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AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

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Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#91

Post by sudosysgen »

nradov wrote: post #72
sudosysgen wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the Soviet famines were due to erroneous data due to dysfunctional bureacracies. Which is exactly why "pen and paper" are an issue.

The Soviet famines were intentional genocide. Communist Party leaders always had plenty to eat. https://victimsofcommunism.org/

This used to be believed by academic historians, until the opening of the Soviet Archives in 1992, and now the consensus is that it wasn't, it was just really bad data.

The link you're citing had multiple authors resign due to academic dishonesty and is funded by the US government, therefore making it state propaganda.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#92

Post by sudosysgen »

nradov wrote: post #76
sudosysgen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean knowledge of the real economy. What materials there are and what is done with it. That's all you need in a planned economy to avoid crises. I said that the USSR had one economic crisis that wasn't due to exogenous circumstances. Which is true. I agree that free markets outperformed them. I'm saying there is clearly potential for improvement since the USSR was so dysfunctional and was planned with pen and paper…

There is no way to gain accurate, detailed knowledge of the real economy. It has always been impossible. That's one of several reasons why economic central planning is stupid.

This is stupid. We can definitely do that, even today, with basic computer technology.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#93

Post by sudosysgen »

lumost wrote: post #66
sudosysgen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not in fact true. The basket of goods didn't have any fixed ruble price, as much of it was free. Much of production was never given a full price in rubles, as a large part of it was by direct resource allocation. You can indeed estimate it using a basket of goods and their equivalent values, but not with income and import/export + exchange rates because you're then removing all natural wealth. It's a very dif…

Something being free simply means the government paid for it on behalf of the worker. Direct resource allocation likewise just implies the government paid for it albeit without consideration for margin or potentially the ability of the resource allocator to remain solvent. Direct resource allocation implies that valuable resources were taken from one activity and allocated to another, the workers who produce the reso…

The issue always comes to assign a price in US dollars.

The government may pay people in other things that were the result of direct resource allocation, so you simply cannot put a price to it.

What is the cost of land that the government gives you? What is the cost of a lump of coal? Clearly this is a lot more than the simple capital cost used to extract it.

The long and short of it is, you're not getting a meaningful price is US dollars.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#94

Post by sudosysgen »

betwixthewires wrote: post #87
lucian1900 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet many starved during the Great Depression as food was being destroyed to prevent its price from cratering. Also, planning can be distributed too. Historically it always has been, to varying degrees depending on technology available.

Do you have a source that food was destroyed to prevent it's price cratering and that caused starvation? Usually if there's demand for food it's price won't crater, and the fact that people were starving tells me there was said demand. Of course if that is the case that that happened, that's an external (government) intervention in a market. Planning is distributed, in market economies. Central planning by definition…

Planned economies can definitely be planned in a distributed manner. Especially anarchist-leaning planned economics has many possible frameworks for this.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#95

Post by _2d30 »

drewcoo wrote: post #88
_2d30 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WalMart is very centrally planned. More than the USSR was at peak. By the 1980s, WalMart required UPC bar codes on everything, and a different bar code on cartons and cases. Headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas did purchasing and distribution control for the entire WalMart economy. They had central planning at a level Gosplan could only dream of. > Amazon, of course, has taken that even further. Whenever people de…

> Whenever people describe WalMart or Amazon as centrally planned economies It's a lucky thing that nobody said that then, or that straw man wouldn't have anything to do. Full work for all straw men!

The author of the comment didn’t quibble about this in their reply nor is my characterization an inordinate one. The author is making a clear comparison between the “central planning” of mega-scale retailers and Gosplan. It’s implied that the comparison is reasonable in that Amazon and WalMart are somehow equivalent to or close to the economy of the USSR or else the comparison itself was self-defeating and therefore wouldn’t have been made. It’s not a straw man at all.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#96

Post by [deleted] »

sudosysgen wrote: post #89
betwixthewires wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not assume P=NP as far as I can tell, unless you understand something I've missed? I'd be very interested in an explanation for how a market assumes P=NP, if I got one I'd basically be done with the concept of markets because I do not believe P=NP. A market economy is a distributed network, a self healing network and a self organizing network that optimizes itself for resource distribution, an emergent proper…

The problem of maximizing your self-interest in a market is general enough that finding a solution to it can require solving an NP-hard problem. This is actually true, real financial problems are NP-hard. The market does not optimize for resource distribution, it optimizes for profit. It is tyrannical in that it removes your agency, as a member of the market you have no other choice but to optimize for profit in many…

[deleted]

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#97

Post by betwixthewires »

sudosysgen wrote: post #89
betwixthewires wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not assume P=NP as far as I can tell, unless you understand something I've missed? I'd be very interested in an explanation for how a market assumes P=NP, if I got one I'd basically be done with the concept of markets because I do not believe P=NP. A market economy is a distributed network, a self healing network and a self organizing network that optimizes itself for resource distribution, an emergent proper…

The problem of maximizing your self-interest in a market is general enough that finding a solution to it can require solving an NP-hard problem. This is actually true, real financial problems are NP-hard. The market does not optimize for resource distribution, it optimizes for profit. It is tyrannical in that it removes your agency, as a member of the market you have no other choice but to optimize for profit in many…

Do you have an example of an NP hard problem a person would have to solve on the process of optimizing for self interest?

