A Proposal for a Simpler Solution To All These Difficult Observations and Problems

OK. Would you care to help me understand correctly, or are you more interested in telling me how stupid I am?

There is no possible modification I could make to my definition of "ideal" that would make any difference to my understanding of your use of the phrase "ideal money". I have already explained this twice.

Existing merely as an image in the mind:

An ideal is a concept or standard of perfection, existing merely as an image in the mind, or based upon a person or upon conduct: We admire the high ideals of a religious person

I think you erred saying there is no possible modification.

Er, what? No, I haven't (more accurately, hadn't) heard of it because no one mentioned it to me before. Is that difficult to understand?

Yes and you are going to suggest we are not ignoring Nash, but we are.

Nash is not being ignored here. "Ideal money" has not been a topic of conversation here before, so far as I can recall. If your evidence that Nash is "ignored" here is that we have not been talking about "ideal money", you should consider two other hypotheses: (1) that the LW community is interested in Nash but not in "ideal money" and (2) that the LW community is interested in Nash but happens not to have come across "ideal money" before. I think #2 is probably the actual explanation, however preposterous you may find it that anyone would read anything about Nash and not know about your pet topic.

Yes and in the future everyone is going to laugh at you all for claiming and pretending to be smart, and pretending to honor Nash, when the reality is, Nash spanked you all.

(I think I already mentioned that Nasar's book about Nash doesn't see fit to mention "ideal money" in its index. It's a popular biography rather than an academic study, and the index may not perfectly reflect the text, but I think this is sufficient to show that it's possible for a reasonable person to look quite deeply at Nash's life and not come to the conclusion that "ideal money" is "the main body of work that Nash was working on nearly his whole life".)

Yup she ignored his life's work, his greatest passion, and if you watch his interviews he thinks its hilarious.

The person who removed your earlier post has already explained that what he was actually saying about Hayek was not "Hayek is better than Nash" but "please don't think I'm removing this because I dislike the ideas; I am a fan of Hayek and these ideas of Nash's resemble Hayek's". This is more or less the exact opposite of your characterization of what happened.

No, it will be shown they thought it was an inconsequential move because they felt Nash's Ideal Money was insignificant. It was a subjective play.

He was also running around saying that he was Pope John XXIII because 23 was his favourite prime number. And refusing academic positions which would have given him a much better platform for advocating currency reform (had he wanted to do that) on the basis that he was already scheduled to start working as Emperor of Antarctica. And saying he was communicating with aliens from outer space.

No you aren't going to tell Nash how he could have brought about Ideal Money. In regard to, for example, communicating with aliens, again you are being wholly ignorant. Consider this (from Ideal Money):

We of Terra could be taught how to have ideal monetary systems if wise and benevolent extraterrestrials were to take us in hand and administer our national money systems analogously to how the British recently administered the currency of Hong Kong.~Ideal Money

See? He has been "communicating" with aliens. He was using his brain to think beyond not just nations and continents but worlds. "What would it be like for outside observers?" Is he not allowed to ask these questions? Do we not find it useful to think about how extraterrestrials would have an effect on a certain problem like our currency systems? And you call this "crazy"? Why can't Nash make theories based on civilizations external to ours without you calling him crazy?

See, he was being logical, but people like you can't understand him.

Of course that doesn't mean that everything he did was done for crazy reasons. But it does mean that the fact that he said or did something at this time is not any sort of evidence that it makes sense.

This is the most sick (ill) paragraph I have traversed in a long time. You have said "Nash was saying crazy things, so he was sick, therefore the things he was saying were crazy, and so we have to talk them with a grain of salt.

Nash birthed modern complexity theory at that time and did many other amazing things when he was "sick". He also recovered from his mental illness not because of medication but by willing himself so. These are accepted points in his bio. He says he started to reject politically orientated thinking and return to a more logical basis (in other words he realized running around telling everyone he is a god isn't helping any argument).

