âHistorically âuncoordinatedâ competition has often had much better results than coordination!â This is so vague and abstract that itâs very hard to falsify, and Iâd also note that it doesnât actually rule out that there have been more cases where coordination got better results than competition. Phrasing at this level of vagueness and abstraction about something this highly politcized strikes me as ideological in the bad way.
Iâd also say that I wouldnât describe the successes of free market capitalism as success of competition but not coordination. Sure, they involve competition between firms, but they also involve a huge amount of coordination (as well as competition) within firms, and partly depend on a background of stable, rule-of-law governance that also involves coordination.
I feel like you are reacting to my comment in isolation, rather than as a response to a specific thing Will wrote. My comment is already significantly more concrete and less abstract than Willâs on the same topic.
When Will says âuncoordinatedâ, he clearly doesnât mean âthe OpenAI product team is not good at using Slackâ, he means âcompetition between large groupsâ. Willâs key point is that marginally-saved worlds will be not very good; I am saying that the features that lead to danger here cause good things elsewhere, so marginally saved worlds might be very good. One of these features is competition-between-relevant-units. The ontological question of what the unit of competition is doesnât seem particularly relevant to thisâneither Will not I are disputing the importance of coordination within firms or individuals.
âHistorically âuncoordinatedâ competition has often had much better results than coordination!â This is so vague and abstract that itâs very hard to falsify, and Iâd also note that it doesnât actually rule out that there have been more cases where coordination got better results than competition. Phrasing at this level of vagueness and abstraction about something this highly politcized strikes me as ideological in the bad way.
Iâd also say that I wouldnât describe the successes of free market capitalism as success of competition but not coordination. Sure, they involve competition between firms, but they also involve a huge amount of coordination (as well as competition) within firms, and partly depend on a background of stable, rule-of-law governance that also involves coordination.
I feel like you are reacting to my comment in isolation, rather than as a response to a specific thing Will wrote. My comment is already significantly more concrete and less abstract than Willâs on the same topic.
When Will says âuncoordinatedâ, he clearly doesnât mean âthe OpenAI product team is not good at using Slackâ, he means âcompetition between large groupsâ. Willâs key point is that marginally-saved worlds will be not very good; I am saying that the features that lead to danger here cause good things elsewhere, so marginally saved worlds might be very good. One of these features is competition-between-relevant-units. The ontological question of what the unit of competition is doesnât seem particularly relevant to thisâneither Will not I are disputing the importance of coordination within firms or individuals.
Fair point.