Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

During the dying days of calling myself a libertarian (I think the last permutation was "realistic geo-libertarian") I read a blog post kinda like this, but less concrete. It was by a guy who made up a word, something like "Mazolith", and he was trying to describe how letting these forces unchecked was this hyper system that we were failing to recognize.

One of the lines was

I got to about there ^ in the comment before I remembered more of the quote. The article I trying to find was this:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

It is extremely good and it plays well after DHH's intro. I know some of the arguments there against libertarianism are strawman arguments, but overall it's a great article and about a day after reading it and thinking about it I started just calling myself a Liberal (it's more complicated than that, but it's the closest fit).

DHH touches on exponential growth specifically, but more generally what is needed is to recognize the world as a system of forces and feedback functions, and to take actions to limit the consequences of those systems.

For example, democracy is a system to establish which people run our country. If media is allowed to be funded by foreign forces unchecked then it can subvert our democracy. We must now make a choice, do we do something or allow it? For a time we allowed it because our propaganda works better than theirs (mostly because ours is the truth and we live in free societies) but with the advent of social media we may need to make a different choice or change our systems to adapt.

It is this type of thinking. It's a superset of what the Canadians and others call "good government". It's a way of managing systems to enact our ends: a more peaceful, prosperous, sustainable existence.

Capitalism and growth have a place, but that place needs to be carefully considered and guarded.

It's that or we perish in a nuclear holocaust or melted, polluted planet.

> if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it?

I have a pet theory that is slowly becoming a personal religion of sorts. (Disclaimer: only accreditations are a biochem degree over a decade ago, and this armchair.) It involves a belief that at each level of organization -- atomic, cellular, organismal, societal (which in itself has something of an interesting fractalness) structures try to arrange themselves such that they have "access to the maximum possible future opportunity space"[1][2]. When each structure at every level is operating in such a way, structures tend toward centralization as some parts of the whole become more powerful, and the whole at the next higher level of organization becomes more effective. And so we tend to create hierarchy and oppress our fellow man, for the same reason that our brain cell oppresses and rends subordinate the skin cell of the finger. And so oppression is systemic, almost a law of nature. Decentralization and equality is not what the universe tends toward.

But we can perhaps be clever, and create the society we want and value. It would be a rare organism, in many ways crippled, like a slime-mold among eukaryotes.

So if perhaps centralization and growth (ie control of largest possible future opportunity space) is expected as a physical law of sorts, then the trick would be to create a niche that preserves our value system -- we'd need to engage in systems design that allowed our society to exist is a "test harness", where we get to /feel/ like we're fulfilling desires for these things, but are somehow prevented from engaging in the behaviour that we have subjectively decided (at a societal level) will lead to bad outcomes. I dunno, just riffing here ;)

[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_...

[2]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170126-information-theory-a...

From a resource perspective nerve cells don't really consume all that much of the body's resources. More than fat cells but less than active muscle tissue. It's really cancer that's the major risk.

Society and structures do tend towards centralization (at least on a local or short-term scale, not a physics guy, but entropy seems to say something over time).

Concepts like path-dependency seem to have an explanation for this, but they also stand in contrast to "access to the maximum possible future opportunity space". Many structures are clearly sub-optimal; organizations often crystallize in ways that maximize nothing at all but short-term laziness. They centralize by choosing paths that are convenient, not necessarily those that offer the most opportunity.

Interesting hypothesis . As far as maximization of opportunity space is concerned its not very different from selfish gene theory suggested by Dawkins . But I guess you are wrong about need to centralized being inbuilt in nature . You are confusing unification / alignment with centralization . If you look outside of any abstraction level ( molecular ,cellular ,organismal ) its hard to tell if the underlying harmony is attained by centralization or coordination of independent autonomous entities. thats why a lot of well meaning people tilt toward the intelligent design and can’t bring themselves to believe that Evolution was self organized .

You do understand that exponential growth is mandated by our system of government? The government sets growth targets as a matter of policy, and to meet this growth target it inflates the currency, (key concept: inflation is a policy, not a rule of the universe) to stimulate economic activity. You don't have a choice to not participate in this.

>key concept: inflation is a policy, not a rule of the universe

The money supply has to grow with the growth of the economy and population, and it's better to have excesses than shortages. Or should we infinitely divide a single dollar for everyone to use?

Growth of economic activity and population is a collective choice we are making . We may eventually have less of economic activity, population, or both .

>Growth of economic activity and population is a collective choice

Collective choice, not government mandate as the person to whom I replied suggested.

Begging your pardon, what evidence do you have to support your assertion that 'the money supply has to grow'?

The way I think of it is this: The fruits of techonological innovation are supposed to be the rising tide that lifts all boats; the mechanism by which it does this is by lowering prices. When you have systematic inflation, you are robbing the poor of their opportunity to get ahead and giving it to those who have first access to cheap money (wall street, political cronies, i.e. big contractor)

"In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse."

Insightful and depressing.

Another way to look at that statement is "All values that do not lead to continued existence are competed away", which is basically exactly what the theory of evolution says.

We know that this statement is false, BTW, because of the existence of organs like the appendix, which AFAWCT are completely vestigial.

Also, it ignores the part of the dynamic where new values are created because they allow you to throw some other values under the bus. Cooperation, empathy, creativity, intelligence, and pretty much everything that makes us human are all examples: our non-primate ancestors didn't have these, but the evolution of them allowed us to fight more fiercely than a lion, move more quickly than a cheetah, live in colder places than a penguin, and go without foraging longer than a bear.

The appendix is not vestigial.

But your argument could have used Art, which is vestigial other than as a signalling mechanism for pattern abstraction ability and excess resources.

er, Moloch is not a made up word.

"Moloch is exactly what the history books say he is. He is the god of child sacrifice, the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies in exchange for victory in war.

He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power."

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