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SedanChair posted:No, because that's all nonsense. It's literally nonsense, you've never come to a point about any of it. You don't have any training. SedanChair is a good poster and you should listen to him, RealityApologist. No seriously, I've been following this thread since the beginning, and I can only assume that the people who are suggesting you just aren't communicating your ideas very clearly are giving you the benefit of the doubt out of pity. You've made it clear that you have no interest in actually learning even basic economics, which, as biased as it often can be (usually because, like you, the researcher in question decides to fly off into hypothetical thought experiments, and reality be damned), can still provide some insights on how human beings actually work that you seem to lack. The problems with your idea are not technical, they are foundational. It is incoherent and reeks of technological fetishization, which given its obvious relationship to the bitcoin anarcho-techno-libertarian bullshit comes as no surprise. At its core, their problem, like yours, is a fundamental misunderstanding of society and human beings, coming from what I can only assume is some sort of sheltering from the world. Searching for a system that provides some technical solution to economic inefficiencies (and injustices) sounds good on paper, but it only works if you assume humans are little programmable robots that all function the same way. Your fetishism of of social media is a great example of this: your entire system seems to assume that people will just naturally gravitate towards your crazy money/social network hybrid, because blah blah efficient markets, people will prefer it blah blah. Even if this was true (it's not), it would require such a fundamental re-engineering of all modern social institutions that it's ludicrous to think such a project could be as simple as just programming some sort of network protocol. Who would pay the cost of even a partial transition to strangecoin? Who would benefit? You have no grasp of the implications of what you talk about, instead you posit an idyllic utopia that will magically flourish at some unspecified point once all your still unlaid plans are realized. That's why all this discussion about the technical side of your ideas are nonsense. Your ideas are really just a delusion you've spun for yourself that justifies to you why your utopia is really achievable, because dreaming of the perfect possible future world is a much more pleasant experience than dealing with messy reality. If you really want to help people, go volunteer, be an activist, hell, just join a club. But do something where you actually involve yourself with real people, so that maybe you could gain a little perspective on how deeply naive your understanding of the world is. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Apr 5, 2014 |
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Apr 5, 2014 21:48
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Who What Now posted:Wait... Eprisa, you do know what the Scientific Method is, don't you? He just said agricultural techniques from 10,000 years ago are "a form of science" so my guess would be no. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Apr 5, 2014 |
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Apr 5, 2014 22:59
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RealityApologist posted:My views on science are basically Quine's, and are quite well established (although not necessarily the most popular) in the philosophy of science literature. Quine was saying, accurately, the scientists do not have some magic insight into the way the world works that regular people do not. He was not saying that "science" as a term is interchangeable with "observation of the environment of any kind" which is what you're doing. Science is a very specific and systemic epistemology, it is not simply the act of drawing conclusions from observing the world around you. Also, your habit of just dropping in some decontextualized snippet of text as a substitute for an actual argument is really making me wonder about your philosophy studies. You'd think one thing a professional arguer would be able to do is argue well. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Apr 5, 2014 |
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Apr 5, 2014 23:19
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RealityApologist posted:You obviously don't know anything about the philosophy of science. What hubris to engage in this conversation without the necessary background! Nothing you've quoted here is at odds with what I've said on the scientific method. I know who Quine is and I know what his understanding of science entails. I dispute that he would have accepted unstructured observation, that is something lacking internal coherence, as scientific. I can accept the idea that some ancient peoples practiced a form of proto-science, in that they tried to come up with some sort of framework to account for their observations. But more often than not this framework was not epistemologically or ontologically coherent, they did not build a system that was internally consistent, and neither have you! You haven't been able to provide us with any coherent methodology for understanding your views on economics, all you do is prevaricate endlessly about how your system has yet to be defined. Well, if it's so great, define it. Lay down some precepts about how it is you believe that markets function, for one. Provide us with the hypotheses that make your project make sense. Also, alchemists absolutely did not have a systemic understanding of the world. Alchemy was a system that tried to marry knowledge gained via divine revelation (in the form of any number of metaphysical and supernatural connections) with observed reality. This is the core of what made alchemy unscientific. They were very obviously not naturalists, which was the biggest problem with their whole epistemology.
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Apr 5, 2014 23:44
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Adar posted:Things that Eripsa does not understand, as evidenced throughout his threads: Philosophy and formal logic.
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Apr 5, 2014 23:47
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BernieLomax posted:I thought he said he was an alchemist in this field? In that he wants to create proto-science that at some point might be a science or something. Even then, I feel he can claim whatever he wants because moral judgements of this nature are usually idiotic anyway. Especially when moral criticism is used as an excuse to act like a dick. No, it is out of good faith, to point out that RealityApologist doesn't understand the concepts he is using as a basis for his "radical" economic system. Much in the same way that someone who talks about energy flows within the body as a source of disease holds a confused and incorrect view of what energy actually is, RA demonstrates that he does not actually understand the concepts he is using in an attempt to revolutionize economics. Like so many before him, he takes his own misapplication of known concepts and facts as a revolutionization of those of those concepts and facts.
