[Question] Can Second-handedness be superficially apparent with certain goals and values?

[Max Kaye]

I have a bit of a conundrum around my life/actions and
second-handedness. One possibility is that second-handedness can be
superficially apparent but is not foundational and so not a problem.

I was reading ET's recent post "Criticism of 12 Rules For Life:
Secondhandedness"

He starts with some good crits of quora

Then: (note 2nd level quotes are JP, 1st level quotes ET)

>> As of July 2017, as I write this—and five years after I addressed
>> “What makes life more meaningful?”—my answer to that question
>> has received a relatively small audience (14,000 views, and 133
>> upvotes), while my response to the question about aging has been
>> viewed by 7,200 people and received 36 upvotes. Not exactly home
>> runs.
>
> JP's goal is popularity. He judges a home run not by what he thinks of
> what he wrote, but by what other people think. His stated goal – his
> criteria of success (a home run) – is to get views and upvotes, not
> to please himself.
>
> My goal, when I write, is truth. I don't judge ideas by popularity. I
> go by arguments. If someone has a criticism – even one single
> criticism from one person – I'll consider the reasoning and address
> it or change my mind. But if a thousand people downvote me without
> giving any arguments, I don't regard that as making any difference
> intellectually.
>
>> The Quora readers appeared pleased with this list. They commented on
>> and shared it. They said such things as “I’m definitely printing
>> this list out and keeping it as a reference. Simply phenomenal,”
>> and “You win Quora. We can just close the site now.” Students at
>> the University of Toronto, where I teach, came up to me and told me
>> how much they liked it.
>
> JP is a second-hander (see The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand to understand
> the term more). He's judging his work by the opinions of other people
> instead of by rational evaluation of the content of the work. He's
> concerned with who thinks what (social metaphysics, as Ayn Rand called
> it) instead of what the rational arguments about the material are.
>
> If I were sharing a success story like this, I wouldn't quote
> reason-less praise. I'd be concerned with the rational benefit of the
> popularity. Did it get me any questions or criticisms I learned from?
> Did the audience have enough intellectual merit to help me improve the
> ideas? It's nice if people like you're work and they're helped, but
> that must not be a creator's primary motivation or reward. Yet JP
> focuses on it.
>
>> I had written a 99.9 percentile answer.
>
> JP writes this like it's 99.9th percentile quality, when he's only
> demonstrated 99.9th percentile popularity. These are completely
> different things which JP blurs together.

I agree with ET's crits.

However, something occurred to me while reading it: that maybe a person
could look second-handed when they aren't.

to explain, I'll use an example from my own life. the numbers marked
like [N] are there to refer back to statements.

JP says in 12 rules for life (note: I haven't read 12 rules, but have
heard JP talk about this in interviews and found this quote)

>> Aim high. Set your sights on the betterment of Being. Align yourself,
>> in your soul, with Truth and the Highest Good. There is habitable
>> order to establish and beauty to bring into existence. There is evil
>> to overcome, suffering to ameliorate, and yourself to better.

[1] So this idea of 'align your soul to the highest good' seems to me to
be a good principle.

[2] Now, it's meaningless if you have a bad idea of what "good" is. I
think I have a fairly idea of what "good" is, though.

in 2015 I cofounded a political movement called Flux (voteflux.org).
While I had _an_ idea for something similar before reading BoI it wasn't
super well formed and more pragmatic than based in philosophy.

(Note: this email isn't meant to be about Flux, but for context the
original idea presented here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moFGcYqizzU - note: BoI philosophy
wasn't really integrated at this point, this can be contrasted with
current idea presented in "The Case for Flux" -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq25UXc_ONg - I don't talk about
philosophy or economics at all in the first video, and it's about 50% of
the second video; also note I don't endorse the "rules for rulers" part
of the second video anymore, but haven't fully worked through issues /
uncertainties I have around it yet)

[3] I think Flux and Issue Based Direct Democracy (the system of
democracy I designed based on ideas from BoI and economics) are good,
compatible with BoI, and - if successful - will help government and
western societies make progress.

So, here's my conundrum:

[4] Being a political thing, with the intent of winning elections, means
that popularity has to come in to it. I _need_ to care about what ppl
think of it to some degree because we need to win votes.

[5] If caring about popularity _in general_ must have elements of
second-handedness, then surely I inherit those elements

[6] But if I'm right about my principles and motivations being good;

[7] and that working towards that via Flux / IBDD is good;

[8] then some conflict exists between [7] and [5]

[9] - [8] isn't an issue because [7] and [5] aren't in conflict - i.e.
there are some things that _seem_ second-handed at first glance but
really aren't. So [5] is wrong.

--------

Ideas:

* [4] is wrong - there's some other way to affect change politically
without directly winning elections, so popularity doesn't matter, and I
don't need to worry about it, thus need no elements of second-handedness

* [4] is wrong because I can become popular in a moral way without
sacrificing integrity or principles; i.e. not all popularity is bad,
just blind popularity seeking without explanation of *who* supports Flux
and *why*. This also means [5] is wrong, only some types of popularity
are bad

* [1] is wrong and there is a better principle for how to live that
invalidates the chain of reasoning

* [2] is wrong - I don't have a good idea of what is good and meaningful
(i.e. misconceptions in philosophy great enough to invalidate [3])

* [3] is wrong - either trying to invent new systems and affect
political change within the system is wrong, or I'm wrong about Flux and
IBDD being good

I think there's some repetition in those options - like [7] and [3], but
I think this is clear enough to demonstrate my thoughts.

I'm unsure of whether my reasoning above holds, or [5] is true and one
of the ideas above is true (i.e. I'm making some mistake either in
philosophy or execution)

---
Max Kaye
xk.io

[anonymous FI]

On Feb 3, 2018, at 18:39 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> [3] I think Flux and Issue Based Direct Democracy (the system of
> democracy I designed based on ideas from BoI and economics) are good,
> compatible with BoI, and - if successful - will help government and
> western societies make progress.

*Which* economics did you use in the design? There are competing ideas
about econ.

[Max Kaye]

Somewhat difficult to answer because I'm not formally trained, but a
bunch of my reasoning is from first principles. it's probably most
similar to the austrian school, but afaik that's also the best "school"
of economics.

IBDD is primarily built on division of labour / specialisation and
trade, opportunity cost, and comparative advantage. It also has elements
from BoI's philosophy, particularly about how to use currencies to
incentivise the creation of new ideas. Some of that is similar to topics
like "why capitalism encourages new ideas", and although I've got a
fairly intuitive, non-technical understanding of that I think it's
reasonably robust. part of the problem is I'm bad at explaining it and
that's something I want to get better at.

Most of my econ education (I had a little at uni but found it not
relevant or biased to lefty stuff) has been through cryptocurrency, and
that's fairly liberalist / libertarian. Ppl like Mises and Hayek are
popular. There's a little from ppl like Friedman but not as much.

I use a few ideas from Bernard Lietaer (from his book new money for a
new world) - he does a lot of work on complementary currencies and the
importance of monetary diversity. The general idea is you can use monies
with various properties to cause specific changes in a community. this
video was the thing to put me on to him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9EI2PrDpmw

Most of my research and thinking has been on things like currency supply
and engineering currencies

So IBDD is essentially a political currency (we've gone to some effort
to design ways to make it very hard to sell for $, which I'm not
convinced is actually bad but many ppl see it as bad so I think it's
important to have answers to those questions and to build in such a way
that we are able to correct mistakes)

It's built to encourage ppl to specialise in areas they care about (via
opportunity cost) and arbitrage issues over time (so there's a
'liquidity token' which is used to move political value between issues
as they come up and these tokens persists over time). Units issued for
each issue expire after the issue (so their only utility is voting) and
can be swapped via an auction system where ppl bid in liquidity tokens
for voting tokens. tokens are fungible with other tokens of the same
type (like all voting tokens for one issue are fungible but not for
different issues).

AFAIK not much (if any) research has been done into this sort of thing,
i.e. when you treat votes like stocks or money how to people use them
and reorganise and that sort of thing?

There's also some ideas of my own that are (I think) original. Like
liquidity tokens (LTs) get inflated and the new LTs are distributed to
everyone (multiple reasons for this). When viewing balances in LTs it'll
be displayed as % points, not as individual units. I think this is good
because it makes ppl view prices differently and shows inflation
actively changing your "balance". This might make it go up or down
depending on how many LTs you have (proportionally) and how the
population changes.

So this "show balances as % points" is one of my ideas that I think will
change the way ppl think about currency.

---
Max Kaye
xk.io

[Justin Mallone]

On Feb 4, 2018, at 1:21 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
> On 4 Feb 2018, at 14:38, anonymous FI wrote:
>
>> On Feb 3, 2018, at 18:39 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>
>>> [3] I think Flux and Issue Based Direct Democracy (the system of democracy I designed based on ideas from BoI and economics) are good, compatible with BoI, and - if successful - will help government and western societies make progress.
>>
>> *Which* economics did you use in the design? There are competing ideas about econ.
>
> Somewhat difficult to answer because I'm not formally trained, but a bunch of my reasoning is from first principles. it's probably most similar to the austrian school, but afaik that's also the best "school" of economics.
>
> IBDD is primarily built on division of labour / specialisation and trade, opportunity cost, and comparative advantage. It also has elements from BoI's philosophy, particularly about how to use currencies to incentivise the creation of new ideas. Some of that is similar to topics like "why capitalism encourages new ideas", and although I've got a fairly intuitive, non-technical understanding of that I think it's reasonably robust. part of the problem is I'm bad at explaining it and that's something I want to get better at.
>
> Most of my econ education (I had a little at uni but found it not relevant or biased to lefty stuff) has been through cryptocurrency, and that's fairly liberalist / libertarian. Ppl like Mises and Hayek are popular. There's a little from ppl like Friedman but not as much.
>
> I use a few ideas from Bernard Lietaer (from his book new money for a new world) - he does a lot of work on complementary currencies and the importance of monetary diversity. The general idea is you can use monies with various properties to cause specific changes in a community. this video was the thing to put me on to him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9EI2PrDpmw

FYI, "cause specific changes in a community” set off my LEFT-WING SOCIAL ENGINEERING ALARM 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨

Money should be neutral, reliably providing the benefits money provides (medium of exchange, store of value) and otherwise allowing people to set their own priorities.

