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Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016
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Comments (125)
"A Push for Less Expensive Hearing Aids"
This deathism is almost stunning in its casual cruelty.
Could it possibly be that the costs of fixing all health problems of old people simply skyrocket after some age? Thus, given limited resources, we only have the following options:
I am not saying that even if this is the case, that the decision where to draw the line was optimal. Just that a line has to exist somewhere.
(And it's not just old people, of course. There is always a surgery that could save someone's life, but won't be done for budget reasons. Etc.)
I'm astonished that hearing aids cost so much, given how thoroughly the personal-audio-hardware space has been colonized by cheap electronics. What's up with that?
I've heard the phrase "disability markup" used to describe how almost everything ever targeted toward physical or sensory disabilities are absurdly expensive. That name implies more intentional malice than I expect is at work; I'd generally round off to "market forces"--it's difficult to take advantage of mass market capitalism when selling to a minority, but it is possible to take advantage of government assistance programs.
It seems like, though, based on my (very limited) understanding of hearing aids, a charitable version of "disability markup" might be closer to reality. After all, if it's treating a disability, especially one found in old people, either those who need it are going to be rich from a lifetime of savings, or poor and getting the government to pay for it anyway, right?
It isn't hearing aids so much as screen readers, but Chris Hofstader implies as much might be a component of business models for such companies in this article:
James_Miller's guess wouldn't apply so much to screen readers (but would apply to things like the Brain Port, which opened at a price of $10,000US), but I wouldn't be surprised if going through the FDA is a big part of the markup on hearing aids.
My guess: "FDA regulates hearing aids, which are intended to compensate for hearing loss."
Regulation limits competition which keeps prices high.
I'm all for cost-benefit analysis. I'm just appalled by the sheer cruelty of writing into law a ban on specific treatments. Perhaps my reaction is due to having spent a life wearing hearing aids, and so I have a rather strong reaction to condemning indefinite millions to the same fate.
The evaluation of mental health policies such as ATAPS (a scheme to pay for 12 free psychology sessions for anyone in Australia referred by a GP) was complicated by the simultaneous rollout all across Australia. If instead the policy was trialed in small areas with iterative improvement and A/B testing we could have a better program and more scope for counterfactual analysis in the evaluation. This issue is shared in the alcohol, tobacco and other drug spcae. An independent mental health and substance abuse policy body to independently devise and evaluate policies independently of political point scoring is an important non-partisan issue in the national interests. It is also an opportunity to shift the paradigm of substance and mental health policy for ideological regulation to pragmatic algorithmic regulation since it is a particularly complex field where optimal regulation is unsuited to high political sensitivity. There's not clear reason this has to be just an Australian thing, but perhaps this is already a thing overseas.
I went to my GP to check I’m doing my exercises right since my chronic pain has persisted for years. Turns out I'm doing squats and kettlebell lifts totally wrong. I guess all my effort into helping my back pain was counterproductive. :’( But there was some positive things that happened today: I heard my friend who was an anxious fella commited suicide and figured I shouldn't worry about imposing, people aren't as anxious as you. Tell people you're into healthy stuff even if you are worried it will make them look weak or bad.
See silver linings in your decision processes, not at the object level because you'll be reassured things are good, put positive spin and rationalise. And, time map from.now till project due dates incorporating response. Maybe ask about strengths and opportunities this week rather than obstacles first in peoploe with problems. His suicide teaches me that the anxious life ain't worth living
Apparently, there's a case for detonating more nukes around the world.
It's time to stop using p-values as a scientific test
Another article about the problems with p-values
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong/Article_summaries
Thanks to the reading group I noticed this link for the first time. Didn't know we had such a resource.
edit: this one too https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/List_of_Blogs
Does anyone know if Eliezer has updated his Super Ketonic Fluid since the formula was published in Sept. 2013? The only post had a note that the recipe was terrible and unhealthy, but no link to a revised version.
Addendum, did anybody actually live off of the stuff for any length of time?
Slashdot-Link: 1 in 3 Developers Fear AI Will Replace Them
WOW AlphaGo beat lee Sedol!
lee was ahead most of the game but the computer beat him in the endgame I think.
Lee Sedol vs. AlphaGo is underway. I'm betting on Lee Sedol.
Have you actually bet on him?
I did.
I lost the initial bet, but then dude doubled down that Lee wouldn't win even one game. I won that bet, so back to 0.
