I wish the next census to taboo “socialism”. In my experience people use this word to describe three rather different things.
a) An imaginary post-scarcity utopia where money is not necessary, work is voluntary, and all people are educated to love each other.
b) Sweden—either the real one, or its idealized imaginary version.
c) The political and economical system led by Communist parties in the 20th century.
And I hope the majority of those people meant something like (a) and (b), because honestly, I can’t imagine how (c) could be related to rationality or truth-seeking or altruism or ethics.
Yeah, that’s again that thing… people in different parts of the world using the same word to mean something different.
I grew up in a country whose official name was “Czechoslovakian socialist republic”. We were a satellite to a country called “Union of council socialist republics”. The political/economical regime we had was officially called “socialism”. -- In my country, almost everyone means this when they use the word “socialism”.
So talking with other people who use the word “socialism” to mean something else, feels kind of surreal. It’s like… are they from other planet or what? Are they not aware that we had “socialist” countries for decades in this part of the world? Or are they in a complete denial about what happened (all the murders, torture, fear, and censorship) in those countries? (Then perhaps it is my moral duty to educate them.) Oh no, they are just using the same word to mean something completely different. At least I hope that all of them do.
To illustrate my level of confusion, just imagine that you meet a group of young people from other side of the planet, identifying themselves as “nazis”. When you ask them what exactly they mean using this word, they tell you it means a lifestyle based on “My Little Pony”. You are like: WTF?!! Then you ask them whether they know something about European history, and what is their opinion about the guys who called themselves nazis, like Hitler and his friends. They patiently explain to you that Hitler and his friends were definitely not true nazis, because, you know, they were completely unlike the “My Little Pony”. Isn’t that obvious? Therefore it would be more proper to call Hitler an anti-nazi. (And later, you see that 27% of LW readers self-identify as nazis. How horrifying would that feel?)
I tend to think of “socialism” as an umbrella term that includes a number of different concrete political systems, all broadly committed to some form of state-directed egalitarianism (or at least more committed than traditional liberalism). Specific socialist doctrines range from anarchism to Soviet-style communism to Scandinavian-style social democracy. Historically, I think most of these systems regarded the socialist state as transitory (or non-existent, in the case of anarchism), paving the way for a class-less utopia where all means of production are held in common, but I think few self-described socialists (excepting perhaps hardcore communists) would see this transition as plausible any more. I certainly don’t.
So I wouldn’t say that I mean something different when I say “socialism” than you do, nor would I say that communism isn’t true socialism. I would say that we are both talking about socialist systems, but different types of socialist systems. There is something that communism and social democracy have in common, which makes them both forms of socialism, but I doubt that that common core includes what you find most reprehensible about communist regimes.
I agree that something like “social democrat” would be a less confusing label than “socialist” for the next census, in order to distinguish the particular variety of socialism that was intended.
Yeah, that makes sense. The utopia, the Scandinavian-style social democracy, the Soviet-style communisms all belong to a greater “socialism” superset, just like Friendly AI and the paperclip maximizer both belong to an “artificial intelligence” superset.
And that is also a reason why someone telling “we are ready to build an artificial intelligence tomorrow”, without providing any more details, would make some people here scared. Not because all AIs are wrong; not because we don’t want a kind of AI here; not because we know that their AI would be unfriendly. But simply because the fact that they didn’t specify the details is an evidence that they didn’t think about the details, and thus they are likely to build an unfriendly AI without actually wanting to. Because the prior probability of unfriendly AI is greater than the prior probability of a friendly AI, so if you just blindly hit a point within the “artificial intelligence” space, it is likely to go wrong.
In a similar way, I am concerned that people who want utopia-socialism don’t pay much attention to the details (my evidence is that they don’t find the details worth mentioning), and are probably not aware (or disagree) with my opinion that it is much easier to create a Soviet-style communism than a stable Friendly socialism. I mean, even if your starting group of revolutionaries all have good intentions, you will probably get infiltrated and removed from power by some power-hungry psychopaths, because… that is what homo sapiens usually does. You know, mindkilling, corrupted hardware, conjunction fallacy (all the things that must succeed to build the utopia), and so on. -- And the different opinions may be caused by some people having first-hand experience of the Soviet-style communism (especially with the aspect that many well-meaning people created the system and supported its running, despite the horrible things that happened; partially because the system made it illegal to share information about those horrible things, while supported spreading the good news, whether real or imaginary), and other people not having this experience (but hearing some of the good news).
Yes, please. We might call these “post-scarcity socialism”, “welfare-state socialism” (or “welfare liberalism” to Americans), and “Communist Party socialism”.
(Of course, there is the argument that we could be living in a post-scarcity society today if it weren’t for the increasing fraction of wealth held by the ultra-rich.)
