The Price of Anarchy • Hacker News Board

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#111

Post by pdonis » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 6:38 PM UTC

snrplfth wrote: post #85

pdonis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Comcast's oligopoly is largely established by the fact that rights-of-way and pole-attachment rights are monopolized by municipalities, which tend to approve only a single, or few providers. Only because, when municipalities do try to treat bandwidth as a public utility, which they can sell to all providers equally, Comcast and other large ISPs sue them. > It's not a natural monopoly. I agree, but I don't think it…

I think it's the structure of rights-of-way, pole-attachments and so forth as monopolies that props it up. The fact that municipalities get sued for trying to sell bandwidth is a problem, but it emerges, I think, because of the fact it's centralized in a government institution.

To some extent, provisioning for bandwidth is a natural monopoly, for the same reason that provisioning for electrical service, water, sewer, and other utilities are natural monopolies. It doesn't make sense to run multiple different electrical, water, and sewer services to the same neighborhood just so multiple different providers can compete; the costs of all that extra infrastructure are too high. The costs aren't as high for bandwidth, but they aren't zero either.

As the size of the "municipality" goes up, though, I agree with you that centralization creates monopolies that are not natural.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#112

Post by sebastos » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 6:39 PM UTC

throwaway729 wrote: post #93

sebastos wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ding ding ding. The Price of Anarchy originally described the surprising result that internet routing seems to work despite the lack of a central planner. [1] The "central planner" is a theoretical maximum for the routing problem - it represents an oracle that automatically knows and applies an optimal routing solution. It's not some kind of government. It's kind of hilarious seeing all of these people commenting abo…

> It's kind of hilarious seeing all of these people commenting about how this is "utopian" thinking... I suppose you're referring to me, since I'm the only one who has used that word. To clarify, I was replying to a comment , not making any comment directly relevant to the paper or PoA. That said, if someone applied this paper's results directly to a defense of anarchy, I would call that application Utopian because I…

Nothing personal about your comment particularly - I agree with how you're characterizing it. I was reacting to the instant jump to political thought people were making when the PoA has plenty of interesting implications in the merely technological realm :)

> By "standard", do you mean "every mile is taxed equally"? Or "according to construction/upkeep cost"?

Perhaps confusing wording on my part - by standard I meant that the system that actually detects the car and charges the dollars and cents is standardized. In other words, a frictionless lingua franca for tolling that exerted negligible inconvenience on the driver as they were driving. Think "everybody has a Visa", not "every item costs $1".

The tolls themselves would be priced neither uniformly nor "at cost" to offset construction expenses. Rather, they would simply be set to maximize profit for the local municipality that owned the tolling machines. Pricing the edges to maximize profit minimizes congestion, and theoretically does exactly as well as a super-deity oracle with perfect information that could plan everybody's route from start to finish. (This perhaps counterintuitive result is described in ref 2 from the grandparent). Whatever money is made in aggregate is used for all repairs and maintenance, so the idea is that small back roads would help to subsidize the cost of bridges, which are disproportionately expensive to repair compared to their importance in the road network. More importantly, the price to drive on any road is directly reflective of the externality you impose while driving on it. Right now, the expense and complication of exacting the toll is high enough that we only extract tolls at critical points like bridges, which means we only use tolls to discourage congestion in these few places. We set the tolls too high there to offset the fact that there should be tolls on feeder streets and other areas that are getting backed up and contributing to the overall gridlock.

In practice, you'd have to get around some issues surrounding the advertisement of road prices to the driver. The system would have to strike a balance between being fair and fatiguing drivers with too much shopping choice. In this respect, perhaps you could be right that there is some idealized thinking going on. But it is just an idea, after all.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#113

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 6:42 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #102

TeMPOraL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what you quote is true, but I think a lot of discussion stems from focusing on the wrong question, namely "does selfishness lead to better outcomes" as opposed to when it does, and when it does not. Too many people seem to approach economy as an ideology rather than a complex system in which a given approach produces good results here and bad results there, and everything should be subject to optimization and c…

Nobody thinks that selfish leads to "better" outcome. They believe that if everyone acts selfishly, the outcome is still pretty darn good (but of course could be improved if nobody committed crimes or something)

Again, saying that "the outcome is pretty darn good, therefore yay capitalism" is missing the crucial question - when do the good parts happen, when do the bad parts happen, and how to preserve the former while getting rid of the latter.

