Today's Random News

[Fe 26]

how wealth distributes based on natural laws of hierarchy

not really

[Fe 26]

Another fallacy, as most humans have been cooperative animals. Even the systems that are used to argue against that idea, like feudalism, capitalism, communism, depend entirely on that fact.

Truth.

The people that say otherwise tend to be idiots that are cherry picking the works of the mentally abnormal, like those of John Nash or Ayn Rand. These technocratic tyrants all know and believe in Nash's work on the prisoner's dilemma. But do they know that that he gave a speech in 2007 about the value of human diversity and the potential benefits of apparently nonstandard behaviors or roles? And that in 2002 he was anti Keynesian economics?

Or have they looked at research data on variations of the prisoner's dilemma with real people? That time and time again real people have a bias towards cooperation?

The truth is that people are far more bizarre than in world of John Galt. We are cooperative to a fault. We would rather harm others and cooperate with authority or the mob than kill someone for the prisoner's diamond.

[kedawa]

Another fallacy, as most humans have been cooperative animals. Even the systems that are used to argue against that idea, like feudalism, capitalism, communism, depend entirely on that fact.

"You" can be plural, y'know?

[Satsuki]

Truth.

The people that say otherwise tend to be idiots that are cherry picking the works of the mentally abnormal, like those of John Nash or Ayn Rand. These technocratic tyrants all know and believe in Nash's work on the prisoner's dilemma. But do they know that that he gave a speech in 2007 about the value of human diversity and the potential benefits of apparently nonstandard behaviors or roles? And that in 2002 he was anti Keynesian economics?

Or have they looked at research data on variations of the prisoner's dilemma with real people? That time and time again real people have a bias towards cooperation?

The truth is that people are far more bizarre than in world of John Galt. We are cooperative to a fault. We would rather harm others and cooperate with authority or the mob than kill someone for the prisoner's diamond.

I agree with 100% of this, actually. I love reading both Rand and Nash, big fan of both their works, but I definitely don't agree with all of it - and on top of that, they themselves have admitted fallacies in their own work. I think you're right on - the reality of human nature is far more nuanced than most economists and economic minded theories give it credit for. But, even economists and mathematicians like Nash will preface their theories by saying "in a market system," not necessarily "in a society." Not always, but sometimes. In the case of many theories applied to human existence, we often fall into the trap of equating an economic theory to western society and how it maneuvers, forgetting that many societies do not function the same.

[Drewbacca]

Wealth and economics do not correspond to any "natural law" and the belief that they do is one of the most harmful fallicies that is widely believed. Economics are, by definition, a surrogate or workaround to natural law and only behave predictably within conditions they themselves preconscribe.

Another fallacy, as most humans have been cooperative animals. Even the systems that are used to argue against that idea, like feudalism, capitalism, communism, depend entirely on that fact.

there isn't really "natural law" that is a blanket concept that works for every society, as every society is dealing with its own set of circumstances. In very small tribal societies, tribalism and "communist ethics" have thrived for thousands of years. In larger societies, not so much. It's very much dependent on a variety of factors.

I agree with 100% of this, actually. I love reading both Rand and Nash, big fan of both their works, but I definitely don't agree with all of it - and on top of that, they themselves have admitted fallacies in their own work. I think you're right on - the reality of human nature is far more nuanced than most economists and economic minded theories give it credit for. But, even economists and mathematicians like Nash will preface their theories by saying "in a market system," not necessarily "in a society." Not always, but sometimes. In the case of many theories applied to human existence, we often fall into the trap of equating an economic theory to western society and how it maneuvers, forgetting that many societies do not function the same.

No, sorry guys, but this isn't true from any actual psychometrically sound study I've ever read (I read them pretty much every Sunday). I'm open to hearing alternatives, but I'd be surprised if they held much water. I'm also going to put aside the claim Vasteel made that hierarchal social structures aren't natural for now (despite the fact that they can be found throughout the animal kingdom), because this is what we have to work with.

First, lets get something straight—you can't assert that capitalism is uncooperative. Of course it is. Every social game which we govern ourselves with is a cooperative game. You are AGREEING to a set of rules, and then competing within them. But to say normal laws don't govern everything simply because we've invented them (for good reason) and they're not a "real" thing is absurd. ABSURD. When random chance, probability and pathing play out things are distributed more evenly along the middle than the edges. ie. There are more paths to the averages than to the outliers, which is essentially how index funds work.

