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# /leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

A collective of people engaged in pretty much what the name suggests

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File: 957c5cd327a7d41⋯.jpg (313.58 KB, 1148x813, 1148:813, da zdravstvuiet stallman!.jpg)

No.1477348

It's recently come to my attention recently that there are people here interested in the attempts of various computer scientists to introduce cybernetic computerized planning (a model acceptable to most Marxists and anarchists) to the USSR, to improve efficiency and put control in the hands of the workers themselves. We can learn a lot from these pioneers of computerized socialism, seeing as our own society is basically run on the basis of computerized markets - it wouldn't be too big of a leap for most people to imagine democratic planning via computer networks. Besides, even FALC will need some basis for resource allocation.

The problem for Western readers, however, is simply the scarcity of the material in English. Slava Gerovich has published most articles on the matter, but beyond him, details are scarce.

With Google's recent implementation of deep-learning techniques in its translation service between Russian and English, however, it's now feasible to translate whole articles for the most part.

My actual ability to speak Russian is fairly limited in terms of vocabulary, but I've studied a lot of the grammar and verb prepositions. If there's a sentence which you think isn't translating right, I can try to figure it out for you. No guarantees, though.

Here's a good article from Slava, let's start digging up the sources and posting links to the original Russian ones if possible: http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage/articles/Gerovitch-InterNyet.pdf

No.1477370

http://www.au.af.mil/au/afri/aspj/airchronicles/aureview/1967/mar-apr/sleeper.html

We should consider starting a project on this, this is how we take on the world guys.

No.1477404

Here's the first Russian source cited by Gerovich:

Berg, Aksel’. ‘Ekonomicheskaia kibernetika: vchera i segodnia.’ Voprosy ekonomiki no. 12 (1967)

Its title translates to "economic cybernetics: yesterday and today", from something called "Problems Of Economics"

I found their site, but the archive only goes back to 1992: http://www.vopreco.ru/eng/index.html

It's not the one that I wanted, but still useful as a perspective of someone relevant.

I also found this list of sources from a declassified CIA document, not sure how useful it is: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/831939.pdf

What we need are technical details, what the planners specifically thought were relevant problems. I want to see what I can code in Python.

Paul Cockshott's linear optimization of input-output tables is a fine core, what we need are peripheral programs to feed it the right info.

No.1477886

I'm interested, it's really amazing how much capitalism limits people's imaginations. So even if it's really old, there could be a lot of unusual or radical theory in this Soviet cybernetics.

No.1477917

File: c5e4efba3436920⋯.pdf (7.99 MB, 1148x813, 1148:813, [Oskar_Lange_(Auth.)]_Intr….pdf)

File: bcde318d8704cee⋯.jpg (62.11 KB, 850x400, 17:8, quote-when-education-and-r….jpg)

Ever since I stumbled up on the topic of cybernetics, it felt like

my education has cheated me from getting to know this multidisciplinary science.

So I presume that anyone interested has read introductory books on cybernetics.

Ross W. Ashby or Norbert Wiener, Stafford Beer and many others. Oskar Lange was a pioneer of applying cybernetics on the problems of economics.

Regarding specific parts, I have found Czech scientific journal, that has most of the articles in english. And also special issues detailing some specific problems of cybernetics theory are also written in english.

http://www.kybernetika.cz/content.html

A study group would be good. Also I could help with the translations from russian to english.

>>1477886

Every introductory book on topics of cybernetics written by an author living in Eastern Bloc has an introductory chapter saying how humans have been using labour to secure a living to themselves, but their information processing abilities were sufficient even in the era of the industrial revolution.

Essentially a historical materialistic view on how the topic of information processing and information itself came to be investigated by humans.

Also they extend the materialistic notion of matter in that all matter also has an ordering in space, whether it is random or ordered, and thus it has information. And all information is bound to matter or energy.

So they say that information and matter exist together.

No.1478212

>>1477917

What would be the best on-line tool to create a study group?

No.1478215

And for the programming we can create a Github repository.

No.1478223

Cool shit man

Will be checking it out.

t. CS student

No.1478233

So I would be up for using discord for study group, or a github (although I would need to make another git account to prevent doxing).

But I know lots of security fags here are paranoid about le CIA, even though you can't outrun them no matter how many measures you take, and refuse to use them.

So you tell me what would be the best tool to use.

Github allows for colaborative programming and writing simple pieces, and discord can be used to discuss while also saving the discourse for anyone who isnt online at that time. IRC isnt that great in that way, since it doesnt save what is typed, so if youre offline, tough luck.

No.1478288

>>1478215

>>1478233

Why not something like GitLab or Gogs? I mean, the only valuable thing about github is the social framework it offers, but I don't assume that that's what we're in for.

No.1478297

Stupid question, but could we help the Kurds with this as a real world application?

No.1478301

>>1478288

We could do that.

>>1478297

Kurdistan is a fucking warzone, they dont have good information infrastructure and arent really in the mood or position to build it.

No.1478460

File: 2640627c0955945⋯.pdf (7 MB, 1148x813, 1148:813, Introduction to economic c….pdf)

>>1477917

Cropped the book for easier use on ereaders

No.1478479

>>1478301

Surely there's a smartphone per commune, smartphones are absolutely fucking everywhere.

No.1478481

>>1478479

A smarthpone really isnt enough to centrally plan an economy. You need to have all production connected as well.

But we could try.

No.1478484

I'm very afraid about socio cybernetics so I'm not sure how I should feel about cybernetics in the context of the economy .

Cybernetics is a powerfull tool to create order in society. This also makes it easy to abuse it.

If you establish a chatroom or a mailing list to discuss this topic further and maybe to do some planning, please post about it here. I would be very interested in it .

No.1478485

>>1477886

> I'm interested, it's really amazing how much capitalism limits people's imaginations. So even if it's really old, there could be a lot of unusual or radical theory in this Soviet cybernetics.

One of weirdest things I've seen so far (second only to theremin) was Soviet hydraulic computer from before WWII.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/338106

No.1478500

>>1478233

>discord

we can create board here on 8ch with similar functionality, otherwise I'm for >>1478288

No.1478504

>>1478500

The problem with an 8chan board would be that it can be raided and shit, its not invite only.

Anyway, im down for this. I think this is one of the first things on this board that really grabbed my attention and made me want to study the theory behind it and shit, in 3 years.

No.1478505

>>1478481

Well it would function like this with a computer anyway from my limited understanding about the subject. Someone fills in a printout on a clipboard, then everyone hands in their results to an office, which then enters it into the server using a computer. A smartphone would be more than capable of that, and the more smartphones a commune has the less people would be using clipboards. Smartphones are incredibly abundant in the third world though because they get all the older models we had for cheap second hand.

Although we would introduce a problem of potential economic sabotage by having it stored on the internet, and this will likely be unavoidable since I imagine Kurdistan is serviced with cell towers rather than fixed lines, which would cost them $200/km just for cabling. Russia might be able to give them a hefty discount though. Just spitballing ideas though, obviously we would need to get it made first and then send the idea off to our YPG contacts to see if any of the councils are interested rather than asking them if they're interested with nothing to show for it and then potentially not getting it done. >>1478485 Fuck! No.1478509 >>1478505 I think while cybernetics for kurdistan would be cool, we shouldn't focus our small study group on that alone. No.1478513 >>1478509 Well they may not accept it like another poster said, but if you get to the stage you have a proof of concept what I'm trying to say is that the level of Kurdistan infrastructure will match the level we produce it to right off the bat. No.1478515 >>1478504 >8chan board would be that it can be raided and shit, its not invite only. small boards don't get raided. look at /marx/, even with triggering name like this they are doing ok + occasional recruitment of /tech/ autists would be much easier. No.1478518 >>1478513 Call me a negative nancy but I severely doubt the ability of 7-10 odd programmers on a chan to be able to produce such a project succesfully. But I am open to trying it. No.1478519 >>1478515 Fair enough. No.1478531 >>1478515 > small boards don't get raided. look at /marx/, even with triggering name like this they are doing ok + occasional recruitment of /tech/ autists would be much easier. Actually, /marx/ got raided not too long ago - this wiped practically all old threads (except for the stickied ones). No.1478537 >>1478531 >sticky all the threads >add max numbers of pages >create huge post limit >disable deleting old posts at post limit >back up everything No.1478539 >>1478537 At this point you might as well look for a more suitable framework. No.1478543 >>1478539 The point of changing five options in the board settings? No.1478547 >>1478531 I know, I lurk it occasionally, this is not really problem. Of course there are autists who would want to raid le cultural /marx/, but cybernetics is not so triggering simple /pol/ minds, it would be closer to /freedu/. My main point is that if we go full sekrit club we can't have lurkers and we need some means for (very slow) growth, so number of users can at least stagnate, otherwise it is doomed to fail since most people will quit. No.1478550 >>1478547 So, name it something incredibly boring? Would a board/github combo be ideal? No.1478554 >>1478550 >So, name it something incredibly boring? Anything which is not associated with left in american pop culture. tbh even /cybernet/ would work. >Would a board/github combo be ideal? I believe so. No.1478557 >>1478550 Ideally : /leftypol/ + discord + repository No.1478561 >>1478557 >discord what is so great about discord apart from satisfying redditors need of massive tripfag circlejerk? No.1478562 >>1478539 Mailing list, IRC and cgit? Public, but invite only. Most people wouldn't even bother reading through such sites, if it doesn't have 5MB css frameworks and every single html5/tag, so there would be some protection though elitism. But at the same time, anyone could use the technology to cooperate. If the linux kernel can work with this kind of stuff, so can we, tbh. No.1478567 >>1478561 le emojis! 👌😂💯💯💯 No.1478571 best thread on leftypol by a wide margin. Currently reading the PDF, will read Paul Cockshott after. >>1478561 What about Riot? No.1478575 >>1478562 Sounds good. No.1478576 >>1478571 why not some plain old irc? shit just works No.1478578 >>1478567 yeah bruv 👌👌👌👌👌👌😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯 No.1478579 >>1478562 >Mailing list I don't think you can convince people here to give somebody their email addresses + who would manage it? but it sounds good apart from this. >>1478571 do you mean riot.im? I don't know it, but it looks interesting. No.1478581 >>1478562 Wait is cgit a host or just an api? Would we need to host our own server? No.1478585 >>1478579 One could either use something like cock.li to create anonymous addresses, or, since I don't trust VC, one could run a mail server on a server. Downside would be the required maintenance. >>1478581 >Wait is cgit a host or just an api? It's a cgi program, that displays local git repositories hosted on a server. Suckless have their own here: http://git.suckless.org/ >Would we need to host our own server? Yeah, but I'd suppose a$5 could server (eg. DigitalOcean, Linode) would do.

No.1478590

>>1478576

IRC doesn't save conversation that take place when you're logged off.

>>1478579

I like it. It runs on matrix, wich is free software, while also being easy and shiny. It's also not locked down to third party clients, unlike discord.

No.1478599

>>1478590

>IRC doesn't save conversation that take place when you're logged off.

Server side logs?

No.1478613

>>1478599

If you're he'll bend on hosting everything yourself, sure

No.1478626

File: 6b6e0d926bf5031⋯.pdf (2.88 MB, 1148x813, 1148:813, how-to-not-network-nation.pdf)

This PDF might also help.

>>1478590

IRC shouldn't save the log publicly, it's instant and linear messengering. If more important stuff is being discussed or something is being announces, it better to use something like a mailing list, with parallel conversations and threads. I personally always hate having to read through chat logs to see if anything important happened while I was off, and then not being able reply to a message without interrupting the current conversation.

>>1478613

???

No.1478636

>>1478626

I think he's trying to say if I'm hell bent on storing a text file myself, I can do so at my own peril. Just put it on the server you goofs.

No.1478647

>>1478561

>>1478571

M A T R I X is the best option

No.1478653

>>1478636

>>1478626

No I just don't get why you are so hell bend on hosting a server yourself when you can use free publicly available alternatives. Just setup abother email if you don't want o be doxed, use one of the many irc severs there are and just use github or some other existing git site. I don't see why yu would want to host a server.

No.1478654

>>1478626

There's a matrix-irc-bridge not unlike XMPP transports which you can use with any IRC client. Also you don't have to read chatlogs, but you can if you wish.

I agree with you in principle, but there's a reason why most people prefer accessible, shiny interfaces like Discord and Slack and so on.

No.1478668

>>1478647

>>1478626

>>1478613

>>1478599

>>1478590

>>1478585

>>1478581

>>1478576

>>1478571

>>1478562

>>1478561

>>1478557

>>1478554

>>1478550

>>1478288

>>1478233

>>1478215

Ultimately, it's mostly irrelevant what we use. Shouldn't this thread be used to discuss theory and cybernetics? I mean, we can use IRC and matrix, if we want to. If it becomes more serious, we can switch to more serious solutions.

>>1478653

Control? But as I already mentioned, we shouldn't focus on such meta-issues, at least for now.

No.1478702

I'm not knowledgeable about this at all, just dropping by to say this looks really cool and that you should check out decentralized web technologies (saw this a while ago and figured it might come in handy sometime) it figures you will have to look into this kind of thing if you intend for your network to sustain an attack by Porky.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/18/building-decentralized-web/

(warning: this one page is heavy loaded with videos so it will take a while to load)

No.1478710

>>1478668

>not endlessly arguing over the chat client until interest tapers off

Get a load of this guy.

No.1478734

>>1478626

>How not to Network a Nation by Benjamin Peters

I've read 80 % of that so far and unless there is a miracle at the end, the book is shit. S H I T. Here is my review of the first 80 %.

If you want to know anything about economic planning, keep on searching, because this "work" does not describe a single algorithm nor a single criterion for judging algorithms related to planning. (It only mentions Pareto efficiency in passing without giving a definition.) You don't need to be a programming wizard to figure out the author is weak when it comes to computers and math because of just how weak he is. Being an interested lay person should be enough to see right through the blahblahblah.

Look at this waffling:

>Because computational methods do scale, the economic cyberneticists enthused that maybe the principal question for economic reform (who should control the command economy and how?) might be resolved without either the price of politics of the politics of price. It might, the cyberneticists reasoned, be solved with computers.

This looks a bit strange because of a typo: "either the price of politics or the politics of price". So, with the typo fixed, let's read it again. Do you feel you know more now? "Because computational methods do scale…" Whether some method scales well or not certainly depends on the method. You can't say something scales well just because some small-scale version happens to work on a computer. Who writes like that? Somebody who doesn't know what he is talking about. It looks like the entire book is like that. Do you want more waffleshit quotes?

No.1478750

>>1477917

Is it just me or is the first bit of this book really simple? im on 30 right now and the book is explaining highschool tier feedback loops to me.

No.1478764

>>1478734

He needed to reach his word count and it was one day before deadline, no bully.

No.1478772

>>1478750

I'm on a stone-age connection and didn't download that, but I did read a book on cybernetics by Lange. So if that is the same, I can tell you that it is really dull and simplistic, and it just tells you about the Pareto criterion and that if you are risk-averse and don't know about probabilities of different scenarios, you should choose based on performance in the worst-case scenario.

No.1478782

>>1478772

So that entire 200 page book doesnt really delve into math or anything? Its just 200 pages of introductory stuff to how feedback loops work and how you can use to to approximate optimality?

No.1478787

>>1478734

I only skimmed parts of the book myself, but I thought that it might offer helpful insights as to what they did wrong, and future projects should avoid.

No.1478821

>>1478787

It is written by a liberal guy who cannot think mathematically. He talks about linear programming, but then fails to give a proper example of it. He is only talking about word games, like how translators of American thinkers fiddled with specific terms to avoid being accused of being full of capitalist ideology and stuff like that, and how different bureaucrats dissed each other.

Here, have more waffleshit:

>Unlike market behavior, any deviations from the plan could send culpable ripple effects down or up the chain…

Different producers are dependent on each other in real life, independence and responsibility for you own success is a capitalist legal fiction.

>Kharkevich’s article is remembered among some technologists today not for proposing the ESS but for formulating what became known as Kharkevich’s law. This law holds that the quantity of information in a country grows proportionally to the square of the industrial potential of the country (N^2 ). The original formulation of his observation in the article is perhaps less elegant than information technologists might remember: “Given a large number of factories, the number of paired links between them is approximately equal to half of the square of the number of factories.” The law, in effect, prophesies a power law connection at the macro level between an industrial society and an information society.

I thought a power law is a relation that is independent of size? I don't know if the original article is like that or whether the translation is screwed, but this law just seems to describe the number of different ways of making a pair when you have N things: N*(N-1)/2

>These sibling laws (Moore’s 2^N and Kharkevich’s N^2 ) diverge interestingly in complex systems (when N is larger than 4). They also backlight their micro and macro focuses—Moore on microscopic industrial production and Kharkevich on informational industrial society. The result is different framings of the national network as a sort of central processor.

I'm pretty sure that the 2^N and N^2 already diverge in case of N = 1, mate. Waffle, waffle, waffle. It causes me physical pain when people write like that.

