He was also running around saying that he was Pope John XXIII because 23 was his favourite prime number. And refusing academic positions which would have given him a much better platform for advocating currency reform (had he wanted to do that) on the basis that he was already scheduled to start working as Emperor of Antarctica. And saying he was communicating with aliens from outer space.
No you aren’t going to tell Nash how he could have brought about Ideal Money. In regard to, for example, communicating with aliens, again you are being wholly ignorant. Consider this (from Ideal Money):
We of Terra could be taught how to have ideal monetary systems if wise and benevolent extraterrestrials were to take us in hand and administer our national money systems analogously to how the British recently administered the currency of Hong Kong.~Ideal Money
See? He has been “communicating” with aliens. He was using his brain to think beyond not just nations and continents but worlds. “What would it be like for outside observers?” Is he not allowed to ask these questions? Do we not find it useful to think about how extraterrestrials would have an effect on a certain problem like our currency systems? And you call this “crazy”? Why can’t Nash make theories based on civilizations external to ours without you calling him crazy?
See, he was being logical, but people like you can’t understand him.
Of course that doesn’t mean that everything he did was done for crazy reasons. But it does mean that the fact that he said or did something at this time is not any sort of evidence that it makes sense.
This is the most sick (ill) paragraph I have traversed in a long time. You have said “Nash was saying crazy things, so he was sick, therefore the things he was saying were crazy, and so we have to talk them with a grain of salt.
Nash birthed modern complexity theory at that time and did many other amazing things when he was “sick”. He also recovered from his mental illness not because of medication but by willing himself so. These are accepted points in his bio. He says he started to reject politically orientated thinking and return to a more logical basis (in other words he realized running around telling everyone he is a god isn’t helping any argument).
Could you point me to more information about the reasons he gave for leaving the US and trying to renounce his citizenship? I had a look in Nasar’s book, which is the only thing about Nash I have on my shelves, and (1) there is no index entry for “ideal money” (the concept may crop up but not be indexed, of course) and (2) its account of Nash’s time in Geneva and Paris is rather vague about why he wanted to renounce his citizenship (and indeed about why he was brought back to the US).
“I emerged from a time of mental illness, or what is generally called mental illness...”
There is another interview he explains that the us navy took him back in chains, can’t recall the video.
Let me then repeat my question. What do you expect to happen to the values of those “global commodities” in the presence of an AI whose capabilities are superhuman enough to make value alignment an urgent issue? Suppose the commodities include (say) gold, Intel CPUs and cars, and the AI finds an energy-efficient way to make gold, designs some novel kind of quantum computing device that does what the Intel chips do but a million times faster, and figures out quantum gravity and uses it to invent a teleportation machine that works via wormholes? How are prices based on a basket of gold, CPUs and cars going to remain stable in that kind of situation?
You are messing up (badly) the accepted definition of ideal. Nonetheless Nash deals with your concerns:
We can see that times could change, especially if a “miracle energy source” were found, and thus if a good ICPI is constructed, it should not be expected to be valid as initially defined for all eternity. It would instead be appropriate for it to be regularly readjusted depending on how the patterns of international trade would actually evolve.
Here, evidently, politicians in control of the authority behind standards could corrupt the continuity of a good standard, but depending on how things were fundamentally arranged, the probabilities of serious damage through political corruption might becomes as small as the probabilities that the values of the standard meter and kilogram will be corrupted through the actions of politicians.~Ideal Money
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[EDITED to add:] Having read a bit more about Nash’s proposal, it looks as if he had in mind minerals rather than manufactured goods; so gold might be on the list but probably not CPUs or cars. The point stands, and indeed Nash explicitly said that gold on its own wasn’t a good choice because of possible fluctuations in availability. I suggest that if we are talking about scenarios of rapid technological change, anything may change availability rapidly; and if we’re talking about scenarios of rapid technological change driven by a super-capable AI, that availability change may be under the AI’s control. None of this is good if we’re trying to use “ideal money” thus defined as a basis for the AI’s values.
No he gets more explicate tho and so something like cpu’s etc. would be sort of reasonable (but I think probably better to look at the underlying commodities used for these things). For example:
Moreover, commodities with easily and reliably calculable prices are most suitable, and relatively stable prices are very desirable. Another basic cost that could be used would be a standard transportation cost, the cost of shipping a unit quantity of something over long international distances.
(Of course it may be that no such drastic thing ever happens, either because fundamental physical laws prevent it or because we aren’t able to make an AI smart enough. But this is one of the situations people worried about AI value alignment are worried about, and the history of science and technology isn’t exactly short of new technologies that would have looked miraculous before the relevant discoveries were made.)
