Note: Left-click on this image to get a full view of this digital work of fractal art.
This vibrant floral fractal displays layer upon layer of exquisite patterns.
This digital artwork was created by Mr. Stolyarov in Apophysis, a free program that facilitates deliberate manipulation of randomly generated fractals into intelligible shapes.
This fractal is an extension of Mr. Stolyarov’s artistic style of Abstract Orderism, whose goal is the creation of abstract objects that are appealing by virtue of their geometric intricacy — a demonstration of the order that man can both discover in the universe and bring into existence through his own actions and applications of the laws of nature.
Fractal art is based on the idea of the spontaneous order – which is pivotal in economics, culture, and human civilization itself. Now, using computer technology, spontaneous orders can be harnessed in individual art works as well.
Instead of simple ‘yes no’ voting, the Borda Count and Condorcet allow much greater precision in drawing out the best possible outcome of a vote. For the first time ever, the Borda Count has now been used to make a democratic decision – the naming of a new bridge in Dublin [- the Rosie Hackett Bridge].
“Democracy works on the basis of a decision by the majority,” they say. Is that really the best we can do?
Take Donetsk. One guy wants (a) unity with Russia; others prefer (b) independence, (c) more autonomy within Ukraine, or (d) the status quo. So, what does this guy do? Simple: he concocts a catch-all phrase to unite the (a), (b) and (c) supporters, something about self-determination, and holds a referendum. The (d) supporters abstain; he wins; and two hours later, he announces a policy of (a).
Or take Scotland. In 1997, Tony Blair wanted the Scots (and Welsh) to want devolution. The SNP (and Plaid Cymru) argued for multi-option votes to include independence, but Blair said no. Devolution won by 48% (and in Wales, by 1%!) The SNP now controls the question, so it’s back to majority voting.
Or take any majority vote. The obvious flaw of this blunt, divisive and adversarial instrument is this: you cannot thereby identify a majority opinion, because, to be on the ballot paper, that opinion must be identified earlier. You can ratify a majority opinion, perhaps, if you have consulted widely or guessed wisely. But even then, you cannot be sure.
In contrast, you can probably thus identify, with absolute certainty, the opinion of he/she who wrote the question. Which is why, in referendums, parliamentary divisions or party meetings, majority voting has been used by umpteen dictators; they include Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Gaddafi, Duvalier and Khomeini. Some of them changed their party and/or electoral system; none adjusted the majority vote. He – it was always a he – chose the question, and the question was the answer. It works, always, almost. It backfired twice: Pinochet lost his third referendum, and Mugabe lost his one and only which he ruled to be non-binding.
Majoritarianism was also the underlying doctrine of both Stalin and Máo Zédōng. Indeed, on translation into the Russian, the very word ‘majoritarianism’ comes out as ‘bolshevism’… (oops, so they have now concocted a new word: ‘majoritarnost’.)
Democratic decisions need not be resolved by (simple or weighted) majority vote. If there are more than two options on the table, there are several other decision-making voting systems (and even more electoral systems, for the latter sometimes cater for more than one winner). In decision-making, then, the outcome could be the option with the most first preferences, or the fewest bottom preferences, or the best average; furthermore, there could be quotas, thresholds and weightings, with two or more rounds of voting. There are lots of possible systems.
Only two of them take all preferences cast by all voters into account: the Borda Count, a points system; and the Condorcet rule, a comparison of every pair of options, to see which wins the most pairings. Little wonder that the Borda and Condorcet rules are the most accurate. Indeed, the Borda winner is often the same as the Condorcet winner.
In both, people cast their preferences. Then, in the non-majoritarian Borda Count, the outcome is, at best, the option with the highest average preference. And an average involves everybody, not just a majority.
A form of Borda Count is used in elections in Slovenia and in Nauru. For the first time ever, (as far as is known), it has now been used in decision-making. On 20 May, 2014, Dublin City Council opens a new bridge across the Liffey. A ‘Naming Committee’ of six councillors used a Borda Count to get a short list of five names; and on this short list, a full meeting of Council used another Borda count to identify their consensus opinion: Rosie Hackett.
