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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#691

Post by s7r »

jq-r wrote: post #111
wilkommen wrote: post #65

I agree with everything in the blog post. I just think it's really hard for societies to "unfuck" themselves. I think the reason things are going in this direction is because of an increasing concentration of power among a relatively small number of people. It's hard to walk back that kind of concentration of power without societal upheaval. The only reason the gilded age in the United States ended was because of WW2…

You've answered your own question. It is going to be a war. War is a great mallet which destroys most of the power structures and shuffles the cards a bit. But the price to pay is atrociously high. After the war everyone will swear "Never again!", but their children's children have no idea what that means, and have no problem going to war all over again.

When I read this piece, I feel like a lot of these behaviors come back to rent-seeking. Here's a perspective on ways we might be able to transcend rent-seeking, to different ways of work:

https://rebrand.ly/end-of-rent

Jel imate neki contakt? Nisam Hrvat, ali tu sam u tvoj zemlju — mozda mozemo se naci? Tu imas moj informacije: https://github.com/sbutler-gh

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#692

Post by labratmatt »

You see what you want to see. These are not true in my daily life,

1 "Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy." 2 "Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." 3 "Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up."

Dial back the doom and gloom mindset. It's an abundant world.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#693

Post by rland »

It's interesting to look at things from a controls perspective.

An economy (any kind of economy!) is just a feedback control system.

Generally, when you're choosing a feedback controller, you have two options: PID, where you have a set of 3 "dumb" rules, and all you have to do is tune the gains on those dumb rules. Or MPC, where you need to actually build a model of the system you are controlling, and then you can optimally plan to control it the future.

In general, MPC is quite good, much better than PID, if you have a great model of your system. It fails when the model is bad, or when you can't determine your state with accuracy.

PID can be very good -- for systems with very fast dynamics and response times, it is better than MPC, because you don't spend a lot of time in the feedback loop evaluating the model, and you don't need to worry about modeling at all ("model-free")

I think of an economy (very broadly) the same way. The mythical "free market" that everyone talks about is like a PID controller over the whole economy. It's a simple rule, supply and demand, and you can keep prices under control quite well with just a PID controller. But PID can fail spectacularly, too, and cause instability.

In general, you know when instability is happening when you look at a graph of your state variables and it looks like an exponential with a positive coefficient [1]. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this: every single chart we can draw about our economy right now looks like an exponential. Energy, probably the most base measurement, looks like an exponential. This is bad [2] and everyone knows it, which I think is the source of a lot of the modern ennui.

Our old MPC models failed spectacularly, because we didn't have a good way of modeling the whole economy, we only had very granular and incomplete information about the markets, and we didn't have a way of actually solving the optimization problem. The obvious missing link here is the computer.

I agree wholeheartedly with the author, and I think it's really valuable to bring up that we already have central planning going on in the form of the corporation. There are thousands of people whose work is completely decoupled from profit and who engage in long term planning at a scale larger than the market they operate in.

What he describes is like a cascade controller, where the inner loops occur in the linear supply/demand region and the outer loops are a smarter model-informed controller. Rather than pretend like the outer loops are just like the inner loops (a pie-in-the-sky libertarian view) or pretend like the inner loops are just like the outer loops (the anti-capitalist view) we should be thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of both. Right now we're very good at the inner loop but we're basically randomly flailing about with the outer loop.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_function

[2] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#694

Post by wilkommen »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #348
wilkommen wrote: post #65

I agree with everything in the blog post. I just think it's really hard for societies to "unfuck" themselves. I think the reason things are going in this direction is because of an increasing concentration of power among a relatively small number of people. It's hard to walk back that kind of concentration of power without societal upheaval. The only reason the gilded age in the United States ended was because of WW2…

The Gilded Age was generally regarded to have ended about 1900. If you mean the term more broadly and less generally, it still ended in 1929, with the Depression, not with the war.

