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to play devil's advocate, why value (current) efficiency above all else? evolution, for example, marches forward via experimentation over efficiency: billions

to play devil's advocate, why value (current) efficiency above all else? evolution, for example, marches forward via experimentation over efficiency: billions of organisms, each slightly different, some highly viable, most marginally so, and some not viable. that's super-inefficient! it has to be easier to find the handfuls of best individuals and propagate them to the next generation, right? capitalism, too, is inherently inefficient--people deploy capital in all sorts of ways, often profitlessly. it's not like we have one restaurant chain for each type of cuisine. if the answers are so obvious, why don't we get it right the first time?

rosser 8y ago
I am absolutely not valuing efficiency above all — or even much — else. My highest "good", and the thing I want to optimize for, is human potential. So maybe Bob wouldn't have been another Einstein, but he could have invented something that made millions of people's lives marginally easier. But Bob had to pay for his (involuntary, on his part) existence, so he ended up driving a garbage truck instead. It's not a bad job, and he's not unhappy, but he knows there's something more, something missing. Do we really want to blame Bob for the structural forces that made "ensuring you can continue to eat" a question he even had to ask? I'm arguing for a model where everyone is structurally enabled and encouraged to find their own best fitness function, on the theory that such a diversity of thinking and technique will yield a vastly richer world than the "you can have Coke or Pepsi", "Google or Bing", and so on one which we seem hell-bent on ending up with. EDIT: That's not a question of efficiency. It's one of whether we're structurally dis-enabling people from living their best lives. If we are, what are we trading that for? So the fraction of a percent that already owns most of everything can own a little more of it? Because, in my categories, when you argue for Capitalism, that's ultimately what you're arguing for: not iPhones and every kind of ethnic restaurant you might want, but more wealth concentration. If that weren't the case, then wages should have risen alongside prices. Instead, this rising tide is only lifting the biggest boats, while only the waterline is rising for everyone else, and that seems awfully likely to end badly for pretty much all of us. Just look at the history of more or less every other time people have resorted to trying communism in response to exploitation. Those tend to be among the worst outcomes, don't you think? EDIT 2: Preemptively, no, I don't think the fact that (some) people can buy iPhones or big-screen TVs or whatever means things are great. The real measure of the health of an economy is better taken with things like the prevalence of precarity, than how whiz-bag a thing someone can buy, if they happen to have the right number of monkey status points available at the moment of purchase.

rosser 8y ago

I am absolutely not valuing efficiency above all — or even much — else. My highest "good", and the thing I want to optimize for, is human potential. So maybe Bob wouldn't have been another Einstein, but he could have invented something that made millions of people's lives marginally easier. But Bob had to pay for his (involuntary, on his part) existence, so he ended up driving a garbage truck instead. It's not a bad job, and he's not unhappy, but he knows there's something more, something missing. Do we really want to blame Bob for the structural forces that made "ensuring you can continue to eat" a question he even had to ask? I'm arguing for a model where everyone is structurally enabled and encouraged to find their own best fitness function, on the theory that such a diversity of thinking and technique will yield a vastly richer world than the "you can have Coke or Pepsi", "Google or Bing", and so on one which we seem hell-bent on ending up with. EDIT: That's not a question of efficiency. It's one of whether we're structurally dis-enabling people from living their best lives. If we are, what are we trading that for? So the fraction of a percent that already owns most of everything can own a little more of it? Because, in my categories, when you argue for Capitalism, that's ultimately what you're arguing for: not iPhones and every kind of ethnic restaurant you might want, but more wealth concentration. If that weren't the case, then wages should have risen alongside prices. Instead, this rising tide is only lifting the biggest boats, while only the waterline is rising for everyone else, and that seems awfully likely to end badly for pretty much all of us. Just look at the history of more or less every other time people have resorted to trying communism in response to exploitation. Those tend to be among the worst outcomes, don't you think? EDIT 2: Preemptively, no, I don't think the fact that (some) people can buy iPhones or big-screen TVs or whatever means things are great. The real measure of the health of an economy is better taken with things like the prevalence of precarity, than how whiz-bag a thing someone can buy, if they happen to have the right number of monkey status points available at the moment of purchase.