There should be a name for this syndrome of believing "if we built it, we must be the center of it."
"Built" does a lot of work in the conceited relationship of humans to the "built" environment they merely had a small role in catalyzing the emergence of.
Conversation
"Technology is just a tool," and "markets should serve humans" are propositions that emerge from unexamined, uncritical, self-important anthropocentricity. The artificial world is vastly more emergent than we think. It needs to be studied, understood, and related to like nature.
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Herbert Simon/Sciences of the Artificial vector of thing is unacceptably primitive still. That shit hasn't moved since 1970 and vague noises about "weakly coupled systems" and other chart-porn bs from the first pass 50 years ago.
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I'm gonna call my new religion Stackocentrism. Things revolve around the stack, not around the humans. Whatever your mental model of the stack, stackocentrism is still a better mental model than human-centrism.
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If we had a proper map of the leviathan, every balance sheet in the world would show up as safe/burning, and the topology would reveal systemic risk. A financial fire department would descend and put out the fire, do control burns etc.
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The public balance sheet would add an equity stake in the rescued org in proportion to the disproportionate benefit to the “owner.” The less you matter to system survival, the lower your priority, and the higher the stake taken in exchange for rescue if you do get rescued.
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Bailouts are not a bad thing. We live with imperfect knowledge in an uncertain world, with complex patterns of risk coupling. We just need a science of bailouts. A financial equivalent of disaster preparedness and response capability. Instead of processing through a moral lens.
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A stupid thing about human-centric thinking is that every failure becomes a moral failure and the calculus of blame, reward, punishment, and justice becomes the theology of system repair. One reason is we use money allocation (both market and planned) as primary fix mechanism.
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It’s not a bad mechanism, but it has the unfortunate property of also being the primary enabler if individual human quality of life. It’s almost like we need different monetary systems for humans vs the system.
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Otherwise it leads to thinking Bill Gates lives 120 billion times better than average burger-flipper simply because he has a 120 billion times the net worth of the median person with no assets. Most of that money is Stack fuel. He probably only is 10-1000x happier than you and me
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Financialization would actually be a good thing if it included almost everybody in its logic, and encoded what everybody knows about the system. It’s currently terrible because it reflects a tiny minority view of how the world works. A bunch of 0.1% idiots trading green lumber.
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Definitely agree with this idea (although how to stop the black market exchange rate?). How do we decouple the information processing and resource allocation apparatus of markets and prices from the currency of survival?
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Splitting the money supply (along a different axis, but) has been a thing in Cuba for quite a while. It's a corruption machine.
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😬😬😬
I was along for the ride on this thread but this comment feels like it could use a lot more analysis...
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I think there’s a mapping between M1-4 money types and your breakdown. They just add them up to make up layers of money supply
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There are three types of money. The problem is we've started allowing enterprise money to gobble up the rest. Rental-sink money is able to hold out a bit due to sheer size/inertia, but consumer money has been hammered for decades. Don't need separate money, just legal structures.
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Just learned (from 's newsletter in the last subsection of the first section) that the Soviet economy had two types of currency! (one for retail and one for companies)
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