Upvoted for asking an interesting question, but my answer would be "probably not". Whether patents are a good idea even as is is debatable — see Michele Boldrin and David Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly — and I expect beefing them up to be bad on the margin.
I'm unclear on whether the proposed super-patents would
be the same as normal patents except fileable before the work of sketching a plausible design has been done, or
would be even more powerful, by also allowing the filer to monopolize a market in which they carry out e.g. "mar
I believe the following is a comprehensive list of LW-wide surveys and their turnouts. Months are those when the results were reported.
And now in the current case we have "about 300" responses, although results haven't been written up and published. I hope they will be. If the only concern is sample size, well, 300 beats zero!
I found the same article on an ad-blocker-friendly website. And here's a direct link to the academic article in Complexity.
I think in January I read you as amplifying James_Miller's point, giving "tariff and other barriers" as an example of something to slot into his "Government regulations" claim (hence why I thought my comment was germane). But in light of your new comment I probably got your original intent backwards? In which case, fair enough!
I hope this a joke.
Yeah — scurvy's no fun!
Did Kuhn (or Popper or Lakatos) spell out substantial implications of the analogy? A lot of the interest would come from that, rather than the fact of the analogy in itself.
Let's say two AIs want to go to war for whatever reason. Then they can agree to some other procedure that predicts the outcome of war (e.g. war in 1% of the universe, or simulated war) and precommit to accept the outcome as binding. It seems like both would benefit from that.
My (amateur!) hunch is that an information deficit bad enough to motivate agents to sometimes fight instead of bargain might be an information deficit bad enough to motivate agents to sometimes fight instead of precommitting to exchange info and then bargain.
...Coming up with an exte
The amount of wastage from bitcoin mining pales compared to the GDP spent on traditional forms of trust. Think banking isn't contributing to global warming? Well all those office buildings have lights and electricity and back-room servers, not to mention the opportunity costs.
That provoked me to do a Fermi estimate comparing banking's power consumption to Bitcoin's. Posting it in case anyone cares.
Estimated energy use of banking
The service sector uses 7% of global power and produces 68% of global GDP. Financial services make up about 17% of global GDP, ...
You reminded me of a tangentially related post idea I want someone to steal: "Ideologies as Lakatosian Research Programmes".
Just as people doing science can see themselves as working within a scientific research programme, people doing politics can see themselves as working within a political research programme. Political research programmes are scientific/Lakatosian research programmes generalized to include normative claims as well as empirical ones.
I expect this to have some (mildly) interesting implications, but I haven't got round to extracting them.
I'm flashing back to reading Jim Fearon!
Fearon's paper concludes that pretty much only two mechanisms can explain "why rationally led states" would go to war instead of striking a peaceful bargain: private information, and commitment problems.
Your comment brushes off commitment problems in the case of superintelligences, which might turn out to be right. (It's not clear to me that superintelligence entails commitment ability, but nor is it clear that it doesn't entail commitment ability.) I'm less comfortable with setting aside the issue of priva...
(you will find the opinion of Rational Wiki around here is much lower than the of Christianity)
Plausibly people around here talk more smack about RW than about Christianity, but I'm doubtful that we actually think RW worse than Christianity!
I've thought a bit about writing a summary/review of Christopher Achen & Larry Bartels's recent book Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government for LW, since I expect it'd interest quite a few people here. But I'm fairly sure I won't bother now; a week ago a decent summary appeared on the blog of a couple of FRI researchers.
Also relevant:
I agree with the normative statement that pensioners who pay in are "entitled to get something out", but it's a new claim. My comment, like the bit of entirelyuseless's comment to which it responded, was about an empirical claim.
Pensioners have paid into the system, though.
The fact remains that there is a big group of people in Europe who can, in fact, claim government cash even if they declare that they have worked, and could work, but just don't want to work. Insofar as entirelyuseless's general point was that someone has to work to keep an...
Ah, OK, I read your "political decision [...] is quite clearly responsible" as referring to your previous sentence, not your previous comment.
...Europe has a better unemployment system than the USA, for example, but even in Europe (at least in general and if I understand it correctly, and obviously the details differ in various places), there needs to be at least a bit of ambiguity about why you are unemployed. If you openly say, "I am perfectly competent and well qualified for many jobs, and I know from experience that I could get one next week if I wanted. In fact I just received an offer, which I rejected. I do not WANT to work, and I won't," even Europe will not continue offering you
For example, if you're a single mother minding a child, you're providing value, but your child is unlikely to pay you for that! (You reminded me of the feminists' observation that women disproportionately do work, like childcare, which is often left uncounted or under-counted in conventional economic accounts.)
Brad DeLong wrote in 2003 that "the market system's social welfare function gives each individual a weight inversely proportional to his or her marginal utility of wealth", which he found "a completely trivial result"! Here is his algebra. Last year he pointed to Takashi Negishi as someone who published the result in 1960.
