[nod]

(porting my comment over from my dupe)

Corporations are optimization processes. Advertising is an optimization process. Social networks are. Smartphone addiction. Political polarization. Television, mobile games, and most forms of entertainment. This prevalence, and the fact that it's not EVIL doing it but just amoral goal-directed processes, seems to me to be the key to recognizing, fighting back, and fixing society.

We have to figure out some way to fight for our human values, against these optimization processes. I don't think Stross has (or claims to have) a strong answer there... any ideas?

[leggomylibro]

I have an idea, just no concrete ways to act on it. I think that we need to make a system of incentives where the values which we care about are the ones being optimized for.

So, right now we use abstract metrics like GDP or stock indices as a metric for 'success'. So countries optimize for GDP and companies optimize for making money and delivering monetary value to their shareholders.

Maybe we could collectively view those dollar figures as value-neutral and use metrics like international education scores, life expectancy, access to quality nutrition and medical care, incarceration/recidivism rates, etc. to indicate 'success'.

But again, no concrete ways to act on that. What, should we start telling people that money is useless and doesn't matter? I don't think they'll believe us while so many don't have access to apirational opportunities, or even basic necessities. But don't we have the means to provide those things?

[SapphireSun]

Just FYI, you're describing socialism and there is a large body of theory that you can read about that discusses these ideas. It even takes into account the mistakes of the mid-20th century.

Here's a really nice introduction.

https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/capitalism-soc...

[guscost]

There's risk that any of those metrics could be compromised by Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Obvious counterpoint: Money is also a metric susceptible to Goodhart's law. Is it better or worse if the metric is useless except as a target?

[WorldMaker]

Another counterpart is that not everything can be made a metric no matter how hard you try. The advertising world has duped us into believing that we can make metrics out of exceedingly subjective things like "satisfaction" and "happiness", but just because you ask a dozen people to pick a random number between 0 and 5 on any subject you think you can come up with doesn't mean that a 3.76 average means anything at all in the real world.

[lsc]

It is possible that what we are seeing is just what you suggest, that people are fighting back and trying to fix (as they see it) society. Perhaps this is what participatory democracy looks like when the publishing tools are all very accessible; this is just what it looks like when you make the presses cheap enough.

It's possible that passion is now the main resource needed to get your political message out, and radicals tend to be more passionate than the rest of us.

Of course, to moderates, this looks terrible. I consider myself a moderate (or at least I did before the last election; the overton window, it would seem, has moved) and so I personally think this looks terrible, and it's not the most likely possibility, in my opinion. But you could construct a self-consistent narrative in which this was simply democracy in action; it matches much of the available evidence.

The big hole in this explanation is the evidence of foreign powers buying advertising to prop up our radicals. My understanding is that the investigation in that direction is still ongoing... but even then, the idea that a (much poorer) nation could buy our election would be in line with what I suggested about the presses (or at least the opinion-shaping part of the presses) being much cheaper than expected.

[harshreality]

Bret Weinstein's take on it (on Joe Rogan's podcast): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzAgSp_O03I#t=1h05m40s (I recommend starting 5-10 minutes earlier, but the linked starting time is where he really gets to the heart of the matter.)

The gist of it is that he believes markets are good at solving a particular problem, given material constraints and demand, but that markets are awful at determining what problems to solve. There are relatively weak and few incentives and punishments for corporations (other than for things that are outright illegal), so the market is approximately solving whatever problems have the lowest barriers to entry. And a website you can start in your dorm room that ends up scaling and monetizing eyeballs and addicting people is a perfect example. "How do I make a lot of money with one computer and a day or a week or a month's worth of code?" Most of the answers to that question are unhelpful to society, but as long as they're profitable and legal, people will pursue them.

He offers some speculative thoughts on solutions but to me they seem relatively unlikely to solve most of our problems, even if they can solve some of them. For instance, I think (or rather, hope) the combination of fitness+nutrition+healthcare+medical tracking can be fixed if dealt with as a single system. And by fixed, I mean encouraging fitness and providing only nutritious food in the community and thereby lowering everyone's overall food+fitness+healthcare costs, even if food and fitness costs go up. But I don't see how it works as a free market opt-in cluster of services. If you set up something like that, and it is overall cheaper than the status quo, how do you keep poor people and homeless people from signing up immediately and bankrupting your new system? They have a lot more incentive to switch to that new system than rich people (who would probably be subsidizing it to some extent which is a tough sell even if they end up happier and healthier).

[closeparen]

The problems that really need solving are of a political nature. Who gets the rewards and who bears the risks, what are the public spending priorities, what are the rules on employers, multinationals, real estate developers, etc. Does a miraculous breakthrough in high-end medical research even matter when no one can afford basic healthcare?

The only people who can get up in the morning every day and work on these problems are lobbyists. Usually, they're working in the wrong direction. Regardless, does anyone really think we could have a lobbying-based economy?

The free market is working on frivolous problems because that's what's left to do when you don't have the force of a state behind you.

[cgmg]

> The free market is working on frivolous problems because that's what's left to do when you don't have the force of a state behind you.

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

[closeparen]

Startups are not working on the big problems in education, healthcare, housing/homelessness, income inequality, etc. because those are not problems you can solve by bringing innovative products and services to market, they're problems you solve with different public policy.

The space of problems that could hypothetically be addressed by a free-market actor is pretty well tended already; it isn't crazy that we see free-market actors working on things that look unimportant.

[qznc]

It is the job of governments to balance economy and social issues. Germany calls its approach Social Market Economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy

The challenge is to find an international solution.