The creation of money shouldn’t be used to implement a social agenda.

Anyways I read the YouTube description which said

> Bernard Lietaer argues that the monoculture of money is what creates economic instability, leading to liquidity crises. He calls for a greater diversity of alternative currencies, citing innovative and enormously successful initiatives like the Lithuanian Doraland Economy, the Torekes in Belgium and Switzerland's famous alternative currency, the WIR.

First off, economic instability (in the sense of long-lasting "depressions", as opposed to relatively short downturns) is largely caused by government mucking with various things (not just monetary policy, but also regulations, tariffs, high tax rates, etc.)

More monetary competition would be nice but isn’t essential to avoid economic instability.


Anyways, "Lithuanian Doraland Economy”, eh? A thing I have not heard of before!

Let’s investigate 🧐

Some blog post from 2013 is the top post (if this was an “enormously successful initiative”, where’s the official page detailing the results???)

https://grandparentsforthefuture.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/economics-creating-a-monetary-ecosystem/

> Doraland is a system that has been proposed to help Lithuania, the first of three small Baltic States that became independent from the Soviet Union in 1990, to become “A Learning Country” by stimulating grass-roots educational initiatives. “It would be best implemented,” according to the Club of Rome report, “by NGOs, organized around a new Learning Foundation.”

So as of a few years ago this was some fantasy of a group (Club of Rome) with a history of being wrong on economics (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome)

Continuing from blog post:

> The idea is that an individual could earn “Dora currency” by providing teaching activities, in say conversational English or computer skills, and the “Doras” could be exchanged for an educational experience that the individual would choose to pursue—even outside of Lithuania. The Learning Foundation would create and provide the Doras while other NGOs could get involved in organizing the learning activities. The Dora could be tracked using mobile phone technology, and another NGO could be set up to independently audit the earning and exchange of the Doras.

This sounds dumb.

Today, if you provide teaching activities in conversational English or computer skills or whatever, you can earn “dollars” (or “euros” or whatever) that you can exchange for many other things. These things include educational experiences but also include pies and paper towels. So the current system is more flexible than the Dora system. So what’s the advantage here?

It’s kinda like if you did voice overs for Audible and they paid you in Audible credits. Love Audible, but I wanted pie! There’s only so many Audible credits you can use!

A big point of money is to help facilitate transactions in a society where there is a complex division of labor and many many goods one can purchase. So restricting the uses one can put money towards is actually fighting against the point of money!

If the idea is to restrict the uses one can put the Dorabucks to in order to basically pressure/force/“nudge” people into spending more on educational products, that’s super awful/bad/nasty/evil. If you want to get people to spend more on education, persuade them of the value directly. Don’t use shitty fake currencies to create some sorta pressure.

> “This Dora learning-economy is intended to operate in parallel with the conventional monetary system. We are, therefore, witnessing the beginning of an exchange media ecosystem. . . Doraland is an example of a complementary system that encourages non-spontaneous but desirable behaviour patterns.”

They’re pretty explicit about wanting to control people’s behaviors! Yech. What’s up with the reference to "non-spontaneous” btw? Why are they calling that out?

> The process starts with a citizen’s dream project for learning, then Doraland makes a contract with him or her to help realize his or her dream in return for a certain amount of Doras earned through teaching activities. “Non-profit organizations would play the same role in the Dora economy as corporations do in the conventional currency world: organize, motivate and audit the relevant activities.”

This seems like 1 part attempt to manipulate and control people, 1 part low-value project for unproductive NGOs to justify their budgets.


I didn’t see anything on the first google results page to justify the claim that Doraland was enormously successful. I found one link that looked like it might, but it went to a dead link. I am skeptical regarding the success.

-JM

[Max Kaye]

Haha, fair enough. I'd argue many of the examples he give aren't at all
like that though, since they're non-coercive. It's just about causing
some sort of reorganisation of ppl and economics, which can easily be
objectively better.

Think something like "I will create a construct that is useful for
people and if they use it their behaviour should end up changing to
cause X effect". No coercion.

One example he gives is a favela in Brazil. (btw you can read it here in
the first chapter:
https://www.scribd.com/document/93313960/Bernard-Lietaer-New-Money-For-A-New-World-full-pdf-ebook)

They had an under-utilised public transport system, a favela with bad
employment, trash in the streets so bad you couldn't even get a garbage
truck in, health problems, social issues, etc.

Someone had the idea to give away bus tickets (the buses were running
anyway just not used, so no extra expense really) in exchange for bags
of trash. So ppl in the favela started collecting trash and getting bus
tickets.

This had a bunch of effects. Streets started to get clean, and health
improved bc of this. Also ppl started being able to use buses to go
places which helps with jobs, trade, etc. The bus tickets also started
to be used as local currency, at markets, that sort of thing. and so you
got really good feedback loops.

at the end of the day: wealth went up, health increased, streets got
nicer, trade increased, mobility increased, etc.

And Lietaer argues this was because of the nature of the money: it had
particular utility and allowed an _isolated_ economy to form, external
to the greater brazillian economy. This goes back to his theme of
monetary diversity too - even if the brazillian real fluctuated wildly
this community would be mostly unaffected (granted the connection to
buses does mean if they shut down it might have made the
bus-ticket-currency worthless)

You can also look at Bitcoin as monetary engineering - it was just
released into the wild, no coercion, but has had (and is having) a big
effect on the reorganisation of wealth and fintech, among many other
areas.

> Money should be neutral, reliably providing the benefits money
> provides (medium of exchange, store of value) and otherwise allowing
> people to set their own priorities.

Yes, but that doesn't mean we should have only one kind or type.

> The creation of money shouldn’t be used to implement a social
> agenda.

Why? If it's not coercive what's wrong with that?

> Anyways I read the YouTube description which said
>
>> Bernard Lietaer argues that the monoculture of money is what creates
>> economic instability, leading to liquidity crises. He calls for a
>> greater diversity of alternative currencies, citing innovative and
>> enormously successful initiatives like the Lithuanian Doraland
>> Economy, the Torekes in Belgium and Switzerland's famous alternative
>> currency, the WIR.
>
> First off, economic instability (in the sense of long-lasting
> "depressions", as opposed to relatively short downturns) is largely
> caused by government mucking with various things (not just monetary
> policy, but also regulations, tariffs, high tax rates, etc.)

What do you think of Minsky's Instability Hypothesis?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_nqc-A5_Y

Policy does come in to that but I think 'monetary diversity helps
resilience' is compatible with it.

> More monetary competition would be nice but isn’t essential to avoid
> economic instability.

I'm not convinced of this. Or maybe a better way to put it is: monetary
diversity helps avoid economic instability and thus helps correct
mistakes

Yes, I agree. Not _all_ ways of creating money are good. Most are bad.

I don't endorse Lietaer 100% (partially bc I don't know enough econ to
do so honestly), mostly bc I don't agree with all of it. Some of it does
seem silly to me. but I do agree with the idea behind monetary diversity
and that different constructions of money can do different things, and
that we should treat it like a tool and experiment and create and so on
in a non-coercive way.

> Today, if you provide teaching activities in conversational English or
> computer skills or whatever, you can earn “dollars” (or
> “euros” or whatever) that you can exchange for many other things.
> These things include educational experiences but also include pies and
> paper towels. So the current system is more flexible than the Dora
> system. So what’s the advantage here?

The point is to increase friction between more general stuff (outside
dora-land) relative to inside dora-land. There's always friction between
any two currencies/economies anyway so I don't see that as a fundamental
evil, and if ppl opt-in then w/e, but I don't think it's a good way to
do things.

> It’s kinda like if you did voice overs for Audible and they paid you
> in Audible credits. Love Audible, but I wanted pie! There’s only so
> many Audible credits you can use!

Some people in blockchain land think like this and it's frustrating.
Like "tokenize everything" regardless of the explanation.

> A big point of money is to help facilitate transactions in a society
> where there is a complex division of labor and many many goods one can
> purchase. So restricting the uses one can put money towards is
> actually fighting against the point of money!

To some degree, but what if you wanted to affect division of labour _in
one thing only_ (e.g. politics)?

> If the idea is to restrict the uses one can put the Dorabucks to in
> order to basically pressure/force/“nudge” people into spending
> more on educational products, that’s super awful/bad/nasty/evil. If
> you want to get people to spend more on education, persuade them of
> the value directly. Don’t use shitty fake currencies to create some
> sorta pressure.

Well, not if it's easy-ish to sell, if they made it so you couldn't sell
(or was super hard to, like loyalty points) and then exploited ppl who
had lost their jobs or something then yeah, it'd be evil.