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Apr 6, 2014 01:09
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BernieLomax posted:Ok, I remember wrong: Because his statement shows that he has positioned himself in his own mind as some sort of avant-guard thinker who has moved, in some way he never defines, the mainstream body of thought on science and economics. It's a profoundly egotistical and naive position to take, and demonstrates a bad faith towards actual science by blithely concluding that the mainstream body of science simply doesn't understand things as deeply as he does. This also makes clear why he has repeatedly spurned sincere advice that he educate himself on the topics he uses incorrectly. As for the appearance of hostility towards radicalism, I will honestly state that I find claims of radicality among the intellectual and academic classes in society to be laughable. There is nothing easier than suggesting an alternative to reality while providing no mechanism for implementation, or any proof that such a system would work in reality. Especially given that academics as a class are by no means financially or socially deprived, this fetishizations of countermainstream thinking seems to me a perfect way to self-affirm as a noble fighter against the oppressive system while in actuality sacrificing nothing. I have more respect for the academic that does a study into the real effects and pitfalls of a small policy than I do for someone who tries to think up some new magical moral framework that will somehow manage to solve all of society's problems. At least fringe radical groups at least attempt to force societal change, a radical as functionally within the system as an academic is basically an oxymoron. Your characterization of Einstein is also off. He was a revolutionary thinker, but not a radical one. He did not reject all of mainstream physics as it existed at the time; he provided an insight into the mechanisms responsible for observations that had so far failed to be reconciled in a satisfactory way. He built himself on the ideas that surrounded him, he did not simply reinvent all of established science to that point. I don't expect or desire a radical social thinker to come down from on high and solve the ills of our society, or the problems with our science. Do expect such a thing is to misunderstand science and society to begin with.
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Apr 6, 2014 01:39
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BernieLomax posted:Is there a source for this? At least I know that around here uniforms are generally not allowed, with a few exceptions, because of the history of uniforms and fascism. Not sure if the motivation is the same at all. I'm pretty sure the US is not Germany, so I don't know why you would assume the motivations were the same. But no, the logic of the law, and its defence, was that imposters were stealing some of the prestige of the military by lying about their actions, hence the name of the law "Stolen Valor Act". The Supreme Court disagreed that such an act constituted a harm. Here is the decision. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-210d4e9.pdf
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Apr 6, 2014 02:35
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BernieLomax posted:You mention SC as if is super-obvious what that is. In the context of the discussion? The one that started by talking about a SCOTUS decision, and made it pretty clear the they were talking about the Supreme Court? Yes it is super-obvious actually.
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Apr 6, 2014 02:36
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Local Resident posted:Do you usually cite plus.google.com in your other academic writings? There is an actual journal article linked in that post, which I assume is what he wasnted us to look at. That being said, the philosophic argument it discusses doesn't provide anything near a justification for regarding the unifying power of network theory.
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Apr 6, 2014 03:28
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Lehrer posted:I didn't really read this, but are you really equating google glass with black people? Really? Regardless of anything else, that is absurd. You just don't have enough knowledge about the philosophy of science 
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Apr 7, 2014 04:26
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RA, what makes you assume that human brains are good at choosing beneficial community structures, especially in a generalized sense? The social value attributed to a charismatic demagogue like  was obviously misplaced if communal structures are supposed to be for general benefits, and the problems of communal identity are at the core of every nationalist movement, and every terrible genocide, in recent history. Your proposal relies on human social relations functioning in a way that you have no evidence for. And there is a gigantic body of literature in sociology, social psych, and yes, economics that buttresses this point. Your example of the medals and pips is frankly bizarre. Military structures are actually very simple, if highly artificial, structures of social hierarchy. The pinning of medals onto the breast of a soldier is much more a self-affirmation exercise for the individual soldier, and by extension the military as a whole, than it is any sort of assignation of social value within the military hierarchy. At most, it could provide a fuzzy justification for a later promotion, though these would be arbitrary and subject to the whims of the promoter, and so not at all like the sort of explicit social valuation system you describe. And even then, the military, which i'll admit is perhaps the closest modern day example to a system like Strangecoin describes, one that tries to explicitly quantify social worth and reputation, is still subject to all sorts of horrible consequences, including inurring those at the top from the consequences of their actions (say, raping a subordinate) once they have enough social power to protect themselves. Why should the Strangecoin network not be subject to these pitfalls?
