--- Log opened Thu Jun 29 00:00:44 2023
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00:50 < hprmbridge> nmz787> well I /did/ tell it to popup a text editor and then if save is clicked, shove that text into python `exec` to live-update a button handler function
01:06 < hprmbridge> kanzure> first company to come out with a non-lobotomized bot wins
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06:39 < hprmbridge> kanzure> it's not clear to me how much traction enhanced.org has
06:39 < hprmbridge> kanzure> https://twitter.com/enhanced_games/status/1670862210132738073
07:01 < kanzure> naturally, advised by george church, like everything else in the world
07:02 < hprmbridge> kanzure>  https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1064664282450628710/1123976697843286097/image.png
07:02 < kanzure> maybe he's like the free bingo card
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10:09 < kanzure> special olympics. or rather, the super special olympics.
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12:22 < fenn> "enhanced" is a registered trademark? wow
12:22 < fenn> encircling the commons, for justice, or something
12:28 < fenn> i can't tell if these people are serious
12:30 < fenn> there's a painful lack of citations
12:30 < kanzure> same, the video looks like it's not about a specific athlete but rather whoever chooses to show up
12:31 < kanzure> george put his face on it so that's something
12:33 < fenn> they go from claiming that enhanced is natural, "One of the key attributes of humanity is its 'natural' ability and willingness to use technology" and then literally the next line say "Natural Athlete" is a better term for an unenhanced athlete
12:34 < fenn> get your shit straight before evangelizing your ontology
12:36 < kanzure> yes also the "coming out as enhanced" thing is weirdo, you won't attract those people to your side, you should just hold the super special olympics anyway
12:37 < fenn> who were the original evil soviet empire anabolic steroids enhanced olympics athletes? do these people have names?
12:37 < kanzure> erased
12:38 < fenn> Irina & Tamara Press, Boris Shakhlin
12:39 < fenn> "Shakhlin retired from competition at the age of 35 after suffering a heart attack"
12:39 < kanzure> full support for the doubly special olympics from me, but actually i wonder if it should be a different format
12:39 < kanzure> it shouldn't be too surprising that someone can get juiced up minutes before a race and do some impressive things and then fall over dead
12:39 < kanzure> perhaps a more sustained competitive format over multiple months?
12:41 < hprmbridge> kanzure> true of natty sports too
12:41 < fenn> natty is a slur, yo
13:24 < hprmbridge> kanzure> https://twitter.com/Jiankui_He/status/1674226970614452227
13:29 < hprmbridge> kanzure> eukaryotic RNA-guided nuclease https://twitter.com/zhangf/status/1674135753281146880
13:32 < fenn> how do we know SNPs are causal and not associated
13:34 < fenn> .t https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06356-2
13:34 < EmmyNoether> Fanzor is a eukaryotic programmable RNA-guided endonuclease | Nature
13:35 < fenn> OMEGA sounds so much cooler than "Fanzor"
13:35 < fenn> if you're gonna make up a word anyway
13:36 < fenn> gotta work "chytrid fungus" into that somehow
13:37 < fenn> he literally named it after himself, what a dweeb
14:07 < hprmbridge> kanzure> gene editing companies https://twitter.com/andrewpannu/status/1674044508688855042
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14:33 < hprmbridge> manifestable> Curious if anyone has ever looked into 21e8?
14:38 < hprmbridge> manifestable> I'm interested in the for / against on it.
15:18 < fenn> pareidolia
15:19 < fenn> shouldnt it be 21e6
15:19 < fenn> or 21e7 if we're missing a decimal point
15:21 < hprmbridge> kanzure> what are they working on?
15:21 < fenn> it's a pointless bitcoin meme based on a block hash starting with 0000....00021e8000
15:22 < fenn> -0*
15:23 < hprmbridge> kanzure> the company....?
15:33 < fenn> oh it's a meme company
15:37 < fenn> there's literally nothing there. you might as well just ask, "is mark wilcox full of shit or what"
15:41 < muurkha> any relation to Nathan Wilcox?
15:43 < fenn> it seems likely
15:44 < fenn> uh, i meant zooko. no idea who nathan wilcox is
15:52 < muurkha> his brother
16:25 < hprmbridge> manifestable> what about the concepts though even if you dont like mark himself? curious about that also.
16:25 < hprmbridge> kanzure> What concepts?
16:27 < hprmbridge> manifestable> I met him in person, I liked his ideas. he's building a computational data market using self-referential functions similarly to the way large language models build neural nets with language except his are with functions.
16:28 < hprmbridge> manifestable> and it applies proof of work to data as a way to update it.
16:28 < hprmbridge> manifestable> he describes the business model here https://youtu.be/RTToM3JeeyY
16:28 < Muaddib> [RTToM3JeeyY] Mark Wilcox, explain 21e8 to me RIGHT NOW!!! (66:53)
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16:30 < hprmbridge> manifestable> agreed, silly
16:44 < fenn> is there a summary somewhere that's not an hour long video
16:48 < hprmbridge> kanzure> "nvidia is currently shipping around 200,000 H100s *per quarter*, which is around 12 exaflops of fp64, more than double the entire top500 combined"
16:48 < hprmbridge> manifestable> yes
16:49 < hprmbridge> manifestable> 21e8 is a post-2020 information architecture company pioneering computational data markets - a data-centric approach to network peering and content distribution that can be optimised for high complexity computing environments by exchanging information and compute power for energy. Our technology directly addresses the rising conflicts between energy consumption and consumer demand in the face of
16:49 < hprmbridge> manifestable> AI by repurposing the cryptographic processing behind decentralised networks like bitcoin for securing critical infrastructure and managing ESG risk.
16:49 < hprmbridge> manifestable>
16:49 < hprmbridge> manifestable> We’ve designed the first universal framework and methodology for connecting a global semantic context for any data item with the computational cost to produce it - a design pattern that encodes symbolic information and compute cost into unique IDs, removing the need for cloud platform based measurement and analytics approaches for intelligent control systems. Instead, systems architects can rely
16:49 < hprmbridge> manifestable> on a game theoretic approach to network design, aggregating information from competing data service providers. This ensures that dynamic, resilient systems can be created today to withstand the extreme environments of network fragmentation in 2030.