>> “This Dora learning-economy is intended to operate in parallel with
>> the conventional monetary system. We are, therefore, witnessing the
>> beginning of an exchange media ecosystem. . . Doraland is an example
>> of a complementary system that encourages non-spontaneous but
>> desirable behaviour patterns.”
>
> They’re pretty explicit about wanting to control people’s
> behaviors! Yech. What’s up with the reference to "non-spontaneous”
> btw? Why are they calling that out?
>
>> The process starts with a citizen’s dream project for learning,
>> then Doraland makes a contract with him or her to help realize his or
>> her dream in return for a certain amount of Doras earned through
>> teaching activities. “Non-profit organizations would play the same
>> role in the Dora economy as corporations do in the conventional
>> currency world: organize, motivate and audit the relevant
>> activities.”
>
> This seems like 1 part attempt to manipulate and control people, 1
> part low-value project for unproductive NGOs to justify their budgets.

Maybe. my tack with this stuff is to just let it die.

> I didn’t see anything on the first google results page to justify
> the claim that Doraland was enormously successful. I found one link
> that looked like it might, but it went to a dead link. I am skeptical
> regarding the success.

For sure - you should be.

---
Max Kaye
xk.io

[Justin Mallone]

On Feb 4, 2018, at 5:53 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
> On 5 Feb 2018, at 9:31, Justin Mallone wrote:
>
>> On Feb 4, 2018, at 1:21 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 4 Feb 2018, at 14:38, anonymous FI wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Feb 3, 2018, at 18:39 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> [3] I think Flux and Issue Based Direct Democracy (the system of democracy I designed based on ideas from BoI and economics) are good, compatible with BoI, and - if successful - will help government and western societies make progress.
>>>>
>>>> *Which* economics did you use in the design? There are competing ideas about econ.
>>>
>>> Somewhat difficult to answer because I'm not formally trained, but a bunch of my reasoning is from first principles. it's probably most similar to the austrian school, but afaik that's also the best "school" of economics.
>>>
>>> IBDD is primarily built on division of labour / specialisation and trade, opportunity cost, and comparative advantage. It also has elements from BoI's philosophy, particularly about how to use currencies to incentivise the creation of new ideas. Some of that is similar to topics like "why capitalism encourages new ideas", and although I've got a fairly intuitive, non-technical understanding of that I think it's reasonably robust. part of the problem is I'm bad at explaining it and that's something I want to get better at.
>>>
>>> Most of my econ education (I had a little at uni but found it not relevant or biased to lefty stuff) has been through cryptocurrency, and that's fairly liberalist / libertarian. Ppl like Mises and Hayek are popular. There's a little from ppl like Friedman but not as much.
>>>
>>> I use a few ideas from Bernard Lietaer (from his book new money for a new world) - he does a lot of work on complementary currencies and the importance of monetary diversity. The general idea is you can use monies with various properties to cause specific changes in a community. this video was the thing to put me on to him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9EI2PrDpmw
>>
>> FYI, "cause specific changes in a community” set off my LEFT-WING SOCIAL ENGINEERING ALARM 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
>
> Haha, fair enough. I'd argue many of the examples he give aren't at all like that though, since they're non-coercive. It's just about causing some sort of reorganisation of ppl and economics, which can easily be objectively better.
>
> Think something like "I will create a construct that is useful for people and if they use it their behaviour should end up changing to cause X effect". No coercion.
>
> One example he gives is a favela in Brazil. (btw you can read it here in the first chapter: https://www.scribd.com/document/93313960/Bernard-Lietaer-New-Money-For-A-New-World-full-pdf-ebook)
>
> They had an under-utilised public transport system,

People need to go places, so why weren’t they using the public transit system?

Was it too expensive? If so, why wasn’t it priced at a level where they’d get customers???

Was it unsafe? Why didn’t they hire security if so?

Did it not go where people needed it to go? Why didn’t they redesign the routes if so?

Why didn’t it go out of business if it was having trouble getting customers? (I’ve read that Brazil mostly doesn’t subsidize its bus systems, but I’m skeptical as to how the lines can keep operating in places where there’s low customer volume).

Were people using competitors they liked more? Were any of those competitors outlawed or disadvantaged by government laws? Or were people just walking everywhere, or what?

There’s more to this story.

> a favela with bad employment, trash in the streets so bad you couldn't even get a garbage truck in, health problems, social issues, etc.
>
> Someone had the idea to give away bus tickets (the buses were running anyway just not used, so no extra expense really) in exchange for bags of trash.

How were they running empty buses for who knows how long?

How did paying people to be garbageman in exchange for bus rides help the bus people to, for example, pay their drivers and buy fuel and replacement tires for the buses??

> So ppl in the favela started collecting trash and getting bus tickets.
>
> This had a bunch of effects. Streets started to get clean, and health improved bc of this. Also ppl started being able to use buses to go places which helps with jobs, trade, etc.

Why not just discount the fare (which would get you more money anyways than running with a bunch of EMPTY seats — you see this principle in operation all the time in the hotel and airline industries btw) and also, separately, pay people to be garbagemen??

What’s the point of linking the two?

> The bus tickets also started to be used as local currency, at markets, that sort of thing.

Right cuz people were getting paid in them and had extra.

Lots of things *can* be currency. Local bus tickets aren’t great, though!

> and so you got really good feedback loops.
>
> at the end of the day: wealth went up, health increased, streets got nicer, trade increased, mobility increased, etc.
>
> And Lietaer argues this was because of the nature of the money: it had particular utility and allowed an _isolated_ economy to form, external to the greater brazillian economy.

I don’t know if you have some idiosyncratic idea of isolation or something here. But FYI, isolation isn’t good!

Economic integration — via trade — helps productivity and peace. It encourages people to specialize in what they can produce better (more bananas in the tropics, more cheese in France) and raises the costs of things like wars and stuff.

> This goes back to his theme of monetary diversity too - even if the brazillian real fluctuated wildly this community would be mostly unaffected (granted the connection to buses does mean if they shut down it might have made the bus-ticket-currency worthless)

That’s a pretty serious stability issue!

I wouldn’t bet my wealth on the continued operation of an "under-utilised public transport system” in a Brazillian shantytown! BITCOIN sounds like a better bet compared to that!

> You can also look at Bitcoin as monetary engineering - it was just released into the wild, no coercion, but has had (and is having) a big effect on the reorganisation of wealth and fintech, among many other areas.

I think Bitcoin has a lot of problems in terms of the technical side, and its primary uses are speculation and the facilitation of criminal activity.

AFAIK the main good to come out of Bitcoin is the bitcoin lotto winners giving SENS millions!

>> Money should be neutral, reliably providing the benefits money provides (medium of exchange, store of value) and otherwise allowing people to set their own priorities.
>
> Yes, but that doesn't mean we should have only one kind or type.
>
>> The creation of money shouldn’t be used to implement a social agenda.
>
> Why? If it's not coercive what's wrong with that?

Trying to manipulate people is intrusive and nasty, whether or not force is used.

>> Anyways I read the YouTube description which said
>>
>>> Bernard Lietaer argues that the monoculture of money is what creates economic instability, leading to liquidity crises. He calls for a greater diversity of alternative currencies, citing innovative and enormously successful initiatives like the Lithuanian Doraland Economy, the Torekes in Belgium and Switzerland's famous alternative currency, the WIR.
>>
>> First off, economic instability (in the sense of long-lasting "depressions", as opposed to relatively short downturns) is largely caused by government mucking with various things (not just monetary policy, but also regulations, tariffs, high tax rates, etc.)
>
> What do you think of Minsky's Instability Hypothesis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_nqc-A5_Y

Can you give a brief indication of the core content? The video you linked is 90 minutes long.

> Policy does come in to that but I think 'monetary diversity helps resilience' is compatible with it.
>
>> More monetary competition would be nice but isn’t essential to avoid economic instability.
>
> I'm not convinced of this. Or maybe a better way to put it is: monetary diversity helps avoid economic instability and thus helps correct mistakes

I also doubt bus token economies would provide the sort of resilience to the monetary system that would be helpful.

What I’d imagine is more like, several big, financially stable corporations offering difference currency options, with very clear and detailed policies governing things like how much currency exists and can be created at any one time and that sort of thing.

>> Anyways, "Lithuanian Doraland Economy”, eh? A thing I have not heard of before!
>>
>> Let’s investigate 🧐
>>
>> Some blog post from 2013 is the top post (if this was an “enormously successful initiative”, where’s the official page detailing the results???)
>>
>> https://grandparentsforthefuture.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/economics-creating-a-monetary-ecosystem/
>>
>>> Doraland is a system that has been proposed to help Lithuania, the first of three small Baltic States that became independent from the Soviet Union in 1990, to become “A Learning Country” by stimulating grass-roots educational initiatives. “It would be best implemented,” according to the Club of Rome report, “by NGOs, organized around a new Learning Foundation.”
>>
>> So as of a few years ago this was some fantasy of a group (Club of Rome) with a history of being wrong on economics (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome)
>>
>> Continuing from blog post:
>>
>>> The idea is that an individual could earn “Dora currency” by providing teaching activities, in say conversational English or computer skills, and the “Doras” could be exchanged for an educational experience that the individual would choose to pursue—even outside of Lithuania. The Learning Foundation would create and provide the Doras while other NGOs could get involved in organizing the learning activities. The Dora could be tracked using mobile phone technology, and another NGO could be set up to independently audit the earning and exchange of the Doras.
>>
>> This sounds dumb.
>
> Yes, I agree. Not _all_ ways of creating money are good. Most are bad.
>
> I don't endorse Lietaer 100% (partially bc I don't know enough econ to do so honestly), mostly bc I don't agree with all of it. Some of it does seem silly to me. but I do agree with the idea behind monetary diversity and that different constructions of money can do different things, and that we should treat it like a tool and experiment and create and so on in a non-coercive way.
>
>> Today, if you provide teaching activities in conversational English or computer skills or whatever, you can earn “dollars” (or “euros” or whatever) that you can exchange for many other things. These things include educational experiences but also include pies and paper towels. So the current system is more flexible than the Dora system. So what’s the advantage here?
>
> The point is to increase friction between more general stuff (outside dora-land) relative to inside dora-land. There's always friction between any two currencies/economies anyway so I don't see that as a fundamental evil, and if ppl opt-in then w/e, but I don't think it's a good way to do things.

