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B Jacobs
Karma: 434
Sorry guys. I woke up to another giant batch of new comments and I just don’t have the time or energy to respond to them all with the quality that I would want. My comments were already getting shorter and shorter while my longer, more nuanced comments were getting sniped before I could post them. I’m sure some of you made some excellent points.
I cited controlled experiments, you counter with an observation that I have already responded to in both the post and the comments:
I explained this in this section:
One issue that arises with starting a socialist firms is acquiring initial investing.[27] This is probably because co-ops want to maximize income (wages), not profits. They pursue the interests of their members rather than investors and may sometimes opt to increase wages instead of profits. Capitalist firms on the other hand are explicitly investor owned so investor interests will take priority.
A socialist firm can be more productive and not dominate the economy if it’s hard to start a socialist firm.
The strength of a case depends on the strength of the evidence, not on the number of citations!
You are not engaging with the evidence I cited.
A spot check is supposed to take a number of random sources and check them, not pick the one claim you find most suspicious (that isn’t even about co-ops) and use that to dismiss the entire literature on co-ops.
I cite four different studies that show that the theory doesn’t match the observations, Lao Mein doesn’t cite anything. This is the most extreme version of being a selective skeptic.
I’m not handwaving anything I wrote a whole section about how experiments contradict this and what could explain this:
“Experiments have shown that people randomly allocated to do tasks in groups where they can elect their leaders and/or choose their pay structures are more productive than those who are led by an unelected manager who makes pay choices for them.[20] One study looked at real firms with high levels of worker ownership of shares in the company and found that workers are keener to monitor others, making them more productive than those with low or no ownership of shares and directly contradicting the free rider hypothesis.[21] It turns out there are potential benefits to giving workers control and a stake in the running of the organization they work for. This allows workers to play a key role in decision making and reorient the goals of the organization.[22] One explanation for this phenomenon is that of “localized knowledge”. According to economist Friedrich Hayek, top-down organizers have difficulty harnessing and coordinating around local knowledge, and the policies they write that are the same across a wide range of circumstances don’t account for the “particular circumstances of time and place”.[23] (For examples of this, read Seeing Like a State by political scientist James Scott) Those who make the top-down policies in a traditional company are different to those who have to follow them. In addition, those who manage the company are most often different to those who own the company. These groups have different incentives and accumulate different knowledge. This means that co-ops have two main advantages:
Workers can harness their collective knowledge to make running the firm more effective. Workers can use their voting power to ensure the organization is more aligned with their values. Interestingly enough, I have yet to come across a co-op that uses the state of the art of social choice theory, so they could potentially get a lot lot better.“
My prior is that other things are less effective and you need evidence to show they are more effective not vice versa.
Appeal to presuppositions always feels weird to me. A socialist could just as easily say ‘my priors say the opposite’. In any case, you made a claim of comparison, not me, why is the burden of proof suddenly on me?
Of course. I’m saying it doesn’t even get to make that argument which can sometimes muddy the waters enough to make some odd-seeming causes look at least plausibly effective.
I’m trying to explain the scientific literature on co-ops, not persuade you of some scam.
However, in spot-checking whether the statistics were totally wrong, I found myself struggling with wading through signups and links and long mostly irrelevant articles. Of course some nonzero amount of this is likely to happen with spot-checks but it seemed like the layers of links just made it even worse.
This is dishonest, the vast majority of the sources are primary scientific studies and the few times I do refer to secondary sources it isn’t irrelevant.You did handle it right, especially your deleted comment.
OP to explain what data/model it was based on; the problem is that then OP responded back with repeating the links instead of explaining what he had read in the links
Yeah, because the primary source is right there?! What value would me explaining in my second language bring to the explanation, when you can click on the link and immediately download the primary source?
But anyway, no, this link doesn’t link directly to the study either, it links to a report that links to the study
You can immediately see a button that says “download report” when you click on that link. I wouldn’t call that “digging for sources”.
The wall of text doesn’t really answer my questions about the independence of employee engagement.
Furthermore they suggest that managers have a huge effect on employee engagement, which seems to point to a potential area where this assumption could fail.
It’s not independent, co-ops let you vote on managers which allows productivity to increase.
EDIT: I have apologized to (and thanked) tailcalled via messages, and have added the document as the third source. Once again, thanks for the suggestion.
I’ve already explained why socialists firms wouldn’t necessarily take over the economy even if they were productive in both the post and other comments.
They were not direct links to the study, but instead i direct links to articles that talk about the study, so I had to dig further manually.
It was the second source in the post: [2]The articles are often big and contain lots of specific things that might not be directly relevant to your point of using it in the post.
There was a summary of it on the linked page itself:
Unfortunately, most employees remain disengaged at work. In fact, low engagement alone costs the global economy $7.8 trillion.
