All of Timothy Telleen-Lawton's Comments + Replies

[I have only read Elizabeth’s comment that I’m responding to here (so far); apologies if it would have been less confusing for me to read the entire thread before responding.]

I have always capitalized both EA and Rationality, and have never thought about it before. The first justification for capitalizing R that comes to mind is all the intentionality/intelligence that I perceive was invested into the proto-“AI Safety” community under EY’s (and others’) leadership. Isn’t it fair to describe the “Rationalist/Rationality” community as the branch of AI Safety/X-risk that is downstream of MIRI, LW, the Sequences, 🪄HPMOR, etc?

[I’m coming back to the comments in this post now and feeling grateful for all the engagement with our podcast. Apologies for being very low engagement on LW for the last decade.]

I just (re-?)noticed that I never addressed your curiosity about machine editing.

Yes, we made heavy use of an automatic transcript/audio editing tool. We can get you the name of it if desired, though I recommend reaching out to me offline if I don’t reply here sufficiently quickly to any follow-up questions you or anyone might have.

Your curiosity helps me realize that I think we s... (read more)

Awesome, thank you! I'm not sure if we're going to correct this; it's a pain in the butt to fix, especially in the YouTube version, and Elizabeth (who has been doing all the editing herself) is sick right now.

The group I played with (same as Mark Xu's group from comment above) decided that "S2 counting is illegal (you have to let your gut 'feel' the right amount of time)" and "repeating some elaborate ritual that takes the same amount of time before your card is due is illegal" (e.g. you can stick your hand 10% of the way towards the pile when the number's 10 off from your card, and 50% of the way when it's 5 off.)

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff — Totally changed the way I think about language and metaphor and frames when I read it in college. Helped me understand that there are important kinds of knowledge that aren't explicit.

What I get from Duncan’s FB post is (1) an attempt to disentangle his reputation from CFAR’s after he leaves, (2) a prediction that things will change due to his departure, and (3) an expression of frustration that more of his knowledge than necessary will be lost.

1. It's a totally reasonable choice.
2. At the time I first saw Duncan’s post I was more worried about big changes to our workshops from losing Duncan than I have observed since then. A year later I think the change is actually less than one would expect from reading Duncan

All of these answers so far (Luke, Adam, Duncan) resonate for me.

I want to make sure I’m hearing you right though, Duncan. Putting aside the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of the original question, do the scenes/experiences that Luke and Adam describe match what you remember from when you were here?

Agreed I wouldn’t take the ratanon post too seriously. For another example, I know from living with Dario that his motives do not resemble those ascribed to him in that post.

+1 (I'm the Executive Director of CFAR)

What do you recommend if good data is too costly to collect?

I think that if someone has made a claim but failed to use good data or an empirical model, it should not require good data or an empirical model to convince that person that they were wrong. Great if you have it, but I'm not going to ignore an argument just because it fails to use a model.

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".

Great! This is the only 'complete' argument I've seen that our prior for animal products industries should be that they are increasing-cost rather than constant-cost. I'm not as confident as you seem to be, but that's more of a quibble at this point, and I'm glad we agree on the meta-prior!

The challenge then is to convince Norwood and Lusk that we want to know the long-run impact of consumer choices on animal production, not the short-run! They're clearly estimating short-run elasticities since (a) their supply curves are way too steep, even for an increas... (read more)

Given our confidence for opposing positions and your credentials my best guess is that there's a miscommunication, in which case my guess on your correctness won't be well defined. Perhaps there's some critical word I'm using colloquially that has an importantly different meaning in economics.

The most important factor of production in haircuts is human labour. If you double the population of a country, then you double the number of haircuts demanded, but you also double the amount of labour supplied.

To get around the objection of increasing labor, let's assume instead that everyone in the country decides to permanently get their hair cut twice as often as before. What do you expect the real price of haircuts to be in 10 years? Significantly higher, about the same, or significantly less? My prior is "about the same" until I have mor... (read more)

Given your credentials, I can't fathom you disagree that shifts in demand can cause shifts in the short-run supply curve in the long-run. E.g. if lots of people start/stop eating meat, the short-run supply curve will look different 5 years from now due to that change alone.

