morningseagulls

Preprint here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.07425

NB: OP here, but I didn't write this blog or co-author this preprint.

>> its capabilities are arguably an improvement over the capabilities of the old monopolies

>I think this is true, but it's a much, much weaker claim than the one you have been making.

I think you need to stop identifying me with the author of the article. My original comment was to make fun of the author for his ludicrous comment about Marxists calling it a day after nationalizing Amazon, which got some Marxists riled up:

>Perhaps we need to break up Amazon because communism? /s

The comment you replied to in starting this conversation spelled out exactly the same argument you made above:

>So a communist economy, in Marx's sense, is also an economy in which there's perfect information. That can't possibly happen in the real world, of course, and Hayek correctly points this out about a centralised bureaucracy.

So the "much, much weaker claim" is the one I have always been making.

>>> Unlike the monopolies of old, which may have 1) to some extent, Amazon also has 2), and is trying to acquire 3) with its Amazon Business offering

>Wrong again. Amazon has none of those three, nor has any other monopolist in history.

It's exhausting to have to always qualify my statements. Of course I did mean "Amazon also has 2) to some extent, and is trying to make inroads into acquiring 3) to some extent".

>> Amazon does collect and process information that a market participant wouldn't normally have: consumer preferences.

>This is wrong. A market participant does normally have information about the preferences of other market participants. That's precisely the information conveyed by market transactions, buying and selling certain quantities of certain goods at certain prices.

No, this is wrong. Amazon collects information about the preferences of market participants through non-market non-priced transactions as well. Here's a non-exhaustive list of such information collection:

- information from consumer responses to recommendations made by the recommender system

- information from consumers immediately after they've clicked on a link supplied by an Amazon associate, which then directs them to a product page.[0] Yes, there is a market transaction between Amazon and its associates, but at the time of the click, the information isn't generated from a market transaction between Amazon and the consumer.

- information supplied by consumers themselves through Amazon Lists, listing explicitly their preferences for goods and services.[1]

- information supplied by consumers themselves about their social network and preferences through Amazon Wish List.[1]

This is evidence for suggesting that "Amazon also has 2) [to some extent]", possibly to a greater extent than any monopolies of the past century has ever had.

[0] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/ls

>> it's a market-maker that provides a venue for other vendors to sell stuff

>That's not what a market maker is. A market maker is a market participant that guarantees to buy or sell something if no other buyer or seller can be found.

Right, but the similarity between a market maker in finance, and a marketplace maker in ecommerce, is that both of them have a lot more information than an ordinary buyer or seller. It doesn't matter if Amazon doesn't really act as a counterparty: the point is about how much knowledge it has, compared to the average participant.

>Running a marketplace, if it does not mean being a monopolist (which you are insisting it does not), is being a vendor, a vendor of particular services.

I was pointing out that there are two levels we're looking at:

1. Amazon as a provider of a marketplace

2. Amazon as that marketplace and what it entails about how much knowledge it possesses.

Recall that this is in the context of Hayek's arguments in The Use of Knowledge in Society, because the article's author referenced that explicitly.

Now, when I said Amazon isn't a monopolist, this is in terms of 1. Amazon is definitely not the only provider of an ecommerce marketplace with a global reach. In that sense, it's not a monopoly.

But Amazon is a "monopoly" in the sense that Hayek alluded to in his essay, i.e. in terms of 2. Hayek wrote in that essay:

The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.

Technically, it is still an oligopolist, since it is not the sole provider of ecommerce in America, but "organized industries" sounds like an apt way to describe what Amazon is doing. And it's in this particular sense of Hayek's that I referred to Amazon as a "monopoly".

Sorry. Still, it never ceases to amaze me what some people end up doing for work. "You mean they pay people for this?!" is usually my first reaction.

>The Melbourne Gold rush was in the 1850s-1860s so the "new" part has become inaccurate.

It also happened just a few years (very much less than a decade) after the California Gold Rush, and there were other gold rushes after that, so I'm not sure why it's "new" either.

>This came before the usage of 皇 to broadly mean emperor (i.e. during the Spring and Autumn period before the Qin dynasty), although it is used to describe the three mythical emperors. Here it's a clan name (氏), the common clan name of the kingdom of Song.

Good to know.

>When recording names in historical records usually the given name as well as honorary name are given as well (honorary names of these figures are all recorded alongside these given names and are far more ordinary).

