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Mass_Driver comments on A Challenge for LessWrong - Less Wrong
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Roko, do you think you could lay out, in some detail, the argument for why rational people should busy themselves with getting rich? I'm familiar with some of the obvious arguments at a basic level (entrepreneurship is usually win-win, money can be used to help fund or attract attention for just about any other project or argument you care to have succeed, getting rich should be relatively easy in a world full of both arbitrage opportunities and irrational people), but still don't quite find them convincing.
Same with status. I made a similar argument in this exchange, in case you haven't already seen it.
I do find them convincing. Unfortunately, I don't find them motivating. Making a sustained effort to do something usually depends for me on :
My lifestyle tends to be rather minimalistic so that even an average to low income is more then enough to sustain it. I also find it a lot easier to just forgo some comfort or gadget instead of working more to pay for it (such wants are for me usually fleeting anyway). Finding something interesting is for the most part out of my control so I can't do much there.
I have to admit however that I'm in a rather comfortable position so that I don't have to really care about money all that much. I live in Europe so medical care is compared to the USA cheap. I'm building my own house now but I'm getting a lot of help from my family both financially & practically. Still, the same reasoning holds.
This is why I found (when I was younger) communism a better idea than capitalism. I had to recognize however that most people don't think my way and that communism is unsustainable. One of the most surprising experiments in found in this regard is the one where someone can choose between :
Assume that prices of goods stay equal in both cases i.e. that fact that everyone else gets a 200 dollar raise in the first option has no influence on the price of goods. When I first read this to my great surprise most people choose option 2 while I found option 1 the blindingly obvious correct choice.
This suggests to me that someone with political skills should create a startup which is owned by the singinst. Where hackers can donate their time to a project which makes shedloads of money. Lemons to Lemonade etc.
Your original post said :
I assumed that with 'rich' you mean world top 100 millionaire levels (Correct me if I'm wrong here). You are right that I don't care enough about $ and status to reach those levels but I wouldn't say I am poor enough to make absolutely no difference at all.
My minimalistic lifestyle coupled with a average income allows me to save a lot of money. Probably more then my older colleagues who probably earn more then me. And I'm sure that I have more money in the bank that most of the people in my age bracket. (Had anyway. I spend most of it to buy land for my house).
In the future, I'm planning to donate a portion of my income but I'm waiting until my expenses have stabilized and don't expect any major financial costs.
EDIT : My apologies, just reread your top post and realized I overlooked
I'm assuming that $100K is your limit for being rich and as I just have a bit more it makes my original comment invalid.
However, it does proof that not caring much about $ and status is not an insurmountable barrier to acquiring a lot of money. By reversing it (i.e. instead of working harder/smarter and earn more, just spend less) you can still get enough to make a difference (but indeed not to the levels like Bill Gates did).
You are correct off course. I was merely reacting against your statement that I can make no difference at all.
I don't think the minimalist part is the problem.
(IAWYC)
Of course, if you're going to talk like that it seems essential to then frame the situation as "we're going to beat those fools at their own game, muahaha!" rather than "achieving conventional success is something dumb cavemen do, eww" or "I was born a nerd, what hope do I have". I suspect that the default framing is closer to the bad sort, and am somewhat concerned that such talk makes things worse by default. (I'm also not sure what, if any, framing could defeat the seemingly-likely effect where considering successful non-nerds dumb makes one less likely to try to steal their powers, and simply makes it harder to get along with them.)
I think it's difficult to care about $ and status while also caring about rationality and altruism, don't you? It's one thing to say that "X is the optimal instrumental value for Y," and it's another to pursue X on a full-time basis while still being passionate enough about Y to trust yourself to trade X for Y when the time comes. I find that my "terminal values" realign alarmingly quickly when I start pursuing different goals -- 6 to 9 months is about as long as I can spend on a side-project before I start unconsciously thinking of the side-project as one of my actual goals. How about you?
I'm not sure that I agree with this point, but I think considering it is quite important.
On a somewhat related note, I've been contemplating a top-level post on whether paying attention to status is useful for becoming more rational, leaving aside any discussion of whether it is useful for winning; the two issues should be treated very differently, and in the discussion of status on LW that doesn't always seem to be the case.
