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evilweasel posted:My snickering about the toothpaste is because it's hilarious. The very idea that I might be called to account for my use of excess toothpaste before a council of my peers or the TwitterPolice is absurd. It's a hilarious waste of resources, a hilariously intrusive and draconian "government" and a great example of just how little you've thought this through. I don't care that the assembly will accept that someone's son smashed a bunch of tubes of toothpaste, or that they accidentally broke all their lightbulbs: I care they're actually called to account and forced to undergo what amounts to a trial for using too many tubes of toothpaste. It's the sort of dystopian nightmare I would be embarassed include in a story mocking your idea because it would be too extreme and absurd.
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Feb 1, 2012 00:19
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Eripsa posted:Look, there are serious and very important questions about the "tyranny of the majority" and personal privacy and the balance of sustainability and personal freedom. But I'm not going to have that discussion with someone who implies that I'm advocating Stalinism just because I'm advocating for optimizing the economy. Nothing I've said deserves this.
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Feb 1, 2012 03:23
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A serious argument against total information awareness? I must concede the point. I can't see any way that will be abused by any individual or organisation.
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Feb 1, 2012 03:47
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Eripsa posted:The video distinguishes between routine mechanical tasks and tasks that require any "cognitive function".
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Feb 1, 2012 04:41
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Eripsa posted:So we have the tools and knowhow to extract the ore, and we have a global system of use that depends on that ore. I am suggesting that you make the data of ore usage public so that the people can see its rates of use, and they can see the distribution network that enables that use, and you give them a say in how to monitor and coordinate that use, and you make the system open so they can contribution to that production if they want to. This isn't like cleaning the local outhouse for an hour a week. This is living in a place that resembles Mars, working underground, getting covered in dirt and mud, where heat can get to 40 degrees, hundreds of kilometres away from your friends and family. These can't be negotiated around. Money is a serious incentive to overcome this; the Australian navy is haemorrhaging engineers and people with technical skills - both jobs involve hard work in difficult conditions and long periods away from home and family, and one pays a crapton more and lets you go home more often. You can't just throw money or not-money at mining to make it nicer. You can't automate it all - believe me, we are trying - and I'm going to ignore your strong-AI-will-solve-everything idea because you're better than that sort of handwaving. The trucks and part of the digging can be automated, but not everything. Somebody needs an incentive to get out there and dig this stuff up. A million armchair miners on twitter will be happy to say "we need ore" but until someone gets off their arse nothing is getting done. I'm sure there are other craptastic jobs that nobody will do out of a sense of duty or necessity, and many of them require years of training. Why would anyone do this? Why not be a kitesurfing instructor or a sculptor or any other job where you go home to your family every day, and live in a place with decent restaurants?
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Feb 2, 2012 01:51
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Eripsa posted:In other words, the extraction of X tons of ore does not represent the fact that X tons of ore is needed, or that anyone wants it. Instead, it only represents the recognition that this ore's value when mined exceeds the cost of mining, and so someone can make a profit off its extraction. If it were not profitable, it would not be extracted. Supply and demand would ignore that someone may really need ore and be unable to pay for it, but the problem isn't the fact that the ore has value. There is a cost to digging something out from a kilometre below ground and shipping it to the other side of the world. That will always cost something outside of Star Trek. The problem is that a person who needs something can't pay for it, not that it is worth something. Eripsa posted:If the cost of the ore is not related to its usefulness, then it is possible that the amount of ore we should be extracting to solve the coordination problem is different from the amount of ore we are as a matter of fact extracting. Eripsa posted:Perhaps, if profits were not an issue, we may be able to devote more research into improving the safety of the miners at work, and more development of the automation technologies that will keep them out of harm's way in the future. Maybe we could devote research into ways of harvesting and reusing the ore we have already mined, and research into material alternatives to iron ore. These things usually won't turn a profit, and are ignored or sometimes actively avoided for the sake of profits, but it will keep humans from toil in the mines. Eripsa posted:Maybe when all those inefficiencies are ironed out, we'll have a task that is manageable enough that a small group of passionate and experienced people can approach it with the support of their technology and for the benefit of the crowd. Mining is only one example. The real question is this: T-1000 posted:I'm sure there are other craptastic jobs that nobody will do out of a sense of duty or necessity, and many of them require years of training. Why would anyone do this? Why not be a kitesurfing instructor or a sculptor or any other job where you go home to your family every day, and live in a place with decent restaurants? Eripsa posted:Sigh. For people who have trouble following a conversation:
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Feb 2, 2012 08:07
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One more thing: Eripsa, if you haven't, I suggest you read Superfreakonomics. You will probably take issue with a lot of it, but there's a chapter on money and psychology you'd find interesting. They mention a few of the altruism studies you've brought up and a few others with different results. One issue is that studying someone in a test changes their behaviour; people can try to act extra good in front of the people running the test. There are a few tests where people don't know they're being studied and the results are a bit different. Especially entertaining is a study where a researcher introduced the concept of currency to a group of monkeys. The monkeys picked it up very quickly and invented prostitution.
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Feb 2, 2012 10:02
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Eripsa posted:I'll say this one more time: money doesn't actually measure anything. It is completely fictitious. Shekels are the equivalent of fairy dust we've collected that we all think is special and that we've trained ourselves to obey completely when wagged in our faced.