Galton boards even visualize this with gravity itself:



It's important to understand the distribution of chance to some degree, because it also governs distribution of talent, and intelligence. That also contributes HEAVILY to the distribution of productivity in a controlled society. A lot of it is based off of this. Where you fall on this scale is based on a lot of chance and luck and genetics and so forth — but it holds true SO MANY things (including personality traits) and it feeds heavily in to the underlying NATURE of the distribution of "wealth" (by which I mean... productivity and success I guess). It makes some kind of sense simply because humans have a nature. So the games we invent would also have them.

Okay so there's that point.

But on top of that Price's Model concludes that the 50% of the creative productivity is done by the square root of the total sum of contributors. That's a FRIGHTENING statistic. So in a group of 10, 3 people will do most of the work. In a group of 1000, 100 people will do most of the work. This is the underlying schema of why bureaucracies end up forming and stultifying in the first place. Anyone who has done group work in school knows how useless groups of over 4 or 5 are (and also, in technology development adding more human over 6 or 7 is a waste of resourcing).

Use this as a predictive model and look at any creative endeavour in a controlled society (ie "game") and it holds true. From sports (hoops sunk, goals scored, touchdowns), to creative fields (paintings sold, novels sold, songs making top 10) to even entrepreneurial endeavours (tech or trading for example) and you'll find a disproportionate of the return goes to a small group. It is almost inevitable that 1% of people (bloody talented, productive people BTW) end up with 50% of the money, sports accolades, radio hits, money, scientific breakthrough, etc. This is how things distribute over time in a social, cooperative game. Whether it's biology driving the results (LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Warren Buffet) or the result of social constructs (Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla, Bill Gates, Bear Sterns) is a matter of discussion. What it's hard to deny is the underlying laws governing us (which is what I think we're talking about here?)

Another example of this social behaviour can be found in coin-toss games. If you give 100 people $10, and tell them to gamble their money in random games of coin tosses eventually the same distribution forms. See the attached charts:



You could argue that more advanced games with more intelligent players controlling their distribution would change this breakdown significantly (I think this is what you're basically arguing). But it's probably not true. At least not on any scale I've seen. The smartest of us are simply the ones that get to the future fastest. If you have good intelligence and have put work in to understanding how to use a computer you're 10x ahead of most people right now. Distribution of productive output in cooperative and creative games seem to eventually distribute according to this pattern and you can see that in pretty much most domains. Honestly most people seem cool with this — it's only when the games aren't fair that things come off the rails (Wall Street and the bank bailouts for example).

I think some people believe re-distribution "fixes" it. But all it seems to do is let a fresh group of people get to the top 1 percentile. It doesn't stop the pattern.
The good news is that the 1% filter out quite often, so room at the top is always opening up. Companies on the Fortune 500 are only there for 25 years at most before dissolving. It's hard to stay at the top. Funny enough these distribution models also tell us the people who do manage to actually stay at the top for a meaninful threshold of time are basically the 1% of the 1%.

Anyway, I'm bored on a Saturday so forgive me some ruminating here.

[Fe 26]

I think it is important to look at who is coming up with the stuff and who it is about. Nash was a paranoid schizophrenic. Should we really be applying the theories of someone with diagnosed paranoia to all people? And the prisoner's dilemma is about a thief and a mobster. Is the average person not more trust worthy? And the hypothetical scenario is so limiting. When is anyone in that specific set up?

And don't get me started on Rand. Along with all the autisms and asburgers and other stuff I accuse everyone ever of having, she probably had PTSD from what she and her family lived through in Russia.

[Diff-chan]

People are cooperative - especially within their tribe. But then it becomes a show of force outside of it. Look at how the Latins conquered the Italian peninsula for example. But things like a barter system don't scale well past those small societies, hence why "money" was created, as a middleman between the two things (you are a farmer and I am a doctor, you broke your leg but I don't need wheat or milk, etc.). And once you have "money" you need to have a bunch of people who all agree that "money" is worth something. Yea, we could just toss that out and say it's some bullshit, but the desire for people to interact with each other very much drives this behavior AND it's been done everywhere in every place.

I remember reading a book, it might have been Freakonomics (which is mostly shit) about some tribe where currency is like, a bunch of giant rocks. Except the rocks are too big to trade so they just keep them sitting there and know whose rocks are whose. And I think they even said that one time someone's rock got lost or swept away in a storm or something but everyone knew that one guy had it so it was still valid currency in their society, even though it was not physically there. So, well, it just goes like that.

