but I am still looking for you to answer me. Wanamingo posted:
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May 3, 2014 00:35
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RealityApologist posted:So ants organize by attending to information about network structure, and the primary way that humans organize their economy is with a signal that obliterates that information. Hmm, that's funny, innit? I'd say that humans have a far better organised economy than ants, so trying to reorganise human interactions by altering every monetary transaction to crudely model a mathematical model of ant society doesn't really seem that appealing. Also I have no idea how you can on one hand call economists alchemists and on the other claim that the primary mode of human organisation is prices, for a person claiming to work with "network theory" (which includes a lot of combinatorial optimization) do you not like general equilibrium theories? Why would you need an alternative way of calculating monetary transactions? There are a lot of intellectual fields that don't treat prices as the primary method of human organisation, do you think they are all rubbish?
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May 3, 2014 00:46
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Wanamingo, I admitted mistakes in the linearity discussion, and explained at length the mistakes I made and the efforts to correct them. The only reason you'd want me to rehearse these events is to humiliate me.Obdicut posted:In addition, you continually predict what would happen--like people trying to balance their accounts. Why are you predicting that? I'm not predicting that, and it's not an emergent feature of the system. It's a constraint on the system due to the account balances. I've said this a dozen times in response to this question when it appears, but your animosity is so dense that it's compromised your basic reading comprehension. It is why you are one of the most insufferable posters in this thread. If my account hits its limit (either 0 or C), then all my network modifiers go away. Since the strength of my economic position comes from the modifiers, users have a built-in incentive in the network to balance their accounts to avoid these penalties. The fact that you don't understand this basic feature, which has been unchanged since the original proposal, demonstrates that large threads in this discussion have just gone right over your head.
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May 3, 2014 00:48
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RealityApologist posted:Wanamingo, I admitted mistakes in the linearity discussion, and explained at length the mistakes I made and the efforts to correct them. The only reason you'd want me to rehearse these events is to humiliate me. This is you not being able to understand that saying that is actually making a prediction about behavior. People have cited plenty of ways that people could act in the system without balancing their accounts, but you still insist that people would. You think you have made a system that rewards or necessitates the balancing of accounts. But you don't actually know. And you don't understand this, because this isn't actually a logical system of thought to you, but some sort of aspirational 'fix the world' bullshit. quote:If my account hits its limit (either 0 or C), then all my network modifiers go away. Since the strength of my economic position comes from the modifiers, users have a built-in incentive in the network to balance their accounts to avoid these penalties. The fact that you don't understand this basic feature, which has been unchanged since the original proposal, demonstrates that large threads in this discussion have just gone right over your head. Or you just continue to buy and sell stuff from people anyway, because you don't really give a poo poo about your economic position, you just like having stuff. Since it wouldn't matter except for scarcity items, why would the average person give a poo poo? I haven't noticed, have you responded to anyone who noticed you basically plagiarized Doctorow's idea but made it much worse, yet? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Price is an obviously stupid way to measure economic activity, because there's stitloads of things that don't get paid for, and aren't reflected in things bought and sold, or whether the thing is $100 worth of heroin or $100 worth of penicillin. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 01:00 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 00:57
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Obdicut posted:Or you just continue to buy and sell stuff from people anyway, because you don't really give a poo poo about your economic position, you just like having stuff. Since it wouldn't matter except for scarcity items, why would the average person give a poo poo? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive
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May 3, 2014 01:01
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Why would it be an incentive, if they didn't care about their economic condition because they can still buy poo poo, it's just not going to be poo poo that other people are heavily competing for? I haven't noticed, have you responded to anyone who saw that you basically plagiarized Doctorow's idea but made it much worse, yet?
