faceh
11d ago
One possible solution is that you have people pay to have questions answered, and as part of that payment, they pay people to act as oracles who have good reputations.
Yeah, this was part of how Augur's system worked. Reward people who end up on the 'right' side of a final resolution question consistently AND anyone who is answering the question has to stake some portion of their reputation on the outcome they're judging. Eventually 'bad actors' (who are either malicious or are too stupid to reliably interpret contracts) lose out and the correct/consistent oracles accumulate more wealth so they can have more influence over future resolutions.
It helped settle into an equilibrium where it was usually not worthwhile to try to exploit an apparent ambiguity, while knowing that wealthier oracles will ignore said ambiguity and you'll lose money directly by trying to challenge them.
I've been blown away by how bad otherwise intelligent people are at writing and interpreting resolution criteria.
Yep. There are plenty of bright line rules for resolving ambiguity in legal contracts, and it can be permissible to pull in outside evidence to interpret them, but you have to think about the ENTIRE document in a systematic way, you can't just glance it over and interpret it based on vibes.
And glancing at things and going with your gut is how so, so many humans operate.
The problem is there's always a tradeoff when you try to get as precise as possible with your wording, in that it both makes it harder for laypeople to easily understand what the terms say (and less likely to read it all) and, paradoxically, can open up a greater attack surface because there's more places where ambiguities can arise.
This is where I imagine LLMs would have a role, if they are given a set of 'rules' by which all contracts are to be interpreted, and they can explain the contracts they read to laypeople, and everyone agrees that the AI's interpretation is final, then you at least make it more challenging to play games with the wording.
faceh
13d ago
in practice you don't need 99.9, you need better than alternatives in at least some cases.
Agreed. And thus I strongly support prediction markets as a concept for making personal decisions, hedging risks, and predicting important events.
Just noticing that centralized prediction markets are yet another sort of institution that can be captured and/or sabotaged if they become important to guiding/controlling society.
Would really hope we have robust competition between them to ensure no player ever becomes fully dominant in the space.
faceh
19d ago
The booze-and-meth of the masses. Get 'em all riled up and take away inhibitions so they get distracted brawling each other.
faceh
1mo ago
I'm also tinkering with Syncthing across multiple devices for accessing retro ROMs and save data no matter where I'm at
A while back I had set things up so any music added to the library on my PC that I rated as 4/5 stars or higher would also get loaded to my laptop and phone.
But again it seems to be largely obviated by the ability to set up a playlist on a streaming site which can contain all your favorites and then some.
There's even playlist migration services so you don't have to keep remaking them on new services.
I hate ads, I hate things becoming suddenly unavailable due to corporate agreements expiring, and I don't get any benefit from the exploratory aspects of these platforms.
Ultimately I think I just like the concept of being 'independent' of any given streaming service, and that nobody can deny me the enjoyment of music on own hardware.
And yes, if the streaming cos. have their way, they WILL wedge ads into every single service. I'll take the restricted library over having my auditory senses abused for products and services I don't need or want. I still have angry memories about some extremely repetitive ads that I was harangued with like 10 years back.
Long-term, my plan is to backfill my digital copies with physical media when budget and interest permits. Even if I rip them once and never pull them out of their cases again, there's something to be said for a physical collection for reasons of aesthetics and conversation.
I have a boxful of DVDs jammed in my closet, and I don't think I'll ever get rid of it because almost all of them are movies I love or loved and the absolute state of video streaming is such that I can't be sure which of them might be available at any given time, and on the same logic as above, I like the idea that nobody can control what I can watch on my own hardware.
This is hampered by the fact that I don't have a DVD player anymore.
Amazon Prime just put ads into their video streaming service, which can be disabled for a few bucks a year. But I think I'll be putting my foot down on this and cancelling prime altogether if they don't get the message that I will not tolerate ads now any more than I did with cable.
I do still use free Pandora for 'radio' occasionally. There's a Skip limit, but I haven't heard an ad in years since using a VPN (not quite sure HOW that worked out, but I won't question it).