AlphaGo system won first game. Not a go player, but the commentary I've seen suggests it was quite close until the very end.
Hypothesis 1: The cluster plays to maximize odds of a win, not magnitude of a win, and is exploiting a class of close wins that humans have a hard time with. Expect sweeping near wins.
Hypothesis 2: The cluster and the champion are indeed evenly matched. Expect wins and losses. May imply that the game saturates at high levels of analysis, and that there is no such thing as a 'superhuman' go player because the best humans hit the point of diminishing returns.
*EDIT: evidence accumulating in favor of #1.
*EDIT2: final results suggest something between the two.
Perhaps (2) because the AlphaGo people wanted to have a match as soon as they put a high probability on them winning and they are accurately able to calculate their program's strength.
That wasn't true for backgammon, chess, or checkers, to name 3 solved games, so why would that be true for Go?
Allegedly Cho Chikun was asked how many stones he would want from God and said "about four".
I'm not sure what the corresponding figure would be for chess. (Nor actually what its "units" would be -- chess doesn't have a handicapping system as straightforward as go does, and I wonder whether Elo-like ratings go awry if one player is playing absolutely perfectly.)
You can actually calculate this now. Regan has noted that for computer chess, they're getting to the point where they are effectively perfect and equivalent; so whatever that gap between them and the best human player ever is can be turned into a piece advantage. (Not that I know how to do this, but I assume anyone already somewhat familiar with ELO and chess engines can take the ELO difference and figure out the corresponding material advantage. Regan thinks it's probably somewhere ~3600 ELO. Apparently chess AIs can now offer at least "pawn and move, pawn, exchange, and four-move odds." and still beat US champions & grandmasters like Hikaru Nakamura.)
But maybe that was a little hard to answer, so let me put the question the other way: has there ever been a case where a strategy game played seriously & competitively (ie. not tic-tac-toe or blackjack) by adult humans was solved to perfect or superhuman play levels by AI researchers, and the perfect or superhuman play turned out to be identical or so close to the top human's play level that human could win regularly?
A game like that could occur between humans and A.I. with online collectible card games. (I'm specifying online because the rules are streamlined and mass competition is far more available.)
I also don't know of any.
That strikes me as right on the money.
Is there any commentary by a Go pro available?
This video has commentary from a Korean 9p.
Michael Redmond (only english speaking top pro) is on stream.
I wonder if / how that win will affect estimates on the advent of AGI within the AI community.
I've already seen some goalpost-moving at Hacker News. I do hope this convinces some people, though.
People who engage in such goalpost-moving have already written down their bottom line, most likely because AI risk pattern-matches to the literary genre of science fiction. I wouldn't expect such people to be swayed by any sort empirical evidence short of the development of strong AGI itself. Any arguments they offer against strong AGI amount to little more than rationalization. (Of course, that says nothing about the strengths of the arguments themselves, which must be evaluated on their own merits.)
It is entirely possible to firmly believe in the inevitability of near-term AGI without subscribing to AI risk fears. I wouldn't conflate the two.
Most of the arguments I've seen against AI risk I've seen (in popular media, that is) take the form of arguments against AGI, full-stop. Naturally there exist more nuanced arguments (though personally I've yet to see any I find convincing), but I was referring to the arguments made by a specific part of the population, i.e. "people who engage in such goalpost-moving"--and in my (admittedly limited) experience, those sorts of people don't usually put forth very deep arguments.
Here's some arguments against AI x-risk positions from an expert source rather than the popular media:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/superintelligence-fears-promises-and-potentials
http://time.com/3641921/dont-fear-artificial-intelligence/
In any case I think you have unnecessarily limited yourself to considering viewpoints expressed in media that tend to act as echo chambers. It's not very interesting or relevant what a bunch of talking heads say with respect to a technical question.
The Time article doesn't say anything interesting.
Goertzel's article (the first link you posted) is worth reading, although about half of it doesn't actually argue against AI risk, and the part that does seems obviously flawed to me. Even so, if more LessWrongers take the time to read the article I would enjoy talking about the details, particularly about his conception of AI architectures that aren't goal-driven.
I updated my earlier comment to say "against AI x-risk positions" which I think is a more accurate description of the arguments. There are others as well, e.g. Andrew Ng, but I think Goertzel does the best job at explaining why the AI x-risk arguments themselves are possibly flawed. They are simplistic in how they model AGIs, and therefore draw simple conclusions that don't hold up in the real world.
