All of VijayKrishnan's Comments + Replies

My bad. Friedman's NIT implementation seems to be the exact same thing I wrote. NIT seems like a really lousy name for it though, given that it naturally lends itself to the interpretation in my previous comment ; as a fixed percentage bonus added to your salary by the government within some wage band.

I spent a bit of time looking at the details of Negative income tax. It is possible that I am not understanding the subtleties of Negative income tax but it appears that what I proposed is different and better than Negative Income tax. The reason for this is the following. In my scheme if a person is making wage y which is less than some threshold wage x, the state pays him (y-x)/2 which satisfied two objectives (1) People who are poorer get more state aid (2) People are still incentivized to work harder and make more money since their total payout (wages ... (read more)

1VijayKrishnan
My bad. Friedman's NIT implementation seems to be the exact same thing I wrote. NIT seems like a really lousy name for it though, given that it naturally lends itself to the interpretation in my previous comment ; as a fixed percentage bonus added to your salary by the government within some wage band.

| perhaps you have the good habit of translating the general thoughts in your mind into |exemplary exemplary (sic) words,

Yes I do and it has served me very well with regard to being a clearer communicator. It's all the more helpful when communicating with people less used to talking abstractly. I strongly suggest you try it. You'll save time and be more clear 95% of the time unless the people you are communicating with are some really biased sample.

| in which case you wouldn't have had this specific hint that this post was fairly off topic by its narrowness.

I have no idea what you are saying here :)
0lessdazed
narrow/specific/concrete<----------------------------------------------------------------->broad/abstract raise the gas tax 3 cents........................tax energy use............................internalize externalities Other people have downvoted your post/said it should be taken from the main page/criticized it and given general criticisms. I believe that I am being more specific than they and agreeing with them. The problem with this post is that it is narrow, specific, too close to an implementation that "should be implemented tomorrow!" It is not general enough, abstract enough, to fit here. I am articulating why I think it doesn't fit, and I think I am explaining why the others think so. So, if when considering whether or not to post something on the LW main page, part of what I am considering is an economic proposal with a big fat "3 cents" with the number three rather than something I am thinking of in variables, that should be a big flashing warning sign that I am making the mistake of suggesting something too removed from its abstract, generalizable framework, I am possibly summoning politics, the mind killer, as a side effect, and I probably committed the error of not thinking through a problem before being fixated on a specific, narrow solution. "Tax energy use" would be better, "internalize externalities" better still.

I am amused at this comment more than anything else. Of course it should have been (x-y)/r where 1<r<infinity. And of course correspondingly there is no reason to set x to exactly current minimum_wage* 1.5. Your preferred method of writing and talking reminds me a lot of what I tended to do as a Computer Science undergraduate who studied discrete mathematics and formal logic and liked to make statements unambiguously in first order logic. This was all the more because I was doing a bunch of courses that involved mathematical proofs which obviously le... (read more)

1Emile
For what it's worth, I didn't find lessdazed's comment harder to parse or "worse" than yours. Plus, it was shorter!
1lessdazed
I communicated my thoughts poorly. To some extent, I assumed you wrote it as you thought it, considering how the other things were variables and just as a general sense I had. The sign that it's not abstract and that you are likely not holding off on proposing solutions is in how one thinks about it regardless of how one ultimately writes it. I'm not primarily arguing that writing abstractly is always optimal (it admittedly may not have been here), but that thinking concretised is suboptimal, and writing concretised is correlated with concretized thinking. It's like Solomon's Problem. So I have no large beef with how you wrote it, and I think you wrote the idea you had in a more than adequate way, but I and many others see it as not on topic. I think that that is because it is too specific. If this (ideal?) way of writing was a reflection of your thoughts, that should have been a hint that the thoughts weren't general enough. My judgement is very susceptible to being wrong insofar as you may have thought about it totally abstractly and been good at avoiding too abstract writing; perhaps you have the good habit of translating the general thoughts in your mind into exemplary exemplary (sic) words, in which case you wouldn't have had this specific hint that this post was fairly off topic by its narrowness. This confused me for a while. In my opinion, it is more specific ideas that are better prepared to be implemented, i.e. the applications of more general forms. I hadn't expected as a defense against a charge of being too practical and not theoretical enough an emphasis of the distance between the idea and its implementation. In general, one isn't concerned with perfection in the initial presentation of any idea, that makes sense, and one brings up the distance from implementation to show critics (that's me) are nitpicking (me?) and misguided (could be me) when they treat a floated idea inappropriately by subjecting it to a standard suited for smoothing a refined

Agreed. But does this problem not exist in even bigger measure when you have min wage and social security for those unemployed as a result of minimum wage. The social security cannot be equal to the min wage, since otherwise no one would work at min wage. However the social security would presumably be something like 2/3 of min wage to ensure that those who are unemployed are able to have some decent standard of living. And this per your argument would put the implicit tax rate of those earning minimum wage at 67%!

