Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
Trying something new: casting long thoughts into the void. Tell me I'm wrong The primary problem the world faces is that of unpriced externalities. Firms are excellent at finding opportunities to provide goods to customers, but in their rush to remain competitive we frequently find them heaping costs they incur onto the shoulders of people and planet, rather than paying for it themselves. Fundamentally, this is a market inefficiency like any other, and it's a problem that all prior organisms have solved, humanity as an organism is now on the precipice of being able to solve it ourselves. The heart of the problem is this: in order to be able to address the problem of externalities all actors must come to a shared understanding of the costs. In other words, they must come to tell a shared (and true) story about how the world works and the consequences of an action in it.
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Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
The problem with markets today is that they cannot do this for a single simple reason: the context markets create is one that incentivizes the maintenance of private information. To reveal information about how the world works is to give up potential future profits — alpha in the language of finance quants. This is exactly the problem that the negation game seeks to solve: by upgrading markets such that players can be paid for the revelation of information (both *model information* and *state space information*) the negation game is capable of enabling markets to arrive at shared stories of how the world works — such that public goods can be funded or externalities priced — or to fund the resolution of disputes about how the world is or how it works. If we succeed we'll have upgraded our economic structures such that entirely new and lucrative markets are addressable.
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Mike | Abundance
@abundance
I'd say you got the first part 100% right but not the second part. Markets are *inherently* adversarial with information. So it's not possible to use the market itself to come to mutual agreement based on an economic incentive. If 100 people agree that climate change is destroying the planet but it's still very profitable for Shell, these 100 cannot sustainably "fund" the consensus view that "climate change is bad"." Why? Because there is no feedback loop of good opinions in the market, only for profitable strategies. Shell can outspend people so everyone come to an "agreement" that climate change isn't a big issue, because those who profit from externalities have a sustainable feedback loop to maintain their profits. That's why we need to think outside of markets (to consensus mechanisms) for a solution
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Connor McCormick ☀️
@nor
I think 1) markets are just a type of consensus mechanism 2. it's possible to upgrade markets so that they can fund information provision c: it's possible to create epistemically sensitive financial contexts (so more than plutocracy / money wins) See volky's post on this https://x.com/volkyeth/status/1863281120927760692
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Mike | Abundance
@abundance
that is all fine but it doesn't solve the problem you presented in the original cast. If 100 people think climate change is bad, but Shell is making a massive profit from it, the "common understanding" these 100 people need to reach with Shell has to be one where the externality is actually priced (so that it's move valuable not to create it). It's not enough that information about the externality has *some* positive value if that value is not greater than the cost of the externality. My argument is that you can't get there through scarcity-based market mechanisms. The reason being is that you can't create a feedback loop for information provisioning in the market that is more profitable than selling products in the market (while creating externalities)
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