Adequacy: “Okay, the medical sector is a wildly crazy place where different interventions have orders-of-magnitude differences in cost-effectiveness, but at least there’s no well-known but unused way to save ten thousand lives for just ten dollars each, right? Somebody would have picked up on it! Right?!”
There are worse cases. Any time one person murders another person there was an opportunity to save a life for free, not even ten dollars. The murderer just needs to decide to do something else that’s not murder. Okay, so murderers are inadequate at saving lives for free. We shrug, we don’t expect murderers to be good at saving lives, it’s not really their thing.
But is this “civilizational inadequacy”? I don’t know, I see a clear definition of “Adequacy”, but not of “civilizational inadequacy”. In Inadequacy and Modesty Yudkowsky cites the Bank of Japan as an example:
Roughly, the civilizational inadequacy thesis states that in situations where the central bank of a major developed democracy is carrying out a policy, and a number of highly regarded economists like Ben Bernanke have written papers about what that central bank is doing wrong, and there are widely accepted macroeconomic theories for understanding what that central bank is doing wrong, and the government of the country has tried to put pressure on the central bank to stop doing it wrong, and literally trillions of dollars in real wealth are at stake, then the overall competence of human civilization is such that we shouldn’t be surprised to find the professional economists at the Bank of Japan doing it wrong.
I can equivalently say that the overall competence of human civilization is such that we shouldn’t be surprised to find John Q Murderer choosing to murder someone instead of something else that’s not that. I don’t think I’m meant to, because the cost of making all such murderers make a better choice might include banning all weapons and pervasive surveillance and mandatory body armor and extensive policing and the death penalty and various other things. You can’t go from “there’s a murder” to “civilization is inadequate”.
When I translate this intuition back to the Bank of Japan I find similar problems. For human civilization at large, one way to prevent the Bank of Japan being overly hawkish is to invade Japan, overthrow the government, and set up a new central bank with more dovish economists. Not really what we want. Maybe the economists of the world should use persuasion and write papers about what the central bank is doing wrong … but of course they were doing just that, and that’s part of what eventually led to change.
Maybe we can retreat to the Japanese government being inadequate, since the Japanese government originally decided to make the Bank of Japan independent from government, which led to it being able to resist later pressure from the Japanese government to have looser monetary policy. But having an independent central bank is good, actually, and you can’t write a law giving your central bank independence unless it’s being flagrantly irrational. So I think you can’t go from “Bank of Japan too hawkish” to “civilization is inadequate”.
At this point I imagine the Dath Ilani Visitor explaining that in their +40 IQ world the central bank of the one world government was set up with a “fire the bank president” prediction market and various other policies such that yes, in fact, you can write a law giving your central bank independence unless it’s being flagrantly irrational. Although something smarter than that because we can’t simulate +40 IQ civilizations in our heads. Beware the Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence.
But if civilization has “civilizational inadequacy” every time it fails relative to a hypothetical +40 IQ civilization, then all civilizations are inadequate, because you can always keep adding 40 hypothetical IQ points. Also, if that’s the baseline then Japanese monetary policy is a negligible detail—Civilization is inadequate because it didn’t create AGI by the 1200s. This makes the term “inadequate” increasingly ill-chosen. Also, intentional or not, it sounds like sneering.
My take:
Inadequate Markets: good concept, bad name. Suggest rename to “Visible Market Failure” building on the existing economics term.
Civilizational Inadequacy: bad concept, terrible name. Suggest rename to “Civilizational Mediocrity”.
There are worse cases. Any time one person murders another person there was an opportunity to save a life for free, not even ten dollars. The murderer just needs to decide to do something else that’s not murder. Okay, so murderers are inadequate at saving lives for free. We shrug, we don’t expect murderers to be good at saving lives, it’s not really their thing.
But is this “civilizational inadequacy”? I don’t know, I see a clear definition of “Adequacy”, but not of “civilizational inadequacy”. In Inadequacy and Modesty Yudkowsky cites the Bank of Japan as an example:
I can equivalently say that the overall competence of human civilization is such that we shouldn’t be surprised to find John Q Murderer choosing to murder someone instead of something else that’s not that. I don’t think I’m meant to, because the cost of making all such murderers make a better choice might include banning all weapons and pervasive surveillance and mandatory body armor and extensive policing and the death penalty and various other things. You can’t go from “there’s a murder” to “civilization is inadequate”.
When I translate this intuition back to the Bank of Japan I find similar problems. For human civilization at large, one way to prevent the Bank of Japan being overly hawkish is to invade Japan, overthrow the government, and set up a new central bank with more dovish economists. Not really what we want. Maybe the economists of the world should use persuasion and write papers about what the central bank is doing wrong … but of course they were doing just that, and that’s part of what eventually led to change.
Maybe we can retreat to the Japanese government being inadequate, since the Japanese government originally decided to make the Bank of Japan independent from government, which led to it being able to resist later pressure from the Japanese government to have looser monetary policy. But having an independent central bank is good, actually, and you can’t write a law giving your central bank independence unless it’s being flagrantly irrational. So I think you can’t go from “Bank of Japan too hawkish” to “civilization is inadequate”.
At this point I imagine the Dath Ilani Visitor explaining that in their +40 IQ world the central bank of the one world government was set up with a “fire the bank president” prediction market and various other policies such that yes, in fact, you can write a law giving your central bank independence unless it’s being flagrantly irrational. Although something smarter than that because we can’t simulate +40 IQ civilizations in our heads. Beware the Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence.
But if civilization has “civilizational inadequacy” every time it fails relative to a hypothetical +40 IQ civilization, then all civilizations are inadequate, because you can always keep adding 40 hypothetical IQ points. Also, if that’s the baseline then Japanese monetary policy is a negligible detail—Civilization is inadequate because it didn’t create AGI by the 1200s. This makes the term “inadequate” increasingly ill-chosen. Also, intentional or not, it sounds like sneering.
My take:
Inadequate Markets: good concept, bad name. Suggest rename to “Visible Market Failure” building on the existing economics term.
Civilizational Inadequacy: bad concept, terrible name. Suggest rename to “Civilizational Mediocrity”.