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Journal by khallow
I was trying to put together some musings I had about experimentation at the society level with an eye to eventually making society better, but suffered from serious writer's block. So here's what I have.
First, the observation that we can look at a society as a bunch of humans with infrastructure. This infrastructure appears at many levels: individual biology/psychology, culture, rules and trade, the traditional sort of infrastructure (energy generation, roads, emergency services, telecomms, internet), and education/knowledge.
Today, we bring a lot of interesting tools to the table for improving society. First, we have a better understanding and knowledge of the workings of society. Second, advancing technology allows us to do things that weren't possible before. A key one is things are becoming less scarce. We may even be on the verge of the post-scarcity society where basic human needs are "too cheap to meter".
Second, it seems a fine environmental for experimenting with a variety of possibilities that would be legally and culturally acceptable to a degree.
For example, we're already trying out non-traditional relationships like same sex marriage and internet discourse with considerable success.
I wish society was more open to economic/trade experimentation (like gig economy, high frequency trade (and other automated trade mechanisms), and cryptocurrency).
Finally, not much point to experimenting, if one doesn't pay attention to the results. For example, we have vast improvement in the human condition due to the present economic system (global trade, capitalism, plus widespread democracy), but I still see people pushing old narratives that ignore that. Similarly, the economic experiments I mentioned above all have resistance from sources that usually can't be bothered to find an actual problem (gig workers are "exploited", HFT is stealing pennies from grandma every time she trades, and cryptocurrencies are for tax evasion).
On that last point, it doesn't make sense to do experiments, if you can't perceive what works or not in those experiments.
First, the observation that we can look at a society as a bunch of humans with infrastructure. This infrastructure appears at many levels: individual biology/psychology, culture, rules and trade, the traditional sort of infrastructure (energy generation, roads, emergency services, telecomms, internet), and education/knowledge.
Today, we bring a lot of interesting tools to the table for improving society. First, we have a better understanding and knowledge of the workings of society. Second, advancing technology allows us to do things that weren't possible before. A key one is things are becoming less scarce. We may even be on the verge of the post-scarcity society where basic human needs are "too cheap to meter".
Second, it seems a fine environmental for experimenting with a variety of possibilities that would be legally and culturally acceptable to a degree.
For example, we're already trying out non-traditional relationships like same sex marriage and internet discourse with considerable success.
I wish society was more open to economic/trade experimentation (like gig economy, high frequency trade (and other automated trade mechanisms), and cryptocurrency).
Finally, not much point to experimenting, if one doesn't pay attention to the results. For example, we have vast improvement in the human condition due to the present economic system (global trade, capitalism, plus widespread democracy), but I still see people pushing old narratives that ignore that. Similarly, the economic experiments I mentioned above all have resistance from sources that usually can't be bothered to find an actual problem (gig workers are "exploited", HFT is stealing pennies from grandma every time she trades, and cryptocurrencies are for tax evasion).
On that last point, it doesn't make sense to do experiments, if you can't perceive what works or not in those experiments.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Do not use if foil seal is broken.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nostyle on Thursday March 24 2022, @03:05PM (18 children)
What is the "added value" in any of this?
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My pedestrian, common sense assessments of these things:
1) Gig work merely absolves corporations from costs of liability, overhead and employee benefits, shifting these costs onto workers - many of whom are ill-equipped to understand the math.
2) HFT is a scheme to exploit latency in markets to fabricate value where there is none.
3) Cryptocurrency is a method of artificially expanding the money supply, thereby driving inflation so as to enrich those who happen to hold real property and impoverish those who do not.
Then again, I am not well-educated about these things.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @04:01PM (17 children)
Ask the parties going through considerable effort and resources to do these things not me. My take is that the enormous effort going into these things demonstrate the considerable value to the parties undergoing the effort. And that's good enough for me. Nothing has to have value to everyone.
Except that it doesn't. As I noted in my posts on that subject, we already have regulation throughout the developed world that prevents most such gig economy work. Thus, gig economy work doesn't overlap much with regular work.
And sorry, but a worker who deals with those costs will become well-equipped to understand them in a few months to years. And that's an important thing to note. Removing oneself from gig economy work is pretty easy to do - vastly easier than quitting a traditional job.
In other words, there's value where there was none before. That's typical economic fabrication (in the non-deceptive sense of the word) of value.
There is no dearth of artificial means of inflating money supply. That isn't what drives the value of cryptocurrency! And it's absurd to claim that this somehow inflates normal inflation. Even if we were to take the entirety of the cryptocurrency market capitalization as an inflationary add on, it's only $2 trillion [coinmarketcap.com] presently. Real property is somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 trillion [institutionalinvestor.com].
This.
(Score: 2) by nostyle on Thursday March 24 2022, @06:16PM (16 children)
I do not come here to argue, so I will limit myself to a single response to your reply.
Using this logic, you could defend bank-robbery. Still your overall premise was "eventually making society better", an ideal which you seem to abandon in the passage above. I find it revealing that you cannot enumerate any value added.
...except that it does. (Here giving you as much proof as you gave me.)
Sure...either that or become broke and homeless. But if I've got mine, why should I care?...right?
...At least until all the traditional jobs have vanished and been replaced by gig work. In the end it all seems to boil down to master/slave relationships, but, hey, that's okay if all the contracts are in order, ...right?
Here you are being intentionally obtuse. I used "fabricate" in the sense of "lie about" rather than in the sense of "create". Please elaborate on
how HFT differs from graft.
