#greshamslaw — Public Fediverse posts

Spam is a fact of life in email. I don't know anyone who thinks we can eliminate it.

Junk journals, junk articles, and junk conferences have been facts of life in scholarly communication for some time. They existed before AI but AI is aggravating the problem.

Now we can add junk letters to the editor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/science/letters-to-the-editor-ai-chatbots.html

#AI #GreshamsLaw #ScholComm #Slop #Spam

#GreshamsLaw Comes for #TheScience ... (Aka The #Science you're told to follow by 'experts')

"Science publication has become so corrupted that entire journals have been shut down over running fake research. How did we get here?" https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/05/greshams-law-comes-for-science.html

@carapace The general question of how to combat China's surveillance regime, both internally and externally, is an interesting one.

Random thoughts whilst typing...

The growth differential may kick in. Something that's forgotten about many Communist states is that after an initial rapid period of industrialisation, stagnation set in. This occurred in the USSR and notably in North Korea (which was outperforming the South through the 1960s). China is of course a notable exception to the rule with absolutely unprecedented development for any country in world history, over the past 40 years or so. And by at least some measures China are no longer fast-following but are actively leapfrogging Western technology.

Why the Soviets didn't create the, or at least an Internet is a great episode covering by Tech Won't Save Us, 27 May 2021, with Benjamin Peters: https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/62_why_the_soviet_union_didnt_build_the_internet_w_benjamin_peters. Amongst other things, it shows that power-preservation behaviours are NOT exclusive to capitalist systems.

Brain drain. Creativity wants and seeks freedom generally, freedom from oppression most especially, and cheap rents. The number of ways different countries (or states/provinces) have killed their own golden geese is staggering. A big lesson for me is early-20th century Europe which was losing Jewish intelligentsia and gaining Black American talent (artistic and scientific) simultaneously, the former fleeing European anti-semitism, the latter US Jim Crow. Brain drain is interesting ... It's also a case of #GreshamsLaw, FWIW (differential compensation for a given product or capability).

Related, Stalinist Russia rather famously purged much of its own military leadership prior to WWII, on top of general antisemitic tendencies.

Creative antiauthoritarianism. Repressive practices tend to generate secret languages, multi-level communications, shadings of nuance and implication, etc. See Soviet-era humour, "Winnie the Pooh" in current China, etc. Unless monitoring systems become exceptionally good at extracting nuance (and they well might with LLM), that's going to confound efforts. It's also difficult to have a creative and innovative economy without at least some unfettered communications. The TWSU episode above also addresses this.

Data poisoning. I'm far less confident that this really will be effective. Chaffing in the light of overwhelming signals (where you are, as tracked by mobile devices and car plates, what you spend as tracked by payments systems, contact metadata for voice and text comms) is exceptionally difficult to mask.

An emerging civil rights culture. This is what occurred in the West: protections enshrined in law, protecting at least some classes of people. You can trace this back to the Magna Carta, which #AstraTaylor discusses in this year's #MasseyLecture Series (#CBCIdeas). The US Bill of Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, an EU's GDPR, and others. Problems are that these often exist in name only, as dead letters, or are entirely ignored for most of the world's population, to say nothing of backsliding, with growing authoritarianism in multiple countries (US, India, Brazil, Russia, Hungary, Turkey) and long-standing hold-outs (most of the Arab world, large portions of Africa, Myanmar, Iran, North Korea, etc.)

China has an interesting mix of both rapid industrialisation and technological development and retaining at least elements of an authoritarian state. Whether that's a temporary exception or a future indicator ... hard to say.

Prediction as is said is difficult. Particular about the future.

@alcinnz I've been coming back to this article for the past couple of days, there's a lot of good in it. The idea that financial price is only a subset of total price or cost is excellent.

The essay also anticipates a point I'd considered, though that can be extended:

[W]e reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing.

