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Achmed Jones posted:Eripsa, we're still waiting on the relation between attention and resources. Lotta people pay a LOT of attention to the stock market. I'd argue those people, on average, have greater control over the distribution of resources than those that don't. And both the quality and quantity of attention paid to the stock market directly effects performance (in myriad ways). I'm not saying it's already set up the way Eripsa is advocating, but I am saying complete incredulity of the concept betrays either a total lack of understanding or a stubborn refusal to consider his points.
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Jan 31, 2012 02:00
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Achmed Jones posted:Oh. The stock market. Clearly that's an answer and not meaningless irrelevant hand-waving. Try actually thinking about it. I know I didn't explicitly prompt you to do so in my other post, but you should always take it as implied.
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Jan 31, 2012 05:27
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Reading this thread is really quite hilarious, as so many completely miss the point. Discouraging discussion of what a radically new economic model might look like only works to preserve the status quo. And while the aim must be for such a plan to be viable, coherent and sound (if there is any hope of some day implementing it), demanding that in the first draft is absolutely absurd. For someone attempting such an endeavor, pointing out a real challenge or contradiction actually contributes to the effort - but mindlessly nay-saying does the opposite. For those putting such incredible effort into slaying this Winged Demon known as Eripsa, I have to ask - have you spent any time yourself, brainstorming how to solve the objections you raise? In any case, money has always been a means of quantifying attention. In a 'healthy' economy, money actually approximates attention. When money ceases to serve as such an approximation, the economy (and the lives of the 99%) suffer dramatically. Look at Tsunamis. Before this century, there were no photographs - let alone video -of a Tsunami. The best we had to go by was a written account (written before the common era) from Northern Africa and an ink-on-silk painting from Japan. Then we (those of us that were online back then) watched the horror from Indonesia in '04. We were watching the Atlantic, after the quake in Haiti. And there were an awful lot of us watching Hawaii, after the quake in Chile. And then Japan got hosed-and-a-half. In our present economy - the one built on 'currency', the one that has failed utterly in recent memory - money does not always correspond to attention. It does in politics - which is why 'money = speech' (and why corporations are allowed to donate to campaigns, and why campaigns are allowed super-pacs). But that game is rigged. Corporations and individuals with deep pockets could effectively force legislation through - because nobody was paying attention. That game has changed. The Internet is now paying very close attention to every bill that comes before every legislative body. Look at Indiana's 'right to work' bill, or bills that affect women's reproductive rights, or SOPA, etc. Attention is now being paid, and that attention stands the chance of actually rendering the money useless. SOPA didn't fail from a lack of monetary support. Goons had threads about the horror that might result from a Cat-5 hurricane hitting New Orleans a full year before it happened (it helped that our servers were in Nawlins). Had a thread about the impending financial collapse a year before it happened. There've been crazies running around here insisting that Anonymous will soon be a serious force as a non-state actor for years. We've worked out a pretty good system of attention right here. And there are newer communities - relying more heavily on crowd-sourcing techniques - that do a much better job than we do. Winning an election entails drawing more (positive) attention (or less negative, depending). In our Status Quo system, money is taken to correlate with attention. The person with the best fund-raising is expected to get more voters. That system has become broken, and nobody recognizes it. On the right, you have people insisting that nothing has changed - and nor should it, as money=speech. On the left, you have people insisting that nothing has changed - and that we need to pass sweeping legislation to ensure that money!=speech (by killing citizen's united, outlawing superpacs, establishing limits on donations to candidates, requiring 'equal time' on public airwaves, or publicly funding all elections). There's a minority of people out there that realize you could, in theory, win a presidential election on a shoe-string budget, if you properly utilize new media. Imagine if, the day before the elections, Obama decided to do a 'Let's Play', playing through both Portal games (inviting anyone who wishes to watch, while offering reminders to his audience to vote for him come election day). I think this would all but guarantee his re-election. If the thought causes you an emotional knee-jerk reaction, that says a lot more about your thought processes than mine. I may be wrong; but I'm illustrating a very real change in society, and for that change to genuinely /upset/ you says volumes. It's the loving fireplace