I think the unusual names you've come across are those that've slipped through the cracks. In any case, Chinese men back then would have been given a few names before they reached adulthood: usually, a "milk name" from their parents and another (usually more dignified) name when they attend school. The honorary name comes much later. The unusual names may have been "milk names" that survived the cull because the bearers might not have attended school, for example.

Of course, the practice hasn't survived into the modern age, but you still see this practice in the Arabic world, where people can have multiple aliases. So what you labelled as the "given name" need not be the "given name" we understand today, but just the name that's survived to adulthood that's not the honorary name, which comes later.

>Something I'm surprised hasn't come up yet is the ability to flex... "something" in your brain and turn hallucinations on and off.

>I grew up in a Buddhist family and was meditating since an early age. I'm not sure if this was related at all but since I was young I could look at things when I was bored and do something in my brain that would cause the patterns to move. If I then needed to concentrate I could focus and it would go away.

There has been some "intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states."[0]

I came across this while researching meditation practices, and stumbled upon Andrew Newberg's work[1] on the neuroscience of religion.[2][3] He's spoken about an experiment where the neural correlates of nuns experienced in the "centering prayer" exhibited similarities to people who'd taken psilocybin mushrooms.[4]

I find this absolutely fascinating, yet completely expected, because the ancient literature on meditation do mention drugs in relation to meditation. For example, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras mention that "siddhis are born of practices performed in previous births, or by herbs, mantra repetition, asceticism, or by samadhi."[5]

In light of this, I've also thought about why, for example, there are the Five Precepts in Buddhism,[6] which are considered to be fundamental in the path towards attaining enlightenment. We've often understood it as a code of ethics for Buddhists, but what if it arose as a way to protect meditators from harming themselves and others in case of adverse episodes during meditation practice?

[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0147...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_B._Newberg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/what-happ...

[4] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/28/psychedelic-drug-b...

[5] https://realitysandwich.com/11276/psychedelics_light_yoga_su...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_precepts

>She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan

I've never heard of or seen this character until today.

>most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.

"Most people" usually mean "people around me", so it's not indicative.

There are plenty of ethnic Chinese people not living in China who might not have heard of this idiom -- in part because their knowledge of Chinese may not be as deep as people who've gone through the Chinese education system -- and one of them had probably advised Swanson on her name choice.

>>it is a marketplace-as-a-service

>To the extent this makes a difference

It does, because you're arguing as if Amazon sells stuff. It doesn't (just) do that: it's a market-maker that provides a venue for other vendors to sell stuff.

So it's already an error to talk about Amazon as a monopolist, when Amazon isn't the only marketplace out there with a global reach. But you're also making a category error, because you wrote:

>A perfect monopolist, by setting monopoly prices, decreases the value of the price information it gets through transactions, because there are no other competitors offering the same goods at different prices to compare to, so the prices of the monopolist's transactions convey less information about the preferences of other market participants.

Amazon doesn't set prices per se, at least not for vendors in its marketplace that are not itself. So it doesn't do whatever you think it's doing when you were writing that paragraph. Certainly there are "other competitors offering the same goods at different prices to compare" with, because Amazon's marketplace include other vendors. But Amazon is running a marketplace, not (just) being a vendor. There's a difference in category there.

>Hayek was perfectly well aware that such market participants existed (after all, such participants existed in his day--for example, Standard Oil).

And Hayek did mention monopolies or "coordinated industries" as a "halfway house" between centrally planned economies and free markets. Sure.

>But Amazon's information is still limited to information that a market participant can have: namely, as I said, the prices at which the various goods it sells are sold. It does not have any more information than that.

Actually, Amazon does collect and process information that a market participant wouldn't normally have: consumer preferences.

Hayek argued that a central planner wouldn't be able to suck up the decentralised information embodied in every market participant. However, what Amazon is doing is mining the data it has about a consumer's purchase history, as well as the responses the consumer gave to recommendations made by its recommender engine. That is a lot more information than what most market participants would normally have access to.

Now, Hayek has outlined what he thinks is needed to construct a "rational economic order" in the beginning of "The Use of Knowledge in Society":

1) "If we possess all the relevant information",

2) "if we can start out from a given system of preferences",

3) "if we command complete knowledge of available means".

Unlike the monopolies of old, which may have 1) to some extent, Amazon also has 2), and is trying to acquire 3) with its Amazon Business offering. So its capabilities are arguably an improvement over the capabilities of the old monopolies.

