[s-d] Some thought about Inflationary Measures

["Jamie Dallaire" <bad.leprechaun@xxxxxxxxx>]

This whole "bailout" thing j did yesterday got me thinking:

When I first suggested creating the Beast, the main focus of this for me was
the "Devour" Trick. The idea sprang from my wish to create something within
the rules that would require that Players of B work together to prevent some
greater evil from befalling all of us, or the game from being destroyed,
etc.

Manifestly, the beast wasn't quite up to snuff. Not enough of a major
threat. The modified devour rule was another attempt, to force multiple
players to give to the beast (most likely in an altruistic manner for some)
to prevent devouration from occuring, for the sake of all players. But when
it's happened so far, we either didn't care about the threatened rule or
we'd just had some mega-macks scam happen anyway.

But recent economic events pointed to by j's "Bailout" message offered up a
handy model... Recession: it's an emergent phenomenon that springs from
individual human actions, yet no single individual can really do anything
about it without cooperation. And once a crash starts happening, it may be
in many people's best individual interest (at least short term) to defect
(sell off while the prices are still decent) rather than cooperate (hold
onto assets and not contribute further to the crash), but ultimately that
seems to work to everyone's detriment.

Can we model something like that? (No, I don't want to have B modeling the
world economy --- what I mean is something with similar pressures for
cooperation which would favour many individuals, perhaps even everyone in
the game, rather than the game putting pressure on individuals to compete).

I don't know what form this could take, but if anyone has any ideas I think
it would be quite interesting:

Some challenges/requirements:

- make it something we can't or at least won't just legislate out of
existence if we fail.
- make it non-zero-sum

Maybe something modeled roughly on a prisoner's dilemma-type situation?

BP
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