A market optimizes for whatever the participant wants, profit is simply a mechanism by which the overall market performs price discovery. You always have a choice to not optimize for profit, I make trades all the time where profit is not my goal.

Just choosing a job and being kindly allowed a small local marketplace is not agency.

Hayek's point would obviously violate the church-turing hypothesis (unless there's some hitherto unknown quantum-esque computation process going on in the human brain which I doubt, or you're mischaracterizing his point, I'm reading his book as we speak) but I believe that a sufficiently advanced machine capable of outperforming the market given equatable conditions (same information availability and processing) would probably perform those functions with less resource efficiency, not to mention the resources to build a redundant machine we don't need. If you build one that is better by using more energy and resources to scale its capabilities up, well now you're not optimizing resources on the whole because you're dedicating some for this machine to exist and operate, the resources to build the machine and maintain operation are then distributed suboptimally.

If a machine that uses the same net resources for this task and with equal capabilities could outperform the marketplace at efficiently distributing resources, and there are NP hard problems in personal finance, wouldn't that mean P=NP?

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#98

Post by betwixthewires »

sudosysgen wrote: post #94
betwixthewires wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source that food was destroyed to prevent it's price cratering and that caused starvation? Usually if there's demand for food it's price won't crater, and the fact that people were starving tells me there was said demand. Of course if that is the case that that happened, that's an external (government) intervention in a market. Planning is distributed, in market economies. Central planning by definition…

Planned economies can definitely be planned in a distributed manner. Especially anarchist-leaning planned economics has many possible frameworks for this.

I'd like more information on these anarchist leaning planned economics schemes that plan an economy on a distributed manner if you have it, examples or links would be cool.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#99

Post by betwixthewires »

sudosysgen wrote: post #90
betwixthewires wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing about market economies is that the economy itself measures the food and distributes it in a maximally efficient manner when left unmolested, no central planner needed. Distributed economies will always be more efficient than planned economies, because everyone on a distributed economy participates in the cognitive load of measuring and distributing resources, so the network has more processing p…

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises. As for food being always produced in market economies, see the Bengal famine. Food wasn't destroyed in the Holodonor, it was simply redistributed. Similar famines happened under capitalism, all it takes is for a crop to come up first or for cash crops combined with the anarchy of production to lead to a crop that is beneath the requirements. So no, similar famines did…

Optimal does not mean perfect. Externalities exist. For example, a meteor could hit the great plains and cause a famine. The market cannot solve that, but it can optimize available resources.

Markets emerge spontaneously, like evolution. Evolution functions more optimally than if there were theoretically some god pulling levers. Not perfect, optimally. Markets function better than planned economies for the same reason, that the depth and dimension of the information needed real time does not allow for some entity to make the minutiae of the decisions that need to be made real time. Feedback loops in a complex dynamic multiparty system like a market or evolution sometimes do have much longer latency, but the mean latency of all information flows in both examples is vastly smaller than if every one of those flows had to go through a decision making entity first.

Re: AI and Communism: Narratives of AI Behind the Iron Curtain

#100

Post by lucian1900 »

betwixthewires wrote: post #87
lucian1900 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet many starved during the Great Depression as food was being destroyed to prevent its price from cratering. Also, planning can be distributed too. Historically it always has been, to varying degrees depending on technology available.

Do you have a source that food was destroyed to prevent it's price cratering and that caused starvation? Usually if there's demand for food it's price won't crater, and the fact that people were starving tells me there was said demand. Of course if that is the case that that happened, that's an external (government) intervention in a market. Planning is distributed, in market economies. Central planning by definition…

Before the revolution, landlords in agricultural areas were already selling food to the industrial cities, with prices subject to market forces. After the revolution, the state planned this trade and set fixed prices for food so industrial workers could afford it. Since these prices were lower than what the landlords wanted to extract, they destroyed food rather than sell it to the state. “Fraud, famine and fascism” by Tottle has many quotes from primary sources, here’s a few http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/node77.html

Planning hasn’t been entirely centralised in any socialist country. There is naturally a lot of back and forth when determining what an area needs and what it can produce. A lot of planning is also delegated locally for matters that don’t affect other areas. Ultimately planning is the essential part, while some amount of centralisation is useful for optimisation to avoid merely local optimums.

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