I would like to see a comparison one of these days between nations and open source projects in terms of how they are governed. There is much variety amongst open source projects in systems of government, including consensus (subversion), voting (debian), and benevolent dictatorship (python).

The video features lead developers from the subversion project, which has a consensus based community. During the presentation, they state that voting should be a last resort.

"If you find yourself voting on everything all the time then something is wrong, and you need to be more introspective. Voting means there is a winner and a loser ... People need to learn how to make compromises, and hopefully you are bringing people into your community who are the kind of people who like to make compromises and are willing to deal with that."

This is a gem of a comment to me, because it encapsulates so much of what I think is the problem with many communities - the lack of a common desire for sincere consensus. Many other significant points like this one are discussed, and I highly recommend watching the video.

I've been reading What is Thought? by Eric Baum, a book on the mind by an AI researcher.

For part of the book, Baum describes solving Blocks World problems with a computational economics model. The problem is called Hayek, and it is described in this article. I will just describe the part that is most interesting to me.

The program is implemented as a collection of agents which bid for ownership of the puzzle. Only the owner of the puzzle at any given time is allowed to move its pieces. The puzzle itself is turned into a cash reward when it is solved. Otherwise the world is zero-sum between agents, with money only changing hands during the sales of the puzzle between agents.

Using such rules, evolutionary algorithms are applied to encourage the development of more profitable agents. Successful agents were those able to buy low and sell high, which (assuming accurate pricing) would mean being able to advance the solution the most.

Of course, accurate pricing is a hairy issue; the hardcoding of a good scoring function helps the system a lot.

This is a general parallelization paradigm, where heuristics exist in ecosystems which estimate the value of each other's actions and compete to maximize their own value in that context. An agent's pricing of the puzzle state is subjective to the extent that it is specific to the position of that agent's actions in the chain leading to the solution, and objective to the extent that the other agents see the same chain. I would guess that it is more objective when the action chain is serial and more subjective when many alternative parallel chains exist.

I find Economic AI models cool because they clearly work for humans, and if could be made to work for computers would allow the construction of hybrid cybernetic economies where humans and agents can compete in the same pool.

In a two-way barter trade, two people (1 and 2) exchange two objects (A and B). From the voluntary nature of the transaction, we conclude that both people value their new possessions more than their old; to one person A > B while to the other B > A. These two statements contradict each other, but that's okay because they apply to different people; Person 1 prefers A to B while Person 2 prefers B to A. In fact, this contradiction is what makes trade possible. At this point, there is little temptation to label either person as being wrong.

Now imagine that prior to the trade, the two people had in fact just walked out of the same store, having bought the objects of the trade in the store. At best, if both objects cost the same, the trade seems pointless. In all other cases, one of the people could have done better by just paying less for his post-trade object in the store. This untaken better option prompts us to label the choice as irrational.

In the first case, we had no problem believing that people could have differing preferences for objects. In the second case, however, once the objects acquired price tags, it seemed stupid to trade something with a higher price for one with a smaller price. The way I presented it, the objects were actually cash in the recent past, and trading any two amounts of cash for each other is clearly irrational because the numerically larger amount can always do more.

I wrote this essay to clear up some confusion regarding the zero-sumness of the stock market. In that case, the object A is a stock certificate while object B is money. The question is basically whether stock has an objective price independent of the buyer. If such a thing existed, then every successful stock sales means either the buyer or the seller has made a pricing mistake.

Conclusion? I don't know. I've distilled it as far as I can.