"Implicit in the statement "giving people what they want" is a set of assumptions about what "want" means."
And while that's all very interesting and important in the abstract, it's worth double-checking that you don't get yourself lost in the weeds... which I think you did... and forget that the paperclip maximizer is scary precisely because it has no concept of wants in it. With capitalism, wants can be changed in real time, and the system reacts. The paperclip maximizer does not. They are fundamentally different.
There is a memeset that strongly encourages you to fling up whatever word smokescreen is necessary to ensure that nothing positive is said about Emmanual Goldstein, today played by Capitalism, but it's still just a word smokescreen. There is a fundamental different between a paperclip maximizer and capitalism, and you should not throw yourself into a word tizzy until you've confused your rational brain enough that you can fall back on the comfortable emotional judgments about capitalism. Not every bad thing that can be said about capitalism is true simply because it's a bad thing said about capitalism.
I think the point here is that in no reasonable definition of the words we are using does capitalism optimize (or even attempt at) giving people what they want. The only way to claim that is to redefine "what people want" as "what capitalism gives them" tautologically, which is I think the point the poster you're responding to was getting at which I think you've completely missed.
And telling people they are thinking emotionally and not rationally is unbelievably condescending and unnecessarily insulting and has no place in a discussion forum like this. Please try to be respectful.
I think the point to take away is that capitalism is a machine which mindlessly maximizes SOMETHING, disregarding all other things, and that thing isn't necessarily good. I think you're very right to point out that the 'something' is actually dynamic in some sense, though that doesn't save capitalism from the argument here. Dynamic can be bad: I suspect it's dynamic based on the material desires of the particular tiny group of human beings who happen to currently posses a great deal of capital, which is not a particularly good thing.
You are right that the analogy breaks down at the assumption that humans would allow the paperclip machine to run amok; human wants do powerfully change and influence the market machine. At the same time, the abyss gazes into us, and human wants change in response to the machine as well.
I'll give an example that intersects the Pavlovian scare words of both "capitalism" and "government": the Prison-Industrial Complex. It's reasonable to want to remove members of society who are dangerously violent, or "cheaters" of sufficient scope. Yet iterate this desire over enough time, and it takes on a life of its own: politicians who want to look tough on crime, parents who want their fears assuaged, private companies who want to profit from correctional tax dollars, and most insidiously, the swaths of police, prison guards, and support staff who want paychecks, benefits and job security.
The final product is something we don't actually want: the most populous prison system in the world, which is massively expensive, socioeconomically predatory, and fails to rehabilitate most of its inmates. Yet there are enough stakeholders who do want the institution to persist for reasons of personal benefit (and enough taxpayers who want to imagine a cute moralistic story and are willing to pay for the luxury of ignorance), that a massive machine of oppression is created and sustained out of a simple, reasonable human want.
I'm not intrinsically anti-capitalist; I'm in the camp of Jaron Lanier, in that money, markets, and corporations are all technologies, and neither good nor evil. But technology should serve humans, and not the other way around; that means paying attention to the power of unchecked, autonomous feedback loops and their power to influence human behavior and our various social ecosystems.
>It's reasonable to want to remove members of society who are dangerously violent, or "cheaters" of sufficient scope. Yet iterate this desire over enough time, and it takes on a life of its own: politicians who want to look tough on crime, parents who want their fears assuaged, private companies who want to profit from correctional tax dollars, and most insidiously, the swaths of police, prison guards, and support staff who want paychecks, benefits and job security.
Of course, this assumes all the actors were initially well-intentioned, which they weren't. Plenty of people supported harsh policies of criminalization and "justice" because they wanted to come down hard on the dark-skinned and the poor.
And while that's all very interesting and important in the abstract, it's worth double-checking that you don't get yourself lost in the weeds... which I think you did... and forget that the paperclip maximizer is scary precisely because it has no concept of wants in it. With capitalism, wants can be changed in real time, and the system reacts. The paperclip maximizer does not. They are fundamentally different.
There is a memeset that strongly encourages you to fling up whatever word smokescreen is necessary to ensure that nothing positive is said about Emmanual Goldstein, today played by Capitalism, but it's still just a word smokescreen. There is a fundamental different between a paperclip maximizer and capitalism, and you should not throw yourself into a word tizzy until you've confused your rational brain enough that you can fall back on the comfortable emotional judgments about capitalism. Not every bad thing that can be said about capitalism is true simply because it's a bad thing said about capitalism.