Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 February 2010 12:14:05AM 8 points [-]

I don't. Karma is a proxy for whether the community wants to hear from you. You can predictably go against that - I sometimes do - but there should generally be a strong reason behind it. Karma is a proxy sign for whether you're being helpful, not an accumulated resource that can be burned.

Comment author: David_J_Balan 13 February 2010 10:00:56PM 1 point [-]

Just for the record, this was not an instance of intentionally burning karma on a post that I knew people weren't going to like. I'm not saying I would never do that, but I have never done it and have no immediate plans to.

Comment author: Morendil 11 February 2010 07:52:34AM 3 points [-]

One thing I've tried to do when posting is to look at the site's mast and run its mission statement through my mind at the start and at the end of writing: "refining the art of human rationality", and how is my post going to contribute to that precisely? What will my readers do or think after reading that they didn't before?

This is known among article writers as the "so what" test.

Also, you have a higher bar to clear for non-US readers, and I'm one of those (probably atypical in that I'm actually a little interested in US constitutional law). You may not have thought enough about your audience, as this excerpt suggests: "we could get rid of the silly system we have now".

You could call this the Kemo Sabe test, after the cartoon in which the Lone Ranger and Tonto find themselves surrounded by angry Indians, the LR says "We're in trouble, Tonto" - and the latter replies "Who's this 'we' that you speak of, Kemo Sabe?"

To summarize, I've downvoted this for failing two major relevance tests.

There seems to be a norm against heavy edits to top-level posts. I can see some reasons for such a norm, but they seem outweighed by the benefit of improving the posts. Maybe someone can set me straight on that.

Anyway, I'd like to encourage authors to revise top-level posts more, and in that spirit I'll declare here, not just for this post but more generally, my willingness to change downvotes to neutral or even upvotes whenever an author makes the effort, as you did, to discover what readers are not liking, and then makes revisions to their post to address these issues.

Comment author: David_J_Balan 11 February 2010 08:20:17AM 0 points [-]

Good point on the Americocentrism. I'll keep that in mind.

I appreciate your appreciation of my attempt to make my point better in the above comment. I don't know if it caused Eliezer or any other readers to now agree that it is a point that belongs on LW, but either way I think it improved matters at least somewhat. But I don't think I agree that it would be a good thing if everybody started editing top-level posts, because then the comments made before the revisions would no longer make sense. And I also suspect that a bunch of edits in response to comments would often make the final product worse and not better. I think the way to handle situations like this is in the comments as was the case here, and hopefully those will guide future top-level posts that as a result will have fewer problems to begin with.

Comment author: Sticky 11 February 2010 07:06:18AM 1 point [-]

The Constitution is not a complete system of law (it is, if I remember correctly, the shortest national constitution currently in force) -- so, even if we dismiss the amendment process as airily as you do, the strictest originalism doesn't amount to "live under the exact framework set up by a bunch of very flawed 18th century white dudes forever", because most of that framework was in the form of statutory law. It's not clear to me that the amendment process deserves to dismissed the way you did. You call the Founders "very flawed", which is surely true, but many or most of the ways those flaws were reflected in the Constitution have already been addressed, by amendment. I say that simply to avoid any idea that we need some body such as you suggest simply to make adjustments from time to time.

Nevertheless, a thing may be desirable even if we don't actually need it. So, do we want "a process by which some trusted, relatively non-political body gropes their way to the solutions to problems"?

As it stands, this is a contradiction. Deciding upon solutions to public problems is what politics is. You are proposing to take the politics out of political decisionmaking. If it isn't just nonsense, I can only take this to mean taking the democracy out of political decisionmaking. Therefore what's wanted here is a defense of democracy itself.

Let us suppose that we have some way of knowing that the people chosen really are wise (although I can't imagine what test we could apply) -- we still can't trust them. By the very act of distinguishing them from non-members, we give them distinct interests which may well be contrary to the interests of the people. Their very existence as a body is already contrary to the people's interest in self-government. We are primates, after all, and we derive a significant portion of our subjective happiness from our power and status, which means that having a decision made for you rather than making it yourself is a significant disutility. The decisions would need to be of much higher quality to justify this on utilitarian grounds, but we can't trust a council of wise elders to give us decisions good enough, because, as I said, by virtue of their position they have different interests from us.