delusion. Eripsa has done a fine job of pointing out that money utterly fails at approximating an objective measure of attention. And it does. But before the internet existed, it was the best we had - and it did a reasonably good job (so long as the populace didn't become too apathetic). Now, we have the internet. There are already two corporate GIANTS that are actively measuring attention (and making a huge profit from their efforts) - Facebook and Google. And people are upset as gently caress about that. But the internet already tracks attention. That's what 'trending' means. That's what 'reaching the first page' means. That's how targeted advertising works. That's what it means when something 'goes viral' - that it's drawing a great deal of attention. And, again, SA deserves some credit for this. We made AYB - the first viral meme to 'break through' into mainstream media - go viral. We've been behind thousands of popular memes. We spawned 4chan. Chanology was a success (and had a profound influence on the present incarnation of political activism) in part because goons created enturbulation.org. We live in an attention based economy. And there are forces at work trying to kill this, trying to restore money as king. This is where things like SOPA and mandated persistent identity and an 'internet kill-switch' come in. Hell, what is the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, if not an opportunity for basement dwelling high schoolers to demonstrate that they are paying attention? We have the ability to measure this. We're already doing it. The economy that is emerging is based upon it. And there are counter-forces working to kill it. And those counter-forces are (generally) recognized on these forums as 'bad.' And these forums recognize the capitalist system that got us where we are as fundamentally flawed. And somehow, when Eripsa comes in here and starts brainstorming on the topic, he gets dumped on by a shitload of sycophantic sophists - actively (albeit obliviously) undermining the advancement of humanity. I'm not saying you should interpret him uncritically; but yes, make an effort at a charitable interpretation before you just poo poo all over him. Make an effort to understand what it is he's advocating, before you throw in your two cents. And make an effort to contribute to the overall project - brainstorming a better future - that attempts to off-set whatever stumbling blocks you uncover. I couldn't predict what the outcome of such a productive thread would be (if I could, we wouldn't need to crowd-source it). I don't think Eripsa is approaching this from an ideological perspective either. Everyone needs to approach this thread from a pragmatic point of view. And it's fair to expect such a discussion to be very high-level, difficult to understand, involved, all-encompassing, and to start out very rough. If you expect Eripsa to be capable of posting a 'tl;dr' in the OP that somehow accounts for all your objections and instantly convinces everyone - you fail to grasp the task that Eripsa is undertaking. And he's not the first to attempt such a project. The Founding Fathers had such discussions. The bankers probably had a similar discussion when they were dreaming up ways to repackage junk mortgages as AAA rated investments. Small groups of sci-fi writers have argued such alternative economies in pubs. There seems to be an underlying theme in this thread not merely that Eripsa is wrong, but that nobody has a right to even imagine dreaming so big. gently caress those people. If you're a lurker, I urge you to speak up and poo poo all over anybody you see pushing such stupidity. Now - more than ever - is the time to dream big.
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Feb 4, 2012 01:19
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ryde posted:Uglycat, I actually do ruminate on alternate economics. I don't write out documents and whatnot and post them on Something Awful, but I'm certainly willing to discuss them. People in this very thread have brought up alternative systems. The problem I have with Eripsa is that he is not willing to challenge is base assumptions, and prefers to rather turn around and re-assert them with a bunch of flowery but ultimately meaningless rhetoric. I've spent plenty of time arguing with Eripsa. He's more than willing to entertain criticisms, and I've come to trust - when he says a criticism doesn't apply - that I've misinterpreted him. If you find your criticisms are unable to move him, I strongly encourage you to spend more time considering his position. He is a trained philosopher, and understands (better than most) how to reason. Don't make the mistake of assuming he's just stubborn - it's an easy mistake to make, given the general attitude of posters on this forum. And if you want to derail his thread with your own alternative economic model, I doubt very much he'd be telling you to shut up. I'm not claiming for a moment that Eripsa is flawless, but I can assert with total confidence that people dismissing him as useless or foolish are themselves both. An idea needn't be polished to have value; and there's genuine value in having other people contribute to the endeavor of polishing an idea. Really, it's impossible to accomplish anything grand without employing such a tactic. Everyone needs a sounding board. And these forums serve as a fantastic sounding board - if you can convince those that post to participate in the project.
