>Also the funny thing: the very ethics of capitalism was always "if I mind my own business and/or maybe even benefit for myself at others' expense, things will turn out Good for everyone". Greedy optimization ("greedy" in the CS sense of the word). Now that it turned the world into such a mess, what's the answer? More individualism, more minding your own business, more greedy optimizing? Seriously, how do people arrive at this conclusion?
People arrive at this conclusion because people have seen that despite its many flaws, it's still considerably better than the alternatives. All one needs to do is a comparative study involving countries that adopted "capitalism" and other alternatives. It's a no-brainer.
>The idea that local optimization is better than global baffles me completely. Where do people get it from?
maybe because it's practically impossible to have the information needed to optimize at global level at any point in time (primarily because information becomes redundant faster than it travels to the global hierarchy and gets processed there), and because competency and impartiality to do global optimization is near impossible.
Theoretically, a competent global optimization would be better than localized optimizations (just as in greedy algorithms vs globally optimized ones), but practically the closes such entity would be UN - and we have thread running right now about its uselessness.
> People arrive at this conclusion because people have seen that despite its many flaws, it's still considerably better than the alternatives. All one needs to do is a comparative study involving countries that adopted "capitalism" and other alternatives. It's a no-brainer.
I'm not saying capitalism is a problem compared to other economical regime alternatives. I'm saying that we're pretty clear that a lot of our problems - both local and global - come from too much greedy capitalism, and it's sort of obvious the answer to them isn't more greedy capitalism.
> Theoretically, a competent global optimization would be better than localized optimizations (just as in greedy algorithms vs globally optimized ones), but practically the closes such entity would be UN - and we have thread running right now about its uselessness.
True, though again I'm not thinking about black/white distinction and "global" as in "entire world". More like a spectrum (more scope better than less scope; "global" over "local" may just mean not fucking over your neighbours or fellow citizens of your town), and more like a mindset.
People arrive at this conclusion because people have seen that despite its many flaws, it's still considerably better than the alternatives. All one needs to do is a comparative study involving countries that adopted "capitalism" and other alternatives. It's a no-brainer.
>The idea that local optimization is better than global baffles me completely. Where do people get it from?
maybe because it's practically impossible to have the information needed to optimize at global level at any point in time (primarily because information becomes redundant faster than it travels to the global hierarchy and gets processed there), and because competency and impartiality to do global optimization is near impossible.
Theoretically, a competent global optimization would be better than localized optimizations (just as in greedy algorithms vs globally optimized ones), but practically the closes such entity would be UN - and we have thread running right now about its uselessness.