The Well-Read Cypherpunk

[Tim May]

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 at 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