“It’s hard to beat signaling equilibria—because they’re “multi-factor markets”—which are special cases of coordination problems that create “inferior Nash equilibria”—which are so stuck in place that market controllers can seek rent on the value generated by captive participants.”
It’s things like this that makes me puzzled why the author is yet libertarian, even in spite of this perfectly succint description of the Awful state of affairs arrived at in the wild west, when a Leviathan could try to transcend/straddle these fruits/niches and force them upward into a more Pareto optimal condition, maybe even into the non-Nash E. states if we’re extra lucky. Or is Regulatory Capture and the Law of Unintended Consequences generally so strong that any attempt can be assumed futile, and we’ll always achieve more harm than good in some lateral unexpected way as the market circumvents our efforts? (The Germans have a wonderful word—Verschlimmbessern! When you try to help/improve something, with good intentions but end up breaking it worse) Is it only thus today because all regulators also come with the undesideratum of human error? Would an AI too be doomed & unable to remedy these inferior equilibria? Or does the libertarian view only apply pragmatically now at the human era.
a Leviathan could try to transcend/straddle these fruits/niches and force them upward into a more Pareto optimal condition, maybe even into the non-Nash E. states if we’re extra lucky.
Remember that old Yudkowsky post about Occam’s Razor, wherein he points out how “a witch did it” sounds super-simple, but the word “witch” hides a ton of hidden complexity? I’m pretty sure you’re doing the same thing here with the word “could”. Instead of trying to picture what an imaginary all-powerful leader could do, imagine what a typical leader would do. You’ve just given a speech to Hillary Clinton about why it’s imperative to decimate the university system for economic reasons, or to Donald Trump about how protectionism is always Pareto-suboptimal. Do they react the way you wish them to act? Does their reaction make you want to give them more forceful power, or less?
For that matter, you don’t have to imagine any speeches—every politician and their staff have access to the same internet you do, and can learn everything about coordination problems and their solutions that you can, and even without totalitarian official power they still have enough of a “bully pulpit” and enough credibility, seriousness, and so on to push the world out of at least the shallowest non-globally-optimal local optima. How many of them are doing so? By contrast, how many of them are deliberately setting up more barriers to such changes?
I don’t think that using a label like libertarian in this was is helpful for discussing the problem. Identity-labels hinder clear thinking about politics. EY doesn’t engage into saying that he’s a libertarian in a post like this.
“It’s hard to beat signaling equilibria—because they’re “multi-factor markets”—which are special cases of coordination problems that create “inferior Nash equilibria”—which are so stuck in place that market controllers can seek rent on the value generated by captive participants.”
It’s things like this that makes me puzzled why the author is yet libertarian, even in spite of this perfectly succint description of the Awful state of affairs arrived at in the wild west, when a Leviathan could try to transcend/straddle these fruits/niches and force them upward into a more Pareto optimal condition, maybe even into the non-Nash E. states if we’re extra lucky. Or is Regulatory Capture and the Law of Unintended Consequences generally so strong that any attempt can be assumed futile, and we’ll always achieve more harm than good in some lateral unexpected way as the market circumvents our efforts? (The Germans have a wonderful word—Verschlimmbessern! When you try to help/improve something, with good intentions but end up breaking it worse) Is it only thus today because all regulators also come with the undesideratum of human error? Would an AI too be doomed & unable to remedy these inferior equilibria? Or does the libertarian view only apply pragmatically now at the human era.
Remember that old Yudkowsky post about Occam’s Razor, wherein he points out how “a witch did it” sounds super-simple, but the word “witch” hides a ton of hidden complexity? I’m pretty sure you’re doing the same thing here with the word “could”. Instead of trying to picture what an imaginary all-powerful leader could do, imagine what a typical leader would do. You’ve just given a speech to Hillary Clinton about why it’s imperative to decimate the university system for economic reasons, or to Donald Trump about how protectionism is always Pareto-suboptimal. Do they react the way you wish them to act? Does their reaction make you want to give them more forceful power, or less?
For that matter, you don’t have to imagine any speeches—every politician and their staff have access to the same internet you do, and can learn everything about coordination problems and their solutions that you can, and even without totalitarian official power they still have enough of a “bully pulpit” and enough credibility, seriousness, and so on to push the world out of at least the shallowest non-globally-optimal local optima. How many of them are doing so? By contrast, how many of them are deliberately setting up more barriers to such changes?
I don’t think that using a label like libertarian in this was is helpful for discussing the problem. Identity-labels hinder clear thinking about politics. EY doesn’t engage into saying that he’s a libertarian in a post like this.
He’s not that libertarian in the political sense, though probably more than either of us.