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I agree. Trust is fundamental to human society, and without it we can't function. No matter how many fancy technological solutions you layer on top. I think th

I agree. Trust is fundamental to human society, and without it we can't function. No matter how many fancy technological solutions you layer on top. I think there's a deeper problem that you're ignoring. The desire for trustless systems didn't materialize out of nothing, as has been pointed out many times in the cryptocurrency discussion space. Some of it is surely coming from a libertarian angle of absolute personal freedom to avoid the "unfair" regulation from the government, to avoid the compulsions the state imposes on each of us in order to grant us the rights it does. I think that's a very small part of it though. I think most of the desire for "zero-trust" comes from a disillusion of the current parties seen as trusted. I can at least say that this is what drives the desire within me. It's very hard to see the fairness in paying taxes when I see the people labeled the most trustworthy abuse the system to hide money in tax havens all while using their entrusted positions to lead the economy of the world into an ever deepening hole. When we see the actors labeled "trustworthy" acting maliciously, it becomes hard to trust the system that calls them "trustworthy". I go to work every day where I'm asked to ignore my own instincts and instead do whatever some faceless "process" claims is the right thing to work on. I'm asked to ignore the horrible state of our products and instead focus on the massive piles of money we shovel in the door from out entrusted position as a financial institution. Meanwhile I can turn on the TV to see the very same people talk about how they just couldn't have known that billions were being stolen from my government because it's just so hard to be a bank. That shit does stuff to your trust in other people and I'm not alone in that disillusionment. In that light I think the discussion makes much more sense, even if it doesn't make it any more helpful. Trust is still important, but the current method of obtaining trust, and the by extension people we imbue with it, is broken. For someone in the middle of that, it becomes very logical to discard the whole thing like a junior rewriting a legacy business app.

strogonoff 4y ago
I heard the opinion where people don’t want to pay taxes that they don’t think do something good, and because the government can freeze their accounts if they don’t pay then they believe it’s unfair. Presumably, there’s understanding that one cannot participate in a complex web of interdependencies that is advanced human society without giving up complete freedom, due to the presence of the aforementioned malicious actors. So I don’t understand why not assume other people—whom one without immense hubris would assume to be equally smart—and whom hopefully one voted for, directly or not—have struggled with it and arrived at a solution that works? And if one legitimately thinks it’s a bad solution and cares enough about it, why not attempt to fix it instead? Is this a failure of democracy? Could it be that it moves too slowly for the modern age? Or is there a belief in some underlying conspiracy due to which democracy is not a democracy and no change is possible? Regarding rogue agents exploiting the system to avoid paying taxes, I don’t think should be a factor that affects my decision on whether I should pay taxes (like what a criminal does shouldn’t be my guiding principle). What I would agree on is that there’re people incentivised to attempt to benefit at someone else’s cost, and that those people exist everywhere including corporations, institutions, and the government. I’d also agree that, regarding government specifically, it’s worse because such malicious actors are incentivised to actively seek power because power converts to money very well. It’s a truly regrettable state of affair, because government corruption leads to corruption elsewhere. I think part of the issue is democracies being liable to be influenced by kleptocracies in other countries, who funnel unjustly extracted money into Western economies much to the benefit of individuals at the receiving end. I just don’t think this can be solved technically, we either work on people not being jerks or we will have them find ways to be jerks regardless of any checks, barring complete thought control and predictive crime enforcement dystopia. --- As another analogy, it’s like a distinction between the spirit and the letter. The spirit is the guiding principle, and the letter is a lossy way to express it. Automatic conversion between the spirit and a letter is not possible: this is a philosophical issue adjacent to the hard problem of consciousness; one human not being able to convey to another human the entirety of what they think or feel, words being always interpreted through another mind’s lens. Whether the letter can be expressed on paper or as a smart contract, the letter is never going to be equal fidelity to that of the spirit, and for understandable reasons (such as “fallible humans have written it”) should never have precedence over the spirit. So I wish we invested the effort that goes into inventing higher and higher fidelity letters into, say, alleviating whatever pushes people to violate the spirit in the first place. It’s a much more complex meatspace problem, though.