If an AI were available I would still object, because even if it seems Friendly we can't trust it that much. It might become aware of the fact that it also has interests.

Comment author: David_J_Balan 11 February 2010 08:05:55AM 0 points [-]

Part of the reason for having a Constitution in the first place is supposed to be that there are some things that are so fundamental that they ought not be subjected to ordinary democratic decision-making. If you don't buy that premise, then we don't need a Constitution at all (or at least a Bill of Rights). If you do buy that premise, then the question becomes whether and when that set of things that is above the ordinary law ought to change over time. One defensible position is that it ought never to change unless the change can make it through the very difficult amendment process. But the way that position is usually advanced is by incorrectly claiming that the only alternative to it is judicial tyranny and then daring your opponent to come out on the side of the tyrants, and that is not defensible. And that was the main point of the post.

The "Wise Elders" point is merely that if you take a position other than the "no change except for amendments" one and so allow for some additional (though still limited!) changes over time, then the question becomes who should have the power to make those changes. Presumably they should be people who are in some sense above the political fray, because by assumption we are talking about things that should not be left to ordinary politics. And I can see no reason why the people who are given that power ought to be primarily legal experts.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 11 February 2010 02:52:53AM 4 points [-]

Why's this on LW?

Comment author: David_J_Balan 11 February 2010 03:55:54AM 8 points [-]

It's not totally clear to me how narrow or broad the ambit of LW posts should be in terms of how far they can stray from core questions of rationality. This post seems no farther from that core than other posts that appear here, but then maybe some of those shouldn't be here either.

In any case, the thing that I think gives this an LW-type flavor is that it's an example of how you can use a certain kind of argument to bully your opponents. One side in the argument takes a legitimate value that no one can dispute (unlimited power by judges is bad) and then, by what pretty much amounts to a rhetorical trick, sets things up so that anyone who attempts to reasonably trade that value off against other values stands accused of abandoning the value entirely. This leads to a situation where the guy on the other side of the argument comes out sounding unpersuasive, but only because he's got to conduct the argument within the unfavorable constraints set up by the first guy.

Maybe you still don't buy this as being close enough to core LW topics to belong here, or maybe I didn't make the link explicit enough in the post.

How Much Should We Care What the Founding Fathers Thought About Anything?

-3 David_J_Balan 11 February 2010 12:38AM

A while back I saw an interesting discussion between U.S. Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia. Scalia is well known for arguing that the way to deal with Constitutional questions is to use the plain meaning of the words in the Constitutional text as they would have been understood at the time and place they were written.* Any other approach, he argues, would amount to nothing more than an unelected judge taking his or her personal political and moral views and making them into the highest law of the land. In his view if a judge is not taking the answer out of the text, then that judge must be putting the answer into the text, and no judge should be allowed to do that.** One illustrative example that comes up in the exchange is the question of whether and when it's OK to cite foreign law in cases involving whether a particular punishment is "Cruel and Unusual" and hence unconstitutional. In Scalia's view, the right way to approach the question would be to try as best one could to figure out what was meant by the words "cruel" and "unusual" in 18th century England, and what contemporary foreign courts have to say cannot possibly inform that question. He also opposes (though somewhat less vigorously) the idea that decisions ought to take into account changes over time in what is considered cruel and unusual in America: he thinks that if people have updated their opinions about such matters, they are free to get their political representatives to pass new laws or to amend the Constitution***, but short of that it is simply not the judge's job to take that sort of thing into account.

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Comments (35)
Comment author: David_J_Balan 18 January 2010 06:34:06AM 5 points [-]

Very nice.

Comment author: Larks 04 January 2010 01:26:27AM 4 points [-]

In the world as it currently exists, it's those terms or nothing

The same point could be made about any price on a competative market: it's that price or nothing for an individual customer. Nonetheless, if large numbers of people were unwilling to pay that price/accept those terms, competitors would enter the market to cater for them.

