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JoshuaZ comments on How minimal is our intelligence? - Less Wrong
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We have good reason to think that the missing volumes of Diophantus were at Alexandria. Much of what Diophantus did was centuries before his time. If people in the 1500s and 1600s had complete access to his and other Greek mathematicians' work, math would have likely progressed at a much faster pace, especially in number theory.
We also have reason to think that Alexandria contained the now lost Greek astronomical records, which likely contained comets and possibly also historical nova observations. While we have some nova and supernova observations from slightly later (primarily thanks to Chinese and Japanese records), the Greeks were doing astronomy well before. This sort of thing isn't just an idle curiosity: understanding the timing of supernova connects to understanding the most basic aspects of our universe. The chemical elements necessary for life are created and spread by supernova. Understanding the exact ratios, how common supernova are, and understanding more how supernova spread out, among other issues, are all important to understanding very important questions like how common life is, which is directly relevant to the Great Filter. We do have a lot of supernova observations in the last few years but historical examples are few and far between.
On the contrary. Kill a few people or make them suffer and it has little direct impact beyond a few years in the future. Destroying knowledge has an impact that resonates down for far longer.
This is an interesting argument, and I find it unfortunate that you've been downvoted. The hypothesis is certainly interesting. But it may also be taboo for another reason: in many historical cases, book burning has been a precursor to killing people. This is a cliche, but it is a cliche that happens to have historical examples before it. Another consideration is that a high status of academics is arguably quite a good thing from a consequentialist perspective. People like Norman Borlaug, Louis Pasteur, and Alvin Roth have done more lasting good for humanity than almost anyone else. Academics are the main people who have any chance of having a substantial impact on human utility beyond their own lifespans (the only other groups are people who fund academics or people like Bill Gates who give funding to implement academic discoveries on a large scale). So even if it is purely an issue of status and taboo, there's a decent argument that those are taboos which are advantageous to humanity.
Isn’t this kind of thing archetypal of knowledge that in no way contributes to human welfare?
Perhaps, but note that this wasn’t a precursor to killing people; people were being widely killed regardless. But the modern attention is not on the rape, murder, pillage, etc... it’s on the book-burning. Why the distorted values?
Alvin Roth is no doubt a bright guy, but the idea that he has done more lasting good for humanity than, say, Sam Walton, is absurd. You’re right that Bill Gates has made a huge impact – but his lasting good was achieved by selling computer software, not through the mostly foolish experimentation done by his foundation. Sure, some academics have done some good (although you wildly overstate it) but you have to consider the opportunity cost. The high status of academics causes us to get more academic research than otherwise, but it also encourages our best and brightest to waste their lives in the study of arcana. Can anyone seriously doubt that, on the margin, we are oversupplied with academics, and undersupplied with entrepreneurs and businessmen generally?
Follow up reply in a separate comment since I didn't notice this part of the remark the first time through (and it is substantial enough that it should probably not just be included as an edit):
If this falls into that category then the archetypes of knowledge that doesn't contribute to human welfare is massively out of whack. Figuring out how much of the Great Filter is in front of us or behind us is extremely important. If most of it is behind us, we have a lot less worry. If most of the Great Filter is in front of us, then existential risk is a severe danger to humanity as a whole. Moreover, if it is in front of us, then it most likely some form of technology and caused by some sort of technological change (since natural disasters aren't common enough to wipe out every civilization that gets off the ground). Since we're just beginning to travel into space, it is likely that if there is heavy Filtration in front of us, it isn't very far ahead but is in the next few centuries.
If there is heavy Filtration in front of us, then it is vitally important that we figure out what that Filter is and what we can do to avert it, if anything. This could be the difference between the destruction of humanity and humanity spreading to the stars. If there are any contributions that contribute to the welfare of humanity, those which involve our existence as a whole should be high up on the list.
Well, no. In modern times number theory has been extremely relevant for cryptography for example, and pretty much all e-commerce relies on it. But other areas of math have direct, useful applications and have turned out to be quite important. For example, engineering in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance benefited a lot from things like trig and logarithms. Improved math has lead to much better understanding of economies and financial systems as well. These are but a few limited examples.
You are missing the point in this context having the taboo against book burning is helpful because it is something one can use as a warning sign.
So I'm curious as to how you are defining "good" in any useful sense that you can reach this conclusion. Moreover, the sort of thing that Roth does is in the process of being more and more useful. His work allowing for organ donations for example not only saves lives now but will go on saving lives at least until we have cheap cloned organs.
This is wrong. His work with malaria saves lives. His work with selling computer software involved making mediocre products and making up for that by massive marketing along with anti-trust abuses. There's an argument to be made that economic productivity can be used as a very rough measure of utility, but that breaks down in a market where advertising, marketing, and network effects of specific product designs matter more than quality of product.
