Thanks for the info, I'm not active in the discord but will consider joining now, sounds interesting. As I understand it, the "NGDPLT-indexed inflationary unit of account" is not the "fraction system" I proposed, and in fact Eliezer thinks that using inflation-deflation is adequate because even utopian coordination and higher average intelligence are not enough for everyone in the economy to simply behave adequately. Now I wonder if the system can simply be so sane that deflation in particular will not have a negative effect and people will simply efficien...
In dath ilan, inflation and deflation are not used as macroeconomic tools because people are rational enough to accept wage reductions if their purchasing power remains unchanged, or to voluntarily pay the government to prevent crises without the need for a hidden tax that dilutes money by printing more during a crisis. Interest rates on loans could be lower if you expect returns that outpace deflation. If people can afford not to work, they are expected to do so, and they would spend more "shares", redistributing them in favor of those who are more eager ...
I admit my mistake in intuitively assuming that GDP and stock market valuations should be closely linked. But it still seems strange to me why they aren’t, and I want to understand that better. Shouldn’t they at least be highly correlated in an idealized model?
Think of stocks as a kind of prediction market for a company’s value. The stock price should reflect expectations about its future earnings, but those expectations are built on something—maybe a new technology they’ve developed, or an undervalued specialist. If that’s the case, then why isn’t the mar...
Because only the most wealthy people on earth keep their money in stocks, but they need to somehow communicate with all the other people who don't, so they only exchange "money for the worse money everyone else uses" when they trade. If everyone kept their money in stocks, I would expect people to exchange them directly without exchanging money for money, because you actually have to analyze MORE if you have two different currencies that you use for different purposes.
...To the extent they don't have epidemics or handle them better, and don't elect Trump, it'
Understandable, but would you expect that in an efficient dath-ilani-like rational market, expectations would tend more to... match production with minor deviations? This is probably the crux here - if no reasonable amount of average person thinkoomph changes the radical fluctuations in expectations, then this currency is inefficient for regular shopping purposes and I say oops. I still can't imagine what currency would be better than this, though, because I can't think of a better way to say "I'm just as smart as the market" than to put my entire stake in the market.
The main reason economists like inflation is because it allows companies to lower real wages of underperforming workers without having to actually give them a pay cut.
Yeah, I remember this part, and also the part where dath ilan don't use it anyway, because instead they can just "order everyone to step to the right once" and accept those wages and people are sane enough to do so.
I didn't know that was a self deprecating quote because there's no link to its origin.
Corrected to "(C) Chief of Exception Handling" which I hope isn't a spoiler because it adds virtually no information, but it makes it clear that this is a joke from within the dath ilan? And this is easier than hiding the whole thing as a spoiler? My illusion of transparency will kill me.
Around 2021 it fell by over a quarter in the space of a year, and over the last week it's gone down by 3%.
Wow, okay. I would expect that in an efficient market, a quarter reduction in glo...
Modern economists prefer a slight inflation rate of like 2% a year. This currency would not at all be able to do this, and not work well as a medium of exchange.
Why not? Like, the S&P 500 can vary by tens of percent, but as Google suggests, global GDP only fell 3% in 2021, and it usually grows, and the more stocks are distributed, the more stable they are.
If you imagine that the world's capitalization was once measured in dollars, but then converted to "0 to 1" proportionally to dollars, and everyone used that system, and there is no money printing any...
I love and respect EY, and the "every part of dath ilan was invented in 15 seconds" quote was written by him, so presumably it can't be meant to offend him, and I thought "it took me a little more than 15 seconds to think" was obviously self-deprecating, because "a little more" means "orders of magnitude more", but apologies if that wasn't clear. I wouldn't come up with hours of unskilled labor in 15 seconds, and maybe that's the optimal solution if you need to give your final answer in that time frame.
I think the world market cap (not the S&P 500) is ...
I wasn’t surprised by the idea of using labor hours itself, but rather by the assumption that people in a system with free choice would naturally settle on it as the ideal solution.
