Not really. Alonzo does his thing, I do my thing, and we stay out of each other's way.

• 20 hours ago

Keep in mind that I'm not Alonzo Fyfe's biggest fan.

• 2 days ago

I'm not sure the distinction between IOS and IFS makes sense. All acts fulfill emotional desires: we eat food because we feel hungry, not because we physically need food (although we obviously evolved the emotional need to satisfy the physical need). Or as Alonzo Fyfe puts it, the gazelle flees the lion not because it doesn't want to get eaten but because it fears the lion.

I'm not sure there's a distinction between "tangible" and "intangible" benefits except to in that the fulfillment of a desire might have more or less connection to the physical world: some desires can be fulfilled just by thinking, others just by speaking and listening, others, such as the desire to quickly move between Oakland and San Francisco, might require massive effort by thousands of people to fulfill.

I think a better way to distinguish desires is by their social implication: some desires are mutually fulfillable: satisfying my desire also satisfies another's desire; other desires are exploitative: satisfying my desire entails another person's desires will go unsatisfied.

It's possible that given enough time, people will simply evolve not to have exploitative desires. But... for this to happen, there will have to be real social selection pressures.

• 2 days ago

Well, in that sense, the withering away of the state under communism is unproblematic.

• 2 days ago

It's not clear precisely what you mean by "Greed" when you say, "[greed] is impossible to retain under Communism." People tend to act in their own perceived individual self-interest. Even if people are rational, having good epistemically supported understanding of objective reality, they will act according to their rational self-interest. I want communism because it's in my own self-interest, and its in the self-interest of everyone who cannot claw their way into the top 7-10%, the bourgeoisie.

The problem is not that people are "greedy" in the sense of acting in their own self-interest; the problem is that capitalism institutionalizes the value of acting in one's own immediate, material self-interest, and institutionalizes the negative value of acting with regard to mutual self-interest.

My argument is not that federated decision-making cannot determine their mutual self-interest. My argument is that in Prisoner's Dilemma situations, two or more parties must coercively bind themselves to acting in their mutual self-interest to escape the "rational" Nash Equilibrium of mutual defection. The problem is not primarily about information, but about motivation.

The only penalty that federated agents can impose on each other is their own defection, the "Tit-for-Tat" solution to the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. But when the lag between one player's defection and the retaliation exceeds the agents' lifetime, then it's difficult to see how this solution could be operative.

• 3 days ago