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xv15 comments on 2011 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Wait a sec. Global warming can be important for everyday life without it being important that any given individual know about it for everyday life. In the same way that matters of politics have tremendous bearing on our lives, yet the average person might rationally be ignorant about politics since he can't have any real effect on politics. I think that's the spirit in which thomblake means it's a political matter. For most of us, the earth will get warmer or it won't, and it doesn't affect how much we are willing to pay for tomatoes at the grocery store (and therefore it doesn't change our decision rule for how to buy tomatoes), although it may effect how much tomatoes cost.
(It's a bit silly, but on the other hand I imagine one could have their preferences for tomatoes depend on whether tomatoes had "genes" or not.)
This is a bit like the distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Macroeconomics is the stuff of front page newspaper articles about the economy, really very important stuff. But if you had to take just one economics class, I would recommend micro, because it gives you a way of thinking about choices in your daily life, as opposed to stuff you can't have any real effect on.
You don't have much influence on an election if you vote, but the system stops working if everyone acts only according to the expected value of their individual contribution.
This is isomorphic to the tragedy of the commons, like the 'rationalists' who lose the war against the barbarians because none of them wants to fight.
Exactly, it IS the tragedy of the commons, but that supports my point, not yours. It may be good for society if people are more informed about global warming, but society isn't what makes decisions. Individuals make decisions, and it's not in the average individual's interest to expend valuable resources learning more about global warming if it's going to have no real effect on the quality of their own life.
Whether you think it's an individual's "job" or not to do what's socially optimal, is completely besides the point here. The fact is they don't. I happen to think that's pretty reasonable, but it doesn't matter how we wish people would behave, in order to predict how they will behave.
Let me try to be clear, since you might be wondering why someone (not me) downvoted you: You started by noting your shock that people aren't that informed about global warming. I said we shouldn't necessarily be surprised that they aren't that informed about global warming. You responded that we're suffering from the tragedy of the commons, or the tragedy of the rationalists versus the barbarians. I respond that I agree with what you say but not with what you seem to think it means. When we unearth a tragedy of the commons, we don't go, "Aha! These people have fallen into a trap and if they saw the light, they would know to avoid it!" Casting light on the tragedy of the commons does not make it optimal for individuals to avoid it.
Casting light on the commons is a way of explaining why people would be behaving in such a socially suboptimal way, not a way of bolstering our shock over their behavior.
In a tragedy of the commons, it's in everybody's best interests for everybody to conserve resources. If you're running TDT in a population with similar agents, you want to conserve, and if you're in a population of insufficiently similar agents, you want an enforced policy of conservation. The rationalist in a war with the barbarians might not want to fight, but because they don't want to lose even more, they will fight if they think that enough other people are running a similar decision algorithm, and they will support a social policy that forces them and everyone else to fight. If they think that their side can beat the barbarians with a minimal commitment of their forces, they won't choose either of these things.
And this is why xv15 is right and Desrtopa is wrong. Orther people do not run TDT or anything similar. Individuals who cooperate with such a population are fools.
TDT is NOT a magic excuse for cooperation. It calls for cooperation in cases when CDT does not only when highly specific criteria are met.
At the Paris meetup Yvain proposed that voting might be rational for TDT-ish reasons, to which I replied that if you have voted for losing candidates at past elections, that means not enough voters are correlated with you. Though now that I think of it, maybe the increased TDT-ish impact of your decision could outweigh the usual arguments against voting, because they weren't very strong to begin with.
But sometimes it works out anyway. Lots of people can be fools. And lots of people can dislike those who aren't fools.
People often think "well if everyone did X sufficiently unpleasant thing would happen, therefore I won't do it". They also implicitly believe, though they may not state "most people are like me in this regard". They will also say with their facial expressions and actions though not words "people who argue against this are mean and selfish".
In other words I just described a high trust society. I'm actually pretty sure if you live in Switzerland you could successfully cooperate with the Swiss on global warming for example. Too bad global warming isn't just a Swiss problem.
Compliance with norms so as to avoid punishment is a whole different issue. And obviously if you willfully defy the will of the tribe when you know that the punishment exceeds the benefit to yourself then you are the fool and the compliant guy is not.
Of course they will. That's why we invented lying! I'm in agreement with all you've been saying about hypocrisy in the surrounding context.
I agree. Desrtopa is taking Eliezer's barbarians post too far for a number of reasons.
1) Eliezer's decision theory is at the least controversial which means many people here may not agree with it.
2) Even if they agree with it, it doesn't mean they have attained rationality in Eliezer's sense.
