Rationality Quotes Thread November 2015

elharo

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

I think there may be something to consider in the idea of having

"Loans where society has promised to go to great lengths to enforce the will of the creditor, even if the debtor's reasons for nonpayment are convincingly sympathetic."

and

"Loans where society may forgive the debt, if the debtor offers a good reason to do so, even if the creditor disagrees with society's judgement on this issue."

be legally distinct types of lending, such that the creditor and the debtor can negotiate on which type it will be without society retroactively altering the agreement. Creditors will of course prefer the first class of loan, but society as a whole would have a preference that many loans of the second type be available for personal emergencies.

such that the creditor and the debtor can negotiate on which type it will be

Why wouldn't the market price these two types more or less efficiently meaning that the second type will have to charge a higher interest rate to compensate for the option of the politicians deciding not to pay the loan back?

0Jiro11y

This proposal is equivalent to just having society never forgive debts. If society doesn't ever forgive debts, you can still do the equivalent to case 2 by simply writing a normal contract and adding a clause saying that the debt is cancelled under these conditions, then listing the same conditions that would cause society to cancel it under your proposal. So we've already had this. It didn't work well.

0entirelyuseless11y

If you do that you might end up simply shifting the bad thing that happens from being "someone doesn't get paid back" to "someone doesn't get a loan who needed one."