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Alchenar posted:Or to put it another way, Soviet allies were virtually all net burdens and recipients of subsidies/aid and it is unclear how having more of them would have been a good thing. I think this misunderstands a key point of international relations. Having allies who are net recipients of subsidies or aid is generally beneficial in the long-term if your aim is (for example) to have global access to specialist goods or services, to have a bunch of areas where you can build military bases and airstrips, and to build a geopolitical consensus favourable to your ideology. Bretton Woods was essentially a giant subsidies agreement and it cemented the USA as the world's premiere superpower for decades. Aid budgets in most developed nations are huge and that isn't a result of pure philanthropy - foreign aid confers political and logistical advantages that go beyond "number in deficit go down".
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Aug 23, 2021 17:54
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Android Blues posted:I think this misunderstands a key point of international relations. Having allies who are net recipients of subsidies or aid is generally beneficial in the long-term if your aim is (for example) to have global access to specialist goods or services, to have a bunch of areas where you can build military bases and airstrips, and to build a geopolitical consensus favourable to your ideology. Yes I agree, but that's not the argument that Captain Obvious is making in this thread. e: also it's only beneficial in the long term if you can afford it and you actually have a plan to do any of those things. e2: trying desperately to get back on topic: China's belt and road strategy for example is subsidy from a position of economic strength clearly targeted at establishing preferential trade logistics and rights to rare earth minerals. The USSR was mostly just throwing money at ideology. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 18:04
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Gee, I wonder how that happened. Instead of shitposting, can you respond to the arguments we are making? Clearly not every country suffered ongoing wars or attacks, and wouldn't explain say, France doing just fine post-war despite also being invaded and occupied (multiple times even). It's not like Hungary or Romania were that economically damaged as a result of WW2. Again, you seem to be suggesting that there were handicaps, but if so, why does this suggest that central planning is good if it couldn't withstand or account for a handicap?
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Aug 23, 2021 18:11
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Raenir Salazar posted:Instead of shitposting, can you respond to the arguments we are making? Clearly not every country suffered ongoing wars or attacks, and wouldn't explain say, France doing just fine post-war despite also being invaded and occupied (multiple times even). It's not like Hungary or Romania were that economically damaged as a result of WW2. Post-war France was an economic basket case that received massive, concordant stimulus for years from the USA's surplus funds via the lever of the Bretton Woods agreement. France's continually failing post-war economy under Charles de Gaulle, decades later, was in fact one of the straws that broke the camel's back and lead to the Nixon Shock. The same could never be said for the Soviets, who weren't signatories.
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Aug 23, 2021 18:32
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Raenir Salazar posted:Instead of shitposting, can you respond to the arguments we are making? Clearly not every country suffered ongoing wars or attacks, and wouldn't explain say, France doing just fine post-war despite also being invaded and occupied (multiple times even). It's not like Hungary or Romania were that economically damaged as a result of WW2. An interesting idea. I'm going to try and make an apples 2 apples comparison between France and Vietnam because they had similar population totals at the time of their conflict. So, imagine for a moment that the French did not surrender and collaborate with the Germans but instead attempted to repel them in a protracted conflict*. In response, the Germans dropped 3x more bombs in France and surrounding territories than the entire total of non-nuclear bombs actually dropped in WW2. The result was that every road, railroad, and just about every building above ground level was decimated. Versailles is gone, the Louvre has collapsed, and the countryside is littered with chemical weapons and unexploded ordinance that take decades to clear. On top of this, 4x more casualties are inflicted drawing substantially from those capable of work. Then, after the Nazis had finally been kicked out, instead of assisting the French to rebuild their country the international community forces the French to pay all the debts that the German puppet regime racked up running war-time France into the ground. That's only part of what happened to Vietnam. *ignoring for a moment the relatively small but valorous French Resistance cells. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 19:07
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Cpt_Obvious posted:An interesting idea. I'm going to try and make an apples 2 apples comparison between France and Vietnam because they had similar population totals at the time of their conflict. Okay but we had already responded to this, plenty of countries were bombed out and razed basically to the ground but ultimately bounced back better under liberal democratic capitalism while everyone who was behind the iron curtain stagnated and had their governments overthrown by pro-democracy movements. Basically Japan fits your comparison perfectly in terms of the monumental amount of bombs that were dropped and the amount of its economy that got torn away when Korea and Taiwan became independent nations and Manchuria was handed over back to China. But Japan bounced back and by the 80's had basically one of the world's strongest economies before the lost decade; which while stagnation, it's been recovering from and hasn't threatened its form of government or economic system of being a liberal democratic nation operating under state capitalism. Again to repeat, having your country devastated as a result of WW2 or some other later conflict doesn't have any bearing on these systems eventually failing because in every case these nations did recover and improve their economies but then hit a developmental wall and then collapsed when soviet subsidies ended in a chain reaction causing a systemic collapse of these systems. North Korea had significantly industrialized itself and was briefly more developed than South Korea, but then South Korea embraced democracy and reformed its economy and then North Korea stagnated and with the end of the USSR this difference only became more stark as North Korea focused more and more of resources it looted from its starving citizens to build a stronger armed deterrence. To repeat, you're arguing that planned economies can't work under adversity, which seems to suggest to me that they were bad systems that should have ended sooner; not being given another chance to fail harder.
