Economic Devastation

[CoinCube]

CoinCube, I haven't had much time to think deeply.

My reason to subvert the oversight of government with technology is because without I note power corrupts absolutely and there is no feedback loop that can limit collectivism. The masses don't wake up and change the direction (remember the Petri dish from Understanding Everything Fundamentally which you linked from the opening post of this thread).

Whereas, the free market does limit anarchy such that it doesn't have such devolved, unmitigated disasters. Anarchy can result in egregious individual losses, but it doesn't have the systemic risk of collectivism.

That is my simplest way of proving to you that I am correct.

Does that advance our understanding of our differences?

If you understand what I wrote to be factually correct, then why be repulsed by those egregious individual harm that can come from anarchy? Collectivism also wields egregious individual harm but worse in the form of widespread systemic collapse.

How did we diverge?

I agree there will be a plurality of top-down organizations within anarchy (not just one big collective that swallows everything). But the difference is that the free market is voluntary and competitive and thus the plurality of top-down controllers will never devolve into a single-minded, top-down, systemic catastrophe.

Well there is one exception I can think of where anarchy devolves to systemic collapse. Let's say we know an asteroid is heading for earth, yet no top-down actor in the anarchy has the incentive to act. Then we might need an involuntary collective to act and destroy the asteroid before it impacts the earth. But that is hardly a great argument for keeping collectives around perennially.

Can you think of any other examples that are more compelling in your side?

In line with your asteroid example above unrestrained anarchy can lead to megadeath in other ways. As we proceed into the knowledge age the resources required to develop and deploy nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks will continue to decline. At some point it may be possible for a single individual to possess the destructive potential our nation states have today. Human nature requires us to develop and enforce significant controls around such technology. Terrorism is a currently a bogeyman used to further state control. That may not always be the case.    

But why get so enamored with I3552's proposal for a currency based on the hodler's reputation value (anonymous with pseudonyms or not, doesn't matter due to Dunbar limit scaling)

The reason for our partial divergence is that a descent into anarchy especially uncontrolled anarchy will result guaranteed egregious individual losses. The losses from the systemic collapse of socialism while definitively worse remain theoretical until actualized. Hence there exists a potential window of opportunity to act and develop a solution that avoids the guaranteed losses while preventing the unactualized ones.

You point out that all historic instances of involuntary collectivism have eventually devolved to a horrible end game to which I reply that never in history have we had the technology, awareness, and education they we do today. At the very least we have a better chance of solving the problem than prior civilizations did.

The reason I supported I3552 was not because of his proposal which is skeletal and not flushed out. Indeed in my only comments on his actual proposal I mentioned several several significant potential problems. What interested me about I3552's writings was his eventual goal for government.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg10810137#msg10810137

=Sixth Round
A desires a box which is in possession of B.
A offers B to trade his box for a paper in which the violence monopolist vows to not let anyone trade but by that way, insured by his whip.
A get the box and B the paper because he do not want to be assaulted and because he knows that other people gonna have to accept it, increasing community total wealth and safety?

So the violence monopolist prints money out of fear and alienation and by the commodity nature taxes it.
---
I am not an expert CoinCube, but we saw together A being hit and punished by his treachery behavior on the First Round. The same A that repaired his morals and were trading goods and labor force by the Third Round. Yes, the same A that with an honest promise persuaded not only B but the whole group adding immense value by the Fourth Round, value enough, you know, to prevent civil war and starvation if we are lucky. And that is my bet.

If we can dump the commoditization of human awareness and solve the reputation problem that justified the violence monopolist to take his throne we can even go as far as Seventh Round... and by seventh Round... o My Holy Utopian Future...

I3552's goal is to ultimately to reform the government. It is the same goal Armstrong pushes when he argues for education. I fully acknowledge the prospects for success do not look at all promising at this juncture. Indeed, our society may not be advanced enough to break out of this cycle. We cannot stop the bursting of the global asset bubble. A backlash and wave of confiscation is also inevitable. Perhaps there is some small chance that this event in conjunction with the rise of cryptocurrency will allow us to wake up the masses and convince them to climb out of the petri dish rather then consume themselves in a orgy of self destruction. I acknowledge that it is a long shot, but at least we have a much better chance than the Romans did.
 
You are not wrong in your views and I understand your point. Our dispute centers around what may be possible rather than what is now. The work you and others doing on anonymous cryptocurrency is very important for it is an insurance policy to protect the individual in the event I3552, myself, and people like us fail.  

Sorry CoinCube, I am not going to be able to teach all the people. I am going to have go introverted and just do what I think will help me and others who have similar views and needs as I do.

You have done a tremendous amount to enlighten the people already. You should act to protect you and yours I would not want it any other way.  
  

