Taxes would increase to pay for the Universal Basic Income. You could do it using the money we currently spend on welfare, but that includes things like medicare. Either we need to keep that, or we need to give them extra money to pay for medical insurance.
Supply of labor could decrease. This is a necessary consequence of any effort to help the poor. But since we already have a welfare system, it's just a question of which causes labor to decrease less.
Supply of labor could decrease. This is a necessary consequence of any effort to help the poor. But since we already have a welfare system, it's just a question of which causes labor to decrease less.
For things like welfare (and almost certainly for UBI, though I doubt there's enough empirical evidence either way to be sure), yes.
Things like education subsides (assuming they subsidize professionally relevant education rather than just signaling, which admittedly is a somewhat dubious assumption) and the EITC (basically a negative income tax for the working poor in the US) could very well increase the labor supply.
When we tried Paranoid Debating at the Boston meetup a few years back, we often had the problem that the deceiver didn't know enough about the question to know which direction to mislead in. I think the game would work better if the deceiver were simply trying to bias the group in a particular direction rather than make the group wrong. I think that's also a closer approximation to real life - plenty of people want to sell you their product and don't know or care which option is best. Not many just want you to buy the wrong product.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama_series_stephen_hawking_ama_answers/
the vast majority of the discussion is about AI risk.
Previous thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/mnq/instrumental_rationality_questions_thread/
This thread is for asking the rationalist community for practical advice. It's inspired by the stupid questions series, but with an explicit focus on instrumental rationality.
Questions ranging from easy ("this is probably trivial for half the people on this site") to hard ("maybe someone here has a good answer, but probably not") are welcome. However, please stick to problems that you actually face or anticipate facing soon, not hypotheticals.
As with the stupid questions thread, don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better, and please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
(See also the Boring Advice Repository)
Meta sub-thread
These ideas came out of a recent discussion on actually trying at Citadel, Boston's Less Wrong house.
Actually Trying means applying the combination of effort and optimization power needed to accomplish a difficult but feasible goal. The effort and optimization power are both necessary.
Pretending to try means doing things that superficially resemble actually trying but are missing a key piece. You could, for example, make a plan related to your goal and diligently carry it out but never stop to notice that the plan was optimized for convenience or sounding good or gaming a measurement rather than achieving the goal. Alternatively, you could have a truly great plan and put effort into carrying it out until it gets difficult.
Trying to try is when you throw a lot of time and perhaps mental anguish at a task but not actually do the task. Writer's block is the classic example of this.
Sphexing is the act of carrying out a plan or behavior repeatedly despite it not working.
Actually Trying requires a combination of optimization power and effort, but each of those is done with a very different way of thinking, so it's helpful to do the two separately. In the first way of thinking, Optimizing Mode, you think hard about the problem you are trying to solve, develop a plan, look carefully at whether it's actually well-suited to solving the problem (as opposed to pretending to try) and perhaps Murphy-jitsu it. In Executing Mode, you carry out the plan.
Executing Mode breaks down when you reach an obstacle that you either don't know how to overcome or where the solution is something you don't want to do. In my personal experience, this is where things tend to get derailed. There are a few ways to respond to this situation:
The key is to respond constructively to obstacles. This usually means getting back to Optimizing Mode, either directly or after a break. The failure modes here are derailing immediately, a "break" that turns into a derailment, and sphexing. In our discussion, we shared a few techniques we had used to get back to Optimizing Mode. These techniques tended to focus on some combination of removing the temptation to derail, providing a reminder to optimize, and changing mental state.
Context switches are often helpful here. Because for many people, work and procrastination both tend to be computer-based activities, it is both easy and tempting to switch to a time-wasting activity immediately upon hitting an obstacle. Stepping away from the computer takes away the immediate distraction and depending on what you do away from the computer, helps you either think about the problem or change your mental state. Depending on what sort of mood I'm in, I sometimes step away from the computer with a pen and paper to write down my thoughts (thinking about the problem), or I may step away to replenish my supply of water and/or caffeine (changing my mental state). Other people in the discussion said they found going for a walk or getting more strenuous exercise to be helpful when they needed a break. Strenuous exercise has the additional advantage of having very low risk of turning into a longer-than-intended break.
The danger with breaks is that they can turn into derailment. Open-ended breaks ("I'll just browse Reddit for five minutes") have a tendency to expand, so it's best to avoid them in favor of things with more definite endings. The other common say for breaks to turn into derailment is to return from a break and go to something non-productive. I have had some success with attaching a sticky-note to my monitor reminding me what to do when I return to my computer. I have also found that if the note makes clear what problem I need to solve also makes me less likely to sphex when I return to my computer.
In the week or so since the discussion that inspired this post, I have found that asking myself "what would Actually Trying look like right now?" This has helped me stay on track when I have encountered difficult problems at work.
Come to give, listen to and discuss book recommendations. People will be giving 1-minute pitches for books they think may be of interest to the rationalist community. All comers are encouraged to offer their recommendations.
Phase 1: Arrival, greetings, unstructured conversation.
Phase 2: Presentations. This starts promptly at 4:00, and lasts 30-60 minutes (until we run out of book recommendations).
Phase 3: Further discussion. We'll explore the ideas raised in phase 2, often in smaller groups.
Phase 4: Dinner. It's about a five minute walk to the usual restaurant.
A's utility function also needs to be specified. How many utils is the first box worth? What's the penalty for additional boxes?
The claim that the market is good at predicting future earnings.
This is conceptually very easy to test; get historical stock price and earnings data, compute P/E ratios at each snapshot, compute earnings growth across snapshots, and then look at the relationship between the two. Vanguard ran the numbers here (page 7), and two ways of calculating the P/E ratio were the strongest two factors. (As one would expect, 1-year returns were very difficult to predict at all, and they were mostly useful for 10-year returns.)
That's very useful info. Thanks for the link.
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I've been through the free will sequences a second time now, and I'm trying to figure out how to apply it to my life.
See, even that sounds weird, because applying to my life...trying...figure out...whether I do or not is inevitable, right?
Speaking from the naive standpoint, how does the determinist viewpoint affect your decisions? How do you think about it, incorporate it? Do you compartmentalize and pretend you're in control, or what?
I think the main takeaway is that you shouldn't worry too much about questions of free will. Basically, the fact that your free will is made of physics doesn't mean it makes sense to make poor choices or not take responsibility for yourself and then blame physics. Also, don't go looking for magical explanations of free will existing "outside of physics".