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Aug 23, 2021 19:35
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Planning is basically the only way to deal with the massive inefficiencies in capitalist market economies - namely the fact that capitalist overproduction causes the system to collapse once a decade - and even with the primitive tools GOSPLAN had has proven to be adept at industrializing pre-modern agrarian societies. The biggest hurdle, besides being cut off from most of the world economy by capitalist encirclement, is the economic calculation problem surrounding the consumer goods market, which conservative economists have been writing about since Friedman. But with modern computational powers and logistics this is increasingly looking like a solved problem. Read Cockshott, etc etc. Just unfortunate that the world's first democracy was destroyed by the bourgeoisie dictatorship before cybernetic socialism could be implemented at scale.
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Aug 23, 2021 20:53
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Raenir Salazar posted:Okay but we had already responded to this, plenty of countries were bombed out and razed basically to the ground but ultimately bounced back better under liberal democratic capitalism while everyone who was behind the iron curtain stagnated and had their governments overthrown by pro-democracy movements. Basically Japan fits your comparison perfectly in terms of the monumental amount of bombs that were dropped and the amount of its economy that got torn away when Korea and Taiwan became independent nations and Manchuria was handed over back to China. But Japan bounced back and by the 80's had basically one of the world's strongest economies before the lost decade; which while stagnation, it's been recovering from and hasn't threatened its form of government or economic system of being a liberal democratic nation operating under state capitalism. This is pretty disingenuous. Japan was not pulling itself up by its bootstraps: it became a US colony in all but name and enjoyed earth-shaking amounts of investment from the USA, who wanted to use their leverage over the defeated Axis powers to set up industrial nations they had legislative and political influence over. Similarly, describing South Korea's economic success as the country "embracing democracy and reforming its economy" is glossing over the (far more important) fact that the US funnelled gigantic amounts of foreign aid, stimulus and investment cash into South Korea as part of their ongoing proxy struggle with the USSR. quote:‘The Korean total of $6 billion in U.S. economic grants and loans, 1946-1978, compares to $6.89 billion for all of Africa, and $14.89 billion for all of Latin America’ (Woo 1991:45). South Korea was considered such an important strategic objective for the USA that the US stimulus budget for one small country was almost the size of the entire stimulus budget for Africa. The levels of investment were huge. Attributing the economic success of South Korea to fiscal policy and a can-do attitude without mentioning that is like attributing the success of a startup CEO who got $14,000,000 in seed capital from their parents to "innovative thinking".
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Aug 23, 2021 21:04
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This discussion is kind of skirting the fact that modern corporate structures are heavily centralized. Executives at Amazon and Walmart make decisions that determine the livelihood of millions of employees and consumers without any input on their behalf. It is only a handful of investors who have their interests represented.
Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Aug 23, 2021 |
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Aug 23, 2021 21:59
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Android Blues posted:This is pretty disingenuous. Japan was not pulling itself up by its bootstraps: it became a US colony in all but name and enjoyed earth-shaking amounts of investment from the USA, who wanted to use their leverage over the defeated Axis powers to set up industrial nations they had legislative and political influence over. The USSR also funneled massive amounts of aid into its satellite states and they didn’t exactly take off. Many in this thread don’t seem to want to entertain the idea that perhaps a centrally planned economy is a poo poo system and we have plenty of examples of it failing and none where it worked. Now I’m not going to sit here and go “lol embrace capitalism” but clearly if we want a alternative to Capitalism it needs to be something other than Soviet-Style central planning. The current Chinese model seems to be a state-managed Capitalism but others in this thread have described it better.
