From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Nov 20 2002 - 02:39:39 MST
On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 03:34:39PM +0100, Max M wrote:
>
> Anders, It would probably not be as bad as you describe. I believe that
> a central planning system with massive computer power and good data,
> should do at least as well as the Sovjet Union did. It is probably not
> nessecary to model society at the detailed level you are trying to.
Yes, I think my horribly overengineered supercomputer socialism would
work better than the Soviet Union. But I don't think it would be vastly
better solution. The point in my thought experiment was that even with
perfect planning things won't be good.
> Plus it would probably be possible to develop systems with a less
> chaotic behaviour than you seem to imagine. Like small amounts of
> overproduction in vital areas like food production. Just like the EU has
> been succesfully doing since WWII.
One could likely re-engineer the economy to be more stable, yes. But the
problem is that this kind of re-engineering seeks to create something
that is stable, and most forms of progress are not stable. So I would
say a planned economy might be possible, but it is incompatible with
open-ended progress. This was not much of a problem for
Marxist-Leninists, since they seemed to have a view of the communist
state as an attractor where no change was necessary, but it is
fundamentally incompatible with transhumanism.
> It would be just like developing new technology from market analysis. It
> just won't fly as it just cannot be modelled. A centralised system would
> leave little room for trial and error.
Exactly. It has a hard time learning, since most of the information to
be learned is local. The Hayek-Mieses argument is only part of it; a lot
of the useful and necessary learning processes in an economy are not
measured in prices but in the growth of experience among people and
institutions. In a market there is an incentive to leverage this
experience growth into profit (either directly by making things better,
or by selling it or even using it as an advertisement), in a centralized
system there is no such incentive and in planned systems this useful
information has no way of reaching the planners.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:15 MST