[JonFish85]

>"Luckily humans have developed a great coordination mechanism called 'democracy' and we can use it when coordination in the market place has failed."

I find that sort of thinking pretty scary. I'm incredibly hesitant to expand the purview of the government into whether products should succeed or fail. It sounds like what you're saying is that people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves, so we should enact government regulations to think for them. This is something markets are very good at, as others have stated. Expanding the government's role in things should be an absolute last resort, to me.

If people are willing to trade their personal information for cheap, cool gadgets, then who is the government to step in to say "no, you're not allowed to do that"? By the same token, you could flip it around: could the government step in and say "you don't want this gadget that's always listening to you, but you have to have it because some group you don't agree with tells you to"?

I want to be careful not to go too slippery slope, but should the government step in and shut down Google, because they exist to serve ads? What about Facebook? It's the same thing there: people trade their personal information for perceived value in other places (Facebook: keeping in touch with people, Google as access to information). Should the government be the ones to decide who should be allowed to make decisions about their information?

It's scary because once the government gets to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool. To me, a useful way to think of government is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.

[mikeash]

Government has been doing this for a long time already. To see it in action, just try to buy some thalidomide, or book a flight with an airline that only requires 20 hours of training for their pilots, or buy a new car with no air bags. The question of whether the government should decide what people should be allowed to use or what products should succeed was answered a long time ago with “yes, it should.” The only question here is what side of the line this particular product falls on.

[rhizome]

If people are willing to trade their personal information for cheap, cool gadgets, then who is the government to step in to say "no, you're not allowed to do that"? By the same token, you could flip it around: could the government step in and say "you don't want this gadget that's always listening to you, but you have to have it because some group you don't agree with tells you to"?

Third question: should you be allowed to trade my personal information for cheap cool gadgets?

[hutzlibu]

Yes. Legally allowed, but lacking morals.

In other words, don't give your number, to people you don't trust.

[frgtpsswrdlame]

>It sounds like what you're saying is that people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves

In the prisoner's dilemma are the prisoners stupid? No, they're actually defined as rational. What makes them come to their collectively poor outcome is that they have no way to act collectively, they require coordination. Those prisoners could be smarter than you and me, they're still trapped by the rules of the system they exist in.

>If people are willing to trade their personal information for cheap, cool gadgets, then who is the government to step in to say "no, you're not allowed to do that"? By the same token, you could flip it around: could the government step in and say "you don't want this gadget that's always listening to you, but you have to have it because some group you don't agree with tells you to"?

Our own government has some problems with this but since we're being a bit high-minded here, let's ask ourselves what a democratic government ideally is. It's just a way for individuals to coordinate with each other.

Prisoner's Dilemma again. By market mechanisms, we're going to jail for two years. We may meet some strange definition of freedom but if we're both rational then we know we will never realize the option of serving lesser sentences. To me though that isn't real freedom so we can see then that a coordination mechanism isn't here to curtail freedom, it's here to grant it (it lets us both choose to remain silent.)

I believe the same things about markets/government. Why should we purposefully handicap ourselves to the individual realm stuck with Echo with ads when we can go to the collective realm to grant ourselves a better outcome.

>I want to be careful not to go too slippery slope, but should the government step in and shut down Google, because they exist to serve ads? What about Facebook?

If the people collectively decide that then yes.

>It's scary because once the government gets to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool.

Well here let me rework this:

It's scary because once the people get to decide what people should and shouldn't be allowed to use, or what products should or shouldn't succeed, it can be used as an incredibly powerful tool.

You're right that is powerful, we should have that power.

>To me, a useful way to think of government is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.

Let me rework this also:

To me, a useful way to think of markets is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.

[JonFish85]

I'm not sure how the Prisoner's Dilemma applies here? I agree that consumers should be educated and have the ability to make informed decisions; in many ways, this is what makes a market more "fair": make sure that consumers have access to information, and let them make the best decisions they can.

> I believe the same things about markets/government. Why should we purposefully handicap ourselves to the individual realm stuck with Echo with ads when we can go to the collective realm to grant ourselves a better outcome.