>I would feel weird about giving myself a rare and ultra-high-prestige name.

Er... 司馬 isn't that rare, and people would rather advise you to select a rare but prestigious family name, rather than a rare and unknown one.

It's like given names in English: if you pick a rare and unknown name (or even a common one with an unusual spelling), people are just going to go "huh?"

>> I’ve collected names from the sublime—Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson’s (金玉鹅) beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name

>Was that joke? At least in Japanese, the two first are a very common colloquial for testicles.

Probably not, although "beautifully phonetic [...] rendering" is a bit of a stretch: only her given name is phonetically rendered.

Whoever advised her on taking the name probably didn't know the Japanese colloquial meaning of 金玉, but was referencing the Chinese idiom 金玉滿堂[0]. It probably sounded good to Swanson because she's deeply concerned about poverty[1], but it feels like gilding the lily, because the whole name literally means "gold-and-jade goose/swan" (鹅 is probably referring to the "swan" in "Swanson", but "goose" seems to be what people landed upon in this thread).

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%87%91%E7%8E%89%E6%BB%BF%E...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Swanson

>please take this article with a grain of salt as it reeks of whitesplaining.

Agreed. Also, most Chinese names are "invented" anyway, so why is that in the headline?

>鹅 = goose

鹅 can refer to quite a few birds in Chinese[0], and in this case, since the article noted:

Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson’s (金玉鹅) [has a] beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name

鹅 is probably referring to 天鹅 ("swan")[1], which is part of Swanson's family name.

A bit of an explainer: In names, a word that's usually two characters long is often truncated. For example, the name of the kirin (麒麟) is often used in names, but is often truncated to 麟 (麒 is also possible) so that another character (e.g. a verb) can be introduced, e.g. Alan Tam's given name[2], 詠麟, means to rhapsodise about the kirin.

>Usually the more chars resembling wealth in your name, the less educated family you may be from.

Swanson's an anti-poverty activist,[3] so perhaps that may explain something about why 金玉 might have been appealing as a reference to 金玉滿堂.

Her party "has traditionally been associated with tenants, environmentalists, and the labour movement"[4], so I imagine that perhaps she wanted something green in the name as well, and jade (玉) fits the bill.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%B5%9D#Chinese

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A9%E9%B5%9D#Chinese

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Tam

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Swanson

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Progressive_Elect...

>I think the Japanese meaning encompasses any kind of roundish object

As in Chinese, 金玉 also means "gold and jewels" in Japanese, i.e. treasure, so the semantic distance to testicles is not any smaller. Presumably someone might have heard of "family jewels".

>For a Chinese speaker, using 金玉 (gold+jade/precious) to describe testicles probably wouldn't be too strange

金玉 is used in the idiom 金玉满堂, which can either mean full of riches or knowledge,[1][2] so it would be rather strange.

[0] https://jisho.org/search/%E9%87%91%E7%8E%89

[1] "形容财富极多，也形容学识丰富。" (Describes someone who's extremely wealthy, but can also describe someone who's full of knowledge.) https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%87%91%E7%8E%89%E6%BB%A1%E5%...

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%87%91%E7%8E%89%E6%BB%BF%E...

>皇非我 (Not-Me Huang). An official of the kingdom of Song. Again maybe a result of traditions trying to protect children from evil spirits, but I still find it rather amusing.

I'd think that, since 皇 means "emperor", the name is protective in the sense that it's trying to say "no, no, I'm not the emperor".

>I've never really heard a good explanation for these, other than given names didn't really matter back then, rather it was adult honorary names (e.g. Zi or 字) that mattered more, which sure I guess I can believe. On the other hand, if that was the case I'd expect a cornucopia of awful names rather than the comparatively few, but still abnormally many, that I observe now.

Presumably, honorary names are the ones that are recorded, since they mattered more, not the awful names given by your parents or nicknames.

>>> The prototypical Chinese name has three characters, a single surname followed by a two-character given name. A smaller number of Chinese people only have a single given name, and a very few have two surname characters.

>I'm not sure if this is correct.

It's not. The distribution of one- and two-character given names is pretty even in China.

>Another interesting characteristic of Chinese names is that given names are very diverse and varied, while family names come from a small set (something like a hundred or so). This is opposite from the West (or at least America) where given names are pretty restricted (e.g. lots of Johns and Emilys) but family names have a lot of variation (probably due to all the immigration).