Political Whores fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Apr 7, 2014 |
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Apr 7, 2014 23:10
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RealityApologist posted:I never made this assumption, and I pointed to exactly the literature you refer to (like the Stanford Prison experiment) in order to make it clear that this isn't my suggestion. People can form all sorts of terrible awful communities with horrible intentions and consequences. Where do you base this claim? I am saying that I see no evidence that humans are in aggregate capable of the type of reasoning you imagine. Our social reasoning is based on simplification and stereotype, which is why it is so prone to misattribution of social worth. If it wasn't, con artists would never succeed and racism wouldn't' be a thing. This fundamental claim you are making is unsupported. That paper you provide also says exactly what I said, that badges are an incentivization exercise, not that they provide a robust guide of social worth or reputation, which is what you suggest they would do. In fact, the paper concludes by alluding to the possibility of perverse incentives. quote:Incentivizing users to increase their activity naturally brings up How has this been accounted for in Strangecoin, why should this not represent a fundamental problem with your implementation of the system you describe? E: also BernieLomax you have also demonstrated that you have no idea what you're talking about and have explicitly stated that you only are defending Strangecoin because you enjoy novelty and counter-culture, which is about as far from a useful contribution to the discussion as you could get. When I provided you the citation you asked for, it was because I figured you were unsure where to look it up, but it later became apparent that you had not sufficiently payed attention to the conversation to understand what was being discussed. I wasn't going to call you on it, but this sort of evidence makes me doubt your ability to participate productively in this discussion. You might say that your social reputation has been harmed. Now all we have to do is quantify by how much, and couple it to your earnings, and we'll have a working model of Strangecoin. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 7, 2014 23:54
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RealityApologist posted:"Level of complexity" is not a fundamental barrier to understanding. Adding more complexity does not necessarily make something less understandable. Adding emergent layers upon emergent layers might actually make something more understandable if it fits into patterns I'm already disposed to detect. You have provided no evidence for the validity of the emergent patterns you predict you will see, and we have provided plenty of evidence that such patterns in fact do not occur. Lower level compelxity has nothing to do with it, the models you propose are too simplistic at the level of analysis.
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Apr 8, 2014 00:02
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RA, if you were to observe a family of Jewish people having Chinese food on Christmas, how would that affect the systematization of your observations? You make appeals to coherentism as a justification for why your own personal observations can serve as the be all and end all of your theorizing, but now you have been provided a counter example. Muslims families. There, two counter examples. Atheist Families. Three. Now, using these observations, construct a model that will allow you to predict the actions of a human organism. Coherentism doesn't absolve you of the need to account for observations counter to your predictions.
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Apr 8, 2014 01:03
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RealityApologist posted:First, the altcurrency paper that we've been talking about concluded with a comment about how the community structure in a network is actually predictive of social activity, and therefore important to consider in understanding and managing it's behavior. So most of my discussion has been in defense of the claim that community structure does predict social activity. In case the support for this claim is still in question, here's another resource of support. Community structure is mildly predictive of social activity, but no tint he highly deterministic way you seem to think it is. Already the fact that you can only point to studies constructed on digital communities and social media leads to an obvious problem of selection bias, since most of the planet remains unconnected to these networks. This alone is a huge blind spot in your reasoning, and one that you should seriously look into. Would these predictions hold across the entriety of a human society wide social network? I don't beleive there is any reason to believe this would be true. RealityApologist posted:Second, I've argued (mostly during the nepotism discussion) that our historical attempts at reifying a community structure (through the caste system in India, modern economic classes, race, etc) are actually just poor-but-implementable ways of uncovering the community structure. That someone is black doesn't say anything about their relative economic value to a system, so a system grounded on race and skin color to determine economic position is just doomed to failure. The argument is that we're currently relying on mostly inherited/traditional markers of community organization (like race and class), and these poor markers will be usurped by more detailed and useful data about the network and its structure. This is also the reason why I think these issues don't become worse in Strangecoinworld. It's not like future populations will find better ways or organizing around race or class, any more than future vehicles will find ways to attach more and more horses to a carriage. You guys are attacking my proposal for an automobile by arguing that the amount of poo poo produced by the horses that would be required to pull the thing would drown the street. You fail to understand that the poo poo horses produce aren't a problem on future roads, which isn't to say there aren't problems but just that they aren't the same problem. Here, I think your problem is believing that things like racism evolved as an attempt at some sort of objective measure of social worth. But they didn't, there was never any rational attempt made to quantify social worth by skin colour or familial origin. These patterns emerged as a natural result of a human bias towards xenophobia and preference for the ingroup. You believe that strangecoin would favour the creation of a far more just social order, but this seems to rely on the fundamental rationality of the actors in your system, by endorsing people based on some objective level of merit in the system based on their own actions. This is not how humans behave in any network observed, even social media ones. Why would Strangecoin prevent something like the ostracization of someone who looked or acted differently than the majority? How would things like peer pressure and social discipline be counteracted? What happens if a charismatic leader manages to receive many endorsements on the basis of his rhetoric, only to turn around and use it to marginalize another group? What part of this community structure you suggest would do away with human prejudice, because I don't see it.
