that this is just the kind of thing that happens when retailers are foolishly prevented (by public opinion, if not by law) from charging the true market price.

Retailer console base prices are set by the manufacturer. A first-party retailer is not allowed to charge more than the RRP as part of their agreement.

Perhaps an important economic point here is that consoles are generally sold below-cost. Console manufacturers lose money on every product they sell from hardware costs. This is because consoles make their money on games, where the margins are much fatter.

The issue here is that the manufacturers and retailers are working in a commodity mindset, whereas the market for these items has shifted away from a commodity and into a luxury due to the high demand compared to supply.

In general though, I'm optimistic about scalpers collapsing under increasing liqudity. Sony poured a lot of resources into automating their manufacturing pipeline and has been churning them out as fast as they can since day 1, with no sign of slowing. The number of consoles in the world is increasing at a much faster rate than the number of people who want consoles.

Thanks for your thoughts ACrackedPot 🙂

Sounds like a stressful model to think about! Maybe I'm just too much of a pacifist for that mindset. But I agree that friction is absolutely a critical part of democracy. A big part of that is giving people a non-violent way to settle disputes and come to consensus over limited resources.

First, it labels a society that's in civil war where decisions are made by the sword as democratic provided everyone has equal power and is equally effected.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply ChristianKl :)

Such a broken-down society doesn't have a system of governance, and we explicitly say that this is a property of a system of governance. A power vacuum within which a system would normally sit is distinguishably different to a functioning state. So, it seems like we would fully expect this definition to fail here at no fault of its own.

Secondly, it ignores delegation of power. By the nature of delegation of power it means that the person who's the recipiant of delegated power has more power then the people who delegate their power. 

Yes, this is in support of radical and direct democracy, not the watered-down versions we see today which depend far too heavily on delegation. It is a very intentional ignoring of delegation, because delegation is directly counter to maximizing this property. I do propose Liquid Democracy as a just solution for sometimes temporarily delegating power in the "Counter-Arguments: The Average Punter" section, because it is sometimes necessary for decisions where the average voter isn't proficient. 

Delegation of power not only happens through elections. If many people read an article by an investigative reporter, that gives the investigative reporter power which in turn means that a single man can create change when something isn't working. Free speech is a central part of the Western notion of democracy because it allow such interactions to happen.

We are not merely describing democracy as "elections", as I try to outline in the opening "What Is Democracy". You will notice that I describe agency as not merely the agency of an individual within a political system, but general agency of action, which I believe encompasses your views on free speech.

Thanks very much for your thoughtful reply MakoYass, I agree with everything you've said here. It's certainly a strange line to straddle personally, where I'm totally on-board the crypto train but also a radical environmentalist. But I also look forward to speculation being ripped out of the crypto ecosystem as much as possible and replaced with functional value. One day soon, we can hope.

But that isn't what I want, and it's not what I'm saying here. At no point do I make the claim that the values represented by the safety team are or should be static. I understand the point you're making, I've even written about it pretty extensively here, but as far as I can see it's a much more general ethical issue than the domain of this essay. It applies just as readily to literally any organisation as it does to the theoretical organisations proposed here.

Specifically what values wider society holds and how they evolve those values is not the purview of this essay. Whatever those values are - within a reasonable domain of the possibility space - the orthogonality of the production team and those values remains. E.g if your society is single-mindedly focused on religious fervour, your societal values are still orthogonal to any good production team, so it doesn't really affect the point I'm making all that much.

I'm not 100% sure if your intention is to equate democratic governance with this lottery hypothetical, but I'm not quite sure the two can be compared. As to how important or nominally good I might perceive value drift as, well I think it's rather like how important the drift of your car is - rather dependent on the road.

So the concept of "redistributing equally" gets kind of complicated.

Ah yes, you're right in redistributing the 50 tokens when refunding the winners in the same proportion is tricky. Probably necessitates being able to have fractional tokens so you can refund someone 0.1 token or something like that. I imagine it will be very simple for the losing choices.

Also, I don't mean a regular Dutch auction, I mean a blind one where all bidders submit their bid at once (like an election). My understanding of a blind Dutch auction is that it resolves this "people don't bid because they don't think they could win" result in general auctions.

This was absolutely an intuitive suggestion from reading about voting theory and auctions, you've got a much deeper understanding of the VT maths than I do. I do think that thinking about elections like an auction for a decision can be a useful way of thinking about it, but I don't have professional experience with this beyond helping to design some videogame economies. Don't take this as any kind of standard suggestion - just mine :)

Why would it bother?

We can't really speculate too strongly about the goals of an emerging AGI, so we have to consider all possibilities. "Bothering" is a human construct of thinking that an AGI is under no obligation to conform to.

An AI that isn't using all it's compute towards it's assigned task is one that gets replaced with one that is.

This is why I specify that this is an emerging AGI, where we are in a situation where the result of the iterator is so complex that only the thing iterating it understands the relationship between symbols and output. We can provide discriminators - as I also describe - to try and track an AGI's alignment towards the goals we want, but we absolutely can't guarantee that every last bit of compute is going to be dedicated to anything in particular.