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Feb 4, 2012 01:43
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Best Friends posted:"Let's destroy the current global economy and replace it with a system that cannot possibly work, or maybe slavery. Also, I believe in magic." Who said we have to destroy it? Just leave it alone, that part takes care of itself. Frankly, I'm terrified of the potential outcome of having no plan for moving forward, when this inevitability plays out. And Eripsa is, from my understanding, a naturalist/physicalist. I certainly am, and have seen nothing in this thread that necessarily appeals to some non-physical substance. As a point of fact, your brain operates on a sort've 'distributed attention-based economy.' So, hey, proof of concept there. Get Kane in here, I bet he'd be able to give you specifics and much better analogies. I tried doing that myself, years ago. Citing neuroscience. Everyone dismissed me as a lunatic, but I got a PM from this guy - Kane - who identified himself as a neuroscience graduate student in Tel Aviv who is seeing the exact same trends I'm seeing. Since then, Kane tried his hand at starting a learderless, self-organizing protest movement (between Egypt's revolution and Libya's) and got 500,000 people to show up. I'd call that a proof-of-concept. If you don't have any understanding of how self-organizing networks (be it neurons in a brain or some computational analog) work, openly acknowledge this fact (when criticizing as 'pie-in-the-sky' someone that cites self-organizing networks as a potential key to solving our present predicament). But dismissing the very idea makes you appear extremely ignorant to anybody that has practical, real-world experience with such effects (and understands them from a naturalist perspective). It's not coincidence that Eripsa and I have had many heated arguments in the past; he and I both are fascinated by consciousness. He and I were frequent (and prominent) participants in discussions of consciousness on these very forums going back almost a decade. Examining economies is not all that different from deriving intelligent behavior from neural networks (plus input). Basically, many of the critics in this thread come off as falling for the economic equivalent of the 'zombic hunch.' From there, the Dunning-Kruger effect has served as a derail.
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Feb 4, 2012 02:43
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evilweasel posted:Assuming that a person's cross-section for the purposes of stacking the corpses of the dead is .1m^2 and you stacked the corpses of the dead in an equilateral triangle it would be 764 meters on each side, though not as tall as the tallest building in the world, oops. How can you possibly make such a calculation without understanding the system you're attempting to model?
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Feb 4, 2012 02:54
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Best Friends posted:No, I don't think Uglycat or Uglycat's friend did the Egyptian revolution. counterpoint: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/01/egyptian-activists-action-plan-translated/70388/ but no, Kane had nothing to do with Egypt. He just watched it play out exactly as one would expect, given the new realities we face today*. It did inspire him to start this though - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/04/israel-protests-social-justice *the very same realities so many in this thread are stubbornly refusing to accept
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Feb 4, 2012 03:00
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Achmed Jones posted:What makes you think people refuse to accept that things are unjust? You fail to understand my point. Shocker of the month. People refuse to accept the idea that a leaderless, non-hierarchical arrangement of nodes (in a web) might produce intelligent behavior.
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Feb 4, 2012 03:06
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Achmed Jones posted:But no one has said that, at all. It's what you're arguing. It doesn't surprise me at all that you fail to grasp this.
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Feb 4, 2012 03:13
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ryde posted:My assertion is that the resulting "intelligence" will have the negative effect. Here's your thesis. The null hypothesis.
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Feb 4, 2012 03:15
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evilweasel posted:Uglycat if you're going to be doing both sides of the argument in your head it would be nice if you'd actually type out what the voice arguing with you says instead of quoting random posters and ascribing it to them. If you're going to be doing just one side of the argument in your head, I recommend you abstain.