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Feb 2, 2012 10:38
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Eripsa posted:There are a few specifics I have not touched on. I've been keeping a list: Problems with twittertopia: - The freeloader problem of people not wanting to work at all. - The problem of people not wanting to do unpleasant jobs when they could do pleasant jobs, and the only incentives being a sense of duty, or the abstract risk (a poor motivator) of everybody dying. Why be a technician on a toothpaste manufacturing line when I could be a sculptor or surf instructor? - Your willingness to accept that people might not want to work, and production of essential items (food, medicine) may plummet. - At the same time, you have described this as post-scarcity - A lack of explanation of how enough things actually get where they're needed beyond "iron needed at hospital->mentioned on twitter->sufficient iron appears at hospital". - The fact that you've empowered busybodies on the internet to monitor everyone and see no way that this will be abused. - The complete absence of privacy (in your words, total information awareness) - The conflict of experts vs producers vs everyone else in allocation - Your modelling of humans as beings of pure altruism trapped in a system that forces them to be cruel and selfish, and when they are set free, they will act without self-interest and with regards for the group. - The fact that attention may be given to vital items (eg: medication) only briefly compared to trivial items (television), therefore some sort of weighting is needed, which is very difficult to compute and renders the attention-metric fairly moot. - Your dismissal of empirical evidence (reddit witch-hunts, car crashes in India) compared to faith in how things should work under your system. - Automation and super-google being a giant handwave comparable to magic. - The fact that people will still have things they don't want, and want things other people have, and these things will still have value, and people will want to trade them, and trading will still take place but will be a lot harder. - The fact that you have fixated on money (a medium of exchange, or store of value) as the root of all evil, as opposed to people in need not having the things they are in need of. --edit:-- ryde posted: - The fact that having enough people with high levels of altruism, attention, and pro-activeness to make the theoretical society work could also make the current society work. - How to keep people from "Going Galt" without resulting to coercion. - The fact that attention does not really map to value, and that you have to have weights put in place by people to make it so, meaning that the system isn't any less arbitrary than actual money. Narbo posted: -How to exile undesirables/excess toothpaste users. --edit 2:-- Sir John Falstaff posted (paraphrased): - The problem of tracing back each item through the production chain - all people involved at each stage of manufacture, how to divide attention points between them, and the people who allowed those people to be involved with manufacture, and so on. (Eripsa posted a solution to this one, but rudatron pointed out that "Your solution to the problem is for people to recognize that attention is utterly loving useless to orient an economy around." so I'm leaving that there in case Eripsa has a better answer. Slanderer posted: - What you are physically looking is not what your attention is focused on. Stop discriminating against the blind people, or people who spend any amount of time thinking Zodium posted: - By extension, wouldn't disabled people in general pose a significant problem for the attention economy's ability to solve the coordination problem? How would it deal with, say, people suffering from schizophrenia or ADD? --end edit-- I am sure I have missed some of the points people have tried to raise, and I invite anyone who can think of more to post them and I'll add to the list. I would appreciate if you could address some of these issues without saying that flaws in the existing system absolve them, or using the word slavery. It's not that we just don't like the system, or dislike you. I like the fact that you are outraged at the injustice of the world. What I dislike is your inability to accept that anybody has raised a single problem with your idea. Even Einstein could admit when he made mistakes. Either your plan is absolutely perfect, with no need for improvement and we're all too dumb to see (kind of ironic since you're willing to assume the internet is very intelligent when it comes to allocating resources, etc) or maybe you might need to consider some of our objections. Just because people think there are flaws in your system doesn't mean that they are in love with the existing one or are just being mean. Someone mentioned a system where everyone writes a wishlist, feeds it into the computer and it then decides what gets done. It's about as handwavey as yours, but removes a lot of the issues with the giant monitoring system. Or how about a system where everything is the same as now, except the richest 10% of the world population are executed annually and their resources divided among the poorest people, until everyone's wealth lies within a certain range. Unfortunately neither plan is grounded in reality (unlike the existing system) since (a) they require infrastructure that we do not have and do not know how to create, (b) they make very simplistic assumptions about how people will behave in such as system, and (c) they could very easily end up as nightmarish dystopias worse than North Korea. They might be grounds for a fun movie (preferably something like Equilibrium with lots of shootouts to break up the economics) but they're not serious. Why should we take your system any more seriously?
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Feb 4, 2012 06:39
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I've updated the list of problems with twittertopia here in light of new questions and one of Eripsa's responses. Eripsa, when you get the chance, could you please address the rest?
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Feb 4, 2012 10:24
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I don't know where to begin. You've actually ignored the freeloader (or freerider) problem in your answer; people are still going to consume resources without contributing to them. You're advocating the world poverty line as a baseline, which you describe as "minimally comfortable" when people at that level do not even have toothpaste for twitter to monitor. You think people would do crappy jobs because they've always done crappy jobs and would be self-actualised by these crappy jobs, even though they would get the exact same standard of living as everyone else whether they worked the crappy job or not. Eripsa, out of curiosity, what do you do for a living? You don't have to be too specific, just a vague description would do.
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Feb 11, 2012 11:58
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Eripsa posted:Ok, evilweasel. I am pretty sure that I've made my argument here about as clear as I possibly can, and despite your deliberate attempts to distort it into insanity I think the position holds up well enough to scrutiny that you're going to have to start providing actual arguments instead of relying on all the other meatheads (like Slanderer) who jump in with no content trolliing. Either every person in this thread is an idiot, or we're all hopelessly negative, or there is something very wrong with your idea.
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Feb 11, 2012 22:24
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Eripsa, Cefte's not talking about homo economicus, he's talking about people using their brains to avoid getting killed - something that they are optimised for by three billion years of evolution. People were capable of rational thought long before economists existed, and just because some economists have used the word rational to advocate ideas you don't like, doesn't mean that humans are entirely incapable of deciding to act in a way that maximises their chances of not dying. You don't need to go off about rational actor theory. Driving is different to throwing a ball or picking up an object. At the very least there is some aspect of conscious thought involved in safe driving, it's not just reflex or learned instinct or muscle memory. At least, it feels to me like I'm thinking when I get behind the wheel. I can check the statistic when I get to work but driver inattention in the seconds leading up to the crash is the cause of a huge number of accidents. Eripsa posted:My writing must be incredibly unclear We've spun off target from the point we've been trying to make about roads Eripsa posted:I'm talking about the flow of traffic itself, the use of the resource itself, and not the planning organizations and institutions that result in those structures. My point was explicitly that what the law says doesn't matter to the traffic flow, what matters is how the roads are structured. Cefte posted:Driving absolutely does force specific behaviours, because if you gently caress up you die, or kill someone and go to prison, or damage an expensive car. Consequences for deviating from an incredibly rigid and universalized system of rules when driving a car are very much immediate, and the psychology of immediate consequences is fundamentally different to that which you're implying will guide people to go mine coal because someone they can't see might need it in the future.
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Feb 12, 2012 22:49
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Eripsa posted:For instance, I think it is incredibly likely that if we were mass manufacturing laptops, what we'd do is figure out the best balance of performance and production requirements in order to try and build a stable, dependable, and sustainable laptop. Maybe we end up designing a laptop that would cost $10,000 in today's costs, and we build it out of good, solid materials and engineer it to last on the order of 10-12 years of use, instead of the 2-3 years at best in today's planned obsolescence. Let's say we make 3 different models to customize to particular uses, but we just mass manufacture these few models of really good quality computer, using every computer manufacturing resource we have and dedicate it all to building sustainable products, and then distribute them as best we can to everyone who wants one. There are still going to be shortages with new technology (making the generous assumption that new stuff still gets made) and it will be challenging to allocate who gets what, and to prevent people stealing stuff or creating a thriving black market. You can't share everything; the whole point of things like phones is having them always there when you want them. If production drops because there's fewer people to work the mines, there's going to be the same number of people wanting a lower amount of stuff. Fire_Monkey posted:Also, can you explain how this is post scarcity as you have claimed? If it was post scarcity, these problems would not exist as I could simply type into my replicator 'one awesome TV' and have one. This is a highly optimised system, but there is definitely still scarcity.
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Feb 16, 2012 12:30
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Fire_Monkey posted:I have been reading post-scarcity as nothing being scarce, not just the bare necessities to live being rationed to everyone. Eripsa posted:However, I think that we are doing way, way more work than necessary to solve the basic coordination problem. These napkin calculations won't hold up to much scrutiny, but just so we know what kind of numbers we are dealing with: Google tells me that, if were perfectly distributed, the average human income is around $7000/year or about $20/day, whereas the world absolute poverty line is somewhere around $1 a day. That means, roughly, we are doing about 20 times as much work as we need to be doing to solve the basic coordination problem. Its worth mentioning that with our current distribution method, one billion people still fail to meet even the low bar of $1 a day, but my point here is just about how much work it will take. Let's be generous and say we are doing 10 times as much work as necessary to provide a minimally comfortable lifestyle for everyone on the planet, so that our current rate of production is 10 times what would be required to solve basic coordination. Eripsa posted:I'm suggesting that in the cases where it doesn't scale, we do without. Just because we don't get all the iron we think we need (and were used to under slavery) does not give us the right to force people to do it by depriving them of food and shelter and basic medical care if they don't. So if we don't get those resources distributed, then we do with out and we find some other way.
