Talk:Corruption

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Craig Calcaterra (talk) 04:26, 27 March 2023 (CDT)

Motivation for the terminology

One of the issues in discussing DAOs is that they break categories. A DAO can be at the level of a small group, to the level of a large corporation, to the level of a global, supranational network. Business terminology and concepts need to stretch to global economic applications. For example the same concept that is "overhead" in a small business needs to be used on a national level and is the same concept as "taxes as public maintenance", has meaning in a supranational DAO. So it requires new terminology, or at least a change in the way we use well-established words. So we need technical terminology. So "corruption" means something new here. "Oppression" has a new meaning. "Overhead"... . Craig Calcaterra (talk) 21:27, 8 April 2023 (CDT)

More examples

Taxes are another example related to corruption. Taxes are overhead. All overhead is wasteful--a necessary type of waste in any system. Taxes are needed to keep societies stable. Any overhead in a system is wasteful and therefore, technically, spoilage. Some taxes are corruption, such as education, because a minority is benefitted, whenever they are spent, at the expense of the majority. Again, this is a necessary type of corruption. And it's easy to argue education is not corruption when you take the longer view, because everyone benefits in a society with more technically competent citizens. So the majority does not suffer at the expense of those who used the taxes for education. But from the narrower time-limited view, taxes are a waste in the system--overhead costs that should be minimized subject to the lower constraint that their purpose is served. ...

Many types of overhead are necessary to keep a system stable. E.g., policing is necessary overhead to maintain any organization—-from the level of an individual, to a family, to a neighborhood, to a corporation, to a city, to the level of a nation. They are still corruption or spoilage in the system, and so they should be minimized while guaranteeing they are effective in their purpose. That interpretation is part of the reason they are naturally thought of negatively.

Almost every crime I can imagine is corruption in this sense. Some corruption is legal. But if an act is corrupt as seen from a long enough time period, then it is bad for the system, and so should be proscribed by rules preventing it.

Policing is a type of waste/overhead that is associated with fighting corruption. Because of its association with corruption, people are rightfully suspicious of policing--like taxes. But policing is not essentially corrupt. Using death against death is how humans survive in a dangerous world. Vaccines are dead diseases fighting against diseases that cause death. ForEx traders use corruption to fight against corruption — any arbitrage is corruption, or waste, in the system. So any business margins at all is corruption. So lying when you are doing a business deal — information asymmetry — is taking advantage of the inefficiencies of the system, the corruption of the system, to make a profit.

But corruption is also necessary for a system to work. Friction (which is wasted energy) is necessary for any mechanical system to work. We also minimize friction in many places. But it needs to be in other places. There is a deeper fact of reality that explains this. Friction is infinitely complicated chaos when you inspect it microscopically. In order for two physical components of a mechanical system to interact and affect each other, they need friction—otherwise they would slip past each other, and not grip. How this friction works is not understood by science, in any situation. We have theories of course, but they are woefully incomplete. But that's the point. Friction is the word we use to describe "rounding off" all the infinite calculations we cannot make to describe what's really going on materially. This is analogous to how traders take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. There is an infinite amount of information that needs to be "rounded off" when a trader makes a move. That corruption/friction is part of the system.Craig Calcaterra (talk) 21:27, 8 April 2023 (CDT)