Could you point me to more information about the reasons he gave for leaving the US and trying to renounce his citizenship? I had a look in Nasar's book, which is the only thing about Nash I have on my shelves, and (1) there is no index entry for "ideal money" (the concept may crop up but not be indexed, of course) and (2) its account of Nash's time in Geneva and Paris is rather vague about why he wanted to renounce his citizenship (and indeed about why he was brought back to the US).

"I emerged from a time of mental illness, or what is generally called mental illness..."

"...you could say I grew out of it."

Those are relevant quotes otherwise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zb6_PZxxA0 12:40 it starts but he explains about the francs at 13:27 "When I did become disturbed I changed my money into swiss francs.

There is another interview he explains that the us navy took him back in chains, can't recall the video.

Let me then repeat my question. What do you expect to happen to the values of those "global commodities" in the presence of an AI whose capabilities are superhuman enough to make value alignment an urgent issue? Suppose the commodities include (say) gold, Intel CPUs and cars, and the AI finds an energy-efficient way to make gold, designs some novel kind of quantum computing device that does what the Intel chips do but a million times faster, and figures out quantum gravity and uses it to invent a teleportation machine that works via wormholes? How are prices based on a basket of gold, CPUs and cars going to remain stable in that kind of situation?

You are messing up (badly) the accepted definition of ideal. Nonetheless Nash deals with your concerns:

We can see that times could change, especially if a “miracle energy source” were found, and thus if a good ICPI is constructed, it should not be expected to be valid as initially defined for all eternity. It would instead be appropriate for it to be regularly readjusted depending on how the patterns of international trade would actually evolve.

Here, evidently, politicians in control of the authority behind standards could corrupt the continuity of a good standard, but depending on how things were fundamentally arranged, the probabilities of serious damage through political corruption might becomes as small as the probabilities that the values of the standard meter and kilogram will be corrupted through the actions of politicians.~Ideal Money

.

[EDITED to add:] Having read a bit more about Nash's proposal, it looks as if he had in mind minerals rather than manufactured goods; so gold might be on the list but probably not CPUs or cars. The point stands, and indeed Nash explicitly said that gold on its own wasn't a good choice because of possible fluctuations in availability. I suggest that if we are talking about scenarios of rapid technological change, anything may change availability rapidly; and if we're talking about scenarios of rapid technological change driven by a super-capable AI, that availability change may be under the AI's control. None of this is good if we're trying to use "ideal money" thus defined as a basis for the AI's values.

No he gets more explicate tho and so something like cpu's etc. would be sort of reasonable (but I think probably better to look at the underlying commodities used for these things). For example:

Moreover, commodities with easily and reliably calculable prices are most suitable, and relatively stable prices are very desirable. Another basic cost that could be used would be a standard transportation cost, the cost of shipping a unit quantity of something over long international distances.

(Of course it may be that no such drastic thing ever happens, either because fundamental physical laws prevent it or because we aren't able to make an AI smart enough. But this is one of the situations people worried about AI value alignment are worried about, and the history of science and technology isn't exactly short of new technologies that would have looked miraculous before the relevant discoveries were made.)

Yes, we are simultaneously saying the super smart thing to do would be to have ideal money (ie money comparable to an optimally chosen basket of industrial commodity prices), while also worry a super smart entity wouldn't support the smart action. It's clear fud.

Or: suppose instead that the AI is superhumanly good at predicting and manipulating markets. (This strikes me as an extremely likely thing for people to try to make AIs do, and also a rather likely early step for a superintelligent but not yet superpowered AI trying to increase its influence.) How confident are you that the easiest way to achieve some goal expressed in terms of values cashed out in "ideal money" won't be to manipulate the markets to change the correspondence between "ideal money" and other things in the world?

Ideal money is not corruptible. Your definition of ideal is not accepted as standard.