3AShepard
I don't think that's quite right. The marginal tax rate is going to be 50% no matter the value of x, given your formula. Your social security payment is half the difference between your income and the x threshold, so each additional dollar you earn below that threshold loses you 0.5 dollars of social security. This is true whether the threshold is $10,000 or $100,000. You are right, though, that there will be a correspondence between the minimum wage and the level of x. I don't think this is causal, but popular notions about the ideal levels for both the minimum wage and 'x' will probably both reflect underlying notions about an "acceptable standard of living". If there's a correspondence between the level of the minimum wage and the fraction of people who give up working because of this system, I think it would be chiefly because of this correlation (in addition to the employment effect of having a minimum wage at all).

It's not obvious that it's a subsidy. This would be a subsidy only if an employer would have to pay a person less here compared to a market with no minimum wage laws and no social security. For example, imagine that in such a market a person's wage is $4 per hour (who is currently almost certainly unemployed in California due to the $8/hr min wage). Now let's analyze what happens to the prevailing wage of a person of similar skill with the above scheme where the government ensures that a person makes at least $6 an hour. The marginal utility of money is lo... (read more)

This seems to be a good idea. But the only problem with it is that the labor market is not as liquid as a financial market. It is in principle quite possible for a person in a free market to be commanding 1.5 * minimum_wage in a part time job or for part of the year, but unable to find work for the rest of the year or rest of the free time, which would push his annual salary below minimum wage. Theoretically there should be absolutely zero unemployment with no minimum wage laws. However in practice it would still be a couple of percent due to liquidity... (read more)

0Hyena
I don't think we need to handle liquidity problems, though, except through unemployment insurance. Designing its incentives would overcome most of its ill-effects (for example, creating a cash bonus for getting a job that diminishes the longer you on it, a la a shared savings model). I actually live on UI, I know way too much about what unemployment looks like from the inside at this point.

The ridiculous amount of activity by the untrained and uninformed on the stock markets seems to suggest that people could use a significantly higher amount of "zero sum" bias there. There are tons of people who would not peg their investment skill in the top 1%, who nonetheless think they have a good chance of making money in short term trades. There certainly seems to be the thinking that the stock market is a source of profits for one and all, regardless of investment skill and understanding.

This bias however is most prevalent in the idea that getting rich cannot possibly be a noble act, a point extensively addressed in Paul Graham's essays.

3multifoliaterose
Actually, in regards to your first point, I suspect that people do have an intuitive sense that playing the stock markets is a zero-sum game. I think that the main reason that people exhibit irrational stock market behavior is overconfidence bias.
0multifoliaterose
Great points. I will link this comment in my next post.

You are right about competition serving quite a useful purpose in the real world. However the real world is not like financial markets where you have liquidity by the milli second with regard to competing offers. If competition did a great job of providing an alternative in real time, they would be no need to do the following in pretty much any negotiation

  1. Pretend that you have lots of time and are in no hurry to close this deal with the other party or anyone else.
  2. Pretend that you looked up and found/know of much better deals elsewhere that what the othe
... (read more)

I have been heavily leaning towards the anti-cryonics stance at least for myself with the current state of information and technology. My reasons are mostly the following.

I can see it being very plausible that somewhere along the line I would be subject to immense suffering, over which death would have been a far better option, but that I would be either potentially unable to take my life due to physical constraints or would lack the courage to do so (it takes quite some courage and persistent suffering to be driven to suicide IMO). I see this as analogous... (read more)

I wrote "probably 50%". I guess it could be reasonably inferred that this is an extrapolation using my best guess coupled with actual numbers.

1wizzwizz4
Write “half”, or (if you're feeling pedantic), “~half”.

Agreed! In fact I was toying with the idea of emailing Robin this idea in a couple of lines as a potential idea for a future post at overcomingbias. I finally overcame inertia and went on to compose this :)

The 50% american divorce rate is mostly in line with published statistics. I don't think it is unrealistic to assume that an overwhelming majority of folks getting married, feel that they are getting married to "the one", so I am just keeping the 50% figure. In any case getting this number to be very accurate is not important to the argument, so I didn't care to get the best possible estimate of this possible.

9Vladimir_Nesov
Then say "a fair portion of", not "50%". Saying "50%" gives an illusion of actual data. I'm not so sure.

Yeah that's what I meant but wrote the sentence clumsily. Have corrected it now.

1Vladimir_Nesov
But can you keep the 50% figure while changing what it denotes? Where does the figure come from?