Yes, we are simultaneously saying the super smart thing to do would be to have ideal money (ie money comparable to an optimally chosen basket of industrial commodity prices), while also worry a super smart entity wouldn’t support the smart action. It’s clear fud.
Or: suppose instead that the AI is superhumanly good at predicting and manipulating markets. (This strikes me as an extremely likely thing for people to try to make AIs do, and also a rather likely early step for a superintelligent but not yet superpowered AI trying to increase its influence.) How confident are you that the easiest way to achieve some goal expressed in terms of values cashed out in “ideal money” won’t be to manipulate the markets to change the correspondence between “ideal money” and other things in the world?
Ideal money is not corruptible. Your definition of ideal is not accepted as standard.
But what you quoted him as saying he wanted was not (so far as I can tell) the same thing as you are now saying he wanted. We are agreed that Nash thought “ideal money” could be a universal means of valuing oil and bricks and computers. (With the caveat that I haven’t read anything like everything he said and wrote about this, and what I have read isn’t perfectly clear; so to some extent I’m taking your word for it.) But what I haven’t yet seen any sign of is that Nash thought “ideal money” could also be a universal means of valuing internal subjective things (e.g., contentment) or interpersonal things not readily turned into liquid markets (e.g., sincere declarations of love) or, in short, anything not readily traded on zero-overhead negligible-latency infinitely-liquid markets.
I might ask if you think such things could be quantified WITHOUT a standard basis for value? I mean its strawmany. Nash has an incredible proposal with a very long and intricate argument, but you are stuck arguing MY extrapolation, without understanding the underlying base argument by Nash. Gotta walk first, “What IS Ideal Money?”
I have (quite deliberately) not been assuming any particular definition of “ideal”; I have been taking “ideal money” as a term of art whose meaning I have attempted to infer from what you’ve said about it and what I’ve seen of Nash’s words. Of course I may have misunderstood, but not by using the wrong definition of “ideal” because I have not been assuming that “ideal money” = “money that is ideal in any more general sense”.
Yes this is a mistake, and its an amazing one to see from everyone. Thank you for at least partially addressing his work.
No you aren’t going to tell Nash how he could have brought about Ideal Money. In regard to, for example, communicating with aliens, again you are being wholly ignorant. Consider this (from Ideal Money):
See? He has been “communicating” with aliens. He was using his brain to think beyond not just nations and continents but worlds. “What would it be like for outside observers?” Is he not allowed to ask these questions? Do we not find it useful to think about how extraterrestrials would have an effect on a certain problem like our currency systems? And you call this “crazy”? Why can’t Nash make theories based on civilizations external to ours without you calling him crazy?
See, he was being logical, but people like you can’t understand him.
This is the most sick (ill) paragraph I have traversed in a long time. You have said “Nash was saying crazy things, so he was sick, therefore the things he was saying were crazy, and so we have to talk them with a grain of salt.
Nash birthed modern complexity theory at that time and did many other amazing things when he was “sick”. He also recovered from his mental illness not because of medication but by willing himself so. These are accepted points in his bio. He says he started to reject politically orientated thinking and return to a more logical basis (in other words he realized running around telling everyone he is a god isn’t helping any argument).
“I emerged from a time of mental illness, or what is generally called mental illness...”
″...you could say I grew out of it.”
Those are relevant quotes otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zb6_PZxxA0 12:40 it starts but he explains about the francs at 13:27 “When I did become disturbed I changed my money into swiss francs.
There is another interview he explains that the us navy took him back in chains, can’t recall the video.
You are messing up (badly) the accepted definition of ideal. Nonetheless Nash deals with your concerns:
.
No he gets more explicate tho and so something like cpu’s etc. would be sort of reasonable (but I think probably better to look at the underlying commodities used for these things). For example:
Yes, we are simultaneously saying the super smart thing to do would be to have ideal money (ie money comparable to an optimally chosen basket of industrial commodity prices), while also worry a super smart entity wouldn’t support the smart action. It’s clear fud.
Ideal money is not corruptible. Your definition of ideal is not accepted as standard.
I might ask if you think such things could be quantified WITHOUT a standard basis for value? I mean its strawmany. Nash has an incredible proposal with a very long and intricate argument, but you are stuck arguing MY extrapolation, without understanding the underlying base argument by Nash. Gotta walk first, “What IS Ideal Money?”
Yes this is a mistake, and its an amazing one to see from everyone. Thank you for at least partially addressing his work.