My impression was that this links into a sort of a political system, where groups of people who are incentive-compatibly subscribing to roughly the same gendertrope send representatives (via elections? this part has always seemed super fuzzy) into some sort of negotiation process?
So I imagined that things like a “May/December Romance” could be formalized and tweaked so “if you want to be half of one of those, here is a pamphlet for how to do that, that has been playtested and co-optimized”.
I think this system would, in general, be an enormous benefit OUTSIDE of gender and romance...
...but I haven’t been able to figure out how to actually get such a thing to work properly, even in theory. The economics and psychometrics and playtesting costs and personal choices and preference solicitation aren’t trivial!
And of course, the non-incentive-compatible persotropes (that, in our timeline form temporarily, and then gain a negative stereotype, and then dissolve again) would be much MUCH harder to get this to work on. Maybe impossible?
But even just trying to get it working for the incentive compatible persotropes is hard enough!
Naively I would assume that no possible decentralized open and democratic institution could get this to work, and so handling such things is left to Keepers?
(If my guess is wrong, much of the logic below might be transferable to Governance or even private industry I guess?)
And so “the Keepers” presumably do the measurements, and playtesting, and math. And one of the results of all this is that it makes the Keepers feel that it is correct to maintain the conspiracy of silence around BDSM in dath ilan, since there is a known tragic equilibrium?
And then, you finally get to the juicy parts! The place where most institutions fail!
So I’m super curious if the system is Kaldor-Hickswith transfers or without transfers? Or something else?
If I imagine myself to be a Keeper trapped in a society whose median members were all so invested in and tolerant of fucking with each other’s heads and secretmongering and so on (rather than tracking freedom-of-speech and marketplace-of-ideas logic first and foremost) I would imagine still being able to argue semi-successfully, behind closed doors(?), to other Keepers, that Keeper institutions would have a deontic duty to maintain a ledger for every person on the planet who was being benefited and harmed by various such macro-level persotrope management choices… so that the (benevolent?) conspirators designing the cultural systems with net wellbeing in mind would have a duty to be able to notice when they locally err (and the ability to repair things that were correct to repair).
Once you have that accounting worked out, you’d still maybe have to dosomething (that somehow doesn’t mess things up too much) and then maybe tell governance to somehow maybe send the (rare?) net victims a monthly check to make the scales of Justice balance as perfectly as possible? Or something?
Surely someone like Keltham might get suspicious of those big checks? What the heck are they for?!?
He’s literally an example of someone where the concept of sadism was being purposefully withheld, transferring value FROM people like him (and also masochists (who would otherwise get higher bids due to more demand)) TO the rich sadists (who pay less for the same joy, since demand is lower due to the demand destruction caused by the systemically maintained ignorance).
Maybe it doesn’t matter that much? Like I imagine a masochist auctioning themselves off using a Vickrey second price auction… then in some sense all that matters to the price is “however much the person who wants to win the auction the secondmost out of all bidders”??
Clearly, adding 18-year-old Keltham to that market as a one off motion doesn’t move the needle then and there.
EXCEPT! There is a deeper point here (related to converting from information to money (rather than from money to implied sociological truths)) which is that if Keltham had known about that market since he was 6, and then realized be wanted to bid in that market at some point, then maybe he would have had even more interest in piling up a lot of money? (In the story, Keltham himself might have been already aimed this way for other reasons, but others with the same lack of information might not have been. Even if Keltham himself was already money-seeky to a maximal extent, sure others in nearby situations were not?)
And so, after a time delay of maybe 20 years from “the end of the Masquerade about this” to some kind of equilibrium, there would eventually be “many such people” trying to be the TOP bidder, and this would likely cause the second price to go up in the actual auctions!
And that equilibrium is what the Keepers are choosing to avoid I think?
Oh… and don’t forget, since this benefits the rich secret sadists, they are the ones who should be paying the tax. The explanation and enforcement of that would be hilarious. I can just imagine the Keeper who got that job, trying to explain that “You know those weird checks you’ve been getting since you were 12? Yeah, those will stop now, and you (and the entire new secret gendertrope you’ve joined) are going to be funding them!” 🤣
Something in this ballpark seems like it could be a hilarious premise for a story.
(But ALSO, note that there would also be a countervailing push the other way, where people might pretend to be masochists for pay and then girardian mimesis could kick in to make them (and others!) “really” be masochists… and so on. Basically, it would be very hard to estimate the actual equilibrium to figure out the right amount to send Keltham each month, as compensation for harming him by hiding information from him on purpose.)
The world of dath ilan is presented fait accompli, but every part of it tends to cause me to have this reaction (which I’m not honestly complaining about, since “bonkers world building” is one of my favorite things to study for fun)...
