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Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by Loquebantur on Monday November 09, 2026 @12:00PM (#50428275)
You engage in confessions as accusations when ignoring the possibility, it could be you who is wrong.

The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism. The economic system forces corporations to behave in anti-social ways.

Similar goes with the trope you peddle, individuals were to blame. They're not. The system they live in, and never had any say in shaping, forces them to engage in behaviors short term that ultimately run counter to their own interests long term.

Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable. Those contributions get monopolized and their benefits privatized. That's not a "belief".

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by thegrimmest on Monday November 09, 2026 @12:45PM (#50428832)
What do you mean capitalism? As in the system of private ownership, free exchange, and due process, spanning back to the dawn of agriculture?

Which bits do you object to? The idea that people should be able to form going concerns that outlive any individuals (e.g. investing in the construction of a fishing boat)? That several individuals should be able to share in the risk and profit of such a venture (e.g. a group investing in the construction, and receiving shares of the profit of each catch)? Or that they should be able to hire others on a free market for a wage or share of profits (e.g. hiring a crew for the boat)? Or that if they should have a dispute, there should be a formal, legal, process to resolve it?

The trouble is that there is no human system in which the agents who distribute the resources are perfectly aligned with the agents to whom resources are distributed. This is nowhere more obvious than in the planning, execution, and communication, failures of the Soviet Union. This is a general case of the alignment problem, which is fundamentally unsolved. I would argue that it's un-solvable as long as your agents are living organisms competing in an ecosystem.

Niches exist to be exploited. As long as the niches exist, they will be exploited. Resenting that is akin to resenting the biggest fish in the pond for being so damn aggressive - it's pointless. We live in a pond, and we should focus on maintaining the nonviolent and often ecosystem-benefitting nature of our exploitation (since it is hard-won and precarious), rather than resent the inescapable reality of its existence.

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by soperj on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:21PM (#50429379)
> As in the system of private ownership, free exchange, and due process, spanning back to the dawn of agriculture?

As far as I can tell none of these things existed before modern times. Mostly people were under authoritarian rule.

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by Loquebantur on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:41PM (#50429676)
You point out aspects you like about capitalism, but those maybe aren't the problematic parts to begin with? You imply, there were no viable alternatives, but that's just ignorance on your part.

When you refer to "private ownership", you unreflectedly endorse things like individuals "owning" land.

The consequence of that negligence are things like environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on. A substantial part of what currently goes wrong on the macro-scale.

"Free exchange" is a misnomer in the same vein. The "freedom" leaves people to willfully avoid asking whether they really should in the first place. More importantly, it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without.

"Due process" isn't tied to capitalism to begin with and all these things don't "span back to the dawn of agriculture".

You put up the straw man of the Soviet Union, prepping it up to the height of serving as the epitome of what humans could conceive of as alternatives (or modifications) of the existing system. That's a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy, not higher insight.

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by thegrimmest on Monday November 09, 2026 @02:10PM (#50430149)
Territorial (read: assertion of exclusive rights to the use of land) behaviour is not unique to humans. My point is that "capitalism" is an abstraction that includes pre-existing human behaviour and motivations, and that many of these in turn are emergent from the constraints of natural world.

> environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on

> asking whether they really should in the first place?

> it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without

All of these criticisms reflect a total naivety to ecosystem dynamics at play, and the motivational landscape that they create. As long as these behaviours continue to create a competitive advantage for the organisms that display them, they will continue to emerge and perpetuate. There is no method of social organization that can overcome the competitive reality of the ecosystem we live in.

You'll also note that environmental destruction, resource hoarding, and interference competition are all widespread behaviours in the natural world. We are part of that world, and are subject to the constraints that it produces.

It's like trying to overcome a bug in the CPU instruction set by writing JavaScript. The "problems" are part of the fundamental substrate and aren't addressable at the proposed layer of abstraction.

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by Loquebantur on Monday November 09, 2026 @02:29PM (#50430496)
Territorial behavior in animals is no justification for anything?

When you abstract, you leave things out. You claim to abstract from cave people. How is that the best we can do?

You pretend, humans were cells competing mindlessly. Then you conclude, any other approach than mindless behavior was naive.