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Feb 4, 2012 03:20
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Best Friends posted:Congratulations on getting a PM from someone who may or may not exist and who may or may not actually be involved with what you think this possibly real person is involved with. I don't know if you realize this, but it's possible for goons to become actual IRL friends and/or associates. Kane is a real person, and I consider him a friend. In any case, I got daily updates from him as he made a very strong effort at starting a protest movement - a protest movement that did end up occurring. I'm not by any means suggesting that Kane is the 'secret mastermind' of that protest movement; the whole point of this is that there *isn't* a secret mastermind, no hierarchy, no leader. There's only those who acted first, those who decided to support them (a vastly under-valued role), those who are late to the party - and those who sit on the sideline spitting bile at everyone. I could brag about Eripsa too. He's been rather instrumental in the #occupy movement. Not coincidence.
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Feb 4, 2012 03:25
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Best Friends posted:Uglycat, if you think I am strawmanning and not literally stating things Eripsa has proposed in this thread, that means you are the one who has not being reading Eripsa's posts. Quote mining is, in fact, a subset of straw-manning. Oh, were there simply an 'on' button for your brain, I'd push it. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Feb 4, 2012 03:28
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Best Friends posted:Tracking every single thing every one does (including by satellites), as supported by free labor, and using twitter and social media to shame excess production are Eripsa's core concepts. No, those are real-world examples he's cited (not as a 'proof of concept', but as a hint at what we're moving towards) to defend his assertion that an attention-based economy might be able to better allocate resources than a profit-driven capitalist system. Why are you even commenting here if you haven't been [edit]comprehending[/edit] his posts?
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Feb 4, 2012 03:31
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Best Friends posted:Here is the very first post where Eripsa talks about the mechanism to make the 'attention based economy' work, from the front page of this thread: You are writing to me on a machine that tracks your attention. As for your criticisms, suppose you had the attention span to read (and sophistication enough to comprehend) this essay. The approach you take to refuting Erispa applies equally in criticizing Dennett (hint: none at all). It's a thought experiment. There is a particular method for evaluating them. You don't know that method. Look into that, before revealing your thoughts for the world to judge. In any case, you also fall into the camp of morons that imagine Eripsa (and I) are techno-fetishist Kurzweilesque singularity people. Eripsa's Empirical Prediction #1 should lay that myth to rest.
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Feb 4, 2012 04:04
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Best Friends posted:Just read this thread before commenting on it is all I am asking. I didn't realize it upsets you so much to be wholly and utterly refuted. If I knew, I'd have gone easier on you.
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Feb 4, 2012 04:32
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Best Friends posted:You haven't refuted anything. You just keep saying "I'm right, I'm right." You aren't even quoting Eripsa. Because that would involve reading the thread. Eripsa proposed that an attention-based economy might do better than a profit-driven economy at allocating resources (by a humanist measure). He then gave an elaborate thought-experiment to help illustrate his point. You have scoffed at his thought experiment - revealing your inability to comprehend how they work - and then mindlessly pointed at your own poor comprehension as a 'refutation' of Eripsa's initial hypothesis. And yes, I have a sufficient understanding of what's happening in this thread to make this observation. You are a fool, and your presence here decreases the signal-to-noise ratio. I'm calling attention to this fact.
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Feb 4, 2012 04:43
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Best Friends posted:This, in reference to using satellites to track 'attention': I could have wasted ten minutes of your life by writing a full paragraph addressing each of your straw men, but tilting at straw men is a derail. Eripsa has pointed out real-world phenomenon that parallel the sort of thing he's advocating, and he's imagined hypothetical systems (putting an RFID chip in /everything/) that can (in theory, at least) help a clueless moron like yourself comprehend what he's actually advocating. Y'know, since criticism necessarily must begin with comprehension, for it to be constructive. Which is what he's looking for. You saw 'RFID chips in every object', wondered aloud where miners will get the motivation to do a difficult job (if we aren't stuffing their pockets with green pieces of paper), and scoffed at the absurdity of it all. It's only absurd because you don't comprehend it, of course. In fact, when reading high-level stuff, apparent absurdity is generally a good indicator that you don't actually grasp what's being discussed. From there, you just kept pointing at your own inadequacies and insisting that they represent Eripsa's failings.
