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My issue is not with capitalism but with assuming the present rules of asset ownership are optimal! If we could make housing free - conjure it out of thin air -

My issue is not with capitalism but with assuming the present rules of asset ownership are optimal! If we could make housing free - conjure it out of thin air - it would be really bad for landlords. They rely on that income to make a living! We should still obviously do it. More of a thing that people want is usually good.

Nevermark 3y ago
What exactly would we want to incentivize landlords for if land was free? ??? They are not creating anything unique or otherwise. It’s not remotely comparable.
yffi_bit 3y ago
Conjuring things out of thin air also tends to have side-effects, and it's better not to stop at the first-order effect of an action before going ahead and "just doing it". Concretely with content generation: if the disregard for copyright leads to a world where people no longer make the effort to produce and think about new things, the only things that you will consume will be produced by AI. Reminds me of The Matrix :-)
- AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  Conjuring things out of thin air does not have side effects because it is not possible. The whole point of the phrase was to describe a hypothetical situation with no side effects to avoid sideways arguments about "but actually here's some bad things that would happen if you did that unrelated to the central argument".
  - yffi_bit 3y ago
    I actually agree completely with that; my initial reply doesn't quite put the focus where it needs to be. So let me try again: in my view, you shouldn't think of policies or laws impacting real people by ever placing yourself outside of the reality in an ideal case, because the hard bit is not conjuring ideals but finding a way of making them happen. It's always a lot messier where the rubber meets the road. People have already died and suffered because ideals (specifically around asset ownership) that weren't quite thought through, but caught on. Take communism as an example. Part of my point is that such "implementation details" are not as unrelated to the central argument as they seem. This is very different from the software world where it might be ok to assume that in 2 years we'll have the computations be 10x as fast and work out a solution backwards from there.

Nevermark 3y ago

What exactly would we want to incentivize landlords for if land was free? ??? They are not creating anything unique or otherwise. It’s not remotely comparable.

yffi_bit 3y ago

Conjuring things out of thin air also tends to have side-effects, and it's better not to stop at the first-order effect of an action before going ahead and "just doing it". Concretely with content generation: if the disregard for copyright leads to a world where people no longer make the effort to produce and think about new things, the only things that you will consume will be produced by AI. Reminds me of The Matrix :-)

AbrahamParangi 3y ago
Conjuring things out of thin air does not have side effects because it is not possible. The whole point of the phrase was to describe a hypothetical situation with no side effects to avoid sideways arguments about "but actually here's some bad things that would happen if you did that unrelated to the central argument".
- yffi_bit 3y ago
  I actually agree completely with that; my initial reply doesn't quite put the focus where it needs to be. So let me try again: in my view, you shouldn't think of policies or laws impacting real people by ever placing yourself outside of the reality in an ideal case, because the hard bit is not conjuring ideals but finding a way of making them happen. It's always a lot messier where the rubber meets the road. People have already died and suffered because ideals (specifically around asset ownership) that weren't quite thought through, but caught on. Take communism as an example. Part of my point is that such "implementation details" are not as unrelated to the central argument as they seem. This is very different from the software world where it might be ok to assume that in 2 years we'll have the computations be 10x as fast and work out a solution backwards from there.