On Viktor Glushkov:

>His intense persistence of mind rendered possible his mathematical achievements, and his vision was shortsighted since youth due to his voracious reading habits. It is not known whether this contributed to his protracted struggle with a fatal brain tumor.

Can you get brain tumors from thinking too much?! Well, I guess if that's a problem, it's one the author of this book doesn't need to worry about.

>The hidden networks governing the Soviet state were far too complex and heterarchical to have had any single cause. (Most multiactor networks involve complexities that are impossible to express in linear form.)

Eureka, MULTIACTOR NETWORKS, you guys! Today I learned that the social networks and relationships that formed USSR society had more than one person in it!

No.1478953

>>1477917

So appearantly this introductory book is far too simple.

What else is interesting?

No.1479201

No.1480037

So it I see it correctly, one first has to learn Russian, to study anything worthwhile regarding Cybernetics?

>where to learn russian

No.1480078

>>1480037

I think the point of this thread is to have google translate it with their new translator while rusfriends help us with edge cases.

OP needs to post though.

No.1480241

>>1480078

You can find them too, just go into the link that I posted in the OP, look down into his bibliography, and start digging.

Finally found something in Russian on one of the researchers mentioned, Liapunov

http://www.nsc.ru/win/sbras/dates/Lyap/lyap1.html

It mentions that his main work is "Теоретические проблемы кибернетики", or "Theoretical Problems Of Cybernetics"

Looking for the book, I did find this pdf:

http://elib.ict.nsc.ru/jspui/bitstream/ICT/1154/1/Zhuravlev2.pdf

No.1480275

File: 4d0767df5f8edd5⋯.pdf (3.9 MB, 1148x813, 1148:813, Pioneers Of Soviet Computi….pdf)

Here's a full-length book on the topic in English, no translation required.

No.1480537

>>1479201

OK, this is good shit!

No.1480576

File: ffbc550c8549d90⋯.pdf (97.02 KB, 1148x813, 1148:813, Upravleniye Nauchno-Tekhni….pdf)

Management With Scientific-Technical Progress

This is an article actually written by the man Viktor Glushkov himself, the guy most often mentioned in conjunction with "Soviet Cybernetics".

Download pdf and translate it. If there's a problem, just post the original phrase in Russian here.

No.1480739

File: acf83691d656ac1⋯.jpg (16.73 KB, 615x410, 3:2, robot-social-Robots-turn-h….jpg)

>>1477348

What was the soviet stance and your stance on robowaifus? This will determine if I help you or not

No.1480867

>>1480739

Does it matter? Robowaifus will presumably not be banned in the instance of anarchy. I don't know if anyone in the USSR ever considered it.

If there were Russian hikikimori though, they probably would've provided state-appointed wives to get them back to work. From that, we can extrapolate the possibility of a Soviet robowaifu project.

No.1481016

File: 6be62b77ec21d61⋯.jpg (256.44 KB, 585x707, 585:707, 6be62b77ec21d612973162dbd4….jpg)

Heya, I guess I posted with you in a thread a few days ago.

I honestly think that in the next cycle of leftist revolutions and governments, this "decentralized plan" by way of iterations in a real-time computer network will inevitably be attempted by at least one nation. It has the potential to be the X factor on making socialism stick for good.

It recently hit me that, before reading up on cybernetics and AI, it might be better to start by reading up on how the socialist economies did come up with their plans. The amount of data involved, the time and manpower it took, the ability to change data on the fly or not, and of course, all the practical details, because seriously, how the fuck do you even start planning out the economy of a fucking continent? I'll start making a list for this material. I suppose that, unsurprisingly, the juicy stuff is in Vodka, but the material in English should be more voluminous than the one about cybernetics.

Incidentally, there already exists something akin to this "decentralized plan" we're dreaming off. Electrical grids are monitored in terms of flow of power between a number of nodes, some generating electricity, most of them consuming. It's like a very simplified version of what we have in mind, but it's a standard technology used the world over for decades. Some key terms for googling are "power-flow study" and "one-line diagrams".

>>1480241

I don't think there should be much problem finding material in English on Lyapunov. His work was very, very important for control systems, to the point of being basic teaching material in the West even during the Cold War.

No.1481098

File: 8bcf8efa1146285⋯.png (329.04 KB, 540x360, 3:2, make america green again.png)

>>1481016

Was waiting for you to show up! Really excited to see what you have on hand!

>Some key terms for googling are "power-flow study" and "one-line diagrams".

>His work was very, very important for control systems, to the point of being basic teaching material in the West even during the Cold War.

So I can look up the names of his books in English?

> it might be better to start by reading up on how the socialist economies did come up with their plans.

IIRC, they used something called "material balances".

> in the next cycle of leftist revolutions and governments

With climate change putting a hard cap on how long humanity can survive with capitalism, we need to do this now.

No.1481445

Paul Cockshott is a computer scientist at the university of Glasgow, one of his primary research topics is cybernetically planned economy.

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/%7Ewpc/reports/index.html#books

No.1481466

>>1481445

Decent book, already read it. He has considerable ideological baggage, spending a not-insignificant portion of the book trying to rehabilitate the USSR as truly socialist without even knowing the proper definition of the word (an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production)

His essay "Calculation In Natura: From Neurath To Kantorovich" has the relevant details of rationally planning an economy via computers, without the baggage. The first 6 pages are milquetoast and irrelevant (talking about the death of socialism in the West), but the remainder of the 41 are nothing short of epic. They truly convinced me that computerized planning is the way forward for socialists.

No.1481505

What would be the goal in research of cybernetics, aside from of course having a proposal? I think it is the case that proposals essentially already exist, though obviously the real infrastructure and application likely wouldn't even be considered under current capitalist conditions.

Is there any value in creating simulations in order to indicate the way the system could work? At least as an experiment or proof of concept that might drum up attention among lay people, allowing them to not only conceptualize, but actually see the system in action?

No.1481551

File: 11869d8083239b3⋯.pdf (256.84 KB, 540x360, 3:2, Calculation In Natura - Fr….pdf)

>>1481505

Scroll down to Pg 25 to see example 2, Cockshott gives a good example of how this planning system works mathematically.

The main reason why I'm so interested in Soviet cybernetics specifically is the peripheral aspect of the whole thing - the algorithm for a program is relatively easy to develop (it's just linear optimization of input-output tables), the questions are "how do we get there from raw info", "how do firms input this info efficiently", etc.

I want to know what they thought were relevant issues with regard to the actual implementation, in short.

No.1481951

>>1481551

The "internet of things" should be useful in the peripheral aspect so we should be researching that area too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things

No.1481952

>>1481949

The internet of things is a buzzword. All those toasters and fridges connected to the internet is not going to give us usefull information, its only going to give privacy issues.

No.1481960

>>1481952

"The Internet of things (IoT) is the inter-networking of physical devices, vehicles (also referred to as "connected devices" and "smart devices"), buildings, and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data."

I think it is perfectly useful, and of course security might be the hardest part.

No.1481968

>>1481960

Its litterally just linking shit to the internet. The word itself is a buzzword, just like synergy.

Everything has to be "smart" but 90% of the shit they make smart will not produce any useful data and are just gimmicky. It will die down eventually. Being able to turn on your toaster downstairs with your phone is the definition of gimmicky.

No doubt that some things, like cars, can help in traffic control, but all of industry is already connected to the internet. Consumer electronics are not going to give a socialist state any useful information regarding industrial logistics and demand.

No.1481971

>>1481968

It would help tuning up the models of society in real time having the most accurate information on the status ( position and any parameter) of everything.

No.1481981

>>1481971

Do you have any idea how much computing power that would take?

Also what the fuck is the use of tracking where every fridge, toaster or phone is? We want economic planning, not fucking NSA cranked up to 11. It has no benefit to the planning of the economy and the cost to create such a massive model of society would be immense.

No.1481987

>>1481981

We need NSA cranked up to 11 In The Service of Communism.

No.1481990

>>1481987

Very funny, stalin.

No.1481993

>>1481990

Cyber Marxism-Leninism will win :P

No.1482339

>>1481981

>where they are

You're right, that could probably be discerned more generally by a kind of labor token price mechanism or something similar, like has been stated before. Though I already forgot what the paper said about that, because prices don't rise in a vacuum. Somebody raises the price, and if there is no profit to be had why raise it to check if there is still a demand for it? It seems like it would just stay at it's fixed price of cost and run out.

But either way, I think something can be devised to discern what people want in a region at the point of distribution. Even if it were as simple as having a sort of request system for anybody who couldn't find what they wanted at a store. That is useful data about demand.

But ultimately it seems like having more information is almost always good for planning. You can definitely be inefficient about how you are collecting information, since there is cost to it, but we already do collect a shitload of information that just happens to be isolated by different companies for their use.

No.1482566

File: 5bac4c371be218c⋯.png (106.66 KB, 1530x863, 1530:863, AASSTV1.png)

My autistic screeching, tell me watch you think tovarishes.

No.1482590

>>1481993

>:P

fuck off

No.1482699

>>1482566 checked

I don't understand it

No.1482704

No.1482739

>>1477348

If you're interested on the Western version of cybernetics, Operations Research is what you have to look for. Although resource planning in particular is not the main focus of research, actually more complex results were found, such as ways to solve non-linear systems.

No.1483117

>>1481016

>decentralized plan

>Electrical grids

try again

>Electrical grids are monitored in terms of flow of power between a number of nodes, some generating electricity, most of them consuming.

wew, you mean like it was monitored already in the fifties?

Soviets were monitoring reactive power coefficient on the level of the whole country

periodic reduction of this coefficient was one of the rare instances of planning actually working

electric power industry was one of the first to be significantly automated

mechanic relay systems did the job even before your "wew internet dude, new age!" mentality

personnel sits on their ass most of the time, and only when relay defense goes off they identify and fix the problem

>>1481551

>it's just linear optimization of input-output tables

great, you answered question of how to produce shit

but the real question is what to produce and what should be the structure of the end product

it is in society's interest to keep prices of goods as close as possible to their values

it is in enterprise's interest to keep prices of its goods as far away from their values as possible

No.1483419

>>1483117

>it is in society's interest to keep prices of goods as close as possible to their values

>it is in enterprise's interest to keep prices of its goods as far away from their values as possible

>enterprise's interest

You are projecting capitalist relations. If short-term some products are under-supplied relative to demand when priced according to labor costs, the price is increased (consider that people have similar income, so this roughly does ration according to need), but this increase doesn't land in the pockets of the people in the unit producing that thing. It doesn't land in the pockets of anybody.

No.1483509

File: 414fd9203606211⋯.gif (1017.8 KB, 325x203, 325:203, you will never know unless….gif)

>>1481098

>So I can look up the names of his books in English?

AFAIK he wrote no books, only academic articles, and extremely technical ones at that. But you could literally fill libraries with literature that teaches or expands upon his discoveries. I think the theories that would most concern our magical decentralized plan would be the functions and the stability theories that have his name. It's quite fascinating stuff, rendering real-life systems into numbers then checking if they're stable or will collapse given X time and how you might fix that and whatnot. Mind you, Lyapunov's material is not for novices, it's the sort of thing they start teaching midway through engineering degrees. And I figure that if someone does manage to get a prototype for the decentralized plan going, Lyapunov and other control systems material wouldn't be needed anytime soon, because there would be a lot of work in software design, modelling, data acquisition etc. that needs to come first, even if an existing power-flow study software was used as a basis.

>"material balances"

Hmm, apparently it's effectively what our algorithm would do: reduce all commodities to numbers (usually weight), and then measure its flow. I like that word. It's possible those early planners were using a cruder version of what we call control systems now. Cruder in method, but on an absurdly large scale.

>With climate change putting a hard cap on how long humanity can survive with capitalism, we need to do this now.

Well shit. Look man, I know it's great we're brainstorming and sharing very interesting texts and all, but this is a very long-term project for a real-life group/task force/superhero squadron, working full time, and more importantly, with a lot of academic background. Maybe one of us will manage to kickstart a pre-pre-pre-alpha version as a postgrad project, God willing. Maybe a hundred years from now, a curious soul begins to research the history of MARX Mx.II the AI that allowed mankind to end poverty despite still having scarcity, and he will find traces of a Chinese cartoon board where plucky dreamers dared dream of a better future long before it became reality.

No.1483524

File: 475a70073103e20⋯.jpg (17.75 KB, 600x342, 100:57, ea07_periodic_genius.jpg)

>>1482566

So we basically run simulations of Bolshevik Parties, until we reach the optmized Party?

Fucking brilliant. Someone give this man a Stalin Lenin Prize.

No.1483527

>>1483117

You have shitposted before in other cybernetics threads, haven't you? Your style feels really familiar.

No.1483533

>>1483509

I will try my best if I ever make it to university.

No.1484773

File: 11869d8083239b3⋯.pdf (256.84 KB, 600x342, 100:57, 11869d8083239b3cad10bc9c85….pdf)

File: 33ccc7a6fa62b5a⋯.jpg (302.83 KB, 800x800, 1:1, 33ccc7a6fa62b5ad8445101baf….jpg)

Bump

Are you guys doing your homeworks? I'm trying to create a very small program in Perl with this, page 25 example 1:

No.1486082

>>1484773

this looks fun

No.1486926

I have finished the book by Benjamin Peters and can now tell you that it is indeed shit all the way to the end. He also promotes the horseshoe model:

>the ruinous rise of socialism (whether Soviet, German national, or other form)

That's not to say that one should avoid all conservative or liberal writers (Neumann was a conservative, but his insights are so general that they are useful in general), I just want to say that this book is the perfect turd. It really has nothing going for it.

I'll check out Mikhail Botvinnik next, USSR chess guy that researched computer chess and apparently found something in that for a more general purpose, including economic planning.

And BUMP.

No.1487018

>>1481952

>fridges connected to the internet is not going to give us usefull information

No.1488175

File: 448f0cf24b738e2⋯.jpg (49.21 KB, 640x480, 4:3, C0Lpio4WEAAF586.jpg)

No.1488231

File: bb73d50fb4af2f0⋯.jpg (12.1 KB, 250x263, 250:263, lenin-photo19.jpg)

>>1484773

God damn it, so much stuff to read it's ridiculous, even without this cybernetics binge now.

Some guy in another forum mentioned he discovered a Soviet mathematician with interesting ideas about rendering processes into mathematical models. I misplaced his name and will have to ask again tho. Maybe it's someone we already mentioned here, maybe not.

Oh, and it seems no one posted these, but here are a couple of great links.

http://bookzz.org/ for a shitload of pirated books

http://sci-hub.cc/ so you can pirate virtually any academic paper

No.1488243

So out of all this shit, which book would you recommend to a second year CS student who already knows whats in this paper

>>1477917

??

No.1488254

>>1488243

Suicide.

No.1488257

>>1488254

Fuck off cunt

No.1488303

>>1488257

Nigga this is "Conjure the level of data the Soviet Union had for the sake of wanking off in a 🍀🍀🍀study group🍀🍀🍀" not ????

Weasels have already shit all over this project by rejecting real life applications and opting for unusable "testing". A project like this can only exist in the real wold with real applications, made possible by real data from a real, willing, able, body which requires our help.

There was potential at the start when people were thinking big but it is now a mockery of all the previous ideas. People did their best to think as peabrained as possible and shit all over this as much as they could as early as they could and instead opted to go back to shuffling papers at the J. Edgar Hoover building making greentext frogthreads. What I'm trying to say is, for example, automating Kurdistan is far more likely than creating a system based off the internet of things which shovels hamburgers in your mouth. And there is a reason that has happened. One benefits a poor state in the ME, another is prime data. Wake the fuck up.

No.1488321

>>1488303

Jesus christ, take a fucking chillpill, dickhead. I just asked what, out of all the large papers and pdf's posted here, are most appropriate for my level of understanding. Don't project your anger against "muh internet of things" faggots onto me. I just asked for a fucking recommendation, if you can't even handle that you should consider killing yourself.

No.1488340

>>1488321

Wasn't trying to bully fam, was just making clear how much people hate this project.

No.1488343

>>1488340

So why would you direct that anger at me? Do you expect me, a fucking scrub who just manager to program a silly half-broken app together, to "just go to kurdistan and automate everything" or "just go to kurdistan and do big data". I haven't even learned the basics of fucking program structure because my school is retarded. Thats why I asked for a recommendation on this topic because it is interesting and I want to learn what smart people wrote about it, and how they might have done it.

No.1488389

>>1488343

Because I am drunk and angery, angery at everyone who doubts us in the thread.

Saturday night leftypol fever bitch!

No.1488453

File: 900e60c96d614e9⋯.jpg (80.78 KB, 950x960, 95:96, homer jubilant russian wor….jpg)

People please don't fight, it's highly unoptmizing. Also you know what they say about arguing with drunkards.