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Aug 23, 2021 22:06
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To be fair the centrally planned economy produced some fantastic results in some cases primarily the total war scenario but also projects like the soviet space program or industrialization and infrastructure efforts (that didn't end up being built on piles of corpses) Unfortunately the state security apparatus needed to sustain and protect this system also resulted in many people getting repressed or defecting for a better life in countries that not only managed to have toilet paper before 1969, but also to mass produce it. So you really have to consider it all holistically and not just the system of resource distribution
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Aug 23, 2021 22:28
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Solaris 2.0 posted:The USSR also funneled massive amounts of aid into its satellite states and they didn’t exactly take off. I'm not sold on the USSR's model either, but I think particularly the framing of the success of the Japanese and South Korean economies as the natural consequence of embracing capitalism, while not mentioning the fact that both countries were essentially on economic steroids courtesy of the USA's international aid and foreign development budgets, and were propped up by force wherever their economies failed, is an ahistorical viewpoint that's worth calling out. Asserting that France (for instance) had a great economy post-war because it embraced open markets is straight up silly, and pays no regard to the facts. That level of ahistoricity doesn't even strike me as an attempt to varnish the truth, so much as the poster in question having zero awareness of how wrecked the French economy was after WW2 and how reliant the country (along with many other European countries) was on American stimulus and bailouts to develop a facsimile of a recovery.
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Aug 23, 2021 22:42
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Cpt_Obvious posted:This discussion is kind of skirting the fact that modern corporate structures are heavily centralized. Executives at Amazon and Walmart make decisions that determine the livelihood of millions of employees and consumers without any input on their behalf. It is only a handful of investors who have their interests represented. Massive centralized corporations controlling huge chunks of industries is also bad. Their big plans will also fall short and miss critical new developments and will also lead to inefficiencies and incompetence. More importantly though, their priorities will not match those of the population at large, much like how unelected autocracies will also be prone to not agree with the desires of the people they control. Bad things will happen in closed centrally-planned systems. Economic freedom is good. Bad things will also happen in totally unregulated or unmanaged systems, so there's gotta be some kind of accountable authority somewhere. So you gotta have some of each, and that's what most of the planet is doing, but the exact ratios and processes vary.
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Aug 24, 2021 01:32
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There's been a lot of discussion ITT comparing and contrasting PRC to USSR, so I thought this video by economist Richard Wolff would be pretty helpful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Tbf2bpgs-E&t=481s I time stamped it at his explanation of state capitalism in the USSR which leads into his comparison of state capitalism in China. I skipped over his talks about private property and private enterprise in the Soviet Union, but if you want to learn about that then just start at the beginning (it's 30 mins total). Edit: It also addresses the "Is China Communist?" question someone brought up earlier. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Aug 24, 2021 |
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Aug 24, 2021 03:02
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SlothfulCobra posted:Massive centralized corporations controlling huge chunks of industries is also bad. Their big plans will also fall short and miss critical new developments and will also lead to inefficiencies and incompetence. More importantly though, their priorities will not match those of the population at large, much like how unelected autocracies will also be prone to not agree with the desires of the people they control. And yet in any given industry under capitalism, there is a tendency towards creating large corporations that allocate and plan the distribution of resources through central planning methods. It's clearly more efficient to have an Amazon where you can buy all your needs instead of a billion small mom and pops that you need to go to individually for every little thing, and consumers prefer it. Maybe part of the problem is not with the central planning per se, but with the planning being determined by a handful of people - a politburo or a board of directors - and not by the populace. quote:Bad things will happen in closed centrally-planned systems. Economic freedom is good. Bad things will also happen in totally unregulated or unmanaged systems, so there's gotta be some kind of accountable authority somewhere. So you gotta have some of each, and that's what most of the planet is doing, but the exact ratios and processes vary. And one alternative that's not a mixed market capitalist economy is a democratic planned economy. E: One book which explores this concept of democratically planned economy is the People's Republic of Walmart. I need to read over Towards a New Socialism as well. Aside from Allende's Cybersyn (which was quite successful before being violently put down by Pinochet's US backed coup) I don't think democratically planned economies have been given a chance to be tested. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Aug 24, 2021 |
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Aug 24, 2021 18:38
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Which leads to another point: we've really only seen one model for planned economies played out in communist countries over and over again, with a central politburo deciding production. We could say this model has failed, but it leaves out other forms of planned economy. Capitalism has had hundreds of years to play out different models and determine their weaknesses and strengths. It seems premature to me to throw up our hands as socialists and proclaim the supremacy of free market capitalism when new models are possible with increased computing power.
