|
Purple Prince posted:In theory at least allocating resources to problems in an objective way, without a central coordinating mind, ought to be the sort of job distributed computing is good at. How do you figure that? The basic problem is similar to the bin-packing problem, which is combinatorial NP-Hard. Throwing an AI at it simplifies it by introducing unknown bias from the person creating the training data set.
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 19:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 1, 2024 23:57 |
|
|
unwantedplatypus posted:The reason that we currently and historically have a class of elites, and what makes this a socio-economic class, is that their position and power is reproduced across time and individuals; and their position in society gives them a shared interest. There is no intrinsic reason that the head factory coordinator has a shared interest with a residential building administrator. Their jobs have little to do with each other, and neither commands respect in the others line of work. However, if both of those positions personally profit from exploiting the labor and resources of others, suddenly they have a shared interest in keeping an underclass of people to exploit for their own benefit. A CEO's exploitation of workers is intrinsic to a model of social labor for personal profit, and thus is preserved across generations and persons. In addition, when the unequal distribution of resources and power is abstracted into the accumulation of money, it can be passed down via family inheritance. However, this perpetuation of class is only possible through the model of social labor for private profit. I absolutely understand this, but you are still sidestepping the retort that any option that replaces market forces allocating labour with people allocating labour is a literal regression under your model to a pre-capitalist system which has even more inbuilt inequality. Until you can answer this question, the best possible option for the progressive left is the same one it's been for the last 50-60 years or so, which is to argue for a free market economy to do the initial allocation of resources and generate wealth, moderated by taxation and market incentives to redistribute wealth out as fairly as you can. e: \/\/ sure you can try to do that but without a model to look at I'm totally unconvinced you actually get good outcomes from it. There's loads of problems but I think the two most glaring are: 1) As previously stated complex decision making requires specialisation. You need information and the time to assimilate it and make decisions. Being a boss/manager/politician is literally a full time job and I can't see how you get past that. 2) I also don't think people actually want anything like this. Lots of people in the UK grumble about having to vote in a general election more often than the usual five year cycle. They want to be able to vote on the direction of the country once and then not be bothered by politics for the next five years. They have problems, but what they want is for politicians to recognise those problems and offer solutions - we don't live in a world where everyone has a pet policy they desperately want to pursue. I think that most people are happy just knowing that there's someone in charge and they don't have to worry. Where they get unhappy is when they think the system is rigged against them and that politicians have stopped caring about their problems, but that's a cry to fix the system, not that they want more to do with it. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Dec 29, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 19:41
|
|
|
I'm not sure the only options are capitalism or feudalism. I also am not sure that there is a hard distinction between "people allocating labour" and "market forces" given that markets are operated by people, often an increasingly small number of people given the trend towards market domination by larger and larger corporations. Perhaps there could be some model whereby lots of people, democratically, allocate labour?
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 19:46
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I'm not sure the only options are capitalism or feudalism. I also am not sure that there is a hard distinction between "people allocating labour" and "market forces" given that markets are operated by people, often an increasingly small number of people given the trend towards market domination by larger and larger corporations. Is this something you genuinely don't understand and need explained or are you just being obtuse?
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 19:51
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:I absolutely understand this, but you are still sidestepping the retort that any option that replaces market forces allocating labour with people allocating labour is a literal regression under your model to a pre-capitalist system which has even more inbuilt inequality. The idea that a market somehow allocates resources without involving people is more or less a textbook example of what a Marxist would consider commodity fetishism.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 19:53
|
|
|
NovemberMike posted:Is this something you genuinely don't understand and need explained or are you just being obtuse? Helsing posted:The idea that a market somehow allocates resources without involving people is more or less a textbook example of what a Marxist would consider commodity fetishism. That would broadly be the point I was making. Society doesn't run on some magic gestalt entity called The Market making decisions, it runs on a handful of assholes in charge of your company making decisions for everyone else based on what makes them richest. It can only "efficiently assign labour" according to one value (the maximum benefit to the owners) and only as well as the assholes in charge can make that decision, which is often not very well at all. It is already running on an oligarchic group of people deciding how to assign labour, it never stopped.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 19:57
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I'm not sure the only options are capitalism or feudalism. I also am not sure that there is a hard distinction between "people allocating labour" and "market forces" given that markets are operated by people, often an increasingly small number of people given the trend towards market domination by larger and larger corporations. How exactly do you democratically allocate labor to perform counterproductive work like RCA?
