Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

It's a well written article, but a lot of it appears to be based on a flawed interpretation of Yuen Yuen Ang's "China's Gilded Age".

Ang's argument is that there are 4 types of corruption - Petty Theft (eg. policeman takes a bribe), Grand Theft (eg. a Governor embezzles from the state pension fund), Speed Money (eg. business pay bribes to speed up processing of a permit), and Access Money (eg. pay bribes to get access to the bureaucracy).

Ang's thesis posits that China's comparative ability to somewhat temper Speed Money corruption was the primary driver for China's economic growth (eg. via SEZs and allowing foreign corporate structures to leverage Hong Kong).

This is not meant to be treated as a positive though. Ang points out that China still has an active problem with Access Corruption due to the chumminess between regulators and politically connected firms which can lead to systemic risks (eg. Evergrande Crisis):

"China provides a sharp illustration: by enriching capitalists who pay for privileges and rewarding politicians who serve capitalist interests, access money perversely stimulates transactions and investment, which translates into GDP growth (Ang 2019; Ang 2020, chapter 5).

Yet this does not mean that access money is “good” for the economy—on the contrary, it distorts the allocation of resources, breeds systemic risks, and exacerbates inequality. The harm of access money only blows up in the event of a crisis: for example, America’s first great depression of 1839 (triggered by risky public financing and state-bank collusion) (Ang 2016, chapter 7; Wallis 2000, 2001), the 1997 East Asia financial crisis (Kang 2002), and the 2008 US financial crisis (Baker 2010; Igan, Mishra, and Tressel 2011; White 2011; Fisman and Golden 2017; Fligstein, Brundage, and Schultz, Forthcoming)"

- "Unbundling Corruption: Revisiting Six Questions on Corruption", Yuen Yuen Ang 2019

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3481412

was the "spoils system" the XIX equivalent of "access money" in the US?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

In a way.

While the "spoils system" did incentivize access, the principal-agent problem in this case would treat a voter as the principal and a legislator as the agent, as is a common issue with patronage systems in general.

Access Money in Ang's typology hasn't been extended to patronage politics (yet).

My current take is that culture is just path-dependent[0] interpretations of pretty much the same situation [1]

[0]large mean time between scattering events, e.g. number and make-up of parties dont change very much since the last time the current system became barely-functional (we take on socio-technical debt before we have actual social tech??) as it is, 1789 was a bit too long ago for founder-mode, may halloween continue to console us!

[1]more tk. it seems mostly everyone is tripartite. Tripartism, has its own en.wikipage! But more research on YYA’s taxonomy is required of me.

If you take the interpretation —as I do— that 1984 was a bunch of fast-forward* around the message that Orwell wanted to write, then it also says:

a/ everyone is tripartite

b/ every now and then, mid and high circulate, often by appeal to the low

c/ as soon as the old mid becomes the new high, they forget their promises

which is completely in keeping with what he said in Animal Farm. (did he have a third book on the topic?)

{a: PIE, b: Veblen, c: Machiavelli}?

(I recently learned the chinese latin TLA "SPA" from a Zhihu question about the PRC equivalent of the low)

* not completely fast forward: one sentence of the last narrative explains why the Man even bothers to keep the low down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40023059

EDIT: on Tripartism, yeah, a large part of our current "The Middle" party was previously known as Christian Democrats.

Re:cruelty/VPS/offering struggle

Not sure if the sage is allowed cruelty(=irreversibilty?<= deluging), more sure that the sage is forbidden from enjoying it (or even signalling its enjoyment, cf Not-Hillel)

That may be why a common definition of cruelty is being unnecessarily unpleasant: the Lords/Ladies of Instrumentality would say, it's not me, this just falls out of the Lagrangian, and yes it was horrible yet I was but the instrument. (compare the original words to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6m9SusjNYk )

The chinese note a tension between 霸 and 王 , do they also note one between 正 and 仁?

