6 ms·

Sad how there's no discussion of the economy that enables stuff like this to happen. "Why were people so cruel and evil?" is a stupid question; it's not about

by cq 15y ago

Sad how there's no discussion of the economy that enables stuff like this to happen. "Why were people so cruel and evil?" is a stupid question; it's not about cruelty or being "evil". It's about money. Don't expect people to be moral in this economic system. Morality is a weakness in a capitalist society, and you'll go out of business if you bring morality into a competitive business ecosystem. This is why we need to change the rules of our economic system, if you care about morality. Moreover, sure P. S. Landis "saved the whales", but he didn't do it to save the whales, he did it to generate an enormous amount of profit for Mobile Oil, and was paid for it handsomely.

philwelch 15y ago
Can you name an economic system that doesn't have similar flaws? Economic systems only usable by hunter-gatherers don't count, unless your real argument is with civilization rather than capitalism.
- nickpinkston 15y ago
  Distributism has some interesting properties of socialism / capitalism, but would still have killed the whales probably... "The Venus Project" guys believe they can do this, but it just seems like a human enslavement program masked as human empowerment.
- dexen 15y ago
  Let me reverse that question for you: Can you name an ecosystem (as in, natural system) that doesn't have similar flaws? A predator predates on its prey as long as feasible. When prey is overhunted, some of the predator population dies out (negative feedback, if you will), or the predator adopts (behavior or genome) to use alternative food sources, or to better utilize the resource. Nothing new to see here, move along ;-) Not that I approve of predatory use of natural resources; we humans sure should know better. Just please don't make it sound unnatural.
  - Lagged2Death 15y ago
    When prey is overhunted, some of the predator population dies out (negative feedback, if you will) ... please don't make it sound unnatural. I think it's OK to characterize human interaction with the ecosystem as unnatural. Feedback loops like the one you mention work OK for cheetahs and gazelles. Too many cheetahs leads to too few gazelles leads to skinny cheetahs and eventually to fewer cheetahs, etc. But that happens because one is the food for the other; the amount of predation is directly related to the current populations of both, and the amount of predation also has an impact on the future of predation. Consider an alternate history scenario: No replacement for sperm whale oil was ever found. Sperm whales were hunted entirely to extinction to keep those big American cars rolling. When the whale oil ran out for good and all, Americans all learned to drive stick. Impact on human population of the planet: none. Impact on the rapaciousness of future generations: questionable. Feedback loops (as opposed to straight-line cause and effect) closed or otherwise in evidence at all: zero. Human interaction with the ecosystem is fundamentally different from the interactions that arise between the other actors within it. Demand for sperm whale oil had virtually nothing to do with the number of humans alive on the planet, and the amount of whale oil left in the world had no impact on the demand for cars, either. With no reciprocal connection, there are no levers for a feedback loop to even take hold of. One might even say that what separates humans from animals, in the grand scheme of things, is our ability to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is in the thrall of, or even to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is.
    - VladRussian 15y ago
      > Americans all learned to drive stick. Impact on human population of the planet: none. Impact on the rapaciousness of future generations: questionable. Feedback loops (as opposed to straight-line cause and effect) closed or otherwise in evidence at all: zero. Either less drivers on the road or more accidents ( i did drive stick back in the Russia and it is very different driving, esp. when all around you is also driving stick). It would also result in smaller cars with less powerful engines. It looks like a very powerful feedback loop for me. >Demand for sperm whale oil had virtually nothing to do with the number of humans alive on the planet Huh? who was driving automatic transmission cars? >One might even say that what separates humans from animals, in the grand scheme of things, is our ability to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is in the thrall of, or even to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is. a very Grand Statement of Dilusion. We'll see how we escape global warming.
