You can never win with the masses. They will always be wrong, for as long as they demand to organize themselves in collectives.
The Internet is essentially the mass of masses. Extrapolate the audience averaging effect in the popular game show
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire:
"But there’s a third option: You can use your “Ask-the-Audience" life line. You can poll the entire studio audience on the four possible answers, and their responses are instantaneously assembled into a bar graph. Invariably, this graph shows one overwhelming choice, and with rare exceptions the audience is right. “I’ll trust the audience,” you tell Regis. “Final answer.”
Good move. But why? No person in the audience is any more likely than you to know where grapes come from, yet the collective intelligence of the group is almost always a better bet than your best guess. Psychologists are very interested in this perplexing statistical phenomenon. If the crowd is always wiser than any individual, what does that say about the way knowledge is stored and arranged in our minds? And can it help us make better choices, even beyond game shows?
...
That’s actually what Vul and Pashler found when they ran the experiment. As reported in the July issue of the journal Psychological Science, the average of two guesses for any individual participant was better than either guess alone, regardless of the time between guesses. So polling the “crowd within” does indeed yield a statistically more accurate answer. What’s more, this internal crowd gets more independent-minded with time: Contestants who were asked to second-guess themselves three weeks later benefited even more by averaging their two guesses than did those who second-guessed themselves immediately. The psychologists speculate that the cognitive pull of the original answer loses its power and allows more mental flexibility over time."
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2008/06/polling-crowd-within.cfm@vokain You have probably seen this already, but in case not: enjoy!
BBC - The Code - The Wisdom of the Crowd
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HUPS. Interesting how every single block size limit poll, since the first one in Feb 2013, has had majority support for the increase.
I assume both of you are smart guys.
So why do you commit this blatantly obvious category error of equating collective intelligence to the misalignment of priorities in the
Iron Law of Political Economics?
I just can't fathom how you can't see that is proximately analogous (in terms of shared versus independent self-interest) to equating ant colonies to
Tasmanian devils.
Let me translate that Iron Law into a form that is more easily appreciated:
Mancur Olson, in his book The Logic Of Collective Action, highlighted the central problem of politics in a democracy. The benefits of political market-rigging can be concentrated to benefit particular special interest groups and simultaneously distributed via debt to the population wherein each self-interested individual has the incentive to maximize his/her parasitic extraction from the collective, while the costs (in higher taxes, slower economic growth, and many other second-order effects) are diffused through the entire population (and often obfuscated and easily ignored as charged to the future generation in the form of debt).
This general model has consequences. Here are some of them:
Political demand for income transfers, entitlements and subsidies always rises faster than the economy can generate increased wealth to supply them from.
The equilibrium state of a regulatory agency is to have been captured by the entities it is supposed to regulate.
The only important class distinction in any advanced democracy is between those who are net producers of tax revenues and those who are net consumers of them.
Corruption is not the exceptional condition of politics, it is the normal one.
P.S. I have tried my best to teach this concept but it seems after 1000s of posts in the Economic Devastation and other threads, I still can't get readers to acknowledge that collective organization of humans suffers from a misalignment of priorities. That humans have big brains or that collective intelligence of humans is higher than for solitary humans is irrelevant.
that "Law" was constructed in the context of a debt-based fiat system in which money printing is central and of which Bitcoin is NOT. hence, our optimism that we can change things for the better. does optimism always have to be unrealistic?
The People demand fractional reserves debt. If you deny this fact, then let's go down that rabbit hole such as using the 1800s as an example where the People demanded debt from the private, decentralized banks. Otherwise I assume you accept this fact.
you've got it backwards. debt has been imposed by bankers. they've tricked everyone into assuming more debt by manipulating interest rates downwards esp since 1980, the last high of 17%. this is accomplished by money printing to buy UST's.
The State and its mandate to regulate legal tender exists because there is a power vacuum on which entity will regulate fractional reserves and backstop the economy when the fractional reserves periodically implode with the business cycle.
have you ever read The Creature from Jekyll Island? great history on the secret meeting of JP Morgan et al where the Fed was hatched
We had decentralized money in the 1800s and we can clearly see it ended with the bankruptcy of the USA wherein JP Morgan had to bailout the country (which led to the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913).
A power vacuum means that the system in decentralized mode can't squelch some undesired activity (e.g. counterfeiting a.k.a. fractional reserves) without some entity being given the monopoly on force (i.e. Max Weber's canonical definition of the State).
again, you have it backwards. the Fed facilitates fractional reserves to the point of massive excess. can 2008 be any clearer?:
The regulation of fractional reserves is a collective power vacuum that will always exist under any technological paradigm including Bitcoin (unless we can argue that humans will no longer have use for debt).
i actually think that a reasonable debt system (10x) could be overlayed on top of Bitcoin. and probably in USD which would preserver the existing system with minimal disruption. i have long argued this here.
Thus you have transposed (i.e. conflated) causality (cause and effect). The demand for centralized control over legal tender derives from individual self-interest that Bitcoin does not alter.
there is no demand for centralized control. it was co-opted from the beginning. you might be able to make that argument only today b/c the debt build up via the dervatives Tower threatens to throw us into Armageddon w/o the centralize manipulation and moral hazard you call for. change would demand pain, yes.
Thus Bitcoin is a power vacuum because it can't resist centralization and the People's self-interest in debt implicitly demands the State to maintain force over regulating finance.
those of us who understand the dynamic i've just outlined are NOT demanding centralization and in fact are actively resisting it. at this pt, after most of the vulnerable have had their homes taken away, the only ones left holding most of the debt are the elitists you are referring to who stand to lose the most in a move towards a decentralized digital currency based on a fixed supply. this is why we see increasing attempts to co-opt Bitcoin or impose regs.
I explained in the Economic Devastation thread that I think the demand for debt in the Knowledge Age may diminish, because I explained in great detail in one of my essays linked from the opening post of that thread that knowledge production can't be financed.
the only real debt growth has been the student loan bubble as banksters grasp at the last straws to continue the game. now they are targeting our offspring who have a whole lifetime ahead of them to be debt slaves.
Our problem however, is that most humans are not ready to transition to the Knowledge Age work and they will continue to demand debt and Industrial Age jobs (or the government to subsidize failure to obtain such a job).
i foresee a leveling out of resources and wealth due to the transparency of information access facilitated by the Internet. this can't be stopped despite the state's resistance.
The only way we cross the chasm without falling into an totalitarian abyss along the way, is a newly designed crypto-currency for the fledgling Knowledge Age that can resist attack by the State because the People implicitly (due to their self-interest in debt and subsidies) demand the State to maintain a monopoly on force.
i agree and think Bitcoin is it.
Bitcoin can only serve the NWO because it does not have immutable qualities of decentralization and anonymity. You are hoping for a mass awakening (to defend Bitcoin and maintain its decentralization) but that is impossible because the individual self-interest of each of the People are misaligned with such global optimization.
as PeterR described it; Bitcoin offers "Hope". there is no more powerful motivator for the avg Joe. ppl have died defending it. now we have a tool that gives us that.