3) Even if they have attained this sort of rationality, we are but a small community, and the rest of the world is still not going to cooperate with us. Our attempts to cooperate with them will be impotent.
Desrtopa: Just because it upholds an ideal of rationality that supports cooperation, does not mean we have attained that ideal. Again, the question is not what you'd like to be true, but about what's actually true. If you're still shocked by people's low confidence in global warming, it's time to consider the possibility that your model of the world -- one in which people are running around executing TDT -- is wrong.
Those are all good reasons but as far as I can tell Desrtopa would probably give the right answer if questioned about any of those. He seems to be aware of how people actually behave (not remotely TDTish) but this gets overridden by a flashing neon light saying "Rah Cooperation!".
He may be mistaken about how high trust the society he lives in is. This is something it is actually surprisingly easy to be wrong about, since our intuitions aren't built for a society of hundreds of millions living across an entire continent, our minds don't understand that our friends, family and co-workers are not a representative sample of the actual "tribe" we are living in.
Even if that is the case he is still mistaken about game theory. While the 'high trust society' you describe would encourage cooperation to the extent that hypocrisy does not serve as a substitute the justifications Desrtopa is given are in terms of game theory and TDT. It relies on acting as if other agents are TDT agents when they are not - an entirely different issue to dealing with punishment norms by 'high trust' agents.
Sure.
We are in agreement on that. But this might better explain why, on second thought, I think it dosen't matter, at least not in this sense, on the issue of whether educating people about global warming matters.
I think we may have been arguing against a less than most charitable interpretation of his argument, which I think isn't that topical a discussion (even if it serves to clear up a few misconceptions). If the less than charitable argument is the interpretation he now thinks or even actually did intend, dosen't seem that relevant to me.
"rah cooperation" I think in practice translates into "I think I live in a high trust enough society that its useful to use this signal to get people to ameliorate this tragedy of the commons situation I'm concerned about."
There are plenty of ways in which I personally avoid cooperation for my own benefit. But in general I think that a personal policy of not informing oneself at even a basic level about tragedies of commons where the information is readily available is not beneficial, because humans have a sufficiently developed propensity for resolving tragedies of commons to give at least the most basic information marginal benefit.
To me, this comment basically concedes that you're wrong but attempts to disguise it in a face-saving way. If you could have said that people should be informing themselves at the socially optimal level, as you've been implying with your TDT arguments above, you would have. Instead, you backed off and said that people ought to be informing themselves at least a little.
Just to be sure, let me rewrite your claim precisely, in the sense you must mean it given your supposed continued disagreement:
Assuming that's what you're saying, it's easy to see that even this is an overreach. The question on the table is whether people should be informing themselves about global warming. Whether the first epsilon of information one gets from "informing oneself" (as opposed to hearing the background noise) is beneficial to the individual relative to the cost of attaining it, is a question of derivatives of cost and benefit functions at zero, and it could go either way. You simply can't make a general statement about how these derivatives relate for the class of Commons Problems. But more importantly, even if you could, SO WHAT? The question is not whether people should be informing themselves a bit, the question is whether they should be informing themselves at anywhere close to the socially optimal level. And by admitting it's a tragedy of the commons, we are already ANSWERING that question.
Does that make sense? Am I misunderstanding your position? Has your position changed?
It seems that you are trying to score points for winning the debate. If your interlocutor indeed condedes something in a face-saving way, forcing him to admit it is useless from the truth-seeking point of view.
Yes, you are misunderstanding my position. I don't think that it's optimal for most individuals to inform themselves about global warming to a "socially optimal" level where everyone takes the issue sufficiently seriously to take grassroots action to resolve it. Human decisionmaking is only isomorphic to TDT in a limited domain and you can only expect so much association between your decisions and others; if you go that far, you're putting in too much buck for not enough bang, unless you're getting utility from the information in other ways. But at the point where you don't have even basic knowledge of global warming, anticipating a negative marginal utility on informing yourself corresponds to a general policy of ignorance that will serve one poorly with respect to a large class of problems.
If there were no correlation between one person's decisions and another's, it would probably not be worth anyone's time to learn about any sort of societal problems at all, but then, we wouldn't have gotten to the point of being able to have societal problems in the first place.
In which case you want an enforced policy conforming to the norm. A rational shepherd in a communal grazing field may not believe that if he doesn't let his flock overgraze, other shepherds won't either, but he'll want a policy punishing or otherwise preventing overgrazers.
Yes, and this means that individuals with the ability to influence or enforce policy about global warming can potentially benefit somewhat from knowing about global warming. For the rest of the people (nearly everyone) knowledge about global warming is of no practical benefit.