Re: 2015



On Sep 28, 10:14 pm, "Jonathan" <wr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<Willie.Moo...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1191000271.570967.269230@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


So, you agree, that Joe Strout was inserting your comments into a
conversation you never said anything about so that he could hijack the
conversation.



On Sep 27, 11:39 pm, Joe Strout <j...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <aranders-E3AA10.22523927092...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Alan Anderson <arand...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Jonathan" <wr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Soon, the collective weight and intelligence of the masses
will decide on all matters of importance, and in real time.

That's a depressingly pessimistic prediction. "Collective
intelligence"
is amazingly low

Not always; it depends on how it's organized. See
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385721706/> for example.

and "the masses" tend to consider celebrity and
entertainment to be important.

Well, true. Not sure what can be done about that.

Best,
- Joe

--
"Polywell" fusion -- an approach to nuclear fusion that might actually
work.
Learn more and discuss via:

<http://www.strout.net/info/science/polywell/>







First off I don't see where Johnathan has posted in reply to my
comments.
Second, your faith and allegience to the ideals this nation and most
nations were founded to support are woefully lacking
Third, your lack of faith is only exceeded by your lack of vision and
knowledge.

As to the discussion you are attempting to start in the face of my
suggestion, your conclusions are based on the asinine presumption that
what entertains people and engages their idle curiousity is the same
thing that is important to them and motivates them and directs their
efforts.

The fact is that wealth is spread more evenly than at any other time
in human history. That great amounts of liquid assets are in the
hands of millions of people. And these people all have common
political interests in the global marketplace.

This will inevitably lead to the next great development in human
history - the end of the nation state as we know them today. The end
of the right of governments to kill people, to steal from people and
to lie to people. This will bring about the end to many difficulties
that now seem intractable and will bring about an age of relative
peace stability and wealth aginst which this age will appear poor
indeed - in the more privileged of nations.

I agree completely. Market systems and democracies best mimic
a naturally evolving ecosystem...nature.

Yes, this is an emergent system. However, both markets and
democracies suffer from certain deficiencies. These have been
outlined by Nobelist Dr. Ken Arrow in his impossibility theorem.
Basically when you try to use scalars to measure human values you have
the possibility of preference loops. This leads inevitably to cycles
in the market and cycles in voting and no clear consistent progress.
This knowledge discovered in the 1950s, and universally acclaimed in
the 1970s, has not been used to fix the system, but has been used by a
minority of specialists to put the fix in on the system. That is, if
specialists poll the population and determine where the preference
loops lay, they can navigate those preferences to whatever end point
they like by controlling the order of decision making. This is most
blatant in the closing room at a car dealership when you're buying a
new car. It is also seen in the inanities that pass for debate these
days. Candidates don't really differ on policy, just the order that
the policy is carried out. That's because they have very different
gaols in mind basedon polling data.

My hobby is chaos
and complexity science, which is essentially a new form
of systems theory, but based on abstract Darwinian principles.

Well, the problem is scalars can be uniquely ordered whereas human
values are not necessarily ordered in that way. I can like B better
than A and C better than B, but it frequently happens I like A better
than C. This cannot happen with scalars. It can happen with feelings
and when it does, this preference loop can be navigated to any end
point by a knowledgeable specialists who has control of the order of
voting, or even the order of thinking about issues. Editors for
example.

In chaos theory this is the magnifying factor that allows the
butterfly wing to start a tornado after a short time - so to speak.

My answer is to replace the scalar systems of voting and money with a
vector system.

Another Nobelist, Wasily Leontief devised the input-output method of
econometric analysis - wherein the inputs and outpus of an economy are
put in tabular form. Taking columns on this table tells you all about
the contributions of inputs. Rows tell you all the costs of outputs.
Columns and rows are vectors, and the transformation of one vector to
another completely describes a monetary relationship.

Not generally recognized is that Leontieff's work is an answer to
Arrow's inpossibility theorem. That is, if everyone has an internet
enabled PDA that securely transacts business - call it the valuenet -
then individuals can make declarative statements about things that
they like and things that they don't like. This is similar to voting
in the old system. Their personal PDA encodes this in a personal
transaction table, and when they buy and sell things (including their
labor and so forth) values are adjusted vector fashion.

What happens is that the ideals of the market and of democracy are
excuted continuously completely and not subject to cycles (of the
Arrow type) or manipulation.

