RE: Embracing Linear Equality on Steem: Unlearning the Sucker & Maximising the Arsehole in Me
It is true that the system as it stands currently does incentivise bad behaviour. By bad behaviour, I mean actions that both transgress broader moral norms, and are detrimental to the longevity the system itself.
But, it is also true that unethical behaviour in that context can legitimately still be seen as unethical, and therefore attract moral condemnation. The fact that the system incentivises such behaviour does not remove anyone's moral responsibility.
For example, a society that incentivises violence against children is not what I would call a good system. It's also completely coherent to say that individuals committing the violent acts are doing the wrong thing. The only people interested in excuses are cultural relativists and the aggressors themselves. People with a more firm idea of the ethics of that situation, whether they are part of that society or not, will not run such a line of reasoning.
As you correctly observe, a more relevant example is the commons dilemma. Overuse of a common un-owned or collectively owned resource might be incentivised by the context it occurs in. Yes, it is true that a good system would not do this. But it's also true that fairly rational good people (by which I mean minimally good, not 'moral saints', with a bit of common sense) would recognise this and act to change the system and restrain themselves to maintain equilibrium while redesigning the relevant parameters.
I guess you and I differ in that I don't think maximising profit at the ultimate expense of the system that creates it is rational. I agree that the system is flawed and that desirable behaviour that is good for the platform should align with profit maximisation. But none of the people involved in fucking it up, regardless of the size of their stake, get to absolve themselves of moral responsibility.
all that hard work and I cant seem to vote more then $0.01, and if i come back tomorrow to give you one more cent then i can't give it to another genius... Wha t a dilemma. Yet whales are able to shitvote on shitposts and dishes that make people shit
And anyone who implies that whales don't fully deserve the right to do so is a communist.
I'm a communist!
I'm in a community.
Does that now allow me to name them something back?
Something in the realm of anti-social hypocrites. If you see the irony in that...
No, I definitely agree with your last statement that profit maximization behavior right now is coming at the expense of the collective. Unfortunately, as I stated it's not that a lot of us whales can't see it, we just can't stop or trust other large stakeholders from doing it. It's similar to the prisoner's dilemma, except with so many trustless parties it's too costly to collaborate and we end up where we are. Because while everyone taking part is the worse possible outcome for the collective, not taking part while everyone else is is the worst possible outcome for the individual. I'm well aware that if we all clawed back our own votes it's worse than if we all didn't because the value loss in steem price (either falls or unrealized potential gains) in a rational market will exceed what we get. But it's sort of the game theoretical sub optimal place we're in and seemingly stuck.
I don't agree that prevailing ethical or social norms can be relied on to take precedence in an economic system. Maybe ideally this would be the case, but it's too far fetched. I do suggest what I consider a very realistic and far superior solution in my other reply to this very same post. Thanks for reading my take and voicing your views. I'm interested in seeing what you think of my suggested solution below.
https://steemit.com/funny/@kevinwong/embracing-linear-equality-on-steem-unlearning-the-sucker-and-maximising-the-arsehole-in-me#@trafalgar/re-kevinwong-embracing-linear-equality-on-steem-unlearning-the-sucker-and-maximising-the-arsehole-in-me-20180419t032538535z
In philosophy (which is my academic background and profession), 'moral saint' is used to denote a hypothetical agent whose every action is as morally good as possible. I don't think people need to be that good to make linear rewards work, but clearly more people would need to be 'better' than they are now (otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation).
Given my interest in non-ideal action-guiding theories, I should know better . Economic systems, systems of governance and government, conceptions of justice; none of these things should be designed for the way you wished people were - you have to design them to cope with the way people actually are.
This isn't an endorsement of some sort of moral determinism (so you are still not off the hook). Humans, and the societies they exist in exhibit and incentivise a range of levels of selfnessness, so I'm not peddling some idea the kind of assholery that steemit rewards is somehow reducible to a pre-theoretic notion of 'human nature'.
