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RealityApologist posted:No, I'm not. I explicitly said that I was giving up the economic and political rhetoric to concentrate on modeling the multiagent network. I've explicitly adjusted my presentation and rhetoric on the basis of the criticisms raised in this thread. I'm being responsive to criticism. And y'all call me a flipflopper for doing so. It took me ages to catch up, but I just want to say that it's been a real joy reading this thread. I haven't had this much fun since that goldmined thread about the guy who refused to take the slightest bit of financial advice. This is just a classic post. RA, if you've given up the economic and political rhetoric of Strangecoin, then what is its current purpose? If it's not an economic system, and it's no longer being used to affect political change by making our caste system explicit, then what is Strangecoin currently used for? Let's pretend that you succeed at "modeling the multiagent network" (lol). You have the network now, what are you going to do with it? Strangecoin went from a currency, to a tool for economics research, to a tool for exploring existing power structures, to a game. Why should I, as a technologically literate first world consumer, want to use Strangecoin?
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Apr 28, 2014 22:43
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RealityApologist posted:If you don't want to talk about the technological mediation of social organization, or the potential for using tools like Strangecoin to study and even manage such systems, then I have nothing to tell you to change your mind or make you interested in this project. But the average person doesn't want to talk about the technological mediation of social organization (do you mean phonecalls, texting, and facebook messages here?) or the potential for using tools like Strnagecoin to study such systems. How will you convince them your currency, as you just called it again, is worth switching to?
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Apr 28, 2014 23:29
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RealityApologist posted:If you don't want to talk about the technological mediation of social organization, or the potential for using tools like Strangecoin to study and even manage such systems, then I have nothing to tell you to change your mind or make you interested in this project. I am interested in the subject, mostly because I want to understand your thought processes. Let me rephrase and see if it jives better for you: You say that Strangecoin would provide advantages by revealing currently implicit relationships between economic entities like workers, corporations, or consumers. You also say that Strangecoin would allow these entities to interact in novel, more efficient ways. Can you provide an example of a current economic phenomenon where Strangecoin would provide new data or allow people to interact differently? I guess what I'm getting at is that transitioning even a small part of today's current economy to Strangecoin or your previously mentioned attention economy would require a huge investment in technology to track each transaction and present the data in a meaningful way. If we're going to invest in all this tech because apparently we need new economic data, what if instead we invested to track every dollar through every transaction? What data would Strangecoin provide that tracked dollars could not?
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Apr 29, 2014 00:55
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RealityApologist posted:The question "why should anyone give a poo poo" can be used to cripple just about any project of passion a person can have. A pack of a dozen people yelling "who gives a poo poo" after everything you say is the perfect way to pummel a person's passions into submission. I'm not complaining about it, except that it's a distracting noise in the thread. It's like sand I have to slog through to say anything important in the thread, and it requires a lot of confidence in myself and my abilities to push forward in the face of this pummeling. All I'm asking for is discursive charity; if people are confused in the thread let me remind everyone again that I'm responding to about a half dozen genuine interlocutors and another dozen assholes simultaneously, and any such conversation is bound to get confusing. 1) "Why should anyone give a poo poo" is not a crippling or distracting question. It is the first and most important question any writer must answer for his or her audience. This is writing 101 level poo poo here. You, creator of the marble attention economy, should know better than anyone else that attention is limited and valuable, and you as a writer must convince me, the reader, that your poo poo is worth spending attention on. The fact that you see this as a needless distraction rather than the raison d'etre of your writing speaks volumes to your qualifications as an academic. 2) The amount of "why should anyone give a poo poo" or "why should we actually implement your idea" you get is going to be proportional to the magnitude of the change for which you're calling, and you literally want to change the world in the most radical of ways. You want us to give up currency, redesign our entire economy, and apparently give up private property in order to fully implement Strangecoin. This idea, if implemented, would be as radical as full communism, and that was an ideology wars were fought over and for which millions died. You better have some pretty drat good evidence to back you up. The fact that all you can offer is handwaving and paragraphs of word salad is pathetic compared to what you are calling on your readers to do. 3) Finally, don't you dare ask for discursive charity in this thread when you haven't offered us a loving shred of it. You dodge questions, take quotations out of context, claim victory in past arguments you lost, and, worst of all, didn't even try to do the loving calculations you implied you did and which you asked the thread to do! You are the most disingenuous and disrespectful poster in this entire thread. And I am a genuine interlocutor. I entered with a legitimate question, "why should I care?" and got poo poo on and dismissed in your first reply. And despite writing several more paragraphs of word salad and introducing an entirely different project of yours, you still haven't answered my question.
