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I came across the following example & I wanted to write about it but I realized it was a good example of a Thinkie & I haven’t written about thiat Thinkie yet so here it is. Whew! Quite the opening sentence.
Pattern: You’re stuck thinking about a complicated problem.
Transformation: Look at the problem in its wider context. What are the “sources & uses” (from Permaculture) of the problem? What feedback loops does it participate in?
Okay, here’s the motivating example. I’ve been hearing the slogan, “Profit is theft.” I’m not convinced but where does the idea come from? Here’s the quote that got me thinking about wider scope:
In economics there’s a concept called “ecosystem exploitation.” It’s what happens when a producer appropriates the difference between what an input costs and what it contributes to the final output. In the original framing this was strictly about labor.
A factory owner pays a worker a wage.
That worker produces something worth considerably more than that wage.
The owner sells that product and pockets the difference in value.
That final act is exploitation because the surplus created in production is not returned to the input that generated it.
The paper goes on to talk about how training LLMs is exploitive in this way, which I happen to agree with. However, not my point.
The structure above—paid a wage→produce→sold—isn’t the whole picture. “Profit is theft” makes good sense if that’s the whole picture. However, there’s a larger sequence into which this picture fits:
Capital owner invests in building a factory.
Worker paid a wage.
Produces widget.
Widget sold at a profit.
Capital owner gets paid back with interest.
What incentive does the capital owner have to build the factory, without which there is no production, without step 5? If we give all the profit to the worker, the factory never gets built. We’re going to have to find a way to split the excess of sales price - cost of production.
Now, I realize I have stepped into a giant centuries old debate, no, war, but that’s not my point (although my question about incentives for those producing content digested by LLMs holds). My point is rather than pick apart the pieces of a complicated problem, sometimes it’s more productive to zoom out & see the problem in context.
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