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Lol, classic Soviet Union story. I have been thinking about this. In general people tend to work on greed and fear. Could we build a system that is based on

Lol, classic Soviet Union story. I have been thinking about this. In general people tend to work on greed and fear. Could we build a system that is based on peoples goodwill or it would be doomed? I still blame the shit government Quote: "The cadres determine everything."

tim333 11y ago
>In general people tend to work on greed and fear. People are pretty flexible depending on their environment. Paulgraham.com/good.html is not totally naive but depends on an environment where evil doesn't prosper too much.
pen2l 11y ago
> In general people tend to work on greed and fear. Could we build a system that is based on peoples goodwill or it would be doomed? Some people work on greed and fear, while some others do work on wanting to improve the world. In my experiences and observations, the ones who work because they want to improve things were the ones who grew up in stable and loving households and were taught to be nice.
- nickff 11y ago
  There has actually been a great deal of work trying to find the best predictors of generosity and trust; people who have grown up in free markets have more of both than do those who grew up in more socialist countries. Interestingly, the first people to make this finding were socialists who thought the games (such as 'the dictator game' and 'the ultimatum game') would show how socialism improved fellow-feeling, kindness, and understanding.
  - selestify 11y ago
    That's very interesting, any suggested reading? Were the socialist researchers able to publish their results in their own countries?
- eveningcoffee 11y ago
  I tend to believe that many (likely most) of the people related to the parents anecdote where indeed ones who grew up in stable and loving households and were taught to be nice as the Soviet social system was relatively stable.
  - prodmerc 11y ago
    As long as you worked within said system. Try anything outside it and you'll quickly find yourself in big trouble. I guess it's the same everywhere, but at least a capitalist system gives you more leeway to do what you want, just enough to make it possible to grow big enough that the main system sees you as an equal (or at least a necessity) instead of a mortal enemy that needs to be shut down...
geofft 11y ago
If you convert "greed and fear" to "rational self-interest, tempered for risk", there's a field of study called mechanism design that looks at how to set up systems and incentives so that everyone's rational self-interest yields a desirable overall result. I suspect one of the biggest problems with adapting an algorithmic result to the real world is that the resulting system has to be self-sustaining and resilient: you have to provide enough incentive not to change the incentives. Leaving aside its internal merits or lack thereof, it certainly did the Soviet Union no favors to be opposed by a roughly equally-powerful nation that was constantly threatening military action if they didn't change their mechanism. The mechanism itself has to solve that, or it will require benevolent people to keep it in place who have zero incentive to remain benevolent. (See also, the Soviet Union.) In most other cases you don't have this problem because people actually are benevolent enough. If you're designing a congestion-control protocol like TCP, you just have to make it incentivize nodes to behave; you don't also need TCP to incentivize sysadmins to keep running TCP instead of replacing it with something else.
- derefr 11y ago
  > I suspect one of the biggest problems with adapting an algorithmic result to the real world is that the resulting system has to be self-sustaining and resilient: you have to provide enough incentive not to change the incentives. An analogous situation within a different optimizing system: it's pretty easy to create a GMO tweak to improve crop yields for the indivdiual seeds you created. It's a much harder problem to create a tweak that's actually advantageous to the plant, such that will be kept in the next generation and spread to fixation.
prodmerc 11y ago
People work for all kinds of reasons. The more you can accommodate, the better. Open source software still fascinates me, and it's interesting to see how people just build stuff just to have others use it for free. This would not be possible at all in a "communist" country - you either work for the state or you don't. Anything you do is either benefiting the state or it doesn't exist. Citizens don't even get to know about the stuff. Absolutes are bad either way, but people need at least a bit of freedom to get informed about the latest developments and work on their ideas without someone watching over their shoulder and dictating their every move...
winter_blue 11y ago
> In general people tend to work on greed and fear. I don't think that's an accurate depiction of humans. People work either: (1) they want money, and/or (2) they want something to do during their waking hours. Even if I had enough money that I never had to work the rest of my life, I still would definitely work, because I enjoy work, and want to do something meaningful (from my perspective) with my life. I would most likely be a pro bono computer science researcher, and might maybe join a PhD program -- if I get to pick what I research on, which might be possible since I don't need grant money, and would cost the school zilch. But basically, my point is that what motivates me (and most people) to work is either: (1) the love of work, or (2) the need for money. Absolutely not greed and fear, as you say. Now with regard to communist societies, I think the biggest problem is the utter lack of freedom. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a strong feeling that the epic failure of communist economies like the Soviet Union or pre-1990 India could be directly attributable to heavy regulation of businesses. They made it hard to start and run a business. Now I'm sure over 90% people will never start register a company in their lives (maybe that percentage is reducing now), but making it hard for 10% that do start & run businesses could be the direct cause for the failure of these large economies. For example, India, until 1990 followed Soviet Union-inspired policies, and one of the biggest consequences of this was insane red tape know as "License Raj"[1] wherein you couldn't start a business without approval from a dozen corrupt government agencies, and even if you did succeed in starting one, you were subject to an overwhelming number of regulations that made it insanely hard for you to run your business. Why do I think making it hard for 10% to run business is the cause of their economic failure? Because it prevented any sort of free market capitalistic competition. Everything was run by a bunch of non-business-minded bureaucrats who predictably did a bad job at it. Restricting private businesses and especially competition prevented an increase in production efficiency, and made the economy as a whole less efficient. A lot of these factors and other factors rolled in to one, led to the hour long lines for milk and butter. More fundamentally, regulations erodes away your freedom. If you want to do something -- and starting a business or selling something is doing something -- if the government steps in and says "no you can't do that without my approval" that is an insane Mafia-protection-racket-esque interference in your personal freedom. You're just trying to make something and sell it! Nothing wrong with that! People have been doing this for millennia! Why do I need to listen to you, follow your little rules, or pay you a fee, to exercise my personal freedom? Regulations take away freedom. And enough of it destroys economies. End of story. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj

tim333 11y ago

>In general people tend to work on greed and fear. People are pretty flexible depending on their environment. Paulgraham.com/good.html is not totally naive but depends on an environment where evil doesn't prosper too much.

