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Kilty Monroe posted:It'd be interesting to see what happens in an EVE-like MMO set up with an economy like this as hordes of huge nerds try to figure out how to exploit it (my hunch: it ends in hyperinflation as big cooperative efforts come together to cycle through currency as fast as possible acquiring game assets). Then you'd at least have some experimental data to compare and contrast the behavior of this system with that of traditional economies. Every single transaction type Eripsa specified in his word salad of an essay already exists in very basic banking and contract law using existing non-pseudointellectual dollar bills and contracts. The only thing that would change from today is a basic income coupled with an account balance cap as an incentive to spend. What would happen in a videogame is a lot of people with massive account balances scattered between many accounts and, yes, a hyper-inflationary scenario for the average space peasant whose basic income wouldn't cover upgrading a newbie ship (as the goon cartel would simply acquire hard assets as fast as they could, then keep them cycling among themselves to avoid any penalties). Assuming every player was magically restricted to one account because Eripsaland, they would still form a cartel and the cartel would quickly own 100% of the videogame since there is nothing in the earlier sentence that *requires* multiple accounts to work. Assuming no cartels because Eripsaland, the currency itself would likely become worthless as a store of value as players repeatedly failed to understand why they were being penalized for success and the medium of exchange would shift to an in-game item. What would happen in reality (given the other attention essays; I make no claim on the feasibility of balance caps + basic incomes in general other than to say the combination is probably still pretty ruinous) is that a lot of plebes would starve and the world would be run by Youtube trolls, but Eripsa describes this as a feature so it's not actually a negative for him. Adar fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Mar 31, 2014 |
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Mar 31, 2014 09:26
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Serious reply in between laughing really hard:Kilty Monroe posted:What would be real-world examples of coupling and inhibition? I'm having a little trouble penetrating the overly technical language, but they appear to be agreements between two people that end up pulling extra money out of the Monopoly bank rather than each other, and I'm not aware of anything similar in reality. The Universal Account can loosely be thought of as the Fed (disclaimer: this is a retarded analogy but I'm not going to give Eripsa more precious attention by coming up with something more accurate). The Fed distributes money to banks at the prime rate. If the prime rate falls, the banks get cheaper (more) money = coupling. If the prime rate rises, they get less = inhibition. Another real world example of coupling is OPEC, which successfully distributes more money amongst all of its members by cartelizing a key resource. I know it's shocking that this dumb idea might have unforeseen problems if applied to everything IRL but here we are! quote:Also, if there really is no functional difference aside from the balance cap, but this system would still result in hyperinflation, then would just imposing a wealth cap in the real world also result in hyperinflation? As someone put it, the system here imagines that money is literally on fire and *must* be spent at the risk of losing it. This naturally results in massive evasion or shockwaves of utterly socially useless spending on garbage or both. It certainly introduces hyperinflation at the basic income level. You can get around this by also implementing rigid price controls on everything, preventing your citizens from trading with the outside world and very harsh penalties for doing anything with money without prior approval. This particular "innovation" might even work on the consumer level. Ask the Soviets how well that model worked when applied to actual industrial output.
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Mar 31, 2014 18:13
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RealityApologist posted:I've said multiple times that the issue of transitioning to a world of strangecoin is completely irrelevant. This is a project in modeling the dynamics of a complex economic system. Where is the "model", as opposed to word salad, you have described? How is the system in any way more complex than the one we have now or even complex at all (insanity and word salad do not complexity make)? Why is the transition period irrelevant to the "model" - are you just not registering transaction costs as a thing that exists? eXXon posted:Justin Bieber dropped by my bar last night and had a shot of whiskey and then I bought a new car with the strangecoins from his 5 million twitter endorsers and now there are millions of angry parents wondering what the gently caress. Fortunately after he left the bar he got arrested and now you're in jail for being around him and the parents are all in jail for paying attention to you so everyone wins.
