[“Shoplifting is risk-free”] is false, but easily close enough to truth for our purposes.
I don’t think so. Shoplifting is more and less risky in different places and situations. I bet that the amount of shoplifting is monotone increasing in the amount of risk, even when that amount is relatively small. If that’s true, then “why don’t people shoplift more” doesn’t require an explanation beyond “because they don’t want to take the risk.” Do you disagree?
Yes, I disagree. Keep in mind, there is a very wide variety of protection a store can have for its goods. The depends on the value of the goods, but also on the “kind of person” that exists in the area, and the latter factor is crucial to understanding the dynamic I’m trying to highlight.
For the same goods, a store will have more security measures in areas where the “kind of people” (decision theory types) tend to steal more. But the population is never uniform. So, although the security measures account for some percentage of prevented shoplifting (and thus can be explained purely though causal consequences to shoplifters), there remains the group that differs from the typical person in the area. This group must stay sufficiently small for the store to stay profitable.
Therefore, the store is relying on a certain fraction of the population refraining from shoplifting even when they could get away with it.
But even if shoplifting is really kept low because of (mistaken) beliefs about its difficulty, that still doesn’t eliminate the newcomblike aspect. You still have to account for why this epistemic error happens in just the right way so as to increase total utility. And the explanation for that looks similar to the evolution case I discussed at the beginning of this subthread, but with memes replacing genes: basically, regions with “better norms” or “more systematic overestimation of shoplifting’s difficulty” will tend to flourish and outcompete those that don’t. Economic competition, then, acts as a sort of “Parfitian filter” in the same sense that evolution does.
I don’t think so. Shoplifting is more and less risky in different places and situations. I bet that the amount of shoplifting is monotone increasing in the amount of risk, even when that amount is relatively small. If that’s true, then “why don’t people shoplift more” doesn’t require an explanation beyond “because they don’t want to take the risk.” Do you disagree?
Yes, I disagree. Keep in mind, there is a very wide variety of protection a store can have for its goods. The depends on the value of the goods, but also on the “kind of person” that exists in the area, and the latter factor is crucial to understanding the dynamic I’m trying to highlight.
For the same goods, a store will have more security measures in areas where the “kind of people” (decision theory types) tend to steal more. But the population is never uniform. So, although the security measures account for some percentage of prevented shoplifting (and thus can be explained purely though causal consequences to shoplifters), there remains the group that differs from the typical person in the area. This group must stay sufficiently small for the store to stay profitable.
Therefore, the store is relying on a certain fraction of the population refraining from shoplifting even when they could get away with it.
But even if shoplifting is really kept low because of (mistaken) beliefs about its difficulty, that still doesn’t eliminate the newcomblike aspect. You still have to account for why this epistemic error happens in just the right way so as to increase total utility. And the explanation for that looks similar to the evolution case I discussed at the beginning of this subthread, but with memes replacing genes: basically, regions with “better norms” or “more systematic overestimation of shoplifting’s difficulty” will tend to flourish and outcompete those that don’t. Economic competition, then, acts as a sort of “Parfitian filter” in the same sense that evolution does.