Hmm, I feel like most of my motivating examples are symmetric in costs and benefits?
In the lemon’s market you are trying to either buy or sell a car at a price that makes it worth it.
In the OODA loop dogfighting example you are trying to get in a position to take down your opponent
I agree that open courts are among the best tools for dismantling paranoia-inducing environments. My ideal post would have a whole section on those! I just didn’t have the time to cover it all, and am hoping to write more about courts and above-board investigative processes in future posts.
The lemon market example seems poorly motivated. Presumably many buyers want to get around conveniently, and they have to decide whether any given offer is the right solution to that problem. If the quality of available cars declines all-around because lemons drive the good sellers out, that’s bad news, but doesn’t mean buyers should be spending more effort sussing out lemons; they should only be doing this if they think there are likely non-lemons available!
Sure! I don’t think I said anywhere that buyers should be spending more effort sussing out lemons? The lemon market example is trying to introduce a simple toy environment in which a transition from a non-adversarial to an adversarial information environment can quickly cause lots of trades to no longer happen and leave approximately everyone worse off.
At least my model of the reader benefits from an existence proof of this, as I have found even this relatively simple insight to frequently be challenged.
“Buying a car in a lemon’s market is a constant exercise of trying to figure out how the other person is trying to fuck you over” would seem to be saying that the more lemons there are, the more effort buyers should be spending sussing out lemons.
Yeah, I am not enthused about that paragraph, honestly. I do still think it tracks, but it’s not great.
Like, in that section of a post, I am trying to make a conceptual jump from the simple economic model, to the lived experience of what it’s like to be an actor within that economic model (in the above example I should have said “buying a car in a market that is transitioning from a peach market to a lemons market”). Economic models generally do not cover the experience of what the algorithms that produce the outcome feel like from the inside, but in this case, it felt like an important jump to make.
I didn’t intend to communicate that thereby the classical lemons market model predicts that you should spend more resources trying to figure out which cars are peaches and lemons. Indeed, in the classical lemons market model one of the core assumptions is that there is no way for you to tell. I do cover the slightly adjusted case of there being a costly inspection you can perform to tell whether a car is a lemon or a peach a few paragraphs later.
IDK, maybe that paragraph is bad. I am not super attached to it. It was the result of specific user feedback of someone being like “man, you talk about all of this abstractly, but clearly a lot of the point of this post is to talk about the internal experience of being in one of those situations, and I feel like I need more pointers towards that”.
Hmm, I feel like most of my motivating examples are symmetric in costs and benefits?
In the lemon’s market you are trying to either buy or sell a car at a price that makes it worth it.
In the OODA loop dogfighting example you are trying to get in a position to take down your opponent
I agree that open courts are among the best tools for dismantling paranoia-inducing environments. My ideal post would have a whole section on those! I just didn’t have the time to cover it all, and am hoping to write more about courts and above-board investigative processes in future posts.
The lemon market example seems poorly motivated. Presumably many buyers want to get around conveniently, and they have to decide whether any given offer is the right solution to that problem. If the quality of available cars declines all-around because lemons drive the good sellers out, that’s bad news, but doesn’t mean buyers should be spending more effort sussing out lemons; they should only be doing this if they think there are likely non-lemons available!
Sure! I don’t think I said anywhere that buyers should be spending more effort sussing out lemons? The lemon market example is trying to introduce a simple toy environment in which a transition from a non-adversarial to an adversarial information environment can quickly cause lots of trades to no longer happen and leave approximately everyone worse off.
At least my model of the reader benefits from an existence proof of this, as I have found even this relatively simple insight to frequently be challenged.
“Buying a car in a lemon’s market is a constant exercise of trying to figure out how the other person is trying to fuck you over” would seem to be saying that the more lemons there are, the more effort buyers should be spending sussing out lemons.
Yeah, I am not enthused about that paragraph, honestly. I do still think it tracks, but it’s not great.
Like, in that section of a post, I am trying to make a conceptual jump from the simple economic model, to the lived experience of what it’s like to be an actor within that economic model (in the above example I should have said “buying a car in a market that is transitioning from a peach market to a lemons market”). Economic models generally do not cover the experience of what the algorithms that produce the outcome feel like from the inside, but in this case, it felt like an important jump to make.
I didn’t intend to communicate that thereby the classical lemons market model predicts that you should spend more resources trying to figure out which cars are peaches and lemons. Indeed, in the classical lemons market model one of the core assumptions is that there is no way for you to tell. I do cover the slightly adjusted case of there being a costly inspection you can perform to tell whether a car is a lemon or a peach a few paragraphs later.
IDK, maybe that paragraph is bad. I am not super attached to it. It was the result of specific user feedback of someone being like “man, you talk about all of this abstractly, but clearly a lot of the point of this post is to talk about the internal experience of being in one of those situations, and I feel like I need more pointers towards that”.