In a plural democracy, on any contentious question, there should always be more than two options ‘on the table’. If a democratically elected chamber takes decisions by a non-majoritarian methodology, there is no longer any justification for majoritarianism: majority rule by majority vote; neither single-party majority rule nor majority coalition nor even grand coalition.
Consider a consensual polity. One party moves a motion. Other parties may propose, not amendments to this clause or that, but a complete (even if similar) package. If, when the debate ends, a verbal consensus proves to be elusive, all concerned move to a vote.
No one votes no. No one votes against anybody or any thing. Instead, everyone votes for (one, some or hopefully) all the options listed, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In a nutshell, the Modified Borda Count – that’s its full name – can cater for a more inclusive polity; it is ideally suited for power-sharing, for all-party coalition governments of national unity, and for international gatherings. It is more accurate; ergo, it is more democratic.
Peter Emerson is the Director of the de Borda Institute. His participation in the Northern Ireland Peace Process prompted him to join CND. His latest book is Defining Democracy, Springer, 2012.
This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 3.0 license.It was originally published at OurKingdom.
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Decentralization: Why Dumb Networks Are Better – Article by Andreas Antonopoulos
“Every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power.” — Eric Hoffer
In computer and communications networks, decentralization leads to faster innovation, greater openness, and lower cost. Decentralization creates the conditions for competition and diversity in the services the network provides.
But how can you tell if a network is decentralized, and what makes it more likely to be decentralized? Network “intelligence” is the characteristic that differentiates centralized from decentralized networks — but in a way that is surprising and counterintuitive.
Some networks are “smart.” They offer sophisticated services that can be delivered to very simple end-user devices on the “edge” of the network. Other networks are “dumb” — they offer only a very basic service and require that the end-user devices are intelligent. What’s smart about dumb networks is that they push innovation to the edge, giving end-users control over the pace and direction of innovation. Simplicity at the center allows for complexity at the edge, which fosters the vast decentralization of services.
Surprisingly, then, “dumb” networks are the smart choice for innovation and freedom.
The telephone network used to be a smart network supporting dumb devices (telephones). All the intelligence in the telephone network and all the services were contained in the phone company’s switching buildings. The telephone on the consumer’s kitchen table was little more than a speaker and a microphone. Even the most advanced touch-tone telephones were still pretty simple devices, depending entirely on the network services they could “request” through beeping the right tones.
In a smart network like that, there is no room for innovation at the edge. Sure, you can make a phone look like a cheeseburger or a banana, but you can’t change the services it offers. The services depend entirely on the central switches owned by the phone company. Centralized innovation means slow innovation. It also means innovation directed by the goals of a single company. As a result, anything that doesn’t seem to fit the vision of the company that owns the network is rejected or even actively fought.
In fact, until 1968, AT&T restricted the devices allowed on the network to a handful of approved devices. In 1968, in a landmark decision, the FCC ruled in favor of the Carterfone, an acoustic coupler device for connecting two-way radios to telephones, opening the door for any consumer device that didn’t “cause harm to the system.”
That ruling paved the way for the answering machine, the fax machine, and the modem. But even with the ability to connect smarter devices to the edge, it wasn’t until the modem that innovation really accelerated. The modem represented a complete inversion of the architecture: all the intelligence was moved to the edge, and the phone network was used only as an underlying “dumb” network to carry the data.
Did the telecommunications companies welcome this development? Of course not! They fought it for nearly a decade, using regulation, lobbying, and legal threats against the new competition. In some countries, modem calls across international lines were automatically disconnected to prevent competition in the lucrative long-distance market. In the end, the Internet won. Now, almost the entire phone network runs as an app on top of the Internet.
