Enjoying the Dangerous View from the Frontier
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The idea is that the person should evenly divide the cake or risk getting the smallest slice when all other slices have been distributed. Applying this to government, legislation and institutions as a whole may seem daunting, but not so in my opinion. I will elaborate if asked…
I’m asking.
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Systems of cooperation, like Democracy, or abstract ones like pain and pleasure, have a goal of replication of 'good' knowledge. In the case of the cake, for example, pain and pleasure are tools that evolution created to solve knowledge replication problems. That is to say, if it hurt, it was something correlated with less gene replication, and with more gene replication for pleasure. Those are vestigial measurement algorithms created by animal cells cooperating and replicating, knowledge about the universe instantiated in a water and carbon based substrate.
The idea that knowledge existed before the brain and even in the primordial ooze is an extremely broad definition of 'knowledge'. However, matter does seem to find ways of organizing itself into more and more complex systems. The idea that pleasure and pain drive the system of gene replication is interesting. Gene replication is just one (really great) means of perpetuation.
Which ever spark hit which ever carbon molecule to get 'life' going might have been the most basic form of instantiation that the human mind could grasp but the spark and the molecule came from something smaller that we still struggle to understand. And as we grapple with biomimicry, gene modification, artificial intelligence etc., it becomes just as difficult to define for life as it is to define for knowledge where it began or where it will end up.
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Originally Posted by Josh >
I’m asking.Universal Basic Income implemented
Federal tax rates on the wealthy implemented and or loopholes closed
Government insured home loans(FHA) built-in racism corrections
Single-payer government health insurance
Estate taxes on the wealthy adjusted to where it was in the 1950's and 60's.
Personal political campaign fundraising outlawed. Replaced by a central campaign funding mechanism that distributes equally among eligible candidates.These are some of the resource throughways that can be controlled or adjusted (cutting the cake). Cody may remember sometime back that I had said "Billionaires should not exist". To which I think he misunderstood me as meaning an attack on billionaires, or something like that. What I mean is if the cake cutting had been done fairly, there wouldn't be any billionaires. Billionaires should not exist if a society with a government of cake cutters is doing their job. Billionaires are a sort of sore or infected blister that should tell us our society and government system is unwell.
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The principle:
The Cake Cutter Principle is the principle that says whoever cuts the cake gets the last slice of the cake.
Where it could be beneficial:
Universal Basic Income implemented
Federal tax rates on the wealthy implemented and or loopholes closed
Government insured home loans(FHA) built-in racism corrections
Single-payer government health insurance
Estate taxes on the wealthy adjusted to where it was in the 1950's and 60's.
Personal political campaign fundraising outlawed. Replaced by a central campaign funding mechanism that distributes equally among eligible candidates.Let's just look at UBI, because it's the first one on the list.
In the United States, with existing tools (link is for lols), there's only two ways to pay for UBI: "the US budget"(taxes) and inflation. Since the FED is separate from the US government, I doubt the FED will want to just print money directly to citizens of a given (or all) jurisdictions it caters to. This is why when they "print money," like for quantitative easing, it goes through banks/companies to get into the economy. So, the logical choice for a government to source funds for something like UBI should be the former: the US budget (as supported by taxes and other economic tools). Taxes go to the US treasury, which controls all assets and debts for the US government. There are various instruments/tools they can use to change how that money flows (bonds, debt ceiling etc). But, ultimately it relies on collecting at least SOME dollars from citizens.
Regarding the "last slice of the cake," for UBI, what does that mean? If "tax dollars" are the cake, then UBI isn't the end of the cutting. The slices aren't for people, they're the programs themselves. So the people slicing up the cake, whatever coalition/group is in power at the time, is partitioning tax dollars for programs. UBI would just be one of those programs.
To re-iterate: The cake is the US budget (incl. various tools like debt ceiling, investments and tax collection), the cutters are politicians, and the slices are government programs. If there's something I'm reading wrong here, please correct me.