- Banana699 4y ago
  >there’s understanding that one cannot participate in a complex web of interdependencies that is advanced human society without giving up complete freedom The problem is, that web is not just a neutral thing that arises organically, it's a bloated mess of faceless coercion that is disproportionally manipulated by a minority. It used to be that a tribe agreed not to kill or cheat each other and defend against common threats, that's something very basic that I have trouble imagining anybody not wanting. There were manipulators and status seekers, always, but they were forced to divide their attention between the thousands and thousands of tribes and sub-tribes, if I percieve my tribe to be controlled by a trump or a biden or a putin, I can always take my family and go elsewhere, at no more cost than the price of the trip and the risk I'm accepting by leaving the tribe. Fast forward through 10K years of agriculture, and we're sheep. Lovecraftian faceless horrors called states divide up the entire earth into 200 divisions or so, the vast majority of which are irrelevant (except in deploying violence against you :)), about 10 or 15 control pretty much 99% of what you do. The size acts as a force multiplier for manipualtors and status seekers: Now only the best trumps and bidens and putins compete to govern you, and the winner, as they say, takes all. They can do whatever the F U C K they can, let me tell you, quite honestly and coming from a guy who appreciates democracy and misses it in his country, that democracy is a laugable excuse of a government scheme. You can tell your bullies you hate them? Great, but I'm betting they already know. You can whine and threaten to get them out of the office ? that's it ? you spend a whole 2 or 4 or 6 years raging at a bunch of people and getting other people to rage with you and other people to rage against you, so that, finally, the bullies can "only" bully you as much as they already have, and not more ? and this the best case scenario that you can only get if you're good at convincing people your cause is worthy ? Is this your local optima ? There is no feedback, the massive inertia of millions and millions of obedient drones serve to condition and dampen any single insurrection. The contradictory feedback of the huge and impotent masses all cancel each other in an orgy of destructive interference, and what remains is the will of the rulers. The coordination overhead asymmetrically influnces those trying to live in freedom, and favors those trying to crush it. Words alone can't express how I despise and loath hierarchical societies. Words alone can't express how I loath complex huge things that are out of my control and harm me. I don't think that feelings can be serialized into strings, but if they can, it would take me a very large one to express all the myriad and subtle ways that I hate nation states. >I don’t understand why not assume other people—whom one without immense hubris would assume to be equally smart I don't think intelligence play into it, at least not the kind of intelligence I respect. Smart people are bullied all the time. Smart people had 10K years to fix the massive clusterfuck that is hierarchical societies or toss them into the dirstiest toilet, and they couldn't. It would be the height of hubris to assume you can succeed where billions failed. >Is this a failure of democracy? No, it's a failure of people being dumb enough to think that the social protocls and algorithms that fared well in networks of N=100, struggled in networks of N=1000 and absoultely tore themselves apart in networks of N=10000, can scale well to networks of N=10000000 and above. Anything that doesn't respect the underlying reality is doomed to repeatedly live in fear and failure and die in confusion, and the reality is that distributed systems are hard. It's even harder when the processors were never built to operate like this. You're trying to reinvent ants and bees with primates, and failing so hard that the result is not recognisably any of them. "Democracy" is a bandaid, a flawed ideal that can never work, and makes things worse by making you think you're doing something. >I just don’t think this can be solved technically Correct, it's solved by not being large clusterfuck of coercion and control, by being small and simple and beautiful, by recognizing the fundamental limits to cooperation that being flesh and blood enforces on you, and respecting them. >work on people not being jerks You can't. Being a jerk is encoded in your DNA. Life competes. Life meta-competes: competes at the level of the rules of competition itself, to bend and distort it in their favor, the meta-game. Life at its very core is the aspiration of a single celled asshole to convert the entire universe into more versions of itself, it began so, and it remains so. The only way to emulate altruism, to hack it onto a system after the fact, is to make selfish assholery more expensive than selfless altruism, always. Sometimes that would make sense, like within the boundaries of your gene pool, few people, I love to imagine, think about deceiving and coercing their flesh and blood, and fewer still actually go along all the way. But that natural familiar affection declines exponentially as the genetic diff grows, and you have to resort to complement it with artifical measures. The problem with artifical measures, though, is that they are second-class citizens, they are never as convincing and natural as natural inlicnations. It's an uphill fight. Invent laws and rules and regulations and constitutions and religions and mainfestos Till The Cows Come Home, you can't put them in the DNA, and DNA is what life is, and what a thing is what a thing does. So it is an arms race: I invent a God today to tell people to be nice to each other, and tomorrow a smooth-talking smooth-brained asshole manages to convince people God Ackshually wants us to do his bidding instead, I invent democracy the day after tomorrow to convince people that everybody matters, and by the weekend that same breed of smooth-talking smooth-brained assholes find the exploit. Unless, and until, every single nerve signal going in or out of a brain is subject to your rules (by dystopia, by utopian merging of all human minds into one, by anything), you don't have rules, you have suggestions, protocols, paradigm. "Would you please agree not to fuck with me ?", maybe I will, who knows, I'm not my best self all the time, and there are worse. Why put yourself with a bunch of strange assholes and bet your wellbeing on them obeying a buggy protocol they are never truly compelled to follow ?

