I don’t know why Eliezer originally wrote this; probably mostly just for fun. The cross-post helps give his answer to the first two Qs in the Inadequacy and Modesty comments:
So why didn’t the Bank of Japan print more money? If they didn’t have an incentive one way or another I would expect them to cave to the political pressure, so what was the counter-incentive? Did they genuinely disagree and think that printing money was a bad idea? Were they reluctant to change policies because then they would look stupid?
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Even if we believed that central bankers are purely selfish, and don’t care at all about the mandate they have nominally taken on, they still have some incentive to produce higher employment (inflation being equal). Politicians encourage them to do so, and they get prestige among macroeconomists (e.g. “wow FED chairperson X presided over the longest period of peacetime growth since 1900.”). To paraphrase evolution-is-just-a-theorem: what incentive do central bankers have not to puruse adequately loose monteray policy?
This isn’t an important point for most readers, and indeed part of the point of the Bank of Japan example in that chapter was that Eliezer doesn’t think it’s important or necessary to understand the BoJ’s reasoning, or model a specific bias they might have, in order to be confident that they’re wrong on object-level grounds. Hence the psychologizing above gets cleanly left out.
I don’t know why Eliezer originally wrote this; probably mostly just for fun. The cross-post helps give his answer to the first two Qs in the Inadequacy and Modesty comments:
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This isn’t an important point for most readers, and indeed part of the point of the Bank of Japan example in that chapter was that Eliezer doesn’t think it’s important or necessary to understand the BoJ’s reasoning, or model a specific bias they might have, in order to be confident that they’re wrong on object-level grounds. Hence the psychologizing above gets cleanly left out.