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Feb 16, 2012 13:34
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Whiskey Richard posted:Also, not everybody is an attention whore. I'm intensely private, not on facebook, have a small group of friends, keep my name off the internet and out of the paper, but am very successful professionally and do well from a money perspective. If I had to get my name out there like some needy drama club student just to amass this currency-replacement, it would mean a significant decrease in quality of life for me and anyone who doesn't dream of being the next American Idol. Your entire economy is based around attention whoring. Nice work. Better hope your kids are good looking extroverts. Eripsa posted:Why do you think people will completely abandon any professional standards if they aren't getting paid?
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Feb 16, 2012 23:10
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I have tried to be as polite as possible because this thread is interesting. I agree with very little here, but I just can't look away. I have tried to be polite because threads turn to crap as soon as people become uncivil. It's very easy to take offence over real and imagined slights when all we have is text and the discussion always derails into a shitfight over who is the more morally bankrupt. Nobody wins a shitfight. Eripsa, you've been quite rude to ryde, who has been giving extremely good feedback on a lot of things. I seem to recall him giving the computational complexity of the superdatabase serious consideration and his comments on processor development have been spot on. And yet... Eripsa posted:But you are right, we want our computers to be more aggressive, and that means shorter turn around times and more waste. I was suggesting that it may be more reasonable to delay those turn arounds for increased efficiency. You don't think that's a worthwhile trade off. That's fine, we might disagree. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong, or that I don't understand the nature of the industry here, its just that I'm fine with less frequent turnover that produces more durable products. That's a sacrifice you don't seem willing to make, but that doesn't mean I've somehow made a big mistake. Eripsa posted:But again, this is a matter of preference. I've mentioned a similar argument in the health care debates. People have argued that the American health care system is superior to the European model because even though not everyone gets health care in the US, it allows for rich people to pay for extremely high end procedures that might be unavailable in the European model. Eripsa posted:So the question is, do you want universal coverage but possible miss out on the latest medical innovation, or do you want selective coverage but with high performance for those who can afford it? Eripsa posted:I think your view is contrary to my basic moral framework, and frankly I think it is a selfish, morally bankrupt view. It is certainly not the kind of view you can arrive at from behind the veil of ignorance. In any case, I think we'd be able to survive with computer that work well enough until the next production cycle, and the console industry seems to confirm that suspicion. Will it make everyone happy? Probably not. Is it the more reasonable way to use our resources? Probably so. Then he calls you on it and you reply here, effectively saying that his disagreement at being told just how terrible you think he is, is just proof he's bought into the marketing. And now it gets really interesting: Eripsa posted:I didn't say "you disagree with me therefore you are morally bankrupt" This interaction with ryde is a microcosm of this entire discussion. Someone points out flaws in your argument, and they disagree because they are a selfish evil capitalist. Followed by: Eripsa posted:Look, guys, before we get all huffy and puffy, conversations like this only work when we have some grounds for shared understanding and agreement. It only works if we find the places where we do agree, so we have some leverage against the points where we don't. Alrighty, some content. I have studied engineering at a university level so I thought I'd share a bit of my knowledge, but I am by no means an expert or always right about everything. This is a bit lengthy and isn't essential reading. Planned Obsolesence, by T-1000 Executive summary:Planned obsolesence exists, has advantags and disadvantages, and can be divided into functional and psychological obsolesence. For consumer electronics over a period of three years of more, functional obsolesence begins to dominate due to technological advance. Once upon a time, products were built to last. This was due to a number of reasons. - Things took longer to build because they were built by hand with simpler tools. - Materials cost more. - People were poorer, and had less money to spend on nonessentials. If a product broke, they would remember and never buy that model again. Around, say, the post-WWII economic boom, the middle class exploded in the US and other countries that hadn't been completely burnt to the ground. Suddenly there was both a lot more money sloshing around for consumer goods and a lot more manufacturing capability sitting idle now that demand for tanks and bayonets had plummeted. Clever people in business realised that if they built a product that lasted 20 years, they would only make money from a customer once every 20 years. But if they built a product that lasted only 5 years, they would make four times as many sales. Additionally, the product would cost less to make, so they could undercut their competitors. Unfortunately, for some products, a short lifetime was not an option. The big example of this was not consumer electronics, but automobiles. A car needed to last a couple of decades, and that was a problem. Product lifetime is a probability function. A certain percentage of goods designed to last 5 years will break after 5 years and 1 day (right after the warranty runs out - bad luck!). A certain percentage will last 6 or 7 or 8 years. A certain percentage, built when the stars align just so, will still be running smoothly after 20 years. And a certain percentage will be dead in under 5 years, some of them even under 1. If you built a car to last 5years, then some percentage of those cars would break down within 1. You get a reputation for building lemons, and nobody buys from you. Case in point, US car manufacturing in recent years. Additionally, a car is a going to be a huge investment (at least at present), and consumers expect a car to last a few decades within which they'll sell it or drive it into the ground. So if the car lasts twenty years, how do you convince a customer to sell early and buy a new one in five? Planned obsolesence was the answer. Next year's model had much more stylish headlights, and fins. The one after that had a leather interior. Coupled with the new-fangled world of advertising, suddenly the car that was the coolest thing ever last year was now totally lame. You should resell it and buy a new one! Technology did progress. Engines got bigger/smaller, brakes got smoother, all sorts of safety devices have been invented. But generally there's incremental difference between this year's model and last year's. You see the same thing in clothing, video game franchises (Call of Duty launches a new game every year now) and a whole heap of stuff. These incremental changes are usually worthwhile. DVD to Blu-ray was a step up, Windows 7 is better than Vista, and next year's cars are probably a bit safer than last year's. But this gradual progression is generally not motivation enough to ditch the one you bought recently. So we divide planned obsolesence into functional and psychological. The difference between functional and psychological planned obsolesence is that one is because the old one no longer works (or a new one works much better) and oen is because you want a new one and you want it now. Both factors have an impact on consumer electronics, but over a timespan of three years of more, it's probably the functional obsolesence that becomes dominant. The original ipods still play music, but they can't play youtube videos and the interface is clunkier. A ten-year-old-laptop is largely useless due to improvements in processor speed and higher system requirements of modern software There are advantages and disadvantages of planend obsolesence. The wiki article covers it pretty well. Because some consumers are willing to pay more for a product that they expect to last longer, there is a market of quality goods with long-term warranties; off the top of my head, whitegoods, kitchenware and power tools are fairly mature technologies where products can be divided fairly easily into cheap and crappy or more expensive and high-quality (I could be wrong, it's been a while since we bought a fridge, but that sort of proves my point). There is also obsolesence that is unplanned. Horse-buggies were rendered obsolete by automobiles. Eripsa posted:Evilweasel, on the other hand, has repeatedly raised questions and given examples in this thread that show very clear misunderstandings or conceptual failures on his part, and he has not taken any time to point out any areas of agreement because he thinks the whole thing is so ridiculous that it doesn't actually deserve serious discussion. Which is why he spends his time trolling the thread, and that's why I ignore him. Suppose there were a creepy weirdo that lived on the outskirts of town. No friends, a bit odd, kept to themselves. Then someone accused them of being a child molestor. What stops this from turning into a witchhunt? We already have this problem, but we have some sort of legal system that is meant to prevent this. When the mob is the law, what can you do? Given the chance, the mob would have given Lindy Chamberlain the chair. Anyone that ever went into Gitmo would have been fed to panthers or something on live TV. Eripsa posted:It has to stop. Human slavery has to stop. I don't know how I can say that any more convincingly. The capitalist system everyone in this thread is defending so passionately is literally keeping people in human bondage to make sure you get the newest loving gadget, and you all seem to think this system is perfectly fine. Or if you don't think it is fine then you don't think you have to do anything about it because the Free Market and the World Governments will get together and do something about it eventually through voting or I'm not sure what. Or if are smart enough to know better than that, then you think capitalism is inevitable and we can't do any better and we should just try to grab as much poo poo as we can before we die. In all cases, from reading this thread my impression is that the general consensus here is that this is the Best and most Just of all possible worlds. Most threads in D&D inevitably devolve into a discussion of why-I-believe-in-socialism/anarchism/distributism/etc and I'd rather avoid that here because this thread is pretty unique. I would sooner make changes to the current system (the typical shopping list - social safety net, less on anti-drugs, less military, etc etc etc) than burn the system down and build from the ashes, as you have more or less advocated. Because burning the system down would leave all my friends and family out in the cold until we got some other shelter built up, and I have my doubts as to whether that new shelter would be enough to keep them from freezing when winter came. I would sooner see a rising tide lift all boats than cut everything down to the same level and call it equality. I get that you're only seeing this system through a glass darkly and your ideas are bigger than your ability to describe them to us. Fair enough. But please, man, stop and consider what I said before: either we're all hopelessly negative, or very stupid, or there is something very wrong with your idea.