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Apr 29, 2014 19:10
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RealityApologist posted:I proposed an altcurrency that applies bonuses to transactions on the basis of network structure, and for this I'm responsible for justifying the atrocities of communism. This is the kind of rhetoric I'm charged with responding to in this thread from self-described "genuine interlocutors". RealityApologist posted:Racism has some benefits for the majority, but even in deeply racist societies the stereotypes relationships break down in strange and interesting ways all the tim. My claim is not that racism isn't effective for social control; of course it is. My claim is only that there are more effective and more useful methods available, and ones that operate under different values and assumptions. Cantorsdust posted:You want us to give up currency, redesign our entire economy, and apparently give up private property in order to fully implement Strangecoin. This idea, if implemented, would be as radical as full communism, and that was an ideology wars were fought over and for which millions died. You better have some pretty drat good evidence to back you up. The fact that all you can offer is handwaving and paragraphs of word salad is pathetic compared to what you are calling on your readers to do. Here's another loving example of disingenuity. I didn't say you're responsible for justifying communism. I said you were proposing an idea as radical as communism and that you should have good evidence to back you up. I was referencing an earlier post you made saying that Strangecoin is hostile to the idea of private property and that there would be no private property under Strangecoin. That's the kind of radical proposal that needs to have a very drat good reason to implement. You are now misinterpreting my quotes, denying your own previous writing, and again accusing me of not arguing in good faith. Seriously, this entire thread is a record of what you've said before. You think you can get away with lying about what you previously said? RealityApologist posted:I've made mistakes in this thread, many of which I've admitted to and tried to compensate for. But the inflated rhetoric and confusion surrounding this discussion is as much a product of the other participants in this thread as it is is a product of me. I am not the only one generating confusion and hype in this thread. It would be helpful if there were any recognition of this fact by any of the participants in this thread. You've certainly made mistakes in this thread, and you have admitted to some of them. But you certainly haven't tried to compensate for them, or you wouldn't be trying to pull this poo poo on page 60 again. I recognize that some posters are hostile to you, but I don't see that as confusion or hype. And they have legitimate reason to be hostile to you, considering your shameful posting. RealityApologist posted:The idea of Strangecoin was novel enough to motivate a successful Hacker News thread, and the history of discussion on this forum was sufficient context to drive 60 pages of discussion. This settles the "why should anyone give a poo poo" matter sufficiently to justify the thread. Continuing to ask the "why should I give a poo poo" isn't a helpful analysis, it's just cynical trolling, as I said on the first page, cannot be taken seriously. I'm not asking you to justify this thread. I can make a thread on literally anything, and as long as it isn't breaking any rules, it's justified. Hell, I can go to BYOB and make any thread and it's justified. I'm asking you to justify why we should implement Strangecoin. And you still haven't given me an answer. I explained in my previous post why it isn't just cynical trolling, but the most basic and important question you must answer to your reader. RealityApologist posted:As for the substantive question of "what is Strangecoin supposed to do?", I think that's fairly clearly addressed in the original proposal. Strangecoin is a currency where trades are modified to reflect aspects of the network structure and not merely the goods being traded. What does the economy look like if currencies operate in this way? How does that change the incentive structure of the agents in that economic system? Are there any benefits of such a framework relative to traditional currencies? These are all questions I don't know the answer to. The proposal describes a model that can be built to test these kinds of questions. I think the scope of the question is relatively modest and straightforward and interesting. And I don't think it requires me to answer for the atrocities of communism before anyone is expected to care. I understand what the network proposes to do. I don't understand why? Again, your idea would require radically changing the world to implement. If you want to convince people to implement it, you need to answer all those questions you're asking here before anyone would be convinced. And you're the self-described network theorist here, why aren't you answering them? The network itself might be interesting. I would be interested in reading what you discover after you code it up, and it would be interesting to see what kind of behaviors emerge from the rules you've set up. It's fine to claim you want to create a model, and I agree that creating such a model would be relatively modest, straightforward, and interesting. But you're not just claiming your network would be interesting. You've alternately claimed at various points of this discussion that Strangecoin would replace currency, eliminate nepotism, eliminate social castes, reify social castes, and a bunch of other pie in the sky, grandiose visions. You've compared yourself to an alchemist observing the dawn of chemistry. You've compared yourself to loving Marx. The scope of the original question may be modest, but your believed self-importance is anything but. You can't back out of this now by claiming modesty.
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Apr 29, 2014 20:08
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CheesyDog posted:Calvinball is a celebration if childhood imagination and the sheer sense of fun being more important than structure. It was a revolution in friend-playing when my friends and I realized that it was more fun for both sides to fight and do cool things to the other person than to continually escalate the +infinity sword versus +2 infinity armor debate.
