School taught me to write banal garbage because people would thumbs-up it anyway. That approach has been interfering with me trying to actually express my plans in writing because my mind keeps simulating some imaginary prof who will look it over and go "ehh, good enough".

Looking good enough isn't actually good enough! I'm trying to build an actual model of the world and a plan that will actually work.

Granted, school isn't necessarily all like this. In mathematics, you need to actually solve the problem. In engineering, you need to actually build something that works. But even in engineering reports, you can get away with a surprising amount of shoddy reasoning. A real example:

Since NodeJS uses the V8 JavaScript engine, it has native support for the common JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format for data transfer, which means that interoperability between SystemQ and other CompanyX systems can still be fairly straightforward (Jelvis, 2011).

This excerpt is technically totally true, but it's also garbage, especially as a reason to use NodeJS. Sure, JSON is native to JS, but every major web programming language supports JSON. The pressure to provide citable justifications for decisions which were made for reasons more like "I enjoy JavaScript and am skilled with it," produces some deliberately confirmation-biased writing. This is just one pattern—there are many others.

I feel like I need to add a disclaimer here or something: I'm a ringed engineer, and I care a lot about the ethics of design, and I don't think any of my shoddy thinking has put any lives (or well-being, etc) at risk. I also don't believe that any of my shoddy thinking in design reports has violated academic integrity guidelines at my university (e.g. I haven't made up facts or sources).

But a lot of it was still shoddy. Most students are familiar with the process of stating a position, googling for a citation, then citing some expert who happened to agree. And it was shoddy because nothing in the school system was incentivizing me to make it otherwise, and I reasoned it would have cost more to only write stuff that I actually deeply and confidently believed, or to accurately and specifically present my best model of the subject at hand. I was trying to spend as little time and attention as possible working on school things, to free up more time and attention for working on my business, the productivity app Complice.

What I didn't realize was the cost of practising shoddy thinking.

Having finished the last of my school obligations, I've launched myself into some high-level roadmapping for Complice: what's the state of things right now, and where am I headed? And I've discovered a whole bunch of bad thinking habits. It's obnoxious.

I'm glad to be out.

(Aside: I wrote this entire post in April, when I was finished my last assignments & tests. I waited awhile to publish it so that I've now safely graduated. Wasn't super worried, but didn't want to take chances.)

Better Wrong Than Vague

So today.

I was already aware of a certain aversion I had to planning. So I decided to make things a bit easier with this roadmapping document, and base it on one my friend Oliver Habryka had written about his main project. He had created a 27-page outline in google docs, shared it with a bunch of people, and got some really great feedback and other comments. Oliver's introduction includes the following paragraph, which I decided to quote verbatim in mine:

This document was written while continuously repeating the mantra “better wrong than vague” in my head. When I was uncertain of something, I tried to express my uncertainty as precisely as possible, and when I found myself unable to do that, I preferred making bold predictions to vague statements. If you find yourself disagreeing with part of this document, then that means I at least succeeded in being concrete enough to be disagreed with.

In an academic context, at least up to the undergrad level, students are usually incentivized to follow "better vague than wrong". Because if you say something the slightest bit wrong, it'll produce a little "-1" in red ink.

Because if you and the person grading you disagree, a vague claim might be more likely to be interpreted favorably. There's a limit, of course: you usually can't just say "some studies have shown that some people sometimes found X to help". But still.

Practising being "good enough"

Nate Soares has written about the approach of whole-assed half-assing:

Your preferences are not "move rightward on the quality line." Your preferences are to hit the quality target with minimum effort.

If you're trying to pass the class, then pass it with minimum effort. Anything else is wasted motion.

If you're trying to ace the class, then ace it with minimum effort. Anything else is wasted motion.

My last two yearly review blog posts have followed structure of talking about my year on the object level (what I did), the process level (how I did it) and the meta level (my more abstract approach to things). I think it's helpful to apply the same model here.

There are lots of things that humans often wished their neurology naturally optimized for. One thing that it does optimize for though is minimum energy expenditure. This is a good thing! Brains are costly, and they'd have to function less well if they always ran at full power. But this has side effects. Here, the relevant side effect is that, if you practice a certain process for awhile, and it achieves the desired object-level results, you might lose awareness of the bigger picture approach that you're trying to employ.

So in my case, I was practising passing my classes with minimum effort, and not wasting motion, following the meta-level approach of whole-assed half-assing. But while the meta-level approach of "hitting the quality target with minimum effort" is a good one in all domains (some of which will have much, much higher quality targets) the process of doing the bare minimum to create something that doesn't have any obvious glaring flaws, is not a process that you want to be employing in your business. Or in trying to understand anything deeply.