"Whoever cuts the cake gets the last slice of cake"...?
So those politicians who strive hard get elected and choose how the tax money gets used should be the last ones to get money for the programs that their constituents voted for them to prioritize?This isn't even getting into what it means to "raise the debt limit," what it means when the FED changes interest rates, what GDP means and how and if it grows.
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The idea that knowledge existed before the brain and even in the primordial ooze is an extremely broad definition of 'knowledge'.
Knowledge is:
- Information which, once instantiated, tends to cause itself to remain so. (The information is useful [it solves a problem])
- Information can be instantiated on any substrate that has a few "counterfactual" properties. (like a lighthouse light can:
- turn on and off
- copy other on and off signals
- can be interchangeable with other systems that can encode bits
The commonplace definition of knowledge relies on experience, which is where the "problem of induction," comes in. Experience is based on observation, and all observations are theory laden--so that existing definition of knowledge is broken. This is what Karl Popper aimed to correct.
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Universal Basic Income implemented
Federal tax rates on the wealthy implemented and or loopholes closed
Government insured home loans(FHA) built-in racism corrections
Single-payer government health insurance
Estate taxes on the wealthy adjusted to where it was in the 1950's and 60's.
Personal political campaign fundraising outlawed. Replaced by a central campaign funding mechanism that distributes equally among eligible candidates.Based solely on your platform, you'd have my vote. I wouldn't even expect you to explain exactly how to implement all that. I'd just assume that you must be more knowledgeable and dedicated to get the job done than the last guy who gave it a shot.
My idea of cake cutting in Washington isn't that the cake cutters get a slice of the cake they cut. It's that they get entire cakes of their own just for cutting other peoples' cakes and telling them which slice (crumb) to take and what to do with it. That's after they figure out how to make a cake in a kitchen that doesn't have any milk or sugar and 30 amateur cake chefs are bumping elbows and dipping their dick fingers into the batter to get a taste. One of them even tries to slip psychedelic mushrooms in there. Finally they get one baked but they don't have a knife or a table so one chef holds it while the other tries to cut it with a skewer and, "Oops!" And, "Oops, my ass!" Now there's blood on the cake and the cake's on the floor and the people are outside beating on the door. "Fuck it, we'll take it with blood on it, sure!"
I might write the next Titus by the time I'm done with this cake analogy. Anyway, Cody I'm still dealing with a layman's definition of knowledge. I'll reply to you once I've read up a bit.
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Originally posted by Josh >
Based solely on your platform, you'd have my vote. I wouldn't even expect you to explain exactly how to implement all that. I'd just assume that you must be more knowledgeable and dedicated to get the job done than the last guy who gave it a shot.Well, some of this has already been done in other European countries. It'd basically just be a copy and paste. The hurdle is and always has been misinformation and partisan politics.
Originally posted by Josh >
My idea of cake cutting in Washington isn't that the cake cutters get a slice of the cake they cut. It's that they get entire cakes of their own just for cutting other peoples' cakes and telling them which slice (crumb) to take and what to do with it. That's after they figure out how to make a cake in a kitchen that doesn't have any milk or sugar and 30 amateur cake chefs are bumping elbows and dipping their dick fingers into the batter to get a taste. One of them even tries to slip psychedelic mushrooms in there. Finally they get one baked but they don't have a knife or a table so one chef holds it while the other tries to cut it with a skewer and, "Oops!" And, "Oops, my ass!" Now there's blood on the cake and the cake's on the floor and the people are outside beating on the door. "Fuck it, we'll take it with blood on it, sure!"Yeah, I'd probably start with the second sentence, which I have italicized. That's lobbying. It is the basis of almost everything that prevents progress of progressive agenda...and centering legislation around a cake cutter principle. Lobbying would go out the window with personal political campaign fundraising being outlawed. It's nothing more than legalized bribery and you'll find that a majority of Americans would favor getting rid of it.