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Feb 4, 2012 05:03
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Best Friends posted:Congratulations on having finally read some of the thread. As your reward, I will graciously decline to point out how your characterization of eripsa's statements has completely reversed. Allow me to offer you a lecture - free of charge! In philosophy (that's a discipline you might have heard of, in passing), there's a concept known as 'validity.' See, an argument is 'valid' if the conclusion could not be false, assuming the premises to be true. Now, within an argument, you can 'push' and start a sub-argument. Under certain (very specific) circumstances, you can 'pop' some new conclusion out of that sub-argument. Eripsa's thought experiment exist as a sub-argument. Now, suppose you actually identified a REAL problem with Eripsa's thought experiment (to my knowledge, you've not). Would that refute Eripsa's initial hypothesis? Would it be possible for it to be the case that "An attention-based economy could outperform a currency-based economy (by certain humanist measures" is true, even if you really did point out an actual bona-fide problem with Eripsa's thought experiment? I expect a one-sentence answer on my desk by the beginning of next class session. Next lecture well be on 'soundness', and how the fact that you've not pointed out any actual bona-fide problems with Eripsa's thought experiment wholly undermines your efforts.
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Feb 4, 2012 05:17
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Eripsa - You write about this alternative, distributed system for directing and measuring attention. Would you stomp out every instance of top-down direction (like cockroaches loving up your utopia)? Or would there be room for top-down systems within your larger distributed economy? Would the private lab that researches vaccines necessarily fire/demote their shift foreman and chief researcher, or can such leadership persist (perhaps ad hoc?) within your larger over-arching distributed system?
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Feb 4, 2012 09:03
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evilweasel posted:Wrong. There is a second idea about how to get cooperation, that every single person in this thread (besides you, apparently) intuitively understands. What is it? Greed. This does not actually undermine his point.
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Feb 11, 2012 21:43
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evilweasel posted:No. People can be motivated to cooperate through rewards as well as punishments. And you (and many in this thread) have intentionally avoided any consideration of what sort of 'rewards' people may find in participating in an attention-based economy. Even as people, presently, find participation in viral memes extremely rewarding, and even as, presently, viral campaigns are having increasingly powerful political and economic consequences.
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Feb 11, 2012 22:19
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T-1000 posted:Either every person in this thread is an idiot, or we're all hopelessly negative, or there is something very wrong with your idea. I agree with this trillema. I've also observed a lot of posts in this thread that have attempted to demonstrate the last point to be true, but each of those posts betrayed either a total lack of comprehension, or a mindless negativity on the part of the author.
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Feb 11, 2012 22:27
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evilweasel posted:That's not "the alternative" there are many alternatives and nobody is suggesting the rational actor model. You have no idea how often I've chortled to myself, reading this thread, as you've obliviously defended the 'rational actor model' while insisting that you reject it, mistakenly accusing Eripsa (and not the fools here defending the status quo while pretending to be progressives) of being a member of that cult (when he's explicitly stated and explained his opposition to it).
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Feb 11, 2012 23:54
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evilweasel posted:I presume you chortle to yourself and talk to yourself a great deal so I doubt it. In any case, I'm reasonably confident you've been wholly oblivious when you've (frequently) committed that blunder. You're welcome to think of me what you will nonetheless.
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Feb 12, 2012 00:12
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evilweasel posted:You've basically defined, after this, "its a mob when it does bad things and a direct democratic exercise of justice when it does good things". You offer absolutely nothing to suggest that you have any method for seperating out the two, you're just going to redefine things as they happen so that only legitimate things will happen. He's given a very clear-cut - albeit (apparently) counter-intuitive - way of distinguishing the two. The difference is in their communications structures. One-to-many broadcasting structures are mobs, many-to-many broadcasting structures are democracy. Elections get input from every participant. Fox News does not.
