I would be interested in reading such a post.

http://www.economist.com/node/21525456 for the starter.

The arguments in favour of speculation, in general, rest on assumption of intelligent trading and diversity of strategies. The short term range, however, is entirely up to software tools, whose decisions are stupid and have identical systematic errors. I think the short term trading is going to go out with a bang first time there's any interesting software-level exploitation - either a direct hack or adoption of one bot whose decision theory makes non-trivial use of understanding of other instances of itself. Bang as in, a millisecond level bubbles and crashes followed by decision to roll it back and regulate or prohibit.

How exactly is not having this extremely speculative stock and currency trading running at the timespan of milliseconds became 'having to do everything for themselves'? Or are we speaking of the market where i buy groceries?

This needless back-and-forth trading can be immediately eliminated with 5% tax on those operations (i.e. you sell stock or currency worth $1000, you pay $50). Hell, 1% would cut much of crap out (5% may be too severe). Would it make everyone 'have to do everything for themselves"? Let's look, I pay sales tax whenever I sell anything I make for actual consumption, it's way more than 5% , and it didn't force anyone to do everything by themselves.

I am not an economist, nor do I play one on TV. My current studies (mostly maths, modelling and statistics) do contain a sizeable econ component, however, so I pay attention to these things.

I also have plenty of other things I could be doing with my time. Would you appreciate me talking at length about the pros and cons of financial transaction taxes?

I see what you mean. But I thought "ripples of one wave affected the other wave" was the accepted interpretation of the double slit experiment. In other words, the double slit experiments prove the wave-particle duality. I wasn't aware that the wave-particle duality was considered evidence in favor of MWI.

I'll start with the second question.

is there any experiment or argument or experience or anything that could convince you that green is not real in the way that you currently believe that it is?

That would amount to convincing me that the experience which is currently happening, is not currently happening; or that an experience which previously happened, did not actually happen.

is it your belief that green is an ontologically basic primitive? Or is green composed of other ontologically basic primitives that are outside the standard model?

The analysis of color as abstractly three-dimensional (e.g. hue, saturation, brightness) seems phenomenologically accurate to me. So as a first approximation to a phenomenological ontology of color, I say that there are regions of color, present to a conscious subject, within which these attributes vary.

If we want to go further, we have to tackle further questions, like what ontological category color belongs to. Is it a property of the conscious subject? Is it a property of a part of the conscious subject? Should we regard sensory continua as part of the perceiving subject, or as separate entities to which the subject has a relation? Should we regard color as a property of a visual region, or should we look at some of the philosophical attempts to collapse the distinction between object and property, and view "colored region" as the basic entity?

What I believe is that consciousness is not a collection of spatial parts. It has parts, but the binding relations are some other sort of relation, like "co-presence to the perceiving subject" or "proximity in the sensory manifolds". Since color only occurs within the context of some conscious experience, whether or not it's "ontologically basic" is going to require a lot more clarity about what's foundational and what's derivative in ontology, and about the ontological nature of the overall complex or unity or whatever it is, that is the experience as a whole (which in turn is still only going to be part of or an aspect of the total state of a self).

Clearly this isn't in the standard model of physics in any standard sense. But if the standard model can be expressed - for example, and only as an example, as an evolving tensor network of a particular sort - then it may be possible to specify an ontology beneath the tensor formalism, in which this complex ontological object, the conscious being, can be identified with one of the very high-dimensional tensor factors appearing in the theory.

The correct way to state the nature of color and its relationship to its context in consciousness is a very delicate question. We may need entirely new categories - by categories I mean classic ontological categories like substance, property, relation. Though there has already been, in the history of human thought, a lot of underrated conceptual invention which might turn out to be relevant.

I keep running into problems with various versions of what I internally refer to as the "placebo paradox", and can't find a solution that doesn't lead to Regret Of Rationality. Simple example follows:

You have an illness from wich you'll either get better, or die. The probability of recovering is exactly half of what you estimate it to be due to the placebo effect/positive thinking. Before learning this you have 80% confidence in your recovery. Since you estimate 80%, your actual chance is 40% so you update to this. Since the estimate is now 40%, the actual chance is 20%, so you update to this. Then it's 10%, so you update to that. etc. Until both your estimated and actual chance of recovery are 0. then you die.

An irrational agent, on the other hand, upon learning this could self delude to 100% certainty of recovery, and have a 50% chance of actually recovering.

This is actually causing me real world problems, such as inability to use techniques based on positive thinking, and a lot of cognitive dissonance.

Another version of this problem features in HP:MoR, in the scene where harry is trying to influence the behaviour of dementors.

And to show this isn't JUST a quirk of human mind design, one can envision Omega setting up an isomorphic problem for any kind of AI.

Interesting post throughout, but don't you overplay your hand a bit here?

There's nothing that looks remotely like a goal in its programming, [...]

An IF-THEN piece of code comparing a measured RGB value to a threshold value for firing the laser would look at least remotely like a goal to my mind.

If China is moderate capitalism, one shudders how would extreme one looks like...

I'm immensely skeptical of the notion that clever people are needed to tell dumb people what to do to achieve what they want

Every system ever devised consists of smart people telling the dumb ones what to do. Even in feudal society with hereditary rule, the thicker-than-brick kings were manipulated by smart barons and courtiers :-P

Caveat lector: I'm reading Atlas Shrugged right now.

Generalization from fictional evidence