Even having opened the study, I’m still left with confusions about the methodology
From the study
Methodology
The primary data in this report come from the Gallup World Poll, through which Gallup has conducted surveys of the world’s adult population, using randomly selected samples, since 2005. The survey is administered annually face to face or by telephone, covering more than 160 countries and areas since its inception. In addition to the World Poll data, Gallup collected extensive random samples of working populations in the United States and Germany; these samples were also added to the dataset.
The target population of the World Poll is the entire civilian, noninstitutionalized, aged-15- and-older population. Gallup’s data in this report reflect the responses of adults, aged-15- and-older, who were employed for any number of hours by an employer.
With some exceptions, all samples are probability-based and nationally representative. Gallup uses data weighting to minimize bias in survey-based estimates; ensure samples are nationally representative for each country; and correct for unequal selection probability, nonresponse and double coverage of landline and mobile phone users when using both mobile phone and landline frames. Gallup also weights its final samples to match the national demographics of each selected country.
Regional findings in this report include data obtained from 2021 to as late as March 2022 (reported as part of 2021 data in this report). To determine percentage point changes for regions, Gallup uses data from 2020 and 2021 from the same countries in each region.
Country-specific findings in “Appendix 1: Country Comparisons” are based on data aggregated from three years of polling (2019, 2020 and 2021 — with several countries’ 2021 data obtained in early 2022). Percentage point changes for countries indicate the differences in percentage points when comparing the average from 2018, 2019 and 2020 with the average from 2019, 2020 and 2021.
Gallup typically surveys 1,000 individuals in each country or area, using a standard set
of core questions that has been translated into the major languages of the respective country. In some countries, Gallup collects oversamples in major cities or areas of special interest. Additionally, in some large countries, such as China and Russia, sample sizes include at least 2,000 adults. In a small number of countries, the sample size is less than 1,000. In this report, Gallup does not provide country-level data (aggregate of 2019, 2020 and 2021 data) or country-level percentage point change data (aggregate of 2018, 2019 and 2020 data) for any country that has an aggregate n size of less than 300.For results based on the total sample of adults globally, the margin of sampling error ranged from ±0.5 percentage points to ±0.7 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For results based on the total sample of adults in each region, the margin of sampling error ranged from ±0.6 percentage points to ±5.0 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For results based on the total sample of adults in each country, the margin of sampling error ranged from ±0.5 percentage points to ±8.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.
I’m not sure I understand the economics of this. If co-ops have an inherent massive growth advantage, wouldn’t that outweigh the advantage capitalist firms have in giving more dividends to investors? Because while in the short term the capitalist firms would maybe give more to their investors, in the long term the co-ops would grow bigger and therefore have more money to give, even if they allocate a smaller fraction of it?
I never claimed a massive growth advantage:
There seems to be a small increase in companywide productivity[33]
As I said, the meta-analysis’s only show a small growth advantage. If e.g a socialist firm grows with $1000 and a capitalist firm with $900, but the capitalist firm gives the $900 to the investors and the socialist firm gives $500 to both the investors and the employees, the investors can make more money with capitalist firms.
There’s just no way that things like this are remotely as effective as say GiveWell causes
Do you have any evidence for this?
and it barely even has longtermist points
Not all EA’s are longtermists.
What data and model are these estimates of the causal effects of it based on?
You can find my sources in the references section. This was based on a gallup study
Another thing that confuses me is why socialist firms need special support and don’t naturally come to dominate the economy. You seem to attribute this to owners extracting value, but that seems short-sighted; presumably if you have an economy with a mixture of socialist and non-socialist firms, and the socialist firms are much more productive, they would grow quicker and become dominant over time.
I explained this in this section:
One issue that arises with starting a socialist firms is acquiring initial investing.[27] This is probably because co-ops want to maximize income (wages), not profits. They pursue the interests of their members rather than investors and may sometimes opt to increase wages instead of profits. Capitalist firms on the other hand are explicitly investor owned so investor interests will take priority.
A socialist firm can be more productive and not dominate the economy if it’s hard to start a socialist firm.
I have a Mnemonic device for checking whether a model is Gears-like or not.
G E A R S:Does a variable Generate Empirical Anticipations?
Can a variable be Rederived?
Is a variable hard to Substitute?
There’s evidence in the form of observations of events outside the cartesian boundary. There’s evidence in internal process of reasoning, whose nature depends on the mind.
My previous comment said:
both empirical and tautological evidence
With “empirical evidence” I meant “evidence in the form of observations of events outside the cartesian boundary” and with “tautological argument” I meant “evidence in internal process of reasoning, whose nature depends on the mind”.
When doing math, evidence comes up more as a guide to intuition than anything explicitly considered. There are also metamathematical notions of evidence, rendering something evidence-like clear.
Yes, but they are both “information that indicates whether a belief is more or less valid”. Mathematical proof is also evidence, so they have the same structure. Do you have a way to ground them? Or if you somehow have a way to ground one form of proof but not the other, could you share just the one? (Since the structure is the same I suspect that the grounding of one could also be applied to the other)
I meant both empirical and tautological evidence, so general information that indicates whether a belief is more or less valid. When you say that you can keep track of truth, why do you believe you can? What is that truth based on, evidence?