>>1488243

Honestly man, we're all learning as we go along too, reading a lot of shit before we can even put it all in a proper order – that is, even if we can read it all, because this is some arcane shit. So I can't say for sure what's the best introduction yet, but my best guess would be >>1481551

No.1488468

>>1488389

Fuck yeah dude I'm drunk too

No.1489209

File: 5e9753fc9a7f616⋯.jpg (289.43 KB, 1280x1792, 5:7, feets37.jpg)

>>1483419

>It doesn't land in the pockets of anybody

on the balance sheet of enterprise this increase in price in accordance to the level of demand will result in the profit

so you have two ways

1 center takes those profits from enterprises

2 enterprises pay rent to the state for the use of the MOP, and keep the rest of the profits, reinvesting them as they see fit

Cockshott is not very clear on the issue

his main concern is manipulation of prices around their values and calculation problem

anyway, there's no third way around this

as long as prices fluctuate around values, you have to somehow deal with profits

and as soviet example shows, enterprises very much don't like when the state takes their profits

and they will fight tooth and nail to keep them

>>1486926

>it is indeed shit all the way to the end

his book has some valid points

ARPANET was a centralized effort at its core

Soviet military and ministerial networks were scattered and disorganized

more so, they were incompatible on the hardware and software level

proposals for the shared military-civilian network and standardized unified data transfer protocols were shoved under the desk

this is facts, you can't just ignore them

why ministries were so isolated from one another? why are they often tried to sabotage each other?

only answer I can think of, is that because they had different antagonistic interests

>>1488243

don't bother with the fancy cybernetics

do yourself a favor and read some solid book on operations research and solve all problems in it

also another interesting book by the same author http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=E258CE40E4E969BDA57D9B44A71CC882

No.1489256

>>1488389

>>1488468

No.1489583

>>1489209

>>1488453

Thanks friends

No.1489601

>>1489209

>feets37

Post the rest? :3

No.1489836

Non-slide bump.

No.1489891

>>1488243

Read Towards a New Socialism by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, if you haven't yet.

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/

>>1489209

>as long as prices fluctuate around values, you have to somehow deal with profits

Do you picture the income spent on products as physical bills and coins that go to the shop, and then wander from the shop to the factory and from the factory to the state? Same recommendation for you as above.

No.1490268

Here is one simple example of linear programming in python

http://www.vision.ime.usp.br/~igor/articles/optimization-linprog.html

I would suggest using Jupyter Notebook for python, you can even use it interactively online

https://try.jupyter.org/

just create a new python notebook, paste code inside and play with numbers

No.1490657

>>1478485

The west had analog computers as well. Britain had a simple economic model made visible with water flows called the MONIAC, Monetary National Income Analogue Computer. It was more of a didactic gadget than a device for planning.

No.1492181

Bump

No.1492489

Bumpx2

No.1493472

So I've started reading Botvinnik's chess program book ("Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning" which is the English translation of "An Algorithm for Chess") and got an idea useful in designing a program for chess and other board games, and I don't even play chess myself. The hubris, eh? But it's a simple and general idea, that I believe applies to economic planning as well: The medium-run goal of the program shouldn't just be to get nearer to what the specified end goal is, but it should aim towards creating situations it can comprehend well. Indeed I believe this is such a simple idea that many other people must have had it and I wonder whether there is a specific word for it.

No.1495445

So how are we going to get the data to model this?

No.1496614

>>1495445

Good question.

No.1496738

>>1495445

Depends on what exactly you want to test. best thing I can test is small web app, not worldwide economic simulation.

No.1497064

File: 48090111065607a⋯.jpg (73.94 KB, 600x600, 1:1, 1348010282557.jpg)

>>1489209

Holy fuck I cant even solve the problem with calculating the maximised surface of the square in the first problem set.

Am I retarded? How can you calculate the derivative? The function for the surface is

>S = a*b

and this is also true for the total length of sides L

>L = 2(a+b)

But if you substitute, say, a in function for S for

>a = 1/2*L - b

Then you get

>S = (1/2*L - b )*b

>S = -b^2 + 1/2*L*b

No.1497092

>>1497064

>Am I retarded?

I am. Holy shit.

No.1497793

>>1493472

Finished the book. Despite what the introduction promises, it really does not go beyond being about chess programming, there is a vague claim that it does and some very vague words, but no example. Not recommended.

No.1499705

>>1489209

Thanks these books look interesting

No.1499824

>>1496738

Let's start small then. How about simulating the national economy of Nauru? Climate change will make it cease to exist, further simpifying the simulation.

No.1500221

>>1497064

>Am I retarded

No, that's just maths for you. At first you don't get it and it seems completely impossible, and then at some point it starts making sense and it's easy as pie.

I'm not sure, but I think you're on the right track. Remember that L is a constant, even if it's not a defined value, so you can work with it. So:

>S'=1/2*L-2b=1/4*L-b

What you can see is that S'=0 when b=1/4L. S' is a linear function, and a falling one, so you know that S will be rising in value until b=1/4L and then start falling again, which means that S has its highest value when b=1/4L. So:

>b=1/4L

>L=2(a+b)=2(a+1/4L)=2a+1/2L

>2a=L-1/2L=1/2L

>a=1/4L

hence

>a=b

So the square has the highest surface when the length and width are equal

No.1500238

>>1500221

To make the middle part more clear:

>b=1/4*L

>L=2(a+b)=2(a+1/4*L)=2*a+1/2*L

>2a=L-1/2*L=1/2*L

>a=1/4*L

No.1500271

>>1500221

Yea someone explained to me that L was a constant. Its been 2 and a half years since I actually used derivatives to I forgot you can do that.

No.1501446

>>1499824

>Climate change will make it cease to exist, further simpifying the simulation.

Thank god, without the need of calculating weather we need one supercomputer less to accomplish this simple task!

No.1504479

Nice and easy bump.

No.1506355

File: 674316555f33c32⋯.png (158.84 KB, 1024x768, 4:3, OGAS.png)

Bump.

No.1508243

Bump

No.1508638

>>1477370

haha I love the cold war propaganda tone of that article

No.1508800

Read some essays by Stafford Beer. These were good for getting hyped about cybernetics (Beer must have been amazing at motivating people in person), but I didn't learn a damn thing about it. Perhaps it's better to just read up on logistics and voting theory / game theory to get an idea how to get not too dishonest data from self-interested humans for the logistics.

No.1509085

File: 5dcc45964146be9⋯.jpg (67.78 KB, 500x339, 500:339, cyb.jpg)

>>1508800

Beer is the shit. Project Cybersyn, yo. Fuckin' Pinochet crashed that shit. It was gonna crack too. I think if Allende had gotten a chance to launch it, it would have triggered mass revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

No.1509618

File: b4dec8511cdd587⋯.png (49.42 KB, 672x760, 84:95, b4dec8511cdd587bb9004a07c3….png)

>>1509085

>the closest the world ever got to democratic socialism and computer-aided planning

>of course both had to be ruined by an Porky ball-licker

We truly live in the worst timeline.

No.1509783

>>1509618

Is in our hands to make it real comrade.

No.1512125

>>1509783

problem is that nobody here have a clue what we need to create.

Should we create some (almost) game AI which would try to create some town/country/commune/…? Or some protocol for consumer-producer communication, maybe even with self-destructive currency? I don't know…

No.1513001

Where could an aspiring anon go to study this subject in more detail? Are there any universities still doing research into cybernetics?

No.1513289

>>1513001

The meaning of "cybernetics" is different here and now than it was then and there. Currently, it's just anything that involves hi-tech crap, but originally it meant something like studying processes and things as systems, and how they could be interfaced and controlled. The key thing that has been (possibly) lost here is that these systems used to include virtually any kinda of systems instead of just electronic gizmos, including biological, psychological etc. and more importantly for us, economical systems. (Of course, the brunt of the operational aspects, the "under the hood" parts, always was STEM, but its applications on fields other than STEM are what has decreased.)

Of course, I can't tell for sure if there are or not any universities out in this big wide world that still teach this broader cybernetics. But I can tell you that, "mainstream-education-wise", the remit of old cybernetics has been kind of parcelled between various STEM disciplines (which again demonstrates the putative abandonment of biological, economical etc. areas).

Control systems is an important field within electrical and automation engineerings, among similar courses. Some places have the more specialized course of control engineering and, of course, just plain cybernetics. All of these courses are commonly found. I imagine that the amount of non-STEM applications involved varies a lot by university, and there might be plenty of programmes that teach oldskool cybernetics, but the trick would be finding those from amongst the "mainstream" ones. I suppose you'd have to ask in specialized communities of enthusiasts, engineers and such about which places might have the programme you're looking for.

No.1513946

>>1478668

So is there going to be anything done about this? Who would be interested in starting something?

No.1514553

>>1513946

>Who would be interested in starting something?

lot's of us are, but there needs to be a few ideas what exactly is "something"

No.1514815

>>1512125

>some protocol for consumer-producer communication, maybe even with self-destructive currency?

Something like that. And before doing that, start with reading about voting-system research and auctions to get inspiration for criteria or directly copy them.

No.1514914

File: 7f807d848dac31c⋯.jpg (100.79 KB, 600x840, 5:7, tumblr_lh8x3rTN2J1qz6f9yo1….jpg)

>>1513946

>>1514553

>>1512125

I don't want to be a wet towel, but let me point to my 3rd paragraph here: >>1483509

Even just a proof of concept would be a massive undertaking, not the sort of thing started by a group of ancoms who met on the internet. This AI/network/algorithm/Deus Ex Machina might one day bless mankind with unerring economic guidance, but I'm afraid its genesis won't be at our dear /leftypol/. Altho if you want to start a group so we can keep sharing information, I'm all for it. Or maybe we could have periodic threads here on /leftypol/? Once every 2 weeks or something?

For now, I'd say inform yourself and read as much on the topic as possible, and seek academic guidance on the topic. Not becoming a postgrad student or anything, but just talking to professors and their students about further reading and whatnot.

But of course, if you want to learn programming and start simulating a town or something, don't let me stop you. You'll learn a lot with the experience. In fact, any projects that deal with the many topics of our super-algorithm (flow study, programming in general, power grid diagrams, simulations, control systems, computer networks, software design etc.) is the sort of thing that makes for a cultured individual.

Oh yeah, was about to post when I remembered something that would be extremely valuable: translations from Russian, or acting as an interpreter between us and Russian academics. Like mentioned before, the vast majority of the material on Soviet cybernetics hasn't been translated yet, with >>1479201 being a perfect example. Of course, translating books and articles is no simple task either, but it's more doable by humble anons on the internet.

And to finish things up, some more links:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R0700z1.html

http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/how-the-computer-got-its-revenge-on-the-soviet-union

There was at least one American periodical of Soviet cybernetics: Soviet Cybernetics Review. Also another general periodical called Joint Publications Research Service Reports occasionally had articles on the topic. Unfortunately, both of them are behind paywalls. Fucking Porky standing in the way of muh knowledge REEEEEEE An interesting sidenote is that the idea of a Soviet economy-optimizing national computer network had the CIA shitting its pants in the 60s.

No.1514934

>>1514914

We should start translating all those articles by date and putting them somewhere all together classified the best we can. A collective dropbox or something.

No.1515110

File: b4fd6d45d129d90⋯.jpg (33.59 KB, 600x338, 300:169, your brain on reformism.jpg)

>>1488175

Where is this from? I'm very interested.

>>1509085

>>1509618

The Soviet GOSPLAN already did computer-assisted economic planning in the 60s and 70s, but due to the limited power of the processors that were then available it could only calculate a few thousand key products of the economy. I imagine the Chilean Cybersyn would've fared even worse, only improving efficiency in some few sectors of the economy, and certainly not "triggering mass revolution". See Elab. 2.1 (pp.7-8) of: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/quito.pdf (another great text by Cockshott and Cottrell, elaborating on the thesis of socialism based on computerized in-natura calculation)

All in all, the mistake of Allende and the Chilean socialists back then, was their naive trust in the bourgeois political system and their unwillingness to let the proles rise in arms. They pretty much demonstrated that the pretensions of a "democratic way to socialism" are a meme and forever will be. The correct line was held by the MIR all along; by '73 it reached thousands of militants in size, led the seizure of farms and factories all over the country (much to the dismay of the reformists), and managed to build a primitive military structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Left_Movement_(Chile)

No.1515185

>>1488231

>Some guy in another forum mentioned he discovered a Soviet mathematician with interesting ideas about rendering processes into mathematical models. I misplaced his name and will have to ask again tho. Maybe it's someone we already mentioned here, maybe not.

Leonid Kantorovich?

No.1515190

File: ffc1154cf497095⋯.jpg (184.09 KB, 640x629, 640:629, ffc1154cf497095f55d28887af….jpg)

>>1514934

Speaking from experience, a good translation is more time-consuming and tiring than you think. It's the sort of freelance work that ends up being better remunerated than most people imagine. We would be extremely lucky if we found a Russian translator willing to do it for free.

>>1515110

As I understand it, the GOSPLAN computer assistance was effectively just a souped-up calculator, not an actual simulator like what we're talking here. My notion is that the apparatchiks limited the use of computers for the same reason they pulled the plug on cybernetics as a whole: they would lose power.

Also

>mfw he could have proclaimed socialist Chile 3 months earlier thanks to the Tanquetazo, but still took the high road

No.1515237

>>1514914

>ancoms

Hey now, not all of us are retarded.

No.1517679

>>1514553

At least a chat (IRC or Discord) or a periodic thread on the topic?

No.1517705

>>1517679

let's go with periodic thread. let's make it… every even week's saturday? IRC/discord is circlejerk.

No.1517726

>>1517679

Correction: wanted to say cyclical thread, like the /rojava/ one.

No.1517799

>>1514815

The allocation system should react in a monotonic way to inputs. So, with a single-winner voting system, comparing two situations that are only different in that in the second situation some thing X is ranked higher on some ballots, in the second situation the winning probability of X shouldn't be lower (the criterion is called mono-raise in voting system analysis).

Likewise, in a system for allocating multiple resources to people who bid on it, comparing two situations that are only different in that in the second situation one actor bids higher on some item X, in the second situation the probability of that actor obtaining X shouldn't be lower. Now, where does the actor got that extra "money" to bid more in the second situation? If the allocation procedure uses some point system that has no usage outside of it, and no points are saved up for later usage inside of it, it's just all used up and when the system is used again at a later date everybody gets a new endowment of points for bidding, that means the actor got these points by reducing their other bids. We can split this criterion into two variants: One where the other bids by the actor are shrunk proportionally by some factor that frees up points for increasing that one bid compared to the first situation, and a stronger more general criterion where the other bids by the actor are just any combination of same or lower amounts as in the first situation to free up some points for that one higher bid.

Further variations are possible: instead of a bid for one unit of a thing, it can be a bid for multiple units of the same thing, and the guarantee the criterion asks for is that the higher bid doesn't result in getting less.

No.1517950

Continuing from >>1517799:

Another import from voting system analysis is clones. Clones are similar candidates. A voting system is robust with respect to clones if shrinking or increasing the size of a clone set has no effect on whether the winner comes from the clone set or not; and furthermore, if the winner is outside the clone set, it shouldn't change either. How to properly define clones, then?

For rating ballots, clones can be defined as candidates lumped together in the same rating on every ballot: So, if we do a poll on the best video game ever, and everybody who rates Virtua Street Kombat at three stars also rates Mortal Samurai Fight at three, and everybody who rates VSK at four stars also rates MSF at four and so on, we call these rating clones. Average ratings is robust with respect to rating clones. This is also true for median ratings. For ranked ballots, clones are defined as sets of candidates that are always ranked together without another candidate between them. This is quite different from rating clones in that subsets of clone sets are not necessarily clone sets themselves.

Both variants leave something to be desired in that the clone definition is so narrow that you are unlikely to encounter them in the wild (adding a single ballot not following the pattern destroys these clones), but it's a starting point. Rating methods that aren't even robust with respect to rating clones should be avoided and likewise with ranking methods.

Inspired by this for our analysis of systems handling allocation requests, let's call ratio clones things that are requested in fixed proportions. So, suppose Alice wants 30 X and 20 Y and Bob wants 12 X and 8 Y and everybody else wants these two things in this 3 : 2 ratio, then X and Y are a ratio clone set. A second situation that is only different in that now X and Y are only available in a package called Z in the aforementioned ratio, with people making their requests as before, should leave the allocation basically unaffected.

No.1519463

cont. from >>1517950

The participation criterion states that adding ballots shouldn't make the results worse from the point of view of what is stated on the ballots. So, if your ranking is A>B>C>D, then adding your ballot to the pile shouldn't change the result from B to C , for instance. I doubt it's a good idea to insist on it, as it is a very restrictive criterion. Many voting methods, like instant-runoff voting and all Condorcet methods, fail this criterion.

Median ratings fails here as well, and that's the method I would like to see for councils determining prices and quantities (and for juries determining penalties). I'm particularly partial towards a version of this with deliberation. Instead of instantly setting the median, there would be two voting rounds. In the first round, people are asked to specify an upper and lower limit (you can put in the same value twice if you are already sure), then the upper limit is set by deleting the highest quarter (rounded down) of stated values and taking the highest one from the remaining ones, and likewise the lower limit is set by deleting the lowest quarter (rounded down) of stated values and taking the lowest from the remaining ones. The final value has to be within these limits. There is a discussion, and then there is a median vote for what the value is going to be.

