Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable because there's a constant red blinking light re-assuring people that, in fact, he doesn't have any clothes on. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for a more realistic example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates due to it clearly and verifiably not being respected.
Yep, and we have seen some government bodies using Github or other platforms to publish open data, or to be more transparent on procedures, and yet most of them still don't do it. Which is my point: the problem is not lack of technology, but lack of motivation/human capability/initiative to do it.
> Once you have verifiable "truth" in a system, it becomes a lot harder for it to become corrupt. "The emperor has no clothes" modality stops being profitable. If a central authority clearly goes against the protocols of the system, for example: the police decide not to arrest someone who is proven to have stolen $10 million from someone, the system disintegrates.
I'm sorry but this looks incredibly naive. I can tell you a very real example: in my country, Spain, we have papers proving that, among others, a certain M. Rajoy, of the PP party, received money that came from illegal donations. The prime minister at the time, Mariano Rajoy from the PP party, denied that it was him on the papers. He didn't face any legal consequence.
There have been so many times that a central authority has clearly gone against the protocols of the system without it disintegrating... You can't apply tech solutions to a problem that's not at all about tech.
That's why you get papers "proving" someone's guilt, but no action taken because the handling of such situations lies outside of the common understanding of the system. I'm sure most people think to themselves "I'm sure if the papers were legitimate then that person would be in jail, there must be something else going on". When you codify the system entirely, and people buy into it, then someone submits papers recognized by the system to be authentic that prove someone is guilty of a crime, it's much more likely there will be enough pressure to take action in that case, because then people are thinking more along the lines of "those legitimate papers proved they're guilty, why are they still not in jail?"
Obviously one major problem is how to build a system which handles all of the edge-cases that crop up? One possible answer is to use a DAO which can modify itself through whatever means (usually democratic).
Or people think to themselves "well, the papers are authentic but the meaning is open to interpretation" or "well, it's not such a bad thing" or "well, but the others are doing worse", or a myriad of things. All of those are real arguments I've seen made.
It is naive to think that you can codify everything into a system in a way where there's no open interpretation possible. It is naive to think that people will trust the system instead of what they heard the system says, or that people will trust the system over leaders, or the the people responsible for enforcing the system decisions and feeding the system information won't find a way to elude responsibility.
In general, it is naive to think that the problem of corruption, which is a problem about trust (if the person I like says he didn't do it or did it for a good reason, then I trust him above all else), enforcement (the ones responsible for enforcing the rules are the ones breaking them) and tolerance (people don't care that much about corruption if it doesn't harm them) will be fixed by a solution that at most will help a little bit in the enforcement part.
In any well designed online game (please don't use shitty ones against me), cheaters aren't able to hijack the entire system or ruin an economy. Their exploits break the game temporarily and most of the time it doesn't affect that many people. In bad cases, the state gets rolled back, the exploit patched, and the game continues. Sometimes things are just unavoidable, and everyone counts their losses.
I think blockchain has the potential to make fairer and more resilient systems, and with new incentives as well. We can use game theory to try wildly different societal structures, and quickly switch to another one if one doesn't work well.
On some level, trust always has to be present. If we make the rules trustless, enforcement becomes the bottleneck (until Robocop?), but it's still potentially better than what we have now where we simply have to trust millions of other people not to fuck with anything too much.
This is useless and unconstructive generalizaton. AFAIK many non-tech problems were solved with technical solutions.
Technology is not a field. Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives.
Not at all. I mean, to take your example:
> Not enough food? Invent agriculture.
Agriculture is invented and pretty advanced and yet there are a lot of humans suffering from hunger.
Technology is what humans apply to improve their lives when they don't have a way to do something. Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues... Having the technology is far from enough in most cases.
The idea that "technology solves everything" permeates HN and you'll see it all over the place in threads about education, politics, corruption, music, math... Funnily enough, when the people who actually know about the topic show up in those threads, most of the time they end up explaining why the problem at hand is not at all technology related.
Perhaps we could invent a new thing to solve that too? Improvements to crop technology, breeding, farming methods continue to happen every year. Inventions like the Internet bring information to people in rural areas who might not otherwise have had access to it. Why can't we solve all these things with technology?
> Sometimes the problem isn't knowing how to do something, but getting people to do it, to give you money for it, to use it in a responsible way, teaching them, logistical issues...
But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?
It seems anything humans invent is just one more tool we accumulate as a society. Once it was language, then writing, then mass communication, now perhaps it'll be a secure economy.
Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.
> But can't those things all be solved by inventing something? Let's say you wanted to teach someone something, perhaps even without their knowledge or against their will? Could someone not invent a thing or process for doing that?
No, I don't think you can. You can't fix people not wanting to do things by tech (unless you want to create a slaving machine, and I don't think that's the idea), you can't make tech that magically eliminates energy requirements to transport or build things, or that eliminates costs. I think we need to be at least a little bit realistic when evaluating the problems.
I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology. It's like someone saying that you only need a hammer for woodworking.
At some point, people were afraid of any technology. Now, they live online, eating highly processed food delivered by planes. Yes, you can ‘fix’ people. Just give them convenience.
> I don't see one can be naive/deluded enough to think all problems can be solved by new technology.
Who said that all problems can be solved by technology?
> Unless you invent a way to generate political will, eliminate wars, reduce inequality, no, I don't think you can.
Technological progress often goes against the will of governments. See Twitter-triggered revolutions.
You can't solve non-tech problems with technical solutions. If the government doesn't bother to have accessible documentation about how to do X thing, why would they bother to make a blockchain about it? If the knowledge about how to do X thing is not written down but depends on how a bunch people end up implementing it and never cared about it, how are they going to put those procedures into code?
> Yes, you could create a central system which flags "bad actions" or something, but it'd be difficult to prove someone scammed you without the cooperation of the central authority.
Given that we rely on the central authority to enforce rules, it doesn't seem too weird to expect them to cooperate.
> Currently if someone says "no I didn't scam you", the truth of their statement is ambiguous without cooperative investigation. On a blockchain it's inherently unambiguous and the information is immediately available for all parties involved to know how to proceed.
That's a naive way to look at it. We don't live in the blockchain. You'd still need cooperative investigation to ensure that what ended up in the blockchain is what the parties agreed to. Unless you move absolutely everything to the blockchain, including personal understandings and expectations of contracts, you will still need out-of-chain investigations.