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[aminorex]

On leverage: It has benefits and drawbacks.  The beneficiaries tend to advance it, while the victims denounce it.  I see two dominant reasons why leverage should not be categorically condemned:  Firstly, any power great enough to impose limits on leverage globally would be a far worse source of systemic instability than the leverage it regulates.  Secondly, where there is advantage to be had from a feature of beneficial contract, regulation is doomed to failure, in as much as work-arounds with the same effects seem always to be found.  That can't be surprising:  As ecosystems become overgrown, mature, every last source of energy for growth is hunted down and extracted.  The competitive pressure to do this continues until final resource exhaustion, every time.  (Co-evolving species does not help really.  It just means the overgrowth and exhaustion occurs quasi-periodically or chaotically.  It is only in the infinite limit that the unboundedness of entropy can rescue the system with p -> 1, and then always by reforging it in a new, perhaps higher-, perhaps lower- dimensional, frame - even one which redefines energy itself.  This kind of chaotic evolution is a necessary consequence of what we signify as "life" and "mind".  Until the substance underlying those notions changes radically, it will persist in some form.)

Some might find an endless regulatory game of whack-a-mole to be entertaining.  But again, the process of generating endless rules which are actually impossible to follow and end up constraining unintended persons in unintended ways, strangling the creativity of innovation and bloating the bureaucracy, increasing taxation and decreasing economic efficiency, promoting corruption and making a mockery of the cohesive ideologies of society  will ultimately be more destabilizing that a few financial failures of whatever size a transparent market would tolerate forming.

You can do fully collateralized futures.  They are certainly less useful, and don't even reduce systemic risk relative to a market-based system of bonding with re-insurance guarantees, so I don't think many would find the case for their requirement to be compelling.  Since I have a horse in the race, I would be de-motivated to bolster the case.  Hedging reduces risk, and depends on leverage in practice, but could also be done fully-collateralized.  I suppose that detractors of such applications of leverage consider that reducing the profits of rentiers is reward in itself.  I don't, but I do think that socializing the downside of risk is a form of corruption and demonstrates the subversion of law.

It is important to understand that the deflationary limit of debt-based monetary systems is essentially zero - unlike, for example, a commodity system such as gold or bitcoin, where no matter what happens to prices, there is at least a semi-stable money supply, in a debt-based system, defaults destroy the money supply.  Right now we are seeing vast quantities of money rush into inflating asset bubbles.  A cascade of defaults when those bubbles pop could destroy the bulk of the global notional money supply.  Even if central banks were to make up such losses by re-inflation, the sheer dislocative stress of the cycle would insure dramatic social instability which those banks are unlikely to survive, as constituted today.

I think that "levered" debt-based money supplies are a very bad idea, in part because they increase the magnitude of collapses, and in part because they are used to enslave the vulnerable majority.  I think they are a very new thing, at this scale, not yet 50 years old, and their collapse will serve a much-needed didactic purpose (very soon):  It will make humanity as a whole intensely averse to such systems, such abuses, much as the Weimar inflation steeled Germany against inflationary policy impulses for 100 years.  The species may never revisit that system again.  Maybe, the worst thing that could happen would be an engineered soft-landing.  (Even if that were possible now, though, the likelihood is that it would eventually fail on an even grander scale.  Economic and social capital are not the whole story:  Fuel and food are also subject to supply shocks during the next 20 years.)

I won't address fractional-reserve free banking, because I have enough indirect exposure to money-center banking to understand how little I know.  It's not what happens today on the local scale, where banks are fee-for-service operators and loan broker-dealers overwhelmingly.  Rehypothecation spirals certainly exist, and no one can say they aren't destabilizing and expect to be taken seriously, but they are denizens of a dense jungle, and move about at night, so I think very few people not native to that jungle can even identify them by sight.  I certainly doubt that any academic economists have more than superficial understanding of these species.  They go extinct rapidly, but are cross-bred and cultivated into new species no less rapidly, so that few but their creators ever understand them.  I am far too ignorant of commercial banking to say what effect it may have on systemic leverage.

[TPTB_need_war]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Fully backed (no leverage) is low entropy, thus greater systemic risk and low efficiency
Date:    Sun, April 12, 2015 7:58 am
To:      "Armstrong Economics" <armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Armstrong will be proud of this post, but he may not like the conclusion that central banking is the problem.

Aminorex, thank you for helping to elucidate the points about leverage. Your way of explaining has helped greatly. It is the exchange between us that makes it all more clear to readers and ourselves. Kudos!

