[extropy-chat] by the same token

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Oct 17, 2004, at 4:02 PM, Trend Ologist wrote:
> The same reason socialism is unrealistic is the same reason 
> libertarianism is unrealistic: we're evolving so slowly that by the 
> time any sort of socialism could theoretically succeed it would 
> already be outmoded. Perhaps libertarianism has a better future-- 
> however that future is way off past the middle of this century, and 
> probably nearer to the end of the century.


Both pure socialism and pure anarcho-capitalist libertarianism are 
unrealistic because both are based on invalid models of the system we 
actually live in (in a mathematical sense).  Bad assumptions mean bad 
outcomes, and hence why both models always seem to be broken in 
practice and neither are optimal in a pure form.

The problem with socialism is very simple: it scales poorly when 
applied to finite agents e.g. humans, mostly due to computational 
complexity as a function of population with respect to making it 
perform well.   Libertarianism is an adaptive catch-all that scales 
extremely well in the general case, though it makes some assumptions 
that are broken in fact or fall below the noise floor on a local scale. 
  In short, socialism requires (nearly) complete public information 
about the agents involved to approximate optimality but degrades badly 
without it, and libertarianism is a robust approximation of optimality 
that can be less efficient on a local scale but degrades very 
gracefully with partial or incomplete information on the agents 
involved.

As far as I can tell, socialism doesn't scale much beyond groups of 
about 100 people or so; beyond that libertarianism is more optimal.  
Attempting to scale socialism to very large populations (like an entire 
country) is ruinous and suboptimal, and betrays a pretty poor 
understanding of the nature of the system.  Math and reality don't give 
a crap about ideology.  Libertarianism has one meritorious property:  
it allows for the local emergence of socialist systems when such forms 
are optimal without damaging the mechanics of the system.  This is 
important if for no other reason than to protect long-term diversity.


j. andrew rogers