I'd argue that this isn't just demand side (that is, personal behaviour), but very consciously and deliberately supply-side: commercial interests try to line up "consumption opportunities" where the public has low costs for additional consumption. There's "junk food" entertainment, literal junk food (food being something that's consumed on an ongoing basis), broadcast and streaming markets, endless scroll, captive markets (travelers, tours, students, patients, inmates, ...), etc., etc. The sell / buy / consume dynamic just keeps on keeping on.

There's also a great line by wilderness-travel writer Joseph Wood Krutch: ""bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people".

Sometimes simplified to "A bad road is a good filter."

#JosephWoodKrutch http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm

That is, raise the 2nd price, or other associated prices, with a destination, experience, or product, and you'll find that those who find their way there or seek out that experience tend to be a useful social filter. It's something of a melding of #GreshamsLaw and the #JevonsParadox.

Edit: #MoarHashtags

#TheSecondPrice

@alcinnz I've been coming back to this article for the past couple of days, there's a lot of good in it. The idea that financial price is only a subset of total price or cost is excellent.

The essay also anticipates a point I'd considered, though that can be extended:

[W]e reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing.

I'd argue that this isn't just demand side (that is, personal behaviour), but very consciously and deliberately supply-side: commercial interests try to line up "consumption opportunities" where the public has low costs for additional consumption. There's "junk food" entertainment, literal junk food (food being something that's consumed on an ongoing basis), broadcast and streaming markets, endless scroll, captive markets (travelers, tours, students, patients, inmates, ...), etc., etc. The sell / buy / consume dynamic just keeps on keeping on.

There's also a great line by wilderness-travel writer Joseph Wood Krutch: ""bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people".

Sometimes simplified to "A bad road is a good filter."

#JosephWoodKrutch http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm

That is, raise the 2nd price, or other associated prices, with a destination, experience, or product, and you'll find that those who find their way there or seek out that experience tend to be a useful social filter. It's something of a melding of #GreshamsLaw and the #JevonsParadox.

Edit: #MoarHashtags

#TheSecondPrice

@alcinnz I've been coming back to this article for the past couple of days, there's a lot of good in it. The idea that financial price is only a subset of total price or cost is excellent.

The essay also anticipates a point I'd considered, though that can be extended:

[W]e reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing.

I'd argue that this isn't just demand side (that is, personal behaviour), but very consciously and deliberately supply-side: commercial interests try to line up "consumption opportunities" where the public has low costs for additional consumption. There's "junk food" entertainment, literal junk food (food being something that's consumed on an ongoing basis), broadcast and streaming markets, endless scroll, captive markets (travelers, tours, students, patients, inmates, ...), etc., etc. The sell / buy / consume dynamic just keeps on keeping on.

There's also a great line by wilderness-travel writer Joseph Wood Krutch: ""bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people".

Sometimes simplified to "A bad road is a good filter."

#JosephWoodKrutch http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm

That is, raise the 2nd price, or other associated prices, with a destination, experience, or product, and you'll find that those who find their way there or seek out that experience tend to be a useful social filter. It's something of a melding of #GreshamsLaw and the #JevonsParadox.

Edit: #MoarHashtags

#TheSecondPrice

@alcinnz I've been coming back to this article for the past couple of days, there's a lot of good in it. The idea that financial price is only a subset of total price or cost is excellent.

The essay also anticipates a point I'd considered, though that can be extended:

[W]e reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing.

I'd argue that this isn't just demand side (that is, personal behaviour), but very consciously and deliberately supply-side: commercial interests try to line up "consumption opportunities" where the public has low costs for additional consumption. There's "junk food" entertainment, literal junk food (food being something that's consumed on an ongoing basis), broadcast and streaming markets, endless scroll, captive markets (travelers, tours, students, patients, inmates, ...), etc., etc. The sell / buy / consume dynamic just keeps on keeping on.

There's also a great line by wilderness-travel writer Joseph Wood Krutch: ""bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people".

