Eugine_Nier comments on Is Politics the Mindkiller? An Inconclusive Test - Less Wrong

14 Post author: OrphanWilde 27 July 2012 05:45PM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 02 August 2012 08:52:29PM 0 points [-]

Wouldn't a working theory of utilitarianism "solve" the economy directly? Similarly if everyone had perfect market knowledge they would know from the prices set on goods and services (including "live forever" and "be free of pain and suffering") what everyone's utility preferences were and it would be possible in theory to calculate a course of action that maximized wealth and at the same time maximized utility.

That runs into pigeon hole problems, even in theory.

Comment author: Pentashagon 03 August 2012 01:19:54AM *  0 points [-]

Say a theoretical human can have M preferences and there are N humans so we need to store MN utilities. Clearly humans can't consciously hold that much information in their head even for just themselves, but I can currently store about 142 32-bit integers for every person alive on earth on a single relatively cheap hard drive. A centralized world economy could keep track of individual price-preferences of all products that have a UPC assigned using about 7x10^19 prices, or a little over 10 exabytes. Difficult, but not intractable.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 03 August 2012 07:03:04PM 0 points [-]

Say a theoretical human can have M preferences and there are N humans so we need to store M*N utilities. Clearly humans can't consciously hold that much information in their head even for just themselves, but I can currently store about 142 32-bit integers for every person alive on earth on a single relatively cheap hard drive.

Assuming the other humans aren't similarly using hard drives to extend their effective memory.

Comment author: Pentashagon 03 August 2012 08:58:15PM 0 points [-]

Assuming the other humans aren't similarly using hard drives to extend their effective memory.

I guess there's an limit on the percentage of wealth owned by the people, then. In the worst case the government would need at least 50% of the total wealth to devote to mirroring the memory storage used by all the people. Pretty steep tax rate, and that doesn't include effective taxation by wealth redistribution that might result from the central government's calculations.