Comment by alexgieg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexgieg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The reason is simple: ideological blindness.

If an agent has goal A, and they believe (strong believe) the way to reach A is via method P, and that any criticism of P is invalid no matter what, they will keep trying P until it arrives as A, since they know P eventually leads to A.

Reality doesn't care about strong beliefs though. If reiterating over P in reality leads to result B, that's what doing P will achieve, always and invariably.

This problem affects an immense number of things. In economics a prime example is Marxism. If you read the goals (A) of Marxism, they're pretty nice, all things considered. The problem is that Marxism (P) doesn't lead to those results, but to a very different set of outcomes (B). And since ideological purity requirements never allow P to be questioned, all it keeps resulting in is B, irrespective of how amazing A would be if P in fact led to A.

With American conservatives in general, and MAGA in particular, it's the same. A, B and P are different, but the dynamic is the same.

Well said, I totally agree.

> If an agent has goal A, and they believe (strong believe) the way to reach A is via method P, and that any criticism of P is invalid no matter what, they will keep trying P until it arrives as A, since they know P eventually leads to A.

> Reality doesn't care about strong beliefs though. If reiterating over P in reality leads to result B, that's what doing P will achieve, always and invariably.

Yeah, some say that repeating the same thing and expecting different result is the definition of stupidity.

> If you read the goals (A) of Marxism, they're pretty nice, all things considered. The problem is that Marxism (P) doesn't lead to those results, but to a very different set of outcomes (B).

I'm not sure. I mean nobody knows if it could lead to its goal, because Marxism in practice is yet to be seen. What the USSR implemented was not Marxism (and not even Communism), but in fact Leninism and Socialism. This latter is a freaky, twisted, sick version of it with an actual ruling class, no different to the bourgeoisie or the former feudal nobility (Stalin effectively acting like a czar and his inner circle being the new nobles).

> With American conservatives in general, and MAGA in particular, it's the same. A, B and P are different, but the dynamic is the same.

So true. But I would go even further, the actual ideology (P, A) doesn't matter at all. The root cause of the problem, just like you've said, is "ideological purity requirements never allow P to be questioned". When there's no feedback on P (or worse, only false positive feedback given), then this is technically flying blind, no matter what the ideology in question is, the result will surely be an epic fail and fall (since A != B).

IMHO, although Marxism has some good insights, it's a very limited analysis of reality due to the necessity of framing things within a Hegelian framework, while at the same time ignoring, for example, the most recent peer-reviewed, reproducible discoveries in psychology and neuropsychology. That lack of the later causes all manners of misalignment when real people, and the whole psychological spectrum they comprise, have to intersect with that framework and its implications.

There are some kinda-ish modern, more nuanced versions of Marxism that may be more successful than orthodox variants in that. The Frankfurt School had some quite interesting developments there, such as incorporating Freudian psychology through Lacan, but that is itself already very dated by decades. Also, its approach requires abandoning or inverting many premises of orthodox Marxism, such as, for example, by accepting that in many cases it's the superstructure that determines the infrastructure, not the other way around, so they exist in a tensional relation, which leads adepts of orthodox Marxism to call Frankfurtians revisionists and not to want to hear much more.

So I suppose a fully modernized Marxism incorporating everything modern human sciences has to offer could do reasonably well, but it'd be extremely different from both old school Marxism, as well as from the Frankfurtian revisions.

I personally think that Marxism is a complete non-sense. His premissas were correct (being based on historical facts), but his conclusions were absurd wishful thinking at best. No modernization could help that. I'm not sure about this, just IMHO.

I mean yeah, at the end of the day increasing inequality always leads to unrest and revolt, sure, that's undeniable. Happened numerous times in the past, it is happening in the EU right now, and surely will happen in the future too. But I don't believe this can be solved like Marx imagined, even with psychology and neuropsychology added to the mix.

IMHO a strict, exhaustive, well thought-out, rule-abiding system with rock-solid breaks and balances is necessary at a minimum, not unlike how Solon and Cleisthenes reformed the entire system in ancient Athens. Demokratia was very different to today's democracy, it was an air-tight system that covered all corners without any loopholes. For example, voting was considered a work, therefore voters got paid (which made vote-buying futile, making the whole process corruption-free), and thanks to public lottery it was impossible to bribe or persuade the judges, as nobody knew in advance who they will be. It was a system that aimed for rights must not be influenced by wealth and status (which is the total opposite of today's democracies, where only the wealthy can run for presidency and have a say in lawmaking, not the common people).

IMHO fighting inequality can't be based solely on some ideology (maybe with psychology on top), but must be a multi-disclipinary effort covering all aspects of society like in demokratia. I'm not sure if even this could succeed (Greeks failed after all), but I'm sure without it will just reproduce the vicious cycle that Marx spoke of.

Oh, sorry, we have derailed the topic a bit, hope other readers don't mind.

I mostly agree with your points.

When it comes to the economic side of things, I believe the best approach right now is to learn all major schools: mainstream economics plus Keynesianism, Libertarianism, Marxism, Distributism and at least a handful of minor ones. That helps to untie one's mind from holding too strong beliefs in what still isn't a science but at some point maybe become one.

On the political one, I fully agree. In fact, I wish lottery was used extensively, including for executive roles. There's research showing it results in way better outcomes all around, as politics ends up somewhat close-ish to having traits similar to the average of a population, rather than lower than it, as in other models. Alas, getting there from here is almost impossible. Too bad.

> When it comes to the economic side of things, I believe the best approach right now is to learn all major schools

Also it wouldn't hurt the economy if it were based on actual math. At the university I had to learn micro and macro economy (thankfully just one semester each), and my book was full of impossible things: graphs without units, confused linear and exponential trends, obviously wrong greater-than and less-than relations...

