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quote: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. Not really, I just want you to snap out of it. Just cut it out. It's OK to stop behaviors that aren't working. It doesn't diminish you. You don't have to find a neat way to argue your way out of it like a gymnast nailing a landing. All you have to do is laugh it off and quit doing it. This is a forum where people say crazy poo poo, I do it all the time. It's a place for staking out positions. These aren't positions though. This is just jabbering. Pointing out that your ideas are hot garbage, Cory Doctorow on jenkem and Benadryl, is not "dehumanizing." I'm the last person who would call a person with mental health issues a nonperson. It doesn't reduce you to something less than human to point out that you are talking nonsense.
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May 3, 2014 02:43
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RealityApologist posted:FWIW It's an allusion to Haraway: And based on the quote you provide there, the term makes no loving sense in the context you placed it.
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May 3, 2014 03:03
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RealityApologist posted:It's especially funny because you all actually think I have no idea what I'm doing. When are you expecting to publish? This work is academically meaningful, after all.
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May 3, 2014 03:03
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There is no answer for why an account can be balanced, as the assumed 'noble lie' of the system is that the adopters will act as Nash-equilibrium homo economists irrespective of anything but a myopic Ants-playing-Star*Craft apologetic. This is despite the history of Prisoner's Dilemma and many other economic models being a rather unsure conclusion! Because, much like the conflation of gender into tools, Eripsa has also conflated 'incentive' as if it was also a tool to be built and adopted rather than the consequence of a large cultural and social constructs that, yes Virginia, has loss-conditions such as starvation as part of its design. The magical thinking of tool-as-ritual is the consequence of the moral failure that is singularity theology- the conception of society as a body of tools, to be adopted and discarded as individuals once the eschaton of post-scarcity has been immanentized. This is why the mentors and colleague distance themselves from Eripsa's positions- his moral failures as a human being has poisoned his thinking- and with it, all studies that he associates with. RealityApologist posted:I just want to build the drat thing so the future can loving get here already because it isn't here yet and things are pretty poo poo, and you all have a hell of a lot better loving chance of making it happen than me. So then to ask, in order to 'push the understanding forward' is there a philosophical difference between the 'tool' of strangecoin and the 'tool' of the emergent culture that the strangenet would require to be implemented?
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May 3, 2014 03:15
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I don't get why he doesn't just discard the whole thing about being able to essentially break the system by not giving a poo poo and spending negative and draining the TUA. I get the technological utopian-ism he's attracted to, but its some serious post-scarcity nonsense and I would have thought that anyone can recognize we aren't there yet (we wont ever be). Since people aren't ants they can understand the system they've been placed in and how to exploit it to their benefit since they aren't stuck playing by genetically set "fair" implementation of those rules and aren't literally selfless. If strangecoin was ever implemented, I think my first action would be to buy a gun, some goats, and a farm in the middle of nowhere where I would wait out the societal collapse that would be caused by massive amounts of people quitting working followed by economic meltdown and food riots once the TUA was completely drained or everyone still working switched to bartering or a saner currency like bitcoin. SickZip fucked around with this message at 03:45 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 03:39
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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. It's not that he can't sometimes answer the most basic questions. He can. It's just that he takes two paragraphs and three examples to explain something that can be answered in one sentence. Any relevant points that are made are lost in the mire of useless academic language. It would be a good refresher for Eprisa to post a simplified and clean version of Strangecoin's current design. And by cleaned up and simplified I mean something that is both relatively brief, easy for a layperson to understand, and easy to follow with no unnecessary comments. Essentially something that doesn't make the eyes of avid followers of this conversation slide of the page.
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May 3, 2014 03:43
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SickZip posted:The cool thing about people not being ants is that they can figure out the system and how to exploit it to their benefit since they aren't stuck playing by the rules or driven by genetic programming that makes them selfless. You both underestimate how "stuck by the rules" we actually are (ie, how much our genetic programming and social structures constrain our possibilities for free action), and overestimate how much the ants are limited by genetics. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120926092910.htm quote:Slave rebellion is widespread in ants I hope someone is enjoying all the neat ant research I've been sharing. I have tons more, including lots of great pictures. I've been considering making a megapost of anarchist-themed ant pictures for the picture thread, but the hostility towards me trails into other threads and I don't want to infect that one.