Incentives. I ponder John Rawls' theory of justice - he was quite happy to use economic inequality to incentivize desirable behaviour. For example, even though equality is good, inequality in the form of paying surgeons more than average is better. That's because it encourages people to become surgeons - but this ethical advantage only true if there's reasonable equality of opportunity to become a surgeon, and if the benefits of having surgeons are reasonably equitably available to all members of that society (via the notions of income redistribution and universal healthcare that so many people around here find so triggering).
This isn't about progressive taxation or other things that give voluntaryists nightmares. But the principle is the same. We want big investors and whales to exist, but we also want their existence to produce a beneficial effect for smaller users. Actually it's more than 'want' - we need them to produce benefit for smaller stakeholders, otherwise we'll end up right where we are now: heading toward a distinctly uncertain economic future.
So yes, curation does need to be incentivised. I am not sure what exact curve the rewards need to be set at, but I can see the argument for changing it. On top of that, we also need to try and educate and encourage people to not game the system, and for whales live up to the responsibilities of being major stakeholders.
Trouble with all this is that you need to get the witnesses, who are controlled by these large stakeholders, to agree to a change that means these stakeholders either make less money, or have to put more effort in to make the same amount of money. It might not technically be regulatory capture, but IMHO, it's pretty analogous.
One thing that did occur to me would be to change how witness voting worked, then watch the problem solve itself in an organic, 'bottom up', way. We can't have one account = one witness vote, for obvious reasons. And with the ability to use bidbots to quickly raise one's reputation, weighting voting by rep won't help much either. What you could do have the stake-weighted witness voting work in a non-linear way, so that while the ability to choose witnesses grows with stake, it grows less with each additional vest. You could do this with either a log function - tweaked to not allow hordes of tiny account to choose the top witnesses - or maybe a cube root function - something like that, my calculus is pretty rusty. Whatever the case, if witnesses were suddenly more beholden to people in the minnow to dolphin range, then maybe they'd suddenly they would have both the motivation and ability to do more than act in the short term interest of their biggest voters.
Or not - it's just an idea.
So there you go - I agree this needs to be addressed systematically. But I want to be clear on one thing: If a system incentivizes bad actions, this does not magically mean that bad actors have no moral responsibility. For that to be true, it would mean that moral goodness or badness can be purely reduced to what is incentivized or not. I'm not saying that isn't the case, but you sure as hell haven't established that position to my satisfaction. Self-voting, delegating for profit rather than curating, low-effort spam, multi-thousand account voting rings - all of these things are currently incentivized, and all of these things (to a greater or lesser extent) also deserve condemnation.
Unless someone's steemit-assholery is needed to pay the rent or feed their kids, I'm not interested in excuses. I'm glad you are focused on solutions (doubly so, considering how much more influence you have than the average person here). But, incentives or not, you are still responsible for your choices. Don't expect people to let your behaviour pass just because the system rewards it, or 'everyone else is doing it'.