Giving a median rating to a single thing doesn't fail participation, but when rating several things it can happen that in the aggregate X is rated higher than Y, you add some ballots also rating X higher than Y, and the aggregate changes so that now Y is rated higher than X. This problem can arise when the resolution of the ballots is higher than three grades.

No.1519594

What if we create a website? And make it a virtual political party with communist cybernetics as it's constitution?

We could create and manage it from here in the /leftypol/ cyclical threads.

No.1521662

>>1519463

>Giving a median rating to a single thing doesn't fail participation, but when rating several things it can happen that in the aggregate X is rated higher than Y, you add some ballots also rating X higher than Y, and the aggregate changes so that now Y is rated higher than X. This problem can arise when the resolution of the ballots is higher than three grades.

Which is why Top-Flop voting got only three grades.

No.1521762

Finally got the name of the Soviet mathematician: Vladimir Arnold. His work seems to be too rarified even for our goals, tho he did study the stability of control systems, as well as something magnificently called catastrophe theory.

>>1517726

>>1519594

I'm against cycling, because old and possibly valuable information gets lost. Look at how much interesting information and links we have in this thread that would eventually be lost. A periodic thread is more straightforward, we can just archive it when it reaches X posts and keep track of the links.

As for a website, dunno, I don't think we have enough material to fill one up.

No.1522294

So, I wrote a little something:

>By Man, For Man

>It's official: capitalism doesn't work anymore. Not only does it continue to push its workers to work harder in a never-ending race to the bottom against machines, a race which only benefits those who own capital in the first place, but in this perpetual rat race, it has begun to consume more of the world than humanity can afford to for the sake of its own survival and it approaches full automation of human labor, which will unfortunately bring starvation and abject poverty to most under capitalism rather than the abundance promised by those who once dreamed of it. An organizational opposition to it and an alternative vision must be articulated, now or never.

>By gradually expanding itself through struggle and commerce, an international confederation of worker-run unions, mutual aid societies, and workers' cooperatives could replace capitalism and implement a computerized system of democratically planning the economy between worker owned firms and consumers according to what people actually need, but where does one even begin?

>Bitcoin's blockchain system [1][2] provides an extremely democratic and decentralized basis for storing and organizing data for a people's direct planning of the economy, but it must be modified, for Bitcoin still shares the shortcoming common to all market economies (operation according to the Law Of Value, which concludes that capital expands for capital's sake, more value-producing mass begets more demand for labor and more use of scarce resources).

(continued)

No.1522295

>>1522294

>Start off with an agglomeration of 3 blockchain systems - one for storing past logs of what was produced and to where it goes, one for verifications that assets were delivered to their immediate next destination according to the plan, and one for currency compensation logs (as while most goods, under an automated system of production for use, would have no price at all, there will always be some scarce goods - it is thus necessary to reward more greatly that work which is in demand by the system itself to determine who can then buy the most expensive products, even if most people do get a certain allowance of currency for luxury goods).

>As for the actual interface, it is to be programmed in Javascript and rely upon a system of verification of possession - that is, that a particular individual within the system has an asset and that who they got it from can verify that they gave it to them. This is for the recieving side of assets. For the sending side, rely upon a stock control method as described by the Socialist Party Of Great Britain in their article "Beyond Capitalism" [3] - "Decentralized production entails a self-regulating system of stock control. Stocks of goods held at distribution points would be monitored, their rate of depletion providing vital information about the future demand for such goods, information which will be conveyed to the units producing these goods. The units would in turn draw upon the relevant factors of production and the depletion of these would activate yet other production units further back along the production chain. There would thus be a marked degree of automacity in the way the system operated." (Paragraph 25) This system is ideal for blockchain systems of information storage, as one transaction (that is, a good being taken from the stock) can easily be transmitted from a center of distribution to all centers of production and all sites of the decentralized planning network of computers.

>As for more removed problems, namely that of deciding which production process to use to make a good where there are several options, an addition of Paul Cockshott's calculating mechanism outlined in "Calculation In Natura: From Neurath To Kantorovich" [4]could easily be integrated into the whole scheme of things - it would read the first blockchain system's logs of what was produced, read the second blockchain system's logs of what is in demand, and use the latter to determine what is still available to be used (by assigning every product a serial identification code, a number for a particular size of screw or a specific type of Mexican mangoes, inputting these numbers and their quantities produced and consumed into a spreadsheet, and then subtracting what was consumed from what was produced) and then performing, based off knowledge input by each firm on its productive processes available, a calculation of what particular resources should be allocated to which particular pieces of capital for processing and transportation, and when. It does this by spitting out relevant numbers to firms, now worker owned and managed for lack of need for a capitalist to plan production.

>What if the planning process, even when optimized to make full use of currently available resources, cannot bring down all the prices of goods to zero by creating a super-abundance of them? Well, once again, the pseudo-monetary currency saves us again. In the event that more than one good cannot be provided in excess and thus both goods will have to have prices, it's trivial for the system to calculate all possible plans which maximize productive capacities in the name of meeting demands and having it use a secondary algorithm to select the one with the least difference in prices. This makes sense because the prices here are objectively determined, mathematically derived from supply and demand (unlike markets - let's be honest, no one really understands how they work in terms of exchange-value determination).

(continued)

No.1522297

>>1522294

>>1522295

>Pay is to be determined by a tertiary algorithm's determination of where bottlenecks lie - that is, it takes the first blockchain system's information of what is produced and how and combines it with the second blockchain system's information on who gets what to determine which human occupations could use extra people in them to increase production. For those, the pay goes up. For fields with an excess of people, the pay goes down. Because everyone gets a certain amount of luxury spending currency anyways as both a buffer and a basic necessity, doing the work most demanded by the system (that which other people haven't already taken) will mean more luxury goods, or those of higher quality. If people really don't want to scrub the sewers, then those who do take on that hard work will be the ones who can buy Bugattis and eat gold-plated caviar.

>By instituting production for use along rationally planned lines and making use of the optimization of resources made possible by modern technology, this system provides an alternative to the long-ailing system of capitalism and makes a utopia of minimal work with high living standards a definite possibility. Not only would it fix the problems originally identified by anarchists and Marxists in the middle of the 19th century, but it could also have environmental health and difficulty of work criteria factored into it, thus eliminating the concept of an externality from economics once and for all. Either humanity implements such a system with utmost immediacy or lets itself be killed by the capitalist monster of its own devise.

>[2] - https://blockchain.info/

So, what do you guys think? It avoids running on the Law Of Value, addresses many relevant problems not typically considered in these discussions, is based off already existing technologies, and is enough of a pseudo-market that normies might be comfortable with it. Plus, it removes any room for accusations of lurking state tyranny by lolbertarians.

No.1522531

>>1522297

Bitcoin is pointless nonsense similar to having a gold standard.

No.1522556

>>1522297

>If people really don't want to scrub the sewers, then those who do take on that hard work will be the ones who can buy Bugattis and eat gold-plated caviar.

I have been mentally constructing such a system in my head, I am fully on board for this.

No.1522559

>>1522531

Have you even read what he wrote? It doesnt say "use bitcoin", it says "use the blockchain technology in bitcoin to ensure lack of fraud and stuff"

No.1522563

>>1522297

Anyway how would one start to even construct such a system? Would we need to create a simulation of factories, demand, resources etc and build a robust scalable system on that? I would be willing to sink lots of free time into this if someone with some more experience than me (ie more than 2 years of practice-focussed CS education) is working on it. I dont think I would be able to design an entire system like that, but if someone is able to do it, I would be willing to chime in on the designing as far as I can and help implementing is.

No.1522982

>>1522559

But Blockchains are very inefficient, at least resource wise, and over time lead to centralisation, since weaker miners can't compete. And more generally, it's a real waste of electricity. One-Computer-One vote might be better, but I', still sceptical, even though it does sound nice at first.

>>1522563

Why would you calculate every part of the economy on one level? Wouldn't it make much more sense to have multiple levels of abstraction, from within a workplace up to inter-national or even inter-continental coordination? Then one only has to work with these "black boxed" of the economy, which are given expectations and resources and give feedback and products? The faster this cycle, the faster the economy can adapt to changes, and I don't really see why a global planning system should care about a local road being built, as long as everything stays within the system.

No.1522996

>>1522982

Well I don't know much about this stuff, which is why I said I would be willing to do codemonkey work if I can watch over the shoulder of someone who is more experienced than me and ask questions/make suggestions

No.1523161

>>1522982

No one wants to mine anything. The block chain is simply a decentralized ledger that cannot be overwritten or edited.

No.1523206

File: f7f139b8d4345ec⋯.png (650.09 KB, 1000x1002, 500:501, f7f139b8d4345ec894f7191ef4….png)

>>1522295

>>As for the actual interface, it is to be programmed in Javascript

>it is to be programmed in Javascript

>shilling for your preferred language in manifesto

I don't see other flaws, but it might be because I'm running very similar line of thought like you, but you are a few books ahead of me.

No.1523352

>>1523161

Yes, and to ensure a certain chronology one needs a certain NP problem that has to be solved, or at least attempted to be solved, by miners in the network.You can't have a blockchain, without any form of mining (Crypto currencies usually use reverse-hashing as the problem that requires a certain time to be solved on average by a nondeterministic algorithm) you don't have a blockchain, and if you do, it's not a blockchain but some other distributed storage system.

No.1523556

No.1523564

Brainlet here. Can anyone explain what this is all about?

It sounds very fancy.

No.1523570

>>1523564

egonimic blanning

with gombutars

No.1523773

>>1522559

It doesn't say "use bitcoin", it says "use the pointless nonsense technology similar to having a gold standard". You are projecting capitalist notions of privacy onto socialism, but production unit 954735498 delivering 10 000 kg of steel to production unit 75498378957983 won't be a private b2b matter. It's like somebody asking you to implement an online voting scheme, and your brain breaks while thinking about how to combine reliability with secrecy of the vote, but the concept you are asked to implement doesn't have any anonymity whatsoever. And in that case, verifying that one's vote is counted is trivial.

No.1523821

>>1523773

Shit you may have meant this to be snarky but you actually blew my mind a little bit.

I should really find a way to step out of this tunnel vision. I just realised you could do electronic voting by assigning everyone an ID, then putting all votes publically available by ID and show the totals. This way everybody can check the legitimacy of their own vote and the total tally.

No.1523868

>>1523773

Well, I saw the blockchain as a potential base because it clearly works and because I want to avoid any chance of people gaming the system. Notions of the pursuit of profit might not immediately disappear. I doubt that it will be a problem, but it can't hurt to have things be ironclad by a degree of anonymity, decentralization, and sender-reciever verification. It's meant to be a ledger as >>1523161 points out. Rather than forming a consensus on what is to be produced and how (as it does in a market like with Bitcoin), it's a tool for decentralized consensus of how to produce what goods are decided on by a combination of consumer demand and voting via syndicates and popular assemblies (both of these being modes of organization which develop organically in the absence of state power). The two interact with each other to a degree - the actual organizations of people and their autonomous actions determine by what criteria productive processes are selected to best meet demand - but they are overall two separate systems.

>>1523556

>>1523206

It's what I know and it works for building interfaces. I'll remove that, there are probably people who know this topic better.

>>1523352

I actually don't know that much about other distributed storage systems, do you know of any other common models? I just need something that's well-proven, easily computable, and secure.

>>1523821

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/handivote/

This is a good example of what you're suggesting, developed into a foolproof system.

No.1524488

Bumping this thread… with no survivors!

No.1524528

>>1523556

Javascript is literally the only language that matters luddites. You can now run a full stack with nothing except javascript and a DBMS of your choice.

No.1525020

One bit I thought was interesting was how he states that a price-calculating system is just a less-general version of a full calculation-in-kind one. That is, any system of prices is just a system of calculation-in-kind where you have lost all the information about everything but the labour costs.

That got me thinking: could we create a working system for co-ordinating production based on calculation-in-kind and sell it to porky? Such a system would be able to optimise for any production goal you chose (using Kantorovich's method). Porky would of course use it for maximising profit. But if enough porkys have this system running their production, the next time there's a general strike the workers could switch the very same system over to co-ordinate all of the factories where the system is installed over to needs-based production goals. Boom, socialism without the bureaucracy.

The other thing I was thinking is that there's tons of places even in first world countires where you could run small-scale pilot tests of these economic systems. Post-industrial places abandoned by porky have a decent amount of arable land, lots of resources to recycle, and unemployed labour to spare. If we figured out most of the kinks in these post-capitalist economic systems we could give those communities the real economic ability to rebuild themselves on a socialist basis. Some might say that's utopian but utopianism is the expectation that people will change their lives based on your good idea alone. By contrast I'm saying that the development of a fully worked-out post-capitalist form of economic organisation would be a concrete change in material conditions. Combined with our existing capacity for abundance, I think this alternative economics is the missing link we have required to actually be able to make the jump to socialism.

Now I can already hear a lot of armchair-lounging leftcoms taking offense to the idea that we could possibly work out how a socialist economy before the revolution, but consider this: are we more likely to figure out how to actually run a socialist society now, or in the middle of the inevitable civil war that will follow any revolutionary movement?

No.1525025

>>1525020

You're going to have to elaborate what exactly you mean with

>a working system for co-ordinating production based on calculation-in-kind

since I didn't read the book. Unless I absolutely have to read the book, then just tell me and I will read it.

No.1525059

File: af954b763a25b0d⋯.png (954.13 KB, 1304x892, 326:223, af954b763a25b0ded190426bdb….png)

>comrades sharing literature and even writing mini articles

impressive

No.1525081

>>1525020

Also can you explain how such a system would benefit abandoned post-industrial cities and towns?

No.1525085

BUMP

No.1525088

>>1525085

why are you bumping so soon? It's alright to let thread fall to 6-10th page

No.1525093

Also bumping fills up the reply cap so dont do that please.

No.1526516

File: 11869d8083239b3⋯.pdf (256.84 KB, 1304x892, 326:223, Calculation In Natura - Fr….pdf)

>>1525025

It's not a book, it's a 41 page essay. It really is an enlightening read - you'd be surprised at what it shows to be possible.

>>1525020

They already have similar systems for resource allocation probably. It could, however, give cooperatives a method of working efficiently. Of course, what commands the program spits out would really be the will of the market made material via a mechanism different from a boss, but still the same ultimately. Combine these with unions and grassroots councils like the ones suggested by communalists, however, and you'd have a pretty good basis for both structures to actively agitate for revolution and the foundations of a new mode of production to arise spontaneously out of the current one as it fails again and again.

>leftcoms

Someone posted a link to this thread in a discussion about them. They're not against all action, just opportunistic action.

>Post-industrial places abandoned by porky

You mean left-behind former industrial powerhouses like Cleveland and Detroit? Yes, that's the perfect area for the kind of structure-creating which I'd like for the calculator to be the basis of.

It's interesting to see people independently coming to the same conclusions that I did some time back.

No.1526551

>>1526516

>Yes, that's the perfect area for the kind of structure-creating which I'd like for the calculator to be the basis of.

is that sarcasm?

No.1526577

>>1526551

No?

We can best prove to people the fundamental contradiction between exchange value and use value and why it matters in imagining a better world by creating the actual structures of a future society in those places where the people have been left for dead by capital.

No.1526769

>>1525025

In-kind calculation means having a gigantic table of what goes into producing X and how much X goes into producing this or that other thing, for all the things. In-kind means the things are counted as they are, and not in money form. Suppose some place makes one type of jacket that has twelve buttons, with the buttons coming from a different supplier. If you make jackets according to the blueprint, the recipe, for this particular jacket this place is making, whether you make three or three million, you need twelve buttons of a particular sort per jacket. When you mix ingredients in ratios that are independent of the scale, there is a particular jargon for describing that: fixed input co-efficients.

Suppose the prices of all your inputs are perfectly rigid forever, then you can just record these things in terms of money cost. You can look at the blueprint for the particular jacket and say, you need such amount of rubles for these buttons per jacket. So, you want to make two thousand of these jackets, multiply the specification's button entry by two thousand, and likewise for the other inputs. But if input prices change, this doesn't work out. Looking at the blueprint in physical terms still works. You can say, 12 of these buttons for one of these jackets means 24000 of these buttons are required when producing 2000 of these jackets.

When you produce one particular thing and your task is just to put together as many units of that thing as possible, and you have fixed input co-efficients, you can look at your storage room and tell which input you run out of first if nobody re-stocks anything in there. And you can also tell, if you had an unending supply of that particular input, what other input you would run out of first then, and so on. You can make a scarcity ranking without referring to any sort of market here. The bottleneck, the limiting factor, determines your output. Where these dependencies exist, a planned economy can directly deal with these as what they are in physical reality, instead of the clumsy indirect way of market calculations. However, this doesn't really solve all economic questions. (Do we really want to produce as many of these jackets as physically possible? How many do we want then?) So this has to be combined with administrative lexicographic distinctions about what products and services are fundamentally more important and a consumer feedback mechanism that is pretty similar to what we have in capitalism, though on a more equitable basis.