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Apr 1, 2014 01:11
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Eripsa, while you've been skimming past the 500,000 posts from all sorts of professionals explaining how terrible your ideas are, has your reaction been that they might have a point or is it that you are simply a misunderstood genius who is on the cusp of transforming the world and the other advanced degree holders ITT are simply too blind to see it?RealityApologist posted:The primary critique of my writing has been that it is too verbose. The primary critique of the proposal is that I don't know economics. I often struggle with the internal combustion engine and don't know anything about philosophy so here's a proposal for a perpetual motion machine: it thinks, therefore it is. You can pay me in attention. It took four seconds for you to read my post so I expect the Y+N*Q^5 strangecoins in my account(s) ASAP.
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Apr 2, 2014 01:54
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If you retards hijack this thread away from Eripsa the terrorists will literally have won. Eripsa: I have considered becoming an architect because I think that triangles are cool. Imagine an upside down triangle house. Wouldn't it be awesome to live in one of those? Let's transfer all of society over to upside down triangle houses ASAP. I may not know anything about engineering or design or urban planning or anything at all, but here's a 5000 word essay on HackerNews about it LOOK AT ME
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Apr 2, 2014 02:01
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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. RealityApologist posted:The primary critique of my writing has been that it is too verbose. The primary critique of the proposal is that I don't know economics. I am extremely interested in cats. Here's a picture of a very unhappy cat taking a bath. I don't know anything about cats but I think this means it has cancer and needs an operation. No need for the veterinarians ITT to weigh in, I might not understand veterinary medicine and I'm more interested in the water surrounding the cat anyway but it's so unhappy that it plainly has cancer. Why are you calling me crazy?
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Apr 2, 2014 02:08
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Eripsa, let's go back to your very first post: RealityApologist posted: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. RealityApologist posted:The primary critique of the proposal is that I don't know economics. You are literally proposing that a specific economic theory "provides tools" for solving economic problems and then stating the fact that you don't understand economics is not an indictment of your theory.
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Apr 2, 2014 02:26
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Popular Thug Drink posted:Nine times out of ten invoking Dunning-Kreuger is just a lame way of shutting down an idiot. Adar posted:It would probably be helpful to your cause if you could at least point out why Captain Dunning lost Napoleon the war with his reckless charge right into Corporal Kruger's forces. RealityApologist posted:I don't give a poo poo about anything in this post.
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Apr 2, 2014 02:36
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RealityApologist posted:The consensus of the forum seems to be that if you aren't an expert then you shouldn't say anything. People are coming out to proudly admit how little they know about anything but their specific technical field, and admit to being clueless about how it fits in with the rest of science as if it is something to be proud of. I don't understand this sentiment at all. Eripsa, as a philosophy grad student, you have probably heard of Socrates saying "I know that I know nothing". Would you say Socrates was proud of that statement? Conversely, would you be surprised to learn that there is a 20th century corollary to this statement that has been mentioned on this very page?
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Apr 2, 2014 02:54
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RealityApologist posted:Look, even if I am guilty of everything you mention, it again amounts to a claim that I'm a poor writer and I'm out of my depth. This seriously implicates half of academia, and about 80% of anyone with an op ed column in a major periodical. I've been in the academy long enough to know I'm performing well within the norms. Thomas Friedman is both much more right about everything and a better writer than you, sorry. RealityApologist posted:So my impression is that the very idea that I would attempt to articulate an ambitious proposal, despite my incompetence, that is generating all this ire. The suggestion is that no one is actually capable of such a thing, so I'm a fool to even try, especially given my apparently obvious and severe cognitive disabilities. Your impression is wrong; your proposal itself is generating this ire because it's terrible. The cognitive disabilities you're exhibiting are the reason we think it's funny enough to keep posting.