There’s some friction in our existing system. We have a variety of currencies and transaction costs exist. Ho hum.

Intentionally adding friction to some new currency in order to manipulate people’s behavior seems very bad to me.

Just pay people general use money, don’t try and control their life and make them a puppet who has to take the transit method you approve of and spend the “right” amount of resources on educational materials etc. So gross.

Honestly it’s interesting cuz lots of lefties thing getting paid a *wage* is slavery, but getting paid a frickin’ special-use *token* is much more controlling and restrictive than general use money.

>> It’s kinda like if you did voice overs for Audible and they paid you in Audible credits. Love Audible, but I wanted pie! There’s only so many Audible credits you can use!
>
> Some people in blockchain land think like this and it's frustrating. Like "tokenize everything" regardless of the explanation.
>
>> A big point of money is to help facilitate transactions in a society where there is a complex division of labor and many many goods one can purchase. So restricting the uses one can put money towards is actually fighting against the point of money!
>
> To some degree, but what if you wanted to affect division of labour _in one thing only_ (e.g. politics)?

Then spend money to hire people to do the politics stuff you want ;p

>> If the idea is to restrict the uses one can put the Dorabucks to in order to basically pressure/force/“nudge” people into spending more on educational products, that’s super awful/bad/nasty/evil. If you want to get people to spend more on education, persuade them of the value directly. Don’t use shitty fake currencies to create some sorta pressure.
>
> Well, not if it's easy-ish to sell, if they made it so you couldn't sell (or was super hard to, like loyalty points) and then exploited ppl who had lost their jobs or something then yeah, it'd be evil.

I think projects of the type where you are trying to manipulate/control people’s behavior are evil.

Some people think advertising is like that but they are wrong. Advertising is trying to appeal to people’s *current* values and convince them that some purchase will help them fulfill these values (e.g. an ad might appeal to a guy who thinks of himself as a cool guy and imply that cool guys have cool cars like the one in the ad). Lots of the actual values promoted in ads are silly/bad, but the ads are just taking people as they find them, not trying to change/control their lives.

-JM

[Max Kaye]

too poor

> Was it too expensive? If so, why wasn’t it priced at a level where
> they’d get customers???

bc these ppl were poor and pricing it too low would have meant they'd
lost money (making assumptions for the sake of the argument - provided
they're realistic i don't see this as compromising the *point* of the
argument)

> Was it unsafe? Why didn’t they hire security if so?
>
> Did it not go where people needed it to go? Why didn’t they redesign
> the routes if so?

this was all fine, presumably they had appropriate routes

> Why didn’t it go out of business if it was having trouble getting
> customers? (I’ve read that Brazil mostly doesn’t subsidize its bus
> systems, but I’m skeptical as to how the lines can keep operating in
> places where there’s low customer volume).

let's presume they had enough to be profitable, but still under capacity
(like every bus was 1/3 full)

> Were people using competitors they liked more? Were any of those
> competitors outlawed or disadvantaged by government laws? Or were
> people just walking everywhere, or what?
>
> There’s more to this story.
>
>> a favela with bad employment, trash in the streets so bad you
>> couldn't even get a garbage truck in, health problems, social issues,
>> etc.
>>
>> Someone had the idea to give away bus tickets (the buses were running
>> anyway just not used, so no extra expense really) in exchange for
>> bags of trash.
>
> How were they running empty buses for who knows how long?

somewhat empty, not fully

> How did paying people to be garbageman in exchange for bus rides help
> the bus people to, for example, pay their drivers and buy fuel and
> replacement tires for the buses??

presume they were profitable anyway, but also if you do this for some
period of time and then ppl can bring in enough money from outside the
economy can become self-sustaining

>> So ppl in the favela started collecting trash and getting bus
>> tickets.
>>
>> This had a bunch of effects. Streets started to get clean, and health
>> improved bc of this. Also ppl started being able to use buses to go
>> places which helps with jobs, trade, etc.
>
> Why not just discount the fare (which would get you more money anyways
> than running with a bunch of EMPTY seats — you see this principle in
> operation all the time in the hotel and airline industries btw) and
> also, separately, pay people to be garbagemen??

well, they were paying ppl to be garbagemen - in bus tickets

how'd you do the subsidy? maybe this was an order of magnitude more
efficient

> What’s the point of linking the two?

bc that's what created the synergy

>> The bus tickets also started to be used as local currency, at
>> markets, that sort of thing.
>
> Right cuz people were getting paid in them and had extra.
>
> Lots of things *can* be currency. Local bus tickets aren’t great,
> though!

no, they're not. lots of problems like non-divisibility. but bad money
is better than no money. also they're pretty small units of currency
already, would be more of a problem if the tickets were worth $100USD,
but if they were $1usd then it's easier to see how it could work

>> and so you got really good feedback loops.
>>
>> at the end of the day: wealth went up, health increased, streets got
>> nicer, trade increased, mobility increased, etc.
>>
>> And Lietaer argues this was because of the nature of the money: it
>> had particular utility and allowed an _isolated_ economy to form,
>> external to the greater brazillian economy.
>
> I don’t know if you have some idiosyncratic idea of isolation or
> something here. But FYI, isolation isn’t good!

universal isolation isn't (well, there are some cases e.g. political
money where it might be, but in general no it's not)

however, it wasn't universally isolated, it created a semi-permeable
bubble

> Economic integration — via trade — helps productivity and peace.
> It encourages people to specialize in what they can produce better
> (more bananas in the tropics, more cheese in France) and raises the
> costs of things like wars and stuff.

absolutely, but money (and wealth disparity) can also create boundaries;
e.g. poor person living in NYC has less access to stuff than a person of
same wealth living in peru

>> This goes back to his theme of monetary diversity too - even if the
>> brazillian real fluctuated wildly this community would be mostly
>> unaffected (granted the connection to buses does mean if they shut
>> down it might have made the bus-ticket-currency worthless)
>
> That’s a pretty serious stability issue!

well it was already a near zero-net-worth area, and the instability
would be due to outside stuff not inside this bubble

> I wouldn’t bet my wealth on the continued operation of an
> "under-utilised public transport system” in a Brazillian shantytown!
> BITCOIN sounds like a better bet compared to that!

haha, maybe, but it doesn't need to be perpetual

>> You can also look at Bitcoin as monetary engineering - it was just
>> released into the wild, no coercion, but has had (and is having) a
>> big effect on the reorganisation of wealth and fintech, among many
>> other areas.
>
> I think Bitcoin has a lot of problems in terms of the technical side

completely agree

> and its primary uses are speculation and the facilitation of criminal
> activity.

while speculation is a big activity, i'm not so sure about the criminal
side - there have been some talk of money laundering but that's way way
less than via banks

also criminality is not necessarily good or bad - e.g. buying jeans in
the USSR was criminal

> AFAIK the main good to come out of Bitcoin is the bitcoin lotto
> winners giving SENS millions!

that's one good, but it's also somewhat explanationless and they're not
attaching conditions or trying to improve SENS - just blindly donating

>>> Money should be neutral, reliably providing the benefits money
>>> provides (medium of exchange, store of value) and otherwise allowing
>>> people to set their own priorities.
>>
>> Yes, but that doesn't mean we should have only one kind or type.
>>
>>> The creation of money shouldn’t be used to implement a social
>>> agenda.
>>
>> Why? If it's not coercive what's wrong with that?
>
> Trying to manipulate people is intrusive and nasty, whether or not
> force is used.

manipulate is value laden - changing ppls behaviour via interacting with
this is not universally bad.

if I make a product and advertise I'm trying to change ppls behaviour -
that doesn't mean it's bad

if i write a philosophy essay and tell ppl about it i'm trying to change
their behaviour too

>>> Anyways I read the YouTube description which said
>>>
>>>> Bernard Lietaer argues that the monoculture of money is what
>>>> creates economic instability, leading to liquidity crises. He calls
>>>> for a greater diversity of alternative currencies, citing
>>>> innovative and enormously successful initiatives like the
>>>> Lithuanian Doraland Economy, the Torekes in Belgium and
>>>> Switzerland's famous alternative currency, the WIR.
>>>
>>> First off, economic instability (in the sense of long-lasting
>>> "depressions", as opposed to relatively short downturns) is largely
>>> caused by government mucking with various things (not just monetary
>>> policy, but also regulations, tariffs, high tax rates, etc.)
>>
>> What do you think of Minsky's Instability Hypothesis?
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_nqc-A5_Y
>
> Can you give a brief indication of the core content? The video you
> linked is 90 minutes long.

this is 8 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrXngX2J1K0 - can't vouch
for it bc haven't reviewed it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaQdgBBTgRI - 7 min video from steve
keen (same as orig video), sort of an overview of history more than a
full explanation.

basically credit cycles cause instability via public/private debt ratio
to GDP - explains some instabilities - to do with increase of private to
gdp ratio particularly I think. I can't do it just here.

>> Policy does come in to that but I think 'monetary diversity helps
>> resilience' is compatible with it.
>>
>>> More monetary competition would be nice but isn’t essential to
>>> avoid economic instability.
>>
>> I'm not convinced of this. Or maybe a better way to put it is:
>> monetary diversity helps avoid economic instability and thus helps
>> correct mistakes
>
> I also doubt bus token economies would provide the sort of resilience
> to the monetary system that would be helpful.

i agree - but the point of that was not that monetary diversity via bus
tickets is a panacea, just that it allowed this one case and the result
was good (i.e. employment, trade, meaningfullness for ppl, better living
conditions, etc)

> What I’d imagine is more like, several big, financially stable
> corporations offering difference currency options, with very clear and
> detailed policies governing things like how much currency exists and
> can be created at any one time and that sort of thing.

