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ChristianKl comments on Estimate the Cost of Immortality - Less Wrong
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Money (AKA the free market economy) is a way of allocating resources efficiency. The alternative - a command economy - is where some central agent decides how resources should be allocated.
By using money and buying and selling goods and services, we are already pooling our resources. The money thing is a way to decide what we should do with them, where decisions are made by people choosing to spend money on one thing rather than another.
Command hierachies are only one alternative to markets. Tribes and networks are two other forms.
Wikipedia for example creates a lot of value with being structured as a network.
WTF are these? I have never heard of them. Sounds fishy but I don't have time to definitively debunk.
Wikipedia is a ultimately a hierarchy where certain committees of high-power admins get the final say. Also, wikipedia isn't really like an economy - the product types (articles) naturally match 1-1 with the producers (experts on that subject). There aren't any intermediate products or supply chains. As a resource allocation problem, wikipedia is trivial.
I linked to David Ronfeld's paper laying out the terms.
The resource allocation that happens at Christmas is tribal in nature. People don't receive gifts because they pay money to receive a gift. They don't receive gifts because a hierachy organizes who gives whom a gift.
YCominator says that one of the biggest benefits of being a YC company is the access to YC alumni. YC alumni feel that they have a tribal obligation to help new YC company.
When programmers on stackoverflow help each other that value exchange is a network. Most of the value generated at Wikipedia get's generated through the network mode. A person thinks that contributing to Wikipedia is valuable, so they contribute. Value generated at LW get's generated through the network mode. In a lot of open source value get's generated via the network mode. Internet governance works in the network mode.
If you look at many African countries they are in a mess because their main way of value exchange is tribal. Politicians have more loyality to the clan to which they belong than they have to the hierachy of the government. If you think the only two choices are a command economies and market economies you miss the way value flow in such societies and therefore make all sorts of bad decisions.
It produces value in a way that's different than market economies and command economies.
It still manages to outcompete the Encyclopaedia Britannica which operates through market mechanisms where it pays people to write articles.
Irrelevant. The question at hand is how to allocate resources. Britannica is also a trivial resource allocation problem. Wikipedia gets volunteer labour for free on a massive scale, whereas Britannica has to pay. The fact that wikipedia therefore wins is nothing to do with allocation
Which fails completely when the subject is in any way political or controversial. And by fail completely, I mean produces articles which anti-correlate with reality.
I don't think it fails completely. Failing completely would mean that it's clearly worse than the alternatives.
If I have a political question such as what happened at the Paris attacks, Wikipedia provides good answers.
Is there a single market driven or hierarchical organisation that you would consider to be completely trustworthy on the topic of
Racial bias in criminal news in the United States