It sounds like the sum of UOPs is constantly inflating, possibly by a large (but perhaps nearly constant?) amount. This might or might not be a problem, but it seems to me to at least be a barrier. I don’t know enough about economic modeling, especially for this particular case, to decide whether spending UOPs on bids negates this or not. It seems like it would, but I can’t justify that.
It depends how competitive the voting is. Lets say we have two people Jim and Bob. The average amounts of UOPs you can get from being in charge is 5000, let say they both have the same fixed costs for flunkies (2000), it makes sense to bid anything up to 2999. They will both still get a profit of 1 UOPS. If either of them think they can improve on the average they might bid more than 3000, and if they aren’t well calibrated they would lose UOPS.
The big worry is collusion to keep bidding low, so that they can both gain control.
If UOPs are a currency, how are exchanges regulated? Can one write them into a will to be inherited? Can one purchase them with regular money? Can one give them to another politician in order to negotiate a policy?
I’m not sure. If the market is competitive I’m hoping the transfers won’t need to be too heavily regulated as no one should gain too much, so they won’t be able to give much away without sacrificing their ability to gain a post. The worse that might happen in willing things is someone incompetent might be given them, and then you have a time period of not very good governance, and that person loses most of their UOPs and can’t get control again. But that might happen with things like alzheimers or other brain injury.
Can one donate them to another politician in order to see him or her elected? What about demanding that donation be a loan, perhaps with interest?
These seem necessary for new politicians to be introduced into the system, so I wouldn’t regulate them too much.
Its design is loosely inspired by learning classifier systems where nepotism/collusion is not too much of a problem, so I don’t know how it will interact with live humans. It might be like communism, nice in theory but not practical.
I’m planning to try it out at some point, on the small scale.
I’m definitely interested in how you plan to try it out.
The biggest problem that I see is the potential for
Rich person buys UOPS.
Spends UOPS to get office (for him or a flunky).
Uses powers of the office to get richer (but lose potential UOPS).
Repeat as necessary.
The rich get richer, and the powerful gain more power; we require a lot of protections against this pattern in our own governments, which still work poorly. It seems like with a fungible currency, this pattern is that much more dangerous.
I hope it would be moderately self-regulating. Whether sufficiently self-regulating I’m not sure.
Lets say Fred sells his UOPs for money, and becomes known as such, other politicians might decide to not work with him, as he is hurting their ability to make UOPs by introducing bad elements into the market. Collusion is a problem in this situation again though.
I’ll briefly sketch out my latest slightly more complex thoughts. It was designed to avoid the free rider problem. If you had multiple politicians getting UOP directly one may not bother to allocate their UOPs well or at all (as they don’t give UOPs they have lots to bid, so are hard to dislodge).
Lets say you have 12 ministers each that get slightly different flavours of UOPs, each month you need a different flavour of UOP to bid on a political post, including ministerial seats.
So the different ministers would have to trade UOPs between them, if they wanted to have long term control. If one minister was perceived not to be distributing them well (selling them for example) by the others, they might not be allowed to trade or get bad trade terms.
This is supposed to be a way of having the populace be able to give different feedback signals to different politicians without them having to figure out who did what at a specific time. Not perfect, I really want a theoretical framework to allow me to test out these ideas.
Numbers/times scales are for ease of thought only.
I’m definitely interested in how you plan to try it out.
I’m going for an non-profit company devoted to trying to spread the word about this style of system, run by those same ideas. So definitely eating its own dog food.
So the organisation would try and get donors and fund research into the maths behind what would be stable, run experiments when people are encouraged to try to subvert the system (harmlessly) and build web applications/phone/facebook apps to manage the currencies. Hopefully some people will find it a novel and fun enough idea to want to take part/donate some and gain some control *.
If nothing else I’m willing to provide some enough money for web hosting or something and we can fight for control over that.
Lets say you have 12 ministers each that get slightly different flavours of UOPs, each month you need a different flavour of UOP to bid on a political post, including ministerial seats.