My impression was that this links into a sort of a political system, where groups of people who are incentive-compatibly subscribing to roughly the same gendertrope send representatives (via elections? this part has always seemed super fuzzy) into some sort of negotiation process?
So I imagined that things like a “May/December Romance” could be formalized and tweaked so “if you want to be half of one of those, here is a pamphlet for how to do that, that has been playtested and co-optimized”.
I think this system would, in general, be an enormous benefit OUTSIDE of gender and romance...
...but I haven’t been able to figure out how to actually get such a thing to work properly, even in theory. The economics and psychometrics and playtesting costs and personal choices and preference solicitation aren’t trivial!
And of course, the non-incentive-compatible persotropes (that, in our timeline form temporarily, and then gain a negative stereotype, and then dissolve again) would be much MUCH harder to get this to work on. Maybe impossible?
But even just trying to get it working for the incentive compatible persotropes is hard enough!
Naively I would assume that no possible decentralized open and democratic institution could get this to work, and so handling such things is left to Keepers?
(If my guess is wrong, much of the logic below might be transferable to Governance or even private industry I guess?)
And so “the Keepers” presumably do the measurements, and playtesting, and math. And one of the results of all this is that it makes the Keepers feel that it is correct to maintain the conspiracy of silence around BDSM in dath ilan, since there is a known tragic equilibrium?
And then, you finally get to the juicy parts! The place where most institutions fail!
So I’m super curious if the system is Kaldor-Hicks with transfers or without transfers? Or something else?
If I imagine myself to be a Keeper trapped in a society whose median members were all so invested in and tolerant of fucking with each other’s heads and secretmongering and so on (rather than tracking freedom-of-speech and marketplace-of-ideas logic first and foremost) I would imagine still being able to argue semi-successfully, behind closed doors(?), to other Keepers, that Keeper institutions would have a deontic duty to maintain a ledger for every person on the planet who was being benefited and harmed by various such macro-level persotrope management choices… so that the (benevolent?) conspirators designing the cultural systems with net wellbeing in mind would have a duty to be able to notice when they locally err (and the ability to repair things that were correct to repair).
Once you have that accounting worked out, you’d still maybe have to do something (that somehow doesn’t mess things up too much) and then maybe tell governance to somehow maybe send the (rare?) net victims a monthly check to make the scales of Justice balance as perfectly as possible? Or something?
The often-possible convertibility of money and information makes this tricky however!
What if you’re getting a huge check like that?!?
Surely someone like Keltham might get suspicious of those big checks? What the heck are they for?!?
He’s literally an example of someone where the concept of sadism was being purposefully withheld, transferring value FROM people like him (and also masochists (who would otherwise get higher bids due to more demand)) TO the rich sadists (who pay less for the same joy, since demand is lower due to the demand destruction caused by the systemically maintained ignorance).
Maybe it doesn’t matter that much? Like I imagine a masochist auctioning themselves off using a Vickrey second price auction… then in some sense all that matters to the price is “however much the person who wants to win the auction the secondmost out of all bidders”??
Clearly, adding 18-year-old Keltham to that market as a one off motion doesn’t move the needle then and there.
EXCEPT! There is a deeper point here (related to converting from information to money (rather than from money to implied sociological truths)) which is that if Keltham had known about that market since he was 6, and then realized be wanted to bid in that market at some point, then maybe he would have had even more interest in piling up a lot of money? (In the story, Keltham himself might have been already aimed this way for other reasons, but others with the same lack of information might not have been. Even if Keltham himself was already money-seeky to a maximal extent, sure others in nearby situations were not?)
And so, after a time delay of maybe 20 years from “the end of the Masquerade about this” to some kind of equilibrium, there would eventually be “many such people” trying to be the TOP bidder, and this would likely cause the second price to go up in the actual auctions!
And that equilibrium is what the Keepers are choosing to avoid I think?
Oh… and don’t forget, since this benefits the rich secret sadists, they are the ones who should be paying the tax. The explanation and enforcement of that would be hilarious. I can just imagine the Keeper who got that job, trying to explain that “You know those weird checks you’ve been getting since you were 12? Yeah, those will stop now, and you (and the entire new secret gendertrope you’ve joined) are going to be funding them!” 🤣
Something in this ballpark seems like it could be a hilarious premise for a story.
(But ALSO, note that there would also be a countervailing push the other way, where people might pretend to be masochists for pay and then girardian mimesis could kick in to make them (and others!) “really” be masochists… and so on. Basically, it would be very hard to estimate the actual equilibrium to figure out the right amount to send Keltham each month, as compensation for harming him by hiding information from him on purpose.)
The world of dath ilan is presented fait accompli, but every part of it tends to cause me to have this reaction (which I’m not honestly complaining about, since “bonkers world building” is one of my favorite things to study for fun)...