I'm not as much a fan of them being run by big companies - I don't see a
need for that and introduces dependencies that aren't always good (like
we don't want to exacerbate the "too big to fail" phenomena, right?)

That doesn't mean we couldn't use secondary currencies linked to them,
but my intuition is that they shouldn't hold too big a part of the
market

Yup.

> Just pay people general use money, don’t try and control their life
> and make them a puppet who has to take the transit method you approve
> of and spend the “right” amount of resources on educational
> materials etc. So gross.

on the whole I think this is okay - but if it's just 1:1 convertable
(like the bristol pound) feels a bit less useful to me.

> Honestly it’s interesting cuz lots of lefties thing getting paid a
> *wage* is slavery, but getting paid a frickin’ special-use *token*
> is much more controlling and restrictive than general use money.

Yeah - case in point http://peerism.org/ "Peerism solves job automation
and wealth inequality via a proof-of-skill blockchain economic protocol
which matches paid work to tokenized individual skill levels, and shares
the wealth from AI."

I don't think it'll hold up at all. also man lots of buzzwords.

>>> It’s kinda like if you did voice overs for Audible and they paid
>>> you in Audible credits. Love Audible, but I wanted pie! There’s
>>> only so many Audible credits you can use!
>>
>> Some people in blockchain land think like this and it's frustrating.
>> Like "tokenize everything" regardless of the explanation.
>>
>>> A big point of money is to help facilitate transactions in a society
>>> where there is a complex division of labor and many many goods one
>>> can purchase. So restricting the uses one can put money towards is
>>> actually fighting against the point of money!
>>
>> To some degree, but what if you wanted to affect division of labour
>> _in one thing only_ (e.g. politics)?
>
> Then spend money to hire people to do the politics stuff you want ;p

not sure we're talking about the same thing - the problem is that
politics is anti-specialization now (due to ideas like:
one-person-one-vote-on-everything)

some specialization happens due to policy trading but if you have a
majority like the republicans do now then democrats are cut out 100%,
which is anti-trade.

imagine cutting out like 45% of the population from the economy?

in any case - i think there's a better way.

>>> If the idea is to restrict the uses one can put the Dorabucks to in
>>> order to basically pressure/force/“nudge” people into spending
>>> more on educational products, that’s super awful/bad/nasty/evil.
>>> If you want to get people to spend more on education, persuade them
>>> of the value directly. Don’t use shitty fake currencies to create
>>> some sorta pressure.
>>
>> Well, not if it's easy-ish to sell, if they made it so you couldn't
>> sell (or was super hard to, like loyalty points) and then exploited
>> ppl who had lost their jobs or something then yeah, it'd be evil.
>
> I think projects of the type where you are trying to
> manipulate/control people’s behavior are evil.

coercively, yeah. but there's nothing wrong with simply creating an
economic machine and letting ppl choose if they want to use it. if it's
good then they'll tend there. that's why no communist-society-machine
works well, because ppl want to opt out and opt in to a more capitalist
society.

elements of capitalism are innate in reality - i think - bc it's
fundamentality individualist and non-coercive, but there are many ways
to construct capitalist societies and they all have different
properties.

> Some people think advertising is like that but they are wrong.
> Advertising is trying to appeal to people’s *current* values and
> convince them that some purchase will help them fulfill these values
> (e.g. an ad might appeal to a guy who thinks of himself as a cool guy
> and imply that cool guys have cool cars like the one in the ad). Lots
> of the actual values promoted in ads are silly/bad, but the ads are
> just taking people as they find them, not trying to change/control
> their lives.

convincing / persuading someone is manipulation - just the good kind.

maybe i'm using manipulate in too general a sense, in any case i think
it's an ambiguous and value laden word that hides real details. like the
problem with emotionally manipulating someone is that you're doing
something to them they don't get to choose (initiation of force; unless
their super skilled and can see it or react appropriately). but then the
problem is that you're secretly coercing them (which is a specific
crit).

i see manipulation in the general sense as changing something about
environment / experience that alters the result. how it alters the
result and what the motives were are deeper issues and the actual point
that criticism should focus on, not that some change was made at all.

if you don't like how i'm using manipulation as a word i'll stop using
it, but will call you out too when you use it if i think it's hiding
details or value laden. maybe easiest to agree not to use it at all in
that case?

---
Max Kaye
xk.io

[Justin Mallone]

On Feb 4, 2018, at 7:39 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>
> On 5 Feb 2018, at 10:55, Justin Mallone wrote:
>
>> On Feb 4, 2018, at 5:53 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 5 Feb 2018, at 9:31, Justin Mallone wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Feb 4, 2018, at 1:21 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On 4 Feb 2018, at 14:38, anonymous FI wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Feb 3, 2018, at 18:39 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> [3] I think Flux and Issue Based Direct Democracy (the system of democracy I designed based on ideas from BoI and economics) are good, compatible with BoI, and - if successful - will help government and western societies make progress.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *Which* economics did you use in the design? There are competing ideas about econ.
>>>>>
>>>>> Somewhat difficult to answer because I'm not formally trained, but a bunch of my reasoning is from first principles. it's probably most similar to the austrian school, but afaik that's also the best "school" of economics.
>>>>>
>>>>> IBDD is primarily built on division of labour / specialisation and trade, opportunity cost, and comparative advantage. It also has elements from BoI's philosophy, particularly about how to use currencies to incentivise the creation of new ideas. Some of that is similar to topics like "why capitalism encourages new ideas", and although I've got a fairly intuitive, non-technical understanding of that I think it's reasonably robust. part of the problem is I'm bad at explaining it and that's something I want to get better at.
>>>>>
>>>>> Most of my econ education (I had a little at uni but found it not relevant or biased to lefty stuff) has been through cryptocurrency, and that's fairly liberalist / libertarian. Ppl like Mises and Hayek are popular. There's a little from ppl like Friedman but not as much.
>>>>>
>>>>> I use a few ideas from Bernard Lietaer (from his book new money for a new world) - he does a lot of work on complementary currencies and the importance of monetary diversity. The general idea is you can use monies with various properties to cause specific changes in a community. this video was the thing to put me on to him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9EI2PrDpmw
>>>>
>>>> FYI, "cause specific changes in a community” set off my LEFT-WING SOCIAL ENGINEERING ALARM 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
>>>
>>> Haha, fair enough. I'd argue many of the examples he give aren't at all like that though, since they're non-coercive. It's just about causing some sort of reorganisation of ppl and economics, which can easily be objectively better.
>>>
>>> Think something like "I will create a construct that is useful for people and if they use it their behaviour should end up changing to cause X effect". No coercion.
>>>
>>> One example he gives is a favela in Brazil. (btw you can read it here in the first chapter: https://www.scribd.com/document/93313960/Bernard-Lietaer-New-Money-For-A-New-World-full-pdf-ebook)
>>>
>>> They had an under-utilised public transport system,
>>
>> People need to go places, so why weren’t they using the public transit system?
>
> too poor
>
>> Was it too expensive? If so, why wasn’t it priced at a level where they’d get customers???
>
> bc these ppl were poor and pricing it too low would have meant they'd lost money

you say here that "pricing it too low would have meant they'd lost money” but below you want to "presume they had enough to be profitable, but still under capacity (like every bus was 1/3 full)"

If the bus is 1/3 full at peak times, you should lower the price or run fewer buses.

the buses are a service that needs to constantly be run and maintained, every day. they’re not like a natural resource that’s gonna be available anyways no matter what you do.

an unfilled seat is a loss. figure out how to do price discrimination and fill it (demand), or figure out how to have fewer unfilled seats by reducing the number of such seats (supply).

there’s normal, standard ways to do this in a capitalist society.

when i’ve gone on priceline.com to get a cheap hotel room in NYC, I wasn’t offered a rat extermination job in NYC in exchange. I was offered a *price*!

Running with lots of stuff empty is *not* an attribute of a business which is being reasonably run. Actual capitalist industries put huge effort into making sure their shit is at or nearly full whenever possible (see: airlines, hotels, ridesharing services). And they don’t use odd barter arrangements to make that happen either — they charge money.

> (making assumptions for the sake of the argument - provided they're realistic i don't see this as compromising the *point* of the argument)

>> Was it unsafe? Why didn’t they hire security if so?
>>
>> Did it not go where people needed it to go? Why didn’t they redesign the routes if so?
>
> this was all fine, presumably they had appropriate routes
>
>> Why didn’t it go out of business if it was having trouble getting customers? (I’ve read that Brazil mostly doesn’t subsidize its bus systems, but I’m skeptical as to how the lines can keep operating in places where there’s low customer volume).
>
> let's presume they had enough to be profitable, but still under capacity (like every bus was 1/3 full)

>> Were people using competitors they liked more? Were any of those competitors outlawed or disadvantaged by government laws? Or were people just walking everywhere, or what?
>>
>> There’s more to this story.
>>
>>> a favela with bad employment, trash in the streets so bad you couldn't even get a garbage truck in, health problems, social issues, etc.
>>>
>>> Someone had the idea to give away bus tickets (the buses were running anyway just not used, so no extra expense really) in exchange for bags of trash.
>>
>> How were they running empty buses for who knows how long?
>
> somewhat empty, not fully
>
>> How did paying people to be garbageman in exchange for bus rides help the bus people to, for example, pay their drivers and buy fuel and replacement tires for the buses??
>
> presume they were profitable anyway, but also if you do this for some period of time and then ppl can bring in enough money from outside the economy can become self-sustaining

what do you mean by "and then ppl can bring in enough money from outside the economy” exactly?

