I do not see what there is in a continued existence of 60-hour weeks that cannot be explained by the relative strength of the income and substitution effects. This doesn’t need to tell us about a poverty equilibrium, it can just tell us about people’s preferences?
I agree with most of this, but as a hardline libertarian take on AI risk it is incomplete since it addresses only how to slow down AI capabilities. Another thing you may want a government to do is speed up alignment, for example through government funding of R&D for hopefully safer whole brain emulation. Having arbitration firms, private security companies, and so on enforce proof of insurance (with prediction markets and whichever other economic tools seem appropriate to determine how to set that up) answers how to slow down AI capabilities but doesn’...
Either I am missing a point somewhere, or this probably doesn't work as well outside of textbook examples.
In the example, Frank was "blackmailed" into paying, because the builder knew that there were exactly 10 villagers, and knew that Frank needs the street paved. In real life, you often do not have this kind of knowledge.
Yes, you need to solve two problems (according to Tabarrok) to solve public goods provision, one of which is the free-rider problem. Dominant assurance contracts only solve the free-rider problem, but you need to also solve what he calls the information problem to know how to set the parameters of the contract.
Oh that’s fun, Wikipedia caused me to believe for so many years that “bad faith” means something different from what it means and I’m only learning that now.
Trillions of dollars in lost economic growth just seems like hyperbole. There’s some lost growth from stickiness and unemployment but of course the costs aren’t trillions of dollars.
They did in fact not go far enough. Japanese GNI per capita growth from 2013 to 2021 was 1.02%. The prescription would be something like 4%.
I disagree total working hours have decreased. The number of average weekly hours per person from 1950 to 2000 has been “roughly constant”. Work weeks are shorter but there are more people working.
As an example to explain why, I predict (with 80% probability) that there will be a five-year shortening in the median on the general AI question at some point in the next three years. And I also predict (with 85% probability) that there will be a five-year lengthening at some point in the next three years.
Both of these things have happened. The community prediction was June 28, 2036 at one time in July 2022, July 30, 2043 in September 2022 and is March 13, 2038 now. So there has been a five-year shortening and a five-year lengthening.
Even voting online takes more than five minutes in total.
Anyway, I’d rather sell my votes for money. I believe you can find thousands of people, current non-voters, who would vote for whatever you want them to, if you paid them only a little more than the value of their time.
If the value of voting is really in the expected benefits (according to your own values) of good political outcomes brought forth through voting, and these expected benefits really are greater than the time costs and other costs of voting, shouldn’t paying people with lower value of th...
Voting takes much more than five minutes and if you think otherwise you haven’t added up all the lost time. And determining how you should vote if you want to vote for things that lead to good outcomes requires extremely more than five minutes.
I don’t know what purpose it serves in the post. There are more significant reasons why copies of deceased persons would never be exact anyway, without needing to go into anything beyond classical physics.
It’s the mainstream view, but not the only one and not necessarily quite correct. The Standard Model is a quantum field theory incorporating special relativity and the particles are thought of as being quanta of fields. Regardless of whether the particles are entirely reducible to fields, fields are clearly more important overall than particles.
This unfortunately means that copies could never be absolutely exact as a consequence of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
The uncertainty principle doesn’t mean what you think: to replicate a person exactly, you just need to replicate exactly the values of each classical field at each point of space occupied by the person (the world is made of fields, not particles). You probably can’t do that, but it’s not the uncertainty principle that says you can’t do that.
What the uncertainty principle says is more like this: there are no wave functions in the pha...
The only real connection seems to be wanting to do math on on how good things are?
Yes, to me utilitarian ethical theories do seem usually more interested in formalizing things. That is probably part of their appeal. Moral philosophy is confusing, so people seek to formalize it in the hope of understanding things better (that’s the good reason to do it, at least; often the motivation is instead academic, or signaling, or obfuscation). Consider Tyler Cowen’s review of Derek Parfit’s arguments in On What Matters:
...Parfit at great length discusses optimific
I don’t see “utility” or “utilitarianism” as meaningless or nearly meaningless words. “Utility” often refers to von Neumann–Morgenstern utilities and always refers to some kind of value assigned to something by some agent from some perspective that they have some reason to find sufficiently interesting to think about. And most ethical theories don’t seem utilitarian, even if perhaps it would be possible to frame them in utilitarian terms.
