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

Jacque Fresco has died

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 113 posts

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#101

Post by Elinvention »

jokoon wrote: post #71

Once you realize politicians do an actual hard job running things by using deception, and when you realize money is just a tool we use to measure what goes where with accounting, then you realize we use money because even the best ideas don't work because humans are natural competitors. Money is not about corruption or running numbers, it's about counting sheeps in a complex human society. That's it. Currency is not…

I think you don't know much about The Venus Project.

He did not believe human were competitive by nature. He believed competition is a product of scarcity. And he understood that while visiting the Tuamotu islands, where natives lived very differently than we do. Corruption in a monetary system is exacerbated. It's so easy to pay off someone that it became normal.

We do know how to reduce conflict. But we don't want to. Every country has interests to keep one of the factions involved in power. How can the conflict terminate if one country gives weapons to a faction while another bombs them?

In 2016 he was awarded by UN for "City Design & Community". And he may receive other awards post mortem.

If you look more deeply there is little ideology in Fresco's view.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#102

Post by taw55 »

afsina wrote: post #41
barrkel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Murphy is right in so far as in the aggregate humanity will be fantastically wealthy, but the distribution will be such that almost everybody will only subsist due to the benevolence of the wealthy.

Perhaps. However, it is also likely that technological advances will make the level of quality of life quite close whether you are wealthy or not.

Which is a completely orthogonal thing...

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#103

Post by taw55 »

EGreg wrote: post #49
afsina wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He (and Fresco) is of course talking hypothetically but as he continues: "If such a world really is technologically possible, we should cut the socialist dreamers some slack. Their fault lies not with their vision, but with their plans for achieving it." From what I understand Murphy claim that if such a dream is technologically possible their's is not the correct way. I guess main point is that sooner or later Fresc…

Property rights certainly requires central calculation and coersion, too. Look at all the activities undertaken in the name of copyright and patent enforcement. This is "property rights". Look at cable companies suing cities to not give citizens fast broadband, while they maintain their cartel. This is central enforcement. A company like Apple can be privately owned. The app store is privately owned. Facebook, Google…

Indeed, privatization of public utilities for example have created more government bureaucracy, not less, exactly for these reasons. Market fundamentalists (the anarchist leaning side at least, less the Hayekians and such) seem to believe that institutional structures that emerge from non-coerced (if it were ever black and white) property owning individuals will carry their values in some immutable form and corruption only ever arises when agents "become social". I find this an extremely naive view of human group behavior. The entire underlaying theory seems to be based upon 19th century hard-reductionism (sadly still the norm in the economics profession) and really needs a post-complexity, post-behavorial update. As it stands it is firmly entrenced in the realm of ideology, I wouldn't even consider it soft science.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#104

Post by Jabanga »

barrkel wrote: post #32

"if property rights were respected by all, “humanity would become fantastically wealthy.”" This comment by Robert Murphy is a weird non sequitur apropos of not much in the article. If property rights are respected by all, some small fraction of humanity will indeed become fantastically wealthy, but the vast majority would be on the tail end of a very thinly tailed distribution as humans become worthless for productio…

>If property rights are respected by all, some small fraction of humanity will indeed become fantastically wealthy, but the vast majority would be on the tail end of a very thinly tailed distribution as humans become worthless for production - leading to quite a bit of aggregate unhappiness.

The evidence suggests that adoption of market institutions boosts wages for all classes and is the most effective way to alleviate poverty:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-pol...

I would argue this is because the sum knowledge of society is NOT accessible to any one party. Knowledge exists in a diffused pattern, across billions of individuals. The only way for the entirety of that knowledge to come to bear is for all the individuals that constitute a society to participate in market decisions, with rules that punish bad decisions with a reduction in capital and reward good ones with an increase in capital.

In other words, a government will not be able to intelligently invest with anywhere near as much skill as billions of independent individuals investing their own capital.

Every individual has unique knowledge about specific domains, and when empowered and incentivized to invest, will utilise that knowledge to find and invest in opportunities within these domains that the vast majority of the population would overlook.

It's billions of individual investment decisions, each utilising the unique knowledge of the individual investor, that combined, can create a highly effective economy that rapidly grows and produces significant returns for the population.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#105

Post by cLeEOGPw »

swalsh wrote: post #15

I think as a whole his vision is little too "non organic". I don't think society can be planned to the degree he wished. However disassembled there were some solid ideas, many of which are becoming realities today. He represents one of my favorite parts of the 50's and 60's. Which struck me as a time where people imagined that it was totally possible to just upend society, and rebuild it in a better way. The level of…

He was absolutely out of touch. At no point he ever considered the basic human, as an animal species, instincts, tendencies, mechanisms and other mechanics surrounding human societies. His idea of society is an equivalent of designing an everlasting engine with assumptions like friction, radiation, air resistance and evaporation doesn't exist. He discarded reality, created his own reality in his own mind and pushed an idea as worthy of some kind of significance.

