At 1:21 PM -0700 4/15/01, Greg Broiles wrote:
At 01:46 AM 4/15/2001 -0700, Ryan Sorensen wrote:
Read the hundreds of articles on these matters. Read "The Enterprise of Law: Justice without the State," by Bruce Benson. Read David Friedman's "Machinery of Freedom," and his other books. Read...
The point is, Aimee, _read the background material_.
Admittedly, I'm not Aimee. I was wondering if I could get a few helpful pointers towards the background material? Any assistance would be much appreciated.
You might also take a look at Robert Axelrod's _The Evolution of Cooperation_.
And there are a dozen other books. The Well-Read Cypherpunk should know something about free market economics (not the Samuelson technical stuff taught in introductory econ classes in college), a litte bit about game theory and evolutionary game theory, some basic anarchist theory (left or right, provided one can see through the ideology), and should have an exposure to primitive cultures and how they trade for goods, how international commerce evolved, etc. It used to be that wide reading in "Scientific American" would supply a lot of the basics, stripped of any ideology. (Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column was a staple...fortunately, his couple of dozen books are widely available.) The point of course is not to lay out a "logical proof" that crypto anarchy and related things are inevitable, but to establish a series of "paving stones" that allow the reader to stand and see how the gaps are likely to be filled in. (There are places where rigorous proof is useful, mainly in filling in these gaps. This view is in sharp contrast to the "pure logic" worldview demolished by Godel, Turing, Kleene, Chaitin, and others. Yes, such things have applicability even to epistemology.) Even fields dominated by ostensibly rigorous proof, like mathematics, fit this model. Before one can read a proof, a set of concepts has to be established. A few proofs, relating to geometry and number theory (no largest prime) are accesssible to young kids with little formal education, but even these kids must understand numbers and triangles and such, else the "proofs" are only manipulations of abstract symbols. (There's a small faction within mathematics which thinks this is all math is.) A demand that a "proof" be given that crypto anarchy is inevitable is thus not very interesting. What is more interesting is to establish the "paving stones" which make it more obvious what the implications of certain technologies are. (And thoughtful government analysts, even those who are no great friends of crypto anarchy, point to the dangers of crypto anarchy for the precise reason that they have enough of the paving stones to see how things are likely to unfold if certain trends continue.) Those of us who started the list, or who arrived in the first few years, were generally immersed in the writings of David Friedman, Bruce Benson, Vernor Vinge, Orson Scott Card, Robert Heinlein, Douglas Hofstadter, Hakim Bey, Martin Gardner, Robert Axelrod, Henry Hazlitt, and, last but not least, Ayn Rand. Not all of us had read all of this stuff, but it was a common enough set amongst techno-libertarians. Some were more knowledgeable about evolutionary game theory, others more knowledgeable about Unix. But when someone referred to Friedman's essays on Icelandic anarchy, it didn't draw the blanks I think we now see. Maybe people in those days, pre-Web, read more books. If someone didn't understand the reference, they tended to ask politely. Lately, we've had outsiders arrive on the list hostile to the core ideas. Though there is no ideological purity test, it is not interesting when someone like Aimee Farr--just the latest in a series--arrives and says, essentially, "OK, prove it to me!" Lacking the paving stones, the basis vectors, the building blocks, giving her some kind of logical proof would be pointless. And, as I said to her, if she wants one from me she can pay my daily consulting fee for as long as it takes me to write one. Many reading lists have been given over the years. Use search engines to find them (much Cypherpunks traffic shows up in Google, for example.) My Cyphernomicon has a bunch of book references, too, as well as supplying mini-essays on hundreds of topics. Read Steven Levy's article in "Wired." Read the essays of Eric Hughes, Duncan Frissell, and many others. Read about the Law Merchant, about international trade even before nation-states existed, much less international courts of justice. Read about the early bankers and how they enforced contracts. Read, read, read. I'm not saying every subscriber or interested person here should read hundreds of books. Just reading half a dozen, and thinking "outside the box" about the implications, is more important than reading but not integrating the ideas. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns