Proponents of ideas like radical markets, universal basic income, open borders, income-sharing agreements, or smart contracts (I’d here include, for instance, Vitalik Buterin) are also optimization partisans.
In the case of UBI, what is optimization from the viewpoint of the decision makers is freedom from the viewpoint of those concerned by the decision.
After all : money is needed to fulfill the basic needs of life in society. Without UBI, little people are forced to look for money on the job market, where they are perpetually reminded that they must prove their usefulness by joining a group of sufficient efficiency on the global market (a company). On the other hand, UBI frees these people to pursue their own, possibly wildly creative goals, however inefficient these are deemed by others.
So I’m thinking : maybe freedom is a limited (and highly valued) goods. If some have leeway to apply arbitrary decisions, then necessarily others don’t. I need airplanes to be very reliable so that I can travel at my fancy. Freedom is based on top of reliability (which is equivalent to optimization in this context). Even at the individual level : I’m free to do what I want today because my body is highly optimized to obey my mental commands.
This idea seems to pervade your article (e.g. when you mention corruption as a typical sign of freedom), but it wasn’t really explicited anywhere.
In the case of UBI, what is optimization from the viewpoint of the decision makers is freedom from the viewpoint of those concerned by the decision.
After all : money is needed to fulfill the basic needs of life in society. Without UBI, little people are forced to look for money on the job market, where they are perpetually reminded that they must prove their usefulness by joining a group of sufficient efficiency on the global market (a company).
On the other hand, UBI frees these people to pursue their own, possibly wildly creative goals, however inefficient these are deemed by others.
So I’m thinking : maybe freedom is a limited (and highly valued) goods. If some have leeway to apply arbitrary decisions, then necessarily others don’t. I need airplanes to be very reliable so that I can travel at my fancy. Freedom is based on top of reliability (which is equivalent to optimization in this context). Even at the individual level : I’m free to do what I want today because my body is highly optimized to obey my mental commands.
This idea seems to pervade your article (e.g. when you mention corruption as a typical sign of freedom), but it wasn’t really explicited anywhere.