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[Starver]

I've been seeing a lot of Bc news recently. Some surrounding its 'exchange rate' or 'heists' or being dropped by Steam, etc, because of its value and some seemingly totally random.

[McTraveller]

The most interesting thing I find about bitcoin is that people say "look, it's not controlled by a central authority."  The only thing worse than being controlled by a central authority is being controlled by a distributed authority. At least with a central one you can rebel against it or overthrow it or whatever. If it's distributed, good luck with that - you've basically given up control to a hydra.

Other observations:

People are mad or jealous about the people making massive returns on bitcoin because they are getting massive amounts (if they cash out) and yet they didn't actually produce anything for society*.  It's kind of the same with stock market millionaires - and probably why people don't complain as much about entertainers making massive incomes. At least with the entertainers, they had to actually do something; for the people who lucked out on an "investment" they just managed to ride an appreciation wave - they didn't (generally) actually produce goods or services which corresponded to that increase in value.

It's somewhat astonishing that people are piling all this money into an unregulated market. At least with the "traditional crooked banks" you have some deposit insurance.

*There is probably some argument that these people "produced" a more viable bitcoin network by making early "investment", so their gains are related to that, but that isn't how most people view massive gains.

[redwallzyl]

Its just using capital to get more capital for those with capital. therefor standard capitalism. I wont cry when it comes crashing down.

[McTraveller]

Its just using capital to get more capital for those with capital. therefor standard capitalism. I wont cry when it comes crashing down.

Yo dawg, I heard you liked capital in your capital...

But more seriously, that's the thing though isn't it? They aren't using capital to get more capital. They are using money to get more money.  You can use money to buy capital, but they aren't the same thing.  It's a subtle and important distinction, and forgetting it (or having a system like we currently have that purposely confounds the two) leads to things like the recent recession.

[WealthyRadish]

Making the distinction between money capital and capital goods is well and good, but loses relevance in the very context you're describing. The sole driving purpose of capital goods is to facilitate the appropriation of a greater share and quantity of the produce for the owner, and since money capital and capital goods can be freely interchanged with little expense they may as well be the same if applied to this singular purpose.

I don't know what any of this has to do with bitcoin, however.

[McTraveller]

Well, that's the "modern" interpretation of capitalism.  There's another version, which apparently isn't en vogue any more.  It says there isn't a "sole" purpose of capitalism, but a couple.  The main alternative being that instead of using the capital goods to facilitate the appropriation of a greater share and quantity of produce you use capital goods to maintain a constant share or quantity of goods for less and less effort on the part of the owner.

Of course, that is the root of the entire modern debate about wealth inequality isn't it?  Cultural norms (not anything inherent to private ownership of capital itself) say that you keep what's yours and try to get more instead of just being content with what you have and simply try to make it sustainable with as little effort as possible.  I'm personally very lazy, so I'd much rather just be allowed to maintain my standard of living with less and less effort.  But instead we have a society that institutionalizes inflation and a host of other things like how benefits are tied to how many hours you work that means you are basically forced to maintain a constant level of work and increase output instead.

A good example is how mobile companies say "For the same price, now get 4GB a month data instead of 3GB" and what I'd much rather have is "no, give me 3GB for 75% the price you used to charge me - I don't want more data!"  That's not the only industry that does it either; about the only industry that you can get the same thing for lower price than you used to is consumer electronics, and even that I think is starting to change.

[WealthyRadish]

The main alternative being that instead of using the capital goods to facilitate the appropriation of a greater share and quantity of produce you use capital goods to maintain a constant share or quantity of goods for less and less effort on the part of the owner.

This interpretation only holds for small businesses, where the owner is themself a worker, and the capital in question lessens the owner's labor (or effort) only. For some possible examples, a landholding peasant, an independent artisan, or a freelance programmer. If this business has employees and the capital is able to reduce their necessary hours worked or the skill/wage rate required of the worker, and this reduction in employment outlay is greater than the depreciation of the capital goods, then this surplus represents an increase in the share of produce that belongs to the owner, which may in turn be used to accumulate more capital, lower prices for the purpose of competition, or otherwise be consumed by the owner personally in whatever manner they see fit (including decreasing the hours they personally work by employing others longer, only for the sake of their own leisure and eventually removing the need for them to work in the business at all).