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Feb 18, 2012 01:37
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Eripsa posted:So I just want to remind everyone that the alternative to this "dystopia" is the bystander effect, the endemic problem of anonymous crowds in late 20th century capitalism, where there is literally no incentive to help others. My system does present a solution, or at least an alternative, to the bystander effect. An individual is usually not subject to the bystander effect when in a crowd with which he has some special relationship; you aren't a bystander when your father collapses of a heart attack. Eripsa posted:Industrialization is alienating. This is the constant refrain of philosophers and social thinkers throughout the 20th century. That alienation results in bystanders and other disengaged community members, who do not see themselves as participants. Eripsa posted:The characteristic of industrial communities is not just that they are large, but that they are anonymous in the sense that no one bears any special relation to anyone else. This is exaggerated in democratic capitalist societies because of the pretense that money equalizes those relationships: that I could do what he did if I could only afford it. The idea that anyone could be rich. These are the so-called "leveling myths" of capitalism. Especially in industrial communities, you never know who the experts are, or who is "responsible" for fixing any particular problem, so taking action yourself may not always be the best course of action. On the farm is was "get the doctor", but in the theater it's "is there a doctor in the house?" If I'm not the doctor, then I'm not the one who should get involved. Eripsa posted:Do you agree that the bystander effect is dampened by communities with special relationships? Cefte posted:The cat man was alive. In fact, he was almost unhurt - a mere fractured collarbone. He was, however, trapped inside his module, and mouthing something - the audio feed from his cockpit had cut out. Ma tore his attention from his HUD-halo and looked out, directly at the smoking module in the distance.
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Feb 19, 2012 03:03
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Achmed Jones posted:Yes, the bystander effect is dependent upon industrialization.
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Feb 19, 2012 03:25
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Eripsa posted:These would be great objections, guys, if I had ever argued that the bystander effect was unique to the industrial age. But since I never made that argument, these are all missing the point. Eripsa posted:Industrialization is alienating. This is the constant refrain of philosophers and social thinkers throughout the 20th century. That alienation results in bystanders and other disengaged community members, who do not see themselves as participants. Eripsa posted:What your objections have highlighted, though, is that the bystander effect is really endemic to cosmopolitanism, and not just industrialization. That's right, but cosmopolitanism becomes increasingly more common in post industrial societies. I don't see how the bystander effect is more or less endemic in any particular society, as opposed to more endemic in a larger group. Eripsa posted:But the point that my system addresses this issue still stands. This feels like another tangent, as people already run to help others after nearby accidents. The problem is when those accidents are out of sight and out of mind. Again, diffusion of responsibility, the urge to copy everyone around us, and Dunbar's number - how does the attention system address these factors? Achmed Jones posted:Ah, I was under the impression that any ignoring counted if "someone else will take care of it" is a plausible thought (regardless if those people are present or will be coming down the road later). I assumed that one-on-one interactions as in the parable were a special case (and generally the most difficult case for the effect's manifestation).
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Feb 19, 2012 04:01
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Eripsa posted:I was using the term a bit loosely, but I meant it to refer to the opposite of kin relations. Eripsa posted:So again, if you are in a small village and everyone knows each other, you can't really be a bystander. You can fail to act well to another person, obviously, but you can also get called on it and be held responsible for your delinquency, because there are already strong social relations established between the participants to keep them engaged and adhering to social norms. In small communities, the roles of the individuals are clearly mapped out, and what is expected of them is just as clear, so there is much less ambiguity of when one should and shouldn't act. Eripsa posted:But in big cities and metropolitan centers you have people interacting whose only relation is proximity, and whose social roles can be far more ambiguous and largely unknown to each other, and that brings with it no special obligations at all. So it presents the issue of how to act, what is appropriate, and who to trust, which are just the basic social issues. Money works really well in a system where the social relations are ambiguous because money is a neutral and anonymous way to exchange goods, and it doesn't require building a relationship of trust and care required in making reliable trades in other sorts of economies. Money works as a social glue despite the rampant alienation of urban society. In fact, money flourishes in such environments, because people become disconnected from both the source and consequences of their actions, and can consume without being held responsible for those consequences. Hence, Foxconn. I would argue that alienation is unique to modernity because our previous affliction was a more existential concern along the lines of "am I or my family going to starve to death or die of the common cold?" Eripsa posted:Yes. In capitalism, the only incentive is profit, and so no one helps anyone because there is no profit in it. Scratch that, you help some one by giving them a makeover and filming it and packing it full of advertisements and then showing it 5 times a day on cable. Because that kind of "helping someone" is profitable. Again, let's say there is someone who is a bit odd, keeps to themselves, unsociable. We could be unkind and say they're a spergy neckbeard. Who is going to care about this person? If they're accused of something, what's to stop them ending up like Farai Kujirichita or the outcasts that got hanged at Salem? Walldo posted:What the gently caress is this thread about?
