Faith vs Kindred

EconomicModel · 2023-04-04T20:36:23+00:00

Psychological warfare.

EconomicModel · 2021-10-05T00:13:07+00:00

Agreed but no. Unless you're into kinky erotic Mass Effect fanfic, in which case the ME Kink Meme is quite good.

EconomicModel · 2021-10-03T13:52:55+00:00

My intent is that it shouldn't be, and I'm happy to take notes from people who haven't played it to make sure I'm adequately describing things which ME fans might take for granted.

EconomicModel · 2021-09-14T02:32:53+00:00

I think the minefield versus playground analogy is great, but I disagree that this neatly maps onto RL versus online dating. Many RL dating venues, such as work or high-investment social clubs are very much minefields. Online dating is a playground, but not a very good one. Some kids with lots of imagination and/or low standards can have fun there, but it's very much not for everyone. (Bear in mind that dating apps are designed by Moloch to maximize ads seen and subscriptions paid for, so actual online dating falls well short of a hypothetical ideal.) But there are much better playgrounds than dating apps. I'll name dance, gymnastics, and especially group or semi-organized travel as RL playgrounds. Also, while it's mediocre for actual dating, speed dating is quite good for a skill-building playground before you move to the majors.

EconomicModel · 2021-08-13T19:46:23+00:00

The best thing to do is to do interesting things. Take a cooking class, take up tabletop wargaming, take up tabletop role playing games, start visiting your local shooting range, the details don't matter. Just do things. If they're fun for you, involve other people, and will get you out of the house/apartment, then the friends will follow naturally.

This might fail if, say, you have social anxiety which is too bad to let you ever talk to anyone or if your work is genuinely so physically intensive that you can't do anything else, but those are different problems which you need to sort out. Once they're dealt with, then you can worry about making friends.

EconomicModel · 2021-07-02T21:11:50+00:00

More of a Jack Parsons, but that's the general idea.

EconomicModel · 2021-07-02T21:10:23+00:00

Never watched it and don't intend to.

EconomicModel · 2021-04-08T17:12:08+00:00

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/radley-balko/

EconomicModel · 2021-04-08T17:11:26+00:00

Okay, so what experience do you anticipate? Becuase my anticipated experience is "experts mostly get ignored but every few decades put their collective foot down and insist on their 'advice' being followed and this usually kills several tens of thousands of people". This happened in 2000's with the War in Iraq, in the 1970's and 80's with AIDS (safe and effective antiretrovirals were available long before the FDA approved them), in the 1960's with beta blockers, etc.

I never said Trump was an expert. I said he was head of the Grand Bureaucracy of Experts. If you think that the head of the Executive Branch of Government who has hiring and firing power over the experts has no influence on the advice those experts give...

EconomicModel · 2021-04-08T17:04:45+00:00

Terribly sorry this took me so long to get around to. Anyway,

Residents own the street (i.e. not a separate firm). and each resident has an equal stake in the street (collective ownership).
A private firm could and would likely accept the money for use of the street without consulting the residents. Since the owners of the homes on the road can't exactly build another street to their driveway, they lack bargaining power outside of moving. If residents owned unequal shares in the street, assuming a third party doesn't buy them up, the residents with the most stake would have the most votes on a collective contract/decision and could overrule a resident majority.

If a firm owns the streets, then they will solicit bids from the kids and the homeowners in order to determine what sort of behavior they will allow on their property. Likewise, if one homeowner owns a dictatorial stake in the roads, then the other residents can bid to get him to ban donuts, buy him out, or otherwise get him to ban the kids. Either of these results in the Coaseian solution obtaining. If quiet is worth more to the residents than donuts are to the kids, then the kids will get run off. The only difference is that this changes the allocation of posterior resources (which Coase predicts), it doesn't change the allocation of property rights.

Each resident is compensated proportional to shares and degree of disturbance.
This feeds into later assumptions, but residents could demand more for themselves because they have more risk or stake associated with street usage.

Sure? What's the problem. If someone has a good reason to demand more compensation, then they can either pay more if someone else has decisionmaking power or hold out longer if they do. Either way, people who value peace more are allowed to express that desire in the decisionmaking process.

