I’m pretty capitalist, but the idea that markets are the smartest large-scale entities we’ll ever invent is deeply depressing. This is why I’m always intrigued by *interesting* distortions. Not tawdry cronyist power grabs, but other kinds of weird unplanned distortions.
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Analogous to why the thought that some massive gradient-descent based algorithm is going to be the best kind of AI we might ever invent




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Interesting distortions include: reason (eg planning), urgent temporal forcing functions (climate change), low liquidity regimes and “art” pricing, ‘economics of pricelessness’, bureaucracy (= human GOFAI), smart contracts, HFT, exotic securitized instruments...
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Joscha Bach
Problem with all these distortion ideas is that they are almost always easier to hack than use as intended. Cf the Lebowski theoremhttps://mobile.twitter.com/Plinz/status/985249543582355458 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
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Still, out of every 100 ideas to do better than today’s market, if 99 are easier to hack than use, 1 is a genuine advance within or outside the ‘market’ paradigm. So I like the idea of an eternal arms race between markets and imaginative attempts to distort them.
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You’ll always end up with one of 3 things: A new kind of criminal (99%) A new kind of market (0.9%) Something smarter than a market (0.1%)
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Dumb view: both markets and distortions are eternal patterns. Free-market fundamentalist view: markets evolve, distortions don’t Reactionary view (both left and right): markets are static but my new kind of distortion will deliver utopia Ze Truth: Arms race. Both evolve.
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Replying to @vgr
The concept of a "market" is itself an attempt to distort the market.
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