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Apr 29, 2014 20:39
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RealityApologist posted:Proposing a multiagent system that applies network bonuses to transactions is not an idea as radical as communism. It is if you expect this multiagent system to replace dollar transactions, abolish private property, and change the way we interact with our friends, family, and strangers. You were suggesting a cybernetic system of auras to analyze financial relationships between people! You don't think that isn't a radical suggestion? Also, you didn't address any of the other statements in my post, specifically: Cantorsdust posted:But you're not just claiming your network would be interesting. You've alternately claimed at various points of this discussion that Strangecoin would replace currency, eliminate nepotism, eliminate social castes, reify social castes, and a bunch of other pie in the sky, grandiose visions. You've compared yourself to an alchemist observing the dawn of chemistry. You've compared yourself to loving Marx. The scope of the original question may be modest, but your believed self-importance is anything but. You can't back out of this now by claiming modesty. You can't back out of this by claiming a "modest proposal" now. You said you have this grand vision that's going to change the world, not just a multiagent model.
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Apr 29, 2014 21:54
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Krotera posted:Just breed ants whose usage patterns resemble the patterns of humans and then use slime mold to generate a rail plan that summarizes the details. But how will you teach them to use Google Glass?
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Apr 30, 2014 05:09
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RealityApologist posted:As I've argued in this thread, price and value in economic systems often masks important features of the social and political systems that support its structure. There's lots of good political reasons to be worried about our existing political and economic frameworks, and Strangecoin represents an alternative framework that seems qualitatively different than other proposals on the table. You don't know this, as you haven't run any models or even finished your spec. You have no idea what new information a Strangecoin transaction might carry yet, as that is an emergent property of the system. RealityApologist posted:The proposal I've given, and the examples I've used to explain it, demonstrate fairly well how transactions come to reflect network structure through the various modifications, and how the transactions types are meant to cover certain dimensions of control on the network. The proposal you've given doesn't demonstrate anything yet, because it's not even fully specced yet! There is no network structure yet, and there's no guarantee that transaction types will control the network the way you want it to. Again, that's an emergent property of the system, and the system hasn't been modeled or even finished yet. My point is, anyone can propose a model. The work lies in fully speccing it out and coding it up so that it can be simulated, then discovering what the simulation says. Several goons have mentioned to you in this thread how rarely models work the way they were originally intended to. It would be premature to draw any conclusions about social organization before you finish your spec. So maybe go and do that before you proclaim Strangecoin's importance to us? RealityApologist posted:You are acting like I've stormed in waving a revolutionary flag and then settled for just playing a game of cards, as if I've given up my principles or have no committed positions. That's... exactly what you did. You compared yourself to the alchemist on the eve of chemistry, ie a great revolution that changed everything about alchemy. Then when we called you on your hubris, you retreated into the position you hold now, that Strangecoin's just a model or a game. You've changed fundamental aspects of your spec left and right as soon as someone actually coding it up had a problem. You had an argument on extremism where you simultaneously claimed to be an extremist, claimed to have never been an extremist, and then claimed you were just extreme about some things, like Strangecoin. You have no committed positions, largely because Strangecoin to you is just words and an idea instead of a mathematical or concrete reality. Words are a hell of a lot easier to change, and your idea always remains the same, regardless of criticism. RealityApologist posted:The analogy to Marx earlier was meant to be structural, to explain the relation between digital philosophy and attention economy, which is roughly the same structural relation as between Marx's dialectical materialism and the theory of value that underlies is work in economics. The point is not to say that I'm doing work as historically important as Marx, but just that there's a structural analogy in how a metaphysics (a philosophy of history and science) can inform a radically new theory of value (in economics and anthropology). For what it's worth, digital philosophy isn't strictly incompatible with dialectical materialism, it just brings new ontological resources (network theory, especially as employed by the digital humanities) to bear on the analysis of a historical dialectic. Attention economy is the result where attention replaces labor as the source of human value. Now, I've only been working on this project for three years, so it's nowhere near the shape to be properly compared to Marx's corpus and the century and a half of analysis, commentary, and application it's had. Again, I'm not comparing the significance of this work to Marx, and I have no desire to be a digital Marx or anything like that. But in the midst of a philosophical discussion about the relation between digital philosophy and attention economy, the analogy is surely helpful in explaining how this is meant to fit together. So Strangecoin's gone back from being a game to a "radically new theory of value (in economics and anthropology)." And the attention economy is meant to replace labor as the source of human value. But these aren't radical new ideas and I'm a disingenuous arguer for daring to call them so. They're just games! RealityApologist posted:There's