Ugh. I'm torn when I see things like this. I sincerely like the rationalist community, but I never quite engaged with it. And posts like this seem to confirm th

Ugh. I'm torn when I see things like this. I sincerely like the rationalist community, but I never quite engaged with it. And posts like this seem to confirm that it was probably a good decision on my part. The author identifies 3 successful instances of what he wants to exist, and then fails to ask the question of "how do they accomplish what I want to?" In particular, one of the marketplaces, the financial markets, is several orders of magnitude larger than the others and has a huge vested interest in getting issues like this right. And they largely have. For instance the capital issues are handled through a broker system, where the aggregation of opposing bets allows for mitigation of risk from margined bets, and the settlement processes, such as daily settlement of price differences in futures. If you're trying to build something complex, it's probably a bad idea to start from a blank slate. A lot of our existing solutions were hard-won, and it would be a shame to simply discard that understanding. The programming community, and others connected to it, seem to disregard history and existing institutions as obsolete or to be distrusted. For a field that's less than a century old, that's somewhat defensible. Nassim Taleb makes the point in Antifragile that ideas usually have something akin to a constant hazard rate. Something old which is still used is less likely to be replaced than something that has only been around for a short while. The nascency of most of science makes it hard then to determine what is and isn't fungible. But marketplaces are as old as trade. The aspects that we see in them are far less arbitrary than you'd think, even if it's hard to express exactly why they are there. If you're going to work at building another version of something that has been around for so long, you'd be wise to start by analyzing and understanding what is already out there. I think it's the engineering equivalent of Eric Weinstein's policy around talking to people you know to be intelligent. If they seem to be saying something obvious, they are probably saying something subtle. And if they say something that seems wrong, they may instead be saying something counterintuitive. Similarly, if part of an antiquated system that is still in use seems to be useless, needlessly complex, or downright harmful, there is a good chance that you simply don't understand it. I was really excited last year when I saw some people within lesswrong trying to become more accommodative and appreciative of "hufflepuffs" within the community (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DbdP8hD2AcKcdSsgF/project-hufflepuff-planting-the-flag https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DbdP8hD2AcKcdSsgF/project-hu...). I really hope that effort continues and sees fruition. Hangups like this could be easily spotted and remedied by having a contingent of people who are less philosophical and more battle-hardened within your ranks.