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Strange Loops and Blockchains

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Strange Loops and Blockchains AbacusWell-nighStrange Loops and Blockchains Sep 28, 2018 In which idealists set expectations concerning the problem of governance. I. Naming things is nonflexible In his Pulitzer-prize winning magnum opus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter discusses the rencontre of naming things. Naming things is hard, Hofstadter explains, considering every name given to a thing is inevitably simpler than the thing itself. A name is a summary, and names are chosen to highlight the most important aspects (according to… someone) of the thing stuff named. Of course, highlighting unrepealable aspects of something necessarily ways downplaying other aspects of that thing. Naming things is hard, then, considering there is unchangingly something a name leaves out, and that omission usually ends up stuff important at some point lanugo the road. A “good” name is one which gets us most of the way there, most of the time – but no name is perfect. This is the same idea as the stardom between the “map and the territory”: a map is unchangingly a summary of the territory, a reduction of the dimensionality; a perfect map would be the size of the territory, and thus not useful. A “perfect” name would be as complicated as the thing itself, and thus untellable to speak! It’s worth noting that that naming is only really a problem for things that are complex. For example, a variable named time-delay is fairly complete, just like the name “goalie” is a fairly good unravelment of that role on a football team. But what well-nigh a job like “president”? When dealing with increasingly complicated things, naming gets harder. Hofstadter plays with this idea via a humorous dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise, in which the former attempts to solve a puzzle posed by the latter, with little success: Achilles: Confound it all! Every time you requite one of my answers a NAME, it seems to signal the imminent shattering of my hopes that that wordplay will satisfy you. Why don’t we just leave thisWordplaySchema nameless? Tortoise: We can whimsically do that, Achilles. We wouldn’t have any way to refer to it without a name. And besides, there is something inevitable and rather trappy well-nigh this particularWordplaySchema. It would be quite ungraceful to leave it nameless! Achilles has an intuition for the wordplay – he understands the essence of the puzzle – but every time he unquestionably has to transcend undefined intuition and commit formally to an answer, that formalization contains some inherent limitation (this is the origin of the term “strange loop”). This is the essential insight of Hofstadter’s work: unendingly we struggle to formalize something ramified (“give it a name”), that formalization necessarily leaves something out. This is considering formalizations are stock-still summaries of the things themselves, and can never capture things in their entirety. In a unrepealable quite profound sense, the daily headache of programmers naming variables is substantially unfluctuating to Russell and Whitehead’s valiant but vain effort to place mathematics on solid, static foundations (it is highly suggestive that Whitehead spent the rest of his career developing a metaphysics of dynamism known as “Process Philosophy”). The truth is that we are limited beings attempting to discern the nature of things which are superior to our power of comprehension. We can incrementally expand our horizons, and iteratively modernize our understanding, but we will never quite reach the boundaries. II. A guiding metaphor Before moving on, let’s introduce three wacky thinkers and use their work to develop useful guiding metaphor. The first is a cognitive linguist out in California who thinks that our minds run on metaphor, that they are the essential towers blocks of our understanding. The second is a mystical philosopher living out in the mountains somewhere, who thinks that all life forms can be understood as stuff recursively well-balanced of increasingly fundamental life forms, equal to some unvarying set of rules. The third is a long-dead german philosopher, who thought that many of the world’s social phenomena could be seen as a dynamic tension of opposites. A lot of people think this trio is totally bananas. But let’s play a game and for the next 90 seconds pretend that they were all basically right well-nigh everything. I made you an image containing our important metaphor.Squintat it for a minute and we’ll discuss. What do we see here? In the center, Da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian Man, here taken as an typical human. Off to the sides, we see an Ameoba (minimally structured biomass) and a skeleton (highly structured but lifeless). The metaphor here is that humans come into stuff with the hardness (skeleton) is brought into a well-turned tension (magenta arrow) with the softness (the organs and tissue). Too far in either lattermost and the soft-hued complexity of the human cannot survive: a lifeless skeleton, or a puddle of goop. This image provides us our first example of a dialectical tension, an essential component of Hegel’s philosophy. We see similar tensions elsewhere: in between liberals and conservatives, between process and outcome, between self-rule and security, and between individual and community, among others. Each one of those words captures the end of a spectrum, but life cannot be sustained at the end of the spectrum. It can be sustained only in the tension which comes from bringing the extremes into a dynamic but stable balance. A small nonprofit with pages of bureaucratic rules will get nothing done; likewise, a multinational firm without unobjectionable procedures and policies will be mired in dysfunction. Note moreover that the Ameoba can live just fine without a skeleton; but that Ameoba is a simple life form. The skeleton literally provides the windrow for supporting increasingly ramified types of life (there’s a reason why vertebrates are the headliners in the supplies chain). “Solving” a dialectical tension is not the end of the story: it simply sets the stage for the whence of a new story – this is the essence of Wilber’s treatise of increasing levels of complexity, each succeeding level of complexity made possible by the foundation