The Job Board

Here's the intro :

lobbes relatedly, wasn't there a trilema job board posting for a Eulora trade bot? I remember weird details from the spec but can't find the thing these days
mircea_popescu lobbes there were two attempts, the most recent of which you might be remembering. the ancient one was the whole pankkake getting pissed off by himselfⁱ.

lobbes aha okay
mircea_popescu anyway, the thing didn't go nowhere because of a fundamental problem of specification.

lobbes damn. I'm almost tempted to try something along those lines. Would be nice to plop a box up connected to eulora and have my invoices able to be settled automatically. of course, it would be eventually (tm)
mircea_popescu lobbes here's the problem : once you step away from the communion of the holy church and attempt to instead live under a roof you yourself built, you're suddenly very alone. how would you handle these, "write a complete requirement" ? rando will try to game the requirement. soon your administrative costs mount to exceed the actual cost of making the item. it's basically a dollar auction, you know how those work ? actually, i guess ima write an article for to detail. brb.

Before we can move into the discussion of this intro, there's some prerequiste reading to do :

• As far as the communion and the holy church etc is concerned, the relevant article is Dupa Dealuri :
  

  The secret young men do not know, and generally with their perdition find, is that the church as a body, in congregation and comunion, is protected by the Lord with immense, unspeakable power from the immense, unspeakable but ultimately not sufficient lures of the Enemy. For as long as he stands with the others, and in comunion with Christ's own bride, the young man is protected, and what's more, and what's infinitely worse -- feels powerful. Riding on a narrow plank atop a thin separation line between two fluid media the surfer thinks he feels "the power of the ocean". He doesn't, not really. The subdued ocean he feels is the subdued ocean he feels, not the ocean altogether.

• As far as the weakness of contracts is concerned, the relevant article is the (awkwardly named) GPG Contracts article. No quote because integrally relevant.
• "Exam-taking" refers to the practice of agents measured for a specific quality through a specified process to optimize their characteristics/behaviour/etcetera for the process rather than for the quality it nominally aims to measure. This is a fundamental cause of the failure of would-be representative systems, such as ourdemocracy or any other socialism.
• A dollar auction is a deliberately constructed situation to extend the original objection of Buridan's ass into a more refined objection to the possibility -- not the actuality, you understand, but the very possibility -- of deliberatelyⁱⁱ rational activity. It goes like so : should someone auction a dollar on the condition that the top two bidders have to pay the amount they bid but only the top one gets the dollar, it would then be a rational move for a first player to bid one cent, and it would further be rational for a second player to bid two cents. At this juncture, it is rational for the first player to bid three cents, and for the second to bid four, and so continuing indefinitely until they're each bidding in excess of fifty cents, meaning the auction is now profitable for the auctioneer ; and then continue past each bidding a dollar, and two and twenty. Because the marginal cost of one extra cent is far exceeded by the marginal gain of one extra dollar.

So equipped, let us proceed to the discussion of the item itself.

The thing sought, such as for instance a script to make your computer beep randomly, or anything else, is the dollar.

To obtain this dollar, you, the "employer", write out a spec describing what exactly it should do, at the cost to you of one penny. This seems like a great deal, to you.

To obtain the counter-dollar, someone, the "employee", writes out an item which satisfies your spec, at the cost to them of two pennies. This seems like a great deal, to him.

Discovering the difference between the dollar sought and the twopenny offered (at the cost of a penny), you find yourself forced to expend two further pennies to revise the spec ; and similarily, discovering the difference between the counter-dollar sought and the counter-spec offered in exchange (at the cost of... a penny), the someone finds itself similarily forced to expend three further pennies to revise the delivery.

This game will continue, and "rationally" at that, long long after you've both expended in excess of the value of the dollar in your respective, rational but entirely useless and besides the point activities.

It may seem, naively, that there should be a way out of this ; but leaving aside your intuitions to which you are more than welcome as ever was a coffin-liner-writer, there is ample experimental evidence to the very contrary. Indeed, if the whole edifice of contract and the society built upon it weren't fundamentally flawed and therefore untenable, what exactly would we be here and why would they be trading their daughters' maidenheadsⁱⁱⁱ for our very valuable secret large numbers ?

Yes, for as long as you live under the irrational mantle of the lordship as today it exists, supported by the steely infrastructure of the WoT and the forum as they have been deliberately (but not necessarily rationally -- if you review the design process you'll probably agree the more correct descriptor is "inspirationally") designed there is a chance such problems may be avoided. But it is a chance not a guarantee, and there is indeed little that can be rationally said about the whole damned thing.

This, then, is why I'm not actively pursuing this item. Until and unless I figure out some kind of way out of this, the "Job Board" category on Trilema lays derelict, and so following. What can you do ?

1. The matter was never clarified. It could have been really system-d that soured the Frenchie on the very early republic ; but I vaguely recall (and can't right now find in the logs) that there also was some complaint about my "not saying anything" for however many months about a project on which we were working together, in the sense that I attempted a specification and he was going to / did some work on.

   Either way, it's a pity, I liked the guy. Then again (as you've possibly noticed from your own experience), not all that you like yourself like you back any. C'est la vie. [↩]

2. There's an important difference between retroactively-rational and prospectively-rational activity. The latter is necessarily a superset of deliberately rational activity.

   In any case, the construction of retroactively-rational histories is in itself an arbitrary (which is to say, irrational) process, which is why Trilema keeps mocking the "just the facts" idiots. [↩]

3. Exactly in the manner the previous set of subhumans, vaguely known as "Indians", traded theirs to the actually human if not very humane colonizers. [↩]