Robin Hanson and "Mencius Moldbug" debate futarchy at Foresight 2010

moldbug come back. we love you

bureaucracy is just a result of a system growing bigger and bigger. it's better to have a country where it is impossible to create a big change rather then have one where new leader can change the country in to fascist one like in modern Russia. In ideal country things should change because of achieving critical mass of some sort. That is natural.

You could have random segments of the society voting and if their segment decides correctly, retroactively, their stock price would go up, and the segment with the highest stock price would effectively be in charge.

A while ago I did a video series on economics that expressed my displeasure with orthodox economic theory. Economics should be thought of along the lines of electromagnetism. We don't have a "free market" in wiring up a building or we would be electrically shocked. But we also do not trust it to privileged experts. Electromagnetism is the ultimate democratic enterprise because it is experience and intelligence that counts.

Holy shit Naval Ravikant is in the building!

You know, I feel like the current "Russia tampered with out elections!" hoopla exposes a rather large flaw with futarchy. I have just been introduced to this concept, so forgive me if I'm speaking out of ignorance, but when this system is implemented as a form of governance how do we negate the influence of outsiders with an agenda and bad actors in general? Even if we look past Moldbug's very real question of how we assign a standard value and we just assume this whole "voting" process is based on money as with current paradigm in the stock market, aren't we opening up the governance of a certain area to manipulation by much larger outside forces with their own agendas?


I'll give an example. Hanson says we should first try this in a small village. Well, let's say it succeeds there and we then move on to say a large town. Now let's say this large town is on the coast and their primary industry is fishing. What happens when a competing town of fishers and fisheries a state away runs the numbers and comes to the conclusion that they could spend X amount of dollars to influence the "betters" in the market to make a poor decision that will place regulations that effectively cripple and ultimately destroy the fishing market in their rival town and therefore improve their position as a supplier of fish around the country? Of course, some of these betters will see through the ploy and realize that ultimately not restricting the fishing market will keep the town intact and thriving, if the amount X is large enough and the other town is able to exert enough pressure it's entirely possible that they can cause enough of the "betters" to take the bribe and bet in the wrong direction. This will be even easier because unlike in the game of chess where even the "disinterested" betters without much knowledge of the game can logically deduce a good or bad move, in the case of politics there are many more factors at play and the "correct" move is not nearly so cut and dry. Moldbug makes this point in his opening remarks, but sadly he gets caught up in his chess analogy and doesn't think to switch it up at some point and remove it from the abstract world of chess and ground it reality, where the flaws inherent in futarchy become readily apparent.


Whereas in chess no one would ever say, "Pawn to King 4 is the better move but its bad for the environment of the board, therefore I think we should go with Pawn to Bishop 4 because while it may lose us the game of chess it will preserve our environment" in the world of politics this is a very real consideration. Now, maybe in some cases this latter move may indeed by warranted, however, in futarchy there will be many instances where it is not but it will be beneficial to outside actors that this move be made. Perhaps at a large enough scale this can be mitigated but especially at the level of small, local governance it opens up certain areas to predatory manipulation in a way that is to me glaringly obvious.

How does a 9 year old video look like it's from the year 1990???

Why do we allow people who do not even work play casino games with other people's lives?

I can't stand Moldbug's virtual deification of Steve Jobs in opposition to the useless government. The vast bulk of Apple's tech was invented by the goverment.

What an awkward fucking event, this is like one of those cringe videos

god dammit i want more.

Kind of comforting to see actual nerds. Is this where they all got raptured to?

Moldbug kinda looks like Sam Hyde

Sounds like the basic problem is: If you use a prediction market to decide an outcome, it becomes a market for purchasing an outcome.

"How did we know that democracy worked? We didn't, we tried it."

"Yeah yeah these malicious interests happen but it's such a large and chaotic system that all the different actors will cancel out, look I can prove it with my sterilized 2-digit sample size classroom experiment model"
the hubris of open societies and social sciences in a nutshell

Moldbug predicts Stockfish 10 in his intro.

I thought futarchy was some kind of futanari dictatorship. Power through dick flattening.

Hansen's nervous laughter is incredibly off-putting.

good debate

"Basically because it fails on both I would say retarded." clap clap clap clap

Futarchy sounds like hell

This was productive because they were allowed to interject and interrupt. The modern debate format is strict because women don’t know how to be aggressive when discussing something and we all lose for it

I came here to see Mencius because I found some of his other writing interesting.

I was cringing all the way through at how utterly unprepared his was for this debate. Utterly one-sided.

I'm not a fan of either of these guys' solutions, but good god, living in futarchy seems like absolute misery. At least monarchy is mostly hands off for the citizen.

Nerds can not talk off the cuff, the “moderator” has a bizarre talking style.

Moldbug; not an index fund guy.

Very enlightening. Particularly Moldbug’s use of Yiddish terminology.

The Facilitator seemed to be eagerly performing metaphoric pillow-fluffing on Robin Hanson. It was almost difficult to watch the beginning. Speaking of stock markets and chess games, how relevant is Game Stop and Robin Hood in this discussion? Seems like a pawn to Bishop 4 opening?

Lulz. If a “king” can get dumped by shareholders, was he really a king?

I just found the holy grail of button downs tucked into jeans. 🙌🏾

A master class on not using filler words.

GME x >>>> Y

This was a pretty entertaining debate. Futarchy seeks to fix the inherent problems with democracy, while still keeping a semblance of democracy around. But I think Curtis Yarvin(Mencius Moldbug) made the better case. Futarchy ultimately fails to address the problems of democratic decision making in any meaningful way. It may look different in form, but it is essentially the same in content. Maybe Futarchy would be good for making it so people have some more skin in the game, and hence might do some more research before making a decision on which market to invest in, but most people will probably just follow market trends blindly since that will mitigate their chances of losing money. And this is not desirable because people still won't be making decisions based on what would be best for the country, it will be based on whether they will lose money or not. Maybe I'm missing something, but this just seems like democracy mixed with plutocracy.

A bunch of autists discussing about economical science fiction lmao

I don’t see why the disinterested speculators would bet on a decision that aligns with the goals of society. They have no skin the game, so if they believed that the manipulators would win then they would put their money behind that. What stops X from betting that Y will win.

Isnt Futarchey when you cook a Pheasant in a Turkey?

Too many people who love moldbug and dont understand prediction markets in comments

Host should be forced to do a push up every time he studders.

2024 update: It has been 14 years since this talk. Prediction markets have been tried in both conventional and cryptocurrency markets. No market ever reached meaningful traction. Futarchy as a governing system is hopeless and barely remembered as a theory as it fails to deal with vision, strategy, planning and consequent decision making. Subsidizing decision making was a non-starter. The freeloader and no-skin-in-the-game dilemmas were never solved. Truly decentralized decision making quickly proved enormously resource inefficient. With the wisdom of hindsight - Moldbug (now Curtis Yarvin) crushed all opponents here.

Hanson is so unnecessarily nervous. Jesus.