Would you say you are one?
Yes, I consider it very likely correct to care about paths. I don’t care what percentage of utilitarians have which kinds of utilitarian views because the most common views have huge problems and are not likely to be right. There isn’t that much that utilitarians have in common other than the general concept of maximizing aggregate utility (that is, maximizing some aggregate of some kind of utility). There are disagreements over what the utility is of (it doesn’t have to be world states), what the maximization is over (doesn’t ...
Utilitarianism is pretty broad! There are utilitarians who care about the paths taken to reach an outcome.
To put it mildly, this is not really a desiderata at all, it's actually an extremely baffling property.
How can we decide an axiom used to pin down a bargaining solution is intuitive or baffling without first having a goal in mind? Which axioms are sound for the bargaining solution used to pick deals depends on the purpose that led us to want to apply bargaining theory to a problem. If you’re designing a file sharing protocol, you don’t care about bargaining chips. You just want the files to be distributed quickly. Or if you’re designing a standard for n...
Other than water, potatoes are mostly starch, which becomes easily digestible after cooking. This makes your blood sugar level go up and down fast and makes you feel hunger quickly after eating them. I don’t know the implications of eating potatoes on a long-run effect on how hungry you feel generally.
This is a fantastic post. Thank you for writing it!
In the case where there are zero observed successes (so 𝑆 = 0) in the last 𝑛 years, Gott’s formula
for the probability that the next success happens in the next 𝑚 = 𝑍 − 𝑛 years gives
which ends up being exactly the same as the time-invariant Laplace’s rule. The same happens if there was a success (𝑆 = 1) but we chose not to update on it because we chose to start the time period with it. So the time-invariant Laplace’s rule is a sort of generalization of Gott’s formula, which is neat.
“Eat nothing but 𝑋 for 𝑛 weeks” diets (where 𝑋 is a single food item that isn’t a meal replacement) are pretty bad diets that we wouldn’t want to follow even in the cases where they are effective at losing weight, which when they are they probably are for all sorts of bad reasons. You have more important concerns than losing weight. I wouldn’t follow such a diet for one week and would pay a good amount not to have to follow it for four weeks or longer periods of time; I don’t think people should be willing to participate in such studies for free.
That it...
There is no reason why you would want to convert stock to cash in a way related to how (or how much) dividends get paid, so it's purely an inconvenience. And the FIRE safe withdrawal rate is similarly in general unrelated to the dividend rate. Dividends are not relevant to anything.
No, because stock prices are more dependent than dividends on state variables that you don’t care about as a diversified long-term investor. See how smooth dividends are compared to stock prices: the dividends are approximately a straight line on log scale while the price is ...
I agree that steelmanning is bad and don’t know what to think of the “charity” cluster of principles (I at least think you should strive to understand what people said and respond as exactly as possible to what they said, not to what seems to you to be the strongest and most rational interpretation; that should only be a consideration for interpreting correctly what they said, if an interpretation being stronger makes it more likely that it was their interpretation; doing otherwise would just not be worth it even if only because it caused misunderstandings...
The air conditioner was intended as an example in which a product is shitty in ways the large majority of consumers don’t notice, and therefore market pressures don’t fix it.
But they do: among air-air heat pumps, dual hose air conditioners exist (but one hose versus two hoses is a huge gain in convenience), as do window air conditioners which are better (for efficiency; they cannot be installed in all windows), as do heat pumps with split indoor and outdoor units, which are much better (but more expensive). And ground-source heat pumps, which are better...
Are there any examples of how much to tax a few properties in a real (or real-ish) example?
Land values are lower than they would be without income taxes, so attempts to estimate how much can be raised with this methodology will underestimate the real number. Market prices for vacant plots ignore most of the value of land because of privileges and regulations suppressing most of that value. Real estate appraisals ignore even more value because assessors often use as basis income generated by land use without accounting for capital value and because they use historical values that lag behind.