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Aug 24, 2021 19:38
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Yeah but... the case study you have chosen of the immense benefits that central planning can provide is literally a well regulated marketplace. To try and put a cap in this - I do actually converge with you in the long run. Once you can replicate the information gathering capacity of the marketplace through a nightmare Orwellian surveillance process and automate enough of the economy (including passing innovation and design to AI) that you can escape the problems of human behaviour and incentives in management then something looking like fully automated luxury communism is the hopeful vision of the future. But there's a lot of prerequisites there.
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Aug 24, 2021 20:08
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Alchenar posted:Yeah but... the case study you have chosen of the immense benefits that central planning can provide is literally a well regulated marketplace. Except that those are unstable because the "well regulated" bit is always being undermined by the "marketplace" bit. Also, claiming "it only works with weird Orwellian Uber-control of info" is kind of an overreach, wouldn't you say?
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Aug 24, 2021 21:12
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Josef bugman posted:Except that those are unstable because the "well regulated" bit is always being undermined by the "marketplace" bit. Also, claiming "it only works with weird Orwellian Uber-control of info" is kind of an overreach, wouldn't you say? I think we are heading towards axioms here because it depends on exactly what you mean by instability and if you think that certain kinds of instability are necessarily a bad thing. I will readily concede it's terrible for individuals who need protection but on a macro level every economic system needs a function to allow for error identification and correction. The failure of planned economies to have a functioning model for identifying errors in their systems is one reason why they've historically proven to be far more prone to irrecoverable instability than market economies. And the value of the market is that it's the decentralised aggregate information flow of every economic decision every individual makes. If you centralise that information flow you end up with.. well, China. e: \/\/ yeah I'd like to apologise to everyone who wants to read about China here - Alchenar fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Aug 24, 2021 |
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Aug 24, 2021 21:22
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Josef bugman posted:Except that those are unstable because the "well regulated" bit is always being undermined by the "marketplace" bit. Also, claiming "it only works with weird Orwellian Uber-control of info" is kind of an overreach, wouldn't you say? Yeah, the idea of Cybersyn was this: the factories provide data about their supply and production to a central authority. That authority publishes reports and recommendations of policy, and the public looks at these reports and votes on the recommendations. It didn't require knowing the minutiae of every individual person's consumption habits. The central point is that the public got to have a say over what decisions were made in the economy, how resources were to be allocated and distributed. In our current market system, such decisions are largely left to a few private owners. We have a political "democracy" but we don't have an economic democracy, which is actually the most important area of decision-making in a society. Which is why we see our current bourgeoisie democracies controlled by wealthy elites because they have the actual power. E: I'll also concede that I'm talking out of my depth here, this is a complex topic and maybe we should move this to a new thread. America Inc. fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Aug 24, 2021 |
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Aug 24, 2021 21:29
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Do Chinese speakers actually refer to the US as meiguo? Because it seems strange to refer to your rival as "the beautiful country".
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Aug 25, 2021 05:44
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I don't think people worry too much about the meaning of each individual character in compound words derived from other languages.
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Aug 25, 2021 05:48
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no hay camino posted:Do Chinese speakers actually refer to the US as meiguo? Because it seems strange to refer to your rival as "the beautiful country". This is gonna blow your mind but there was a word for America before China and the US were rivals, and probably in some form or another before the United States existed as a country. Chinese also writes foreign words phonetically using Chinese characters so way back when America was referred to as: Mandarin 亞美利加 - Yà měi lìjiā "America" 美利堅 - Měilìjiān "(A)merican" Cantonese 米利堅 - mai5lei6gin1 "(A)merican" etc. probably a number of others. But for short/common versions of country names (just like we refer to the US as "America/US" despite it being "The United States of America") you take the first character + 國, and it happened to end up 美 became the common one. Japanese is similar: 亜米利加 - アメリカ - amerika Becomes 米国 for short, aka "Rice Country". There was probably some aspect of intentionally choosing "beautiful" as one of the characters for America back when though but it predates current rivalry by a lot. Of course you're right that it would not be impossible for China to start referring to the US as something else besides "beautiful country" a la "freedom fries" but nobody major is stooping that low yet.
