both of those seem sorta like no-brainers
You'd be surprised. There are plenty of people who refuse to assign a value on life, feeling that doing so would somehow diminish a life's importance, or be immoral. (This type of person seems to be overrepresented in the humanities...)
Well, it also seems like a no-brainer to me the Breatharianism is insane, but I know people certainly subscribe to it. What I meant by that was more that it seems well-established among LessWrong readers.
This is degenerating into mere politics. The part that was interesting to LW was:
Refuse to assign a value on life? Then you can't engage in cost-benefit analysis... and as a result, you'll stay blind to the whole concept of underuse.
Do you mean the assignment of a value of life or the general principle of assignment of values to everything? In either case, both of those seem sorta like no-brainers (which, I imagine, is why no one is discussing them).
It seems to me that the most relevant thing in this post was the idea of a bias against recognizing underuse in general. It actually reminds me of when I was introduced to Robin's idea of the danger of excess medical care in that most people (myself included, at the time) had a bias against recognizing the harms done by extra treatment.
The purported reason for each of these government interventions is to enforce property rights where they don't exist.
No doubt. I'm not ignoring the tragedy of the commons, though – I'm just saying that I have yet to see compelling evidence that it actually exists.
A free-for-all spectrum might have some interference, but then again, the concept of "interference" is a bit dated anyway, as modern technology can much more effectively filter it out than it could when the Titanic sunk (which was when we got a lot of these spectrum regulations in the first place).
A free-for-all in land development is not a great example of the tragedy of the commons, since it is not, strictly speaking, a commons. Sure, the "skyline" could be considered a commons, but then again, given astronomical land values in dense urban settings, it's a bit unclear as to why a cluttered skyline would be such a bad thing. (The roads could be considered a commons, though given the deteriorating state of the environment and the very workably private mass transit companies that existed before the socialization of transport in the US, it's difficult to argue that government-owned transport in the form of "road commons" is such a great idea.)
As for the IP argument, people have been arguing about this for a good long time. The best resource that I can recommend arguing against a tragedy of the commons is Against Intellectual Monopoly by Levine and Boldrin. For a brief summary of some of the argument against IP in pharmaceuticals (which is by far the field in which IP has the most support), see here.
Are you saying that there is no incidence of the tragedy of the commons at all, or just that these things are not tragedies of the commons? If it's the latter, I think it's pointless to argue the specifics of any particular examples when the broader point still stands. When there is a tragedy of the commons, one possible solution is to create property rights so that incentives align with social optima, but the problem of the tragedy of the anticommons can arise if the property rights you create are too strong.
In practice, there will be cases where you don't want to try to re-align incentives. If you have a situation where you are going to be naturally close to the social optimum (maybe the spectrum or the skyline are good examples of this - I'm not familiar with these cases intimately), then unless you have a well-calibrated government you are more likely than not to over-shoot the social optimum. If you have something that's seriously misaligned - maybe people burning huge amounts of neurotoxin-containing wood and wearing a mask or something - you might overshoot or undershoot the social optimum, but even a poorly-calibrated government might be able to get you closer.
Is it possible for anyone here to actually suggest anything that's truly meaningful in the context of raising children? We can say what we think is a good idea, but I think the first place to look for this information is in any population studies that have been done (adopted twin studies maybe?) about rationalist beliefs in people raised with different techniques. Then we'd still have the politically untenable task of randomly assigning the techniques we come up with to children and testing how rational the end up being. Maybe there's some insight to be had here, but I doubt we would have responses much better than chance.
Something interesting about the tragedy of the anticommons is that it is created entirely by government. Intellectual property, spectrum allocation, and zoning/land use regulations would not exist in an anarchic world. I've heard incredibly cogent and compelling arguments against each type of government-created "market," and it's a damn shame that people look at you like you're a crazed lunatic when you suggest that either a) people shouldn't be granted monopolies on ideas and mathematical equations (i.e., computer code); b) the government should not be regulating the spectrum at all (god forbid we'd live in a world where all communication were as plentiful as wi-fi is today!); or b) maybe people should be allowed to build gigantic skyscrapers wherever the hell they want without parking. The last one is particularly pressing (in my opinion), though it's upsetting that the closest that people get to recognizing this particular tragedy of the anticommons is supporting New Urbanism, which is at best a bastardized version of the most truly efficient urban allocation mechanism – market urbanism.
It sounds to me like you are ignoring the Tragedy of the Commons there, though. The purported reason for each of these government interventions is to enforce property rights where they don't exist. I think the whole point of this post about the tragedy of the anticommons is to illustrate that you are finding an optimum, not a single limit.
The fact that all of these things mentioned here are created by government (and I am not sure that you've proven that tragedies of the anticommons can't arise naturally) just gets to the point that you can easily over-correct for a failure of natural incentives, which means that you should probably be putting some thought into designing feedback mechanisms to naturally find the optima that you are looking for.
I don't agree that by failing to put a value on life you necessarily also fail to discover the concept of underuse. Doesn't it follow immediately from the fact that you can have a positive externality that you would necessarily also have underuse?
I don't agree that by failing to put a value on life you necessarily also fail to discover the concept of underuse. Doesn't it follow immediately from the fact that you can have a positive externality that you would necessarily also have underuse?
The concept of eminent domain exists specifically to deal with this problem, and it is at least a few hundred years old. Eminent domain is used to force land owners to give up or allow the usage of land when necessary to allow for the construction of projects like roads and sewers, and it has also been applied in limited cases to patents. However, expanding the use of eminent domain is likely to be politically untenable, because for every time it's used there must be an unwilling counterparty who will make noise.
One problem with eminent domain is that it doesn't insure optimum use because the only feedback mechanism is through democratic processes, so it's just a public choice problem then. With eminent domain you will probably destroy underuse and just replace it with overuse.
Edited to add "If you aren't sure what the conclusion is or aren't sure you agree with it, continue." The case where you aren't sure whether you agree was meant to be excuded by "If you are sure you do", but wasn't very clear. The case where you aren't sure what the conclusion is wasn't mentioned at all, and it's an important one since many good articles take awhile to get to the point, or cover a broad range of points, and shouldn't be aborted early.
Hm. Well, I was thinking in general that you can come to the same conclusion by more than one route and it could be important to see how other people do it. For example, I hold now some libertarian-style beliefs that I held when I was a teenager, but the framework that those beliefs are in is completely different. "Free trade is good because (comparative advantage, economic reasoning" is different than "Free trade is good because people shouldn't be restricted in who they can sell their goods to!" by a wide margin.
In fact, there have been situations where I've changed my mind to be on the other side of an issue by reading something whose conclusion I agree with, because I would see flaws in their arguments, try and overlay my own arguments and find that the same flaws exist in both arguments, leading me to change my beliefs.
Maybe we agree, though, and what you mean by "conclusions" is what I mean by "conclusions and reasoning."
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Didn't say it was an absolute - yes, you can certainly discover the concept of underuse even if you refuse to put a value on life. But your odds of doing so are lower than if you would have.
I'll agree that they are lower, but I am not sure that they are significantly lower. It seems to me that ANY positive externality would be evidence for underuse and you can think of a large number of them without ever putting a value on life.
That said, I do think that it is obviously important to put a value on life so that you can do cost-benefit analyses.