16:53 < fenn> yes i saw the website, but it's gibberish
16:53 < fenn> buzzword soup, but not popular buzzwords
16:54 < fenn> my gut reaction is that he's highly intelligent but schizophrenic
16:56 < fenn> there might be an idea there, but it's not clear what it is
16:58 < hprmbridge> manifestable> I think those are fair first takes because it's talking about some high-level concepts. I've been keying into the ideas behind it for the better part of 3 years, and they all seem to really respond to me.
16:58 < hprmbridge> manifestable> For example, I really like the idea of just using proof of work as a method to rank content for example.
16:58 < fenn> heh "you are not autistic you have been suffering from information overload since birth"
16:59 < fenn> that's called pay-to-play
16:59 < fenn> if you want to read nothing but ads, that's fine, but i don't
17:00 < hprmbridge> manifestable> Interested to explore that a bit. I guess I have the opposite view on it.
17:02 < fenn> let's say i want to promote some content. i pay a third party to point their massive ASIC farm at it, piling on the proof of work. my content rises to the top. five thousand other corporations do the same. any individual without such resources is buried under the tide of sponsored content
17:02 < hprmbridge> manifestable> So for example, if I could attach some compute to my yelp review of a restaurant, it doesn't necessarily cost me anything but it does demonstrate my having invested more than just time it takes to spam a message. But anyway, I digress, that is just one area where I see benefit.
17:02 < fenn> how is this involved in ranking then
17:02 < hprmbridge> manifestable> I see. I think the thing with 21e8 is that it's not ASIC hash being directed at the data, but GPU power
17:02 < hprmbridge> mwilcox> Gm
17:03 < fenn> there's not a practical difference
17:03 < fenn> hello
17:03 < hprmbridge> manifestable> hello mark
17:03 < hprmbridge> mwilcox> Can someone pitch me on Bitcoin
17:04 < fenn> yes we whiffed on bitcoin because of the prevailing low SNR in the digital currency space at the time
17:04 < hprmbridge> manifestable> Well, I think there is a difference in the sense that I have a gpu whereas I don't have a ASIC
17:04 < hprmbridge> manifestable> so I can direct it with resources I already posses
17:04 < hprmbridge> manifestable> as opposed to needing to rent it elsewhere
17:05 < fenn> that's called an unstable equilibrium
17:06 < hprmbridge> manifestable> can you expand on that idea?
17:06 < hprmbridge> manifestable> or maybe describe the rosier scenario that we missed due to this ratio?
17:07 < fenn> by we i mean this channel specifically
17:08 < fenn> marc fawzi was relentlessly promoting his energy based currency and cross posting to open manufacturing and p2presearch, which were hot at the time
17:08 < fenn> a couple months later satoshi published the bitcoin whitepaper which sounded very similar
17:09 < fenn> the bitcoin paper did a bad job of explaining the implicit economic incentives around mining and electricity usage that keep the whole thing from spiraling out of control
17:10 < fenn> the rosier scenario is that we're all billionaires
17:12 < fenn> the unstable equilibrium is expecting that your GPU will continue to mean anything in the face of well funded spammers, who will inevitably buy GPUs or whatever
17:12 < hprmbridge> mwilcox>  https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1064664282450628710/1124130344862498866/EeGE8hLX0AEMUV6.png
17:12 < fenn> don't get me wrong, hashcash stamps are useful for preventing certain kinds of spam
17:13 < fenn> mwilcox, publish a whitepaper
17:27 < hprmbridge> kanzure> anyone can do PoW on top of arbitrary content
17:28 < hprmbridge> kanzure> but how do you make people care about that? only some users will even understand why they might want to prefer content that has proof of burn attached. the rest will go to cnn dot megafox.
17:29 < hprmbridge> kanzure> WoT is also not the answer here because it only works if everyone participates, one of the original failure modes of ripplepay/rumplepay
17:30 < hprmbridge> manifestable> sorry but can you remind me what WoT is?
17:31 < fenn> web of trust
17:31 < hprmbridge> manifestable> oh thanks
17:31 < hprmbridge> kanzure> where you use reputation of an author to compute whether something is spam
17:32 < hprmbridge> kanzure> anyway, check out my PoW project https://webcash.org/ and the background of why you're able to do hashing without a blockchain https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5408873.0
17:33 < hprmbridge> manifestable> ok thanks
17:33 < hprmbridge> kanzure> did we answer mwilcox's question adequately?
17:34 < L29Ah> 02:12:56]<fenn> the unstable equilibrium is expecting that your GPU will continue to mean anything in the face of well funded spammers, who will inevitably buy GPUs or whatever
17:34 < L29Ah> well funded spammers will pwn you regardless of the obstacles you rise around yourself
17:35 < L29Ah> extreme measures such as web of trust-based visibility can impede their effort, but with enough funds they can bypass it
17:35 < hprmbridge> kanzure> Yes but the theory is that spammers do not have unlimited hashrate. If spammers are 100% of all money though.....
17:35 < fenn> Falcon-40B-stupidfilter-uncensored i choose you!
17:36 < L29Ah> they don't have to have an unlimited hashrate, they only have to have enough to get through your treshold
17:36 < hprmbridge> w.portr> https://twitter.com/jiankui_he/status/1674226970614452227?s=46&t=Piu0ZOOuqhLOww_uGyCvYQ
17:36 < hprmbridge> w.portr> he jiankui is back
17:36 < hprmbridge> kanzure> yes. and how do you convince users to set a threshold at all. or to use the software?
17:37 < hprmbridge> kanzure> @w.portr https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/01/239624/the-transhumanist-diy-designer-baby-funded-with-bitcoin/amp/
17:37 < L29Ah> a critical mass of users should get fed up with spam
17:38  * L29Ah spends <5min a day on spam so no hashcash adoption from me any time soon
17:38 < hprmbridge> w.portr> damn this is old lol
17:39 < hprmbridge> kanzure> things take time.
17:45 < hprmbridge> manifestable> mwilcox didn't have a question. I was more interested in building a discussion around his ideas but he said if you wanted to talk to him about it, he'd prefer email.