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Feb 19, 2012 10:25
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I'm short on time so my comments will be brief.Eripsa posted:Absolutely, but in small towns you enforce things through homogenization, and cultivate an identity around that enforced norm. So Sparta might have had thousands of citizens, but they were all Spartans, and aren't presented with clashing and possibly contradictory views. It is a large community, but it isn't a cosmopolitan community. There is only one thing it means to be a Spartan, and all Spartans live and identify by that norm. We know what makes a Spartan a Spartan. Witch hunts and "mob rule" of the reddit type are instances of homogeneous communities seeking detractors from that norm. Eripsa posted:I never said that people won't help each other because of capitalism. Eripsa posted:In capitalism, the only incentive is profit, and so no one helps anyone because there is no profit in it. Eripsa posted:We are talking about dynamical systems here, there is no room for the obsolete metaphysics of causation. We are talking about the constrains that dynamically interrelated systems and their ecologies of subsystems have with each other, up and down the chain, and at all levels of analysis. Eripsa posted:So you are right, I am talking about a social system that manages all interpersonal interactions, and not just carving out a subset of those interactions and calling them "economic". Eripsa posted:What's to stop them in our system? Well, supposedly, the justice system, where if they are accused of something, they can be put in front of a neutral body representing the state and its people, where justice can be served. Eripsa posted:If these bodies, which we currently trust to enact justice, and which are so visibly failing, claim to derive their legitimate authority from the people, then whence the fear of putting the authority directly in the hands of the people? Why do we do eagerly rush to voice our meager defense of the status quo and denounce the ideals of democratic self-government, just as the possibility for such becomes technologically feasible? Eripsa posted:In fact, I challenge anyone to describe for me a diverse population that reached consensus, without duress, to commit the horrible crimes you are all afraid would happen if we had "mob rule". Every single example given so far, of reddit or of witch hunts or of Nazi Germany, are all cases where the "mob" is homogenous, and often forms as a mob to precisely attack elements that do not accord with that homogeneity.
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Feb 19, 2012 21:48
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Ahz posted:I've been following this thread since pg1 and I do have to say I am massively impressed that it's gone on this long and the patience of some of you who have been arguing with Eripsa in good faith. This many pages later and he has still not given a single inch against this idea, that's some serious mind gymnastics at work here.
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Feb 20, 2012 03:49
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Eripsa posted:- I've addressed exactly how to overcome problems with short-sightedness (educate them, give them all the information)
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Feb 24, 2012 07:59
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I considered making another long list of objections, but that was less fun than writing a story. I’m nowhere as good a writer as Cefte or Eripsa but I tried. If anything, it’s more optimistic than Cefte’s but it’s probably a less true implementation of Eripsa’s grand vision. Also I admit I only read the first two chapters of Eripsa’ story, I couldn’t find the third. The thing that’s irked me about it and the whole system is how utterly detached it is from production itself. It’s a system of “how do we most equitably share this giant pile of food, toothpaste and lightbulbs that we found in this one place”, not “how do we produce and distribute the things we want/need to all the people that want/need them”. Throw in an acceptance of black market trade, the fact people won't want to work as much, a gutted legal system and an incentive to attract as much attention as possible and here is a condensed summary of my objections. It’s still pretty long. Sorry. The Wrong Sort Of Attention Jake always ate breakfast around 5am; sometimes a food shipment came in the night, and if there was anything particularly good in it – coffee, tea, bacon – it was usually gone by dawn. The last cup of coffee in Gulgong had been drunk over a decade ago, and despite small amounts being produced around the country, none of it ever reached them. Even the bikies couldn’t get their hands on any, no matter how much you offered in trade. Today there was fresh bread – one slice per person, the usual – and local eggs and milk. Not great, but better than the People’s Weeties. When they were kids, his brother Robert used to say that the Weeties were cut with sawdust, and they’d gotten worse since then – one reason Jake wouldn’t move to the city, where the milk was diluted and food like the Weeties were often the only option. Jake’s usual table was on the top balcony of the Bluegum Hotel with his back to the town below. This was partly to be a polite customer – the more attention the hotel got, the more priority it would have in receiving deliveries when an autonomous supply truck rolled into town – but mostly it was so he didn’t have to look at the statue in the middle of town. Instead, he read the news on his People’s Laptop. Gulgong had only made the national news twice. The first time had come as the result of a last-ditch attempt to garner attention for regional areas – they had held an open vote on what sort of attraction or landmark they should construct to put their town on the map, to try to escape their fate of being another dying country town. They had expected to build an agri-science research centre, or an art museum, or maybe establish a film festival. The digital consensus had been for them to build the southern hemisphere’s largest statue of a tyrannosaurus. It was to be constructed out of machinery that lay abandoned and rusting ever since the mine closed down. Their concerns were assuaged by the intense enthusiasm the idea garnered online, so the Gulgong People’s Assembly approved the idea. Over a hundred local tradesmen and labourers volunteered to work on construction. Over a dozen engineers collaborated online as part of the crowdsourcing process, and all would later deny that calculating the wind loading had been their personal responsibility. The finished statue was 164 feet tall and quite ferocious-looking, and got the town a substantial jolt of attention when photos and videos were posted online. Before the novelty faded, plans were made to use their newfound influence to spearhead an initiative to revitalise the region, focusing their influence on the pitiful state of the transport network, the limited and unjust nature of essential supply distributions, the unreliable electricity supply and declining public health. Three weeks after construction finished, the top half of the tyrannosaur blew off in a storm, crushing a block of public toilets but harming nobody. The legs and tail of the statue remained standing. The collapse got the town another jolt of attention and made the news for a second time; a motion to demolish the remainder of the statue was proposed locally, but this was vetoed by the National Assembly. The internet thought that half a giant statue of a dinosaur made of mining equipment was way funnier than no statue at all. The half-statue received over three million Likes within the first few days, and was declared a protected national monument. People had been leaving town ever since the mine closed down, but that was when the exodus really began. You couldn’t not look at it, right in the middle of town, jagged and rusting, twice as high as the Assembly Hall. It loomed over the straggly banksias like a deformed alien tripod that had missed Sydney, missed Canberra, and come to obliterate Gulgong, population 14,000....12,000....8,000 and falling. Some people went to the cities on the coast, hoping for better access to manufactured goods. Others went to larger regional towns in the hopes of better food security. To add to the insult, any time you looked at the loving eyesore, the moron who’d thought of building it got some attention; he’d leveraged it to gain support for new sculptures, most famously a ten-foot tall slogan-shouting RoboNorris. Jake was so pissed at the guy he avoided looking at the statue to deny him that thin trickle of attention. Jake got some of that attention, too. He was the bright spark who suggested they open the poll to the entire internet. He’d felt the ground start to slide from under his feet when