been this strain of criticism in these threads that my ideas are haphazard and plucked without reason or thought and assembled willy nilly, or worse, ad hoc in response to criticism. Yes there has been, because your ideas do seem to be haphazard, plucked without reason or thought, and assembled willy nilly, or worse, ad hoc in response to criticism. edit: And what's the deal with using ands to connect all the parts of a list? "My ideas are haphazard and plucked without reason or thought and assembled willy nilly." I've noticed it before, and using ands like that instead of commas makes your writing feel even more haphazard than it already is. Did you take any writing in undergrad? How did you make it to grad school writing like this? RealityApologist posted:The implication is that I have no consistent views, no focused topic, and that I've spent no time thinking about what any of this means. Yes, that is the implication. You've admitted that you haven't actually done the calculations you implied in your OP and that you've only been thinking about this for a week and a half before making the thread. So I think it's fair to say you've spent no time thinking about what any of this means. Your constant change of definition in Strangecoin from currency to model to system to game lacks focus. And if you have views, it's hard to tell what they are beyond "I want to make something important." RealityApologist posted:I'm not sure how this is supposed to square with the claim that I've stubbornly refused to change anything about my views; apparently now the joke is that I've only been consistent about my inconsistency. I feel like I've been consistent in the theoretical commitments of digital philosophy and the interpretation of the attention economy, to the point that I'll bite big bullets like caste systems. You've stubbornly refused to change the content of your original Idea, which is that Strangecoin will be an economic game changer and will make you Important. We keep telling you that Strangecoin is poorly thought out crap, easily gamed, and better off entirely scrapped. Then you counter by offering to change some aspect of it, and maybe it will be good now? Like the "big bullet" of caste systems. Reifying caste systems was merely one bad aspect of an overall Bad Idea. You can take it or leave it, but when the core is poo poo, it makes no difference. So both statements are true. You remain obstinately certain in your conviction that Strangecoin is a Good Idea and Important and will make you Important, and you're willing to change or sacrifice anything else about the system if it means you can stay Important. RealityApologist posted:Strangecoin is a thought experiment for testing some of these theoretical insights, and represents at least some attempt at technical progress beyond just theory. The fact that it's meant to function as a game or a toy world doesn't represent some inconsistency in my commitments. If the thread accuses me of inconsistency, that's because it's failed to appreciate or comprehend the level of abstraction at which those theoretical commitments lie. I'll accuse you of inconsistency because just a few short paragraphs ago Strangecoin was "a radically new theory of value (in economics and anthropology)." That's inconsistent! I believe there are very few game makers out there who would introduce their games as a radically new theory of value in economics and anthropology (unless they're Peter Molyneux. But then they're Peter Molyneux.) RealityApologist posted:Perhaps this is a problem with my ability to communicate, Yes, it is. RealityApologist posted:I'm coming to you as a philosopher with an idea that bears on interests you probably have as a member of the general audience; Yet when I, as a member of the general audience, ask "why should I care about this?" you immediately dismiss me. If I'm not a philosopher (I'm not, I did applied math in undergrad and medicine now), you're going to have to explain to me Strangecoin's significance. And as a scientist/mathematician, that means a simulation or hard data that shows something interesting going on. RealityApologist posted:And while it's true that I have more to learn and more skills to acquire, I have no delusions of ever acquiring the total skills necessary to accomplish this task on my own, much less of sending anyone into revolution wearing my name on their arms. I just think the issues are interesting and worth thinking about, and I'm interested to know what might compel others to think along with me. You could totally gain the skills necessary to finish coding and speccing it out, though. Computer programming is not that hard to learn, especially not at the level required to make a script to move some numbers around. Two different goons did it just over the course of this thread, only stopping when you couldn't finish your original spec! If you're interested to know what might compel (compel? that sounds a little forceful/manipulative) others to think along with you, a finished spec and some simulations showing interesting behavior would go a long loving way. The fact that you're not willing to do any of that while passively aggressively making GBS threads on everyone else criticising you makes everyone really hostile to your idea or wanting to help you. Cantorsdust fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 19:22
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RealityApologist posted:I've written tens of thousands of words in this thread alone to explain, justify, and defend the ideas going into this project, and I made it very clear up front that I don't have the technical expertise to bring the project to fruition. I came to these threads with the hope of developing the idea beyond its initial stages, with a community that not only has the technical competence but has also demonstrated a history and interest in the topic. I mean, people were asking me in other threads to start this thread. This context is entirely lost in the kind of "why" questions being asked. Again, most of the "why" questions being asked are childish questions to which there can be no satisfying response; attempting to respond to such questions is just feeding trolls. Okay, but I'm not trolling you. I'm not dodging your questions or mischaracterizing your points (willfully! I may make mistakes in understanding). I just went through an entire