Deadweight Loss as a Service | Hacker News Reader

Deadweight Loss as a Service

unoriginal.blog

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The organization pairs won't be exactly 1-to-1 because building is harder than destroying, different organizations are more efficient and money is non-linear. If you had a "dump oil in national parks" and a "clean up oil dumped in national parks", you'd need $1000 for every $1 of effort dumping oil. So at best this system is a discovery mechanism for comparatively valuing organizations, but it's not really set up that way because there's a big difference between an Antidollar™ donated to cancel out a dollar and a dollar donated after you've reached 0 dollars difference from the counter party.

It's satire.

The comment might be too, but you never know on the Internet. Poe's Law.

Turtles all the way down.

I believe you may have something with Anti-dollar. Joking aside, there’s almost always a company on the other side of the coin. Boycotting or otherwise public outcry’s and cancel culture would look a whole lot different if it were a value-based voting platform where competing interests vie for the value. Add reporting for government agencies on what’s “hot” and it sends a clear picture on what the national sentiment is.

I know this is a joke, too, but I worry that you aren't seeing the joke if you think there is something here. This is a setup to take in dollars from everyone and arbitrage the sentiment difference across the userbase, effectively meaning they don't have to pay anything and just take the dollars home. That's the joke. And anyone who actually would put in dollars are who the joke would be being played upon were it real.

Yeah but imagine if there was something like this for real, only the dollars weren't greedily kept, but spent in some way that people on both sides support. Like, maybe pro-choice and anti-abortion supporters would both support the excess money going to support new mothers or adoption programs.

Then imagine the incentives for campaigners to skip the two-sided prediction market and just spend their money on advertising directly to voters and lobbying politicians.

Or the implications of implementing the only way to make this actually work by taking the pesky voters out of the decision process altogether and just letting the money decide the outcome...

> letting the money decide the outcome

some people call that data driven decision making and they like it

others call it “skynet” and they fear it

or they'd just shift the debate to why you shouldn't give money to the opposing party's cause: "they say the money is for ___, but really they do ____ with it".

There is a similar game that distributes more of the money to causes where people vote with their dollars and antidollars and the winning side gets 1-epsilon of it because the operator of the game requires vigorish.

It's like poker with no cards. Ideally the winner puts in just a dollar more than the loser and they nearly double their donation. If the winner can't get enough information to do that and has to spend too much for the pot they end up making a huge unmatched contribution.

The game makes sense to play if you're sure you will win but you don't want to start it if you think you won't.

I believe I know this game. Strange how wording it this way makes way more sense.

I know but I was referring to just the concept of dollar vs anti-dollar. Not the payout or anything but just the idea that companies get X dollars where X is the sum of users who voted for them. Let the people decide.

The reality is humans will find a way to make this corrupt.

But that doesn't let the people decide. That lets the people with spare dollars decide.

Sure, fair point, replace dollar with vote point…

That's a business model, not a joke.

A business model includes a transaction where one side gets value in exchange for returning value to the other side. When it is a one-sided transaction like this, where one side gives money and the other just pockets it... that is more often referred to as a "scam"

No, both parties get value. Suppose a user would receive 1 utility for donating $1 to some cause in a traditional fashion (e.g., giving the charity money directly). Using this platform and with an OmniMatch of 25%, the user will effectively donate $1.25 for the cost of $1 and accordingly get 0.25 extra utility. The user gets surplus utility no matter what. The platform, on the other hand, needs to be careful in what markets it creates and how it sets OmniMatch, in order to make money.

One side gives money, and a fraction of that money goes to the intended cause, is referred to as "fundraising". One of the more dubious aspects of donating to a charity is that some of their resources are spent persuading other people to donate to them, in what looks like a strongly zero sum game for the sector as a whole. I think there's a credible chance the system outlined here would end up at a higher effective efficiency than the current state of the art of charity fundraising.

The joke is that there is something there. For example in a presidential election, I'm indifferent between my preferred candidate having $1 more and the opposing candidate having $1 less. If it were possible to honestly negotiate with my counterpart who supports the other candidate, we could either save our money or agree to both donate to a mutually agreeable charity, and everyone would be better off.

The US certainly spends a lot on elections, and one might debate whether that's too much or not. But what is certain is that campaign money contributes to the GDP. It funds a lot of salaries.

