I’m only a bit of the way in, and it is interesting so far, but it already shows signs of needing serious editing, and there are other ways it is clearly wrong too.
In ‘The inequivalence of society-level and individual charity’ they list the scenarios as 1, 1, and 2 instead of A, B, C, as they later use. Later, refers incorrectly to preferring C to A with different necessary weights when the second reference is is to prefer C to B.
The claim that money becomes utility as a log of the amount of money isn’t true, but is probably close enough for this kind of use. You should add a note to the effect. (The effects of money are discrete at the very least).
The claim that the derivative of the log of y = 1/y is also incorrect. In general, log means either log base 10, or something specific to the area of study. If written generally, you must specify the base. (For instance, in Computer Science it is base-2, but I would have to explain that if I was doing external math with that.) The derivative of the natural log is 1/n, but that isn’t true of any other log. You should fix that statement by specifying you are using ln instead of log (or just prepending the word natural).
Just plain wrong in my opinion, for instance, claiming that a weight can’t be negative assumes away the existence of hate, but people do hate either themselves or others on occasion in non-instrumental ways, wanting them to suffer, which renders this claim invalid (unless they hate literally everyone).
I also don’t see how being perfectly altruistic necessitates valuing everyone else exactly the same as you. I could still value others different amounts without being any less altruistic, especially if the difference is between a lower value for me and the others higher. Relatedly, it is possible to not care about yourself at all, but this math can’t handle that.
I’ll leave aside other comments because I’ve only read a little.
In ‘The inequivalence of society-level and individual charity’ they list the scenarios as 1, 1, and 2 instead of A, B, C, as they later use. Later, refers incorrectly to preferring C to A with different necessary weights when the second reference is is to prefer C to B.
I agree and I published an edit fixing this just now
The claim that money becomes utility as a log of the amount of money isn’t true, but is probably close enough for this kind of use. You should add a note to the effect. (The effects of money are discrete at the very least).
I mostly agree, but I think footnote 17 covers this?
The claim that the derivative of the log of y = 1/y is also incorrect. In general, log means either log base 10, or something specific to the area of study. If written generally, you must specify the base. (For instance, in Computer Science it is base-2, but I would have to explain that if I was doing external math with that.) The derivative of the natural log is 1/n, but that isn’t true of any other log. You should fix that statement by specifying you are using ln instead of log (or just prepending the word natural).
I think the standard in academic mathematics is that logx:=logex, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_logarithm#Notational_conventions, and I guess I would sort of like to spread that standard :). I think it’s exceedingly rare for someone to mean base 10 in this context, but I could be wrong. I agree that base 2 is also reasonable though. In any case, the base only changes utility by scaling by a constant, so everything in that subsection after the derivative should be true independently of the base. Nevertheless, I’m adding a footnote specifying this.
Just plain wrong in my opinion, for instance, claiming that a weight can’t be negative assumes away the existence of hate, but people do hate either themselves or others on occasion in non-instrumental ways, wanting them to suffer, which renders this claim invalid (unless they hate literally everyone).
I’m having a really hard time imagining thinking this about someone else (I can imagine hate in the sense of like… not wanting to spend time together with someone and/or assigning a close-to-zero weight), but I’m not sure – I mean, I agree there definitely are people who think they non-instrumentally want the people who killed their family or whatever to suffer, but I think that’s a mistake? That said, I think I agree that for the purposes of modeling people, we might want to let weights be negative sometimes.
I also don’t see how being perfectly altruistic necessitates valuing everyone else exactly the same as you. I could still value others different amounts without being any less altruistic, especially if the difference is between a lower value for me and the others higher. Relatedly, it is possible to not care about yourself at all, but this math can’t handle that.
I think it’s partly that I just wanted to have some shorthand for “assign equal weight to everyone”, but I also think it matches the commonsense notion of being perfectly altruistic. One argument for this is that 1) one should always assign a higher weight for oneself than for anyone else (also see footnote 12 here) and 2) if one assigns a lower weight to someone else, then one is not perfectly altruistic in interactions with that person – given this, the unique option is to assign equal weight to everyone.
While footnote 17 can be read as applying, it isn’t very specific.
For all that you are doing math, this isn’t mathematics, so base needs to be specified.
I am convinced that people really do give occasional others a negative weight.