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May 3, 2014 03:49
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SickZip posted:I don't get why he doesn't just discard the whole thing about being able to essentially break the system by not giving a poo poo and spending negative and draining the TUA. I get the technological utopian-ism he's attracted to, but its some serious post-scarcity nonsense and I would have thought that anyone can recognize we aren't there yet (we wont ever be). The cool thing about people not being ants is that they can figure out the system and how to exploit it to their benefit since they aren't stuck playing by the rules or driven by genetic programming that makes them selfless. From what I can gather (the actual reasoning may be neck deep in an explanation of something else that seemed entirely irrelevant), the reason to not crash the system is because other people won't trade with you if you're at a low throughput or an unbalanced account. Why those individuals don't just band together and trade amongst themselves to retain a desirable amount while also antagonistically trading with others isn't clear yet. Also, I don't think it's been explained as to how individuals can achieve a higher velocity or a balanced account without engaging with people of similar status. Another note on transaction velocity: Wouldn't the incentive for transaction velocity provide a disincentive for bulk transactions? i.e. 100 transactions of 1 object to the same person is better than 1 transaction of 100 objects. RealityApologist posted:You both underestimate how "stuck by the rules" we actually are (ie, how much our genetic programming and social structures constrain our possibilities for free action), and overestimate how much the ants are limited by genetics. Xelkelvos fucked around with this message at 03:57 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 03:52
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RealityApologist posted: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. The obvious problem is that the spec currently uses a centralized design and has strict boundary conditions. I don't see an elegant way of "patching" the design to include subjective clout, and I consider subjective clout to be a vital feature when thinking about Strangecoin in reference to actual human institutions (families, neighbourhoods, etc) and economic relationships (to reflect things like shipping costs, language barriers, and local needs/scarcity). The current design works fine as a thought-experiment ("game" is only for things that are fun  ) but people are going to pay more attention if the system has some apparent applicability to real-world affairs.And attention is the only thing that actually matters 
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May 3, 2014 03:56
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That article about ant slaves was legitimately interesting. Not sure that it proves any point, but still interesting.
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May 3, 2014 03:58
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SickZip posted:I don't get why he doesn't just discard the whole thing about being able to essentially break the system by not giving a poo poo and spending negative and draining the TUA. I get the technological utopian-ism he's attracted to, but its some serious post-scarcity nonsense and I would have thought that anyone can recognize we aren't there yet (we wont ever be). Since people aren't ants they can understand the system they've been placed in and how to exploit it to their benefit since they aren't stuck playing by genetically set "fair" implementation of those rules and aren't literally selfless. The TUA cannot be drained, it is limitless. The coins aren't what is important, what is important is how much "influence" you have over the system. How you get this influence and what you do with it are as of yet undefined. But whatever it is, you want it apparently.
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May 3, 2014 03:59
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Who What Now posted:The TUA cannot be drained, it is limitless. The coins aren't what is important, what is important is how much "influence" you have over the system. How you get this influence and what you do with it are as of yet undefined. But whatever it is, you want it apparently. The way I understand it: More influence -> More incentive for others to trade with you -> More trades -> More influence the incentive for others to trade with that high influence person is that they receive more money from those transactions from the TUA or something and that being connected to the High Influence Individual will provide similar but smaller benefits when trading. I may be wrong. If I am not, then that structure is basically akin to a pyramid scheme.
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May 3, 2014 04:04
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RealityApologist posted: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: I was going to tell you to get the gently caress off your high horse but the fall would probably kill you, or at least leave you drowning in a giant pool of irony. Are we back to talking about StrangeCoin as a model, then? Because it's not, I thought we established that. You even admit yourself that you merely suspect that ant organization does actually describe some human organizational structure, except you haven't actually done any work to demonstrate that yet. It's just a suspicion. Your ridiculous Google Glass Ant Game doesn't even have a super preliminary alpha, there are just a few screenshots (which I noticed you credited to someone else) and a pathetic plea for cash to hire someone capable of writing code. quote: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). What if a few people generate arbitrarily high throughputs of coin, which they then use to purchase tangible goods? You know, because sane people give no fucks about StrangeCoins in and of themselves, but seek wealth - useful wealth - not nebulous and intangible influence. By the way, why do they want influence in the network, again? Are we going to talk about StrangeCoin as a game, and not as a currency that can be exchanged for something of actual value? RealityApologist posted: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. You've vomited out pages of speculation on how you expect people to behave in StrangeCoin. Like, for example, the rest of your post. You may not have specified exactly how the network is structured, but you certainly keep repeating baseless assertions as to how people would be expected to behave. Oh, there's also the unsubstantiated claim that the network could be stable or feasible in the first place. Or how about this one: RealityApologist posted: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. StrangeCoin is a currency that, for some reason, people don't want to acquire lots of. Yes yes, there's a balance cap. But are agents too stupid to figure out that they can just buy more things with their Coin instead of hitting the cap? And didn't you have some vague notion that contributing to TUA would give you e-peen, so why would it be a bad thing to maximize your income even at the risk of exceeding the balance cap? By the way, did you ever figure out why a seller would set a price of 100 coin for a widget, and accepting payment from a 4x supported user @ 500 coins while rejecting a broke hobo, instead of charging 500 coins post-modifiers and accepting 500 coins from TUA via the hobo as well? That discussion got abandoned over the last few pages for unknown reasons. RealityApologist posted: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. Nope! Sorry, the motivation is still remarkably poor. 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? It raises an obvious question about what would happen in an economic context where transactions demand explicit consideration about network structure. Even accepting your premise that pricing goods obliterates information about the economy - which sounds incredible to me, but I'm not an economist so I'll leave it be - you have in no way demonstrated that ant economies are better structured than human ones. You certainly have made the judgment throughout this thread that some kind of network attention economy is preferable to our current system. If you're going to backpedal from that claim like you usually do, then we're back just to having a potentially interesting system, with an incomplete and probably still fundamentally broken implementation.