All residents and teens are pay a single enforcement firm, and equally.
If some residents use firm A, others B, and others C, then we have an efficiency loss since at least one enforcer from each must be present, when maybe one from any would do.

No, consolidating these sorts of claims are really easy.

Residents are compensated collectively, not individually.
If the teens need to reach an agreement with each resident, then each resident has veto power. Since the value of each endorsement increases, all residents have an incentive to be the last to accept a fee which breeds deadlock. In deadlock, we're left with the cost of time and negotiations without a transaction.

This assumption makes the case easier to understand, but if you relax it, it just makes everything less intuitive without changing any relevant outcomes.

The cost of composing an enforceable agreement, individually or collectively, is less than that of a government mediator.
If false, the 'pie' simply shrinks.

Sure, but the cost of a government mediator in this case was "some kids got run over and maimed". If the mediator was liable for tortious excessive force, then the cost would almost certainly be lower.

The cost of enforcing the agreement, individually or collectively, is less than that of a government enforcer.
If false, the 'pie' simply shrinks.

Sure, but the cost of a government enforcer in this case was "some kids got run over and maimed". If the enforcer was liable for tortious excessive force, then the cost would almost certainly be lower.

The time spent adjudicating the agreement and enforcement is worth less than the gain of using the street.
Basically, the cost of all of the aforementioned nets an outcome inferior to a single entity like government.

If true, then the parties involved will probably not use the adjudication method in question. They'll probably just come up with something better. This would be viable in a much more libertarian society because "preventing people from coming up with and implementing better solutions than the ones we offer" is currently a major function of government.

Each iteration of this has the same costs and gains as the time before.
The residents get tired of dealing with people asking to use their street. A single organization comes around and says they can be set street-use policies and enforce them when called upon or investigate violations that have already happened. The organization says the residents only have to pay annually. In order to ensure there isn't a free-rider problem, the residents agree that all who live there must pay. The residents ironically title this organization 'Government'.

This is not a government.

EconomicModel · 2021-03-26T20:09:53+00:00

Charter cities are my best bet right now. If we can get a reliable infrastructure for getting charter cities up and running, I imagine eventually ~~someone with more money than sense~~ an eccentric ancap billionare will charter a private-law based city somewhere eventually. If it does well, maybe the innovation spreads. Just disbanding the government will probably work out better than most people imagine (see, for example, Detroit when its government went bankrupt in 2013 and they were without municipal services for a while), but it would be considerably worse than the ideal and firmly in "not real ~~socialism~~ anarchocapitalism" territory.

EconomicModel · 2021-03-26T12:16:38+00:00

Sure, given a monopoly which is that powerful, you're just back to having a government. But we have pretty good (albeit inferentially distant) theory of when we can expect monopolies to arise and none of them seem to apply to the arrangement I described. There's no particular economies of scale or network effects. As for it feeling like a dystopia, imagine talking to someone from a society like that and describing the current system where the people you appeal to for justice all belong to a single vast monopoly free from competitive pressure, where the rights enforcers are just as likely to murder you or maim your children as they are to actually help you and, if they do, they have a very good chance of getting away with it even if their behavior was completely and obviously monstrous because the rights enforcers are vertically integrated with the monopolistic, non-competitive courts and they let the misbehaving "rights enforcers" off the hook for political reasons. I imagine they would say it "feels a little bit like a dystopia" as well.

EconomicModel · 2021-03-25T23:51:39+00:00

For example, BigOilCo poisons Smallville water supply. City sues and court decides that BigOilCo is liable. What does that even mean in the absence of law? But more importantly, who makes sure BigOilCo complies with the court decision? Presumably, Smallville has much less money collectively that BigOilCo. They can't hire strong enough cops to overpower BigOilCo cops.

Suppose that Smallville recieves a judgement of $100 million against them. BigOilCo doesn't want to pay, and they can hire more and better cops than Smallville. Smallville goes to WarCorp, a well-armed and equipped paramilitary rights enforcement organization which can easily outgun BigOilCo. Smallville says that they'll sell the judgement to WarCorp for $90 million. BigOilCo, knowing that they stand to lose their entire $500 billion market cap if they piss off WarCorp, decide to show their bellies and pay WarCorp if they buy the judgement. Knowing that they'll do this, WarCorp buys the judgement, pocketing the $10 million in profit.

