Sporder - Latest Comments

Re: Matt Ridley Counters Pessimism About a 7 Billion Population

Syed Danyal Ahmad — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 11:43:38 -0000

Islam taught that 1400 years ago.

Re: Breeders – A Virtual Ecological Sporder

Scote — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 10:48:37 -0000

The website domain is expired. I can't play the dumb thing but i wanna.

Re: Emergent behavior in the game AI war

cole Terlesky — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:49:57 -0000

One of the other benefits of the preference system was that it was easy to maintain and expand. If some weakness can be easily found and exploited you can just add in an additional preference.

I also forgot to mention that that the civilization games use something similar in certain aspects of their game AI.

Re: Emergent behavior in the game AI war

Toban Wiebe — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:41:11 -0000

Very interesting. The preference system approach makes more sense than decision trees for the purposes of AI. This is what evolution used in intelligent organisms. Unintelligent organisms (plants, bacteria) which can't process information rely on simple if-then rules. But organisms with brains that can analyze situations can be programmed with a preference system, and the organism then simply behaves in the way that it expects will best satisfy its preferences (i.e., it solves the optimization problem on the fly, rather than the solution being hard-coded in).

Re: Andy Kessler on the Rise of Consumption Equality

Gregory Koch — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:28:23 -0000

Yes, there was a time when cars were luxury goods. More recently, computers were only owned by rich people or schools, not least because they were probably five times bigger than the dorm room I'm typing this from. But there are still luxury goods. For instance, many foods are only eaten by the rich. Caviar, for instance. Granted, this is more trivial than a computer, but remember, there was a time when the masses (and even the President of IBM) wondered what a computer was good for. Once people decided to buy them, the price (and size) went down and the masses could afford them. Luxury cars may not just be for the 1%, but probably are for the top 5 or 10%. And as a football fan from New York, I should point out that the Jets and Giants are rapidly pricing regular fans out of the ticket market through PSLs. There was a time when the common man could afford season tickets. Now, they can't. (Interestingly, Green Bay's long-running system where the season ticket holders are also shareholders in the team has worked for about a century now, and there is about an 1,200 year waiting list for season tix now. At least on a football basis, it seems capitalism falls to communism. But I digress.)

You are saying that goods which used to be only for the wealthy are now enjoyed by the masses. But they have been replaced by new previously non-existent goods. Prior to the car being invented, the rich got fancy carriages while the poor just got a horse. But then the rich got Fords and the masses got the carriages. Now, the masses are driving Fords and the rich are driving Mercedes.

Similarly, it used to be only the wealthy had cell phones, and those were the old kind with the pull-up antenna that were almost as big as your head. The rest of us had a landline and that's it. Then, the wealthy got upgraded (but low-tech by today's standards) cell phones, while the masses got the bulky ones. Then came the "non-smart" phones of today, like my phone. It's got pictures, and texting, and music, but it's not a smart phone. The wealthy got those while the rest of us got the previous generation's phones. Then came the smart phones (like the iPhone). And now while we own a landline and a cell phone and that's it, the wealthy have multiple lines on multiple numbers for work and more stuff at home too (exact figures are probably hard to figure out since Donald Trump's home telephone number is not readily available).

Who knows? Maybe in 20 years the wealthy will literally have an EyePhone wirelessly communicating with a brain chip? And the rest of us will all have regular iPhones? We really can't predict it now, but it's possible.
One way or the other, the wealthy will always be a step ahead of us in terms of goods.

Re: Gabe Newell on the Surprising Economics of Modern Video Games

cole Terlesky — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:06:34 -0000

I think what is amazing about Valve and some other recently successful innovative indie games is that they are moving away from selling software as a product and moving towards selling it as a service. I think this would be the inevitable path for many digital things that are easily reproduce-able if they didn't have draconian copyright enforcements to fall back on.

Netflix is a movie streaming/renting service. Steam is a platform for offering a whole cadre of services along with the games themselves (achievements, community features, accessibility from multiple machines).

Duplicating a product is easy in the digital age. Duplicating a service is always difficult.

