Edge: THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY: A Talk with Yochai Benkler - The Diigo Meta page

• 21 Jun 09
  

  Amira's notes

  We have a lot of sophisticated analyses that try, with great precision, to predict and describe existing systems in terms of an assumption of universal rationality and a sub-assumption that what that rationality tries to do is maximize returns to the self. Yet we live in a world where that's not actually what we experience. The big question now is how we cover that distance between what we know very intuitively in our social relations, and what we can actually build with.

  philosophy technology culture psychology sociology society Social networks sharing collaboration economy business

  • YOCHAI BENKLER]: The big question I ask myself is how we start to think much more methodically about human sharing, about the relationship between human interest and human morality and human society. The main moment at which I think you could see the end of an era was when Alan Greenspan testified before the House committee and said, "My predictions about self-interest were wrong. I relied for 40 years on self-interest to work its way up, and it was wrong." For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.
• 20 Apr 09
  

  Michel Roland

  prospective cooperaton networking science_2.0

  • The main moment at which I think you could see the end of an era was when Alan Greenspan testified before the House committee and said, "My predictions about self-interest were wrong. I relied for 40 years on self-interest to work its way up, and it was wrong." For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.
  • In economics, we see a substantial work in experimental economics, like Ernst Fehr's group in Zurich and Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis in Santa Fe, starting to do experiments that show that people deviate from selfish rationality. That people systematically and predictably behave in ways that are much more cooperative than would be predicted by the game theoretical impact.
  • 6 more annotations...
  • • One of the worst performing GM plants in 1980 closes down, opens up two years later under Toyota management, almost the entire same employees said the entire union leadership. Within a couple of years it becomes the most productive plant in the U.S.
    • A) that people systematically do not behave according to the traditions of selfish rationality under controlled conditions; B) that when you set up systems with different assumptions, you get different behavior, and you get actually better results. There is a beautiful study, for example, from two or three years ago about knowledge workers. Knowledge work is one of the hard things to get precise in contracts. How do you tell somebody, "How creative have you been at 11:00 in the morning?" And so that's a classic place where having precise contracts to precisely monitor what you do and what you don't do becomes very difficult.
    • They use chunks of time, particularly chunks of time that they used to spend watching passively finished goods as entertainment, in an activity that's a social activity and a creative activity and an expressive activity on a very large scale. This is tilting all of our information, knowledge and cultural industries something between a quarter and two-thirds of the way around. Because in addition, government will continue to fund some science, some arts, et cetera. Commercial organizations will continue to do the same thing. Individual selling in markets will, but also social production now comes in as a major force. And that re-aligns in different industries more, in different industries less.
    • But the decision point is essentially which of these worlds we go. And it's a decision point we're making through law. The copyright wars are a classic instance of trying to set up the technology and the legal environment in such a way that you can keep the horse in the barn, and rent it out for rides, as opposed to having all the horses out. Situations where you get digital rights management and criminalization of breaking or distributing things that overcome digital rights management.

    • the non-fungible is the human relationships. That's where the talks come from, that's where the services and teaching come from, that's where the live performance for the musician comes from.

      
      

      In some cases the spectacle is really the equivalent of the rock star live performance. It's not at all about the human relation, it's about the unique experience. Which in some sense is somewhere between the human connection and the artifact.

    • The Berkman Center is now quickly becoming very interdisciplinary, and part of what we are doing is to build open research platforms that will allow any social scientist to use web-based tools to conduct both controlled experiments and large-scale, computationally-supported observational studies.
• 10 Apr 09
  

  Maximillian Kaizen
  • The main moment at which I think you could see the end of an era was when Alan Greenspan testified before the House committee and said, "My predictions about self-interest were wrong. I relied for 40 years on self-interest to work its way up, and it was wrong." For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms
  • I have been looking at the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. Before that, I was looking at questions of property and 19th century land reform in the U.S. in the Homestead Act, and it struck me as identical.
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  • • based very much on the sale of information and culture as goods, with a relatively concentrated industry and a small number of players controlling a relatively limited set of creators. A very stark separation between producers and consumers, with consumers conceived as relatively passive and watching culture.

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