Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

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No we do not control the rules. Quoting Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

"If I ordered a general to fly from one flower to another like a butterfly, or to write a tragic drama, or to change himself into a sea bird, and if the general did not carry out the order that he had received, which one of us would be in the wrong?" the king demanded. "The general, or myself?"

You can not just wish any rules and laws of human or physical nature. You can tell people to fly like butterflies, but when they do not, your anger at them would be misdirected. If you try to act as if there are no rules except ones you invent, you, not unlike many socialists that imagine they can ignore the laws of nature, are in for a lot of unpleasant surprises. You can blame the evil capitalists - just like Venezuelan government, having mismanaged the country for years to the point they have now shortage of toilet paper (why is it always the toilet paper? that basic thing has some very bad luck with socialists) now blames the capitalists and hidden enemies. But that won't do you any good, as it doesn't do any good for them. Until you recognize the rules of the system is not purely under your control, you won't get very far.

So the economy, as it is currently constituted, is the one, single way in which things could be arranged and if they were arranged in any other fashion the whole society would implode and we'd run out of toilet paper? Is that your contention?

Because if it isn't, then you have to admit that we can make some changes to the system. Reasonable people might disagree as to the type and extent of changes that would "work", but they would all agree that some sort of changes would improve things. In other words, there are things the general could be ordered to do that would not be absurd or impossible for a general to accomplish, like marching around in shiny shoes, or invading another country.

Quoting a French dude doesn't make your argument better, it just helps illustrate how little you thought about your words before hitting "reply".

>>> Is that your contention?

No, it's not. Repeating for those who TLDR the pervious comment: you can not just invent any rules you like. There exist rules that are there regardless of your desires. I hope you see the difference between this and "is the one, single way in which things could be arranged".

>>> we can make some changes to the system

Of course we can. We just need to understand we can not make any changes but just some and in certain ways, and those some changes have to be done right. People can fly. You just need to follow certain rules and do certain tricks. If you try to fly without following those rules, you may die or be badly hurt. So may a society if it tries to make changes without following the rules.

>>> Quoting a French dude doesn't make your argument better,

I would advise you to familiarize yourself with who the "French dude" is. That would make your life richer and your understanding of the world fuller. It would also hopefully make you understand why I quoted him.

The comment to which you responded never said we can make up any arbitrary rules we like, just that we can change the rules if they aren't to our liking...

> We, as a polity, control the rules of the system in > which all this stuff happens. If the system we've > built exhibits behaviors that we find undesirable, > then we can change the rules.

Your comment, as you have explained it, is therefore completely pointless. You were arguing with a straw man more or less.

We're not asking people to change themselves into seabirds. We're telling banks to shoulder the consequences of their own mistakes, through higher capital ratios.

The "heads I win, tails you lose" nature of highly leveraged firms increased the risk of systemic failure in the financial system. Those systemic risks are a socially-undesirable negative externality. And they're not inevitable! They're the result of lax regulation.

You're right that we don't control the laws of nature. But we do control the rules of our financial system!

Changing the rules so that people would be more responsible for their own mistakes can be done. I'm not sure though the New Yorker readership would like it - being responsible for one's own mistakes is not always pretty, and not many people would like it if it applied to them too.

>>> They're the result of lax regulation.

Here it goes again, the illusion you could control everything if only you had enough government people sitting everywhere and looking at everything. Unfortunately, it does not work this way. More regulation would not help you avoid financial calamities - first, because the guys who would regulate it would have absolutely no idea where the calamity would come from, because they are not prophets. If it would be easily preventable, then it would be easily prevented. The ones that aren't prevented - aren't easy to foresee. Second - because the only guys who understand how the things really work would be the same people who work in the depth of the industry - look up "regulatory capture". Third - the regulatory agencies would be controlled by politicians, which means whatever was not captured by the lobbies would be captured by partisan interests. If after reading this you think "I like this picture, give me more of it!" - then more regulation is the recipe for you.

>>> we do control the rules of our financial system!

Unfortunately, this financial system is not a mathematical abstraction we can define any way we like, and thus is controlled by the laws of nature. Thus you can define any rules, but the consequences of such rules may surprise you.

No we do not control the rules.

This is a bad way to start your comment because it is an absolutist, indefensible statement. It is plain wrong, in part because you are not explicit about the quantifiers that are involved. Might I suggest that in the future, you try something more along the lines of:

Yes, we can change the law, though we need to be aware of the limitations of such changes because there are some rules, underlying human nature, that we cannot change.

I believe that mostly captures what your position appears to be, and it expresses it much more succinctly and effectively, even without silly quotations of fancy authors.

> No we do not control the rules.

Quote yourself: "Changing the rules so that people would be more responsible for their own mistakes can be done." ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6845656 )

I think smsm42's point is pretty clear. Reading the first phrase and stopping is not conducive to a reasonable discussion.

I didn't stop reading there, I stopped quoting there. Big difference.

The poster they replied to said "we control the rules of the system in which all this stuff happens" -- this is true. To then respond that we can't bend every single physical law isn't a point, it's so silly I wouldn't have bothered responding to it, hadn't I noticed smsm42 contradicted themselves later in another post.

I don't think there's any contradiction. That one can change some rules to a limited degree doesn't mean we can control the rules, anymore than building a plane means we can control gravity.

smsm42's point is that one can't say "this is how the economy shall work"; that doesn't contradict the possibility of tweaking certain aspects of the current economy.

That seems like grasping at straws to me. The problem is that smsm42 started his comment with a completely indefensible absolutist statement: "No, we do not control the rules."

This is obviously wrong, because we (as society) control all the rules that are written into law.

This whole back and forth could have been avoided if smsm42 had instead written: "Yes, we can change the law, though we need to be aware of the limitations of such changes because there are some rules, underlying human nature, that we cannot change."

Much more conducive to a productive argument, don't you think? It even works without appeal to authority via silly quotes!

The problem is that smsm42 started his comment with a completely indefensible absolutist statement: "No, we do not control the rules."

This is obviously wrong, because we (as society) control all the rules that are written into law.

But the post smsm42 originally replied to didn't wrong "the rules that are written into law", but "the rules of the system in which all this stuff happens". Which (according to smsm42) includes other rules that are not written into law (those underlying human nature) and which we don't control.

This whole back and forth could have been avoided if smsm42 had instead written: "Yes, we can change the law, though we need to be aware of the limitations of such changes because there are some rules, underlying human nature, that we cannot change."

It's a matter of perspective, but I don't think that paints the image that smsm42 wanted to portray. I feel it's more "Hayek-ian" than that.

I don't think that paints the image that smsm42 wanted to portray.

That's quite possible because of course I was going from my impression and trying to read between the lines.

That was kind of the point of my comment: If he'd been less absolutist in his statement, and acknowledged that surrealize had a point, we might have found out what his position actually was. Now we may never know...

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