You know, maybe we should change how we think about the ordering. Instead of family-given or given-family, it's clearly restricted-arbitrary.

>Sure it’s nice to have a Chinese name that sounds familiar, but would you expect your (say) Indian immigrant colleague to adapt an English-sounding name when moving to Canada?

I remember watching a comedian doing a bit about this phenomenon of people adopting names from other cultures, where there were two Caucasian ladies at an ashram, both called Lakshmi, and an Indian lady by the name of Pam. I wish I could find a video of this.

And in case anyone was wondering, the "New Gold Mountain" is another name for Melbourne[0].

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%96%B0%E9%87%91%E5%B1%B1

>Also Bostrom is a nincompoop and no article that mentions him deserves to be taken seriously.

Agreed, and as I've pointed out elsewhere[0] (see also the parent comment[1]), his ideas are also not that new. I think it's quite sad that people somehow think that, because it shows how history -- even the development of ideas in the 20th century -- can be so easily forgotten.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21319970

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21319584

>This struck me as a warmed-over version of the literary conceit that we're all just characters in a particularly elaborate-seeming novel or stage play.

He also came up with the notion of apocalyptic "superintelligences"[0], which is a warmed-over version of 20th-century critiques of the corporation, starting with one written by an economist and a lawyer[1]. People like Cory Doctorow[2], Ted Chiang[3] and Charlie Stross[4] have pointed out the similarities.

>He's terribly clever but also deeply neurotic, like a pessimistic Ray Kurzweil (whose prediction record is rather better than he gets credit for, but similarly dwells a little too much in his own imagination).

He's a transhumanist[5] who co-founded the WTA (now Humanity+)[6] in 1998. I think he's probably realised along the way that doom and gloom sells: he founded FHI in 2005[7] and inspired Musk to fund CSER in 2012[8] with his book[0]. It's pretty much his day job now to be deeply pessimistic.

And it looks like doom-and-gloom think tanks are catching on: France is apparently hiring science fiction writers to dream up future threats[9]. Nice job if you can get it, I guess.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Modern_Corporation_and_Pri...

[2] https://boingboing.net/2015/07/03/why-were-still-talking-abo...

[3] https://boingboing.net/2017/12/18/skynet-llc.html

[4] https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/llcs-are-slow-ais.html

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism#Growth_of_transh...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity%2B

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Humanity_Institute

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_the_Study_of_Existe...

[9] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/24/20708432/france-military-...

>Alienation is a critical and central part of Marxist critique. To miss it is to misunderstand Marxism.

I don't think the author meant that reference to Marxism as anything more than a rhetorical flourish. His target, in that context, was Hayek's argument from incredulity against central planning in The Use of Knowledge in Society.

>Marxists could not call it a day after nationalizing Amazon because the people who make the goods that Amazon sells would still be alienated from the goods they produce, and Amazon's workers would still be alienated from the products of their own labor.

As I understand it, this alienation -- as you've described it here -- seems to have its roots in the division of labour in society, which seems to me to pre-date industrial capitalism. If that's so, then the work of Marxists can never be done, because work itself would have to be totally eliminated for the division of labour to vanish.

>You could just as easily say that space colonization is the highest form of humanitarianism.

"Greed" and humanitarianism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they can be mutually compatible, depending on what your definition of "greed" is.

From an economic point of view, humanitarianism can serve the economic "greed" of the rich that's often decried. This is because both of these can be rooted in the realisation that humans have intrinsic economic value, so that the loss of a human life represents a loss of a lifetime of economic value to society.

In the case of Bezos, it's quite clear from the article that his humanitarianism is intrinsically linked to his "greed":

>When Bezos describes these colonies—and presents artists’ renderings of them—he sounds almost rapturous. “This is Maui on its best day, all year long. No rain, no storms, no earthquakes.” Since the colonies would allow the human population to grow without any earthly constraints, the species would flourish like never before: “We can have a trillion humans in the solar system, which means we’d have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. This would be an incredible civilization.”

"We can have a trillion humans [...] This would be an incredible civilization." Sounds familiar? This is essentially the siren song of the Chinese market, magnified a thousandfold.

>> Hayek is arguing that no centralised agent has perfect information. The author is arguing that Amazon is approaching the stage when it would have perfect information about the consumers it serves.