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May 3, 2014 04:06
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And to think I almost stopped checking this thread... maybe I should have...RealityApologist posted: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. Umm, this is pretty disingenuous and even insulting. I am capable of coming to my own conclusions. Not to mention that I think 90% of the work of my closest colleagues is utter crap, so maybe I'm a science-cynic scientist or something but you're not in bad company having half-baked ideas. So no, I didn't come to my conclusions because of the prevailing currents in the thread. I mean seriously? Maybe you weren't around for my "you are not a computer" thread and its reincarnation, but there was a bit of a dogpile against me there. I am not afraid of being in the minority on a scientific question. If I was I wouldn't be an ecological psychologist. Anyways if you look back at my posts I think you'll see that I did engage with your views as presented. I applied my own perspective and suggested several ways forward to develop from this the sort of inquiry that I am familiar with. But you never responded to any of those substantive contributions. Was that not straightforward enough? Is that code for too critical? If you're interested in me applying my knowledge to your problem that's the best you're going to get. From here it seems you're the one who hasn't been engaging with the thread. Of course there's a lot of so that's understandable, but it's still pretty hypocritical to single me out for not engaging. RealityApologist posted: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. As I said I might make a thread this summer. But for the record, I don't do agent-based modeling, I do mostly low-dimensional order-parameter dynamics (as opposed to models of very high dimensionality such as [most] neural networks, agent-based models, network models, etc.). And I don't really have any thoughts worth sharing on "human organization", my work and the work I'm familiar with isn't at the society level, it's mostly at the organism-local environment level. Nothing in my knowledge of self-organizing systems suggests any way to improve human society. All I really know about ants has to do with path integration, how they get back to their nest after foraging for food, with connections to the sense of space in humans. It's mostly boring stuff, with the exception of some interesting experiments that tested competing hypotheses by giving ants little stilts or cutting their legs at the knee before the return trip. Anyways I know what you mean I'm just feeling a bit hostile after your other comments so I feel the need to clarify. I don't think I'm the complexity scientist you think I am. Of all the academic work I've seen you post, the closest point of overlap is probably Andy Clark, not the ant stuff. FWIW I had never heard of "network theory" before this thread or maybe one of your others. I am regularly surprised to discover new approaches to self-organization/complexity, but the approaches grounded in physics (non-equilibrium thermodynamics, homeokinetics, synergetics) seem more promising from my limited perspective. Have you read Robert Rosen? You should. E: gently caress it I'll post my ant literature also: http://sun.menloschool.org/~dspence/biology/pdfs/ant_odometer.pdf SurgicalOntologist fucked around with this message at 04:27 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 04:21
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That's Very Interesting, Eripsa
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May 3, 2014 04:22
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Xelkelvos posted:The way I understand it: More influence -> More incentive for others to trade with you -> More trades -> More influence If this is true then there is no actual reason to trade with someone with a "high" influence versus someone with "low" influence, as the money you get is worthless, and if the goal is to have as much money flying through your account as fast as possible you need to trade with as many people as possible in as little time as possible while also making periodic large purchases to flush out accumulated coins. I'm fact, let's say we have four individuals. Person A sells a paperclip to Person B for [Cap-1] Strangecoins. Person A now has an income of [Cap-1] and Person B has an expense of [Cap-1]. Person B then sells the paperclip to Person C for the same price, completely balancing his account, and brining Person C to having an expense of [Cap-1]. Person C sells to Person D, who sells back to Person A, who starts the chain over again. Technically you could do this with two people or a billion people so long as it forms a loop. But, we will have four people for whom Strangecoins move through very quickly, granting them each a large amount of influence. And because they are trading only with other High-Influence actors, they have even higher influence. Essentially the four of them will have become an Influence Large Hadron Collider, spinning Strangecoins around and around until it explodes and releases influence*. And anyone can do this, at any time, meaning you can have as much or as little influence as you want/need at a moment's notice. So influence is also worthless. Unless this isn't how influence is attained or used. I don't know because Eprisa won't address what it is, how one gets it exactly, or what one does with it. I know this isn't how the LHC works, but Eprisa gets a massive boner for misused metaphors, so it works for that. -EDIT- It seems a few other posters already pointed out my exact setup. Whoops. Who What Now fucked around with this message at 04:44 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 04:31
