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

The Price of Anarchy

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 140 posts

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#81

Post by wyager »

Wow, people are really running away with the political analogy used here.

Calm down folks, they're not ragging on decentralized systems. If you read and comprehend the definitions in the article, you'll see that it's a fully general solution that allows for emergent organization through market systems or cooperation. You can bake those things into the strategies and utility functions of the actors.

It's just a fun and descriptive name for the difference between an idealized central controller (which can force everyone into a configuration that maximizes an arbitrary global utility function) and the lack of such a controller. The outcomes could be the same, they could be different. If you factor in the negative utility of having the central authority in the first place, you can game-theoretically justify your particular favored level of anti-authoritarianism.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#82

Post by snrplfth »

throwaway729 wrote: post #79
snrplfth wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's a big weakness of these theories, I think. My question is not terribly complex or dependent on unusual or unrealistic situations. I would also note that sometimes, people operating off a 'psychologist' basis like you've identified, misunderstand the critiques of others as being also 'psychologist'. For example, the Hayekian critique of central economic planning is often characterized as a psychological a…

> My question is not terribly complex or dependent on unusual or unrealistic situations. No, usually the psychological arguments are needed to hand-wave away crucial but obvious problems. > Well, that's a big weakness of these theories No, it's not. It's perhaps their most important insight. I mean, IMO they're wrong, but the insight about the need for a psychological aspect is important and correct. Libertarians and…

Let me clarify: I'm saying that the "well, your objections are just psychological" aspect is the weakness. Sure, to have a psychological theory is fine, but too often it drifts into essentially "objections to our theory are merely based in the same psychological malformation that is produced by the current system - therefore when we get rid of the system, the objections will go away too". This is a weakness, I think.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#83

Post by jessaustin »

RodericDay wrote: post #59
snrplfth wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the comment he was responding to said "humans in more permissive societies habitually live in relative harmony even more than those in less permissive ones." So the fact that, upon trivial examination, a society is revealed to not actually be that permissive, is not evidence against the assertion that permissive societies are harmonious. I mean, I don't think RodericDay was saying that those two examples were imp…

Parent post said: > One might suspect that all our beneficial habits would break down if there weren't an almighty parental figure lying in wait to punish us I interpreted this in the vein of a libertarian "we don't need a nanny state". And so I assumed that the person was thinking of the USA as a "permissive society in harmony" and of something like North Korea as an "less permissive society in disarray", as opposed…

I'm at least as confused by your comment as you were by mine. b^) On a spectrum of permissiveness, I would have thought we could safely place USA between DPRK and Sweden? I'm happy to consider arguments against such an arrangement... Of course, the idea of a spectrum is also a bit flawed, since there's more than one axis to this.

But we were talking about coercion and authority: GP seemed unable to imagine taking decisions without them. I wanted to point out that most of us are already doing that, to some extent. I hope that in the rest of my life I'll see some progress: more decisions based on personal preferences rather than authority and coercion. To that end, I'm an anarchist. That is, I oppose arbitrary authority.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#84

Post by nickik »

throwaway729 wrote: post #56
snrplfth wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if people can freely organize themselves into collectives or communes, then some of those collectives will be more successful than others, and without mandatory redistribution, you'll have inequality again. Also, if people can leave collectives, then inevitably there are going to be collectives with few or only one single member left, and you're back to individual ownership.

A lot of communists posit that capitalism (and perhaps in some cases statism) cause and/or arise from something kind of resembling a mental illness. Marx's "Alienation" and especially Delueze's "Desire" have this flavor. I think this is one reason why there's a whole brand of communism that's closely tied to Freudian/Lacanian style psychology. That psychological aspect usually plays some role in transitionary theorie…

> IMO that includes anarcho-capitalism.

No it does not.

(Most) Anarcho-Capitalism assumes humans as they are now.

It uses the same analysis as do political scientists and economics use now to model systems.

Most AnCap explicitly reject "Socialist Man"-type stuff.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#85

Post by snrplfth »

pdonis wrote: post #80
snrplfth wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Comcast's oligopoly is largely established by the fact that rights-of-way and pole-attachment rights are monopolized by municipalities, which tend to approve only a single, or few providers. It's not a natural monopoly.

> Comcast's oligopoly is largely established by the fact that rights-of-way and pole-attachment rights are monopolized by municipalities, which tend to approve only a single, or few providers. Only because, when municipalities do try to treat bandwidth as a public utility, which they can sell to all providers equally, Comcast and other large ISPs sue them. > It's not a natural monopoly. I agree, but I don't think it…

I think it's the structure of rights-of-way, pole-attachments and so forth as monopolies that props it up. The fact that municipalities get sued for trying to sell bandwidth is a problem, but it emerges, I think, because of the fact it's centralized in a government institution.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#86

Post by [deleted] »

snrplfth wrote: post #61
monocasa wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that 'collective of one's legitimately only needs one worker, then that isn't a problem. If someone else joins him later then he has to share the MoP. I fail to see the logical inconsistency.