It might be interesting to distinguish between “personal hingeyness” and “utilitarian hingeyness”. Humans are not utilitarians so we care mostly about stuff that’s happening in our own lives, when we die, our personal tree stops and we can’t get more hinges. But the “utilitarian hingeyness” continues as it describes all possible utility. I made this with population ethics in mind, but you could totally use the same concept for your personal life, but then the most hingey time for you and the most hingey time for everyone will be different.
I’m not sure I understand your last paragraph, because you didn’t clarify what you meant with the word “hingeyness”? If you meant by that “the range of total amount of utility you can potentially generate” (aka hinge broadness) or “the amount by which that range shrinks” (aka hinge reduction) It is possible to draw a tree where the first tick of an 11 tick tree has just as broad of a range as an option in the 10th tick. So the hinge broadness and the hinge reduction can be just as big in the 10th as in the 1st tick, but not bigger. I don’t think you’re talking about “hinge shift”, but maybe you were talking about hinge precipiceness instead in which case, yes that can totally be bigger in the 10th tick.
If in the first image we replace the 0 with a −100 (much wider) what happens? The amount of endings for 1 is still larger than 3. The amount of branches for 1 is still larger than 3. The width of the range of the possible utility of the endings for 1 is [-100 to 8] and for 3 is [-100 to 6] (smaller). The width of the range of the total amount of utility you could generate over the future branches is [1->3->-100 = −96 up to 1->2->8= 11] for 1 and [3->-100= −97 up to 3->6= 9] for 3 (smaller). Is this a good example of what you’re trying to convey? If not could you maybe draw an example tree, to show me what you mean?
Ending in negative numbers wouldn’t change anything. The amount of endings will still shrink, the amount of branches will shrink, the range of the possible utility of the endings will still shrink or stay the same length, the range of the total amount of utility you could generate over the future branches will also shrink or stay the same length. Try it! Replace any number in any of my models with a negative number or draw your own model and see what happens.
If we draw a tree of all possible timelines (and there is an end to the tree) the older choices will always have more branches that will sprout out because of them. If we are purely looking at the possible endings then the 1 in the first image has a range of 4 possible endings, but 2 only has 2 possible endings. If we’re looking at branches then the 1 has a range of 6 possible branches, while 2 only has 2 possible branches. If we’re looking at ending utility then 1 has a range of [0-8] while 2 only has [7-8]. If we’re looking at the range of possible utility you can experience then 1 has a range from 1->3->0 = 4 utility all the way to 1->2->8 = 11 utility, while 2 only has 2->7 = 9 to 2->8 = 10.
When we talk about the utility of endings it is possible that the range doesn’t change. For example:
(I can’t post images in comments so here is a link to the image I will use to illustrate this point)
Here the “range of utility in endings” tick 1 has (the first 10) is [0-10] and the range of endings the first 0 has (tick 2) is [0-10] which is the same. Of course the probability has changed (getting an ending of 1 utility is not even an option anymore), but the minimum and maximum stay the same.
Now the width of the range of the total amount of utility you could potentially experience can also stay the same. For example the lowest utility tick 1 can experience is 10->0->0 = 10 utility and the highest is 10-0-10 = 20 utility. The difference between the lowest and highest is 10 utility. The lowest total utility that the 0 on tick 2 can experience is 0->0 = 0 utility and the highest is 0->10 = 10 utility, which is once again a difference of 10 utility. The probability has changed (ending with a weird number like 19 is impossible for tick 2). The range has also shifted downwards from [10-20] to [0-10], but the width stays the same.
It just occurred to me that some people may find the shift in range also important for hingeyness. Maybe call that ‘hinge shift’?
Crucially, in none of these definitions is it possible to end up with a wider range later down the line than when you started.
I tried a bit of a natural experiment to see if rationalists would be more negative towards an idea if it’s called socialism vs if it’s called it something else. I made two posts that are identical, except one calls it socialism right at the start, and one only reveals I was talking about socialism at the very end (perhaps it would’ve been better if I hadn’t revealed it at all). The former I posted to LW, the latter I posted to the EA forum.
I expected that the comments on LW would be more negative, that I would get more downvotes and gave it a 50% chance the mods wouldn’t even promote it to the frontpage on LW (but would on EA forum).
The comments were more negative on LW. I did get more downvotes, but I also got more upvotes and got more karma overall: (12 karma from 19 votes on EA and 27 karma from 39 votes on LW). Posts tend to get more karma on LW, but the difference is big enough that I consider my prediction to be wrong. Lastly, the LW mods did end up promoting it to the frontpage, but it took a very long time (maybe they had a debate about it).
Overall, while rationalists are more negative towards socialist ideas that are called socialist, they aren’t as negative as I expected and will update accordingly.