Democracies, markets and freedom spread like a healthy forest
alonside a freshly damaged ecosystem.

Democracies and markets are subject to common mode failures and so
cannot do what we expect of them. This is well known among
specialists, but generally not recognized or addressed by our leaders.
Likely because our leaders owe their power to exercise of this
specialist trade.

Such natural forces
are relentess, pervasive and imaginative.

People, not systems have imagination and when they believe in
themselves, they can work wonders. This is true. Government's proper
role is to assist in this process. Of course it is typical of
government's to take responsibility for all good things that happen,
even if they don't deserve it, and blame all bad things on someone
else, even if they don't deserve that. haha.. We are all taught
irrespective of where we were raised, that our government and our
nation -whichever nation it is- and our religion - if we live in a non-
secular culture - it better than everyone else's - and that all the
good right and happy and joyus things in our lives were brought to us
by our nation government and so forth - and all the bad things that
happened were someone else's fault. This is a fantasy. But it is a
fantasy that is unversally accepted - nearly. And it is one that is
easy to see through. The imagination and will and heart of each
individual has the power to bring joy and plenty and happiness to
others. Governments do not do this. Governments and culture and
society at its best - provides vehicles to empower individuals to be
their best. But generally governments produce a weak and dispirited
people and then exploit the wounds in their psyche it creates to
maintain and enlarge its power.

Those 9.5 million people who have managed to scrape together $37.2
trillion in liquid assets have the power if they work together to
bring governments to heel - much as the barons brought John I to heel
- and tell them to get their act together and as Hipparchus told the
physicians of his time - to do no harm. I humby suggest that the
following rules be universally adopted by all governments, and those
that reject these, be rejected by all;

(1) Thou shalt not kill - you shall not wage war one nation against
the other (court mandated killing is something else in this context).
(2) Thou shalt not steal - you shall not tax, or cause to be spent
on public matters, more than your people can afford (the Schumpeter
limit) (theft is something else in this context) - accounting
procedures and the public reporting of results in a clear consistent
manner should be the norm, not hiring accountants to report to the
government. We got it backwards.
(3) Thou shalt not bear false witness - you shall not operate, keep,
or study matters that are known as national intelligence.(advertising
is something else in this context)

As I said,aggregate global tax rates are about 2/3 of all there is,
and reducing that to 1/6th all there is would be a huge immediate boon
to humanity. Those turned from power and government employment would
quickly find jobs in the resulting booming economy. All the
industrial capacity turned away from building and maintaining weapons
would be best served by increasing food production (swords into
plowshares) The world spends $3.2 trillion on food, and needs only
something on the order of $0.4 trillion to adequately feed every
body. Given Reagan's 3:1 ratio (who was the only political leader who
looked clearly at taxes) this means $1.2 trillion government programs
worldwide would achieve this end. (assuming they're all honest) This
is far less than the $3 trillion per year we spend on militaries. i
am not proposing this as a permanent program. Economic growth would
quickly fill the gap - but this would be done immediately and sustain
for three years or so, until economic conditions were improved enough
to fill the gap. Then the program can be reduced to something 1% this
size - to take care of emergencies. I saw a special on Animal Planet
where folks were going out and rescuing pets and livestock that were
abandoned when an Arizona town was over-run with forest fires. Too
bad we're not as concerned with humans as we are with animals.

But clearly, with cessation of hostilities generally, and ending the
lies and the lie making factories, and the wide availability of jobs,
along with adequate food and water - the majority of the unrest in the
world would end almost immediately. Sure there would be pockets of
folks and crazy individuals. But this is more of a policing effort
not a military effort.
..
It's only a matter
of time before the diseased nations of the world relent.

That will never happen because of the common mode failures outlined by
Schumpeter in his multi-volume - human values and social choice.

I mean.. I would bet everyone here believes in Darwin, democracy
and market systems.

Darwin, yes. emergent system in the natural environment yes.
Democracy - no, market systems - not yet. I believe the market system
has a potential to become an emergent process that properly
constituted can encompass features we associate with the best
democratic systems. Namely, by using vectors rather than scalars to
encode wealth (vector money) and using declarative statements to
encode the vector portion (similar to voting whenever you want on
whatever you want and having your votes immediately carried out) - and
transacting these through a value net - we can have an emergent system
that resolves Arrow's paradox and moves us forward as a species.

