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Zvi’s Thoughts on the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF)
pde40

Our first public communications probably over-emphasized one aspect of our thinking, which is that some types of bad (or bad on some people's preferences) outcomes from markets can be thought of as missing components of the objective function that those markets are systematically optimizing for. The corollary of that absolutely isn't that we should dismantle markets or capitalism, but that we should take an algorithmic approach to whether and how to add those missing incentives.

A point that we probably under-emphasized at first is that intervening in marke... (read more)

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2Wei Dai
This framing doesn't make a lot of sense to me. From my perspective, markets are unlike AI in that there isn't a place in a market's "source code" where you can set or change an objective function. A market is just a group of people, each pursuing their own interests, conducting individual voluntary trades. Bad outcomes of markets come not from wrong objective functions given by some designers, but are instead caused by game theoretic dynamics that make it difficult or impossible for a group of people pursuing their own interests to achieve Pareto efficiency. (See The Second Best for some pointers in this direction.) Can you try to explain your perspective to someone like me, or point me to any existing writings on this? There is a big literature in economics on both market and government/regulatory failures. How familiar are you with it, and how does your approach compare with the academic mainstream on these topics?
Zvi’s Thoughts on the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF)
pde180

Hi!

I'm a co-founder of the AI Objectives Institute. We're pretty interested in the critical view you've formed about what we're working on! We think it's most likely that we just haven't done a very good job of explaining our thinking yet -- you say we have a political agenda, but as a group we're trying quite hard to avoid having an inherent object-level political agenda, and we're actively looking for input from people with different political perspectives than ours. It's also quite possible that you have deep and reasonable criticisms of our plan, that ... (read more)

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8Zvi
Sorry I didn't reply earlier, been busy. I would be happy to have a call at some point, you can PM me contact info that is best. I do think we have disagreements beyond a political agenda, but it is always possible communication fell short somehow. If you don't have a political agenda I would say your communications seem highly misleading, in the sense that they seem to clearly indicate one.
6Quinn
I think there exists a generic risk of laundering problem. If you say "capitalism is suboptimal" or "we can do better" people are worried about trojan horses, people worry that you're just toning it down to garner mainstream support when behind closed doors you'd look more like like "my specific flavor of communism is definitely the solution". I'm not at all saying I got those vibes from the "transformation of capitalism" post, but that I think it's plausible someone could get those vibes from it. Notably, the book "Inadequate Equilibria" was explicitly about how capitalism is suboptimal and rigorously asks us if we can improve upon it, and managed not to raise anybody's alarms about it being a secret communist plot. I guess because it signaled against such a reading by taking the aesthetic/vocabulary of academic econ.