Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 924 posts

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#321

Post by BitwiseFool »

voakbasda wrote: post #54
sam0x17 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're merely documenting how current regulations are inefficient at catching current abuses. With proper regulations, these kind of abuses could be mostly prevented. With anti-regulation sentiment permeating government and politics right now, this becomes much, much more difficult. People will use the failure of antiquated regulations that need to be updated as justification for removing or kneecapping them, because…

Anti-regulation != anti-government. I am okay with regulation and being regulated, but I absolutely am not okay with any of our existing governments having any part of that process. Revolution does not require anarchy as an outcome; indeed, my preference simply would be to install better governance. Turning the law into a set of constantly shift sands would make it impossible to do business, because that could end up…

I've been reading about the philosophy of Law, and how other cultures deal with legal codes. One of the most intriguing takeaways was critically examining our own system and just how verbose it is. American (and just about all Western Legal Codes) are extremely detailed and contain tons of clauses that are explicitly enumerated.

Whereas an older society might have a law as simple as "Do not break into other people's houses", we will have dozens of codes defining what constitutes breaking and entering, determining what kind of property was being broken into, the scale of theft, whether or not there was intent, and more. And, there are sentencing differences depending on what kind of tools the burglar was carrying, if at all. To me, now that I've seen how other cultures handle law, this is complexity overkill.

We don't seem to be comfortable with "common sense" laws because they are considered too vague. But the alternative is a really dense legal code you have to be professionally trained to understand, and one that is so complicated that offenders can avoid prosecution based on dozens of technicalities.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#322

Post by solveit »

whatshisface wrote: post #197
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I think your comment clearly explains some ideas I've had for a while but have been struggling to elucidate. I think it's also why you see so much "pendulum-ism" in the tech world. Something about the current paradigm is difficult ("monoliths make it hard for large teams to release software quickly and independently!"), so then a new paradigm comes along which perhaps addresses some of the shortcomings of the…

I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it. Another thing to bear in mind is that none of the participants in the financial system have ever been interested in designing a financial system. They have been interested in making money.

> I don't believe the broader financial system ever tried out making transactions impossible to reverse. They might not have ever had the power to do it.

I mean, cash transactions are irreversible right? Unless you mean that there was always a government willing to force a reversal, in which case crypto (and all technical solutions) isn't all that different. It's just another day in the never-ending arms race between the regulator and the regulatee.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#323

Post by nouveaux »

padobson wrote: post #287
nouveaux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny." I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from s…

Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical. I disagree with the premise here. China doesn't need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is bad, they just need to agree that shooting nukes at San Fran is going to cost…

"That's more like markets and prices than it is appealing to a centralized hierarchy."

My thought process is more like a well regulated market than it is a king of the world. A market requires consensus. With your point about Shanghai, the consensus here is that nuclear war will ensure mutual destruction.

"it's pretty clear that on a long enough timeline, the regulation fails to punish the bad actors and actually restricts the good actors from fixing problems independently. "

Large cities have existed throughout history under all sorts of governance and regulations and they continue to thrive. The downfall of a city is more correlated with economic perils than lawlessness. Even with all the crime and homelessness in San Francisco, I'm willing to bet anyone that for 2021, San Francisco will have one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world. Urban centers will continue to require consensus through governance to be productive.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#324

Post by IAmWorried »

abbub wrote: post #308
colinmhayes wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I find it hard to believe there has ever been a better time to be alive than now. Obviously we've got a long way to go, but things have been continuously getting better overall, not worse.

I mean...based on what? We have more stuff, that's for sure. Our healthcare (when we can afford it) and nutrition is probably better and more consistent. Are we any happier? I'm not sure.

I honestly believe that if you remove social media from the equation, there is zero doubt that modern life makes you happier. There are so many awesome things you can do nowadays with modern tech, you have practically unlimited entertainment. But now you also have on-demand comparison, and as they say, comparison is the thief of joy. The sooner society realizes that social media is the REAL thing that is making people unhappy, the better.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#325

Post by mcculley »

notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#326

Post by thebean11 »

noahth wrote: post #273
robotresearcher wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights. Don't forget about the very important real progress being made.