pen2l 11y ago

> In general people tend to work on greed and fear. Could we build a system that is based on peoples goodwill or it would be doomed? Some people work on greed and fear, while some others do work on wanting to improve the world. In my experiences and observations, the ones who work because they want to improve things were the ones who grew up in stable and loving households and were taught to be nice.

nickff 11y ago
There has actually been a great deal of work trying to find the best predictors of generosity and trust; people who have grown up in free markets have more of both than do those who grew up in more socialist countries. Interestingly, the first people to make this finding were socialists who thought the games (such as 'the dictator game' and 'the ultimatum game') would show how socialism improved fellow-feeling, kindness, and understanding.
- selestify 11y ago
  That's very interesting, any suggested reading? Were the socialist researchers able to publish their results in their own countries?
eveningcoffee 11y ago
I tend to believe that many (likely most) of the people related to the parents anecdote where indeed ones who grew up in stable and loving households and were taught to be nice as the Soviet social system was relatively stable.
- prodmerc 11y ago
  As long as you worked within said system. Try anything outside it and you'll quickly find yourself in big trouble. I guess it's the same everywhere, but at least a capitalist system gives you more leeway to do what you want, just enough to make it possible to grow big enough that the main system sees you as an equal (or at least a necessity) instead of a mortal enemy that needs to be shut down...

geofft 11y ago

If you convert "greed and fear" to "rational self-interest, tempered for risk", there's a field of study called mechanism design that looks at how to set up systems and incentives so that everyone's rational self-interest yields a desirable overall result. I suspect one of the biggest problems with adapting an algorithmic result to the real world is that the resulting system has to be self-sustaining and resilient: you have to provide enough incentive not to change the incentives. Leaving aside its internal merits or lack thereof, it certainly did the Soviet Union no favors to be opposed by a roughly equally-powerful nation that was constantly threatening military action if they didn't change their mechanism. The mechanism itself has to solve that, or it will require benevolent people to keep it in place who have zero incentive to remain benevolent. (See also, the Soviet Union.) In most other cases you don't have this problem because people actually are benevolent enough. If you're designing a congestion-control protocol like TCP, you just have to make it incentivize nodes to behave; you don't also need TCP to incentivize sysadmins to keep running TCP instead of replacing it with something else.

derefr 11y ago
> I suspect one of the biggest problems with adapting an algorithmic result to the real world is that the resulting system has to be self-sustaining and resilient: you have to provide enough incentive not to change the incentives. An analogous situation within a different optimizing system: it's pretty easy to create a GMO tweak to improve crop yields for the indivdiual seeds you created. It's a much harder problem to create a tweak that's actually advantageous to the plant, such that will be kept in the next generation and spread to fixation.

prodmerc 11y ago

People work for all kinds of reasons. The more you can accommodate, the better. Open source software still fascinates me, and it's interesting to see how people just build stuff just to have others use it for free. This would not be possible at all in a "communist" country - you either work for the state or you don't. Anything you do is either benefiting the state or it doesn't exist. Citizens don't even get to know about the stuff. Absolutes are bad either way, but people need at least a bit of freedom to get informed about the latest developments and work on their ideas without someone watching over their shoulder and dictating their every move...

winter_blue 11y ago

> In general people tend to work on greed and fear. I don't think that's an accurate depiction of humans. People work either: (1) they want money, and/or (2) they want something to do during their waking hours. Even if I had enough money that I never had to work the rest of my life, I still would definitely work, because I enjoy work, and want to do something meaningful (from my perspective) with my life. I would most likely be a pro bono computer science researcher, and might maybe join a PhD program -- if I get to pick what I research on, which might be possible since I don't need grant money, and would cost the school zilch. But basically, my point is that what motivates me (and most people) to work is either: (1) the love of work, or (2) the need for money. Absolutely not greed and fear, as you say. Now with regard to communist societies, I think the biggest problem is the utter lack of freedom. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a strong feeling that the epic failure of communist economies like the Soviet Union or pre-1990 India could be directly attributable to heavy regulation of businesses. They made it hard to start and run a business. Now I'm sure over 90% people will never start register a company in their lives (maybe that percentage is reducing now), but making it hard for 10% that do start & run businesses could be the direct cause for the failure of these large economies. For example, India, until 1990 followed Soviet Union-inspired policies, and one of the biggest consequences of this was insane red tape know as "License Raj"[1] wherein you couldn't start a business without approval from a dozen corrupt government agencies, and even if you did succeed in starting one, you were subject to an overwhelming number of regulations that made it insanely hard for you to run your business. Why do I think making it hard for 10% to run business is the cause of their economic failure? Because it prevented any sort of free market capitalistic competition. Everything was run by a bunch of non-business-minded bureaucrats who predictably did a bad job at it. Restricting private businesses and especially competition prevented an increase in production efficiency, and made the economy as a whole less efficient. A lot of these factors and other factors rolled in to one, led to the hour long lines for milk and butter. More fundamentally, regulations erodes away your freedom. If you want to do something -- and starting a business or selling something is doing something -- if the government steps in and says "no you can't do that without my approval" that is an insane Mafia-protection-racket-esque interference in your personal freedom. You're just trying to make something and sell it! Nothing wrong with that! People have been doing this for millennia! Why do I need to listen to you, follow your little rules, or pay you a fee, to exercise my personal freedom? Regulations take away freedom. And enough of it destroys economies. End of story. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj