Re: Nautilus: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent

Posted by Robert Wall on Jan 22, 2017; 9:10pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Nautilus-Investing-Is-More-Luck-Than-Talent-tp7588738p7588795.html

Marcus,

I am not sure but you may have the wrong impression of employee-owned worker cooperatives.  Of course, they have structure and management and decision-making processes just like capitalist-owned companies. Even Forbes think they are a good idea: If Apple Were A Worker Cooperative, Each Employee Would Earn At Least $403K (December 2014).  It might be a good project for you to research this more. Check out Mondragon in Spain, for example.  Britain under Jeremy Corbin's leadership for Labor is floating a plan to allow employees to have first-refusal rights to purchase companies that want to sell or move offshore. 

There are all kinds of co-operative institutions with perhaps the best example in this country being the idea, at least, of the public bank, like the Bank of North Dakota, which may be the only one, but not sure. Cooperatives are much more prevalent outside of this country.  There may be an insidious reason for this, however. Nonetheless, after you do a little research, I am sure that you will see that employee-owned cooperatives would meet with your concept of good "enterprises."  They are inherently community motivated and supported and are not the kind of enterprises that you will see move offshore or park their cash there to avoid US taxation [note: Co-ops actually pay more taxes than capitalist-owned corporations]. Give them a second look ...

I give that names like worrying, self-reflection, doubt, analysis, and reading.   I believe it is practiced in a widespread way by the type 1 thinkers that Pamela mentioned. 

You might have to remind me what Type 1 Thinking is all about. I found this--Type 1 and Type 2 thinking--but that isn't what I was trying to explain.  If you mean a sort of Closed-Loop Reflect-Analyze-Act type thing, then yes; that could be something akin to Hebbian learning.  The most important part is that the process-a self-administered psychodynamic one--is implemented by the individual and not, say, a psychologist or priest.  I don't get the worry or doubt part, though, unless you mean that the objective is to diminish those sensations and grow confidence. The other important part is mindfulness ... being consciously aware as much as possible.  So much of our awake time is lived on "automatic."  Very difficult to break out of this. 

But, in this thread, I wasn't so much interested in this process at the individual level except to use it as a tangible example to define--for Steve--what it might mean at the level of society, that being the underlying exploratory thrust of this thread. How can Hebbian learning be applied at the level of society? At the moment, it's a rhetorical question.  I mean, what are the synapses of a society? All I can think of is the level of a Golden-Rule kind of morality manifest in its so-called zeitgeist. But if the society is basically amoral, then those hypothetical "synapses" are weak.  

We tend more to use crime and punishment as a way of strengthening these social synapses, but it doesn't result in a positive feedback loop to the members of that society-- many who will eventually figure out how to game the system to their own advantage. People have to actually have faith in the system in a way that they see something egalitarian that emerges.  We don't have that in our society and I think the Eric Smith provided some insight into why: Power--to have control over one's destiny--is as unequally distributed as wealth, which Eric may argue is the result of an imbalance between access and constraint. [an interesting aside: employee-owned cooperatives tend to blunt this kind of malignancy from growing 😎]. Anywho ...

From your last paragraph, if I follow, you seem to have much more hope that we can improve society with chemicals, gene editing, quantum computing, or with surgical implants than I do.  I don't think that I would want to live in such a society. What will emerge, if any of this is at all possible, is a super-smart animal with the same ratty morals and self-interest. That's a very dangerous animal, IMHO.  This is why many folks are scared of AI; look who's leading the pack at this technology and buying up the world's brain trust: Google ... one of those "enterprises" that you justifiably don't seem to trust. 🤔  

Cheers

On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 8:35 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

Robert writes:

 

< It would be a Hebbian-oriented mental process by way of "habituating" the kind of thoughts that lead to altruism or the desired state. >

 

I give that names like worrying, self-reflection, doubt, analysis, and reading.   I believe it is practiced in a widespread way by the type 1 thinkers that Pamela mentioned. 

 

< And, so my question is how this can work at the level of a society, beyond the individual level. An example, perhaps but not sure, is the societal transformation of profit-oriented, capitalist or stockholder-owned enterprises into employeed-owned cooperatives. >

 

Ok.  I’m skeptical about the concept of employees.   Employees aren’t the deciders pretty much by definition.   To simply have a bunch of people that do enough to get an income isn’t typically enough to make an enterprise successful.   Hard problems require improvisation, not just managers that divide up work.  Actually I’m skeptical about the concept of enterprises too.   Enterprises imply insiders and outsiders and thus haves and have-nots.   The only solution I can see is to divorce goals from organizations.   Goals need to be their own first class objects that aren’t proxies for other things like money.  For example, I write to FRIAM because it has an inherent value to me, not because it is proxy for something else like professional networking or whatever.   I work on a free editor feature because I want it.   As soon as organizations get involved there is trouble.  In reality, we need organizations like political parties and non-profits like the ACLU to cope with bigger organizations like the elected federal government.  And we need the federal government to counter other governments that have even more objectionable properties. 

 

< Genetic engineering isn't going to get us there either, IMHO. We don't know where to locate the genes or how to comfigure the so called Hox circuits to get better brains or minds.  Again, better for whom? >

 

Through experiments, individuals with more or less short term memory can be identified.    There have been cases in the popular press (e.g. 60 minutes) about people that have profound auto-biographical long term memory.   There are IQ tests.  There are individuals in academia in industry that demonstrate incredible productivity (objective measures like citations or patents).   Pick some phenotype of interest, and then the inverse problem is what are the minimal polymorphisms in the genomes of individuals that have this phenotype that are distinct from individuals that don’t have this phenotype.   The combinatorics of such a search are very hard (4^(3e9)), but Ising machines like adiabatic quantum computers could help address that.    It would require a huge collection of full genome samples to make the inferences robust.   The idea is to work backward from brains that have the desired property to the nucleotide mutations that statistically are associated with it (and not).  If there are pareto-optimality tradeoffs, that should come out in the statistics too.   For example, being a gymnast or a Sumo wrestler call for different specializations.

 

Marcus

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove