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That organisms which don't have offspring that look like human babies will not experience the same things as cute as humans do.
I don't think I understand. The hypothesis says that we evolved to find human babies cute because people who find babies cute are more likely to take care of them and then they'll reproduce and propagate those genes. I guess there's no strong reason why that necessarily means that we have to find human babies cuter than anything else: if the "appreciating cuteness" faculty happened for some random reason to glom extra hard onto bunnies there probably there wouldn't be any very strong selective pressure against it (though as Alicorn points out, there would probably be some slight pressure). Is that what you mean?
Very compactly put. The data simply do not contradict the theory in the first place.
What does the hypothesis predict?
In response to
Things You Can't Countersignal
There is a very nice and closely related paper with the excellent title "Too Cool for School? Signaling and Countersignaling," summarized here:
http://www.zhongwen.com/cs/index.html
Somebody I know once conjectured that this story might not work if there were a continuum of types instead of discrete types. I don't know if anyone has ever worked that out.
A standard debating tactic is to attribute overly strong claims to the other side, which seem easy to knock down. You don't have any concrete quotes of such overly strong claims, so you seem to be just assuming someone must have said something overly-strong somewhere. Re the quote from me, that quote doesn't say how much info gets aggregated from any given group.
In the original post, I said regarding our sole conversation on the subject that I can reall:
"I asked Robin Hanson about this once at lunch a few years ago, and we had an interesting chat about it, along with some other George Mason folks. I won't try to summarize everyone's positions here (I'd feel obligated to ask their permission before I'd even try), but suffice it to say that I don't think he foreswore the Hayekian idea entirely as an argument in favor of prediction markets."
Then I added:
"And there is a quote by him here that seems to embrace it. In any case, I'd be interested to know what he thinks about it."
That sentence had a link to an article that contained the quote in my comment above. Taken all together, does that really strike you as me "attibuting overly strong claims" to you? It sure doesn't strike me that way. I pointed out that you've said some things that seem to lean in a pretty "Hayekian" direction, explicitly acknowledged that I'm not certain to what extent you are making those kinds of claims on behalf of prediction markets (I'm still not), and asking you to clarify. If you think that's a debating tactic, then you and I have very different ideas of what a debating tactic is.
In response to
Hayekian Prediction Markets?
I'm not sure there is a clear enough claim here to agree or disagree with. Pretty much all institutions aggregate information in some way, and this includes all sorts of markets. This aggregation can include not just directly reflecting info contributed by participants, but also informing participants, who then combine that new info with their old info, and then contribute that new combined info. Certainly there are barriers to such aggregation, which include transaction costs and risk aversion. The important question is of course the relative ability of different institutions to achieve this function; barriers exist in all institutions. Existing speculative markets seem to do a good job of this, and new design variations (e.g., combo markets) may do even better.
In the absence of decisive empirical evidence, the amount of credence to give to a particular prediction method (whether absolutely or relative to alternative methods) depends in part on what theoretical claims are being made for it, and on how well-supported those claims are. The articles that I linked to don't just say that prediction markets do reasonbly well in aggregating information, or that they do better than the alternatives. Rather, they make explicit reference to Hayek's famous argument which, as I understand it, involves a strong claim of incorporating lots of tiny pieces of information held locally by individuals. And without leaning too hard on a single quote, one of those articles seems to have you agreeing:
Hanson has suggested that prediction markets “can be used to aggregate information from any [italics added] given set of participants.”
I think there is a fairly clear question here of just how strong an absolute "Hayeakian information aggregation" claim you are making.
In response to
Hayekian Prediction Markets?
I'm not as hot on the Hayekian principle as economists were, but I don't see how any of the factors you suggest would be different between a prediction market and a normal stock market.
And normal stock markets are pretty good at allocating ressources, up until the moments where everything goes berserk, so there's no reason to suspect that prediction markets would be much different.