17:45 < hprmbridge> manifestable> It's mark@21e8.nz
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17:47 < hprmbridge> kanzure> like he wants a discord/email bot or bridge?
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17:51 < hprmbridge> manifestable> No, but this is what he said:
17:52 < hprmbridge> manifestable> 21e8 bridges exaflops and exahashes
17:53 < hprmbridge> manifestable> not many people I think can understand the significance of what he's working on, but I thought you'd find it interesting, novel and maybe relevant to some of your areas of focus.
17:53 < hprmbridge> manifestable> I do think characterizations of him as being buzzword soup are fair, but if you look beyond it to the proof of work, I think it's fairly novel and ingenius.
17:54 < fenn> there's nothing to look *at*
17:54 < hprmbridge> kanzure> well, if he ever has the energy to do write-ups or such, i might offer peer review
17:55 < hprmbridge> manifestable> I did have the pleasure the other day when we met in person of speaking for over an hour with him and Ian Grigg, and the topic revovled around a lot of what you were describing above, @kanzure about the WoT and need around proof of work and identity solutions.
17:55 < hprmbridge> kanzure> I don't think anyone has a way of solving the forthcoming AI spam problem with proof of work. I think it could be an ingredient, but I don't see an end to end solution yet they could be self perpetuating
17:55 < hprmbridge> kanzure> yeah I don't think WoT is a reasonable requirement
17:56 < hprmbridge> manifestable> I'm curious if you'd heard of him or followed what he's been doing since prior to today?
17:57 < hprmbridge> kanzure> I saw some spam on Twitter but it was clearly spam so I ignored it.
17:57 < hprmbridge> kanzure> needs to use PoW to bootstrap itself
17:58 < hprmbridge> kanzure> having a twitter e/acc anons posting "bangers" doesn't do anything, except maybe discredit e/acc
17:59 < hprmbridge> kanzure> The most important thing is actually building things. Working on important projects. Sitting around writing tweets is not one of those things. They should learn genetic engineering or computer engineering or electronics or other irrelevant skills. We need to be solving aging. We need to be solving biological intelligence.
17:59 < hprmbridge> kanzure> uh, relevant, not irrelevant
17:59 < fenn> (everything is relevant to someone)
18:00 < hprmbridge> manifestable> yeah, that makes sense
18:00 < fenn> bangers are not effective, full stop
18:00 < hprmbridge> manifestable> unless you're in england
18:00 < hprmbridge> manifestable> then they're delicious
18:01 < hprmbridge> manifestable> ok well, thanks everyone for your perspectives! an off-topic question I guess, I'm really interested in custodia. is it active right now?
18:03 < hprmbridge> kanzure> oh, just ask info@custodiabank.com, I am on to other projects
18:08 < fenn> i would like a protocol to cryptographically attest that an LLM said X about Y with prompt Z, so i don't have to actually run the damn thing
18:09 < fenn> this seems pretty straightforward and scalable, but i haven't heard of such a thing
18:09 < hprmbridge> manifestable> I think AskHAPI might do that
18:11 < fenn> mwilcox is going on about energy consumption and communication and i'm like, what energy consumption. my brain filled in LLM stupid filters as a plausible future scenario
18:12 < fenn> it would be a lot of energy usage if every human on the internet were separately running their own LLM speculatively on links to judge whether they're worth looking at or not
18:12 < hprmbridge> manifestable> I think his point was that the real cost in data is not in the compute, but it's in the transfer
18:12 < hprmbridge> kanzure> what if service providers like openai simply had a cache lookup of previous prompts and responses. or if they signed their responses with a key.
18:13 < fenn> it's sort of dangerous to turn over your global censorship mechanism to a single entity
18:14 < hprmbridge> manifestable> I asked the AskHAPI dev and he said no, he doesn't do that yet but that he's been talking about doing this also.
18:14 < L29Ah> kanzure: so i have skills in programming, electronics development and robotics, how do i apply them for solving aging, preferably w/o going broke?
18:14 < hprmbridge> kanzure> think very hard about the problem, and then write down the solution.
18:15 < L29Ah> so far it seems to me like enterpreneurs are in greater demand than developers
18:15 < hprmbridge> kanzure> germline has a lot of anti-aging low hanging fruit btw
18:15 < L29Ah> i'm not especially interested in anti-aging products that won't be applicable to myself
18:16 < hprmbridge> kanzure> well that's why you will probably fail
18:16 < L29Ah> and germline editing is a taboo-ish area
18:16 < hprmbridge> kanzure> so is anti-aging
18:16 < hprmbridge> kanzure> who cares
18:16 < fenn> it's not tho
18:16 < L29Ah> not really, anti-aging is just disease treatment
18:16 < hprmbridge> kanzure> the FDA does not recognize it as a disease. or do they now?
18:16  * L29Ah inserts metformin
18:17 < hprmbridge> manifestable> Are you familiar with Michael Levin L29Ah?
18:17 < L29Ah> FDA won't imprison you for inserting metformin
18:17 < L29Ah> no
18:17 < fenn> if you're not a young blood vampire, the normies generally don't care about anti-aging tech
18:17 < hprmbridge> kanzure> sounds like you have already decided the solution has to be in a very narrow space
18:18 < hprmbridge> manifestable> Check out Michael Levin's studies on planaria. They're anti-aging wonders.
18:18 < hprmbridge> kanzure> yes people here know Michael Levin...
18:19 < L29Ah> i decided that the low-hanging fruit you mention are about correcting new humans
18:19 < L29Ah> there's also an area of growing new bodies or organs for replacement that even more taboo
18:19 < L29Ah> is
18:19 < hprmbridge> kanzure> so it's not enough to solve aging, it has to be for you specifically?
18:20 < hprmbridge> manifestable> also connected to Dr. Levin's research. Highly recommended as a jumping-off point.
18:20 < L29Ah> for me theoretically applicable
18:20 < hprmbridge> kanzure> help me understand
18:20 < hprmbridge> kanzure> what if I told you that you could actually solve this for new people
18:20 < L29Ah> otherwise i don't really have more motivation to work on it than on a random other commercial project
18:21 < hprmbridge> kanzure> you still wouldn't want to in this situation?
