thegrimmest

Trouble is that we live in an ecosystem, and "hoard the maximum you can defend, not the minimum you comfortably need" is an optimal behaviour emergent from the system.

An ecosystem with an under-exploited niche will eventually produce the behaviour that fills the niche. It's a self-optimizing system. None of this is fundamentally escapable as long as we are living organisms competing for finite resources.

Voting and broadcasting (and here we are broadcasting) are different things.

Maybe a hot take, but I don't know that "privacy" and "anonymity" are the same thing, or that the latter is worth preserving. I would very much like to live in a world where everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity, just as they already do in the real world.

This was already the case for all of human history until the information age. If you wanted to say something, you had to physically say/print/shout it. And your reputation would be affected as a consequence. This more aligned with how humans are wired - that social actions have social consequences.

If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.

Like most people, I treat people I know with a lot more kindness than people I don't. Whether most of us like to admit it or not, our actions demonstrate that we don't generally have much regard for distant strangers, no matter how profoundly they suffer and how much we benefit from it (see the conditions in which most of our goods are made). You can call that immoral, but rational self interest is absolutely normal human behaviour, and I'm not even a psychopath.

My point is that the niches exist to be exploited by the least scrupulous among us. As long as the niches exist, they will be exploited. Resenting that is akin to resenting the biggest fish in the pond for being so damn aggressive - it's pointless. We live in a pond, and we should focus on maintaining the nonviolent and often ecosystem-benefitting nature of the exploitation (since it is hard-won and precarious), rather than resent the inescapable reality of its existence.

I'm failing to see why any of this is immoral. Taking every (legal, nonviolent) advantage is called "doing business". We live in a competitive ecosystem. Under such conditions certain behaviours are emergent from the system. It creates the niches that make this behaviour optimal. If you don't want to be taken advantage of by a sharp, don't be a square.

I don't see how living in an ecosystem, complete with selective pressure, asymmetrical compounding advantage, etc. can possibly be immoral, since it's fundamentally inescapable.

How are we torturing morality so that the median quality of life rising by just about every metric is "Evil"?

It's lonely being an outlier, especially in a trait that's so fundamental to how you see the world. Despite best effort, it's hard to relate to most people, and they especially find it hard to relate to you. The delta of lived experience is quite wide, often insurmountable.

An empire is a network of countries, controlled by and for the benefit of a central country, predominantly taken by force and maintained at least to some extent through the threat of force.

I tend to agree. The keyword is "control". The US does not control, it influences. The distinction is of kind, not of degree.

As a contrast I offer the former-Soviet empire, which was very much controlled from Moscow in a way Berlin is simply not controlled from Washington today. Much in the same way that Russia is attempting to control eastern Ukraine.

We need different words for these very different modes of existence. The Soviets controlled so they were an empire. The US influences so, despite being very large and powerful, and using that power to further its interests, it is not.

Empire is not defined by number of wars. China/Beijing exercises control over several nations that would otherwise be independent of it (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, nominally Taiwan). Modern India is not an empire (though Mughal India very much was), neither is it exactly a major world power.

I don't think you addressed my main point about ecosystems.

Following your argument, every major power could be considered imperialistic, which kind of defeats the purpose of the word. Aye the US maintains some minor, vestigial, colonies. However it does not engage in imperial conquest. South Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan are not part of US territorial holdings, and it was never a US war objectives to make them so.

We have to draw some lines somewhere, otherwise "imperialist" just means "really big". If you disagree, name a non-imperialist world power.

The US American system is more capitalistic than the german one and the scissor between poor and rich is higher.

And yet the US is a dominant player and Germany is not.

And we do not have a problem of resources today, we have so much food

I never said there needs to be scarcity for an ecosystem to emerge. These properties emerge wherever living things compete for finite resources. Imagine a pond where you introduce a few small catfish. At first, food is plentiful. Yet the fish will grow and reproduce until it is scare. It's the same with resources. Individuals/companies/societies will grow to consume the maximum they can sustain, because this is the optimum behaviour in an ecosystem.

