Can you define either one without reference to value judgements? If not, I suggest you make explicit the value judgement involved in saying that we currently have underconsumption.
Democracy and individual liberty; decentralised prediction markets
A pair of links I found recently (via Marginal Revolution) and haven't found on LW:
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/03/10/mark-s-weiner/paradox-modern-individualism
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475054.0;all
The former discusses liberty in the context of clannish behaviour, arguing that it is the existence of the institutions of modern democracies that allows people individual liberty, as it precludes the need for clan structures (extended family groups, crime syndicates, patronage networks and such).
The latter is a author's summary of a white paper on the subject of decentralised Bitcoin prediction markets with a link to the paper.
Yes, due to those being standard terms in economics. Overinvestment occurs when investment is poorly allocated due to overly-cheap credit and is a key concept of the Austrian school. Underconsumption is the key concept of Keynesian economics and the economic views of every non-idiot since Keynes; even Friedman openly declared that "we are all Keynesians now". Keynesian thought, which centres on the possibility of prolonged deficient demand (like what caused the recession), wasn't wrong, it was incomplete; the reason fine-tuning by demand management doesn't work simply wasn't known until we had the concept of the vertical long-run Phillips curve. Both of these ideas are currently being taught to first-year undergraduates.
But driving this reasoning to its logical conclusion you get a lot of strange results.
The premise is that humans are differnt from animals in that they know that they inflict suffering and are thus able to change it, and according to some ethics have to.
Actually this would be kind of a disadvantage of knowledge. There was a not so recent game theoretic post about situations where if you know more you have to choose probabilistically to win on average whereas those who don't know will always choose defect and thus reap a higher benefit than you - except if they are too many.
So either
You need to construct a world without animals as animals suffer from each other and humans know that and can modify the world to get rid of this.
Humans could alter themselves to not know that they inflict harm (or consider harm unimportant or restrict empathy to humans...) and thus avoid the problem thereby.
The key point I think is that a concept that rests on some aspect of human being is being selected and taken to its 'logical conclusion' out of context and without regard to that this concept is an evolved feature itself.
As there is no intrinsic moral fabric of the universe we effectively force our evolved values on our environment and make it conform to it.
In sofar excessive empathy (which is an aggregated driver behind ethics) is not much different from excessive greed which also affects our environment - only we have already learned that the latter might be no good idea).
The conclusion is that you also have to balance extreme empathy with reality.
ADDED: Just found this relevant link: http://lesswrong.com/lw/69w/utility_maximization_and_complex_values/
Robert Nozick:
Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who get enormously greater sums of utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose . . . the theory seems to require that we all be sacrificed in the monster's maw, in order to increase total utility.
My point is that humans mostly act as though they are utility monsters with respect to non-humans (and possibly humans they don't identify with); they act as though the utility of non-sapient animal is vastly smaller than the utility of a human and so making the humans happy is always the best option. Some people put a much higher value on animal welfare than others, but there are few environmentalists willing to say that there is some number of hamsters (or whatever you assign minimal moral value to) worth killing a child to protect.
On the other hand, there must be some downside to pain asymbolia, or we'd all have it. (Plainly the mutation exists; why isn't it selected for?)
Because a child who doesn't find pain unpleasant is really, really handicapped, even in the modern world. The people who founded A Gift of Pain had a daughter with pain asymbolia who is now mostly blind, amongst other disabilities, through self-inflicted damage. I'm not sure whether leprosy sufferers have the no-pain or no-suffering version of pain insensitivity (I think the former) but apparently it's the reason they suffer such damage.
This book seems to be a useful source for people considering the question of whether pain could be improved.
Newcombe-style problems, including the Prisoner's Dilemma, and the difference between rationality-as-winning and rationality-as-rituals-of-cognition.
How much does a genius cost? MIRI seems intent on hiring a team of geniuses. I’m curious about what the payroll would look like. One of the conditions of Thiel’s donations was that no one employed by MIRI can make more than one-hundred thousand a year. Is this high enough? One of the reasons I ask is I just read a story about how Google pays an extremely talented programmer over 3 million dollars per year - doesn't MIRI also need extremely talented programmers? Do they expect the most talented to be more likely to accept a lower salary for a good cause?
Eliezer once tried to auction a day of his time but I can't find it on ebay by Googling.
On an unrelated note, the top Google result for "eliezer yudkowsky " (note the space) is "eliezer yudkowsky okcupid". "eliezer yudkowsky harry potter" is ninth, while HPMOR, LessWrong, CFAR and MIRI don't make the top ten.
I have tremendous trouble with hangnails. My cuticles start peeling a little bit, usually near the center of the base of my nail, and then either I remove the peeled piece (by pulling or clipping) or it starts getting bigger and I have to cut it off anyway. That leaves a small hole in my cuticle, the edges of which start to wear away and peel more, which makes me cut away more. This goes on until my fingertips are a big mess, often involving bleeding and bandages. What should I do with my damaged cuticles, and how do I stop this cycle from starting in the first place?
Nail polish base coat over the cuticle might work. Personally I just try not to pick at them. I imagine you can buy base coat at the nearest pharmaceuticals store, but asking a beautician for advice is probably a good idea; presumably there is some way that people who paint their nails prevent hangnails from spoiling the effect.
I don't follow. How can consumption increase economic growth when it comes at the cost of investment? Investment is what creates economic output.
There is such a thing as overinvestment. There is also such a thing as underconsumption, which is what we have right now.
To provide a concrete example, this seems to suggest that a person who favours the Republicans over the Democrats and expects the Republicans to do well in the midterms should vote for a Libertarian, thereby making the Republicans more dependent on the Tea Party. This is counterintuitive, to say the least.
Is it? Again, I haven't done the math, but look at the behavior of minor parties in parliamentary systems. They typically demand a price for their support. If the Republican will get your vote regardless why should they care about you?
I agree that voting for a third party which better represents your ideals can make the closer main party move in that direction. The problem is that this strategy makes the main party more dependent upon its other supporters, which can lead to identity politics and legislative gridlock. If there were no Libertarian party, for example, libertarian candidates would have stood as Republicans, thereby shifting internal debate towards libertarianism.
Another effect of voting for a third party is that it affects the electoral strategy of politically distant main parties. If a main party is beaten by a large enough margin it is likely to try to reinvent itself, or at least to replace key figures. If a large third party takes a share of the votes, especially of those disillusioned with main parties, it may have significant effects on long-term strategies.
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Legislative gridlock is better than bad laws being passed.
Really? By whose definition of "bad laws"? There are an awful lot of laws that I don't like (for exaple, ones mandating death for homosexual sex) but that doesn't mean I'd like to screw up the governance of an entire country by not allowing any bills whatsoever to pass until a reform bill passed. That's a pretty good way to get a civil war. Look, for example, at Thailand, which is close to separating into two states because the parties are so opposed. Add two years of legislative gridlock and they'd hate each other even more; I am reasonably confident that gridlock in Thailand would lead to mass civil unrest and a potential secession of the northeast, which might well be violent.