The only thing that this man taught me is how far you can get just by being super persuasive.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#106

Post by Jabanga »

EGreg wrote: post #42
barrkel wrote: post #32

"if property rights were respected by all, “humanity would become fantastically wealthy.”" This comment by Robert Murphy is a weird non sequitur apropos of not much in the article. If property rights are respected by all, some small fraction of humanity will indeed become fantastically wealthy, but the vast majority would be on the tail end of a very thinly tailed distribution as humans become worthless for productio…

When anarcho capitalists make the jump from the non-aggression principle (NAP) to property rights, they invariably switch from using deontological arguments to consequentialist arguments like everyone else: "Look communism failed, capitalism produces more wealth" "Well if everyone has everything they need, who's going to work?" It sounds like the music industry asking who's going to record songs if copyright isn't st…

I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but I am a fierce proponent of private property rights, and I regularly make deontological arguments for them. My central argument is that self-ownership (the right to our person) implies a right to appropriate natural resources, since our bodies are constituted of natural resources that at some point we appropriated. That same principle should extend to non-biological appropriation, since there's no reason to give a different moral treatment based on how the natural resources were appropriated. Thus, our property is an extension of our self, which axiomatically we consider people to have an absolute right to.

What it ultimately comes down to is that the value you add to natural resources morally belongs to you. When you turn 100 lb of food into a brain, that produces Mozart's symphonies, you are converting matter into a higher value form, and you should be entitled to that value. Similarly when you convert a dead tree into a canoe, you should be entitled to that canoe, minus whatever value you're depriving society of by depriving them of the log. This is just and this is fair, and appropriately, it aligns with consequentialism.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#107

Post by jokoon »

Elinvention wrote: post #101
jokoon wrote: post #71

Once you realize politicians do an actual hard job running things by using deception, and when you realize money is just a tool we use to measure what goes where with accounting, then you realize we use money because even the best ideas don't work because humans are natural competitors. Money is not about corruption or running numbers, it's about counting sheeps in a complex human society. That's it. Currency is not…

I think you don't know much about The Venus Project. He did not believe human were competitive by nature. He believed competition is a product of scarcity. And he understood that while visiting the Tuamotu islands, where natives lived very differently than we do. Corruption in a monetary system is exacerbated. It's so easy to pay off someone that it became normal. We do know how to reduce conflict. But we don't want…

> I think you don't know much about The Venus Project.

I learned about this project in 2009. It's idealist by nature. It's great, but it doesn't really account for the reality of how politics work.

> He believed competition is a product of scarcity.

Good luck keeping that nice living standard by removing competition off the table. Corruption is why we win.

> But we don't want to.

Geopolitics at play, there is so little people can really do about it. Ultimately, people will choose to be able to afford another lollipop to their kid, rather than maybe care about people thousands of kilometers away. We'd rather save 10 cent on the gallon of gas or get marshmallow than let our neighbor have shelter. Husbands will gladly shit in their neighbor's yard just to content their wives.

The intricacies are so complex and people don't really have time to really care at all, but ultimately, at the larger scale, we still are competitive because that's how the first world get comfortable. It's crazy how people can eat organic but won't try to be informed about the middle east and how the world is poor.

I have respect for his project, but it seems to make abstraction of the politics of what he is proposing. It says "beyond politics". You cannot remove politics from the equation. Politics is how the world works.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#108

Post by boona »

dang wrote: post #63
boona wrote: post #39

You mean someone who understands the complexities of the markets and the financial system wasn't convinced by Marxism with robots? I can't imagine why.

Please don't post snarky swipes here. If you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14423470 and marked it off-topic.

First, a comment that promotes Marxism or Nazism or any of heinous ideologies should be met with a certain harshness. We tried that in the 20th century, and considering the 100+ million dead people (most of it due to Marxism), I think it's fair to say that that was a bad turn in human history.

Second, considering that the comment I was replying to contained snark i.e. "atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions", I'm not sure why you focused on mine.

In the future, please be consistent with your application of warnings. You wouldn't want to members to believe that you're ideologically driven rather than promoting open intellectual discussion.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#109

Post by boona »

rbanffy wrote: post #94
boona wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Venus Project has tried to distance itself from the Marxists It has sure tried, but it can't, because it's Marxist at it's core, and it therefore shares it's same inherent problems. It can't calculate properly properly for one, and whether the heads of those systems are politicians or programmers, the failure points are the same. > please let's not pretend that Marxian economists are economically illiterate Mar…

> Marxism from a logical perspective, will fail because it can't calculate. That's very wrong. You don't need a Sears catalog to sum the costs of production/acquisition all the way to the start of the value chain. You may need input to predict the demand for a given product but that, again, supposes a market. > The direct result of which has been a drastic drop in living standards to starvation. You seem to ignore th…

> You don't need a Sears catalog to sum the costs of production/acquisition all the way to the start of the value chain

This was common practice for communist countries, because they couldn't calculate otherwise. Logically, you can't calculate like the market does since the price system (or lack of system) is able to communicate vast amounts of information that socialism just can't. See The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich Hayek. It's in part why he won the Nobel prize in economics. It's a short essay that's free online.

> You seem to ignore the effects of embargos and arms races.

It doesn't come close to explaining the catastrophic system wide failure that Marxism produces.

Re: Jacque Fresco has died

#110

Post by atlih »

staticelf wrote: post #6
rodolphoarruda wrote: post #3

I remember when I watched the Zeitgeist documentaries and had my first contact with this 'resource based" society. Weeks later I had dinner with a friend who was a director in a Spanish consulting firm specialized in the banking sector. I tried to impress him with what I had seen in the documentary. In the end, it was like having an atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions.

I was also pretty juiced up and into the venus project for a while until I realized nobody is interested in living in such a world. Then I gave up.

And then came Zuckerbergs Harvard commencement address. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmYv8XGl-YU

Basically poor Jacque was 40 years ahead of his time.

Post reply on HN