I'll not argue further about crypto. I suspect there may be some value in having a convenient means of barter outside of traditional currency in the event the SHTF - perhaps better than the liquor and tobacco I am stock-piling for that eventuality. And I certainly would not refuse any offers anyone would like to proffer for an NFT of my next journal on SN. :)
--
In truth, your response makes me think that Azuma may have a point, and that your promotion of these technologies has an ulterior motivation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @07:20PM (15 children)
Indeed, I could. But there's a serious difference. It's not merely a matter of not seeing the "added value" of bank robberies - it hurts real people.
As to "value added", I find value in people pursuing and achieving their wants without notable harm to others or demanding resources from others, no matter how little those wants matter to me personally.
The two primary recent gig economy jobs are transportation in markets with severely restricted transportation options (such as ride hailing cartels), small internet-accessible tasks that couldn't be paid for before, and delivery services for goods that didn't have delivery services before. Things like Uber, Mechanical Turk, and GrubHub. There's very little overlap with most real world jobs where the gig approach wouldn't make sense and would be heavily regulated.
If that were going to be a genuine problem, it would have happened long before now. Gig work has been around forever. What's changed is that we have technology to apply gig work to roles that are otherwise poorly covered, just as I noted before.
No, I'm merely playing on the double meaning of fabrication. Now, let's consider the definition of graft. Here's a typical one [wordnik.com]:
So what's deceitful or fraudulent about trading really fast? Or even of placing and removing book orders that fast? (They can after all be traded when they exist - even if it's just for a microsecond.) Nothing at all. So right there, HFT isn't graft.
I'll note here that Canada attempted [soylentnews.org] to use the financial system to shut down a protest (the trucker convoy thing). I don't know how far along they were, but crypto transactions [reason.com] would have still gone through. Getting cut off from normal finance by a hostile government is the sort of SHTF moment that I think would make crypto very viable.
Like what? There's no point to me trying to defend myself from vague innuendo. Azuma crosses the line to complete fabrication, in the deceptive sense of the word.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @09:20PM (12 children)
Webster:
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Wallstreet took six figures from me in 2008. No one went to jail. Fuck wallstreet. My excess all goes to charity now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @09:47PM (2 children)
Don't bother, he is pedantic when it suits and loosey goosey when he's up against the wall. Truly an epic shill khallow is, and he might even be doing it for free!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @10:44PM
-Zedd, Spectrum [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @12:58AM
In other words, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @11:06PM (8 children)
Ok. Should blow up society because someone was mean to you 13 years ago? Because I don't see the point of complaining about this in a thread about societal experimentation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @12:02AM (7 children)
Sorry, I was trying to be neighborly by engaging you in your journal, and your foolishness brought some old angst to the surface. I should know better.
As to the fate of society, I cannot avert its impending and inevitable doom. The foundations of it are shot. Enjoy it while you can.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @12:55AM (6 children)
No problem here. I'm used to neighborly on the internet.
Well, we can make that less impending and inevitable, and/or we can figure out how to put the pieces together afterward by this experimentation. It helps to know what works and doesn't work so we don't make as many of the same mistakes next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @02:37AM (5 children)
Salvation will not come by way of gig work, HFT or crypto, though, so my estimation is that you are discussing deck chair arrangements on the Titanic.
There is a quote I once read that I have been unable to find for some months now, saying something like this:
Let's run that experiment.
--
-Matthew Koma, Zedd, Spectrum (Acoustic Version) [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @03:28AM
Eureka!!! Found it:
-Baha'u'llah, Tabernacle of Unity [bahai.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @03:42AM (3 children)
So what? If there genuinely is an iceberg out there rather than your imagination, we can drop that stuff and do something more useful to immediate survival. But in the meantime, what's the point of not doing it? My take is that if we want to survive this age relatively intact, we're going to have to bootstrap our own way out. That means work and a lot of experimentation.
What makes you think we haven't? For example, this is what happens at a variety of religious retreats and monasteries, places of learning, etc. And the approach works fine for them. One needs peace and tranquility for the things they offer.
But how valuable is peace and tranquility really? Sure, destroying humanity in a nuclear war is a bad idea. Let's not do that. But what of the vim and vigor of the business world? I think it has a great mix of peace and conflict that serves us better than the above ideal would. That is in part why I tend to focus on business-oriented experimentation rather than government policy, ideals, and such. My take here is that we've already have in place a better approach than peace and tranquility for large portions of society.
Further, what are you willing to do to the souls that aren't willing to go with the program ever? There's this delusion that people just need the right learning experience and they'll be peaceful. No one has found that magic yet. And I wouldn't be surprised if (or perhaps when someone does, it turns out to be a snake in the grass (say technologically enhanced brainwashing or the like) which can and maybe will be used to destroy peace rather than create it.
Further, the quote calls for universal consensus. That's not an experiment even if we should choose to consider this possible. As I've noted elsewhere, a good experiment should be limited in extent. If it shows the desired improvements, then we can consider implementing it on a larger scale.
Bottom line here is that I think the pessimism and the demand for unanimity are both unrealistic. Neither would have done anything about Russia invading the Ukraine, for a current war example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @05:16AM (2 children)
"That is why you fail"
-Yoda
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @07:07AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @11:31PM
A little bit like how Azuma keeps trying ta school ya.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @07:11PM (1 child)
So do your Wall Street scams with their multi-trillion dollar heists which result in higher prices every day
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @10:00PM
None of the things I mentioned counted as scams, much less enormous Wall Street ones. Just saying.
But since you mentioned it, I'll try to hurt less people with my multi-trillion dollar scams next time. Promise.