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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#651

Post by posix86 »

munificent wrote: post #388
delusional wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the argument is that transferrable. As a developer you don't really live within the legacy systems. At most you're a politician negotiating between the different component parts. Society is different. I don't like DeFi, but I get what they're feeling. It feels like society has left us behind. Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. You…

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

But can't the argument br made that programming, or computing generally, is the process of automating information processing - automating thought? Any many public offices and servants, as well as many regulatory processes and management positions are nothing but menial mental tasks?

What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with traditional methods - because the issue of trust falls away. And, they are implemented in a way that is transparent to everyone.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#652

Post by munificent »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #501
munificent wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone REALLY believe that "things don't work"™ because the systems put in place are flawed? I do. When society produces large-scale negative outcomes, I believe there are roughly four causes: 1. Because human groups are complex, interactive, iterative dynamical systems, the system as a whole may have emergent properties radically different from the intentions of any of its individual participants. No one in a…

>Some people are selfish and willing to harm others for their benefit. A few are outright sociopaths. Some fraction of these will end up in positions of power. Some sociopaths become business leaders and politicians. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is the opposite: what fraction of business leaders and politicians are sociopaths? I'll wager it's nearly 100%.

I would happily take that bet. I'm sure it's higher than the percentage of general population, but I'd bet money it's still less than 20%.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#653

Post by AutumnCurtain »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #557
jspaetzel wrote: post #306

All of this is just pessimistic complaining. Flip this and be optimistic and you'll find life isn't all that bad. Think about the last hundred years... * Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history. * Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work. * Society is able to support mo…

> Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work. You're assuming this axiomatically, at first blush this is simply nepotism which is typically a term w/ negative connotations.

It outright states meritocracy is wrong...

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#654

Post by munificent »

posix86 wrote: post #651
munificent wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

But can't the argument br made that programming, or computing generally, is the process of automating information processing - automating thought? Any many public offices and servants, as well as many regulatory processes and management positions are nothing but menial mental tasks? What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with tra…

Computing doesn't automate thought. It only automates processing data. In order to process anything, data has to be deliberately loaded from the real world into a computer. And in order for that processing to accomplish anything, a human has to take the results and take action on them.

If you think most social problems stem from people simply not knowing the right thing to do, then, sure, crunching some numbers might help. But my belief is that most social problems come from understanding the people around us, and having the right social structures and psychology to do the right thing. Computers will help with neither of those.

It's like having a nonfunctioning trackpad or display. No amount of software is going to fix that.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#655

Post by FooHentai »

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…

>These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so they usually propose a hard fork, or a rewrite in , or some other such shiny greenfield solution that promises eternal escape from the problems of the past.

An awful lot of the productive and unproductive effort in society is generated by idealistic inexperienced people forging ahead with something because they are unaware of the depth and complexity that awaits them. The paradox of experience is that you can avoid pointless pursuits but you also miss worthwhile ones due to low likelihood of success or high perceived effort.

Same experience as you but in systems administration and engineering, FWIW. Sure sign of an inexperienced sysadmin is their desire to throw things out and deploy new ones rather than figuring out why things are the way they are and seeing if they can be improved without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sure sign of an experienced admin is an almost inhuman ability to tolerate rotten systems without flipping a table, but also living with a lot of pointless shit that would benefit from a re-work or swap out.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#656

Post by int_19h »

bduerst wrote: post #626
meheleventyone wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although in reality enforcement can be selective and vary by jurisdiction so it’s also decentralised in implementation.

True, but it doesn't make sense to throw out the baby with the bathwater. From what I've seen being argued about proponents of defi (or smart contracts) is they operate on the premise that the centralized authority is the bad actor. While this is true in some cases, it's not all cases, and despite it's flaws there is still a need for centralized authorities to arbitrate.

The issue with centralized authorities that has to be mitigated somehow is that, once they appear, they tend to accummulate more and more power, and inevitably become a bad actor eventually, even if originally they weren't intending to.

A decentralized approach to this is to have the hierarchy of authority organized bottom-up rather than top-down. The hierarchy can then be toppled by "pulling the rug" at the bottom-most layer when it becomes abusive. OTOH centralized hierarchies tend to fight this by promoting principles such as "democratic centralism" (where all decision making has to flow up before it flows back down, allowing to control it at the top).

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#657

Post by pippy » 

  People like to use the term free market to describe the optimal market system, but that's pretty lousy terminology. The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.
I've never seen this put so concisely. I've found it frustrating that so much of the popular social-economic diatribe is based on outdated economic terminology from 100 years ago. So much has changed and yet the language does not.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#658

Post by WJW »

posix86 wrote: post #651
munificent wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

But can't the argument br made that programming, or computing generally, is the process of automating information processing - automating thought? Any many public offices and servants, as well as many regulatory processes and management positions are nothing but menial mental tasks? What decentralization provides is a platform on which these things can be automated and implemented much, much more easily than with tra…

Transparent to everyone able to read the code, perhaps. Those poor souls who have not learned to program in whatever defi language is hip this month will just have to accept that they will have no say in governance, nor even be able to discern what is happening and why. Bureaucracy is bad enough when it's made out of humans, let alone when you have unfeeling machines executing a (possibly buggy) script.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#659

Post by xipho »

Regulation is fine, life requires it. Your whole body is one big regulatory system, centralized in various ways, making sure everything in you is aligned. It's a fundamental part of (your) Life, and we (evolved apes) require other simularly regulated Life forms to persist. I often wonder if those who don't like regulation fail to grasp this. I also wonder if those tuning regulation should look more for clues in evolutionary biology. There are no easy answers, but evolution has produced some truly incredible things. Go to then ant thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#660

Post by ggm »

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…

> This article is profoundly insightful.

How about adding a "not" to that and trying it on for size? Is it really profound?

> There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure: https://holo.host -This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW.

Umm.. do we? Is this .. OK, forgive me, I've been penalty boxed for the first time in the last week, and should word this carefully, but.. my skeptical meter is on stun. Is this 'shilling' which is regrettably common in cryptocurrency conversations?

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