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:01
|
|
|
I'm not familiar with the term RCA.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:04
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:That would broadly be the point I was making. This is a bit overly reductive. Markets behave differently to command economies, if you're willing to just pretend that they're the same to make a point then you're ignoring a lot of nuance. Oligarchs do have an outsized influence on markets, but they're still much weaker than they are in a command economy. It wasn't the oligarchs pushing Blockbuster out of business.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:07
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I'm not familiar with the term RCA. Root Cause Analysis.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:08
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:I absolutely understand this, but you are still sidestepping the retort that any option that replaces market forces allocating labour with people allocating labour is a literal regression under your model to a pre-capitalist system which has even more inbuilt inequality. Well its not a "regression" because I don't take a Teleological view of history, but also the idea that "people allocating labor" = literally feudalism is a leap of logic you and you alone are making. I cant answer your question because I have no idea what you're talking about. How does people allocating labor lead to inbuilt inequality? Why are you somehow conflating all non-capitalist political economy with feudalism or (i'm guessing) USSR style state capitalism?
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:08
|
|
|
NovemberMike posted:This is a bit overly reductive. Markets behave differently to command economies, if you're willing to just pretend that they're the same to make a point then you're ignoring a lot of nuance. Oligarchs do have an outsized influence on markets, but they're still much weaker than they are in a command economy. It wasn't the oligarchs pushing Blockbuster out of business. Markets are composed of lots of individual command economies
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:10
|
|
|
e: /\/\ yes which is why the profit motive and market value are important things. Decentralised decision making needs a guide rail to produce outcomes. In capitalism it's the market. In what you want it's...?unwantedplatypus posted:Well its not a "regression" because I don't take a Teleological view of history, but also the idea that "people allocating labor" = literally feudalism is a leap of logic you and you alone are making. I cant answer your question because I have no idea what you're talking about. How does people allocating labor lead to inbuilt inequality? Why are you somehow conflating all non-capitalist political economy with feudalism or (i'm guessing) USSR style state capitalism? Because you keep refusing to describe the system that you want, so all we have to go on are examples of systems based around people allocating labour, which all instantly become systems where the people you have allocating labour are the socio-economic elite. Owlfancier has at least given the usual answer ('some form of democracy') but every time I ask this question I've never managed to get further than that hopelessly vague response.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:11
|
|
|
NovemberMike posted:This is a bit overly reductive. Markets behave differently to command economies, if you're willing to just pretend that they're the same to make a point then you're ignoring a lot of nuance. Oligarchs do have an outsized influence on markets, but they're still much weaker than they are in a command economy. It wasn't the oligarchs pushing Blockbuster out of business. I mean I'm not enormously keen on state operated command economies either because yes they fall into a lot of similar problems driven by lack of input by the majority of people who spend their lives doing the work. Without that input it becomes much easier to ignore their needs. Which again feeds back into the suggestion that there may be an effective upper limit on the scale of human society related to our ability to communicate with each other, above which it invariably collapses into simplified, but ultimately harmful forms of organization such as hierarchy. Which is why I generally advocate for sacrificing productivity for inclusion of as many people as possible in the decision making process, because I can't suggest any other mechanism by which people's welfare won't be sacrificed to ensure the edifice of production continues at any cost. Either because it's owned by someone who is only concerned with their own profit, or because it's directed by people who aren't directly immersed in the welfare of the workforce. karthun posted:Root Cause Analysis. So after briefly googling it I'm not sure what's weird about it? It's some kind of method for identifying why problems happen in processes of production, if you are involved in a production process then you have an interest in not having problems in that process, therefore you would want labour to be assigned to identify and fix them? Is there something specifically weird about the method that makes it impossible for people to want to use it of their own volition? Like if I have to use a machine every day to do my job and it keeps breaking why would I not want to know why it keeps breaking so it can be fixed? I get perhaps that you might think "well it's not my problem" but I'd actually characterise that attitude as