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Apr 2, 2014 03:02
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icantfindaname posted:I dunno I don't think Eripsa is dumb per se, just delusional and 100% invested in the type of techno-fetishist thinking discussed in that other thread recently. Techno-fetishism is much easier and makes more sense than this. You start with the premise of a Singularity, then push to get there, then ???, then supercomputers solve all our problems as the universe shrinks back in on itself and the cycle repeats every few trillion years. It's not even self-contradictory. A couple of hundred years from now there'll probably be a real religion based on the concept. This is more of an arbitrary decision to turn the world into a pile of skulls because it sounds cool and then doubling down whenever he's called on it. trucutru posted:(The fact that D&D is so easily trolled helps continue with this topic, since it is obvious that you don't have any intention of having an actual productive conversation). Oh come on these are some of the only readable threads in D&D exactly because he's serious about it
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Apr 2, 2014 03:14
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RealityApologist posted:I suppose, for this reason, I really do sympathize with a lot of the criticisms in this thread. I don't know anything about economics. But as so many people have already pointed out, the proposal here really has nothing to do with economics in the traditional sense. Adar posted:Every single transaction type Eripsa specified in his word salad of an essay already exists in very basic banking and contract law using existing non-pseudointellectual dollar bills and contracts. The only thing that would change from today is a basic income coupled with an account balance cap as an incentive to spend. If you ignore the word salad and incoherent babbling your proposal as stated in this thread (and this thread only) is making what is already there much more complicated and also hyperinflationary and murderous, but doesn't contain anything unknown to economics. The Attention Economy as stated elsewhere is certainly new, though (in the sense that the piles of skulls would be larger and also look shrunken from dehydration)
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Apr 2, 2014 03:19
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DoctorDilettante posted:That's me, and that's all true. The hangout should be fun times. Is he this bad IRL too?
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Apr 3, 2014 09:56
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RealityApologist posted:Right, but the motivation in Strangecoinland isn't to acquire more strangecoin on it's own, so the person's ability to give me a payment of strangecoin in any amount doesn't really matter all that much. What matters more is my income over time Unless Strangecoinland is also full of immortals you are literally retarded if you believe this.
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Apr 3, 2014 23:22
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Guys it's okay if my system allows me to scam people for a billion strangecoins just once because no one will trade with me and my billion strangecoins ever again. Also the invisible hand of the free market something something
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Apr 3, 2014 23:23
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LGD posted:Look, I think its perfectly obvious that humans will naturally respond to a system where any amount of fame inherently causes an exponential increase in economic power with unilateral decisions to reduce that economic power so as to provide a small abstract boost to a fund that apparently barely subsidizes some level of universal welfare. This jives with observed behavior and (even leaving aside all of the exploitable opportunities for collusion) would definitely not provide incentive for socially destructive attention whoring by the worst people imaginable on a heretofore unseen scale. Strangecoin: in the land of the rational actors, the non-linear thinker is king
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Apr 3, 2014 23:31
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RealityApologist posted:I can imagine lots of reasons. If it was mandated by a legitimate criminal justice system, for instance. "You know what a legitimate criminal justice system needs that it can't currently do? The power to inhibit people's economic transactions" said absolutely no one, ever
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Apr 3, 2014 23:37
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moebius2778 posted:Is there actually a model of how people will behave under StrangeCoin? Because that's one of the things that's always seemed odd to me about trying to code the entire system up - you've got a bunch of rules about what sorts of actions an actor can take in the system, but no real way to model how an actor would act in the system. I don't know any math but I'm an actual human so I feel qualified to answer this. Step 1: buy a lot of stolen identities Step 2: feedback loop Step 3: use my newfound illgotten wealth to inhibit Eripsa from buying toothpaste, forever
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Apr 3, 2014 23:42
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We're talking about an "economic system" that presupposes that large wealth transfers are unimportant because in the long run access to massive amounts of capital does not compensate for difficulty of future transactions. It's like someone literally doesn't understand how econo oh yeah I forgot
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Apr 3, 2014 23:53