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Apr 8, 2014 02:10
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GulMadred posted:Nah. Inhibition (as per the original spec) requires the consent of the target. The religious folk could refuse to link to the gay bar and boycott them in the traditional sense (refrain from purchasing their services). If they were sufficiently motivated, they might also attempt to shun/blockade the gay bar's [owners | staff | patrons | suppliers] - detaching them from the local network and refusing to sell them anything. There would presumably also be non-economic effects (e.g. forbidding their children from playing with the children of the shunned). If really motivated then they might try to recursively shun anyone who refused to play along with the shunning campaign (c.f. Catch-22). It's doubtful that they could actually starve the gay dudes to death (post-scarcity world is a precondition for the Strangeconomy) but they could presumably make life difficult and unpleasant for their targets. This still requires a majority to hold progressive opinions as a precondition for the system to work. Assuming you could implement strangecoin in a world with the social values of the 40s, gay people would receive virtually no support and could easily become relegated to their own little economic ghetto, rather than the bigots. RA has implied that the nature of Strangecoin is such that it would shape community behaviour away from this, but it actually requires a world without systemic bigotry. If an absolute majority wanted to ostracize gay people, they still could, and they could put social pressure through the threat of ostracism on anyone who didn't follow along with their ideas. The only way you would assume that Strangecoin would move away form this if if you believe in a narrative of history as the eternal forward march of progress, which wouldn't surprise me of RA but is also totally naive of the actual effort and cost social progress required of minority groups. E; Little Blackfly posted:In the context of the discussion? The one that started by talking about a SCOTUS decision, and made it pretty clear the they were talking about the Supreme Court? This one, BernieLomax. I'm not joking, your inability to follow the discussion from the beginning, a post that referenced the supreme court decision directly, makes me doubt that it is worthwhile to listen to you. The nature of a forums discussion makes it easy for people to read some line out of context, and then try to contribute to a discussion without actually having any understanding of what is being discussed. Based on my personal observations, I've found that such behaviour is a good indicator that the poster in question has nothing of value to contribute to a discussion. Your tendency to, like RA, quote some wikipedia page about a study out of context as some sort of support to your point (in this case by claiming that I am conforming to the broader majority in devaluing your posting )is also usually a sign that the person can't really defend their own arguments. Let me put your mind at ease though: I had no knowledge of you prior to this thread. My judgement of you comes from your posting int his thread, which has shown terrible reasoning and an appeal to novelty as a defence of incoherent ideas, and an inability to follow a discussion for a page and a half. These two points have led me to conclude that you don't have any substantive arguments to make. However, I am always cognizant of the fact that my observations may be inaccurate, so if you actually do end up providing some sort of substantive reason why all the myriad criticisms that have been levelled both at RA and Strangecoin are wrong, I will be happy to reevaluate my opinion of you. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 02:37
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RealityApologist posted:Which, again, is to say that complexity isn't itself an impediment to understanding. There are extraordinarily complex patterns in nature to which we are nevertheless extremely sensitive. An even better example is the fact that we can detect genetic compatibility through scent alone. This is an unbelievably complex signal being sorted out of the noise, and it would be surprising that we're capable of such a feat except for how utterly central the ability is for our reproductive success. We're capable of the feat not because the signal is simple (some simple stereotype or generalization on a kind), but because the equipment we're using has evolved to do this one job really really well. Same with facial recognition and, I'm claiming, with community structure. This is the most awful faulty reasoning I have ever seen. The study shows that there appeared to be a preference for MHC differences based on sent. Do you know what a major histocompatibility complex is? It's the cell structures that can affect things like organ donation compatibility, and it's present in all vertebrates. No ones knows for sure why it evolved, but it may have been as a way of ensuring that cancers weren't transmissible (which can happen in inbred strains or species with extremely low genetic diversity). In fact, the detection process is quite simple in its discrimination: It literally follows along a division of self or nonself for antigen response. It is in fact extremely simple, and has nothing to do with genetic compatibility for reproduction, which isn't even a real thing within a species like humans. Learn the actual facts about what you read before you reference this poo poo out of context.
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Apr 8, 2014 03:59
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RealityApologist posted:No, it just requires in situations where people having an alternative between an organization system that is effective at coordinating action, and one that is a crude cudgel for coordinating action, they'll tend to prefer the more effective one. Racism is very effective for the majority. It allows them to accrue many, many benefits. Why would people give up their prejudices and move to an alternative system without tangible incentive? E: Also, what prevents a pogrom or something similar? Do people just not interact outside of the strangecoin network? If not, what prevents someone from telling everyone to never endorse or always inhibit Jews? Political Whores fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 04:06
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RealityApologist posted:The study I cited was an example of detecting an extremely complex signal about genetic compatibility. The process of detection might be simple, but the signal it communicates is not: it's telling you a lot of important things about the creature you're detecting. These features are relevant to reproduction and a host of other sociological issues, and we are very sensitive to this signal. My point was that the complexity of the signal is not the barrier to intuitive comprehension or sensitive discrimination. My argument was that we can detect a complex signal if we have the right pattern detector. Because the signal it is giving is not some sort of nuanced complex reading of information, it is literally related to a few factors that are quite easy to understand. I am saying that the information transfer you posit this study as showing is not there, what our olfactory sensors detect about another person is a very simple. It communicates nothing like what you claim it does. You have taken a study, pulled few words out of it like "genetic compatibility", and used it as the basis for a reasoning that is totally at odds with what is actually talked about in the paper. Do you have even basic reading comprehension?