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RealityApologist posted:You both underestimate how "stuck by the rules" we actually are (ie, how much our genetic programming and social structures constrain our possibilities for free action), and overestimate how much the ants are limited by genetics. That has nothing to do with anything I said and I don't know what reaction I'm expected to have to it. When presented with the Holy Wonder of a Science Article, am I supposed to whither away like those dudes who saw the arc of the convent? Ants are really complex but are still obeying simple genetic programming without the ability to understand the the programming or the system it's occurring in. An ant has no ability to act outside of these despite the fact that even the simple rules of being an ant are really complicated and capable of generating emergent behavior. A human though can see the system and the rules and respond in a dazzling variety of ways including completely novel ones. Your very proposal shows this, it's a terrible idea but you're responding to the current system and trying to create new rules. This is a level of understanding and response to a system far beyond anything comparable to ants. A human can understand your system and will respond in many ways including ones that go against the spirit of the rules of strangecoin whereas an ant must always act in good faith. You talk about incentives but the system is incredibly fragile to people not obeying the incentives or not doing what they're "supposed" to do. From freeloading off TUA to infinite money loops to all the other exploits people have found. Even if you can structure all the rules so none of these could pay off and I don't think thats possible, what if people are acting ideologically or irrationally or what-have-you. What if people just create systems that exist outside of your carefully controlled system? If I'm near my cap, why don't I buy a gold brick from a broker willing to exchange it for coins when the time comes? Why wouldn't elaborate systems of alternate currency and barter spring up where people could bypass the strangecoin rules when convenient. In strangecoin land, I picture a black market so big that it eventually engulfs the entire real economy. SickZip fucked around with this message at 04:53 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 04:45
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SickZip posted:That has nothing to do with anything I said and I don't know what reaction I'm expected to have to it. When presented with the Holy Wonder of a Science Article, am I supposed to whither away like those dudes who saw the arc of the convent? I just want to append to this. If your response to these concerns, Eripsa, is to claim you aren't anticipating any particular behaviors or lack thereof, then please stop trying to defend strangecoin as an alternative economic system in any sense. If it is a proposal for an agent based computational model that exists in a very abstract level, in which case of concerns about gaming are misplaced, but so are all your claims of potential social benefits, or any of your predictions as to how humans would actually react to a real economic system based on it.
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May 3, 2014 04:58
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If it makes Eprisa feel better, I'm a biological determinist so I agree that saying ants are programmed biologically while humans aren't is a flawed criticism because Free Will is probably bullshit. But that doesn't change the fact that comparing an individual human to an individual ant is as stupid as comparing a supercomputer to a diode.
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May 3, 2014 04:59
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Who What Now posted:The TUA cannot be drained, it is limitless. The coins aren't what is important, what is important is how much "influence" you have over the system. How you get this influence and what you do with it are as of yet undefined. But whatever it is, you want it apparently. He talks about strangecoin being zerosum in total. Individual transactions aren't, but the whole thing is. There are a finite amount of coins in the system. TUA soaks up all the excess coins and returns it through a guaranteed income proportional to the total TUA. But its not going to have a total since you can spend negative and the excess comes from TUA so in practice you would get a period of insane fake post-scarcity economics followed by bread riots and people trading chickens for a gallon of gas. This entire thing is a house of cards where he expects people to meekly follow the system and do what they're supposed to. This is why I hate the ant analogy for human behavior. An ant follows the rules, even if it was a really smart ant that explicitly understood the rules it would have no desire to disobey them since ants are literally selfless. When you find human behavior that follows similar principles as ants it represents an underlying mathematic order and thats really cool but its partially really cool since the fact that the unifying principle works in two very different organisms is somewhat surprising. RA is working backwards and making a mathematic order that would work for ants and then applying it to humans. This is insane and is a good way to trip over literally every way that humans are different and more complicated from ants. Like, since discrimination is not only legal in strangecoin land but the way things are supposed to work, can I just stop selling to blacks? The entire thing seems only designed for consumer pricing from major firms where prices are completely set. What about where prices are negotiated? If I'm going to get less coins from someone because of their network, why don't I just increase the price? Could a business make everything "negotiable"? Could I not make a lucrative business by only selling to the negative balance pariahs but charging 10000% markup? I would have plenty of customers and they wouldnt care what they're paying since they aren't paying. My account balance is zero so I sell a paperclip to my friend for enough to put him at the account balance. The money comes out of TUA and my friend buys a ferrari. We repeat this. Let's say the system actually worked and I am now a pariah who can't buy or sell. Why would I care since he gave me half of his thousand ferraris and is letting me stay at his mansion which he built out of ferrari's.