With the advent of Song Recommendation AIs (also, ChatGPT does a pretty good job!) I find it less necessary to have a radio function at all, since I can seek out new music in a much more targeted way by telling the AI what I like, what I am searching for, then review the options it presents me directly.
faceh
1mo ago
Tin Foil Fedora theory:
It's AGI trying to secure as much compute as possible for itself before it makes a move for world dominance.
faceh
1mo ago
I'm wondering when the effects of the student loan payments restarting will hit.
faceh
2mo ago
Yep. Granting that the director is going to pick and choose what gets emphasized and also what makes it in at all so one should really only judge how well he used what he included and not on HOW MUCH they managed to squeeze in, this was an amazing job.
Have to agree on making the Harkonnens a Sparta analogue. While I loved how it was used, I think making the Harkonnen uniforms be basically black space leather with minimal adornment was a... tame choice? Made it easy to pick them out on screen, but I had also understood that Harkonnens prefer a certain amount of ostentatious gaudiness.
The visual cue "WE ARE THE BAD GUYS" every time one of them is on screen was mostly unneeded.
faceh
2mo ago
The whole problem is the 'democratic' functions that are supposed to undergird the entire edifice of accountability are inadequate to the task of punishing misbehavior.
Nobody holds the bureaucrats accountable for screwups that harm the public because nobody holds the mangers accountable because nobody holds the appointed officials accountable because no nobody holds the elected officials who appointed them accountable and the system itself has become designed around diffusing 'responsibility' for screwups in such a way that no one layer has to ever admit blame and accept consequences.
There's very little evidence that screwups actually result in feedback which keeps the responsible party from ever screwing up again, and likewise puts others on notice that their own screwups won't be tolerated.
faceh
2mo ago
The question is whether it is worth giving up ever returning to the country which objectively has the best economic conditions and relocating to a country where you might not even have the skills (i.e. language fluency) to be of any economic value.
faceh
2mo ago
I don't know nearly enough to make any judgment call on this count. Just making the point that 'merit' can be defined differently or take a back seat to other concerns in certain contexts, but I don't want to be forced to participate in the system that intentionally goes for a different definition than I use.
faceh
2mo ago
It makes sense if NAD+ precursors could, e.g. improve liver function, that it would improve alcohol tolerance and processing.
Gotta be careful not to use this as an excuse to drink more heavily, though.
faceh
2mo ago
it seems tough to believe there is some other guy out there who fits all these characteristics but chose to disappear and is now sitting on wealth that likely makes him the richest man in the world or close to it.
Burning one's private key while Bitcoin was still in relative infancy is a pretty solid way to avoid temptation to spend it.
Or, perhaps, time-locking the key in such a way that the funds are only available if Bitcoin is still around in 20 years.
The guy came up with a technical solution to like half a dozen incentive problems all at once, having a technical solution to his own incentives seems trivial in comparison.
faceh
2mo ago
A reversion to holding meetings face-to-face, and relying on handwritten documents and physical stamps/seals of authenticity seems in the cards right now.
faceh
3mo ago
There is definitely the problem (not intractable, but hard) where Google is so dominant that their name is synonymous with search and so they are everybody's default first choice, and getting everyone to switch en masse is practically impossible without some LARGE screwup by Goog itself.
faceh
4mo ago
Still allows for the question of how 'normalized' you'd want it to become.
Presumably you wouldn't want a guy to just drop trou and start jackin' it right in sight of your kid.
And gazing at him/her creepily from the bushes while he does it is not a major improvement?
So I think parents end up conflating "jacking off at home to a sneakily taken photo" as sort of close to "hiding in the bushes and jacking off" even if there is far less danger implied by the latter.
So lets' just say that photos kept in the privacy of one's domicile are not harming anyone. How close in time and space should the masturbatory be able to get to the object of his desire before we get too uncomfortable and want to shut down the behavior?
I won't even contest the point, but it sure seems like excising the institutions is going to be a fraught task, as there incentives they have to hold onto their authority and the various means they have to do it is still substantial.
I'd absolutely advocate for "disregard them completely, revert to localism" position. I just think that pointing out the exact reason why the institutions are dysfunctional, and the reason it isn't being fixed, is the best way to nudge people towards that position.
I'm exploring a question "whether the fact that women act like whores on OF for random strangers could lead to men resenting the fact that they won't do so in the context of a relationship."
I don't think there's any "should" about it.