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Feb 20, 2012 11:22
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ryde posted:In particular, the jury selection process that Eripsa denounced as game-able is also intended to remove pre-conceived biases present in the larger population, and select against people who have prior knowledge, and thus bias, in the case. See, you're trying to interpret Eripsa on a 'populism'/'authoritarianism' gradient, while oblivious to the role ATTENTION played in the narrative you cite. Yes, Reddit is a populist community. Yes, when their moderators act, such actions are - in a neutral sense - authoritarian. And yes, SA kicked them in the rear end. With a leaderless, organized, crowd-sourced social media campaign. The very question of whether the result was a populist one or an authoritarian one seems absurd. Because ATTENTION is a much better means of defining that narrative. Edit - and can you imagine trying to account for that narrative from a capitalist meta-narrative?
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Feb 20, 2012 11:47
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evilweasel posted:Again, nobody is failing to understand your arguments: they're just bad. This is why repeating them has no effect. One way or another, you and I have very different understandings of what Eripsa is saying. Wouldn't you agree*? How well do you think you understand MY interpretation of Eripsa's argument? I would actually very much like to see how you'd characterize it. Though if you refuse to be at all charitable, the experiment would be entirely pointless. Well, not pointless, as it would be a case of you once more embarrassing yourself. Pointless nonetheless, as either nobody else will recognize and publicly acknowledge this. But yes. If you're willing to attempt a charitable reconstruction, how do you think you and I might differ in our interpretations of Eripsa's argument? *if you do agree, then you must now revise your position that "nobody is failing to understand your arguments." But if your revision is as simple of 'fine, nobody but Uglycat fails to understand your arguments', you must them demonstrate how I have misunderstood Eripsa's argument. To do so, we must explore the difference between my understanding of it, and the OBJECTIVE understanding. Whether that OBJECTIVE understanding is 'measured' by Eripsa's posts, or by your understanding of them isn't the point either - the question is where does your understanding and Eripsa's differ. And all you've done, throughout the whole thread, is relate everything to your understanding. Your well-developed, fallible, human, above-average understanding of how the universe works. It's the Fireplace Delusion. The whole thread. Eripsa has not charged into this thread teeth bared and armed with arrogance. He's prepared to concede points. He's prepared to argue his case. He's aware that his case is novel, and this will require a high degree of scrutiny. He feels he's being dismissed without the courtesy of such seriously, thoughtful scrutiny. The smallest courtesy you can offer him would be, when he makes a post asserting "No I'm absolutely and completely confident you are wrong on THIS POINT", actually revisit the topic in your mind. Work through it again, and attempt to determine why it is that Eripsa disagrees with you so strongly on that point. Hint: It's not because he SO DESPERATELY WANTS TO BE RIGHT and NEEDS THIS TO BE RIGHT. Which is how you've consistently interpreted him.
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Feb 23, 2012 23:29
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Slanderer posted:Obviously, the solution is simply not to consider ramifications. Ever. That is the first step to becoming the Eripsa. You disagree with him on what the ramifications will be. It's not that he hasn't considered them. But when he's tried to pursue a discussion of what those ramifications might be, and how it is that we imagine ourselves able to predict them, you all slink away and whine that he's worming his way out of yet another Internet Argument Defeat.
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Feb 23, 2012 23:37
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Your Sledgehammer posted:What about Prop 8? It was direct democracy in action, and the consensus was absolutely the wrong one. That can happen. If you don't want it to, the question you should be asking is 'how do we ensure this method results in good policy?' Turns out, actions you take can affect the likelihood of that outcome. But you have to take ownership of your own attention, and recognize that this is an attention-based economy. But no, it's not a perfect utopia he's describing.
