4 ms·

> "doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people" Determining this, even with the information available today, seems like folly; like a never ending

> "doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people" Determining this, even with the information available today, seems like folly; like a never ending circle of statistical manipulations and justifications to support preconceived notions. Action on just about any social issue of note can be argued one way or another to be satisfying this guideline.

api 7y ago
I recall a rather amazing paper a while back arguing that markets cannot be perfectly efficient unless P=NP. There are too many brutal NP-hard optimizations involved. I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning. If these things were possible we would live in a utopia.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning. It would be worse for central planning, because in addition to the problem you mention, central planning has the problem of getting the necessary information to the central planner, which in the general case is impossible: the information goes up as the exponential of the population size, but the bandwidth of information channels to the central planner only goes up linearly with the population size.
  - indrax 7y ago
    Markets are no better on any of these issues.
    - ric2b 7y ago
      They are at least in the sense that instead of a small group of individuals attempting to process all the information (impossible), you have a large number of individuals processing subsets of the information (possible, but can have it's own issues like missing the forest for the threes).
peterwwillis 7y ago
It's true that you could use twisted logic to change the outcome of what the greatest good is, but they don't stand up to reasoning. Anyone can say anything to defend their position. Many have just said "It's God's will". Does that mean you can't actually know what the greatest good is? We can probably get very close to knowing it, and the little details shouldn't matter. But most of our "social issues" are squabbles over these details, and the good never gets done, or becomes reduced.

api 7y ago

I recall a rather amazing paper a while back arguing that markets cannot be perfectly efficient unless P=NP. There are too many brutal NP-hard optimizations involved. I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning. If these things were possible we would live in a utopia.

pdonis 7y ago
> I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning. It would be worse for central planning, because in addition to the problem you mention, central planning has the problem of getting the necessary information to the central planner, which in the general case is impossible: the information goes up as the exponential of the population size, but the bandwidth of information channels to the central planner only goes up linearly with the population size.
- indrax 7y ago
  Markets are no better on any of these issues.
  - ric2b 7y ago
    They are at least in the sense that instead of a small group of individuals attempting to process all the information (impossible), you have a large number of individuals processing subsets of the information (possible, but can have it's own issues like missing the forest for the threes).

peterwwillis 7y ago

It's true that you could use twisted logic to change the outcome of what the greatest good is, but they don't stand up to reasoning. Anyone can say anything to defend their position. Many have just said "It's God's will". Does that mean you can't actually know what the greatest good is? We can probably get very close to knowing it, and the little details shouldn't matter. But most of our "social issues" are squabbles over these details, and the good never gets done, or becomes reduced.