View source for Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/5.1r/2081 market-signals

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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">"bolshevism has no market signals"
this is flatly false on its face. this is one of the stupidest things people say, after the fractally false "you can't predict society"

let's assume for one second that Kropotkinism is a miniature Bolshevism within the space of a town, just like Bookchinism is a town-sized Liberalism
this may not be entirely correct depending on which group of Anarchists you talk to, but for the moment we will take one very specific hypothetical variant of Kropotkinism as a working model

one of the central concepts of Kropotkinism is the open warehouse. the concept of markets is to be replaced with mere communal stores of supplies.
if we took this concept rather rigidly and strictly, we could imagine this taking the form of a town notice board in which everyone put up their orders for particular products they would like to exist in the town and the whole concept of jobs and economic institutions was designed around fulfilling the contents of this public notice board. the Kropotkinists build their warehouses, but they fill up the warehouses based on the list of projects on the town notice board.

this hypothetical public notice board is almost exactly the same thing as Soviet quotas, only done on a smaller scale. it is not easy to see what is the fundamental difference between them. nationwide quotas come out of what various local areas of individuals need. the town notice board comes out of what various local areas of individuals need. yet, when we conceptualize quotas as a town notice board, it becomes obvious that the notice board is a kind of market signal. when people buy products at a retail store the retail store sends out an order for 100 flats of product and right-Liberals call this a market signal. but if it were in some way able to properly incorporate the concept of item quantity, the town notice board would do exactly the same thing. the retail store has a shopping list, and the town notice board has a shopping list. the moment a shopping list exists and it contains approximately reasonable estimates of quantities of items, it's a market signal. the major difference between these two processes mathematically is that with the town notice board <em>producers get the market signals faster</em>. as long as somebody who is fulfilling an order updates the notice board, somebody else who was about to fulfill the same order does not have to wastefully produce the same thing and wait to throw away their products and lose money, except in the case they are really and truly convinced they could make a better version of that product and there would be no harm in having twice as many of them.

so, if Bolshevism does in fact have market signals, then why are people so afraid of quotas? what exactly do they fear could go wrong with the town notice board? to answer this, we need to apply graph economics.

as we have covered,  <ins>[I don't know if we have yet]</ins>  graph economics breaks down sales into granting nodes and receiving nodes. receiving nodes are the customers or investors who <i>receive</i> particular kinds of effort or subsidiary arrangements of people. granting nodes are the workers or Directors who <i>grant</i> their energy and labor to fulfill an economic request. if the granting nodes for a particular transaction aren't in place, the transaction or project does not occur.
in the case of the town notice board, the board is the receiving node, and all the people who answer it serve as granting nodes. instead of capital being the major factor that creates receiving nodes as capital itself snowballs, <i>the sheer mathematical possibility of multiple arrangements of receiving or granting nodes</i> is what allows these possibilities to eventually come to be in real life. if people in the town have input on possible arrangements of granting nodes, they become part of the receiving node.

the thing that might make the notice board potentially scary to someone is that it has taken the same processes that already exist and laid them bare to the point they cannot be ignored. with the notice board, it could be that there is nobody qualified to do some of the tasks. the same thing happens in capitalism. with the notice board, it could be that one person thinks of an arrangement of society they'd like but it's an arrangement a significant number of other people really don't like. the same thing happens in capitalism. with the notice board, it could be that people overestimate or underestimate what they need, even as individuals. the same thing happens in capitalism. a retail store can make an estimate on what people want and when the people get there end up sold out. a library can make assumptions about what books people want to read, or some republican process or wad of charities can make assumptions about how much money should go to the library, and those assumptions could be totally wrong, leaving people ordering books from other libraries or bookstores. with the notice board, people could collectively draw up plans that leave other people taken aback at what kind of work they'll have to do. the exact same thing happens in capitalism. anybody with a useless degree can attest that the work people have to do doesn't necessarily have anything to do with their individual talents much less their passion.
it's arguable that despite all the possible problems the notice board is better in almost every way. compared with capitalism, the notice board system gives no real leverage to use the economic process to argue that people inherently don't belong in a town, because as long as the receiving node process can think of something other people will agree to those people doing, there is an inherent place for anyone in the town as long as they don't abandon it.

but surely there must be some reason why the notice board will never work!
notice board systems don't already exist, so there must be some <em>reason</em> we haven't adopted them — quota systems too.
well, the major problem is inside the conflicts between different possible arrangements of granting nodes. this is the problem.
every single possible arrangement of granting nodes can be conceptualized as an economic Particle Theory or Social-Philosophical System. the thing an owner or owner-aspiring Director actually does is order people into a particular self-contained countable Culture, and attempt to force people to keep doing the same Culture for long periods of time, or simply accurately predict they will keep doing it. meanwhile, several capitalists or Director types are each busy ordering people into different forced or predicted Cultures in parallel. people do not usually notice this process because they always simply let the capitalists figure out how to arrange the Cultures and agree to move to different cities if they don't fit into some particular capitalist's countable Culture as well as another one.
however, if people were able to abolish capitalists and create a notice board system, it would suddenly open up a big and messy question of which of all mathematically-possible graphs representing countable Material Cultures were the best ones to create. some people would want everyone arranged into right shape to create iPhones. other people would want everyone arranged into the correct shape to create Android phones. yet other people would want everyone arranged into the best shape for creating low-power or refurbished Linux phones. this would happen with every product, every public service, every media series, and everything else.