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92WwPFDn_xM#t=90s

Hmm, no pro-logicians interested yet? Is it because logic is such a gradual domain.. would it move you beyond knowing just the name* to note that i’ve been involved with … experiments?? (Im a fan of <<Experimental Mathematics>> tho this is 2 steps removed, shall we call it “Experimental Logic”?) To whether its common or uncommon, depends on how deep you want to look, i guess!

*Check out DP-G and TSC’s 2020 update, where their Ham doesnt seem so contrived, and in fact, closer to, let’s say, the-country-that-shall-not-be-renamed. Are the chinese paying attention??!! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42039941

Citation on the tension? I suspect the tension isn’t between elite-driven and anarchism*. No time to hunt for a item i saw a while back here (its “everywhere”) observing that you cant see any of the supposedly cataclysmic events of the XX (& XIX?) on the emissions chart.. perhaps we should explore (cue tony blair’s victory song) the tension between inflation and deflation instead?

*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42031606

[maybe Einstein saw Goedel as Spinoza reincarnate, pity he hadnt heard about MPB (or even RPF/AG]

PS hadnt seen the PC article, thanks! The content is very familiar.. however.

Hmm... can't find a source (by 1800 it's already trad.) for "he who causes two blades of grass to grow where one did before, is a greater benefactor to society, than {he who conquers kingdoms, all the politicians of a land, etc.}"

How long before we have Gravitational Engineers?

EDIT: as to pro-logician (in the proset sense) JYG is the closest I know of, and for him physics is more than one applicational layer away. (I find presenting boolean truth tables makes the foundational q's that bother him disappear for me. A gramme is better than a damn!)

EDIT2: [multivariate, wlog] calculus works because things have interiors and exteriors, so in the sense of highly leveraging containment/implication, that'd be an advanced application of logic? (compare CSP's existential graphs)

EDIT3: wow, looking at china vs india (esp. the crossing!), we can really see the power of:

  if your time horizon is...
    1 year    plant rice
    10 years  plant trees
    100 years educate people

I think I need to be less contemptuous of popularisation!

2020 update = https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.10.031038 ?

Will have to think of a good citation; I'd thought it a truth universally acknowledged that bureaucracy, customer interfaces, and other formal systems (正; 正名) cover all bases in theory but in practice the lasting ones tend to leave pragmatic, if implicit, escape hatches (仁; fac et excusa)?

Yes 2020.

Does <<the galois theory of algorithms>> throw any light on vNuC? (von Neumann universal constructors, aka(?) the orthographically suggestive “geon”)

P4: >…we have to construct a Hamiltonian whose ground-state energy is dependent on the outcome of a (quantum) computation. This is possible thanks to Feynman and Kitaev’s history state construction used ubiquitously throughout quantum complexity proofs

[Escape hatches of substance, steadfast in starstorms, abstracting into infinity…]

Defo. I should skim vN's book today, but a priori I'd say it's a mechanical instance of generators and structures; the more universal the universe of structures, the larger the class of generators. (and on the flip side, all members of the empty set are universal constructors, capable of making any other member)

To make a uC you need a quine and some generators; the galois connexion above ought to pick out the fixpoints/closed sets. (in particular, we're usually interested in cases where the latter are infinite but the former are finite — the XX continuation of angels* dancing on medieval pinheads)

Lagniappe: https://www.xkcd.com/974/

* I guess now we would say they expended a great deal of intellectual energy on attempting to discern if angels had 0, finite, or infinite measure?

EDIT: if you haven't already, consider that quinoids don't have to exactly self-reproduce, don't have to be quines: one can program "objects" that, upon receiving a message, reproduce themselves and all their response methods (essence) — but with a new state (accident).

https://archive.org/details/theoryofselfrepr00vonn_0/page/10... has a shout out (bottom of page) to one of my favourite papers: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memorand...

Having missed its 64th anniversary, I guess I should plan to get a working implementation of my kleene algebra (quantale) in shape for its 75th?

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