Edited for clarity.
One of the reasons that I suggest it is useful is that it allows us to realize how status related biases are changing the way we personally think. Roughly speaking our cognitive biases are either "artifacts, weaknesses and limitations of the way the brain manages to process information" or "things we think that are sub-optimal epistemologically because it helps us bullshit our way to more status".
Agreed, and I would emphasize that status-related biases can specifically hinder the pursuit of rationality itself. For example, asking people questions seems to often be interpreted as an attempt to lower their status, which seems kind of counterproductive, especially for a community like this one. Really, there are a whole range of common reactions related to the idea of "taking offense" that seem to hinder communication but affect status.
Part of my problem with making money today is that most of the methods of making money are benefiting from status games that do not help society.
Pretend for a moment I am a cool shades seller. I sell someone some cool shades. They are happy, they get more status girls etc. Everyone else wants some cool shades, so I sell them some. Now we are back to the status quo, everyone has some bits of plastic that are no better for keeping the sunshine off than some uncool shades and I have some money. The dangerously hip sunglasses took some energy to produce and oil to create that could have been used for producing something of lasting value or preserving some life. Also I needed to have been advertising my sub zero shades with images of women clinging to suave men, in order to compete with other makers of eye wear.
So not only am I exploiting the fact that the world is mad, I am excaserbating it as well. As most consumption is about status or other signalling, it is hard to get away from it when entering the world of business. Even if you aren't a customer facing company, you will supporting and enabling other companys that do play off the biases of the individual. Not to mention things like cigarettes.
Edit: Now if we were perfect rationalists we would swallow our distaste for creating more madness if we thought that we could do more good with the money from the sunglasses, than the waste of resources and increased irrationality engendered by the advertisement.
So sell information. These days, you don't even have to have it made into a physical product.
I don't know if you have a named bias there, but I think seeing a situation that's pretty bad, and then not looking for good possibilities in the odd corners, counts as a bad mental habit.
I'll note that one of the biggest new fortunes is Google, and their core products aren't status related, even if many Google ads are. What's more, Google's improvement of search has made people generally more capable.
I don't think it makes sense for you to try to make the most possible money by trying to create The Next Big Thing. Maybe I'm too indulgent, but I don't think people are at their best trying to do what they hate, and I think it's easier to create things that serve motivations you can understand.
Not all LW discussions should be taken as assuming status/money feeds back into UFAI prevention. Where it does, I obviously agree with you, but if the question of what's the right thing to do in the absence of existential risk considerations is something people find themselves thinking about anyway, they may as well get that question right by paying sufficient attention to positional vs nonpositional goods.
Smokers love the first cigarette of the Day. People who buy lottery tickets love the feeling of potentially winning lots of money. Nerds love to ignore the world and burrow into safe controllable minutia. It doesn't mean that any of them is good for them in the long term.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with other optimising. Every one in society other optimizes each other all the time. People try and convince me to like football and to chase pretty girls. To conform to their expectations. You've been other-optimizing the non-status oriented in this very thread!
I don't normally air my views, because they are dull and tedious. My friends can buy their fancy cars as much as they want, as long as they have sufficient money to not go into unsustainable debt, and I won't say a word.
But you asked why altruists might have a problem with making money, and I gave you a response. It might be irrational, I'm unsure at this point, but like akrasia It won't go away in a puff of logic. If it is irrational it is due to the application of the golden rule as a computationally feasible heuristic in figuring out what people want. I don't want a world full of advertising that tries to make me feel inadequate, so I would not want to increase the amount of advertising in others worlds.
But maybe "non-people like me" do want this. I don't know, I don't think so. The popularity of things like tivo and ad-block that allow you to skip or block ads. Or pay services without ads suggests that ads are not a positive force in everyone's world.
I also see people regret spending so much money on positional goods they get into debt or bankruptcy. This I am pretty sure is bad ;) So I would not want to encourage it.
Still, there are probably useful things to be made and done which have little or no fashion component.