I wouldn't call economics a "natural law" but merely a system that is designed around natural behavior. Like the law of supply and demand. The simple fact is that something that is scarce is worth more to us. Why? I don't know, but it just is. So building a system to facilitate that just makes good sense. We see these things pop up well before the idea of "capitalism" or "communism" ever existed.

It becomes increasingly abstracted as we move up, but that's the basic idea. The fact is that "communism" as we know it failed precisely because it bumped against these basic realities of human behavior, it doesn't work because it's not the way humans work.

[Drewbacca]

I think it is important to look at who is coming up with the stuff and who it is about. Nash was a paranoid schizophrenic. Should we really be applying the theories of someone with diagnosed paranoia to all people? And the prisoner's dilemma is about a thief and a mobster. Is the average person not more trust worthy? And the hypothetical scenario is so limiting. When is anyone in that specific set up?

I don't think that's very important. Who is less important than what, IMO. Nash being schizophrenic is obviously alarming, but the argument being made is what need scrutinizing else you throw out the baby with the bath water. All scientific claims should always be scrutinized regardless of person. It's why peer reviewing is blind. Nietzche was put in to an insane asylum at a young age, as well as many of our prominent artists. Maybe you have to be a little bit insane to confront the tragedy of life head on and discover new territory? I don't know. I'm not that kind of genius.

But the general purpose of theories in the first place is predictive validity. If the theory a nut job puts forth can predict then the nutjob was probably on to something.

People are cooperative - especially within their tribe. But then it becomes a show of force outside of it. Look at how the Latins conquered the Italian peninsula for example. But things like a barter system don't scale well past those small societies, hence why "money" was created, as a middleman between the two things (you are a farmer and I am a doctor, you broke your leg but I don't need wheat or milk, etc.). And once you have "money" you need to have a bunch of people who all agree that "money" is worth something. Yea, we could just toss that out and say it's some bullshit, but the desire for people to interact with each other very much drives this behavior AND it's been done everywhere in every place.

I remember reading a book, it might have been Freakonomics (which is mostly shit) about some tribe where currency is like, a bunch of giant rocks. Except the rocks are too big to trade so they just keep them sitting there and know whose rocks are whose. And I think they even said that one time someone's rock got lost or swept away in a storm or something but everyone knew that one guy had it so it was still valid currency in their society, even though it was not physically there. So, well, it just goes like that.

I wouldn't call economics a "natural law" but merely a system that is designed around natural behavior. Like the law of supply and demand. The simple fact is that something that is scarce is worth more to us. Why? I don't know, but it just is. So building a system to facilitate that just makes good sense. We see these things pop up well before the idea of "capitalism" or "communism" ever existed.

It becomes increasingly abstracted as we move up, but that's the basic idea. The fact is that "communism" as we know it failed precisely because it bumped against these basic realities of human behavior, it doesn't work because it's not the way humans work.

Yeah, exactly. It also should be noted that there's something inherently corruptive about intelligence that plays in to communism. It's like... too much order controlling the unrelenting suffering and chaos of our existence. It's balled faced arrogance and probably the root of most evil. Something like... "Anything outside of this order we've made is to be rejected and burned". The great lie of communism is utopia free from all inequality. It's strange to me our generation doesn't actually understand most of these things. At the centre of successful, life-fulfilling models is the individual. Societies that embrace the chaos of individual freedoms seem to benefit the most from those ideas, I guess.

As I read about philosophy these ideas seem to jump out at me a lot. As phenomena peeking behind all of the developments and failures of the last 100 years. They govern supply and demand, human development and also seem to scale like fractal patterns. You can look at a subset and see the same pattern, or zoom out and abstract and see examples too. The risk is making sure "natural laws" and so forth aren't used as a means to persecute people. I think that's the dark side risk of being governed entirely by chance and individualism, too.

[Fe 26]

The problem of communism is that it has people in it. People just replaced capitalism by wealth/resource with capitalism by state. The evil people were still there. Things like nepotism were still there. Instead of getting your cousin's kid a good job at your company, you got him a good job at your state funded whatever. Family and friends still got the choice cuts of meat, as it were.

Truth be told, any form of government would work if people were better. But we're not. There are enough shitty people at any given time to sour just about any form of government.

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

[Diff-chan]

Well, except I'm not talking about it from a utopian point of view. We have to design systems around human behavior, not hope for better human behavior.