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JoshuaZ comments on How minimal is our intelligence? - Less Wrong
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Sorry, poor wording on my part. I mentioned number theory initially as an area because it is the one where we most unambiguously lost Greek knowledge. But it seems pretty clear we lost many other areas also, hence why I mentioned trig, where we know that there were multiple treatises on the geometry of triangles and related things which are no longer extant but are referenced in extant works.
I'm not at all convinced incidentally by the argument that people would have just sat on the number theory. Since the late 1700s, the rate of mathematical progress has been rapid. So while direct focus on the areas relevant to cryptography might not have occurred, closely connected areas (which are relevant to crypto) would certainly be more advanced.
So what evidence do you have that the economists are fixing the problems created by the sociologists in any meaningful sense?
So that won't work at multiple levels. A major issue when assisting people in the developing world is coordination problems (there are things that will help a lot but if everyone has a little bit of money they don't have an easy way to pool the money together in a useful fashion). Moreover, this assumes a degree of knowledge which people simply don't have. A random African doesn't know necessarily that bednets are an option, or even have any good understanding of where to get them from. And then one has things like vaccine research. You are essentially assuming that market forces will win do what is best when one is dealing with people who are lacking in basic education and institutions to effectively exercise their will even if they had the education.
Huh? All of these can result in total utility going down compared to what might happen if one picked a different market equilibrium. How are these not market failures?
In limited circumstances, marketing can produce positive utility (people learn about products they didn't have knowledge of, or they get more data to compare products), but I'm curious to here how marketing is at all likely to produce positive externalities.
Yes, they have and that's ok. Anti-trust laws help market stability. The prevent the problem we've seen in the banking and auto industries of being too big to fail, and prevent the problem of bundling to force products on new markets (which again I'm quite curious to here an explanation for how that isn't a market failure).
I confess I don't understand this question. Could you please clarify?
But these "institutions" are not laws of nature, they aren't even tangible things - an "institution" is just a description of the way people co-ordinate with each other. So yes, people in developing countries often can't co-ordinate because they have bad institutions, but it would be equally true to say that they can't have good institutions because they don't co-ordinate.
Actually, I think that a "random African" likely knows a lot more about what would improve his standard of living than you or I, and my mind boggles at any other presumption. If he'd rather spend his money on beer than bednets, but you give him a bednet anyway, then I hope it makes you happy, because you're clearly not doing it for him.
Apart from the reasons you already mentioned, marketing creates a brand which reduces information costs. This is of course particularly important in a low information market. Spending money to promote your brand is a pre-commitment to provide satisfactory quality products.
Firstly, no-one can "pick" a market equilibrium. Secondly, order is defined in the process of its emergence. Thirdly, proof of a possibility and a demonstration of a real-world effect are not the same thing.
So every time a business gains on account of departures from the free market, that's a travesty, but every time it loses, that's the way things are supposed to work. No wonder you think academics are the only ones who do any good. Besides, TBTF isn't an economic problem, this is a political problem. They had too many lobbyists to be allowed to fail, that's all.
How is it a market failure? It's possible for bundling to reduce consumer surplus, but that's just a straight transfer.
You said earlier that:
My confusion was over this claim in that it seems to assume that a) sociologists are creating societal problems and b) economists are solving those problems.
Human behavior is not path independent. Institutions help coordination because prior functioning governments and organizations help people to keep coordinating. Values also come into play: Countries with functioning governments have citizens with more respect for government so they are more likely to cooperate with it an so on.
This only makes sense in a context where markets are low information and marketing creates actual information and where negative behavior by a brand will have a substantial reduction in sales. In practice, people have strong brand loyalty based on familiarity with logos and the like,. So people will keep buying the same brands not because they are the best but that's because what they've always done. Humans are cognitive misers, and a large part of marketing is hijacking that.
You are missing the point. The point is that there are other stable equilibria that are better off for everyone but issues like networking effects and technological lock-in prevent people from moving off the local maximum.
What do these two sentences mean?
I don't know where you saw a statement that implied that, and I'm curious how you got that sort of idea from what I wrote.