the tyrannosaur statue idea really took off, and suggested that the Gulgong Assembly should moderate the poll; he was pilloried online for his authoritarian meddling. He opposed the construction as a waste of manpower and precious steel; he got support in some quarters, but there was too much enthusiasm for him to try to break the consensus. In hindsight, his opposition was half-hearted by this point; he’d been swept up in the madness with the rest of them. When he suggested that they at least build a sculpture of a dinosaur that actually existed on the continent of Gondwana, Twitter decided he was a huge sperg and made sure he knew it. Nearly a year had passed since then. The internet had forgotten him, but he would never live it down in Gulgong. He tried to make up for it. He attended all the Sub-assemblies except one (Civil Harmony, a clusterfuck of loudmouths, busybodies and feuding neighbours) and was well respected by a few people on the Public Safety committee, largely due to his brother’s work. Most of the time, he did nothing except vote and volunteer. He made the mistake of volunteering for a sewage maintenance team and found himself the community’s resident expert on septic tanks when the other three guys left town with their families. He worked in the struggling community gardens (yields were poor, this was grazing land), sheared the odd sheep, and didn’t hoard anything (except whiskey, toilet paper and morphine). And still he was the guy who thought up Tyrannosaurus Wrecks. The only things keeping Jake in Gulgong were his family. Jake’s mother had advanced Alzheimers and couldn’t bathe, use the bathroom or eat without assistance; Jake, Emma and her four kids had moved in with her to care for her. The best medical help they’d been able to get had been a video consultation with a kindly but harried doctor in Melbourne. She had suggested a few medications that could be used if Jake could find them (he couldn’t), and recommended against moving his mother from where she was familiar unless it was into permanent high-intensity care. Even then, she’d almost certainly get better care from her immediate family than she would in a nursing home. So Jake was stuck there until his mother died. And Robert had sworn to never leave Gulgong, and Jake couldn’t abandon him either. The sun was beginning to rise behind him, and he shifted to block the glare on his screen. Today, the North Shore Province was beating the secession drum after a fresh skirmish at the Sydney Harbour Bridge that killed 17; the Sutherland Shire Commune had reopened Lucas Height Reactor, for “peaceful research purposes” but everyone suspected a dirty bomb from those bogan motherfuckers (who were probably in league with the North Shore); the occupation of the Hunter Valley by the Western Sydney Peoples’ Militia was enforcing fairer food sharing in the state’s breadbasket; necessary steel production was at a forty-year low; the Southern Cross Patriots Militia claimed that their drone-frigates had detected and sank three suspected refugee boats in the Timor Sea; bushrangers had raided a supply convoy heading from Bathurst to Dubbo; the General Assemblies of Brisbane and Cairns were voting tonight on a mutual assistance pact, amidst mounting evidence of chronic underreporting of fruit yields in an attempt to evade distribution quotas. He flicked to the sports section. The 48th Ultrabowl would kick off that day. He was about to browse the designs of the biomechanical Hunters that would be pursuing the Ultranauts when he received an email. "Hello Jake, I’m sorry to have to tell you that your brother Robert Hanrahan is dead. His body was found in the alley behind the Stockman's Tavern at 3:32am this morning. An investigation into his death has been opened and you are welcome to participate. For further information, contact the Gulgong Public Safety Committee. His case file is #0289-284-H. Your brother’s body is being transported to the morgue at Gulgong Medical Centre. If it is not collected within 48 hours, it will be cremated and disposed of. I’m sorry for your loss. Love, Ma" Attached were links to photographs of the crime scene, results of a preliminary medical examination, contact details for the Public Safety Committee, and a map from the Bluegum Hotel to the morgue. He sat numb for a few moments, toast halfway to his mouth, egg yolk dripping onto the table before he slammed his People’s Laptop shut and headed out to his bicycle. Gulgong was too small to support a real public transport network, and most of the ethanol that was ever destined for them fell off the pallet at some stage of the journey. Nearly everyone rode bikes or horses, or walked. Even some of the Nazghuls, nominally a biker gang, rode pushbikes due to limited ethanol and the need to cannibalise some bikes for parts; nobody ever mentioned this to their faces, though. It had rained earlier in the morning and now the air was crisp and pleasant, entirely undramatic and strangely disappointing. When Jake’s Dad died, the derailment didn’t get much attention at all because it was the same day as the disaster on the Lingerie Space Station. Jake, his brother Robert and sister Emma had borrowed horses and ridden to the crash site just outside town. It had been a very weird day, pulling bodies from out of the twisted carriages while meteors streaked down overhead. A video of the scene had got them enough attention to take care of the funerals, but that was about it; the trains had never run to Gulgong again. Today was just shaping up to be a day of normal, sunny Spring weather, except his brother was dead. poo poo. He had been expecting an email like this for a while. And poo poo poo poo poo poo, he was riding right past the Nazghul clubhouse, navigating on autopilot. A handful were sitting outside having a few breakfast beers, stocky, tattooed men with a mixture of beards and mohawks. The club was headquartered down in Wagga Wagga but since the toilet paper shortage four years ago, they’d been aggressively setting up franchises throughout rural New South Wales. They watched him ride past. They would have recognised him – half the town knew him on sight, and Jake’s brother was known to the Nazghuls in particular. poo poo. They would probably think he was sending them a message. Unlike everyone else, the Nazghuls didn’t seem to want much attention. One murmured something to the others, and they all laughed. Jake could hear a couple of motorbike engines sputtering up ahead, so he detoured right onto Barton Avenue. This took him past the Revolutionary Church, where a few Crusaders were heading in for a dawn service. There was a service every day, sometimes more. Reverend Tommo (over at St. Mary’s at the other end of town ) had some pointed remarks about their school of Calvinism, their doctrine of prosperity and the lifestyle of Archbishop Hastings, but even he admitted that this Church could get things done. When one of their congregation in Goulburn needed to go to Sydney to use one of the last MRI machines, they got every Crusader in every church in the country to pay attention, and a train was organised within days – the first train to pass the mountains in two years. Maybe that was how the attention system was supposed to work. All Jake knew was that the Archbishop was in the news pretty regularly giving comment on health services or education, and there were rumours that the Crusaders were influencing how both were provided. He’d need to call Tommo and organise a funeral service or something. poo poo. He turned left onto Deakin, avoiding a dead horse that had lain in the middle of the street for a few days – it had died in the night, nobody knew whose it was, and nobody had confessed – and went past the recruiting centre for the Southern Cross Patriots. This early, most were probably sleeping off the previous night’s drinking. They were the assholes who’d got the Expulsion Act voted through by all the Assemblies. They had all sorts of attention-grabbing billboards plastered around– “we grew here, you flew here”, “Australia for Australians”, “the right kind of diversity”. They weren’t racists, they were always keen to point out, they were just keen to defend their nation’s heritage and diversity from the imposition of a foreign way of life. Their old recruitment centre on Main had been worse, with a huge mural of a map of the country with red arrows descending ominously from the north. It was now a wreck, gutted by fire; nobody had been hurt, the suspected arsonist had fled town (Jake strongly suspected Robert had helped), and the Southern Cross Assholes were still drilling in main street on the first Friday of every month. Part of their routine was to assemble and salute in front of the burnt ruin, as if in memoriam. The rest of the time they mostly got drunk, got stoned, started the odd punch-up and played footy, not always in that order. This was a particularly weak branch, largely