[Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/5/5 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> I think economics does apply here because we are specifically asking an
> economic question - how best to allocate our present resources (should the
> WMF buy a server, or etch stuff on nickel plates).  And I don't think values
> have to be monetary in order to apply economic principles to them.  You can
> have a pure barter system and still have economics.

Perhaps, but I'm still not entirely convinced. It may be an economic
question, but that doesn't mean our theories of economics can answer
it.

> However, I think you ask a good question when you ask how to assign a value
> to future historical knowledge.  I think the only rational answer is that
> the value of future historical knowledge is the value to those who are
> presently alive.  That doesn't mean that the value to those who are not yet
> born is irrelevant, but that it is only relevant to the extent that it can
> be translated into value for those who are alive.  I value future historical
> knowledge to the extent I value giving that knowledge to my children, or to
> the extent I value giving my children the value of giving it to their
> children, etc.
>
> But I guess from your position on this that you would disagree with that.
> So I'd ask you, how do *you* value future historical knowledge?

I think now we're into the realms of philosophy, rather than
economics... It is a difficult question. There is a fairly well known
(I believe) question in ethics about whether a certain impact on a
specific known person is the same as that impact on an abstract
unknown person. It comes up when trying to answer questions like: Is
it right to kill one person in order to make a drug that will,
somewhere down the line, save thousands of lives? Most people would, I
believe, answer "no", which means they put more value on the life of a
specific person than a hypothetical person (I think I'm one of those
people, although I can't justify it rationally...). I think your
viewpoint is similar to that viewpoint (they are different questions,
obviously, but I think they are similar enough to draw meaningful
comparisons), so I guess it is a widely held one. I'm not really sure
what my viewpoint is (so, by extension, I'm not sure how to assign
value to future historical knowledge), I'll have to think about it...

>> Or any kind of knowledge? In economics things have value
>> due to scarcity,
>
>
> No, things have value due to marginal utility.

If value was determined by utility, water would be far more expensive
that diamonds. You say "marginal utility" rather than just "utility",
but I don't pay a different amount for my first glass of water each
day than my second, even though the first is far more useful to me.

>> knowledge is freely reproducible, so the concept of
>> scarcity doesn't really apply - either it exists, or it doesn't.
>> Access to knowledge may have monetary value, but the existence of the
>> knowledge doesn't, the concept just doesn't apply.
>
>
> If that were true, then why would anyone ever pay someone to create
> something?  Surely the existence of knowledge can have value, and I don't
> even think I'm in the minority in that belief.

It clearly has value (otherwise there would be no such thing as
academia), but I don't think it has a well defined monetary value. Our
theories of economics are an approximation to reality that allow us,
in some circumstances, to predict how things will work out (in fact,
those predictions are often self-fulfilling, which rather complicates
things). I don't think our economics can adequately describe the value
of knowledge.

We have gone massively off-topic into a discussion of the philosophy
of economics and epistemology here. I think we are all agreed that,
for now at least, we don't want to pursue these ideas, so let's just
shelve them and move on!