I am bound by many contracts signed by Congress and they didn't even have well-aligned incentives.
Thanks for the suggestions!
My plan was to include a 1-day lag of the independent variable as a control variable in some of the regressions and see what effect that had.
Yep, plan to do that, and then also add a 'date' control variable as well.
repeat, as I posted at the end of the last Open Thread, probably too late in its life for comments.
I'm planning on running an experiment to test the effects of Modafinil on myself. My plan is to use a three armed study:
Each day I will randomly take one of the three options and perform some test. I was thinking of dual-n-back, but do people have any other suggestions?
I'm planning on running an experiement to test the effects of Modafinil on myself. My plan is to use a three armed study:
Each day I will randomly take one of the three options and perform some test. I was thinking of dual-n-back, but do people have any other suggestions?
You've misunderstood Jacob's suggestion. Under his system there are no 'claims' - the health insurer simply pays for whatever healthcare it thinks will extend promote your health, up to the value it gets from your prolonged health (presumably around $100k / QALY )
The government is incentivised to keep people alive and paying tax, and disincentivised to treat people unnecessarily.
Unfortunately I don't think that's true:
...Many Californians - most Californians - are assets. That is: productive citizens, or children who will grow up and become productive citizens. Their place is the left side of the balance sheet. Their presence in California increases California's productive power, and thus its value as a financial asset.
As the King begins the transition from democracy, however, he sees at once that many California
Thanks very much, this is very helpful. I had never heard of the books that I guess it looked like I was writing fanfic for!
In a small attempt to help, I cross-post all my high-quality LW-relivant posts to LW.
I don't suppose someone who knows lisp (?) could explain the comment someone made on reddit here ? Despite writing the original story, I don't understand their explanation!
Good idea; done!
in which case you would be begging the question.
No, I am explaining how the appearance of transgender people is consistent with the conservative view: they are simply confused. I am not assuming anything.
a counterexample to their existing model of the human condition
I'm not sure how this could be counted as a counterexample to anyone's model. Presumably most people would agree that there are people who are confused about their sexuality. It would only be a counterexample to that model if the student was correct, but whether or not the student is correct is precisely what we are discussing.
If James agreed with the student, this would not be a counterexample to his beliefs, and if he disagrees with the student, it he would not agree that they represented a counterexample to the model.
What does it mean to be female? It has to be something such that babies, animals and people in tribal cultures can be classified as female or not. Lets call this property, that baby girls, hens and women in hunter-gatherer tribes share, and baby boys etc. do not, property P. People who identify as female are presumably claiming they have property P, and presumably think this is a substantive claim.
Now, could P be something such that merely believing you had property P, made you have property P? Certainly there are some properties like this:
I think of it as outsourcing my RSS feed.
Obviously YMMV; I work in investment.
I like the test. It seems to have multiple levels, each of which Brennan passes:
There are cases like this!
Do people who passionate argue for buying a home instead of renting violate the Efficient Market Hypothesis?
The explanation for this market inefficiency, as for so many others, is the government. There are massive tax benefits to owner-occupied housing, like the non-taxation of imputed rent. This means that the value of a house to a homeowner exceeds the value to a landlord. This plus the liquidity-constraints of the marginal homebuyer mean that the marginal house is worth more to the marginal homebuyer than he is able to pay for it.
As for whether peopl...
I don't think so - an important part of Pascal's Mugging is that the demon acts second - you produce a joint probability and utility function, and then he exploits the fact that the former doesn't fall as fast as the latter rises.
Yes, I meant over adult children. I don't think this has much impact on minors.
My pleasure! I love blog page-views.
It also means that discovering the universe is older than we currently expect ould significantly raise the EV of such research. Any probability of non-finite history could cause the EV to blow up.
Hmm, an interesting combination of arguments!
I'll have to think about rebuttals. My concern is that by explicitly mentioning arguments that I think are silly we give them a certain level of credence. In some cases I've tried to indirectly address them, but maybe I should put more work into that. Alternatively I could write a separate 'Common Objections' article.
I'm really glad to see other people thinking these thoughts, and I would love to figure out how to make this a reality.
Awesome! I don't have much in the way of practical ideas here, beyond talking about it, writing about it, and posting links in high-readership locations.
Yeah, that section is called speculative for a reason!
I guess the attractiveness of this option partly rests on whether you think parents generally have too much or too little influence/incentive/involvement in their children or not.
I think the same essential abuses that exist with debt exist here, so time-limitation (say equity stops yielding returns after 15-20 years, and can be discharged by bankruptcy) is important.
Yeah, so in the examples I assumed a 20yr duration. Note that student loan debt is currently not able to be discharged through bankruptcy though.
I worry about abuses when the equity stake is high. If you're a mentor, and your investment decides they don't really want to prioritize income maximization, what will you do?
Take a loss? Investors are used to small part...