18:22 < hprmbridge> kanzure> not even for notoriety? fame? fortune? the good feeling of having solved a nearly impossible problem?
18:22 < L29Ah> sure i would want to do nice things for other humans, ignoring all the other factors, but the space of nice things is huge, and i'm not in the position to decide that working on fixing aging for new people is more important than e.g. working on a new smartphone
18:22 < hprmbridge> kanzure> oh it didn't work for yourself? is that the big hangup?
18:22 < hprmbridge> kanzure> what if it worked for literally everyone else, except you
18:23 < hprmbridge> kanzure> and your refusal to work on doing the necessary work is delaying it
18:23 < L29Ah> i don't understand what isn't clear
18:23 < hprmbridge> kanzure> (in this scenario)
18:23 < L29Ah> there's plenty of "necessary" work in this world
18:23 < hprmbridge> kanzure> I guess what is unclear is your lack of motivation.
18:23 < fenn> sergeeva is in levin's lab
18:25 < L29Ah> motivation is priorities, my priorities state that my life is more important that the lives of the others, so if other people want me working on their problems, they should compensate me for my efforts accordingly
18:25 < hprmbridge> kanzure> solving aging for already aged adults is overconstraining the problem. it's already a hard enough problem. we should solve what we can, and then work on the harder parts.
18:25 < L29Ah> so that the priorities shift in their favor
18:25 < hprmbridge> kanzure> it's not altruism, you would be enriched at least reputationally and could invest resources into your other  important projects.
18:27 < hprmbridge> kanzure> and along the way you can surely be paid and compensated. there is literally unlimited money floating around out there.
18:27 < L29Ah> so?
18:27 < fenn> a proof of concept for anti-aging in germline modified organisms could lead to a theory of aging that is actually useful, which could lead to a treatment for existing organisms
18:28 < L29Ah> toss me an offer if you have one; i'm not feeling good at enterpreneurship i afraid
18:28 < hprmbridge> manifestable> Maybe you will be a new person some day.
18:28 < hprmbridge> kanzure> you told me you have no motivation why should I expect you to be able to work
18:28 < L29Ah> did i?
18:29 < hprmbridge> manifestable> If there is rebirth.
18:29 < hprmbridge> kanzure> I guess what is unclear is your lack of motivation.
18:36 < fenn> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Bowles_(economist)#Selfishness_vs._altruism
18:37 < fenn> bowles has a whole chapter about how countries/institutions/economic systems whatever, people who have a direct stake in upkeep of a thing will put more effort toward upkeep of the thing, and unsurprisingly everything works better in those systems
18:38 < fenn> tragedy of the commons stuff
18:39 < fenn> anti-aging has a similar free rider problem. nobody wants to die of old age, but also you're a fool if you just give away all your effort for free. nobody wants to be taken advantage of. so only enclosed selfish businesses get worked on in practice
18:40 < hprmbridge> kanzure> anti-aging has a weirder problem. it is old people who want to fund it the most, but young people who would benefit the most.
18:40 < hprmbridge> kanzure> (and the younger people usually have less money)
18:41 < fenn> younger people would benefit from having money more too
18:42 < hprmbridge> kanzure> hm?
18:42 < fenn> assuming everyone dies at age 72 or whatever it is, young people have more time to enjoy the benefits of money invested/spent at an earlier point in their life
18:43 < fenn> and more interest on compounding returns
18:44 < fenn> anyway i don't think it's really a paradox. young people just haven't taken the idea of aging seriously because it hasn't personally affected them
18:44 < hprmbridge> kanzure> the unborn tho?
18:45 < fenn> you can't get younger than that i suppose
18:45 < fenn> if there's a way i'm not sure i want to know about it
18:46 < hprmbridge> kanzure> you've lost me. you have failed to demotivate me.
18:46 < fenn> it wasn't my goal
18:48 < fenn> oh i thought you were bemoaning the lack of interest in anti-aging among young people
18:49 < L29Ah> you've lost me. you have failed to motivate me.
18:50 < hprmbridge> kanzure> agency is a thing you need to develop for yourself, I mean I guess I can just tell you to do if that's what you need?
18:50 < hprmbridge> kanzure> what to do, rather
18:51 < fenn> do we have an economic mechanism design for large scale coordination around problems like this? kickstarter doesn't quite do it. government funding is susceptible to corruption, and taxation is unethical to start with. is there a way to invest money effectively towards anti-aging that doesn't result in the technology being locked up and made unavailable to those who didn't contribute?
18:51 < L29Ah> i'm not sure it's called "agency", seems like what you're talking about is more of a domain-specific knowledge
18:51 < L29Ah> different people know how to solve different problems
18:52 < hprmbridge> kanzure> fenn, lock up is the least of the worry right now. we don't even have it yet.
18:52 < muurkha> fenn: dominant assurance contracts
18:53 < L29Ah> fenn: every technology is made available if it's a profitable thing to do
18:53 < fenn> kanzure, i'm talking about how to fund an organization to solve aging, so people like L29Ah can contribute their skills without having to independently figure everything out themselves
18:54 < L29Ah> some anti-aging foundation hosting a hiring site for their longevity startups could work
18:54 < fenn> "Dominant assurance contract have the added condition that if the funding benchmark isn’t reached, the provider pays a prize to the pledgers. Pledging becomes a dominant strategy ... if enough people pledge you get the public good and if not enough pledge you get the prize.”
18:54 < hprmbridge> kanzure> We should be preparing people for the possible reality that we could be in, where we're able to solve aging for unborn people but not for people who are already aged.
18:55 < hprmbridge> kanzure> Even if we cannot solve aging for already aged people, it is still extremely important to solve the problem anyway.
18:55 < hprmbridge> kanzure> If the argument is that there is no selfish motivation to do that, then I argue that they're in fact is many selfish reasons to go and do that.
18:55 < L29Ah> is it?