Re: Competition: The Solution to Politics

Gregory Koch — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:59:42 -0000

You should check out "Visions of Liberty". It's a collection of 10 short stories about anarchist/libertarian societies in the near to far future. A lot of them involve sporders of some sort. One of them concerns pretty much what you're saying here, only more high tech. Everybody had a computer implant where they could identify which country they were from. This would determine their rights, privileges, and responsibilities. For instance, I could declare "My house is no longer America. I am now a citizen of GregoryKochLand, whose entire area consists of my house" just by pushing a few buttons. To join an existing country, I would have to apply for citizenship, of course. In any case, declaring myself the president and sole resident of GregoryKochLand would then entitle me to full national sovereignty over my house, and I would not pay taxes to America or New York. But I wouldn't do that, since then I would have to cross over an international border to get health care, which becomes kind of tricky. And of course, the government could set a border checkpoint every time I want to leave my house and enter the USA. But there would be some interesting possibilities. And the other nine stories were interesting too.

Re: Design woes for sporders

Gregory Koch — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:52:47 -0000

Wait a minute... Doesn't "spontaneous order through human interaction" contradict itself? If humans interact to cause it, is it really spontaneous?

Re: Why the Sporder Approach? Or, Is Economics Enough?

William — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 01:02:22 -0000

Great explanation of "sporder"! I really like this whole approach to studying human life. The only bone I have to pick is that I don't think trying to "derive an ought from an is" is a problem, but I realize that's pretty controversial so I won't go into it now...Also, if you haven't read "The Future and It's Enemies" by Virginia Postrel, you should, as it's right up your alley and very relevant to this project.

Re: Starling Murmuration Sporder

Ryan Safner — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 22:47:08 -0000

The video is really incredible to watch. It's no wonder a lot of modern scientists start to probe emergent systems by looking up in the sky or in the ocean at flocking animals. It's almost always the "go-to" example for biological sporders.

It's also an interesting way to model the system - a phase transition after a critical "flip" is reached in the equations...

Re: The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

Toban Wiebe — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:13:00 -0000

I agree, empirical inferences are never absolutely certain, because of the problem of induction. But I think that deduction gives us knowledge that is not just tautological. So there is certain knowledge, it's just not empirical.

Re: The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

Ryan Safner — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:09:05 -0000

Your claim is indeed a big problem, or at least it would be, because I don't think it applies. I think what is meant by "untrue" by CR here is a bit of a hyperbole (to make the hendiatris sound more bold and completely refuting the classical criteria for knowledge).

Popper is indeed an "objectivist," in that he believes there is an absolute truth irrespective and independent of our beliefs. It's just that what appears true today might prove to be false tomorrow.

E.g. "All swans are white" is "true" to us until we find that one black swan. Then we can say "not all swans are white" is now more true. We continue to improve our theories over time and as we discard those we falsify (but previously thought were true), we asymptotically approach the absolute truth.

This is why Popper, like David Hume, rejects induction as a means for generating knowledge about what is true. We don't have any "good reasons" to justify an inference from specific facts to a universal claim. We can only test claims and say they are false, not that they are "true." The best we can do is corroborate theories by subjecting them to many empirical tests and have them survive. As we keep doing this, and keep discarding any falsified theories, we seem to approach the truth.

That's my understanding, at least.

Re: The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

Toban Wiebe — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:33:01 -0000

That's a problem in my mind: if CR says that all knowledge is tentative, then so is that very claim; it bites its own tail, so to speak. It's not internally consistent.

For example, the statement "there is no absolute truth" is self-contradictory. It is itself a claim of absolute truth.

Re: The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

Ryan Safner — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:25:22 -0000

Thanks Jacob! Finally got around to reading your post - very interesting indeed. I have to profess my ignorance on quite a few points here, but I'm still curious:

Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "constructivism?" I haven't heard what Sowell had to say about it, just Hayek's conception in, e.g., Law, Legislation, & Liberty.