On leverage: It has benefits and drawbacks.  The beneficiaries tend to advance it, while the victims denounce it.  I see two dominant reasons why leverage should not be categorically condemned:  Firstly, any power great enough to impose limits on leverage globally would be a far worse source of systemic instability than the leverage it regulates.  Secondly, where there is advantage to be had from a feature of beneficial contract, regulation is doomed to failure, in as much as work-arounds with the same effects seem always to be found.  That can't be surprising:  As ecosystems become overgrown, mature, every last source of energy for growth is hunted down and extracted.  The competitive pressure to do this continues until final resource exhaustion, every time.  (Co-evolving species does not help really.  It just means the overgrowth and exhaustion occurs quasi-periodically or chaotically.  It is only in the infinite limit that the unboundedness of entropy can rescue the system with p -> 1, and then always by reforging it in a new, perhaps higher-, perhaps lower- dimensional, frame - even one which redefines energy itself.  This kind of chaotic evolution is a necessary consequence of what we signify as "life" and "mind".  Until the substance underlying those notions changes radically, it will persist in some form.)

Excellent. You have articulated my upthread thoughts with more analytical precision. You are even getting into my points from my essay:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Algorithm_!=_Entropy

Definitely higher entropy systems are less systemically risky. The risk is a spread out into chaos. There is too much chaotic friction a.k.a. potential energy (i.e. Taleb's anti-fragility) in high entropy systems. And this is precisely why collectivism is inferior to free markets. On the downside collectivism can quite often (often a century or less, i.e. human lifespan) collapse to near 0, whereas as you allude to below (but you have error which I correct below), high entropy systems have a much higher level of implied equilibrium.

Some might find an endless regulatory game of whack-a-mole to be entertaining.

Hahaha. Love the visual.

But again, the process of generating endless rules which are actually impossible to follow and end up constraining unintended persons in unintended ways, strangling the creativity of innovation and bloating the bureaucracy, increasing taxation and decreasing economic efficiency, promoting corruption and making a mockery of the cohesive ideologies of society  will ultimately be more destabilizing that a few financial failures of whatever size a transparent market would tolerate forming.

You are simultaneously reinforcing my upthread point[1] about collectivism's unintended (even obfuscated) side-effects, but also you are misrepresenting my upthread point that the transparency should come from instead of a central bank regulating leverage, employing a decentralized (in theory "no one controls it") public ledger crypto-currency with free market demand for transparency. Thus, the free markets will anneal the regulation implicitly by the movement of capital from overly risky entities.

Of course I agree with you that transparency won't work if we expect a collectivized central bank to be transparent. The regulated always sleep in bed together with the regulators. But a free market (i.e. high entropy) can't be so gamed. A free market crypto-currency can be transparent for reserve ratios (even with individual transaction anonymity). Do you need me to explain how?

You can do fully collateralized futures.  They are certainly less useful, and don't even reduce systemic risk relative to a market-based system of bonding with re-insurance guarantees, so I don't think many would find the case for their requirement to be compelling.  Since I have a horse in the race, I would be de-motivated to bolster the case.

That was my upthread point against Denninger's "one dollar for one dollar" proposal. Non-leveraged futures don't cover all the possible ways that markets need to optimize strategies for optimal market efficiencies. They reduce degrees-of-freedom, i.e. they reduce entropy!

Hedging reduces risk, and depends on leverage in practice, but could also be done fully-collateralized.  I suppose that detractors of such applications of leverage consider that reducing the profits of rentiers is reward in itself.  I don't, but I do think that socializing the downside of risk is a form of corruption and demonstrates the subversion of law.

As you may be implying, the ethical argument is ambiguous (analogous to my upthread point[1] how collectivist Wars on Drugs, Teenage Pregnancy, Women's Lib, Human Trafficking have unintended systemic collapse consequences). Rather the precise analytical reason Denninger's non-leverage proposal is insane, is because it reduces the entropy of the system.

[1]

I am not motivated to stop human trafficking and teenage pregnancy with a global government, because for one reason those are economic activities else they wouldn't exist. They aren't being subsidized by government (and to the extent they are, then reducing government will reduce them which is what you want). When the government destroys what is economic there are kinds of unexpected impacts which are also very harmful to individuals. I provided a detailed post upthread about some of those adverse impacts. I just don't understand why you favor these actions? You say you are a thinking and judging man, so by what evidence? I think if you dig into it, you will end up being converted just as you were on the Global Warming lies.

It is important to understand that the deflationary limit of debt-based monetary systems is essentially zero - unlike, for example, a commodity system such as gold or bitcoin, where no matter what happens to prices, there is at least a semi-stable money supply, in a debt-based system, defaults destroy the money supply.  Right now we are seeing vast quantities of money rush into inflating asset bubbles.  A cascade of defaults when those bubbles pop could destroy the bulk of the global notional money supply.  Even if central banks were to make up such losses by re-inflation, the sheer dislocative stress of the cycle would insure dramatic social instability which those banks are unlikely to survive, as constituted today.

In this paragraph you have failed to identify the generative essence of the problem, although you alluded to it near the top of your post as I pointed out above.