being exactly the sort of thing that the strict division of responsibility in hierarchical production encourages. Because yes, it's literally not your problem, you have no stake in the effectiveness of the production process, you get nothing if you produce more, you lose nothing if you produce less, you are paid the same either way, you have no say in whether the thing gets fixed or not. A more participatory way of working I think would help with that, both in terms of people having say in how their workplace is run, and also in terms of seeing the actual benefits of improvements in the process? Not even getting rich, but like, if you finish your work faster because the process got better, you can just go home early? You get the benefit of improved productivity by having to work less. Contrast with now, of course, where an improved process either means job losses and/or more money for the boss, and nothing for you. Think of how you might work differently if you were working for yourself, and why that's different from how you work when you work for someone else. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Dec 29, 2019 |
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:16
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:e: /\/\ yes which is why the profit motive and market value are important things Well the original point I was trying to make was that you can't make conclusions about human nature based off of how present and historical societies are structured; and also therefore can't assume that all political and economic systems require a class hierarchy. The fact that I can't mention a marxist analysis of something without you going "OH YEAH I BET YOU DONT EVEN KNOW HOW TO DO COMMUNISM" is not my problem. I can talk about steps we could take to weaken class hierarchy, such as democratization of the workplace, de-commodification of goods like housing, food, and healthcare, expropriating all private (as distinguished from personal) property and making the creation of new private property illegal, changing the currency system to some form of labor notes. I can't, and nobody can, describe every aspect of an economic system that doesn't yet exist; much in the same way that you can't actually fully describe how the economy that you live in and take as a rule of nature actually functions. Yes you can appeal to the vague term of "market forces", but that's little more than a thought-terminating cliche that ignores how the market is just the results of many individual decisions of supply and allocation. You can believe there is some special labor organizing ghost that dwells within the gaps of our knowledge, but I think that's a little unreasonable.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:22
|
|
|
There's no inherent reason that "the people who capture profit/excess value" need to be exclusively management and hierarchical decision makers. If workers owned the profits of their company instead of stockholders/investors, in addition to their salaries, and management wasn't able to set themselves disproportionate salaries, you have at least the start of a sustainable structure. Capitalists complain that entrepreneurs take risk and all kinds of other bullshit to justify them turning their small initial stake into a massive fortune when a venture succeeds. Removing founders as a privileged group and forcing separation of financial underwriting and executive control of businesses is the second part of making the structure workable.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:38
|
|
|
unwantedplatypus posted:Well the original point I was trying to make was that you can't make conclusions about human nature based off of how present and historical societies are structured; and also therefore can't assume that all political and economic systems require a class hierarchy. The fact that I can't mention a marxist analysis of something without you going "OH YEAH I BET YOU DONT EVEN KNOW HOW TO DO COMMUNISM" is not my problem. I can talk about steps we could take to weaken class hierarchy, such as democratization of the workplace, de-commodification of goods like housing, food, and healthcare, expropriating all private (as distinguished from personal) property and making the creation of new private property illegal, changing the currency system to some form of labor notes. Nice meltdown. It's pretty easy to explain how a series of command entities competing in an marketplace with informed consumer choice results in a system in which efficient entities succeed and inefficient entities do not. Individuals, through the aggregate of their purchasing choices, will choose which command entities are allocated more resources. Because they will make those choices in their own interest, the economy will trend towards the entities that are able to produce the best quality goods in the most efficient way. Now we all know it's a hell of a lot more complicated than that, and has all of the problems that have been brought out earlier, and sometimes just fails, but there in three sentences I've described market capitalism in a way that explains how as a system it attempts to work. Also none of it relied upon class analysis because you don't actually need class analysis to explain how any of this works. It's sometimes helpful, but it's only a small part of the picture. If you can't even do that, and all you have is 'if people were different then things would be different', then all you've done is make a trite observation that doesn't actually help anyone.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:45