The Internet is a dumb network, which is its defining and most valuable feature. The Internet’s protocol (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol, or TCP/IP) doesn’t offer “services.” It doesn’t make decisions about content. It doesn’t distinguish between photos and text, video and audio. It doesn’t have a list of approved applications. It doesn’t even distinguish between client and server, user and host, or individual versus corporation. Every IP address is an equal peer.
TCP/IP acts as an efficient pipeline, moving data from one point to another. Over time, it has had some minor adjustments to offer some differentiated “quality of service” capabilities, but other than that, it remains, for the most part, a dumb data pipeline. Almost all the intelligence is on the edge — all the services, all the applications are created on the edge-devices. Creating a new application does not involve changing the network. The Web, voice, video, and social media were all created as applications on the edge without any need to modify the Internet protocol.
So the dumb network becomes a platform for independent innovation, without permission, at the edge. The result is an incredible range of innovations, carried out at an even more incredible pace. People interested in even the tiniest of niche applications can create them on the edge. Applications that only have two participants only need two devices to support them, and they can run on the Internet. Contrast that to the telephone network where a new “service,” like caller ID, had to be built and deployed on every company switch, incurring maintenance cost for every subscriber. So only the most popular, profitable, and widely used services got deployed.
The financial services industry is built on top of many highly specialized and service-specific networks. Most of these are layered atop the Internet, but they are architected as closed, centralized, and “smart” networks with limited intelligence on the edge.
Take, for example, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), the international wire transfer network. The consortium behind SWIFT has built a closed network of member banks that offers specific services: secure messages, mostly payment orders. Only banks can be members, and the network services are highly centralized.
The SWIFT network is just one of dozens of single-purpose, tightly controlled, and closed networks offered to financial services companies such as banks, brokerage firms, and exchanges. All these networks mediate the services by interposing the service provider between the “users,” and they allow minimal innovation or differentiation at the edge — that is, they are smart networks serving mostly dumb devices.
Bitcoin is the Internet of money. It offers a basic dumb network that connects peers from anywhere in the world. The bitcoin network itself does not define any financial services or applications. It doesn’t require membership registration or identification. It doesn’t control the types of devices or applications that can live on its edge. Bitcoin offers one service: securely time-stamped scripted transactions. Everything else is built on the edge-devices as an application. Bitcoin allows any application to be developed independently, without permission, on the edge of the network. A developer can create a new application using the transactional service as a platform and deploy it on any device. Even niche applications with few users — applications never envisioned by the bitcoin protocol creator — can be built and deployed.
Almost any network architecture can be inverted. You can build a closed network on top of an open network or vice versa, although it is easier to centralize than to decentralize. The modem inverted the phone network, giving us the Internet. The banks have built closed network systems on top of the decentralized Internet. Now bitcoin provides an open network platform for financial services on top of the open and decentralized Internet. The financial services built on top of bitcoin are themselves open because they are not “services” delivered by the network; they are “apps” running on top of the network. This arrangement opens a market for applications, putting the end user in a position of power to choose the right application without restrictions.
What happens when an industry transitions from using one or more “smart” and centralized networks to using a common, decentralized, open, and dumb network? A tsunami of innovation that was pent up for decades is suddenly released. All the applications that could never get permission in the closed network can now be developed and deployed without permission. At first, this change involves reinventing the previously centralized services with new and open decentralized alternatives. We saw that with the Internet, as traditional telecommunications services were reinvented with email, instant messaging, and video calls.
This first wave is also characterized by disintermediation — the removal of entire layers of intermediaries who are no longer necessary. With the Internet, this meant replacing brokers, classified ads publishers, real estate agents, car salespeople, and many others with search engines and online direct markets. In the financial industry, bitcoin will create a similar wave of disintermediation by making clearinghouses, exchanges, and wire transfer services obsolete. The big difference is that some of these disintermediated layers are multibillion dollar industries that are no longer needed.