There is something inefficient about the market, but I think it's just hyperbolic discounting: when signing the contracts, people don't care enough about their future selves.

Comment author: David_J_Balan 04 January 2010 06:47:39PM 3 points [-]

Economists are very fond of the argument of the following form:

"if Thing X that you think is bad in a particular market was really bad, some firm have an incentive to enter and offer a product without thing X and get tons of customers. Therefore, Thing X must not really be bad."

And it is a powerful argument. But not nearly as powerful as it's sometimes made out to be. The economics literature is full of stories in which bad things happen in stable equilibria. And I suspect that there are many more such stories that have not yet been written down. On the credit card thing in particular, there is the Laibson & Gabaix (2006) paper that I cited in the earlier post. The practices are bad and there is no incentive for an entrant to enter and offer a product that doesn't use them.

Comment author: RobinHanson 04 January 2010 02:40:12AM 0 points [-]

Since your preferred explanation does not require anything beyond ordinary ignorance, I don't see how you can claim that this phenomena requires us to postulate such a thing. I think you should try to get a little more formal with your analysis.

Comment author: David_J_Balan 04 January 2010 06:41:22PM 2 points [-]

The models I have in mind are the standard "lemons" adverse selection model and other models in which one side doesn't know something important about the other side's attributes, for example a government purchaser who doesn't know if a particular contractor has high costs or low costs. In the lemons model, the market unravels partially or entirely. In the other models, the agent that knows its attributes can earn some "information rents," which are necessary to get the low-cost agents to reveal the fact that they are low cost. In these models, the uninformed agent does not simply proceed as if it didn't know it was uninformed, the equilibrium outcome is a product of the fact that both sides know that one side is uninformed. When these models apply, remedying the information asymmetry solves the problem directly. I don't see how they apply to credit card contracts and other similar examples. Are you saying that they do?

Comment author: Bo102010 04 January 2010 02:57:57AM *  2 points [-]

...because anyone who voluntarily chooses those terms and also supports the ban must be being inconsistent somehow...

If trees could get together and set a limit on how tall any one tree is allowed to get, they would be better off (by expending fewer resources on growing large trunks and more resources on reproducing), even though they're all individually better off violating any limit.

Robert H. Frank uses this idea to justify several types of labor regulations in his columns and books. I just want to point out the principle here and note that similar behaviors aren't necessarily irrational.

Comment author: David_J_Balan 04 January 2010 06:33:48PM 2 points [-]

There's a nice paper by Bengt Holmstrom (Review of Economic Studies, 1999) that has a story about inefficienty high (but still voluntary) work effort in the absence of a policy that limits effort, such as a maximum hours restriction. The idea is that no one worker can cut back effort to the efficient level without appearing to be of low ability, and this is true even though employers know that all the workers aren't as good as they appear (their high output is largely due to the fact that they work too hard, not to how good they are).

Comment author: JRMayne 04 January 2010 05:34:05AM 1 point [-]

I'm likely more sympathetic to your argument than most here (though not more sympathetic than society generally), but the end BTW link puzzled me.

The link is to an analysis of a restaurant menu analyzed by a book writer who appears unaffiliated with the restaurant; I don't think the restaurant is making no bones about tricking people.

Further, I don't think they're tricking people. I've been tricked by restaurant menus, so I'm not someone who says that can't happen.

But the menu in the link is attempting to sell food for money. They are, no doubt, trying to maximize profit. But there's no dishonesty, just marketing. If we're going to end up regulating this type of marketing, it seems to me that will end badly. "Trickery," to me, is an unwelcome surprise. Trickery's not pictures of food and menu presentation strategy. Or have I missed something substantial?

Comment author: David_J_Balan 04 January 2010 06:26:27PM 1 point [-]

You're right that I made it sound like it was the restaraunt itself admitting the trickery, which it wasn't. My mistake. And I certainly am not suggesting that the government should regulate the placement of prices on menus. I linked that article simply as a nice illustration of the fact that sellers are always and forever manipulating buyers, rather than simply informing them. Even something as straightforward as a menu is seen not simply as an opportunity to let patrons know what is available and at what price, but to push their buttons.

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