EY “If you have lots of entities with root permissions on matter, any of whom has the physical capability to attack any other, then you have entities spending huge amounts of precious negentropy on defense and deterrence. If there’s no centralized system of property rights in place for selling off the universe to the highest bidder, then you have a race to burn the cosmic commons, and the degeneration of the vast majority of all agents into rapacious hardscrapple frontier replicators.”
yes, I agree with you exactly on this point.
I think that maybe the disagreement between you and robin is based upon the fact that Robin lives intellectually in the world of economics.
Economics, is, if you think about it, a subject in an odd position. The assumptions of classical economics say that people should be perfect selfish bastards with certain utility functions. In reality, we are not, but the theory works to a useful extent, and we use it to run the world.
Perhaps economists have made an emotional association between real “nice” human behavior in competitive environments and the theory of rational utility maximizers which they mistakenly use to describe that behavior.
When you start screaming about how competition between rational bastards will lead to futility, an economist emotionally associates this scenario with competition between quasi-rational human businessmen (or states) whose apetite for utter world domination at absolutely any cost is almost always tempered by them having a reasonably normal set of human emotions, families, social connections and reputations, etc (or in the case of states, it is tempered by irrational leaders and irrational, changing public opinion). The economist then uses whatever argument he can find to backward rationalize the emotionally motivated conclusion that competition leads to good outcomes.
Robin seems to have chosen a particularly bizzare way of rationalizing the goodness of competition: redefining ethics (or even denying the usefulness of ethics at all) so that outcomes where almost everyone is a slave are actually OK. Less intelligent fans of the market take the more obviously false route of claiming that competition between self-modifying agents will lead to “traditionally good” outcomes.
We need to somehow unlearn the association between (free market/independent state) competition and the effects that that system has when the agents concerned happen to be human. If we cannot do this, we are doomed to find out the hard way.
Many commenters in this post have been making a similar mistake by thinking that a friendly singleton would be corrupted by power. People are having trouble stepping out of the human frame of reference.
EY “If you have lots of entities with root permissions on matter, any of whom has the physical capability to attack any other, then you have entities spending huge amounts of precious negentropy on defense and deterrence. If there’s no centralized system of property rights in place for selling off the universe to the highest bidder, then you have a race to burn the cosmic commons, and the degeneration of the vast majority of all agents into rapacious hardscrapple frontier replicators.”
yes, I agree with you exactly on this point.
I think that maybe the disagreement between you and robin is based upon the fact that Robin lives intellectually in the world of economics.
Economics, is, if you think about it, a subject in an odd position. The assumptions of classical economics say that people should be perfect selfish bastards with certain utility functions. In reality, we are not, but the theory works to a useful extent, and we use it to run the world.
Perhaps economists have made an emotional association between real “nice” human behavior in competitive environments and the theory of rational utility maximizers which they mistakenly use to describe that behavior.
When you start screaming about how competition between rational bastards will lead to futility, an economist emotionally associates this scenario with competition between quasi-rational human businessmen (or states) whose apetite for utter world domination at absolutely any cost is almost always tempered by them having a reasonably normal set of human emotions, families, social connections and reputations, etc (or in the case of states, it is tempered by irrational leaders and irrational, changing public opinion). The economist then uses whatever argument he can find to backward rationalize the emotionally motivated conclusion that competition leads to good outcomes.
Robin seems to have chosen a particularly bizzare way of rationalizing the goodness of competition: redefining ethics (or even denying the usefulness of ethics at all) so that outcomes where almost everyone is a slave are actually OK. Less intelligent fans of the market take the more obviously false route of claiming that competition between self-modifying agents will lead to “traditionally good” outcomes.
We need to somehow unlearn the association between (free market/independent state) competition and the effects that that system has when the agents concerned happen to be human. If we cannot do this, we are doomed to find out the hard way.
Many commenters in this post have been making a similar mistake by thinking that a friendly singleton would be corrupted by power. People are having trouble stepping out of the human frame of reference.