A major example where this idea of the owner lessening effort clearly doesn't hold would be a modern corporation, where shareholders typically exert zero effort in the goings on of production, and indeed often ownership of the company is itself essentially only a traded speculative commodity.

I'm personally very lazy, so I'd much rather just be allowed to maintain my standard of living with less and less effort.  But instead we have a society that institutionalizes inflation and a host of other things like how benefits are tied to how many hours you work that means you are basically forced to maintain a constant level of work and increase output instead.

This doesn't make you lazy, it's what most people desire in healthy societies (to lessen drudgery and focus on more meaningful pursuits). I would say the abnormal behavior is the opposite, the unbridled avarice we see completely unrestrained today. Henry George called it the fundamental law of economics that people will seek to satisfy their desires with a minimum of effort, though I would argue that he only had the luxury of overstating this point because he lived in a country and time when the great body of free working people were only recently losing their independence and made dependent on wage employment.

[McTraveller]

This interpretation only holds for small businesses...

A major example where this idea of the owner lessening effort clearly doesn't hold would be a modern corporation, where shareholders typically exert zero effort in the goings on of production, and indeed often ownership of the company is itself essentially only a traded speculative commodity.

It doesn't "hold" only for small businesses - that's just steeped in the modern impression of what a 'corporation' is.  Consider that a valid reason for forming a corporation is that some enterprises require more resources than a single individual can acquire but a group of people could do it.  That enterprise could be something like a major infrastructure project, where the output of the company itself is the thing that benefits the owners - not just the "shareholder returns."

Corporations today are kind of a mishmash of this, but lean heavily toward the "we're just a company to shield ourselves from liability and to make stupid piles of cash" instead of the "we want a big project that will make all our lives better" side.  But there is nothing to say a company can't do that.  Often you see things like today that are more like co-ops than corporations though, and sometimes non-profits.

Now I realize some of this is hypothetical and academic, because reality seems to show that while that is a "mathematical possibility" it doesn't play out much in real societies.  A large part of it I think is that barriers to entry to most industries are so high that new competition can't come in easily, which means oligopolies in most industries.  So companies in those industries just enjoy increased profits when they increase productivity because there is no effective competition - the benefits of productivity no longer spread around.  This is shown by many studies of wage and wealth growth versus productivity growth versus corporate profits over the past several decades.

So I guess yeah I agree that most companies don't use productivity to reduce work required but instead just increase profits... which is arguably not going to turn out pleasant if larger and larger industries do no longer require workers.

[redwallzyl]

This interpretation only holds for small businesses...

A major example where this idea of the owner lessening effort clearly doesn't hold would be a modern corporation, where shareholders typically exert zero effort in the goings on of production, and indeed often ownership of the company is itself essentially only a traded speculative commodity.

It doesn't "hold" only for small businesses - that's just steeped in the modern impression of what a 'corporation' is.  Consider that a valid reason for forming a corporation is that some enterprises require more resources than a single individual can acquire but a group of people could do it.  That enterprise could be something like a major infrastructure project, where the output of the company itself is the thing that benefits the owners - not just the "shareholder returns."

Corporations today are kind of a mishmash of this, but lean heavily toward the "we're just a company to shield ourselves from liability and to make stupid piles of cash" instead of the "we want a big project that will make all our lives better" side.  But there is nothing to say a company can't do that.  Often you see things like today that are more like co-ops than corporations though, and sometimes non-profits.

Now I realize some of this is hypothetical and academic, because reality seems to show that while that is a "mathematical possibility" it doesn't play out much in real societies.  A large part of it I think is that barriers to entry to most industries are so high that new competition can't come in easily, which means oligopolies in most industries.  So companies in those industries just enjoy increased profits when they increase productivity because there is no effective competition - the benefits of productivity no longer spread around.  This is shown by many studies of wage and wealth growth versus productivity growth versus corporate profits over the past several decades.

So I guess yeah I agree that most companies don't use productivity to reduce work required but instead just increase profits... which is arguably not going to turn out pleasant if larger and larger industries do no longer require workers.

