Wait, what?
Capitalism maximizes "giving people what they want". This is much closer to the benevolent AI models than to paperclip maxizers.
Capitalism maximizes "giving people what they want". This is much closer to the benevolent AI models than to paperclip maxizers.
There are also varied spectra of wants: on some level, I want to pursue self-actualization goals that are years away. On another level, I want to step out of the rat race and read a good book. On yet another level, I want to watch TV, eat candy, and click a button that delivers a dopamine reward directly to my brain. These wants are frequently in conflict, and capitalism is more incentivized (or capable) to satisfy some of those than others. (I remember a good PG essay about the phenomenon of short wants vs. long wants, but I can't find it; neighboring ideas are found in http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html and http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html)
I don't think markets are a bad technology, any more than any other technology. But the paperclip analogy fits: people do want paperclips, but they also want a variety of other things that aren't paperclips. If we create social machines that optimize some wants over others, a plethora of human needs and desires may be drastically under-supplied as an unintended side effect.
And while that's all very interesting and important in the abstract, it's worth double-checking that you don't get yourself lost in the weeds... which I think you did... and forget that the paperclip maximizer is scary precisely because it has no concept of wants in it. With capitalism, wants can be changed in real time, and the system reacts. The paperclip maximizer does not. They are fundamentally different.
There is a memeset that strongly encourages you to fling up whatever word smokescreen is necessary to ensure that nothing positive is said about Emmanual Goldstein, today played by Capitalism, but it's still just a word smokescreen. There is a fundamental different between a paperclip maximizer and capitalism, and you should not throw yourself into a word tizzy until you've confused your rational brain enough that you can fall back on the comfortable emotional judgments about capitalism. Not every bad thing that can be said about capitalism is true simply because it's a bad thing said about capitalism.
And telling people they are thinking emotionally and not rationally is unbelievably condescending and unnecessarily insulting and has no place in a discussion forum like this. Please try to be respectful.
I think the point to take away is that capitalism is a machine which mindlessly maximizes SOMETHING, disregarding all other things, and that thing isn't necessarily good. I think you're very right to point out that the 'something' is actually dynamic in some sense, though that doesn't save capitalism from the argument here. Dynamic can be bad: I suspect it's dynamic based on the material desires of the particular tiny group of human beings who happen to currently posses a great deal of capital, which is not a particularly good thing.
I'll give an example that intersects the Pavlovian scare words of both "capitalism" and "government": the Prison-Industrial Complex. It's reasonable to want to remove members of society who are dangerously violent, or "cheaters" of sufficient scope. Yet iterate this desire over enough time, and it takes on a life of its own: politicians who want to look tough on crime, parents who want their fears assuaged, private companies who want to profit from correctional tax dollars, and most insidiously, the swaths of police, prison guards, and support staff who want paychecks, benefits and job security.
The final product is something we don't actually want: the most populous prison system in the world, which is massively expensive, socioeconomically predatory, and fails to rehabilitate most of its inmates. Yet there are enough stakeholders who do want the institution to persist for reasons of personal benefit (and enough taxpayers who want to imagine a cute moralistic story and are willing to pay for the luxury of ignorance), that a massive machine of oppression is created and sustained out of a simple, reasonable human want.
I'm not intrinsically anti-capitalist; I'm in the camp of Jaron Lanier, in that money, markets, and corporations are all technologies, and neither good nor evil. But technology should serve humans, and not the other way around; that means paying attention to the power of unchecked, autonomous feedback loops and their power to influence human behavior and our various social ecosystems.
Of course, this assumes all the actors were initially well-intentioned, which they weren't. Plenty of people supported harsh policies of criminalization and "justice" because they wanted to come down hard on the dark-skinned and the poor.
The fact that the distribution is skewed by capital ownership and that agents other than people can own capital creates a powerful distortion and an entirely different systematic effect.
So while your point still stands, if you have a decent middle-class then it will be much more powerful than any billionaire will ever be.
As the system progresses, agents get the choice between loosing their allocation or using it to accumulate capital. This is unfortunate since, theoretically, the whole point of capitalism is to maximize long term consumption.
So do drug dealers who get girls hooked on heroin and put them on the streets. Simply because you serve some compulsion or desire that someone has does not make you benevolent, there are such things as high local utility traps.
Yes, I'm sure that what I want involves working lots of hours to buy Boston real-estate. That surely wasn't determined for me by capitalism, in roughly the same way that a not-quite benevolent AI might determine that what I really ought to want is paperclips.
Wants cannot be considered seriously independent of the reality of scarcity. The sum of the world's wants is greater than the sum of the world's resources, so we have to have some system of allocating those resources among those wants. There are many theories on how to do this, but free market trade is somewhat unique in that it is one of the only systems that acknowledges and allows for subjective value. So long as you are permitted to freely trade your time and resources, you are able of exchanging them for whatever you want most - which is not the same as being able to exchange them for all that you want.
Well, no. What I actually want is to live with my fiancee and not be homeless, and she's from Boston and needs to live near family right now, so here we are. Revealed-preference theory is one subgoal stomp after another.
Among the choices available to you, you are getting what you want. That's not to suggest that the choices you have available are the choices you want, but I would suggest that the blame for that lies with the fact that we do not live in a post-scarcity society rather than on the resource distribution model we use.
No, actually. I want to live with my fiancee. I could perhaps come up with a supergoal for that if I tried, but it would still involve this specific fiancee.
Some things are terminally good, others instrumentally. The chain of reduction stops at things I want for their own sake, long before it hits "Maslow".
>Among the choices available to you, you are getting what you want.
This is vacuous. Firstly, there might be some superior option nobody told me about, or that I didn't think of. Secondly, defining "what I want" as "what was available to me" amounts to rationalizing economics backwards into psychology while ignoring the available empirical evidence. You don't get to tell me what I want based on what I did, because there are in fact many, many filters between what I want and what I do.
>but I would suggest that the blame for that lies with the fact that we do not live in a post-scarcity society rather than on the resource distribution model we use.
These are effectively the same statement. We have more than enough resources to put everyone in the realm of diminishing returns to additional economic resources -- we just have capitalism instead of happiness.
(This is another reason why revealed preferences theories are crap.)