>>> So ppl in the favela started collecting trash and getting bus tickets.
>>>
>>> This had a bunch of effects. Streets started to get clean, and health improved bc of this. Also ppl started being able to use buses to go places which helps with jobs, trade, etc.
>>
>> Why not just discount the fare (which would get you more money anyways than running with a bunch of EMPTY seats — you see this principle in operation all the time in the hotel and airline industries btw) and also, separately, pay people to be garbagemen??
>
> well, they were paying ppl to be garbagemen - in bus tickets

why not pay them in money?

> how'd you do the subsidy?

From first principles, I wouldn’t subsidize anything.

I would have e.g. market-based garbage pickup.

But like, if we assume the govt has taken responsibility over things like garbage pickup, it should hire enough people to do the job.

> maybe this was an order of magnitude more efficient

Why would it be more efficient? Why’d you mention an order of magnitude, specifically?

>> What’s the point of linking the two?
>
> bc that's what created the synergy

what do u mean by synergy?

>>> The bus tickets also started to be used as local currency, at markets, that sort of thing.
>>
>> Right cuz people were getting paid in them and had extra.
>>
>> Lots of things *can* be currency. Local bus tickets aren’t great, though!
>
> no, they're not. lots of problems like non-divisibility. but bad money is better than no money.

i’m honestly not sure why you bring this up. brazil has a currency, does it not?

> also they're pretty small units of currency already, would be more of a problem if the tickets were worth $100USD, but if they were $1usd then it's easier to see how it could work
>
>>> and so you got really good feedback loops.
>>>
>>> at the end of the day: wealth went up, health increased, streets got nicer, trade increased, mobility increased, etc.
>>>
>>> And Lietaer argues this was because of the nature of the money: it had particular utility and allowed an _isolated_ economy to form, external to the greater brazillian economy.
>>
>> I don’t know if you have some idiosyncratic idea of isolation or something here. But FYI, isolation isn’t good!
>
> universal isolation isn't (well, there are some cases e.g. political money where it might be, but in general no it's not)
>
> however, it wasn't universally isolated, it created a semi-permeable bubble
>
>> Economic integration — via trade — helps productivity and peace. It encourages people to specialize in what they can produce better (more bananas in the tropics, more cheese in France) and raises the costs of things like wars and stuff.
>
> absolutely, but money (and wealth disparity) can also create boundaries; e.g. poor person living in NYC has less access to stuff than a person of same wealth living in peru

Peru’s GDP is 6k a year.

The way higher accumulation of capital in places like NYC allows even marginally productive people to create way more wealth than they would in Peru. That actually is very helpful to *poor* people, which is why so many try and come into this country illegally! (And why very few New Yorkers move to Peru!)

Sure if you live in a wealthy country and make money and then *move to a way cheaper country* you’ll be able to buy more like house and stuff. But the wealth you have is thanks to the wealth you accumulated to the wealthy country .. oh and btw if you do that, you’re *helping* the poorer country by bringing capital there..

I don’t really get what you mean by this “create boundaries” stuff but it sounds bad.

>>> This goes back to his theme of monetary diversity too - even if the brazillian real fluctuated wildly this community would be mostly unaffected (granted the connection to buses does mean if they shut down it might have made the bus-ticket-currency worthless)
>>
>> That’s a pretty serious stability issue!
>
> well it was already a near zero-net-worth area, and the instability would be due to outside stuff not inside this bubble

What do you mean by "instability would be due to outside stuff not inside this bubble”?

>> I wouldn’t bet my wealth on the continued operation of an "under-utilised public transport system” in a Brazillian shantytown! BITCOIN sounds like a better bet compared to that!
>
> haha, maybe, but it doesn't need to be perpetual
>
>>> You can also look at Bitcoin as monetary engineering - it was just released into the wild, no coercion, but has had (and is having) a big effect on the reorganisation of wealth and fintech, among many other areas.
>>
>> I think Bitcoin has a lot of problems in terms of the technical side
>
> completely agree
>
>> and its primary uses are speculation and the facilitation of criminal activity.
>
> while speculation is a big activity, i'm not so sure about the criminal side - there have been some talk of money laundering but that's way way less than via banks
>
> also criminality is not necessarily good or bad - e.g. buying jeans in the USSR was criminal
>
>> AFAIK the main good to come out of Bitcoin is the bitcoin lotto winners giving SENS millions!
>
> that's one good, but it's also somewhat explanationless and they're not attaching conditions or trying to improve SENS - just blindly donating
>
>>>> Money should be neutral, reliably providing the benefits money provides (medium of exchange, store of value) and otherwise allowing people to set their own priorities.
>>>
>>> Yes, but that doesn't mean we should have only one kind or type.
>>>
>>>> The creation of money shouldn’t be used to implement a social agenda.
>>>
>>> Why? If it's not coercive what's wrong with that?
>>
>> Trying to manipulate people is intrusive and nasty, whether or not force is used.
>
> manipulate is value laden - changing ppls behaviour via interacting with this is not universally bad.
>
> if I make a product and advertise I'm trying to change ppls behaviour - that doesn't mean it's bad
>
> if i write a philosophy essay and tell ppl about it i'm trying to change their behaviour too

What’s your point with these two examples?

You seem to be responding to a claim that runs something like “any attempt to persuade people to change their behavior is bad.”

>>>> Anyways I read the YouTube description which said
>>>>
>>>>> Bernard Lietaer argues that the monoculture of money is what creates economic instability, leading to liquidity crises. He calls for a greater diversity of alternative currencies, citing innovative and enormously successful initiatives like the Lithuanian Doraland Economy, the Torekes in Belgium and Switzerland's famous alternative currency, the WIR.
>>>>
>>>> First off, economic instability (in the sense of long-lasting "depressions", as opposed to relatively short downturns) is largely caused by government mucking with various things (not just monetary policy, but also regulations, tariffs, high tax rates, etc.)
>>>
>>> What do you think of Minsky's Instability Hypothesis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9_nqc-A5_Y
>>
>> Can you give a brief indication of the core content? The video you linked is 90 minutes long.
>
> this is 8 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrXngX2J1K0 - can't vouch for it bc haven't reviewed it

So the first minute of this says that Minsky’s hypothesis was that lengthy periods of prosperity cause people in financial institutions to invest in ever riskier assets which increases instability.

I think the reason financial institution people invest in riskier assets is not the period of prosperity but the fact that the govt will BAIL THEM OUT if they fuck up badly enough.

If you’re not playing with your own money, where’s the risk?

On the topic of the financial crisis specifically, I recommend this book, which is by an Objectivist https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Crisis-Free-Market-Cure/dp/0071806776



Around 3 minutes in the guy starts talking about the relaxation of credit standards when people are paying down debts etc.

That’s totally normal and fine. When people are saving more money and holding less debt, interest rates will tend to fall, which will cause more marginal borrowers to get access to credit.

What would normally prevent this from getting out of control is things like:

1) the operation of interest rates (which will rise again if tons of borrowing occurs — but doh, our interest rates are set by a central bank!!)

2) the necessity of having significant accumulated capital already before making huge personal financial commitments involving debt (but doh, our govt dominates the housing market with subsidized programs and encourages people to make huge financial commitments with very little capital!)

3) institutional accountability such that businesses will go out of business if they make a bunch of bad loans, discouraging such bad loans from being made in the first place (but doh, politically connected financial institutions can count on getting bailed out if they are “too big to fail”!)

4) general good lending practices as a result of the possibility of going out of business mentioned in #3 (but doh, if you have good lending practices you’ll get attacked as being RACIST and be targeted by the govt for a shakedown — see the Community Reinvestment Act)

Basically, periods of economic growth are GREAT, and should make the system MORE stable. But the govt fucks with a lot of stuff and causes random chaos.

If you want me to comment more on this vid I can but I dunno if you’ll say you don’t think it’s a good representation or something.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaQdgBBTgRI - 7 min video from steve keen (same as orig video), sort of an overview of history more than a full explanation.
>
> basically credit cycles cause instability via public/private debt ratio to GDP - explains some instabilities - to do with increase of private to gdp ratio particularly I think. I can't do it just here.
>
>>> Policy does come in to that but I think 'monetary diversity helps resilience' is compatible with it.
>>>
>>>> More monetary competition would be nice but isn’t essential to avoid economic instability.
>>>
>>> I'm not convinced of this. Or maybe a better way to put it is: monetary diversity helps avoid economic instability and thus helps correct mistakes
>>
>> I also doubt bus token economies would provide the sort of resilience to the monetary system that would be helpful.
>
> i agree - but the point of that was not that monetary diversity via bus tickets is a panacea, just that it allowed this one case and the result was good (i.e. employment, trade, meaningfullness for ppl, better living conditions, etc)
>
>> What I’d imagine is more like, several big, financially stable corporations offering difference currency options, with very clear and detailed policies governing things like how much currency exists and can be created at any one time and that sort of thing.
>
> I'm not as much a fan of them being run by big companies - I don't see a need for that and introduces dependencies that aren't always good (like we don't want to exacerbate the "too big to fail" phenomena, right?)

Too big to fail is a phenomena of very stupid govt policy, not of economics or nature.

...

