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100 years of whatever this will be

apenwarr.ca

871–880 of 924 posts

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#871

> We don't need deregulation. We need better designed regulation. The article's thesis is so obvious that it's amazing it needs to be argued in this particular way. Two thoughts here: 1) It's often problematic when people take absolutist views on things, i.e. "government regulation is ALWAYS bad." The optimal amount is never zero. 2) After following some "dark enlightenment" people on Twitter and libertarians with a…

> After following some "dark enlightenment" people on Twitter and libertarians with a subset of very far right viewpoints, it's becoming clear that lots of these people claim to want "freedom," but what they really want is freedom from the existing power hierarchies, and to create new ones in which they are on top again.

The linked essay explicitly makes the point that in the absence of formalised structures, power will accrue into an implicit elite from either pre-existing social networks or the formation of in-groups of those who can network and who tick the boxes of qualities the group views as good. Libertarians want to remove the formal structure of government in favour of a new unelected and unaccountable elite arising from whichever group they feel part of. At least the ones that aren't just dupes do.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are ok with being wealthy. Yup. 100%. I doubt you'll find an organism on Earth that's not ok with having access to more resources than it needs. Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources? Sounds like you might want to also consider as well the iterative prisoners dilemma and the tragedy of the commons with respe…

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I've been wary of wealth for so long that I've internalized that feeling, so I forgot to phrase it more like "people are ok with being wealthy while others are poor". I could never be a billionaire or even a millionaire, and then walk around and not see the countless people suffering all around me, and around the world. Now, I imagine many of them feel that they are making a p…

> This isn't just feel-good woo woo stuff. A society could be built

In addition to my above recommendations you might also want to investigate your ideologies. It seems to me your view of the world and how it works, as presented here in your comments, is from a woefully low resolution representation of the extraordinary detail that goes into society and economic systems.

> around love as surely as it could be built around fear in capitalist societies.

No. Not at all, in any way shape or form. You'll probably want to investigate, as well, human psychology, neurology, and the history of civilization. But start with the iterated prisoner's dilemma.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources? Only in a religious context where they see a benefit to vows of poverty or simplicity. Wealth as we have it right now is a huge pain in the ass. You have to worry about what some idiot in the Fed is doing, what some senile old man in an office is doing, and what some old Boome…

This has problem been rolling around in my head and where I’ve landed is that humans are terrible administrators, mainly because we get bored administering something after it’s built. We see it in software development all the time. People are less interested in maintaining code they’ve inherited and are more interested in building their own. I don’t think this is a bad thing per se. We’re creative optimistic creature…

> mainly because we get bored administering something after it’s built.

That's only for people high in "openness to experience". People low in openness are more than happy to plod along doing the same thing forever.

https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/openness-big-five-perso...

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#874
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.

Larceny (small- or industrial-scale) can only exist if counterparties are kept ignorant of previous larceny on the part of the bad actor. It takes centralized systems to keep people ignorant. In good, decentralized systems which demand long-term public track records of agent behaviour, with decentralized memory of these records, malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larcen…

> malevolent behaviour by an agent would rapidly make that agent incapable of future larceny.

This is a naïve claim which is disproved by all available evidence.

Markets without central regulation are always exploited by participants with more knowledge. Regulations are required to keep the playing field level.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Assuming if somebody breaks an agreement, you just hit them over the head with a stick. But that's not a society any of us want to live in.

I didn't say you should run society like that. I only provided an example to prove that centralized control is not necessary to enforce rules. Typically people form groups that enforce certain rules. You can have bigger and smaller groups. Some big countries are very centralized, others less so - I think federalization in the US serves to counteract centralization? Ideally people have some degree of freedom to switch…

Centralized authority is definitely necessary to enforce rules in any practical sense.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#876

I've been thinking a lot lately about first principles. For example, the Golden Rule is great, but the concept of reincarnation transcends it, making it self-evident. The Book of Genesis probably started "in a beginning", not "in the beginning". And so on. When I look around at the state of the world today, it just makes me so tired. Everyone's running around on autopilot and not questioning the basic assumptions. It…

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.

For me, reincarnation means that there is always an observer. Regardless of our mental state, whether we're awake or asleep, intoxicated, locked in a sensory deprivation tank, etc, we're still observing our lives.

What happens when we die? I believe that our consciousness finds a way to continue somewhere else. There's no gap, because not being conscious is a non-sequitur. We just fade out and fade in seamlessly, across time, without our memories, like tuning into a new TV station.

I think that self-awareness stems from source consciousness, which is a universal force like gravity. At the most basic level, it's God experiencing itself through every possible contextual reality. Because what else is there to do? We explain it as emergent behavior arising from stochastic processes, but that's from an individual mindset. As a whole, our consciousnesses act more like waves interacting with one another and resonating at frequencies we feel subjectively as harmony and discord.

There are a number of basic operations that science could use to "prove" that reincarnation exists. We could merge and split minds, pause minds and unpause them, turn parts of them on and off, play minds at different speeds, put them in simulations, etc. Aliens probably have access to technology like this, and these ideas have been explored a ton in sci fi. But at the end of the day, would knowing the truth give us any more satisfaction than say, recreational drugs like psychedelics? I'm just not sure.

This wavy-stochastic-quantum aspect of reality may seem far-fetched, except it's looking like the wave equations that underpin quantum mechanics are nothing special, and in fact can be simulated classically on ordinary computers:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06787

https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.04...