There's an argument for that in the case of the car industry, but the economic consensus is that the economy as a whole would have gotten much worse if the banks hadn't been bailed out.
Technological lock-in and network effects again. For example, in the case of Internet Explorer, having it bundled with Windows meant that many people ended up using IE by default, got very used to it, and then it had an advantage compared to other browsers which stayed around (because people then wrote software that needed IE and webpages emphasized looking good in IE). In this context, if the consumers had been given a choice of browsers, it is likely that other browsers, especially Netscape (and later Firefox) would have done much better, and by most benchmarks Netscape was a better browser.
So why haven't they all done so? An RA may well have more on-the-ground knowledge, but a do-gooder may well have more of the kind of knowledge that you learn in school. Since the D-G is not seeking to take over the RA's entire life, it's a case of two heads are better than one.
You could do with distingusihing short term gains from long term interests. People don't pop out of the womb knowing how to maximise the latter. It takes education. And institions: why save when the banks are crooked.
It would be truer still to say that good institions take a long and fragile history to evolve. They didn't evolve everywerhe and they arrived late where they did. Go back about 500 years and no one had good (democratic, accountable, fair honest) instituions.
It's hard to know where to start with that lot. Brands aren't information like lib raries are information, they are an attempt to get people t to buy things by whatever means is permitted. They can be wors than no information at all, since African mothers would have presumably continued to brest fee without nestle's intervention:
"The Nestlé boycott is a boycott launched on July 7, 1977, in the United States against the Swiss-based Nestlé corporation. It spread in the United States, and expanded into Europe in the early 1980s. It was prompted by concern about Nestle's "aggressive marketing" of breast milk substitutes (infant formula), particularly in less economically developed countries (LEDCs), which campaigners claim contributes to the unnecessary suffering and deaths of babies, largely among the poor.[1] Among the campaigners, Professor Derek Jelliffe and his wife Patrice, who contributed to establish the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA), were particularly instrumental in helping to coordinate the boycott and giving it ample visibility worldwide."
Yes, because all humans are perfectly rational and have unlimited willpower. But then again, why doesn't he sell the bednet I gave him and buys beer with it?
And I claim that where? Are you claiming that the donors are perfectly rational and have unlimited willpower - and are also perfectly altruistic?
My claim is the modest and surely uncontroversial one that JoshuaZ's "random African" is a better guardian of his own welfare than you, or Bill Gates, or a random do-gooder.
Because you gave everyone else in the area a bednet, so now there's a local glut. But yes, I'm sure some people do sell their bednets.
It is not (language warning) entirely uncontroversial. Whether through poor education or through giving disproportionate value to present circumstances (and none or too little to future circumstances), people can and often do do things that are, in the long run, self-defeating. (And note that this 'long run' can be measured in weeks or months, even hours in particularly extreme cases).
At least one study suggests that the ability to reject a present reward in favour of a greater future reward is detectable at a young age and is correlated with success in life.
Of course people can do things that are self-defeating - did I ever suggest otherwise? I never said people are perfect guardians of their own self-interest, I said, and I repeat, that a random person is a better guardians of his own self-interest than a random do-gooder.
I am getting a little frustrated with people arguing against strawmans of my positions, which has now happened several times on this thread. Am I being unclear?
None of those links suggest that people are worse guardians of their own self-interest than the outsider. In fact, quite the reverse. Take the fertilizer study. The reason that the farmers weren't following the advice of the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture was that it was bad advice. To quote:
So the study demonstrates that the farmers were better guardians of their own self-interest than some bureaucrat in Nairobi (no doubt advised by a western NGO). If they had been forced to follow the (no doubt well-meaning) advice, they would have been much worse off. Maybe some would have died. Now, at the same time, they don't know every possible combination, and it turns out that if they changed their farming methodology, they could become more productive. Great! That's how society advances - by persuading people as to what is in their self-interest, not by making someone else their guardian.
Phrased in this way, I think that I agree with you, on average.
In the original context of your statement, however, I had thought that you meant that "a random charity recipient" instead of "a random person".
