Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

thoughtinfection.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 99 posts

Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

#51

Post by drabiega »

plutooo wrote: post #48
drabiega wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that may be true in some sense there is a very important caveat. Capitalism maximizes giving people they want in proportion to the capital they have. The fact that the distribution is skewed by capital ownership and that agents other than people can own capital creates a powerful distortion and an entirely different systematic effect.

Remember that capitalism works in favor of big numbers. 1 person has to earn as much as 1000 people in order to have the same power as them. So while your point still stands, if you have a decent middle-class then it will be much more powerful than any billionaire will ever be.

The problem isn't power, it's the behavior generated by rules of the system. Because agents only receive output proportional to the capital they possess, they are incentivized to accumulate capital and the system ends up optimizing for capital instead.

As the system progresses, agents get the choice between loosing their allocation or using it to accumulate capital. This is unfortunate since, theoretically, the whole point of capitalism is to maximize long term consumption.

Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

#52

Post by plutooo »

irln wrote: post #50
plutooo wrote: post #47

It's a faulty analogy. In fact, a paperclip maximizer goes against every single principle of capitalism out there. The paperclip maximizer is bad exactly because it isn't based on capitalism; it will maximize paperclips regardless of whether someone values them or not! At _any cost_, it will maximize paperclips. Markets, on the other hand, have the goal of providing products/services that people are willing to pay fo…

You've identified one of the key defects in capitalism today...the disconnect of a "true" market where value is measured by folk's willingness to pay for things.

So, the problem is not enough capitalism? ;)

Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

#53

Post by jerf »

lukifer wrote: post #27
marcosdumay wrote: post #7

Wait, what? Capitalism maximizes "giving people what they want". This is much closer to the benevolent AI models than to paperclip maxizers.

Implicit in the statement "giving people what they want" is a set of assumptions about what "want" means. Do I want life-saving medicine? Do I want a soul-sucking job that pays the bills? Do I want to be de-facto-required to participate in Facebook in order to socialize? I may voluntarily choose all of these things, and while that is unambiguously better than being forced to do them by violence, that's subtly distinc…

"Implicit in the statement "giving people what they want" is a set of assumptions about what "want" means."

And while that's all very interesting and important in the abstract, it's worth double-checking that you don't get yourself lost in the weeds... which I think you did... and forget that the paperclip maximizer is scary precisely because it has no concept of wants in it. With capitalism, wants can be changed in real time, and the system reacts. The paperclip maximizer does not. They are fundamentally different.

There is a memeset that strongly encourages you to fling up whatever word smokescreen is necessary to ensure that nothing positive is said about Emmanual Goldstein, today played by Capitalism, but it's still just a word smokescreen. There is a fundamental different between a paperclip maximizer and capitalism, and you should not throw yourself into a word tizzy until you've confused your rational brain enough that you can fall back on the comfortable emotional judgments about capitalism. Not every bad thing that can be said about capitalism is true simply because it's a bad thing said about capitalism.

Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

#54

Post by irln »

plutooo wrote: post #52
irln wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've identified one of the key defects in capitalism today...the disconnect of a "true" market where value is measured by folk's willingness to pay for things.

So, the problem is not enough capitalism? ;)

Not more capitalism :), just determining a better way to manage the money supply then a few folks on the board of central banks. If we could somehow connect an increase or decrease of the money supply to a classic market definition (e.g. people buying and selling) I think it would make a very positive impact to everyone.

Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

#55

Post by [deleted] »

nevinera wrote: post #46
Sakes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is just a subset of intelligence. You absolutely can describe capitalism as an intelligent system since it is primarily made up of units (people) which are intelligent. If capitalism didn't have a coherent behavior, then how could we ever rely upon it as a primary driver of our economy? It must be coherent and on some level understandable for us to make predictions around it.

You can call an ecosystem 'intelligent' if you want to, I suppose, but there's not really any way to discuss it as a 'maximizer' when it has no goals and no intentional behavior. You could as easily describe water as a 'gravitational potential' minimizer - it has a collective aggregate behavior that you can characterize, but that doesn't make it intelligent by most definitions of the word. >If capitalism didn't have…

[deleted]

Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

#56

Post by electricblue »

Thinking about this some more, it would seem that if we really have a Capital Maximizer then the system's process toward its objective (creating capital) is highly inefficient. If your goal is to create capital in the world you need better infrastructure, after all what capital is more useful than that which can be easily used to create more capital? Long term, if you're a Capital Maximizer trapped on this planet, you only have a small finite amount of resources than can be converted to capital, you would want to spread out to other planets very soon. These are obvious things we aren't doing very well.

Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

#57

Post by plutooo »

drabiega wrote: post #51
plutooo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that capitalism works in favor of big numbers. 1 person has to earn as much as 1000 people in order to have the same power as them. So while your point still stands, if you have a decent middle-class then it will be much more powerful than any billionaire will ever be.

The problem isn't power, it's the behavior generated by rules of the system. Because agents only receive output proportional to the capital they possess, they are incentivized to accumulate capital and the system ends up optimizing for capital instead. As the system progresses, agents get the choice between loosing their allocation or using it to accumulate capital. This is unfortunate since, theoretically, the whole…

But what is capital but investment in the long term?

Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

#58

Post by eli_gottlieb »

Oh good. The Americans are rediscovering Das Kapital.

Forgive the snark, but when I first heard about paperclip maximizers, I thought, "Oh, you mean like capitalism." That these two things have a likeness is the reemergence of an idea that had been buried in order to make capitalism look good.

Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

#59

Post by epx »

People fantasize too much about capitalism. The definition of capitalism is: capital and income are expressed under the same monetary unit (like mass and energy could be):

income = capital x interest rate

The former alternatives was to put capital in a separate "namespace". In Middle Ages, only nobles could have land and land was the only capital that could exist ("usury" was forbidden, you know). Then came mercantilism, that defined wealth as a quantity of gold that one had; and so on.

Capitalism will certainly pass, but hopefully not going back to restricting access to capital. I imagined something like a "complex" interest rate, with the imaginary part representing natural resources, while the real part is the human effort that is the only think currently measured by monetary unit. But bimetalism failed everywhere it has been adopted, I think that the imaginary part of a price would become dominant since natural resources are becoming the limit of economic output.

Re: Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer

#60

Post by eli_gottlieb »

kaffeemitsahne wrote: post #33
bko wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some would disagree that the purpose of existence is to promote happiness. Robert Nozick offered this thought experiment to which I would not opt to maximize happiness: > Nozick asks us to imagine a machine that could give us whatever desirable or pleasurable experiences we could want. Psychologists have figured out a way to stimulate a person's brain to induce pleasurable experiences that the subject could not disti…

Why wouldn't you?

Because I happen to care about things-in-themselves, and I can have a lot of fun and be very happy with things-in-themselves. Experience machines are the kind of thought experiment invented by people who can't conceive of real life being a nice place to live, and thus constantly want to escape into the un-real.
Post reply on HN