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Apr 8, 2014 04:17
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Forums Barber posted:The study was "do you think this shirt or the other shirt smell better". i can't even conceive how one could argue that this means we are able to make intuitive judgements about complex systems that are somehow correct. What would be correct in the shirt-sniffing situation? The researchers theorize three or four possibilities, rule a few out (mostly), and think that it's possibly others. Nowhere do they say "wow people can pick out a suitable mate by smell, that's amazing", possibly because the idea of a suitable mate is transparently more complex than that. RA's misinterpretation goes deeper than that. The signals being posited here are not novel of all that surprising. They have nothing to do with some generic level of genetic compatibility. It's basically two things, sexual fitness and MHC differentials. This last part is the part that he seems to be pulling "genetic compatibility information" thesis from, but that's not what MHCs are at all, as I explained above. The only signal they send is one that basically amounts to "like me" or "not like me", with preference shown for the latter. Why that should be is the matter for debate, but the information transmitted is extremely simple. I don't see how you could read that paper and use it the way he did, without unironically invoking Dunning-Kruger. He is unaware of his own incompetence in the field of biology, in this case, and so does not even have the ability to evaluate his own lack of comprehension.
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Apr 8, 2014 04:51
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RealityApologist posted:The procedure is simple. That's different from the information being conveyed, which is very complex. No, all that we can conclude from that study is that preferences for a few traits was selected for in our evolutionary history. Your inference that the reason for this is because these traits communicate some hidden complex of information isn't supported at all. There is no indicator that the indicators communicate anything of the sort, and in fact the mechanisms at play imply that the information conveyed is actually small. If anything, the subtle part of the process is how it motivates action, since all the higher cognitive processes and social conditioning mediates the effect.
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Apr 8, 2014 05:22
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Please also add biology. I don't really have the energy in me to explain everything he's getting wrong, especially by typing with my thumbs. E: also, he seems to think that property ownership is identical to capital accumulation. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 12:36
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Who What Now posted:I like that Eprisa can't actually show a single piece of evidence that the information from the sniff test is complex, but continues to assert that it is anyway because he can't conceive of how it couldn't be. It's perhaps the most textbook example of an Argument From Ignorance possible. I know, I don't feel like I've been anything other than simple and straightforward in my explanations. However, I am going to give it one last try, because even though he's only using this as an analogy for the human ability to process complex information from our environment, I feel that the errors RA is making are more broadly revelatory of his faulty thinking when it comes to the human ability to naturally intuit social worth in a community structure. Errors are as follows: 1) There is no such thing as genetic compatibility in the way you are using the term.MHCs do not provdie any information on the viability of offspring, and a couple can have children whether or not their MHCs are similar or different. The only thing that is communicated by MHC detection is the fact that I probably won't get transmissible tumours from you if we were making out and accidentally touch open wounds. It is not some sort of genetic screening. The detection literally just has to do with a few protein markers on the top of the cell membrane. Similarly, the only information that is transferred for fertility is the fact that the woman is secreting a certain hormone. It is not some sort of indicator of whether or not she's capable of having children otherwise, or whether or not she would be a good mother.The data provided is in fact very simple, and consist purely of the presence of certain hormones, and the presence of protein differentials on cell membranes, which in effect is what we used to determine the presence of any foreign body, and operates along a self and not self determination system. Literally the only thing to communicate is "like me" and "not like me". You seem to assume that some sort of complex computation to interpret chemical data is taking place, but that is not the case. The chemical signals, adn the information they confer are actually quite simple. Which brings me to my next point. 2) There is no computation in the mind about what this information means. In essence, even if you could see these chemical signals as being encoded information, there is no decoding of this information on the part of the receptor. All that happens is that certain pathways in our brain fire off in response to chemical stimulus. This occurs because at some point in our evolutionary history, a preference for these traits was selected for due to some sort of selective pressure, environmental or otherwise. The subconscious is not calculating out the probability of genetically fit offspring when it smells another person's sweat. It's akin to chemotaxis, only much more complex, but there is no cognition of what these signals actually mean. Humans are not interpreting a complex and nuanced set of data to determine the fitness of a partner when they smell that person's sweat. And finally, 3) We have no idea why these traits were selected for. At some point in history, and for MHCs it may well have been around the time we started developing spinal cords, preference for certain traits provided an advantage. This does not necessarily mean that they still provide an advantage or won't be eliminated from the gene pool in 10,000 years. It's essentially a fallacious appeal the nature, one that he also commits when he posits that humans will naturally be able to intuit community structures like the ones he proposes. We know that something like the cities that we live