This clause triggers my “too complex for human agents” switch.
I’m approaching this problem from the perspective of finding flaws exploitable by selfish agents, rather than reviewing it as a better method of organization between agents that desire to cooperate but have imperfect information; perhaps that’s not the point, and you’re not trying to make a system that is robust against corruption?
Fungible commodities are money, and I’m not sure whether I believe a government can work where politicians are paid based on their approval rating, and elected based on their worth times their desire to govern. Dividing up the UOPs into several buckets in order to force increased trade only increases barriers to trade and thus increases the need for a common currency, and the likelihood that all politicians will start exchanging UOPs for dollars (because they need to exchange dollars for different kinds of UOPs).
In our world, not liking someone is usually a small factor in negotiating trade terms, and I don’t see why moon-world is different in this regard.
I actually expect this to work much better for non-profits, because they are small and full of people who want to be there and support a common goal; I see an internal currency exchange as a signaling mechanism that might help group coordination. I think it’s worth pursuing, but I don’t feel like it’s analogous to running a government.
I was thinking about why I didn’t have an explicit problem with selling UOPs for money.
I see giving someone UOPs as equivalent to delegating some political authority. I’ve read a bit in a computer security field that has had long running arguments with the main stream security field about delegation.
They tend to argue that if bad things happen with explicit delegation, they can easily happen with implicit delegation as well. So your example of buying UOPs for money and then using the UOPs to get political power to enact something, why not just buy off the politician directly to enact something? I do propose that the transactions of UOPs be transparent so that people can see who gave UOPs foolishly/unwisely as well. So the delegation would be known.
You made me wonder if the dislike of explicit delegation is a bias. And if so why do we have it?
However the system doesn’t have any checks and balances for implicit bias. Somehow we have to align the politicians incentives with the long term good of the organisation. Huge potential payoffs X years after they leave office under some conditions? I’ll have to think about this some more.
This clause triggers my “too complex for human agents” switch.
You might be right.
I’m approaching this problem from the perspective of finding flaws exploitable by selfish agents, rather than reviewing it as a better method of organization between agents that desire to cooperate but have imperfect information; perhaps that’s not the point, and you’re not trying to make a system that is robust against corruption?
That is the point, but I would also like to root out laziness. I.e. people doing nothing but managing to get UOPs somehow.
The assumptions it was originally designed with might not be compatible with politics, I’m unsure. If nothing else it might inspire other people to think of other systems that are compatible with politics.
It depends how competitive the voting is. Lets say we have two people Jim and Bob. The average amounts of UOPs you can get from being in charge is 5000, let say they both have the same fixed costs for flunkies (2000), it makes sense to bid anything up to 2999. They will both still get a profit of 1 UOPS. If either of them think they can improve on the average they might bid more than 3000, and if they aren’t well calibrated they would lose UOPS.
The big worry is collusion to keep bidding low, so that they can both gain control.
I’m not sure. If the market is competitive I’m hoping the transfers won’t need to be too heavily regulated as no one should gain too much, so they won’t be able to give much away without sacrificing their ability to gain a post. The worse that might happen in willing things is someone incompetent might be given them, and then you have a time period of not very good governance, and that person loses most of their UOPs and can’t get control again. But that might happen with things like alzheimers or other brain injury.
These seem necessary for new politicians to be introduced into the system, so I wouldn’t regulate them too much.
Its design is loosely inspired by learning classifier systems where nepotism/collusion is not too much of a problem, so I don’t know how it will interact with live humans. It might be like communism, nice in theory but not practical.
I’m planning to try it out at some point, on the small scale.
I’m definitely interested in how you plan to try it out.
The biggest problem that I see is the potential for
Rich person buys UOPS.
Spends UOPS to get office (for him or a flunky).
Uses powers of the office to get richer (but lose potential UOPS).
Repeat as necessary.