I think the legal details of this will need to be worked out but this is certainly very interesting! In theory, such a move ought to make you a more desirable wife and ought to prevent certain types of mistrust in the hypothetical husband. I doubt both of these would pan out in practice though, unless you are fairly certain to restrict your pool of potential husbands to the ultra-rationalists (who probably barely even exist in practice), or to guys who would a priori have preferred paternity testing, even before you bring it up to them.

One general question, folks. This is my first lesswrong post. What do I need to have this post as part of the "promoted posts" and consequently accessible to more readers of this site. Till today I never even noticed the new tabs post, which is currently the only easy way to reach my post.

Thanks.

2kpreid
— About Less Wrong
2cupholder
My understanding is that one of a handful of editors has to manually promote your post, which they tend to do if (a) they wrote the post, (b) the post gets a high (about 20+) score, or (c) it's about a Less Wrong meetup.

(1) and (2) seem pretty easy.

If there is a contradiction in pre-pre nups, either one party reneges on the contract and pays the stiff price or the marriage doesn't take place. When you opt for such a pre-pre-nup you are presumably willing to eliminate the pool of potential partners who are fundamentally opposed to the terms of your pre-pre-nup. Think of this as ideally no different from a situation when community property and other similar laws were abolished. In such a situation, you are free to turn down suitors who want pre-nups that enforce community ... (read more)

I am puzzled by Eliezer's confidence in the rationality of signing up for cryonics given he thinks it would be characteristic of a "GODDAMNED SANE CIVILIZATION". I am even more puzzled by the commenters overwhelming agreement with Eliezer. I am personally uncomfortable with cryonics for the two following reasons and am surprised that no one seems to bring these up.

  1. I can see it being very plausible that somewhere along the line I would be subject to immense suffering, over which death would have been a far better option, but that I would be eith
... (read more)
5Technologos
Could you supply a (rough) probability derivation for your concerns about dystopian futures? I suspect the reason people aren't bringing those possibilities up is that, through a variety of elements including in particular the standard Less Wrong understanding of FAI derived from the Sequences, LWers have a fairly high conditional probability Pr(Life after cryo will be fun | anybody can and bothers to nanotechnologically reconstruct my brain) along with at least a modest probability of that condition actually occurring.
4JesterMatrix
Thank God, I've been lurking on this forum for years now, and its this one that I have never felt like such an outsider on this forum, especially with the very STRONG language Eliezer uses throughout both this post and the other one. It felt as if I was being called more than just a bit irrational but stupid for thinking there was a more than negligible chance that I upon waking I would be in a physical or mental state in which death was preferable yet I would be unable to deliver. I can see it being very plausible to be awoken in extreme and constant agony, or perhaps in some sort of permanent vegetative state, or in some sort of not yet imagined unbreakable continued and torturous servitude for the 1,000+ years. I just do not the risks as outweighing the benefits of simply being alive.

If you were hit by a car tomorrow, would you be lying there thinking, 'well, I've had a good life, and being dead's not so bad, so I'll call the funeral service' or would you be calling an ambulance?

Ambulances are expensive, and doctors are not guaranteed to be able to fix you, and there is chance you might be in for some suffering, and you may be out of society for a while until you recover - but you call them anyway. You do this because you know that being alive is better than being dead.

Cryonics is just taking this one step further., and booking your ambulance ahead of time.

I suspect that Eliezer too has a similar opinion on this

Nope, ongoing disagreement with Robin. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ws/for_the_people_who_are_still_alive/

...while not being quite sane enough to actually notice you're driving away the very gender you're trying to seduce from our nascent rationalist community, and consequentially shut up about PUA... In the end, PUA is not something we need to be talking about here, and if it's giving one entire gender the wrong vibes on this website, I say the hell with it."

Very unfortunate that we are suggesting censoring a rather important and fertile topic that fits bang in the middle of the overcomingbias/lesswrong framework because:

  1. PUA related discussion

... (read more)

The resolution of tension is in the following. I do empathize with complaints related to sexual harassment in the workplace, them being under pressure due to "unreasonable" norms etc.

I however absolutely detest lying or soft peddling the truth or refraining from asking hard and important questions, simply because they affect some people's political sensibilities. I have little regard for such political sensibilities that subvert the quest for the truth.

So yes, a woman who complains of sexual harassment in the workplace is not one I would chara... (read more)

If you are prone to dismissing women's complaints of gender-related problems as the women being whiny, emotionally unstable girls who see sexism where there is none, this post is unlikely to interest you.

The above does not apply to me per se, but this post neverthless doesn't interest me for its content. The poster of this article certainly looks like an immature feminist who is incapable of separating rational inquiry and the asking of hard questions, when they get close to her value system.

I have found Anna's posts way more mature and tackling iss... (read more)

1thomblake
Seriously? It would be helpful if you could re-read those two fragments, and resolve the tension.