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v13/183

This lends a lot of credibility to the idea that reality is a simulation. And that we can (and probably are) interacting with our reality in macro ways that follow similar math to the micro. This New Age - quantum connection always seemed pretty out there to me, but now I'm having trouble finding a better model for reality.

One way to look at consciousness/life that I find interesting is as a quantum influencer. Life may direct probabilities around it to work in its favor. Reincarnation has a lot in common with multiverse theory. As in, if the observer always exists, then it exists no matter how improbable it is to exist. In other words, when an individual is born, a universe may get created for it. When it dies, it may go on living in its own reality in a separate universe, we just can't be with it anymore. ESP experiments suggest that life may influence "real" probability from quantum random number generators, choosing the reality most beneficial to life. So Schrödinger's cat may always be alive from its perspective, even if it dies from ours, although these experiments may be inherently impossible to replicate:

https://hackaday.com/tag/pear-study/

https://www.enigmaticdevices.com/replicating-the-princeton-p...

My favorite takeaway from all of this is that if we are all one, drawn from the same source consciousness, then each of our beliefs are no more or less valid than anyone else's. We can choose to see the miracle of life and the magic in each moment.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about, this is just the best working theory that I've found so far.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#877
post #4

I strongly believe that money itself has been corrupted lately, this then causes all number of bad flow on effects to happen. A massive shift happened when central banks started getting involved in direct purchases of various asset types and we started to see a major distortion happen in monetary policy that which has distorted the functioning of money itself. For example who would care if their business is completel…

> As a whole I think people need to ask what money is again and have some serious conversations about what money and the monetary system should be.

Money is not some concrete thing that has some inherent value. It's never been that. It's always been a promise, an abstract thing backed by collective trust.

Fractional reserve banking was not a coup d'etat of an elite few performed to disenfranchise the 99% in order to ballast the 1%. It was a considered decision by rational actors and was necessary to enable economic growth since its introduction.

In many ways it's wonderful that the current generation is questioning the old ways of doing things. This is how progress is made. I'm down. But money, government, everything which is the product of historical trial-and-error is a Chesterson's Fence: you really do need to understand why it's there before you try to rip it out and replace it with something else. And it's just so clear to me that basically nobody trying to replace fiat currency with crypto or whatever actually understands why fiat came to be.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#878
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the value that money represents is a single value. But why is it a scalar and not a vector? For example, why isn't everything priced with a value and a carbon cost? That would make prices vectors instead of scalars Suppose for the sake of the argument that the main countries making up the world economy agree to re-price everything in terms of length 2 vectors (standard_cost, carbon_cost). The former element is meas…

Would this vector stop at length two? How about other "nudge" worthy metrics? See existing cross-border tariffs for a long list of physical properties which influence tariffs for a perceived and often disputed, social objective.

> Would this vector stop at length two? How about other "nudge" worthy metrics?

that's a good point. there's definitely other societal goals that can be nudged toward through prices.

but on another hand, i'm not sure thinking about prices as vectors is that helpful. to change behaviour a regulator needs a way to internalise the external costs into prices, or some equivalent mechanism, and some enforcement mechanism for non-compliance.

but if you have all that, it isn't clear what use price vectors are. and if you only had price vectors but the extra components weren't reflected in the price, with no enforcement mechanism, then they won't change behaviour.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4 is just 1. Compromise inherently involves both parties giving something up. Submission and compromise may be similar in many cases, but they are not the same. > That only works for up to N parties. In the cases where it only works for N parties (which can vary wildly depending on the situation), agreed. > You can't achieve stable compromise with everyone ever because you have parties that are not rectifiable. Tha…

That which is may be that which is not, unless it is and your senses don't deceive you, and no evil genie is in play, and then it probably is unless you're trapped in a simulation. But you can't solve everything with consensus, and you're welcome to play word games but forcing people is not "consent".

> That which is may be that which is not, unless it is and your senses don't deceive you, and no evil genie is in play, and then it probably is unless you're trapped in a simulation.

Very nice!

Can you give an example where "That which is may be that which is not" (with or without the "unless it is" part)?

And considering this idea: do any conclusions or interesting ideas logically follow from it with respect to our preceding conversation? I'm not seeing any, but the odds of my senses deceiving me seems high.

> But you can't solve everything with consensus...

Right you are, hence my lack of making that assertion.

> ...and you're welcome to play word games...

As you are welcome to engage in evasion and rhetoric.

> ...but forcing people is not "consent".

Right again, and I've made no assertion that it is.

This is a fun conversation, I hope we can continue it - perhaps we can drill down and determine where it is that you and I disagree (assuming we actually do).

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#880

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folks very quickly forget that regulations are written in blood. You know what other kinds of regulations are onerous? Everything aviation related. Every corner of aviation. And yet we're not clamoring to deregulate aviation because the consequences are so clear and self-evident. Regulations are generally there for a reason. If they aren't, they need to be amended, we don't need to make our own money, except for blac…

Not all regulations are written in blood, and not all regulations have their intended effect. Aviation is a great example of this. Yes aviation in most of the developed world continues to be extremely safe and the regulations are largely written in blood, off the backs of many failed aviation experiments. But regulations _are_ stifling aircraft design and the FAA is trying to desperately figure out how to not calcify…

Rethought and improved, yes. Abandoned as fundamentally broken, no.
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