I make a difference between long-term and short-term goal, like I make for the rest. If you take the medicine comparison made above, I’m aware that for now we don’t know how to completely replace our Azathoth-made organic bodies with better, engineered ones. So for the short I’m advocating improving/fixing the body as we can. But for the long term, I would like us to find a solution to get rid of that Azathoth frame, and have an engineered body that is free of all the defects.
I made the same stance for the economy. On the long term, I want to get rid of free market, this Azathoth process that may end up finding solutions to problems, but doing so without caring for the suffering it produces, and without long-term vision. Every time a company goes bankrupt, it’s a huge amount of waste in term of energy, time and resources, and a huge amount of suffering, broken families, … and so on. Natural selection is cruel, and it is as much as in the economy.
But I’m aware we can’t get rid totally of free market for now. We don’t know how to do it. But we should try to improve what we can improve, fix what we can fix. Organs that can be made in a non-Azathoth way should be made so (EDF, SNCF, CERN for example). Safety measures should be added (unemployment money, working code, …). Universal free healthcare and education. Things like that, that have working implementation already.
And we should also continue looking and experimenting for ways to make deeper change. We have a very small amount of workers control over companies in France, a “Comité d’Entreprise” elected directly by the workers in the company, and that have a say on safety/hygiene related issues within the company. We should increase its power and see if it does really improve working conditions or not. I spoke of Cybersyn in my initial comment. This project was made 40 years ago, with much reduced computing power, in only 3 years, and yet it gave interesting results, before it was drawn in blood by Pinochet. Couldn’t try to make things like that, limited in some sectors, and see how they work ?
Wouldn’t a working theory of utilitarianism “solve” the economy directly? Similarly if everyone had perfect market knowledge they would know from the prices set on goods and services (including “live forever” and “be free of pain and suffering”) what everyone’s utility preferences were and it would be possible in theory to calculate a course of action that maximized wealth and at the same time maximized utility.
The problem is that people produce artificial prices and utility values that don’t reflect reality or their true preferences. Fixing that problem can only be done with more rationality, I think.
Wouldn’t a working theory of utilitarianism “solve” the economy directly? Similarly if everyone had perfect market knowledge they would know from the prices set on goods and services (including “live forever” and “be free of pain and suffering”) what everyone’s utility preferences were and it would be possible in theory to calculate a course of action that maximized wealth and at the same time maximized utility.
That runs into pigeon hole problems, even in theory.
Say a theoretical human can have M preferences and there are N humans so we need to store MN utilities. Clearly humans can’t consciously hold that much information in their head even for just themselves, but I can currently store about 142 32-bit integers for every person alive on earth on a single relatively cheap hard drive. A centralized world economy could keep track of individual price-preferences of all products that have a UPC assigned using about 7x10^19 prices, or a little over 10 exabytes. Difficult, but not intractable.
Say a theoretical human can have M preferences and there are N humans so we need to store M*N utilities. Clearly humans can’t consciously hold that much information in their head even for just themselves, but I can currently store about 142 32-bit integers for every person alive on earth on a single relatively cheap hard drive.
Assuming the other humans aren’t similarly using hard drives to extend their effective memory.
Assuming the other humans aren’t similarly using hard drives to extend their effective memory.
I guess there’s an limit on the percentage of wealth owned by the people, then. In the worst case the government would need at least 50% of the total wealth to devote to mirroring the memory storage used by all the people. Pretty steep tax rate, and that doesn’t include effective taxation by wealth redistribution that might result from the central government’s calculations.
I make a difference between long-term and short-term goal, like I make for the rest. If you take the medicine comparison made above, I’m aware that for now we don’t know how to completely replace our Azathoth-made organic bodies with better, engineered ones. So for the short I’m advocating improving/fixing the body as we can. But for the long term, I would like us to find a solution to get rid of that Azathoth frame, and have an engineered body that is free of all the defects.
I made the same stance for the economy. On the long term, I want to get rid of free market, this Azathoth process that may end up finding solutions to problems, but doing so without caring for the suffering it produces, and without long-term vision. Every time a company goes bankrupt, it’s a huge amount of waste in term of energy, time and resources, and a huge amount of suffering, broken families, … and so on. Natural selection is cruel, and it is as much as in the economy.
But I’m aware we can’t get rid totally of free market for now. We don’t know how to do it. But we should try to improve what we can improve, fix what we can fix. Organs that can be made in a non-Azathoth way should be made so (EDF, SNCF, CERN for example). Safety measures should be added (unemployment money, working code, …). Universal free healthcare and education. Things like that, that have working implementation already.
And we should also continue looking and experimenting for ways to make deeper change. We have a very small amount of workers control over companies in France, a “Comité d’Entreprise” elected directly by the workers in the company, and that have a say on safety/hygiene related issues within the company. We should increase its power and see if it does really improve working conditions or not. I spoke of Cybersyn in my initial comment. This project was made 40 years ago, with much reduced computing power, in only 3 years, and yet it gave interesting results, before it was drawn in blood by Pinochet. Couldn’t try to make things like that, limited in some sectors, and see how they work ?
Wouldn’t a working theory of utilitarianism “solve” the economy directly? Similarly if everyone had perfect market knowledge they would know from the prices set on goods and services (including “live forever” and “be free of pain and suffering”) what everyone’s utility preferences were and it would be possible in theory to calculate a course of action that maximized wealth and at the same time maximized utility.
The problem is that people produce artificial prices and utility values that don’t reflect reality or their true preferences. Fixing that problem can only be done with more rationality, I think.
That runs into pigeon hole problems, even in theory.
Say a theoretical human can have M preferences and there are N humans so we need to store MN utilities. Clearly humans can’t consciously hold that much information in their head even for just themselves, but I can currently store about 142 32-bit integers for every person alive on earth on a single relatively cheap hard drive. A centralized world economy could keep track of individual price-preferences of all products that have a UPC assigned using about 7x10^19 prices, or a little over 10 exabytes. Difficult, but not intractable.
Assuming the other humans aren’t similarly using hard drives to extend their effective memory.
I guess there’s an limit on the percentage of wealth owned by the people, then. In the worst case the government would need at least 50% of the total wealth to devote to mirroring the memory storage used by all the people. Pretty steep tax rate, and that doesn’t include effective taxation by wealth redistribution that might result from the central government’s calculations.