No.1526815

File: cec18268f5a9f60⋯.pdf (143.36 KB, 1304x892, 326:223, ccm.IJUC07(2).pdf)

>>1526769

But if we want to create such a system (which in theory shouldnt be that difficult) you need to make it so it somehow works in conjuction with a monetary market for resources you cannot make yourself.

No.1526950

>>1526815

No you did not. The post is about some simple relations in production that correspond to Liebig's law in growing plants. Did you intent to post another pdf?

>But if we want to create such a system (which in theory shouldnt be that difficult) you need to make it so it somehow works in conjuction with

… a consumer feedback mechanism. Already mentioned.

No.1528030

>>1519594

If we produce any worthwhile content I believe that bunkermag would be happy to host such articles.

No.1528525

>>1526950

I think I may misunderstand entirely what you are talking about.

No.1530280

File: 5fb88ee04f88183⋯.gif (92.62 KB, 429x650, 33:50, IMG_0490.gif)

No.1530285

File: 11869d8083239b3⋯.pdf (256.84 KB, 429x650, 33:50, Calculation In Natura - Fr….pdf)

>>1528525

No.1531293

>>1522982

>Why would you calculate every part of the economy on one level? Wouldn't it make much more sense to have multiple levels of abstraction, from within a workplace up to inter-national or even inter-continental coordination? Then one only has to work with these "black boxed" of the economy, which are given expectations and resources and give feedback and products? The faster this cycle, the faster the economy can adapt to changes, and I don't really see why a global planning system should care about a local road being built, as long as everything stays within the system.

Could someone give me some feedback on this idea?

No.1531305

>>1531293

This is pretty much guaranteed to happen no matter how you do it because of delegation.

Abstraction and delegation are important concepts in human organization as well as writing good modular programs

No.1531646

http://archive.is/SDBcR

Remember. Don't let good threads disappear!

No.1534233

Holy shit, I can't believe this is still here!

No.1535048

>>1534233 checked

why sage?

No.1535710

I'm giving another shot to western cybernetic writers. Should I go with Ashby or Wiener?

No.1536601

File: f63517729410506⋯.jpg (56.59 KB, 680x510, 4:3, givi.jpg)

just a note to the newfags who didn't go to the bunker during the blackout, we recreated thread at http://bunkerchan.xyz/left/res/2517.html . much conversation didn't happen, but there are some screencaps from this thread + a few bonus links to some articles. check it out, comrades, I do not want to split conversation between boards, but at least take note where to go if this thread goes 404

No.1536603

>>1536601

fuck me, i forgot to turn off my shitposting flag

No.1538813

>>1536601

Likewise, I'll copypaste some of the interesting stuff for the lazy:

No. 2564 (basically a brief overview of what was in this thread):

interesting mentions, needs edit!

>Finally got the name of the Soviet mathematician: Vladimir Arnold. His work seems to be too rarified even for our goals, tho he did study the stability of control systems, as well as something magnificently called catastrophe theory.

>There was at least one American periodical of Soviet cybernetics: Soviet Cybernetics Review. Also another general periodical called Joint Publications Research Service Reports occasionally had articles on the topic. Unfortunately, both of them are behind paywalls. Fucking Porky standing in the way of muh knowledge REEEEEEE An interesting sidenote is that the idea of a Soviet economy-optimizing national computer network had the CIA shitting its pants in the 60s.

>If you're interested on the Western version of cybernetics, Operations Research is what you have to look for. Although resource planning in particular is not the main focus of research, actually more complex results were found, such as ways to solve non-linear systems.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R0700z1.html

http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/how-the-computer-got-its-revenge-on-the-soviet-union

books:

http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/ [towards new socialism]

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=9FD4DCDC1C7DB6CAB9774B7AC6DF1633 [operations research, excercises]

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=E258CE40E4E969BDA57D9B44A71CC882 [operations research, excercises]

http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/%7Ewpc/reports/index.html#books

something in Russian on one of the researchers mentioned, Liapunov

http://www.nsc.ru/win/sbras/dates/Lyap/lyap1.html

It mentions that his main work is "Теоретические проблемы кибернетики", or "Theoretical Problems Of Cybernetics"

Looking for the book, I did find this pdf:

http://elib.ict.nsc.ru/jspui/bitstream/ICT/1154/1/Zhuravlev2.pdf

No. 3092:

(…)

Cybersyn:

No.1538815

>>1538813

DISCUSSION:

No. 2750:

OP of the original thread here, was considering whether I should start a thread here or not.

Haha, I like how you replaced "JavaScript" with "Haskell".

Could someone maybe rewrite it to make less references to socialism and anarchism? I want to get something which I can publish to normies and not scare them off. You need to lure them in, you know?

You can't shout "Kulaki zasluzhili! Nichego Stalin ne sdelal plohoi!" while singing the Internationale in French and expect to get anything but "human nature" arguments or, worse yet, be ignored. You need to present yourself as advocating a reasonable solution to a relevant problem.

I think he overstated the complexity of it. We already have commonly-used programs for solving sparse systems of linear equations such as GLPK. It can't be that hard to modify it to work automatically when given inputs from a secondary program which organizes the given data (what needs to be produced, what resources are available, and what productive methods are available) into a usable format. I'm teaching myself a lot about this in my spare time because I really want to try this. For one, I'm finally teaching myself C beyond Arduino. I have high hopes.

No. 3092:

I don't think that one C library is going to bring us central planning, and I don't really think that we can reduce problem of implementing it to just writing "npm install central_planning" into console.

Main difference between you two is that you both see it from absolutely different degree. Try to make specification of what exactly you want to accomplish, you'll either find out that there needs to be done more than you think or, if you manage to make it "simple" enough, we might help you with coding it.

No. 3203:

The way I see it, what we need to do is precisely that and have it write information to a decentralized ledger of some sort (any alternatives to Bitcoin's blockchain?). This, in turn, must be accessible by an easy-to-use interface which allows individuals to input, for each workplace, what productive method is available (material cost per unit of final product, environmental cost), how productive exactly is it (labor intensity, how many units of final product can be created per hour), and what materials are already available (therefore allowing us to determine what needs to be brought). To determine what needs to be brought to production and distribution sites, you need to plot the relation of goods left in the surplus stock versus time, plot the best fit line, and take its derivative to extrapolate how many goods will be needed to satisfy demand in the future.

If you have those basic components, then the rest of the stuff mentioned in my article will become trivial to implement. I'm looking to create an application that is fundamentally useful in the immediate world. All the syndicates and cooperatives and mutual aid societies will arise spontaneously around it as more and more people hopefully use it.

No. 3208:

well, you described what exactly should be on front-end, we can do that very easily. I'm willing to kill some of my time on fun stuff like this.

All problems are in your first sentence which will need to be designed in very clever way in order to make this whole "decentralized central planning" thing work.

No.1540151

bumping this thread because unbelievable amount of forum sliding happening rn

No.1540218

Well, I think I've found a potential candidate to replace blockchain for the decentralized ledger proposed: Druid, an open-source distributed data store

Here are some notes from Wikipedia:

>Druid is designed to quickly ingest massive quantities of event data, and provide low-latency queries on top of the data.

Ideal for running an entire economy imo

>The name Druid comes from the shapeshifting Druid class in many role-playing games, to reflect the fact that the architecture of the system can shift to solve different types of data problems.

This is perfect - in my mini-article, I outlined 3 problems for which we could have separate blockchains. With this, we'll potentially only need 1 system to address all 3 tasks.

>Druid is used in production by technology companies such as Alibaba, Airbnb, Cisco, eBay, Netflix, Paypal, and Yahoo.

Wow, so it's /really/ widely used. This is probably a secure system by virtue of its redundancy or some other mechanism if it's really this widely used. If there's a way to anonymize the data inputs and have linked timestamping between 2 parties making a transfer and a backup of what both are sending to make sure that no tampering was done, all the better.

If we can combine this Druid system with a stripped-down, modified GLPK to solve for the objective function of linearly optimizing production out of all possibilities and have Druid organize the data as needed for it to do that and then give it back to production centers, we just need to make a flashy interface for end users to input their data and bam: economic planning of fully automated luxury communism? There's an app for that.

>>1535710

Well, Wiener's the one who started it, Ashby's the one who really gave it the principles off which all later works are based. I haven't read either because I don't think they addressed economics IIRC, but I probably should read them anyways. Anyone who's read them can tell us which one is better to start off with? I'm pretty new to this whole cybernetics thing.

No.1540808

The assumptions going into standard voting theory are an issue, so when we take ideas from there he have to look at whether the context is similar enough to the original habitat where the ideas make sense.

One assumption that is very common in models, though there is some awareness of that not being quite right, is that voters have opinions about every issue/party/person on the ballots. The reality is of course often different. Now we could investigate how the hyper-informed individual is part of mainstream economics and the liberal capitalist myth building that has been going on for over 200 years now, but I think it's more to the point to deal with the issue at hand.

Voters who have the option to rank or rate lots of candidates or things or proposals will often not actually bother doing all that if they don't have to, and if they are forced, a lot of their inputs will be random. So, if the method to determine one winner uses rankings it should allow truncated rankings and also to give several things the same rank. Default meaning for not ranking something should be bottom rank. If the method uses ratings, the default meaning for not rating something should be bottom rating. This makes sense when dealing with ballots.

When the context isn't that voters are presented five or ten things in a survey, but rather there are thousands of things and a user only rates a few of them, confidence in results is a big issue. Would you take a product with a five-star average over one with a four-star average, if the first comes from three users voting and the other from three thousand? What's interesting here also is the spread of ratings an item gets. A risk-averse economic planning system would prioritize doing something with a very high probability of being decent over doing something with a non-trivial risk of being crap, even though its average assessment looks better.

Another common assumption in standard voting theory is that the voting happens in an instant and delivers a result and that's the end of it. Now, this is not ideology blinding researchers, that's just what old-timey voting usually is. We will be dealing with feedback systems where people will be influenced by the output of one round when forming their decisions for what their input in the next round will be, and we will also deal with some feedback systems that don't even do rounds. If voting methods are adapted for this purpose, they don't actually satisfy the same criteria that they are mathematically proven to satisfy in their normal context. There are criteria that deal with snap shots ("if such-and-such pattern appears on the ballots, the method should do X"), and these criteria will be satisfied. But there are also criteria that deal with changes ("if the ballot pattern changes in such and such way, the result shouldn't change in the following counter-intuitive way blablabla"), and these we have to check again.

When voting happens continuously for something which is adjusted regularly, we might be interested in having results that don't change dramatically when there is just a tiny change in the votes. However, this seems to run into conflict with the very idea of majority rule. Majority patterns (plural, an option can be a first-place majority, an option can also be majority last-place, and there are other majority patterns) in the voting data can barely exist or barely not exist, so what a few people do can make or break a majority pattern. So, if a voting procedure is used that prioritizes majority patterns, edge cases are possible with dramatic jumps.

No.1541148

Cycled by request.

No.1541630

File: 8d65ec18127ccd0⋯.jpg (135.97 KB, 208x242, 104:121, 8d65ec18127ccd0b3c8bf05200….jpg)

>>1541148

cycling is bullshit, this isn't news discussion, this is book hoarding. recreating thread with screencaps from previous thread is much better, spam gets filtered and only good stuff stays while in cycling threads old stuff get lost. return thread back to normal, please.

No.1544575

File: a639e121cd748b8⋯.jpg (12.08 KB, 255x147, 85:49, a2dbb263d9d745c59c8c25a1eb….jpg)

No.1545059

File: 205dd41e53e4a34⋯.pdf (2.29 MB, fundamentals-of-political-….pdf)

File: 396ca022d5fb9d6⋯.pdf (1.88 MB, fundamentals-of-political-….pdf)

Found another book a while ago (2015), "Fundamentals of Political Economy" by the china book project, with chapters on planning, so I cropped them out.

A bit too state capitalist/maoist for my taste, but might still contain some good stuff.

No.1548362

Before going into procedures for assigning multiple units of multiple things to different people or assigning some resource to multiple purposes, let's first figure out how to assign multiple units of the same thing to multiple people. The algorithm for this might be useful as a part of procedures for more complicated issues.

Suppose people just write down the quantities they request and you then compare the sum of these requests with how much is available and you see that the aggregate sum of requests is bigger than that. This could be dealt with just by scaling down each request by the same factor, so to make the scaled down sum of requests equal to what is available. Problem: People can anticipate that scaling down will happen and make exaggerated requests, which in turn make it necessary to scale down by a bigger factor, which gives an incentive to exaggerate even more, with no end in sight. This exaggeration issue can be solved in several ways.

Random dictator: Suppose you process the requests in random order (or some determined order, what's important is that the order is independent of what numbers are requested), giving each as many units as they demand as long as there is still enough left to give. In that case it is likely some people get exactly the amounts they asked for, one person gets fewer units (and demanding more wouldn't have increased that amount), and some people get nothing at all.

A more egalitarian distribution is the cookie algorithm: Go through the random order of requests repeatedly (once you reach the end you jump to the beginning again) and assign only one more unit each time you encounter a person's request that isn't yet fully met.

It's trivial to see that for both random dictator and the cookie algorithm, one cannot increase the probability of getting some quantity at least as high as X by stating a request for a higher quantity than X. It's also trivial to see that the cookie algorithm gives everybody who doesn't ask for more than their proportional share (number of units available divided by number of people, rounded down to the next integer) just that. When the cookie algorithm is made part of something more complicated, probably these guarantees will not hold anymore, but at least the procedure will be less sensitive to exaggeration strategy than using straight averages for everything.

No.1548495

>>1548371

Go back to reddit.

No.1548509

statistics/math fag here.

The issue of central planning has always been a bit elusive to me. With IOT, reporting, we have plenty of data on input. And in simulating a theoretical demand of goods, production could be put into overdrive or lessened to minimize loss (from items sitting on the shelf too long or demand being unsupplied).

This is totally feasible and is already what corporations use to manage their pipelines. There's no reason why a post-cap society couldn't use these same techniques.

No.1548522

So onto another issue related to this entirely.

How do we build infrastructure that can resist attacks and is resilient to failure? How do we make sure such a system both the hardware and software, doesnt have a single point of failure.,

No.1548528

>>1548522

>>1548509

here.

Not going to happen, especially because many security faults are due to internal incompetence or sabotage.

Just have really high availability and lots of redundancy is basically the best you can do.

No.1548535

>>1548529

You can saturate connections and make them unusable, which might cause big issues.

No.1548538

>>1548529

Yeah, the internet's structure is fault tolerant (sort of) but the individual services aren't. Let's say we have a service that determines grain production. Its data is going to live on a server somewhere. In order to be convenient, it's going to have to take in data from somewhere. That means you've exposed a vulnerability.

There's also the issue of distributed data. Even with really high redundancy drives still fail frequently. So you need to allocate lots of drives for RAID protocols to make sure that data loss only occurs in really really rare cases.

Of course there's other things like data forgery and data manipulation which are both not hard to imagine in a society with "quotas" or similar.

No.1548553

>>1548544

That anon asked about complete protection from both hardware and software failure. Both of those companies invest significant resources into preventing those (which means they are not perfect).

Just look at this talk, Facebook and Google both create, open source, and steward their own programming languages to solve the complex systems programming problems they are trying to solve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBbv1ej0fFo

No.1548599

>>1548553

So a bunch of porkies can make a secure system, but an advanced leftist state can't?

The whole security problem is just an optimization issue and nothing more.

No.1548678

>>1548362

Why not just kick them out of the planning process, if they demand too much too often? They'd probably have difficulties getting all they need outside of the system.

>>1548529

DNS is relativly centralized, destroying the root hosts would be pretty excellent.

No.1548715

>>1548678

>DNS is relativly centralized, destroying the root hosts would be pretty excellent.

This

Not to mention that you could target a singlular area, or even a smaller/bigger hub if you got enough resources, with a heavy denial of service attack to shut down the system.

No.1548767

>>1548362

>>1548678

>Why not just kick them out of the planning process, if they demand too much too often?

And how do you measure that? I say you demand too much, now have fun starving. People do exaggerate all the time. What is considered too much of an exaggeration is, excuse the obnoxious phrase, a social construct. If you don't want to haggle all the time, but everybody else around you, the culture, is expecting that of you, stating what you honestly want will fuck you over. In the fancy new society, there may well be time-intensive rituals and customs that limit how much one is expected to exaggerate, and people getting very nosey to get a good idea about what others truly need, and this all sounds like a life full of bullshit to me, amounting to approximately two years of my life spent in technically unnecessary meetings, two years of everybody's life, for ten billion people. All because of that one fateful day just before the revolution, when comrade number 1548678 couldn't be bothered to spend two hours thinking about a robust request protocol because he spent that time jacking off to Berenstain Bears hentai instead.

No.1549035

>>1548362

Variation of the cookie algorithm for an income-sharing commune: Given that by requesting fewer units than proportional share you enable others to get more, you might take issue with the possibility that, depending on the request pattern a few people might get a lot because of your charity, which may make you more reluctant to share. So, when you request fewer units than your proportional share, you can also specify that the units freed up for allocation by that don't go to people who already got more than some limit above proportional share that you specify.

