Never been one to let the carrier drop

TL;DR=Go slow, be careful, don’t break it trying to fix it. Do not reassign all the wealth to your new system – any worthwhile system can compete with existing ones and win.

There is something I want to make abundantly clear here.

Some people seem to be under the impression that as I discuss bucketed currency and other alternative resource allocation systems, I want to just go out and grab all the existing wealth, stuff it into the new system, and redistribute.

That would not be a good idea. It is not my goal.

Big systems have inertia for a reason. If my resource allocation system is so superior, it should be able to run in parallel with the existing system and add value without controlling distribution at all, or run standalone competing and trading with the existing system and succeed. If it can’t do either of those two things, then it’s a failure and we should toss it back to the drawing board.

The way to succeed at a big project is to start small, test small, develop small, and scale up. ANY system attempting to reassign the wealth of a economy even the size of a small state would likely fail spectacularly – the people losing the wealth would be justifiably resentful, and the people gaining the wealth would likely be the wrong people, for the wrong reasons – we’d end up just like Communism did, with six sets of boots and no pots.

There are some who want to tear our republic apart and start over. I say to you, unless you have a superior system that you’ve tested small and medium scale, or a idea so good we will *all* agree that it’s time has come, PLEASE DON’T. You will only be adding fuel to the fire of entropy burning against our minds and our land.

Also please consider that the fundamental “bones” of the constitution are sound. Nowhere does the constitution say we are a capitalist society, and we could try alternate resource allocation systems while maintaining the design of government which is, largely, well done in my opinion. It is possible that another, better government is possible – I have a number of ideas on the subject – but I think that most of the problems facing us have to do with the resource allocation system and some of the fiddly implementation details surrounding voting, and that the basic structure of the constitution is a fine work and shouldn’t be tampered with.

People, we can build a better mousetrap – but we must:

1) Make sure it addresses close to everyone’s needs. It must beat the current system, which is doing better than you might think.
2) Treat it like a technical problem. Test. Plan. Work together in teams. Use simulation. Avoid getting overly attached to one idea or set of ideas.
3) Understand that if we damage people’s quality of life, they will not thank us for our revolution.
4) Deal with people as they really are, not as we wish they would be. Deal with our culture as it really is, not as we’d like it to be. A good system may literally require a cultural shift, in which case that must be part of our plans.
5) Do not release it until it is stable enough to run wild and free. If we resist the urge to do anything stupid, we can keep civilization as it currently stands together for quite some time – at least until the oil has almost run out. Let’s not end up starving in the cold because we were in a hurry to release.
5.1) Don’t get so caught up in designing a new system that we don’t also continue to apply band-aids, and look for band-aids that could be applied. However, when band-aiding, remember not to ever think the band-aid is the final solution. Raising the minimum wage is a stopgap solution at best, for example. This is probably my biggest criticism of the plans of Bernie Sanders.
6) There is a compelling reason to keep civilization online. If DARPA’s SyNAPSE project scales according to Moore’s law, in 17 years we should be able to build a neural network bigger than we are. A larger mind than ours might be able to see what we can’t. If we can befriend the entity this network represents, we might be able to get their help.

There will be more.. the next article that is worthy of this series has just not yet been written. If you want to see my meandering thoughts as I try to figure out how to build a resource allocation system that works, check out the resource allocation systems category.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 11th, 2016 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Resource Allocation Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.