But what you quoted him as saying he wanted was not (so far as I can tell) the same thing as you are now saying he wanted. We are agreed that Nash thought "ideal money" could be a universal means of valuing oil and bricks and computers. (With the caveat that I haven't read anything like everything he said and wrote about this, and what I have read isn't perfectly clear; so to some extent I'm taking your word for it.) But what I haven't yet seen any sign of is that Nash thought "ideal money" could also be a universal means of valuing internal subjective things (e.g., contentment) or interpersonal things not readily turned into liquid markets (e.g., sincere declarations of love) or, in short, anything not readily traded on zero-overhead negligible-latency infinitely-liquid markets.

I might ask if you think such things could be quantified WITHOUT a standard basis for value? I mean its strawmany. Nash has an incredible proposal with a very long and intricate argument, but you are stuck arguing MY extrapolation, without understanding the underlying base argument by Nash. Gotta walk first, "What IS Ideal Money?"

I have (quite deliberately) not been assuming any particular definition of "ideal"; I have been taking "ideal money" as a term of art whose meaning I have attempted to infer from what you've said about it and what I've seen of Nash's words. Of course I may have misunderstood, but not by using the wrong definition of "ideal" because I have not been assuming that "ideal money" = "money that is ideal in any more general sense".

Yes this is a mistake, and its an amazing one to see from everyone. Thank you for at least partially addressing his work.

After painting the picture of what Ideal Money, Nash explains the intrinsic difficulties of bringing it about. Then he comes up with the concept of "asymptotically ideal money":

The idea seems paradoxical, but by speaking of “inflation targeting” these responsible official are effectively CONFESSING…that it is indeed after all possible to control inflation by controlling the supply of money (as if by limiting the amount of individual “prints” that could be made of a work of art being produced as “prints).~Ideal Money

M. Friedman acquired fame through teaching the linkage between the supply of money and, effectively, its value. In retrospect it seems as if elementary, but Friedman was as if a teacher who re-taught to American economists the classical concept of the “law of supply and demand”, this in connection with money.

Nash explains the parameters of gold in regard to why we have historically valued it, he is methodical, and he also explains golds weaknesses in this context.

I'm impatient and prefer to cut to the chase :-)

It means, in this context, "the first word of the technical term 'ideal money' which Flinter has been using, and which I am hoping at some point he will give us his actual definition of".

Ideal, the standard definition, means implies that it is conceptual.

You began by saying this:

I would like to suggest, as a blanket observation and proposal, that most of these difficult problems described, especially on a site like this, are easily solvable with the introduction of an objective and ultra-stable metric for valuation.

which, as I said at the time, looks at least as much like "There is such a metric" as like "Let's explore the consequences of having such a metric". Then later you said "It converges on money" (not, e.g., "it and money converge on a single coherent metric of value"). Then when asked whether you were saying that Nash has actually found an incorruptible measure of value, you said yes.

Yes he did and he explains it perfectly. And its a device, I introduced into the dialogue and showed how it is to be properly used.

I appreciate that when asked explicitly whether such a thing exists you say no. But you don't seem to be taking any steps to avoid giving the impression that it's already around.

It's conceptual in nature.

Nope. But you introduced this whole business in the context of AI value alignment, and the possible relevance of your (interpretation of Nash's) proposal to the Less Wrong community rests partly on its applicability to that sort of problem.

Yup we'll get to that.

I'm here discussing this stuff with you. I am not (so far as I am aware) ignoring anything you say. What exactly is your objection? That I didn't, as soon as you mentioned John Nash, go off and spend a week studying his thoughts on this matter before responding to you? I have read the Nash lecture you linked, and also his earlier paper on Ideal Money published in the Southern Economic Journal. What do you think I am ignoring, and why do you think I am ignoring it?

Nope, those are past sentiments, my new ones are I appreciate the dialogue.

But your question is an odd one. It seems to be asking, more or less, "How dare you have interests and priorities that differ from mine?". I hope it's clear that that question isn't actually the sort that deserves an answer.

