When you talk about perfectly competitive markets having no profit, you're probably thinking of the term "economic profit". The sort of profit everyone usually thinks of is revenue minus cost, which is called accounting profit by economists so as to distinguish it from economic profit. Also economists are really bad at naming things. Economic profit is revenue-costs-opportunity costs.
In perfect competition, firms do make accounting profit, but they don't make economic profit.
Thanks for posting your model here and getting involved in the discussion. It's always good to be able to discuss these things publicly because I'm sure many people are learning a lot from it.
I'm bothered by it more than you are I guess. I mean, for people already involved in the rationality community maybe RationalWiki can just be seen as some silly vindictive website dressed up as a place to learn. But I feel like RationalWiki has decent pagerank and random people do get sent there in google searches. To have that site be the first or one of the first introductions a person has to a given rationality topic seems pretty destructive.
I'm glad it was discussed in the book because I'd never come across it before. So far though I find it one of the least convincing parts of the book, although I am skeptical that I am appropriately evaluating it. Would anyone be able to clarify some things for me?
How generally accepted is the orthogonality thesis? Bostrom presents it as very well accepted.
Danaher's Motivating Belief Objection is similar to an objection I had while reading about the orthogonality thesis. Mine was not as strict though. It just seemed to me that as intelligence increases new ...
I was young in the 80's, but my impression is that HIV/AIDS was considered a pretty gay-specific thing at first. Later there was more media pushing the idea that it can affect anyone - for example, one of my schools had a straight woman with HIV visit to tell us about it. While this was presumably well-meaning and may have even had good effects in terms of encouraging safety, it did lead me to a quite skewed perspective of the relative risks (I was still aware that it was more prevalent in gays, but not by how much).
I agree that Eliezer maintained his calm better, but I don't believe that Wright is the simpleton you seem to be painting him to be. I've watched a lot of his videos, and I would say there are very rarely moments of "red-faced rage," and certainly none in this video. He was at times frustrated, but he really is working to understand what Eliezer is saying.
These are all excellent points. The increase in labor productivity accruing to immigrants to e.g. the US is often discussed by economists. I'll grant that it's not often discussed in general media, which is part of PhilGoetz's point, but I'm sure I've seen it there too.
Also, many economists have argued that in certain contexts immigration (even low-skilled) does result in economic gains for the native born. The argument goes that immigrants' negative impact on native born wages is small and that this small change is more than offset by the immigrants' abil... (read more)