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Isn’t the answer that we are moving towards decentralised / self sovereign platforms with more creative ways to transfer value that naturally evolve the right e

by zakum1 8y ago

Isn’t the answer that we are moving towards decentralised / self sovereign platforms with more creative ways to transfer value that naturally evolve the right economics? The irony is that bitcoin, the pioneer, confirms your hypothesis because it relies on a form of intentional waste (POW) to disincentivise bad behaviour. PoW is the new bureaucracy. I do think we will find better ways, and decentralisation is the natural outcome.

elvinyung 8y ago
I emphatically do not think that decentralization is the natural outcome, nor that it's optimal. On this topic I would recommend one of Scott's most well-known essays, Meditations on Moloch [1]. The meat of it is this: > …in some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse. If top-town authoritarianism is at one extreme of the spectrum, then completely decentralized systems is the other undesirable extreme, equally bad if not worse: if there is no regulation, then there is no strong coordination, and a race-to-the-bottom situation ensues (in optimizing for X). If everyone is acting game-theoretically optimally, then anyone who tries to improve the situation gets eliminated. It might be locally optimal, but it's highly unlikely to be globally optimal. Decentralization means being a slave to no one, which means being a slave to the incentive system, which means being a slave to everyone else. But I would also encourage thinking of it not as a dualism, a strict choice between bureaucracy and blockchains, but as a spectrum instead. This means that there's an entire world of valid choices in between. I would very much argue that the optimum can be found just by moving closer to the middle. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- forkerenok 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. My thought here is that improving situation doesn't have to happen in the game. One can step out of the game and offer a new one. I.e. the quoted judgement about decentralised systems is not as grave if you don't look at them as closed systems.
  - elvinyung 8y ago
    My interpretation is that actually that is part of the idea. If you want to change the game, if you want to make a new game, then that is strong coordination.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Everyone is always acting game-theoretically optimally. A top-down authoritarian doesn't get his powers from a deity; there was a coordinated effort of a decentralized group of people to get him there and sustain him. He, or whoever pushed to get him in charge, was that anyone trying to improve the situation. No reason the same mechanism can't act to make other changes to the status quo.
  - elvinyung 8y ago
    > Everyone is always acting game-theoretically optimally. This isn't true at all. The fact that the efficient market hypothesis doesn't seem to hold is already the proof of that, and the same reasoning applies to other social behaviors [4]. Furthermore, many, many, many, many studies in neuroeconomics and behavioral economics (and related fields) [1] have shed light on the bounded rationality of human actors in decision making. Game-theoretically optimal decisions is a specific, well-defined thing that's different from making decisions based on the affects and biases of the preconscious and unconscious. You can't just tautologically define "game-theoretically optimal" to be whatever decision someone ends up making. What does this mean? The direct implication is that it's neither game-theoretically optimal nor inevitable for stateless humans to enter into a social contract that eventually cements itself into a state apparatus. A top-down authoritarian doesn't get their powers from a deity, yes, but it wasn't quite explicit coordination either. To demonstrate using a brief example, one of the models of the evolutionary stages of the social contract [2][3] is that states were a natural conclusion of tribal societies, which were themselves a natural conclusion of lineal societies, i.e. families. Lineal societies most likely weren't formed through explicit consent, i.e. early stateless infants probably didn't explicitly decide to enter into a social contract. There's basically no particular a priori reason why families exist (for example, the Ik people in Uganda seem to have no or a very weak concept of using familial relations for survival, even to protect their young), and very likely that this evolution was just the model happened to win out due to random noise in history rather than actual optimality. Again I would like to stress how much the current societal configuration is mostly just noise instead of signal. [1] For an introduction, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-a... [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nomadology https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nomadology [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118317.Anti_Oedipus https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118317.Anti_Oedipus [4] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate-equilibria/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate-...
- natmaka 8y ago
  Top-town authoritarianism has a major flaw: when the Supreme Leader errs and formulates a dangerous order the whole organisation may be in jeopardy. Coordination doesn't imply regulation, conventions (which doesn't imply any chief/judge) are sufficient. Top-town authoritarianism is IMHO worse than decentralization.
  - elvinyung 8y ago
    Yes. They're both very bad. The point, I think, is to look in the middle.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
If you look at Google, Facebook, etc we seem to be moving to centralised self-sovereign platforms rather than decentralised.