The reason for systemic risk of 0 is the low entropy of central banking, not the fact that there is debt and leverage. Commodity money is higher entropy not because it is tangible, but because the reserves are not regulated by a single entity, thus it is much higher entropy.

I think that "levered" debt-based money supplies are a very bad idea, in part because they increase the magnitude of collapses, and in part because they are used to enslave the vulnerable majority.

Incorrect! After all the astute writing you did earlier, then you destroy it by conflating leverage debt with low entropy regulation.

Leverage debt is essential to maximizing the efficiency in the economy which provides the prosperity for the majority.

Please admit your mistake so we can reach consensus.

I think they are a very new thing, at this scale, not yet 50 years old, and their collapse will serve a much-needed didactic purpose (very soon):

Nonsense! Leveraged futures contracts have existed for all the history of mankind in other forms.

The new thing is ubiquity of central banking. Which we didn't have before! Even in the 1800s, the USA did not have a central bank!

Edit: Armstrong also offered another argument on this:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/12/what-is-the-money-are-future-contracts-immoral/

[TPTB_need_war]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/04/will-the-aiib-one-day-matter/#comment-123478

Yes, there certainly should be much more equity financing, or at least financial structures that do not impose financial distress costs. I am struck by the fact that the best developing-country investment story in history was probably the US in the 19th Century, and while there certainly was a lot of external borrowing (and a number of external debt crises, including the very big one after 1837) , much of the capital Europe exported to the US came in the form of equity, including huge land purchases.

But one of the sillier side effects of modern nationalism seems have been a revulsion towards foreign investment in the form of equity...

And precisely what changed from the 1800s to the 1900s is the invention of the ubiquitous central bank and its ability to backstop bank runs to borrow from the future to reduce risk of default in the near-term, while leading to systemic collapse (ETA 2018) in the long-term.

Suvy, I agree with you that volatility just implies leverage per some model such as Black-Scholes. Leverage is not inherently evil, is absolutely necessary to maximize efficiency, and rather leverage ratios should instead be regulated by the free market given more transparency[1].

However, equity is not the same asset class as debt, mainly because equity is not fungible whereas with a central bank backstop debt is fungible, but therein lies the systemic collapse end game downside.

[1]	Leverage is good; centralized regulation is bad Functioning economies require variable leverage Degrees-of-freedom and non-linear fitness require leverage in finance Delving a bit into systemic risk versus leverage (the last linked forum post is from a mathematician, the prior two are myself)

[TPTB_need_war]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/02/when-do-we-decide-that-europe-must-restructure-much-of-its-debt/#comment-123414

Suvy I wrote CoolPage in 1998 from Nipa Hut in a squalor community in Mindanao. I was infested with weekly bouts of Giardia, had a karaoke blasting in my ear 16 x 7, I'd turn my head and my underwear and spoon would be gone. I reached the low of eating only rice because I had run out of funds and none of my boomer relatives would[n't] loan me even $100 because they wanted to punish me for my decision to go international and rustic.

Sorry there is internet access in most of of the world now. There are some 3 billion at least on the internet by most estimates. Up from a 100 million back when I launched CoolPage. And to think I had a million users and thus 1% of the internet, all coming from a Nipa Hut in squalor.

Sorry you are not making any sense. You need to travel outside the USA more to lose your myopia.

Suvy, when I first explored Manila in 1991 (just after Mt. Pinatubo erupted), I noticed all these smoky, smoldering shantytowns, e.g. tiny abodes in along river banks constructed of scrap materials, and I was wondering where all these sharped dressed professionals strolling by were living. Someone informed me they live in those cardboard shacks with only crawl space. If you saw them at the office you would have never known.

It was quite an eye opener and attitude adjustment for a 26 year old westerner.

[TPTB_need_war]

wavefronts interference. The business cycle is not the same wave as the international crisis cycle. This is why you would need computer to search all of fractal patterns and pull out the cycles from the interference.

Could you say the business cycle wave and the "international crisis cycle" wave however you may define them may be interconnected?

The A.I. computer has apparently figured that out and it is very complex and it is isn't only the interference of just two cycles.

Essentially the computer could map all the possibilities and then determine which complex relationship holds true for all dates for different cyclical events.

It isn't really A.I. rather exhaustive search. It might be A.I. in a sense if the computer is altering the structure of what it is searching for based on entropy of its input data set. But as I pointed in my essay, it isn't A.I. in the sense that it is not interacting with the unbounded (in time) entropy of the evolutionary environment:

http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Algorithm_!=_Entropy

Tada!

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/12/questioning-cycles/

[TPTB_need_war]

...

TPTB we appear to be converging towards consensus once more. We usually always do eventually which is somewhat interesting given that our often dramatically different starting positions.
From the logic above you can see why I reach the conclusions I do mainly.  

