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RE: Steem must improve and the key metric for that improvement is "utility"
Dear @dana-edwards, your basic assumption is that people behave rational. In such a case they would do utility maximization. But are people rational? Even in investment decisions where you wouldn´t expect it we constantly see irrational behavior. Buying high, selling low - the classic. Bloggers which are incentivized by micro-payments and still deliver (fortunately) good content even if the time would be spent more profitable otherwise. Some are believing in the future of Steem and put irrationally more money into it than advisable from a risk minimization perspective. My point is that the economic theory that decisions are carefully judged based on ROI or utility maximization, this theory has severe limitations.
No I do not assume people are rational. I assume the Steem community as a whole is rational. No individual person is rational and that includes me. At the same time when people come together and have the benefit of computers then the big necessary decisions can be rational. So for example deciding on questions of how to distribute the reward pool is an optimal decision problem which can only be solved rationally.
The fact that it's not being treated rationally enough could be the source of some of the bad feelings we see. I see SMTs as a brilliant attempt to provide the tools necessary to solve it rationally. Whether or not the community does the right thing for itself is not up to me but my post is about pointing out what the right thing looks like in terms of utility maximization. I also want to note, I'm not an economist, and I'm only presenting my opinion and on how I would decide the best way to allocate the resources.
I do not see anything wrong with the theory. I just think people decide to waste their resources and I'm included in this. I haven't always been the perfect curator and later on have had second thoughts about my own upvotes but I'm a person. And of course I can be irrational as well, if I put a lot of time into my posts and think it deserves this or that, but at the end of the day my happiness isn't the only happiness to be considered in a community.
For Steem to work then the global happiness must rise, not just my own. This is a must have or Steem will fail in my opinion.
Thanks @dana-edwards, for your always thoughtful replies (that distinguishes you from many others, by the way). Agree with you, in addition one reason why people can´t be rational is, that they usually don´t have 100% information to judge rationally,most miss the full picture / all stakeholders views, etc.
I am not that optimistic if whole communities act together more rationally. Sure, outliers and morons are averaged away. But if people do not know the big picture, communities don´t know it necessarily as well. Besides there often form parties in communities, which stalemate themselves by striving in opposite directions in worst case. Often opinions are biased due to emotions or manipulations (there are whole books about mass manipulation). At the end a lame compromise is pursued due to conflicting interests or mere beliefs.
Manually you are correct because human brains cannot scale. I do not advocate we do things manually. Once we apply machine intelligence to the Steem data already generated we can make magic happen. This could indeed be an SMT and represent the data analytics or even predictive analytics functionality of Steem.
Right, I saw your post about this. I truely hope this will work out, but so far machine learning is rather a big, "sexy" promise and remains to be seen, if it can hold what people expect. It is only so good as the assumptions and goals are that are behind the algorithms and the interpretations (similar to Statistics, just neutral numbers, but people do interprete them to their needs). Probably the profit maximization can happen only, if real AIs step in? But who will then profit most? Still the humans?
The more data you have to feed it the better the learner gets because it works on statistics. More examples, better more efficient learning. So I think Steem data can be useful for improving Steem.
Last I checked most of economic theory, except the very latest stuff, is based on the notion that people actually rationally, in what they believe is their best interests. Now it may be that's an extrapolation of a statistical mean of behaviour down to the individual - the mean behaviour is rational in any large enough sample so we assume individuals are rational and irrational actors aren't significant enough to have any great effect worth worrying about.
Big data. I think with the data acquisition capabilities we have we can capture more of the big picture than in any time in human history. I think the problem is human beings cannot manually process big data. I do think the data exists on the blockchain, on IPFS, and that means when machine intelligence is applied to it then yes we can process it.