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RealityApologist posted:But remember, this is all constrained by everyone acting in their own interest, and their incentives are aimed at balancing the system. So a project of any scale is really only going to get going if it has the support comparable to its scale. So the constraining factor on motivating projects isn't getting the money to do it, its motivating the human communities that will sustain it. Because you don't understand economics, I will put this in small, simple words: -money is a store of value that simplifies transactions (you can do transactions without money, but it's inefficient and annoying) -economic value is "a measure of the benefit that an economic actor can gain from either a good or service" (wiki) -if human communities are "motivated" and "gain a benefit from a good or a service", what is the constraining factor? look ma none of my words are long and a fourth grader (but not you) probably understands this quote:In Strangecoinland, no one really cares about how much money you make or have. All the economists and financial experts spend their time studying and making fine distinctions between communities of different type and significance, and the impact those communities have on the network. Information about the network structure of those communities is what is broadcast on 24 hour news shows. The financial news of the day is not about transfers of strangecoin or TUA (which cause very little friction in the system), but instead about the dynamics of community structures, who divide and replicate and reproduce like cells undergoing mitosis. Here are some more small, simple words: -if all the experts care about is "their impact on the network", that can be expressed at "who is contributing the most to the network in both directions", aka "the attention economy" -this means that all the experts care about is who is moving the most money back and forth -this means none of this paragraph means anything and you are both a terrible writer and extremely wrong
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Apr 4, 2014 01:32
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RealityApologist posted:Well, endorsements are good but so is support and the other transactions. and now we're once again back to "this is exactly the same as any other economic system except the parts where I wave my hand around and say it's not" at least be consistently wrong about something; chasing you down is like trying to inhibit Bernie Madoff from making money through voluntarily refusing to deal with him
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Apr 4, 2014 01:39
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RealityApologist posted:I'm literally stunned every time I see someone online inferring from the phrase "tragedy of the commons" that all commons are tragic. Ahh yes, wikipedia. http://wikigroans.com/post/51575660897/http-en-wikipedia-org-wiki-mongol-invasion-of-cen welp, pack it in Genghis Khan, Star Trek II is 8 times more popular so gently caress you
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Apr 4, 2014 02:01
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Things that Eripsa does not understand, as evidenced throughout his threads: -the definition of the word "science" -economics -military logistics -Dunning/Kruger -AI -human behavior in general (I would say behavioral science, but that would be misusing the term, so I won't) Things that Eripsa has tried to write about, make analogies about, or explain (wrongly): -all of the above Is this the full list or am I missing some posts?
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Apr 5, 2014 23:45
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 seriouspost do not read BernieLomax posted:I feel some are too eager to find malice in Eripsa, and often through semantic games. But what's more striking is this tendency to try bringing him down to earth. I doubt Eripsa is going to solve any huge issues in the world, but he has certainly the right attitude, and I wish more people were just as eager at trying to develop radical solutions to big problems. I've read so many articles from so-called radical economists in cool magazines, yet no-one are even close to suggesting any bigger changes to the economic system than those that have happened in the last 50 years - despite that we are at a point in human history where we are required to do a change that is bigger than humanity has ever done (eg. because of globalization or global warming). He isn't Einstein or anything, but I am glad that he is at least touching on ideas at the right scale. But I have never seen any radical ideas from those trying to tear him down, and that's depressing. And you're saying it right out - he shouldn't try to have radical ideas. Reading your post, I understand why people keep tearing down people such as Chomsky because he's too radical, and thus have to be perfect - a higher standard than the one where people have small ideas and are allowed to make mistakes. I can like a wrong but novel idea, as long as the intentions are good. Because then we have something to compare to when a better idea comes around. But some of you just seem to wait around to some magic Einstein comes around and solve all of our problems. BernieLomax posted:It is also because of bad faith. Especially seeing how many here were helldump-posters. There is this asymmetry where he is sharing more than anyone else is sharing, hence he is obviously easier to ridicule, and conversely it is not possible to criticize the motivation, knowledge or credentials of those criticizing him. When people then ask stupid questions they are not scrutinized as heavily, even if their errors are gross and marred with arrogance. For observers it then looks like he is always wrong and the critics always right, and this brings out even more bad faith-posters. I guess this is just crowd behaviour, but it certainly doesn't make crowds look good. The reason why people ridicule radical solutions instead of trying to develop their own is that there's a very high chance every radical solution anyone within two degrees from you will ever come up with is terrible*. By definition, radical ideas are outside mainstream thought, where the mainstream is hundreds of millions of first world professionals who have an overwhelming amount of combined experience, rigor and education to put to bear on a variety of big problems. I've met actual genius-level thinkers who can potentially revolutionize a field; those kinds of people are immediately obvious when they walk into a room, mostly because there are so few of them that you can remember your interaction a decade later. If you aren't one of them, your concept for a perpetual motion machine is just as useless as every other and you're better off focusing your intelligence on something else. *this is distinct from being viable. Lots of terrible radical ideas are viable. They also result in mountains of dead bodies so you can understand where that might give radicalism a bad name. Anyway, combine terrible ideas with obstinacy and you've got a jackass it's funny to ridicule on the Internet. If he wises up it'll stop being funny and he'll stop getting laughed at. It's not hard!
