1/ micro thought: degrees and titles that come from them are a form of "Seeing like a State" legibility. I know degree-less people who I rate as far more insightful than the median PhD in the same subject area, but it takes a lot longer for me to form that judgement
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3/ really, all of this stuff is PKI-adjacent "web of trust". Degrees are a claim by a root authority: USG / The Cathedral certifies Rutgers as X, Rutgers certifies rando as Y What we're seeing is that a huge number of degree granters x ∈ X are certifying absolute garbage as Y
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4/ and more and more people are adding USG / The Cathedral to their own personal CRLs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_revocation_list … I remember reading a white paper by Rivest (?) in the mid 90s on SUDSY, a distributed identity definition ...
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5/ oh, wait, SDSI https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/sdsi11.html … anyway, need to work now, but ... hmmm...
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6/ I've had this argument since the early 1990s, which I made on Usenet back in the day, that increased computational infrastructure will make anarchocapitalism more plausible because one big reason for states is to abstract over / mediate away high-transaction costs e.g.
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7/ the first private roads were called "turn pikes" because you had guards stationed at the ends who would open the gate / turn the gate which was covered with a row of pikes, after the fee was paid guards are expensive
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8/ thus the State can lower costs and increase total utility by just taxing everyone and making the service free ("free"). but roads are not public goods - they are rivalrous (traffic!) and excludable (pikes!)
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9/ and cheap computation means that we can bring back, e.g., private roads because an RFID reader and an electronic gate is a lot cheaper than a staff of guards and manually turning the pikes aside
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10/ so I've expected, for 30 or more years, to see an increase, in the medium or long term, on privatized infrastructure or services ...but I'm now realizing that we'll see this in certifications too I'm not saying that privatizing education is a new idea to me - I've know >>>
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11/ that all along, and was stoked for MSFT certifications 20 or whatever years back ...but what I'm now pondering is that certifications can be more decentralized, in a general reputational sense phase 1: USG certifies via a degree phase 2: MSFT certifies via a cert phase 3:
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12/ this is in a sense a return to the old 19th or 15th or 0th century concept of reputation, but it's reputation mediated by computation pagerank, but for skills I don't think we have that yet, even tho there are some stabs at it (LinkedIn spam of "X recommends Y as good at Z
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13/ tangential thought: there are a lot of phenomena where we have X, then as we get richer we replace X with Y, then as we get richer yet, we go back to a modified X , X' e.g. farms -> cities -> hobby farms home schooling -> gov schools -> home schooling etc.
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14/ and I expect that web-of-trust certification is one such thing exeunt
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15/ Gresham's law - bad recommendations [ cheap signalling ] squeeze out goodhttps://twitter.com/shlevy/status/1280128181912158215 …
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End of conversation
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