Beyond the first wave of innovation, which simply replaces existing services, is another wave that begins to build the applications that were impossible with the previous centralized network. The second wave doesn’t just create applications that compare to existing services; it spawns new industries on the basis of applications that were previously too expensive or too difficult to scale. By eliminating friction in payments, bitcoin doesn’t just make better payments; it introduces market mechanisms and price discovery to economic activities that were too small or inefficient under the previous cost structure.
We used to think “smart” networks would deliver the most value, but making the network “dumb” enabled a massive wave of innovation. Intelligence at the edge brings choice, freedom, and experimentation without permission. In networks, “dumb” is better.
Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a technologist and serial entrepreneur who advises companies on the use of technology and decentralized digital currencies such as bitcoin.
On March 7, 2015, Mr. Stolyarov invited Kyrel Zantonavitch, the author of Pure Liberal Fire: Brief Essays on the New, General, and Perfected Philosophy of Western Liberalism and founder of The Liberal Institute, to discuss his original philosophical framework and its relationship to Objectivism, Classical Liberalism, Austrian Economics, Libertarianism, and Transhumanism. Mr. Zantonavitch was asked challenging questions regarding his ideas and provocative approach, as well as the objectives of his philosophical system. The intense discussion – which, in some places, became a debate – highlighted both areas of agreement and areas of disagreement between Mr. Stolyarov and Mr. Zantonavitch.
Mr. Stolyarov’s review of Pure Liberal Fire describes Mr. Zantonavitch’s thinking thus: “There is perhaps not a single thinker in the world more fearless than Kyrel Zantonavitch. Pure Liberal Fire is the direct, provocative distillation of his thoughts on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, economics, culture, religion, and the history of philosophy – including Objectivism and Classical Liberalism. Zantonavitch seeks to evoke a pure, true liberalism, and he shows no mercy for ideologies and attitudes that constitute its antithesis. He certainly leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind about where he stands on the issues addressed – and each article within the book employs an abundance of superlative expressions – be they positive or negative. When Zantonavitch praises, he really praises – and the same goes for when he condemns.”
Mr. Stolyarov’s response to Mr. Zantonavitch’s approach is characterized by the following comment: “Zantonavitch’s approach and style would entail achieving a fiery, dramatic, immediate deposition of everything (every person, every policy, every idea) he considers evil, dangerous, or damaging. My view of reform is more surgical, focused on getting the sequence of steps right so as to minimize the damage inflicted during the transition while ridding the world of the disease of bad policies (and, in a more long-term fashion, through persuasion and free-market education, also ridding it of bad thinking of the sort that motivates bad policies).”
G. Stolyarov II and Franco Cortese Discuss Humankind’s Future
Mr. Stolyarov invites life-extension advocate and wide-ranging future-oriented thinker Franco Cortese to discuss a broad array of ideas and possibilities regarding the future of humankind.
Apologies for the technical difficulties at the end. The conclusion of our discussion can be found here. The last several minutes of the conversation focus on how emerging technologies could help overcome current existential risks and help lead to the elimination of brutality and barbarism.
Questions addressed in the discussion include the following:
(1) What do you consider to be humankind’s best opportunities for achieving a bright future within the next several decades?
(2) What do you consider to be the greatest obstacles to the realization of such a bright future?
(3) How could such obstacles be overcome?
(4) What actions can most people take to assist in the acceleration of technological progress so as to solve, within the lifetimes of those alive today, many of the major problems currently associated with the human condition?
(5) How can virtual worlds help to improve the physical world?
Franco Cortese is Affiliate Scholar of the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies, Research Scientist at ELPIs Foundation for Indefinite Lifespans, Assistant Editor of Ria University Press, Fellow of the Brighter Brains Institute, Ambassador for The Seasteading Institute, and Chief Operating Officer of the Center for Interdisciplinary Philosophic Studies.
How Can Virtual Worlds Help to Improve the Physical World? – G. Stolyarov II Interviews Peter Rothman
Mr. Stolyarov invites Peter Rothman to discuss the question, “How can virtual worlds help to improve the physical world?”
