nerzhin comments on (One reason) why capitalism is much maligned - Less Wrong

1 Post author: multifoliaterose 19 July 2010 03:48AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Sort By: Best

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: nerzhin 19 July 2010 03:01:58PM 3 points [-]

I agree with most of this post, but think you need to work a little harder to provide evidence. Below I've quoted some lines with emphasis added to try to show this.

It seems very likely that for each positive integer x, the average world citizen at the xth percentile in wealth today finds life more fulfilling than the average world citizen at the xth percentile in wealth 50 years ago did.

Surely there's social science research on exactly this that you could cite?

I'd hypothesize that one is that people have a gut intuition that the wealth of the world is fixed.

This is harder to measure, but still, evidence would be nice.

On average making money seems to be good for society, not bad for society.

How would we test this?

My impressions from casual conversations and from the news is that people in the general population have a belief of the type "there's a limited supply of jobs, if jobs are being sent to Southeast Asia then there will be fewer jobs for Americans."

This is very likely true, and you cite statistics about trade more generally to back it up. But "your impressions from casual conversations"? Really?

Comment author: multifoliaterose 19 July 2010 03:29:53PM * 6 points [-]

I'm happy to add to my post examples of empirical evidence for or against the claims in my post as people point them out.

In the absence of empirical evidence on a given subject matter, it's still reasonable to talk about the subject matter. For example, if there's no hard data supporting or opposing my claims then my post may prompt empirical investigation of the ostensible phenomena in question by a social scientist reader of Less Wrong.

When I say things like "it seems very likely" "I'd hypothesize that" "seems" "my impressions", I'm indicating that (a) I don't know of hard data to back up my claims (b) my subjective impressions point to the said conclusions.

Subjective impressions play an important role in rational decision making about complicated matters where it's impossible to get really robust hard data.

Also, one doesn't always need hard data to have a justified high degree of confidence in something. If you haven't done so already, read some of Eliezer's posts about science vs. Bayesian reasoning:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jo/einsteins_arrogance/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/qb/science_doesnt_trust_your_rationality/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/qa/the_dilemma_science_or_bayes/