- microarchitect 15y ago
  You ask this question as if it were a rhetorical question. Is there any reason to believe that such an economic system that also combines much of "good" properties of capitalism cannot exist? Disciplines like game theory and mechanism design have made tremendous advances over the last few decades. Surely we can put these ideas to work in designing better political and economic systems.
  - tedunangst 15y ago
    I would say, only half facetiously, that game theory has advanced to the point where we are very good at designing systems where everybody loses, but not so good at designing systems where everybody wins.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    It wasn't a rhetorical question. Or rather, it remains a valid rhetorical question until it receives a satisfactory answer. Until that point, all supposed flaws with capitalism are really flaws with all industrial civilizations observed thus far. Tangentially, no real world economic system is "designed". They evolve out of competing interests. Even if you did design a system and implement it perfectly, it would have unintended consequences. We can't perfectly implement pre-designed political and economic systems, though; every attempt seems to turn into a bloodbath.
    - microarchitect 15y ago
      Even if you did design a system and implement it perfectly, it would have unintended consequences. Sure, but what prevents you from then measuring these unintended consequences, plugging them back into your model and asking the question "how should my system change?". Is there any reason to believe we can never reach a stable fixed point? We do things sort of like this in microprocessor design for instance - where we need to deal with "unintended consequences" like parasitic capacitances and resistances that we cannot fully model until the design is complete, but we need to account for while designing the system.
      - 15y ago
dexen 15y ago
> Moreover, sure P. S. Landis "saved the whales", but he didn't do it to save the whales, he did it to generate an enormous amount of profit for Mobile Oil, and was paid for it handsomely. OP mentioned that with different intent: in conservation of nature, we can get better results quicker by focusing on improving technology & organization than by merely loudly protesting current uses of natural resources. Alas, it's better to align incentives with conservation of nature than to try to conserve it against 'em. To the wit, > Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments (...) > It was not their attention grabbing activities that stopped killing whales, but the unsung efforts of chemists finding a synthetic replacement to sperm oil. > Suddenly, the car companies did not need to lobby [for whale hunting] any more. and in comments below the article: > But demanding to stop something without suggesting such better alternatives is waste of time. I'd even say that it is immoral. I see many people believing otherwise.
- tedunangst 15y ago
  It was not their attention grabbing activities that stopped killing whales, but the unsung efforts of chemists finding a synthetic replacement to sperm oil. I don't see how a synthetic oil developed in the 1980s could be responsible for a law signed in 1973, and I'm pretty sure it was the law (regardless of where the law came from (the future??)) that directly stopped the killing. In this case, I'd say the passage of the law led to greater interest in synthetic oil. Conservation led to improving technology, not the other way around.
  - dexen 15y ago
    The original article states clearly that indeed, law regulating cars had great influence -- but it was law regarding tailpipe emissions. The influence was indirect. > Fortunately for the whales, by the 1970s engines became subject to tighter emissions regulations and engineers had to design them to run hotter (...) increased heat load destroyed the modified sperm oil in the ATF faster (...) forcing research efforts into synthetic lubricants. > (...) freshly developed synthetic analogs were performing even worse. Only in the 1980s, a chemical solution to this problem was found (...) At any rate, law prohibiting or limiting something is but a synthetic incentive. It can work, but only to a certain point; works best if there's a substitute available.

