If you found yourself spawned into existence at the exact same moment as everyone else, and had to compete, with a supposedly equal chance of success as anyone else, what rules would you hope govern the set of games that are available to you?

You would clearly need the goals to be challenging, lest it be impossible to distinguish between the players.

You would clearly need the goal to be cheaply verifiable by all, lest it be complex and expensive to administer the game.

You would clearly want the goal to be in principle achievable by anyone in the game, without a tilted playing field or an advantage gained by subterfuge and deceit. Nobody should be excluded for reasons unrelated to the goal of the game.

You would be comfortable that people have differing abilities, but the goal shouldn't be preset to favour the abilities of players who have been pre-chosen to win. For that there must not exist a third-party with unilateral power to adjudicate the result or put their thumbs on the scale.

To guarantee these criteria are met you would want the rules to be written and enforced in public, in an arena or the highest hill in the area, a public square, or some other environment that is equally visible to everyone, in principle and more or less in practice.

In reality we are thrown into life in a brutal competition, judged and evaluated by opaque authorities such as those depicted in literature like Kafka'sThe Trial, from which came the adjective "Kafkaesque", or popular film like The Hunger Games.

Bitcoin and proof of work is the only system that can be said to meet these criteria, and I don't believe anyone would be opposed to these criteria unless they were the beneficiary of the deviation from them.

In life we play games to earn the right to play higher level games. Games nested in games, nested in and heavily correlated with other games. Prestige games, citation indexes, examination systems, electoral systems, conspicuous consumption, sport, social media points and views, the attention game, economic games, sexual competition, discursive competition, war, peace, revolution, and religion, all games, all hierarchies, all of which are rigged or corrupt or opaque to varying degrees.

Goodhart's Law says that a measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. This is incorrect. A measure that becomes a target becomes a game. And a game can be fair, or unfair, a good game, or a bad game. Good games conform to the underlying principles of proof of work:

Challenge - hard to do
Truth - easy to verify
Care - anyone can compete
Responsibility - do it alone

That's why I believe in bitcoin, because bitcoin is for losers, and loser want to be 100% certain that the game wasn't rigged.

Winners, they don't like fair games, they like to win, and to use their victory to tilt the rules in their favour for the next time around.

But there are more losers in the world than winners, and we can choose to play the game that is not rigged against us.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @flat24 18h

This has been an enjoyable read. You express your thoughts and words very clearly.

Why Bitcoin?

Easy, because Bitcoin is the only fair salvation for us mortals, or as you mention, for us losers. The only truly fair game on equal terms. That's Bitcoin.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 21h

Goodhart's Law says that a measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. This is incorrect. A measure that becomes a target becomes a game. And a game can be fair, or unfair, a good game, or a bad game. Good games conform to the underlying principles of proof of work:

Challenge - hard to do

Truth - easy to verify

Care - anyone can compete

Responsibility - do it alone

I think the whole point of Goodhart's Law though is the extreme difficulty of measuring truth. You say a good game needs to have truth: easy verification. But how will you do so without a measure, and how will you stop the measure from becoming poor at measuring truth due to the gamification of it?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules OP 21h

When a measure becomes a target then players will attempt to break the correlation with the thing it's supposed to be measuring, because to win you must be optimised for winning, which is expensive, and discarding the integrity of the game is often a good strategy. If the players can do that then it's a bad game. If the players can't do that then it's a good game.

When students do exams it's explicitly a target, and a measure. Why do we not say that examination results are bad measures? And if we do say that they are bad measures why do we use them?

Think of the people doing the measuring as the selectors, like the crowds at a football match, or potential mates in a sexual competition, or the housing market. The buyers (the crowd, the female, the house hunter) measure the options against a set of criteria. The criteria that each of the criteria being used to make the buying decision are the 4 mentioned, otherwise it ceases to be a good measure.

In other words, don't hate the player, hate the game.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 21h

This resonates with me. I think some winners, especially those that've had the chance to be losers, also don't want the game to be rigged. But that's splitting hairs. Anyone winning would have a hard time admitting the game is rigged, just as us losers would have an easy time imagining the game is rigged.