>>>> It’s kinda like if you did voice overs for Audible and they paid you in Audible credits. Love Audible, but I wanted pie! There’s only so many Audible credits you can use!
>>>
>>> Some people in blockchain land think like this and it's frustrating. Like "tokenize everything" regardless of the explanation.
>>>
>>>> A big point of money is to help facilitate transactions in a society where there is a complex division of labor and many many goods one can purchase. So restricting the uses one can put money towards is actually fighting against the point of money!
>>>
>>> To some degree, but what if you wanted to affect division of labour _in one thing only_ (e.g. politics)?
>>
>> Then spend money to hire people to do the politics stuff you want ;p
>
> not sure we're talking about the same thing - the problem is that politics is anti-specialization now (due to ideas like: one-person-one-vote-on-everything)
>
> some specialization happens due to policy trading but if you have a majority like the republicans do now then democrats are cut out 100%,

This statement about the Democrats being cut out 100% is totally and completely wrong.

The Democrats have actual political power (thanks to the Filibuster) and a lot of leverage due to Republican worries about overreaching and losing seats in the next election (which is less than a year away).

Not to mention all the holdovers in the administrative state and 8 years of Obama judicial appointments…

> which is anti-trade.
>
> imagine cutting out like 45% of the population from the economy?
>
> in any case - i think there's a better way.
>
>>>> If the idea is to restrict the uses one can put the Dorabucks to in order to basically pressure/force/“nudge” people into spending more on educational products, that’s super awful/bad/nasty/evil. If you want to get people to spend more on education, persuade them of the value directly. Don’t use shitty fake currencies to create some sorta pressure.
>>>
>>> Well, not if it's easy-ish to sell, if they made it so you couldn't sell (or was super hard to, like loyalty points) and then exploited ppl who had lost their jobs or something then yeah, it'd be evil.
>>
>> I think projects of the type where you are trying to manipulate/control people’s behavior are evil.
>
> coercively, yeah. but there's nothing wrong with simply creating an economic machine and letting ppl choose if they want to use it.

The Dorabucks thing is a *worse* alternative to money that was specifically designed to be worse in ways so that people would do more projects the creators approved of.

It’s kind of like if Amazon made you do your Alexa orders in Mandarin cuz Bezos really thought everyone should learn some Mandarin. That’s kind of a defective product in spirit (if not in law).

> if it's good then they'll tend there. that's why no communist-society-machine works well, because ppl want to opt out and opt in to a more capitalist society.
>
> elements of capitalism are innate in reality - i think - bc it's fundamentality individualist and non-coercive, but there are many ways to construct capitalist societies and they all have different properties.
>
>> Some people think advertising is like that but they are wrong. Advertising is trying to appeal to people’s *current* values and convince them that some purchase will help them fulfill these values (e.g. an ad might appeal to a guy who thinks of himself as a cool guy and imply that cool guys have cool cars like the one in the ad). Lots of the actual values promoted in ads are silly/bad, but the ads are just taking people as they find them, not trying to change/control their lives.
>
> convincing / persuading someone is manipulation - just the good kind.
>
> maybe i'm using manipulate in too general a sense, in any case i think it's an ambiguous and value laden word that hides real details. like the problem with emotionally manipulating someone is that you're doing something to them they don't get to choose (initiation of force; unless their super skilled and can see it or react appropriately).

Some people like being manipulated and know its happening to some extent as its going on but go with the flow anyways. The fact that you’re manipulating someone who consents doesn’t make it moral.

Your moral analysis seems really focused on whether there’s force or not in a way common to libertarians. Force is a significant issue but not the be-all-end-all of morality.

> but then the problem is that you're secretly coercing them (which is a specific crit).
>
> i see manipulation in the general sense as changing something about environment / experience that alters the result. how it alters the result and what the motives were are deeper issues and the actual point that criticism should focus on, not that some change was made at all.

the issue isn’t that a change was made but an issue of having goals for other people’s lives one shouldn’t.

an example that’s come up in TCS is parents “strewing” books around the house that the parent approves of. This is bad because the parent is focused on what they think the kid should be interested in instead of trying to help the kid by kid’s own lights and values. There’s no force involved — the parent isn’t hitting the kid or anything. But it’s still bad.

> if you don't like how i'm using manipulation as a word i'll stop using it, but will call you out too when you use it if i think it's hiding details or value laden. maybe easiest to agree not to use it at all in that case?

I’m gonna stick up for my word choice for now but we can argue about it :-)

-JM

[Elliot Temple]

The solution is to do enough *philosophical education* so that the popularity part doesn't take much effort.

This fits with general principles I commonly talk about: about powering up and doing what's easy (efficient), not overreaching, prioritizing reason, proceeding in a way that errors get corrected and there are paths forward, etc

As Rand said, it's too early to do a political party.

Elliot Temple
www.elliottemple.com

[Elliot Temple]

I think you're overrating voting and don't understand what problem it solves. It's basically good enough as a compromise so we don't kill each other. It's not some wonderful ideal. It's a bandaid. It's working sorta OK. You want to optimize it, but I want to say "OK, democracy bought us some time to advance philosophy and science, the really important areas to make progress in".

You seem to want to use democracy/voting for more things, whereas actually it should be limited. it's an acceptable compromise about how to run a government which should be a minimal government with limited powers, so we vote over as little stuff as possible. and voting is not a very good solution, most of the time, in the rest of life!

Elliot Temple
www.elliottemple.com

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 4, 2018, at 2:53 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 5 Feb 2018, at 9:31, Justin Mallone wrote:
>
>> On Feb 4, 2018, at 1:21 AM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 4 Feb 2018, at 14:38, anonymous FI wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Feb 3, 2018, at 18:39 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> [3] I think Flux and Issue Based Direct Democracy (the system of democracy I designed based on ideas from BoI and economics) are good, compatible with BoI, and - if successful - will help government and western societies make progress.
>>>>
>>>> *Which* economics did you use in the design? There are competing ideas about econ.
>>>
>>> Somewhat difficult to answer because I'm not formally trained, but a bunch of my reasoning is from first principles. it's probably most similar to the austrian school, but afaik that's also the best "school" of economics.
>>>
>>> IBDD is primarily built on division of labour / specialisation and trade, opportunity cost, and comparative advantage. It also has elements from BoI's philosophy, particularly about how to use currencies to incentivise the creation of new ideas. Some of that is similar to topics like "why capitalism encourages new ideas", and although I've got a fairly intuitive, non-technical understanding of that I think it's reasonably robust. part of the problem is I'm bad at explaining it and that's something I want to get better at.
>>>
>>> Most of my econ education (I had a little at uni but found it not relevant or biased to lefty stuff) has been through cryptocurrency, and that's fairly liberalist / libertarian. Ppl like Mises and Hayek are popular. There's a little from ppl like Friedman but not as much.
>>>
>>> I use a few ideas from Bernard Lietaer (from his book new money for a new world) - he does a lot of work on complementary currencies and the importance of monetary diversity. The general idea is you can use monies with various properties to cause specific changes in a community. this video was the thing to put me on to him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9EI2PrDpmw
>>
>> FYI, "cause specific changes in a community” set off my LEFT-WING SOCIAL ENGINEERING ALARM 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
>
> Haha, fair enough. I'd argue many of the examples he give aren't at all like that though, since they're non-coercive. It's just about causing some sort of reorganisation of ppl and economics, which can easily be objectively better.
>
> Think something like "I will create a construct that is useful for people and if they use it their behaviour should end up changing to cause X effect". No coercion.

The entire point of the system is to be authoritarian. Force is snuck in wherever possible. Saying "no coercion" is really naively/gullibly covering up for tyrants.

Their goal is to control ppl, NOT to let ppl voluntarily run their own lives. They absolutely intend to get the government involved. Don't be fooled by them asserting they aren't going to hurt anyone.

>
> One example he gives is a favela in Brazil. (btw you can read it here in the first chapter: https://www.scribd.com/document/93313960/Bernard-Lietaer-New-Money-For-A-New-World-full-pdf-ebook)
>
> They had an under-utilised public transport system, a favela with bad employment, trash in the streets so bad you couldn't even get a garbage truck in, health problems, social issues, etc.
>
> Someone had the idea to give away bus tickets (the buses were running anyway just not used, so no extra expense really) in exchange for bags of trash. So ppl in the favela started collecting trash and getting bus tickets.
>
> This had a bunch of effects. Streets started to get clean, and health improved bc of this. Also ppl started being able to use buses to go places which helps with jobs, trade, etc. The bus tickets also started to be used as local currency, at markets, that sort of thing. and so you got really good feedback loops.
>
> at the end of the day: wealth went up, health increased, streets got nicer, trade increased, mobility increased, etc.

this is selective attention. it's the same issue behind the broken window fallacy. you're not looking at e.g. the taxpayer funding for the busses, and the use of force involved.

>> https://grandparentsforthefuture.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/economics-creating-a-monetary-ecosystem/
>>
>>> Doraland is a system that has been proposed to help Lithuania, the first of three small Baltic States that became independent from the Soviet Union in 1990, to become “A Learning Country” by stimulating grass-roots educational initiatives. “It would be best implemented,” according to the Club of Rome report, “by NGOs, organized around a new Learning Foundation.”
>>
>> So as of a few years ago this was some fantasy of a group (Club of Rome) with a history of being wrong on economics (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome)

The Club of Rome is evil.


Elliot Temple
www.curi.us

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 4, 2018, at 4:39 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 5 Feb 2018, at 10:55, Justin Mallone wrote:
>
>> On Feb 4, 2018, at 5:53 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 5 Feb 2018, at 9:31, Justin Mallone wrote:



>>>> A big point of money is to help facilitate transactions in a society where there is a complex division of labor and many many goods one can purchase. So restricting the uses one can put money towards is actually fighting against the point of money!
>>>
>>> To some degree, but what if you wanted to affect division of labour _in one thing only_ (e.g. politics)?
>>
>> Then spend money to hire people to do the politics stuff you want ;p
>
> not sure we're talking about the same thing - the problem is that politics is anti-specialization now (due to ideas like: one-person-one-vote-on-everything)
>
> some specialization happens due to policy trading but if you have a majority like the republicans do now then democrats are cut out 100%, which is anti-trade.

oh god if only. dems getting cut out is not even close to the current situation. you seem to have no clue what you're talking about.