Yes, to the point where I have to wonder how drastically far off our unstated premises about the world are. If anything, it seems like we have the exact opposite problem. We have a massive oversupply of "quants" and the like who aren't actually producing more utility or even actually working with real market inefficiencies but are instead doing things like moving servers a few feet closer to the exchange so they can shave a fraction of a second off of their transaction times. There may be an "oversupply" of how many academics there are compared to the number of paying positions but that's simply connected to the fact that most research has results that function as externalities(technically public goods) and thus the lack of academic jobs is a market failure.
No-one is disputing that mathematics can be useful. The question is, if we had slightly more advanced number theory slightly earlier in time, would that have been particularly useful? Answer - no.
No, I am not missing the point. I am perfectly willing to concede that a taboo against book-burning might be helpful for that reason. But here we have an example where people were,at the same time as burning books, doing the exact worse stuff that book burning is allegedly a warning sign of. But no-one complains about the worse stuff, only the book burning. Which makes me disbelieve that people care about the taboo for that reason.
People say that keeping your lawn tidy keep the area looking well-maintained and so prevents crime. Let's say one guy in the area has a very messy lawn, and also goes around committing burglaries. Now suppose the Neighbourhood Watch shows no interest at all in the burglaries, but is shocked and appalled by the state of his lawn. We would have to conclude that these people don't care about crime, what they care about is lawns, and this story about lawns having an effect on crime is just a story they tell people because they can't justify their weird preference to others on its own terms.
Or, we could just allow a market for organ donations. Boom, done. Where's my Nobel?
Now, if you specify that we have to find the best fix while ignoring the obvious free-market solutions I don't deny that Alvin Roth has done good work. And I'm certainly not blaming Roth personally for the fact that academia exists as an adjunct to the state - although academics generally do bear the lions share of responsibility for that. But I am definitely questioning the value of this enterprise, compared to bringing cheap food, clothes, etc, to hundreds of millions of people like Sam Walton did.
I don't see why "saves lives" is the metric, but I bet that Microsoft products have been involved in saving far more lives. Moreover, people are willing to pay for Microsoft products, despite your baseless claims of their inferiority. Gates's charities specifically go around doing things that people say they want but don't bother to do with their own money. I don't know much about the malaria program, but I do know the educational stuff has mostly been disastrous, and whole planks have been abandoned.
Obviously very far indeed.
Answer: Yes. Even today, number theory research highly relevant to efficient crypto is ongoing. A few years of difference in when that shows up would have large economic consequences. For example, as we speak, research in ongoing into practical fully homomorphic encryption which if it is implemented will allow cloud computing and deep processing of sensitive information, as well as secure storage and retrieval of sensitive information (such as medical records) from clouds. This is but one example.
Well, there is always the danger of lost-purpose. But it may help to keep in mind that the book-burnings and genocides in question both occurred a long-time ago. It is easier for something to be at the forefront of one's mind when one can see more directly how it would have impacted one personally.
So, I'm generally inclined to allow for organ donation markets (although there are I think legitimate concerns about them). But since that's not going to happen any time soon, I fail to see its relevance. A lot of problems in the world need to be solved given the political constraints that exist. Roth's solution works in that context. The fact that a politically untenable better solution exists doesn't make his work less beneficial.
So, Derstopa already gave some reasons to doubt this. But it is also worth noting that Walton died in 1992, before much of Walmart's expansion. Also, there's a decent argument that Walmart's success was due not to superior organization but rather a large first-mover advantage (one of the classic ways markets can fail): Walmart takes advantage of its size in ways that small competitors cannot do. This means that smaller chains cannot grow to compete with Walmart in any fashion, so even if a smaller competitor is running something more efficiently, it won't matter much. (Please take care to note that this is not at all the mom-and-pop-store argument which I suspect you and I would both find extremely unconvincing.)
Ok. Do you prefer Quality-adjusted life years ? Bill is doing pretty well by that metric.
"Involved with" is an extremely weak standard. The thing is that even if Microsoft had never existed, similar products (such as software or hardware from IBM, Apple, Linux, Tandy) would have been in those positions.
Let's examine why people are willing to do so. It isn't efficiency. For example, by standard benchmarks, Microsoft browsers have been some of the least efficient (although more recent versions of IE have performed very well by some metrics such as memory use ). Microsoft has had a massive marketing campaign to make people aware of their brand (classically marketing in a low information market is a recipe for market failure). And Microsoft has engaged in bundling of essentially unrelated products. Microsoft has also lobbied governments for contracts to the point where many government bids are phrased in ways that make non-Microsoft options essentially impossible. Most importantly: Microsoft gains a network effect: This occurs when the more common a product is, the more valuable it is compared to other similar products. In this context, once a single OS and set of associated products is common, people don't want other other products since they will run into both learning-curve with the "new" product and compatibility issues when trying to get the new product to work with the old.