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:Nice meltdown. What you described is not at all a thing that actually exists, though. Nor is it a thing that tries to exist. So sure you don't need class analysis to describe something which does not reflect reality.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 20:50
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:Nice meltdown. Well first off you haven't defined what efficiency is, so you aren't actually saying anything. The part your psuedo-evolutionary argument leaves out is that, as described, your ideal market will lead to monopolization as the "inefficient" companies are outcompeted and the older efficient companies use their market power (or use levers of power outside the market) to prevent newer efficient companies from meaningfully competing with them. Therefore, the market will trend towards entities that outcompeted the first "batch" of command entities and then successfully cemented their hold on their sector of the market. In addition this is a super simplified and idealized version of a market that describes very little and predicts even less
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 21:09
|
|
|
It also ignores the idea that production determines consumption, not the other way around. That it is entirely possible, and indeed, easier, to simply utilize productive capacity to create things that nobody needs, and then induce a social demand for them by the fact of their existence and by mobilizing marketing efforts to make them seem appealing, or by exerting pressure on governments to create markets for your products by defunding objectively better alternatives. The idea that people are a group of naturally informed consumers voting with their money in a marketplace of competing commodities is absolutely farcical to the point of being ridiculous, and the idea that this is even some aspirational goal is even moreso. The market is not a conscious, thinking thing. It does not intend anything, and even if it did there is nobody out there in charge of any of these companies that actually wants to have to compete with anyone, the ideal situation for a capitalist is with all their competition dead. They do not want to have to compete, they want to expend the minimum of effort to capture consumers and make them keep consuming as much as possible to maximise revenue, that's it. And that understanding certainly invites a class based analysis to explain the difference in desires between consumers and producers.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 21:15
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:So after briefly googling it I'm not sure what's weird about it? It's some kind of method for identifying why problems happen in processes of production, if you are involved in a production process then you have an interest in not having problems in that process, therefore you would want labour to be assigned to identify and fix them? To go with your machine breaking example, yes YOU may want to have an RCA why your widget machine keeps breaking, but no one in your factory can perform the RCA. Lets pretend that the machine breaks because too much stress is put on a bolt and that leads to a critical failure. The RCA isn't that too much stress was put on the bolt, its all of the engineering failures and compromises that went into designing that machine. The factory that builds that machine will tell you to replace the bolt when it fails and not question how they built a machine that puts too much stress on the bolt. After all, they are working on a different machine and no one wants to look at 5 year old schematics and try to remember what compromises they had to make to get the machine to work in spec. I am an embedded linux programmer on the hardware engineering team with a bunch of PE electrical engineers. I was specifically hired because they needed someone to be able to dive into code and figure out what the hell is going on or to write custom code to test strange edge cases. We do almost all RCA for our company, no one likes us poking around in their poo poo, questioning their internal processes and procedures trying to figure out why we are seeing 10% field failures rather then 2%. If I get some time over the next day I'll type up a real world example. quote:Contrast with now, of course, where an improved process either means job losses and/or more money for the boss, and nothing for you. Think of how you might work differently if you were working for yourself, and why that's different from how you work when you work for someone else. As someone that did contract work for himself for 8 years and was in a 4 person equal split LLC for an other 4, gently caress that. Corporate work is so much easier and significantly less stress. I make less money but who cares. And this might be specific to R&D but there is always more work to do. There are always new embedded CPU's to evaluate. My personal goal is to play with a RISC-V sometime in late 2020. Increased efficiency means I get to play with the new toys earlier assuming that the budget is there for it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 22:10
|
|
|
There's always more work to do everywhere, because your boss is always looking to squeeze more profit out of you, the production process can be accelerated so that more can be produced for people to consume. The point is that there shouldn't be more work to do, what is the point of increased productivity if all it does is accelerate the net rate of human consumption and you get nothing out of it?
