throwanident

If the market is a distributed algorithm, then money is a representation of some of its free variables.

Both are made up in the sense that the algorithm itself can be modified by regulation or social convention. There's even a field of economics dedicated to finding out how to engineer such an algorithm (a mechanism) to satisfy a given objective.

But if the algorithm is more or less stable, then it makes more sense to study it rather than just parts of its state. That's the difference.

The Nazis were about as socialist as the DPRK is democratic.

Next thing you'll say is that Somalia, South Sudan, Congo, Haiti and Afghanistan are all socialist too!

I think I saw someone suggest using a multi-armed bandit algorithm with upvotes as the objective. I'd like to see that!

An algorithm like that would balance the exploitation of showing current highly upvoted posts first with the exploration of showing posts with few votes first, so that every post gets its chance while still penalizing spam posts once they're conclusively known to be bad.

To deter intimidation, ordinary voters should have secret ballots. But to provide accountability, powerful voters should not have secret ballots.

Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to draw a dividing line between ordinary voters and powerful ones in a liquid democracy method to satisfy both of these criteria.

> Those that wanted to get involved in the 24-year-old's dinner dilemma paid $5 (£3.50) to vote in a poll, and the majority verdict was that he should go for Korean food, so that was what he bought.

Ooh, voting with money! Now try using the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism - the results could be interesting.