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Comment by suddenlybananas | Hacker News Reader

The market is a group of people.

And you are a collection of cells, but individual cells (mostly) don’t have the ability to dictate your actions

Yeah, but Jeff Bezos does actually have control over Amazon and can make decisions.

Sort of, kind of. Most decisions you'd see him make would quickly cause his control over Amazon to disappear, without actually improving anything for Amazon workers.

That's one part of the bad mental model of organizations and markets (and thus societies) people have. The people at the top may be richer and more powerful, but they're not actually free to do whatever. They have a role to play in the system they ostensibly "control", but when they deviate too far from what the system expects them to do, they get ejected.

Never mistake the finger pointing at the Moon for the Moon itself. Also, never mistake the person barking orders for the source from which those orders originate.

Yeah, these decisions just appear out of the aether, there absolutely not the result of capitalists acting in their self-interest. It's nice to claim, oh poor little me couldn't possibly have done anything else, I guess I just have to benefit from all this money my decisions give me.

I think you’re agreeing in a way - they are making the decisions that maximise their profits in the existing system (capitalism) and the system is such that it will produce people like this. They can nudge it in their preferred direction but if they were in, say, a frontier economy they’d likely make different decisions.

That. And the aspect I'm trying to emphasize is, those profit-maximizing people are technically free to choose to not profit-maximize, but then the system will happily punish them for it. They can nudge the system, but the system can nudge them back, all the way to ejecting them from whatever role they played in that system so far. And yes, the system is just made of other people.

That's the nature of self-reinforcing feedback loops.

There is nothing like "the" system though. When a government launch some genocide, sure it's an expression of the system in a sense, but it didn't need to respect a majority of actor opinions, and it doesn't mean that "the behavior of the system" is a mere and direct outcome of all the social values at stake which would presumably have great safeguard against any significant deviation.

Virus can kill their hosts, and a bunch of individuals can have significant harmful impact on societies.

A virus that kills their hosts itself dies out quickly. Viruses that thrive, and that we actually have most problems with, are ones that spread before manifesting symptoms.

Much like viruses, systems are subject to selection pressures over time. Systems that are too damaging to society makes society develop memetic, cultural and legal immunity against them. Systems that let individual members easily kill them are fragile and don't survive either.

Systems that thrive are ones that are mild enough to not cause too much external resistance, and are resilient enough to not allow individuals to accidentally or intentionally break them from within.

Jeff Bezos is a product of the system, not a driver of it. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, etc, are outputs, not inputs.

Their decisions are absolutely constrained by the system's values. They have zero agency in this, and are literally unable to imagine anything different.

It is a fascinating take. One way to measure agency is whether Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel have the power to destroy their creations. With exception of Bezos ( and only because he no longer has full control of his company ), the rest could easily topple their creations suggesting that system values you refer to are wide enough to allow for actions greater than 'zero agency'.

That's actually a quite good high-level measure. However, I'd question your measurement: I doubt that Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel would actually be able to destroy their creations. SpaceX, Tesla, X, Meta, Palantir - they're all large organizations with many stakeholders, and their founders/chairman do not have absolute control over them. The result of any of those individuals attempting to destroy their creations is not guaranteed - on the contrary, I'd expect other stakeholders to quickly intervene to block or pivot any such moves; the organization would survive, and such move would only make the market lose confidence in the one making it.

There's no total ownership in structures as large as this - neither in companies nor in countries. There are other stakeholders, and then the organization has a mind of its own, and they all react to actions of whoever is nominally "running it".

Musk is clearly doing his best to destroy Tesla.

Even if Tesla is destroyed by Musk, EVs and self-driving cars are here to stay. If not in USA than in rest of the world.

I don't know about the others, but Zuckerberg can absolutely destroy Meta. He owns a special class of shares that have 10x voting power vs. normal shares, so he personally controls about 60% of the votes. If there was any way of Zuckerberg getting ousted by investors, there's no way they would have let the company lose so much money for so long trying to make VR a thing.

Even then he has a fiduciary duty - provided he acts in bad faith (and it is egregious enough); I think it would still be possible to oust him due to that.

You can also measure agency as the power to destroy other things.

They may destroy their creations but that would be a minor blip in overall system that will keep moving. Destruction of Facebook, Amazon, SpaceX won't destroy social media, eCommerce or reusable rockets. Previously destruction of giants like IBM/Apple(1st round)/Cray/Sun had no impact on PC, GUI, Supercomputers, Servers or any other fields they were pioneer in. Even if OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic all disappear immediately the void will be replaced by something else.

Not to mention, organizations don't just blip out of existence. A dying giant leaves behind assets, IP, and people with know-how and experience - all ready to be picked up and stitched back together, to continue doing the same thing under new ownership.

What are you talking about? Of course they have agency. They're using that agency to funnel as much money as possible into their pockets, and away from other people, it's not that they can't imagine anything different, it's that when they do what they see is a world in which they're not as well off.

That's a very naive take - but also a popular one, because it gives people license to hate those who seem to be better off.

The truth is, no one just acquires power on their own - people with power have it because other people let them, and they can wield this power only as long, and only in ways, as others allow it. Gaining power doesn't make one more free to exercise it - on the contrary, the more power you have, the more constrained you are by interests of those who provide you that power.

The CEO might have more control of Amazon than Jeff.

Indeed. Here, a very large one. Now, focus on the dynamics of that group to see my point.

Or much more elaborately, but also exhaustively and to the point: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

I'm not going to read that hack, but in either case, the metaphysical monster of the market you're proposing is not what is propping up LLMs. It's the decisions of actors at major tech companies and VCs. These are people, not magical entities. And even still, LLMs aren't profitable.

> I'm not going to read that hack, but in either case, the metaphysical monster of the market you're proposing is not what is propping up LLMs. It's the decisions of actors at major tech companies and VCs. These are people, not magical entities.

Your loss. The article is actually talking about the thing you're saying. And so am I. These are all people, not magical entities, and that is exactly why the near-term future of "AI being the new electricity" is inevitable (short of a total collapse of civilization).

The article spells out the causal mechanism 20 different ways, so I still recommend reading it if the dynamics are not blindingly apparent to you yet.

It can simultaneously be true that people in these positions have less agency than most other people assume, and more than they themselves might think.

Another reply mentions that Bezos can't imagine anything different. If that is so (I am not unwilling to believe a certain lack of imagination tends to exist or emerge in extremely ambitious/successful people) then it's a personal failing, not an inevitable condition of his station, regardless of how much or little agency the enormous machine he sits on top of permits him to wield personally. He certainly doesn't have zero as the commenter claims.

FWIW I have read Scott's article and have tried to convince people of the agency of moloch on this site before. But the fact that impersonal systems have agency doesn't mean you suddenly turn into a human iron filing and lose all your self-direction. It might be convenient for some people to claim this is why they can do no different, and then you need to ask who benefits.

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