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Originally posted by **Cody >
**Knowledge is:- Information which...
I had to plant a flag right there. I cannot go any further because we will not agree on your definition of knowledge as you have omitted the word "acquired".
The only definitions I can accept for "knowledge" are as follows...
1. facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
2. awareness or familiarity acquired by experience of a fact or situation.
3. sexual intercourse.Originally posted by **Cody >
** The commonplace definition of knowledge relies on experience, which is where the "problem of induction," comes in. Experience is based on observation, and all observations are theory laden--so that existing definition of knowledge is broken. This is what Karl Popper aimed to correct.Popper is talking about flaws in how knowledge is acquired. He does not suggest a new definition for "knowledge" sans "acquired".
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You don't have my vote...Still waiting for a response to this:
"Whoever cuts the cake gets the last slice of cake"...?
So those politicians who strive hard get elected and choose how the tax money gets used should be the last ones to get money for the programs that their constituents voted for them to prioritize?And as for:
I had to plant a flag right there. I cannot go any further because we will not agree on your definition of knowledge as you have omitted the word "acquired".
I'm going to have to plant a flag right there. Observation and experience are both interpretation, forms of conjecture. "Acquired" through experience is not how new knowledge comes into being, it comes into being through conjecture. Acquired means copied (or interpreted and re-instantiated in the case of humans minds, which is ALSO a form of conjecture--even in the "copying"), in this existing definition of knowledge. Copying is an important property of information substrates, but it does nothing to explain or take seriously the growth of knowledge, or knowledge about knowledge (epistemology). You may experience "new" knowledge to you, but it was not experienced by the person who conjectured it before they tested it. But, it was still (objective) knowledge at that time (when they conjectured it and before they tested it). It was also (objective) knowledge when someone copied (interpreted) it for the first timebut before they tested it. Testing and experience aren't what makes knowledge true. Just because somethings been around for a long time, like a foundation with lots of evidence, doesn't mean it's infallible. A hard-to-vary explanation only becomes obvious once it's already been conjectured a bunch, before then there's been practically infinite "evidence" otherwise. [Related: "That the truth consists of hard-to-vary assertions about reality is the most important fact about the physical world. It's a fact that is itself unseen, yet impossible to vary."]
I already covered this here, though:
The commonplace definition of knowledge relies on experience, which is where the "problem of induction," comes in. Experience is based on observation, and all observations are theory laden--so that existing definition of knowledge is broken. This is what Karl Popper aimed to correct.
Show me an observation that's not theory laden and I'll show you a charlatan.
We like to turn scientific discovery into a narrative/story that makes it centered on observation: eg Newton's Apple, Einstein's bathtub. But those are just stories (look it up, they're unsubstantiated), the tree that dropped the apple didn't do shit, someone still had to conjecture (make a guess) about how to solve some problem. Copying knowledge (acquiring) is a fun thing to study, too. But the question of consciousness, and the history of science and knowledge, is one about conjecture. We already know how evolution conjectures: by being relying on the best replicable knowledge, letting random mutation guide knowledge growth. How do people conjecture? We don't know yet. We'll have to conjecture about it to find out.
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Just curious...how did you come about the title for this thread, "Enjoying the Dangerous View from the Frontier"?
Also, as for this. It's related to me coming back to Urbit, and one of the developers. It's about pushing the boundaries of knowledge and the danger there. It's about questioning the status quo, and, for example, reading the things that have been passed over by the history books (like a denouncement of the Declaration of Independence). It's also a reference to a comment on the blog post that inspired the original post, which I mention in the last paragraph.