in today are unprecedented in our evolutionary history, we have no reason to believe that humanitiy's natural tendency towards communal organization will translate into being able to effectively navigate a social network many millions of times bigger than anything we used to face when our brains were evolving their neural pathways for social interactions. In fact the ability of sociopaths and psychopaths to play off of people's natural inclinations towards trusting people who show certain external signifiers, such as openness in facial expressions, demonstrates how easy it is to game a system based on human social interactions. RA seems to assume that this sort of gaming simply would not occur in a perfect system. Why this should be the case he hasn't given us an answer to. RA, you don't understand evolutionary biology or social psychology, and your system relies on a highly reductive, and frankly bizarre, understanding of human nature. Even if your model is internally coherent, and I think you've proven by now that isn't because you continuously move the goalposts on any number of different criticisms, it serves no useful purpose because it doesn't model reality accurately. Now you may say that this is purely a thought exercise, but given the fact that you started this thread by talking about the social policy implications of your magic e-money, such a statement is just as disingenuous as your continued insistence that you are being bullied when people demand that you answer pertinent questions about your system. There was that clear enough? Political Whores fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 14:20
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The simplicity of the MHC has nothing to do with the actual number of proteins, it has to do with the actual information conveyed to the evolutionarily evolved structures in the brain. A preferences is shown because a switch that basically detects a binary is thrown. Antigen reaction is a signal we get from any foreign protein, and it is innece what is happening here. This is not a complex process. MHCs are not such an important thing that they are required for anything, and in ethnically homogenous populations MHCs are often the same! This is also why I have issue with your use of Gibsonian affordances. MHC detection affords nothing, it provides not extra options to the person detection, merely a chemical switch is triggered in the brain that perhaps at best incentivises an option. But even then, the person is not consciously aware that the option "have sex with someone who I might be able to get a kidney from", nor is such a thing easily discoverable. There is no learning of options present, no understanding at all. In fact without the scientific insight and tools for detection MHCs and understanding what they do, such knowledge would be impossible for anyone ever, and since in the context of our discussion you are making appeals to a human's natural ability to interpret information from their environment, this presents a problem for your thesis. In addition, the nuance and complexity you attribute to this detection is erroneous. An alternate example: Taste is as fine-tuned a sense as smell is in humans. We can detect any number of chemical signals from the food we eat. However, given that our taste preferences have evolved over the course of evolutionary history, our desire for certain tastes are very often prone to making us consume things that aren't optimized for our wellbeing, and false positives with taste are easy to trigger. In addition, taste is heavily culturally mediated, so is not universal across all humans. And this, like your smell example, is for something with amounts to an ok chemical detection suite. It is far more simple than the incredibly subtle, nuanced, and even more culturally mediated information that you suppose humans are naturally equipped to deal with with regards to social interactions. Even if I grant you this natural ability for community organizing as intrinsic to humans apart from cultural programming (though this seems to me to be a huge blind spot in your model, the effect cultural differences will have, since all your theorizing seems derived from studies on digital communities, and many of those tied to certain linguistic groups), your belief that humans will naturally gravitate and effectively use complex toolset as a means of social control is unsupported even by observations of small communities today. The only way I can figure you conceiving of this is if no face to face or actual human interactions ever occur again under Strangecoin, or that transactions would somehow be completely divorced from actual person to person contacts. How else could strangecoin possibly replace or "patch" the social structures of class and race? Why wouldn't people just digitally ostracize any account that they knew connected to a person they didn't like for arbitrary reasons. Again, if someone said, don't endorse Jews because they are the Illuminati, how would strangecoin negate that behaviour? You understand that the human ability to exist within a community structure is the same faculty that generates things like xenophobia and racism, right? Attaching some byzantine digital karma score to it doesn't negate that. Like hitting a brick wall. E: I'm not taking this down, but I think I'm bowing out after this. I skimmed over the part where he said the actual biological function of MHCs was irrelevant, I jumped straight to his itemized points because I only have some much time for stupid sophistic digressions. But yeah, there really is no point is there. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Apr 9, 2014 |
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Apr 9, 2014 03:15
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In the same vein, to support Tokamak point, Daniel Kahneman has done a lot of work on prospect theory and cognitive bias, and its a pretty readable look into the depths of the field of behavioral economics. In particular, it shows that humans are in fact prone to any number of biases in our reasoning. http://www.amazon.ca/Thinking-Fast-...g+fast+and+slow Maybe spend a little time looking into what research exists, before taking your own observations as universal constants. I know, I know, you're a Quinist. Fine. But Coherentism is still a systematic approach to knowledge. You have to account for all this contradictory information somehow. If you can't generate a hypothesis about why the biases wouldn't apply in Strangecoin, then you don't have an internally coherent model.
