Documenting Crazy

It doesn't seem likely that anyone forwarded the previous message to the intended recipient.

I don't know what my situation has to do with this apparent effort to... as someone said, haha... "take over the world". The same person also said I should just get an economics degree, I "would be done in like a minute", but that was [four] months ago—remember, no one's talking to me!

Honestly, can't people just use this idea and fix most of society's problems! So we can get on with more important things.~

Still since I have basically admitted that I would probably die if my goals were accomplished I don't know if it's reasonable for me to complain about the lack of support. No, I don't know why... and it isn't nice to blame people for being stupid when they aren't trying to be.

It is also possible that if I had 'pushed harder' this idea might already be in use. But I didn't feel it was appropriate when no one seemed like they fully understood how or why it works.

So, backing up. The actual solution was discovered during a period of posting on the World of Warcraft forums. Generalizing between the two situations, it seems that the misunderstanding is of how goals relate to actions taken to achieve those goals, and how incentives should prevent harm during progress towards the goal.

Further back, the idea of 'flows' of money were explored in order to arrive at an explanation for why my investments of a certain type of good in the MMO Aion were not as profitable as someone else who just invested in high-quality end products prior to an increase in demand. Furthermore, to reach a conclusion on the effects of spending money earned on other, high-quality products. This was around November 4 or 5, 2010, and was because someone wasn't talking to me and I hadn't emailed someone else and as a result I didn't feel it was appropriate for me to be studying Japanese, so I got distracted by this issue.

So the economy of Aion was, and maybe still is, greatly distorted by people "buying gold" with real money from other people in the game, and using that money to purchase high-end products. Sometimes this money, or the items sold to make money, were farmed by computer-controlled bots, and sometimes it was done by real players—stereotypically Chinese players who had obtained an account for the North American or European realms.

One of my favourite random legion names for a Chinese gold seller was "Wooden fish and goldfish". Others that I recorded were "Writing poetry for you", "Legacy of Flower", "hero is tears".. there was one couple that I thought was very cute, it seemed like they were always together. Maybe not all Chinese players sold gold, but unfortunately it was the stereotype. One person I confronted expressed amazement that I had found out what they were up to, but they were nice so I ended up giving them food. Bots were a different matter but in one case I discovered that a bot's movement program would stop working if I initiated a trade request. This allowed me to take before and after screenshots explaining what I was doing, with the after consisting of the bot having ran off of a cliff.

After thinking about it, it didn't seem it would help the economy to sell one type of high-quality product at high prices to people who had bought gold—which was against the rules of the game and could lead to a ban, as well as being an insult or provocative thing to accuse another player of having done, even if it was true—and then use that money to buy other high-quality products at similarly high prices. All it did was encourage more people to buy gold, and people were very aware of this when considering prices things were sold for.

However, it also seemed there was no effective way to use large amounts of money that had been obtained in this manner. Giving it away would be pointless. In the real world, money that is 'destroyed' allows the government to print more, but the government is not exactly known for its efficient allocation of spending.

The conclusion was that there is little one can contribute through buying and selling decisions in an economy with efficient determination of prices. Unless there is a clear direction that society benefits from progressing towards, the most important influence is on the norms through which society judges success, or on the 'story' of how that success was reached.

The story of Aion, or at least the parts of which I was able to experience, was of two groups of people whose existence was threatened by the other due to a deterioration of the physical world. However, the development progress of the game Aion in North America and Europe was a story of two groups of people, hardcore players and casuals, whose choices for enjoyable play were threatened by the other due to bad game design.

This is another case of incentives not supporting goals. Eventually it became clear that working less was how to fix economic problems in the real world, where unlike in games it is actually somewhat difficult to find tasks to do that will earn you 'money'. But the reason that people had not already adopted something like this was not clear until later on, maybe as a result of the lack of positive feedback toward solutions that would fix problems that people on the World of Warcraft forums said they had in the game.

It was clear then that there were two different attitudes toward problems experienced in the Looking for group system. Some people thought that if everyone was just nicer, everything would be fixed. Other people had no interest in being nice, or had gotten fed up with incompetent people who felt that a desire to be nice should excuse their poor performance, often didn't want to be in the situation at all but felt forced to, and thought that being 'meaner' would discourage incompetent people from joining groups and improve average performance.

I am not sure how the solution I suggested would have worked in practice, or whether it would have been necessary or helpful at all if other previous suggestions had been adopted, but the end result was as one might expect—people were forced to be 'nice' by not being given an option to be mean (mostly), while performance also became almost irrelevant by lowering difficulty so that incompetent nice people would not hold back groups. This result could be described as 'less reliable metrics or signals'.

But since the game's recent changes had shown that this situation was exactly what many people did not want, it was very significant that people were not willing to support a suggestion that should have prevented this. It cannot, of course, be said that people should have supported the suggestion, but the company developing the game clearly stood to lose from this lack of feedback on the specific suggestion.

And if uncertainty about supporting a change caused harmful errors in that case, it was reasonable that a solution to employment could also exist without having received enough support to already be in use. In both cases, people were just construing resistance to "being nice as the solution to everything" as an actual intent to allow harmful situations to exist. The reality is that when people want to accomplish a goal, they don't want their actions in doing so to harm society; but if people are not willing to design a system to avoid these harmful externalities, it means that either these externalities are not as important as people say they are or the people affected by them are too stupid to align their intentions with effective results.

Since incentives are important in determining the intermediate steps toward goal completion, this meant that incentives about work in the real world just have to encourage people to work less, so that people can participate in those types of goals without feeling like they are contradicting the system. When people accuse someone of being selfish or 'mean', it is important that the target of accusation is able to verify that the set of options which society presents to someone in their situation includes the choices they have decided to make. As pointed out in previous posts, people who are aware of the problems which over-reliance on authority leads to will often conclude that confusing behavior that seems to contradict such assumptions is one of the available ways to help fix that problem, and will therefore often not deny accusations of being 'mean' because they are unable to conclude whether their strategy is the one that most helps society.

However, while awareness of the fallibility of authority might make people respond differently to the idea on this site, this is a false hope if the solution is not actually adopted. (I have been trying to avoid that word due to overuse but already the third time in this post!)

Just for the record, the inaccurate ways people think about the economy, which is reinforced by misunderstandings by political leaders and economists:

1. ALL DEBT IS EXTERNAL: the government is "rational", so if it takes on debt it's only because we don't have enough wealth to raise taxes to pay for that spending. Government debt is like a company investing in capital or a household taking out a loan to buy a car. Foreign countries, mostly China, own all U.S. government debt and receive interest payments on it. Please explain in one or two sentences why the assumptions leading to this understanding are wrong.

2. ONLY TRADE CREATES WEALTH: in a global economy, especially one where the US gets much of the critical "oil" resource from other countries, we only get 'value' when we sell stuff to other countries. The US government doesn't sell stuff, it just buys stuff, so all it can do is dilute the value created by companies and workers in the private sector. Please explain in one or two sentences why the assumptions leading to this understanding are wrong.