Ah rats, at first I thought maybe Hofstadter wrote a sequel
18 karma · joined January 25, 2015
"If our so-called scientific system were really objective and honest, it would include happiness as a disorder." I think this is the goal the paper is trying to expose, more than just making a joke about mapping a good feeling to a description of a bad feeling. Indeed, I think the last line of the paper gives it away - our current system is very incomplete and needs to be extended:
> Indeed, only a psychopathology that openly declares the relevance of values to classification could persist in excluding happiness from the psychiatric disorders.
We implicitly trust a tremendous amount of digitized information because we trust its sources - for instance, digital banking works because we trust banks to only log verified transactions to our account. Sourcing that information is absolutely very difficult, but it doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done.
And "my computer got hacked" is kind of a blanket argument against using technology in general - by that same argument you should probably never use digital banking/investment or anything online to manage your life, and nothing should ever be digitized.
It wouldn't be easy, but it is a good use for the tool.
Ownership of a property is a difficult concept to prove, and there is an enormous industry of title insurance which exists to dig through the records and insure a purchase against unknown claims against the property.
A public ledger would make property title/ownership simple and knowable.
Overall I think blockchain technology is incredibly over-hyped, but does have some suitable applications, particularly where public records are involved.