an IR makes it possible to compare very different things to each other; how many cows is a new car worth? how many new cars is a house worth? how about cows to houses?

as more desires emerge, we see a combinatorial explosion of valuation problems

this is where an IR is useful

some technical context: IRs exist to solve a structurally-similar problem in PL theory; how to translate code in any one language to another, when there are a very large # of them?

you could solve this with a "barter system" as well, but that's v hard!

intermediaries are useful

people often don't like intermediaries bc they make a system more complex, in some ways

this is true, but like w/ any engineering challenge, every choice has tradeoffs; here, you trade one additional layer of complexity for a vastly reduced number of overall moving pieces

there are many issues w/ money; it's not easy to make it work well. we've seen many of its possible failure modes; that's why we have so many regulations around this stuff, as the crypto world is rediscovering

but, a tool being hard to use doesn't mean it's not useful

people also don't like money bc they feel controlled by it, embedded within a larger system they don't understand, buffeted around by its whims

I'm sympathetic to these concerns; economics is complex & no one teaches you personal finance

but it's the least bad thing we've tried

every time someone tries to reinvent civics, at some point they run into the problem of limited local information, which sets an upper bound for the efficacy of central planning; to get around this, you need some way of decentralizing decisions

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RT @pee_zombie
also vastly underestimates the power of emergent phenomenon thru convergent local decisioning

standard leftist vision of an at-scale well-organized society suffers from the s…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1334342881205760001

in order to do this, you need a way to "push out" decisions to locales where the necessary information is present, & to "pull in" the decisions about the results

this is a distributed computation problem; in the economy, money functions as the transport layer, feeding back info

this is highly non-trivial to design & implement, which is why historically economies have grown emergently from individuals' desires, each innovation being added just-in-time, agile rather than waterfall

they may indeed be a better system than money, but we haven't found it yet

@pee_zombie I think we have

We need to build an [[interlay]] for decision making.

@pee_zombie anagora.org/interlay

@pee_zombie I believe the interlay should be operated as a [[commons]].