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An occasional mountaineer ought to veer off on so...
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Totally! But this isn't done by withholding that other guidebook from them
If you believe that artificial intelligence is already as creative as real human minds imbedded in real human lives, then you’ll also believe that AI algorithms can be relied on to be the most ...
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it will just enact a deadly dull price war.
All bots do is use the illusion of AI to reinforce positions of network power, by taking gross automated actions like setting prices to zero.
Siren Servers reduce the diversity of explorations, no matter how big a calculation they run, thus increasing the chances that better peaks in the landscape will remain undiscovered.
Sounds a fatalism like Roussou & Malthus
how markets seek “equilibrium,” which is another form of peak on a mathematical landscape.
it’s clearer than ever that there’s no way to know if a particular equilibrium is particularly distinguished or desirable relative to others that might be found.
there was a fashion to invite mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists to meetings with economists to see if any new ideas might come out. The physicist Lee Smolin published an interesting paper about multiple equilibriums as a result of some of these meetings: http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.4274.
The existence of multiple equilibriums is part of what’s so galling about the way networks have taken over money.
Assume the scheme is working well, and the owners are doing so well that they are sure they’ve unlocked the key to the universe.
Ha! Except they're always unconciously, at least, threatened - because that's the presumption in the context of the game they're playing
if the money is being accumulated by these schemes, it is being taken from innocent ordinary people and impoverishing them.
optimization of a financial scheme that creates wealth for anyone anywhere also inevitably helps the whole economy,
both based on the fallacious assumption that there’s only one way these schemes could be made to work.
all these sorts of schemes might work just as well finding different equilibriums.
The either/or logic that pervades debates about economics should never be taken as a complete pres...
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possible that a similar scheme to whatever cloud fund we might imagine could also increase employme...
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Cutting-edge entrepreneurs who have enjoyed the benefits of Siren Servers suddenly turn into backward, zero-sum think...
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lower taxes stimulate business growth independently of any other variables.
That is precisely a claim that there can be more than one equilibrium.
the ascendance of a nonlinear, systemic sensibility into popular folklore bodes well.
If the public can “get” the Laffer curve, then the public can probably also gain a more honest and balanced sensibility of the nonlinear nature of the big challenges we face.
It would be as ridiculous to say a Lafferesque solution is impossible as it would be to say it is automatic or easy to find.
The implications of that statement generalized is actually very interesting
Economics is a real-world big data problem, which means it’s hard.
It’s not a phony big data problem of the kind being used to build instant business empires.
That confusion is one of the great confusions of our ...
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acknowledgment that there can be multiple equilibriums.
the absolute faith in austerity, doesn’t even acknowledge that.
It is senseless to speak in the abstract about whether the Laffer curve is true or false.
Systems with a lot of peaks must also have a lot of valleys between the peaks.
When you hypothesize better solutions to today’s way of dealing with complex problems, you are automatically also hypothesizing a lot of new ways to fail.
they will be tweaky and nontrivial to find.
A government has to act like a scientist. Policy must be tweaked experimentally in order to “crawl on the landscape.” That means a lot of analysis and testing, and no preconception of how long it will take to get to a solution—or expectation of a perfect solution.
Keynes was offended by the sort of situation that can come up:
People want to work, but there are no jobs. Builders want to build homes, but the customers are broke. Companies hold on to cash. Banks don’t lend.
Homelessness rises as construction workers c...
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It would seem that all the necessary buyers, sellers, and financiers are waiting in the wings, and yet they fail to i...
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If you have made it to the top of a low hill and you crawl around incrementally, you will always lose altitude. You seem to have already found the best state you will ever find. That is what a stuck state feels like. Holding on to money is better than lending it when the borrower is unemployed.
An employed borrower could get the loan to buy the house from the developer who would employ the borrower.
Keynesian stimulus is supposed to function as a kick that imparts enough momentum to bound across th...
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Keynes was an unapologetic financial elitist and had no interest in a quest for income equ...
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The enduring nuisance is that someone has to guess about exactly how and when to aim a stimulus kick; this is just another way of saying you can’t have science without scientists.
Keynesian economics is an authentic form of big data science, which means it is hard and not automatic or instant.
There is no automatic correlation between social spending and social improvement, or between fiscal stimulus and fiscal improvement.
Every stab at zooming from one hill through a valley to a higher hill on an energy landscape is an experiment without guarantees.
An experimentalist’s attitude is the onl...
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the possibility that there might be higher peaks waiting to be discovered is also the prelude to hope,
the way out of our current knot of austerity and acquiescence to private spy empires.
The Insanity of the Local/Global Flip
the problem is that Siren Servers eventually become absurd, because of the “Local/Global Flip.”
A Siren Server can become so successful—sometimes in the blink of an eye—that