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Aug 25, 2021 06:14
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no hay camino posted:Do Chinese speakers actually refer to the US as meiguo? Because it seems strange to refer to your rival as "the beautiful country". yes, and they also call france “the lawful country” and england “the country of heroes” and thailand “the peaceful country” and malaysia “horse coming from Western Asia“ because get this: Mantis42 posted:I don't think people worry too much about the meaning of each individual character in compound words derived from other languages.
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Aug 25, 2021 06:53
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That makes a lot more sense, thanks for suffering my ignorance everyone.
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Aug 25, 2021 06:59
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I think it’s worth noting that there’s definitely cases where the was almost certainly some intentional choosing of what characters were used to represent the phonetic equivalent when creating the words, but it’s not something where consciously consider the underlying meaning when you use it. Just like you don’t, for example, consciously think “well, it’s time to end my fast (not eating) since sundown yesterday” when you go to eat in the morning. You just get “breakfast”.
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Aug 25, 2021 07:39
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no hay camino posted:That makes a lot more sense, thanks for suffering my ignorance everyone. I should also add that most names for foreign places are very approximately phonetic. England is Ying-country or with some license, Ing-land. There are easily dozens of characters pronounced as "ing" but they chose one that was relatively commonplace and also kind of flattering. France is Fah-land, Fah being short for Fahrance, and Germany is Duh-land which is short for Dutchland. As you can tell, it's a very approximate phonetic translation.
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Aug 25, 2021 07:48
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lightrook posted:I should also add that most names for foreign places are very approximately phonetic. England is Ying-country or with some license, Ing-land. There are easily dozens of characters pronounced as "ing" but they chose one that was relatively commonplace and also kind of flattering. France is Fah-land, Fah being short for Fahrance, and Germany is Duh-land which is short for Dutchland. As you can tell, it's a very approximate phonetic translation. Sort of but specifically “fah-land” 法國 is an abbreviation for the full phonetic name 法蘭斯/法蘭西 Fǎlánsī/Fǎlánxī for example. It’s not just “eh FAH is close and let’s slap a ‘country’ on there”. Same basic idea though; you usually choose nice characters for a name. Characters in 法蘭西 are Lawful Lily/Orchid West; “lawful flower of the west” after a fashion. There’s exceptions though. Like my city in Taiwan has unfortunate old name of 打狗, lit. Hit Dog Wikipedia posted:Hoklo immigrants to the area during the 16th and 17th centuries called the region Takau (Chinese: 打狗; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tá-káu). The surface meaning of the associated Chinese characters was "beat the dog". According to one theory, the name Takau originates from the aboriginal Siraya language and translates as "bamboo forest". According to another theory, the name evolved via metathesis from the name of the Makatao tribe, who inhabited the area at the time of European and Hoklo settlement. The Makatao are considered by some to be part of the Siraya tribe. Until the Japanese changed the characters to 高雄, which has a similar pronunciation in Japanese.
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Aug 25, 2021 08:55
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I don't know what you mean then, given you charged in to inform me or the thread about the USSR winning the war against the nazis and then recovering. As a response to me making a post directly referring to praise of Stalin's economic acumen. The post I responded to didn’t mention Stalin. You were claiming that the USSR inherited a wealthy country. I was pointing out that the country was actually devastated. To expand on that: By the great war, firstly, then the civil war and then by the great patriotic war. Any “inheritance” left after those first two was rapidly broken in the third. Your attempt to paint the USSR as picking up from a position of wealth is just gibberish. Alchenar posted:I think we are heading towards axioms here because it depends on exactly what you mean by instability and if you think that certain kinds of instability are necessarily a bad thing. I will readily concede it's terrible for individuals who need protection but on a macro level every economic system needs a function to allow for error identification and correction. The failure of planned economies to have a functioning model for identifying errors in their systems is one reason why they've historically proven to be far more prone to irrecoverable instability than market economies. Western market economies have been in a state of irrecoverable instability since about 2008 (probably since the 70s really but it became obvious in 2008) and the failure of markets in the 20s led to the single most deadly war in human history. In terms of the market being some kind of decentralised AI, this is an incredibly idealised view. The actual market tends to behave as a mass of rent-taking, syndicalism and herd behavior (trend following), which leads to speculative bubbles and their collapse. It also has no capacity for long-term planning when there are short-term profits to be taken, alongside an absolute failure to even address the tragedy of the commons. The emergent result of those last two has been the climate apocalypse that we now find ourselves in. Markets can be useful for the smaller stuff but trying to run a modern nation state on those emergent properties is absurd. To bring that back to China: Xi does seem to have recognised the dangers of letting the Chinese economy drift away from party control (whether that be nationally centralised or decentralised on a regional basis). Whether that’s been in the works for a while, or whether it’s a direct response to seeing how the west utterly failed to deal with the pandemic by relying on its quasi-religious market dogma, is a question I’d be interested in seeing an answer to. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Aug 25, 2021 |
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Aug 25, 2021 09:35
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What is this supposed to prove or talk about? Why is a person questioning a chat bot? I don't quite understand what the purpose of the tweet thread is, could someone explain?
