Venkatesh Rao

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.