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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34939 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Trust games are a fascinating construct. Seems like with the levels of power getting thrown around in modern society especially we need a binding compact more than ever.

Unfortunately the ruling class is more instrumental and sociopathic than ever. Do we need a modern religion to bind us all together in fear of hell or something?

Unfortunately the ruling class is more instrumental and sociopathic than ever. Do we need a modern religion to bind us all together in fear of hell or something?

Attempting to reduce how many people do some behavior by applying social pressure will have two main effects

  1. Reduce the amount that behavior does (as people respond to the social pressure).

  2. Shift the population of people who do the behavior more towards people who care less about that form of social pressure (as the people who are more likely to change their behavior in the face of social pressure end up changing their behavior more when said social pressure is applied).

So the danger in that sort of approach is that, if the behavior you're trying to disincentivize through social pressure is individually helpful but collectively harmful ("burn the commons for personal gain"), trying to reduce that behavior through social pressure will result in specifically people who do not care about social pressure doing the thing, and benefiting thereby. So in the short term it appears to work, but in the long term it provides an advantage to exactly the sort of people you least want to provide an advantage to.

A better long-term approach would be to make it actually costly to burn the commons. How that might be achieved in practice is left as an exercise for the reader (because I personally have no clue, and I suspect that any robust solution also would function as a solution to the principal-agent problem).

In my opinion smart contracts on the blockchain are an interesting answer. I expect them to become more relevant as more and more of our useful work happens in a digital environment.

I'm still not entirely clear on how one makes a smart contract meaningfully reference something in the physical world (outside of a few cases like filecoin where the part of the physical world we're interested in is online storage.).

This may be more of a statement on my knowledge than on the viability of smart contracts in general -- if you have some good sources on how that problem is addressed, I would be interested.

The main answer to this has been with NFTs. The challenge is convincing people that an NFT is tied to a certain physical outcome or object.

If everyone agrees that to have legitimate ownership over a piece of land you need a corresponding NFT, you can incorporate that into a smart contract. The hard part is getting public buy in.

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