Sometimes simplified to "A bad road is a good filter."

#JosephWoodKrutch http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm

That is, raise the 2nd price, or other associated prices, with a destination, experience, or product, and you'll find that those who find their way there or seek out that experience tend to be a useful social filter. It's something of a melding of #GreshamsLaw and the #JevonsParadox.

Edit: #MoarHashtags

#TheSecondPrice

@alcinnz I've been coming back to this article for the past couple of days, there's a lot of good in it. The idea that financial price is only a subset of total price or cost is excellent.

The essay also anticipates a point I'd considered, though that can be extended:

[W]e reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing.

I'd argue that this isn't just demand side (that is, personal behaviour), but very consciously and deliberately supply-side: commercial interests try to line up "consumption opportunities" where the public has low costs for additional consumption. There's "junk food" entertainment, literal junk food (food being something that's consumed on an ongoing basis), broadcast and streaming markets, endless scroll, captive markets (travelers, tours, students, patients, inmates, ...), etc., etc. The sell / buy / consume dynamic just keeps on keeping on.

There's also a great line by wilderness-travel writer Joseph Wood Krutch: ""bad roads act as filters... bad roads bring good people, good roads bring bad people".

Sometimes simplified to "A bad road is a good filter."

#JosephWoodKrutch http://www.escapist.com/baja/books.htm

That is, raise the 2nd price, or other associated prices, with a destination, experience, or product, and you'll find that those who find their way there or seek out that experience tend to be a useful social filter. It's something of a melding of #GreshamsLaw and the #JevonsParadox.

Edit: #MoarHashtags

#TheSecondPrice

@scottspeaking There's a growing set of literature, though generally you could look at the rise and fall of movements, social groups, religious movements (look up the Second Great Awakening and Burned Over Districts sometime), etc.

My basic take is that there are two forces at play: (1) network effects though not the n^2 of Metcalfe's Law but some diminishing-return function (Odlyzko and Tilly suggest log(n): https://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf) and (2) frictional costs which are more-or-less constant per node instance (though which can be modified across the network as a whole through various network-hygiene measures).

So, if you've got diminishing returns and constant costs, at some point adding another node no longer breaks even.

The pathological death spiral occurs when high value nodes start defecting from the network. This is the Yogi Berra effect: "Nobody (who's anybody) goes there anymore, it's too crowded (with everybody who's nobody)".

Danah Boyd has some great early work looking at the dynamic between Facebook (upstart) and MySpace (incumbent) in the mid/late aughts: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/ICA2009.html

That's related to the Nazi At the Bar problem as described by @imaragesparkle at Birdsite: https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw/kicking_a_nazi_out_as_soon_as_they_walk_in/. There are some founding / infiltrating cohorts who are so toxic that they lead to the flight of others. See generally Brain Drain and recognise that this can work in multiple directions for multiple groups, e.g., European Jews fleeing to the US whilst American Blacks fled to Europe. Same fundamental reason, but different dynamics affecting different groups. (This is also a #GreshamsLaw phenomenon, which is another trope of mine.)

I've written my own thoughts on why Usenet died, which Fedizens might want to consider. Not all the factors apply, though some do, upshot: it simply became too high-risk (and low-reward) to host Usenet: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/

#Usenet #MetcalfesLaw #OdlyzkoTilly #AndrewOdlyzko #SocialNetworks #RiseAndFall #DanahBoyd

@Ahuka The Market for Lemons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

https://viterbi-web.usc.edu/~shaddin/cs590fa13/papers/AkerlofMarketforLemons.pdf

#MarketForLemons #GeorgeAkerlof #GreshamsLaw

The J.K Galbraith "bad investments driving out good" dynamic is basically: when investors' portfolios go so poorly that they need to raise cash to cover obligations, they'll sell anything to raise that.