Given that I believe you agree with that, I deduce that you only mean that changes in demand cannot shift the short-run supply curve in the short-run, nor shift the long-run supply curve in the long-run. With that I do agree by definition.

Funny that the only post by someone acknowledging... (read more)

You're the first person who disagrees with my conclusion but is willing to admit that some industries will be decreasing-cost (wherein we should expect greater than 1:1 effect on production); that is very refreshing!

in the extreme, every industry is increasing-cost, simply because of resource scarcity (consider the situation if computer game demand was so high that 90% of the population worked as game developers).

Yes, I agree in the extremely-large case. What about the extremely-small case? It's very hard to think of a fledgling market for which the av... (read more)

The default assumption is that industries are increasing-cost, because low-hanging fruit is picked first.

I agree this effect will push towards an increasing-cost industry, but there are other effects at play that might be even more powerful such that the industry is constant- or decreasing-cost. For an extreme example, consider the market for computer games; I expect this to be a decreasing-cost industry (the more people buy computer games, the cheaper-per-quality they will be in the long-run, even ignoring technology improvements). For a more moderate ... (read more)

If just one consumer decided to not buy the good at any price this is what would happen.

Yes, I'm referring to a decrease in a consumer's purchases at any price (such as someone becoming vegetarian in a chicken market) not just at one price (in which case, if the price lowered a cent, they would re-enter the market); I agree this also counts as a decrease in demand.

The answer is that it depends, and the decrease in sales could be tiny or huge depending on elasticities.

Yes, if you mean 'long-run elasticities' then we agree. In fact the only thing that... (read more)

Based on the comments to this article I realized a stronger appeal to established economic theory would probably be more convincing. I've made that appeal in a separate post: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/lj0/misapplied_economics_and_overwrought_estimates/

OK so you have no prior for large cases, you have no prior about the relationship between large cases and small cases, and your guess for small cases is "zero impact".

My prior for large cases is 1:1 impact, my prior is that the impact in large cases is proportionally similar to the impact in small cases, and therefore my prior for small cases is 1:1 impact.

My "not buying a chicken" seems like it would look very similar to anyone else's "not buying a chicken".

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 s... (read more)

That question seems to have a simple answer: your decision will not affect the long-term production of chicken.

OK, so I argue option A, you state option B, and the articles I link argue option C.

That is a much more complicated question

I agree it's a complicated question (in that it requires lots of information to answer precisely and accurately). If you had no empirical data to work with, what would be your best guess/expectation? Also if your answer is proportionally different than in the 'single chicken' case, I'd be curious to know why.

Right. In this case, to answer the question, "If I decide to reduce my lifetime consumption of chicken by one, should I expect the long term production of chicken to drop by ~1, ~0, or something in between?" Which is of demonstrated interest to the authors I am critiquing.

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... (read more)

Empirical evidence is nice and often more convincing than theory, but I don't think it's necessary for an argument to be convincing (to believe otherwise would be quite... burdensome).

In this case, the original articles I am critiquing used purely theoretical arguments to claim that there will be long term price elasticity of supply, and I think that a theoretical critique is sufficient to show that the strength of their arguments is currently too weak to support the complexity of their theory.

I'm certainly open to any empirical evidence that may exist. Would you find a quick analysis of Big Macs moving (or if not, do you have a suggestion for a different empirical analysis)?

No, I haven't looked at the empirical evidence because I didn't think it would be as convincing as the 2 theoretical arguments I made in the original post; let me know if you are aware of any such analysis.

Would you accept the results we find from an analysis of Big Macs as relevant?

• Since Big Macs aren't generally transported across national boundaries, we can think of the market for Big Macs in each country as largely independent.
• While we would both expect various factors such as the price of labor to affect the price of Big Macs differently in each co

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 immed... (read more)

This is true in the short term, but in the long term, the dynamic changes for producers:

• The producers that know how to make chickens for $8 scale up or their production strategy is replicated by others.
• The marginal cost of production (and hence price) keeps falling until all producers are making no profit (relative to opportunity cost of capital)
• The industry can scale up/down (in the long term) to meet changing demand, but it can't drive prices any lower. If prices were any higher the industry would scale up in the short term and keep expanding until t

I think your scenario is a good illustration of "finite inputs", which I listed as one of five example ways in which the long term supply curve may not actually be flat (at the end of the original article).

