Friedrich Hayek and the Collective Brain

128 pointsby mirajabout 8 years ago

15 comments

chrismealyabout 8 years ago

Having read a ton of Hayek I thought I'd share what the real Hayek is like, not the libertarian poster child. Actually existing Hayek would probably disappoint most libertarians. He’s against corporate personhood, skeptical about patents and copyright, and for urban planning, unemployment benefits, public health, socialized medicine, and inheritance taxes. It seems like what gets him really riled up is setting prices for cucumbers or state-owned hat factories.His contribution to social science is his focus on distributed information in economic production. Think about how decision-making is distributed in capitalist economies: bankers, investors, asset managers, producers, distributors, retailers, brokers, executives, corporate planning departments, middle managers, marketing departments, advertising, etc. Just imagine trying to replicate all that effort with a few office buildings' worth of planners in Moscow (Compare that to just Wall Street!). You can't run an economy without enough planners.Hayek never tells jokes. I think if he had any sense of humor at all it might have occurred to him that designing the perfect society without planners (or much democracy) was certainly a kind of planning. He's like the whiteboard in "Office Space" that says "Planning to Plan" except it says "Planning to not Plan" and it's three books and 700 pages long ("Law, Legislation and Liberty").

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RobertoGabout 8 years ago

"[..] Exchange, as practised by people for about the last 100,000 years [..]"We know that exchange is just one more activity that humans do, but, historically, in the thousand of years context, it was not fundamental.We could argue that in the palaeolithic the social organization had little to do with markets. We could argue that in the neolithic, the social organization was, in most cases, hierarchical and top-down.So, the implicit assumption of markets as the 'natural state' of human organization has not real basis. Even money is an invention of the state.The idea that markets are powerful tools don't need to be defended. It's the idea that markets know what is better for us what many reject.It's like saying that we should just start the lawnmower and leave it to decide what to cut. Then, when we don't like the garden, we have to accept it's for the best, because if a better garden was possible is what we would have.

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aerodeckabout 8 years ago

Funny to see this on HN. I am currently reading a book that details the recent history of economic theory and how it has been in bed with neoliberalism. It has much to say about Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society, a think-tank that he founded to develop his ideas.What surprises me about Hayek was that he had a radical conception of decentralization, managing to talk about human society as though on-par with an ant-colony. IMO, this sort of anti-humanism is a necessary ingredient for overcoming anthropocentrism in our current thinking and pivoting towards ecological thinking, rather than purely rational thinking.However, I think Hayek makes some tremendous mistakes in his thinking. Firstly, by reducing the Collective Brain to merely the market/price-discovery, he ignores the possibility that price-controls and/or social-demonization could themselves be components of that brain (perhaps fulfilling the function of an OS's kernel). Hayek talks much about there being no one person who can understand everything, but fails to critique himself. Secondly, he fails to see how the setup of a market has an influence on the kind of information that gets processed. In order for some thing to be exchanged on the market, it needs to be commodified in some way. This transformation of /thing/ into /commodity/ is where the social slight-of-hand happens, necessarily discounting some aspect of it's worth. An example is having two identical mugs, but one of those mugs being /mine/ and therefore special to me. That specialness doesn't exist if the mugs are a commodity, and perhaps that specialness fulfills an informational/computational function. In the end, the price is a result of a collective brain, but the market itself is a human construct. Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit and 4Chan all structure their 'markets' differently, with incredibly different results.Hayek had some good ideas, but he was too much of an apologist for the existing economic order for those ideas to really be useful. As technologists resurrect his ideas to apologize for the existing technological order, the same will likely be the case.

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brbrodudeabout 8 years ago

Libertarians take vague/basic stuff, rephrase them and act as if they just uncovered Gods truth itself. Yes, commerce/market has good stuff, but capitalism isn't the sole owner of commerce and markets, not the inventor, nor anything of it. The Ottomans(islamic golden age etc) had them, but they also redistributed resources to the needy and condemned usury, and so, most past societies also had markets and commerce, and also, no one has ever rallied against "freedom", those 'argument' mean little. The text reads like it could have been written by any teenager who uncritically took all propaganda from facebook and is enamored with an ideology. Plus, he makes it sound like these sort of liberalism and theory is just injustly shunned for no reason(or maybe no other than "all academics are secretly communists"?)The point where left vs right were == USA pre-90s model vs soviet model should be considered anachronic by now, as most leftists, and even china, are not for central planning as a rule, and neither is USA capitalism as defensible now. This is a perfect example of false dichotomy(probably one of the most abused nowadays, because its necessary to do so to sustain a certain narrative).Libertarians(which are called liberals everywhere else on the world, with libertarian meaning non-authoritarian leftist) defend private property and so they are completely for states, police and prisons by consequence. And if you take the theories as nature's truth and apply it leaving out politics you end up with dictatorships like Pinochet's Chile, where only the kernell of state violence remains because it is necessary to keep a system which is not able to satisfy humans needs of survivorship and self-determination(aka freedom).I do plan to take a closer look at Hayek as this one seems like one who was actually interested in science, philosophy, and truth and seems to be an honest free thinker and not as much an ideologue, Nassim Taleb praises him, it seems the reason he's not taken so seriously in Academy is actually because his ideas refused to 'solidify' and provide hard models which would be seem as "more sciency"(I could be wrong, but seems it's one of the points Nassim makes, that a Science with uncertainty at it's core is better than one that tries to cargo-cult its way through).... But damn the undead arguments and mythologizing of 'market is god and good and pure freedom for all all in itself' must die already, lets live in the real world, shall we?Edit: some spelling

iamcasenabout 8 years ago

It is a fascinating thought that human intelligence is collective, and that a vast network of specialists is more efficient than a small network of self sufficient producers. I think there is a lot more to study there.That being said, I could have done without the left leaning politics === extreme, oppressive, authoritarian government bologna.

vyodaikenabout 8 years ago

I can't think of Hayek without being reminded of his claim that personal freedom in Pinochet's torture state was greater than that under the previous government where people were not getting their eyeballs pulled out and genitals shocked for disagreeing with the State.