provided by the resolving of tensions of the level below. As an interesting aside, it is interesting to consider the arthropods (beetles, etc) as an volitional solution to the problem of “structural support” (indulge me my ventriloquist evolutionary biology). Vertebrates put the structure on the inside, arthropods on the outside. Both solutions worked, but had variegated long-term consequences: the former seems to have been largest at scaling up (vertebrates are bigger), while the latter largest at scaling wideness (there are many increasingly species of arthropods). III. No perfect rules As mentioned, words can describe the static ends of the spectrum (“freedom”, “security”, “individual”, “community”), but it is much harder to describe the wastefulness in the center, which can only overly be largest and largest approximated. And so, the struggle of naming variables is the same struggle of developing formal systems is the same struggle of reconciling simple extremes into a dynamic tension: the objects we pursue are unchangingly just vastitude our comprehension.Planeour greatest and most universal “systems” unsupportable some context: Adam Smith’s initial unravelment of self-ruling market suffrage unsupportable some stratum of social cohesion (“fellow feeling” in his words). The various flavors of communist and socialist dream seem some baseline of material zillions to go around. The American republic was designed to withstand factionalism, up to a point.PlaneBitcoin, the buzzing, urgent Ozymandias of trustlessness, assumes some stratum of distribution of computing power. There is a lesson here for the dreamers of utopian dreams, a lesson taught by wits then and again. There is no system (skeleton) which is guaranteed to work from one end of the universe to the other, from now until the end of time. Every system comes working only in a living context (the amoeba, the living matter) into which it is embedded; it is the interaction of the system and the context which yield a stable dynamism. In a recent interview, Jaron Lainer and Glen Weyl discuss “living” technologies: The most successful technologies in history are what you might undeniability living technologies. They engage the people who use them in an ongoing conversation in which both the people and the technology change. Or you could use the word evolve if you like. What we see here is the difference between plain rules and a set of rules in tension with a living force. The former is necessarily partial and incomplete, while the latter is capable of wondrous things. Also, note that most of these successful fusions of rules and context ripened incrementally (recall our biological metaphor).Planethe American constitution, considered at the time a unvigilant experiment, was an incremental response to the failures of the previous Articles of Confederation. To develop an elaborate new mechanism and deploy it whole reticulum is to magistrate failure. As an aside, it is worth noting that incorporating adverserial structures into governance can to some extent reduce the need for structure (or at least transpiration the the types of structure necessary). Since measuring and adapting to an outcome without the fact is much easier than anticipating the process which led to that outcome, competitive or relational mechanisms (think courts of law, games of chess, or plane employee reviews) can play an important role in giving governance frameworks the worthiness to evolve over time. IV. What to strive for In 1984, statisticians Persi Diaconis and David Freedman released a landmark paper titled “Asymptotics of Graphical Projection Pursuit”, in which they prove that under suitable conditions, most low-dimensional projections of high-dimensional data are approximately Gaussian, i.e. very lossy. The trick is to find the projections which result in non-Gaussian projection, i.e. those which capture increasingly of the original structure of the high-dimensional problem. Put flipside way: some names are largest than others, and naming something poorly can be worse than not naming it at all. Consider how the monothiestic diety is often referred to indirectly, via signifiers like “The Powers”, “The Name”, “My Lord”, etc, while the mystery surrounding the “true name” has wilt an traffic-stopping subject of estoric study. Bringing things when to earth, it will be instructive to squint at how variegated crypto communities have been unescapable governance on the ground. Current “on-chain” (i.e. explicit) approaches, such as those used by EOS and the original, infamous, Ethereum DAO suffer from meager participation among voters. On the other hand, the “off-chain” approaches taken by Bitcoin, Ethereum, et al (in which the “mechanisms” are implicit, or “unpsoken”) have achieved varying degrees of success, leading Vitalik to reverse his position in favor of off-chain governance. The issue at hand is that the “rules” for on-chain governance are too transplanted to stave stuff captured by the social context (see: collusion among EOS woodcut producers). Given these transplanted tools, it’s largest to leave governance “unspoken”: it will necessarily be smaller and increasingly sectional (the Ameoba), but this opacity is a baby-sit versus explicit capture by keeping the rules unseen inside of “culture”. The conclusion is not that off-chain governance is largest (to conclude that would be to conclude that cliquish optimacy is better), but rather that we still need to develop the language for describing governance mechanisms that can hold tension with the living gravity of the community. What, then, to build? In short, largest backbones, embedded within a good community. Build new social infrastructure which solves a few current problems without reintroducing ones we’ve once solved – while current governance systems might seem far from perfect, don’t underestimate the value of weight they successfully support. Try to make it robust versus most types of failure. Don’t expect your thing to work forever; sooner the social context will transpiration and the tension will closure to hold. But a few years is plenty, a few decades ideal. Buy us time so that the next time virtually we can see a little bit farther and do a little bit better. Comments Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Abacus Abacus kronovet@gmail.com kronosapiens kronosapiens I'm Daniel Kronovet, a data scientist living in Tel Aviv.