point by point analysis of your last post. It bothers me a little that I did all that, and you only respond to the last line of my entire lengthy post. It's fine if you don't have the technical competence to implement your idea. But if you don't, you probably shouldn't be nearly so convinced of its importance. You have in essence proposed a system and listed its cool emergent features without ever designing the system and seeing what features emerge. Furthermore, the features you have listed as emergent properties, like nepotism reduction or class reification, at best don't seem to be valuable enough to justify the disruption your system would cause and at worst, seem actually horrifying, like the class reification feature. But when we point these problems out, you dismiss us. And it's not just that you dismiss us, but you act so hostile and so condescending, as if the reason we point out the problems is because we just don't understand what you're proposing. We do, and we're horrified. I remember reading your OP. It immediately launched into the transaction types with only a few paragraphs of explanation as to why, and the only explanation given was that dollar-burger trades were insufficient for describing burger value. But you've yet to explain how the transaction types add more value/information to the dollar-burger trade. And I would still like to know, incidentally, how one goes about buying a burger in Strangecoin land. Like from beginning to end, in complete detail, the balances before and after for both individuals and the transactions that would occur. I think it would be very illustrative. So I guess I have a few (legitimate!) questions for you. I think answering them as completely as possible would really help clarify your thoughts to us. 1) What advantages would a Strangecoin network have over a future network where the flow of every dollar was precisely tracked and publicly available? 2) How, exactly, does purchasing a burger work in Strangecoinland? 3) When you describe how Strangecoin will operate in your OP, how did you determine how the network would work? That is, when you said: quote:Finally, balancing one's account requires, among other things, a consistent regular income from TUA. This gives all users an interest in the general health of TUA and of each user to maintain a relatively balanced account. In general, Strangecoin users seek out semi-persistent networks of support and coupling-- similar in some ways to investment, but investment in people-- and the overall stability of these networks account for the economic well-being of both users and the network as a whole. The incentive towards cooperative, stable, interdependent economic relationships takes place through an interface that bears an intuitive relation to traditional currencies, especially as it pertains to marketplaces of competition. How did you determine, for example, that Strangecoin users would seek out semi-persistent networks of support and coupling?
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Apr 30, 2014 20:25
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Muscle Tracer posted:The reason that I and others keep hammering away at the foundations of this concept is that there are no foundations. You CLAIM that people would care about the "health" of TUA, or prefer highly-endorsed individuals over unendorsed ones, or even that people would endorse one another at all. But you make all of these claims WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION, including value judgements like "health." This is what I'm trying to get at when I say that he's creating a system and claiming emergent properties before ever simulating it. Without simulating it, you don't have justification for those claims.
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Apr 30, 2014 21:01
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RealityApologist posted:Again, I'm asking the question "what happens in an economic system if transactions are modified by the network structure?" That seems like an eminently reasonable question to ask, and it's one that I've not found an available answer to, and talking about Strangecoin casually on an internet forum is a completely reasonable way to pursue the project as a hobby as a layperson. I'll answer this question for you. "I don't loving know, depends on the network structure!" Seriously, that question is far too generic to have a meaningful answer. In a sense, our economic system already has transactions modified by the network structure. It's called tax, and a whole area of economic research looks into the effects of taxes on the system. Again, you can't answer questions like this that rely on emergent properties of the system until you define the system. Also, I'd still really like the answers to: Cantorsdust posted:So I guess I have a few (legitimate!) questions for you. I think answering them as completely as possible would really help clarify your thoughts to us.
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Apr 30, 2014 21:30
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Little Blackfly posted:I haven't seen anything in your definitions that explains why you feel you can generalize from ant social structures to human ones. Why is it that you feel you can take a fact, shorn of context, and use it to justify assumptions in spite of ample evidence that those assumptions do not hold? No matter your influences, you seem to lack a consistent or coherent methodology for the assumptions you draw and the inferences you make. All of Strangecoin is based on the, erroneous in my and many other's opinion, assumption that network impact and coin throughput provide meaningful incentives to people in the economic network. The only justification you've given from this is the observation about ants. Given that humans do not operate in a eusocial manner of organization (like ants, bees, or naked mole rats do), why should the assumption be made that any observation is generalizable? Why should information on the composition of the network induce a change in behaviour in the individual? What would a Strangecoin model with even simple logic built into the actors (rather than random transaction selection) look like, in your opinion? Eripsa, please read and focus on this post. It very clearly communicates many of the problems posters in this thread have had with you. It is a Good Post.