I once heard from a friend (still desperately trying to find the source) that James Buchanan wrote a paper distinguishing Hayek's constructivism into two categories - romantic and some other category. This is necessary to point out because by the Constitution of Liberty, Hayek seems to be committing the very constructivism he appears to rail against elsewhere. Anyway, I need to find and read that paper to sound more coherent about it.

I also don't know enough about Hegel to comment on that part, but as for Popper - I find it difficult to believe he upheld "the constructivist attitude of a near unlimited faith in the power of human reason." Maybe I haven't read enough of the *man*, but it seems to me that his *system* is one of distrust towards what he calls "metaphysics," those self-contained, dogmatic, apriorist theories of religion, Marxism, and other philosophies shunning empiricism and falsifiability. Perhaps later in his life when he progressed towards Critical Rationalism he moved more in that direction you claim, I don't know.

Popper and Hayek are an interesting intellectual pair though. I still have to explore the implications of your post to determine their true relationship. It's also up for debate whether "The Fatal Conceit," edited by W.W. Bartley (since Hayek was deathly ill) was written more by Hayek or by Bartley (a Popperian) since there are a lot of Popperian ideas in the book.

Re: The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

Ryan Safner — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 14:59:20 -0000

To your question 1: If my limited understanding of Popper is true - I think that he would certainly say that mathematics qua mathematics is a priori, not empirical, and therefore, not "scientific." "2+2=4" is not falsifiable, and fails to satisfy Popper's criterion of demarcation (what separates science from philosophy/religion or what he calls "metaphysics.")

But I read (http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... that he would treat certain aspects of mathematical statements about the world as falsifiable, which seems to me to make sense within his system. You can falsify the fact that two physical objects added with two more of the same object does indeed produce four of the same object. If it did not, then the statement "2 of x+2 of x=4 of x" could be falsified, where x is a tangible object.

It seems to run into problems when you get into more abstract and non-tangible, yet extremely useful mathematical statements...

To your question 2: I'm not sure what you're asking here. CR is indeed "unjustified, untrue, unbelief."

Re: The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

Alastair Edwards — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 22:19:50 -0000

This was a very intelligent post, especially the section on unbelief. I think you link up critical rationalism and Hayek's use of knowledge in society project in an ingenius and fruitful way. With that being said I have recently come to reject the analytical utility of Hayek's notion of constructivism, a position that I lay out in one of my blog posts:

http://www.jacobroundtree.c...

Its a post that you might find very interesting given your background academic interests. At the end of the post, I expose a serious tension between Hayek's notion of constructivism and his case for liberalism and Popper's own epistemological and political views.

Re: The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

Toban Wiebe — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:51:53 -0000

Interesting post, Ryan. How does this apply to a priori knowledge in mathematics? Also, isn't CR also "unjustified, untrue, unbelief"?

Re: The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

Ryan Safner — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:53:15 -0000

Awesome, thanks Santiago! Will have to read this too now

Re: The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

Santiago Gangotena — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:49:16 -0000

From one of the experts on Hayek, http://econ.duke.edu/~bjc18...

Re: The Benefits of Increased Population

Ryan Safner — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:30:37 -0000

So when I first read this, I thought it was an interesting perspective Rob, but something about the logic never sat right with me. After a day and a half of mulling it over, I think I have an answer:

Imagine a society with a fixed stock of goods that cannot be changed. [This theoretical fiction is only to explore your logical syllogism.] Adding more people to the society changes the valuation of the goods. Each person now attaches value to the goods to achieve their ends. But those goods must now be valued by more people and must now compete against more ends than before. On the surface, this sounds like an argument *against* population growth - since the goods must now be allocated among more ends, artificially making the goods more scarce. Sure this increases their "value" in the sense that each unit is worth more since it has become more scarce. But the increase in "value" we *want* is the ability for each of us to satisfy our ends with those goods.

[Here, to channel my inner Wittgenstein, we have a problem of language, not of philosophy: what do we mean by "value" (both as a noun and a verb)? It's too imprecise.]

These goods can *potentially* satisfy more ends, since there are more people with more ends. But in actuality, they find themselves being allocated to a smaller and smaller proportion of the total amount of ends possible.