Allocation then works like this: Give everybody who demands and amount below or equal to their proportional share just that. Then, among those who asked for more, go through the random order of requests repeatedly (at the end of it you jump to the beginning again) and assign only one more unit each time you encounter a person's request that isn't yet fully met. The additional constraint is that you first allocate the units that don't have any limit attached. When you round out of these, you continue with allocating units with the highest limit attached, after you are out of these, you continue with units with the next-highest limit and so on.

At the end, give back the units you couldn't assign, first give them to those who set the lowest limit and allocate among them in a way that you give first to those who have the least. If each of them reaches the proportional share amount, you continue giving back to those setting the second-lowest limit and so on.

No.1549280

>>1549064

No. Income-sharing communities literally do exist in the real world. Most of them are religious. Last year, I took part in a weekend program they offered so people could check out how they work and live together. And a guy at one commune told us about how they at first put all the money in a pot, then they gathered how much people wished to get out of it, then they shrunk the amount in some way - he wasn't entirely clear (in general these folks don't have a very precise manner of speaking), but I believe it was just shrinking all requested amounts by the same factor to make that equal in aggregate to the amount available for sharing - and that didn't work out and now people just got fixed amounts. It didn't take me more than a second to figure out how shrinking requests proportionally leads to an exaggeration-incentive spiral and how to fix that, and I probably should have said something instead of making a CDi Link face.

I'm very interested in game design and group-decision design though. In the first you aim for something with complex strategies and the thrill of risk and in the other you want to keep it as simple and dull as possible; so when an idea I have for one of these topics turns out to be complete disaster, I immediately look at whether it's good for the other topic. When it comes to economic planning, one important goal is to keep the gap between honest data input and strategically advantageous input small. So, the proposed methods here would be very boring in a game. If you want an interesting voting method for a game, surely it should be one that is maddening in real life.

No.1549398

File: 312b952a0da2578⋯.png (62 KB, 1200x1300, 12:13, peace__love__equality__for….png)

Oh shit, this beautiful thread survived the hacking. I had a screencap made just the day before, but it's good to know it's still going.

I see someone already archived this, but obviously, it's better to archive as late as possible to nab all posts. So if you see this thread about to fall off the board, check archive.is to see if it has a recent copy, if not, archive it.

No.1549559

>>1549429

>your algorithms could only work for simple video games.

You want the program to give you K units of a thing, your "strategy" then is to ask it for K units of that thing. The cookie algorithm would not be a good fit for a video game, as there is no strategy to it, which makes it good for real-world usage.

>keep people as removed from decision making as they are now, although that's kind of the point of cybernetics, isn't it

Stafford Beer was big on subsidiarity and I saw a crude doodle either by him or one of his associates from around the time when they worked in Chile, which showed some dial-gadget thing which was to be used for live voting in connection with TV debates. Paul Cockshott is not a fan of subsidiarity, but he advocates for sortition and also has a (crude) concept about ordinary folks directly voting on taxes and expenditure.

Your post is frankly the dumbest thing I've ever seen on here, and I have been here since the time Warsie defended both the YPG and ISIS, "dialectically".

No.1550526

>>1548767

I was thinking about a committee representing the interests of members within this planning sphere. They would decided from case to case if a certain member were to be abusing the network, and if they wouldn't respond to their warnings, they'd be punished. Maybe kicking out isn't necessary at first, but at least a penalty eg. limiting either the maximal amount of resources they can ask for.

>>1548848

no

No.1550676

>>1550526

>committee representing the interests of members

>decided from case to case if a certain member were to be abusing the network

The key problem with class societies is the fact that there is a separate class of people who have the power to control the distribution of society's productive surplus. Once you have a separate group of people whose job is deciding goods distribution, their main interest lies in maintaining this position of power. This is true regardless of how that group intends to actually wield the power, since keeping the power is a necessary prerequisite to exercising it, regardless of your altruistic or selfish intentions. It's not unreasonable to think we can figure out a way to integrate planning into a truly democratic system that doesn't rely on handing power over to any 'representative' group.

There are a number of ways that you could encourage people to stick to a fair level of consumption - a simple note at the point of distribution saying 'Fair share: x per consumer' would likely be enough for most people, as long as the note makes clear the association between reasonably self-limited consumption and social responsibility. Capitalist society has also developed a technology for influencing consumer demand: advertising. Public messaging aimed at influencing consumption patterns to fit material limitations would be a socially useful form of advertising, far beyond the shit we see today.

You also have to consider the entire societal situation before going to the length of re-introducing stuff like representative 'democracy' (Cockshott makes an incisive argument pointing out that such schemes are effectively aristocracies) or markets (this concession is the laziest part of Towards a New Socialism, I feel) in an attempt to curb hypothetical over-consumption. In an extensively planned economy without private property, most of your ability to hoard is naturally curbed, and the need to do so is obviated anyway. No private property means no large exclusive space in which to keep stuff you've got too much of - the person who demands far too many cars will find themselves inadvertently opening up a public showroom.

Of course, it's also necessary to point out that a significant number of people routinely demanding more of a good than the productive system can currently account for is a powerful signal to expand production of the in-demand good. If production is currently resource-limited, then high demand is a powerful signal to develop more resource-efficient methods of production, or more efficient methods of resource extraction/recycling. Such an emphasis puts the onus for the solution of supply problems on the supply side of the production-consumption cycle, which I think is politically important. Placing the onus on the consumption side leads to a lot of talk about punishments for over-consumption and the implementation of various coercive systems that I think are largely unnecessary for an economic system that looks to transcend class society.

No.1551939

>>1550526

>committee limiting maximal amount of resources one can ask for, may kick you out

Regular allocation should not depend on some committee deciding about each individual request. Somebody may ask for an unusually high amount of something, maybe they are in very particular circumstances that make them ask for that, meriting investigation. But that should be the exception, with the normal state of affairs being automated, default settings that need no interaction. The time people have to discuss individual cases of someone maybe asking for too much of a limited resource is itself a limited resource.

What is available divided by number of people (rounded down to next integer) is your proportional share. Asking for that or fewer units gives you exactly the amount you wish for. Asking for more gives you at least as many units as your proportional share and maybe more, depending on other people asking for fewer units than proportional share. Two people asking for the same amount, whether they get that or fewer units, are treated the same in that they both get an equal amount (one unit difference at most). If you want the COMPUTERGOD to give you X units, you don't increase your chances of getting that by asking for a higher amount, so just ask for X. This is the result when just using the trivial vanilla cookie algorithm.

This can be combined with a limit how much an individual might get, set by a jury (sortition from two groups, people directly involved in the production of the thing and the general population, the ratio in accordance with living labor/(dead labor + some aggregate number supposed to roughly represent natural resources) in its production process, so if it is just a service with no fancy tools, the jury is just the people providing that service, and if it is all about a natural resource, it's the general population) using median vote (or a super-majority method with the same exaggeration-free aspect), or the limit might be set by the people asking for fewer units than proportional share and the mechanism mentioned in >>1549035 - or let's do both: first the jury setting a limit, then the other thing potentially making it tighter. The initial jury limit is published, and you have a short window to react and write a request to the jury if you individually want more than that. Then the jury limit is set.

Instead of directly using the result of the cookie algorithm, it could be used in two rounds: In the first round, in addition to just wishing for a quantity higher than proportional share, you can also mark some quantity as something that you MUST have. This is initially not taken into account by the algorithm. If the result of the first round then is that at least one person gets below some quantity marked MUST (recall that you might get fewer units than what is implied by the jury limit), they can issue some statement asking others to demand fewer units, and there is a second round that by default copies your inputs of the first round, and allows users only to demand fewer units than before and to increase the inequality limit. People who don't bother to do anything in the second round won't get fewer units after the second round than their first-round result.

No.1551951

Honestly, I think the idea of an actual socialist society prior to cybernetics may be putting the cart before the horse. I don't think man is capable of subjugating his own base urges for the sake of others to the extent necessary for a fully functional and truly socialist society. Furthermore, the problems of keeping supply in-step with demand ahead of time is also extremely difficult given the current state of technology and mankind. Once these two problems are resolved, I think socialism will not only become possible, but inevitable.

No.1551965

>>1550676

I think we would still need some commitee to manage the distribution and all other universal spheres of society. The question here lies in what power would they have, what would they get from it, how they would remain, and who would controll them.

I think that's why we need a cenralized direct, or "non-representative" in general, democracy to be able to both appoint the council and guide it in a way desired by people.

So their role would be to manage the common assets, not to have a "total control" as is.

It sould be less of a "representative government/people" relation, but rather a "board of directors/shareholders" relation.

No.1551976

>>1551951

Well if you can't subjugate your own base urges, then maybe you will learn to do so in GULAG.

No.1552000

>>1551976

Some biological imperatives are, by necessity, stronger than the individual's will to live. Something that hasn't been forged purely by the competition inherent to nature is necessary to facilitate an end to competition. The capacity for abstract thinking and the creation of artificial ordered systems are steps in the right direction; what remains is to allow the formal to take its rightful place above the material in the mind in all respects.

No.1552034

>>1552000

If someones greed is stronger than their will to live then maybe they need some actual phychiatric help rather than just a socialist society.

>forged purely by the competition inherent to nature

It's just a "human nature" argument.

Everyone has their desires and the means to satisfy them are material in it's core, but even now if we would move to a society with a more equal redistribution the majority would get more to satisfy their base urges anyway. If some bourgeous had to subjugate their urges for this, or it to be subjugated for them, then so be it.

No.1552075

>>1551939

>jury using median vote (or a super-majority method with the same exaggeration-free aspect)

Come to think of it, I believe it's better for a jury composed of two groups to use something else than direct median, like x-for-x rating. With the median, strong disagreement between the two groups just means that the bigger group, if homogeneous in opinion, can completely dictate the result. Suppose the jury members representing the interest of society at large that the machinery and natural resources (which are not owned by the tiny part of the population working in a particular place) are put to good use are fewer in number than the workers from the place. The former members are far less likely to know each other than the latter and with majority decision making, the niche interests of the workers of the particular place can completely dominate. This is especially bad if they don't just decide on some amount-per-any-person limit, but also decide on granting unique individual requests for more. This could be easily abused for black-market activity. Maybe the individual unique requests should be voted on only by a jury drawn from the general population then or require the OK from both groups.

Here is how x-for-x rating works: Each voter writes down a value between 0 and 100 %. The result is the highest value that is supported by a group of at least that same size. This is robust against exaggeration like the median, and unlike the median, little variations in voting can't lead to drastic changes in results.

No.1552199

>>1552034

>If someones greed is stronger than their will to live then maybe they need some actual phychiatric help rather than just a socialist society.

What would you call a parent sacrificing themselves or some form of material benefit for the sake of their children, then? Mentally ill?

>It's just a "human nature" argument.

No, it's not. It's a universalist argument. Biological organisms will never be unbound from biological laws. Non-biological entities are not subject to biological restraints.

>Everyone has their desires and the means to satisfy them are material in it's core, but even now if we would move to a society with a more equal redistribution the majority would get more to satisfy their base urges anyway.

No. They would still want more, and attempt to take it. There is no fundamental difference between the mentality of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, other than the fact that the former currently has the ability to oppress the other. If you think anything in nature does not have a drive towards conflict, you are living in a Lysenkoist fantasy land.

No.1552264

>>1552199

The difference in mentality exists. For many proletarians, they just come and see a system that has been there before them and they learn to adapt, thinking it is somehow natural.

Until someone comes along and points out to them that such system is artificial and is made to keep them poor and powerless by design, in order to make profit off of them.

Living things in nature have only drive to self preservation, to keep themselves in homeostasis or otherwise propagate their information in time. Because those who do not vanish in time. It is like a pattern formation in chaotic systems, which you find many examples of in mathematics, physics, biology.

Conflict is a particular way of one kind of pattern trying to propagate itself when it clashes with another kind of pattern due to not enough space.

An explicit drive towards conflict is a pure idealism.

See the name of this thread explicitly stating it is about cybernetics.

No.1552299

>>1552264

>Until someone comes along and points out to them that such system is artificial and is made to keep them poor and powerless by design, in order to make profit off of them.

In which case some will struggle in futility against such a system, which has been the history of worker's revolutions thus far, or will attempt to integrate into it, furthering the myth of socio-economic mobility which serves as a carrot for those incapable of improving their own conditions, greasing the cogs of the machine which serves to whip them.

>Conflict is a particular way of one kind of pattern trying to propagate itself when it clashes with another kind of pattern due to not enough space.

No, it is not only due to a lack of space. Simply put, it is easier to benefit by harming other lifeforms than by autotrophism, and organisms that due so are more successful in propagating than others. However, even plants kill each other for easier access to resources, as the principles of natural selection have encouraged this. Capitalism is nothing more than an economic representation of systems inherent to organic life as we know it. Cybernetics, in principle, can allow man to overcome these systems.

No.1552442

>>1552199

>What would you call a parent sacrificing themselves for their children?

If I see more of me in my children than in myself, patterns in how they look and act similar to me (and write!), a potential of these patterns continuing for much longer than the rest of my life, sacrificing myself for them is an expression of my will to live.

>They would still want more, and attempt to take it.

More what? More food? Is there an unlimited urge to eat more and more food? People want fantastic amounts of money because it is the universal equivalent. Even if you don't know what you would need it for, wishing for more money is never wrong, as you can always do everything with N dollars plus one as you can with just N dollars, for any value of N, and not vice versa. The little bit of independence the capitalist owners have is dependent on them being pro-active with getting money if they don't want to risk falling down to the position of proles. You have to act like an asshole to protect yourself and your family, you have to attack if you just want to defend where you are now. You want more money because in this society you need money to cover basic needs and wants for yourself, and your family and friends.

Having physical objects comes with the hassle of cleaning them, checking for rust and mold, repairing them, moving them around. Imagine you can own a lot of stuff, but you can't delegate these activities, or that the extent to which you can ask of other peoples' time to do that for you is pretty similar for everybody. Would you even want to own a massive yacht?

I don't think you are an "anarcho-capitalist", but this reminds me of so many discussions I've had with that lot. They start out talking of themselves like the guardians of civilization, some Biological Truth straight from the Science Journal of My Ass is presented, and as time goes on and you present a fuzzy yet promising picture of a potential future different from capitalism, you reach the point ("…and maybe one or two horses for the children in the commune") when they flip out totally and threaten to take as much free stuff as they can, just to smash it, like anti-social retarded ape-people. And that's what they are. Like those howling "people" gathering when Saddam Hussein was hanged, taking photos on their cell phones (but there was dirt on the camera as it happens when you hold it in your hand as you walk around and your arms are so long your knuckles drag on the ground).

>>1552299

>Capitalism is nothing more than an economic representation of systems inherent to organic life as we know it. Cybernetics, in principle, can allow man to overcome these systems.

Disagree on both counts.

No.1552504

>>1551951

>I don't think man is capable of subjugating his own base urges for the sake of others to the extent necessary for a fully functional and truly socialist society.

I think I need to hear your definition of "true socialist society". Cybernetics can bring us classless society where everyone is rewarded based on his contribution. If there would be some kind of labour vouchers (currency based on labour, ideally non-acumulative) implemented, with the only way to obtain more would be to work more, therefore there would be a way for people to live different lifestyles - from childless basement dweller working a few hours a week to some protestant family dad working 60 hours a week to support his 15 children and wife.

>>1551965

I do also think some kind of committee/parliament/whatever would be needed, which could collect contributions/taxes in order to fund schools, healthcare, research and so on, but I don't think it's really important now. If we could design core of this plan to be purely anarchistic there would not be a problem to modify it to support some committee if some madman would try to implement it IRL

No.1553552

>>1552442

>Having physical objects comes with the hassle of cleaning them, checking for rust and mold, repairing them, moving them around.

And with the ability to maintain them comes the prestige associated with owning them, leading to the development of the attitude of the bourgeois. People, in general, seem to want that, considering that societies holding these values have become dominant nearly everywhere in the world and there is a significant archaeological trend towards increasing materialism as cultures develop, suggesting that this has been the case since the dawn of civilization, at the latest. It doesn't matter how many people call bullshit so long as the system itself continues to exist.

And no, I'm not an an-cap. In terms of political philosophy, I guess I'd probably lean towards Mohism, at least domestically. Internationally, I think imperialism is probably the least of all evils in the long term. As for my use of biology, I fail to see how humanity, in its current state, is not just another instance within its biological classes.

>>1552504

A true socialist society, in my opinion, would be a society in which not only are the means of production held in common, but there is no inclination of its populace towards privatization. If the latter is not met, I think the collapse of such a society is inevitable.

No.1553645

>>1553552

>the prestige associated with owning them, leading to the development of the attitude of the bourgeois.

A: Look how many tea cups I have!!

A: Yes!

B: Why?

A: Prestige! Sex me now!

