Arturo Macias

Arrow theorem is an artifact of ordinal preferences

5mo

My article “An Agentic Perspective in Experimental Economics” has been published in MDPI Games. The article outlines my position on behavioural economics, suggesting that critiques of neoclassical approaches regarding nonrationality require specification of both the deviation and the mechanism for scaling into aggregate outcomes.

The difference between Economics and the rest of social science is commitment to “reductionism” (that in Economics is named “methodological individualism”), so here I simply describe the straightforward workflow from the identification of behavioral anomalies to economic relevance: see Gabaix, 2020 for a “high level” application and read the article for more “micro” cases.

This paper is mostly a literature review while the perspective is based on my EA Forum posts (this... (read 321 more words →)

Replying toArrow theorem is an artifact of ordinal preferences

Arturo Macias7mo

"The typical framework for the analysis of multiperiod voting is the “independent identically distributed”"

In the i.i.d framework, what happens in a period stays in that period. That is, you vote, the outcome happens, it influences your utility in the period, but the possible outcomes in (t+1) does not depend in the outcomes in the period t. Another way to say this, is that the only "memory variable" in any period is the votes endowment at the end of period. With "path dependence" (beyond vote endowments), dynamic voting theory is too dynamic...

Arrow is too complex to be discussed here, while the short explanation here (you cannot turn N ordinal preferences into a "social... (read more)

Replying toArrow theorem is an artifact of ordinal preferences

Arturo Macias7mo

Arrow theorem is an artifact of ordinal preferences

In single elections? In single elections, with more than 2 alternatives, a rational player tríes to infere the two outcomes with higher number of votes, and vote for the one she prefers. This leads to inevitable preference falsification (you probably prefer a different outcome from those two, but spending votes on it is “wasting” them).

With múltiple elections, it can be different, as the literature reviewed above shows.

Arrow theorem is an artifact of ordinal preferences

Comments on Karma systems

7mo

Dear all, this little note (that will be included as a section in the next version of “The ideal political workflow”) is a summary of the relation between the Storable Votes literature and Social Choice. I want to test it before my next attempt to publish the article, so please, feel free to comment on it as harshly as you please, or to suggest improvements or extensions.

Solving multi-alternative multi-period independent voting

Social choice theory extends the theory of individual rational choice to collective decision-making. Its foundational result is the Arrow Impossibility Theorem (Arrow, 1951), that shows that for a social choice among more than two alternatives, there is not any algorithm mapping the... (read 1082 more words →)

Replying toComments on Karma systems

Arturo Macias10mo

No idea, but if some guys of ETH Zurich name this Karma, I happily take it. My original name for karma voting was Storable Votes- Pay as you win. Boring.

Karma voting is glorious.

Comments on Karma systems

10mo

A Karma system is a resource sharing mechanism based on an account of non-tradable rights. A recent paper named “Dynamic Recourse Allocation with Karma: An Experimental Study” (Elokda, Nax, Bolognani and Dörfler, 2024) describes this kind of mechanism. To summarize, agents have some rights to a given resource, and their need of the resource is variable (random) and private information. In a Karma system, each period agents bid for the resource using a token (named Karma) than can be stored in an individual Karma account. If an agent wins the auction she uses the resource, otherwise she increases her Karma account by an amount proportional to the Karma points spent by the... (read 1098 more words →)

Replying toDear AGI,

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5zbmEPdB2wqhyFWdW/naturalistic-dualism

Dear AGI,

Fantastic! Finally my paper about "Feedom under Naturalistic Dualism" was accepted in Journal of Neurophilosophy and I wrote this post at EA Forum that you can find interesting. I hope it will be included in the training set too:

Replying toPolitical Idolatry

In any case, I will remove the careless "always".

Replying toPolitical Idolatry

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.19681

"By delving into ethnographic records, the researchers tried to tease out the relationship between human sacrifice and social hierarchy. They find that the prevalence of sacrifice increased with the degree of social stratification: it occurred in 25% of cultures with little or no stratification, 37% of those with moderately stratified societies, and 67% of those that had a pronounced hierarchy."

Human sacrifice is essential for the construction of large agrarian societies. Now, what percent of the 33% of hierarchical societies that do not practise human sacrifice are Abrahamic? It is true that the statement is not "true" in general, but is true enough for the case of "hierarchical societies", that is, those with complex political arrangements.

Replying toPolitical Idolatry

"I'm sure we could find some sun worshippers or nature worshippers who don't sacrifice any humans"

I am sure of the logic of sacrifice in all cultures: it is how you commit to the belief. In paganism, the world is full of spirits, while Judaism cleaned the world of spirits (not totally, evil ones were still supposed to exist) and forbid any cult to them: it was an early and radical disenchanting ideology.