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Feb 24, 2012 02:23
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evilweasel posted:That's an unsupported assertion, and you have consistently ignored the problem of systemic bias (which I've raised before). Random biases wash out when you scale up: systemic biases do not. Short-sightedness is a systemic bias that is not corrected through increased information, and it does not get removed when you scale up. That short-sightedness is a systemic bias has been confirmed by countless empirical tests; that systemic biases do not wash out when you scale up is merely common sense. Eripsa, I'm afraid he has you here. Systemic biases do 'scale up.' For example, in this thread, there is a groupthink mentality against you, and you seem to be powerless to break it. Evilweasel's last comment - refusing to entertain your point at all - demonstrates this. Plato addresses this in The Republic - "Can I convince you if you would not listen?" Now, EvilWeasel... what you fail to grasp is that you're only halfway there. Yes, there are systemic errors in reasoning that undermine consensus-seeking. You see this. Then you throw up your hands, and insist that democracy is broken and untenable. Instead, you could spend some time understanding the individual biases, how they scale up, and HOW TO COMPENSATE FOR THEM. When you actually take the time to understand how the human mind works, and design a larger structure based on that understanding, you are able to overcome the limitations of the human mind. Without requiring that any of the participants be super-human meta-geniuses. I've gone over the method dozens of times myself in these forums, and consistently get shouted down. But nobody has successfully undermined the explanation. It's not loving rocket science. The future of humanity rests on us solving this problem. The problem HAS been solved - no matter how firmly you reject the recent proliferation of proofs-of-concept.
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Feb 24, 2012 20:51
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Achmed Jones posted:but at that point we're just positing a philosopher king, which is of course unbearably dumb. Yeah man Plato was a moron. The mere fact that he speculates on a Philosopher-King is reason not merely to dismiss him, but to never read him and to dismiss any discussions that might be born out of his work.
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Feb 24, 2012 21:51
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Your Sledgehammer posted:I say again, Prop 8 in California. I asserted this a few pages back and you ignored it. And I addressed your (weak) point.
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Feb 24, 2012 23:36
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Your Sledgehammer posted:This is what you wrote in response to my point about Prop 8. You've described what I, as an individual, can do to ensure that the right action is taken, but unless the collective will is on my side, your point is moot. In an attention-based economy, if 51% of folks think that a group should be disenfranchised, they will be disenfranchised, because the 51% commands more attention. You're missing something. A direct democracy that merely samples popular opinion is, as you point out, flawed. It is also better (by various subjective measures) than most other systems. Eripsa isn't merely sampling popular opinion; he's installing a system by which individuals can communicate and persuade each-other moving *towards* a consensus. Which is significant because it directly addresses your objection. It's also something Eripsa has been advocating from the beginning - so your failure to grasp it once more demonstrates either your poor reading comprehension or your bull-headed stubbornness. And it's not an ad-hoc thing he's slapped on to address your objection; this solution is built-in, which is one of the strengths of his position. Moreover, none of you have even begun to explore that method of moving towards a consensus, because you're all stuck on the (mistaken) belief that he's merely sampling popular opinion and enacting policy based on that. There is a *CONVERSATION* that is CENTRAL to Eripsa's model. Popular opinion is dynamic, not static. Conversation shifts it. Now, if we extrapolate this model to a hypothetical society where suddenly conversation happens much, much faster (say, someone invents a machine that lets people talk globally in real time), you'd expect certain things to happen. Things we're watching happen in real time, as this thread progresses. Enlightenments follow advancements in communication. Enlightenments appear as singularities to the populations approaching them. Once you recognize that popular opinion is dynamic, then it's a matter of using the best social engineering knowledge we have (I'm trying to push a new word, 'Eumemics') to ensure that progress follows. The active participants of the conversation have significantly greater control over the narrative over the passive participants. There's a signal-to-noise issue, but we know a LOT about solving that problem. There's the underlying problem of ethics, but - conveniently - the only coherent explanation of ethics appeals to inter-subjectivity, not any deontological absolutes. Inter-subjectivity, you might notice, is exactly what a 'Consensus' *IS*. Eripsa has recognized the new reality, and is actively working to design a means of working with it. Eripsa's method only works if it is adopted by consensus, and Eripsa is confident the method will be significantly improved if a large number of people critically evaluate and contribute to it. Which is to say, he's *starting* the conversation, but wishes to crowd-source it. And everyone in this thread is actively refusing to participate in that project. Instead, they stubbornly deny the new emerging reality.