So if some IvanInvestor is 50% in HonestSamsSkeeveyStock and 50% in BlueChipCo, leveraged 50%, then if HSSS crashes, IvanInvestor must sell BlueChipCo to cover margins. (Or other obligations.)

If there are enough IvanIvestors ... the price of BSC starts to move.

With housing it's similar, though the mechanism is often of reserves or assets, particularly for banks. With a sufficient movement, enough sellers become "highly motivated" that the market as a whole moves.

Of course, if you're planning to profit from this, you've got to have lower exposure and cash (or equivalently robust assets, which aren't falling) on hand to be able to buy. That tends to be a wealth ratchet for the already uber-wealthy.

#JKGalbraith #JohnKennethGalbraith #GreshamsLaw #Housing

@pluralistic Another ... interesting ... dynamic of collapsing bubbles is of bad investments driving down good.

J.K. Galbraith notes in The Great Crash: 1929, a book I know you've read and like --- see also "bezzle".

Galbraith:

The great investment trust boom had ended in a unique manifestation of Gresham's Law in which the bad stocks were driving out the good.

#Housing #Bubbles #JKGalbraith #JohnKennethGalbraith #TheGreatCrash1929 #GreshamsLaw

@rysiek There's a flavour of argument over packaging systems and formats which runs:

• X package format is difficult for software developers to use.
• Y package format is easy for software developers to use.
• Therefore Y package format is better than X.

What's not realised is that the fundamental value and benefit to package management is to systems administrators / owners / users, and integrated distributions of packages. And that the major costs of operation and maintenance are not installation, but *operations and maintenance.

"Easy for sofware developers" typically translates to "encourages sloppy and difficult-to-maintain processes and practices". Not only this, but by lowering up-front costs at the expense of long-term costs, the practice further encourages poor practices (from an O&M perspective), and puts well-behaved software at a disadvantage.

See the Debian Project's explicit focus on user benefit, a long-term value benefit.

This is a Jevons Paradox / Gresham's Law crowding out of well-behaved software and a race-to-the-bottom of poor long-term O&M behaviour.

#Linux #PackageManagement #OperationsAndMaintenance #JevonsParadox #GreshamsLaw #Flatpak #snap

@rysiek There's a flavour of argument over packaging systems and formats which runs:

• X package format is difficult for software developers to use.
• Y package format is easy for software developers to use.
• Therefore Y package format is better than X.

What's not realised is that the fundamental value and benefit to package management is to systems administrators / owners / users, and integrated distributions of packages. And that the major costs of operation and maintenance are not installation, but *operations and maintenance.

"Easy for sofware developers" typically translates to "encourages sloppy and difficult-to-maintain processes and practices". Not only this, but by lowering up-front costs at the expense of long-term costs, the practice further encourages poor practices (from an O&M perspective), and puts well-behaved software at a disadvantage.

See the Debian Project's explicit focus on user benefit, a long-term value benefit.

This is a Jevons Paradox / Gresham's Law crowding out of well-behaved software and a race-to-the-bottom of poor long-term O&M behaviour.

#Linux #PackageManagement #OperationsAndMaintenance #JevonsParadox #GreshamsLaw #Flatpak #snap

@cadadr #GreshamsLaw is my favourite underdog economic concept.

(Underdog in the sense that nobody appreciates it. Not in the sense that it benefits underdogs.)

(Or undercats.)

@kensanata

@cadadr My imression, having been on the Web since the mid/late 1990s, and the Internet since the mid-1980s, is similar.

I actually saw AltaVista demoed at a tech conference,when Digital's 64-bit Ultrix was a notable advance in raw performance, allowing the entire index to be held in RAM. Google, when it appeared in 1999 was another quantum leap, this time in search relevance, and through about 2010--2012, things improved.

Sacrificing "+word" notation to Google+ was the first highly apparent sign of decline, in 2012 as I recall. Search has gotten dumber, and I switched to DDG in June 2013.