strogonoff 4y ago

I heard the opinion where people don’t want to pay taxes that they don’t think do something good, and because the government can freeze their accounts if they don’t pay then they believe it’s unfair. Presumably, there’s understanding that one cannot participate in a complex web of interdependencies that is advanced human society without giving up complete freedom, due to the presence of the aforementioned malicious actors. So I don’t understand why not assume other people—whom one without immense hubris would assume to be equally smart—and whom hopefully one voted for, directly or not—have struggled with it and arrived at a solution that works? And if one legitimately thinks it’s a bad solution and cares enough about it, why not attempt to fix it instead? Is this a failure of democracy? Could it be that it moves too slowly for the modern age? Or is there a belief in some underlying conspiracy due to which democracy is not a democracy and no change is possible? Regarding rogue agents exploiting the system to avoid paying taxes, I don’t think should be a factor that affects my decision on whether I should pay taxes (like what a criminal does shouldn’t be my guiding principle). What I would agree on is that there’re people incentivised to attempt to benefit at someone else’s cost, and that those people exist everywhere including corporations, institutions, and the government. I’d also agree that, regarding government specifically, it’s worse because such malicious actors are incentivised to actively seek power because power converts to money very well. It’s a truly regrettable state of affair, because government corruption leads to corruption elsewhere. I think part of the issue is democracies being liable to be influenced by kleptocracies in other countries, who funnel unjustly extracted money into Western economies much to the benefit of individuals at the receiving end. I just don’t think this can be solved technically, we either work on people not being jerks or we will have them find ways to be jerks regardless of any checks, barring complete thought control and predictive crime enforcement dystopia. --- As another analogy, it’s like a distinction between the spirit and the letter. The spirit is the guiding principle, and the letter is a lossy way to express it. Automatic conversion between the spirit and a letter is not possible: this is a philosophical issue adjacent to the hard problem of consciousness; one human not being able to convey to another human the entirety of what they think or feel, words being always interpreted through another mind’s lens. Whether the letter can be expressed on paper or as a smart contract, the letter is never going to be equal fidelity to that of the spirit, and for understandable reasons (such as “fallible humans have written it”) should never have precedence over the spirit. So I wish we invested the effort that goes into inventing higher and higher fidelity letters into, say, alleviating whatever pushes people to violate the spirit in the first place. It’s a much more complex meatspace problem, though.