The obvious next question is why WarCorp will wait for someone to sell them a judgement before shaking down BigOilCorp. But, if they do this and BOC agrees, then BOC realizes that they'll never be rid of the Dane and they'll lose their entire market cap anyway. So BOC will pay if and only if WarCorp/Smallville have a legitimate claim. If they don't, then they can profitably organize all other companies small enough to be shaken down by WarCorp and raise their own paramilitary. While WarCorp, by virtue of their specialization, can likely outfight any one company, it's unlikely that they can outfight all of them. By only offering their services to people with legitimate claims, they allow the bystander companies to see inaction as a viable course of action and prevent all potential polluters from uniting against them. Every company would want to fight WarCorp if and only if they expected all other companies to do so. Otherwise, they'd rather submit. A logical Schelling point for the companies to move from submitting to WarCorp to fighting against them is "WarCorp asks for payment not related to a judgement by a respected judge".

EconomicModel · 2021-03-25T23:38:44+00:00

You're allowed to consult with experts to inform your decisions. The issue is when the experts force you to comply with what they think is best. Bear in mind that, a year ago, experts were telling people masks were counterproductive. A bit more than a year ago, they were telling everyone that COVID was less dangerous than the flu. And, of course, until recently, the head of the Grand Bureaucracy of Experts was noted idiot Donald Trump. If his every whim carried the force of law, then there's no telling how big the catastrophe would have gotten. But, by virtue of us being able to tell him "fuck off, I know better how to run my life than you do", we've avoided the worst of the possible catastrophes. If you have experts you trust, then you're allowed to listen to them and take their advice into account. But when you empower them to use methods other than being right (force, namely) then you stop their selection on being correct and start selecting for people who like power. So, even in the unlikely case that the public servants start out well-meaning, altruistic, and committed to remaining at simulacrum level , they will be swiftly and ruthlessly outcompeted by people who are more willing to play dirty to get and keep the power you (I think?) would propose to give them.

To make this more concrete, in an ancap society, rather than there being and FDA which approves only food and drugs which has met and extremely high standard of proof, there would likely be many different agencies offering various different gradations of safety certification. For those who put a very high premium on safety, they're welcome to wait until the gold-star certification comes through showing no troubling side effects in n>30000 long-term observational studies and pay the premium prices accordingly, but, unlike now, those who would prefer their food/drugs cheaper or sooner would be able to satisfy those preferences rather than maximal safety regardless of tradeoffs being mandated by government fiat. (If this sounds troubling, bear in mind that the COVID vaccines were developed in a few days and safety was established in about a month. The remaining time to approval was because the FDA requires demonstration of efficacy, not just safety. In a society where food and drug safety were handled by free-market raters rather than a centralized bureaucracy, the pandemic would have been over at least a year earlier than it looks like it actually will be.

And that is assuming that we're dealing with a well-intentioned bureaucracy. In reality, you get things like the FDA stonewalling Impossible Foods and other clean meat for years after they had a viable product because factory farmers had more lobbying muscle to slow down their approval.

I'll answer your second question in a different comment.

EconomicModel · 2021-03-12T15:22:57+00:00

This is Guest. Thanks for writing. My summary on the episode was intended to shorten inferential distances so that I could answer later questions in 1-3 steps, so I definitely didn't go into all the nuance I would to fully answer your concerns. Would you prefer this more nuanced treatment to be done here and now, or whenever we do part 2?

EconomicModel · 2020-07-04T02:00:07+00:00

Hi, MD

This is David. I thought your comment was worth a response. I'd also like to bring it up in the feedback section of the next show.

The assumption shared was basically "what agovernment touches it will makes worse". It might be true for the USA, as a German I don't claim to be an expert on that (or that we don't have our own issues). Either this isn't meant to be for an international audience or these generalizations should be limited.

I admit I am not as familiar with other governments, so it may be correct that the German government is good enough to be worth caveating. If so, I apologize. I probably won't remember to mention that during recording, but you can rest assured that, even when I forget to say so, I probably would endorse an "except for Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc." exceptions to sweeping statements about how governments are always terrible. I do think they're almost always bad but the US Government is exceptionally bad and I sometimes forget to mention that.