Interestingly, I'm a member of a private chatroom that talks about Bitcoin core development, and there was mention of connections between Vitalik (founder and leader of Ethereum), and Curtis Yarvin--who I mentioned in the first post. I also occasionally listen to Lex Fridman, who had an interview with Eric Weinstein who is kind of a Silicon Valley magnate, where he mentions Curtis Yarvin. Anyway, and interesting thing related to the original post. I see some similarities with this NYT article as well, a guy who blogs some controversial but insightful stuff and is apparently a psychologist for some of those rich dudes in silicon valley, using a pseudonym (which the NYT doxxed at the height of the 'cancel culture' stuff early pandemic).
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The intro to Deutsch's Constructor Theory of Information piqued my interest enough to print the whole thing out for easy reading/note taking. Unfortunately, I simply didn't understand anything beyond the intro. The Wiki page was easier to swallow but could do with some examples. Popper prepared a proper paper. Thanks for that.
The argument of 'knowledge' seems like a semantic one to me. My understanding of the word 'knowledge' (and I think most people's) involves a mind. Of course, the greatest minds throughout history have proven time after time that 'most people's definition' of almost anything is inaccurate or at least incomplete. This may hold just as true for knowledge itself as it does for anything that is acknowledged. But, because the word 'knowledge' is being expanded beyond the scope that most people are comfortable with (the scope of the mind) we either need a new definition for what our minds are doing or we need a new term that includes things that the mind does that are also observable in the physical world (outside the mind).
Einstein's bathtub
Wasn't that Archimedes?
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Regarding Constructor Theory, the official site helps a lot, but personally I didn't quite totally grasp it until I read Marletto's book "The Science of Can and Can't".
I guess you could argue it's "just semantics," but I think the meaningfulness of semantics is kind of the point. If one says it's "just semantics," they may be trying to solve a parochial ("practical") problem that's right in front of them, but arguments about semantics and meaning are where discussion happens on the frontiers of knowledge and understanding. Is that not what, for example, the Supreme Court does? No one more pedantic than the supreme court, lol.
Anyway, the previous paragraph goes a long way to agree with you, I think. Except I think I want to take issue with "greatest minds." I think all minds are great, not just the ones that we put on pedestals.
"Explanatory knowledge is the nemesis of hierarchy."
The point of creating a new foundation of physics, though heretical, and contrary to the whole spirit of empiricism, is to solve a problems that aren't solvable within the existing framework. I think there are direct links between our limited understanding of consciousness and quantum theory that directly relate to empiricism in the foundations of science.
Wait, the bathtub thing was Archimedes?
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Originally posted by Cody >
You don't have my vote...Still waiting for a response to this:
"So those politicians who strive hard get elected and choose how the tax money gets used should be the last ones to get money for the programs that their constituents voted for them to prioritize? "The principle operates with two constants...
1. If you get a slice, it will be the last remaining slice
2. You certainly should never get a slice before anyone else.So it's not only about the programs or how the money is spent from a specific piece of legislation. If a specific piece of legislation, and the process of legislating results in violation of either of the above two points of the principle, then it should not be legal. At the moment, lobbying is legal, and represents a major part of the legislation process. It's where the cake is born and where first slices are allocated.
Originally posted by Cody >
Show me an observation that's not theory laden and I'll show you a charlatan.Observations are by scientific definition not theory at all. Observations are the evidence that either support a hypothesis, or support the debunking of that hypothesis. "Theories" arrive well after rigorously putting the hypothesis through testing and trying like hell to debunk it.
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Originally posted by Cody >
We like to turn scientific discovery into a narrative/story that makes it centered on observation: eg Newton's Apple, Einstein's bathtub.Maybe for kids' picture books. Not actual qualified scientists in their fields of study. Even as a layman, I do not do this.
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Originally posted by Cody >
"Acquired" through experience is not how new knowledge comes into being, it comes into being through conjecture.Knowledge does _not "_come into being". Knowledge is a label for what humans have so far learned through trial and error, and have successfully catalogued. Maybe an argument can be made that a specific person's knowledge colloquially comes into being the moment they have read and understood a page of a physics textbook, but I object to any nebulous statement of knowledge existing or "coming into being" independently of the learner.
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