What if we could throw what generations of people collectively built for a concoction some random dude came up with on their own? What about using the same time investment to contribute to improving our current systems?
Whatever you come up by yourself has zero chances of coming to fruition outside your apartment. Working on your local community to improve lives of real people or joining a political party and influencing the direction of debate is way more actionable.
What a negative response. Someone is trying to come up with a new idea and you say you should only work to improve ideas that already exist. Say that to anyone who has ever come up with a paradigm shifting idea. It’s opinions like this that prevent people from trying to break the mould. Their enthusiasm should be encouraged irregardless of its effectiveness.
Oh yes, believe me, I have enormous respect for our current system. It works really well. It has amazing emergent behavior.
In a way, I want to improve the current system; it's just sometimes an issue of branding, mental models, and compatibility, that it can be useful to think of it as something new. Like a new software that's inspired by legacy systems.
For example, by now it's clear that Open Source technology is almost a miracle. The potential for civilization for a large scale conversion to open source technologies is hard to grasp. Imagine every product sharing design files, and new manufacturers/designers being able to build upon all every other design with zero friction.
We have the problem of how to compensate the developers. Currently we're going with a bland of donations, support systems, and a few other apparently meager funding sources. I don't think our legal system is prepared to tackle this (i.e. you can't fix it completely with a well designed license), and neither our economic system can. So that already begs a certain kind of redesign... what if we had some kind of distributed/decentralized entity supervising the flow of technology/information and rewarding them according to societal impact?
We tend to think of a simple government/industry division, but government tends to be too centralized and imperfectly aligned to effectively fulfill this kind of role (industry due to its economic design tends to perform better).
One of the idea (please, give it a try as well!) is to have a decentralized network of adversarially cooperative evaluators for this (in a system that cross-validates itself and economically aligns estimation accuracy).
This seems naive or small-scale.
But almost every major issue from society stems from this imbalance: the improper/imperfect reward mechanism for doing what's good for us; imperfect coordination. Examples: Predatory advertisement, Pollution, Climate change, Open Source funding, Cultural funding, Addiction-driven design, ... I could go on.
I'm not thinking of completely replacing what we have, but having a third element working alongside government/industry.
This is literally the most important problem in the history of humanity and... there's no much on it, except for ideologically-driven discussion.
> One of the idea (please, give it a try as well!) is to have a decentralized network of adversarially cooperative evaluators for this (in a system that cross-validates itself and economically aligns estimation accuracy).
> Whatever you come up by yourself has zero chances of coming to fruition outside your apartment. Working on your local community to improve lives of real people or joining a political party and influencing the direction of debate is way more actionable.
Just because someone isn't spending their time in the way you deem most effective doesn't mean it's not beneficial for themselves or others.
Iterative change is useful and helpful, but it's also how you get stuck in local maxima. They way out of local maxima is to step back and look at the problem fresh without some of the built in constraints of the current system, and is very useful as well even if they end up going back to us, and isn't something we should discourage people from doing.
If nothing else, they'll likely come away with a good understanding of the constraints of the system and why choices are made, and more importantly a "why" that's far more involved and justified than "well, that's how it is and we can't feasibly change it now."
This is the same reason why it's good to have people attempting to make a new HTTP server, or a new database system, or a new ORM. Those people often end up really understanding those systems extremely well even if they usually go back to using the status quo, and once in a blue moon they come up with something new and novel or at least beneficial under a slightly different set of constraints which better serves a certain audience.
Whatever you come up by yourself has zero chances of coming to fruition outside your apartment. Working on your local community to improve lives of real people or joining a political party and influencing the direction of debate is way more actionable.