While I think that finite supply is a very real force (that, if strong enough, would create significant long term price elasticity of supply as you claim), the other four examples I mentioned also seem very real to me, and it's not obvious which ones win out for any particular industry.

If Cost always grew with industry size, products in big in... (read more)

So what you are basically saying is that in the long run the price will be driven close to the lowest average price -- right?

Yes; in the long term the producers that have higher-than-average Costs will be driven out of the market.

Still not quite, as once you recognize that "perturbations" will happen, you need to engage in some risk management (zero mean does not imply zero volatility). In your scenario the chicken producer seems to be fine with the 50% chance of going bankrupt at the delivery time which isn't a good assumption to make.

I'm... (read more)

If the received wisdom is that a larger chicken industry will increase the price of chicken feed, then my prior is that it's true in the short term, but not the long term. Chicken feed might be in finite supply, in which case Cost might grow with chicken industry size, but there are other reasons I can imagine Cost might shrink with increasing chicken industry size (listed in original article) and I don't have enough confidence about any of these factors to break my prior that Cost at industry size 2X is ~Cost at industry size X.

Huh? A flat supply curve means that the producers will produce the same number of chicken regardless of the price at which they can sell them. I don't see why this should be true in long term.

I mean "horizontal" rather than "vertical". In that sense, a flat supply curve means a constant price, not a constant quantity.

Not quite. You are implicitly assuming that the Cost is fixed in stone and it isn't. The chicken producer should accept all 10-year forwards on chicken if and only if he can buy matching forwards on his production inpu

It's important to note that supply and demand aren't perfectly linear. If you reduce your demand for meat, the suppliers will react by lowering the price of meat a little bit, making it so more people can buy it. Since chickens dominate the meat market, we'll adjust by the supply elasticity of chickens, which is 0.22 and the demand elasticity of chickens, which is -0.52, and calculate the change in supply, which is 0.3. Taking this multiplier, it's more accurate to say you're saving 7.8 land animals a year or more. Though, there are a lot of complex c

One can be very modern and say that supply and demand curves are not real, but they are.

I'm not arguing that supply curves aren't real; I'm arguing that the super-long term supply curve is virtually flat (the price elasticity of supply is arbitrarily high). I find it compelling to imagine a chicken producer accepting contracts to produce chickens 10 years from now. At what prices and quantities would the producer accept the contracts? I would say it would accept all contracts at or above the Cost, at as high a quantity as possible. With lead time and ce... (read more)

Yes; another way to think of this is, "How do you model waste?"

• If you think waste is best modeled by a fixed percentage of all production, then our best guess about the waste is that it changes proportionally with consumption. We don't get to magically assign our consumption to the 'waste' category without highly specific information (such as, "I found it in a dumpster").
• If you expect the percentage of waste to grow/shrink with industry size, that could be an argument for slightly less/more than 1:1 effect (I'd put it in the "Ga

In your model, how can you tell how close a market is to reaching the thresholds you suggest? In other words, if we are somewhere in the middle of converting a "large swath" of the population to vegetarianism, how can we tell if we're at a point of 1 effect?

My guess is that we can't distinguish between those cases, in which case the best we can do is to average out over all long periods of time/market states and estimate that our long term effect is 1:1 (even though, in every case, it probably isn't exactly that).

Thanks to everyone who granted me karma! I just posted the article here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lgy/how_much_does_consumption_affect_production/

Hi, I've been following LW and the occasional article for a couple years but have never posted any comments. Now I'd like to post an article but I need 20 karma to do so. If you don't mind up-voting this comment to allow me to do that, please do!

If it helps, the post I've drafted is about some of the altruistic eating arguments I've seen in the broader LW network such as:

• Benquo's recent article on suffering per calorie of food
• peter_hurford's Why eat less meat?
• Compassion, by the Pound
• ACE's Effects of Diet Choices on Animals

I use one neoclassical eco... (read more)