That some people make noise about wanting to help charity but don't doesn't make the people who actually do it as contributing less utility. Or is there some other point here I'm missing?
Yes, there's no question that the education work by the Gates foundation has been profoundly unsuccessful. But the general consensus concerning malaria is that they've done a lot of good work. This may be something you may want to look into.
My answer is "probably yes". Mathematics directly enables entire areas of science and engineering. Cathedrals and bridges are much easier to build if you know trigonometry. Electricity is a lot easier to harness if you know trigonometry and calculus, and easier still if you are aware of complex numbers. Optics -- and therefore cameras and telescopes, among many other things -- is a lot easier with linear algebra, and so are many other engineering applications. And, of course, modern electronics are practically impossible without some pretty advanced math and science, which in turn requires all these other things.
If we assume that technology is generally beneficial, then it's best to develop the disciplines which enable it -- i.e., science and mathematics -- as early as possible.
He was talking about number theory specifically, not mathematics in general -- in the first sentence you quoted he admitted it can be useful. (I doubt advanced number theory would have been that practically useful before the mid-20th century.)
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I'm not about to investigate the economics of their entire supply chain (I already don't shop at Walmart simply due to location, so it doesn't even stand to influence my buying decisions,) but I wouldn't be surprised if Walmart is actually wealth-negative in the grand scheme. They produce very large profits, but particularly considering that their margins are so small and their model depends on dealing in such large bulk, I think there's a fair likelihood that the negative externalities of their business are in excess of their profit margin.
It's impossible for a business to be GDP negative, but very possible for one to be negative in terms of real overall wealth produced when all externalities are accounted for, which I suspect leads some to greatly overestimate the positive impact of business.
Why focus on the negative externalities rather than the positive? And why neglect all the partner surpluses - consumer surplus, worker surplus, etc? I'd guess that Walmart produces wealth at least an order of magnitude greater than its profits.
Because corporations make a deliberate effort to privatize gains while socializing expenses.
GDP is a pretty worthless indicator of wealth production, let alone utility production; the economists who developed the measure in the first place protested that it should by no means be taken as a measure of wealth production. There are other measures of economic growth which paint a less optimistic picture of the last few decades in industrialized nations, although they have problems of their own with making value judgments about what to measure against industrial activity, but the idea that every economic transaction must represent an increase in well-being is trivially false both in principle and practice.
This is true of everyone, not just corporations. I'm very suspicious that you take this scepticism only against corporations, but not academics.
Someone who is doing research that is published and doesn't lead to direct patents is socializing gains whether or not they want to.
Only if there are any gains to socialize. Consider honestly the societal gain from the marginal published paper, particularly given that it gets 0 cites from other papers not by the same author.
So, I'd be curious what evidence you have that the average paper gets 0 citations from papers not by the same author across a wide variety of fields. But, in any event, the marginal return rate per a paper isn't nearly as important as the marginal return rate per a paper divided by the cost of a paper. For many fields (like math), the average cost per a paper is tiny.
Either I cannot write clearly or others cannot read clearly, because again and again in this thread people are responding to statements that are not what I wrote. The common factor is me, which makes me think it is my failure to write clearly, but then I look at the above. I referred to "the marginal published paper", and even italicised the word marginal. JoshuaZ replies by asking whether I have evidence for my statement about "the average paper." I don't know what else to say at this point.
However, yes, I have plenty of evidence that the marginal paper across a wide variety of fields gets 0 citations, see e.g. Albarran et al. Note incidentally that there are some fields where the average paper gets no citations!
That being a large portion of academia, this presents at least a partial argument for the present state of affairs wrt academia being publicly funded.
The majority of people, other than psychopaths, are not as ruthless in the quest to externalize their costs. A substantial portion of academics sacrifice renown and glory to do research they believe has intrinsic value. This is in large part the reason they can be paid so much less than people of equivalent ability in the private sector.
I agree with your general point about business men and entrepreneurship being undervalued however.
As zslatsman already said, this is not true to nearly as great an extent of most people as it is of corporations. Corporations have an obligation to maximize profits, whereas humans are rarely profit maximizers.
Some people are more willing to externalize costs than others. For instance, some people, given the opportunity to file expense reports under which they can cover luxuries, will take the opportunity to live it up as much as possible on someone else's dollar. Other people, myself included, would feel guilty, and try to be as frugal as possible.
Try not to overgeneralize your own mentality.
Uh huh. Is it true of charities?
I don't think you'll find many here to agree that math doesn't help with human welfare.
Apples and oranges. Business is there to make money. Money is instrumental, it is there to be spent on terminal values, things of intrinsic worth. People spend their excess on entertainement, art, hobbies, family life, and, yes knowledge. All these things are terminal values.