And yes, I think more LW'ers and AI x-risk people should read and respond to Goertzel's super-intelligence article. I don't agree with it 100%, but there are some valid points in there. And one doesn't become effective by only reading viewpoints you agree with...
So, science.
Let me offer a scientific paper in a peer-reviewed journal: Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research. And here is the abstract:
I don't know about you people, but I'm very excited about a possibility of more just and equitable human-ice interactions.
Oh, and that research, evidently, was funded by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $460,000.
Just so you don't think this is limited to glaciers, one of the paper's authors says:
Clearly, this outdated "scientific discovery" thing has to go.
Here's more about the NSF grant. It doesn't sound to me as if very much of that $460k went to funding this "research".
[EDITED to add, in explanation:] It's a five-year grant, with two-and-a-bit years still to run. The NSF page describing it lists three papers, none of which is this one and none of which sounds like it's very much like this one. The NSF page also lists a number of topics, none of which has much to do with "feminist glaciology". So this looks like it's very much a sideshow.
The grant went to Mark Carey (notice how he's the lead author for all the publications arising out of this grant) to study "ways in which science, nature, and society intersect". The paper in question easily falls under this umbrella.
The grant also mentions "employment and training of undergraduate students in specific research projects" (that undergrad is Jaclyn Rushing, one of the paper authors) and "mentoring of a postdoctoral fellow" (who is Alessandro Antonello, another author of that paper).
By the way, another interesting feature of this NSF grant:
Advancing science, I see.
P.S. Oh, and the U of Oregon press release just outright says: "The National Science Foundation supported the research as part of a five-year grant to Carey for his studies on glacier-societal interactions." QED.
Oh yes, I'm not denying that. But, e.g., the discussion under that tweet you linked to includes someone confidently claiming that every cent of that $460k went to "this research", which is surely completely false unless by "this research" is meant "a much broader project of which this paper is a small and peripheral part".
Again, I think you have misunderstood what I was saying; my apologies for being unclear. I was not, at all, saying that the work done on the paper was not in any way supported by that NSF grant. I was saying only what I actually said: It doesn't sound to me as if very much of that $460k went to funding this "research".
The $460k is for the whole of this CAREER thing. Not for this peripheral paper on "feminist glaciology."
(I have no idea whether any of the other work of the CAREER project is more valuable. And there might be a useful idea or two buried in the "feminist glaciology". So the above is in no way a comment on whether the NSF's money is being well spent overall.)
LOL. So some comments to a tweet are written by idiots. News at 11.
Notice that the tweet itself says only that the NSF funded this paper. This looks to be correct.
I suspect that in practice the NSF grant basically just paid a part of Mark Carey's salary and provided some money to pay his collaborators.
And someone who I presume is not an idiot wrote here "that research, evidently, was funded by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $460,000". Which is, y'know, not true unless you take "this research" in an outrageously broad sense.
Me too. Which, again, does not mean that the NSF spent $460k on feminist glaciology research.
But I do. Given this paper which many people suspected to be Sokal-style satire (it's not), I very much doubt the quality of research put out by the recipient of the grant, Mark Carey.
Why did the NSF spend any money on feminist glaciology research?
My guess is that this particular bit of "research" was largely done by one of the other named authors, but they have some rule that the more senior person's name goes on everything. Carey's list of publications doesn't look particularly bullshitty. (Note that he's a historian rather than a scientist; these do not purport to be science publications.)
Because it gives out grants for broad general projects, and the proposal for funding for this broad general project didn't say anything about feminist glaciology, and it would not be a good use of anyone's time for the NSF to vet every single thing done by any academic it funds. (That's my guess, anyway.)
I looked at a random paper called "The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species" and I was like: well, at least he studies something about glaciers per se, i.e. how they became endangered.
Then I clicked at the abstract and saw this:
So again, it's not about glaciers per se, but about, uhm, the cultural symbolism of glaciers.
So it's still the same thing. When talking about "glaciology", I expect something like "here are the physical processes how glaciers are made, and how they melt", but instead the guy produces something like "here is what glaciers mean in fairy tales, and here is how glaciers are compared to penises by feminists". The difference is that to write the former, you actually have to study the glaciers, while to write the latter, you only have to collect stuff people said about glaciers.