18:55 < L29Ah> it's also important to solve global warming and plastic pollution and biodiversity loss and whatnot
18:56  * L29Ah 's favorite is solving statism
18:56 < hprmbridge> kanzure> The control over the climate is a soluble engineering problem. I don't currently have an explanation for why you are not actively working on that.
18:56 < hprmbridge> kanzure> Except so far that you apparently lack motivation to do things
18:56 < hprmbridge> kanzure> sigh, solvable not soluble
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18:58 < L29Ah> sure, the amount of things i'm not actively working on is immeasurably bigger than the amount of things i am actively working on
18:59 < L29Ah> can't do anything about this fact
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19:04 < fenn> the obvious followup question, is there an anti-aging dominant assurance contract pledge/prize that is looking for funding?
19:05 < hprmbridge> kanzure> I don't think it's an incentives problem. It's just a hard problem.
19:05 < fenn> there are two ways to set it up, one way is for people putting dollars in a pot. the other way is for people to pledge labor and skills
19:05 < fenn> i don't even know how to describe the pledge-in-kind thing
19:07 < fenn> there are a lot of anti-aging startups sitting on piles of VC cash, but it's not obvious that they're accomplishing anything. maybe they are. adding hype and delusional founders and how-to-capture-value to the mix, doesn't seem to me to actually help solve the problem directly
19:08 < fenn> meanwhile, lots of people are not working on solving aging and instead doing other things, like playing video games on stream or editing wikipedia
19:08 < fenn> despite everyone agreeing that working on aging is really important and we should all be doing it
19:09  * fenn flips a table
19:09 < muurkha> fenn: I haven't seen DACs getting adopted
19:09 < muurkha> except maybe in the form of Kickstarter, but that's a weakened forrm
19:09 < muurkha> because typically you get nothing for pledging to a failed contract
19:10 < fenn> there's a disincentive for early pledgers to spread the word, because they get the prize if nobody else shows up
19:10 < muurkha> if they're purely speculative pledgers
19:11 < fenn> also it's not clear how the prize pledger gets paid and how to not mess that up. i guess i should read the article about dominant assurance contracts
19:11 < muurkha> in a case like solving aging, pledgers might prefer the contract to succeed than to just get their payoff
19:12 < fenn> that's true of all public goods though
19:12 < muurkha> no
19:13 < muurkha> I mean the benefit you receive for any public good is finite, it would be easy to pay you more than that in most cases
19:13 < muurkha> that's why there's government corruption
19:14 < muurkha> so it depends on the payoff and the good
19:15 < fenn> value of biological mortality isn't infinite because of hyperbolic discounting
19:15 < fenn> immortality*
19:15 < muurkha> agreed
19:16 < fenn> what's so special about anti-aging then?
19:16 < muurkha> well, the benefit is pretty large
19:17 < muurkha> but that doesn't mean it's larger than any possible payoff
19:18 < muurkha> I think the easiest way to handle paying the pledger is to just pay them up front
19:18 < fenn> let's say early pledgers stand to gain a billion dollars if the project doesn't meet its goal. what do you think they would actually do?
19:18 < muurkha> a billion dollars each?
19:19 < fenn> you and me, we each get a billion dollars. so far nobody else has pledged. our goal is $100 billion dollars
19:19 < fenn> is this how it works?
19:19 < fenn> the prize is 2 billion. does it get diluted as other people join?
19:19 < fenn> should i murder muurkha to keep the prize for myself?
19:20 < muurkha> that definitely isn't the original DAC proposal
19:21 < fenn> the prize has to pay out under SOME circumstances, otherwise it's just kickstarter
19:21 < muurkha> suppose the entrepreneur thinks they can do some anti-aging project with US$3 billion
19:21 < fenn> do i get back 10% more than i pledged if it fails?
19:22 < muurkha> so they invest US$30 million to buy pledges
19:22 < muurkha> if you pledge $100 he gives you $1
19:22 < fenn> how long does this whole process take?
19:23 < muurkha> he only collects the $100 if he gets the $3 billion in pledges by some defined deadline
19:23 < muurkha> that's unspecified
19:23 < fenn> at such a large multiplier, the prize has to compete with opportunity costs
19:23 < muurkha> yes
19:23 < muurkha> well
19:23 < fenn> is there some way to stack these things, a compounding prize pool that funds larger prize pools?
19:24 < muurkha> you still have the $100 until and unless he collects
19:24 < fenn> you can't spend the $100 and simultaneously pledge it
19:24 < muurkha> so the multiplier isn't very relevant to the opportunity cost; you just have to keep the $100 in liquid investments
19:25 < muurkha> not spend it, no, but you can invest it
19:25 < fenn> likewise, if you pledge in kind you can't take on a contract for your skills/time and simultaneously pledge skills/time
19:25 < muurkha> if there's a way to stack, you'll probably get perverse Ponzi incentives
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19:26 < fenn> this is what i was complaining about tho
19:27 < muurkha> probably if you want to institutionalize DACs you should start with a smaller project than solving aging
19:27 < fenn> maybe you can say, we only need $1 billion to do something meaningful, but our real goal is $3 billion, so the refund prize stops paying out at $1b
19:28 < fenn> i don't care about DACs i care about solving aging
19:28 < muurkha> a bug fix in a free-software project, a community garden, new streetlights
19:28 < fenn> it would be nice if there were some way to just pay the relevant expert to fix the bug
19:29 < fenn> i couldn't figure out how to do it
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19:29 < fenn> this also sets up perverse incentives tho
19:29 < fenn> rat farming
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19:30 < fenn> bug farming*
19:30 < muurkha> cobra farming, sure
19:31 < fenn> an unvirtuous cycle of cobras eating rats eating bugs eating cobras 
19:31 < fenn> anyway, nobody can add new bugs to the human genome afaik
19:32 < fenn> not until we start doing stuff to it
19:32 < fenn> you can't retroactively add bugs
19:32 < fenn> hrm
19:33 < fenn> best not to go down that line of thought
19:33 < muurkha> heh
19:34 < fenn> the prize funder has to make a bet. this prize will attract N pledge dollars, or else my prize is forefit
19:34 < muurkha> yes
19:35 < muurkha> I think that if DACs are viable psychologically or culturally, they will enable funding a lot of things that aren't currently funded
19:35 < fenn> the funder has an incentive to get past the refund stage, but they already had this. if the prize funder gets a fraction of the total payout, this can attract impartial investors who don't care about the public good
19:36 < fenn> the impartial investors can then pay both the prize and extra funding to drive attention toward the cause
19:37 < fenn> it's not clear that this results in net good being done
19:37 < muurkha> by "investors" do you mean pledgers, funders, or something else?