by cq 15y ago

philwelch 15y ago

Can you name an economic system that doesn't have similar flaws? Economic systems only usable by hunter-gatherers don't count, unless your real argument is with civilization rather than capitalism.

nickpinkston 15y ago
Distributism has some interesting properties of socialism / capitalism, but would still have killed the whales probably... "The Venus Project" guys believe they can do this, but it just seems like a human enslavement program masked as human empowerment.
dexen 15y ago
Let me reverse that question for you: Can you name an ecosystem (as in, natural system) that doesn't have similar flaws? A predator predates on its prey as long as feasible. When prey is overhunted, some of the predator population dies out (negative feedback, if you will), or the predator adopts (behavior or genome) to use alternative food sources, or to better utilize the resource. Nothing new to see here, move along ;-) Not that I approve of predatory use of natural resources; we humans sure should know better. Just please don't make it sound unnatural.
- Lagged2Death 15y ago
  When prey is overhunted, some of the predator population dies out (negative feedback, if you will) ... please don't make it sound unnatural. I think it's OK to characterize human interaction with the ecosystem as unnatural. Feedback loops like the one you mention work OK for cheetahs and gazelles. Too many cheetahs leads to too few gazelles leads to skinny cheetahs and eventually to fewer cheetahs, etc. But that happens because one is the food for the other; the amount of predation is directly related to the current populations of both, and the amount of predation also has an impact on the future of predation. Consider an alternate history scenario: No replacement for sperm whale oil was ever found. Sperm whales were hunted entirely to extinction to keep those big American cars rolling. When the whale oil ran out for good and all, Americans all learned to drive stick. Impact on human population of the planet: none. Impact on the rapaciousness of future generations: questionable. Feedback loops (as opposed to straight-line cause and effect) closed or otherwise in evidence at all: zero. Human interaction with the ecosystem is fundamentally different from the interactions that arise between the other actors within it. Demand for sperm whale oil had virtually nothing to do with the number of humans alive on the planet, and the amount of whale oil left in the world had no impact on the demand for cars, either. With no reciprocal connection, there are no levers for a feedback loop to even take hold of. One might even say that what separates humans from animals, in the grand scheme of things, is our ability to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is in the thrall of, or even to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is.
  - VladRussian 15y ago
    > Americans all learned to drive stick. Impact on human population of the planet: none. Impact on the rapaciousness of future generations: questionable. Feedback loops (as opposed to straight-line cause and effect) closed or otherwise in evidence at all: zero. Either less drivers on the road or more accidents ( i did drive stick back in the Russia and it is very different driving, esp. when all around you is also driving stick). It would also result in smaller cars with less powerful engines. It looks like a very powerful feedback loop for me. >Demand for sperm whale oil had virtually nothing to do with the number of humans alive on the planet Huh? who was driving automatic transmission cars? >One might even say that what separates humans from animals, in the grand scheme of things, is our ability to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is in the thrall of, or even to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is. a very Grand Statement of Dilusion. We'll see how we escape global warming.
microarchitect 15y ago
You ask this question as if it were a rhetorical question. Is there any reason to believe that such an economic system that also combines much of "good" properties of capitalism cannot exist? Disciplines like game theory and mechanism design have made tremendous advances over the last few decades. Surely we can put these ideas to work in designing better political and economic systems.
- tedunangst 15y ago
  I would say, only half facetiously, that game theory has advanced to the point where we are very good at designing systems where everybody loses, but not so good at designing systems where everybody wins.
- philwelch 15y ago
  It wasn't a rhetorical question. Or rather, it remains a valid rhetorical question until it receives a satisfactory answer. Until that point, all supposed flaws with capitalism are really flaws with all industrial civilizations observed thus far. Tangentially, no real world economic system is "designed". They evolve out of competing interests. Even if you did design a system and implement it perfectly, it would have unintended consequences. We can't perfectly implement pre-designed political and economic systems, though; every attempt seems to turn into a bloodbath.
  - microarchitect 15y ago
    Even if you did design a system and implement it perfectly, it would have unintended consequences. Sure, but what prevents you from then measuring these unintended consequences, plugging them back into your model and asking the question "how should my system change?". Is there any reason to believe we can never reach a stable fixed point? We do things sort of like this in microprocessor design for instance - where we need to deal with "unintended consequences" like parasitic capacitances and resistances that we cannot fully model until the design is complete, but we need to account for while designing the system.
    - 15y ago

dexen 15y ago

> Moreover, sure P. S. Landis "saved the whales", but he didn't do it to save the whales, he did it to generate an enormous amount of profit for Mobile Oil, and was paid for it handsomely. OP mentioned that with different intent: in conservation of nature, we can get better results quicker by focusing on improving technology & organization than by merely loudly protesting current uses of natural resources. Alas, it's better to align incentives with conservation of nature than to try to conserve it against 'em. To the wit, > Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments (...) > It was not their attention grabbing activities that stopped killing whales, but the unsung efforts of chemists finding a synthetic replacement to sperm oil. > Suddenly, the car companies did not need to lobby [for whale hunting] any more. and in comments below the article: > But demanding to stop something without suggesting such better alternatives is waste of time. I'd even say that it is immoral. I see many people believing otherwise.

tedunangst 15y ago
It was not their attention grabbing activities that stopped killing whales, but the unsung efforts of chemists finding a synthetic replacement to sperm oil. I don't see how a synthetic oil developed in the 1980s could be responsible for a law signed in 1973, and I'm pretty sure it was the law (regardless of where the law came from (the future??)) that directly stopped the killing. In this case, I'd say the passage of the law led to greater interest in synthetic oil. Conservation led to improving technology, not the other way around.
- dexen 15y ago
  The original article states clearly that indeed, law regulating cars had great influence -- but it was law regarding tailpipe emissions. The influence was indirect. > Fortunately for the whales, by the 1970s engines became subject to tighter emissions regulations and engineers had to design them to run hotter (...) increased heat load destroyed the modified sperm oil in the ATF faster (...) forcing research efforts into synthetic lubricants. > (...) freshly developed synthetic analogs were performing even worse. Only in the 1980s, a chemical solution to this problem was found (...) At any rate, law prohibiting or limiting something is but a synthetic incentive. It can work, but only to a certain point; works best if there's a substitute available.