scalable decentralized currency/contract/communication systems

Oh? Do say more

THIS. THIS IS THE REASON FOR THE HOLIDAY --

"Anyways.  The reasons I wouldn't expect that particular attack angle to work on me if I thought anything more careful than a pure snap decision is, second of all, that I'm explicitly aware of contrasts between easily commensurable quantities and how those can distort my cognition by calling attention to themselves.  First, that I'm constantly putting a quantity on how much I want things.  In Civilization I could easily have translated that quantity to unskilled-labor-hours or, more usual for myself, the minutes or hours of my time that I'd spend to get something - including by working to buy it, if it was something that could be bought directly with money."

"The fact that I don't actually have a bank account full of unskilled-labor-hours, anymore, and instead have a completely unfamiliar currency called 'gold pieces', is contributing to a constant state of disorientation in the back of my mind.  I'll seem less timid and hesitant once I actually know how much everything around me costs and this core process of all of my cognition is able to actually run again."

written by Yudkowsky in Mad Investor Chaos

So... what I'm getting is that prediction markets will be just as annoying but necessary to police for insider trading as the stock market? Alas.

This... is that experiment?

I also want to know the answer to this question

When you say that consciousness is vague and people look to cues from others for how to interpret it, I think you're onto something very important.

Some parenting books treat that as trivially true for kids. It's a bit the basis of CBT. And yet I have an intuitive sense that its implications are critically under-explored. It feels like a nagging intensity in my perceived environment that i reflexively try to focus my eyes on and rising unease when i can't.

Is that the same or different to your reasoning? When that criticality is communicated, what happens next?

Thank you lightcone team for continuing to make these happen. I expect I owe several of you a free gratitude coffee.

Epistemic Status: groping around at an event idea I hope others are interested in

I don't know how to communicate this yet, but there's a ritual I want to do with friends this summer. The following describes some inspirations and gestures toward the general aesthestic.

• It was part of my step-family's lore to learn camping skills and wilderness survival, at one point even giving little "merit badges" for demonstrating mastery. With a similar spirit they would also host summer 'art shows' where'd we'd learn about a different culture and put things we made that year (or day) on display for the family to see.
• Judaism has this week-long celebration that involves building a simple outdoor shelter which one eats in, sometimes sleeps. The shelter itself symbolizes the fragility and transience of life and one's dependence on God.
• Burning Man is a temporary Art-themed city that springs up for a week in the middle of the nowhere and gets torn down cleanly at the end. The standard middle of nowhere happens to be in a freaking desert, so it's got this strong ethos of pushing one's limits individually but also looking out for each other. It emphasizes raw experiences and co-creation, eschews symbols of consumerism. Whole lot of drugs, music, sex, and weirdness.
• Midsummer bonfires or maypoles. For drinking, dancing, singing around. Associated with "fertility", aka event of the year for flirting and/or hookups.
• How To Make Everything youtube series: "Everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery. But could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today?".
• snippets from the sequences
  • Making History Available - "I should immerse myself in history, imagine living through eras I only saw as ink on paper. ... I had to overcome the false amnesia of being born at a particular time. I had to recall—make available— all the memories, not just the memories which, by mere coincidence, belonged to myself and my own era. ... So many mistakes, made over and over and over again, because I did not remember making them, in every era I never lived . . ." 
  • What is Evidence, Entangled Truth, Contagious Lies - rationality as entangling oneself with truths, and truths being heavily entangled with each other.
  • Truly Part of You - "How much of your knowledge could you regenerate? From how deep a deletion? ... A shepherd builds a counting system that works by throwing a pebble into a bucket whenever a sheep leaves the fold, and taking a pebble out whenever a sheep returns. If you, the apprentice, do not understand this system—if it is magic that works for no apparent reason—then you will not know what to do if you accidentally drop an extra pebble into the bucket. That which you cannot make yourself, you cannot remake when the situation calls for it."
• Doing stuff badly and having fun with it, like a child. Your work is going to suck. But it's yours in a way many hyper-optimized alternatives are not.
• Hackerspace/Makerspace: Community-operated work spaces where people with common interests (often in technology, science, and digital art) can meet, socialize, shbrare infrastructure, and collaborate.

Am stalled on figuring out what the minimum viable parts are

Not a literal culture, rather In My Culture.

uncomfortable squirm

In my culture, one is to be super wary of lionizing martyrs.

I want to be excited about cool new holiday ideas. I think trying a fast in a coordinated group is a splendid idea. I want to celebrate the amazing capacity of humans to care about others and to do hard things for good reasons.

but pain is not the unit of effort.

dying for the cause is not a success.

not every cost is avoidable, but i never, ever want to become the kind of person

who mistakes the price sacrificed for a value bought

In my culture there's a meta-tradition around ritual hardships or labors: you are to set aside at least 5 minutes, by the very clock, for considering how you might cheat. If you find you could get results without the hardship, you are expected to cheat for the results and then go find some other way to challenge yourself.