[9rx]

The social contract is broken, but I'm not sure you've correctly identified the cause.

The reality is that a lot of people have truly become useless blobs. Look at Apple's 54 billion dollar cash holdings just sitting there waiting for something of value to cash it in for. That's 54 billion dollars in promises people made to deliver value that they've never made good on. Or, to put it another way, Apple has given away 54 billion dollars in value away for free...

...-ish. Theoretically they can still seek the promises that others made for future value delivery so it isn't technically free is the truest sense of the word, but for all practical purposes it is so. What on earth could you or I ever offer in return to make good on the promise of value we made? I mean, HN tends to be a little more inventive than the general population so maybe you can I can conjure up something at some point. But the average Joe on the street? What are they going to offer to turn that $54 billion promises into actual value? Let's be realistic. At this point, it's never going to happen.

Once upon a time we got this bright idea that if everyone funnelled into university research labs we'd start to all create all kinds of new value to deliver. It was a noble thought, if a bit unrealistic. But somehow that idea got watered down into "go to university so you can get a job pushing paper around", and now the masses don't even understand what value is anymore.

[gsf_emergency_6]

Speaking up for the guy you're arguing with:

"Values" is (one way) how strangers bootstrap trust, "value" is how colleagues (dare I say "compadres") maintain it.

>if everyone funnelled into university research labs

University is an excellent microcosm for analyzing the social compact breakdown, because most of the value has been created by transient workers. With levels of cooperation that any profitable enterprise will laugh at, that value, if properly appreciated, will dwarf GDP.[0]

So I'd agree with GP that values, lack thereof, both internal to academia and of society at large, was the source of the rot.

There's the idea of the long-tail that nobody talks about now, it's still quite relevant, and I'm glad HN is keeping the flame.

[0] seminaries (quasi universities) did a suboptimal values-value tradeoff compared to the Teutonic model. Bell Labs 19xx-1970 obviously had an even better model, surfing on the transience. Internship program was the magic? Values-value resonance? The secret that neither ArcInst nor OpenAI will (re)discover? (Latter too coupled to value!) The profound Ability to capture value from joe and Joe?

Think they were called "program managers" or something.. incubators of valueS. And they didn't need to say what they were working on (contradicting conventional "Apple" wisdom)

i'd love to hear more of your philosophical perspective on IP, historiographic/economic evidence that you've accumulated

[9rx]

> "Values" is (one way) how strangers bootstrap trust, "value" is how colleagues (dare I say "compadres") maintain it.

1. That would imply that if you and I bootstrap trust and then disappear from each other's lives for 20 years, when we finally meet again that the trust will have been lost and will have to be rebuilt. Color me skeptical. It seems to me that most people will, once established, continue with trust until there is some reason to change their mind. It does not need to be maintained, but can be destroyed.

2. Value and trust are not intrinsically linked. In fact, that is the primary reason for why we have a legal system: So that you and I can exchange value without any need to trust each other. If one of us does something stupid within that, the other can send out the hired goons to mess up one's day, thus giving strong motivation to act in good faith towards each other without the presence of trust.

> So I'd agree with GP that values, lack thereof, both internal to academia and of society at large, was the source of the rot.

Nah. Like you said, "values" are only relevant to bootstrapping trust, but trust doesn't scale. Never has, never will. Studies have shown that people can only ever get to know hundreds of people in their lifetime, and cannot even recognize more than a few thousand faces. You cannot build any kind of relevant society on communal trust. Even the smallest communities we find today have way more people than an individual can mange to keep track of. Which, again, is why we establish legal systems instead.

Maybe eons ago, when there were only 100 people on earth, we had a society where values were relevant. But the not-broken social contract being spoken of cannot be from that era. There is no record of that time.

[gsf_emergency_6]

It's going to be hard for me to argue the existence of "high trust" versus "low trust" societies, but I'm happy to accept the relative observability of functional legal regimes. From then on we can discuss whether trust in _systems of rules_ can scale.

you might not like to talk about research orgs. Though I think they are example of a __productive__ system where informal contracts are the norm --so people default to using shared "values" and "folkways" to guide their activities and interactions -- you might argue that unconstrained exploration doesn't scale either.

As for the Dunbar number, it's been popular for HNers to argue for startups that way. "Doing things that don't scale" is one contrarian moral that seem to not involve a lot of legalese at its core. Most effective company lawyers should be like managers, invisible? And startup lawyers-- shared?

Value and trust. I somehow think we agree but I flubbed the exposition. Later.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46155868

[9rx]

> you might not like to talk about research orgs. Though I think they are example

Are they a good example, or are they simply an example of where the stakes are low to non-existent? If the farmer fails to make good on delivering value (i.e. food), there is real risk of you staving to death. That's a problem. If a researcher fails to deliver value. Oh well...? Hell, the very nature of research is such that sometimes value will not be found so that idea is baked in.

[gsf_emergency_6]

These are delicate issues. Not least because research value takes an unpredictably (default long) time to harvest. Here's an agricultural example, which exposes some of the same. Might not be better than the above though it could move the discussion: vanilla farming

-guy discovers manual pollination, unable to capture value in his lifetime.

-people don't starve when they can't have vanilla in their soft serve, but it's still one of the more expensive spices.

-lawlessness means farmers often lose harvests to thiefs.

-Ongoing research to automate pollination (& move production to more developed polities) but I don't think the status quo is going to budge in the coming decades, mostly because the end users always get their supply

[9rx]

The hypothetical vanilla farmer hasn't reached a place of having value. Only after the vanilla is actually able to be captured as value does the farmer enter into trade with it. This scenario you've outlined is much like the entrepreneurial software developer in his basement working on his secret startup idea. Until he has a working MVP that people actually want to buy, he's just there on his own trying to find value to deliver.

This is not aligned with the participation spoken of earlier where the value is already established and others are giving up their value under the expectation of receiving equal value in kind. You're going down a much different road here.