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Apr 9, 2014 04:29
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So what I'm understanding now is that strangecoin is a model meant to simulate and explicitly quantify cognitive biases in human social relations. To what ends exactly? Will it tell me exactly to what degree Emden is a Nazi? What do you expect these patterns you observe to reveal in terms of new information or insight? Install Windows posted:Hey with regards to "people seeking out genetic fitness" - sexual attraction has led to millions of cases of couples where the genetics are actually so incompatible as to make pregnancy either impossible, or only possible with strict medical supervision, due to things like incompatible Rh factors. Yeah, it's almost like MHCs have nothing to do with "genetic compatibility" at all! But wait, that's irrelevant to the example, never mind. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Apr 9, 2014 |
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Apr 9, 2014 04:55
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RealityApologist posted:Imagine having a fooey-like idea burrow in your brain so deep that you feel compelled to work it out, despite your technical incompetence. That sounds more like psychiatric condition, a fixation or obsession of some sort.
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Apr 9, 2014 05:29
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30 pages ago, the only thing you said was:RealityApologist posted:The limited scope that I'm interested in is the particular differences in incentive structure and economic behavior that signals from a Strangecoin network would provide. Slanderer and a few others have been commenting on the technical details of the proposal, and that has been really the only constructive or productive thing happening in this thread. Your first post says this: RealityApologist posted:I was digging through the SomethingAwful archives and found my first essay on the attention economy, written on April 5th, 2011. At the time, Bitcoin had yet to experience it's first bubble and was still trading below a dollar, and Occupy Wall Street was still five months in the future. If you don't have access to the archives, the thread which prompted this first write up was titled "No More Bitchin: Let's actually create solutions to society's problems!" Despite my reputation on this forum, I'm not interested in pop speculative futurism or idle technoidealism. I don't think there's an easy technological fix for our many difficult problems. But I do think that our technological circumstances have a dramatic impact on our social, political, and economic organizations, and that we can design technologies to cultivate human communities that are healthy, stable, and cooperative. The political and economic infrastructure we have for managing collective human action was developed at a time when individual rational agency formed the basis of all political theory, and in a networked digital age we can do much better. An attention economy doesn't solve all the problems, but it provides tools for addressing problems that simply aren't available with the infrastructure we have available today. My discussion of the attention economy was aimed at discussing social organization at this level of abstraction, with the hopes that taking this networked perspective on social action would reveal some of the tools necessary for addressing our problems. What I am asking for is simple: what tools are you expecting to see appear? What behaviour? You attempt to defend your idea by saying that you're not looking to produce anything viable or actually useful as an alternative, but your initial post says otherwise, and you continuously defend your idea from criticism that it is unrealistic in modelling human nature with statements like this: RealityApologist posted:The claim is whether actual human social reasoning reflects the structure of the Strangecoin network. You're right that I haven't supported the claim yet, at least in this thread. Your comments are critical but constructive, so I'm going to take the opportunity to make clear what closely related claims I have been supporting before I support this particular claim, because this is the first time this criticism has been made explicit. You state here that you believe that strangecoin is a way to fundamentally circumvent problems inherent in basically every human society that has ever existed, indeed you finish by explaining that your spec has already accounted for at least some of this behaviour through account caps. Despite your constant backpedaling claims that you're just interested in seeing what new structures may occur (something for which you provide no reasoning as to why these should appear), every time someone drills you on what exactly strangecoin is for, your defence is that you believe it will fundamentally reorder human social interactions away from negative behaviours. You use this as a defence against criticism of strangecoin unrealistic modelling of human behaviour. You cannot hold both these positions and be consistent, either you have no idea what strangecoin will do, or you have a desired endpoint in mind. In either case, all the criticism in this thread still applies, either by pointing out that human behaviours will still effect your system, or by refuting your claim that your system has adequately circumvented these problems. So, what is the purpose of strangecoin, stated simply: Is it purely a thought exercise to which you have given no thought of purpose or consequences, or is it an experimental model meant to fudamentally alter the way humans interact with one another, in ways that you hope will be beneficial to society? Doe you envision a purpose fro strangecoin, and if you do not, do you then retract all of your statements concerning the potential for strangecoin to ameliorate the human condition?
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Apr 9, 2014 23:00
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I don't really think you even need the excuse of a comedy forum to make fun of a lunatic's glossolalia treatise on the social dynamics of family dinner at Neal Stephenson's house. It's not like his ideas wuld have been more well received in academic setting. Well, maybe LessWrong. A self-published journal article may be just the push Strangecoin needs.
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Apr 10, 2014 13:44
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What RA obviously wants out of all this is community enforced ethical consumption. Any attempt to purchase products or services from nodes caries an explicit economic cost, so presumably it would disincentivize dealing with those nodes. Basically every transaction people would do between each other would become a complex calculation as to how much of your economic karma you'd want to risk. It's a lot like a libertarian's fetishizaiton of contracts.
Political Whores fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Apr 10, 2014 |
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Apr 10, 2014 23:34
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Isn't that the purpose of the aura colors? To presumably make interpreting influence intuitive. A lot of strangecoin is an attempt to force people to internalize things like corporate influence in a way that is notionally accessible: reading someone's aura would presumably be a quicker and more immediate things that digging through financial statements. I think, contrary to what the poster above said, that RA has given more thought than your average libertarian on why the idea of a decentralized economic system doesn't work in reality. All of the weird byzantine structures in strangecoin are attempts to work around problems like the fact that people would never put in the effort required to review the sourcing of every purchase. He's just unwilling to admit that his solution isn't workable, so instead he pulls up tangentially related science articles to defend why people would be able to use his system.