The rich get richer, and the powerful gain more power; we require a lot of protections against this pattern in our own governments, which still work poorly. It seems like with a fungible currency, this pattern is that much more dangerous.
I hope it would be moderately self-regulating. Whether sufficiently self-regulating I’m not sure.
Lets say Fred sells his UOPs for money, and becomes known as such, other politicians might decide to not work with him, as he is hurting their ability to make UOPs by introducing bad elements into the market. Collusion is a problem in this situation again though.
I’ll briefly sketch out my latest slightly more complex thoughts. It was designed to avoid the free rider problem. If you had multiple politicians getting UOP directly one may not bother to allocate their UOPs well or at all (as they don’t give UOPs they have lots to bid, so are hard to dislodge).
Lets say you have 12 ministers each that get slightly different flavours of UOPs, each month you need a different flavour of UOP to bid on a political post, including ministerial seats.
So the different ministers would have to trade UOPs between them, if they wanted to have long term control. If one minister was perceived not to be distributing them well (selling them for example) by the others, they might not be allowed to trade or get bad trade terms.
This is supposed to be a way of having the populace be able to give different feedback signals to different politicians without them having to figure out who did what at a specific time. Not perfect, I really want a theoretical framework to allow me to test out these ideas.
Numbers/times scales are for ease of thought only.
I’m going for an non-profit company devoted to trying to spread the word about this style of system, run by those same ideas. So definitely eating its own dog food.
So the organisation would try and get donors and fund research into the maths behind what would be stable, run experiments when people are encouraged to try to subvert the system (harmlessly) and build web applications/phone/facebook apps to manage the currencies. Hopefully some people will find it a novel and fun enough idea to want to take part/donate some and gain some control *.
If nothing else I’m willing to provide some enough money for web hosting or something and we can fight for control over that.
I’ve got a course to finish off first though.
This clause triggers my “too complex for human agents” switch.
I’m approaching this problem from the perspective of finding flaws exploitable by selfish agents, rather than reviewing it as a better method of organization between agents that desire to cooperate but have imperfect information; perhaps that’s not the point, and you’re not trying to make a system that is robust against corruption?
Fungible commodities are money, and I’m not sure whether I believe a government can work where politicians are paid based on their approval rating, and elected based on their worth times their desire to govern. Dividing up the UOPs into several buckets in order to force increased trade only increases barriers to trade and thus increases the need for a common currency, and the likelihood that all politicians will start exchanging UOPs for dollars (because they need to exchange dollars for different kinds of UOPs).
In our world, not liking someone is usually a small factor in negotiating trade terms, and I don’t see why moon-world is different in this regard.
I actually expect this to work much better for non-profits, because they are small and full of people who want to be there and support a common goal; I see an internal currency exchange as a signaling mechanism that might help group coordination. I think it’s worth pursuing, but I don’t feel like it’s analogous to running a government.
I was thinking about why I didn’t have an explicit problem with selling UOPs for money.
I see giving someone UOPs as equivalent to delegating some political authority. I’ve read a bit in a computer security field that has had long running arguments with the main stream security field about delegation.
They tend to argue that if bad things happen with explicit delegation, they can easily happen with implicit delegation as well. So your example of buying UOPs for money and then using the UOPs to get political power to enact something, why not just buy off the politician directly to enact something? I do propose that the transactions of UOPs be transparent so that people can see who gave UOPs foolishly/unwisely as well. So the delegation would be known.
You made me wonder if the dislike of explicit delegation is a bias. And if so why do we have it?
However the system doesn’t have any checks and balances for implicit bias. Somehow we have to align the politicians incentives with the long term good of the organisation. Huge potential payoffs X years after they leave office under some conditions? I’ll have to think about this some more.
You might be right.
That is the point, but I would also like to root out laziness. I.e. people doing nothing but managing to get UOPs somehow.
The assumptions it was originally designed with might not be compatible with politics, I’m unsure. If nothing else it might inspire other people to think of other systems that are compatible with politics.