19:38 < fenn> people who put in prize money up front
19:38 < fenn> or, "refund bonus" money as tabarrok calls it
19:38 < muurkha> so Tabarrok's "entrepreneur" might be a corporation with shareholders?
19:38 < muurkha> that seems reasonable
19:39 < fenn> "entrepreneur" seems like a poor word choice for someone funding a public good prize
19:39 < muurkha> well, that's the word he chose, isn't it?
19:39 < fenn> it is.
19:40 < fenn> the word must have a very different association for economists than for everyone else
19:41 < muurkha> Tabarrok's argument is that if the pledgers are rational they will push the funding past the threshold iff it results in net good being done
19:43 < fenn> do you have to set the refund bonus per pledger so low that it's less than their estimation of the public good's value to them?
19:43 < muurkha> seems plausible, and while the humans aren't very rational, making it in people's selfish interest to fund public goods seems like a step in the right direction
19:43 < muurkha> no
19:44 < muurkha> well, sort of
19:44 < muurkha> but not really
19:44 < fenn> it's all highly uncertain anyway
19:44 < fenn> order of magnitude
19:44 < muurkha> no
19:45 < fenn> what's the dollar value, TO YOU, of curing aging?
19:45 < muurkha> suppose the benefit per person is $1000
19:45 < fenn> it's very hard to answer such questions
19:45 < muurkha> in that case it would be bad to collect $1001 from each person to fund it, by any means
19:46 < muurkha> or more
19:46 < fenn> marginal utility per dollar is not linear, not even close
19:46 < muurkha> irrelevant
19:46 < muurkha> $1000 is still worse than $1001
19:47 < fenn> because they overpaid for the public good?
19:47 < muurkha> yes
19:47 < muurkha> if the entrepreneur can pay, as the price of his put option, $1000 for a $1000 pledge
19:48 < muurkha> then he doesn't need the DAC at all, he can just spend the money directly
19:48 < fenn> but supposedly these pledge pools can keep going even after the prizes have been claimed/made invalid
19:48 < muurkha> it would still work in some sense: he's offering to lend you, and anyone, a demand deposit of $1000
19:49 < fenn> what's a demand deposit
19:49 < muurkha> but in any plausible case, the option price he is paying is much less than the pledge amount, which is in turn less than the pledger's estimation of the public good's value to them
19:50 < muurkha> a demand deposit is a loan you have to repay on demand, at some unpredictable time, such as a deposit in a checking account
19:51 < fenn> the whole scheme ought to still work even if people can withdraw their pledges before it's over
19:51 < muurkha> what?  no, that's backward
19:52 < muurkha> I said that if the *entrepreneur* is paying *pledgers* $1000 up front for their $1000 pledge, then that $1000 is basically a demand deposit
19:52 < fenn> i'm not sure if you'd get more by locking in the pledges, or getting more pledgers overall by giving people the option to withdraw if they unexpectedly need to in the future
19:53 < muurkha> that the pledgers owe the entrepreneur, like a bank owes its depositors
19:53 < fenn> ok now you are talking about something else entirely
19:54 < muurkha> I am explaining the answer to your earlier question still
19:54 < fenn> phrases like "put option" don't mean anything to me, sorry. i can't keep up if i have to learn everything
19:54 < muurkha> 02:43 < fenn> do you have to set the refund bonus per pledger so low that it's less 
19:54 < muurkha>               than their estimation of the public good's value to them?
19:55 < muurkha> but in the middle of that explanation you got confused by my mention of demand deposits
19:55 < fenn> i mean you don't want the pledgers distracted by the monetary prize instead of the real prize, which is the public good
19:56 < muurkha> yes you do
19:56 < fenn> if people start doing weird things because they want the refund bonus, it's a bad mechanism
19:56 < muurkha> no it isn't
19:57 < fenn> so i should murder muurkha to get the billion dollars?
19:57 < fenn> and this solves aging?
19:57 < muurkha> I mean that is a fully general argument against any kind of incentive mechanism
19:57 < fenn> it's not
19:57 < muurkha> including capitalism, lotteries, democracies, and trade
19:57 < fenn> if the prize is less than the value of the public good, you'd expect a pledger to stay in it for the long haul
19:58 < fenn> if the prize is less than opportunity costs, and greater than the public good, well, maybe it's not worth solving
19:58 < muurkha> all of them cause people to start to do weird things because they want to win the system instead of wanting what the system optimizes for
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19:59 < muurkha> that's the whole point of an incentive mechanism, it enables you to harness people's lower nature in the service of their higher nature
19:59 < fenn> let's say i value solving aging at $1 million, that is, i'd pay $1 million right now to have the treatment
19:59 < fenn> if the prize payout is $1000, i'm going to stay in it for the long haul
20:00 < fenn> if we don't reach the funding goal, the prize is just a consolation prize
20:00 < muurkha> Tabarrok proposes paying out the consolation prize conditionally at the deadline
20:00 < fenn> to early funders?
20:01 < muurkha> to would-be funders
20:01 < fenn> who is that?
20:01 < muurkha> the pledgers
20:01 < fenn> all of them?
20:01 < muurkha> yes
20:01 < fenn> isn't that just like pledging less?
20:02 < muurkha> in the case where you didn't reach the goal
20:02 < muurkha> your pledge isn't collected
20:02 < fenn> ok
20:02 < muurkha> I think it's logistically simpler and poses less counterparty risk to pay it out up front, which means it is necessarily unconditional
20:02 < fenn> tabarrok says "Refund bonuses paid only to early contributors was the most successful scheme: more early successes and more total successes than any other method."
20:03 < fenn> he mentions 15% in relation to kickstarter but i dunno if this is what his experiments showed
20:03 < muurkha> oh, has he done experiments?  I hadn't heard!