For example, there don't seem to be any child and pet-proof roach traps on the market.
How plausible is it to believe that the businesses which feed into counterproductive activities are likely to be much more profitable?
If we go with the very pretty Austrian theory that profits tend to be equal across all parts of the economy (unusually high profits draw capital in, unusually low profits drive it out), then the conspicuous profits in fashion-driven industry are counterbalanced by lower odds of making those profits.
I don't know how good the empirical evidence for the Austrian theory is.
True. If you can keep independent you would be okay. If you have share holders you would be bound to maximise shareholder value.
If you build keeping independent into your plans, you're more likely to succeed at it.
I've become somewhat dubious about the whole system of maximizing shareholder value. Anecdotally, companies become worse places to work (including less focus on quality) when they go public.
And I don't believe maximizing shareholder value is a real human motivation (not compared to wanting to make good things or please people you know or be in charge of stuff), and I suspect that a system built on it leads to fraud.
There's a fair amount of evidence that suggests that greater management ownership of a firm correlates with better performance. In other words maximizing shareholder value appears to work better as a motivation when the management are significant shareholders.
I didn't mean that you would intrinsically want to maximise shareholder value. Simply that if you passed up business opportunities due to your ethics and you didn't have a controlling share you might be out of a job.
Society as a whole over-consumes positional goods, and under-consumes non-positional goods. However, non-positional goods are not being consumed at a level of zero, so why not make money selling those? If you can make an improvement to an existing non-positional good, or come up with entirely new ones, that would also shift some consumption from positional goods to non-position ones, which would further satisfy your altruistic values.
Can we be sure of that? Reasoning from the observation that society seems to get rather a lot of benefits from something and that this something doesn't seem to be pure charitable contribution the endless battle to make money must be of some marginal value!
Money makes the world go round.
In that case, it must be the government that generates the benefit! </joke>
It is the manipulation of the status game that does not help society, the economic knock on effects might.
Could we have generated more marginal value with the same resources? Belief in super intelligence would indicate yes. Would it have been possible to generate more marginal value whilst keeping human psychology as it is currently? That is hard to argue conclusively either way. We couldn't switch off the desire for money/fame entirely, but it may have been able to have been moderated and channelled more effectively (science and reason has been fashionable in the past).
Altruists, worth the name, that enter business would have to make sure they were part of the consumerist system that generated value rather than part that detracted from the value other people generated. That would constrain their money making ability.
Absolutely. But lets be clear that for all their faults these status games account for nearly all the value that society creates for itself. In fact, since group selection does not imply in the case of humans these games are the very foundation of civilization itself. I hate status games... but I refuse to let myself fall into that all to common 'nerd' failure mode. Rationalization from bitterness from and contempt for status games that just don't seem to matter to us as much as to others to the conclusion that they have no value.
Only in the "No True Scotsman" sense of 'worth the name'. Altruists push fat men in front of Trolleys. Altruism is not nice. That is just the naive do-gooderism that we read in fantasy and Sci. Fi. stories.
Altruists need not artificially constrain themselves unless the detriment from making money is sufficiently bad that the earnings can not be spent to generate a net benefit to their society (as they personally evaluate benefit). Ways to make money that fit such category are extremely hard to find. For example earnings activities up to and including theft and assassination can be used to easily give a net altruistic benefit. In fact, the marginal value of adding additional zero or negative sum players to the economy is usually fairly small. You just make the market in 'evil' slightly more efficient.
I won't just ignore all ethical unease.
The only incompatibility I see is between rationality and (pure) altruism but I'm aware that's a minority position here.
Spot on as a personal observation and also as a general statement about human nature.
If one only cared about material goods, then you're right.
Otherwise, it depends on how much you need to be relatively richer than others in order to attract the kind of social interaction you like. Think of the stereotypical well-dressed man hoping to land a winning bid on a pretty gold digger.
As I understand it, it is a comparative advantage argument. More rational people are likely to have comparative advantage in making money as compared to less rational people, so the utility maximizing setup is for more rational people to make money and pay less rational people to do the day to day work of implementing the charitable organization. Thats the basic form of the argument at least.