Morosoph's Journal: Capital Flow is a Little Like Pagerank

In response to the front page story Search Engine Results Relatively Fair, I wrote this post, and, although it's far from my best post made on Slashdot, I think that the point that it makes illuminates the nature of the continuum between democratic "equality", through capitalism, to outright hierachy.

From my post:

...It's more like capital flow.

Here's how: the wealthy get to decide who receives their spending, and those people in turn decide how strongly to weight their suppliers' votes in the allocation of resources. This perpetuates through in a cycle that reaches a very rough, shifting equilibrium that very much resembles Google's "pagerank", IMO.

Compared with outright hierarchy, this kind of inequality is still going to appear relatively fair, but it doesn't measure up to equally weighted votes. That is, it isn't democratically fair. However, this, or at least some inequality appears to be essential to making useful discrimination, if you're going to use the "intelligence" of the web itself to do it. Ideally, the results would be based upon the quality of the content itself, no matter how obscure, but the artificial intelligence required to do that would be mind-boggling...

This need for extreme artificial intelligence is of course the reason why socialism has failed. But this is no reason to make this "intelligence" still more perfect. Every advance in such artificial intelligence would bring with it a corresponding reduction of freedom. And we would accept it: authority and convenience are seductive to mankind, as they avoid the need for us to do any real work, apply any judgement, in the course of our lives. Also, in attempting to bring artificial intelligence to the problem, we would be creating hierachy in any case, so the more "perfect" allocation of resources would be at the cost of what those resources are for: doing what we want in our lives.

Back to Google. Borrowed from BlackHat's old bio, a Google search that was wholly semantic should cause serious pause for thought.

Morosoph's Weltanschauung

[mercedo]

Altough I mean it's not sarcastic. Yeah, this time too, the Morosoph's worldview is in full throttle.

Seems you are good at making a good comparison among directly disconnected matters. Capitalism is based on a belief that making profit is virtue, of course it's not always virtue but we have to admit that our eagerness to wealth sure leads to more viable society, state in general.