20:03 < fenn> i'm reading https://foresight.org/summary/dominant-assurance-contracts-alex-tabarrok-george-mason-university/
20:04 < muurkha> this is at least ten years newer than anything I'd heard on the subject, thanks
20:04 < muurkha> a "put option" is a standard securities-market instrument
20:04 < fenn> i just get confused by the terminology, that's all
20:05 < muurkha> it's a contract that obligates the option writer to buy a given thing from the bearer at a given date for a given strike price, at the bearer's option
20:05 < fenn> futures option short smart contract conditional insurance
20:05 < fenn> finance can be arbitrarily complicated and there's nobody reigning it in
20:06 < fenn> reining? it's a word
20:07 < muurkha> my observation is that Tabarrok's original proposal, where the pledgers pay $90 at the deadline if the threshold is met but receive $10 if it is not, is equivalent to paying them $10 up front and then requiring them to pay $100 at the deadline if the threshold is met
20:07 < fenn> reign/rein is a false cognate apparently
20:07 < muurkha> so it's very similar to the entrepreneur buying put options from them
20:08 < fenn> the second option sounds more unpleasant
20:09 < muurkha> for who?
20:09 < fenn> the pledger
20:09 < muurkha> why?  they get $10 right away
20:09 < muurkha> and they don't have to worry about the entrepreneur going bankrupt
20:11 < fenn> because you're on the hook for real
20:11 < muurkha> in either case, no?
20:11 < fenn> no, because if enough people don't pay out, you just go back to fundraising mode
20:12 < fenn> in the first case
20:12 < fenn> anyway they're not equivalent
20:13 < fenn> in the second option you'd have to sign legally binding contracts and provide personal info so they can hunt you down if you don't pay
20:14 < fenn> the first option, by contrast, is just a pseudonym on a list and contact info
20:14 < muurkha> I think you have to do that in both cases, and you don't get to just raise more money in the first case either
20:14 < fenn> what's the purpose of a hard deadline?
20:14 < fenn> it would seem to encourage silly stuff like shorts
20:15 < muurkha> it gives pledgers an incentive to gamble that the entrepreneur will fail
20:15 < muurkha> by pledging money to him
20:15 < fenn> that's stupid
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20:15 < muurkha> it's the whole point
20:15 < fenn> that's exactly what you don't want
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20:15 < muurkha> no
20:15 < muurkha> you've misunderstood the whole mechanism the whole time!
20:16 < fenn> ok. we had 1 month to raise $1 billion dollars and we crossed the finish line at 2 weeks. it's time to pay up! but oh noes, our operation has been sabotaged by anonymous for teh lulz. so we go back to fundraising mode
20:17 < muurkha> yeah, that's the counterparty risk you have to guard against
20:17 < fenn> real pledgers get refunded, but remain pledgers presumably, assuming they haven't been soured by the false positive
20:17 < muurkha> the idea is to enlist the help of people who don't care about the public good to promote it, in the same way that competition enlists the help of butchers to push down the price of meat
20:18 < fenn> why would they promote a thing they stand to gain from failing?
20:19 < muurkha> unclear on your question
20:19 < muurkha> are you asking why someone would pledge to a project they don't care about the success of?
20:20 < fenn> no, i'm asking why someone would promote a project if they will get money when it fails, and they don't care about it succeeding
20:20 < muurkha> I don't know, but why is that relevant?
20:20 < fenn> apparently you get less money the closer it is to succeeding
20:21 < muurkha> What's important here is that they sign contracts to send money, not that they tell their friends it's great
20:21 < fenn> i'm asking about the deadline. if you give it a hard deadline, that gives more leverage to people who can predict the thing will fail at a certain time
20:22 < fenn> it's just like shorting a stock
20:22 < fenn> there are lots of other ways to construct this
20:22 < muurkha> if you don't give it a hard deadline, then when do the people who pledged in order to get the payoff get the payoff?
20:23 < muurkha> also, when does their potential liability end?
20:24 < muurkha> I guess your suggestion earlier was that they could pull out whenever they wanted
20:24 < fenn> option a) they get paid at 15% of the funding goal, b) they get paid at 100% of the funding goal, c) they get paid a fraction of the prize at the first funding failure, then another fraction at the next funding failure, presumably it will end at some point after N rounds
20:24 < muurkha> but that still isn't going to attract the money of stone-faced investment banks
20:25 < fenn> d) after some period of time, regardless whether the funding goal has been met or not
20:25 < fenn> stone-faced investment banks are never going to be pledgers, that was only about finding sources of prize money
20:26 < muurkha> no, Tabarrok's scheme is designed to attract their money
20:26 < muurkha> hmm, (b) sounds backwards: when 100% of the funding is reached, the pledgers don't get paid, they pay
20:26 < fenn> early pledgers would get a reduction in their pledge then
20:27 < muurkha> that makes no sense
20:27 < fenn> maybe
20:29 < fenn> we can choose any number of the options to be active at once
20:29 < muurkha> I don't know if DACs are viable in practice, but you seem to have confused them with some other proposal that I don't understand
20:30 < muurkha> and I don't see how, because the explanation on that page is quite lucid
20:30 < muurkha> even if mine isn't
20:30 < fenn> he doesn't give any numbers
20:30 < fenn> he doesn't explain who pays for the prize or how they got that money
20:31 < muurkha> the entrepreneur pays the refund bonus
20:31 < fenn> or what their motivations for paying for the prize are
20:31 < muurkha> the entrepreneur's motivation for paying the refund bonus is that if they exceed the funding goal they keep the excess as profit
20:32 < fenn> why would anyone contribute beyond the funding goal if it just goes to the entrepreneur
20:33 < fenn> that can't be a good design
20:33 < fenn> the entrepreneur should get some percentage related to the ratio of prize money and funding goal
20:33 < muurkha> in the perfect-information case the entrepreneur's profits are quite small
20:34 < muurkha> as you say
20:34 < fenn> if they're willing to bet more on an uncertain outcome, they get a larger percentage. i don't know how you'd quantify this dispassionately
20:34 < fenn> disinterestedly*
20:35 < muurkha> yes, and in the uncertain case, they also have a significant chance of losing
20:35 < fenn> that's why they should get more
20:35 < fenn> there's a big meta problem around the prize money that he hasn't addressed
20:36 < fenn> it's simple if the prize donor is a philanthropist
20:36 < fenn> it's complicated if the prize donor is a disinterested investor
20:37 < fenn> but then he goes and calls them an "entrepreneur" which makes it sound like they're definitely not a philanthropist
20:38 < muurkha> there are potholes.  I think people in the neighborhood would be willing to pay to get them filled.  so I go offer them a DAC, and if enough of them sign on, I collect their pledges and hire a guy with an asphalt truck for a few days
20:38 < muurkha> seems entrepreneurial?