You’re right, my error.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#695

Post by cardosof »

labratmatt wrote: post #692

You see what you want to see. These are not true in my daily life, 1 "Rich, powerful, greedy people and corporations just get richer, more powerful, and more greedy." 2 "Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves, not for society." 3 "Or, people who are in it for society tend to lose or to get screwed until they give up." Dial back the doom and gloom mindset. It's an abundant world.

Inequality is something we can measure to some degree and it seems to be rising fast.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#696

Post by walterbell »

shoo wrote: post #561
mempko wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a whole I think people need to ask what money is again and have some serious conversations about what money and the monetary system should be. Yes! This is an incredibly important conversation and this conversation is already happening. You see MMT becoming mainstream. Because MMT is a description of how money works today. That it's a technology (and always has been) for governments to provision themselves. In f…

> the value that money represents is a single value. But why is it a scalar and not a vector? For example, why isn't everything priced with a value and a carbon cost? That would make prices vectors instead of scalars Suppose for the sake of the argument that the main countries making up the world economy agree to re-price everything in terms of length 2 vectors (standard_cost, carbon_cost). The former element is meas…

Would this vector stop at length two? How about other "nudge" worthy metrics? See existing cross-border tariffs for a long list of physical properties which influence tariffs for a perceived and often disputed, social objective.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#697

Post by s7r »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #467
Zoo3y wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and perhaps more frustrating to smart people looking to do good realize they are just one person. Huge, structural changes to society involve everyone.

This feeling of frustration is familiar. What helped me was shifting the way I approached the problem. Rather than tasking myself with manipulating social structures directly, I've found joy in teaching others to recognize the structures, recognize the processes by which their reality is maintained, and formulate tools to expose their weaknesses and dismantle them. Ideas spread like seeds in the wind. Our collective…

Really appreciate this sub-thread, including @Zoo3y and @teucris' comments. I share a similar perspective. In the case of this article, I feel like a lot of the behaviors come back to rent-seeking — here's a perspective that might resonate with you:

https://rebrand.ly/end-of-rent

If this interests, send me a note and let's connect/introduce!

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#698

Post by theduder99 »

bb88 wrote: post #612
munificent wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% sympathize with this feeling too. But the pattern I see over and over again is: 1. Society is getting worse. 2. I'm really good at writing software. 3. Therefore the solution is to write software to fix society. That chain of logic is simply the streetlight effect [1] writ large: A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys…

That reminds me of an old joke: Q: How does an engineer cure constipation? A: He works it out with a pencil. Of course in neither sense of the connotation of the punchline, can the engineer cure his constipation. No, he'd need to see a medical professional to do that. I'm old enough to remember that the great promise of the internet in China was as a backdoor to free speech. That was until China contracted companies,…

haha nice modern version! I originally heard the first version as a mathemetician instead of an engineer.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#699

Post by la6471 »

The real problem is not the technology but the mindset. Simply follow the twin principle of live and let live AND do no harm to others. Have a moral compass. You don’t need to be religious or even spiritual for this. Just understand that this is best for you in the long run.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#700

Post by joe_the_user »

jspaetzel wrote: post #306

All of this is just pessimistic complaining. Flip this and be optimistic and you'll find life isn't all that bad. Think about the last hundred years... * Rich people are still rich and poor people have access to more food, medicine, and opportunity then any time in human history. * Families have and always should lookout for themselves first. That's the way things work and should work. * Society is able to support mo…

Some expectations are pessimistic, some are optimistic.

Societies, over time, have gone up and gone down. So sometimes an optimistic perspective has proven right and sometimes a pessimistic perspective has proven right.

The article has a decent argument why a pessimistic approach is plausible. Your examples don't anything particular specific and so they don't really give a case that an optimistic perspective is appropriate. I mean, optimism might appropriate but "change your view to see the good" is just kind of manipulative (something very common now, a reason for pessimism, sadly).

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