And here are some notes I wrote while finishing the piece (that I would have edited and tightened up a a lot)(it’s a bit all over the place):
This model obviously assumes utilitarianism. Honestly, their math does seem reasonable to account for people caring about other people (as long as they care about themselves at all on the same scale, which could even be negative, just not exactly 0.). They do add an extraneous claim that the numbers for the weight of a person can’t be negative (because they don’t understand actual hate? At least officially.) If someone hates themselves, then you can’t do the numbers under these constraints, nor if they hate anyone else. But this constraint seems completely unnecessary, since you can sum negatives with positives easily enough. I can’t see the point of using an adjacency matrix (of a weighted directed graph). Being completely altruistic doesn’t seem like everyone gets a 1, but that everyone gets at least that much. I don’t see a reason to privilege mental similarity to myself, since there are people unlike me that should be valued more highly. (Reaction to footnote 13) Why should I care about similarities to pCEV when valuing people?
Thus, they care less about taking richer people’s money. Why is the first example explaining why someone could support taking money from people you value less to give to other people, while not supporting doing so with your own money? It’s obviously true under utilitarianism (which I don’t subscribe to), but it’s also obscures things by framing ‘caring’ as ‘taking things from others by force’.
In ‘Pareto improvements and total welfare’ should a social planner care about the sum of U, or the sum of X? I don’t see how it is clear that it should be X. Why shouldn’t they value the sum of U, which seems more obvious?
‘But it’s okay for different things to spark joy’. Yes, if I care about someone I want their preferences fulfilled, not just mine, but I would like to point out that I want them to get what they want, not just for them to be happy. Talking about caring about yourself though, if you care about yourself at different times, then you will care about what your current self does, past self did, and future self will, want. I’m not sure that my current preferences need to take into account those things though. Thus I see two different categories of thing mattering as regards preferences. Contingent or instrumental preferences are changeable in accounting, while you should evaluate things as if your terminal preferences are unchanging. Even though humans can have them change, such as when they have a child. Even if you already love your child automatically when you have one, you don’t necessarily care who that child turns out to be, but you care quite a bit afterwards. See any time travel scenario, and the parent will care very much that Sally no longer exists even though they now have Sammy. They will likely now also terminally value Sammy. Take into account that you will love your child, but not who they are unless you will have an effect on it (such as learning how to care for them in advance making them a more trusting child.).
In practice, subsidies and taxes end up not being about externalities at all, or to a very small degree. Often, one kind of externality (often positive) will be ignored even when it is larger than the other (often negative) externality. This is especially true in modern countries where people ignore the positive externalities of people’s preferences being satisfied making them a better and more useful person in society, while they are obsessed with the idea of the negatives of any exchange. I have a intuition that the maximum people would pay to avoid an externality is not really that close to its actual effects, and that people would generally lie if you asked them even if they knew.
In the real world, most people (though far from all) seem to have the intuition that the government uses the money they get from a tax less well than the individuals they take it from do. Command economies are known to be much less efficient than free markets, so the best thing the government could do with a new tax is to lower less efficient taxes, but taxes only rarely go down, so this encourages wasted resources. Even when they do lower taxes, it isn’t by eliminating the worst taxes. When they put it out in subsidies, they aren’t well targeted subsidies either, but rather, distortionary. Even a well targeted tax on negative externalities would thus have to handle the fact that it is, in itself, something with significant negative externalities even beyond the administrative cost (of making inefficient use of resources).
It’s weird to bring up having kids vs. abortion and then not take a position on the latter. (Of course, people will be pissed at you for taking a position too.)
There are definitely future versions of myself whose utility are much more or less valuable to me than others despite being equally distant. If in ten years I am a good man, who has started a nice family, that I take good care of, then my current self cares a lot more about their utility than an equally (morally) good version of myself that just takes care of my mother’s cats, and has no wife or children (and this is separate from the fact that I would care about the effects my future self would have on that wife and children or that I care about them coming to exist).
Democracy might be less short-sighted on average because future people are more similar to average other people that currently exist than you happen to be right now. But then, they might be much more short-sighted because you plan for the future, while democracy plans for right now (and getting votes.) I would posit that sometimes one will dominate, and sometimes the other. As to your framing, the difference between you-now and you-future is mathematically bigger than the difference between others-now and others-future if you use a ratio for the number of links to get to them. Suppose people change half as much in a year as your sibling is different from you, and you care about similarity for what value you place on someone. Thus, two years equals one link. After 4 years, you are now two links away from yourself-now and your sibling is 3 from you now. They are 50% more different than future you (assuming no convergence). After eight years, you are 4 links away, while they are only 5, which makes them 25% more different to you than you are. Alternately, they have changed by 67% more, and you have changed by 100% of how much how distant they were from you at 4 years. It thus seems like they have changed far less than you have, and are more similar to who they were, thus why should you treat them as having the same rate.