Which I am now learning to do. And, in the process, unlearning the shoddy thinking I've been practising for the last 5 years.

Related LW post: Guessing the Teacher's Password

(This article crossposted from my blog)

Summary

I'd like to increasing the well-being of those in the justice system while simultaneously reducing crime. I'm missing something here but I'm not sure what. I'm thinking this may be a worse idea than I originally thought based on comment feedback, though I'm still not 100% sure why this is the case.

Current State

While the prison system may not constitute an existential threat, At this moment more than 2,266,000 adults are incarcerated in the US alone, and I expect that being in prison greatly decreases QALYs for those incarcerated, that further QALYs are lost to victims of crime, family members of the incarcerated, and through the continuing effects of institutionalization and PTSD from sentences served in the current system, not to mention the brainpower and man-hours lost to any productive use.

If you haven't read these Meditations on Moloch, I highly recommend it. It’s long though, so the executive summary is: Moloch is the personification of the forces of competition which perverse incentives, a "race to the bottom" type situation where all human values are discarded in an effort to survive. That this can be solved with better coordination, but it is very hard to coordinate when perverse incentives also penalize the coordinators and reward dissenters. The prison industrial complex is an example of these perverse incentives. No one thinks that the current system is ideal but incentives prevent positive change and increase absolute unhappiness.

• Politicians compete for electability. Convicts can’t vote, prisons make campaign contributions and jobs, and appearing “tough on crime” appeals to a large portion of the voter base.
• Jails compete for money: the more prisoners they house, the more they are paid and the longer they can continue to exist. This incentive is strong for public prisons and doubly strong for private prisons.
• Police compete for bonuses and promotions, both of which are given as rewards to cops who bring in and convict more criminals
• Many of the inmates themselves are motivated to commit criminal acts by the small number of non-criminal opportunities available to them for financial success, besides criminal acts. After becoming a criminal, this number of opportunities is further narrowed by background checks.

The incentives have come far out of line with human values. What can be done to bring incentives back in alignment with the common good?

My Proposal

Using a model that predicts recidivism at sixty days, one year, three years, and five years, predict the expected recidivism rate for all inmates at all individual prison given average recidivism. Sixty days after release, if recidivism is below the predicted rate, the prison gets a small sum of money equaling 25% of the predicted cost to the state of dealing with the predicted recidivism (including lawyer fees, court fees, and jailing costs). This is repeated at one year, three years, and five years.

The statistical models would be readjusted with current data every years, so if this model causes recidivism to drop across the board, jails would be competing against ever higher standard, competing to create the most innovative and groundbreaking counseling and job skills and restorative methods so that they don’t lose their edge against other prisons competing for the same money. As it becomes harder and harder to edge out the competition’s advanced methods, and as the prison population is reduced, additional incentives could come by ending state contracts with the bottom 10% of prisons, or with any prisons who have recidivism rates larger than expected for multiple years in a row.

Note that this proposal makes no policy recommendations or value judgement besides changing the incentive structure. I have opinions on the sanity of certain laws and policies and the private prison system itself, but this specific proposal does not. Ideally, this will reduce some amount of partisan bickering.

Using this added success incentive, here are the modified motivations of each of the major actors.

• Politicians compete for electability. Convicts still can’t vote, prisons make campaign contributions, and appearing “tough on crime” still appeals to a large portion of the voter base. The politician can promise a reduction in crime without making any specific policy or program recommendations, thus shielding themselves from criticism of being soft on crime that might come from endorsing restorative justice or psychological counselling, for instance. They get to claim success for programs that other people, are in charge of administrating and designing. Further, they are saving 75% of the money predicted to have have been spent administrating criminals. Prisons love getting more money for doing the same amount of work so campaign contributions would stay stable or go up for politicians who support reduced recidivism bonuses.
• Prisons compete for money. It costs the state a huge amount of money to house prisoners, and the net profit from housing a prisoner is small after paying for food, clothing, supervision, space, repairs, entertainment, ect. An additional 25% of that cost, with no additional expenditures is very attractive. I predict that some amount of book-cooking will happen, but that the gains possible with book cooking are small compared to gains from actual improvements in their prison program. Small differences in prisons have potential to make large differences in post-prison behavior. I expect having an on-staff CBT psychiatrist would make a big difference; an addiction specialist would as well. A new career field is born: expert consultants who travel from private prison to private prison and make recommendations for what changes would reduce recidivism at the lowest possible cost.
• Police and judges retain the same incentives as before, for bonuses, prestige, and promotions. This is good for the system, because if their incentives were not running counter to the prisons and jails, then there would be a lot of pressure to cook the books by looking the other way on criminals til after the 60 day/1 year/5 year mark. I predict that there will be a couple scandals of cops found to be in league with prisons for a cut of the bonus, but that this method isn’t very profitable. For one thing, an entire police force would have to be corrupt and for another, criminals are mobile and can commit crimes in other precincts. Police are also motivated to work in safer areas, so the general program of rewarding reduced recidivism is to their advantage.