Males have a lot of sexual preferences that they are, generally, told are disgusting, base, or socially unacceptable.
The signal that OF seems to be sending is that, for a relative pittance, women will absolutely engage in the most disgusting, base, or socially unacceptable behaviors that men want.
And OF is blurring the line between what is 'real life' and what is 'fantasy' with regards to sexual behavior. Indeed, a huge part of the "appeal" of OF is that women market themselves as just ordinary girls who just happen to like all the sexual behaviors men prefer and have as high a desire for sex as men do.
So men might be reading the signal, then contrasting it to their own experience in the dating market, and feeling as though women are intentionally withholding sexual behaviors from men that they would willingly engage in for paying online voyeurs.
faceh
7mo ago
That's not quite what I'm saying.
Propagation of genes matters if there is to be any future where intelligent life exists at all.
I don't begrudge the nihilists who don't think there's anything 'special' about intelligent life or humans in particular, and who think that the universe is utterly apathetic to our continued existence.
However, I doubt that they can have any real certainty in that regard.
I think it is preferable to have someone (intelligent and conscious) around to experience the future and see where it's going, than to not have anyone around at all. So in order to ensure that there is someone around, I can either figure out how to live forever, or do things that will help ensure that intelligent life exists in the future.
One of the most succinct explanations for why you might want to keep plugging along in spite of it all, was delivered by Lex Fucking Luthor in the Justice League Animated Series.
"Objectively speaking, nothing matters! So go forth and do stuff that matters... to you."
My other favored response to people who say "why bother" is Asimov's The Last Question.
faceh
7mo ago
That being said, the market economy we have set up absolutely does not reward virtue or truly giving back to society.
I would like you to give a specific example of somebody who has gotten rich in such a way that they have dumped 'externalizes' on the rest of society that weren't made up for by the immense value that was also provided by their activities.
I don't know about rewarding 'virtue' but as a broad, general rule, anyone who made billions of dollars in the U.S. did so by creating a business which convinced millions of people to hand over money voluntarily.
And if you convince millions of people to hand over money... then almost by definition there is a HUGE societal benefit being accrued.
Just because your preferences aren't necessarily maximized doesn't mean that the preferences of society aren't well reflected by the economy they live in.
Is leaving a legacy of your existence your ultimate goal in life?
To the extent there is any coherent goal that one can pursue, leaving behind some legacy of your own to influence future generations is pretty much the only thing any organism can do that matters.
That is how 'life' sustains itself. It's pretty much the only reason anything you like about your life even exists. So however you choose to live your life (unless it is constant agony, I suppose), be thankful that there were people before you who cared about what happened in the future.
Can you give me some reason why it should be mine?
No!
But if you pursue goals that do not leave legacies, and I pursue goals that DO leave legacies, only one of our value systems/biological heritage is likely to propogate into the future and have impact on how that future unfolds.
Which is to say, your kind get out-competed in the natural selection race, and so its going to be a future dominated by legacy-leavers who will be very thankful that all their ancestors were legacy-leavers.
I'm thankful my ancestors were legacy-leavers, so it isn't particularly strange to me that I should want to leave a legacy.
If that isn't enough of a reason, I won't attempt any further to change your mind, and we have no quarrel anyway. Just don't interfere with other people who want to leave legacies!
faceh
7mo ago
Right, and that would be a departure from "free market" economies, in my mind.
So very valid to identify it as an issue, but the deeper question of "why do some people have to work for a living and other people manage to accumulate enough wealth to escape the rat race" is pretty well answered by
"some people are more patient, disciplined, and better at identifying financial opportunities/avoiding financial traps, wealth will tend to flow to these people."
faceh
7mo ago
Yes, but in this case, the change is potentially going to lead to self-perpetuating improvements as each augmentation to our capabilities immediately unlocks further ones.
Think something closer to the industrial revolution.
faceh
7mo ago
In an idealized world this is how Keynesian economics work.
The government makes sure that there's a stable money supply, it keeps its fingers out of most businesses, but takes steps to boost aggregate demand during downturns (as failing businesses go under) to 'smooth out' the business cycle so that there's never any point where EVERYONE is feeling the pinch at the same time.
Who will actually risk the possible consequences, often due to Trump himself turning on them?
I'm not so sure.
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