evilweasel posted:
The foundation of Eripsa’s thinking is, essentially, money is the root of all evil. Eliminate money and bad things go away. At that point you just need good information gathering to allow people to selflessly work together to get exactly what we need done.
No, in fact, my argument is that the concentration of wealth is an impediment to solutions to the coordination problem. Money isn’t the root of all evil, money is just the root of uneven distribution. If we want to even out distribution, at least to solve the coordination problem, then, we need to get rid of money.
Zodium posted:
The beauty of money is that it loosely aggregates all/most of the dimensions we measure value on, including attention. A moneyless economy would need some way to quantify those dimensions of value that aren’t captured by attention.
Good. I’m going to disagree, slightly. Money is a loose aggregate of many dimensions of value, but not all of them, as you mention. There’s lots of values that simply aren’t properly registered in the market, most famously the value of homemaking, which requires incredible amounts of time and work but receives virtually no direct recognition in the market at all (except, funny enough, though advertising). There are also lots of values that are artificially generated by money that wouldn’t exist otherwise (like having more money). You are right that “attention paid” is partly recognized by the value of money, but it is mixed with all sorts of other factors. The market is a complex and unpredictable beast.
What this also means, though, is that since money is the neutral standard for assessing value, that lots of competing values end up getting measured on the same scale- for instance, the value of the Mona Lisa is measured on the same scale as the value of a loaf of bread. And so global decisions about any value, no matter how abstract and luxurious, is going to have consequences for the price of bread and who can access it.
So the idea here is to simplify the beast. Make it all about attention, which is just one of many dynamic factors money currently measures. If we are tracking attention, then the market isn’t some big unpredictable beast, but we now have direct information on patterns of use, and that will have direct consequences for resource management and distribution, and this whole network is geared precisely to solve the coordination problem so it doesn’t run into conflicts with other systems of value (surrounding art, say). Art isn’t good or bad based on how popular it is, and measuring the attention paid to some art is not an indicator of its value in any important sense; if you want a system to judge it aesthetically, then go ahead and develop that system. But measuring attention paid does track its use: it tracks how many eyeballs saw that painting, how much mindshare in the population it has. Regardless of the artistic merit of the piece, this data does give us some measure about its relative importance, and from that data about importance or mindshare we can start to make concrete decisions about how to share it among the crowd.
So again, the system here is designed specifically to address the coordination problem, and my claim is that measuring use (by tracking attention) is the proper way of solving this problem. That doesn’t solve all the value-fixing functions of money, but it isn’t meant to.
(Source: forums.somethingawful.com)