Yes but its a product of never actual entering sincere dialogue with intelligent players on the topic of Ideal Money so I have to be sharp when we are not addressing it and instead addressing complex subject, AI, in relation to Ideal Money but before understanding Ideal Money (which is FAR more difficult to understand than AI).

I think I understand the nature of money OK, but I'm not sure I understand what you are saying about it. "A money"? Do you mean a currency, or do you mean a monetary valuation of a good, or something else? What is "the general market", in a world where there are lots and lots of different markets, many of which use different currencies? In the language I speak, "propriety" mostly means "the quality of being proper" which seems obviously not to be your meaning. It also (much less commonly) means "ownership", which seems a more likely meaning, but I'm not sure what it actually means to say "money is ownership". Would you care to clarify?

Why aren't you using generally accepted definitions?

the state or quality of conforming to conventionally accepted standards of behavior or morals. the details or rules of behavior conventionally considered to be correct. the condition of being right, appropriate, or fitting.

Yes money can mean many things, but if we thing of the purpose of it and how and why it exists it is effectively that thing which we all generally agree on. If one or two people play a different game that doesn't invalidate the money. Money serves a purpose that involves all of us supporting it through unwritten social contract. There is nothing else that serves that purpose better. It is the nature of money.

It seems to me entirely different from your earlier statements to which I was replying. Perhaps everything will become clearer when you explain more carefully what you mean by "A money is chosen by the general market, it is propriety".

Money is the general accepted form of exchange. There is nothing here to investigate, its a simple statement.

Clearly our difficulties of communication run both ways. I have told you neither of those things. I like money a great deal, and while indeed not everyone uses it (there are, I think, some societies around that don't use money) it's close enough to universally used for most purposes. (Though not everyone uses the same money, of course.)

Yes.

I genuinely don't see how to get from anything I have said to "you don't like money therefore not everyone uses it".

Money has the quality that it is levated by our collective need for an objective value metric. But if I say "our" and someone says "well you are wrong because not EVERYONE uses money" then I won't engage with them because they are being dumb.

I think, again, some clarification is called for. When you spoke of "converging on money", you surely didn't just mean that (almost) everyone uses money. The claim I thought you were making, in context, was something like this: "If we imagine people getting smarter and more rational without limit, their value systems will necessarily converge to a particular limit, and that limit is money." (Which, in turn, I take to mean something like this: to decide which of X and Y is better, compute their prices and compare numerically.) It wasn't clear at the time what sort of "money" you meant, but you said explicitly that the results are knowable and had been found by John Nash. All of this goes much, much further than saying that we all use money, and further than saying that we have (or might in the future hope to have) a consistent set of prices for tradeable goods.

We all converge to money and to use a single money, it is the nature of the universe. It is obvious money will bridge us with AI and help us interact. And yes this convergence will be such that we will solve all complex problems with it, but we need it to be stable to begin to do that.

So in the future, you will do what money tells you. You won't say, I'm going to do something that doesn't procure much money, because it will be the irrational thing to do.

It would be very helpful if you would say clearly and explicitly what you mean by saying that values "converge on money".

Does everyone believe in Christianity? Does everyone converge on it? Does everyone converge on their beliefs in the after life?

No but the nature of money is such that its the one thing we all agree on. Again telling me no we don't just shows you are stupid. This is an obvious point, it is the purpose of money, and I'm not continuing on this path of dialogue because its asinine.

I mentioned my own attitudes not in order to say "I am a counterexample, therefore your universal generalization is false" but to say "I am a counterexample, and I see no reason to think I am vastly atypical, therefore your universal generalization is probably badly false". I apologize if that wasn't clear enough.

Yes you live in a reality in which you don't acknowledge money, and I am supposed to believe that. You don't use money, you don't get paid in money, you don't buy things with money, you don't save money. And I am supposed to think you are intelligent for pretending this?

We all agree on money, it is the thing we all converge on. Here is the accepted definition of converge:

tend to meet at a point. approximate in the sum of its terms toward a definite limit.