Edit: though to get the result that the weights are proportional to relative wealth you have to add the assumption that utility goes as log wealth.
Tokyo's population has grown and is growing, but that seems to account for most of Tokyo's economic growth, not zoning regulations, since Tokyo's GDP per capita shows fairly anaemic growth from 2001 to 2012 (can't immediately find a longer time series).
I suspect the answer is "not in general, unless you're willing to pump extra money into the payment-extracting mechanism". Depending on how generally you define "free rider problem", at least some examples of the problem are likely to be captured by Holmström's theorem: a system which pays each member of a team to to provide inputs to produce output can't balance its budget (exactly split the output's value among the team members), be self-enforcing, and Pareto efficient.
I think your fresh paint example is susceptible to Holmströmean lo...
Maybe a side note, but it's not obvious to me that
When you are losing you increase variance. When you are winning you decrease it.
is in general true, whether normatively or empirically.
I think a lot more can be said about this, but maybe that's best left to a full post, I'm not sure. Let me know if this was too long / short or poorly worded.
Writing style looks fine. My quibbles would be with the empirical claims/predictions/speculations.
Is the elite really more of a cognitive elite than in the past?
Strenze's 2007 meta-analysis (previously) analyzed how the correlations between IQ and education, IQ and occupational level, and IQ and income changed over time. The first two correlations decreased and the third held level at a modest 0.2....
Um. Not in economics where it is well-defined. Capital is resources needed for production of value.
While capital is resources needed for production of value, it's a bit misleading to imply that that's how it's "well-defined" "in economics", since the reader is likely to come away with the impression that capital = resources needed to produce value, even though not all resources needed for production of value are capital. Economics also defines labour & land* as resources needed for production of value.
* And sometimes "entrep...
I recognize the difference, but I don't think it's an important one for the purposes of deciding whether to oppose a type of discussion. (I wouldn't expect, in general, a person's honest report of their experience to be much more valuable than someone else's honest attempt to sketch a general model of some phenomenon.) It's also a different objection to Dagon's, which is basically "boo political/social identity, because identity is hard to talk about!".
Edit to add:
Historically, we also had the downvote button.
Yep, if we still had the downvote button, I probably would've just downvoted Dagon's comment and left it at that.
This would be a little more interesting if he linked to his advance predictions on the war so we could compare how he did. And of course if he had posted a bunch of other predictions so we could see how he did on those (to avoid cherry-picking).
We may be able to get part of the way there. I found the following suspiciously prediction-like (and maybe even testable!) statements by Ctrl-Fing the pre-invasion posts on D-Squared's blog.
From October 21, 2002:
...On the other hand, I am also convinced by Max Sawicky’s argument that Iraq is likely to be the firs
Older home appliances were also a lot more expensive in real terms (that is, controlling for inflation).
A point brought home to me by the MetaFilter discussion of the article linked in our OP:
Part of it is that the appliances are also literally cheaper. It looks like a full size fridge cost about $500 in the 60s, which works out to $3500 adjusted for inflation.
The example I was going to use was washers and dryers, which cost about $385 for the set in 1959, or about $3200 in current money.
...I found a stash of business records from 1913, for a c
I strongly disagree. (This is a special case of my general disagreement with strong forms of Politics-is-the-Mind-Killer-type objections to discussing capital-P Political topics.) I also want to amplify Gram_Stone's observation that this kind of topic was historically acceptable on LW.
Yep.
The school → university transition might be the most interesting one WRT tristanm's question, because although it theoretically offers the best opportunity to select for rationality, in practice a lot of people can't or won't exploit the opportunity. I imagine even quite nerdy students, when deciding where to apply to university, didn't spend long asking themselves, "how can I make sure I wind up at a campus with lots of rationalists?" (I sure didn't!)
!
That clarifies things somewhat.
It makes me paranoid and alienated if people I know join facebook groups that advocate political violence/murder/killing all the kulaks, although to be fair its possible that those people have only read one or two posts and missed the violent ones.
Does it help to disaggregate "political violence", political "murder", and "killing all the kulaks"? I'm happy with some instances of political violence, and even some political murders are defensible. The assassination of Jonas Savimbi pretty much ended Angola's 26-year civil war...
The (speculative) explanation my mind immediately goes to: a combination of the you-are-the-average-of-your-5-best-friends heuristic, and the dilution of a selected social group when its members move into new environments.
Universities and workplaces, with unusual exceptions, are probably not going to select as aggressively for high rationality (however you define "rational" & "rationality") as your in-school social selection did. So (I suspect) when the people in your circle started expanding their own social networks during univers...
Related to your second paragraph, I was intrigued when I saw economists pointing out that even low-skilled immigrants could raise natives' productivity & income by (1) nudging natives to upskill and move into higher-skill jobs, and (2) lowering childcare & housework costs, making it easier for native women to work paid jobs.