Peter Rothman, M.S. is Editor of H+ Magazine where he is looking for great articles about the future of technology, humanity, the mind, society, and human culture.
Peter is an engineering and management professional with deep experience in the design, development, and launch, of commercial software products, internet services, and other mission critical systems. He is currently doing research into analysis and visualization of text for a consumer facing application.
He was previously chief scientist of a biometrics-based fraud prevention company. He led the development of Live365.com, one of the largest providers of streaming audio on the Internet. He operated a product development and engineering team for the global multi-million dollar public software company MetaTools/MetaCreations. He founded and operated a startup software company, raised capital, and negotiated eventual sale of company. He has designed and implemented cutting-edge software, algorithms, and technologies.
Peter’s specialties include biometrics, mathematics, streaming media, virtual reality, simulation, text analysis, data visualization, and artificial intelligence.
Peter was an early developer of VR technologies, including developing applications of VR to financial visualization and a concept for unencumbered infantry training using VR for the US Army.
People sometimes support regulations, often with the best of intentions, but these wind up creating outcomes they don’t like. Land-use regulations are a prime example.
My colleague Emily Washington and I are reviewing the literature on how land-use regulations disproportionately raise the cost of real estate for the poor. I’d like to share a few of our findings with you.
Zoning
One kind of regulation that was actually intended to harm the poor, and especially poor minorities, was zoning. The ostensible reason for zoning was to address unhealthy conditions in cities by functionally separating land uses, which is called “exclusionary zoning.” But prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, some municipalities had race-based exclusionary land-use regulations. Early in the 20th century, several California cities masked their racist intent by specifically excluding laundry businesses, predominantly Chinese owned, from certain areas of the cities.
Today, of course, explicitly race-based, exclusionary zoning policies are illegal. But some zoning regulations nevertheless price certain demographics out of particular neighborhoods by forbidding multifamily dwellings, which are more affordable to low- or middle-income individuals. When the government artificially separates land uses and forbids building certain kinds of residences in entire districts, it restricts the supply of housing and increases the cost of the land, and the price of housing reflects those restrictions.
Moreover, when cities implement zoning rules that make it difficult to secure permits to build new housing, land that is already developed becomes more valuable because you no longer need a permit. The demand for such developed land is therefore artificially higher, and that again raises its price.
Minimum lot sizes
Other things equal, the larger the lot, the more you’ll pay for it. Regulations that specify minimum lot sizes — that say you can’t build on land smaller than that minimum — increase prices. Regulations that forbid building more units on a given-size lot have the same effect: they restrict supply and make housing more expensive.
People who already live there may only want to preserve their lifestyle. But whether they intend to or not (and many certainly do so intend) the effect of these regulations is to exclude lower-income families. Where do they go? Where they aren’t excluded — usually poorer neighborhoods. But that increases the demand for housing in poorer neighborhoods, where prices will tend to be higher than they would have been.
And it’s not just middle-class families that do this. Very wealthy residents of exclusive neighborhoods and districts also have an incentive to support limits on construction in order to maintain their preferred lifestyle and to keep out the upper-middle-class hoi polloi. Again, the latter then go elsewhere, very often to lower-income neighborhoods — Williamsburg in Brooklyn is a recent example — where they buy more-affordable housing and drive up prices. Those who complain about well-off people moving into poor neighborhoods — a phenomenon known as “gentrification” — may very well have minimum-lot-size and maximum-density regulations to thank.
When government has the authority to restrict building and development, established residents of all income levels will use that power to protect their wealth.
Parking requirements
Another land-use regulation that makes space more expensive is municipal requirements that establish a minimum number of parking spaces per housing unit.
According Donald Shoup’s analysis, parking requirements add significantly to the cost of housing, particularly in areas with high land values. For example, in Los Angeles, parking requirements can add $104,000 to the cost of each apartment. Parking requirements limit consumers’ choices and increase the cost of housing even for those who prefer not to pay for parking.