> On the political one, I fully agree. In fact, I wish lottery was used extensively, including for executive roles. There's research showing it results in way better outcomes all around, as politics ends up somewhat close-ish to having traits similar to the average of a population, rather than lower than it, as in other models.

I think it should not necessarily be the average of a population. For example, executive roles could be chosen randomly from a pool of people with suitable curriculum. Or a judge for a case from a pool of available judges, etc. This would make wonder for audits and fighting corruption, as long as the lottery is fair and public.

But no matter how good a system is, if a small wealthy group can overrule the Founding fathers' breaks and balances with a simple Congress hearing, well, then that system is hopeless and surely doomed to fail. Rules that oligarchy must obey and can't twist to their liking is essential for democracy, otherwise tyranny emerges. Ancient Greeks knew this, and we can clearly see that they were right.

Economics cannot really use math well because monetary units don't have proper cardinality, carrying more of an unholy mix of cardinal and ordinal properties that also aren't fully consistent with themselves. The non-monetary inputs and outputs are more regular in how they function, but the in-between is utterly weird, and everything trying to make sense of it is valid only under very narrow conditions. Step outside those and the reasoning fails.

On politics, agreed!

Yeah, that's what economist say, but don't you feel this somehow fundamentally wrong and just a pity smokescreen?

I mean after all economy is all about money, measured in numbers: stock prices, exchange rates, interest, balances, income, etc. numbers and numbers and numbers all over, everywhere.

Shouldn't math be the most important thing of all in a field entirely made up by numbers? How come it's not? Isn't that a bit strange?

IMHO Adam Smith was a conman, so no wonder that economists are too. Free market leads to best products at smallest prices? Just look at any real world market: profit maximization is all about oppressing and killing the competition, cutting expanses (so producing poor quality goods), sold as expensive as possible. Reality is literally the opposite what Smith said. Again, IMHO.

Consider this simple example, taken from the Austrian school (their criticism of other economic schools is pretty good; their proposed solutions, not so much):

Suppose you have $3 in hand, and you want a printed issue of the NYT. You take your $3, give it to the newsstand owner, and he gives you a NYT issue.

Why did this exchange happen, rather than no exchange at all?

From your perspective, because you value having a printed issue of the NYT more than keeping your $3, otherwise you'd have kept the $3 and not bothered.

From the newsstand owner, because he values having $3 more than maintaining that copy of that NYT issue on the stand, otherwise he'd have refused your money.

So in the exchange both sides perceive it as increasing their respective satisfaction, so both profitted from it.

Hence, the question on which is worth more, the bills and coins amounting to $3, or the printed issue of the NYT, is meaningless without adding a necessary qualification or "for whom".

That very basic weirdness is inherent to all monetary exchanges, and it builds up from there when we move to aggregates.

PS: Adam Smith didn't say much of what's attributed to him. The "invisible hand" metaphor was something he remarked en passant as a side note, and it wasn't in any way a core part of this theory. In fact, if we read him we find a lot of criticism of the worst parts of Capitalism. His criticism of rent seeking, for example, is brutal, and he was a strong supporter of free public schooling paid for by the State, among many other things.

A very nice author, with good ideas amidst bad ones, unfortunately utterly distorted by his so-called "supporters" who didn't actually read his works.

> Consider this simple example

Exactly the kind of smokescreen I was talking about. "Perspective", "profit of the customer"? All non-sense, deliberately trying to derail you. What matters here is: how much did the newsstand owner pay for the NYT copy and how much did he get by selling it. Basic, elementary school level algebra, nothing more. That's all there is.

> Adam Smith didn't say much of what's attributed to him.

Yes, I know. But he undeniably did say that "free market leads to the best products for the smallest price", that's the core of The Wealth of Nations, and it's all a lie (we can easily see that by looking at the real world, free market leads to monopoly, which is the opposite of healthy competition).

> unfortunately utterly distorted by his so-called "supporters" who didn't actually read his works.

Yeah. This always happens. How come Jesus saying "you must love each other" became distorted as "kill each other in holy crusades"? Or that Marx's "no ruling class" theory was turned into the Kremlin?

Regardless I still think Smith was a conman, because I think he was smart enough to realize his core ideas were a lie. His ideas can only work if all goods were equal, which is hardly true in real life (actually companies do anything to make their product different from the competitors', and if they can't do that, then they bribe, sue, acquire etc. so they do anything to make their product the one and only on the market).

In other words Smith was talking about selling chicken eggs but made it look like if those principles were true for selling any kind of goods, and I'm certain he was well aware of this lie. He was simply too smart to make this error by mistake.

For the first example, how much did the buyer work to be able to pay for that NYT issues, and how much did he learn from it? What that learning cheaper or more expensive than it'd have been had he had to pursue the same amount of knowledge by other means? After acquiring that knowledge, will the buyer be able to make smarter choices that will cause him to spend less than he'd have spent without having acquired that knowledge?

See, anytime anyone says about any topic "it's simple, just...", I know the person hasn't dwelt into the topic with any depth, for every single subject is always more complicated than it looks for people from outside it, who are the only ones to ever say "it's simple, just..."

Case in point, think of your own profession, and how you felt of people who don't know how to do it who told you that. Now generalize it for all professions. That the reality of everything, ever.

On Smith, you're precisely doing some of the necessary complexifying, while however holding to Smith's own 250 years old theory of money when criticizing what I said, so it's contradictory. If you hold to the labor theory of value, your argument against Smith in the second part is invalid. If you goes against Smith's labor theory of value, then your argument in the first (opposing the marginal theory of value I espoused) is invalid. Both cannot be held at the same time unless you can provide a third theory of value that synthesizes both labourism and marginalism delimiting the particular cases in which one or the other is a useful simplification.

So, no, it's never, ever, a case of "it's simple, just..."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com