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Mass_Driver comments on A Challenge for LessWrong - Less Wrong
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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.
I believe you are mistaken. Having adds out there is a significant factor driving the production of content on the internet. Without adds we would not have google in its current form and we wouldn't have gmail at all! By personally avoiding adds we derive benefits for ourselves from the presence of adds while not accepting the costs. Let people who aren't smart enough to download AdBlock maintain the global commons!
Without advertising, there would be far less demand for television and similar media, because its effective price, as perceived by consumers, would be much higher. Query what people would have done with their extra 20 - 30 hours a week over the last 40 years or so if they hadn't spent all of it consuming mindless entertainment.
Also, without advertising, there would be far less demand for useless products, because their effective benefits, as perceived by consumers, would be much lower. A few corporations that completely failed to make useful products would have gone out of business, and most of the others would have learned to imitate the few corporations that already were making useful products. Query whether (a) having most companies make useful products and (b) having most workers be employed by companies that make useful products might be worth more than having Google.
If there were no free television, people would still have a lot of low-intensity timekillers available-- gossip, unambitious games, drinking.
If they had to pay for television, they might have been so accustomed to paying for content that they'd have subscribed to google.
The more interesting question is how different would people need to be for advertising to not be worth doing. I think it would take people being much clearer about their motivations. I'm pretty sure that would have major implications, but I'm not sure what they'd be.
There are people who try to raise their kids to be advertising-proof, but I haven't heard anything about the long term effects.
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.
This is a pretty inaccurate interpretation of what maximizing shareholder value actually means in practice. Generally corporate management are only considered to have breached their fiduciary duty to shareholders if they take actions that are clearly enriching themselves at the expense of shareholders, making an acquisition that is dilutive to shareholders for example.
It is highly unusual for corporate management to be accused of breaching their fiduciary duty by making business decisions that fail to maximize profit due to other considerations. For one thing this would generally be impossible to prove since management could argue (for example) that maintaining a reputation for ethical conduct is the best way to maximize shareholder value long term and this is not something that could easily be disproved in a court.
Activist shareholders may sometimes try and force management out due to disagreements over business strategy but this is a separate issue from any legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value. In the US this is also quite difficult (which is a situation that I think should be improved) and so is fairly rare.
Thanks. I was pretty sure that management wasn't getting sued for failing to maximize shareholder value through ordinary business decisions-- if that were possible it would be really common.
Agreed. I was explaining why I'm dubious about publicly owned companies in general.
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.
You don't need to, and I know I myself don't. (My ethical unease is based on my ersonal ethics, mind you). What I responded to was the general claim about "altruists worth the name". In the previous response I similarly responded to your rationalization, not the conclusion that you were rationalizing. I am comfortable disagreeing on matters of fact but don't usually see much use in responding to other people's personal preferences.
We are talking at cross purposes somewhat.
There are two points.
1) There is working at something you dislike for a greater good (as long as you are very very sure that it will be a net positive. All the talks of cognitive deficits of humans do not inspire confidence in my own decision making abilities)
2) Improving society through being involved in the consumerist economy as it is a net positive force in itself.
My comment about "worth the name" was mainly about 2 and ignoring 1 for the moment, as I had already conceded it in my initial comment.
Then on this we are naturally in agreement. No sane altruist (where sane includes 'able to adequately research the influence of important decisions) will do things that have a net detriment and there are certainly going to be some activities that fit this category.
I would add another category that specifically refers to doing things that are directly bad so that it allows you to do other things that are good.
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.