Technically, "collecting stuff people said about something" could be called science, but then it's not a subset of glaciology but rather a subset of culturology or whatever. And even in that case it should be done more scientifically, i.e. include some numbers. For example, if we are really collecting "stuff people said about glaciers", I would like to see data about how many people believe that glaciers symbolize penises, et cetera. Without those data, the research is worthless even as a subset of culturology.
"Collecting stuff people said about something" is pretty much a definition of the classic form of the discipline of history. History is based on written primary sources; that's why "prehistory" refers to the time before written sources. More recent history has added archaeology, economics, statistics & demography, and other sources in addition to documentary ones — but the core of it is still about using what people wrote in the past as sources for what happened in the past.
(To ask whether history is "science" is kind of like asking whether medicine is "chemistry". History is much older than natural science as a discipline, although a great deal of current history makes use of scientific evidence. This doesn't mean that all [or even most] historians have a scientific mindset or make good use of scientific evidence, of course.)
It's not about glaciers persay, but it very much is about 'glaciers in popular culture'. You could call what he does scholarship as opposed to science, but either way it's something related to glaciers, that people might be interested in.
He is a historian, studying history of science. That subject is exactly about studying what people (scientists) are saying.
Ouch!
I think you're wrong about that. You don't think he self-identifies as a scientist? Among other things, he is one of the IPCC authors... :-/
Here's his university home page. Associate Professor of History; "Mark Carey specializes in environmental history and the history of science", etc. I don't see anything suggesting that he thinks he is a scientist.
The IPCC's reports make some attempt to assess the impact of (any given degree of) climate change. It seems perfectly reasonable for someone who's spent much of his career looking at things like "the global history of human-glacier interactions" to be involved in that.
That webpage says: "He is working in particular on detection and attribution of climate change impacts", and the IPCC publications listed are: "A new social contract for the IPCC"; "Detection and attribution of observed impacts"; "Polar regions". The first two of those are explicitly about the effects of climate change on human societies; I bet his contribution to the third is too. ... Ah, yes, both of those two are parts of something called "Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability".
So: no, indeed, I don't think he self-identifies as a scientist, and I don't see any reason why he should.
The underlying question "is gender biasing the production of scientific knowledge and scientific narratives?" I think is important and deserving of careful consideration, and the application of that question to the area of glaceology no more narrow than something like "the categorial semantics of the pi-calculus".
De-biasing knowledge in psychology is a recurrent theme in LessWrong, and gender is possibly a bias that is hampering scientific discovery.
It is doubly unfortunate that the theme is treated as if it were literary critique or politology, instead of experimental psychology: on one side, narrative instead of experimental exploration gets us no closer to the truth, on the other side it exposes the whole field to ridicule, thereby pushing away positive contribution.
Am I steel-manning too much? There were no such things as "feminist study" when I attended university, and even now it's not so widespread here in Italy, so I don't know if such disciplines are well-known academic jokes or not.
I agree that we should pay more attention to biases, including gender biases.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that people who talk loudest about these topics are even worse than average; that their strategy is more or less "reversed stupidity plus strong political mindkilling". They usually don't care about scientific method at all, because they see this whole process as a fight between the good side and the evil side, and the scientific method itself is a part of the evil side. (They seem unable to understand the difference between "a white cis het man said '2+2=4'" and "'2+2=4' is an evil white cis het fact".)
No. The would go after Kuhn and the majority of people who investigated scientifically what scientists do and say that there isn't one method that can be called
the scientific method. The standard HPS belief is that scientists in different fields use different methods.The scientific method is a tool of fascist oppression!
You think I'm joking? Let me quote you from a presumably peer-reviewed International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare:
(source)
"The evidence-based movement in the health sciences" is not the scientific method. It's a movement.
It's a movement to use the scientific method.
Right, but criticising the movement isn't the same thing as criticising the scientific method.
For example, doors the writer believe that the movement actually succeeds in applying the scientific method?
To be fair, I haven't checked out the source, and I'm unlikely to, on mobile. The quote doesn't establish what you want to say, but maybe the source does, and I should have considered that in my first reply.
The writer is interested in power structures and fighting the fascists:
As far as I can see, basically the authors of the paper want decouple the idea of "truth" from empirical reality and evidence. Demanding evidence to support your claims is an act of oppression and intolerance.
That's not true. The ‘regimes of truth’ used by judges at court don't decouple truth from empirical reality and evidence. At the same time it's not the same ‘regime of truth’ used in EBM. They argue against monoculture and that there's one standard of truth that everybody in science has to follow.