The point is that organisms which avoid these behaviours tend to lose, in every sense of the word, to organisms that do. The behaviours are emergent from the constraints of the system.

that its sometimes just spoils and no one cares

Transportation costs are a major driver of food shortage. It's not at all free to get large quantities of food from where they are produced to where they are consumed. People are generally not willing to transport food (or do much of anything else) at a loss.

It’s not a capitalism problem, it’s an ecosystem. Wherever living things compete for finite resources and opportunities, certain properties emerge from the system. And make no mistake we live in a crowded world full of fierce competition.

Among these properties are optimum behaviours such as hoarding the maximum you can defend (rather than the minimum you comfortably need) and using your power to forestall the growth of others. These behaviours are repeated in nature from microorganisms to apes to humans.

There is no social order which can prevent us from living in an ecosystem, and from these properties and behaviours emerging.

I don't think it's fair to compare US foreign policy to actual imperialism as practiced by the Soviets, the British, etc. The US does not maintain colonies, and, as you point out, does not even attempt to exert total control. Pursuing your interests and forcing total political and cultural domination are not equivalent. The US is more than happy for Germans to be German, Japanese to be Japanese, etc, as long as US interests are prioritized. This is clearly not the case for other major powers.

Nations (and people) exist in an ecosystem, and so will always behave accordingly, and always in their own interests. There are some emergent properties of ecosystems, one of which is that optimal behaviour is to acquire the maximum you are physically capable of defending, not the minimum that you need to survive.

It's perfectly reasonable for the US, the big fish in the pond, to leverage its advantages accordingly, and to the maximum. It would be a disservice to the US people if it did not. Smaller fish should indeed be glad that the big fish is as placid and strategically (rather than ideologically) motivated as it is, given the historically experienced alternatives.

This is absurd. Why is it possible to end up with a majority black, tall, male, NBA team without pre-selecting on basis of race, height, or sex?

I think the demonization comes from people resenting the use of authority to restrict liberty, and from conflating the resentment of authority with bigotry. In this case, let private people discriminate freely.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -H. L. Mencken

I think people should be allowed to make their own choices in terms of whom to hire/associate with, with absolutely no outside intervention. That doesn't make me a bigot.

"leftist subtexts" that treat this as a problem, and not as the single largest driver of growth in human history, to which we owe all of the material comfort we now enjoy.

Many of us don't do what we do for our expertise to be recognized or valued by others, rather that is a pleasant side effect. Many of us do what we do for intrinsic reasons related to the nature of the work, and would likely do it for free, or indeed, would pay for the opportunity. Many STEM-types are in this category, and as such, are compelled to continue to tinker as we fancy, and are glad for more tools to help us expand the breadth of our tinkering capabilities.

A dedicated engineer is always looking to automate themselves out of existence, so that they can move on to the next thing to automate. Ongoing repetitive work is less engineering and more akin to toiling on a line.

This dodges the moral argument behind "guns don't kill people", which is worth confronting directly. I think people can reasonably disagree about whether second/third/fourth/etc. order effects carry moral/legal responsibility.

In light of such disagreement, and given the lack of any higher authority among free, equal, people to arbitrate it, the only reasonable way to coexist peacefully is to avoid imposing your ideas on others. This is the foundation of a liberal society.

No, because that would indicate there should be some sort of regulatory standard for what does/does not constitute "lazy engineering". Creating this standard in turn creates regulatory/compliance overhead for every software engineering organization. This in turn slows everything right down and destroys the startup ethos. "Move fast and break things" is a thing for a reason. The whole point of the free market is to avoid this kind of burdensome regulation at all costs.

If customers want to buy "lazily-engineered" products, from where do you derive the authority to tell them they can't?