Not everything is ... directly ... Google's fault, though black-hat SEO gaming, advertising incentivisation, weaponised viral clickbait, scams and fraud, social media, walled gardens, the rise of mobile, and (though it hurts me to say) the vast democratisation / increased access to the Intenet (largely fuelled by mobile) is itself a major factor. #GreshamsLaw.

And Google's had a hand in much of that, if often indirectly.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

-- Frank Wilhoit

http://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

#Conservatism #GreshamsLaw #Nonreciprocity #power

@Sandra

Everything you say on the futility of participation at the consumer level is as true of the corporate or the political (whether ballot or revo) levels.

False.

The dynamics differ offering different capabilities (and failure modes).

Markets respond principally to supply and demand, as well as monopoly powers.

Politics responds to political influence, votes, political contributions, and public discourse, but is regulated by legislation, constitutions, common law, precedent, tradition, and other factors.

Each has failure modes. For markets, externalities, fraud, coercion, #GreshamsLaw, #JevonsLaw. These all work directly against "personal responsibility" reforms.

Politics suffers from corruption, influence, capture, and other factors but at least presents a different set of mechanisms for correction than markets alone.

Maket failures aren't resolved by marketng them harder.

Political and regulatory change aren't easy, simple, or guaranteed. But the represent capabilities markets and "individual responsibility" alone simply do not and cannot offer.

@Sandra

Think about what you are saying here. You, an individual, can’t effect consumer pattern change on the wide/collective level. But you apparently can effect policy making, production, or marketing pattern change on the wide/collective level?

No.

Neither I nor collective individual action shy of near total compliance achieves this. The tactic as one of achieving the goal of ending negative externalising actions is utterly ineffective. The reason is that the more complete it becomes, the higher the rewards of defection. Simple #GameTheory payoff matrix.

A 1990s ex-junkie memoir I saw once had a cover reading something like "The problem with heroin is that the longer you stop the better that first next hit feels." Effectiveness of cure directly encourages relapse.

Individual action as signalling might have some merits.

But if you want to change the game you've got to change the rules, for everybody playing. Otherwise it's just #GreshamsLaw and a defectors' #RaceToTheBottom

I alone cannot accomplish either. Collectively, the rules change is the only efective mechanism. For signalling and messaging, restraint may be useful, but on an effort allocation, the smart strategy is 90% regulation & rules aimed at the system, 10% messaging interity.

And the whole "you're not doing enough personally" schtick can fuck right off. Because that's the countertactic I see, and quoted and linked at the top of this thread. It's what Annie Leonard's message is all about (I've been quoting it for years).

Wars aren't won by saints and purity scores.

1/

"Race to the bottom" is a phrase often used to describe one class of #GreshamsLaw dynamics, referring to regulatory, normative, or quality behaviours.

It seems to have emerged far more recently than I'd have imagined.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=race+to+the+bottom&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crace%20to%20the%20bottom%3B%2Cc0

#OccasionalNgrams

@JollyOrc's Law of Perceived Conversational Bias:

Insensitive, presumptive, and condescending conversation drives out sensitive, considerate, and supportive conversation.

https://octodon.social/users/JollyOrc/updates/59881

#GreshamsLaw

@sixthhokage95 That's the #TyrannyOfTheMinimumViableUser

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/

(Affecting software.)

The impact on discussion (noted by @Gotterdammerung ) is the #EvaporativeCoolingEffect, a #GreshamsLaw dynamic.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h63fp/is_greshams_law_a_special_instance_of_a_more/

Labour, markets, and complex information inflows at scale

...As a system scales, its capability to process complex informational inputs relative to smaller organisation decreases, due to the greater total informational load. That is, broadcast-mode systems are very good at transmitting complex signals, but they can generally only recieve simple, or at best, standardised, inputs. Executive attention and bandwidth are limited....

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6xnkhj/labour_markets_and_complex_information_inflows_at/

#dreddit #economics #labour #complexity #information #systems #MarketForLemons #GreshamsLaw