(And, trust me, brains have found a whole lot of the bad ones. What do you expect, when you run programs that screwed themselves into existence on computers made of meat?)

Fairly flippant for what's supposed to be a primer.

The rationality of Rationality: AI to Zombies isn't about using cold logic to choose what to care about. Reasoning well has little to do with what you're reasoning towards. If your goal is to enjoy life to the fullest and love without restraint, then better reasoning (while hot or cold, while rushed or relaxed) will help you do so. But if your goal is to annihilate as many puppies as possible, then this-kind-of-rationality will also help you annihilate more puppies.

This seems like bad salesmanship. There's no need to say things like "rationality is compatible with puppy annihilation" in a paragraph that's supposed to be reassuring people rationality is not immoral or hostile to human emotions. Instead, I would say you should to the opposite, and tell people that if they really love someone, that means that it is actually a rational thing to want to make sacrifices for them, because if you weigh everything up their happiness matters more to you than their own.

So, whereas the message of this post can be summarized as "rationality is neutral", I think the post's message should be closer to "rationality is good - it lets you do things like love EVEN BETTER".

Failure is always possible. However there are two responses to failure. One is to be happy with having made the attempt. This does not make failure less likely in the future.

The other is to actually engage with and analyze your failure. If you didn't flip the switch, your failure is a failure. You figure out why you came up with a plan that didn't work. If the switch needs to be flipped again tomorrow, you will have a better chance of flipping the switch tomorrow. If some button needs to be pressed tomorrow, you won't likely fail at button pressing for the same reason you failed at switch flipping.

Doing rather than trying is a commitment to the second response to failure.

It's asking for a password to join. What's the password?

Savory and spirit are two different types of uncategories. Savory starts by having a well defined and narrow category, flavor. Then it uses negation to eliminate a portion of that category. The color green isn't sweet, but that doesn't make it savory because green isn't a flavor. I have some other valid uncategorical definitions of this type.

A mongrel is a dog that doesn't belong to any recognized breed of dog. Manslaughter is the killing of one human by another human, without the intent of seriously wounding or killing. Health is the state of a living organism without significant disease or injury. Fiction is any story that does not represent actual events.

Spirit is a problem because it is an unanchored uncategory. It doesn't start with a known subset of thingspace, instead it starts with thingspace. To use older terms, a definition is generally genus and differentia. Spirit lacks a genus in the way that savory doesn't.

I agree with your definitions of the two curves, although I don't know what point you're making by the distinction.

In either case we can ask, "how much will changes in demand affect equilibrium quantity?" In a constant-cost industry, the answer will be 1:1 in the long-run (as indicated by a flat, or infinitely elastic long-run supply curve), but as you gradually shorten the scope over which you're looking at the market, making it a shorter- and shorter-run supply curve, it will steepen (elasticity decrease) such that the answer is "less than 1:1".

Thanks for acknowledging that.

I think standard economics agrees with your vision of "~always positively-sloping finite supply curves" in the short term, but not necessarily the long term. Here's a quote from AmosWEB (OK, never heard of them before, but they had the quote I wanted)

As a perfectly competitive industry reacts to changes in demand, it traces out positive, negative, or horizontal long-run supply curve due to increasing, decreasing, or constant cost.

Oops, I meant to edit that rather than retract. Since I don't believe there's a way to un-retract I'll re-paste it here with my correction (Changing "Supply Elasticity is 1" to "Supply Elasticity is finite"):

Cumulative elasticity = Supply Elasticity/(Supply Elasticity - Demand Elasticity). A cumulative elasticity factor of one means a demand elasticity of 0.

I believe your math skipped a step; it seems like you're assuming that Supply Elasticity is finite. I actually claim in the original article that "the 'price elasticity of supply' in the arbitrarily long term becomes arbitrarily high". In other words, as "length of 'term'" goes to infinity, the Supply Elasticity also goes to infinity and the cumulative elasticity factor approaches 1 for any finite Demand Elasticity.

Thanks for the math demonstrating my point.

Stepping back, I worry from your sarcastic tone and the reactive nature of your suggestions that you assume that I am trying to 'beat you' in a debate, and that by sharing information that helps your argument more than it helps mine, I have made a mistake worthy of mockery.

Instead, I am trying to share an insight that I believe is being overlooked by the 'conventional wisdom' of this community and is affecting multiple public recommendations for rational behavior (of cost/benefit magnitude ~2x).

If I am wrong, I would like to be shown to be so, and if you are wrong, I hope you also want to be corrected. If instead you're just debating for the sake of victory, then I don't expect you to ever be convinced, and I don't want to waste my effort.

What you are effectively claiming is that there are no suboptimal producers of chickens. Unless every producer of chickens is ideally located, ideally managed, ideally staffed, and working with ideal capital there are differences in production costs.

It's not that this will ever actually be the case, but the argument is that, in the long term, the market approaches what you would expect with such assumptions (and continues to have short term fluctuations away from that). But yes, even this assumption is clearly not actually true in all cases (as with all assumptions in neoclassical economics); the better question is whether it's a good simplification (enough to form a reasonable prior) or whether there is a better simplification we can consider (either simpler or more accurate).

The estimates I'm critiquing in the original post assume "short term elasticities are the best prior for long term elasticities" and I am advocating that "a better prior for the long term cumulative elasticity factor is 1".

There is a reason, that economics assumes that the amount of a good supplied changes as price changes, and I haven't seen any argument that exempts the case of chickens. Also, how does the market create less chickens as demand falls? If there are differences in cost, the highest cost producers leave the market as price falls. Easy to answer with the standard assumptions, but almost impossible with your nonstandard prior.

The explanation of both of these issues is the short term supply curve (which is not flat). In the short term, if people stop eating chicken, the price drops, and the producers that are (in the short term) able to improve their (expected long term) profits by scaling or shutting down do so.

In the specific example, they could be cloned by expanding in the good locations.

More generally, if you're claiming that there's a limited supply of good locations from which to produce chickens, then that reduces to a "finite inputs" argument I discuss in the last section of the OP. (For further discussion see responses to this comment .)

In short, I agree that such effects can create a sloping long term supply curve in some cases, but I also believe that there are other effects that can lead it to slope the opposite direction, and it's not immediately obvious which wins out. My prior is that the long term supply curve for an arbitrary product is virtually flat.

Said another way, if you're going to argue that the long term cost-per-widget is higher when producing 2X widgets than X widgets, then you have to argue that the effect of finite inputs outweighs gains to scale and other factors. I haven't seen such an argument generally or in the case of chickens.