There is a very old Soviet joke about the what would happen if socialism (of the Communist Party rule variety) were to be established in the Sahara. The answer is that after a couple of years a severe shortage of sand would develop...
(Of course, there is the argument that we could be living in a post-scarcity society today if it weren’t for the increasing fraction of wealth held by the ultra-rich.)
I am unaware of a serious version of such an argument.
(Of course, there is the argument that we could be living in a post-scarcity society today if it weren’t for the increasing fraction of wealth held by the ultra-rich.)
I know some hardcore C’ers in real life who are absolutely convinced that centrally-planned Marxist/Leninist Communism is a great idea, and they’re sure we can get the kinks out if we just give it another shot.
You also know some people who desperately need a course in computational complexity. Markets aren’t perfect, of course, but good luck trying to centrally compute distribution of resources.
The various hardness results for economic problems (e.g. computing Nash equilibriums is PPAD-complete) cuts equally much against free markets as against central planning. If a central agent can’t solve a given problem within cosmological time scales, then neither can a few billion distributed agents.
The free market doesn’t solve the central planning problem. It reliably climbs local hills in the solution space by putting more decision-making ability (money) in the hands of those who make better decisions (make more money).
Free market, in a typical situation, has the advantage of having more raw computing power, simply because every person uses their own brain to optimize for themselves. And (some people believe that) the benefits of this additional computing power overweight the costs of not having this computing power coordinated, thus wasting a part of it. (It also has the advantage of having local information, having access to this information before it was filtered by political processing, etc.)
But technically, we are speaking about a linear increase in the computing power here. Like, a few million people, instead of a few dozens of government experts. Computational complexity typically does not speak about linear factors. -- Thus you have sinned against the narrow meaning of “computational complexity”. I believe the downvotes reflect this.
That doesn’t sound like a terribly good argument—the fact that it would take O(something big) time to compute something exactly isn’t terribly important if you can compute a decent approximation in O(something small) time.
My model of how to approximate the optimum solution—specifically, break it up into tiny pieces and keep track of price-analogues by means of a real number valued function of the industrial output being managed—looks an awful lot like a free market with really weird labels for everything. It goes up to and includes closing sub-units that detract from overall optimization (read: unprofitable firms).
I wish the next census to taboo “socialism”. In my experience people use this word to describe three rather different things.
a) An imaginary post-scarcity utopia where money is not necessary, work is voluntary, and all people are educated to love each other.
b) Sweden—either the real one, or its idealized imaginary version.
c) The political and economical system led by Communist parties in the 20th century.
And I hope the majority of those people meant something like (a) and (b), because honestly, I can’t imagine how (c) could be related to rationality or truth-seeking or altruism or ethics.
“Socialist” was tabooed on the census, as were the other political orientations. The text of the option was:
I picked “Socialist” on this basis. There was a separate option for Soviet-style communism, which 0.7% of respondents picked.
Yeah, that’s again that thing… people in different parts of the world using the same word to mean something different.
I grew up in a country whose official name was “Czechoslovakian socialist republic”. We were a satellite to a country called “Union of council socialist republics”. The political/economical regime we had was officially called “socialism”. -- In my country, almost everyone means this when they use the word “socialism”.
So talking with other people who use the word “socialism” to mean something else, feels kind of surreal. It’s like… are they from other planet or what? Are they not aware that we had “socialist” countries for decades in this part of the world? Or are they in a complete denial about what happened (all the murders, torture, fear, and censorship) in those countries? (Then perhaps it is my moral duty to educate them.) Oh no, they are just using the same word to mean something completely different. At least I hope that all of them do.
To illustrate my level of confusion, just imagine that you meet a group of young people from other side of the planet, identifying themselves as “nazis”. When you ask them what exactly they mean using this word, they tell you it means a lifestyle based on “My Little Pony”. You are like: WTF?!! Then you ask them whether they know something about European history, and what is their opinion about the guys who called themselves nazis, like Hitler and his friends. They patiently explain to you that Hitler and his friends were definitely not true nazis, because, you know, they were completely unlike the “My Little Pony”. Isn’t that obvious? Therefore it would be more proper to call Hitler an anti-nazi. (And later, you see that 27% of LW readers self-identify as nazis. How horrifying would that feel?)
I tend to think of “socialism” as an umbrella term that includes a number of different concrete political systems, all broadly committed to some form of state-directed egalitarianism (or at least more committed than traditional liberalism). Specific socialist doctrines range from anarchism to Soviet-style communism to Scandinavian-style social democracy. Historically, I think most of these systems regarded the socialist state as transitory (or non-existent, in the case of anarchism), paving the way for a class-less utopia where all means of production are held in common, but I think few self-described socialists (excepting perhaps hardcore communists) would see this transition as plausible any more. I certainly don’t.
