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Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

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Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#81

Post by carapace »

wallacoloo wrote: post #71
carapace wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible (I would like to believe) but it involves self-referential models: In order to work, economic models must include models of the models (both yours and other peoples'.) This means that cybernetics (the study of "circular loops in causation") is the minimum formalism for economics.

I don't see that these self-referential models are so exclusive to modeling economics. Many machine actors naturally develop to have models of the other actors. An AI which plays Go probably has some limited model of its competitor (or a "typical" competitor) in the sense that it can predict "if I make move, my competitor is likely to counter with one of moves". Consciousness was referenced above. One thing commonly…

(FWIW, cybernetics attempts to model large complex systems.)

> I don't see that these self-referential models are so exclusive to modeling economics.

Each of the OP's examples are non-adversarial.

> reach consciousness with computers, go to Mars, design our genes, achieve immortality, colonize the universe, find the "god's particle",

There's no opponent (according to modern scientific rational materialism) in any of those endeavors.

If you were to develop a working model of economics it would behoove your opponents to alter their behavior in ways that invalidated your model.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#82

Post by coldtea »

chr1 wrote: post #53
tsimionescu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialism is essentially only an extension of democracy to the economic system. Since democracy seems to work relatively decently (warts and all) for most prosperous societies, I don't see why human nature is a good argument for saying it's impossible.

Capitalism is also an extension of democracy, the difference is that with capitalism you get to choose how to vote, by giving part of your vote to someone who have created a better product, and get someone elses vote by doing something useful. With socialism you get the same amount of votes whether you do something useful or not, and can spend that vote on the only type of product whether you like it or not. This is…

>Capitalism is also an extension of democracy

An extension where the more money you have, the more influence you get.

Unless it's 1 person, 1 vote, it's not democracy.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#83

Post by DoctorNick »

jancsika wrote: post #80
DoctorNick wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What's fun about this piece is that it puts into perspective how absurd, unworkable, and thoroughly ripped off of Star Trek the Chilean control room was, which is thoroughly entertaining. Pretty presumptuous, considering how it was never really put into practice before Allende was murdered and Pinochet's brutal regime was installed by the CIA. Reminds me of a quote: “The boys of Capital, they also chortle in their m…

Easter egg inside that metaphor: One day some Spanish anarchists built a functioning helicopter. Upon seeing it fly, the Wright brothers immediately teamed up with the auto industry and shot up everyone in the testing facility. Then the Wright brothers intoned: Not invented here. That was found crossed out in one of William Blum's manuscripts with these words written in red ink: "too inside baseball."

Oh William Blum, still pining for Catalonia...

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#84

Post by IIAOPSW »

sehugg wrote: post #31

SAGE also didn’t have any goofy fake control panels with a place to put your liquor No, but the Weapons Director Console incorporated an ashtray and cigarette lighter on the left side.

I would hope the Weapons Director Console would have had a fake liquor panel with a dual custody lock as a final provision for the doomsday scenario.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#86

Post by chr1 »

coldtea wrote: post #82
chr1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is also an extension of democracy, the difference is that with capitalism you get to choose how to vote, by giving part of your vote to someone who have created a better product, and get someone elses vote by doing something useful. With socialism you get the same amount of votes whether you do something useful or not, and can spend that vote on the only type of product whether you like it or not. This is…

> Capitalism is also an extension of democracy An extension where the more money you have, the more influence you get. Unless it's 1 person, 1 vote, it's not democracy.

> Unless it's 1 person, 1 vote, it's not democracy

Let's say every person has one vote And there are thousands and thousands of elections going on every day. Most of the people are not interested in most of elections, so they ignore elections because it is not possible to follow everything. Which means we end up with 1 person 0 votes most of the time. Now to improve the situation we can agree to collaborate i'll vote the way you want for the issue you care and you'll help me in return. Money is simply a way to make this kind of collaboration easier. Saying that any kind of cooperation should be banned doesn't help anyone, and leads to a stalemate in the case when there are many issues to vote on. In fact if our governments were real democracies where votes could decide real policies instead of picking someone who is going to lie for the next 4 years, we would have a system very similar to money to help us to deal with the large amount of issues to vote on.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#87

Post by toomuchtodo »

carapace wrote: post #47

You can get a PDF copy of Ashby's book "Introduction to Cybernetics" from this site: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in the subject.

DNS doesn't seem to resolve. Wayback to the rescue.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190826152737/http://pespmc1.vu...

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#88

Post by larnmar »

coldtea wrote: post #19

It's funny in a way, that a modern person believes that through technology we can very well reach consciousness with computers, go to Mars, design our genes, achieve immortality, colonize the universe, find the "god's particle", and so on, but successfully modelling an economy is impossible...

We can model an economy, but not at perfect precision.

Building a model always involves decisions about what approximations you make, what entities you consider, and so forth. There’s a lot of flexibility when you build your model.

As a result, the recommendations of the model tend to match the biases of the people making the model; and if they don’t, they’ll keep trying til they do. Left wing economists wind up building models that recommend left wing policies, while right-wing economists build models that recommend right-wing policies, and we are none the wiser.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#89

Post by chr1 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #76
chr1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only the first half of what socialism means, the second half is that if they make poor choices, and their corporation goes bankrupt, the other corporation has to employ them and give the same amount of voting power, as to the old workers who had made better choices, and kept their corporation working. The first half is pretty much uncontroversial, and would work under capitalism too. The problematic part is th…

To my understanding, the only obligation would be that, IF you "employed" someone, they should have the same voting power as everyone else, since they should always be empowered to have some say on their own work. But I don't know of any socialist principle that would force any particular company to "employ"/associate with any particular person.

Interesting, i have never seen this definition of socialism where it is simply about the way companies are governed and companies themselves are free to compete with each other. I expected a system that would try to equalise everyone in the whole country instead of simply everyone working for a given company, so it would need some way to redistribute goods instead of simply giving equal voting rights to all employees.

Would the system you describe be the same as capitalism, with the exception that workers are prohibited from selling their voting rights to anyone else?

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#90

Post by stebann »

coldtea wrote: post #23

> Mind you the Chilean government was being starved of dollars at the time as a form of colonial pressure, just as the Venezuelan government is now in 2019. The results were hilarious. Yes, a coup, a dictatorship and tens of thousands tortured and executed, haha. The whole TFA screams of facile dismissal and cheap comic shots (people smoked on airplanes at the times and well into the 80s even in the US, so there is n…

I felt bad when I read that too. I think foreigners don't know about Latin America, they where all indoctrinated to hate "socialist" or "populist" Latin America states. All propaganda, they never think why people put them there first. Just look what happened in Bolivia.
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