Same way everyone has earned value from the beginning of time: negotiate with others. We are all born naked and without possessions. Everything we get, from the first day of our birth, is given to us by someone else. Our very first negotiations are simple, we are in turns endearing and annoying. As we grow older they become more complex. All I’m saying is that these interactions should be maximally voluntary and nonviolent.

I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that my right to choose which children I help is more legitimate than your right to dictate to me. That the voluntary nature of our cooperation is more important than equality of resource distribution.

Slavery was (is) also an agreed upon social contract, enforced by various means. What makes it wrong? You clearly have morally prescriptive beliefs. Why are you so sure that your moral prescriptions are the right ones? And that being in the majority gives you the right to impose your beliefs on others?

What if you are in the minority? Do you just accept the hypercapitalist dictates of the majority? Why not?

Law is more than convention. What distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate law?

The only way for people who disagree axiomatically to get along is to impose on each other minimally.

This is garbage hypercapitalist/libertarian ideology.

Go on then, how do you decide what people deserve? How do you negotiate with others who disagree with you?

examples above like public libraries

I agree! The nice part about all these mechanisms is that they’re voluntary.

If you’re suggesting that The Engineer’s actions should be constrained entirely by his own conscience and social pressure, then we agree. No laws or compulsion required.

For something to be deserved, it must be earned. What do these people do to distinguish themselves from The Engineer’s pets? If they are wholly dependant on him for their subsistence, what distinguishes him from their god?

To derive an alternate system you need alternate axioms. The axioms of our liberal society are moral equality and peaceful coexistence. Among such equals, no one person, group, or majority has the right to dictate to another. What axioms do you propose that would constrain The Engineer? How would you prevent enslaving him?

Who ever said you have the right to a decent a secure life? People don’t universally agree about this. Some of us posit that we will never escape a state of competition for fundamentally scarce resources. And that the organizing principle of a free society should be peaceful coexistence, not mandatory cooperation.

You figure out your own economic security, I’ll manage mine.

Advocating for regulators to step in is already a value judgement. Why is "high profitability" a cause for regulatory scrutiny? The optimal behaviour in any ecosystem (corporate or natural) is to defend as much territory as is within your power, not to keep only to what covers your "needs". Why have you deemed this behaviour, which is emergent anywhere competition between organisms exists, as in need of regulation?

Apple is succeeding largely on merit, within the bounds of civilized, peaceful competition. Shouldn't we all just be grateful for the contributions they have made to our civilization?

What if military intervention was an explicit part of the investment agreement in the first place? I’m not saying it was, but would it affect your judgement?

You didn’t answer the question. What does the word “legitimate” mean to you?

So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared

Agree! let's get rid of these :)

Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant

Agree! States have always pursued censorship to maintain power. That doesn't contradict the point that social media companies themselves are not state actors, and are not the problem.

States ... pick winners and losers

I'm not sure I'm 100% on board here. States may thumb the scales, but the fact of the existence of FAANG/MANGO seems much more like a market phenomenon than an interventionist project.

social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time

There is almost no clearer display of corporate self-preservation than social media vendors kowtowing to the president.

Much of what you're outlining is standard run of the mill corruption. The US Government (and others) is acting in contradiction to its stated principles. This is not a new phenomenon, and seems in the category of core human governance challenges.

States have a monopoly on violence

This could be amended to "States have a monopoly legitimate on violence". Your comment seems to deny the existence of "legitimacy" as a concept. How do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use of force?

They are closer to states than they are to algorithms

This seems like nonsense. All the tech industry does is convince people. It doesn't force anyone to do anything. States have a monopoly on violence. No one holds a gun to anyone's head forcing them to consume <insert content you disagree with>. In a country of equals, everyone's opinion, including <position you disagree with>, should hold equal sway, and be resolved via democratic due process.

Just because many people hold <position you disagree with> and vote for <politician you find repugnant> doesn't give you any sort of reasonable justification to limit the freedom of others to advocate (including on social media) for it.