due to several investigations organised by the Public Safety committee. The group was more formidable at the national level, and in other towns where the local chapters were more organised and activist and often formed the core of the Public Safety committees themselves. Jake carefully locked his bike to a pole outside the medical centre – technically it was communal property, but this bike was in the best condition of any he’d found. He knew his way to the morgue; he’d helped Robert with a few cases. Debora was photographing and bagging Robert’s effects when Jake walked in. Deb was the unofficial head of the Committee of Public Safety, a thoughtful and thorough investigator who’d lived in Gulgong for half a century. She had great dedication to the wellbeing of her community, and a blind, irrational hatred of refugees. She and Robert were only able to work together because she was in favour of turning back the boats rather than torpedoing them; even then the relationship was sometimes strained. She started as the door slammed shut behind Jake. “Jake. I’m so sorry. Jenkins went around to your house but...” He ignored her, went to the steel table in the middle of the room and lifted the sheet covering his brother’s body. On the day they unveiled the statue, Jake and Robert had stayed home to care for their mother and paint Emma’s kids’ bedrooms. They wanted to paint the girls’ room yellow, but the only colours in the store were People’s White and People’s Beige. The nearest tin of yellow paint was in loving Botany, and only because it was next door to the paint factory. That night, after Emma brought the kids back from the carnival, the whole family had a barbeque, and once the kids, Emma and their mother were asleep, the brothers got thoroughly tinned. “We invade this country, dig up the land for the iron, build more machines with the iron, then build a giant dinosaur out of the machines,” Jake said, finishing his VB. “Why a dinosaur? Why not a giant middle finger?” “Or a scale model of Captain Cook’s cock that plays Land Of Hope And Glory when the wind blows through it,” said Robert, “and shoots miniature Union Jacks out of the top every day at noon?” Jake had cracked another can, and then another. Life was pretty poo poo that day. The beer was pretty poo poo that day, and every day. All the alcohol was. But there was enough for everyone, and that was what really mattered. Robert had once said that the country would run out of food, soap and medicine before they ran out of alcohol. It was technically a luxury but there were less problems if the stuff were just distributed with the food shipments. Weed, too; it was easier to mass produce, the only agricultural sector without a labour shortage. Due to legitimate medical uses, there were always opiates drifting around, both legitimately and through the black market. In a bigger town there would have been social workers and medical counsellors who’d get in touch with anyone who went near the stuff, but not out here. Everyone hoarded morphine when they could; all medical supplies were valuable goods for dealing with the independent homesteaders, the bikies or even folk in the Autonomous Tribal Zones. Most of the farms were independent and didn’t contribute to the community – they only traded, and since the Nazghuls controlled the black market, if you wanted decent meat, you had to deal with the bikies. Some meat did seep through from more cooperative farms, but it mostly went to the cities, and the tinned meat that came back was what you got when you fed spam to pigs and then put their poo poo in cans. Jake mostly dealt with one of Robert’s friends who had contacts in the Indigenous Autonomy Zone just outside town. They had hooked him up with some decent kangaroo steaks. Life was pretty poo poo, but it had been a reasonably good night. That had been a couple of weeks before the Inquiry. Probably the last time drinking with Robert had been fun. “Cause of death was blunt force trauma,” said Debora, beside him. “Skull fracture and cerebral haemorrhage. Andy Plover found the body...your brother when he went to take a leak behind the Stockman’s. Nobody in the Stockman’s can remember seeing Robert.” “Do you believe them?” “No. It doesn’t matter. Rain this morning destroyed most of the material evidence. There’s two guys photographing the crime scene now and a couple of folk online expressing interest in the case but most people are going to be watching the game. We lose the first 24 hours...” “Any leads? Suspects? Motives?” “In this town? Could be almost anyone, over anything.” Debora sighed. “Your brother pissed off a lot of people, here and online. Getting help from outside is unlikely. I loved your brother like a son, but his record was a mile long. Authoritarian tendencies, antisocial disturbances, theft, public drunkenness, accusations of possession of child-“ “That wasn’t true! He was set up!” “I know, Jake, I defended him at the Inquiry. But the accusation’s the same as guilt. People will assume that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. If someone isn’t happy he’s gone, they probably just won’t give a crap. This isn’t even a particularly interesting case. A disgraced private detective suspected of immigrant sympathies and worse, last seen in a venue twice censured for illegal gambling, gets in a drunken fight in an alley, probably over drugs or a woman or just plain stupidity, pulls a gun and gets his head bashed in for it. It won’t get a lot of attention.” Public Safety was always short on manpower, and it’d be especially hard to get volunteers to help investigate today. All the fans would already be watching the pre-game preparation by the Ultranauts, and everyone who opposed bloodsports would already be tweeting up a storm, or watching the lectures and debates being organised in opposition. Deb didn’t need to mention that you could practically get away with murder if your victim was unpopular and your method was uninteresting (but God help you if the internet got footage of you mistreating a cat). It was up to dedicated volunteers to organise investigations, and to present their findings to the Assembly. People like Debora and Robert. “You don’t think there will be an investigation?” Jake asked. “There’ll be one. I just don’t think it’ll achieve much. You can run it if you want. Otherwise Jenkins would probably be keen.” “Aren’t you going to...?” Debora shook her head slowly. “Jake, I was going to talk to call you today. There’s a caravan leaving town tomorrow. Harold and I are going with it.” “East?” “To Harold’s parents’ place in Newcastle. Things are better in the city. You should consider-“ “No. Did they even figure out what happened to the last caravan?” “We’ve got a deal with the Nazghuls, they’re escorting us to Goulburn.” “I seem to recall that last caravan had a deal with the Nazghuls.” “The only other option’s the Crusaders, and they wanted more. The Nazghuls only want half our luxury stuff. We couldn’t take it all anyway.” She grabbed some papers and photos off a tray, shoved them in a folder and pressed the folder into Jake’s hand. “You really think it’s any better in the city?” he asked. “Can’t be much worse than here. I’m so sorry about Robert. I disagreed with him a lot, but he was better than this place. So are you. It killed your old man, it killed your brother, it would have been better if it just killed your mother, and it’s going to kill you too. I think you should really consider leaving town.” “gently caress that,” said Jake. “I’m going to get some answers.” “Listen to me, Jake. We both knew this would happen eventually. Your brother shook too many trees. He got a lot of peoples’ attention. The wrong sort of attention. Twitter can’t protect you from these people.” Robert’s possessions were in a battered cardboard box on another bench where Debora had been tagging them. Jake pulled off the lid and rummaged through it until he found what he was looking for. He checked that the safety was on and there was a round chambered and a magazine loaded, removed the evidence label, then shoved the pistol into his belt. Like most things his brother used, its RFID tag had been removed. Debora hesitated then reached out to him, but Jake shook off her hand and headed out the door. “What are you going to do, Jake?” she called after him “I’m going to attract some attention.” The sun had risen over a statue of half a tyrannosaurus. It was going to be a beautiful day.
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Feb 25, 2012 05:02
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evilweasel posted:I would like to note at no point is consensus actually defined in a useful way: instead, it is defined in a vague way and then the only metrics you could use to actually apply it clearly are discarded. So we're left with a definition where if we don't like the result (e.g. gay marriage) no consensus, but if we do, consensus!