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Apr 6, 2014 00:57
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BernieLomax posted:Yeah, this is the moral judgement. And so what? It isn't even such a pompous statement as you make it out to be, since he even deprecates himself in it. Personally I hoped he tried to model even more complete changes, such as trying to do away with bartering completely etc. But please give me a description of how awesome a science economics is and how it is improving the world. Try to write a realistic essay about a society of larger than a few dozen individuals that has no property rights and is entirely communal. I bet you won't be able to unless you stretch the definition of realism past any reasonable boundary. Even monkeys engage in barter. What's more, even post-scarcity doesn't solve this; as someone else pointed out, in a post-scarcity society the unit of value becomes time, and what takes A a day might take B longer and vice versa so there are logical incentives to exchange work. It isn't possible to remove trade from the human condition unless -everything- is done by AI. More importantly, the successes and failures of our current understanding of economics have nothing to do with whether it's a real thing that exists. Might as well claim you hate the light speed barrier so it's wrong.
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Apr 6, 2014 01:55
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CheesyDog posted:As soon as someone's Strangecoin rep (which will have to act as a metacurrency because the actual currency is unlimited and valueless) falls enough that people start refusing to trade with them, they'll either have to remain in-system and be exploited, circumvent Strangecoing through bartering or other exchanges, or both. They trade with them anyway because why the gently caress wouldn't you, it's just that it will be on the barter system, in the black market or at a 20% discount or all of the above. Also the black market would quickly overwhelm the regular "economy", using that term loosely, as people quickly realize that they don't really *want* to calculate the exact benefit of coupling with the guy who brings them their coffee or the guy who inspected their sewer pipe prior to every single time they make a trade for something and other people realize they can launder every transaction made by the -rep crew and become billionaires until they themselves fall into -rep 200 billion richer and recruit the next guy to take their place ad infinitum. At some point before -rep becomes standard and total societal collapse because, again, why the gently caress wouldn't it, you can rest assured I will run bartertown on my throne of starving orphan skulls. Adar fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Apr 7, 2014 |
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Apr 7, 2014 18:01
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RealityApologist posted:Why do you want your kid having an identity as an economic agent? I don't know, maybe you don't. I'm not telling you how to raise your kid. Strangecoin: wherein strangers give coins to your children
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Apr 7, 2014 22:05
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Strangecoin: wherein people's brains excel at solving high dimensional geography (also I don't understand math)
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Apr 7, 2014 22:42
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RealityApologist posted:I'm saying community structure is something our brains are highly evolved to be responsive to. Strangecoin is more complex than money, but it gains that complexity by reflecting features of the community structure of the network, and that's a particular kind of complexity to which we're particularly disposed to thinking about. Or, to put it in logical terms and also in a way a fourth grader can understand: Brains like "A" "Z" is complex like "A" because I wiggle my fingers around and say so Humans know all about "A" because their brains like it and also because I said so "Z"'s complexity is exactly fine tuned to "A", although I haven't defined "Z" yet Ergo, Strangecoin: wherein strangers give coins to your children
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Apr 7, 2014 22:53
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Human beings know how to think about communities, community membership, and status within communities. This is why Occupy was a roaring success while the Hindu caste system never happened.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:57
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The more complex features Strangecoin highlights are features that pertain precisely to those features that human brains are particularly disposed to thinking about. That is why economics has been solved.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:58
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Strangecoin is more complex than money, but it gains that complexity by reflecting features of the community structure of the network, and that's a particular kind of complexity to which we're particularly disposed to thinking about. That is why everyone who matters spends their time navelgazing about who follows them on Twitter.
