Xerographica
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”—Edmund Burke
The lesson of the potato famine was that crops should be more, rather than less, diverse. The potatoes that were in cultivation didn’t have enough genetic variation which is why the the disease had such a huge impact. But if it’s true of crops… then it’s also true of people. People should be more genetically diverse. This way a new pathogen can’t kill all of us. Although I have no idea how you’d practically ensure greater human diversity!!?? History might refer to you as the opposite of Hitler.
Regarding the danger of AI… if greater diversity is better for crops and humans… then it’s also better for robots as well. We’ll give more resources to the most beneficial robots. Evil robots won’t have a leg to stand on.
And war can be eliminated by tax choice.
Hedge hedge hedge! The most successful plant family on Earth is the Orchidaceae. There are around 30,000 different species! Each orchid seed pod can contain a million dust like seeds that are dispersed by the wind. A million seeds is a huge hedge.
The opposite of hedging is to put all your eggs in one basket. Right now humans have all their eggs in one basket… aka “Earth”. We also allow a small group of government planners to allocate all our taxes. Coincidence? Nope.
Centralization is always a function of conceit. People think they have enough facts to block/limit hetergeneous activity. The more you appreciate fallibilism the more you appreciate decentralization.
The answer is always tax choice.
I created the world’s first micropayments forum… RudeBagel. Some additional info.
Thanks for sharing! Blendle is pretty neat because you can get a refund if you’re unsatisfied. But I’m pretty sure that the “One-Price-Fits-All” (OPFA) model isn’t as good as the “Pay-What-You-Want” (PWYW) model.
People have been trying to get micropayments working for decades and it still doesn’t seem to have had any major successes.
My approach is ridiculously simple. In the forum thread that I linked to… nobody has disputed my approach yet.
Regardless, all micropayments would do is further incentivise the kinds of articles that are already been voted to the top and make the issues discussed here worse.
So popularity equals demand? That sure would make economics a whole lot easier. Nobody would have to spend any money. We’d all just vote for all the products that we want. Voila! The efficient allocation of society’s limited resources!
According to your theory, the most voted for threads on this forum would receive the most money. Care to bet on that? If so, how much?
Heh. I started reading my gf’s 50 Shades of Gray on her kindle… but I couldn’t finish it because it was so bad. She liked it though. shrug
Here are two subreddits...
The same economics article isn’t going to be equally valuable in both subs. In the first sub, Ha-Joon Chang’s articles are going to be a lot more valuable than Peter Boettke’s articles. And the opposite would be true in the second sub.
See how that would work? There’s riches in niches.
It is very hard to find new content buried among all of the noise.
The solution is to facilitate micropayments. People aren’t going to spend as much money on topics that there’s a surplus of. The more readily available something is… the less money that people are willing to pay for it. So facilitating micropayments will allow the crowd to help lift the scarcest/rarest and most valuable content to the top of the list.
Oranges used to be a luxury. In other words, an orange was uncommon but valuable content. Then what happened? Payment.
Orchids used to be a luxury. In other words, an orchid was uncommon but valuable content. Then what happened? Payment.
So we add (micro)payments to Reddit, Youtube, Less Wrong and what will happen? What will happen when we incentivize/reward people who produce scarce but valuable content?
What is the demand for threads? Does it matter that none of us knows the answer?
Super cool! Talk about entrepreneurship in action! You perceived a demand and you decided to tackle it. You took a risk… hopefully there will be a huge reward.
I’ve already signed up and am eagerly awaiting the chance to see how your product compares to the competition.
Regarding sorting… the best method would be to facilitate micropayments. In that thread I gave some reasonably detailed points about how and why.
I love information and economics… so I read through some of your material… but I’m really not sure what problem you’re trying to solve.