Developers typically build only the minimum amount of parking required by law, which indicates that those requirements are binding. That is, in a less-regulated environment, developers would devote less land to parking and more land to living space. A greater supply of living space will, other things equal, lower the cost of housing.
Smart-growth regulations
In the 1970s, municipalities enacted new rules that were designed to protect farmland and to preserve green space surrounding rapidly growing cities by forbidding private development in those areas. By the late 1990s, this practice evolved into a land-use strategy called “smart growth.” (Here’s a video I did about smart growth.) While some of these initiatives may have preserved green space that can be seen, what is harder to see is the resulting supply restriction and higher cost of housing.
Again, the lower the supply of housing, other things equal, the higher real-estate prices will be. Those who now can’t afford to buy will often rent smaller apartments in less-desirable areas, which typically have less influence on the political process. Locally elected officials tend to be more responsive to the interests of current residents who own property, vote, and pay taxes, and less responsive to renters, who are more likely to be transients and nonvoters. That, in turn, makes it easier to implement policies that use regulation to discriminate against people living on low incomes.
Conclusion
Zoning, minimum lot sizes, minimum parking requirements, and smart-growth regulations demonstrably and significantly increase the cost of housing for everyone by raising construction costs and restricting the supply of housing.
The average household in the United States today, rich or poor, spends about a third of its income on housing. But higher home prices hit lower-income households disproportionately hard because a dollar increase in housing expenditure represents a larger percentage of a poorer household’s budget. Indeed, the bottom 20 percent of households spends around 40 percent of income on housing.
In other words, these land-use regulations are unfairly regressive. Relaxing or even removing them would be a step toward achieving greater equity.
Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
Note: Left-click on this image to get a full view of this digital work of fractal art.
This fractal consists of intersecting luminous strands.
This digital artwork was created by Mr. Stolyarov in Apophysis, a free program that facilitates deliberate manipulation of randomly generated fractals into intelligible shapes.
This fractal is an extension of Mr. Stolyarov’s artistic style of Abstract Orderism, whose goal is the creation of abstract objects that are appealing by virtue of their geometric intricacy — a demonstration of the order that man can both discover in the universe and bring into existence through his own actions and applications of the laws of nature.
Fractal art is based on the idea of the spontaneous order – which is pivotal in economics, culture, and human civilization itself. Now, using computer technology, spontaneous orders can be harnessed in individual art works as well.
Note: Left-click on this image to get a full view of this digital work of fractal art.
This ornate rotational fractal conveys intricacy and nobility.
This digital artwork was created by Mr. Stolyarov in Apophysis, a free program that facilitates deliberate manipulation of randomly generated fractals into intelligible shapes.
This fractal is an extension of Mr. Stolyarov’s artistic style of Abstract Orderism, whose goal is the creation of abstract objects that are appealing by virtue of their geometric intricacy — a demonstration of the order that man can both discover in the universe and bring into existence through his own actions and applications of the laws of nature.
Fractal art is based on the idea of the spontaneous order – which is pivotal in economics, culture, and human civilization itself. Now, using computer technology, spontaneous orders can be harnessed in individual art works as well.
Note: Left-click on this image to get a full view of this digital work of fractal art.
This fractal conveys an impression of sharp, determined, multi-layered rotation.
This digital artwork was created by Mr. Stolyarov in Apophysis, a free program that facilitates deliberate manipulation of randomly generated fractals into intelligible shapes.
This fractal is an extension of Mr. Stolyarov’s artistic style of Abstract Orderism, whose goal is the creation of abstract objects that are appealing by virtue of their geometric intricacy — a demonstration of the order that man can both discover in the universe and bring into existence through his own actions and applications of the laws of nature.
Fractal art is based on the idea of the spontaneous order – which is pivotal in economics, culture, and human civilization itself. Now, using computer technology, spontaneous orders can be harnessed in individual art works as well.