You again observe animals and justify your behavior (on a vastly greater scale) by it.

How do you manage not to see the absurdity in that? You're not an animal, you have a conscious mind, capable of rational thought and according foresight.

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by thegrimmest on Monday November 09, 2026 @03:13PM (#50431278)
> You claim to abstract from cave people. How is that the best we can do?

Because that is, in a very fundamental and immutable way, who we are.

I'm saying that we live in an ecosystem, and that creates emergent properties and behaviours. Resource hoarding and interference competition are among those. No amount of consciousness, rational thought, or foresight, can change that.

As long as (e.g.) hoarding resources today makes it more likely for your offspring to succeed tomorrow, the traits that influence people to hoard resources will continue to perpetuate. It's also why, for example, we have the dark tetrad - it works.

Too high of trust creates opportunities for liars. Too many liars lowers trust to the point that it's not profitable to lie. There exists between these two points a stable equilibrium between zero liars and everyone lying all the time, and it's at neither extreme. The same is true for all other behaviours you moralize.

I'm not justifying anything, I'm simply observing the constraints of the system we live in, and inferring that any mode of social organization that ignores or opposes these constraints is doomed.

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by Loquebantur on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:19PM (#50432318)
In your imagination apparently, but that is clearly divorced from reality.

Apart from debatable (but real) genetic differences you don't know about, the crucial point is culture. We're not cave people as we don't share their culture and don't have to.

Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.

Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.

You apparently have never heard about ethics. There is a difference between morals and ethics. Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.

Your idea of an "equilibrium of all behaviors" presupposes mindless automata, again.

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by thegrimmest on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:40PM (#50432629)
"Culture" also exists in an ecosystem, and is subject to evolutionary pressure. It's why things like religious zeal self-perpetuate - armies of fanatical maniacs tend to win wars against armies of pragmatic atheists.

Human societies are meta-organisms - they modify themselves over time, and compete with each other for finite resources. Any culture which sacrifices competitive advantage for any reason is simply out-competed and absorbed by other societies which make no such sacrifice. There is no escaping this reality. This is referred to as cultural group selection.

> Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.

I'm not saying it predisposes us to capitalism though, I'm saying it predisposes us to maximize resources and engage in competitive behaviour. This is supported by the fact that very nearly every organism in nature also engages in resource maximization and competitive behaviour (r-Selection). There is no altruism (going against genetic self interest) in nature, it's simply not sustainable.

> Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.

I'm making no such claim. I'm simply claiming there are constraints in the system, and ignoring them doesn't make them go away.

> Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.

Any yet, no matter how hard we try, we've not managed to eliminate lying (or even agree what specifically it means). Are you really suggesting that some yet-undiscovered set of rules will create a society in which no one will ever lie? Doesn't that sound a bit.. unrealistic?

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by matkoniecz on Monday November 09, 2026 @01:34PM (#50429546)
> The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism.

well, other systems were tried and were worse (feudalism, communism etc)

in practice capitalism with some regulations is better than known alternatives

> Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable

what is not questionable then?

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by Loquebantur on Monday November 09, 2026 @02:20PM (#50430316)
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

Worse, you mistake the bounds of your personal knowledge as the borders of the world.

Even if there was no currently "known" alternative, the proper course of action is to research that and find one?

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by matkoniecz on Monday November 09, 2026 @02:41PM (#50430744)
> Even if there was no currently "known" alternative, the proper course of action is to research that and find one?

please test it properly before putting it in production, communism went poorly

> Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

note that I am not arguing that better system is impossible - that would be silly

but "destroy capitalism" attempts went remarkably badly so far

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by Loquebantur on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:09PM (#50432197)
The experiment "capitalism" has already failed. You simply refuse to acknowledge that fact.

The idea, you would have to produce a turn-key solution, beta-tested on "somebody else" is obvious nonsense and pure deflection.

In the given dire situation, you have to do the best you can, not wait for some imaginary perfect escape hatch to appear.

Re:Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia by matkoniecz on Monday November 09, 2026 @07:31PM (#50434481)
It failed less than communism and feudalism. Which other alternatives you see?