No not at all. It is very hard to have true anonymity on Steemit. What you have is pseudo-anonymity which is not the same thing.
Transparency is something I never said was unnecessary. What I'm saying is the kind of transparency Dan spoke of is what is unnecessary. I completely agree that algorithms can match compatible people up. I do not think the people being matched up are required to know each other's data.
For a formal exploration of this concept look at Yao's millionaire's probem. Steem and Dan take on the attitude that it's the business of Alice and Bob to know what is in each other's wallets and as a result the dollar values are displayed. The millionaire's problem in my opinion has a better solution using homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party computation:
Yao's Millionaires' problem is a secure multi-party computation problem which was introduced in 1982 by Andrew Yao, a prominent computer scientist and computational theorist. The problem discusses two millionaires, Alice and Bob, who are interested in knowing which of them is richer without revealing their actual wealth.
This problem is analogous to a more general problem where there are two numbers a and b and the goal is to solve the inequality a ≥ b without revealing the actual values of a and b.
I don't have to know how much actual wealth you have to know which of us is richer. Consider that this problem has a solution in cryptography literature but for political reasons (bias) the Steem developers decide not to implement it. So we can have both privacy and transparency, at least to greater degrees, but Steem deliberately decides to tip the balance toward greater transparency and less privacy for no apparent technical reason.
Fortunately I saw this coming which is why I invested in the Enigma Project. I knew that Steem developers were making a political decision due to their own bias, rather than a technical decision. I saw technical solutions in literature and blogged about it here but they were ignored, so I invested in Enigma as a hedge. If it is true that people want maximum privacy and transparency on the same platform, then Enigma will become far more popular than EOS or Steem.
True anonymity isn't the point. The disagreement I have with Dan is that his solution "radical transparency+blockchain" is just another trap. I think society has more than enough traps and not enough help for people who would like to avoid the traps. In other words, if all we do as a society is build a bunch of traps, everyone is going to get caught "doing something wrong" sooner or later.
The only way to truly improve society without sacrificing people or requiring "martyrs", is to actually focus on helping people make increasingly better (wiser) decisions over time. Punishing bad decisions does nothing to increase the capacity of individuals to make wise decisions. It just ruins lives, punishes mistakes, and in some cases may even cause loss of life.
So to preserve lives, prevent unnecessary suffering, my solution to the "morality scaling problem" is to use machine intelligence on a decentralized network to allow every individual to scale their decision making capabilities, and with that also allow for increasingly wiser, more moral decision making.
To merely build traps and offer nothing to help humans be better in my opinion only adds to the problem. Yes there are going to be some people who are voluntarily ignorant, who make unwise decisions and who resist changing, but then there are humans who make unwise decisions merely because they didn't have the knowledge or social network of advisers to think of a better solution. If most criminals and "bad people" as defined by society are just people who made some mistake, or unwise decisions, then if these people are not mentally ill (or even if they are), they can benefit from an AI helping them to make increasingly more moral decisions. All the AI has to do is offer suggestions, advice, recommendations, and answer questions.
Alice could ask her AI to help her make a decision not just on what stocks to buy, but on any topic. She can ask the AI what the machines think she should do and get a result from the top AIs trained to answer these sorts of questions, or and she can also ask the AI to create a map of crowd sentiment, to determine which of a list of decisions are the most or least socially acceptable.
This would allow Alice to get advice from both AI and the crowd, and make truly wise decisions consistently.
What is an alternative solution which preserves privacy and transparency?
No not at all. It is very hard to have true anonymity on Steemit. What you have is pseudo-anonymity which is not the same thing.
Transparency is something I never said was unnecessary. What I'm saying is the kind of transparency Dan spoke of is what is unnecessary. I completely agree that algorithms can match compatible people up. I do not think the people being matched up are required to know each other's data.
For a formal exploration of this concept look at Yao's millionaire's probem. Steem and Dan take on the attitude that it's the business of Alice and Bob to know what is in each other's wallets and as a result the dollar values are displayed. The millionaire's problem in my opinion has a better solution using homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party computation:
I don't have to know how much actual wealth you have to know which of us is richer. Consider that this problem has a solution in cryptography literature but for political reasons (bias) the Steem developers decide not to implement it. So we can have both privacy and transparency, at least to greater degrees, but Steem deliberately decides to tip the balance toward greater transparency and less privacy for no apparent technical reason.
Fortunately I saw this coming which is why I invested in the Enigma Project. I knew that Steem developers were making a political decision due to their own bias, rather than a technical decision. I saw technical solutions in literature and blogged about it here but they were ignored, so I invested in Enigma as a hedge. If it is true that people want maximum privacy and transparency on the same platform, then Enigma will become far more popular than EOS or Steem.
References
True anonymity isn't the point. The disagreement I have with Dan is that his solution "radical transparency+blockchain" is just another trap. I think society has more than enough traps and not enough help for people who would like to avoid the traps. In other words, if all we do as a society is build a bunch of traps, everyone is going to get caught "doing something wrong" sooner or later.
The only way to truly improve society without sacrificing people or requiring "martyrs", is to actually focus on helping people make increasingly better (wiser) decisions over time. Punishing bad decisions does nothing to increase the capacity of individuals to make wise decisions. It just ruins lives, punishes mistakes, and in some cases may even cause loss of life.
So to preserve lives, prevent unnecessary suffering, my solution to the "morality scaling problem" is to use machine intelligence on a decentralized network to allow every individual to scale their decision making capabilities, and with that also allow for increasingly wiser, more moral decision making.
To merely build traps and offer nothing to help humans be better in my opinion only adds to the problem. Yes there are going to be some people who are voluntarily ignorant, who make unwise decisions and who resist changing, but then there are humans who make unwise decisions merely because they didn't have the knowledge or social network of advisers to think of a better solution. If most criminals and "bad people" as defined by society are just people who made some mistake, or unwise decisions, then if these people are not mentally ill (or even if they are), they can benefit from an AI helping them to make increasingly more moral decisions. All the AI has to do is offer suggestions, advice, recommendations, and answer questions.
Alice could ask her AI to help her make a decision not just on what stocks to buy, but on any topic. She can ask the AI what the machines think she should do and get a result from the top AIs trained to answer these sorts of questions, or and she can also ask the AI to create a map of crowd sentiment, to determine which of a list of decisions are the most or least socially acceptable.
This would allow Alice to get advice from both AI and the crowd, and make truly wise decisions consistently.