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May 3, 2014 01:03
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e: VVV fair enough but still a weird term of bias. And while we're at it, does anyone else in "your" department have this weirdly faith-based cast to their writings? Like "unfortunately, not everyone believes that the future is digital and beautiful and wonderful." What the hell kind of an academic standard is that? It isn't one; you haven't even managed to convincingly ape the language of overblown pomo butlerism; you're a fraud; incoherency alone wouldn't be a barrier to graduation and tenure; this is why you haven't finished, because your constant stream of unsubstantiated techno-fetishistic glossolalia isn't even fit for the pretend discipline you've sought to infiltrate. You're a guy with a CS degree that had an episode. Move on now. woke wedding drone fucked around with this message at 01:28 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 01:08
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^^ That's a middle chapter of the thesis, not the introduction. Haraway (and the "best machines" quote) is introduced and discussed specifically in earlier chapters.Obdicut posted:Why would it be an incentive, if they didn't care about their economic condition because they can still buy poo poo, it's just not going to be poo poo that other people are heavily competing for? An incentive is when an agent can expect a reward for acting in a particular way. That doesn't mean the agent has to care about anything at all, it just means that their behaviors are constrained by various rewards and punishments. You have an incentive to gain subscribers on your youtube channel because it promotes your position on the "suggestions" list, and you have that incentive whether or not you give a poo poo about youtube or youtube subscribers. Saying you have an incentive doesn't mean you give a poo poo about anything. quote:I haven't noticed, have you responded to anyone who saw that you basically plagiarized Doctorow's idea but made it much worse, yet? You haven't noticed because you haven't read the thread. If you aren't going to read the thread gtfo. RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 01:13 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 01:09
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RealityApologist posted:Wanamingo, I admitted mistakes in the linearity discussion, and explained at length the mistakes I made and the efforts to correct them. The only reason you'd want me to rehearse these events is to humiliate me. Well I'll be a son of a motherfuck, you did. RealityApologist posted:In my elaboration, I made the following mistake: I claimed that the fact that a payment adds some percentage of support from each of their supporters constituted a nonlinear relation. I was wrong. this was a mistake. Slanderer slammed me on the mistake, and I didn't post for 6 hours while I sat over my system of equations and pulled my hair out and generally had to live with a sinking sense of doom and failure and depression. I admitted this mistake and the work I did to correct it in the thread at the time. You showed an incredibly unhealthy reaction to it, and in the very next paragraph you went on to say that strangecoin is nonlinear for reasons beyond what Slanderer complained about, said your buddy thinks we're all morons for disagreeing with you, and that you won the discussion. It's half hearted and weasely, but by god I will accept that. I'll shut up about it now.
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May 3, 2014 01:21
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RealityApologist posted:^^ That's a middle chapter of the thesis, not the introduction. Haraway (and the "best machines" quote) is introduced and discussed specifically in earlier chapters. What about people who aren't motivated to balance their accounts? This is what you just keep skipping over. You're saying everyone will be because they want a good economic position. What about people who don't, because they can still get poo poo even when they're 'broke' in straingcoinland, so they really could give less than a toss about getting a gold iphone or a seat at the mew Mario Bataldi restaurant or whatever. quote:I don't see any shame in the similarities between this idea and Doctorow's; they're both pretty immediately inspired by attention economy considerations from Simon and McLuhan and Shirky and others who I've also cited in the thread. I've asked the thread if they're aware of any existing technical implementations of the idea or anything like it, and even offered that I would shut up and leave the thread if any were produced. The offer still stands. So you're claiming that the near-identicalness of Doctorow's (fictional) idea, including its flaws, to your idea is just because you draw from the same sources? Why are you claiming Doctorow's came from Simon and McLuhan and Shirky? ^^^^^^^ What he can't explain in any rational way is why the hell he didn't actually bother to understand what 'nonlinear' meant before claiming it was true of Strangecoin. Or why he was claiming it as an important attribute of strangecoin when he literally didn't know what it meant. Edit: Ian M. Bank's 'kudos' system is a better worked out attention economy than yours, Eripsa because he acknowledges actors not obeying incentives and others gaming the system, and nobody is ever quite sure if they actually care about kudos or if it's an elaborate joke. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 01:27 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 01:22
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Ok, I did my best to read the pile of words Eprisa vomited up, but I still have no idea what "influence" means in a Strangecoin world, why one would want it, or how one wields it to influence others. And it seems that Eprisa has no idea what the answer to those questions are either.
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May 3, 2014 01:44
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RealityApologist posted:I think at least some of these accusations come from people who genuinely don't understand scientific explanation and mathematical modeling, I'd given up posting in this thread because it was utterly pointless trying to debate with someone who can't answer even the most basic questions about their 'model' , but holy poo poo I can't believe you have the front to actually write that. Yes someone in this thread doesn't get scientific explanation or mathematical modelling , it loving you. :ironcat_slowly_growing_into_huge_ironicat .gif:
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May 3, 2014 02:08