I guess gathering links to multiple related articles under one LW post makes sense.
I might've been influenced too much by people speaking to me (in face-to-face conversation) as if moral realism entails objectivity of moral facts, and maybe also influenced too much by the definitions I've seen online. Wikipedia's "Moral realism" article starts outright with
...Moral realism (also ethical realism or moral Platonism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report
I agree with the substantive point that the changes in living standards we ultimately care about come from productivity growth, not GDP growth as such.
Now for the inevitable disagreements/critiques:
The post title, "Increasing GDP is not growth", isn't actually true as such. Referring to increasing GDP as economic growth isn't a weird LW/transhumanist/etc. affectation; it's totally normal & conventional. If I heard a newsreader talking about economic growth, I'd guess they were most likely talking about (inflation-adjusted) GDP going up.
Th
Relating to that, I have sometimes wondered whether recent government policies to lower the number of foreign students & graduates in the UK might backfire by degrading UK-Chinese relations in the long run.
There are ~100k Chinese students in the UK, which presumably translates to a flow of ~30k per year. Although small compared to China's population, reducing that flow might eventually have some impact on how the Chinese and UK states relate to each other, since those students are relatively likely to be China's movers & shakers of tomorrow, and re...
IMO, an unadorned link to a news website (unless it's more directly LW related) seems better suited to the open thread or media thread.
Do you think that we cant say its a moral fact that [...]
Correct, I would call that a category error.
And this moral evaluation depends on your state of mind?
One's view of the wrongness of torturing a newborn versus soothing it depends on one's state of mind, yes.
If I were confronted with someone who insisted that "torturing a newborn instead of soothing it is good, actually", I could say that was "wrong" in the sense of evil, but there is no evidence I could present which, in itself, would show it to be "wrong" in the sense of incorrect.
IEPB: "People ought to do X" is your preference because you are assuming "People ought to do X" is a moral fact. It's a different issue whether your assumption is true or false, or justified or unjustified, but the assumption is being made nevertheless.
If my mental model of moral philosophers is correct, this contravenes how moral philosophers usually define/use the phrase "moral fact". Moral facts are supposed to (somehow) inhere in the outside world in a mind-independent way, so the origin of my "People ought to do X...
I think the 2004 numbers are actually higher than you suggest. Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo is the third in the Man With No Name trilogy, but North by Northwest and Memento seem to be original.
Oops, thanks for picking me up on those. You're correct about IBIBIC and North by Northwest (maybe I mixed up the second with Psycho?). I'm not sure about Memento. On first Google it looked like Jonathan Nolan had written a short story with a similar premise, and that his brother Christopher had developed the film from the same premise, but without adapting the...
Accidental self-link?
The issue, as I understand gjm, is whether there's a confounding factor.
Treating the correlation between choosing nonviolence (call that N for short) and succeeding in a political campaign (call that S) as accurately representing causality works if one assumes causation runs exclusively as N → S. gjm observes that expected probability of success (P) could be a confounding factor: maybe we have the extra causal arrows N ← P → S, as well as N → S.
According to her blog comment, Chenoweth did try to tackle this by establishing that there's no N ← P causal arro...
Like BiasedBayes, this article reads to me as putting forward a false dichotomy. Unlike BiasedBayes, I don't think that "wellbeing" or "science" have much to do with why I'm unconvinced by the article.
To me the third alternative to the dichotomy is, unsurprisingly, my own view: moral facts don't exist, and "right" & "wrong" are shorthand for behaviour of which I strongly approve or disapprove. My approvals & disapprovals can't be said to be moral facts, because they depend solely on my state of mind, but I'm ...
Delightfully, both the Internet Archive and IMDb are venerable enough that we can see how IMDb's top 250 looked 13 years ago. That lets us do a rough test of whether sequel 'n' adaptation spam clogging the chart is a new phenomenon.
IMDb's top 10, as of June 6, 2004:
A good point to keep in mind, though it looks like Erica Chenoweth has tried to address it:
...In my book with Maria Stephan, we devote an entire quantitative chapter (where we use multiple two-stage models identifying both the choice of NV/V resistance and the link between this choice and the outcome) and four cases studies to this possibility. We find that, while it’s true that people consider the costs before acting, the information environments in which they are operating are highly uncertain and that the selection process isn’t really influencing a majo
I was polled.
Do continue trying to put words into my mouth. That's absolutely going to convince me that it's worth responding to you with good arguments.
I think this post underrates two general rationalist skills, plus some assorted empirical facts. First, the two skills.
... (read more)Avoiding the fallacy of the one-sided wager. The post talks about cost-benefit analysis, but in a complete cost-benefit analysis one has to consider the risks of both choices under offer, not just one. The post takes specific notice of the default course of action's risks (money, tears, side effects) but focuses less on the risks of the alternative (e.g. toddlers winding up in the ER because they're shitting themselves half to death from