Roadmap

If it could be shown that a model for predicting recidivism is highly predictive, we will need to create another model to predict how much the government could save if switching to a bonus system, and what reduction of crime could be expected.

Halfway houses in Pennsylvania are already receiving non-recidivism bonuses. Is a pilot project using this pricing structure feasible?

There is a bit of nice and recent discussion going on about money here, "money" in the sense of the common peasant "I want more money" not in the senses of "Unit of caring" "Utilon buyer" "Trade-able entity unavailable for acausal trade" etc...

There is also, on the web, and in your local store, hundreds of thousands of advices on how to make money: fast, more, passively, selling your body, or brain, or virtual structures. 

People who have money (entrepreneurs, owners), study money (economists) or focus on money (stockbrokers) have a lot to tell you about something closely related. Incentives. They studied and understand when incentives work and when they don't. Some have become masters of creating the right incentives, for employees, customers, CEOs, everyone.

I wont lie, usually, the incentive is money. Pure, abstract, trade-able, feeling-of-power causing, money. Sometimes (Citibank, Safra Bank) also travelling.

What I don't see around a lot, and would like to ask you to help me brainstorm, and list (later I'll edit by adding suggestions and maybe commenting) are the incentives to make money themselves that work, and those that don't.

There are a lot of LWers, I know, who excel at domain X and are emotionally averse to making money, out of X, or sometimes, at all. Money-making is, in a word, impure! Item 6 will deal with that.

I'll say some random unconventional things and open the discussion for those with more experience:

1)Belonging to a society that lacks money and money making altogether is a very powerful incentive for wanting money. The Indians of Brazil (my homeland) frequently engage in juridic battles and bureaucracy to obtain more money from governmental organs, more time than they would dedicate to get medical attention, for instance.

2)I've heard that having a lot of money is an incentive to make more, by making it easier to do so. Spiteful Billionaire meme makes fun of this hypothesis

3)Also heard that not having money is a great incentive to make more. This seems more logical. When you see the empty plate in the horizon, or being thrown in the streets, some sort of alarm must trigger. (If you have experience with this, relate it please)

Yet, I find that even though there is a strong correlation (within the brazilian cultural elite I hang around with) between having a job and not having money at ages 18-28, there is no correlation at all between not having money and efficiency of making money (by either already be making a lot, or in a career with such prospect). It is as if the emergency button can get you to hike a hill, but not to climb a mountain.

4)Morals against munching on others. Traditional, moral or religious frameworks of mind will make an individual believe (probably truly) that munching on friends, family, couchsurfers, franciscans, altruists and other exploitable folk is a bad/undesirable thing to do. One who doesn't want to munch has a stronger incentive to get his own money.

5)Pride. Lots of people are very very proud of having money, theirs or familial. I never understood that, but here it is, just a fact, stated.

6)Nobility times. My mum points out frequently that in our day and age (in Brazil, but also in the states) there is an idealization of making money. Sometimes it is great, sometimes it is nauseating. Her point though is that during the medieval ages when social class was fundamentally determined from birth, working was seen as a lower activity. It was nearly opposite of Self-Madesmanship. Only the needy, with little status shall work. Same view was held by Aristotle, who, in his conception of working, never worked a day in his life. Something like how we see manual tough labour nowadays, but looking down on every worker. Some people, her and me included, were raised somehow in this anomic (mislocated) environment which persists in many European colonies and perhaps among the descendants, within Europe, of past nobles. Worse for them in a changing world.

7) Your suggestions will be listed here soon...

I ask you to suggest things which are incentives for, or against making money. And I don't mean "Good Reasons" and "Bad Reasons" I mean which incentives, in economic jargon, work effectively as an incentive for people to make more money. Then after that you can write about their goodness and badness.

This is thread where I'm trying to figure out a few things about signalling on LessWrong and need some information, so please immediately after reading about the two individuals please answer the poll. The two individuals:

A. Sees that an interpretation of reality shared by others is not correct, but tries to pretend otherwise for personal gain and/or safety.

B. Fails to see that an interpretation of reality is shared by others is flawed. He is therefore perfectly honest in sharing the interpretation of reality with others. The reward regime for outward behaviour is the same as with A.

To add a trivial inconvenience that matches the inconvenience of answering the poll before reading on, comments on what I think the two individuals signal,what the trade off is and what I speculate the results might be here versus the general population, is behind this link.