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Feb 25, 2012 01:21
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Fire_Monkey posted:From my understanding, you would simply need more attention than anyone else that currently requires the fire brigade. This obviously conveniently ignores whether there is sufficient resource in the first place, but that is a bit of a recurring theme. Basically, everyone can get access to whatever they want as long as there is no competition for it, where there is competition than the people with the most attention get it. Actually providing the resource and infrastructure is all down to the people stepping up to do what needs to be done, because people will always work to the greater good apparently. While you and I might be competing, attention-wise, to get the Fire Brigade to our individual houses, the fact that the resource is insufficient and scarce only comes to light as a result of the focus of our COMBINED attention. Basically, places where resources are insufficient will get attention. If you find out that two houses in your neighborhood both caught fire the same night, and that one had to burn to allow the fire brigade to save the other, suddenly your attention is focused on improving your local fire brigade.
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Feb 25, 2012 02:33
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Achmed Jones posted:There's no automatic distribution, the system relies on people to do it. The firemen would have to check their Twitter feeds (presumably with a filter to only display fire emergencies) and decide which of the fires they want to put out. If you don't like that they keep skipping over your neighborhood, you are welcome to debate with them until a consensus is reached about whether or not your house should be saved. In the meantime, make some s'mores. I think it's a little disingenuous to suggest that these sorts of debates would only be had while houses are on fire. Do you think you're able to dismiss as useless the consensus-seeking conversation that takes place /between/ fires?
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Feb 25, 2012 02:38
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Fire_Monkey posted:I think this will actually work with areas such as the fire brigade and other emergency focused areas. Could you elaborate on this a bit? Others in this thread don't seem to be as quick as you.
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Feb 25, 2012 02:56
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Fire_Monkey posted:It is with a large caveat, but a proportion of people would be willing to save lives and get attention. I have no figures to back it up, but it is one of the few jobs a lot probably do not do for the money but for the satisfaction. Now trying to name jobs outside of the emergency services that people would do when they do not have to, and things get trickier. People running sewage treatment works are also very important, but getting the people to work for it is not as straight forward. How might reciprocity work, without any existing currency?
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Feb 25, 2012 03:04
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Slanderer posted:Well, we got these marbles, right? They let you do things! Except they're not a currency, no sir. But you can sorta use them for stuff, so they kind are. Except they're probably nontransferable. Generally, a really lovely currency. More like airline miles than money, I guess. Yeah, see, you've been utterly mistaken this whole time. The marbles are not just another form of currency. And reciprocity is not paid in marbles.
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Feb 25, 2012 03:12
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Fire_Monkey posted:As an exchange of either goods or services. Currency is essentially a standardized unit of 'goods' that can be exchanged anywhere without worrying about how many pineapples there are to the goat or how many potatoes are equal to one carwash. The issues the world currently has with capitalism does not mean that the basic idea of a currency is at fault. You're right, currency solves the problem of bartering by creating a storage unit for work. If you've done a dollar's worth of work, you get a dollar. You can then exchange that for other goods at your leisure. This is not the role that Attention serves. And Eripsa seems to hypothesize that an attention-based economy can avoid a return to bartering despite the absence of a 'standard unit of work.' I suspect you could look at the Burner 'gift-economy' as a very small example of what this might entail, but you cynical goons would immediately dismiss the example, rather than use it as a jumping off point for speculation and thought experiment. edit - but yeah, the fundamental error so many in this thread make, is that they assume both 1) that Attention, in Eripsa's system, must serve the very same purposes that Currency does in ours, and that 2) Eripsa envisions 'attention' serving the same role that Currency serves, oblivious to the fact that it doesn't and cannot. What you're all missing is the question - what purpose does attention serve in our present economy, and how might we better exploit that? Taken to its extreme, I believe it could eliminate currency altogether. I don't think it'll reach that point, and I don't believe it needs to - but I do think we stand to benefit from having an attention-based economy that functions in the way Eripsa describes.
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Feb 25, 2012 03:18
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