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Apr 11, 2014 05:21
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quote:BernieLomax wrote on Apr 11, 2014 04:21:
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Apr 11, 2014 10:28
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BernieLomax posted:Hey, that's unfair. I see no value in attempting to discuss things with you in any way.
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Apr 11, 2014 10:45
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Kjoery posted:What, no. One major theme of this thread has been the importance of clear/effective communication. You failed to communicate whatever the hell it was you wanted to communicate to LittleBlackfly. That is not a victory. The fact that he frames his conversation (and I use that term loosely) with me in terms of win and lose is part of what makes me think his posting has no value.
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Apr 11, 2014 11:46
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I was actually mocking you and your extreme personal investment in this. As much as you intended your little essay as a throwing of the gauntlet for some battle of wits, I don't really see a point in engaging with someone who can't follow a simple discussion. This has nothing to do with English being your second language.
Political Whores fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Apr 11, 2014 |
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Apr 11, 2014 12:00
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Think whatever you want. You obviously feel you acquitted yourself well, so I don't see why you should seek to avoid public attention of your victory.
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Apr 11, 2014 12:30
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I don't know, I'd think that for strangecoin to even function on a workable level for most people, we'd all have to be cyborgs in a future so divorced from the current human condition that worrying about things like consumerism might not even make sense. Would material goods even have any meaning to a human/ai hybrid able to simulate heaven within the confines of its metacortex? I'm being facetious, but it does seem to me that strangecoin isn't created for humans as they exist now to use. It already requires a post-scarcity world by necessity, and some sort of always on HUD that humans would be able to instinctively interpret, almost definitely something worked into our neural systems directly. What exactly is the point of having an account balance in this case? Why even have anything other than reputation scores and just do favours for each other, since the only conceivable opportunity cost in a post-scarcity world would be the time required to do a specialized task? Maybe we're all just paying for processor cycles to run our uploaded selves on, but even then the necessity of the whole strangecoin mechanism seems unlikely. It really seems that strangecoin requires a social structure that is so fundamentally alien to current standards to exist that I don't understand why we would still be thinking of the economy in a primarily transactional sense at that point anyway. If something like an always-on network that the TUA/account system requires even exists, why wouldn't the vast majority of tasks be automated anyway? Would people even have jobs or stores? If we're all in some eudaimonic paradise where all that there is to do is experience things we want to experience and contemplate existence, what is the point of accounting things in this way. And if we're not in this state, then why would such a system ever be agreed to in the first place? Indeed, how could it even function if there were still resource costs to creating goods or providing services, since I doubt many people would endorse each other if it would cost them wages they required for basic necessities, ie. the way most of the world now lives, for potential future income generated in a very indirect way. Political Whores fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 18:13
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Obdicut posted:In a way, Strangecoin is the proof of some principle I don't know if there is the name for. It claims to provide useful information, but it would in fact require nearly perfect information to function. It would help (being, very, very generous to Strangecoin here) to control the allocation of resources, but would only work in a post-scarcity world, or at least one where all resources can be correctly tabulated according to real worth. Yeah, this articulates a big part of what I was trying to get at. Strangecoin seems like a system that presupposes an infrastructure and social order that would make it irrelevant. If the perfect AI that somehow collects and processes all this information on everybody and everything exists, why wouldn't you just let it be the central planner to the economy? Why worry about accounts and income at all? A currency implies a price system, but I don't know why you'd even need one in a system like this, since the valuation system for goods and services, not to mention commodities, would have to function completely differently than it does now. Strangecoin prices wouldn't be the type of information transfer that prices are in a normal economy. I don't even understand why people would bother with capital accumulation at all, since its not like they could keep it or actually require it, thanks to the TUA.
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Apr 12, 2014 18:54
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You've taken your analogy too far, or you have no understanding of what is meant by gaming in an economic sense. It's about taking advantage of the system in ways that cause an economically inefficient outcome. One easy example is large corporations exploiting tax law to pay no tax on their profits, leading to a larger burden on other revenue sources for the state, and an inability to pay the state's expenses. It's not a question of legitimate earnings or fairness, it's a question of people using their understanding of the system that exists to acquire as much for themselves as possible, with negative results for society as a whole. How does strangecoin intend to disincentivize this? What mechanisms exist to incentivize not maximizing profit (in strangecoin or some other store of value)? Because if it doesn't do this, then you haven't address the gaming issue at all. The economic game is not a game people play for fun, for the most part anyway. Making the game more "interesting" to play fairly doesn't really apply to what we're talking about here. Balance in this case would be disincentivizing wealth accumulation. How does strangecoin do that, while maintaining an incentive of ruthless competition? Political Whores fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 20:50
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