The comparison in the post wasn't between prediction market prices and stock market prices, it was between prediction market prices and ordinary prices for goods and services. I hadn't thought about it before, but it seems to me that the points made in the post about prediction markets apply to stock markets as well.
Note that this isn't an argument that prediction markets (or normal stock markets) don't work. It's an argument about whether they have this particular "Hayekian" virtue.
Of course. But it is logically rude to demand some knowably unobtainable even-if-they're-right proof instead, and then toss all the other arguments out the window.
Agreed
The basic point here is a good one, and it's obviously right as it applies to evolution and very likely to AGW as well, though I know very little about that and rely entirely on the fact of the scientific consensus in forming my opinion. But at the same time it is important to keep in mind that just because someone has worked hard and offered you the best evidence that they could be reasonably expected to muster under current circumstances, that doesn't necessarily mean that they have come anywhere near proving the case.
Hayekian Prediction Markets?
I think I basically get the idea behind prediction markets. People take their money seriously, so the opinions of people who are confident enough to bet real money on those opinions deserve to be taken seriously as well. That kid on the schoolyard who was always saying "wanna bet?" might have been annoying but he also had a point: your willingness or unwillingness to bet does say something about how seriously your opinions ought to be taken. Furthermore, there are serious problems with the main alternative prediction method, which consists of asking experts what they think is going to happen. Almost nobody ever keeps track of whose predictions turned out to be right and then listens to those people more. Some predictions involve events that are so rare or so far in the future that there's no way for an expert to accumulate a track record at all. Some issues give experts incentives to be impressively wrong rather than boringly right. And so on. These are all good points, and they make enough sense to me to convince me that prediction markets deserve to be taken seriously and tested empirically. If they reliably produce better predictions than the alternatives, then they deserve to win the day.*
But there is a particular claim that is made about prediction markets that I am skeptical of. It starts with the well-known idea, usually associated with Friedrich on Hayek, that a major virtue of free markets is that there is all kinds of useful information spread out in local chunks throughout the economy, which individuals can usefully exploit but a central planner never could, which is reflected in market prices, and which in turn cause resources to be allocated efficiently. It then goes on to argue that prediction markets have a similar virtue. As an example, suppose there's a prediction market for a national election, and you happen to know that Candidate X is more popular in your little town than most people think. There's no way that some faraway expert could have known this or incorporated it into his or her prediction in any way, but it gives you an incentive to bet on Candidate X, which causes your local information to be reflected in the prediction market price. Lots and lots of people doing the same thing will cause lots and lots of such little local pieces of information, which couldn't have been obtained any other way, to also be reflected in the market price.
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It's a bit off topic, but I've been meaning to ask Eliezer this for a while. I think I get the basic logic behind "FOOM." If a brain as smart as ours could evolve from pretty much nothing, then it seems likely that sooner or later (and I have not the slightest idea whether it will be sooner or later) we should be able to use the smarts we have to design a mind that is smarter. And if we can make a mind smarter than ours, it seems likely that that mind should be able to make one smarter than it, and so on. And this process should be pretty explosive, at least for a while, so that in pretty short order the smartest minds around will be way more than a match for us, which is why it's so important that it be baked into the process from the beginning that it proceed in a way that we will regard as friendly.
But it seems to me that this qualitative argument works equally well whether "explosive" means "box in someone's basement to Unchallenged Lord and Master of the Universe Forever and Ever" before anyone else knows about it or can do anything about it, or it means "different people/groups will innovate and and borrow/steal each others' innovations over a period of many years, at the end of which where we end up will depend only a little on the contribution of the people who started the ball rolling." And if that's right, doesn't it follow that what really matters is not the correctness of the FOOM argument (which seems correct to me), but rather the estimate of how big the exponent is in the exponential growth is likely to be? Is this (and much of your disagreement with Robin Hanson) just a disagreement over an estimate of a number? Does that disagreement stand any chance of being anywhere near resolved with available evidence?