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Apr 7, 2014 23:00
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Strangecoin: ten years ahead of his time, the stranger gives candy to an eight year old
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Apr 7, 2014 23:03
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Human beings know how to think about communities, community membership, and status within communities. Why don't people on SA like me?
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Apr 7, 2014 23:18
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BernieLomax this is 4 u ok  RealityApologist posted:This is actually spot on. It's not that twitter followers matter at all in any practical or existential sense, but its that social rank and hierarchy matter to us a hell of a lot from a subpersonal model-of-the-self-and-social-environment sense, and twitter followers provide an indicator about that value that is meaningful to us and suggests an immediate course of action in response. Twitter is a great indicator of popularity IRL (said absolutely no one ever) quote:The thing is that money isn't like that. I mean, there's things I should and can do with my money that a financial adviser would suggest, but that kind of financial planning is well outside the purview of most people with their paychecks and bills. The money and the bills do supply information about one's status in the network and can be used for those purposes, but especially for people of limited financial means money doesn't provide nearly the kind of flexibility, feedback, and engagement to adequately represent their dynamic position within their social worlds. money can be an indication of social status, except that when you're poor, it's not an adequate indication of social status at all, except it sort of is quote:At most it describes their position in someone else's world, to whom they are subject and obliged. Which is to say that money doesn't describe our economic system, it describes their economic system: the system of the capitalists and embedded interests who have a huge stake in keeping the economic system largely as it is. It's a network designed for their communities of interest, not the rest of the communities we actually care about. money is not a thing that describes poor people's economic systems. it merely describes the economic system as a whole. also it's designed for people who have it. what quote:Money famously underrepresents the care structures in industrial social systems. Strangecoin quantifies our networks of care directly. I'm not operationalizing care; I'm not trying to establish the nature and extent of the concept. Instead, I'm trying to describe a vehicle through which care can be expressed naturally in the way we coordinate our behaviors. Strangecoin doesn't do anything until you express how it does it. also money already does this much better than Strangecoin. also if you want to "naturally express care" it may help to have transaction values be a constant that is known to the people involved in them at the time, otherwise you'd get something silly like "I meant to like someone this much but it turned out I paid that much" literally every time you tried paying for something and that would probably not work very well quote:Anyway. I'm not saying twitter followers exemmplify the care structure or anything so absurd. It's just that the number of twitter followers is something easy to engage with and receive feedback and positive reinforcement on and which may have some impact on one's social identity and psychological well-being, and it serves some of those care functions because the rest of our economy is so poo poo at doing it that we actively seek out these alternatives. our economy is bad at expressing, therefore twitter. more word salad pls quote:Twitter stardom doesn't mean anything more than substantive than that in either politics or the economy. But in an attention economy future, wealth and prosperity is measured my community structure and centrality in the network, which individuals can engage directly with immediate feedback something like the way we engage with twitter now. in the attention economy future we are all dead and god is laughing at us under the uncaring stars. also you don't understand economics so why are you trying to express an economic theory? also also, if twitter stardom doesn't mean anything, why would you propose an economy based on twitter-like behavior? have you even pretended to think your own theory all the way through? quote:Twitter and Facebook are teaching us (both individually and collectively through the development of culture and convention) to engage with explicit networks of digital communities, and to anticipate how they behave and in various circumstances and under various pressures. We're never had to do this before, but now we're all having to learn because we all know we're going to be doing this more in the future. It will take generations before these kinds of network-engaging actions are commonplace enough to trust the human population to engage with our global economy in these terms. But I don't think there's much doubt that we're headed in that direction, so there's no reason not to start talking about it now. yes, not much doubt that we're heading in the direction of the attention economy. that you don't understand economics is no barrier to your predictive skills of where the economy is headed. Strangecoin: money describes their economic system. Twitter describes mine
