I'm also not saying let's ban it. It's a thought experiment. The intended conclusion (though maybe my comment was too cryptic) was that if banning X in general (where X = "entering the market with a slightly better service") is obviously wealth-reducing, then that means allowing X is wealth-increasing, so a random individual instance of X is probably wealth-increasing as well.

And the example in your post looks to me like a quite typical instance of X. It's not unusually bad. Most instances of X will look like stealing customers, putting incumbents out of business and so on. I'm saying it's all right, the benefit over time is bigger than that.

Here's the thing though. What Tom is doing (if we forget distractions like paying salary to employees, paying rent for location etc) is entering the market with a slightly better service, and outcompeting the incumbent. Let's say we ban this activity! Now nobody's allowed to enter a market with a slightly better service and outcompete the incumbent. Enact this ban, and wait a few years. To me it's obvious that society will be much poorer as a result. You'll get rid of the small improvements that add up to large improvements.

And so it seems likely to me that one individual act - Tom starting a car repair shop in a slightly nicer location - will also turn out to increase the total wealth of society, all things considered. Statistically at least.

The use of the word "extractive" in this post confused me a lot.

Looking at the example with Tom and Fred - nicer location or not, Tom is repairing cars. That's the value he's providing to customers, and it's enough to account for all the money he's making. And customers are better off too. The only one losing out is Fred.

All right. The question becomes, as a society should we be sad about the losses of companies that get outcompeted? Say Fred has a software company, making some expensive software to do a task. Then Tom, a hobbyist, releases a small piece of open source software that does the same task just as well. He doesn't make any profit from it, but everyone switches to using his software for free. Fred's company goes out of business, the investment is lost and so on. Was Tom's action "extractive"? Should we be sad?

It's from the recent book "There is no antimemetics division" by Sam Hughes. (An earlier version of the story can be read for free and I think it's actually better than the book version.) In short, U-3125 (or SCP-3125 in the original story) is a kind of abstract monster that exists everywhere and wants to eat the world.

I think this was in the Sequences, the notion of "optimization process". Eliezer describes here how he realized this notion is important, by drawing a line through three points: natural selection, human intelligence, and an imaginary genie / outcome-pump device.

Yeah, I was talking more about finding a real life group. Finding an online group is much less useful.

Wait, if we can be confused whether a property is perfect or imperfect - then why do we assert (in axioms 4 and 6) that some specific properties are perfect? What if they're also impossible, like the perfect tuning?

It's nice that we got to the notion of logical possibility though. It's familiar ground to me.

Let's talk for example about mathematical properties of musical intervals. When a major scale C D E F G A B is played on a just-intonation instrument, all pairwise ratios of frequencies are fairly simple: 2/3, 15/16, all that. All except the interval from D to F, which is an uglier 27/32, unpleasant both numerically and to the ear. This raises the tantalizing possibility of a perfect tuning: adjusting the frequencies a little bit so that all pairwise ratios are nice, not all except one. The property of a tuning being perfect can be described mathematically.

Unfortunately, it can also be shown mathematically that a perfect tuning can't exist. What does that mean in light of your Axiom 3? Must there be a "possible world", or "logically possible world", where mathematics is different and a perfect tuning exists? Or is this property unworthy of being called perfect? But what if we weren't as good at math, and hadn't yet proved that perfect tuning is inachievable: would we call the property perfect then? What does your framework say about this example?

I guess this time I spoke too soon! Indeed if we talk about logical possibility, then we "only" need to prove that the imagined world isn't contradictory in itself. Which is also hard, but easier than what I said.

Yeah. Or rather, I guess modal logic can describe the world - but only if you meet its very strict demands. For example, to say something is "possible", one must prove the impossibility of finding a contradiction between the thing and all evidence known so far, to either the speaker or the listener. If that requirement is met, then modal logic will give the right answers, at least until new evidence comes along :-)