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Comment by TFYS | Hacker News Reader

The solution is to go beyond a competition based society. No matter how good the people running these companies are or want to be, competition will force their hand to create things like this. If it's not them, it'll be someone else. I'm sure we could find a way to encourage innovation without this competitive system.

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Do you have any examples of societies that have successfully abolishing competition (and continued being somewhat functional)?

It seems impossible to me but I would love to be surprised.

Smaller communes can successfully operate non-competitively. It seems the key is limiting membership to people seriously invested in the concept. With open societies that have large membership, competitive and power seeking forces from members uninterested in the vision seem to eventually dominate.

Didn't a lot of 'hippy' communities built like this end up falling apart from various squabbles like some people not pitching in enough etc?

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people

> I'm sure we could find a way to encourage innovation without this competitive system.

It sounds perfect. But how would we achieve it? Rewrite laws that prohibits private property and free enterprise?

Is ownership the thing that motivates people to innovate? I don't think so. People don't innovate because they may get to own a company, they innovate because they get an idea and implementing that idea successfully may get them a big reward. I don't think ownership or competition is necessary for this process. There's plenty of innovation without competition or ownership inside companies already. Workers innovate to get a reward in the form of a promotion and/or raise, not because they're expecting to own something or because they're competing against someone.

One idea could be to collectively pool money to give as rewards to anyone who improves society in a way that people think is worth rewarding. To prevent corruption this process should be transparent and democratic (preferably direct democracy).

Would Bill Gates try so hard with Microsoft if his biggest possible reward would have been what citizens decide to collectively reward him with?

Why not? He would have another idea and try to get another reward for that. If it's the biggest possible reward that you can get, and you have an idea, why wouldn't you try to implement it? The rewards for a successful business 50 years ago were much smaller than they are today, yet people still created businesses, because it was the best reward you could get. They didn't have an idea and abandon it because the biggest possible reward was 1 million instead of 100. Biggest possible rewards 50 years from now could be much bigger, so why do people innovate now?

> If it's the biggest possible reward that you can get, and you have an idea, why wouldn't you try to implement it?

Because it takes lots of work, risk, and sacrifice. If rewards are small (which, obviously, they would be in your scenario where people pool their money together to reward someone), then why take on such difficult task? I know I wouldn't be trying to do any business in your system. Many wouldn't.

The rewards don't have to be small if everyone in the country participates in the pool through taxes. Maybe not in the billions like in the current system, but plenty big enough to encourage people that have ideas.

The risk part is a problem, I agree. If the risk is larger than the potential reward, it isn't worth it. The risk should somehow be collectively handled as well.

> The solution is to go beyond a competition based society.

I'd frame the problem as follows:

"Capitalism is a powerful tool, but fails as the sole guiding principles of a society's values. Christianity, a former enabler of pro-social norms on a massive scale, is dead.

Wat do."

Are you suggesting that the problem lies in people losing faith in a god and in a church? Were people happier when they were more religious and when a church told them what's good and bad? And now we don't have that? And we should seek to replace it and the problems will lessen?

I don't feel qualified to answer that. All I know is that something will fill the god-shaped hole. Pray it won't be communism or Critical Race Theory.

but who should I pray to then?

Since we're on HN, the local wojak's ersatz-god is the computer.

"SCIENCE says we're all living in a simulation, and probability suggests it was created by a COMPUTER."

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