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Aug 26, 2021 10:28
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Josef bugman posted:What is this supposed to prove or talk about? Why is a person questioning a chat bot? My (really tenuous) layman's understanding is that the chatbot works by scanning the whole net for knowledge and then the AI bit is parsing that information into a sentence that appears meaningful. So returning "I'm sorry, the answer to that question is too sensitive" implies: a) if you flood the internet with enough propaganda you can create a situation that is the opposite of the usual assumption that 'information wants to be free' b) if you try hard enough then you can make someone else's AI in a different country give the answers to questions that you want it to give. It becomes an extension of your propaganda network. If you want an unpleasant vision of the future of the information revolution, imagine a thousand AI trying to edit every wikipedia page every second, only it's every single page on the internet. The specific example of asking questions about China just demonstrates the degree to which the CCP has already managed to shutter away alternative sources of information about what's going on. e: all of which is in principle the problem, but as pointed out below that's not a real problem yet Alchenar fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Aug 26, 2021 |
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Aug 26, 2021 10:40
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having messed around with AI text generation, there's so much subjective choice involved in producing a dataset and guiding it that the entire premise of those tweets is the goofiest poo poo ive ever seen, and presenting that even semi seriously should be extremely embarrassing
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Aug 26, 2021 10:56
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Alchenar posted:My (really tenuous) layman's understanding is that the chatbot works by scanning the whole net for knowledge and then the AI bit is parsing that information into a sentence that appears meaningful. So returning "I'm sorry, the answer to that question is too sensitive" implies: Varinn posted:having messed around with AI text generation, there's so much subjective choice involved in producing a dataset and guiding it that the entire premise of those tweets is the goofiest poo poo ive ever seen, and presenting that even semi seriously should be extremely embarrassing So, wait, what? Is this like a magic eye diagram for politics? You can look at it and see something completely different to what it should be and the idea at the centre of it is weird too?
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Aug 26, 2021 11:03
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You don't just "ask GPT-3" things. there's a shitload of settings and controls that come with using any sort of gpt3 model. Clearly he's doing it through some web interface, but doesn't bother saying which one, which would at least let someone understand the basics for how he got there. The AI is recognizing an interview format from the formulation of the words, and is replicating interview answers. There's a really strong urge when you're first messing around with this stuff to want to think that the AI is 'thinking' in the way people do, because it can absolutely seem that way, but its just trying to replicate the thing you've put in front of it. It's very like that the OAI corpus includes dumps of like, the guardian, so it would make sense that it might have some interviews with chinese officials about similar topics, and its desperately trying to mimic them. Pretending that a couple gigs of text from english news sources is somehow showing us the ~power of the chinese propaganda machine~ is a huge leap. him being so shocked by the fact that the AI got caught into a loop of saying the same thing over and over is extremely funny because it constantly does that poo poo about literally anything.