20:39 < fenn> not really
20:39 < muurkha> I'm getting paid to solve their problem
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20:39 < fenn> how much?
20:39 < muurkha> and not as an employee, but as a free agent
20:40 < fenn> do you get paid more for fixing more potholes?
20:40 < muurkha> only enough that it isn't appealing for someone else to offer a DAC to fix the same potholes for a tenth the price
20:41 < muurkha> but enough that it's appealing to me to risk my money on bonuses
20:42 < fenn> there's another problem that this sounds a lot like a scam, and people aren't accustomed to it
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20:43 < fenn> when you have some rando on your porch jumping up and down yelling "it's free money! what's the problem!?"
20:43 < muurkha> yeah, that's the problem of institutionalization of new practices
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20:44 < muurkha> and it's crucial to put in place safeguards against it actually being a scam
20:44 < muurkha> reputation is one, but there are also transparency measures
20:45 < fenn> this is part of why i don't like the "i'll pay you $10 if you just sign this complicated legal contract" scheme you claimed was equivalent
20:46 < muurkha> it's equivalent because you still have to sign the contract
20:46 < fenn> a pledge doesn't have to be a contract
20:46 < muurkha> I mean the entrepreneur has to be able to collect the pledges when he hits the funding goal
20:46 < muurkha> what would a non-contract pledge be?
20:47 < fenn> a good faith memorandum of understanding
20:47 < fenn> nothing at all really
20:47 < fenn> if it turns out the pledges are 50% fake, but you pass the funding goal in the end, what does it matter?
20:48 < muurkha> well, it might matter if you only have enough money to fill half the potholes
20:48 < muurkha> but this isn't really a difference between the entrepreneur paying $10 up front and collecting 
20:48 < fenn> "but why would anyone pledge to such an untrustworthy fundraising platform? it's all fakes!" but in the end they get the goals funded, so it's not exactly fake is it
20:49 < muurkha> but this isn't really a difference between the entrepreneur paying $10 up front and collecting $100 later if successful, and paying $10 at the deadline or collecting $90 if successful
20:50 < muurkha> the percentage of fake pledges will be the same either way, and the same measures work to improve or worsen the bad debt ratio either way
20:50 < fenn> a pledger would have more grounds for a lawsuit if the entrepreneur didn't pay up at the deadline, than if it turned out half the pledges were fakes and they still got funded
20:50 < muurkha> and, for the record, a good-faith memorandum of understanding is a contract
20:51 < fenn> a handshake is not a contract
20:52 < muurkha> a handshake is a contract, in sharia or civil-law countries or if accompanied by a peppercorn
20:52 < fenn> by "fake pledges" i mostly mean people who pulled out or didn't pay up at the end, not a coordinated effort by the entrepreneur to deceive early pledgers
20:52 < muurkha> but the two risks you're describing are independent
20:53 < fenn> they look the same to pledgers at the end
20:53 < muurkha> no, they look totally different to pledgers at the end
20:54 < muurkha> in one case the guy promised to pay you $10 and didn't; in the other case, he collected your $90 and then didn't fill your potholes
20:54 < fenn> i guess you could collect pledges in reverse chronological order? and be very transparent about who pledged what when
20:55 < fenn> i mean the two types of fake pledges look the same to pledgers at the end, assuming limited transparency
20:55 < fenn> "oh yea, totally, half our pledges pulled out at the last minute, i swear"
20:55 < muurkha> yes, but that wasn't what we were debating
20:56 < fenn> right
20:56 < muurkha> we were debating paying the $10 up front unconditionally vs. paying it conditionally at the deadline
20:57 < fenn> the latter involves less transactions
20:57 < muurkha> my argument is that a handshake in either case still has about the same chance of the pledger ponying up at the end; the cheater will try to give you the $10 back
20:58 < fenn> a real cheater would keep the $10 and not pay the pledge
20:59 < muurkha> most people aren't quite that cheaty
20:59 < muurkha> likewise, a notarized written contract in either case has about the same chance of the pledger ponying up in the end
20:59 < fenn> to prevent real cheaters you'd need burdensome legal contracts which i feel is an unreasonable pain in the ass
20:59 < fenn> anyway i think we're going around in circles now
21:00 < muurkha> so I don't know why you're comparing, implicitly, up-front payment with a notarized contract against non-up-front payment with a handshake
21:00 < muurkha> that would be an improvement, because my perception is that instead you keep going off on tangents :)
21:01 < fenn> that is what i'm comparing
21:02 < fenn> i'm easily distractable
21:02 < fenn> it's not my fault reality is complicated
21:03 < fenn> i mean, game theory is basically one big nerd snipe
21:03 < muurkha> I think this is the second conversation today we've had where you've fallen back on "it's not my fault"
21:04 < fenn> would you rather i lie and blow off legitimate concerns, or silently suffer while feeling resentment that i can't point out obvious flaws
21:05 < muurkha> I think there are fundamentally two approaches to life: one that optimizes for good results and one that optimizes for blaming bad results on someone else.  Our country is governed according to the latter approach and I'm sick of it
21:05 < muurkha> of course, how my country is governed is very much not your fault
21:05 < muurkha> good night
21:06 < fenn> in this case god did it
21:10 < fenn> in case anyone is curious what the other one was, i didn't think that "nation-state actor" implied ethnocentrism, and apparently this is my fault
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--- Log closed Fri Jun 30 00:00:45 2023