Ideally, the decline of the state should be in a progressive, inexorable and gradual allowing time for the development of DACs to promote progressive freedom and lay the groundwork for further shrinkage of the state.

and

I oppose the creation of a vacuum unless there is absolutely no other choice.  
Show me the existing not hypothetical decentralized alternative that has any realistic chance of efficiently replacing a centralized solution and I will support it enthusiastically.

You can count on me to have significant reservations about any solution that relies on destroying existing state functions in the hopes that things will just turn out ok.

We appear to be in significant agreement on the above.

My next post will get into the meat of where we still have incongruence or misunderstanding.

[TPTB_need_war]

In line with your asteroid example above unrestrained anarchy can lead to megadeath in other ways. As we proceed into the knowledge age the resources required to develop and deploy nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks will continue to decline. At some point it may be possible for a single individual to possess the destructive potential our nation states have today. Human nature requires us to develop and enforce significant controls around such technology. Terrorism is a currently a bogeyman used to further state control. That may not always be the case.

The only way the State could stop individuals from acquiring and using such technology would be to track everything everyone does. Choke points of yore only (e.g. export restrictions on certain technology) worked before the internet. The cat is already out of the box and the only way to put it back in, is to track everything everyone does. That Orwellian State would mean certain extinction of the human race because centralization of power corrupts absolutely and there will be no way to break out of it until hits 0 (i.e. cancer entirely killed the host).

The logic you expressed appears to me to be certifiably insane because...

All you have provided are the choice between two scenarios which are both human extinction paths.

My gosh. Sociopath much? Why not contemplate a more rosy possibility?

Of course anarchy (a.k.a. the free market) would never end up with the outcome you illogically fear. Because (unlike a perfectly centralized system which has 0 entropy), the entropy of the free market is higher (not 0) and thus it has a higher implied equilibrium state (above 0).

Can't you PERCEIVE (i.e. envision) that the free market will always react by providing self-defense technology? For example, technology to leave planet Earth if necessary, technology to live underground, and remote sensing (this exists already) technology sniff out certain chemical compositions in a certain proximity. Etc, etc, etc.

This perfectly exemplifies why those who lack PERCEPTION and are too much JUDGING, will prefer insane (absurd) low entropy choices.

[TPTB_need_war]

Large scale collectivism is insane because low entropy systems have systemic collapse risk in the vicinity of 0.

Whereas the free market has a much higher entropy and thus systemic collapse risk is very low (thanks aminorex for reminding me of that). Taleb has been explaining this in his reknowned books, e.g. Antifragility. Are you collectivists asleep and blind? Read.

Large scale collectivism has another horrific moral and ethical flaw that the free market doesn't have, with horrific systemic risk implications. Specifically it enables individuals to transfer their responsibility to the State and obfuscate their individual irresponsibility.

Sorry CoinCube, for as long as you do not rescind your "anonymity is repulsive" and do not admit the abominable, asymmetric difference in systemic risk between large government and free markets, then we can't possibly function together in society. You obfuscate (to yourself!) that you want to kill me, so how can I live peacefully with you then.

Come on, you have a university degree in math. Don't let it fail you now. Be erudite and objective please.


Explanation of Entropy

Entropy = Sum(p_i × log(p_i)), where p_i = probability of event i

That equation says a more uniformly distributed occurrence of events has a higher entropy; whereas, concentration of high probabilities for certain events has a lower entropy. At the extreme low a single possible event has a probability of 1 and thus an entropy of 0.

So a system where everything is controlled by a single top-down authority has only one possible set of outcomes (those favored by that single-minded authority) and thus it has an entropy of 0.

We can view entropy as the information content of the system. Thus systems with many autonomous actors with no one actor having a great majority of the possible outcomes in the system, have a much higher information content, i.e. they are smarter, more resilient, and more Antifragile.

[CoinCube]

The only way the State could stop individuals from acquiring and using such technology would be to track everything everyone does. Choke points of yore only (e.g. export restrictions on certain technology) worked before the internet. The cat is already out of the box and the only way to put it back in, is to track everything everyone does. That Orwellian State would mean certain extinction of the human race because centralization of power corrupts absolutely and there will be no way to break out of it until hits 0 (i.e. cancer entirely killed the host).

The logic you expressed appears to me to be certifiably insane because...

All you have provided are the choice between two scenarios which are both human extinction paths.

My gosh. Sociopath much? Why not contemplate a more rosy possibility?

Of course anarchy (a.k.a. the free market) would never end up with the outcome you illogically fear. Because (unlike a perfectly centralized system which has 0 entropy), the entropy of the free market is higher (not 0) and thus it has a higher implied equilibrium state (above 0).

Can't you PERCEIVE (i.e. envision) that the free market will always react by providing self-defense technology? For example, technology to leave planet Earth if necessary, technology to live underground, and remote sensing (this exists already) technology sniff out certain chemical compositions in a certain proximity. Etc, etc, etc.