Why should I care about similarities to pCEV when valuing people?
It seems to me that this matters in case your metaethical view is that one should do pCEV, or more generally if you think matching pCEV is evidence of moral correctness. If you don’t hold such metaethical views, then I might agree that (at least in the instrumentally rational sense, at least conditional on not holding any metametalevel views that contradict these) you shouldn’t care.
> Why is the first example explaining why someone could support taking money from people you value less to give to other people, while not supporting doing so with your own money? It’s obviously true under utilitarianism
I’m not sure if it answers the question, but I think it’s a cool consideration. I think most people are close to acting weighted-utilitarianly, but few realize how strong the difference between public and private charity is according to weighted-utilitarianism.
> It’s weird to bring up having kids vs. abortion and then not take a position on the latter. (Of course, people will be pissed at you for taking a position too.)
My position is “subsidize having children, that’s all the regulation around abortion that’s needed”. So in particular, abortion should be legal at any time. (I intended what I wrote in the post to communicate this, but maybe I didn’t do a good job.)
> democracy plans for right now I’m not sure I understand in what sense you mean this? Voters are voting according to preferences that partially involve caring about future selves. If what you have in mind is something like people being less attentive about costs policies cause 10 years into the future and this leads to discounting these more than the discount from caring alone, then I guess I could see that being possible. But that could also happen for people’s individual decisions, I think? I guess one might argue that people are more aware about long-term costs of personal decisions than of policies, but this is not clear to me, especially with more analysis going into policy decisions.
> As to your framing, the difference between you-now and you-future is mathematically bigger than the difference between others-now and others-future if you use a ratio for the number of links to get to them. Suppose people change half as much in a year as your sibling is different from you, and you care about similarity for what value you place on someone. Thus, two years equals one link. After 4 years, you are now two links away from yourself-now and your sibling is 3 from you now. They are 50% more different than future you (assuming no convergence). After eight years, you are 4 links away, while they are only 5, which makes them 25% more different to you than you are. Alternately, they have changed by 67% more, and you have changed by 100% of how much how distant they were from you at 4 years. It thus seems like they have changed far less than you have, and are more similar to who they were, thus why should you treat them as having the same rate.
That’s a cool observation! I guess this won’t work if we discount geometrically in the number of links. I’m not sure which is more justified.
There is lots of interesting stuff in your last comment which I still haven’t responded to. I might come back to this in the future if I have something interesting to say. Thanks again for your thoughts!
I’m only a bit of the way in, and it is interesting so far, but it already shows signs of needing serious editing, and there are other ways it is clearly wrong too.
In ‘The inequivalence of society-level and individual charity’ they list the scenarios as 1, 1, and 2 instead of A, B, C, as they later use. Later, refers incorrectly to preferring C to A with different necessary weights when the second reference is is to prefer C to B.
The claim that money becomes utility as a log of the amount of money isn’t true, but is probably close enough for this kind of use. You should add a note to the effect. (The effects of money are discrete at the very least).
The claim that the derivative of the log of y = 1/y is also incorrect. In general, log means either log base 10, or something specific to the area of study. If written generally, you must specify the base. (For instance, in Computer Science it is base-2, but I would have to explain that if I was doing external math with that.) The derivative of the natural log is 1/n, but that isn’t true of any other log. You should fix that statement by specifying you are using ln instead of log (or just prepending the word natural).
Just plain wrong in my opinion, for instance, claiming that a weight can’t be negative assumes away the existence of hate, but people do hate either themselves or others on occasion in non-instrumental ways, wanting them to suffer, which renders this claim invalid (unless they hate literally everyone).
I also don’t see how being perfectly altruistic necessitates valuing everyone else exactly the same as you. I could still value others different amounts without being any less altruistic, especially if the difference is between a lower value for me and the others higher. Relatedly, it is possible to not care about yourself at all, but this math can’t handle that.
I’ll leave aside other comments because I’ve only read a little.
Thanks for the comments!
I agree and I published an edit fixing this just now
I mostly agree, but I think footnote 17 covers this?
