I was going to give an example of the type of possible result from fixing unemployment as the result of a surplus of intelligent effort devoted to problem solving... and something else, which might have been the 'gap' of feedback between awareness of the underlying problem and actually fixing it. There were two things, and while I briefly forgot what the second one was I think that may have been it. Then a bunch of notes.
People may have various concerns they think are important for society to fix. For example, feminism, global warming and 'proper behavior at atheist conferences' have all been mentioned on this site as things people care about. The feasibility of addressing these problems will be discussed later but for now I will discuss another problem which I have been involved with.
It isn't even really clear who the audience of this site is. Efforts to 'mobilize' the average person have been almost completely unsuccessful. As was identified early on, people like to have an enemy and this site has always maintained that the most obvious group to blame, the rich, were not responsible for economic problems. James Holmes might have read this site, one article says his academic performance started to deteriorate in "the spring" of this year without any actual dates which is the only thing that contradicts that tentative hypothesis, but new posts here often get only 5~10 views or less unless I recently linked to here from a comment on another site—which has become more difficult now that the URL seems to be on a spam blocklist. So if the solution was to have been supported by the masses/'proletariat' in the style of the book 1984, this future doesn't seem likely without the help of people who are intelligent enough to be in the 'feedback gap' formed by knowledge of the evolution of the accuracy of social standards or "signals". In other words probably no need to keep this post simple.
So back to the example..!
The difficulty of maintaining an enjoyable PvP environment in online games
o.0 Wow my URL history actually still has the film critic Roger Ebert's blog... I commented on the purpose of art and why most games are not really 'art', but those comments weren't published at the time. Basically the bit about conflicting goals at the end of the first post on this site. As examples of how a game could be used as art, I linked videos like one about a Forsaken individual.
Player-versus-player is when characters in a game world fight, often used for MMOs which are a type of online game. There were questions about whether to include PvP when the World of Warcraft was designed (around 2001~2003) and the designers were more familiar with the large-scale boss fights in games like Everquest. The type of world PvP that eventually developed was unexpected and WoW's developers had difficulty in finding a solution that allowed character progression without 'bullying' behavior by players against weaker opponents.
I suggested a solution on the forums but what it was isn't very important. Later events suggested that the threads I had made had not been seen by the game's designers, and even when other events suggested that the current developers had seen a different set of ideas and possibly considered using them, the decision was made not to. The game may have declined somewhat in popularity after that as a result of not addressing certain problems that many people agreed it had.
A similar situation was seen with a competing MMO, Aion. While its designers viewed PvP as a central aspect of the game, they made certain cultural assumptions about how players would act and these assumptions were less valid outside of Korea, and so the game experience of many players was reduced in quality. It seemed likely that the North American subsidiary was writing proposals for improving the game for Western audiences, with suggestions I had made maybe having been of use, but almost no changes were made by the Korean developers. The game eventually declined in popularity and became free to play in North America and Europe despite being the most popular MMO in Korea.
It seemed that the common theme in these cases was not only the lack of support by people who should have been able to understand the benefit to the game from the suggested changes, but also hesitation about using ideas from people outside of the company that had developed the game. Just as a professor at a university needs to publish research to advance in a hierarchy even if their teaching quality suffers, people in other industries must pay attention to their 'reputation' even if it means the quality of the product ultimately declines. The only way to get rid of this idea is to increase access to jobs that provide a reasonable standard of living.
The feedback gap
I don't know what else can be said about this. Intelligent people are avoiding serious discussion about the idea which is the 'theme' of this site. After contacting something like 200 local governments about fixing unemployment, I was very surprised when just before creating this site I received a response from one of them... something like that. A later response made me think there was actually some kind of continuity of interest. Other than that it is just various people going on vacation, other strange coincidences, etc...
Oh, and the idea that due to their greater understanding of something, the system of reputation-building regardless of detriment to society is a necessary construct. This site has described how many of the problems in society or in organizations can be reduced to a single variable—the awareness of varying reliability of signals or of authority, and the changes in attitude that result when significant numbers of people are not so aware such as acting like sheep. Since people do not like to discuss the root cause and until now no one has offered a lasting solution, it may have helped to listen to people even if they were unable or unwilling to explain why a given solution was logically the best; but now that these things have been said reputation should be less necessary in the future. Even art should be vulnerable to critique with a proper understanding of the culture it acts on and the goals which precede it and which it invokes.
The curve of a falling object
Can people be trusted? As mentioned before, it is not really possible to answer this question. But it is possible to influence the likely outcome from answering either way, and prevent someone who does trust other people from having worse outcomes than someone who does not trust others.
Oh, and I was going to mention Zombie by The Cranberries, and for some reason a trope on tvtropes.org which actually has little relevance to this site. Trusting people does not mean you can't fight them—you just have to trust them to want to lose. Young humans and many other entities such as cats may 'fight' each other without intent to harm, and for example it has been said that different cultures in Iraq might fight each other just as a way to spend time while being prepared to stand united against outsiders; an inability to understand this can best be explained by someone making simplistic assumptions about whether exploring a situation that ends in failure has personal benefit.