I'd rather that money go to people instead of a faceless cryptofund. I think that's the joke.

But what is certain is that campaign money contributes to the GDP. It funds a lot of salaries.

This is the broken window fallacy. If you have two groups with diametrically opposed goals, giving them each more money to spend "increases GDP" in a local sense, but the result is that a bunch of people spend a lot of effort for a net result of zero, when it could have gone toward something useful.

I'd rather that money go to people instead of a faceless cryptofund. I think that's the joke.

Yeah, the crypto piece is just for additional silliness. For a real version of this you'd need, like, a spreadsheet with two columns.

If all proceeds went to charity, it could work as a snarky way to raise money for some other charity that’s boring but uncontroversial. It reminds me of the publicity stunts that Cards Against Humanity would do.

In all seriousness, this is an excellent idea.

> Add reporting for government agencies

Way ahead of you—we're licensing Praxis Vector™ technology to Palantir. Thiel didn't buy a board seat for nothing.

This is what lawyers are for. Instead of two companies actually competing, each spends a bunch of dollars on lawyers to fight in court. The one who spends the most dollars on lawyers wins.

Just to be clear, there is a lot of sarcasm here. But I think there is a bit of truth too.

cancel culture is a meaningless phrase , it's just culture.

"Cancel culture" may have been meaningless in the past, but now with the new Antidollars™, it literally exists.

    #include <original-post>

Life moves fast.

Culture 2.0 invokes meaningful change and collaboration on a scale never seen before. Protocols are faster, more robust, efficient by up to 35% versus previous generations. It’s the fastest we’ve ever produced and we didn’t stop there. We went deep to heart of the product to enhance even the most subtle of inefficiencies, rearchitecting the core from the ground up…

I suppose it's more that a culture that encourages actions that result in someone deemed unworthy experiencing negativity.

Read as: don't say anything, ever*, anywhere that isn't droll corp-speak, because somebody, somewhere will have an issue with it and try to take you to task. If that somebody has a lot of followers, you could be out of a job/home/country/freedom.

*trawling through post history et al to find narratives they don't agree with, too

yes, and they used to behead kings.

it's culture. culture shuns what it rejects and lifts up.

Shame is even ritualistic in some cultures.

it's definitely just a phrase used by the short end of the stick.

I'm sure there's a nuanced view of a culture that doesn't dive deep enough and mistakes some virtue and accidentally avoids something of value.

but ultimately, it's a term that's just respinniing what cultures do. they select memes and their purveyors and reject the to advance.

evolution works both as species and as culture. we, the advanced scientific community have dropped the idea that evolution moves towards some greater good and just acknowledge evolution is adaptation to environment.

lastly, culture is what people both adapt to and mold by their actions. with social media that's now basically an infinite fractal.

They used to behead kings. And very often what followed was beheading the people who behead kings. And then we'd behead those that would behead the people that beheaded the king.

A culture doesn't progress just because it changes. It is not uncommon for complex systems to undergo changes that make them self-destructive. You talk about evolution, but the reproductively dominant cell in a complex organism is the cancer cell.

It is entirely plausible that western culture would become non-viable because of "cancel(/r) culture". And that cultures of the future would look in it the same way we look at organisms with poor tumor suppression mechanisms. And that too shall be evolution.

> I suppose it's more that a culture that encourages actions that result in someone deemed unworthy experiencing negativity.

This sounds like most cultures in history. The majority of them have some sort of social shunning for people who act like a jerk (read: acts in ways society and culture have decided are jerkish)

> Read as: don't say anything, ever, anywhere that isn't droll corp-speak, because somebody, somewhere will have an issue with it and try to take you to task. If that somebody has a lot of followers, you could be out of a job/home/country/freedom.

this sounds like an exaggerated victim complex. Try it with "kittens are cute" and not something jerk-ish, and let's see if someone pops out of the woodwork to destroy your job/home/country/freedom.

"In my opinion, i don't believe that narrative is complete or correct" is enough to instigate a nasty backlash.

"kittens are cute" is droll corp-speak.

> "In my opinion, i don't believe that narrative is complete or correct" is enough to instigate a nasty backlash.

I don't think that is indeed enough to instigate a "nasty backlash" (read: people in society shunning you for jerk behavior) if the "narrative" is that kittens are cute, but certainly it'd be reasonable for society to shun someone who seems hateful. It certainly seems on its face to be a trollish statement (designed to inflame rather than understand), given that it omits any details.

