Quote from: cbeast on December 11, 2011, 11:32:34 PM

Quote from: Harvey on December 11, 2011, 11:26:27 PM

Quote from: cbeast on December 11, 2011, 11:22:30 PM

Quote from: Harvey on December 11, 2011, 11:15:13 PM

The only way you are going to get a unilateral human culture that meets your desires is through violence. This RBE is a pipe-dream. You're going to need to stick a state in the homes of families and perform eugenics on people that don't meet your criteria.

Feel free to stand by your beliefs but don't pretend to be peaceful.

I agree. The people in this world are too brainwashed and willfully ignorant. Fear not, RBE will not happen in your lifetime. You have a lifetime of violence and fear based culture to enjoy. Their children's children are who I wish to educate.

No, they are only ignorant of your preferences. Don't honor yourself with an objective moral truth.

I would love to debate this over beers. You claim that people are not willfully ignorant. Priceless. What moral truth do you posit that I have declared? I posit only science that is testable, verifiable, reproducible, and predictive. Learn to distinguish hypotheses from theories. You will then find your platform more solid.

Quote from: Technomage on December 11, 2011, 11:38:11 PM

Quote from: Harvey on December 10, 2011, 02:31:49 AM

Yes because there is an objective value on everything and people just don't know it. People don't know what they want. They don't know what's best for themselves. We should assign specialized technocrats to decide such values and how we should lead our lives. There is a real number and only the wise and virtuous technocrats know.

Now, back to reality: The numbers match up perfectly because they are the culmination of asks and bids of the people who own said "stuff". Nobody knows better than the person who had to make the choices and actions necessary to produce and possess said product and/or service. Now, of course, there is not only one individual that can produce a good or service; there are many and the prices will adjust to competing bids and asks. The spot price is the "real" number. Just because somebody is willing to pay more than you are, it doesn't mean the price is wrong. It just means you don't value the object as much and you will have to pay just as much with whatever goods if you can only barter. Actually, bartering will only make it more expensive with the time you have to spend trading to get it.

Individual desires differ. We are all unique and special in our own way. Didn't they teach you that in preschool? I'm sorry everybody doesn't think and desire the same. We are called sentient individual human beings for a reason. If we all acted and thought unilaterally in unison, guess what: We would be a single individual. Sorry, we are not.

At the least, I am my own organism.

This is what I call the "price mechanism is perfect" speech. You are right that it's much more efficient than barter, I do not advocate that we go back to barter. Imagine international trade using only barter... I can imagine it and it would be much less efficient than what we have now.

But what the so called resource-based economy means is not going back to barter but basically automating the entire production chain. From mining natural resources to creating the final product for your use. It does not eliminate choice. You could go to a market, which would simply be a distribution center, and pick what you want. Just like people do now, but without price tags. This raises many questions and I'll try to answer some of them in advance.

First question usually is related to some need based on "human nature", "wouldn't people just empty the place in an instant?". That's an entirely valid question and this would definitely happen if a market decided today to just give everything for free. There would be a riot. This behaviour is 100% the product of living in a world like this. If you were born to a world without price tags and there were enough products to go around, no one would have incentive to hoard anything. You wouldn't have advertising either.

Now the second question is "how does it work?" and this is where it gets a bit more complex for someone who can only think in terms of prices. But it's really not that complex. There are other ways besides price that we can use to find out what needs to be produced for a certain area, a certain distribution center etc. The core of this is simple tracking of demand. We can use a combination of survey and actual data from the distribution centers to analyze the demand and then keep a supply based on this. We would put more value on less waste though, instead of keeping every product available in the shelfs at all times regardless of waste (because the approach is resource-based). We can then apply advanced trend analysis to predict changes in demand so the shortages are minimal.

After this there is a third question which is "how do we decide what kind of televisions we produce?". Television is just an example. We would value things a little differently than today. We are aiming for intelligent usage of our resources, which means that instead of making products that get broken easily, can not be fixed, can not be recycled, we make products that last longer, can be fixed much easier and can be recycled as well as is technologically possible.

We would have no need to create hundreds of different models that have minor differences, we could create the best model possible and if there's disagreement on this, we could create two models. Or three. Using human resources and technological resources and natural resources to develop hundreds of models which are all made from the cheapest materials to last just enough so people can buy more, is not very efficient.

Then there is the question about "who would do this?" "what is the incentive for people to work?". This is possibly the fundamental issue. There are many directions we can take with this question, but first I have to say that extrinsic rewards are inefficient. They are scientifically proven to do more harm than good. It's obvious that people need money as a reward because money is required for people to live but as a reward and as an incentive to do something intrinsic incentives are much more powerful.

People want to be autonomous in their work. They want to do something interesting and something that's challenging enough but not too challenging. Something they can get better at. And finally, something that matters. These are the ultimate incentives and a saner system would get rid of all the jobs that don't offer these rewards and give people the possibilities to find something that they really like. I suggest reading this book to understand this a little better: http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/0143145088 (there is a short video about this but it only scratches the surface: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc)

I can debate and go further in any of these basic questions because I only gave the short version of each. And if there is some other question, I'm happy to tackle it.

Do you guys think human society is more complex, or less complex, than an individual human brain?