Great post. Many of these arguments are fairly convincing.
My first 'dunk' on April 18, about a 5-year shortening of Metaculus timelines in response to evidence that didn't move me at all, asking about a Metaculus forecast of the Metaculus forecast 3 years later, implicitly predicts that Metaculus will update again within 3 years.
I do however claim it as a successful advance prediction, if something of a meta one
Wait, unless I misunderstand you there’s a reasoning mistake here. You request epistemic credit for predicting implicitly that the Metaculus median was going to drop by five years at some point in th...
If morality is subjective, why do I form moral opinions and try to act on them? I think I do that for the same reason I think I do anything else. To be happy.
What makes you happy is objective, so if that’s how you ground your theory of morality, it is objective in that sense. It’s subjective only in that it depends on what makes you happy rather than what makes other possible beings happy.
If morality is a thing we have some reason to be interested in and care about, it’s going to have to be grounded in our preferences. Our preferences, not any possible ...
Why is inequality morally relevant?
I don’t, but… I’d like to see some indication that the real knowledge is generated by discussion or investigation of meditation or Buddhism here. For example: global workspace theory, predictive processing, cognitive psychology, EEG, neuroscience, these weren’t motivated by meditation and Buddhism, I don’t think? Yes, there are neuroscientists who will write books about meditation and talk about interesting things in these books and also about less interesting things like their profound spiritual insights and I’m afraid the latter part of these books is th...
Meditation and Buddhism are of low interest to most rationalists who have not interacted with any of the in-person rationalist communities. My preference for how to approach these topics in the rationalist community would be: don’t, or do it in a place other than LessWrong frontpage, or do it much less than this. These hypotheses are being unreasonably privileged and overdiscussed on LessWrong relative to the ~nil amount of real knowledge that has been generated by the discussion and investigation so far.
Thank you for doing this analysis!
A post-scarcity society can be defined as a society in which all the basic needs of the population are met and provided for free.
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/universal-economics#lf1674_label_165
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/universal-economics#lf1674_head_187
I think I like this post, but not the approaches.
A correct solution to moral uncertainty must not be dependent on cardinal utility and requires some rationality. So Borda rule doesn’t qualify. Parliamentary model approaches are more interesting because they rely on intelligent agents to do the work.
An example of a good approach is the market mechanism. You do not assume any cardinal utility. You actually do not do anything directly with the preferences you have a probability distribution over at all. You have an agent for each and extrapolate what that age
...Fragility of value is used correctly only to make very different points from what you are stating here, that must result from how different the preference orderings you obtain are from the original preference orderings if you make changes to the complex computation that the values are. Consumer preferences in general equilibrium theory are a real-valued function whose domain is the consumption set, a subset of a full commodity space. This function can be used to define an order relation that represents the consumer’s preferences, each represented by...
because apparently the strongest evidence for "being the kind of person who buys X" is having bought X recently
In general, that you’ve bought something is evidence that you’re the kind of person who buys that thing. Furthermore, if you’ve bought certain items recently, you are far more likely to buy a similar product (for example, you regret the purchase and want to replace it) than someone who hasn’t.
The statement says “if transaction costs are zero, the market produces the efficient outcome”, but what is most interesting is the equivalent contrapositive “if the market didn’t produce the efficient outcome, it was because of transaction costs”.
I would add that the problem is not only transaction costs but also irrationality. You will not get the efficient outcome if the transaction costs are sufficiently low but the agents are not rational enough to think of the transaction or to consent to it. Also, some transaction c...
Category gerrymandering doesn’t seem like a different algorithm from selective reporting. In both cases, the reporter is providing only part of the evidence.
The systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials also say that vegetables and fruits (and, generally, minimally processed whole plant foods) are good for reducing all-cause mortality and heart disease. It’s not just the cohort studies. (1, 2)
The large cohort studies are great because they have large sample sizes, look at people living in normal conditions, and look at the most important outcomes (all-cause mortality, heart disease) over long periods of time.
The randomized controlled trials are great because they address confounding, directly. They’re... (read more)