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May 3, 2014 05:37
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RealityApologist, you are not able to describe 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 3, 2014 05:59
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RealityApologist posted: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.  Modifiers? Nah, I'll just pay the difference out of TUA. But you'll lose your modifiers! But Eripsa, nobody cares about modifiers because anyone can pay any amount out of TUA But nobody will want to accept payments out of TUA, because they're unmodified! But Eripsa, nobody cares about modifications because I can just pay as much as I want. ...I ...I uh... ANTS! WHAT ABOUT ANTS GUYS!!! Seriously, nobody gives a gently caress about modifiers for any reasons. It's not an incentive just because you say so, when the only reasons it COULD be an incentive are weak to the point of not even existing, because TUA. But the HEALTH OF THE SYSTEM! Nobody wants to be damaging TUA! How can you even "damage" TUA when its primary attribute is that it is inexhaustible? YOU'RE SO loving STUPID HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT TUA TRANSACTIONS AREN'T MODIFIED
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May 3, 2014 06:23
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Here's something that directly speaks to what's wrong with Strangecoin (or rather, how the concepts in it are properly applied) and what's wrong with some objections to the ant analogy. Yes, I set aside Friday night to read this 163-page paper. (No, not because of this thread.)quote:...our approach towards a quantified description of social systems has a differing structure to the physicalistic approaches mentioned above. The latter made direct use of physical models in order to interpret them in sociological terms. Instead, our fundamental concepts refer to social systems from the very beginning. In the further construction of the quantitative formulation, we make use of mathematical concepts to describe the dynamics of statistical multi-component systems, which are universal and therefore applicable to social systems as well as to physical systems. However, whereas these methods have already found widespread use in physics, their use in the social sciences is as yet only in an initial state. In pursuing their consequences in the social sciences we will indeed find some deep and rather universal structural analogies between social and physical systems. But these analogies are not due to a direct similarity between physical and social systems. Instead they reflect the fact that, due to the universal applicability of certain mathematical concepts to statistical multi-component systems, all such systems exhibit an indirect similarity on the macroscopic collective level, which is independent of their possible comparability on the microscopic level. The formation of such indirect structural similarities will be shown on several occasions in the forthcoming sections... [emphasis orig.] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0370-1573(91)90024-G
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May 3, 2014 06:32
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SurgicalOntologist posted:Here's something that directly speaks to what's wrong with Strangecoin (or rather, how the concepts in it are properly applied) and what's wrong with some objections to the ant analogy. Yes, I set aside Friday night to read this 163-page paper. (No, not because of this thread.) Congratulations, you put more thought and actual work into this single post than the totality of anything and everything "academic" Eripsa has ever done in his life. If he's awarded a PhD for his assuredly poo poo dissertation, I'm not even sure I'd feel like it's a failure of education at this point. I'd place the blame on his undergrad and MA advisors who pushed him through the system – with him having gotten this far and having seen his IRL mannerisms via Google+, I'd fear for my life if I were to give him a reality check. wheez the roux fucked around with this message at 06:59 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 06:57
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Does the guy have weird IRL mannerisms? I'm too scared to watch the hangout video.
Wanamingo fucked around with this message at 07:26 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 07:22
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Wanamingo posted:Does the guy have weird IRL mannerisms? I'm too scared to watch the hangout video. Picture eyebrows permanently stuck in a state of shock/surprise along with a perpetual too-wide shiteating grin that's eerily reminiscent of Ted Bundy's photographs. I wish I were exaggerating.
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May 3, 2014 07:36
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So the ShamWow guy, then. Gotcha.
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May 3, 2014 07:39
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Eripsa, I would like to do some microeconomic modelling about strangecoin as an academic excercise, but it it's all a bit up in the air as long as we don't know what agents care about, and if prices even have any meaning here. Let's say I want to specify an agent's utility function in the strangecoin economy, would it actually include consumption of goods at all? Or would it be sufficient for the agent to only care about the rate of change of their account balance? If the last point is true, then the strangecoin economy should be regarded as a game separate from any real economy, and you should stop referring to trading and prices as it has no relevance to the agents in the economy anyway. If agents actually do care about consumption, it will be necessary to specify what prevents agents from achieving infinite utility from consumption, because their budget constraint is (apparently?) non-binding.