by zakum1 8y ago

elvinyung 8y ago

I emphatically do not think that decentralization is the natural outcome, nor that it's optimal. On this topic I would recommend one of Scott's most well-known essays, Meditations on Moloch [1]. The meat of it is this: > …in some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse. If top-town authoritarianism is at one extreme of the spectrum, then completely decentralized systems is the other undesirable extreme, equally bad if not worse: if there is no regulation, then there is no strong coordination, and a race-to-the-bottom situation ensues (in optimizing for X). If everyone is acting game-theoretically optimally, then anyone who tries to improve the situation gets eliminated. It might be locally optimal, but it's highly unlikely to be globally optimal. Decentralization means being a slave to no one, which means being a slave to the incentive system, which means being a slave to everyone else. But I would also encourage thinking of it not as a dualism, a strict choice between bureaucracy and blockchains, but as a spectrum instead. This means that there's an entire world of valid choices in between. I would very much argue that the optimum can be found just by moving closer to the middle. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

forkerenok 8y ago
Thanks for sharing this. My thought here is that improving situation doesn't have to happen in the game. One can step out of the game and offer a new one. I.e. the quoted judgement about decentralised systems is not as grave if you don't look at them as closed systems.
- elvinyung 8y ago
  My interpretation is that actually that is part of the idea. If you want to change the game, if you want to make a new game, then that is strong coordination.
icebraining 8y ago
Everyone is always acting game-theoretically optimally. A top-down authoritarian doesn't get his powers from a deity; there was a coordinated effort of a decentralized group of people to get him there and sustain him. He, or whoever pushed to get him in charge, was that anyone trying to improve the situation. No reason the same mechanism can't act to make other changes to the status quo.
- elvinyung 8y ago
  > Everyone is always acting game-theoretically optimally. This isn't true at all. The fact that the efficient market hypothesis doesn't seem to hold is already the proof of that, and the same reasoning applies to other social behaviors [4]. Furthermore, many, many, many, many studies in neuroeconomics and behavioral economics (and related fields) [1] have shed light on the bounded rationality of human actors in decision making. Game-theoretically optimal decisions is a specific, well-defined thing that's different from making decisions based on the affects and biases of the preconscious and unconscious. You can't just tautologically define "game-theoretically optimal" to be whatever decision someone ends up making. What does this mean? The direct implication is that it's neither game-theoretically optimal nor inevitable for stateless humans to enter into a social contract that eventually cements itself into a state apparatus. A top-down authoritarian doesn't get their powers from a deity, yes, but it wasn't quite explicit coordination either. To demonstrate using a brief example, one of the models of the evolutionary stages of the social contract [2][3] is that states were a natural conclusion of tribal societies, which were themselves a natural conclusion of lineal societies, i.e. families. Lineal societies most likely weren't formed through explicit consent, i.e. early stateless infants probably didn't explicitly decide to enter into a social contract. There's basically no particular a priori reason why families exist (for example, the Ik people in Uganda seem to have no or a very weak concept of using familial relations for survival, even to protect their young), and very likely that this evolution was just the model happened to win out due to random noise in history rather than actual optimality. Again I would like to stress how much the current societal configuration is mostly just noise instead of signal. [1] For an introduction, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-a... [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nomadology https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nomadology [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118317.Anti_Oedipus https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118317.Anti_Oedipus [4] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate-equilibria/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate-...
natmaka 8y ago
Top-town authoritarianism has a major flaw: when the Supreme Leader errs and formulates a dangerous order the whole organisation may be in jeopardy. Coordination doesn't imply regulation, conventions (which doesn't imply any chief/judge) are sufficient. Top-town authoritarianism is IMHO worse than decentralization.
- elvinyung 8y ago
  Yes. They're both very bad. The point, I think, is to look in the middle.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago

If you look at Google, Facebook, etc we seem to be moving to centralised self-sovereign platforms rather than decentralised.