I think the standard in academic mathematics is that logx:=logex, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_logarithm#Notational_conventions, and I guess I would sort of like to spread that standard :). I think it’s exceedingly rare for someone to mean base 10 in this context, but I could be wrong. I agree that base 2 is also reasonable though. In any case, the base only changes utility by scaling by a constant, so everything in that subsection after the derivative should be true independently of the base. Nevertheless, I’m adding a footnote specifying this.
I’m having a really hard time imagining thinking this about someone else (I can imagine hate in the sense of like… not wanting to spend time together with someone and/or assigning a close-to-zero weight), but I’m not sure – I mean, I agree there definitely are people who think they non-instrumentally want the people who killed their family or whatever to suffer, but I think that’s a mistake? That said, I think I agree that for the purposes of modeling people, we might want to let weights be negative sometimes.
I think it’s partly that I just wanted to have some shorthand for “assign equal weight to everyone”, but I also think it matches the commonsense notion of being perfectly altruistic. One argument for this is that 1) one should always assign a higher weight for oneself than for anyone else (also see footnote 12 here) and 2) if one assigns a lower weight to someone else, then one is not perfectly altruistic in interactions with that person – given this, the unique option is to assign equal weight to everyone.
I don’t have much time, so:
While footnote 17 can be read as applying, it isn’t very specific.
For all that you are doing math, this isn’t mathematics, so base needs to be specified.
I am convinced that people really do give occasional others a negative weight.
And here are some notes I wrote while finishing the piece (that I would have edited and tightened up a a lot)(it’s a bit all over the place):
This model obviously assumes utilitarianism.
Honestly, their math does seem reasonable to account for people caring about other people (as long as they care about themselves at all on the same scale, which could even be negative, just not exactly 0.).
They do add an extraneous claim that the numbers for the weight of a person can’t be negative (because they don’t understand actual hate? At least officially.) If someone hates themselves, then you can’t do the numbers under these constraints, nor if they hate anyone else. But this constraint seems completely unnecessary, since you can sum negatives with positives easily enough.
I can’t see the point of using an adjacency matrix (of a weighted directed graph).
Being completely altruistic doesn’t seem like everyone gets a 1, but that everyone gets at least that much.
I don’t see a reason to privilege mental similarity to myself, since there are people unlike me that should be valued more highly. (Reaction to footnote 13) Why should I care about similarities to pCEV when valuing people?
Thus, they care less about taking richer people’s money. Why is the first example explaining why someone could support taking money from people you value less to give to other people, while not supporting doing so with your own money? It’s obviously true under utilitarianism (which I don’t subscribe to), but it’s also obscures things by framing ‘caring’ as ‘taking things from others by force’.
In ‘Pareto improvements and total welfare’ should a social planner care about the sum of U, or the sum of X? I don’t see how it is clear that it should be X. Why shouldn’t they value the sum of U, which seems more obvious?
‘But it’s okay for different things to spark joy’. Yes, if I care about someone I want their preferences fulfilled, not just mine, but I would like to point out that I want them to get what they want, not just for them to be happy.
Talking about caring about yourself though, if you care about yourself at different times, then you will care about what your current self does, past self did, and future self will, want. I’m not sure that my current preferences need to take into account those things though.
Thus I see two different categories of thing mattering as regards preferences. Contingent or instrumental preferences are changeable in accounting, while you should evaluate things as if your terminal preferences are unchanging.
Even though humans can have them change, such as when they have a child. Even if you already love your child automatically when you have one, you don’t necessarily care who that child turns out to be, but you care quite a bit afterwards. See any time travel scenario, and the parent will care very much that Sally no longer exists even though they now have Sammy. They will likely now also terminally value Sammy. Take into account that you will love your child, but not who they are unless you will have an effect on it (such as learning how to care for them in advance making them a more trusting child.).
In practice, subsidies and taxes end up not being about externalities at all, or to a very small degree. Often, one kind of externality (often positive) will be ignored even when it is larger than the other (often negative) externality.
This is especially true in modern countries where people ignore the positive externalities of people’s preferences being satisfied making them a better and more useful person in society, while they are obsessed with the idea of the negatives of any exchange.
I have a intuition that the maximum people would pay to avoid an externality is not really that close to its actual effects, and that people would generally lie if you asked them even if they knew.
In the real world, most people (though far from all) seem to have the intuition that the government uses the money they get from a tax less well than the individuals they take it from do.
