How is consideration of decisions about trade not part of agent mindset? “Making a profit” isn’t a special thing, it’s just one more possible future world-state that one might prefer. So yes, I think trading is part of agency. Where’s the error?
“Making a profit” privileges your unit of account as something intrinsically valuable, instead of considering the desirability of outcome directly. This is sometimes a good approximation (and indispensable for running a business), but it is not actually an attempt to directly discern the worldstate features you can change that you care about. This is what I mean by collapsing the map-territory distinction.
Ah, I see. I’m so deeply in the consequentialist/market view of the world that I mentally translate “making a profit” as not necessarily monetary, but just “improving my perceived state of the world”. I also say that I profit by going to bed on time in order to feel good the next day and that I profit by donating money to a charity that I believe improves the world more than I otherwise could with that money. “profit” is just shorthand for “result in a better world-state”, and every action is trading the un-taken decision for the taken one.
In the narrower sense “making a monetary profit” can absolutely be a bad decision. One doesn’t need to categorize things as sacred to make good decisions.
The thing I want you to notice here is that using “profit” as the default term for this makes profiting from a single transaction (e.g. arbitrage) the central case of acting to produce desired world states. I expect that simply reordering material reality to suit your preferences (e.g. tidying your room), or improving the capacity of aligned systems (e.g. learning to communicate better with your friends) will occur to you less often as things you might want to focus on, than it would if you treated profit more explicitly as a special case of beneficial actions.
How is consideration of decisions about trade not part of agent mindset? “Making a profit” isn’t a special thing, it’s just one more possible future world-state that one might prefer. So yes, I think trading is part of agency. Where’s the error?
“Making a profit” privileges your unit of account as something intrinsically valuable, instead of considering the desirability of outcome directly. This is sometimes a good approximation (and indispensable for running a business), but it is not actually an attempt to directly discern the worldstate features you can change that you care about. This is what I mean by collapsing the map-territory distinction.
Ah, I see. I’m so deeply in the consequentialist/market view of the world that I mentally translate “making a profit” as not necessarily monetary, but just “improving my perceived state of the world”. I also say that I profit by going to bed on time in order to feel good the next day and that I profit by donating money to a charity that I believe improves the world more than I otherwise could with that money. “profit” is just shorthand for “result in a better world-state”, and every action is trading the un-taken decision for the taken one.
In the narrower sense “making a monetary profit” can absolutely be a bad decision. One doesn’t need to categorize things as sacred to make good decisions.
The thing I want you to notice here is that using “profit” as the default term for this makes profiting from a single transaction (e.g. arbitrage) the central case of acting to produce desired world states. I expect that simply reordering material reality to suit your preferences (e.g. tidying your room), or improving the capacity of aligned systems (e.g. learning to communicate better with your friends) will occur to you less often as things you might want to focus on, than it would if you treated profit more explicitly as a special case of beneficial actions.