Now, charity recipients are still people, of course. However, charity recipients are usually people chosen on the basis of poverty; thus, the group of people who are charity recipients tend to be poor.
Now, some people are good guardians of their own long-term self-interest, and some are not. This is correlated with wealth in an unsurprising way (as demonstrated in the marshmallow experiment linked to above); those people who are better guardians of their own long-term self-interest are, on average, more likely to be above a certain minimum level of wealth than those who are not. They are, therefore, less likely to be charity recipients. Therefore, I conclude that people who are in a position to receive benefits from a charity are, on average, worse guardians of their own long-term self-interest than people who are in a position to contribute to a charity.
So. I therefore conclude that a person, on average, will be a better guardian of his own self-interest than a random person of the category (charity recipient); since the selection of people who fall into that category biases the category to those who are poor guardians of their own self-interest. It's not the only factor selected for in that category, but it's significant enough to have a noticeable effect.
But likely not a better guardian of his or her own self interest than a nonrandom do-gooder who's researched the specific problems the person is dealing with and developed expertise in solving them with resources that the person is has had no opportunity to learn to make use of.
Certainly -- tautologically -- he's not a better guardian of his or her own self interest than some who is in fact a better one. But inventing a fictional character who is in fact a better one does not advance any argument.
One might as well invent a nonrandom do-gooder who thinks they have properly researched what they think are the specific problems the person is dealing with and thinks they have developed expertise in solving them with resources that they think the person has had no opportunity to learn to make use of, but who is nonetheless wrong. As with, apparently, and non-fictionally, the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture.
Of course, less qualified guardians of an individual's self interest who believe themselves to be more qualified are a legitimate risk, but that doesn't mean that the optimal solution is to have individuals act exclusively as guardians of their own self interest.
If the Kenyan Ministry of agriculture follows the prescriptions of the researchers in the article cited above, they will thereby become better guardians of those farmers' interests than the farmers have thus far been, within that domain.
The optimal solution isn't necessarily to have someone else act as the "guardian" of their self-interest, however well informed. BTW, I don't know if this is true of American English, but in British English, one meaning of "guardian" is what an orphan has in place of parents. Doing things for adults without consulting them is usually a bad idea.
Not if they try to do so by simply coming in and telling the farmers what to do, nor by deciding the farmers' economic calculations are wrong and manipulating subsidies to get them to do differently. (I've only glanced at the article; I don't know if this is what they did.) Even when they're right about what the farmers should be doing, they will go wrong if they use the wrong means to get that to happen. Providing information might be a better way to go. The presumption that if only you know enough, you can direct other people's lives for them is pretty much always wrong.
That isn't obvious. D-G's are likely to be qualified to help people, the people they are helping are likely to have a hsitory of not helping themselves sucessfully.
Would they have had access to fertilizer at all w/out the govt? Two heads are better than one, again.
People like Bill Gates aren't "random do-gooders". I'd not it find it strange that in the counterfactual that Bill Gates had the time to guard my own welfare (let alone some random African's), he might do a better job at it than I would myself. Certainly he might provide useful tips about how to invest my money for example, might know ways that I've not even heard of.
Bill Gates was a software executive who got into malaria prevention and education reform and poverty reduction and God knows what else, not because of his deep knowledge and expertise in those subjects, but a generalised wish to become a philanthropist. He's the very archetype of a random do-gooder.
But the whole point is that he doesn't have the time (or knowledge, or inclination, or incentives, or ...) to guard your welfare - or that of a "random African". Sure, if Bill Gates was my father he might be a better guardian of my welfare than I am. But he ain't.
My point is that the qualification "random" is rather silly when applied to one of the most wealthy people in the world. That he achieved that wealth (most of which he did not inherit) implies some skills and intelligence most likely beyond that of a randomly selected do-gooder.
An actually randomly-selected do-gooder would probably be more like a middle-class individual who walks to a soup-kitchen and offers to volunteer, or who donates money to UNICEF.
I'm not.
I might agree about myself or “a random do-gooder” (dunno about Gates), but these people do look like they've done their homework.
He didn't say that. You're being a troll.