The key to this logical puzzle, I think, is marginalism - each person only values goods on the margin. Since in this world, the stock of goods cannot change, I can't see any margin for people to act upon. Unless their preferences change stochastically or their preferences are a function of the total population (such that perhaps they adjust their preferences when they see more people existing), I see no reason for them to act relative to an increase in population - they would be content, or at least gains from trade would have been exhausted.

Sure this isn't a realistic scenario, but it should theoretically follow from your logic. I think that your inference isn't sufficient to explain the benefits of population growth. It requires something more than just saying more people create more value. It would have to be a result of their ingenuity to transform goods into new goods, or to make more efficient uses of existing goods.

- - - -
It's still not making perfect sense to me, but that's the best I've got right now. I swear, there was a brief moment of lucidity in there somewhere.

Re: The Benefits of Increased Population

Robert Kenneth Kirchoff — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:38:48 -0000

Another obvious insight that rests on economic reasoning:
Value is subjective, and only humans are capable of valuations (well, perhaps they aren't but even if lesser creatures can value, the point holds). Without falling into the classic utilitarian aggregation fallacy, simple logic leads one to conclude that an increase in the number of valuating actors leads to an increases in possible value overall.

Re: The Benefits of Increased Population

Ryan Safner — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 19:54:35 -0000

I agree Toban, most people view population growth through the lens of a physical problem. If you simply compare the level of population and the stock of resources, then of course it's easy to get gloomy.

Julian Simon's Ultimate Resource (II) is probably one of the definitive economic works exploding this fallacy. People - and specifically, their capacity to innovate - are "the ultimate resource." Only entrepreneurs incentivized by profits who have access to knowledge of relative scarcities and demands through the price system can come up with brilliant new ways to use less and less of a resource to get more and more product out of it.

Keep on child-having!

Re: Emergent Game Genres: Less Real is More Real?

cole Terlesky — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:39:06 -0000

Well I think part of the reason for their narrative choices is that it allows them to diverge from 'reality' to fix game balance or coding issues. For many of the fantasy games that have magic as part of the story line there is a consistent fix. The same goes for EVE online except they use advanced technology.

If there is a real world example for the players to check you against then suddenly you have to balance the game or the code to fix the 'reality' which can be much more difficult.

I don't know if there is a trade-off between reality and popularity, but there is definitely a trade off between complexity and popularity. An intuitive interface, and a limited set of options will allow new players to easily learn what is going on. However, its hard to maintain a good level of depth to keep players engaged for a longer time period if you continually sacrifice the options available to players.

Its important for our purposes to note that this isn't really a problem. After all we can see examples of spontaneous order occurring out of relatively simple rule-sets.

Re: Emergent Game Genres: Less Real is More Real?

Gregory Koch — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:28:28 -0000

That depends. When did/does this fictional universe diverge, so to speak, from the main timeline (i.e. ours/Star Wars/whatever it's based on)? If we're having a blank state to start from creation, it would be handled differently than saying here's Earth as it is today, now do what you want with it (the latter nearly resembles Erepublik). On the other hand, starting civilization from scratch leaves open a new set of questions, such as how government, money, etc. will evolve. At that point, you'd need to leave it more open to the players, IMO.

Re: Conway’s Game of Life

Gregory Koch — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:31:53 -0000

Ryan,
Sorry. I wasn't attempting to read something else into it. Keep in mind, I'm willing to guess most readers of this blog did not know what Conway's Game of Life was prior to reading this blog. I, having heard of it prior to reading this post, happen to know the point Conway was making when he created it, namely that it is possible for all life in the universe to have evolved from simple to complex by what this blog refers to as "spontaneous order". I assumed you were just presenting a simplified argument so that those of us who aren't as familiar with Conway could still understand what you were saying. However, I was wrong for assuming that simply because you mentioned CGOL here, you agreed with the entire point it was trying to make. Now that I have read other posts and know more about this blog, I can understand that you weren't making any points about evolution specifically, simply about spontaneous order, which is essentially what Conway was referring to, albeit not under that name. But this was the first post I read on your site. That wasn't as clear to me then.

-Gregory