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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

The human brain consumes 20% of our total energy budget in exchange for allocating our resources, so maybe it's not too out-of-whack?

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Only the "brain" on your analogy is extremely inefficient at locating resources, and the people that compose it are utterly unsuited for that responsibility, driven by amoral greed (with no thought to other considerations), and in that place mostly by a mixture of birth and luck rather than competence.

It turns out that resource allocation tuned to maximize value outperforms resource allocation tuned for fairness in terms of material standard of living.

It turns out that 'value' as defined by central banks treats the enslavement of the species as more valuable than the survival of the species.

Central planners don’t get to define value... that’s the point.

Not really a good analogy.

The brain does far, far more than marshal resources and distribute the where they are needed, which in essence is what the financial sector does for the economy.

I think it's a perfect analogy. From the point of view of a species as a whole, the majority of what we see as the brain's functions are only relevant because humans are amazingly inefficient compared to smaller organisms. We need our brains because our reproductive cycle produces "too big to fail" output.

Yes this analogy would work if every brain became a cancerous growth that realigned laws and basic pathways to serve the survival and growth of the brain, but this is not the case, the brain in the body has a maximum size (proportionality) and also serves the rest of the body. Not only the brain's satisfaction, but the skin, the gut, the sense organs all rely on the brain however the brain serves them primarily before serving "itself"

An organism's reproductive gain factor isn't that sensible a metric of its success. A better one is how adaptable it is.

Because of our brains, humans are extremely adaptable. Even with primitive technology we spread throughout the globe, and unlike wild cats or bears we haven't needed to speciate into each climate, develop camouflage fur, etc. The biological investment in an advanced brain gave us the opportunity to thrive everywhere.

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