The "cultivate consistent mathematical tradeoffs" paradigm in light of Debt's very pretty thesis about trust-determined resource distribution

CREATED: [2021-04-23 Fri 15:21]
ID: 8163659d-f92d-46bb-95fb-268d5c18c97c
REVIEW_SCORE: 4.0
MTIME: [2025-04-03 Thu 13:07],[2025-01-21 Tue 18:58]

Debt presents a framework of resource distribution systems where its shape is determined primarily by how much people participating in it trust each other. In a high-trust social environment, one that could fairly be called a community, you have a commons, with longstanding relationships of indebtedness that are never expected to be resolved. In a low-trust social enviornment, you get markets, where the books have to balance on a short timeframe; and to enable this you often have coin or cash - fiat currencies issued by a central trusted authority of some kind, or bullion currencies (is that what they are called?) whose value is commonly agreed upon to track the price of the metal used. (The metal functions as an index, it's still a system of mutual agreement, just of a different shape).

In the high-trust communitarian model, can you be VNM rational? Does it make sense to try to be? This opens a stranger question: how do you imagine or characterise rationality without fungible indices like gold, or fiat values?

• Does any account of rationality worth the name reduce to numbers?
• Is that the best heuristic for humans of think about their problems? Are there better approximation algorithms to run?
  • The high-trust model of resource dsitribution seems to be a better heuristic for optimal resource distribution.
    • It lets you run multi-commodity flows sanely - these are hard to compute top-down but easier to best-effort solve in a distributed fashion.
    • It loosens the constraints to consistency-whenever instead of consistency-by-timestamp.
    • It lets you win more stag-rabbit games.

So,

• markets:VNM-rational::resource-commons:?
• markets:LessWrong-rational::resource-commons:?

How do you get Dutch-booked on hard-to-price goods? How does tight correlation of one's community fate fuck with our ability to understand what's going on when a transaction occurs? Or, if you're playing against reality or God, how do you express your ability to leverage knowledge that you don't possess? If I don't want to get dutch-booked by fate, how do I account for the fact that my interactions with fate are entangled with it in ways that are hard to price?

• How aspiration in the sense of that one new yorker article about listening to bach in a music-appreciation class? (sidenote archivebox needed)
• How changes in perception as a goal is selected and pursued? (how in general to maintain reflective consistency across a time period where one is meant to be allowed to change?)
  • How do you not betray yourself?
    • Is this incoherent? Is it more that one's internal economics is poorly understood when understood only in terms of mere exchange?
    • Do our picoeconomics behave like an uruk machine?