Re: Financial allocation poll stage 3

Matthew Toseland <mjt92-KWPb1pKIrIJaa/[email protected]> Sun, 28 Aug 2016 20:05:29 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.network.freenet.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 28/08/16 19:48, Ian Clarke wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 1:32 PM, Matthew Toseland mjt92-KWPb1pKIrIJaa/[email protected] wrote:
> On 28/08/16 19:29, Ian wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 1:23 PM, Matthew Toseland <mjt92-KWPb1pKIrIJaa/[email protected]>
>> wrote:> That's not what was asked. My prioritization proposal
>> separates the
>
>> estimation of the value of completing a task from the estimation of the
>
>> task's cost. These can then be combined later to come up with a
>
>> prioritization.
>
>
>
>
> Which will inherently prefer "easy wins". Which is probably a good
>
> thing.
> I agree. The principle is very simple, maximize value relative to
> cost. Then all
> you need is a way to estimate value and cost, these are hard problems
> in the
> general case but I think our approaches will work well.
> So, if anyone disagrees with the approach, either they disagree that
> we must
> maximize value relative to cost (I'd love to hear that argument), or
> they need
> to propose a better approach to estimating value and cost.

It doesn't always work. Sometimes it is necessary to make a start on the
big-ticket items, even though they're costly.

The classic example of this is market failure in carbon credits: Carbon
trading finds the "easy wins" very quickly, but it's very poor at things
like encouraging building new wind farms rather than coal plants. In
fact it's so bad at this that an entirely separate mechanism is needed
in the electricity sector.

Does this reasoning apply to Freenet? Well, there are some fundamental
problems that should bear a high priority even though their immediate
visible impact to users may not be that spectacular. Security
improvements are an example (e.g. deploying Arne's darknet security
fix). Although here, darknet usability/performance enhancements are the
big one. Not only do they improve security, they may actually help to
get us some viral growth. Winning all around...

Really that sort of thing just means you've under-estimated the value of
a big task. Which is bound to happen, but I'm not sure how to avoid it...

> Ian.
> Ian Clarke
> Founder, The Freenet Project
> Email: [email protected]

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