> "kittens are cute" is droll corp-speak

Is it? According to who? I certainly don't think so. My corporation hasn't said that at any point. Are you sure you aren't using the term to mentally dismiss anything which disagrees with your theory?

Reads to me like: even more power to people with deep pockets, if this was for real.

filed under “#fiction”

Satire at its finest, I was 2/3 of the way through the article and still trying to tell whether it was a spoof, or the public unveiling of a terrible, TERRIBLE startup.

I didn't realize until I read the comments. I am not smart...

I consider this to be Trust Pollution. When you trust something, you will believe it without much thinking, caught off-guard.

Is this the best April Fool's ever? Witness - BBC News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEqp0x6ajGE

The company name alone already tipped me off. It's all very ridiculous, and yet posted here.

The gratuitous use of the TM emoji instead of ™ seemed like a giveaway to me.

Lost opportunities: Tyler Cowen on Advisory Board; Powered by Stripe.

You should start a prediction market on which companies and individuals should be included in the next draft!

(but seriously, it's pretty on point already. I was primed to post that I looked forward to seeing the Overcoming Bias entry taking this idea seriously, but they got around to namechecking Robin Hanson in the penultimate paragraph)

Despite being satire, I think that could work in the US. It plays off the my team / their team dynamic and sends some fraction of the donated money onwards. Very like an inefficiently run fundraising organisation. There's an outside chance of the setup making a loss for the organisers but only if a pair is very unevenly matched (and that's fixable by letting the 'onmimatch' run down to 0%). I'm not even sure it qualifies as fraudulent.

I think it is literally a satire of US FPTP voting. Tons of money go in and the winner receives a pittance. Compare to something like proportional representation or score voting.

What? Other voting systems still end up with a winner. If you had score voting for the US President, people would still spend a fortune on it, and the winner would get the same as he does now.

"No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in"

If we had score voting we wouldn't have to choose between an artificial two choices, the winner of which having barely any resources to actually accomplish anything. I'm interpreting the small amount of money as representing fear to do what the majority of their voters want, lest they lose a crucial 1-2% from the middle.

If my money can be destroyed like that why would I donate through this plat form even though I get 50% more? It doesn’t enough for me to overcome the risks of some group diverting all my funds to an opposite cause

I know this is satire, but this is effectively how lobbying in America is really done.

Part of the satire is how they are trying to present an idea where they just take stacks of money as an innovation that is great for users.

I didn’t even catch it was satire. I was like “that sounds like a funny bedroom project rather than an 8million funding startup.

I don’t know if that makes me gullible or the world I live in crazy.

Reminds me of antistocks [1]:

"We sell antistocks.”

“Antistocks? Is that like . . . shorting a stock?”

“Shorting is barbaric. Think how nice and simple going long is. And then with shorting you have to borrow from some specific person for some specific amount of time, and deal with margin calls and short squeezes and all that garbage. We asked ourselves - how can we make shorting as simple as going long? Antistocks are the answer. A Tesla antistock is a certificate which obligates you to pay us the value of a Tesla stock dividend each year.”

“Why would anyone ever buy that?”

“They don’t! We pay them X dollars to take it! Then when Tesla goes down, they pay someone else less than X dollars to take it from them, and keep the profit.”

“What if they don’t pay the reverse dividend?”

“I mean, that’s the counterparty risk you take with everything, isn’t it? Home loans, car loans, credit default swaps. If it helps, we’re limiting the product to accredited investors, so they can’t, like, pay a homeless guy $1 to take it off their hands.”

“And you think people will prefer this to just shorting Tesla the normal way?”

“It’s not just about shorting Tesla. This is the beginning of a whole new antifinance revolution. Lots of people want to invest in SpaceX, but they can’t, because Elon Musk selfishly refuses to go public. No one else can get around that. But we can! We print a million shares of synthetic SpaceX stock and a million shares of antistock, each antistock share requires you to pay one one-millionth of SpaceX’s yearly profits to the holder of one stock share. Or, you know how millions of ordinary people can’t afford homeownership anymore because Blackrock keeps buying up all the homes as investment properties? We just print a million synthetic houses and a million antihouses, where the antihouse owners have to pay the average rent in a certain area to the synthetic house owners each month. Blackrock gets to invest in real estate without having to worry about all those boring contingent things like mold or termites, and we can leave the real physical houses for ordinary families.”