That not only means that the existing questions might get biased answers but also that important questions don't get scientific investigation because they are not interesting in the EBM paradigm. That's classic Kuhn. Scientific paradigms not only determine answers but also questions and old questions often get forgotten with new paradigms.
They bring the question: `How should a woman assign meaning to the diagnosis she just received that, genetically, she has a 40% probability of developing breast cancer in her lifetime? What will this number mean in real terms, when she is asked to evaluate the meaning of such personal risk in the context of her entire life, a life whose value and duration are themselves impossible factors in the equation?`
Under classic EBM that's not a question about which you can write a scientific paper.
Yes, I think that's about correct -- there should be.
Whether a question is "interesting" has nothing to do with single or multiple standards of truth.
That's not a question for science. It's a question for a psychotherapist, lay or professional.
Correct and I like it this way. Not everything has to be science.
Not quite -- your question belongs to the field of sociology of science, more or less, and this is a paper in an Earth sciences journal. The authors don't ask questions about gender bias, they specifically propose a "feminist glaciology framework", in part because they unconditionally assume that this bias exists and severely impacts the study of glaciers.
I see no evidence whatsoever that this paper has any interest in what you or I might consider "truth" of the scientific kind.
It depends on who you ask :-/
The problem is that the article doesn't just focus on that question. It also frequently makes deontological claims about how natives knowledge should be more respected. Including knowledge that supposes that glaciers don't like certain smells.
How much did humanity try applying science to science itself?
For example, let's say that we have a hypothesis "if we force scientists to publish a lot, they will produce better science". Well, that's a testable hypothesis. We could take a large set of scientists, randomly split them into two groups, provide unconditional income to one group, and tell the other group they will be fired if they don't meet their quota of published research. Wait ten or twenty years, and then compare which group has more Nobel prices.
Okay, that was exaggerated, but I hope you got the idea.
In other words, I am curious about how much the working conditions, education, etc. of scientists is actually based on pseudoscience or random decisions, and how much is somehow evidence-based.
I'd guess most of it is based on neither, and is just the result of coordination problems (Ctrl-F for "Tsars" in the latter link).
That still leaves the question of how you decide who get's to be a scientist. There's not enough money to fund everybody who wants to be a scientist with a decent salary.
Science also often isn't funded with the goal of producing Nobel price winners.
It appears to be an active field of study.
The first two links seems mostly about how science influences culture. The third one seems like what I wanted; too bad that the Wikipedia page doesn't contain any conclusions of that research.
The last Wikipedia article has to be written by a cynic:
I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but... Less Wrongers, do you believe in falling in love after 20-25? For me it seems that I am no longer able to feel anything as intensely as I was able to feel when I was 18. I don't know what happened. I am not saying that people over 25 don't love, just that it is no longer the same thing. Maybe I'm just generalizing from one example, but although I am still young, I feel like I've lost something significant. Can you relate to any of that?
My husband and I fell in love when I was 40 and he was 36. I agree with Viliam: the obsession was definitely weaker, and the idea that the other will make life perfect forever was missing. But that's a good thing, IMO.
What exactly does "falling in love" mean? Seems to me that the typical components are:
Assuming that after 25 you become more mentally mature (as opposed to merely physically older), you should be less likely to believe in fixing all your problems by being with the right person. So this mental component of "teenage love" will be missing. You may still believe in fixing a specific problem though. (For example, if the other person is rich, it may solve your financial problems; if the other person is a fan of exercising, just living in their presence may make you more likely to exercise; and generally any person may solve the problem of loneliness.)
You can still become strongly obsessed, but assuming the mental maturity, you may have more control over the process. That is, you may be aware that you are obsessed, and it may make you less blind (or blind for a shorter period of time) towards the other person's faults. You should be less likely to do crazy self-destructive actions as a result of the obsession. Your previous experience may make you aware that the obsession phase is temporary, and you could consider this either a very bad thing or a very good thing.
You can still feel strongly sexually attracted. Maybe in higher age the libido is weaker, or maybe you already have regular sex with someone else, so the sexual pressure will be smaller.
Feeling good with other people probably doesn't depend on age, or the effects of age are smaller than effects of personality or your current situation. I am not very sure about this.
Also there are the changes in environment, such as when you are older you are more likely to be busy, so you have less time and opportunity to fall in love with someone, less opportunity to spend time with them (unless you move together), etc.