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Apr 30, 2014 22:28
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eviltastic posted:So catching up on the thread, I have realized I am dumb about queer theory and would appreciate someone like Gerund directing me to a good starting point for reading up on it. It's tangential and I'd take it to PMs if I had them, but. RA's answer when I asked the same question is here, such as it is. Your involvement here kinda mirrors mine. I got interested by what I thought was an effort to quantify elements of value from a kinda-sorta Marxian-sounding understanding of value, particularly given all this talk of getting away from private property and so on. I lost interest when it turned out to be more about seeking desired emergent properties by making the currency do behavior-forcing things beyond its role as a medium of exchange because network theory &etc, to hopefully expose class structure I guess. Having skimmed the revised spec I am still not clear on how third party information is conveyed, and this is absolutely critical to predicting behavior! The examples read like the actors are operating on perfect information, but I don't see defined mechanism for acquiring it other than engaging in a transaction. [/quote] Okay, so I've read the example, and it seems rear end-backwards. In the example, a burger price is set but how much the seller actually receives from the buyer varies by the buyer's modifiers. Why not instead have the seller sell to anyone who can afford the price, and instead the buyer's modifiers modify how much the buyer has to pay for the burger. That is, instead of [Seller receives] = Price * [buyer's modifiers] and [Buyer pays] = Price have [Seller receives] = Price and [Buyer pays] = Price / [Buyer's modifiers] That seems basic. It allows the seller to anticipate how much money they would get instead of playing a guessing game, and the change in price would modify the buyer's behavior.
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May 1, 2014 04:50
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evilweasel posted:no he doesn't, you made a stupid assertion and he denied it You know a thread is poo poo when evilweasel starts using all lowercase. JawnV6 posted:
You're absolutely right that it's the same idea. Sorry if I stole your thunder. If I had to guess why RA didn't pay attention to your question when you asked it, it's because you framed it as a question of spec instead as an alternative formulation to RA's original idea. Which shows how little thought went into RA's original idea that he didn't consider that. RealityApologist posted:And his second (and Cantordust's) question about this: Okay, price fixing round two: I forgot to take into account seller modifiers. So now it's [Seller receives] = Price and [Buyer pays] = Price / ( [Buyer's purchasing modifiers] * [Seller's selling modifiers] ) Why do I think it's so important that the seller receives a constant price? A couple reasons. First, just from a practical perspective, I as a seller don't particularly care about "discriminating among buyers." I'll sell it to whoever has the cash to cover my costs + my fair share of profit, limited only by legal restrictions. The only time I would care about discriminating among buyers would be if selling to a buyer would affect my bottom line. It would only affect my bottom line if a large number of other customers banded together to boycott me for it or if suppliers started boycotting me for it. But boycotts are hard to accomplish, since it requires many people working together for no obvious benefit to themselves. So, like in real life, I rarely have to worry about a boycott. So, like in real life, I will sell to whoever and don't need a tool for "buyer discrimination." Second, it becomes really hard to predict the future or do any sort of business planning if there are no set prices to plan around. I'm a hamburger vendor that sells burgers to buyers A, B, and C for revenue B_A + B_B + B_C. Now, have I made a profit? I don't know yet, let's check my supplier's prices. Well, what prices? Wait, how much did I pay last time for a burger? The problem arises when, if every person has different modifiers, translating between all these modified interactions becomes increasingly difficult. You would be better to "translate" each Strangecoin amount into a Unmodified Equivalent Value (UEV). That is, someone with [Buyer's purchasing modifiers] = 2 and 50 Strangecoins has a UEV of 100. That way, at least everyone has a common reference point for pricing they can refer to. A seller can say "I need to get a UEV of 500 from this sale." Then everyone's wallet software would calculate how much a buyer would have to pay based on the seller's modifiers and the buyer's modifiers. And you have a very strange sense of buyer "discrimination." A buyer need not be told outright that he or she can't shop here. But if they lack modifiers, then for the same UEV price the buyer will have to pay more than a buyer with many modifiers. That's still discrimination. Likewise, a buyer can also discriminate among sellers. The seller with the best [Seller's selling modifiers] means that for the same UEV price, it's cheaper to shop there. Everything still works, and existing economics concepts can be applied to the UEV price. Examples: There are two sellers. Seller A has modifier 2, and Seller B has modifier 1. There are also 2 buyers. Buyer C has modifier 2, and Buyer D has modifier 1. Let's run some transactions. Both sellers