Command economies are known to be much less efficient than free markets, so the best thing the government could do with a new tax is to lower less efficient taxes, but taxes only rarely go down, so this encourages wasted resources. Even when they do lower taxes, it isn’t by eliminating the worst taxes. When they put it out in subsidies, they aren’t well targeted subsidies either, but rather, distortionary.
Even a well targeted tax on negative externalities would thus have to handle the fact that it is, in itself, something with significant negative externalities even beyond the administrative cost (of making inefficient use of resources).
It’s weird to bring up having kids vs. abortion and then not take a position on the latter. (Of course, people will be pissed at you for taking a position too.)
There are definitely future versions of myself whose utility are much more or less valuable to me than others despite being equally distant.
If in ten years I am a good man, who has started a nice family, that I take good care of, then my current self cares a lot more about their utility than an equally (morally) good version of myself that just takes care of my mother’s cats, and has no wife or children (and this is separate from the fact that I would care about the effects my future self would have on that wife and children or that I care about them coming to exist).
Democracy might be less short-sighted on average because future people are more similar to average other people that currently exist than you happen to be right now. But then, they might be much more short-sighted because you plan for the future, while democracy plans for right now (and getting votes.) I would posit that sometimes one will dominate, and sometimes the other.
As to your framing, the difference between you-now and you-future is mathematically bigger than the difference between others-now and others-future if you use a ratio for the number of links to get to them.
Suppose people change half as much in a year as your sibling is different from you, and you care about similarity for what value you place on someone. Thus, two years equals one link.
After 4 years, you are now two links away from yourself-now and your sibling is 3 from you now. They are 50% more different than future you (assuming no convergence). After eight years, you are 4 links away, while they are only 5, which makes them 25% more different to you than you are.
Alternately, they have changed by 67% more, and you have changed by 100% of how much how distant they were from you at 4 years.
It thus seems like they have changed far less than you have, and are more similar to who they were, thus why should you treat them as having the same rate.
It seems to me that this matters in case your metaethical view is that one should do pCEV, or more generally if you think matching pCEV is evidence of moral correctness. If you don’t hold such metaethical views, then I might agree that (at least in the instrumentally rational sense, at least conditional on not holding any metametalevel views that contradict these) you shouldn’t care.
> Why is the first example explaining why someone could support taking money from people you value less to give to other people, while not supporting doing so with your own money? It’s obviously true under utilitarianism
I’m not sure if it answers the question, but I think it’s a cool consideration. I think most people are close to acting weighted-utilitarianly, but few realize how strong the difference between public and private charity is according to weighted-utilitarianism.
> It’s weird to bring up having kids vs. abortion and then not take a position on the latter. (Of course, people will be pissed at you for taking a position too.)
My position is “subsidize having children, that’s all the regulation around abortion that’s needed”. So in particular, abortion should be legal at any time. (I intended what I wrote in the post to communicate this, but maybe I didn’t do a good job.)
> democracy plans for right now
I’m not sure I understand in what sense you mean this? Voters are voting according to preferences that partially involve caring about future selves. If what you have in mind is something like people being less attentive about costs policies cause 10 years into the future and this leads to discounting these more than the discount from caring alone, then I guess I could see that being possible. But that could also happen for people’s individual decisions, I think? I guess one might argue that people are more aware about long-term costs of personal decisions than of policies, but this is not clear to me, especially with more analysis going into policy decisions.
> As to your framing, the difference between you-now and you-future is mathematically bigger than the difference between others-now and others-future if you use a ratio for the number of links to get to them.
Suppose people change half as much in a year as your sibling is different from you, and you care about similarity for what value you place on someone. Thus, two years equals one link.
After 4 years, you are now two links away from yourself-now and your sibling is 3 from you now. They are 50% more different than future you (assuming no convergence). After eight years, you are 4 links away, while they are only 5, which makes them 25% more different to you than you are.
Alternately, they have changed by 67% more, and you have changed by 100% of how much how distant they were from you at 4 years.
It thus seems like they have changed far less than you have, and are more similar to who they were, thus why should you treat them as having the same rate.
That’s a cool observation! I guess this won’t work if we discount geometrically in the number of links. I’m not sure which is more justified.
There is lots of interesting stuff in your last comment which I still haven’t responded to. I might come back to this in the future if I have something interesting to say. Thanks again for your thoughts!