The paradox of modern capitalism. Its eating itself. The supposed reason and benefit its existence as a system is becoming utterly invalid as everything is consolidated. Yet we keep feeding it more public resources and letting it grow until it consumes us all.

[Helgoland]

What youtube autoplayed while I was reading that.

[Reelya]

However, there might be a logical flaw with the general assumption here:

While the brain isn't a digital computer, that's a completely different point to the question of whether digital computers can model a brain. You can't just flip around logical statements in this manner, which seems to be the point Searle is actually trying to make. It's just plain fallacious.

Modelling a brain would be subset of the possible functions that a complex-enough computer could be programmed to execute. Showing that there's not a 1:1 relationship between the brain and an arbitrary digital computer is a complete red herring, if your actual point is to prove that digital computers cannot model a brain. Basically, almost any phenomena doesn't have a 1:1 relationship with the abstract abilities of a digital computer, but that is in fact entirely irrelevant to to question of whether a digital computer can be programmed to model that phenomena.

If that isn't the point he's trying to make then it seems kinda interesting but completely pointless. It's like proving a rock isn't a planet, when your point is to claim planets aren't made of rocks. It doesn't actually make a lick of sense.

[Reelya]

Well cognitivism is clearly an extremely niche belief, if nobody is actually arguing that as a position, what is the point of you bringing it up?

It just seems like a straw man to attack AI research in general then, but critiquing in fancy detailed language, a viewpoint nobody is promoting.

The thing is, a brain could model a digital computer, and a digital computer could model a brain. There not being a 1:1 relationship between the two classes of things is pretty irrelevant to ... basically everything that's worth talking about.

[Reelya]

Uh, like 60 years ago ... also saying that cognitivists thought of the mind as identical to a digital computer seems like a straw-man position itself, which Searle only adopted because he could twist it into a spurious attack on AI research

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitivism_(psychology)

note that the term "digital computer" appears nowhere in there, except in the reference to Searle's article itself. Cognitivists developed as a critique of behaviorism, and the field held that behaviorists didn't put enough emphasis on the internal cognitive processes. I don't see there any real argument that cognitivists were saying the brain was "like a computer" any more than the behaviorists were.

Penrose and Searle were both smart people but their anti-AI arguments real like voodoo science. Brain processes are (1) driven by the laws of physics, you can (2) model the laws of physics, so therefore, brain processes can be modeled (given enough computational resources). Basically they waste a lot of words discussing stuff that's entirely irrelevant. It doesn't matter how "non-linear" a function is (as Penrose argues), non-linear functions can be modeled mathematically just fine. They're really desperate when they start using arguments like that.

[Reelya]

I also don't see why you need to see me posting anything at all as a personal attack against you, as you seem to time and time again.

Uhh, where did I say anything was a personal attack from you to me? I just disagreed with the article, and pointed out the very likely bias based on who the author was.

Also, it's interesting that Searle brings up the "homonculus fallacy" as an argument, because that's one precise fallacy you could accuse Searle of abusing in the Chinese Room argument. e.g. he argues that the little man in the room doesn't understand Chinese, therefore there's no understanding of Chinese in the system. However ... that's pretty much a variant of the "homonculus fallacy": How can there be any understanding unless the little man in the room understands Chinese? Seems kind of like circular logic there. "Only humans can understand Chinese, therefore the lack of a human to understand Chinese means no understanding can exist". e.g. no subset of understanding could be possible, because understanding requires an entire person in the room who has complete understanding. Which begs the question of whether the human who "understands Chinese" is made up of smaller humans inside their neurons, each of which understands Chinese ... definitely the homonulus fallacy.

[McTraveller]

Interesting article.  It seems to be related to the idea about "what is the computational power of the universe, to be able to make the universe work".  Most people would say "the universe doesn't compute its state - its state simply evolves."  So the brain doesn't "compute", its state merely "evolves" due to physical laws, not a program.

At least, I think that's what the paper means by the point that physics is not syntactical.

Perhaps a less abstract example: consider the piston and crankshaft in the cylinder of a car.  This system doesn't "compute" the current air volume in the cylinder - the volume in the cylinder is just a direct result of the configuration.  To get more fundamental: when you put two charged particles near each other, the universe doesn't "compute" the force between them - the force just is what it is.

(Maybe.)