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 22:34
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:There's always more work to do everywhere, because your boss is always looking to squeeze more profit out of you, the production process can be accelerated so that more can be produced for people to consume. The point is that there shouldn't be more work to do, what is the point of increased productivity if all it does is accelerate the net rate of human consumption and you get nothing out of it? I did work in telecom and now I work in medical device R&D. I'm perfectly fine with additional consumption of both of those services. Ironically the primary feature demanded in both is a decrease in energy consumption. In the telecom world moving away from 25 watt FPGA's to 5 watt ASICS is a massive decrease in consumption. I'm not going to talk about the specifics of medical device R&D but needless to say less energy consumption there is also a good thing. In either case I perform no socially necessary labor so no profit can be extracted from me. Welcome to to the R in R&D.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 23:20
|
|
|
karthun posted:In either case I perform no socially necessary labor so no profit can be extracted from me. Welcome to to the R in R&D. Yeah, there's a reason there's like no antibiotics research
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 23:23
|
|
|
unwantedplatypus posted:Yeah, there's a reason there's like no antibiotics research Sounds like something our State Universities should take up. Just don't let them sell off the patents.
|
|
#
?
Dec 29, 2019 23:34
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:In which case, the problem you have is that you need to find a more efficient way of allocating skills to jobs than the market Why?
|
|
#
?
Dec 30, 2019 03:47
|
|
|
NovemberMike posted:How do you figure that? The basic problem is similar to the bin-packing problem, which is combinatorial NP-Hard. Throwing an AI at it simplifies it by introducing unknown bias from the person creating the training data set. There are algorithms to optimise the bin packing problem though, even if those are imperfect. The bias issue is the obvious one for AI and unavoidable, but I feel like if you were going to design a benevolent dictator central planning AI you could design a set of standards for that bias like "acceptable outcomes shall lead to no more than a twofold difference in wealth between the wealthiest and least wealthy humans".
|
|
#
?
Dec 31, 2019 01:30
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:My appeal is that you're not even willing to consider the idea that the way of organizing society you're advocating for is responsible for the problems you're trying to solve with it. We can change anything we want. The burden is to make a positive intelligent argument for it. “Everything sucks” isn’t that when we know things can suck a lot worse (Venezuela). unwantedplatypus posted:The reason that we currently and historically have a class of elites, and what makes this a socio-economic class, is that their position and power is reproduced across time and individuals; and their position in society gives them a shared interest. There is no intrinsic reason that the head factory coordinator has a shared interest with a residential building administrator. Their jobs have little to do with each other, and neither commands respect in the others line of work. However, if both of those positions personally profit from exploiting the labor and resources of others, suddenly they have a shared interest in keeping an underclass of people to exploit for their own benefit. A CEO's exploitation of workers is intrinsic to a model of social labor for personal profit, and thus is preserved across generations and persons. In addition, when the unequal distribution of resources and power is abstracted into the accumulation of money, it can be passed down via family inheritance. However, this perpetuation of class is only possible through the model of social labor for private profit. Sorry but this is dumb as poo poo and exactly what I parodied and compared to Libertarians earlier. The idea of the local shop owner and the Fortune 500 CEO colluding to maintain an underclass is hilarious. Elites are elites. People with power have power. They come in many forms. They’re probably not gas station owners. If you care you need to see all of them. If you want a simplifying ideology to make you feel good stick with the Marxism (Or try out some other crank ideology once and a while).
|
|
#
?
Dec 31, 2019 03:02
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 1, 2024 23:57 |
|
|
asdf32 posted:We can change anything we want. The burden is to make a positive intelligent argument for it. “Everything sucks” isn’t that when we know things can suck a lot worse (Venezuela). the market says the deaths of those billions will be more profitable than saving them, asdf32. what does your freshly-learned experience with Boeing tell you the market will do to them. will your reaction be any different to when Donald Trump got you to agree unconditionally funding concentration camps was a good idea.
|
|
#
?
Dec 31, 2019 03:07
|
|