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Stream: community: discussion

Topic: Applied Categories and Capitalism (semi-joke)


view this post on Zulip Hypatia du Bois-Marie (Sep 08 2023 at 05:32):

The ultimate goal of software analysis and formal methods is not to make mutability "well-designed" but instead to cancel it all together.

Just like the ultimate goal of crypto-anarchism/agorism/etc. as well as any economist on our side is not to optimize capitalism but to end it, killing the concept of money/currency once and for all.

Otherwise it's all everybody playing stupid games; what games you asked? Political persecution, economic persecution, social persecution, cultural persecution, Gödel's first incomplete persecution!

jAnE sTrEeT [1, 2] you (anti-historic + anti-revolutionary)^2 piece of sheaf!

[1] https://twitter.com/JXQNHZr1yUAj5Be/status/1699849247942656150
[2]
https://blog.janestreet.com/oxidizing-ocaml-ownership/

view this post on Zulip Noah Chrein (Sep 12 2023 at 15:07):

Not sure if I am responding correctly, but I've long had this view of capital as "the stuff that makes people do things for me they wouldn't normally want to do, because they know they can get others to do stuff they don't want to do, and if they don't, we will fight them using the law and eventually the military".

Money should be much more than that, it should be able to remember its uses and make judgements like "I was created as a byproduct of an action, I am being used by x, here is the space of actions I can be traded for that have equal value to the action that created me". I was hoping blockchain would do this, but mostly people wanted to use it for more money-as-"look at this shiny thing, please do stuff for me". I do, however, believe category theory could play a great role in the evolution of capital towards a MUCH more expressive currency, i.e. not just trading with coins, but trading with highly expressive mathematical structure, i.e. objects of some (formal) category.

Not only would this make for a more equitable economy (i.e. prevent con-men, and false advertisement), but it would also allow for companies to be more transparent about the uses of their money. I recently asked Elon Musk on twitter (a useless thing to do) how I could be assured that the money generated by advertisements on that platform is used for building community and not for lining someone's pocket. If we had such a highly structured notion of currency, might I be able to add a stipulation to the money generated by my viewing advertisements that it is "only to be used for server maintenance and paying developers"? Might twitter be able to say "we are working on project x, and need a certain amount of funds" to which I could devote my funds purely to that project, and not to others?

I do believe there is a formal category theory that encapsulates both mathematical objects (sheaves, groups, sets) and "non-mathematical" objects (sandwiches, chairs, movies) and everything in between (programs, data). Maybe then I will be a rich man, trading sheaves for sandwiches.

view this post on Zulip Steve Huntsman (Sep 12 2023 at 16:18):

Noah Chrein said:

Not sure if I am responding correctly, but I've long had this view of capital as "the stuff that makes people do things for me they wouldn't normally want to do, because they know they can get others to do stuff they don't want to do, and if they don't, we will fight them using the law and eventually the military".

Money should be much more than that, it should be able to remember its uses and make judgements like "I was created as a byproduct of an action, I am being used by x, here is the space of actions I can be traded for that have equal value to the action that created me". I was hoping blockchain would do this, but mostly people wanted to use it for more money-as-"look at this shiny thing, please do stuff for me". I do, however, believe category theory could play a great role in the evolution of capital towards a MUCH more expressive currency, i.e. not just trading with coins, but trading with highly expressive mathematical structure, i.e. objects of some (formal) category.

Not only would this make for a more equitable economy (i.e. prevent con-men, and false advertisement), but it would also allow for companies to be more transparent about the uses of their money. I recently asked Elon Musk on twitter (a useless thing to do) how I could be assured that the money generated by advertisements on that platform is used for building community and not for lining someone's pocket. If we had such a highly structured notion of currency, might I be able to add a stipulation to the money generated by my viewing advertisements that it is "only to be used for server maintenance and paying developers"? Might twitter be able to say "we are working on project x, and need a certain amount of funds" to which I could devote my funds purely to that project, and not to others?

I do believe there is a formal category theory that encapsulates both mathematical objects (sheaves, groups, sets) and "non-mathematical" objects (sandwiches, chairs, movies) and everything in between (programs, data). Maybe then I will be a rich man, trading sheaves for sandwiches.

A PoV that I heard in a conversation with David Spivak and Brendan Fong (I wouldn't claim they were saying it or not, just that I heard it) some years back was roughly that money is a way of encoding possible future actions, i.e., basically a data structure that handles (objective functions common to) intrinsic motivation. Which is an ironic choice of words I guess.

One is greedy to the extent that the actions they want to be able to take in the future are the ones that money enables.