61–70 of 212 posts
Also optimism has never been as high as it is now with all this talk about full automation of the economy and people living happily ever after with their guaranteed basic income.
The thing about capitalism, and our dismal history with capitalism-at-large, the "assume the other party is a shitbag" idea is so fundamentally ingrained in our cultural What's that got to do with Capitalism? Correct me if I'm making a straw man, but the alternative to capitalism is to remove negotiation from individual interactions by implementing more State-heavy mechanisms like Communism. Isn't creating a crap-ton…
Honestly, what does regulation have to do with capitalism - where did this meme start and how can I kill it? Capital markets are a tool for allocating resources. They're pretty good at it in that they tend to work better than e.g. palace economies and mostly everything else humans have tried. But there is absolutely nothing to the way that capital markets work that suggests regulation somehow breaks it or whatever ot…
I don't think anyone is claiming that regulation necessarily breaks capitalism. It just tends to. Most regulations have very obvious innovation-stifling or friction-causing side effects that are deleterious to the free market.
The idea that the Pareto-optimal situation is the one where everyone freely copies from each other may be appropriate for the market Tesla finds itself in, but is in general directly contradicted by the actual experience of the technology industry. The experience of the technology industry is that innovation happens in periods of monopoly. That monopoly might arise from first-mover effects, network effects, lock-in e…
The majority of important software innovations have come from the open bazaar, not the cathedral. The Internet; The Web; Firefox, WebKit; GNU/Linux, Unix; HTTP; SSH, SSL, AES; Python, Ruby, C, C++. Thousands of humble open source projects which have been distributed to and changed by millions of users.
And even when large corporations do spawn projects, those that succeed are those that encouraged at least some degree of openness. Android from Google, Java from Sun. Open standards for computer hardware architectures and software have lasted and stood the test of time.
Open code, projects, and standards have more than stood the test of time. We are actually living in a time of unprecedented open source success. The majority of computing systems run on significantly open source code. Millions of Android phones running Linux. Every serious server on the planet running on Apache or NGINX on Linux or BSD. A landslide percentage of users accessing them using Webkit, Blink, and Firefox. That's just the tip of the iceberg! Millions of lines of code are being updated publicly, in real time, by thousands of people across the world in collaboration. More so than ever before!
Sure, maybe some people are a bunch of VC-backed business-savy Steve Jobs-worshipping iPhone mobile app developers now, but it's still sad to see someone say that tech innovation "happens in periods of monopoly" on HackerNews.
The Pareto Optimal is not an outcome which is best for both, since the whole point of this concept is to avoid giving a definition of "best for both". Rather it is an outcome from which no player can be made better off without making some other player worse off. So, for example, for two greedy people sharing a cake, any division of the cake, including one which gives the entire cake to one person, is Pareto optimal.
Anyone seriously interested in understanding what game theory really says and avoiding superficial mistakes in its interpretation should read at least the first chapter of Binmore's 'Playing for Real'.
I got the impression that the underlying motivation for writing the post, and tactic you used for justifying your positions was largely in response to what I would consider the overly myopic hacker news user base. That is, disproportionately white, male, curmudgeoney programmers. I sympathize with your frustration, but urge you not to let their world-view cloud yours, or cause you to search for complicated answers to simple questions.
An example of what I mean:
> I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism.
On this point, I urge you to consider a much simpler explanation: that people are skeptical because there is much to be skeptical of. People like Musk are a rare breed in Silicon Valley. Today's tech "entrepreneur" rarely looks like Elon Musk, someone who genuinely seems to want to do good things for the world. The skeptisism exists because there are a lot of startups doing plain silly things, masked in global do-goodery marketing narrative.
Startups are the new gold rush, today's investment banking. But the west coast has much different cultural norms towards opulent wealth than does the east coast. Put simply, we like to hide it out here, they like to flaunt it out there. Thus, "we're making the world a better place" instead of something like The Wolf of Wall Street.
Still, I enjoyed your post and your choice of using macro-economic theory as a lens through which to view this. Thanks for writing.
The only hope is cultural change. The only hope is cultural trust , and the only way to achieve that is to allow like-minded individuals to separate themselves into autonomous political units. This is dangerous thinking Chris, if you start following these thoughts through to the end, rather than spinning off into happy-clappy "change the world's heart" wishing...
Did you not see the link at the end of the article to Balaji's talk on exit? (Genuine question. If you haven't checked out that talk, its about opting out as an option for pursuing change and it sounds like what you're alluding to!)
We've got a lot of problems facing humankind right now. The stakes get higher every day. Whatever it is we have to do to solve the toughest one we need to do _whatever it takes._
The author is seriously mistaken about game theory. The Nash Equilibrium requires every player to be maximizing their payoffs given what the other players are doing. But game theory itself does not say what the nature of the payoffs are: there is no problem in modelling altruistic players who attach a high payoff to outcomes which are good for everyone and low payoffs to outcomes which benefit only themselves. The Pa…
I think the author had that part mostly right, actually.