a notice board seems simple enough when you are only using it to determine who should write science books or who should grow fruit trees.
but imagine, for instance, that the world has several gigantic media series loosely tying together hundreds of millions of people and you have to face the complicated question of what kind of media people should be creating. media series have been handed over to the people, and Byron West in northern Utah thinks he has a great idea for a new <cite>Dragon Ball</cite> spinoff, but Marigold Carter thinks there needs to be more Media Representation and she would rather that Byron has to do animation cells on her great new show idea about bisexual immigrants helping fantasy creatures escape a wardrobe kingdom and make it to the real world. Byron argues that expanding large media series is not a problem because great numbers of people would be interested. Marigold argues that the more people get focused on existing media series that happen to overlook questions of social justice and Representation, the more any number of perfectly legitimate arrangements of people who <em>could</em> amass great numbers into themselves and become just as important for the receiving node process become silenced and arbitrarily made impossible when they don't have to be. A third person called Ruth Shepard shows up to split the difference by suggesting they just make Byron write a socially-insightful entry in a popular media series, either on the Representation angle or on a [[redlink|meta-transitional realism]] angle of speculatively depicting the Material System of an ideology such as Bolshevism. which of the three is right? what show will Byron soon be working on?

another way to look at this problem is to conceptualize it in terms of a contrived scenario where people live in a town of distinct ideologies. the town contains 50 Anarchists who just want to write poetry, but 5 Trotskyist theorists who think the Anarchists ought to be thrown in factories so they can then form soviets. how do these people figure out how to live together in the same town? if we think about it, the answer lies somewhere in whether the structure the Trotskyists call for or the structure the Anarchists call for will better allow every individual to meet the needs of all the other individuals in the population. there is most likely <em>some</em> concrete answer to what structure of networked people and industries would make people the most content with each other relative to other possible structures.

the notice board system suddenly isn't looking simple enough for a bunch of Third-World peasants or non-college-educated Anarchists to spontaneously figure out how to build it. it's going to require some very sophisticated mathematics in order to correctly be able to solve the problem of how to fit ideologies and Cultures together mathematically. nonetheless, if we seriously entertain the concept that capitalists do nothing but arrange people into graphs, and in their own way most philosophical theorists do nothing but arrange people into graphs, then the question of resolving what are the best industrial arrangements and ideologies really all boils down to one big question of graph mathematics.
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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">this is the reason why the United States has so much trouble with Menshevism

I just listened to this video on <cite>Pokémon</cite> which tried to investigate how Pokémon centers were funded, and I thought the video would be worse than it was, but it did have a very interesting segment about going through and trying to figure out the major export of every gym leader or city that would be funding the Pokémon centers all to explain how they could possibly exist.
the commenters, who may have been a bunch of Europeans or just a bunch of people who were very tired, didn't exactly like the video. but when you watch this video it does a lot to explain its own existence.

the United States is so broken and fragmented with so many cases of businesses and towns completely falling apart that we are reduced to asking how a town will fit together by literally taking the smallest pieces and drawing arrows between them. whenever we make the mistake of saying the word "should" our government programs shatter into a million pieces and don't exist, and then a couple business territory owners who got bit by them start vocally complaining that no social structure would exist without its granting nodes and if you make businesses mad they have no obligation to put their money into anything versus anything else. the owners greatly overestimate their own importance to the world, but at the same time, it still happens to be true for other reasons that we are reduced to nothing happening at all and everything crumbling into nothing unless we go seek out specific individual charities and individual sponsors and individual corporations to fund specific individual projects. as far as Liberal government programs go the notice board is killed and dead with a bunch of stakes through it. government programs absolutely won't happen just by a bunch of people saying "should". those kinds of programs only happen any more with a real actual analysis of the fine structure of society and exactly how the individuals or tiny islands fit together.
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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">how much money do you have? -

any time somebody starts believing in Voluntary Socialism and this idea that you don't need government programs or any change to capitalism for particular individuals to live their best life given what things are my go-to answer is now, "how much money do you have"

"I don't think capitalists are always bad, I think some of them can be good"  "how much money do you have to pay for every single trans person getting hormones. how much money do you have to rehabilitate every single Black person from a poor neighborhood who has ever stolen something and run psychological studies to see how well the rehabilitation programs are doing. how much money do you have to send every reactionary who wants to shoot people to therapy. how much money do you have to endlessly persuade all these reactionaries to go to therapy even though they say they don't want to. you can do it if you have enough money, anything can be done with money. oh, you don't have that much money? do you know anyone else who has that much money? you could fix all of this immediately if you just knew enough people with money. you don't? you're telling me you don't? do you really care about these issues or do you not? they won't get fixed unless you go round up all the people with money that you think are really nice and get the money out of them. do you still believe capitalism is good sometimes? or do you now believe it leaves people behind because it puts money arbitrary places and makes it really hard to mobilize money?"
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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; border: none;">when you really think about it basically everything humans do is a math problem
with few exceptions. almost every time you think it isn't the case you can reduce something to a math problem it actually is