Ideologies are mind poison.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#114

Post by logfromblammo » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 6:43 PM UTC

antocv wrote: post #36

dunslandsboo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most anarcho-capitalists that I know and from who I learn are absolutely not about "every man for himself" at all. Charity and voluntary cooperation are major parts of the society as they would like it to become. See https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Friendly_society and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_resolution_organizatio...

Doesnt that seem like an oxymoron, anarcho-capitalist? Like up-down?

"Anarchist" is antipodal to the "nationalist" part of "nationalist mercantilism", which is historically associated with "capitalism" in such a way that many people confuse the two.

This is exactly why some people prefer the term "propertarian anarchist" to "anarcho-capitalist", so as to avoid arguing over the meanings of words rather than the tenets of the school of thought.

An anarcho-capitalist cannot make and enforce any law establishing rights in property, but instead recognized that by societal convention, people can claim objects for their exclusive use, and defend such claims by voluntarily respecting the reasonable claims of all other participants in the society.

If you have faithfully watched the television series of The Walking Dead, "The Claimed Gang" that was featured in season 4, episode 11, were basically anarcho-capitalists. If you said "claimed", whatever it was became yours, and if you violated someone else's claim, you got a beatdown from the whole gang.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#115

Post by ue_ » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 6:49 PM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #100

ue_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I were to develop a machine that manufactures widgets in my spare time at home, that machine would have to be seized since communism is the public ownership of the means of product No. That's personal (not private) property. The MoP are manned by labour supplied by the proletariat. If you are having people working with that widget maker (aside from yourself), and you are paying them wages (or slavery), then it q…

You CANNOT freely organize yourself in an communism. This is because as soon as you start "freely organzing" a whole bunch of my property now apparently becomes "means of production" and gets siezed from me. What if I and a group of other people want to organize and work together, in exchange for wages with fully voluntary other people?

>What if I and a group of other people want to organize and work together, in exchange for wages with fully voluntary other people?

There's no problem with that, but the people working for you wouldn't be very clever - there would be no reason to sell your labour under Communism. In fact, it would be so backward, the exploitation so evident, that nobody would even bother. Why would you want to work for wages when there are no wages under Communism?

Nobody is going to stop you from doing it. Communism is stateless. But you'd be pretty stupid to be doing it, and it would be a massive waste of time and resources. Nobody in their right mind would work for wages in a system where everyone else gets the product of their labour.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#116

Post by VLM » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 7:00 PM UTC

nickik wrote: post #76

throwaway729 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...as they would like it to become... Friendly society... DRO... I think this has always been my primary gripe with ancap -- it's Utopian. And all Utopian thinking has the same problem -- it's either irrational, or very rational but starting from very strong axioms. Ancap writers, to their credit, tend to care a lot about crafting strong, rational arguments. When I think about ancap (or any political theory that se…

I don't think its all that Utopian. An-Caps take a lot of care to make there institution prove against human weakness. There is also a lot of study into historical examples that explain part of how a An-Cap society would work. I don't one can expect more from any group. An-Capism is as un-utipian as you can get while still having some vauge definition of an ideal system. Most AnCaps happily admit that the assumed soc…

"prove against human weakness."

You were likely thinking of moral and ethical lapses, but there's also the crucial problem of IQ and disability. Could a ancap community of PHD students work? Probably. Elsewhere? Well...

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#117

Post by pdonis » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 7:04 PM UTC

ue_ wrote: post #107

pdonis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the motivation underlying (almost) every transaction in which your goal is to sell things in such a way as to get yourself the largest profit And the goal of the buyer is to buy things in such a way as to get himself the largest surplus, i.e., the most value for a given cost. So by your reasoning, all buyers are selfish just as much as all sellers are selfish. > People have moral standards. I think I'm just a cynic…

>So by your reasoning, all buyers are selfish just as much as all sellers are selfish. I don't disagree with this. But I think that there is more harm that comes from the corporation to the consumer than there is from the consumer to the corporation, or at least more potential harm. And I think that arises out of selfishness that is unfortunately built into the system. >Moral standards existed long before any regulat…

> it does not mean that such cooperation is fair

"Fair" is subjective. Our moral intuitions give us fairly consistent answers for simple cases, but most cases are not simple.