This perfectly exemplifies why those who lack PERCEPTION and are too much JUDGING, will prefer insane (absurd) low entropy choices.

That is because the two scenarios at their extremes are both ones of mass death and extinction. It is only in balance that we find optimal outcomes. If technology advances to the point where a single individual acting alone possess the ability to destroy the entire biosphere then you are correct it will become necessary to track everything everyone does.

At that point we would need to be very very creative and develop solutions that prevent that observation from turning into an Orwellian nightmare. Perhaps the state could be fractured  into small groups of 100 or so people where only those individuals could observe each other and sharing that information with anyone else made strictly illegal except under prespecified and extreme situations? I don't know. It remains a very difficult problem for the future.

I agree that unrestrained anarchism could possibly avoid extinction via self defense technology. It would imply a transition of humanity to a viral reproduction strategy with dormant periods when we lived in small groups underground and on colony ships in transit between the stars and growth periods where we settled a new world or repopulate it after radiation levels subsided only to repeat the process. I find that future unappealing.

We have once again come full circle and return to our original divergence from well over a year ago.

So what is the informational value of the collective (aka socialism) which appears to me to be chains on our individual ankles? What do we lose by discarding it so that individuals can optimize more freely?

Socialism and anarchism are in constant opposition. Anarchism is needed to combat the evils/suboptimal outcomes of unrestrained socialism as you have convincingly demonstrated. However, socialism is likewise needed to combat the evils/suboptimal outcomes of unrestrained anarchism.

The informational value of socialism is that it smooth’s the fitness curve. Anarchy if left unchecked results in an ever steeper curve. This has been shown to reduce the rate of evolution/change as it forces convergence onto the nearest local valley or local optima.

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000187

Thus unrestrained anarchism increases short term fitness at the cost of long term optimization/adaptation. To borrow from your corporation analogy the proper role of socialism is to help ensure trailblazers survive long enough to eliminate the economic friction. In a landscape with an extremely steep fitness curve those individuals may not survive or succeed (crossing those barriers involves significant cost). We can get stuck in a higher valley (of the N dimensional solution space).    

In its most extreme form anarchism can drive the entropy of society past the Error Threshold at which point information is destroyed rather than created.

So we are really looking for is congruence or harmony (aka resonance and I have written about this w.r.t. to potential energy and even explored Tesla's work) but if we can't eliminate all necessary barriers then increased degrees-of-freedom in one sub-area might be suboptimal, ineffective, or perhaps counter-productive.

This is the key point. Unrestrained anarchism does not eliminate all necessary barriers. Instead it forces conformity to the nearest local optima effectively raising barriers to distant more global optima.

Like I said earlier we are to some degree natural ideological opponents. Perhaps this is due to our division along the FP vs TJ axis?  

If we somehow could achieve the goal we both share and enact a government that was stable and intent on constantly shrinking itself there would likely be two opposing political parties.

The anarchist party would constantly be pushing the latest decentralized solution arguing for rapid dissolution of state functions. The collectivist party would constantly call for restraint and more study worrying over the unknown consequences of untested solutions. Balance would be achieved in the interplay between the parties. We would diverge in that hypothetical world just as we do here today.

[aminorex]

The reason for systemic risk of 0 is the low entropy of central banking, not the fact that there is debt and leverage. Commodity money is higher entropy not because it is tangible, but because the reserves are not regulated by a single entity, thus it is much higher entropy.

These issues are in different frames, and not directly related.  It's not really debatable that debt-based money enslaves the holders to the issuers, nor that an annihilable virtualized currency can go to zero much more readily, by write-off, than a material, immutable supply, which must always go somewhere, and can never decrease in supply by ordinary means.

I think that "levered" debt-based money supplies are a very bad idea, in part because they increase the magnitude of collapses, and in part because they are used to enslave the vulnerable majority.

Incorrect! After all the astute writing you did earlier, then you destroy it by conflating leverage debt with low entropy regulation.

Leverage debt is essential to maximizing the efficiency in the economy which provides the prosperity for the majority.

I think the conflation is in my expression and consequently in the mind of the reader, rather than in my own mind.  I used the scare quotes because this is a very different notion of "leverage" than contract leverage.  Not all degrees of freedom lend themselves to constructive application.

I think they are a very new thing, at this scale, not yet 50 years old, and their collapse will serve a much-needed didactic purpose (very soon):

Nonsense! Leveraged futures contracts have existed for all the history of mankind in other forms.

I understand and agree with your statement, yet continue to hold my position, and without a trace of dissonance:  I was talking about the constructive basis of the money supply, which is irrelevant to leverage futures.

