[Link] Why don't people like markets?

GLaDOS

An interesting piece with speculation on possible reasons for why people seem to be biased against markets. To summarize:

Market processes are not visible. For instance, when a government taxes its citizens and offers a subsidy to some producers, what is seen is the money taken and the money received. What is unseen is the amount of production that would occur in the absence of such transfers.
Markets are intrinsically probabilistic and therefore marked with uncertainty, like other living organisms, we are loss-averse and try to minimise uncertainty
Humans may be motivated to place their trust in processes that are (or at least seem to be) driven by agents rather than impersonal factors.

The last point reminded me of speculation from the recent LessWrong article Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions:

Do all theories of legitimacy also perhaps rest on the same cognitive failings that conspiracy theories do? The difference between a shadowy cabal we need to get rid of and an institution worthy of respect may be just some bad luck.

Before thinking about these points and debating them I strongly recommend you read the full article.

An interesting piece with speculation on possible reasons for why people seem to be biased against markets. To summarize:

Market processes are not visible. For instance, when a government taxes its citizens and offers a subsidy to some producers, what is seen is the money taken and the money received. What is unseen is the amount of production that would occur in the absence of such transfers.
Markets are intrinsically probabilistic and therefore marked with uncertainty, like other living organisms, we are loss-averse and try to minimise uncertainty
Humans may be motivated to place their trust in processes that are (or at least seem to be) driven by agents rather than impersonal factors.

The last point reminded me of speculation from the recent LessWrong article Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions:

Do all theories of legitimacy also perhaps rest on the same cognitive failings that conspiracy theories do? The difference between a shadowy cabal we need to get rid of and an institution worthy of respect may be just some bad luck.

Before thinking about these points and debating them I strongly recommend you read the full article.

The fact that "Politics is the Mind-Killer" doesn't call for a blanket ban on political discussion doesn't mean that a community norm against nonessential political discussion is necessarily a bad idea. Now, I would say that roystgnr's jumping the gun a bit here -- the OP's tied pretty closely to heuristics and biases research, and avoids explicit color politics -- but I'd rather we engage the norm on its own terms rather than in terms of its relation to Eliezer's post. After all, we're hardly bound to take Eliezer's word as gospel.

Ok sure I can agree with this, even if I think Overcoming Bias/LessWrong used to be more interesting when we stuck to EY's proposed norm. But come now you must know of what I'm talking about when I say:

It has now been applied to everything from biology, sociology, sexuality and even recently to religion.

There has been overreach. Worse politics as the mindkiller is now being used as a political tool.

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[Link] Why don't people like markets?

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[Link] Why don't people like markets?

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