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Comment by Ntrails | Hacker News Reader

I cannot remember where I read this, but it was a view that basically the mere concept of a "company" is a collective fiction that we all believe in. As are nations, laws, etc etc. The idea that "tesla" is an entity one can interact with. That this "tesla" thing has value in and of itself. They're derived from beliefs in a system. Which could evapourate and render the idea of value meaningless.

I don't think this is very useful, since "yeah but without society there are no companies, money is nothing" doesn't take us very far! But hey.

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It's useful from the standpoint it was explained in Sapiens (like how the fiction of the LLC allowed certain innovations) but not so much in this context. You can believe in the corporation or not, the important thing is that you won't go personally bankrupt if your company does, if the relevant 'belief system' aka the US judicial system evaporates, we have bigger problems to worry about than well, anything else in this conversation

I agree with GP to some extant, but yeah..the old "nothing matters in this semi infinite void we call reality" isn't usually much of a starter.

It's worth talking about in so far as trust is important for some concept to work. Like.. how you will help your friend move apartments because you know he will help you in a year or so. Or whether a successful (thus far) crypto coin could go to zero.

But the whole point of a corporation is it is a legal entity, you don't need to trust anything for it to work other than other than.. idk the fabric of our society.

But it's kind of a problem that TFA tries to "prove" otherwise without a big disclaimer about the limits of his model in the real world...

>I cannot remember where I read this, but it was a view that basically the mere concept of a "company" is a collective fiction

I think I read something similar in Sapiens.

So the other way to say this is that companies are just as real as anything else in our society.

That was kind of Harari's point when using that lens in Sapiens, it wasn't that the corporation was some flimsy imaginary concept, it was that it is a fiction in the same way democracy or religion is.

It's interesting but not very useful. What's also interesting is that almost everything (actually everything?) is concepts that we collectively believe in.

This is my takeaway from the book The Case Against Reality.

> I don't think this is very useful, since "yeah but without society there are no companies, money is nothing" doesn't take us very far!

This reminds me there always exists a path between the current society & a completely different one, and a short path to something completely different is to start from scratch.

Company is not fiction to believe in, it is an agreement a contract by the society encoded in a set of laws. The laws governing companies, unlike the market-value of assets, are very resistant to change. Market values change very often, especially values of crypto-currencies. Laws don't change often.

A company exists and has valid standing not because people believe in it but because the law says it exists. It is easy to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a company exists (or not). That has nothing to do with whether people believe it is valuable.

I suspect that a company is still a natural abstraction in the sense described by John Wentworth (wrt “information at a distance” and such).

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