[p2p-research] Project Cybersyn

[Michel Bauwens]

Do you think you could explain, to non-mathematicians, where this continuum
starts and end? So when peer production, when market, when both and in what
proportions?

Michel

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 6:07 AM, J. Andrew Rogers <reality.miner at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 8:33 PM, Kevin Carson
> <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 12/8/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Don't you think Kevin, that our present stigmergic capabilities, based
> on ultra low transaction and communication costs, may revive such
> possibilities, and replace the dream of centralized planning, by horizontal
> coordination, as in fact already occurs in the large peer production
> efforts?
> >>
> >
> > Definitely.  But there's probably a limit to the scale of
> > coordination.  Such stigmergically organized projects must be tied,
> > directly or indirectly, to a market pricing system that values their
> > inputs.  And market pricing systems are useful for providing a system
> > for evaluating the most productive use of inputs, comparative demand
> > for different products, and the most productive of competing uses for
> > inputs.  I see peer production taking place within a market framework
> > that serves an informational function (if one of last resort).
>
>
> There are many examples of cooperative, peer-based structures in real
> business and society.  It can definitely work under some parameters.
> In more and more *commercial* industries, you have projects executed
> as ad hoc organizations of individuals and smaller organizations that
> are only reified as a semi-solid business construct for that one
> project. I only see it becoming more prevalent.
>
> There are hard mathematical limits on how well cooperative non-market
> decision systems scale if we assume altruistic agents of roughly
> equivalent intelligence, thought it does scale to useful numbers for
> real societies (mucho algorithmic information and decision theory
> elided). Comparative advantage as applied to *decisions* has
> interesting properties. I think one of the biggest failures of
> classical economics, regardless of flavor, is that it has no concept
> of this kind of continuum, assuming that it must be one or the other
> in all cases.  Cooperative specialization will out-perform
> anarcho-capitalism with relatively small numbers of agents but
> degrades rapidly and becomes extremely wasteful as scales increase. An
> optimal system -- assuming parity of intelligence -- requires both if
> pathologies are to be avoided.
>
> Of course, this assumption does not hold if there are gross
> asymmetries of intelligence, but that produces a result that is
> different from either extreme if we assume that all agents have rough
> parity of intelligence. Super-intelligence produces a system where the
> equilibrium is essentially totalitarian, but the lesser intelligences
> are incapable of even  discerning that fact if well-executed. Even if
> we assume modest differentials in intelligence, such as you might find
> in a human society, the theoretical consequences tend to be a little
> more totalitarian -- and invisibly so -- than most people would likely
> prefer. This is where the argument ultimately ends up: if you are
> manipulated beyond your ability to discern such that you have no
> concept of that manipulation, what does that mean as a practical
> matter?
>
>
> --
> J. Andrew Rogers
> realityminer.blogspot.com
>
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