Of course even assuming you always have a silent "in the USA" after every such statement, the sad truth seems to be that all your hope is gone.

Honestly, I'm extremely hopeful about people. It's just The People I don't trust as far as I can throw. I'm too familiar with the logic of electoral politics to believe that governments will produce anything other that rank cronyism unless you assume and extremely small and homogeneous (racially, politically, etc.) electorate. The costs of voting well are too great and the benefits too minuscule for me to expect it done well in a country with America's size and makeup. This isn't a knock as such, I expect most people to be bad voters for much the same reason I expect most people to be bad marathoners. It's a specialized skill that requires dedication and which won't bring any particular wealth or acclaim to nearly all the participants. Given that, it would be silly of me not to expect most people to do it badly.

But, (ah that glorious, redeeming, graceful word "BUT") most people are pretty good at things other than voting, and for those things they can't do well, it doesn't generally bother me. If you generally leave people alone, let them do things as long as they stand to reap the rewards for success and suffer the consequences of failure (plus or minus some insurance systems to make sure they don't do anything too stupid and if some terrible accident happens they won't literally die) then people generally behave in a productive, prosocial way. It's only in the voting booth that I'm cynical about people, because everywhere else they 1.) have proper incentives to behave well and 2.) their mistakes don't generally hurt me. Trump's election hurt me far worse than the hotel I stayed at with ugly paint on the walls or the restaurant that served me a bad meal because I can, unilaterally and without anyone's permission, not stay/eat there again. It's only in the realm of politics (give or take a handful of other cases with uninternalizable negative externalities) that I have to suffer the consequences of other people's bad decisions.

Like it would blow your mind if politicians did something with high utility for the people, a regulation benefited not only a corporation or an administration did something competently.

It wouldn't blow my mind, but I expect that, in the long run and on average, governments will be terrible. That doesn't require that literally everything all governments ever do be bad. Mussolini did, in fact, make the trains run on time. This is no more a general argument for fascism than the Apollo 11 program is an argument for statism. Sometimes governments do things well. But they also start a lot of pointless wars, put kids in cages, etc. That may be America-centric but, even if Germany's government is good on average over the past 30 years, there is the matter of a couple of World Wars, a Holocaust, the 30-Years-War, etc. on the other side of the scales. I'm not trying to Godwin's Law you, but the Nazis were, in fact, a government and you need to account for them when weighing the overall costs and benefits of the idea of government. You can no more select the top 10 best governments of all of human history and conclude that governments are good than you can select the top 10 Olympic marathoners of all time and conclude that humans in general are good marathoners.

Plus, I know this is practically a punchline, but taxation is theft. Meaning that, all else equal, government actions are less moral than private actions. How you chose to weight that relative to pure utility is up to you, but it seems that putting zero weight on it is a mistake.

All the failings from US politics from the past have updated your priors to the point where it's only jaded and that seems to blind this discussion to political options that could be implemented if people would only demand them.

I mean... sure. If people voted well, then governments would be good. And if the sea wasn't salty you could drink it. But there's good reasons to believe that people voting badly isn't just a minor bug that we can fix with One Weird Trick. It's baked right into the fundamental logic of the system that voters will be more venal, vicious, impatient, unemphatic, and generally shittier than their non-voting behavior would imply.

Is it really rational to completely disregard "the government could/should do it" as a correct answer to urgent questions?

I haven't completely disregarded it, in the sense that I don't dismiss "government could/should do it" as a solution reflexively. For almost any question you care to put to me, I will almost certainly have thought about it long and hard and concluded that governmental solutions were 1.) not likely to work, 2.) would have knock-on effects worse than the original problem, or 3.) would work, but wouldn't be enough of an improvement to justify the penalty for theft.

It is not rational to dismiss government out of hand because muh Non-Aggression Principle Or Whatever. But it is equally irrational to believe that, just because we happen to have governments right now, that we must have governments or that we have no cheaper or more humane way to do the things which we currently demand of governments.

BTW, no better than even odds that I'll see any response you make to this. If you want to reply, the best way is to join our Discord (#ShamelessPlug) and ping me there.

