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hmm this may be a good point. is it really capturing value or is it creating value? people made links because they wanted to make links anyway. the value of li

hmm this may be a good point. is it really capturing value or is it creating value? people made links because they wanted to make links anyway. the value of links to a search engine doesn't exist without a search engine, and the existing value of links isn't diminished by that (except for the specific case of a manually curated link directory, e.g. the original yahoo).

claudeganon 6y ago
The links were the prerequisite of Google/page rank, so Google only realizes that value once they had been created. They added value to that labor by making visible and accessible a dimension of this underlying network to others, but then channeled that mostly to themselves and ultimately disrupted, perhaps even destroyed (depending on your perspective), the signaling they observed. They were not alone in this, but it’s hard to compare their impact on the web to say, various forms of cataloging of works in library networks, and come away seeing them as impartially additive.
- darawk 6y ago
  This misses the point of the example, though. The point is that not all labor has the same value. Albert Einstein's thoughts produced a lot more social utility than mine do, for instance.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Even Einstein, despite his immense genius, wouldn’t fail to acknowledge the social utility and necessity of all the mathematicians and scholars whose work informed in his own. He certainly wouldn’t express the sentiment “they were doing all that math and physics before I came along anyway.” Quite ironically, he was also a strident socialist, so I doubt he’d disagree with the labor theory of value either. I used the example of the library cataloging because I think it’s an apt parallel. These systems, invented by librarians for organizing all of the world’s information, prior to the internet, have contributed immense social utility and enabled work that would be otherwise be unimaginable and impossible. But no librarian would claim that Melvil Dewey’s accomplishment was greater than that of all the works that have been catalogued. Page rank itself was derived from measures of academic citation impact scoring by Eugene Garfield, who I likewise imagine would’ve felt the same, despite being a successful entrepreneur on similar terms. The sort of hubris behind thinking that abstractions of a network are more valuable than the network and its labor itself perhaps explains why libraries remain an incredible resource and Google search gets worse and worse, year after year.
    - darawk 6y ago
      I don't really understand your point. Obviously the whole network is important. Einstein's contributions would not have been possible without the society around him to produce food and shelter, the centuries of mathematics and physics research he built upon, etc.. Nobody is claiming that these people did something completely on their own, or did not draw upon immense wealth created and produced by others. The point is that each individual person's marginal contribution to the global utility function is not equal. Einstein built upon the work of others but the edifice he created is worth more than the one I have created. He increased the social utility function more than me, so we can say that his work is more valuable than mine. This is completely orthogonal to whether or not he had help.
      - claudeganon 6y ago
        My point is that your conception of individually-oriented social utility is based on hierarchical forms of epistemology that the people you cite themselves did not embrace. It’s a projection of Capitalist logic and forms of valuation that has little to do with how these networks work or form new knowledge. Identifying individual variations in social utility is less important than furthering the network’s growth and ability to produce further improvements, in aggregate. This is why most serious researchers don’t work in industry and why the business world is dominated by inanity and con men.
        darawk 6y ago
        > My point is that your conception of individually-oriented social utility is based on hierarchical forms of epistemology that the people you cite themselves did not embrace. It’s a projection of Capitalist logic and forms of valuation that has little to do with how these networks work or form new knowledge. Are you rejecting the concept of variation in aggregate utility? I don't think that you need any sort of capitalist epistemology, or hierarchical vision of society to explain the presence of utility variance. > Identifying individual variations in social utility is less important than furthering the network’s growth and ability to produce further improvements, in aggregate. This is why most serious researchers don’t work in industry and why the business world is dominated by inanity and con men. Identifying individual variations in utility is how you maximize network growth. That is precisely the reason capitalism is structured the way that it is. Direct resources to people and entities who are growing the network, in proportion to how much they are growing it. That is the distilled essence of capitalism.

claudeganon 6y ago

The links were the prerequisite of Google/page rank, so Google only realizes that value once they had been created. They added value to that labor by making visible and accessible a dimension of this underlying network to others, but then channeled that mostly to themselves and ultimately disrupted, perhaps even destroyed (depending on your perspective), the signaling they observed. They were not alone in this, but it’s hard to compare their impact on the web to say, various forms of cataloging of works in library networks, and come away seeing them as impartially additive.

darawk 6y ago
This misses the point of the example, though. The point is that not all labor has the same value. Albert Einstein's thoughts produced a lot more social utility than mine do, for instance.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Even Einstein, despite his immense genius, wouldn’t fail to acknowledge the social utility and necessity of all the mathematicians and scholars whose work informed in his own. He certainly wouldn’t express the sentiment “they were doing all that math and physics before I came along anyway.” Quite ironically, he was also a strident socialist, so I doubt he’d disagree with the labor theory of value either. I used the example of the library cataloging because I think it’s an apt parallel. These systems, invented by librarians for organizing all of the world’s information, prior to the internet, have contributed immense social utility and enabled work that would be otherwise be unimaginable and impossible. But no librarian would claim that Melvil Dewey’s accomplishment was greater than that of all the works that have been catalogued. Page rank itself was derived from measures of academic citation impact scoring by Eugene Garfield, who I likewise imagine would’ve felt the same, despite being a successful entrepreneur on similar terms. The sort of hubris behind thinking that abstractions of a network are more valuable than the network and its labor itself perhaps explains why libraries remain an incredible resource and Google search gets worse and worse, year after year.
  - darawk 6y ago
    I don't really understand your point. Obviously the whole network is important. Einstein's contributions would not have been possible without the society around him to produce food and shelter, the centuries of mathematics and physics research he built upon, etc.. Nobody is claiming that these people did something completely on their own, or did not draw upon immense wealth created and produced by others. The point is that each individual person's marginal contribution to the global utility function is not equal. Einstein built upon the work of others but the edifice he created is worth more than the one I have created. He increased the social utility function more than me, so we can say that his work is more valuable than mine. This is completely orthogonal to whether or not he had help.
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      My point is that your conception of individually-oriented social utility is based on hierarchical forms of epistemology that the people you cite themselves did not embrace. It’s a projection of Capitalist logic and forms of valuation that has little to do with how these networks work or form new knowledge. Identifying individual variations in social utility is less important than furthering the network’s growth and ability to produce further improvements, in aggregate. This is why most serious researchers don’t work in industry and why the business world is dominated by inanity and con men.
      - darawk 6y ago
        > My point is that your conception of individually-oriented social utility is based on hierarchical forms of epistemology that the people you cite themselves did not embrace. It’s a projection of Capitalist logic and forms of valuation that has little to do with how these networks work or form new knowledge. Are you rejecting the concept of variation in aggregate utility? I don't think that you need any sort of capitalist epistemology, or hierarchical vision of society to explain the presence of utility variance. > Identifying individual variations in social utility is less important than furthering the network’s growth and ability to produce further improvements, in aggregate. This is why most serious researchers don’t work in industry and why the business world is dominated by inanity and con men. Identifying individual variations in utility is how you maximize network growth. That is precisely the reason capitalism is structured the way that it is. Direct resources to people and entities who are growing the network, in proportion to how much they are growing it. That is the distilled essence of capitalism.