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Obdicut posted:What about people who aren't motivated to balance their accounts? Then their transactions lose all modifiers. Since network transactions are made in light of modifiers, users have an incentive to balance the account. That's what it means to be an incentive. I don't know how many more times I'll need to explain this to you. quote:So you're claiming that the near-identicalness of Doctorow's (fictional) idea, including its flaws, to your idea is just because you draw from the same sources? Attention economy is not my idea or Doctorow's. It's Simons. Doctrow's work shows obvious influences of Simon on Doctorow and he's posted about Simon a number of times on Boing Boing. I don't think anyone would dispute the influence those thinkers have had on Doctorow, and I'm not at all sure why you are disputing it now. Doctorow (and many, many others) have talked about attention economic ideas more or less explicitly. I've said that my favorite implementation is in Sterling's Caryatids, which is far more realistic and dystopian than anything Doctorow produces: quote:When they had docked at Mljet in their slow-boat refugee barges, they'd been given their spex and their ID tags. As proper high-tech pioneers, they soon found themselves humbly chopping the weeds in the bold Adriatic sun. I've never claimed to be the originator of the idea of an attention economy or suggested that I have any special role to play in its development, so the idea of shaming me for pointing to others who've also talked about the idea is rather silly. The idea has been around for 30 years, and it's had a lot of influence on science and economics in the time since. I think the conversation is still worth having because I think it's important in its own right, and because I don't know of any existing attempts to formally realize the kind of currencies presumed in these works of science fiction. Although post-scarcity might be required for such a currency to work in practice (although Sterling's discussion doesn't suggest that's the case), I don't think there's any technological barrier preventing us from studying the formal aspects of such a system by building models (like Strangecoin) and seeing how they actually behave. So basically you're laughing at me for trying to build a thing that exists in science fiction. I've pointed to dozens of articles from a half dozen disciplines trying to establish the theoretical and technical considerations necessary for building the thing, none of which is to be found in Down and Out, but you're going to dismiss the whole project as a shameless act of plagiarism and fraud. And you think that's the obvious, reasonable conclusion to draw from the thread. At best it demonstrates that you're a hostile rear end in a top hat, and you're a fool to think you've established anything more. Obdicut and SedanChair together give the impression that no one should speak beyond their area of expertise, and the presumption to do otherwise is so offensive that they think the only sensible response is to treat me as insane (ie, a nonperson) and shame me into silence. Their arguments are consistently directed at establishing that there is no legitimate basis for allowing me to express my thoughts; they've concluded not only that my thoughts have no value but that they should be actively shunned from the public discourse. I think SedanChair is genuinely disturbed by the accusation that his behavior constitutes bullying and dehumanization, because as a social worker I'm sure he's dealt with cases of people who've been subject to far worse treatment of the same sort, and were in less privileged positions to be able to cope with it. But I think that watching me fail makes him feel better about himself anyway, and that calling me insane helps ease whatever cognitive dissonance he might experience. Seriously, guys, if there's anything at all that makes me uniquely qualified to conduct this thread with all of you, it's the fact that I've developed a healthy tolerance to the critical and personal attacks over the last few years, so that they don't really distract me from being productive. I know you guys think academia is harsher than y'all, but I've been here long enough to know its not true. There are of course petty rivalries between academics that can get hostile, but there's rarely the kind of sweepingly crass immaturity and dehumanization I face in this thread. The better comparison is to politics; I can definitely see why the constant barrage of hostility could chew up and spit out someone who wasn't almost dogmatically confident in their positions and abilities. I don't have any ambitions whatsoever to run for office, but if I did this would be great training for it. The biggest challenge isn't meeting every objection precisely and convincingly (just do what you can with what you have), but instead the challenge is maintaining composure while you're doing it, staying focused and on message and don't let yourself get swallowed up by the details. I elaborate the analogy to politics not because I have egomaniacal aspirations, but to sympathize with the criticisms in the thread that I'm difficult to nail down. In some sense the criticism is appropriate because I'm trying to advocate for the topic and its philosophical assumptions, and that means persisting with the idea with the dogma of a politician on message, and politicians can be slippery as hell. But that doesn't make the message empty. I just happen to be an advocacy group of 1 in these threads which forces me to defend the message most consistently. If the idea had other advocates in the thread (even ones who disagreed substantively with me and my specific proposals), then we might have an argument about the specifics where not only am I shown to be mistaken, but where I can leave the discussion and it can continue in my stead. As it stands, I think this thread (and the last 10 pages or so in particular) have done a lot to increase this forum's comprehension of the attention economy, its various philosophical and political dimensions, how strangecoin is intended to be an implementation of this idea, and the scope and aim of developing a working implementation. But the thread does still show some difficulty continuing with that discussion in my absence, especially since so many would-be advocates (like Cantordust and SurgicalOntologist) enter the thread by adopting its overall hostile and skeptical position as their default attitude. Which is not to blame them, but when in Rome... So SurgicalOntologist finds himself in the position of simultaneously defending complexity science and distancing himself from my views, even though I'm coming from a perspective really quite close to his own, about topics that wouldn't be foreign to other discussions he has with his colleagues (perhaps at the bar after work), but nevertheless he has to adopt the distancing posture just so he can participate in the thread at all because that's the way the wind is blowing. Any defense of any of my claims in this thread comes packaged between layers of apology and distancing from my views, making it harder for anyone (except, apparently, GulMadred) to just straightforwardly engage my views as they are presented. It would help if more advocates for the ideas and science being presented would step forward, whether or not they agree with me, and without presuming that a discussion of the science must happen by way of a criticism of my character or ideas. I say this not to complain, but just to echo the idea that we'd all get a lot more done if the thread isn't about me.
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May 3, 2014 02:25
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jre posted:I'd given up posting in this thread because it was utterly pointless trying to debate with someone who can't answer even the most basic questions about their 'model' , but holy poo poo I can't believe you have the front to actually write that. I makes me particularly happy to write lines like that for this audience. It's especially funny because you all actually think I have no idea what I'm doing. edit: SurgicalOntologist, if you want to do a hangout on complexity science, agent-based modeling, and why ant organization might matter for human organization, I think it would be fantastically interesting.
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May 3, 2014 02:29
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