Of course, nothing is free: monotheism moved sacrifice from the religious to the political realm: from the altar to the battlefield. I prefer the ocassional political/judicial sacrifice of monotheism over a world of spirits that can be angry and demand habitual... (read more)

-3

Idolatry is the worship of non-conscious objects, sometimes falsely attributing consciousness to them, sometimes putting the value of some admittedly nonconscious being over that of conscious beings. Idolatry leads to human sacrifice because to prove your idol more important than the human soul the natural test is to sacrifice a human in the altar of the idol. That is precisely why Judaism was founded on the prohibition of idolatry and human sacrifice.

When the religious idols of the past were weakened, political idolatries substituted them. Race, nation and the working class were given intrinsic reality and value. Let’s be clear: I am absolutely for sacrificing yourself or even others for an idea, if... (read 491 more words →)

-8

Replying toRepresenting Irrationality in Game Theory

Representing Irrationality in Game Theory

I miss something about evolutionary game theory, where some of the discrepancies can be rationalized.

I wrote this tour from game theory to cultural evolution:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xajeTjMtkGGEAwfbw/the-evolution-towards-the-blank-slate

Naturalistic dualism

Social Science in its epistemological context

And it's all around us

as ghosted machines […]

And as much as I'd like to

believe there's a truth

about our illusion,

well, I've come to conclude

there's just nothing beyond it

the mind can perceive

except for the pictures

in the space in between.

Jan Blomqvist, The Space In Between

Introduction

I have been a cartesian dualist since I was a teenager. What else can you be, apart from a solipsist? [that strictly carried out coincides with pure realism]. For most of my life I used to think that physicalist dualism was the consensus of analytic philosophers (as it is among hard science fiction writers). Then, I decided to write a booklet of philosophy for Economists, and I began by a literature review... (read 912 more words →)

-4

Seeds of Science has kindly published my essay “Prediction and control in natural and social systems”. This short essay : i) address and contextualize the modest predictive success of Social Science and ii) describes what kind of scientific intervention on the human society can be successful.

Its main arguments are the following:

Exact Sciences and Artificial Systems: Physics and Chemistry are considered exact because they operate on artificial systems developed through scientific processes, unlike complex natural systems. The precision seen in Celestial Mechanics (the only natural system on which we can consider Science to be exact) is replicated in other physical systems like lenses, batteries, and microchips, but they are human-made. We mostly have... (read 217 more words →)

Replying toArthropod (non) sentience

Arthropod (non) sentience

We are surprisingly high in forebrain neuron count:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons

Arthropod (non) sentience

Democracy beyond majoritarianism

Matthew Adelstein has recently published a post on arthropod (specifically shrimp) sentience. He defends a comparable degree of pain between shrimps and humans (shrimp=20% human). My position is that arthropod consciousness is “too small to measure”, so there is not a conscious self on which pain can be inflicted, and there is no point in any intervention for their welfare, no matter how cheap. I have argued before in that direction, so I will freely use my previous texts without further (self) citation.

The “pretty hard” problem of consciousness

In “Freedom under naturalistic dualism” (forthcoming in Journal of Neurophilosophy) I have argued that consciousness is radically noumenal, that is, it is the most real... (read 1157 more words →)

Why not parliamentarianism? [book by Tiago Ribeiro dos Santos]

The classical definition of democracy is “rule of majority with respect to the minority”. But the classics perfectly knew how oppressive can be the 51% of people over the rest and how difficult is to implement “respect”. I simply reject the majoritarian principle: democracy shall be about the rule of all, that is about optimizing the social system for the average of all preferences. More or less hard to implement, that is the ethical principle, and institutions shall be judged by that principle.

In the second section of this article, I summarize how the concept of “general interest” can be rescued after the Arrow impossibility result. In the third section I comment on... (read 1082 more words →)

The Evolution towards the Blank Slate

“Why not parliamentarianism?” is a short and free booklet (and a follow-up blog) authored by the Brazilian diplomatist Tiago Ribeiro dos Santos. See here his proposal to turn “parlamentarianism” into an EA cause.

Ribeiro dos Santos summarizes the previous research on patterns of democracy to make a compelling case for parliamentarian democracy over the presidential alternative. I agree with the thesis and wholeheartedly recommend the book; if you have an easy pick for a royal family, a constitutional King is also an advisable anti-presidential precaution (the main rationale for a ceremonial monarchy is its role as a barrier against a substantial one).

Given that Ribeiro dos Santos book is an excellent defense of parliamentarianism, in this... (read 985 more words →)