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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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 Do not quote with only a name.

That will only work if you label all debt in that way, since you cannot have 100% certainty of any debt being paid back. And this means that there will be no real difference in the world except that people realize that debts are not always paid back, which they ought to realize anyway. It does not prevent anything bad from happening, just as my redefinition of "bad" does not.

That will only work if you label all debt in that way

And, of course, people do that. It's called a "credit rating" and there are a few large institutions which assign ratings to bonds. Pretty much all bonds traded in financial markets have credit ratings.

-150lbsofstorkmeat11y

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.