[TPTB_need_war]

CoinCube, I can't fathom how the mathematical point flew right over your head.   I give up. The balance is precisely high entropy. Collectivism doesn't have it.

aminorex, you lack logic skills despite your apparently impressive math and other skills. I have noticed this on numerous occasions, but this can be because your mental focus is in other areas at the moment. That debt-based money enslaves holders says nothing about causality. That you think a single virtual currency could be destroyed says nothing about the entropy of the market place and the number of altcoins ready to jump into its place. You completely sidestepped the actual generative essence by presenting strawmen that contained no applicable logic. I stopped reading there. Nevermind. Thanks for the upthread help.

My exceptional logic skills are what makes me a very highly capable programmer. Programming is much more about a state machine of logical possibilities, than other types of intellectual disciplines.

There are more productive activities I could be doing than this.

[thaaanos]

CoinCube, I can't fathom how the mathematical point flew right over your head.   I give up. The balance is precisely high entropy. Collectivism doesn't have it.

High entropy is not fruitful, humans realized that and formed societies with rules. You should aim at enough entropy to have coverage but also commitment, just like life

Entropy producing structures are stable as long as the production rate is above the rate of their environment, thats fine in an open system. But a problem in a closed system cause eventualy those structures dominate the entropy production in the system. So the crux is not free market/colectivism but are we reaching the limits of the system or will a breakthrough push them further? There lies belief. Reality simply dictates that when you stop growing you start dying.
So i ask do you see a breakthrough before we reach the walls of the system? Of course not, breakthroughs cannot be forseen, hence all the doomsaying, but life, intelligence, societies, cyberspace are a string of breakthroughs so I remain optimistic that one more is expected.

[vokain]

Not really making any statement with this, but I ran into it not too long ago and found it nice to ponder.

[TippingPoint]

If we somehow could achieve the goal we both share and enact a government that was stable and intent on constantly shrinking itself there would likely be two opposing political parties.

The anarchist party would constantly be pushing the latest decentralized solution arguing for rapid dissolution of state functions. The collectivist party would constantly call for restraint and more study worrying over the unknown consequences of untested solutions. Balance would be achieved in the interplay between the parties. We would diverge in that hypothetical world just as we do here today.

Divergence expands to fill the available space.

[CoinCube]

CoinCube, I can't fathom how the mathematical point flew right over your head.   I give up. The balance is precisely high entropy. Collectivism doesn't have it.

Anonymint we have already concluded this mathematical debate.  Entropy increases the information content of a system only to a point. Beyond that point it becomes destructive.

Anonymity allows uncontrolled destructive chaos.

And who are you to judge that individual freedom and responsibility produces destructive outcomes?
I am an anarchist. I believe in the math of optimal fitness.

So my task is thus to show that the math of optimal fitness requires anarchy to be contained and limited.
I accept your challenge.

Life requires entropy to exist, but critically such entropy must be limited and contained. Entropy/mutation must not be allowed to exceed the error threshold. Error threshold was developed from Quasispecies Theory by Eigen and Schuster to describe the dynamics of replicating nucleic acid under the influence of mutation and selection.

If replication was without entropy no mutants would arise and evolution would cease. On the other hand, evolution would also be impossible if the entropy/error rate of replication were too high (only a few mutation produce an improvement, but most will lead to deterioration). Error threshold allows us to quantify the resulting minimal replication accuracy (ie maximal mutation/entropy rate) that still maintains adaptation.

This can be shown analytically at its clearest in an extreme form of a fitness landscape which contains a single peak of fitness x > 1 with all other variations having a fitness of 1. With an infinite population there is a phase transition at a particular error rate p (the mutation rate at each loci in a genetic sequence). In Eigen and Schuster (1979), this critical error rate is determined analytically to be p = ln(x)/L (where L is the chromosome length). When this mutation/entropy rate is exceeded the proportion of the infinite population on the fitness peak drops to chance levels.

The can be thought of intuitively as a balance between exploitation and exploration in genetic search. In the limit of zero entropy/mutation successive generations of selection remove all variety from the population and the population converges to a single point. If the entropy/mutation rates are too excessive the evolutionary process degenerates into random search with no exploitation of the information acquired in preceding generations.

Thus the optimum entropy rate should maximize the search done through mutation subject to the constraint of not losing information already gained.
Any optimal entropy rate must lie between the two extremes, but its precise position will depend on several factors especially the structure of the fitness landscape.

It is also worth noting that at least with genetic algorithms natural selection tends to reduce the mutation/entropy rates on rugged landscapes (but not on smooth ones) so as to avoid the production of harmful mutations, even though this short-term benefit limits adaptation over the long term.
    
