[p2p-research] Building Alliances (basic income and entrepreneurship)

[Paul D. Fernhout]

J. Andrew Rogers wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 9:19 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Another view is that talent is distributed in many ways, and so our systems
>> need to be more distributed to capture that innovation and contribution, as
>> that is not sufficiently done at present.
> 
> This is true, but you are not understanding why it is true or the
> nature of that system. I take it no one here is a big fan of math?

Used to be. :-)

But I found in grad school that people can bully as well as mislead with 
math, same as most anything else.

I agree with Michel that we should be careful linking our self-worth with 
some current understanding in the sciences.

 > [snip]
 > I have metaphysics? Does my mother know?

She probably helped give it to you. :-)

Like you said about driving a car and thermodynamics, all our mental actions 
link to our metaphysical ideas, we just may not be aware of them explicitly.

 > [snip]
> Well that's the problem now, isn't it?  I'm waiting for someone to
> propose a way to do that which passes basic critical muster, but there
> hasn't been much beyond handwaving.  I've been working on this problem
> for years, but from a slightly more rigorous perspective.

As I said elsewhere, assumptions, values, emotions, and aesthetic choice of 
valid tools, are all required to do any kind of thinking. So, rigor may be 
in the eye of the beholder. :-)

> We can't meaningfully solve these problems if we pretend fundamental
> problems with the proposals don't exist. I've heard all these happy
> proposals before, because I used to work with NGOs on designing
> sustainable systems and international protocols of this type. We
> initially made the same naive mistakes then that are being made here
> now.

Many NGOs are so bureaucratic as to be dysfunctional. I'm not sure one can 
generalize from them to p2p.

Can you please provide a summary list of detailed mistakes (and ideally how 
to avoid them)?

How is Debian GNU/Linux a mistake? Or Wikipedia? Or the web? Sure, they all 
could be better, of course. Improvable is not quite the same in feel as 
mistaken, even though one might argue they are similar issues.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/