It's like a system of food stamps where you can beg for more, and if you are lucky you may get more. There is no prestige in having more food stamps.

>significant archaeological trend towards increasing materialism since dawn of civilization blabla muh deep Chinese philosophy

You don't even know the meaning of terms like materialism or bourgeois used on this board. Mate, it's time to stop posting (or at least post in one of our regular muh human nature threads instead of shitting up this one).

No.1553696

>>1553645

>Wow, that's a really nice vase

>Yeah, I traded some food stamps for it, demonstrating my ability to hold an excess of what's necessary in order to exchange it for something that's basically meaningless but aesthetically pleasing, while other people are barely getting by

>Wow, I'd sure rather fuck you than have my kids work fields all day

The only way around this even slightly is basically a 100% death tax, and everything would still probably go to shit unless the human mindset is significantly altered.

>You don't even know the meaning of terms like materialism or bourgeois used on this board.

>there can be only one meaning for each word

>I need to ignore the history of these terms and other potential meanings in order to fit in with my fellow radicals

No.1553750

What happened to comrade Stallman image?

No.1553856

>>1488243

Paul Cockshott's "Towards a new Socialism"

No.1554889

>>1553696

The "food stamps" (labor vouchers) won't be physical tokens, but electronic accounts linked to your ID.

>words have different meanings

When you want to join a conversation, you have to stick to definitions implicit in how people in that conversation are using them. Gift means poison in German, but we are talking in UH MERRY KHAAAAAAAAN here, so it would be silly to bring up that meaning when criticizing others who talk about a "gift economy". Likewise with the way you talk.

>>1488243

>>1553856

Yes. It's still the best book on socialist planning I know.

Maybe this is also good: Classical Econophysics by W. Paul Cockshott, Allin F. Cottrell, Gregory J. Michaelson, Ian P. Wright, Victor M. Yakovenko. All these authors have written interesting things on email lists and so on. Yakovenko made popular a very simple model with people having equal amounts of money, then randomly doing transfers. The result is an extremely unequal distribution (for Mathematica users: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/StatisticalMechanicsOfMoney/). The table of contents looks promising, but I'm a hundred pages in and it just goes on and on about bees and printing technology. What they present about information and entropy in these hundred pages is important, but I believe they could have said it with ten.

In brief: Shannon's concept of information is about messages being efficient, which means the probabilities of a bit being 0 or 1 should be as close to fifty-fifty as possible. Kolmogorov's concept of information is about how short you can make a program for creating a particular number sequence. The shorter the program, the less information is in the number sequence. The counter-intuitive result when using that definition is that random sequences have the highest amount of information. Productive activity (in a very broad sense, whether we talk about humans or bees) is about reducing entropy (only possible locally, in the universe as a whole it never decreases), that is reducing the number of states an environment can be in, which brings us to cybernetic regulation. (Not every single step in production does reduce entropy though, rather there is a reduction when making sheets of paper or metal and then an increase again when letters are put on the paper and the metal sheets are pressed into forms.)

No.1558708

>>1553750

It ran away in shame of BO's spergout.

No.1559761

Friendly reminder that cybernetics was considered bourgeois pseudoscience in the USSR.

>Cybernetics was also outlawed as bourgeois pseudoscience. Norbert Wiener's 1948 book Cybernetics was condemned and translated only in 1958. A 1954 edition of the Brief Philosophical Dictionary condemned cybernetics for "mechanistically equating processes in live nature, society and in technical systems, and thus standing against materialistic dialectics and modern scientific physiology developed by Ivan Pavlov".[11] (However this article was removed from the 1955 reprint of the dictionary.) This attitude hampered the development of computer science and engineering in the Soviet Union. Notice that the Russian term "кибернетика" ("cybernetics") has come to describe what is called "computer science" in the West.

No.1559771

>>1559761

>in the USSR

Who cares?

No.1559786

>>1559771

I'm just pointing out the dangers of ideology.

Anyway, isn't cybernetics just utopian bullshit like techno-singularity?

No.1559790

>m-muh economic calculation problem

did this thread BTFO libertarians forever?

No.1559942

>>1559786

>Anyway, isn't cybernetics just utopian bullshit like techno-singularity?

No, you fucking retard, why don't you read up on the matter so you don't look like an absolute imbecile? Even the wikipedia page would provide you with enough information to disabuse you of such an idiotic notion.

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

>Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed incorporates a closed signaling loop—originally referred to as a "circular causal" relationship—that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in the system in some manner (feedback) that triggers a system change. Cybernetics is relevant to, for example, mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. The essential goal of the broad field of cybernetics is to understand and define the functions and processes of systems that have goals and that participate in circular, causal chains that move from action to sensing to comparison with desired goal, and again to action. Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks. Cybernetics includes the study of feedback, black boxes and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organizations including self-organization.

No.1559954

This is the best thread on leftypol by the way. I wish there was a way to give the collective thread a medal.

No.1561319

>>1559954

yes, you just sit, learn and feel like doing something.

No.1564291

>>1548362

If I understand you properly, both of them are quite interesting, with cookie seems like winner because of more "fair" redistribution. My autistic screeching:

requested = { ##dictionary, person id:amount    0:8, 1:9, 2:11, 3:53, 4:2 }stock = 70def randomDictator(requested, stock, rSeed):    if rSeed:        personId = rSeed.pop()        if requested[personId] < stock:            stock -= requested[personId]            requested[personId] = 0        else:            requested[personId] -= stock            stock = 0        randomDictator(requested, stock, rSeed)##randomDictator(requested, stock, [2, 1, 5, 3, 4])def cookie(requested, stock, rSeed, personId):    print (requested, stock)    if stock:        if requested[personId%len(rSeed)] > 0:            requested[personId%len(rSeed)] -= 1            stock -=1        cookie(requested, stock, rSeed, personId+1)        cookie(requested, stock, [2, 1, 0, 3, 4], 1 )

I wonder how would be solved maintaining low price of goods. You obviously need lot's of storages, but what if item I requested isn't in my nearest storage? Should the program find next closest storage and request stuff from there or just wait? Couldn't this cause massive underperformance of some industries?

No.1566466

>>1559942

>No, you fucking retard, why don't you read up on the matter so you don't look like an absolute imbecile?

Easy, man, easy. He's just spooked as everyone once was. And to his credit, there is a trace of utopianism in some cyberneticians.

No.1566485

>>1566466

>there is a trace of utopianism in some cyberneticians

Yes, utopianism is something I think we should be on guard against. I conceive of this stuff less as a blueprint for a future society and more as the development of the tools we need to build the new society.

I think that the revolutions and revolts of the 20th century have shown us that the working class doesn't lack for revolutionary will or ability to self-organise - what it lacks is the basis for a new way of doing things.

I think that's why the previous revolts have all ended up dependent on 'revolutionary parties' or middle-class forces - the movements have lacked the tools to create a new way of organising production and distribution. With properly developed cybernetics and computer-assisted planning, I think we'll finally have all the tools necessary to transcend the law of value.

It's incumbent upon us to develop these tools, but we shouldn't stray into trying to prescribe the course of the new society - the best we can do is create systems that enable the working class to democratically organise production and society.

No.1566621

>>1566485

>Yes, utopianism is something I think we should be on guard against.

Yeah, it's easy to fall into the trap of believing that technology X will solve this problem all by itself, as if its application didn't depend on material conditions.

>I conceive of this stuff less as a blueprint for a future society and more as the development of the tools we need to build the new society.

That's a very good analogy actually, I'll remember that one, thanks. A fella in another thread bemoaned how the much touted industrialization failed to elevate man, and I pointed out that by itself it's just a tool, and one which hasn't been used to that end. When industry is finally wielded by the workers, it will serve the workers.

And the rest of what you say makes sense. You could frame the shortcomings of revolutions, or of administration of socialist countries post-revolution, as failures of information. Perhaps not just of economic factors, but also ideologic, philosophic etc., but that's just a supposition.

God knows that the original sin of the left is divisiveness, and it almost inevitably stems from dissent over small matters. I'm aiming high here, but who knows, our dream network here might be the X factor that allows that unification of the left, since economy is the crux of socialism and anarchism. If this network solution could get a lot of factions on board, the unification of the left would be a step away.

No.1566692

>>1566621

>God knows that the original sin of the left is divisiveness, and it almost inevitably stems from dissent over small matters.

Fuckin' A. Endless bitching about philosophical and political minutiae when no-one seems to have done the slightest bit of work to figure out how the system we're all so excited about is supposed to run.

I would be overjoyed if this could be the start of a new, more hard-headed and economically-oriented sort of communism. Lately I just haven't seen the point in fighting pissweak pointless little activist battles when we have no idea how to win the war.

No.1566822

>>1566692

To somehow get to the specific ideas on how to win the war we must organize research in cybernetics and its application to management of economy. With principles of socialism, anarchism and communism in mind. Otherwise any good result would be abused to uphold private ownership. of social fruits of labour.

Just like all other sciences are doing with their research institutes, laboratories, libraries, conferences, workshops and so on.

Organizing a group to translate original literature on cybernetics into english, or probably even esperanto, might be a great first step in building the research groups from scratch. That applies most to eastern europe. Or areas with eastern european immigrants who might be interested in leftism.

Essentially it requires to copy the way scientific research works.

Organizing lectures on cybernetics and its application to economics, or workshops as a part of existing anarchist or socialist groups, or independent higher education groups that the anarchist groups like to organize.

Of course in the first stages of organization, it would be mostly research of existing literature, making models of systems, developing algorithms and getting/creating economic data to run the algorithms on. The only application can be applied to certain coops if they exist.

That is if they do not already use similar systems of automated economical management.

No.1567206

>>1483524

But the Bolshevik Party was already the optimal Bolshevik Party.

>>1482566

It's basically Stalinism with computers, where only the inner party can tinker with the machinery, and an AI decides who goes into the inner party? Putting a lot of stock in that MAI.

>>1522297

>Pay is to be determined by a tertiary algorithm's determination of where bottlenecks lie - that is, it takes the first blockchain system's information of what is produced and how and combines it with the second blockchain system's information on who gets what to determine which human occupations could use extra people in them to increase production. For those, the pay goes up. For fields with an excess of people, the pay goes down. Because everyone gets a certain amount of luxury spending currency anyways as both a buffer and a basic necessity

Won't this be extremely alienating on a human level? People will continually see their pay go up and down without understanding why. Long as you have a hard floor of pay you can't fall through it would be livable, but I can imagine this causing a lot of grumbling among people who cannot attain the skills needed to fill in bottleneck sectors.

No.1568140

There are some who say the economy is, and should be, based on micro-foundations. That means the description of the economy starts with given individuals with given personalities and given wants and ends with society. And should be - that's like wishing that many hands draw spontaneously at different spots on a wall, each hand only concerned with its own little part, maybe a few interactions with the immediate neighbors, and yet expecting that all of these actions somehow add up to a sensible coherent picture.

There are some who say they want a more rational economy, that is a more planned economy, where actors are confronted with a given set of prices, they submit statements about how much they want of this or that thing, then, without any trade yet happening, we allow the prices to dance in response to the quantities demanded, look at the new demand statements, still don't trade and instead let the prices dance again, and so on, and when that process stabilizes around certain quantities and prices (there is no mathematical reason for assuming that), we will have a sensible plan. That's like saying that the process of painting a detailed and good picture involves drawing detailed and wrong pictures. But that's not how the pros paint. They don't go from detailed and wrong to detailed and right. They go from rough sketches to detailed pictures, from roughly right to exactly right. The corresponding action to that in planning the economy is NOT planning with points (exactly this price, exactly that quantity, both likely wrong), but with RANGES.

The painter doesn't necessarily have a precise idea at the start of painting, just a rough idea, and doing the rough sketch leads to a more precise idea. Upper limits and lower limits to prices and quantities, together with technical constraints, already have a more precise picture implicit in them, without any individual being aware of it before we put together a list of facts, each of which when taken alone looking utterly boring and obvious and, in a word, uninformative. But put all these "non-infos" together, and the sum turns out to be more informative than the parts.

When we want to gather the opinions of ten people, we can talk with them. When it's a hundred people, we can ask them some questions that they answer in writing, maybe we drop the idea of having any back and forth then going on. When asking a million people for their opinions, the information a single person can give has to be constrained, so it is clear and machine-readable. We just ask them to rank some proposals, for instance. Ballots and surveys constrain how people express themselves. This may not sound like much to be enthusiastic about (who loves doing surveys?), but there is a lot of room for improvement here.

No.1568141

>>1568140

One freedom that people should have is to state ambivalence. When you ask them to rank things, they should be allowed to give the same rank position to several things. Forcing people to make distinctions about things they are undecided about creates fake information and fake precision. Counter-intuitively, forcing people to state distinctions where they don't see any can it make harder to get to an aggregate decision. I call this the fuzzy information paradox. Here is the most simple example: You have to decide between thing A, thing B, and thing C, and ask two people about their opinion. The first person understands one aspect of the issue very well, and when it comes to that aspect, thing A and thing B perform clearly better than C. There is another aspect that the other person understands very well, and when it comes to that second aspect, B and C are better than A. Neither of them is sure what the best thing of the three is. Suppose you have a separate talk with each, and you are an impatient and want a clear recommendation. Then it can happen that the first person recommends A and the second person recommends C. If only you had been patient and allowed them to state their ambivalences, then you would have gotten a clear recommendation! Not allowing them to state their ambivalence destroyed information.

Compare that with trying to make sense of the world in terms of money. There is such and such amount of dollars in the world, one adult animal of species A costs an amount of X dollars, and you get two for the price of two times X dollars. Therefor, the pile of dollars divided by X gives you the amount of animals of species A that humanity could get right now, if they only used money for that, right? Of course that isn't right and it isn't the right formula to figure out how much exists of anything. Trying to plan for a socialist world using money aggregates leads to absurd conclusions. And I want to make something clear here. Talking about the world in money aggregates does not become nonsense in socialism, it is nonsense right now. Humanity cannot make up for pollution by paying sin taxes (and paying to whom? God? Will God be bribed that way to change the laws of physics for us?), no, we have to recognize the physical constraints as what they are in planning.

No.1568159

>>1566692

>how the system we're all so excited about is supposed to run.

Oh believe me I've seen enough bitching aboit it too. But at least the concensus on "let's get to that point first and see" has some unifying potential in it.

>>1566822

Interestingly enough I've found one project on some leftist twitter not so long time ago which deals with something you described.

It's a bit liberal-ish, but interesting nontheless.

https://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=PHILOS-L%3Bcd670467.1704

No.1572948

>>1567206

>Won't this be extremely alienating on a human level? People will continually see their pay go up and down without understanding why. Long as you have a hard floor of pay you can't fall through it would be livable, but I can imagine this causing a lot of grumbling among people who cannot attain the skills needed to fill in bottleneck sectors.

Is there a better solution to the problem of "how do we get people to do the hard, unwanted work necessary to keep the system running"? I thought the same thing, and came to the conclusion that it could be a life's entire effort to resolve this. I thought the same thing when reading "Towards A New Socialism" at first, then gave up and focused on the rest. I at least have the consolation that most goods won't even have prices - already, canned food at my nearby Dollar Tree costs $0.79, for example. I realized that it could go for$0, and it made me wonder, "how many other physical goods actually cost nothing and are ridiculously marked up?". Dr. Dre headphones cost (costed?) ~$300 and supposedly only costed ~$18 to actually make. The point is, money would only be needed for scarce goods, those which are harder to make. A democratic program to determine in-kind subsidies to the production of necessary goods which have prices much higher than 0 to make might be a good side project in the future. Maybe people will do the jobs anyways, but I'd rather not chance it until the whole system is operational and capitalism has been given the wall treatment. If we really can immediately eliminate all which produces alienation by commanding labor against its will, that would be nothing short of epic, but we need to take baby steps first.

>>1568140

>>1568141

This is an excellent argument for in-kind planning in general. I came to the conclusion a while ago that investigating prices and how they're formed is BS because prices follow absolutely no "equilibrium laws" whatsoever - they're the idealistic concoctions of mentally sick vulgar economists. Now I think I'm starting to get where they come from, though - capitalism is a linear optimization function which maximizes production of what goods are demanded by those in possession of money, given current material constraints (capital, land, labor). Who owns that money? Those who own property. Prices follow this relationship around and simply tell those who own property "this is how to adjust yourself to match these production goals". It's a roughly-correct system with low-accuracy mass info inputs which self-corrects and extracts as much productivity as it can from whatever it can find under the sun. I remember poo-pooing those who argue that we must become cyborgs perfectly in tune with "market logic" to compete with AI because they were extending the logic of capitalist production, but is this entire project simply repurposing its own nature? I suppose it is different because it's not for the purpose of pure growth and capital accumulation, but rather the satiation of human needs, but it undeniably has some parallels. Someone should conduct a full cybernetic analysis of capitalism, taking your article as a starting point, and compare it to what is proposed in this thread in terms of how well both can potentially self-correct to meet human needs. It might be time to email Cottrell and Cockshott.

>>1564291

Saving this, this is very valuable.