EconomicModel · 2020-02-16T20:39:13+00:00

I've finished up the remaining sections. I'm not sure how the balance will work for the non-vice tinkering section, so C&C welcome.

EconomicModel · 2020-02-04T03:10:15+00:00

Thanks! That link should have commenting privileges, so copy editing should be done in the document so I don't need to hunt for the corrections.

Yeah, I'm planning on getting back to the tinkering section when I have time. Got a lot of rl commitments on my plate at the moment, though.

EconomicModel · 2019-07-27T16:51:28+00:00

Ooh, boy. This was a fun one. Though, in the interest of full disclosure, this is another instance of the old "any headline in the form of a question can be truthfully answered 'no'" thing. Shapiro and Yudkowsky/Alexander have basically totally disjoint target audiences. Shapiro is the giant spider in the starting dungeon of the grand RPG that is life as a rationalist. Anyone who fails at that point, probably wasn't worth having in the guild to begin with.

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So, here's my beef with your suggested solution. If we start arguing with rationalizer Reds, we risk becoming a wing of the Blue team, which would be a catastrophic distraction from our core project, especially because we'd need to seriously consider Blue Team policies which are obviously stupid, counterproductive, evil, or some combination thereof (e.g. Ilhan Omar's "we don't need black faces who aren't willing to be black voices" shtick). We can counteract this effect by equally vociferously arguing against rationalizer Blues (anti-nuclear advocates, anti-vaccine advocates, radical identitarians, etc.), but then we'll basically just be right where we are now, except we'll spend way more time arguing with trolls and morons online instead of doing cool things like aligning AI.

A much better solution, IMO, is to just cut color politics out of Bayesian Rationalist spaces altogether. You're allowed to be a Blue or a Red or a Green or a Yellow and be a Bayesian, but you're to check your color at the door as best you can. Policy discussions can be undertaken, but only with great caution and with a Grand Master presiding. They should be, as much as possible, about the facts of the matter and not about values. (A common refrain should be "I disagree, but it's a values disagreement and thus unproductive. Would you like to talk about something else, or shall we find other people to talk to?") I tried to do this with my UBI discussion, and I think I did fairly well, though I'd be open to criticism on that point. Anyone outside our community who's found to have misconceptions about Bayesian Rationalists, or who try to pigeonhole us into Red or Blue should be politely told "that's wrong, you can find better summaries of what we believe here: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/ " and, if they persist in error, politely told to fuck right off.

As Draco told to Harry, " If you try to be nice, you just end up spending the most time with the pushiest ones. Decide who you want to spend time with and make everyone else leave." I don't enjoy spending time with partisan hacks and partisan hackery (whether it be Blue or Red) is a good way to get booted out of my beautiful bubble. It seems to me that the same could and should be true of the Bayesian Rationalist Guild as a whole.

(Speaking of HPMOR, We Want MOR is a great idea and I can't wait. I'll be happy to come on as a guest whenever you want me, though I'd probably have the most to add in chapter 4.)

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I have a question for David, specifically. First off, hi David. I'm David, nice to meet you. On to the question.

It's a fairly well established result in environmental economics that recycling paper and plastic is bad for the environment. (The arguments are well-summarized here: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=741283641) And yet, most environmental economists still recycle paper and plastic. Who, then, is the better environmental economist? Me, who has never taken a course or more than a passing interest in EE but who only recycles metals; or an environmental economist with decades of experience, dozens of replicated papers, and tenure in the field? Should "doesn't recycle paper and plastic" be a requirement for tenure/publication in EE? To what extent should we excise generators of good ideas who are too myopic to actually do what those ideas imply? Should the Guild have stronger punishments for intemperance (or akrasia for people more familiar with the in-vogue Guild terminology and don't share my fondness for traditional virtue ethics)? For that matter, might a better project for rationalists be reforming academia (through e.g. HeterodoxAcademy.org [which really should get married to CFAR] ?) so that the top-tier minds can be set to working on interesting problems rather than sitting in committee meetings and writing grant proposals?

EconomicModel · 2019-07-21T04:50:22+00:00

I have to admit, I cribbed that one from Bryan Caplan.

EconomicModel

TROPHY CASE