So I wouldn’t say that I mean something different when I say “socialism” than you do, nor would I say that communism isn’t true socialism. I would say that we are both talking about socialist systems, but different types of socialist systems. There is something that communism and social democracy have in common, which makes them both forms of socialism, but I doubt that that common core includes what you find most reprehensible about communist regimes.
I agree that something like “social democrat” would be a less confusing label than “socialist” for the next census, in order to distinguish the particular variety of socialism that was intended.
Yeah, that makes sense. The utopia, the Scandinavian-style social democracy, the Soviet-style communisms all belong to a greater “socialism” superset, just like Friendly AI and the paperclip maximizer both belong to an “artificial intelligence” superset.
And that is also a reason why someone telling “we are ready to build an artificial intelligence tomorrow”, without providing any more details, would make some people here scared. Not because all AIs are wrong; not because we don’t want a kind of AI here; not because we know that their AI would be unfriendly. But simply because the fact that they didn’t specify the details is an evidence that they didn’t think about the details, and thus they are likely to build an unfriendly AI without actually wanting to. Because the prior probability of unfriendly AI is greater than the prior probability of a friendly AI, so if you just blindly hit a point within the “artificial intelligence” space, it is likely to go wrong.
In a similar way, I am concerned that people who want utopia-socialism don’t pay much attention to the details (my evidence is that they don’t find the details worth mentioning), and are probably not aware (or disagree) with my opinion that it is much easier to create a Soviet-style communism than a stable Friendly socialism. I mean, even if your starting group of revolutionaries all have good intentions, you will probably get infiltrated and removed from power by some power-hungry psychopaths, because… that is what homo sapiens usually does. You know, mindkilling, corrupted hardware, conjunction fallacy (all the things that must succeed to build the utopia), and so on. -- And the different opinions may be caused by some people having first-hand experience of the Soviet-style communism (especially with the aspect that many well-meaning people created the system and supported its running, despite the horrible things that happened; partially because the system made it illegal to share information about those horrible things, while supported spreading the good news, whether real or imaginary), and other people not having this experience (but hearing some of the good news).
Yes, please. We might call these “post-scarcity socialism”, “welfare-state socialism” (or “welfare liberalism” to Americans), and “Communist Party socialism”.
(Of course, there is the argument that we could be living in a post-scarcity society today if it weren’t for the increasing fraction of wealth held by the ultra-rich.)
There is a very old Soviet joke about the what would happen if socialism (of the Communist Party rule variety) were to be established in the Sahara. The answer is that after a couple of years a severe shortage of sand would develop...
I am unaware of a serious version of such an argument.
(For some value of “post-scarcity” smaller than an American might have in mind.)
I know some hardcore C’ers in real life who are absolutely convinced that centrally-planned Marxist/Leninist Communism is a great idea, and they’re sure we can get the kinks out if we just give it another shot.
C’ers?
People who’d choose option c) from Viliam Bur’s list, I imagine.
As in, line up all those against and shoot them?
Do these people see themselves as among the organisers of such a system, or the organised?
You also know some people who desperately need a course in computational complexity. Markets aren’t perfect, of course, but good luck trying to centrally compute distribution of resources.
The various hardness results for economic problems (e.g. computing Nash equilibriums is PPAD-complete) cuts equally much against free markets as against central planning. If a central agent can’t solve a given problem within cosmological time scales, then neither can a few billion distributed agents.
The free market doesn’t solve the central planning problem. It reliably climbs local hills in the solution space by putting more decision-making ability (money) in the hands of those who make better decisions (make more money).
Free market, in a typical situation, has the advantage of having more raw computing power, simply because every person uses their own brain to optimize for themselves. And (some people believe that) the benefits of this additional computing power overweight the costs of not having this computing power coordinated, thus wasting a part of it. (It also has the advantage of having local information, having access to this information before it was filtered by political processing, etc.)
But technically, we are speaking about a linear increase in the computing power here. Like, a few million people, instead of a few dozens of government experts. Computational complexity typically does not speak about linear factors. -- Thus you have sinned against the narrow meaning of “computational complexity”. I believe the downvotes reflect this.
That doesn’t sound like a terribly good argument—the fact that it would take O(something big) time to compute something exactly isn’t terribly important if you can compute a decent approximation in O(something small) time.
(I’m not a Communist, FWIW.)
My model of how to approximate the optimum solution—specifically, break it up into tiny pieces and keep track of price-analogues by means of a real number valued function of the industrial output being managed—looks an awful lot like a free market with really weird labels for everything. It goes up to and includes closing sub-units that detract from overall optimization (read: unprofitable firms).