Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> You have to be pretty damn sure you can build a better new world before you burn down the old one.

Isn't that just a social version of the precautionary principle?

You can never be damn sure you can build a better world without trying unless you are sure you can simulate that world ahead of time, and you can't be sure of that without validating your simulation. I personally suspect this sort of simulation is simply impossible because of well known "chaos theory" type phenomena like feedback loops in real systems. There is no way to A/B test history.

We now know that Marxist type systems of the sorts deployed by Lenin and Mao don't actually result in a better world and in many cases result in a worse one, but I don't think anyone could have proven such a thing ahead of time had the systems never been tried.

In practice the precautionary principle would lead to a world of absolute stasis since if the burden of proof is 100% on the actor then no action can be taken.

My personal view is that the ideal situation is a stable society with a frontier. That way you can go to the frontier and try new things and then the stable society can import the things that work. This isn't unique to me, and a version of it is called the Frontier Thesis. We once had this in the American West, but no more, so we should hurry up and build more rockets.

> There is no way to A/B test history.

This is the first thing you learn as a Political Science student in university. The "science" half of the name is somewhat lacking when you can't experiment.

> We now know that Marxist type systems of the sorts deployed by Lenin and Mao don't actually result in a better world and in many cases result in a worse one

We don't know this. There's a lot more to economic security and human rights than private vs state control of production.

> We once had this in the American West, but no more, so we should hurry up and build more rockets.

While a frontier can provide some space for experimentation, redundancy is the real cure.

We haven't done this as a society though since there is an advantage to large scale when securing a nation's economy and currency with armed force.

The interesting new technology doesn't seem to be cheaper rockets but instead a new way to make sure our money is valued as we wish. Cryptocurrency's method of securing transactions against counterfeiters using math enables small-scale economies to operate without wasting too much resource on keeping order.

A system where cities/towns have more sovereignty would enable greater diversity and experimentation because a failure would be much easier to deal with.

Thousands of cities with each their own policies of how wealth spreads is the diverse dream I wish for as the world shrinks into fewer languages, customs, and ideas.

> > We now know that Marxist type systems of the sorts deployed by Lenin and Mao don't actually result in a better world and in many cases result in a worse one

> We don't know this. There's a lot more to economic security and human rights than private vs state control of production.

We know that Marxism-Leninism didn't result in human rights, either. Neither did Maoism.

Sorry if that point was hazy. I'm in agreement with your comment but those implementations of national economies operating on Marxist principles were stifled greatly. WW2 caused much greater destruction of the USSR than the US. The US' anti-communist military actions, and economic blockades all existed because of a belief that allowing any communism ultimately leads its spreading everywhere.

A rephrasing would be: We don't know for sure that a Marxist type system does not work because we have so few examples. Maybe we just haven't tried enough variations to find a version that compiles cleanly.

That's a nice dream, but I don't see how "keeping order" results from cryptocurrency ? Especially preventing cities from attacking other cities to take their resources...

Both Lenin and Mao didn't deploy a Marxist system. They did deploy an autocratic system under the guise of Marxism. At best, we can speculate that autocracy is a failure mode of attempts to install Marxism.

That's the problem with all social theories - running experiments on them takes darn long, usually results in piles of disenfranchised and/or dead people, and is in no way repeatable. (Frontier Thesis kind of addresses that by insulating the core of society from the experiments harsh results, but... you still have harsh results)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com