>>1568159

Maybe I'll need to spend some time compressing this thread and all the arguments within it into a cogent thesis paper and sending it with a link to an archive of this thread in the future. I think there's potential.

No.1579520

>>1568159

From their twitter (Autonomy_UK), they look like liberal UBI shills who conceive of mass unemployment as something that is more a result of technology rather than the economic system.

No.1579562

Is there a tldr? Is this about studying soviet cybernetics, or simulating the modern economy through a model based off Marx's theory of value? I have to learn coding before I start graduate school in the fall, so it would be useful to me if the latter is true.

No.1579570

File: 0cfed8fbef9496d⋯.jpg (96.4 KB, 500x638, 250:319, 0cfed8fbef9496d1c9cc66474e….jpg)

>>1579562

No.1579663

>>1579562

This thread has covered two main things.

Second, it's about discussing the methods by which we could use computer modelling to run a non-capitalist industrial economy. I've been making the argument that achieving communism is a pipe dream if we don't know out how to run it.

It's interesting that you should mention simulating the modern LTV-based economy, though. Cockshott and Cottrell (two academics whose work is discussed a lot in the thread) talk about the fact that prices can accurately predicted based on the socially necessary labour time involved in production.

They also published a textbook, Classical Econophysics. Among other things they model a situation where wealth starts off uniformly distributed and then people make exchanges at random. Their model ends up with a power law distribution of wealth among the population - exactly the same kind of wealth inequality we see in the real world today. Essentially, they demonstrate that market exchanges will lead to inequality with the same inevitability that the distribution of kinetic energies of particles in an ideal gas conforms to a Boltzmann distribution.

No.1579674

>>1579663

>Essentially, they demonstrate that market exchanges will lead to inequality with the same inevitability that the distribution of kinetic energies of particles in an ideal gas conforms to a Boltzmann distribution.

That's interesting, because during my recent reading of Capital, I was struck how Marx's depiction of labor resembles a classical mechanics depiction of energy and work. I will have to read Cockshott and Cottrell, though, because their work sounds like exactly what I was interested in thinking about after Capital.

No.1581662

File: f8ba16760f04d0b⋯.pdf (3.33 MB, (Routledge Advances in Exp….pdf)

No.1581886

File: e93ce22e7bc5b52⋯.jpg (284.9 KB, 763x768, 763:768, 1470379655113-0.jpg)

>>1567206

>But the Bolshevik Party was already the optimal Bolshevik Party.

If it was, it wouldn't need a selection process nor purges, now would it?

No.1582155

>>1554889

I have now finished reading Classical Econophysics. This book covers a lot, classical economics and Marx, criticism of Marx (both neoclasical and inspired by Ricardo), criticism of neoclassical economics, the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution in physics and money-using economies, chartalism, Kalecki, the general trend of profitability, and more. It's a good book, but not much in it is about cybernetics.

No.1582668

This site has some pdfs by western writers on cybernetics, including Ashby's introduction: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/LIBRARY.html

Cybernetics dictionary: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/INDEXASC.html

No.1582749

Looks like the first pdfs posted have 404ed probably because of April first hacking.

Anyway, more recent archive.

http://archive.is/q736J

No.1583862

>>1582749

The original archive still has all the stuff. I'm currently slogging my way through Oskar Lange's book on economic cybernetics.

https://archive.fo/SDBcR

No.1586409

>>1582749

>>1583862

That's weird, the paperclip symbol for the PDFs is gone but the files are still there. But the accompanying images are completely gone. ALGORITHMAAAAAAAPE!

No.1589348

No.1589545

>>1548362

Production of stuff can be ordered into lexicographic tiers of importance. Lexicographic means that, when several tiers both ask for a particular resource, there is no "exchange rate" of demand budget points that have different weight or something like that. Rather, the "weight" of the request of the highest tier is infinitely stronger. It has total priority. Only if the highest tier (food I guess) asks for fewer units of input X than what is available, can the second-highest tier get any units of that, and the third tier can only get what is left after first and second tier had their say and so on. (Maybe two tiers are already enough though.) So, the distribution between the tiers is like random dictator, except it's not random, it's ordered from highest tier to lowest. Within each tier, something like the cookie algorithm can be used.

(I wonder if such a structure would create a strong incentive to make mousepads and all sorts of other things edible…)

No.1590164

There is a general problem when trying to reckon about piles of stuff of different things with one-dimensional methods. One and the same pile partitioned in different ways should be recognized as the same, so if represented by a single number that number shouldn't grow or shrink. To analytically separate pile size and its distribution I guess something like Sraffa's standard product is needed.

No.1590383

>>1585514

That's what I've always found very interesting about this subject - in essence what we're working on here is a method of automating the role of the bourgeoisie, in so far as they mediate the distribution of resources within society. If the last actual thing they can be considered to do was automated, they would be entirely obsolete.

>>1589545

>I wonder if such a structure would create a strong incentive to make mousepads and all sorts of other things edible…

Holy shit, Charlie Fourier was right. Seas of lemonade confirmed. Who would have thought that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was actually a prophetic work of socialist polemics?

No.1592317

File: 0b098e3dfda4855⋯.jpg (41.22 KB, 429x377, 33:29, 0b098e3dfda4855229339c51da….jpg)

>User deleted his own post #1585514

why does people delete their posts? I want to hear every, even shitty opinion on this subject…

No.1592621

>>1592317

It was this video, is from the video game MGS2, the story is basically what would happen if the bourgeoisie constructs a system homologous to the what we want to make to shape culture/memes in order to keep the status quo:

No.1595034

File: c623bb0f961a5ce⋯.png (169.1 KB, 400x520, 10:13, ClipboardImage.png)

Does anyone have a collection of these?

No.1595627

>>1514914

>not the sort of thing started by a group of ancoms who met on the internet.

Why not? Trying and failing would likely be a better way to learn this material, and it would encourage more to learn as well.

No.1596500

There is math resarch into methods for when there is a given pile of things to allocate (a typical term for that kind of thing is cake-cutting). There are three common criteria here. The method should be 1. Pareto efficient. Avoid allocations that are Pareto-dominated. P-d means that there is a possible different way of allocating things that nobody likes less and at least one person prefers. 2. Envy-free. Nobody would prefer to swap the allocation they got with another person. 3. Equitable. If the bundle person A receives is made of things scored by person A being worth X points in total, then the bundle person B receives is made of things scored by person B X points in total as well.

It's not possible to construct a method that always delivers all of these, so the question is how important each criterion is.

No.1598441

Suppose for some things and people we retain a market. Instead of hand-waving about a market being sensible, I would like to know for sure that it works, and I just don't see it.

Let's start with a very simple market: Instead of money, there is play money, meaning all individuals have the same amount, there is no saving or debt, instead it is used up entirely in the allocation of a given pile of things, and the play money is used for putting a cap on how much an individual can request. You can't give play money to another person either. Before anything from the pile is received by anyone, there is an iterative procedure of people sending requests to the center based on some data, the center gives everybody an update, people react to that by updating their requests, the center releases an update again, and so on. When an equilibrium is reached, the stuff is allocated.

Now, I don't want to make a hair-splitting argument about some very small amount of that pile left unallocated or a small amount of play money left unused, I'm okay with taking a state that isn't perfectly stable as good enough (ending in a loop of a small subset of states that don't differ by much) and just use a lottery for the crumbs left. I don't see how one can be even sure a market procedure would reach that sort of equilibrium, unless you strongly constrain what sort of input is allowed.

The common sense view of markets is that when prices go up, quantity demanded goes down; when prices go down, quantity demanded goes up. But when several prices change, just about anything can happen: Suppose the price of X goes up, and a person then demands more of it. This can happen when:

1. One or more other things the person requests go down in price so much that the person has now more budget left to buy stuff with.

2. Another thing that is a substitute for X gets so expensive that X is the cheaper alternative despite it also rising in price.

3. One or more other things that augment the use value of X change in price in a way that this combination gets cheaper.

The crude way to make sure that demand reacts to price as it should according to capitalist theology, is that the iteration procedure keeps a record of what people request in each iteration and constrains your inputs, so that they are weakly monotonic. So if in the first round you ask for 5 units of X at 10 points per X, and in the second round the price of one X is 8, you cannot ask for fewer than 5 units. Suppose you ask for 8 units then. If the price in the third round is between these two prices, the amount you can ask for is also constrained in that you can only ask for 5 to 10 units of X then. I figure many people would be frustrated with the resulting allocation for the above three reasons (and there are more). So, is there an elegant way of solving that? Should we go a more administrative route, where the things in the pile are already classified in some way (substitutes, useful combinations) before the iterative procedure starts?

No.1601122

File: 85fd96107fee03b⋯.jpg (44.15 KB, 438x720, 73:120, 1469752882361-1.jpg)

No.1601143

>>1601122

You know, until recently I'd never considered how deep this kind of sentiment runs. Now that I have noticed it, I realise that it's all over the place, and it takes many guises. "Oh we won't have another chance at revolution for at least 50 years.", "Communism isn't possible until labour is 100% automated", "We'll never be able to keep 7 billion people well-fed", "It'll never happen here, we have to wait and pray that the Joint Dictatorship of the Proletariat of the Oppressed Nations (JDPON pbuh) shows us mercy", "The halting problem means that you can't manage an economy unless you simultaneously know the exact position and momentum of every particle in the universe", etc, etc, and sho on.

You know what? You people say that it's all impossible and that we should face to Ｂｌｏｏｄｓｈｅｄ. Fucking prove it. I think that full communism will turn out a perfectly feasible economic system, achievable within our lifetimes. I don't know how it'll work yet, but instead of declaring it impossible I'm going to do the work and either get it done or prove its impossibility. You can keep sniping from the sidelines, get on the train, or fucking neck yourselves. Your choice.

No.1601228

>>1601143

>I'm going to do the work and either get it done or prove its impossibility.

The way I see it is

>prepare plan for new economic order

>wait for capitalist crisis

>promote it

>???

>either communism or go back to the step 1

I don't think it's impossible, too. All you need to do is unite french and german speaking workers which would trigger domino effect from ex-socialist countries and we will have communism within 2 decades. Easy, right?

we are close bump limit, should we recreate thread when we reach it or wait a few days/weeks?

No.1601311

>>1601228

I'm working on compiling notes and readings from this thread, the Empirical Marxism thread, the Ecomp thread, and the bunkerchan cybernetics thread into one package. It'll be easy enough to post in the OP of the next thread I'm not the OP of any of those, just a very interested poster who had been working on similar ideas before finding this board/thread.

I'd like to produce something article-sized for wider publication on at least bunkermag but hopefully places with more reach too. I think this idea's got legs, and the theory I've seen/contributed to here is some of the most exciting and original stuff I've come across despite years spent on the irl Left. I'd like to see contributions to this work from more than just a tiny fraction of a ~1000 person leftist board - even if this does seem to be one of the only good leftist discussion areas the internet has ever produced.

Regarding your scenario, I think the second and third step will be reversed in order. I made a couple of posts in the Dauve thread [ >>1585265 ] about the spontaneous appearance of communist productive relations in information-based industries (starting here >>1599771 ). Following that logic, I think we should be thinking about how to integrate the planning-in-kind systems talked about in this thread into already existing financial and stock-management systems/networks. That way, when crisis hits, workers in struggle have the tools to start making communism a reality already at their fingertips. There was a turn of phrase I quite liked in the Ecomp software thread - 'turnkey socialism'. In all likelihood things wouldn't turn out like that, but the tools are important to develop regardless - at the very least for a proof of concept regarding economic co-ordination eschewing the Law of Value.

No.1607834

File: a40b61f8f55c4ae⋯.gif (1.42 MB, 615x450, 41:30, a40b61f8f55c4aee06b540d6fa….gif)

Are you doing your homework, anon?

No.1609010

>>1598441

Tip for anybody who wants to build such an allocation procedure: Even if the iteration steps require people stay within their budgets when making requests, this doesn't need to be true for the final allocation. It's also not a requirement to come up with final prices for the things.

No.1609426

Big question about the pricing system Cockshott and Cottrell propose: If individual consumer power is to be calibrated based on deeds, shouldn't the price ratios of products be different for different people, to make it more fair? Okay, that's probably sounds like the opposite of fair, but hear me out. (Note that with non-transferable electronic consumption points it is entirely possible to make different people pay different prices for the same thing.)

C & C deal with different contributions by granting people different consumption budgets. But consider how a thing is made: There is human work and there are natural resources. When we talk about a service with basically no tools or other things involved, just human-to-human, it makes sense to me that, in an according-to-deeds world, I get roughly an hour for an hour I give. But when the thing I want is basically just a natural resource, shouldn't I have a right to my share just by being human? Why should I give hours of my life to get something that doesn't contain human hours? Almost every product is a mix, of course. So, shouldn't the price of a thing require payments with two different inconvertible "currencies", X human-hour budget points plus Y nature-budget points, with everybody having the same income in nature-budget points? (We can call that allocation system Human Nature, heh.)

No.1609451

>>1609426

Starting from Cockshott and Cottrell's assertion that you need a system in place to limit consumption, your conclusion is basically valid. I think I recall them bringing up the need to account for natural resource use, though I don't recall what suggestions they made regarding it (it's been a couple of months since I last went over TaNS).

In any case, between the normal labour voucher pseudocurrency, the commune-specific women's work voucher (I mean if we're establishing a separate currency for domestic labour, let's be realistic about how it's going to end up), and the natural bounty voucher UBI you've made a reasonable argument for, I think it's pretty obvious that trying to limit consumption using pseudocurrencies and pseudomarkets will quickly become a total headache. Getting people to do a regular budget in one currency is bad enough, balancing a budget in three separate currencies, only two of which are interchangeable? Even Lenin would go looking to defect.

I think the case I make in post >>1550676 is a decent argument for jettisoning markets entirely.

No.1609484

>>1609426

>If individual consumer power is to be calibrated based on deeds, shouldn't the price ratios of products be different for different people

Whoops, I forgot to mention something, as so far I have described the system, people do see the same prices.

The dual-payment system is somewhat clumsy, since some people might prefer products containing less than their individual proportional share of nature and more human time, with some people having the opposite preference, so both groups would be more happy with a different allocation. So maybe it's better for each individual to only have one consumption budget, but still have individualized prices that work in a way similar to what's described above, so that working longer doesn't tend to make resource-intensive stuff available as much as work-intensive stuff (you would still get the information about how each product being made of two parts), unless the demand for the resource-intensive stuff is very weak.

>>1609451

>I think it's pretty obvious that trying to limit consumption using pseudocurrencies and pseudomarkets will quickly become a total headache.

Well, the productive activity of millions of people is a rather complicated topic. I don't expect simple proposals.

No.1609514

>>1609484

>Well, the productive activity of millions of people is a rather complicated topic. I don't expect simple proposals.

Fair enough, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to want to switch to a system that achieves (to the lay observer) the same basic goals at the cost of more complications for the end user. Placing price-based limits on consumption also carries with it the implication that scarcity is a going concern. I have no evidence for this, but I can imagine that the spectre of scarcity may encourage hoarding and overconsumption where free access would have circumvented them. Retaining markets in a socialist goods distribution system smacks of reinventing the wheel to me. The supposedly unlimited nature of human desires doesn't seem a good enough reason to me - human desires are quite limited, in practical terms. After all, there is only so much food a person can want to eat in a day, and you can only drive one car, boat, plane, etc. at a time. And sho on.

Of course, all of the above points are contingent on figuring out a consistent, theoretically sound economic basis for full communism. So if that whole thing turns out to be impossible, I'll start entertaining the idea of reinventing the 'market' wheel.

No.1612568

File: 8f91bc7b95a0b81⋯.png (646.71 KB, 609x601, 609:601, left cybernetics.png)

There is another book by Botvinnik, Computers in Chess - Solving Inexact Search Problems, I am reading the intro right now, and this one seems to have more on using the AI outside of chess.

>Although the chess program was not complete even after ten years, the program PIONEER-2 for computing the monthly repair schedule for the Interconnected Power System of Russian Central was completed in a few months. In mid-October of 1980 a medium-speed computer constructed the plan in 40 seconds (…) PIONEER-2 turned out to be more competent than the humans (…) In the following year, PIONEER-3 was developed to produce the annual plan for all power stations in the USSR. The plan for 1982 was produced in 3 minutes 19 seconds. If one notes that the monthly plan dealt with 200 units for 30 days, and the annual plan with 600 units for 365 days, one must be amazed; the dimension of the full-width search tree for the annual plan is essentially infinite. The truth of the matter is that by using the chess master's method, the search problem is reduced to one of analysis, and therefore the solution depends only weakly on the dimensions of the search.

>In 1982 the program was updated. It not only produces the plan, but if necessary minimizes the increase in the reserve power that must be dedicated to offset the output of the units in repair. The technicians like this very much, since now they can only approximate the amount of reserve power needed for maintenance; the computer itself made the value of the reserve more precise. (…) After PIONEER-5 has successfully completed its trials, one may assume that, to a first approximation, it will be capable of planning any branch of the economy.