Continuing the UBI conversation from last month
Hi Dirk,
I do not understand how you get to “markets are incorruptible because there are no subjective influences in the functioning”.
Culture – at any and every level is a subjective influence.
Marketing is a subjective influence.
Every assumption we make is a subjective influence.
Every alteration of context (all levels) is a subjective influence.
I really have no idea what you meant with that sentence.
Can you please provide a conceptual framework and a couple of examples.
Right now I see deliberate lies and deception at every level of the systems – the rule making, the rule enforcing, the gated institutional narratives (at every level of institution – public and private).
Jordan Petersen has one thing that he says that is profoundly important at this and every level – that one of the keys to life is to be invited to play as many games as possible.
That is part of it.
Another part of it is being able to distinguish which games are worth playing and why.
That is a potentially infinitely dimensional game space.
Some of those games are now posing existential level risk to everyone – players and non-players alike. There has always been an aspect of that, but technology now allows it to apply to everyone.
So it becomes important – critically so – that every game have an explicit statement in respect of life and liberty of all players, spectators and others. Players may choose to put their own lives and liberties at risk, but never those of others. That is not a class of game that is playable.
There are no safe places any more – anywhere!!!
I am happy for anyone to take on any level of risk that they choose for themselves. I counsel against it, and I accept the freedom to reject my counsel.
What I do not accept, is anyone having the right to put my life at risk in playing their game – and I apply that notion universally.
So no – I do not see any way in which markets are free from subjective influence, any level, ever.
[followed by]
Hi Dirk,
Thanks, that analogy helps, and it is useful to show several problems with the idea of a market as an “abstract instrument”.
Yes there is a sense in which a market delivers a number, like an ammeter, that gives a measure of something. And there is a sense in which that can be used as an abstract instrument, and that is never all that it is.
And an ammeter is only any good if its internal components have constant resistance that can be calibrated for. When the internal resistance of the instrument is different in every interaction in ways that are opaque and impossible to calibrate for, then any reading from the instrument is unreliable at best and deceptive at worst.
The second major problem I have is with the very idea of the market as an abstract instrument.
A market is not an abstract instrument.
It is a real interaction between people who differ on many different dimensions (including and not limited to):
how necessary is any particular interaction for their physical survival as individuals?
Sure, for some people it is an abstract tool, and for others it is live or die.
For some it is just a game, for others much more.
For some anything goes, for others individual life and individual liberty are much higher values.
It is deeply more (much much more) than just an abstract instrument – and therein lies one of the deepest issues we have.
[followed by]
Hi Dirk,
Again – I do not understand what “chargeable angels” have to do with anything about playing games.
Many people today seem to have the impression that having accumulated the sort of value markets measure (scarcity value, value in exchange) somehow is the only sort of value that people have.
That simply is not so.
Sure, we are all restricted in things like time and energy, and must all choose according to some value metric.
Assuming value in exchange is necessarily a dominant factor in such choices seems to be a category error in logic.
[followed by Dirk “My angels example was chosen to demonstrate the impossibility of a belief in angels to solve all human related problems.” …]
Hi Dirk,
On this we agree.
How best to do that seems to be a matter of some dispute.
The idea of exchange value as something being earned, rather that being something one has a certain amount of as of right, seems to be antithetical to survival in an age where automated systems are getting both cheaper and more competent, and are removing any values that an exponentially increasing sector of the population are able to bring to the market based system – such that most can no longer get enough from the system to survive.
Ted Howard NZ's Blog 