Earlier quoted context omitted.
The free market is the best algorithm for hill-climbing a society into feudalism, one A/B test at a time.
Can you expand on this? I'm curious what you mean.
- There's no real mechanism in the free market for long-term goal setting, apart from massive capital or collective action. Collective action is pretty hard to organize without capital.
- People have vices and virtues. Long-term thinking tends to lead to better outcomes. Long-term thinking tends toward virtues. Short-term instinct tends toward vices. See e.g. the marshmallow experiment.
- A/B tests and the concept of "revealed preference" optimize for vice without regard to long-term good. If you ask a smoker if they want to quit, they'll often say yes. But their "revealed preference" shows that they want to keep smoking. So "revealed preference" optimizes for vice.
- There's a feedback cycle between the most effective micro-optimizers and the accumulation of capital. So those who have the most money, can afford the most micro-optimizations. And those micro-optimizations favor the holders of the capital at the expense of society at large. Thus we are gradually optimizing ourselves into the will and control of the wealthy, AKA feudalism.
We can see this playing out in operating systems, too. Windows, despite MS's antitrust sins, and much as the Slashdot crowd loved to hate it, used to be very focused on compatibility and widespread use. There used to be a saying, "80% of your users only use 20% of your features, but they all use a different 20%". Now everything's gone from focus groups to telemetry. In other words, from planning and virtue, to reactionism and "revealed preference". Anything not used by 100% of users, or anything that doesn't favor the holders of the keys, is at risk of being destroyed in the next automatic update.