Hacker News Reader

Comment by jahaja | Hacker News Reader

This is also a crisis of critical thought. There's an utter lack and/or willingness to imagine any other reality than the current market economy. This goes even to the length of advocating some sort of scorched earth policies to decrease the earth's population since in their mind, the only human is the market-human and is as such inherently a terrible polluter.

This is fundamentalism.

View on HN

There are plenty of attempts to think about other systems, implement them, and advocate for change. They all lack something important: success.

Also ironically it is a market of competing ideas to markets.

If success would be a prerequisite of evolution it would grind to a halt.

That may have sounded profound but it comes off poorly because it gets the theory of evolution completely wrong.

Success is the differentiator that allows for the selection part of natural selection. Also evolution cannot “grind to a halt” because it is an outcome of thermodynamics.

Evolution isn’t a metaphor. It is still the underlying physical process even in selection of political systems.

Did I though? Success is the differentiator post-mutation. If mutation itself ceases due to the prerequisite, evolution does too. But why do you feel the need to read and dissect an analogy so literally in the first place? It's not the point.

> If mutation itself ceases due to the prerequisite, evolution does too.

But then your reply doesn't make sense. Here's what parent said:

> There are plenty of attempts to think about other systems, implement them, and advocate for change. They all lack something important: success.

That part would imply that mutation is happening, just unsuccessfully. If you wanted to disagree with that, then your analogy was just confusing.

Given what I wrote in my original comment I interpret the reply as standard status quo apologetics and implying that success needs to be a prerequisite. Then the analogy seems appropriate no?

Success is the selective measure. Not the prerequisite. The prerequisite is a population that changes over time relative to the selective pressure.

I have never talked about the selective phase.

Right?

It’s not an analogy. Evolution is the actual process. No ifs ands or buts about it.

There are myriad attempts to try alternatives to some ideal “market economy”. From Venezuela to Burning Man to Wikipedia to China to Japan to Romania to the Canadian wheat board.

What succeeds, lives.

Ok, given your replies I can only conclude that I should never use an analogy in a reply to you ever again. You've read everything literally and run away with it. The only thing I was attempting to say is that the random mutation phase is a part of evolution and that can't have a success prerequisite. This was intended to say that one can't require previous success to be a prerequisite to political and economic ideas.

What I am conveying to you is that your misunderstandings of evolution are causing you to say things that are illogical pretzels.

Evolution is such a beautiful, elegant discovery. It underlies so much behaviour in the universe, from biology to politics to economics to culture.

If you insist on calling it an analogy--even though it is in fact the reality of the situation, which is just one more example of you misunderstanding it--your use of it is faulty, and so your "analogy" is failing.

And towards the overall point, there are plenty of competing ideas and executions to the market economy. While I sustain none are succeeding, many adventurers in this field would disagree.

While you just don't seem to know about them, perhaps you could take this conversation as a call to action to go search for the many groups working on testing different economical models and go join them. It could be fun!

This is your second reply to where I explain what I meant with regards to evolution without you enlightening me about what's wrong but instead go on about evolution in some sort of spiritual awe.

But you're not done there. After you've decided to overrule that the author of the analogy used it as an analogy you extrapolate that since I'm not following your evolutionary wanderings I'm clearly ignorant of politics and economics altogether. What the hell?

> They all lack something important: success.

Are you sure? The increasing automation will perhaps give us a future where most people don't have to work and we'll still have plenty of food, shelter, social interaction and entertainment - the latter is almost free in this digital world.

Maybe it is just me, but it's as if one can start to see the contours of it forming, slowly, though, as many of the remaining automation tasks are really, really hard. Like building a house, or making something that can do the house chores that we don't have machines for yet.

This will probably happen someday, but it's probably centuries away, or at least a single century away if we're being very optimistic. We have to figure out how we can deal with the problems we're facing in our lifetimes.

Your counterexample is an unrealized future hypothetical utopia. I am not sure where you are going with that, but I am sure that isn’t a “success” because it doesn’t exist yet. That is just a simple question of logical validity not of empiricism.

Not the OP, but it is not 'unrealized' as you say. Read enlightenment now by steven pinkerton. He has a whole book about how we are currently 'realizing' this 'future hypothetical utopia'

When I was 18, microcomputer advocates were predicting 3-day working weeks because of all the hum-drum work computers would do for us.

I'd like to believe in your dream and I'm not saying it won't come to pass, but we'll have to redesign our culture to stop fetishising hard work first.

There's not been too many as it's remarkably difficult to implement an alternative to a market economy outside of revolution. That likely favours specific alternatives.

I've not seen attempts to implement any approach that is seeking sustainability, or constrain growth, or break out of the duopoly of centrally planned vs free market.

That leaves a lot of ideas, of varying credibility, that have never been trialled in any way, shape, or form. Off the top of my head "doughnut economics" was briefly popular in the news a few years ago. It remains a thought experiment. (I don't remember enough about it to comment on its viability).

Coops, communes, nonprofits, open source projects... lots of attempts to develop a sustainable micro economy. Build up from there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com