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May 3, 2014 07:46
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SurgicalOntologist posted:Here's something that directly speaks to what's wrong with Strangecoin (or rather, how the concepts in it are properly applied) and what's wrong with some objections to the ant analogy. Yes, I set aside Friday night to read this 163-page paper. (No, not because of this thread.) I completely agree with you that there are many systems that have indirect similarities, which have been called superficial similarities earlier in the thread. To refer to my namesake, fractals are found all over the place, and they generally pop up any time you're trying to optimize a natural process within a set of constraints. But the similarities are only indirect. The way systems play out and solutions form is completely different solution to solution, even if they may appear the same from further back. Ant organization does look like human organization if you zoom all the way out to a "population utilizing resources and filling space" view. But that tells us nothing about the internal processes or how to optimize them. RealityApologist posted:so many would-be advocates (like Cantordust and SurgicalOntologist) enter the thread by adopting its overall hostile and skeptical position as their default attitude. Hey, gently caress you. The skeptical position is the correct position with which one should enter an argument. All new ideas should be approached with skepticism until there is evidence provided for them. It's the default state of nature--you don't go around believing everything you hear unless you have reason to believe it. That's not hostile--that's just skeptical. The hostility stems from your adamant belief in your Strangecoin proposal despite not only a lack of evidence to support it but a wealth of argument that points out its serious flaws. I seriously have no idea how you're going to advance in academia if you can't handle skeptical, let alone hostile views. Okay, now. REAL QUESTION: Using my UEV economic system where the seller only cares about getting the price they've set, why should they care whether or not the money comes from a hobo drawing on TUA or a millionaire paying out of pocket? REAL QUESTION: Why should a shopkeeper prefer to set a price of 100 but require x5 modifiers rather than setting a price of 500 and accepting anyone with cash? They get the same amount of Strangecoin either way. REAL QUESTION: If TUA is unlimited, why would anyone worry about its health? What does the "health" of TUA mean anyway? If TUA according to your original formulation is just the n+1 fiction for the real n accounts, why should anyone care what its current value is? How does a TUA in poor health hurt the network? Honestly, I think you'd be better off removing TUA and having just an upper cap on income, with additional income above the cap being redistributed according to whatever plan seems optimal. Inversely proportionally? Just keep it in an account for the government (or distributed network) to decide how to spend? That would fix a lot of the weirdness with your system.
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May 3, 2014 08:09
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"Harry, can I have a word with you in my office?" "Sure. Is everything okay, Lisa?" "Well to be honest no, Harry, things aren't okay. You've been coupled with our organization for over three years, but I think your relationship with this company has run its course. I'm afraid I'll be terminating this transaction, effective immediately. I'm letting you go, Harry." "I... I don't understand. What did I do wrong?" "You're drawing pictures of naked children, Harry." "I'm driving traffic to the site, Lisa. Isn't that what you hired me to do?" "We hired you to illustrate an interactive website on fire safety for children ages four to seven. And until about two months ago you were doing just fine. But then there was that meeting in February where you went on about how the heat from the fires would make the kids look uncomfortable if they were fully clothed. And then the theme of your drawings started following a clear pattern: Fire Safety in the Pool, Fire Safety in the Shower, Fire Safety in the Closet with your Uncle. I mean, these don't even make sense. But your most recent series, Fire Safety and Cock Rings... it just goes too far." "15 million visits this week already, Lisa. And it's Wednesday." "It's wrong, Harry." "I can't believe this. You said I've been here three years, but you aren't counting the three years before that when I was struggling out of college and this place noticed me and started endorsing my work around the web. It was that early exposure that helped me to develop my craft into the polished work I'm producing for you today. Those endorsements let me prove that I could attract an audience with my illustrations, and that's precisely why you eventually offered me the coupled position I have now." "Harry, your 'polished work' is totally inappropriate. I mean, look at this one. Peeing on things is not an example of fire safety!" "I... seriously? You don't like it? Not even Flamey?" "Flamey the anthropomorphic flame? The one that tells kids to pee on him and he'll stop being scary? No, it's disturbing to the point that I've reported you to the authorities for investigation." "Wow. Okay. But what about the traffic? 15 million hits is nothing to snark at." "Yeah, but 90% of those are sham accounts with no connections at all, or botnets whose activity will all get reverted in the next system audit. It's worthless traffic. Our primary audience are children. Which means families. And that's network gold." "1.5 million hits is nothing to snark at." "Well... true. And some of those hits are surprisingly well-connected. But our business is in providing safety information to children. We're not pornographers. Your recent illustrations have attracted the kind of attention that is hurting our reputation among our target audience. We're receiving far more coins than we were anticipating, but everyone will see in the audit that it's coming from dirty sources. Spending it would mean spreading that dirty money around our friends at the library and in the elementary schools and fire stations and other organizations we've coupled with. Exploiting the attention of pedophile networks risks losing our transactions with our primary coupling partners. In the interest of preserving those relations, we're starting a process of inhibition to return most of the coins we acquired over the last few months to TUA. Also, you're fired." "Well, poo poo. Fired. I don't know what I'm going to do; two-thirds of my income and about a quarter of my expenses are the result of my coupling with this business. Losing this job throws my whole financial situation out of whack." "I'm sorry Harry. I wish there was something more I could do." "If the rest of my network remains stable I have about a month before my account bottoms out, so hopefully I can put something together with the network I have left. Until then, I've recently received a lot of, well not job offers exactly but requests for illustration work. Hopefully freelancing