I basically agree with everything you said.
With regards the race and socio-economic background issue, I agree, only noting that this is similarly an issue for job applications and other financial products. Reality is not race-blind; at some point you have to deal with it, and this is not a special case.
Perhaps it would be easier to do in England (or some other non-US country) for this reason.
Yeah, good point. You could address this through contingencies - have it be part of the contract that you had to carry on in engineering - but I expect investors would simply have to take the hit. This is basically the issue I was talking about in the section on Adverse Selection.
The expected income of an incoming freshman engineering student versus the expected income of a graduating engineering student are two very different numbers.
Yup, I agree. Incoming freshmen who said they wanted to do engineering might get a slight discount - only a year or two in, once they've passed some courses and actually declared would they get the full discount. I figure this is the sort of thing the market is capable of pricing in.
Congratulations! You are very unusually virtuous.
Sure, maybe you think it's not morally obligatory. But EAs who think it's good to give 10% generally think it's better to give 20%, and similarly maybe it is permissible to abort a baby but morally better to not.
you would support impregnating every fertile female, voluntarily or forcibly, if you expect this to maximize QALY
No, but that's not what the repugnant conclusion is. The RC is about the desirability of an end-state - highly populous worlds could be very desirable and yet some methods for achieving such worlds still be morally impermissible. There can be side-constraints, to use Nozick's (?) terminology, or other values at stake.
You might find [this article] on population ethics interesting.
...Or do you qualify it by saying "maximize the QALYs of eve
Yeah there are many cases where the math I did would produce a different answer. But I think this concern at least remains hypothetical.
pick-pocketing
If you add "socially useful" or "not immoral" obviously this is excluded.
High barrier to entry. I expect that at my current skill level I'd get caught pick-pocketing the first time I tried it, and that would impact my ability to try it a second time.
Your guess would be mistaken! I think I am much more concerned about the autonomy than the average EA, which is a large part of the reason I write the only libertarian effective altruist blog I'm aware of.
But most EAs do not seem to care about autonomy, hence why I pointed out than autonomy arguments, a classic pro-abortion argument, are not available to them.
Meta: I think you may have had a negative reaction to my post because you (perhaps reasonably) pattern-matched me as an ideological opponent, which I think is a (perhaps reasonable) mistake. I think s...
Yes I deliberately avoided discussing the law for this reason, and to try to keep down the number of open worm-filled cans.
Full open boarders, although Michelle partly disagreed here, and many have concerns about immigration's effects on domestic policy/crime etc.
As someone who's had a very nuanced view of abortion, as well as a recent EA convert who was thinking about writing about this, I'm glad you wrote this. It's probably a better and more well-constructed post than what I would have been able to put together.
Thanks! It took a long time - and was quite stressful. I'm glad you liked it.
The argument in your post though, seems to assume that we have only two options, either to totally ban or not ban all abortion,
I actually deliberately avoided discussing legal issues (ban or not ban) because I felt the pur...
Yeah I think the repugnant conclusion is not actually very repugnant; it just seems so because of scope insensitivity.
But I would stress that the argument I make doesn't rely on your having a goal of maximizing QALYs. You might assign some credence to other moral views that take a stance on aborting fetuses; deontology, for example, or even just 'maximize the QALYs of everyone who is already alive.'
On the other hand we also have to take into account the reduced quality of other people's lives due to the existence of the new person: the resources she will consume, the work required to bring her up.
Yep, but it seems plausible these would be outweighed by the value she will create for others, assuming she eventually gets a job, pays taxes, etc. Assuming you think humanity is net positive value, absent some particular reason to think the child will be negative it seems reasonable to assume she will be positive.
...Btw, I think temporal discount is neces
The physical state of the fetus is not in question; the 'surprising discovery' here would be that an abortion has some quality of badness, one which is not implied by a subjective observer's desires or a full and complete understanding of the physical system.
I think I have two responses:
Else we'd say abstinence is fairly reprehensible, since it also prevents the creation of new people.
Yeah, I realise they're quite related positions. I often feel guilty for not having had children yet.
Can we factor that in?
My guess is that because everything is linear, treating a fetus as being like 0.3-person-weight will give you the same answer as treating them as having 1-person-weight with probability 30%
Great post. You can think of lots of on-going choices like this; whether to be nice to colleagues, for example, or making an effort to drive efficiently in a similar way. Accruals based accounting also gives you similar results, if you can manage the trick of actually assigning some amount of extra weight, unhappiness etc. to each unnecessary food item consumed.
Unfortunately in writing the article Vox themselves seem to have fallen prey to some of the same stupidity; if you're familiar with Vox's general left-wing sympathies you'll be unsurprised that the examples of stupidity used in the article are overwhelmingly from right-wing sources. If you really want to improve people's thinking, you need to focus on your own tribe at least as much as the enemy tribe.
I previously wrote about this here.