I wrote:
---
If you plan to stay on this list, I think it's long past time that
you spend several hours reviewing past developments in these areas.
(You see, the "quick review" process is much better than the method
you suggested re: economics, that people read the main textbooks.
People don't need to spend several months wading through cryptography
textbooks to come up to a level that is sufficient to understand the
real issues.)
---
This is still an important issue, even though Aimee seems to think
her head is "being bashed on the pavement" on this issue.
"The best is often the enemy of the good."
My reading list suggestion had included several important books for
list members to read that covered the economics topics of most
interest and importance to our themes. The authors you have already
seen. The topics are, roughly: libertarian viewpoints, public choice
theory, game theory, the role of evolution and learning, preference
revealing, etc.
It is not essential to become an expert in game theory, or
cryptography, or economics, or law. Rather, it is important to "get
up to speed" quickly...IF one plans to contribute to a mailing list
or discussion forum.
As this applies to crypto, for example, it is very important
important that members of the list understand roughly how PGP is
used, how remailers work, what the BlackNet experiment showed, how
reputations solve many distributed problems of interest to us, and so
on--I could generate a long list of topics, and in fact _have_
generated such a list in the form of the Cyphernomicon. This is
_much_ more important than that they spend several months reading
Schneier, or Koblitz, or any of the dozen or so main textbooks.
(Ideally, they should have one of these books to look at while
reading about PGP, remailers, etc.)
--Tim May
--
Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