Also, if you are looking for a partner approximately in your age, the best ones are already taken. (Maybe this shouldn't bother you, because if you are still single, the best ones were probably out of your league anyway.)
So, there are some disadvantages, but it's still possible.
I don't find this to be particularly true. I don't even know if the converse ("the worst ones are least likely to be taken") is true.
My definition of "the best ones" tends to include people who have invested a lot of energy into themselves and their careers, and thus made themselves less available and appealing on the dating market during their college years and mid-twenties.
In fact, when I casually look over my Facebook friend's list, "the best ones" tend to remain single even after thirty, because they're doing their physician's residency, or undertaking a scientific expedition in a remote jungle, or something along those lines.
If "best ones" means "hottest ones", well, people become suddenly single later in life for a wide variety of reasons.
Do you use the lack of information on Facebook about the fact that they state that they are in a relationship as a sign that they aren't in a relationship?
I could relate to the same feeling when I was about your age, but at 31 I fell like I was never fallen before, and boy did it hurt like hell when it was over (it still does, in a sense). So, another opposite data point.
It's possible that the more experience we accumulate the better we become at manage whether or not to fall in love, but the intensity in my experience never fades.
Yes, I can relate to feeling like there was no way I could fall in love again after ~25, but I was wrong.
Who runs Metaculus? Is it a reincarnation of an older organization?
It is some kind of prediction market. Is it a descendant of one of the teams in the IARPA prediction contest? It reminds me of Twardy and Hanson’s Scicast. Is it related? Or do they all look the same to me? The site mentions no names, but Angelbase lists some. Do they suggest some earlier incarnation?
FLI's anthony aguirre is centrally involved or leading, AFAIK.
Why do we have monthly media threads ? Can't people just post in open threads ?
Open Threads are already pretty crowded at around 200 posts per thread. Media threads also seem to have slightly different posting rules and are doing just fine as-is.
My comments don't have the button for editing them any more. Have other people's edit buttons disappeared?
My edit buttons seem fine.
My edit button has reappeared, but if I use it, the replies to that comment disappear temporarily, so this is looking like a random glitch.
Edited to add: The reply didn't disappear, so random glitch.
It has always been true that when you are editing a comment the replies are hidden.
Probably the disappearing edit button is that it is not available on one's user page. But it is available on post and permalink pages.
Edit: I, too, had a glitch. I went to recent comments and I had two comments visible. This one had an edit button and the other didn't. A reload fixed it. The one that didn't also lacked a reply button, fixed by the same reload. Since only my comments have edit buttons, but all comments have reply buttons, there are more opportunities to observe reply glitches. After the reload my comments were fine, but this comment lacked a reply button. Another reload fixed that.
Me too.
No, I still have edit buttons.
Responding to a point about the rise of absolute wealth since 1916, this article makes (not very well) a point about the importance of relative wealth.
I've had a short discussion about this earlier, and find it very interesting.
In particular, I sincerely do not care about my relative wealth. I used to think that was universal, then found out I was wrong. But is it typical? To me it has profound implications about what kind of economic world we should strive for -- if most folks are like me, the current system is fine. If they are like some people I have met, a flatter real wealth distribution, even at the price of a much, much lower mean, could be preferable.
I'm interested in any thoughts you all might have on the topic :)
It's complicated. It seems clear to me that right now a huge number of people want to increase their absolute wealth more than their relative position. People who move from poor countries to rich countries often wind up in a lower percentile in the new country, but are better off in an absolute sense. Relatively few independently wealthy first-worlders move to poor countries to increase their relative wealth (although a handful of people do, admittedly.) This is complicated somewhat by the fact that recent migrants might still have enough connections to their old country that their higher relative position in the old country is more salient to them than their lower relative position in the new country.
Similarly to you, unless the rich people use their money to abuse me, I care more about my absolute than relative wealth. My struggles are not with comparing myself to other people, but with getting what I want. Give me everything I want, and I won't care if you give other people 10 times more.
If you took the wealth existing today and distributed it more flatly, many people would have higher absolute wealth. So I don't see how caring about absolute wealth makes current system fine.
We do have the data point that a capitalist economy provides higher average wealth than a communist one. But that doesn't imply that e.g. a capitalist economy with basic income couldn't provide even more. (Maybe the problem with communism was lack of competition and the micromanagement of everything by political nitwits, not the flatter distribution of wealth per se.)