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Apr 8, 2014 00:12
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RealityApologist posted:The biology of a cell is immensely complex and delicate and far beyond my comprehension or understanding; our best biologists only yet have a glimpse of its enormous complexity. But the behavior of a human being is something more tractable, at least for some purposes given what I know about human beings. I can predict, for instance, what my family will likely be doing for the holidays or whatever. I can make these predictions and have a good sense of the behavior of that human organism, even though it is entirely composed of cells displaying patterns of patterns of emergent activity, and I am completely oblivious to many of those patterns at many different scales. The biology of a cell is immensely complex beyond the understanding of biologists, but the behavior of a human being is more tractable. That is why humans have mastered the network behavior I have just spent so much time admitting I have no idea about, while genetic engineering is far beyond our mortal ken.
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Apr 8, 2014 00:41
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RealityApologist posted:All that matters about my ability to predict human behavior is that I have a pattern for doing so at the scales necessary given the interests I have. If my concern is about what my family is doing for the holidays, then my predictive frameworks are quite sufficient for describing the system, despite my ignorance at other scales. All that matters about my ability to predict human behavior is that I can come up with an economic theory despite not understanding it.
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Apr 8, 2014 00:43
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Strangecoin: I know what my family does for Christmas, therefore attention economy
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Apr 8, 2014 00:46
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RealityApologist posted:I can predict, for instance, what my family will likely be doing for the holidays or whatever. I can make these predictions and have a good sense of the behavior of that human organism The Krebs cycle: more complex than the literally semi-infinite number of decision trees in which Eripsa's family winds up not having dinner together six months from now
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Apr 8, 2014 00:53
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| # ¿ Sep 12, 2024 15:39 |
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Malmesbury Monster posted:I don't think anyone would dispute the idea that humans as a whole understand human behavior better than cell biology. The point of contention is whether you do. I think you've spent so long thinking about this that you've lost sight of how humans actually behave in favor of a hazy theory of how you think we should. This is probably why, after pages upon pages of discussion, you've still proved entirely incapable of describing what an instance of human behavior might look like in Strangeworld without resorting to letters and symbols. I would dispute that. Humans understand cell biology fairly well until you get down to a couple of levels below that. When given a previously unknown terrestrial cell, a scientist will eventually be able to decode its genome, clone it, explain almost exactly how it interacts with body chemistry, tailor a virus to kill it and a bunch of other stuff. It's not perfect but there's a good level of understanding there. Good luck explaining how humans behave on an organizational level, never mind as individuals, to an alien lifeform seeing it for the first time. There are any number of behaviors that range between merely irrational to wildly counterproductive. That's without getting into brain chemistry, about which we know very little, and various psychological/physiological disorder combinations about which we know virtually nothing. This makes sense because we have only begun to get the computational tools to try to model any of this and the models are horrendous. I know you've said "as a whole" but actually humans "as a whole" know virtually nothing about *either* of those things; we're just slightly more arrogant about understanding ourselves, that's all. Into this vast abyss of unknowns comes Eripsa and proclaims the answer to our problem is by basing our societal structure on Twitter. Unfortunately for him, Twitter has trolls too. Adar fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Apr 8, 2014 |
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Apr 8, 2014 02:53
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