But are collectives allowed to exclude people? If not, how will they select appropriate workers? If you can just show up at a collective and say "I want to work here, and you can't exclude me or kick me out " then how will they be able to function? People will just leave collectives with poor returns and make collectives with good returns take them on.

[deleted]

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#87

Post by jessaustin »

mcguire wrote: post #65
jessaustin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a bit of ideology here, in that there's no particular reason that this tiny little observation about network routing had to be called "The Price of Anarchy ". Just the same, it's a mistake to think this topic itself has anything to do with politics or economics. A mistake made intentionally, perhaps, by those with particular political motives.

Network routing is an example. Just because Einstein's original thought experiment involved a train doesn't make special relativity railroad engineering.

Yes it also applies to disk controllers etc. Special relativity isn't about political economy either.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#88

Post by vidarh »

ue_ wrote: post #41
justinmk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Serving your customers well is entirely out of self interest, Right, just like "altruism" is also rooted in self-interest. It turns out that people are motivated by all kinds of things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology

I don't mean to say that everyone acts entirely for themselves, with no action motivated by kindness. I mean to say that in a sytem with multiple people trying to do the same thing you are doing (selling for a profit), you'll have to compete with people with various moral standards and ways of getting their profit. This kind of system, I believe, eventually forces out those who are not "aggressive" enough with their…

Capitalism does not require ever higher returns. It requires ever higher efficiency in extracting surplus. Barring monopolies etc., this should be expected to continue dropping as competition gets more fierce.

Other than that, your argument above is basically Marx thesis for the cause of the eventual collapse of capitalism: He praised capitalism for providing that efficiency necessary to provide sufficient wealth to eventually be able to erase poverty, but at the same point argued that this efficiency ultimately means that to stay competitive, salary costs will eventually need to be systmatically pushed down (whether by actually lowering salaries or through e.g. automation) until capitalism keeps hitting crises where the production capacity outstrip demand as the competitive forces throw more and more people into unemployment, eventually pushing people to revolution.

This is also the basis for why Marx unlike many others of the time was cautious in his criticism of capitalists for being capitalists: He points out that the same mechanism will keep throwing capitalists into the working class through failure, and hence capitalists are according to Marx just as much unable to change the system from within as workers.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#89

Post by dragonwriter »

nickik wrote: post #84
throwaway729 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of communists posit that capitalism (and perhaps in some cases statism) cause and/or arise from something kind of resembling a mental illness. Marx's "Alienation" and especially Delueze's "Desire" have this flavor. I think this is one reason why there's a whole brand of communism that's closely tied to Freudian/Lacanian style psychology. That psychological aspect usually plays some role in transitionary theorie…

> IMO that includes anarcho-capitalism. No it does not. (Most) Anarcho-Capitalism assumes humans as they are now. It uses the same analysis as do political scientists and economics use now to model systems. Most AnCap explicitly reject "Socialist Man"-type stuff.

> (Most) Anarcho-Capitalism assumes humans as they are now.

No, most anarcho-capitalism that is analytical (rather than holding anarcho-capitalism directly as a first principal) relies on outdated idealistic models of humanity.

> It uses the same analysis as do political scientists and economics use now to model systems.

In that, despite its well known flaws, the rational choice model is still frequently used (either as a tolerable simplification in some contexts, or simply from inertia in others) in both political science and economics, this is true. OTOH, it remains an known-to-be-false idealized model.

Re: The Price of Anarchy

#90

Post by mmirate »

throwaway729 wrote: post #48
dunslandsboo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most anarcho-capitalists that I know and from who I learn are absolutely not about "every man for himself" at all. Charity and voluntary cooperation are major parts of the society as they would like it to become. See https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Friendly_society and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_resolution_organizatio...

> ...as they would like it to become... Friendly society... DRO... I think this has always been my primary gripe with ancap -- it's Utopian. And all Utopian thinking has the same problem -- it's either irrational, or very rational but starting from very strong axioms. Ancap writers, to their credit, tend to care a lot about crafting strong, rational arguments. When I think about ancap (or any political theory that se…

> it's either irrational, or very rational but starting from very strong axioms.

I'm not sure I understand why the latter is anywhere near as bad as the former, or even bad at all.

... Err, by "very strong" did you mean "makes (a conjunction of) many claims" rather than "resilient"?

Post reply on HN