"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little." - Edmund Burke
The lesson of the potato famine was that crops should be more, rather than less, diverse. The potatoes that were in cultivation didn't have enough genetic variation which is why the the disease had such a huge impact. But if it's true of crops... then it's also true of people. People should be more genetically diverse. This way a new pathogen can't kill all of us. Although I have no idea how you'd practically ensure greater human diversity!!?? History might refer to you as the opposite of Hitler.
Regarding the danger of AI... if greater diversity is better for crops and humans... then it's also better for robots as well. We'll give more resources to the most beneficial robots. Evil robots won't have a leg to stand on.
And war can be eliminated by tax choice.
Hedge hedge hedge! The most successful plant family on Earth is the Orchidaceae. There are around 30,000 different species! Each orchid seed pod can contain a million dust like seeds that are dispersed by the wind. A million seeds is a huge hedge.
The opposite of hedging is to put all your eggs in one basket. Right now humans have all their eggs in one basket... aka "Earth". We also allow a small group of government planners to allocate all our taxes. Coincidence? Nope.
Centralization is always a function of conceit. People think they have enough facts to block/limit hetergeneous activity. The more you appreciate fallibilism the more you appreciate decentralization.
The answer is always tax choice.
I created the world's first micropayments forum... RudeBagel. Some additional info.
Thanks for sharing! Blendle is pretty neat because you can get a refund if you're unsatisfied. But I'm pretty sure that the "One-Price-Fits-All" (OPFA) model isn't as good as the "Pay-What-You-Want" (PWYW) model.
People have been trying to get micropayments working for decades and it still doesn't seem to have had any major successes.
My approach is ridiculously simple. In the forum thread that I linked to... nobody has disputed my approach yet.
Regardless, all micropayments would do is further incentivise the kinds of articles that are already been voted to the top and make the issues discussed here worse.
So popularity equals demand? That sure would make economics a whole lot easier. Nobody would have to spend any money. We'd all just vote for all the products that we want. Voila! The efficient allocation of society's limited resources!
According to your theory, the most voted for threads on this forum would receive the most money. Care to bet on that? If so, how much?
Heh. I started reading my gf's 50 Shades of Gray on her kindle... but I couldn't finish it because it was so bad. She liked it though. shrug
Here are two subreddits...
The same economics article isn't going to be equally valuable in both subs. In the first sub, Ha-Joon Chang's articles are going to be a lot more valuable than Peter Boettke's articles. And the opposite would be true in the second sub.
See how that would work? There's riches in niches.
I sure think it is! But I could be wrong...
This is my first article/post? here and to be honest, I have this website open in another tab and I keep refreshing it to see if I still have enough points to post. I wish I would have taken a screenshot every time my karma changed. First it was 0, then it was -1, then it was back to 0, then I think it jumped up to 5. I thought I was safe but then this morning it was down to 0. So if this post seems "linky" then it might be because I'm trying to share as much information as I can... (read 391 more words →)
Slugs misbehave when they eat my orchids.