We’ve gone beyond the capacity of the human mind to an extraordinary degree. And by the way, that’s one of the reasons that I’m not interested in the debate about I.Q., about whether some groups have higher I.Q.s than other groups. It’s completely irrelevant. What’s relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they’re cooperating, not how clever the individuals are. So we’ve created something called the collective brain. We’re just the nodes in the network. We’re the neurons in this brain. It’s the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit by bit. However, bad things happen. And in the future, as we go forward, we will, of course, experience terrible things. There will be wars; there will be depressions; there will be natural disasters. Awful things will happen in this century, I’m absolutely sure. But I’m also sure that, because of the connections people are making, and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before, I’m also sure that technology will advance, and therefore living standards will advance. Because through the cloud, through crowd sourcing, through the bottom-up world that we’ve created, where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation. - Matt Ridley, When ideas have sex
Less Wrong meet-ups should be orgies. Everybody should be having sex with everybody. They won’t be having sex with their bodies of course… they’ll be having sex with their brains. Do you want people to have safe brain sex? No way! Every meet-up should be responsible for the birth of a billion beautiful brain children.
And in order for this to happen… you really can’t have a format where everybody holds their questions/comments until the end of some lecture. You can’t pass one mic around and have everybody listen while one person speaks for 5 minutes. You need a format where people freely and simultaneously throw their thoughts out there… and freely share their thoughts on other people’s thoughts.
You want a bunch of brain storms… not one brain drizzle.
With a completely decentralized format… you can have dozens of different discussions simultaneously occurring. But… how can you know what people in other clusters are discussing? You can’t… unless people use Reddit to share notes on their discussions.
When information becomes more symmetrical (here, here)… the nodes can continually better position themselves. The AI cluster will grow or shrink depending on people’s interests and information. Same thing with the economics cluster and the transhumanism cluster and the epiphyte cluster. Clusters will break apart and reform with different nodes… so there will be fusions and hybrids… like Chinese tacos and coywolves.
The logical consequence of destroying the dam is that you’ll get a flood of information. Facilitating a bunch of brain storms will result in a deluge of information. The challenge will then be prioritizing. Your brain can only process so much information… so you’ll want to process the most valuable information.
This is why “quarters up” is necessary. The crowd uses their pennies, nickles, dimes and quarters to give more volume to the most important information. Essentially they are saying… “have sex with these ideas!”
Offering to pay a woman with whom you are on a date for sex isn’t a good move.
Is it a good move to accurately communicate your valuation of her company? Of course it is. And it’s absurd that it’s acceptable to give her a diamond but it’s not acceptable to simply give her the money instead.
Just create a subreddit for the meet up. You can post/vote(up/down) comments/questions/topics before/during/after the meeting.
Of course it would work even better if people could “quarters up” their favorite posts. Why would it work better? Because it would allow participants to quantify their interest in the various comments/questions/topics. Plus, how cool would it be to get paid for being an excellent poster?
I upvoted this for a few reasons. One reason is because right now I’m winning the least Karma award. I have −200 karma! It seems that you have enough raw natural talent to easily steal this prestigious award from me. So that’s one reason that I gave you an upvote. In fact, I’m going to go through and upvote all your posts.
Another reason that I gave you an upvote is that it’s really rare to find someone who seems to have fired their “editor” or removed their facade.
And another reason is because I hate censorship too.
A few times I’ve mentioned that nobody has adequately explained why the best method that we have of controlling humans (the market) wouldn’t also work for AIs. Scott Alexander recently posted an entry… No Physical Substrate, No Problem… that is by far the best explanation that I’ve come across. From my perspective though his explanation is still far from adequate. The biggest problem is that there’s no real recognition of the significance of garbage in, garbage out. I thoroughly explained my point here… Debugging Scott Alexander And Paul Krugman.
If your reply clearly reveals that you haven’t bothered to read my thorough explanation… then this will support my suspicion that it’s better to share just the link without any description of the contents. I’d prefer to trade with 1 person who has read the contents rather than trade with 100 people who have only read the description.
And of course you’re certainly welcome to downvote this! But I’ll stop sharing links when people stop clicking on them. In other words, I’ll get the message when LessWrong completely vanishes from my blog’s traffic statistics. As it stands… plenty of people still click on my links… so here I am!
Even if the content contained the cure for cancer and the solution to “unfriendly” AI?
Because it helps to illustrate the problem with our government. If people don’t understand the problem with our government… then obviously they won’t appreciate how tax choice is the solution.
Slugs misbehave when they eat my orchids.