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RE: Econophysics and the blockchain.

in #blockchain7 years ago (edited)

You know that old saying about Archimedes and how if he had a place to stand and a lever, he could move the world? Perceptually speaking, it is possible, even easy to make literally anything the center of existence and conceptualize literally everything else as orbiting corollaries to that one central thing.

Having said that, it's a fun way of looking at the world and can produce genuine insights. We could say that all of human history is about money or stories or attention or information processing or sight or greed or-or-or-or. All those things are true, all of them are a place to stand. The lever is what you do with that information.

It is equally fascinating to consider how technology changes to serve our needs and how our behaviour changes to serve the technology. We invented chairs and so pelvic floor problems and chronic lower back pain became things. Also, chiropractors. We invented cars and so traffic jams and drive-thrus and teenagers having sex at "Makeout Point" became things. We change our speech pattern, enunciate our words, shrink our vocabulary when talking to Alexa or "OK Google" because it isn't yet 'smart' enough to catch our informal everyday modes of speech as human ears would. In effect, the algorithms make us more legible so that we fall within the limits of their sight. Their limits.

What does that have to do with the above post? Money is an algorithm too; it allocates attention and interest and action; few things shape our behaviour more profoundly even as we shape its behaviour in turn.

Very inspiring post; look at the ridiculous comment you have elicited from me :embarassed:

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Super interesting- one of the classes I took last spring was in the humanities realm. I focused on 'looking for signs of self-awareness in AI' by discussing first what made us 'human'. Whether art influences culture or vice versa is always the theme and I talked about how we measure 'intelligence' based upon our own human experiential metrics. How does anyone TRULY know that another is 'aware'? Money is most definitely an algorithm and the internet is the platform for spreading this 'meme' (theory of memetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics). Ideas as the actual catalyst for evolution is fascinating to me. It's interesting how we've used the word 'leverage' in terms of many things capital.

Leveraging Money
https://www.blueleaf.com/articles/how-leverage-works-in-investments/

Leveraging Human Capital
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00131610121969389

Military Application of Memetic Leveraging
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a507172.pdf

the list goes on and on...

Thanks for your awesome response- led me to some cool new thoughts about social implications of currency and inflationary concepts.

Holy WOW! Ok. I will respond, but I must eat first. So you get two comments. Pre-novel read and post novel read. I feel like I should make a reaction vlog post for affect.