Why the Sporder Approach? Or, Is Economics Enough?

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This could have easily become another blog about economics or politics or philosophy or current events, as all of us are eagerly interested and fairly qualified to comment on these subjects.  But we chose to center our blog around the idea of sporders.

I want to take a moment to describe why I think several economically-savvy bloggers, most of us aspiring to become professional economists, are taking a broader leap outside of normal “economics” to explore sporders.  Of course, this is just my own opinion and ex-post facto rationalization.  But nonetheless, I think this approach brings something new and useful to the table of understanding our world and seeking to improve it.  The sporder framework seems to be effective, honest, and interesting.   Continue reading →

Starling Murmuration Sporder

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Wired has an interesting article on the science of the spontaneous order of starling flocks, prompted by this amazing viral video:

There is no leader directing the flock. Each starling follows local rules, and order emerges on a global level.

Starling flocks, it turns out, are best described with equations of “critical transitions” — systems that are poised to tip, to be almost instantly and completely transformed, like metals becoming magnetized or liquid turning to gas. Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition.

At the individual level, the rules guiding this are relatively simple. When a neighbor moves, so do you. Depending on the flock’s size and speed and its members’ flight physiologies, the large-scale pattern changes. What’s complicated, or at least unknown, is how criticality is created and maintained.

It’s easy for a starling to turn when its neighbor turns — but what physiological mechanisms allow it to happen almost simultaneously in two birds separated by hundreds of feet and hundreds of other birds? That remains to be discovered, and the implications extend beyond birds. Starlings may simply be the most visible and beautiful example of a biological criticality that also seems to operate in proteins and neurons, hinting at universal principles yet to be understood.

Design woes for sporders

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I am almost 3 months into my first programming class (we are learning python), and I am starting to grasp some of the difficulties in programming sporders. I wanted to share a couple of my thoughts on the subject:

First, a reminder of what we are trying to accomplish:

The overall goal is to facilitate the emergence of a spontaneous order through human interaction in a video game medium. Sporders are a relatively common occurrence in video games, but when we create one we want to be consciously aware of what is happening, and be able to observe the process. By understanding what is occurring, I hope that we can repeat the process in the future (thus making is possible to do basic hypothesis testing).

Second, what are the troubles that might arise when trying to create a Sporder:

Sporders often take something simple and build upon it to make it more complex. Programming has been a process of taking a complex problem and breaking it down into simple code-able components. They are at odds with one another. When I think about how to make a sporder I often just find myself replicating each individual process that the sporder has created. In the end I have something with the functionality of the sporder, but none of the adaptibility that makes them interesting. I didn’t realize just how pervasive design bias is unless you try and program something.

Another problem is that I should have started learning how to program five years ago. Learning code is a process very similar to learning a new language, but with none of the forgiving ears of an actual human. Luckily it is an enjoyable process, and I often get the same satisfaction that I would from solving a difficult puzzle.

Third, and finally, some good news:

One of the programming assignments for my class involves creating Conway’s game of life. =)

 

The Sporder of Knowledge, Critical Rationalism, and a Bookstore

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I have particularly obsessed with epistemology in the last few weeks – that is, the nature of knowledge.  I’ve always found the subject interesting, but since my intellectual transformation to (and through) the Austrian school of Economics, methodology of the social sciences has always puzzled me.  Apriorism and extreme rationalism no longer sits well with me like it once did, so I am exploring its ontological possibility and its practical limits.  But that’s for another series of posts and probably a paper.

At the beginning of the summer, I wrote a blog post called “A Critical Rationalist Epiphany at a Bookstore” (on my old blog, now long gone), exploring the nature of critical rationalism and the sporder of knowledge.  I wrote this before we launched Sporder and I started re-framing most of my thoughts in terms of sporders.  I wanted to repost it here for two reasons (aside from the fact that I find the subject fascinating): 1) It deals with the sporder of knowledge and 2) I want to use it as a reference to dive more deeply into epistemology in some forthcoming posts.

And I am currently reading Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery so I am slowly gaining credibility to grapple with his ideas.