Banana699 4y ago
>there’s understanding that one cannot participate in a complex web of interdependencies that is advanced human society without giving up complete freedom The problem is, that web is not just a neutral thing that arises organically, it's a bloated mess of faceless coercion that is disproportionally manipulated by a minority. It used to be that a tribe agreed not to kill or cheat each other and defend against common threats, that's something very basic that I have trouble imagining anybody not wanting. There were manipulators and status seekers, always, but they were forced to divide their attention between the thousands and thousands of tribes and sub-tribes, if I percieve my tribe to be controlled by a trump or a biden or a putin, I can always take my family and go elsewhere, at no more cost than the price of the trip and the risk I'm accepting by leaving the tribe. Fast forward through 10K years of agriculture, and we're sheep. Lovecraftian faceless horrors called states divide up the entire earth into 200 divisions or so, the vast majority of which are irrelevant (except in deploying violence against you :)), about 10 or 15 control pretty much 99% of what you do. The size acts as a force multiplier for manipualtors and status seekers: Now only the best trumps and bidens and putins compete to govern you, and the winner, as they say, takes all. They can do whatever the F U C K they can, let me tell you, quite honestly and coming from a guy who appreciates democracy and misses it in his country, that democracy is a laugable excuse of a government scheme. You can tell your bullies you hate them? Great, but I'm betting they already know. You can whine and threaten to get them out of the office ? that's it ? you spend a whole 2 or 4 or 6 years raging at a bunch of people and getting other people to rage with you and other people to rage against you, so that, finally, the bullies can "only" bully you as much as they already have, and not more ? and this the best case scenario that you can only get if you're good at convincing people your cause is worthy ? Is this your local optima ? There is no feedback, the massive inertia of millions and millions of obedient drones serve to condition and dampen any single insurrection. The contradictory feedback of the huge and impotent masses all cancel each other in an orgy of destructive interference, and what remains is the will of the rulers. The coordination overhead asymmetrically influnces those trying to live in freedom, and favors those trying to crush it. Words alone can't express how I despise and loath hierarchical societies. Words alone can't express how I loath complex huge things that are out of my control and harm me. I don't think that feelings can be serialized into strings, but if they can, it would take me a very large one to express all the myriad and subtle ways that I hate nation states. >I don’t understand why not assume other people—whom one without immense hubris would assume to be equally smart I don't think intelligence play into it, at least not the kind of intelligence I respect. Smart people are bullied all the time. Smart people had 10K years to fix the massive clusterfuck that is hierarchical societies or toss them into the dirstiest toilet, and they couldn't. It would be the height of hubris to assume you can succeed where billions failed. >Is this a failure of democracy? No, it's a failure of people being dumb enough to think that the social protocls and algorithms that fared well in networks of N=100, struggled in networks of N=1000 and absoultely tore themselves apart in networks of N=10000, can scale well to networks of N=10000000 and above. Anything that doesn't respect the underlying reality is doomed to repeatedly live in fear and failure and die in confusion, and the reality is that distributed systems are hard. It's even harder when the processors were never built to operate like this. You're trying to reinvent ants and bees with primates, and failing so hard that the result is not recognisably any of them. "Democracy" is a bandaid, a flawed ideal that can never work, and makes things worse by making you think you're doing something. >I just don’t think this can be solved technically Correct, it's solved by not being large clusterfuck of coercion and control, by being small and simple and beautiful, by recognizing the fundamental limits to cooperation that being flesh and blood enforces on you, and respecting them. >work on people not being jerks You can't. Being a jerk is encoded in your DNA. Life competes. Life meta-competes: competes at the level of the rules of competition itself, to bend and distort it in their favor, the meta-game. Life at its very core is the aspiration of a single celled asshole to convert the entire universe into more versions of itself, it began so, and it remains so. The only way to emulate altruism, to hack it onto a system after the fact, is to make selfish assholery more expensive than selfless altruism, always. Sometimes that would make sense, like within the boundaries of your gene pool, few people, I love to imagine, think about deceiving and coercing their flesh and blood, and fewer still actually go along all the way. But that natural familiar affection declines exponentially as the genetic diff grows, and you have to resort to complement it with artifical measures. The problem with artifical measures, though, is that they are second-class citizens, they are never as convincing and natural as natural inlicnations. It's an uphill fight. Invent laws and rules and regulations and constitutions and religions and mainfestos Till The Cows Come Home, you can't put them in the DNA, and DNA is what life is, and what a thing is what a thing does. So it is an arms race: I invent a God today to tell people to be nice to each other, and tomorrow a smooth-talking smooth-brained asshole manages to convince people God Ackshually wants us to do his bidding instead, I invent democracy the day after tomorrow to convince people that everybody matters, and by the weekend that same breed of smooth-talking smooth-brained assholes find the exploit. Unless, and until, every single nerve signal going in or out of a brain is subject to your rules (by dystopia, by utopian merging of all human minds into one, by anything), you don't have rules, you have suggestions, protocols, paradigm. "Would you please agree not to fuck with me ?", maybe I will, who knows, I'm not my best self all the time, and there are worse. Why put yourself with a bunch of strange assholes and bet your wellbeing on them obeying a buggy protocol they are never truly compelled to follow ?