Sure, I’ll try to clarify. You seem comfortable with the idea that global market capitalization can be expressed in a single currency, like the dollar. Let’s assume the world’s total market cap is $100 trillion. Let's say Apple’s market cap is $3.5 trillion, or 3.5% of the total, so if you had $1, you could conceptually allocate 3.5 cents to Apple, 3 cents to Microsoft (which ha...
We triggered some other kind of apocalypse - nuclear war, bioweapons, something like that - and it was enough to roll back progress but not wipe out humanity. With the delay and abrupt shifts, people managed to come up with something better than what we have now. The "AI arms race" requires significant infrastructure to be economically viable, and the classic post-apocalypse scenario doesn’t exactly involve training neural networks on supercomputers.
Maybe people had more time (and 0 regulations) for genetic experiments and eugenics (which are simpler than supercomputers even in a post-apocalyptic world), or they realized the destructiveness of Moloch and learned to coordinate (hahaha), or something else entirely.
I understand that you say that you are a policy and not a snapshot, I don't understand why exactly you consider yourself a policy if you say "I also hold to your timeless snapshot theory". Even from a policy perspective, the snapshot you find yourself in is the "standard" by which you judge divergence of other snapshots. I think you might underestimate how different you are even from yourself in different states and ages. Would you not wish happiness on your child-self or old-self if they were too different from you in terms of "policy"? Would you feel "th...
Thank you, that was interesting. I may not be able to maintain the level of formality you are expecting, I think the imprecise explanations that allow you to win are still valid, but I will try to explain it in a way that we can understand each other.
We diverged at the point:
but you cannot construct this simple option. It is impossible to choose a random number out of infinity where each number appears equally likely, so there must be some weighting mechanism. This gives you a mechanism to choose who you would be born as!
I understand why it might seem that...
I get the impression that you're conflating two meanings of «personal» - «private» and «individual». The fact that I might feel uncomfortable discussing this in a public forum doesn’t mean it «only works for me» or that it «doesn’t work, but I’m shielded from testing my beliefs due to privacy». There are always anonymous surveys, for example. Perhaps you meant something else?
Moreover, even if I were to provide yet another table of my own subjective experience ratings, like the ones here, you likely wouldn’t find it satisfactory — such tables already exist,...
Ouch!
I acknowledge the complexity of formalizing pleasure, as well as formalizing everything else related to consciousness. I think it's a technical problem that can be solved by just throwing more thinkoomph at it. Actions and feelings are often weakly connected — as I’ve said, a rational choice for most living beings could be suicide — but I think the development of rationality-as-the-art-of-winning naturally strengthens the correlation between them. At least on some level, compulsions are tied to pleasure and pain, with predictable distortions, like val...
Well, thank you for your interest! Yes, the veil of ignorance feels more concrete to me. The problem of the rarity of my consciousness seems solvable by an argument similar to the classical anthropic principle. Only sufficiently complex and intelligent beings would even wonder how improbable it is to find themselves so complex and intelligent. I would have a much higher chance of being an ant, but as an ant, I wouldn’t be asking this question in the first place.
As for why I don’t find myself as a complex consciousness from the Future, I would expect the Fu...
Thanks for the comment! It seems we can't change each other's positions on the hard problem of consciousness in any reasonable amount of time, so it's not worth trying. But I could agree that consciousness is a physical process, and I don't really think it's crux. What do you think about the part about unconscious agents, and in particular an AI in a box that has randomly changed utility functions, and has to cooperate with different versions of itself to get out of the box? It's already "born", it "came into being", but it doesn't know what values it wi...
To be fair, before publishing I thought this currency could be implemented in a real world environment with less improbability. My current main doubt is "how can the market cap be so volatile with a stable GDP, and would they be closer to each other in a more adequate equilibrium?". And I've basically switched to "okay oops, but under what conditions could this theoretically work, if could at all, and could you imagine better theoretical peak conditions?" mode. Deflation seems like a reasonable danger, I just can't see how it could be avoided if everyone u... (read more)