As an example, someone might assume that everyone, or most people of a certain age has encountered the apparent conflict which is at the base of the problem, and that all intelligent people have tacitly agreed to 'defect' or use the strategy of choosing your own goals over those of others. Allowing oneself to fail might then be seen as a 'signal' of not being selfish and by implication of not being intelligent enough to understand the assumptions many people would have made about the root problem.
Critically, people will make errors when they assume everyone else has made the same assumptions about trust that they have, or more precisely when they assume that everyone is using the same strategy toward conflict instead of a population of mixed strategies. When we are young we are taught to be "good", and that being "good" will lead to success in life, or at least some people are... and it is only natural that, while young, some of us will trust the people saying this and apply it to our future course of action.
In some cases this leads to conflict between nations. In other cases, it leads to attacks on individuals with the understanding that there will be some positive result. For example, if people can be trusted when they say that they think unemployment is the most important issue in the United States, and it has been shown that unemployment is associated with a substantially higher suicide risk, someone might logically conclude that people who oppose available ways to create jobs literally want unemployed people to kill themselves and acting in a way that causes people to support job creation could save lives even if some are lost in the process. If people don't want this to happen, all they would have to do is openly come out in opposition to the idea that people should be trusted or that they, personally, can be trusted. In this way, it is not realistic to expect everyone to 'secretly' agree that people cannot be trusted.
So who is responsible for the fact that four years after the financial crisis, unemployment is still very high in the United States and many other countries around the world? People might want an answer to this before allowing society to advance beyond this point in history.
The answer, as said before, is that it is only the result of everyone's prejudices and assumptions. This might be long...
If economists were more competent, the problem would have been fixed in the 1930's or even earlier. The world had no nuclear weapons, but most wars are basically because one or both sides wanted them to happen or refused to devote reasonable attention to preventing conflict and the use of the idea on this site might have prevented the second world war entirely.
But it should be clear that the underlying psychological explanation for the problem is pretty complicated, and isn't taught in economics courses. Even social psychology is somewhat lacking for the same reasons that have lead to more retractions of published articles in many fields—lack of incentive to produce useful results. The faulty assumptions about markets that result can be seen in many discussions. For example, thinking that marginal utility to a firm from additional product is always positive, instead of marginal utility becoming negative as prices would need to be lowered to sell the additional product which would lead to lower total revenue; or thinking about products as something that depends only on the work needed to create it instead of the perception of that product in the minds of social contacts; or not thinking about work or income as signals which in turn inflate the cost of certain products without a proportionate increase in utility for other people.
But part of it is the apathy of people themselves. No matter what economists say or do, the idea of the government creating jobs is very simple and only lacks support from voters. Focusing too much on this issue and thinking it is important to everyone can easily lead to assumptions about homogeneity of strategies toward conflict and whether people can be trusted, and neither polarized scenario implies the nuance which is necessary to interpret support for proposals with unknown viability.
So economists are not really responsible for high unemployment any more than the average voter is. Government workers cannot be held accountable either, because they are just doing the jobs given to them. Wall Street is not responsible either, since much of their profits are just the result of inflation due to budget deficits and people not wanting to raise taxes to match government spending. It would be logical to blame the middle class but people don't really seem interested in doing that. People might want to blame the opposing major political party, but in fact people from both ideological extremes tend to follow their political leaders while accusing both their allies and political enemies of not thinking independently. Maybe people think the United States would be better off if the government regulated Wall Street out of existence or disallowed any use of leverage for example, but while this would lower the profits of financial institutions it would also lead to fewer high-income financial workers and significantly higher unemployment unless the idea on this site is used.
People might think that high profits for financial institutions is irrefutable proof of corruption, but this is easily explained by inflation and trends in economic inequality. 'Government corruption' as an explanation for Wall Street's profits is at best only a distraction, which keeps people hoping for a solution to the "problem" through political change. However, financial workers and government leaders understand that as long as unemployment is high, financial sector profits lead to an objective positive benefit to society by reducing unemployment when people are not willing to vote for the government doing this through more visible means of directly hiring more people or contracting them to do work. Wall Street is thus seen as a 'necessary evil' in response to the greater injustice of an incompetent voting population that refuses to raise taxes to support higher spending.
To be clear, the use of the idea on this site would allow the government to cut spending. It might or might not allow lower taxes since they're already pretty low.
It is the responsibility of a leader to choose good advisors. Machiavelli said to ask for advice while still making your own judgements. While it is true that the current Presidential administration is the most open in history, previous attempts to contact the administration have not resulted in this idea being used, and unemployment is still high which could possibly cost the current President the upcoming elections so it must be said that the quality of advisors chosen is lacking.
If the idea on this site is used and it causes unemployment to quickly be fixed, people might feel the current President should be rewarded with reelection but there is really no strong reason to do this. Both major political parties in the United States see unemployment as the major issue and should agree on this solution, which will allow the electoral debate to shift to other issues.
A more complicated argument can be more difficult and time-consuming to refute, but the idea on this site is only as complicated as you want it to be—starting out very simple, and getting more complex as no one was taking it seriously. Since people have different, and incorrect, assumptions about the economy—or the nature of society—and why this idea wouldn't work it does not seem possible to convince everyone of its validity in a small amount of space.
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