4 ms·

A deeply and clearly thought out argument for why immutable blockchains and code as law are terrible ideas, yet the conclusion is that crypto-anarchist technolo

by simonh 4y ago

A deeply and clearly thought out argument for why immutable blockchains and code as law are terrible ideas, yet the conclusion is that crypto-anarchist technologies are a net good. No explanation or exploration of why that might be the case, given the preceding damning indictment of the principles such technologies are based on. Very odd. As to the broader issue, I agree with those here pointing out that indifference to human values is simply part of the nature of the universe. I wouldn't say that nature is inherently hostile, it's just indifferent. Survival of the fittest doesn't care about the feelings of those eliminated form the gene pool. The rules we code into computer systems are no more or less intractable to human values than the laws of physics that make our bodies work. I think this means that decision making on human affairs should fall to humans, which means all such decision are ultimately political ones. Crypto-anarchism can't do an end run around that. Yet I think it's wrong to think of human values as purely a system we choose to impose on brute nature from outside it. We are part of nature. Our systems of values, and traits such as love and empathy are evolved behaviours. They were selected for by those same implacable laws of nature and survival of the fittest. So I don't see recognition of the implacability of nature as irretrievably nihilistic.

scaramanga 4y ago
Right, I found the ending of the article to be baffling non sequiturs about the greatness of bitcoin. > Our systems of values, and traits such as love and empathy are evolved behaviours. They were selected for by those same implacable laws of nature and survival of the fittest. I think this is undoubtedly true, but it is also true of psychopathy. I think that the ability to construct a false self, as a defensive mechanism, which is incapable of feeling empathy and which is able to prosecute objectives regardless of the cost to others, even to the point of suicidality is an inherent part of our nature and must have been strongly conserved considering how obviously deleterious it's effects can be to the self, the tribe, and the species. If that is so, then how is the indifferent mechanism of evolution to deal with a trait which both provides an important situational advantage but when left unchecked, can spiral out of control to the level of species extinction? But for that, I find flights in to abstraction to be pretty pointless, since we can just watch the answer to this question unfold at global scale, before our eyes.
- simonh 4y ago
  > ...how is the indifferent mechanism of evolution to deal with a trait which... when left unchecked, can spiral out of control to the level of species extinction? I suppose if we accept that alien life and civilizations do or will exist, then in the long run such traits, and counterbalancing social behaviours, will be subject to selective pressure. In the very long run.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
efficientsticks 4y ago
I agree that things should be considered ultimately as political (even judicial if needed). But it’s not a given - Black Mirror describes worlds in which that reality does not win a survival-of-the-fittest competition against harsher technological regimes. It seems every time we describe these dystopias they become true, which for me is a reflection that it’s easier to destroy than to create, absent a learned culture.
- simonh 4y ago
  I’m not so pessimistic, all this means is that freedoms must be actively fought for and maintained. That they cannot be taken for granted. However we have many times fought against supposedly more efficient autocratic systems and won. Napoleonic imperialism, and that of the great Central European powers of WW2, Fascism, Stalinism, South American military dictatorships. We’ve beaten them all. A successor to Maoism is still in power in China, but Mao would have been horrified by the reforms under Deng. We’ll see how Xi’s reversion works out. I know there’s a strong current of left sentiment here that thinks billionaires are somehow taking everything for themselves, but the fact is the freedom of movement and association that enabled globalisation has raised hundreds of millions out of poverty. Those billionaires employ millions of people. I’d rather they ran these companies than government functionaries. For the first time more than half of humanity now live comfortable middle class lives. Progress in my lifetime has been breathtaking, and it’s been so fast a lot of people’s ideological assumptions about how the world is and works have been left far behind. There’s still a lot more to do of course, 10% of people in severe poverty is still far too many. China under Xi shows how a technologically competent authoritarianism can achieve a stable steady state that will be very hard to break down. We must do it though, the future of humanity depends on it. If such a regime was to gain broad sway over humanity there’s a real possibility Orwell’s vision of a boot stamping on a human face forever could come to be. I don’t think it’s inevitable though. The fact is free and open societies are actually far more efficient and productive.
  - efficientsticks 4y ago
    Thanks for this great reply. Ironic thing though - that 10% most severe poverty mostly lies on the African continent, exactly the place which could stand to benefit the most from China’s intervening, and of course before that it was Chinese people who were in great poverty. Now I’m as aghast at the militant astro-turfing by that country on these forums as anyone else (and much worse inside), but there I’m not so pessimistic, perhaps seeing their own positive change effected on an outside group can cause some kind of re-evaluation for the culture.
ByteJockey 4y ago
> A deeply and clearly thought out argument for why immutable blockchains and code as law are terrible ideas, yet the conclusion is that crypto-anarchist technologies are a net good. I think there's an important distinction between things like bitcoin and the technologies described in the article. The technologies mentioned in the article all take some sort of action without ongoing human input. Things like bitcoin (and other crypto-anarchist technologies), on the other hand, preserve human agency. I mean, there's a lot of automation on the mining side of bitcoin, but the currency side allows trades to be initiated by human beings. Bitcoin preserves human agency so well that people using it to commit crimes is one of the arguments against it. Now, you could argue that what I'm describing is a bad thing, or that the tradeoffs are unfavorable, or what have you. And there are several reasonable arguments in this area. But I think the distinction between technology that responds to human input and does work for us and technology that runs autonomously and makes its own decisions based on rules set up at a prior date is important here.
- simonh 4y ago
  >Things like bitcoin (and other crypto-anarchist technologies), on the other hand, preserve human agency. You have a point about simple transactions, to some extent they just do what you tell them, but etherium is the poster child for crypto-anarchism. Code is law is literally the rallying cry of these systems, because taking out trust in humans and institutions is the whole point. Even many of the stablecoins are supposedly beyond trust because they're based on financial instruments that "guarantee" their stability. Of course that's not turning out very well. If these systems are subject to human oversight, then they're open to exactly the problems of governance, institutional control and politics as anything else. Crypto-anarchism is about automating all of that away, but that puts implacable emotionless code in the driving seat, and the article explains very eloquently why that's a bad thing.
  - ByteJockey 4y ago
    > but that puts implacable emotionless code in the driving seat, and the article explains very eloquently why that's a bad thing. To re-iterate my previous point, putting code in the driver's seat would imply that something like the etherium network decides what transactions to make (or possibly entering into their flavor of smart contracts by itself). I have not heard of any proposals for this.

