= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Closet survey #1 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (653)
I tried hard to think of something that I haven't already talked about, so here goes:
I have a suspicion that the best economic plans developed by economists will have no effect or negative effect, because the ability of macroeconomics to describe what happens when we push on the economy is simply not good enough to let the government deliberately manipulate the economy in any positive way.
Update: You could call this half right in retrospect. Fiscal policy is ineffective except when monetary policy is ineffective, and the Federal Reserve didn't print nearly enough money but the money they did print did prevent another Great Depression. We would not have been better off if the Federal Reserve had done nothing, thinking all their plans ineffective. There might be some kind of lesson here about EAs who fret about "What if we can't model anything?" whose despair seems kind of similar to Eliezer_2009's.
To clarify, "the money they did print did print another Great Depression" should (probably) read "the money they did print did prevent another Great Depression", right? The version with the typo sounds unfortunately like "The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression".
Right. (Also the Federal Reserve totally did cause the original Great Depression, but this is a mainstream stance.)
What's the minimum amount of information you could send Eliezer_2009, that he would agree with you?
Economists' plans relating to monetary policy do influence how the Federal Reserve Board acts (since it is run by economists) and this does influence the economy.
I was including the Federal Reserve Board in "economists". Forgive me if that was a mistake.
Let me be more concrete: I suspect that the Obama stimulus plan won't accomplish anything positive, not because of any particular flaw I could name, but because the models they are using to organize their understanding of macroeconomics are just wrong - somehow or other.
The amount of chaos here seems so great - so many things going differently than predicted, so many plans failing to have their intended constructive effect - that I suspect a chaotic inversion: it's not chaos, we're just stupid.
I believe this about climate change as well.
You might try reading Thomas Woods's new book "Meltdown". It's an easy read, it took me about 4 hours. It would have been less but I had to keep stopping and thinking "How come I didn't realize that before?" It struck me as mostly accurate, which makes me wonder about mainstream economists' attacks on Austrian economics. I am definitely going to be reading more Austrian economics. Woods is an historian rather than an economist, but the core of the book is that gov't meddling in the money supply causes the business cycle - that the Federal Reserve caused the current crash by inflating the bubbles with cheap (below market) credit.
This position is not uncommon, and it is very different from my understanding of your first comment.
For what it's worth, I think lots of people are confused about macroeconomics, including many/most economists. However, there is a particular macroeconomic/monetaryeconomic theory which does give substantial insight: monetary equilibrium theory (goes by a few other names). Unfortunately, I can't give good resource for learning this theory. I'm slowly working on an introductory series.
I think I agree with your premises here, but my conclusion is that our predictions will be weakly correlated with reality and our best plans will have a 55% or 51% success rate, not that they will have no effect or negative effect.
There no reason to assume that messing with a complex system that you don't understand means that you will have on average a 50% success rate.
There are many cases where trying to push a complex system into a local optima might have bad consequences. The system might get more robust but lose resiliency.
What do you mean when you say 'plans'? Do you mean all plans or just most plans?
Edit: oh, I didn't read closely, you mean macroeconomic plans.