“Sorry, but this sounds like a terrible idea.”

“I’m glad you think so! Would you like to be a seed anti-investor in our startup? If you’re right, then our antistock prices will never be this high again!”

[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/even-more-bay-area-house-pa...

It’s a joke but it’s also essentially how binary prediction markets work: you have two contracts, each of which resolves to $1 or $0 depending (oppositely) on whether X happens. You then solicit bids on both. When the sum of the offer price of both exceeds $1, you sell one of each, and put the dollar you collect aside to pay out to whichever bet comes true.

I had no idea this was fake until I came here to figure out what I was missing/why anybody would be stupid enough to give money to this.

You could say that reveals something about me. I disagree. It says something about the crypto scene and things being promoted even here over the last few years.

Besides the name of the product. This is what convinced me it was satire:

“… efficient using the latest AI and blockchain technology. “

Being Rickrolled just doesn't have the same feels now that Youtube will immediately blast an add in your face before you can enjoy the classic.

I hadn't noticed that before but you're right, YT has ruined Rickrolling.

I like how different people have different perspectives of the same event. I use Mozilla Firefox with uBlock Origin. YouTube videos do not play automatically when I click on YouTube links from other websites.

Personally, my conspiracy theory is that somehow the YouTube team twisted Google Chrome team's arms to force them to make a byzantine system so that YouTube videos would pretty much always auto play. I cannot imagine how any self-respecting programmer(TM) would agree to such nonsense unless they were being paid very handsomely.

> Personally, my conspiracy theory is that somehow the YouTube team twisted Google Chrome team's arms to force them to make a byzantine system...

You're not far off. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_...

Makes sense. Youtube kept blocking me because it detected ad blocking mechanisms. Being stubborn I would simply reload the page and clicked the x button before it had a chance to load up the blocking code and then the video would play fine.

After a while youtube gave up and no longer tries to force me to uninstall the ad blocking mechanisms.

That or the ad blocking mechanisms got better.

I have a similar experience. Though for me i didn't evade them, i just didn't visit for a ~week. When i eventually tried again, suddenly it wasn't a problem again.

Wondered if i was part of some a/b and they rolled back? no idea. Either way i'll happily drop YT if they try that shit without giving me a sane "no ad" tier lol.

if you have YT premium you can get rickrolled in peace

If you pay the Danegeld to the Dane, I think “in peace” should be in quotes.

Paying for a service someone is providing and appeasing ransacking murderers doesn't really seem equivalent to me.

Oh, you’re right. I’ll go and sign up for the alternative to YouTube instead.

If you pay the ad company, don’t ever expect fewer ads.

Invidious is heaven-sent! I'm just a bit lazy :) and watch a lot of youtube so hope it they get something out of it.

Firefox + ublock origin still has me rick rolling just like back in the good old days

I just don't get the entitlement around Youtube. It costs money to maintain the servers and keep it running, 24/7 so you can enjoy the content. It certainly doesn't owe you a free Rickroll.

If for whatever reason Youtube wants to enshittify its service to destroy its UX it is 100% within its rights to do so.

If you want it to (temporarily) work again, just get everyone within 6 degrees of separation from you to sign up for Youtube Premium.

How is this entitlement? They are just stating a fact, a surprise video isn’t really a surprise when you have ad roll first. They make no value judgement about youtube, you projected that.

It also cost them money to run it when they had competition. Why didn't they charge then? Their dumping tactics worked and they are the only global platform now, do you think they are entitled to extort us and profit from our attention?

And to top it off, you think we should reward this behavior?

There's at least one learning tool where you pick a charity you hate and it donates your money if you don't do your weekly lessons.

More to this idea, paying micropayments to remove money from articles would be interesting.

It would flatten bias. Reporters don't want to piss people off, reporting true facts would minimise this.

It'd be interesting to see what style of article would emerge.

(And people can't be bother paying micropayments to support authors but they sure as hell will be bothered to hurt them)

Sadly, the name ‘hatreon’ appears to have already been taken by a defunct Patreon alternative, because otherwise that's exactly what this ‘business model’ could be called.

grudgepay

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