by simonh 4y ago

scaramanga 4y ago

Right, I found the ending of the article to be baffling non sequiturs about the greatness of bitcoin. > Our systems of values, and traits such as love and empathy are evolved behaviours. They were selected for by those same implacable laws of nature and survival of the fittest. I think this is undoubtedly true, but it is also true of psychopathy. I think that the ability to construct a false self, as a defensive mechanism, which is incapable of feeling empathy and which is able to prosecute objectives regardless of the cost to others, even to the point of suicidality is an inherent part of our nature and must have been strongly conserved considering how obviously deleterious it's effects can be to the self, the tribe, and the species. If that is so, then how is the indifferent mechanism of evolution to deal with a trait which both provides an important situational advantage but when left unchecked, can spiral out of control to the level of species extinction? But for that, I find flights in to abstraction to be pretty pointless, since we can just watch the answer to this question unfold at global scale, before our eyes.

simonh 4y ago
> ...how is the indifferent mechanism of evolution to deal with a trait which... when left unchecked, can spiral out of control to the level of species extinction? I suppose if we accept that alien life and civilizations do or will exist, then in the long run such traits, and counterbalancing social behaviours, will be subject to selective pressure. In the very long run.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

efficientsticks 4y ago

I agree that things should be considered ultimately as political (even judicial if needed). But it’s not a given - Black Mirror describes worlds in which that reality does not win a survival-of-the-fittest competition against harsher technological regimes. It seems every time we describe these dystopias they become true, which for me is a reflection that it’s easier to destroy than to create, absent a learned culture.