Do you think what the people around you have doesn't effect what you want?
To some degree it does, but often doesn't. For example, many people around me are obsessed with travelling to exotic countries. I am okay with staying home, or I travel to meet interesting people, but the idea of travelling to the opposite side of planet just to see a beach or a jungle seems completely silly. Some people spend a lot of money on fashion. Many people love to eat and drink in restaurants; I am okay with soylent. I only bought a smartphone because I wanted to develop mobile games. If the mass transit is reliable, I don't want a car.
Things that I value most are: having free time, and talking with interesting people. Also having a computer with internet connection, but that is relatively cheap today. If I would win a lottery, I would mostly try to achieve the situation where I never have to work for money again. (That doesn't mean I wouldn't do anything productive. It just means I would be doing things that I choose to do, and doing them my way.)
Attending conferences is a way to get to talk with a lot of interesting people. Seats at the TED conference or LeWeb are expensive and limited.
Is that an optimal way of finding interesting people to talk with?
I guess the question is, if other people would get a lot of money, what fraction of that would go into competing for resources I care about. (I assume it's smaller than 10%, but I didn't think about this too much.) Then I wouldn't want other people to become so rich that even that fraction of their income would be higher than my whole income.
Sorry, "fine" was way stronger than what I actually think. It just makes it better than the (possibly straw) alternative I mentioned.
In capitalist economies scarce resources are effectively auctioned off to the highest bidder. If you're noticeably poorer than people around you, you will likely be unable to get to these resources. A simple example: buying a house.
At one level, no, it doesn't. But at the same level it also doesn't imply that a capitalist economy with X (where X can be anything) couldn't provide even more as well.
At another level yes, it does, because there are reasons why a capitalist economy works and a command economy doesn't. These reasons are relevant to evaluating whether a basic income is a good idea.
Could you expand on this?
Consider incentives. Under capitalism one incentive is the possibility of becoming rich, but another, more basic one, is the desire not to starve. Under a command economy you won't usually starve (because you're a useful labour unit), at least in a situation where you can do something about it. You still might starve because of incompetence or a political decision.
A large number of people do not enjoy their jobs and, given the opportunity, would... take early retirement, let's put it this way. That's a problem. Command economies solve it by command (recall that being unemployed was a criminal offense in the Soviet Union). Capitalist economies solve it by saying "OK, I'll wait till you get hungry".
A livable basic income would make that incentive disappear. Yes, some people would be happy. The consequences for society, though, are debatable :-/
How do you know?
I see it as a question of preference so I know by never having felt envy, etc. at someone richer than me just for being richer. I only feel interested in my wealth relative to what I need or want to purchase.
As noted in the comment thread I linked, I could start caring if someone's relative wealth gave them power over me but I haven't been in this situation so far (stuff like boarding priority for first-class tickets are a minor example I did experience, but that's never bothered me).
Have you ever been poor?
No. Thanks for making me notice how relevant that could be.
I see that I haven't even thought through the basics of the problem. "power over" is felt whenever scarcity leads the wealthier to take precedence. Okay, so to try to generalise a little, I've never been really hit by the scarcity that exists because my desires are (for one reason or another) adjusted to my means.
I could be a lot wealthier yet have cravings I can't afford, or be poorer and still content. But if what I wanted kept hitting a wealth ceiling (a specific type, one due to scarcity, such that increasing my wealth and everyone else's in proportion wouldn't help), I'd start caring about relative wealth really fast.
What exactly needs to be done to get this picture on the top of the title page of LessWrong, linking to this page?
Please don't do this. It will look like LessWrong is just a marketing page for RAIZ.
Puzzle playtesters needed! I'm looking to beta test a whole bunch of puzzles for the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. I've got many types - logic, math, words, uncategorizable, etc. Best done with a friend or 7. PM me for details if you're interested. Example of (an easier version of) the kinds of puzzles I mean, insofar as any one puzzle could possibly be an example: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwYx-fx5mJcaa3kxSUFHVjAtVG8xQlZYcHpKS25ZSHhTSTdN
Should "pop slurper" be 10 letters?
Looks like 9 to me. It's not crazy.
Ah. Found it. Saw a different one that also matched but had 10 letters.
Nerd sniped! Finally solved it though.
Which is why I probably shouldn't volunteer to playtest for you, sorry.
Why?
Fun.