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ThrustVectoring comments on Open thread, May 17-31 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

2 [deleted] 17 May 2013 01:47PM

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Comment author: ThrustVectoring 20 May 2013 12:58:16PM 0 points [-]

You also know some people who desperately need a course in computational complexity. Markets aren't perfect, of course, but good luck trying to centrally compute distribution of resources.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 May 2013 05:02:37PM *  3 points [-]

That doesn't sound like a terribly good argument -- the fact that it would take O(something big) time to compute something exactly isn't terribly important if you can compute a decent approximation in O(something small) time.

(I'm not a Communist, FWIW.)

Comment author: ThrustVectoring 20 May 2013 06:26:44PM 1 point [-]

My model of how to approximate the optimum solution - specifically, break it up into tiny pieces and keep track of price-analogues by means of a real number valued function of the industrial output being managed - looks an awful lot like a free market with really weird labels for everything. It goes up to and includes closing sub-units that detract from overall optimization (read: unprofitable firms).

Comment author: Pfft 20 May 2013 05:36:43PM *  3 points [-]

The various hardness results for economic problems (e.g. computing Nash equilibriums is PPAD-complete) cuts equally much against free markets as against central planning. If a central agent can't solve a given problem within cosmological time scales, then neither can a few billion distributed agents.