61–70 of 178 posts
If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly: Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale w…
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Right -- it's ultimately a trust problem, and we're in an unfortunate negative feedback loop here. Bots aside, what we post on the internet (and believe in general) is a function of the information we consume. That information is increasingly consumed through the internet, and the internet (as typically used) is feeding us increasingly poor quality information. (To be consumed, then shared. Recurse...) We can (and I…
I find it interesting that when something uses proper grammar and spelling, it may appear more trustworthy. Consider this: a consumer that employs above average grammar and spelling skills to write product reviews may also be more skillful in forming and expressing valuable opinions and assessments of any product. I think that people are naturally inclined to pick up on those signals, whether the correlation is real…
back to the Amazon example: an expert car mechanic may have worse spelling/grammar than a hobbyist, but I should probably trust their Amazon review of a car part more.
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This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.
There was never any coercion in the US. All those black people simply begged to be chained and beaten for centuries. The tribes? They just really wanted to travel to Oklahoma. Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering. Whitewashing history to make it more palatable is dangerous.
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People forget that institutions take time to develop. They also forget that high-trust institutions frequently begin with a dictator. The end-point is high-trust/low-coercion, but you can't get there from low-trust/low-coercion. First you have to go through a high-trust/high-coercion state, after which you can gradually taper off the coercive elements as institutions mature and the individual actors get used to the n…
This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was never any coercion in the US. All those black people simply begged to be chained and beaten for centuries. The tribes? They just really wanted to travel to Oklahoma. Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering. Whitewashing history to make it more palatable is dangerous.
We're talking about whether or not coercion is necessary to bootstrap a high-trust society. Are you arguing that those types of coercion were fundamentally necessary to establish the United States? Or are you forgetting this context in order to have something to be upset about?
[0] https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-eco...
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There was never any coercion in the US. All those black people simply begged to be chained and beaten for centuries. The tribes? They just really wanted to travel to Oklahoma. Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering. Whitewashing history to make it more palatable is dangerous.
> Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering. Depends on the state, if I'm remembering correctly. New Jersey allowed certain women and african americans to vote until (I believe) 1806. Dirtying history to make our advancements larger is also dangerous.
If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly: Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale w…
So, should we just try to ignore the larger-scale exploitation of trust?
But I think there's a risk of sending a lot of bright, productive people off to tilt at technological/interface/regulatory windmills in a way that leaves fundamental trust issues out of scope.
Even if Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could wave a magic wand and remove every fake review, counterfeit product, scam, personal threat, or piece of false/fraudulent media, there would still be a trust issue. We still have to trust that they did what they said, that whatever disappeared was correctly identified, and that they didn't wrongly remove many legitimate items in the process.
Even if the magic wand that makes these decisions has the utmost ethical and logical integrity, there will still be some mix of skeptics, cynics, malign actors, competitors, bots, etc. who chum the waters with accusations to the contrary. We'd still have to choose whether or not to trust this process and the actors behind it.
So, I think it might be productive to focus on some smaller questions first. To be semi-arbitrary: can we find a protocol for reliably building a 50-person trust network with a limited scope/focus (maybe identifying reliable providers of a single service), where each participant knows a small fraction of the network, which is capable of meeting both its purpose and is capable of detecting and reforming or ejecting exploiters? If the first is tractable, can you expand the scope/focus of the networks and retain these properties? Can you compose a higher-order network that retains these properties?
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> Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering. Depends on the state, if I'm remembering correctly. New Jersey allowed certain women and african americans to vote until (I believe) 1806. Dirtying history to make our advancements larger is also dangerous.
Provide some evidence then. What percentage of women could vote then? What percentage of blacks? If it's not a significant amount, your reply isn't much of a rebuttal.
> That all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age, who are worth fifty pounds proclamation money, clear estate in the same, and have resided within the county in which they claim a vote for twelve months immediately preceding the election, shall be entitled to vote for Representatives in Council and Assembly; and also for all other public officers, that shall be elected by the people of the county at large.
It's probably also worth noting that these restrictions applied to men, too.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_Jersey_Stat...
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That's part of the issue; there is no need for commercial first-hand accounts anymore. If someone on social media is talking about a news event and provides a video documenting their presence, that is about as verified and accurate as you can hope for.
Which is incredibly susceptible to someone with an agenda who wants to spin an narrative and knows how to leverage social media. It's tailor made for propaganda. Joe Schmoe who is actually there doesn't know how to inflate his likes and SEO his account. His voice gets drowned out by the people who are getting paid to push a particular viewpoint. There is no editor providing oversight. No ethics board. No neutral poin…
And that's exactly how news industry worked always, since invention of press (actually even before, though it wasn't industry back then).
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Provide some evidence then. What percentage of women could vote then? What percentage of blacks? If it's not a significant amount, your reply isn't much of a rebuttal.
The original requirements were the same for everyone - white or black, male or female - though thanks to the doctrine of coverture, married women would not have the assets to qualify. (Married women could generally not own property independent of their husband) Coverture was not applied universally however, and many married women still voted. See [0] > That all inhabitants of this Colony, of full age, who are worth f…