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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#441

Post by jagged-chisel »

kube-system wrote: post #335
maerF0x0 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood the reason we even have marriage defined in government at all, and thusly would include "gay" marriage (all marriage is marriage if it's undefined)... We don't have a government definition of prayer or baptism, but for some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Also why do they get varyingly get tax incentives or disincen…

Marriage is a contract. Governments regulate the enforcement of contracts. That's why they're involved. The religious part of marriage is entirely optional.

But the government doesn't get involved at the outset of new contracts between businesses. I get that government, via the courts, has involvement when there's a dispute, but it's not like two companies wanting a contractural relationship have to file the contract with the government when it's created.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#442

Post by crdrost »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #382
davidw wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's part of the point of the article. Those rules are not some kind of distributed system. They are centralized.

One person can hit another person over the head without any centralized authority being involved. So I don't think your claim is correct at all. Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick.

Right but that gets into scaling problems and arguments... for a hundred people sticks might work, for a thousand it gets dicey, by 10,000 things start to break down as factionalism spontaneously emerges: within our tribe we handle things via social cohesion and weak displays of symbolic force, outside our tribe we handle things via stronger displays of retribution

Point is that "hit with a stick" happens to also centralize power, albeit dynamically, at scale.

If you're really looking for a counterexample to centralized institutions, a better metaphor is probably "ecosystem." No centralized authority tells the lions to be kings and queens of the savannah, their status as apex predators comes dynamically from some transform {biosphere} -> {biosphere} finding a natural fixed point which has stability simply from the abstract mathematics of fixed points. A similar dynamic stability exists in the US in the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats, no central authority says that there have to be only two parties, but rather the rules of the game state "we divide everything into districts and every race is run as winner-take-all" which naturally induces this 50/50 two-party split that will destroy the country eventually

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#443

Post by generalizations »

nouveaux wrote: post #294
generalizations wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples…

"someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical." 100% agree with the example of someone's tree on their 200 acre farm. However, if I have a dying tree that's a risk to falling on my neighbor's house, it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government. Proximity to others plays a big role.

> it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government

The neighbor wouldn't be the tyrannical one. And, there's better solutions - put the liability for the tree on the person whose property it's on. That's a fair assignment of responsibility. I do think it would be tyrannical for the government to declare that all trees must be removed if they meet certain criteria.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#444

Post by pcthrowaway »

potatolicious wrote: post #113
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…

> I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus. At the risk of pedantry (but in this case I think warranted): consensus literally means every single person agrees. This is as opposed to something like democratic rule, where rules can be made and enforced even if not every single person involved agrees. I think OP is using the precise (non-colloquial) definition of "consensus" and rightly points o…

Where do you get this definition? Wiktionary just talks about widespread agreement, not unanimous agreement: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/consensus

To be fair, I've heard it used (presumably) the same way, but I understood this to be a type of consensus that relies on an agreement by all.

From the wikipedia definition on consensus-based decision-making:

> The focus on establishing agreement of the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion, differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#445

Post by seaourfreed »

Watch the corruption in Wall Street, Congress (w/Lobbyists) and the Establishment:

* First Wall Street used modern tech in 1980s and 1990s to make better markets

* BUT then corruption happened when Wall Street maxed out making money from tech in efficient markets. They then shifted to taking money via a rigged economy.

* Wall Street rigged economy is shown by high frequency firms front running trades (at least claimed and maybe proven in Flash Boys book)

* 2008 Mortgage Crisis shows Wall Street rigging the economy

* $3.5 billion per year flowing through lobbyists successfully causes congress to sell out.

* The economy has been rigged for the last 30+ years

* At least bitcoin and crypto are enabling those abused by a rigged economy to create competitors

* Creating a "bank account" has been blocked from entrepreneurs for 40 years. Crypto at least enables businesses to be created with crypto-bank-account equivalents, transfers, and financial transactions.

The establishment is the root of the problem. Entrepreneurship by good ethical people competing and winning must be a strategic part of the solution.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#446

Post by mcguire »

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.

Are you talking about the same Decentralized Finance?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#447

Post by dv_dt »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #343
pydry wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the reason you got gay marriage but not universal healthcare is that gay marriage doesn't threaten corporate interests.

Universal Healthcare doesn't particularly threaten corporate interests either. Remember when centrist Obama tried to implement the Heritage foundation approved version and everyone went a little crazy for no obvious reason? It would be comforting to think that some evil geniuses were holding back universal healthcare for their own benefit, but it's mostly just lingering stupidity and racism that's holding America bac…

I interpret the events as Obama did pass the Heritage foundation version and it passed because it was more acceptable than any public option let alone universal healthcare.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#448

Post by generalizations »

guntars wrote: post #281
generalizations wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples…

> Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish. That's an interesting interpretation. To me, what's more nasty and brutish than a fellow man? I always thought the divide was explained by how in the country everyone knows everyone and have repeated interactions with the same people. It's pri…

> Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)?

That's a...fairly prejudiced generalization you've made there.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#449

Post by uniqueuid »

nouveaux wrote: post #96
uniqueuid wrote: post #20

Avery is such a treasure trove. What's hard about this particular situation, and what we often don't recognize enough: - We regularly overestimate the power of "traditional" systems such as government, courts, civil society. To a large degree, we've just been lucky that they work, but it's neither obvious nor guaranteed that they will continue to do so. - One of the hard problems is that we don't have any clue how ne…

"To a large degree, we've just been lucky that they work, but it's neither obvious nor guaranteed that they will continue to do so." While I agree that it's not obvious our current systems will continue to work, I don't think the system is born out of luck. The system is largely based on trial and error in the pursuit of what the majority wants. Yes, there are those with outsized influences and corruption at every le…

I completely agree.

Luck was not what created the current system, but luck was what left it working for so long. This idea is of course not new, it's the essence of "ages of discord" etc.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#450

Post by delusional »

mcguire wrote: post #435
delusional wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that all the things you are listing are also on the inside of the system. There's certainly an element of rebellion to protests for example, but it's also a consolation price. Elon Musk doesn't have to protest, neither does Jeff Bozos. They just call up their preferred politician and the system dances for them. Protests are an opium fed to the disenfranchised masses to keep them from fundamentally changing…

But grassroots campaigns and protests do result in change. Not quickly enough for many people, but if your alternative is burning everything down....

Grassroots campaigns and protests let you change the small stuff around the edges. The system provides you with just enough knobs to play with to keep you oblivious to all the ones you can't.
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