Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47722279

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706273

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47643326

Points: 44

# Comments: 11

The most we have are faint gestures at how some Buddhists could indeed have been alive in the same place, at the same time, as early Christians. But Christ himself, as far as we know, never referenced Buddha or any Buddhist works, never interacted with a practitioner of the faith (or even referred to one), and all the same applies to the Apostles.

E.g. nobody would suggest that Buddhism was particularly influenced by Greek religious thinking, but we know with certainty that Greeks were present in the region due to their service in the Persian empire of the time.

This shouldn't make as much of a difference as it does, but due to how our legal system works, it's much harder to get meaningful legal satisfaction when an algorithm (or other inhuman distributed system) commits a crime against a person than when a person does so.

You can't just proclaim what incentives should be. We do have a mechanism for changing the incentives of management though: it's called unions.

This already happened

The whole idea of enshittification is that someone makes a high-quality app (or whatever), outcompetes all other entrants, and locks down the market. Then, having acquired pricing power, they can raise prices or, more often (as these tools aren't 'priced' from the perspective of the consumer, but rather indirectly funded e.g. through ads) lower the quality of the product. The steps in this chain are not inherent to 'making products', they emerge entirely from the confines and incentives of our market-based economy.

And it's not just "centrally planned economies" that avoid this. We see evidence from historical modes of production like artisinal handicraft. Despite there not being a free market of producers (as guilds generally possessed legally-enforced monopolies over saleable production) the general quality of goods thereby produced did not generally trend downwards. Indeed, we can see from the sources that in cases where quality was known to have dropped, popular backlash led to interventions, e.g. the various Parisian bread laws, or hallmarking regulations for goldsmiths. Obviously, similar mechanisms exist today in the form of governmental regulations, but the problem with free market economies is that they produce actors both incentivized and empowered to hamstring the government, capture regulators, and ultimately undermine that self-same free market, to their own benefit.

How so? In a democratically planned economy, we would expect that economic decisions considered by the majority of the population to be unwise/upsetting/etc. would not take place. Yes, many/most decisions would probably happen 'behind the scenes', according to the delegated authority of smaller committees or individual officials, but that's only so long as those decisions don't cause bad results for the broader populace.

More broadly, how exactly would enshittification take place in an economy not based around market principles? The whole idea is that someone makes a high-quality app (or whatever), outcompetes all other entrants, and locks down the market. Then, having acquired pricing power, they can raise prices or, more often (as these tools aren't 'priced' from the perspective of the consumer, but rather indirectly funded e.g. through ads) lower the quality of the product. These steps are not intrinsic to reality, they emerge entirely from the confines of our market-based economy.

And yes, you can argue that in an "ideal market" they wouldn't happen, but a truism of modern economics is that "sufficiently free markets" produce actors with the power and desire to capture/destroy said free market.