Below is the original post, unaltered:  Continue reading →

The Benefits of Increased Population

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Following up on Ryan’s post about population fears, I find it interesting that almost nobody ever mentions the substantial benefits of greater population. I’ll admit that I struggled with the economic arguments at first. It just seems so obvious that a population of billions is too much for the planet. My problem was that I was thinking of it as a physical problem rather than an economic one.

The economic argument for greater population is so simple that I’m surprised it didn’t occur to me right away. It rests on Adam Smith’s insight: “The division of labour is limited by the extent of the market.” Simply put, in a world of just one person, there would be no division of labor, and that person would (maybe) barely survive. With more people in the world, trade makes specialization and division of labor possible, greatly increasing each person’s productivity through economies of scale. Moreover, the range of consumer goods expands, as low-cost mass production of a good is economical only with a sufficiently large consumer market for that good. More people makes us all better off. Likewise, more trade makes us all better off.

As Matt Ridley argues in The Rational Optimist, as population has increased, our ecological footprint has shrunk. Greater division of labor has decreased each person’s ecological footprint so much that it more than offset the addition of more people. For example, greater efficiency in agriculture allows more people to move to cities and reduces the amount of land needed to produce food, both of which lessen our ecological impact. So more trade and more population is better for the planet too!

So rather than celebrate falling rates of population growth, we should really consider it as a bad thing, and encourage more child-having.

Matt Ridley Counters Pessimism About a 7 Billion Population

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Matt Ridley writes in the Wall Street Journal about the recent U.N. projection of there being 7 Billion people living in the world as of Oct 31.  Unsurprisingly, most media outlets mention in the same breath the challenges that such an “overbearing” population brings with it – pressure on food, water, prices, and natural resources, as well as augmenting poverty and economic hardship.

These fears stem from the classic Malthusian fear that population growth will outstrip production, reducing the world into poverty, misery, and death.  Of course, technological innovation, capital accumulation, and market-price rationing of goods have allowed the world not only to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe, but to flourish with flying colors.  Yet it is always more popular to be a pessimist, and Malthusian fears have always lived on, especially among the “Green” movement.  Ridley tackles this pessimism head on in his book The Rational Optimist, arguing in a similar vein.   Continue reading →

Emergent Game Genres: Less Real is More Real?

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I was thinking earlier today about what the most successful game genres are that exhibit emergent gameplay most successfully.  This is interesting to study, but also necessary to think about when designing our own games to exhibit emergent gameplay and simulate markets.

To a large extent, the success of game in exhibiting emergent gameplay is a function of its popularity: as the more players there are playing a game, the more (diverse) content they will generate, and the more likely players will substitute their own ideas for inefficient game mechanics, others imitate them, and ultimately ingrain them into unintended game institutions.

Sometimes this also requires the ability of developers to scale a game, to expand it to massive gameworlds on servers capable of servicing thousands, even millions, of players. But again, this seems to be a function of the demand for a particular game – you won’t see massively multiplayer games that players by and large do not like.  Small, independent games can still attract players and/or turn a profit, but they do not garner a critical mass to require large servers or worry about scaling.  Perhaps this is because their genre only has a small group of devotees, and a “mainstream” game requires a genre that can capture the masses. Continue reading →

Market Manipulation in EVE online

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Below is a quote from a website of one of the major alliances in EVE online. Their plans are to crash a part of the EVE economy by cornering the market for an essential fuel. They speak in a lot of lingo, but that is the basic jist of their plans. This is fully within the games rules, and I’m guessing that the developers will not intervene.

http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?11617-Goonswarm-Shrugged-The-Gallente-Ice-Interdiction

Goonswarm Shrugged
help release this pubbie from his eternal burden. by suicide bombing him.

It’s time to inflict Goonswarm’s rage on Empire once again. Jihadswarm was a way for Goons to cause suffering and rage in unsuspecting pubbies, who (naturally) had no idea that they could be hurt in empire space. Unfortunately, Jihadswarm had few lasting effects on the EVE universe. By hitting everywhere, it failed to hit hard enough in any one spot. That all has changed now, as the finance team has come up with a way to hit a small slice of empire space, and yet have a much larger impact. The isolated pain of random pubbies is not enough. It is time for Goonswarm to hurt everyone in EVE, and so reap the misery of a wronged universe.

 

We’re going to wreck the entire EVE economy

 

Continue reading →