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dmixabout 8 years ago

> Hayek’s point in his famous essay of 1945, “The Uses of Knowledge in Society”, is that central planning cannot work because it is trying to substitute an individual all-knowing intelligence for a distributed and fragmented system of localised but connected knowledge, much of which is tacit.Yet centralized control is the hammer that everyone turns to whenever there is a problem. Instead of figuring out the root-cause and actually solving problems the default instinct of all modern state-heavy economies is always to add more layers on control. And I don't mean the 'state' but people... I see it all the time on HN and Reddit too.A perfect example of this recently is all of the calls for price controls in pharma - prices are a great example of distributed knowledge systems. Despite the fact research points to gov-backed monopolies being the primary cause for drug price fluctuations [1], sometimes increasing prices 2000% at a time. In any other market if a company increased prices even 25-50% they would put themselves out of business because a competitor would step in to offer a better price.This was demonstrated recently with the Epipen controversy [2]. They would never have been able to jack their prices so high if they had any competitors, and there are companies dying to compete with them, but they have been stuck in the FDA 'backlog' for years.Plenty of other research shows that price controls results in shortages. Just like the massive food shortages that have been happening since Venezuela enacted price controls on food.Yet the argument is being characterized as the evil selfish individualism which permeates American 'capitalism' making these pharma CEOs jack prices up.Of course not all regulation is bad. There are many externalities that can't be controlled in the market (pollution is the perfect example). But this immediate instinct to always turn to more centralized control with blind trust, while villianizing markets, is an unhealthy obsession IMO. People act like capitalism is the shining star of American culture but as far as I can see it is continually villianized in movies and pop culture to the detriment of society. While government is held to such low standards that we only expect mediocrity from them.For example, in response to pharma prices, how about cleaning up the existing regulatory system so the FDA doesn't have companies in the backlogs for years? Or investing more capital so they have enough people to handle the load? Or are we just so used to inefficient government that we just expect them to not do their jobs well? But no, clearly the solution is to give them even more work to set prices for thousands of drugs.I'm all for Hayek being taught in schools, maybe people would hold both markets to higher esteem and governments to higher standards. So we get better policy and new policy only when centralized control actually makes the most sense./rant[1] <a href="http://khn.org/news/government-protected-monopolies-drive-drug-prices-higher-study-says/" rel="nofollow">http://khn.org/news/government-protected-monopolies-drive-dr...</a>[2] <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-drugs-vs-chairs/" rel="nofollow">http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-dr...</a>

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rankoabout 8 years ago

Interesting aside - the Matt Ridley who wrote was chairman of the Northern Rock bank in the UK when it became the first British bank to suffer a run for 150 years. Perhaps when it was nationalised in 2008 he said something like "it takes a government to rescue a failed bank".

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hyporthogonabout 8 years ago

(1) 'Exchange between strangers is a unique feature of us modern hominids' isn't really falsifiable without begging the question or establishing a hard boundary between kin and non-kin, which afaik is currently a function of the problem under consideration (i.e.'kin' might mean something different to geneticist vs. anthropologist vs. linguist vs. classical economist and even something different for a different problem in each of those disciplines). But 'this is what makes us human' is far from essential to Hayek..and probably basically inimical to Hayek, as some other commenters have pointed out.(2) The 'reduction of collective intelligence to the price mechanism' objection (which is often a specific case of generic objections to dimensional reduction, including e.g. perceptron thresholds) is addressed throughout Minsky's Society of Mind[0], esp. the 'frames' concept.(3) The article doesn't mention the benefits of localized knowledge (as opposed to the 'practical reality' of localized knowledge, which may be lamentable and/or fixable), which iirc Hayek does get into (or maybe some other Hayekians? more modern systems-oriented folks? can't think of a source at the moment). If some knowledge (for example, within a community of practice) weren't pretty strongly localized, then every knowable would be in one truly global variable space, and abstraction would be incredibly computation-intensive, and knowledge growth would be horribly O(n!), and all of thought would work like JavaScript (ZING). This is a stronger kind of localization than technical specialization (which just maps onto SOLID class design rather than variable space).[1][0] Beautiful html edition: <a href="http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/" rel="nofollow">http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/</a> [1] Broad philosophical musing on this sort of thing: <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bubbles" rel="nofollow">https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bubbles</a>

joshuaheardabout 8 years ago

When the author talks about the Collective Brain, or the Cloud, it is really referring to the Market, or the Marketplace of Ideas. Conservatives like the market over government for the very reasons outlined in this article. I'm glad these fundamental ideas are getting updated with today's nomenclature.

aidenn0about 8 years ago

> If Hayek is mentioned at all in academia, it is usually as an alias for Voldemort.I thought that economists in academia were largely Austrian, which would certainly not position Hayek as Voldemort.

djschneiabout 8 years ago

"Hayek is my homeboy"...that must be a bumper sticker...

saintPirelliabout 8 years ago

There is one guy in a t-shirt in this classroom. Savage!

mcnaughtonrulesabout 8 years ago

Wild to see Hayek on hacker news

RodericDayabout 8 years ago

The way I see it, democracy and markets are opposed to each other.Democracy: One person one vote.Markets: Each person has tiny micro-votes, and they can get more votes by supporting initiatives that pan out. One individual with millions of micro-votes can easily out-vote a million individuals with less votes.It's interesting to see just how "cargo cult"-like the practice of voting has become in many places.