One response to this problem is to point out that a free market is the best mechanism we know of for maximizing "fairness" in the sense of bargaining power. But free markets are actually pretty rare. For example, large corporations' wage structures, which dictate the terms of many people's employment contracts, are not the products of a free market; they are the products of the corporations' internal processes, which are dictated by top-down centralized control. (To some extent they are also products of negotiations, for example with labor unions, but that just extends the top-down centralized control to the unions.) So an obvious way to make cooperation fairer is to decrease the average size of corporations, in order to expose more transactions to free markets. In the absence of regulation, I suspect that this is what would actually happen, because most large corporations are the products of regulation, not of free market competition.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#118

Post by stale2002 » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 7:10 PM UTC

ue_ wrote: post #115

stale2002 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You CANNOT freely organize yourself in an communism. This is because as soon as you start "freely organzing" a whole bunch of my property now apparently becomes "means of production" and gets siezed from me. What if I and a group of other people want to organize and work together, in exchange for wages with fully voluntary other people?

>What if I and a group of other people want to organize and work together, in exchange for wages with fully voluntary other people? There's no problem with that, but the people working for you wouldn't be very clever - there would be no reason to sell your labour under Communism. In fact, it would be so backward, the exploitation so evident, that nobody would even bother. Why would you want to work for wages when the…

In this wonderful future, there will still be scarcity. There isn't going to be an infinite number of things.

Sure, maybe all my food and housing is paid for. But what if I want more stuff, that I couldn't normally get?

What if I WANT to work for a wage, in order to get these other things? That doesn't sound stupid at all.

Or perhaps the person who I am working for, due to him having a really good business model, or idea, or skill set, produces so much product of labor that I rather get a small portion of my product of labor from him, than get an even smaller product of labor the "normal" way, even if the normal way I receive is my "fair" share?

I as an employee do not care a single bit about getting my "fair share" of product of labor. I care about MAXIMIZING my absolute amount of product of labor.

As in, I'd rather have 10 percent of 100,000$ than 100% of 1 ,000$. Why would I care if my boss gets 0 dollars or 90,000$s?

I don't care if my boss "exploits" me, as long as it is a better option than working for a "fair" share anywhere else

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#119

Post by danharaj » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 7:12 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #110

danharaj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess all those colonial wars and government interventions to build and prop up industries never resulted in higher returns. Capitalism is most certainly not just private ownership of the means of production. That is too reductionist. That is like saying biology is chemistry. Technically true, but misses the point. Because the means of production are held privately there is a class distinction between owners and wo…

Capitalism and nationalist mercantilism are historically related, but one does not necessarily follow from the other. Anarcho-capitalists usually define "capitalism" as "societal convention allows an individual to own property for that person's sole benefit". In that school of thought, your ability to own things is limited by your ability to defend what you have claimed. You can't just take your money, use it to buy…

I am talking about capitalism in material terms as it happens because that's what the post I replied to was doing, not an ideal, hypothetical form of capitalism. likewise if we were having a discussion about the real life consequences about Marxism-Leninsim (like a productive discussion on that topic can actually happen on HN) I would be criticizing the USSR as it actually developed and not, say, as it was described by Stalin's theoretical ramblings.

An-capitalism has never happened and probably never will because it presumes there is an ideal form of capitalism that can outcompete the actual capitalism that exists which is inextricably tied with state power. In every development of capitalism in every country starting with the very first ones in Europe, the state's power was used to disrupt the old order and establish a new one. It was not the only necessary ingredient, but it was essential.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#120

Post by yarrel » Mon, Jan 09, 2017, 7:34 PM UTC

bo1024 wrote: post #38

I just want to mention that many commenters here are reading much more into the name politically than do the game theorists/computer scientists who actually do research on it. The research is focused on the game theory and not meant to make any sort of political points or value judgement. The main question asked is how to design systems so that even in a game-theoretic equilibrium, the total "welfare" is close to the…

Then they should use less political and value judgement entailing language.

That they don't indicates that they enjoy the attention doing so brings to their otherwise dry mathematical endeavors. Or that they aren't very good at rational decision making. In which case it's not clear that they are the best people to be writing about it.

Don't shoot the recipient.