This is something I think we disagree on: I don't see this as a handicap at all. I also disagree that the better outcome is to grow the government's role in something like this. To me, this is a case where the so-called "invisible hand of the market" is the way to go: ensure that consumers have access to the information they need, and let consumers make the best decisions for themselves.

> If the people collectively decide that then yes.

I think we have to be very careful about how this is used; people collectively decide silly things all the time ("Pink Slime" comes to mind, for some reason), and we have to be very careful about how we encode things into law. Once the government is responsible for something, it's hard to walk back on that. Leaving things to the market leaves things in a more fluid state, in my opinion.

> To me, a useful way to think of markets is as a very sharp knife: it can be extremely useful in the right situations, but you can really hurt yourself if you're not careful.

This may be true to some degree, but it aligns pretty well with people's changing opinions and wants/needs. If we're careful about some things (e.g. monopolies, access to information, etc -- things that allow markets to work efficiently), we can avoid having to bring out the sledgehammer when it's not needed. Some of the early 20th century government involvements led to humanitarian crises (the Communist revolutions in China and Russia); that's not to say that governments necessarily lead to the worst situations, just that sometimes markets are better at things than government involvement. This is a case where I believe this to be especially true.

[frgtpsswrdlame]

>I'm not sure how the Prisoner's Dilemma applies here? I agree that consumers should be educated and have the ability to make informed decisions; in many ways, this is what makes a market more "fair": make sure that consumers have access to information, and let them make the best decisions they can.

But that's the point of the prisoner's dilemma. Individuals who are educated, can make informed decisions, have access to information about the results of their decision will always make a decision that isn't the best decision they can make. What the prisoner's dilemma reveals is that the only way to beat the game is through a coordination mechanism. Nothing else will ever help.

>This is something I think we disagree on: I don't see this as a handicap at all.

Hmm so in the prisoner's dilemma you don't see the prisoners without coordination as handicapped? To me it's obvious. Prisoners with coordination realize the best overall outcome, prisoner's without coordination are never able to realize that outcome. Seems straightforwardly handicapped to me.

>To me, this is a case where the so-called "invisible hand of the market" is the way to go: ensure that consumers have access to the information they need, and let consumers make the best decisions for themselves.

I'm providing you with examples where the invisible hand doesn't work the way we like to pretend. The hand is guided towards overall societal benefit by individually selfish actions. What I'm talking about are cases where individually selfish actions lead the invisible hand to overall societal detriment. And that in those instances we need government as a way to coordinate together so that we may reposition the invisible hand where we desire.

>Leaving things to the market leaves things in a more fluid state, in my opinion.

Fluid isn't necessarily good however. We will persist 'fluidly' with Echo with ads until we get the government to act and then we will exist 'statically' with Echo without ads. I suppose I'm fine with that static-ness.

>Some of the early 20th century government involvements led to humanitarian crises (the Communist revolutions in China and Russia);

You're being a bit funny with 'government involvement' here. Maybe there should be some corollary to Godwin's Law where the first one to compare a government program to Mao loses. Anyhow, I'm not talking about seizing the means of production, I'm talking about regulating existing markets.

>that's not to say that governments necessarily lead to the worst situations, just that sometimes markets are better at things than government involvement.

There's also plenty of instances where government involvement is better than markets. That's the case I'm making - essentially that we need government regulation as a way of reigning back the invisible hand when it goes awry aka smart homes that secretly advertise to you.

[JonFish85]

I thought Prisoner's Dilemma was more about the inability to have good information: the prisoners can't communicate with each other, and therefore have imperfect information about their decision. To me, this supports my argument: if the prisoners are free to communicate and gather information as they see fit, they can make a good decision. What it sounds like you're saying is that the government should tell the prisoners what to do. I prefer the former, because I think it keeps the responsibility still on the prisoner ("consumer" in our case).

You keep using the word "coordination", and I guess I just don't see it applying in the way I think that you mean. There are other, perhaps better, ways to coordinate than governmental intervention. You've said that boycotts don't work, but I'd say that if the market doesn't want a product, it will fail; why does a government have to enforce that? A boycott may fail because a loud minority isn't representative of the overall market; isn't that the behavior you want?