great stuff @samueldouglas - as a philosopher feeling grumpily that i have to get to grips with the dismal science, steemit is a microcosm where all the problems i'm seeing jump out out at you at high speed. here are my not very coherent thoughts thus far: people can game any system and they will. at the same time, altruism is a force in any economic / cultural system, though as a 'percentage' of the determining force, it can get very low or very high, [taking a historical / anthropological sweep]. misalignment of incentives, so that people maximising their gains by exploiting the incentives provided by a system are also acting in ways inimical to the system's achieving its declared aims or even continuing to exist at all seems the norm with most systems. [e.g. capitalism treats waste as an externality that can be dumped without expense into the envrionment, thereby degrading the conditions that capitalism needs to continue, i.e. life on earth.] the aim here at steemit, i presume, is to provide the conditions for 'good content', of use to people, to be produced and distributed, in a way that rewards content creators so that they can create, and which removes the economic exploitation and ideological dominance of middle men - the publishing industry, tin-pan alley, hollywood, FB etc. Also, it seems that steemit hoped to broaden the base of content providers so that anyone can express themselves in the space. Though this latter isn't directly about getting good content, it can be thought of as a maximising condition for good content to emerge and for new creators to hone their craft etc. It mitigates the elitism that might grow out of the concern for 'good content'. Of course, there has to be the means in place to maintain the infra-structure on which the system sits, and economically, this costs. Questions arising now: what is 'good content' and who is to say? Can a system be optimised just by tweeking parameters? Thoughts: game theory has a very thin idea of culture. Rich, complex culture, including ethics, however, is bound to be an influential vector in any ecosphere/economy and that is where we have room to manouvre past the mechanistic and probably hopeless game of tweeking parameters. [e.g. print more money!] Culture building is a must here IMO. Communism? Hell yes. Not Stalinism, Trotskyism or even Marxism - but the 'naturally occuring communism' without which ordinary human life in communities would not be possible.
You raise some very good points with the witnesses. In a way they represent our politicians here and like our real world politicians seem just as susceptible to being bribed to do the highest payers bidding. I thought @freebornangel made a good point on another post in suggesting the ability to down vote witnesses we feel have been led astray and no longer have the platform's best interests at heart.
In traditional politics, large stakeholders normally have to work quite hard to achieve control of politicians and public servants - look at the amount of money lobbyists spend in most democracies! The weighted stake voting system instantly circumvents this inconvenience, making the largest holders of SP instant kingmakers.
My reading of the whitepaper is that this was completely deliberate, as the largest stakeholders are supposed to (a) attract the most scrutiny on their actions and (b) have the best interests of the network at heart. Such beliefs strike me as a little quaint now.
The n2 and 40 votes a day made selfvoting unattractive.
Stinc changed it to favor scammers over mass adoption, knowingly.
The reason the n2 and 40 votes were there was because in alpha that is how they fixed selfvoting.
If we reverse those forks this is a nonissue, but good luck getting stinc to own its mistake.
Its a dao, dont you know?
Brilliant work here. Thank you for your ideas and input.
Thanks for the feedback. I love trying to solve complex problems, and it doesn't get much more complex than this! More importantly, if we can make steemit/steem really work, this should inform approaches to other economic systems.
We are part of an experiment after all :)
I've just read and resteemed your comedyopenmic post, quality!
An experiment indeed. It's on those grounds that I'd love to attract a broader diversity of ideological viewpoints to steemit.
Thanks for the resteem & feedback on my comedyopenmic post. It's a strangely effective way to make a point.
O BOY, and then you manage to top your previous post.
And i can only vote $0.00 cent LOL
So bring the whale experiment with the n2 and tell the large investors to wait until the ecosystem is large enough to accomodate them.
That 100mv cap can ge raised when 100k dolphins exist to mitigate against the whales sucking it all up.
Exciting the minnows enough to buy in will allow those that want out to exit.
Without a 100mv cap to make small buy ins worthwhile we are subsisting on bigger fools that will run out at some point.
O BOY, and then you manage to top your previous post.
And i can only vote $0.00 cent LOL
Story of my life :) Luckily, I'm past caring about the money. I mean, more $ would be nice. And getting paid to write would be fantastic. But as things are, it would be delusional to think I could make a decent amount of money here, even if I did have the 'moral flexibility' to go 'full arsehole'.
Even if you would try to go full blackhole, then it still may not work.
The already existing full pro blackholes already know all the tricks and just out-hole the new holes.
So then you put in even more energy doing shit that you know that sucks, and don't even enjoy doing it.
Any idea how this works in the steemporn corner? I bet it there works the same under the classic name of the same model. PIMPING..
@samueldouglas, you are a breath of fresh air. You have my full 100% upvote, at a current value of about $0.01.
I'll try not to spend it all at once ;) Seriously, thanks - the kind words are worth a lot in their own right.