you might want to try to say poetic expression isn't a math problem or novels aren't a math problem
but you'd be wrong, because of the fact computer programs have become able to read great bodies of text and model all the connections between words and reduce the act of constructing sentences to a mathematical function. language is actually just one big math problem. language is about how things that are not fully understood can be put together in a sentence and related to each other to better understand them; language is basically just a very complicated form of algebra. likewise, stories have the same basic algebraic character. whatever happens in a story is ontologically connected such that A means B and B is different from C. this means that the act of solving all the possible continuations of a story that might make sense to an audience is, at the end of the day, more or less a math problem.

imagine you live in the universe of <cite>Dragon Ball</cite> and there is some kind of big malicious threat. the villain has some particular outward power X, but there is probably some number of less powerful people each with power Y that you could add up to defeat that character. addition problem. series sum. math problem.
Goku wants to round up a bunch of people on various planets to do the Spirit Bomb? math problem.
Goku wants to get a bunch of people who don't actually want to listen to him to add up together? that's another math problem. there are particular ways to order people into graphs that will work or will cause more people to order into graphs, and there are particular ways that will not. the act of figuring out which method of organizing people will successfully organize people is its own kind of math problem.

this is one of the biggest errors at the center of Trotskyism and a great portion of Marxisms today that keeps them from succeeding
people are trying to solve the wrong math problem, or putting the wrong function into the equation to solve the math problem
people like Rosa Luxemburg or Felix Guattari — who shouldn't be so weirdly comparable when they belong to totally different ideologies, but anyway — think you need to solve the result side by trying to get people to add up to a generalized movement to break capitalism to pieces,  [[redlink - Zinovievism|Zinovievists]] too,
when it's arguable that what they need to be doing to actually end up with a viable workers' state is solve the result side by trying to get people to <i>add up to a viable workers' state</i> and then form the generalized movement around it to construct it and defend it.
it might sound outlandish to somebody who has primarily been drilling the most really basic axioms into workers every day to get them to simply do anything, but if you don't want the population of your workers' state to all turn into wreckers over the next 70 years you have to think about what core things about assembling a workers' state people aren't understanding each and every time a country does that.

every time you want to actually implement a policy or create a service or fix some public service people use, it's a math problem. on one side of the equation is the completed program or service or whatever the end result is. on the other side of the equation is all the people that actually have to arrange their effort and their very existence to create that thing. cool new service <em>equals</em> a thousand or so individuals who have to be moved away from whatever else they're doing to create it.
but the equation is not necessarily complete with just a list of individuals. on top of that you have to put transformations that put the individuals into the correct shapes to equal the other side. assuming you have a workable list of individuals to start out with, you have to find the transforms that operate on the individuals correctly.
it's kind of like tangrams. on one side of the equation is a bunch of geometric shapes carved out of a square and on the other side is a specific assembled shape, and in between that, you theoretically have exact transforms that would rotate all those shapes from rest into the correct position.   <ins>[*f]</ins>
but there are some extra factors with people versus tangrams. each individual has compatible arrangements and incompatible arrangements, so it's like, some transforms will work on a given set of individuals and some transforms won't. and also, you don't always know what's inside each individual, so individuals can be a little like wave functions, with a particular state space to them. in theory you can still figure out how to properly arrange all those little fuzzy wavefunction people into the correct transforms to match the other side. to say you couldn't is kind of like saying quarks could never form into protons, or quarks could never form into atoms; of course they can, because we see it every day, even though we can hardly ever see an individual quark in isolation.

every process of picking between one ideology or policy or industry structure and another is just organizing people,
and organizing people is just figuring out how to use incomplete information to guess the correct transforms to rotate the people into a viable graph arrangement.
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[*] Byron West: riff on <i>Ryan North</i> / "Bryan East" in the "[[redlink|penguins and bananas]]" chapter

[*] Marigold Carter: riff on <i>Magnolia Porter</i>, as part of the same vague conceptual constellation as <i>Ryan North</i>

[*] Ruth Shepard: references "Red-Stater" in chapter "[[Philosophical_Research:Molecular_Democracy/5.2/1999_raditz-vote-biden|normal conversation about elections]]"

[*f] RD's confession: I have been tossing together a <cite>Dragon Ball</cite> AU where characters can actually "transform" using many people in a formation. one of these transformations is humorously called the "Fourier Transform" because it involves summing up multiple separate groups of people, a little bit like how real [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform Fourier transforms] add waves together, though it's more of a simple pun than meant to truly portray that kind of mathematics. this idea was something I recorded about five months ago, and now I'm here; that should give you some idea of the prior context when I wrote this.<br />
this footnote is only for this scrap and will not be included in finished chapters. the final book will not explicitly reference any of my un-posted fanworks. although... that doesn't mean there won't be any sneakier mentions of the same story concepts that still slip all the way through. a philosophy thought experiment can truly be anything, and don't you forget it.

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