References:
Eigen, M., & Schuster, P. (1979). The Hypercycle: A Principle of Natural Self-Organization. Springer-Verlag.
Ochoa G., Harvey I, Buxton, H. Optimal Mutation Rates and Selection Pressure in Genetic Algorithms. Proc. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2000
Clune J, Misevic D, Ofria C, Lenski RE, Elena SF, Sanjuán R. Natural Selection Fails to Optimize Mutation Rates for Long-Term Adaptation on Rugged Fitness Landscapes. PLOS September 26, 2008

 

[TPTB_need_war]

CoinCube, anarchy will never be composed of infinite equiprobable (i.e. resourceful) actors with no hierarchical structure, thus the downside systemic risk is mild (i.e. the free market will be able to organize and converge on solutions and is the most resilient system nature gave us). There will always be leaders (such as myself) who apply more resources and thus more control into the free market with our resources, e.g. more knowledge capital. In other words, the voluntary participation free market provides for the self-annealed balance between decentralization and hierarchical leadership. The free market and Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is nature's optimum system for us.

Whereas, involuntary participation top-down collectivism has a systemic end game risk of being controlled top-down in totalitarianism, i.e. entropy near to 0.

This asymmetry of systemic risk is undeniable.

Please don't waste my time with more of your illogical myopia and inapplicable strawmen (i.e. yes the research paper is applicable and the optimum entropy is self-annealed by the free market, not by totalitarianism). You can't grasp simple mathematical asymmetry that has been spelled out so clearly for you.

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/13/discourse-on-voluntary-servitude/

I am familiar with The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, or the Anti-Dictator  by Étienne or Estienne de La Boétie (November 1, 1530 – August 18, 1563). We have the same birthday. He is one of the people I have been compared to since he looked deeply into human nature and government as well with the strange surrender of freedom.

The date of preparation of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is uncertain but he too was young and delivered his observations between the age of 18 and 22.

The essay argues that any tyrant remains in power because his subjects grant him that power. The freedom of men is voluntarily relinquished by society for they become corrupted by the habit and prefer the servitude of the courtier to the freedom of the free man. This relation between domain and obedience it actually important to understand for this is the reason we have cycles in our political-economy.  This is the great mystery of politics – why do people surrender their freedom preferring the obedience to rulers? What possesses humankind to even agree to standby and allow their rights, privileges, and immunizes plundered and otherwise oppressed by government overlords? What Boetie explains in “The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,” is fa fascinating observation. It is not fear that creates the domination of society, such tyranny requires our consent which can be non-violently withdrawn.

[TPTB_need_war]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/04/will-the-aiib-one-day-matter/#comment-123522

Suvy, we don't disagree on debt being useful. I refined my understanding on debt after contemplating the degrees-of-freedom and fitness point. And that is why I also think leverage is good. I think the problem with leverage is the lack of self-annealing in the free market due to top-down control over reserve ratios which via regulatory capture leads always to lack of transparency. The free market can't anneal political collectivism. Well it does route around that Coasian barrier by collapsing the entire economy instead later once the default contagion forces to do so have accumulated. I think we are that juncture again in world history. Current ETA is collapse to accelerate over the period 2016 - 2019. Europe first, then USA in late 2017 after the strong dollar from the safe haven capital flows chokes off the USA economy. Asia will bottom first because Asia doesn't have the burden of demographics, massive unfunded liabilities for boomers, and bankrupted pensions due to ZIRP.

[CoinCube]

Whereas, involuntary participation top-down collectivism has a systemic end game risk of being controlled top-down in totalitarianism, i.e. entropy near to 0.

This asymmetry of systemic risk is undeniable.

Actually we completely agree on this. Where we appear to differ is that I believe this asymmetry will decline and potentially even reverse as technology advances. That is why I support the development of robust anonymous cryptocurrency while simultaneously hoping that a more elegant solution becomes possible.
 
I am modifying my prior comments in the following manner.

"Anonymity is a desperate and somewhat repulsive unsustainable solution. Unfortunately I have no better or even viable alternatives to offer."

Does that mollify your concerns?

[TPTB_need_war]

http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/02/when-do-we-decide-that-europe-must-restructure-much-of-its-debt/#comment-123496

1. In any decentralized, voluntary participation free market, the control of resources (e.g. savings, knowledge, etc) are always power-law distributed. The leaders will drive the rise of the post-industrial (a.k.a. Knowledge Age) economy and their fixed capital costs are insignificant component of their cost of production.

2. The relevance of the masses is they are fodder for the vested interests who control the political collective and they are vested into the Industrial Age where the control over finance, stored monetary capital, and fixed capital traits give them their power. Thus all the NSA totalitarianism, War on Terror, etc.. Our political masters are marching towards a one-world reserve currency. But the Knowledge Age is fledgling away from their power. They think these fodder are their asset to maintain control, but the Knowledge Age will simply hand them all the liability for those fodder and none of the control, e.g. taxing virtual anonymous commerce will be impossible.

I could go into more detail on your other points, but suffice it to say we are headed into a tempest and a radical paradigm shift for humanity (as was the analogous case for the rise of the Industrial Age, which as you may know required the Black Death in Europe to raise the value of labor).