are selling hamburgers at a UEV price of 100. For Buyer C, the real prices appear as follows: Hamburger from Seller A price = 100 / (2 * 2) = 25 Strangecoin. Hamburger from Seller B price = 100 / (2 * 1) = 50 Strangecoin. For Buyer D, the real prices appear as Hamburger from A price = 100 / (1 * 2) = 50 Strangecoins Hamburger from B price = 100 / (1 * 1) = 100 Strangecoins. On the sellers' end, Sellers A and B would both receive exactly 100 strangecoins from any of these sales. So, prices for Buyer C are lower across the board, making it easier for C to buy burgers from anyone. Similarly, prices from Seller A are lower, making Seller A the preferred burger joint among buyers. In this way, modified pricing has allowed for both buyer and seller discrimination without requiring strict prohibition of buying and while maintaining a price point that humans can understand and plan around. edit: Okay, now things are gonna get weird. I realized from my last calculation about real price to the buyer that real value matters to the seller as well. The seller's purchasing modifier should actually have an affect on the prices they charge. Why? Because if two sellers receive 100 Strangecoins in a sale, their respective purchasing powers will still differ. That is, if Seller A's buying modifier is twice that of Seller B's buying modifier, Seller A can afford to charge half the price of Seller B. Why? Because with double the purchasing power, Seller A can still buy as much as Seller B can with twice the money. So it looks like this: Same example as before, the sale has been completed. Sellers A and B both received 100 Strangecoin in their wallet. But Seller A has a buying modifier of 2, while Seller B has a buying modifier of 1. Now Seller A has a UEV of 200, not 100. So maybe UEV prices should be Price / ( [Buyer's purchase modifier] * [Seller's sale modifier] * [Seller's purchase modifier] ) ? Now prices reflect the real purchasing power that the buyer's coins give to the seller. Sellers with greater purchasing power now reflect by passing those savings onto the consumer. Cantorsdust fucked around with this message at 18:44 on May 1, 2014 |
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May 1, 2014 18:33
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Muscle Tracer posted:I'm going the Eripsa route and just quoting this one line, but it's a response to your whole post. I agree that it only addresses individual pricing without considering the network. But I don't particularly care about the network as a seller, and I doubt anyone else would in a "real" Strangecoin world. Because unless we've hit post-scarcity, businesses are still going have to follow the basic economics of supply and demand. I'm really just trying to imagine what a day to day business working in Strangecoinland might look like. I still think Eripsa's proposal is fundamentally flawed because there's no way to get anyone to care about "the strength/health of the network" unless it directly benefits them. Tragedy of the commons and so on. So you need to structure your incentives so that building the strength of the network does benefit the individual. One way to do this would be to tie buying power to your relations to the network, like I posted. It's still weird to have such a focus on impact on the economy. No one in real life considers the impact of the economy before they do something, and for the vast majority of people that's okay because their individual actions have no way of impacting the economy. And for the 0.1% that can, there are/should be laws in place to govern what they can do.
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May 1, 2014 18:55
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Muscle Tracer posted:The issue is that with TUA, funds are limitless. You can draw an infinity of money out of TUA and there is literally no mechanism to stop you from doing this. So it doesn't really matter to your burger merchant how much she can buy or sell a burger from: she will in absolutely no circumstance be out of funds. Oh I agree that with drawing from TUA added everything becomes an unworkable, meaningless mess. I took that for granted all along 
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May 1, 2014 19:01
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RealityApologist posted:It's nice to see two different posters give exactly contradictory response to my post. A fracture in the consensus view of the thread means we're hitting interesting on interesting issues of substantive disagreement where hopefully people can engage in discussion independent of me. About 20 pages ago I was worried the thread was dying, but the last few have been really interesting. Good work everyone. You're really reading waaaay too much into this ant thing. Ants have no emotions and virtually no thoughts. None. They are little organic robots following built-in rules. Are they a good example of organization and complex behavior coming from a few simple rules? Yes. Does ant behavior match human behavior on some deep level? No, because humans actually think. You're falling back into this semi-mystical thought process that people pointed out before. Just because two things appear superficially similar doesn't mean they share some deep connection underneath. That's exactly what the alchemists thought, too.
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May 1, 2014 19:15
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God it's almost like emergent behavior is really hard to predict!
