More examples can be dug out from some of Wikipedia’s list of rulers deposed as children.
This suffers from an obvious huge selection bias, right? Also:
We have no reason to restrict to child-monarchs—so many Emperors, Kings, and Tsars have been deposed by their advisers or “agents”.
I guess this is a general argument that we shouldn’t delegate things to others. But the interesting argument to worry about AI is that delegating to smarter artificial agents is much worse than the usual delegation scenario that we’re used to, because of how much smarter they are than us. So if child-monarchs are deposed by advisers at the same rate as emperors, that’s some evidence that the gap between the wisdom of the principal and the agent doesn’t make things worse (although it could be that the absolute level of the wisdom of the agent modulates the effect of the gap, since this is held approximately constant in the sample).
I mainly mentioned child-rulers because Robin was using that example; and I used “getting deposed” as an example of agency problems that weren’t often (ever?) listed in the economics literature.
TBC I agree that child-rulers are a relevant case, I just think that the frequency with which they are deposed relative to adult-rulers is what matters evidentially. I think I agree that getting deposed doesn’t fit well into the agency literature though.
This suffers from an obvious huge selection bias, right? Also:
I guess this is a general argument that we shouldn’t delegate things to others. But the interesting argument to worry about AI is that delegating to smarter artificial agents is much worse than the usual delegation scenario that we’re used to, because of how much smarter they are than us. So if child-monarchs are deposed by advisers at the same rate as emperors, that’s some evidence that the gap between the wisdom of the principal and the agent doesn’t make things worse (although it could be that the absolute level of the wisdom of the agent modulates the effect of the gap, since this is held approximately constant in the sample).
I mainly mentioned child-rulers because Robin was using that example; and I used “getting deposed” as an example of agency problems that weren’t often (ever?) listed in the economics literature.
TBC I agree that child-rulers are a relevant case, I just think that the frequency with which they are deposed relative to adult-rulers is what matters evidentially. I think I agree that getting deposed doesn’t fit well into the agency literature though.