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0 pointsSoftwareMaven14y ago0 comments

buyers and sellers in a market needn't individually be aiming to arrive at an efficient or socially beneficial outcome

Yet we have regulation because we've seen sellers destroy the environment and take advantage of buyers left and right.

voters in a democracy needn't individually be aiming to elect someone who will be best for everyone's interests

Yet Congress has shone time and again that corruption and cronyism are at it's heart, even if it sacrifices what is good for the people, the economy, or the government. (I don't think the system is even working right now, but that doesn't mean it won't in the future; the US has gone through times lime this before.)

employees of a company needn't all be concerned solely with the company's success

But what happens when employees only focus on their own reward? Companies like that become intolerable places to work at that are hugely inefficient, generally surviving only by cannibalizing itself or by simply leveraging its mass in a pseudo-illegal way). The corporate system is designed for everybody to be doing what is best for the company (which might not always be profits), but that breaks down, too, when everybody starts pursuing their own agenda to the exclusion of anything else.

Systems can take a certain amount of perturbation and survive, but, just like Stuxnet and the centrifuges, if you introduce too much disorder in a system, it will break down. In human society, it seems selfishness, that drive to take care of myself regardless of what it means to anybody else, is often the root cause of that (it certainly is in all the above cases).

It's too bad we can't be a little more communally-oriented (without needing to live in the forest in a VW and not take baths ;). Who wants to do a sun-dance with me to find some extra pollen for the hive?

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gjm1114y ago

Did you perhaps miss the bit where I said "Of course, none of these systems works perfectly in practice, and sometimes that's because some individual's self-interest ends up having too much influence on the outcome. Some or all of the systems might want changing to encourage participants to act less self-interested somehow." ?

I wasn't saying "there's never anything wrong with selfishness" or "systems that try to make selfishness produce results that benefit everyone never get exploited" or anything of the kind. Just pointing out that "look, people are being self-interested rather than aiming to serve the greater good" isn't on its own a good objection.

I also wasn't arguing that there should (in any of these domains) be no regulation. There should be, and as it happens there is. Perhaps there should be more. That's an entirely separate question from whether a basically-adversarial system in which all the lawyers are out to win is a good thing.

So far as I know, it's an open question whether justice is best served by a purely adversarial system in which everyone argues for a particular outcome, or a purely investigative system in which no one is supposed to be on one side rather than another, or a basically adversarial system with a bunch of rules that aim to take some of the edge off (which is what we have now), or some other intermediate thing. It's not the sort of question you can resolve by saying "You can't do that -- it means everyone just cares about winning!" or "You can't do that -- it relies on people ignoring their own interests!".

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