A very large fraction of DeFi supporters do not regard all of those as desirable progress.

What is "very large"? What fraction of legacy bankers regard all of those as desirable progress? That's a pretty silly ad-hominem.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#327

Post by fabianhjr »

pjkundert wrote: post #39

This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theor…

> everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus)

Not really, Secure Scuttlebutt is highly subjective and has been in use for a while. ( https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ )

Some spinoffs adopt that explicit subjectivity of each user.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#328

Post by syngrog66 »

I agree wholeheartedly with this piece. Have for years.

I've invested a lot of time into thinking and learning about these sorts of "big" or societal/infrastructural/cultural problems, and figuring out what are the very top problems (AFAICT), and prioritized them down to say the 2 to 5 biggest and most growing threats that need to be eliminated, mitigated or fixed. I've begun working in my free time on what I see is the 2nd most urgent and apocalyptic threat:

democracy vulnerabilities -- the risk of free peaceful democracies (like the US, most especially, and despite our obvious impurity in that regard) devolving and collapsing, and trying to mitigate the attacks and corrosive effects from the bad actors pushing for it (which in the case of the US includes some treasonous and misguided domestic folks but also certain foreign governments as well.)

I'd love to make a difference too on what I see as the #1 threat/risk (greenhouse gas emissions, climate shifts, ecosystem collapse, pollution of our land/water/bodies) but... its harder for me to see ways where my skill mix and resources can help there. compared to the #2 one (democracy collapse.)

they are inter-linked, because #1 can increase forces pushing #2 to happen. and if #2 happens its more likely to make #1 worse than better.

but yeah I'm done with the purely worrying, thinking & talking stage. I'm acting. With as much urgency as I can afford to invest, time-wise.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#329

Post by AnimalMuppet »

GavinMcG wrote: post #122
lisper wrote: post #103

This essay seems deep and profoundly insightful but I don't think it actually is. Its ultimate call for "better designed regulation" is the no-true-scotsman fallacy in sheep's clothing. How do you know if your regulations are "properly designed?" If they produce good outcomes. But the problem is that there is no consensus about what a good outcome is. Some people are not happy, for example, unless women are quite lit…

It might not be deep and profoundly insightful, but if it sets things up in such a way that it can credibly utter the phrase "properly designed regulation" then it's moving in the right direction. In other words, properly designed regulation might not be a deep and profoundly insightful solution, but it might seem that way at first glance because our political discourse is so screwed up these days.

That's a really hard problem though. There are too many powerful interests, on too many sides, all trying to influence the regulations to give them a leg up.

The best regulations come as a balance of the competing interests. But that requires the different interests recognize each other as legitimate, or at least as needing to be met halfway as a practical matter. It can't be done in a scorched-earth atmosphere - all that can come out of that is regulation that is differently bad.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#330

Post by CapmCrackaWaka »

padobson wrote: post #309
syndacks wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me except for the reincarnation/another life bit. Bedsides scripture, is there any evidence of this in science? I'm asking genuinely here.

I'd ask you to check your basic assumption about science as an authority. Science is really good at transmitting information about deterministic processes, but is really bad at transmitting information about non-deterministic processes or even processes that are so complex that they appear non-deterministic e.g. human behavior. I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be use…

> I don't believe in reincarnation, but it's not hard at all for me to see how it can be used as a moral tool that helps people think long term.

At first glance things like this can sound good. However, religious ideologies like this are always double edged swords. In India, their caste system is heavily reinforced by the believe that people in a lower caste were "bad people" in a past life, and so there are no reservations about subjugating or otherwise discriminating against them.

This _always_ tends to happen to _every_ spiritual law scheme eventually, under different cultures. If a religion has enough followers, people have used its (seemingly good natured) ideology to kill and discriminate against those they don't like. This is the nature of humanity, I doubt there is any possible spiritual teachings that wouldn't eventually fall into this trap.

Post reply on HN