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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

You seem to be missing the collective action aspect. You’re saying the equivalent of “it doesn’t matter if I dump my car oil in the river, because it’s a negligible impact on the environment.”

It can be marginal at the individual level but very important if it scales to the societal level.

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You're mixing two things together: * something that's illegal (dumping used oil into a river) * and something that's perfectly legal (buying oil)

You buy electricity and it's yours to decide how to use it. i.e. heat up your house or mine crypto.

That's a fair critique of a bad analogy. But it still misses the point of the collective action problem. Consider a different analogy: you are free to burn as much fuel as you want, and individually it doesn't make much difference. But if everyone collectively takes that same stance, it leads to large negative externalities.

IMO the extreme libertarian view works fine for small groups but does not do a good job of managing collective action problems in large societies when the scope exceeds our psychological bandwidth.

You’re not free to burn as much fuel as you want, as there are economic and physical limits in place.

What you are free to do is choose how to allocate resources—heat up or cool down your apartment, train/run a neural network, watch a plasma TV, etc.

Telling people what to do with their resources is central planning, and it has never worked.

Ignoring the fact that “central” planning is a nebulous and uninformative term, what do you propose when those “economic and physical” constraints are insufficient to mitigate the negative externalities of a collective action problem?

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