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May 1, 2014 20:10
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Slanderer posted:a man chooses!!!. an ant obeys
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May 1, 2014 20:21
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SurgicalOntologist posted:Here's something that directly speaks to what's wrong with Strangecoin (or rather, how the concepts in it are properly applied) and what's wrong with some objections to the ant analogy. Yes, I set aside Friday night to read this 163-page paper. (No, not because of this thread.) I completely agree with you that there are many systems that have indirect similarities, which have been called superficial similarities earlier in the thread. To refer to my namesake, fractals are found all over the place, and they generally pop up any time you're trying to optimize a natural process within a set of constraints. But the similarities are only indirect. The way systems play out and solutions form is completely different solution to solution, even if they may appear the same from further back. Ant organization does look like human organization if you zoom all the way out to a "population utilizing resources and filling space" view. But that tells us nothing about the internal processes or how to optimize them. RealityApologist posted:so many would-be advocates (like Cantordust and SurgicalOntologist) enter the thread by adopting its overall hostile and skeptical position as their default attitude. Hey, gently caress you. The skeptical position is the correct position with which one should enter an argument. All new ideas should be approached with skepticism until there is evidence provided for them. It's the default state of nature--you don't go around believing everything you hear unless you have reason to believe it. That's not hostile--that's just skeptical. The hostility stems from your adamant belief in your Strangecoin proposal despite not only a lack of evidence to support it but a wealth of argument that points out its serious flaws. I seriously have no idea how you're going to advance in academia if you can't handle skeptical, let alone hostile views. Okay, now. REAL QUESTION: Using my UEV economic system where the seller only cares about getting the price they've set, why should they care whether or not the money comes from a hobo drawing on TUA or a millionaire paying out of pocket? REAL QUESTION: Why should a shopkeeper prefer to set a price of 100 but require x5 modifiers rather than setting a price of 500 and accepting anyone with cash? They get the same amount of Strangecoin either way. REAL QUESTION: If TUA is unlimited, why would anyone worry about its health? What does the "health" of TUA mean anyway? If TUA according to your original formulation is just the n+1 fiction for the real n accounts, why should anyone care what its current value is? How does a TUA in poor health hurt the network? Honestly, I think you'd be better off removing TUA and having just an upper cap on income, with additional income above the cap being redistributed according to whatever plan seems optimal. Inversely proportionally? Just keep it in an account for the government (or distributed network) to decide how to spend? That would fix a lot of the weirdness with your system.
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May 3, 2014 08:09
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RealityApologist posted:child porn example What the gently caress is wrong with you? You could have written anything else, and the example would have worked the same way. You could have written about furries or bronies and it would have had the same message without the skeevy undertones. Why did you think it was okay to write this story? How did you expect goons to receive it? Did you expect goons to focus on the technical points of the story you were trying to communicate or get hung up on the big red flashing child porn neon sign? I'll tell you your audience's thought process: at best, you are a terrible writer with no sense of your audience. At worst, you are a secret pedophile because only someone who doesn't understand the inhibition to gently caress children would write poo poo like this.
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May 3, 2014 19:03
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It's telling, Eripsa, that you have to resort to writing lovely fiction instead of answering the numerous real questions people have posted in the thread. edit: Cantorsdust posted:Okay, now. REAL QUESTION: Using my UEV economic system where the seller only cares about getting the price they've set, why should they care whether or not the money comes from a hobo drawing on TUA or a millionaire paying out of pocket?
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May 3, 2014 21:01
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Install Windows posted:That's not true, we'd simply have a kinda lovely economy. Fishmech, master of being technically correct while completely irrelevant.
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May 4, 2014 01:29
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I'm afraid we've hit the depressive phase of his bipolar posting. Maybe we'll see something new in a week?
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May 5, 2014 23:00
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Badera posted:I think someone posted parts of his doctoral thesis. It was...about what you'd think. I'm far from an expert and it seemed impossibly lightweight even to me.  EDIT: I went back and looked at the Hangout for identifying information, and it turns out that the guy I posted was not Eripsa, but DoctorDilettante. The similarity was so striking that I just kind of assumed... Link removed to protect the semi-innocent?
Cantorsdust fucked around with this message at 03:39 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 03:22
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See, now I'm confused. When I was originally googling the names, I settled on who turned out to be DoctorDilettante because his LinkedIn said he was a 6th year graduate student at Columbia. But Daniel Estrada's LinkedIn says that he was an "Instructional Assistant Professor" at the University of Illinois until May 2012. He's now working as "Human-Cyborg Relations," describing his work as "Freelance writing, blogging, and social media wizard." This jives with what Eripsa mentioned earlier about no longer having academic paper access. But I thought Eripsa was finishing his PhD? Eripsa, are you currently enrolled in a graduate program at any university, or was that a lie, too? Please note: I'd be happy to take all this down if this is doxxing, but Eripsa specifically referred to his academic credentials multiple times and posted his real name for the Google Hangouts thing. I figure he's waived any right to privacy there. Besides, establishing credentials is part of a "productive academic discussion" and lying about one's credentials would be yet another example of being disingenuous.
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May 6, 2014 03:55
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| # ¿ Oct 8, 2024 06:25 |
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May 6, 2014 04:13
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