will hold me over until something better comes along for me to couple to. Maybe I can get a few supporters so that each illustration I sell earns me more income" "Good luck out there. The pedophile networks are dangerous and aren't most stable source of income." "True, Lisa. Thankfully we live in the utopian future where enlightened democratic principles ensure that communities of shared interest can gather to trade illustrations of of naked children without living in fear of the tyrannical oppression of a majority who finds our aesthetic tastes offensive. I can trust that a thorough and lawful investigation by the authorities will conclude that I've not and have no plans to put any children in danger, and will therefore be exonerated of any accusations you've made." "Either way, Harry, I have developed so much confidence in the smooth functioning of our leaderless, self-organized utopian future society that I didn't hesitate to report you to the authorities. If there was trouble I trust that they'd find it, and if not I trust that you'd be treated humanely and respectfully to continue pursuing your hobbies as you see fit. Although I personally find your interests reprehensible, the structure of our social organization allows me to sublimate that emotion into the formally straightforward and symbolically meaningful economic activity of decoupling our activity from yours. Completing the transaction expresses my repulsion well enough that I can continue to treat you civilly, without resorting to witch hunts or violence." "You said it, Lis. And I can trust that the system will continue to support my transactions even after losing a major source of employment, because my economic situation is supported in multiple ways, and improving that situation is simply a matter of finding others who are interested in my work. Which for me isn't a problem because apparently there's a lot of interest in pictures of kids loving. If there wasn't and I don't find a job, TUA ensures that I can still trade for goods, although without a support network it will be difficult to trade anything of much value. But that's okay because we live in a post-scarcity world where food is freely available and I can easily print any material object I need, so even without employment of any sort I will want for nothing except to occupy my boredom. I leave you now to go shade in the testicles of a young boy, since I have customers waiting." "Hail Satan." "Hail Satan." ---------  Pedantic moral of the story using simple bullet points - You couple to the people you want to succeed along with you. They share your fate; they're people you trust to perform well. They are your self-selected caste. - You endorse someone to help them succeed by gaining exposure (opening doors that are otherwise unavailable). - You support someone to amplify the successes you already perceive them to have. - You inhibit to correct mistakes of various sorts that might arise. - All the balancing acts are performed by TUA. - Networks > coin - The Randian-esque speeches at the end about our utopian future is meant as sarcastically. Pigs will always be scum. Death is certain. - If you actually bite the "but they're illustrations!" troll bait you are a moron. To address GulMadred explicitly, hopefully the above story suggests at least some answers to your questions. It's pretty thoroughly attention economic. The system is "objective" in the sense of trading coin, but "subjective" in the sense that the implication of network effects vary from person to person. Harry has reasons to be attracted to the attention of the pedophiles, and Lisa doesn't, and so even though its a large volume of attention they react to it differently. So even though everything is quantified and objective, the system is still subjective in the sense of the network analysis, which is what matters anyway. Also, the above story suggests something like regular audits to find the cheaters and assess the network structure. I've suggested this earlier, than Strangecoin world will have economic reports that are mostly about the organizational structure of the economy and not just the performance of its parts. So it's right to point out that Strangecoin specifies the structure of the network and provides some details of its behavior, but full analysis of the network would take some additional nontrivial work to make explicit. I have another short dialog in mind for dealing with the potential issue of ring structures, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. <3 RealityApologist fucked around with this message at 09:59 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 09:53
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Strangecoin: the economy for pedophiles
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May 3, 2014 10:13
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What the gently caress. 
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May 3, 2014 10:18
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So I've tried reading this thread and its pretty much impenetrable, it's basically just gawking at a strange autist right? And uh, apparently child porn is the backbone of the global economy?
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May 3, 2014 10:29
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SurgicalOntologist posted:And to think I almost stopped checking this thread... maybe I should have... RA has both demonstrated, and cleanly conceded, that he does not have the skills (math, coding, complex systems, economics--you name it, he's conceded it) needed to work on this project, so why would anyone think he's in any position to respond to substantive contributions? He doesn't avoid substantive replies for any nefarious reason so much as because he just can't tell what is and what isn't substantive. Independent of RA, approaching this discussion from a scientific or technical perspective, as I think the OP tries to lend itself to, seems especially pointless. RA has not completely or consistently defined what is to be explained or accomplished, and at times has been contradictory in his attempts to do so. He hasn't completely or consistently explained the context his views are supposed to exist in, and has at times been contradictory in his attempts to do so. There is nothing to explain and nothing to implement. It's not impossible that a new, theoretically workable economic model could spring mostly fully formed from the mind of a single individual, as with Marx, but it is in-con-ceivable that any meaningful form of such an idea would fill less than a book, as with Marx. Starting off married to this very particular (and frankly, obviously ill-informed) way of having the economy work pretty much killed the thread before it began. I think the thread might have been interesting, beyond the "mock RA" facet, if RA had framed it as a question of "What would happen if the economy worked differently?" and working towards a principled method for generating meaningful answers to that question. As it is, it's just all over the place with respect to phenomena of interest, supposed purpose and levels of analysis. No one in their right mind can make heads or tails of this.
