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Comment by eyelidlessness | Hacker News Reader

Better products don’t necessarily make the world better. They often make the world worse. I don’t have a particular chip on my shoulder about Apple, or Microsoft, or free software. There are things I appreciate that all of them produce, and good in the world because of some of those efforts by each. But yes, making the world better and making money are inherently in conflict. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to reconcile them acceptably for this endeavor, I even addressed that.

Ugh I have half a mind to post a Wikipedia link, but it’s going to be really upsetting if I play a part in dialectics becoming another inscrutable topic on HN like monads.

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> Better products don’t necessarily make the world better.

It depends who you ask. Someone is buying those products. We use money and public opinion to proxy for what we value. Without freedom to use those someone would need to dictate what's valuable.

If money disappeared overnight, a lot of people would die (almost all of them). So, money allows the survival of people. If you are not a misanthropist, then, the world is better with money, since it allows people to live.

Therefore, making money is simply something that must be done to allow the existence of human life. This is not in conflict of making the world better, it's in service of it.

> If money disappeared overnight, a lot of people would die

If asbestos disappeared overnight lot of people would die. I almost made this a list but it would detract from the point. Making something disappear overnight is almost always harmful in any systemic context. There are a lot of things I want to eradicate from existence, and I don’t think I could name one which I would want eradicated overnight.

But I wasn’t even advocating for eliminating money. I was acknowledging a tension between incentives. Please don’t make me elaborate about dialectics. No one will enjoy it.

Let's make this simpler: If money disappeared, a lot of people would die. I don't care how long you make the transition period; even if it's a change spread across 20 years, without a database of resources and how many belong to each person (which is what money is), you aren't going to be able to coordinate people well enough to feed billions of people each day. How would the deletion of the database serve anyone?

Let’s make this simpler still:

> But I wasn’t even advocating for eliminating money.

You claim that "making the world better and making money are inherently in conflict." My understanding of this sentence is that one cannot make money while making the world better. It follows then that it is bad to be making money, since it makes the world worse. If it is bad to be making money, it would be better to not be doing so. If money is not being made, this is the same as money being eliminated, as it ceases to serve its purpose.

Please tell me where you disagree.

Fine I’ll link the damn Wikipedia page. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

Things can be in conflict without being in combat. Acknowledging that one thing conflicts with another doesn’t mean one must extinguish the other. My whole point was to identify how the two could be reconciled for the purpose of the endeavor, even while still being in conflict. Please tell me where you still don’t understand why I’m not arguing with a strawman argument you keep trying to assign to me.

> Acknowledging that one thing conflicts with another doesn’t mean one must extinguish the other.

Conflict does imply one thing stands opposed to another. I would not agree that making money inherently makes the world a worse place. Rather, the existence of money facilitates trade and makes the world better because it allows us to specialize in our respective trades. If I'm a farmer who raises chickens, money makes it so I don't have to trade for things with chickens.

> I would not agree that making money inherently makes the world a worse place.

I didn’t say that it does. But I think you’re more interested in justifying making money than understanding the conflict I’m identifying.

> understanding the conflict I’m identifying.

From where I stand, there isn't a conflict between making money and making the world better. Money is a proxy for what people think makes their world better. And, since what people think is entirely subjective, there may be conflicting ideas about what makes the world better. If I want the city to spend $100k on shareable bicycles and you want it to spend $100k to build a recycling center, who is right? Money does not introduce conflict. Different ideas might.

That is a bizarre distinction, one I’ve never heard of and certainly can’t find any information about “logical combat.” I’d be interested to know where you learned of this dichotomy.

If this semantic issue is the source of the disagreement, what we have here is a failure to communicate.

My goodness there is a wealth of literature specifically available from the link I posted. Counterposing ideas is a basic tenet or philosophy. The tension between them is a fundamental underpinning of the complexity of living in society. It’s a whole world of ideas to explore if you want to. Grab a book if you’re curious.

Money doesn't allow people to live, shelter, food, water and friends are what allows people to live. Do you think that you plant dollar bills in the ground and they grow food?

You can't grow enough food for everyone, house everyone's friends, and keep them alive without money. You could maybe do one of those without money, but at the expense of the other two. The money is a critical part of keeping track of how much of each thing you can do without running out of resources. There are too many resources in the world to keep track of them all in your head.

Money doesn't keep track of resources. It is a fake system that has no correlation to how many resources are available to each person, and in fact it is ripe with abuse to hoard resources for those that don't actually need them.

Computer systems and databases are what keeps track of resources, as well as communities. This idea that we should focus on money rather than morals or value is absurd and part of the issue that will end up causing the 2nd fall of rome.

But it does track the relative allocation of resources between all parties, which is all you need to grow food, etc. (and yes, that balance can be changed by printing money, but again, it is simply changing the relative allocations). Communities cannot really keep track of how many plots of land that Corporation X has bought, especially if they are a national establishment buying plots all over the country. You would have to have a distributed mechanism for tracking that, which would somehow involve each district protecting its own data sources very carefully. Luckily, people already carefully guard a data source: dollars. So we don't need this.

Of course we should focus on morals and value. But value is something that cannot be measured accurately using any real world metric, so we only have approximations, of which money is one. As for morals, I'm not sure where you got the idea I said we shouldn't focus on them. One moral I have is that keeping people alive is good, and in the industrialized world, money is the only way to do that, whether you earn it or steal it.

Money doesn't "keep track of resources." If it did, the Fed would not have been able to create $2 trillion in "Quantitative Easing."

It's an imperfect analogy, but I think dollars are more like inches - useful to measure and compare things, and subject to redefinition at the whims of power. (Imagine a carpenter telling you he can't finish building your bookcase because he's "run out of inches." They are not the things they measure.)

The fact that the underlying number of resources changes dynamically is not related to whether money keeps track of those resources. The quantitative easing is akin to when an OS overcommits memory and starts doling out more memory than actually exists in response to malloc() calls.

This works because people (programs) aren't going to start using the money/memory right away, or even necessarily at all. Yet, it prevents the system from locking up (or crashing). The fact that not that much memory exists doesn't mean that your malloc() call doesn't let you keep track of how much memory you are allocated. You can't just start writing to memory that hasn't been allocated to you, in essence. The memory (and money) put a bounds on what kind of behavior you can do, what kind of resources you can use.

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