The nice thing is once a workable system is developed and deployed, it
will be picked up by everyone as it naturally displaces weaker
systems. Just as stronger currencies displace weaker ones - this
currency system is stronger than any paper or metal currency in a
large variety of ways and will quickly displace all existing
currencies.

This is how the barons will take over the crown. They will arrange
for their own purposes the value net. And once it exists, it will be
widely used by all to do business. And once that happens, taxes will
be levied, but not paid. All wealth will be outside the hands of the
governments. If the system be honest. That is, secured against
snooping. Powerful techniques exist to secure transactions like
these. At that point, the barons can cause governments to adopt the
three policies i've outlined for good government.

Many use transfer pricing between subsidiaries to avoid taxes anyway.
This legal and legitimate system of handling international trade can
be easily encoded in a system of banks and made universally available
to everyone. It is at this level that conflict will arise between
governments and people, led by the modern day barons.

At this point the three rules can be proffered to the governments to
allow them to access a portion of the new value-net.


Just what few of you will accept is
that complexity science has shown all three are merely
subsets of a more general and universal tendency to
...self-organize.

Chaos theory shows us the importance of trifles under the right
conditions. Exponential amplification is required.

Arrow has demonstrated the importance of one trifle - order of
voting. He has shown that this results from the scalar nature of vote
counting and the non-scalar nature of human values. So, this has
nothing to do with amplification - it has everything to do with
information being incompletely accounted for. So, this has nothing to
do with chaos theory - although there are other chaos based effects
once you have an operating system that works relaibly.

Vector based currency as i've described it, taken from Leontieff's
work - answers Arrow and allows the first step toward readl
government..

Marketers and Politicians have used Arrow's knowledge to grab power.
Knowledgeable academics have soft sold the shortcomings because they
fear a loss of faith in democracy and markets. They have come to fear
this because specialists have raised this issue to them so that they
would soft sell it. Other academics busy in their own fields, accept
the judgements of knowledgeable academics they trust and respect. The
public subject to the cheerleading of their governments for its own
worth since birth, accept unquestioningly the precepts. Those that do
not are generally malcontents that have personality issues. Non-
specialists, non-expert, non-academics who point to a possible problem
are told they are wrong, or easily made out to be a malcontent.

The 'integral' so to speak of the complexity sciences is
the Complex Adaptive System, derived originally from
the study of random boolean networlks. A single abstract
model that explains nature, and in all of it's myriad forms.
From galaxies to emotions.

Yes, by 2030 according to Moravec and Kurzweil, humanity will have the
computing power to replicate the human brain. By 2040 we'll be able
to buy a box load of human brains for the price of a laptop. by 2050
we'll be able to buy a planet full of human brains for the price of a
laptop.

So, what will the world be like when everyone has their own think
tank? everyone has their own planetary population dedicated to their
tiny concerns? What happens when these computer systems are attached
to acuators and sensors?

Moravec in his book ROBOTS describes this in detail. Kurzweil
speculates about this as well in his THE SINGULARITY IS COMING.

Well before these dates we would do well to reign in the power, the
abuses, and the lies of governments since the singularity event that
is predicted will likely take on the character of whatever is powerful
at the time of the singularity.

That is, we could be building berserker machines or angelic machines -
depending on our intent. And one way this intent may be modified is
to adopt the three rules I've offere here.
,
Complex Adaptive Systems - Webs of Delighthttp://www.calresco.org/lucas/cas.htm

CALResCo Complexity Writingshttp://www.calresco.org/themes.htm

And they all do the same thing, they relentlessly
attempt to increase order over time and with
Darwinian cleverness.

Not one specialized theory will provide a magic bullet. My vector
money suggestion resolves a very particular form of failure of
democracies and markets. Adopting the three rules I suggest here will
resolve much of the pain and suffering and many of the woes of the
world today. The studies you recommend may provide soliutions to
other problems. But when they do, their results will be easily
explained and their benefits easily seen.

There are also computer programs that program themselves to achieve
goals and use sexual reproduction to select against an envornment that
rewards the goals set out. These are all useful things. Especially
when we can model the entire human race accurately. We can make
decisions based on effects that it is impossible for a single human to
understand - but would certainly benefit everyone once the tool was
available.



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