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Aug 26, 2021 11:20
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no hay camino posted:The central point is that the public got to have a say over what decisions were made in the economy, how resources were to be allocated and distributed. In our current market system, such decisions are largely left to a few private owners. We have a political "democracy" but we don't have an economic democracy, which is actually the most important area of decision-making in a society. Which is why we see our current bourgeoisie democracies controlled by wealthy elites because they have the actual power. But how does this concept deal with something like Fox news? The second one group can convince people to vote against their own interests, short or long term, everything falls to poo poo. EDIT: and I'd like to thank everyone for the past few pages. They've made this thread the most interesting place on the forums lately. This is the literally the poo poo I come to D&D for. Megillah Gorilla fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Aug 26, 2021 |
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Aug 26, 2021 12:40
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Megillah Gorilla posted:But how does this concept deal with something like Fox news? In an economy where the media isn't run by profit-driven entities, you're likely not going to have a Fox News (or MSNBC for that matter) spreading misinformation in the interest of capital. In a centralized system like Cybersyn, where the government collects and reports economic data to the public, the danger would probably be with the government itself hiding or distorting information. You'd probably want something akin to the BBC, an independent entity from the government that collects, verifies, and reports information on the economy. Meanwhile the government would make proposals based on that information which is not in their control. But even then that begs further questions - who appoints the people for this independent agency, wouldn't the agency still want to defend itself from leaks of misconduct?
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Aug 27, 2021 02:38
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In Australia, we have the ABC, which is like the BBC, but with an 'A' in it. For the longest time it was the most well respected, well funded, source of news in the country. It prided itself on its independence and accuracy. Then a couple right wing governments ago, cries of bias went up because the ABC was universally condemning the government's policies of putting children in offshore camps to die, the Stolen Generation and other Aboriginal genocides, being 'close personal friends' with the Catholic bishops in charge of hiding rape and all selling off all the state and federal assets to their mates. What the government could do directly was limited due to the ABC charter allowing them independence. So they very slowly went about throwing out the independent members of the ABC board of directors and replacing them with cronies, right wing talking heads and literal industry shills. The ABC is still the best source of news in the country, but we cannot know how much is not reported on. Their budget's been slashed to a small fraction of what it once was, whole studios have been closed (or moved to electorates run by right wingers), current affairs shows are evaporating and being replaced with mush. tl;dr a wise person once pointed out that, once established, bureaucracy only serves itself. As much as I feel the lure of a centralised bureaucracy and all the good it can do for a country, my eternal worry is what happens to information when that same bureaucracy inevitably decides the purpose of its existence is its existence and not the people its supposed to serve. But that's something no one has solved yet and certainly isn't inherent to centralising everything.
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Aug 27, 2021 04:20
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Megillah Gorilla posted:In Australia, we have the ABC, which is like the BBC, but with an 'A' in it. This sounds pretty similar to the BBC, which now has a revolving door leading to Conservative Party HQ.
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Aug 27, 2021 10:07
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Mantis42 posted:But with modern computational powers and logistics this is increasingly looking like a solved problem. Read Cockshott, etc etc. Just unfortunate that the world's first democracy was destroyed by the bourgeoisie dictatorship before cybernetic socialism could be implemented at scale. It is not a solved problem except if you assume people are either representative agents or conform to particle physics, neither or which is remotely true. Failing that, allowing even trivial agency for interactions of N larger than ten or so agents regularly makes the problem intractable (to the degree of ’There aint enough molecules in the universe for a computer like this’.) All macro models, be it input output, econophysics, dgse, cybernetics, cge or whatever, are just clever analogies for aggregate outcomes and assume, rather than calculate or predict, emergent effects of reactive agents interacting. You may say you like the chances of socialist macro planning over, say, the dsge and structural VARs that the FED uses, but neither approaches even tries to solve the fundamental coordination and information problem rather than circumventing it. For that you need algorithmic game theory and mechanism design and behavioral approaches combined. And depending on your stance, that is either really early work or just downright impossible. Overall, decentralized systems will be inefficient in ways that depend on institutions, traditions, psychology, sociology, "genes" and whatever else influences emergent human interaction. Centralized systems will be inefficient by having to chose some approximation to the multiplex issues of human interaction. It is entirely unclear to me that one would always be better than another in every condition. So to clarify, you may say that you believe that this or that economic planning algorithm will be good enough, and in particular, better than a social market economy (or whatever the benchmark is). However, saying that we solved the problem of computing centralized (or decentralized) implementation cause we can stack a million RTX3000 is incorrect. Even known allocation mechanisms that capitalist firms use like auctions and two part tariffs are only optimal, stable, etc. under rather approximate assumptions, and these are incredibly small N issues compared to planning an economy. And perhaps more importantly, the value function is merely: extract as much surplus as possible while agents still participate instead of wandering off elsewhere. Economic planning, among other things, seeks to Ensure welfare of everyone. That’s a different game entirely. Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 10:07 on Aug 30, 2021 |
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Aug 30, 2021 09:45
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