simonh 4y ago
I’m not so pessimistic, all this means is that freedoms must be actively fought for and maintained. That they cannot be taken for granted. However we have many times fought against supposedly more efficient autocratic systems and won. Napoleonic imperialism, and that of the great Central European powers of WW2, Fascism, Stalinism, South American military dictatorships. We’ve beaten them all. A successor to Maoism is still in power in China, but Mao would have been horrified by the reforms under Deng. We’ll see how Xi’s reversion works out. I know there’s a strong current of left sentiment here that thinks billionaires are somehow taking everything for themselves, but the fact is the freedom of movement and association that enabled globalisation has raised hundreds of millions out of poverty. Those billionaires employ millions of people. I’d rather they ran these companies than government functionaries. For the first time more than half of humanity now live comfortable middle class lives. Progress in my lifetime has been breathtaking, and it’s been so fast a lot of people’s ideological assumptions about how the world is and works have been left far behind. There’s still a lot more to do of course, 10% of people in severe poverty is still far too many. China under Xi shows how a technologically competent authoritarianism can achieve a stable steady state that will be very hard to break down. We must do it though, the future of humanity depends on it. If such a regime was to gain broad sway over humanity there’s a real possibility Orwell’s vision of a boot stamping on a human face forever could come to be. I don’t think it’s inevitable though. The fact is free and open societies are actually far more efficient and productive.
- efficientsticks 4y ago
  Thanks for this great reply. Ironic thing though - that 10% most severe poverty mostly lies on the African continent, exactly the place which could stand to benefit the most from China’s intervening, and of course before that it was Chinese people who were in great poverty. Now I’m as aghast at the militant astro-turfing by that country on these forums as anyone else (and much worse inside), but there I’m not so pessimistic, perhaps seeing their own positive change effected on an outside group can cause some kind of re-evaluation for the culture.

ByteJockey 4y ago

> A deeply and clearly thought out argument for why immutable blockchains and code as law are terrible ideas, yet the conclusion is that crypto-anarchist technologies are a net good. I think there's an important distinction between things like bitcoin and the technologies described in the article. The technologies mentioned in the article all take some sort of action without ongoing human input. Things like bitcoin (and other crypto-anarchist technologies), on the other hand, preserve human agency. I mean, there's a lot of automation on the mining side of bitcoin, but the currency side allows trades to be initiated by human beings. Bitcoin preserves human agency so well that people using it to commit crimes is one of the arguments against it. Now, you could argue that what I'm describing is a bad thing, or that the tradeoffs are unfavorable, or what have you. And there are several reasonable arguments in this area. But I think the distinction between technology that responds to human input and does work for us and technology that runs autonomously and makes its own decisions based on rules set up at a prior date is important here.

simonh 4y ago
>Things like bitcoin (and other crypto-anarchist technologies), on the other hand, preserve human agency. You have a point about simple transactions, to some extent they just do what you tell them, but etherium is the poster child for crypto-anarchism. Code is law is literally the rallying cry of these systems, because taking out trust in humans and institutions is the whole point. Even many of the stablecoins are supposedly beyond trust because they're based on financial instruments that "guarantee" their stability. Of course that's not turning out very well. If these systems are subject to human oversight, then they're open to exactly the problems of governance, institutional control and politics as anything else. Crypto-anarchism is about automating all of that away, but that puts implacable emotionless code in the driving seat, and the article explains very eloquently why that's a bad thing.
- ByteJockey 4y ago
  > but that puts implacable emotionless code in the driving seat, and the article explains very eloquently why that's a bad thing. To re-iterate my previous point, putting code in the driver's seat would imply that something like the etherium network decides what transactions to make (or possibly entering into their flavor of smart contracts by itself). I have not heard of any proposals for this.