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Feb 26, 2012 01:22
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Eripsa posted:Ya, man, all those historical examples of consensus-based communities causing havok and mayhem really are damning to my view
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Feb 28, 2012 23:35
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Eripsa posted:I am writing a lot of words right now, but I can make this very simple and give you guys a head start with your gasping astonishment at my ridiculous view. And then Eripsa posted:I want to be clear that I'm using the term "consensus" in a technical way. Eripsa posted:The crowd doing the wave is a self-organized system, and it is organized on the basis of a consensus among the crowd. The consensus is the shared understanding among the participants that they are about to do the wave. This shared goal gets executed with some central coordination, but the coordination is not what is motivating the participation of the members. The fact of coordination doesn't make something other-organized. I am baffled that you can post that as an example of consensus and then write Eripsa posted:In particular, if I construct a crowd with very narrow specifications it may be very easy to achieve a consensus within that subgroup. This example proves literally nothing about consensus. This is the reverse of your playing "no true mob" because no mob is diverse enough for your standards, it's just no crowd is too homogeneous and no task too trivial for their consensus to be a useful example. Eripsa posted:[w.r.t Reddit/SA] I will give an example of consensus failing that I mentioned before, one you will no doubt be familiar with, but I'll spell it out so you and everyone else understand my interpretation. The Occupy movement ran into problems with consensus because it's really hard to do with difficult problems and with larger, diverse groups with different agendas. We need to make dinner? Great, consensus is that the dinner people make dinner with what we've got. The camp is messy? Consensus is we clean it. There's problems with our government? Consensus is we should talk about it in discussion groups some more but not actually formalise a list of concrete proposals/demands/requests/suggestions/whatever you call them because it drags the meeting out because people disagree. When the group ranges from people who literally want to abolish money to people who want to reform a broken system as well as anarchists, libertarians, socialists and who knows what, it's really freaking hard to reach a compromise that pleases everyone. That is my understanding of consensus You haven't really defined what consensus is, other than as something that a group does without being stopped by a bigger group. And something about eating a whole pizza. As an aside, the whole pizza thing adds a Mr. Plinkett-pizza rolls vibe to this thread; if that's what you were going for, kudos. But I still have no idea how the Marbleverse would decide things that people are going to have opinions about; whether to build a desalination plant or recycle greywater or impose water restrictions, whether the new highway should go this way or that way, whether the school curriculum should include more native American history or harder science. The kind of things governments decide. Is it just a representative system only instead of votes it's popularity? Is it random lots? Is it just someone starts building a desal plant and if nobody stops him, it gets built? Also, if someone is caught stealing, they are taken before the Assembly and put on trial in the court of no laws. There are a million and one ways that this could go wrong. "Just the consensus of the people and the facts of the case"? The facts of the case are highly subjective. If not, every court case today would be open and shut and we wouldn't have spent the last thousand-odd years building a justice system that still doesn't work properly. (I'm not talking about the American system exclusively). The Occupy example above is my example of consensus maybe not working. Can you please post an example of a large number of people reaching a decision by consensus? Preferably consensus from a diverse group on something difficult, rather than "are cookies delicious?" reached at the Cookie Monster family reunion. Hell, even an anecdote will do, like I just related. An actual consensus, not a bunch of race car fans doing the wave. How did that seem like the best example of consensus you could think of? Did you expect anyone to be satisfied by it? I mean, I almost expect the next youtube link you post in a wall of text to be a rick roll and then we all concede we've been bested, it was well played, and the thread goes out on a high; this thread has been weird and entertaining, but now we're through the looking glass.
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Feb 29, 2012 12:11
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Eripsa posted:Here's two cases. - when it involves immediate danger requiring swift action - when the correct course of action is completely clear to all people involved - when the majority of people need to do absolutely nothing So yes, when the default mode of people is "chillax" and a the decision to be made is "95% of you should continue to chillax, while 5% who trained to save lives should go save a life right here, now" vs "....don't" then consensus can be a reasonable method. As you might suspect, I think this is an example that is very limited in application, but it's better than the Mexican wave. Eripsa posted:At this point it should be obvious that I think this example is very simple and not particularly helpful. The alternative if you disagree is to leave the group. This will end up with endless fractured sub-groups in constant conflict with one another. People who want to build a highway versus people who want to save the trees that will be chopped down to build it. People who want to abolish money versus those that want to restore it to the gold standard. This is no way to run any large group if you expect things to get done with a reasonably complicated problem.
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Feb 29, 2012 21:30
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Lyesh posted:How would somebody even start to try to do this? I'm serious here.
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Mar 1, 2012 06:51
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Lyesh posted:That would be an interesting idea. Maybe use the images from that person at microsoft (I think?) who had a camera strapped to their chest taking pictures every minute.
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Mar 1, 2012 07:19
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The Duke of Ben posted:How are really difficult and mutually exclusive courses of action decided upon? You've said that communities that cannot form a consensus break apart, which I suppose is an answer. It's a very poor answer though, because earlier you said that the system needs to be fully integrated and that no outside organizations could be tolerated. These ideas are mutally exclusive. Or a new garbage tip is needed but nobody wants it in their suburb. At present you'd get some sort of analysis done by a group of experts, discussion at a local and state council level, court challenges, etc, and eventually a new site would get picked. Some people would be unhappy and they'd just have to deal with it. I posted earlier that there would be "People who get off on creating shitstorms and being difficult, people who are (ironically) bad at cooperating with others, people with strong opinions who refuse to see the validity of other perspectives." These are often prevailent at the local government level (I've been to my local council meeting twice, it was not pleasant) but get filtered out in the court system, largely by judges with the patience of saints. You responded to this point with Eripsa posted:"I'm making burgers, who's in?" T-1000 posted:The Occupy movement ran into problems with consensus because it's really hard to do with difficult problems and with larger, diverse groups with different agendas. We need to make dinner? Great, consensus is that the dinner people make dinner with what we've got. The camp is messy? Consensus is we clean it. There's problems with our government? Consensus is we should talk about it in discussion groups some more but not actually formalise a list of concrete proposals/demands/requests/suggestions/whatever you call them because it drags the meeting out because people disagree. When the group ranges from people who literally want to abolish money to people who want to reform a broken system as well as anarchists, libertarians, socialists and who knows what, it's really freaking hard to reach a compromise that pleases everyone.
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Mar 1, 2012 21:37
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Eripsa posted:See, here's the thing: you don't get a choice. Sorry, but tough loving poo poo. Insofar as your choice of privacy ultimately condemns the rest of the community to an unsustainable system, and your preference is simply insufficient reason for securing your privacy.
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Mar 10, 2012 04:35
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Eripsa posted:So I'd like you to consider my actual proposal, and explain why you find it unsatisfying. Let's take a morally neutral example. Open question to the thread: are there any worthwhile works of fiction involving a world without privacy? All I can think of is 1984 and bits of Minority Report. Eripsa posted:That's absolutely right. I'm talking about how to balance collective interest with individual interest. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you don't have any embarassing medical conditions, or personal history or interests or whatever that you don't want absolutely everyone to know. That's really wonderful for you, but there are a lot of people out there without that luxury. Eripsa posted:The youtube video above just led me to this:
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Mar 14, 2012 00:07
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Eripsa posted:Why do you think this? Why, a priori, should we assume that this information isn't necessary? We are talking about the dynamics of complex networks. All the data matters. Eripsa posted:Again, you aren't taking my position seriously. Each of these dystopic visions of the future are centrally controlled and operated by an authority- the state, big brother, whatever. I'm advocating an anarchistic story, where there is no one who can leverage any institutional power against you. Eripsa posted:Watch the lecture, or read the article, both of which require just a click of a link. Jesus, do I have to ask people to actually consider the links and information I'm posting in this thread again?
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Mar 14, 2012 01:00
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Sir John Falstaff posted:This is starting to remind me of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Simply dump all those urbanites into the countryside with some shovels, eliminate private property, kill off those that complain, and it'll all work out. Except, you know, decentralized. And with Twitter, somehow.
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Mar 14, 2012 23:15
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