Elliot Temple
www.fallibleideas.com

[Max Kaye]

I think I'm overrating voting _as it has been_, not what it could be. I
think currently it's about decision-making (in so far as we need to
reach decisions, it's not _great_ at picking good solns to problems),
satisfying western values around self-sovereignty, and I also think it
solves the problem of influential-people-losing-influence (i.e. there
are strong biases reminiscent of the precautionary principle and it
strongly biases the status quo). To what extent each was designed or
intentional is debatable, but I think they're all in there somewhere.

I think we can design systems of democracy that accelerate and amplify
progress in philosophy and science - that's one of my primary
motivations. I structure it like: _if_ I'm right, then it's almost
(actually?) evil not to try. And since I _think_ I'm right, and nobody
has refuted it yet, I have to keep going.

> You seem to want to use democracy/voting for more things, whereas
> actually it should be limited. it's an acceptable compromise about how
> to run a government which should be a minimal government with limited
> powers, so we vote over as little stuff as possible. and voting is not
> a very good solution, most of the time, in the rest of life!

Sounds like my main priority should be testing IBDD to see if it behaves
in the manner I predict. If I'm right then we don't need to limit it bc
we have a system that better produces enhances progress and is self
limiting.

I think systems that are natively self-limiting are better than systems
where we impose limits on them.

---
Max Kaye
xk.io

[Max Kaye]

Mm.

What about popularity due to other things? Say I won some competition or
got put on a podium bc someone famous decided I should be. If that
happened I'd try to use it as a platform to do more philosophical
education, or at least inspire ppl to educate themselves. Maybe that
would reduce my popularity (well, it certainly would) but it seems like
that'd be the thing to do.

One way to look at it (not sure if valid) is to weight philosophy
education by number of ppl and time, then graph against time. So ppl
earlier on are better, but MANY more ppl later is better than a small
number early and then nothing else. Then you'd sort of maximise for area
under the curve to get the most impact from philosophical education. But
that might involve caring about popularity for the wrong reason. I'm
unsure.

> This fits with general principles I commonly talk about: about
> powering up and doing what's easy (efficient), not overreaching,
> prioritizing reason, proceeding in a way that errors get corrected and
> there are paths forward, etc
>
> As Rand said, it's too early to do a political party.

Well - it's too early to _win_ with a political party, which is why I'm
not working on that full time. Focusing on other things (indirection) bc
that's the path I see to being in a position to one day win with a
political party.

---
Max Kaye
xk.io

[Elliot Temple]

On Feb 7, 2018, at 1:34 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:

> On 6 Feb 2018, at 17:27, Elliot Temple wrote:
>
>> On Feb 3, 2018, at 10:21 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>
>>> On 4 Feb 2018, at 14:38, anonymous FI wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Feb 3, 2018, at 18:39 PM, Max Kaye <m...@xk.io> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> [3] I think Flux and Issue Based Direct Democracy (the system of democracy I designed based on ideas from BoI and economics) are good, compatible with BoI, and - if successful - will help government and western societies make progress.
>>>>
>>>> *Which* economics did you use in the design? There are competing ideas about econ.
>>>
>>> Somewhat difficult to answer because I'm not formally trained, but a bunch of my reasoning is from first principles. it's probably most similar to the austrian school, but afaik that's also the best "school" of economics.
>>>
>>> IBDD is primarily built on division of labour / specialisation and trade, opportunity cost, and comparative advantage. It also has elements from BoI's philosophy, particularly about how to use currencies to incentivise the creation of new ideas. Some of that is similar to topics like "why capitalism encourages new ideas", and although I've got a fairly intuitive, non-technical understanding of that I think it's reasonably robust. part of the problem is I'm bad at explaining it and that's something I want to get better at.
>>>
>>> Most of my econ education (I had a little at uni but found it not relevant or biased to lefty stuff) has been through cryptocurrency, and that's fairly liberalist / libertarian. Ppl like Mises and Hayek are popular. There's a little from ppl like Friedman but not as much.
>>>
>>> I use a few ideas from Bernard Lietaer (from his book new money for a new world) - he does a lot of work on complementary currencies and the importance of monetary diversity. The general idea is you can use monies with various properties to cause specific changes in a community. this video was the thing to put me on to him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9EI2PrDpmw
>>>
>>> Most of my research and thinking has been on things like currency supply and engineering currencies
>>>
>>> So IBDD is essentially a political currency (we've gone to some effort to design ways to make it very hard to sell for $, which I'm not convinced is actually bad but many ppl see it as bad so I think it's important to have answers to those questions and to build in such a way that we are able to correct mistakes)
>>>
>>> It's built to encourage ppl to specialise in areas they care about (via opportunity cost) and arbitrage issues over time (so there's a 'liquidity token' which is used to move political value between issues as they come up and these tokens persists over time). Units issued for each issue expire after the issue (so their only utility is voting) and can be swapped via an auction system where ppl bid in liquidity tokens for voting tokens. tokens are fungible with other tokens of the same type (like all voting tokens for one issue are fungible but not for different issues).
>>>
>>> AFAIK not much (if any) research has been done into this sort of thing, i.e. when you treat votes like stocks or money how to people use them and reorganise and that sort of thing?
>>>
>>> There's also some ideas of my own that are (I think) original. Like liquidity tokens (LTs) get inflated and the new LTs are distributed to everyone (multiple reasons for this). When viewing balances in LTs it'll be displayed as % points, not as individual units. I think this is good because it makes ppl view prices differently and shows inflation actively changing your "balance". This might make it go up or down depending on how many LTs you have (proportionally) and how the population changes.
>>>
>>> So this "show balances as % points" is one of my ideas that I think will change the way ppl think about currency.
>>
>> I think you're overrating voting and don't understand what problem it solves. It's basically good enough as a compromise so we don't kill each other. It's not some wonderful ideal. It's a bandaid. It's working sorta OK. You want to optimize it, but I want to say "OK, democracy bought us some time to advance philosophy and science, the really important areas to make progress in".
>
> I think I'm overrating voting _as it has been_, not what it could be. I think currently it's about decision-making (in so far as we need to reach decisions, it's not _great_ at picking good solns to problems), satisfying western values around self-sovereignty, and I also think it solves the problem of influential-people-losing-influence (i.e. there are strong biases reminiscent of the precautionary principle and it strongly biases the status quo). To what extent each was designed or intentional is debatable, but I think they're all in there somewhere.
>
> I think we can design systems of democracy that accelerate and amplify progress in philosophy and science - that's one of my primary motivations. I structure it like: _if_ I'm right, then it's almost (actually?) evil not to try. And since I _think_ I'm right, and nobody has refuted it yet, I have to keep going.

how does voting help in philosophy and science? what problems does it solve there?

those are truth-seeking fields, and voting measures popularity, and popularity isn't truth. at first glance it's not apparent how voting will help.

i'm guessing you agree critical discussion is important. you don't want to replace critical discussion with voting.

so consider critical discussion as a starting point or baseline. what problems do you think it has? and how will adding voting, in what ways, solve those problems?



Elliot Temple
www.elliottemple.com

[Elliot Temple]

popularity is ok when it doesn't take much effort, and you aren't making compromises to keep it (like giving the speech you think the audience wants to hear instead of the one you think is true).

if you do your own thing and then get invited to speak, ok no problem. you put no effort into getting the invite. it's just a bonus.

if you make a SMALL effort to get a speaking invite, that's ok too. it doesn't need to be zero.

but PRIMARILY you should try to get smarter, more powerful, learn, solve problems, etc. that's much more EFFICIENT.

it's possible to spend an entire life (huge effort) chasing speaking invites and popularity, and still fail. they can be very expensive and not worth it. they're ok when very cheap (when they involve doing little that differs from what you would do if you knew for a 100% fact that you would not get a speaking invite).

> One way to look at it (not sure if valid) is to weight philosophy education by number of ppl and time, then graph against time. So ppl earlier on are better, but MANY more ppl later is better than a small number early and then nothing else. Then you'd sort of maximise for area under the curve to get the most impact from philosophical education. But that might involve caring about popularity for the wrong reason. I'm unsure.

yes i know this area-under-curve weighting and think it's a good starting point. IIRC it's also the one used for judging squirrel maximizing in the super-relevant squirrel morality dialog (i forget offhand if i say how the weighting is done explicitly in that piece).

this is a very progress-oriented weighting b/c there is a long future ahead. it's also very averse to catastrophic risks (like risk of the extinction of humanity).

>> This fits with general principles I commonly talk about: about powering up and doing what's easy (efficient), not overreaching, prioritizing reason, proceeding in a way that errors get corrected and there are paths forward, etc
>>
>> As Rand said, it's too early to do a political party.
>
> Well - it's too early to _win_ with a political party, which is why I'm not working on that full time. Focusing on other things (indirection) bc that's the path I see to being in a position to one day win with a political party.

losing political parties, that aren't even close to winning, are inefficient.

what's the point of a political party that doesn't come near winning? to get the word out. to spread ideas. to get people involved. to educate people.

but political parties are not the optimal way to educate people or organize an idea-oriented movement. they aren't designed for that, and have a bunch of distractions from it.


Elliot Temple
www.curi.us