>This statement in the article is a huge misstatement.

At least blame the right person: me. The above statement is a paraphrase of what I thought the author's argument was.

>First, Amazon only has information about the goods it sells.

>There are huge supply chains behind the products it sells that it does not see.

And it is in the process of acquiring more information. Amazon isn't just a retailer anymore: its main source of operating income is now AWS[0]. Also, dredmorbius has pointed out[1] that Amazon is doing vertical integration with its Amazon Business offering[2].

>There are many things it doesn't sell, and many things that it can't sell.

This is irrelevant, because these "many things" exist in a market outside of Amazon's "jurisdiction". Even in the historical centrally planned economies, these "many things" also existed.

>There are also many things of value that are not exchanged with money.

And they are getting rarer and rarer, because monetisation is now the Great Project.

>In other words, it has exactly the information that Hayek says a market participant has, and no more: the price at which other market participants will buy whatever quantity of one's products are sold.

Actually, Amazon has more information than a single market participant has. Since it is the market because it is a marketplace-as-a-service, it has exactly the information that Hayek says the sum total of all market participants have. This invalidates Hayek's argument that no centralised agent can possibly collect that much information. This point is what I believe the author of the article is trying to make.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-2018-aws-delivered-most-of-...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21306655

[2] https://www.amazon.com/b2b/info/amazon-business

>This argument - that Amazon prefigures a new Soviet-style planning - has been made sincerely.

Because there is evidence that Marxists had tried, and failed, to do what Amazon has now succeeded. Project Cybersyn comes to mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2018/08/project-cybersyn-...

However, what Amazon has done is just characteristic of "organized industries", which Hayek conceded in his essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society, as being a "halfway house" between Soviet-style planning and free markets.

>Well, I suspect that the help is not disinterested. Nor do I think it's done in a 'personal' capacity.

I won't quibble with the "not disinterested" bit, but what he's doing is introducing people that he knows to the Buttigieg campaign, so in that sense, it's quite personal:

>Zuckerberg and Chan recommended numerous potential campaign hires, and two of them are now on staff: Eric Mayefsky, senior digital analytics adviser, and Nina Wornhoff, organizing data manager.

>Mayefsky previously worked as the director of data science at Quora, a 10-year-old question-and-answer startup founded by former Facebook employees. Mayefsky worked at Facebook for almost four years starting in 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile. Wornhoff previously worked as a machine learning engineer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and in Democratic politics in Indiana, Buttigieg’s home state.

>The article also misinterprets Marxism/communism.

>it's not a revolutionary seizure of the means of production.

The revolutionary bit of Marxism was a political sideshow for Marx's anarchist supporters. The economic theory of Marx does not require a revolution, because according to that theory, the superior mode of economic production should eventually prevail.

That is why you have political movements like democratic socialism and social democracy. These are moderates who believe that Marx's theory of economic progression is correct, but who also believe in incremental change.

>that part of the article misinterprets centralised planning. What it describes is the logistics of getting something from one place to another.

I think it's worthwhile to re-read the passage I quoted:

>Hayek[...] argued that no bureaucracy could ever match the miracle of markets, which spontaneously and efficiently aggregate the knowledge of a society.

This isn't just about physical logistics. Hayek is arguing that no centralised agent has perfect information. The author is arguing that Amazon is approaching the stage when it would have perfect information about the consumers it serves.

>Amazon doesn't have the final word on what people buy (or the destination of goods for that matter) so it isn't a centrally planned system in that sense.

Even if it doesn't have the final word, it does have quite a bit of say in the form of its recommender system.

Also, "communism" in the sense of Marx -- one of the two senses in which I was using the word -- is not necessarily a centrally planned system. Rather, it's an idealisation of what an economy would become if it achieved 100% automation, i.e. an economy operating at 100% efficiency.

You can see it in the structure of Marx's "historic materialism" argument: just as capitalism had displaced feudalism because it's more efficient, socialism would then displace capitalism, and communism would do the same for socialism. In Marx's hierarchy of efficiency:

Feudalism < capitalism < socialism < communism

So a communist economy, in Marx's sense, is also an economy in which there's perfect information. That can't possibly happen in the real world, of course, and Hayek correctly points this out about a centralised bureaucracy. But he's wrong about markets; no market is 100% efficient or operates in an environment of perfect information either.