“Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights).”
Conversation
I think “cost to make the future untrue” is the right definition. Raw probability will be ill-posed in an open futures canvas. Stuff like between X and Y kilograms of gold will enter the market each year for the next 20 years”is fine for investment but useless against black swans
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Other interesting phenomenology that came up and could potentially be accommodated in the cost-to-make-false definition include bugs, dissent, alt interpretations of a hard thing, smooth vs striated uses of hard things.
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A general weak point is that the cast/contents distinction is probably theoretically fragile. Medium/message coupling effects, form/content logic bombs like godel sentences… but you could probably get a folk notion of hardness to a usable state, like Taleb’s antifragility
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That was one of the things not clear from the article. Clearly you had an implicit distinction in mind like a contract vs it’s state. A question came up about how for eg the NFL roster of teams and game schedule is “hard” but not in same sense as football rules. Contents vs cast.
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hm, not sure I follow yet.
In my terminology, casts are just "a description of a future state of the world", along with a "measurement" of the hardness of the cast (cost, or probability)
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yeah, it's very much work in progress/in public - probably going to be writing ~this for the next 5 years
appreciate the comments!
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This essay reminded me of some very related thoughts from a different angle I have in a draft newsletter. I think I'll flush that out today... might be some ideas/connections there
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