Your money example is a linguistic trick. It uses nominal wealth. 3. simply does not hold for nominal wealth. If “all else equal” meant “interest > inflation,” then it would say that real wealth is growing exponentially, in which case 3 would indeed always hold. The example as it stands just doesn’t prove much, other than nominal wealth is not real wealth.
More significantly, wealth is purely socially determined; it has no objective value. Intellect has objective abilities. Chess is a terrible example. If you use something non-relative, like, say, deriving general relativity, or building a rocket, or catapult, or what-have-you, higher intelligence will result in a better/more-quickly-made end product. In some cases, the end product won’t exist without a certain level of intelligence; if no human had ever had an IQ over 75, I sincerely doubt we’d have general relativity (or electricity, or, well, pretty much anything).
There may be a bit more complexity to the issue of recursive self-improvement, but I really don’t see the distinction between contextual and concrete values being nearly as significant as you have claimed.
Your money example is a linguistic trick. It uses nominal wealth.
I would like to expand on this idea. Earning interest on a savings account is not a FOOM, but an attempt to participate in someone else’s FOOM. The real economic FOOM comes from using one’s resources to develop better resource producing capabilities, e.g. building a factory or tools (which may at some point be obsolete, the trick is to get a good return on the investment before that happens, and then move on to a new investment). A savings account, on the other hand, is able to collect interest by providing loans to people who have plans to make good investments. The interest rate they can collect will be low because there are more savings accounts than skilled investors (and the savings accounts compete with other loan providers, like central banks that can print money for loans, which incidentally also causes the inflation that negates the value of the interest earned).
Generally, it is not a problem that FOOMs may fail due to competition, as one of them will win the competition, just as the serious investors do better than those who use savings accounts.
Sorry, about the message, I got the wrong meaning of objective.
Yes IQ has objective properties in the sense they don’t rely on society.
But I think the difference between objective and subjective is not a good one to keep. Minds and societies are physical things, they may change more mecurially than other physical things, but they are still physical.
Your money example is a linguistic trick. It uses nominal wealth. 3. simply does not hold for nominal wealth. If “all else equal” meant “interest > inflation,” then it would say that real wealth is growing exponentially, in which case 3 would indeed always hold. The example as it stands just doesn’t prove much, other than nominal wealth is not real wealth.
More significantly, wealth is purely socially determined; it has no objective value. Intellect has objective abilities. Chess is a terrible example. If you use something non-relative, like, say, deriving general relativity, or building a rocket, or catapult, or what-have-you, higher intelligence will result in a better/more-quickly-made end product. In some cases, the end product won’t exist without a certain level of intelligence; if no human had ever had an IQ over 75, I sincerely doubt we’d have general relativity (or electricity, or, well, pretty much anything).
There may be a bit more complexity to the issue of recursive self-improvement, but I really don’t see the distinction between contextual and concrete values being nearly as significant as you have claimed.
I would like to expand on this idea. Earning interest on a savings account is not a FOOM, but an attempt to participate in someone else’s FOOM. The real economic FOOM comes from using one’s resources to develop better resource producing capabilities, e.g. building a factory or tools (which may at some point be obsolete, the trick is to get a good return on the investment before that happens, and then move on to a new investment). A savings account, on the other hand, is able to collect interest by providing loans to people who have plans to make good investments. The interest rate they can collect will be low because there are more savings accounts than skilled investors (and the savings accounts compete with other loan providers, like central banks that can print money for loans, which incidentally also causes the inflation that negates the value of the interest earned).
Generally, it is not a problem that FOOMs may fail due to competition, as one of them will win the competition, just as the serious investors do better than those who use savings accounts.
Sorry, about the message, I got the wrong meaning of objective.
Yes IQ has objective properties in the sense they don’t rely on society.
But I think the difference between objective and subjective is not a good one to keep. Minds and societies are physical things, they may change more mecurially than other physical things, but they are still physical.