You may find the references to some communist revolutions distasteful, but I think it's an appropriate comparison in that folks see government as the solution to a problem that markets solve really well. I specifically didn't say that what you're espousing will lead to 50m deaths, but I do think it's a useful tool for showing where government can take on too big of a role with regards to things that markets are very efficient at doing themselves.

>"I suppose I'm fine with that static-ness."

Isn't Hacker News full of people that explicitly disagree with this? That static laws are a big tool for incumbent companies to build their moat, and entrepreneurs try to break those down in ways that are intended to be better for everyone. Maybe you disagree (which I respect), but in many ways, static laws look good on the surface but have real downsides in the long run.

> aka smart homes that secretly advertise to you.

I don't think that these things should be done secretly. I think companies should have to make this information available to consumers, and I think the government should enforce this to some degree (e.g. if a company is recording my phone calls to send back to their headquarters, absolutely it should be known).

[theclaw]

> I thought Prisoner's Dilemma was more about the inability to have good information: the prisoners can't communicate with each other

That sounds like the Byzantine Generals Problem. Prisoners can communicate all they like, it just doesn't really matter what they agree at the end of the day.

[frgtpsswrdlame]

>I thought Prisoner's Dilemma was more about the inability to have good information: the prisoners can't communicate with each other, and therefore have imperfect information about their decision.

Even if the prisoners are allowed to communicate, if there is no underlying coordination mechanism, some binding agreement, a punishment for breaking the agreement, etc. then the default state is still defection.

>What it sounds like you're saying is that the government should tell the prisoners what to do. I prefer the former, because I think it keeps the responsibility still on the prisoner ("consumer" in our case).

I think this is the part that most people (and maybe you) get stuck on because the basic idea is that you give up one freedom to gain another. The prisoners are stuck. Until each one tells the other "if you squeal on me, my brother will kill you on the outside." Now, where they were once trapped by the rules of the game a new rule has been added. Do the prisoners gain or lose freedom when they threaten each other? The answer is neither because they never had any to begin with. In both scenarios they are trapped into picking a specific choice by their own rationality. The difference is that pre-threat they were trapped into a suboptimal decision and now they are trapped into an optimal decision. Coordination is the only thing that mattered here and it allowed everyone to benefit.

Now if we move this analogy over to government intervention in markets, which component of the analogy is 'government'? Easy, it's the mutual threat. The government isn't some outside entity and it isn't telling the prisoners what to do, it's the agreement between the prisoners and it's the enforcement mechanism of that agreement. The government here isn't reducing freedom (or increasing it) on an individual level but on a societal level it's granting us the freedom to move to more optimal outcomes.

>You've said that boycotts don't work, but I'd say that if the market doesn't want a product, it will fail

That's just not true. The prisoners want shorter jail terms, yet they'll fail to get them. Where you and I are clashing is the difference between individuals and society.

>why does a government have to enforce that?

Because otherwise it won't happen. There has to be an enforcement mechanism to for coordination to work. Otherwise defecting will dominate.

>You may find the references to some communist revolutions distasteful, but I think it's an appropriate comparison in that folks see government as the solution to a problem that markets solve really well.

Like I said, see Mao's Law. It's absolutely distasteful and not an appropriate comparison at all.

Besides we're specifically talking about problems that markets don't solve.

>Maybe you disagree (which I respect), but in many ways, static laws look good on the surface but have real downsides in the long run.

I do, but if you look at what I said you can see that my 'static' scenario and my 'fluid' scenario are both equally static. In one we're static because we're stuck by government regulation, in the other we're static because we're stuck by market rules (we can't coordinate.)

>I don't think that these things should be done secretly. I think companies should have to make this information available to consumers, and I think the government should enforce this to some degree (e.g. if a company is recording my phone calls to send back to their headquarters, absolutely it should be known).

You know who else liked government enforcement? Hitler. This is an appropriate comparison btw.