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May 3, 2014 10:41
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RealityApologist posted:"Hail Satan." Well, finally you're making some sense.
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May 3, 2014 10:47
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Wee Tinkle Wand posted:What the gently caress.  This thread has been excellent at teaching me how to go about things in a way that has helped me far more than the standard classes in my grad school. Watching criticisms happen in real time was a good experience for the future, and the documents linked earlier on academic writing have certainly made my writing better over the last month. Whuffies to all the guys in here. But I think you finally broke Eripsa. You broke him utterly. How the hell did he think defending his proposal by defending Child Porn was a good idea?
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May 3, 2014 11:09
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Leaving aside the intentional creepiness of Erpisa making us all read about child porn, which probably satisfied him on a very deep and unfortunate level and will satisfy him even more when people finger-wag and he goes "Oh, I'm clearly against child porn, don't you see the bit at then end?":quote:If there wasn't and I don't find a job, TUA ensures that I can still trade for goods, although without a support network it will be difficult to trade anything of much value. But that's okay because we live in a post-scarcity world where food is freely available and I can easily print any material object I need, so even without employment of any sort I will want for nothing except to occupy my boredom. He's sooooo close to realizing why a large amount of the population would not give a poo poo about the incentives and would just draw from TUA and not try to maximize throughput. So close. And yet sails past it. Also, why would the pedophile networks be undependable? That's just kind of tossed in there as a moral sop, but there's nothing about the system that'd make that true. Finally, this exposes the way that privacy gets just shat on in this system. You can't buy, or sell porn of any kind without everyone knowing about it. You can't write romance novels in your spare time without everyone knowing about it. And not just somebody who does a lot of research, literally everyone you buy a burger from. This system makes your economic activity the most identifying part about you as a person: anything you do that's non-economic nobody gives the slightest gently caress about in this system. Only economic activity gets logged or noticed. Again, I'm amazed by his capacity to make this system worse, uglier, more dystopic, and more of a fool of himself in every single post defending it.
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May 3, 2014 12:15
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RealityApologist posted:"Harry, can I have a word with you in my office?" Welp,
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May 3, 2014 12:27
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New idle questions: Why aren't people using proxies or money laundering in strangecoin world? Seems like a really useful service. Unless this is all overseen by a godlike AI, then the amount of enforcement and laws and attention to defeat this seems unfeasible. Who seriously wants to spend time on this? I previously thought all this was baked into the system and it seemed annoying but now we have to apply subjective judgement and there are audits and the dude who sold me a hamburger at lunch could receive 90% of his funds from professional orphan murderers and I would never know or bother to look it up. Who thinks that its a good idea for every single transaction ever to be as complicated and vulnerable to manipulations and gamesmanship as wallstreet? If networks were actually what mattered and coins flowed fast and free, seems like it would reward people who spent all their time min-maxing the system rather than doing anything productive. The system really seems designed to reward the non-productive drop-outs who don't care about it and non-productive number crunchers who care about it mainly. SickZip fucked around with this message at 12:36 on May 3, 2014 |
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May 3, 2014 12:33
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SickZip posted:New idle questions: Because everyone will have a colored halo around their head that has all this nuanced information, and you'll be able to look at it and instantly tell because humans are good at that sort of thing. This is the actual explanation. quote:Who thinks that its a good idea for every single transaction ever to be as complicated and vulnerable to manipulations and gamesmanship as wallstreet? If networks were actually what mattered and coins flowed fast and free, seems like it would reward people who spent all their time min-maxing the system rather than doing anything productive. The system really seems designed to reward the non-productive drop-outs who don't care about it and non-productive number crunchers who care about it mainly. Some criticisms Eripsa just dodges because he has no clue how to address them, some he co-opts and tries to wedge into the ever-larger shambles pile he's creating, but I think this one may be one where he actually doesn't understand the criticism, because he doesn't really think about the outputs of his system much or the way people would use it, he thinks he already knows how people would use it. I basically asked him this three times in a row and he kept replying "They'd have an incentive" as though that answered me.
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May 3, 2014 12:37
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