Correlation does imply some sort of causal link.
For guessing its direction, simple models help you think.
Controlled experiments, if they are well beyond the brink
Of .05 significance will make your unknowns shrink.
Replications prove there’s something new under the sun.
Did one cause the other? Did the other cause the one?
Are they both controlled by something already begun?
Or was it their coincidence that caused it to be done?
Indeed. I think that a serious search for an answer to these questions is probably best left for the “Long Reflection.”
That’s a nice conceptual refinement. It actually swings me in the other direction, making it seem plausible that humans might not have nearly enough time to find the optimum arrangement in their expected lifespan and that this might be a central question.
One possibility is that there is a maximal value tile that is much smaller than “all available atoms” and can be duplicated indefinitely to maximize expected value. So perhaps we don’t need to explore all combinations of atoms to be sure that we’ve achieved the limit of value.
This makes me connect with the post the other day about research speedruns. Those posts interested me because it was a little like looking over the writer’s shoulder, and seeing how they approached the challenge. It seems to me like this could be another useful rationalist training program. I imagine I could learn from both roles, and suspect many others could too.
Thanks very much for pointing this out. I hadn’t seen these rebuttals before.
Although I think the assumption that economic growth demands endlessly increasing material consumption is flawed, it seems natural to imagine that even a maximally efficient economy must use a nonzero number of atoms on average to produce an additional utilon. There must, therefore, be a maximal level of universal utility, which we can approach to within some distance in a finite number of doublings. Since we have enormous amounts of time available, and are also contending with a shrinking amount of access to material resources over time, it seems natural to posit that an extremely long-lived species could reach a point at which the economy simply cannot grow at the same rate.
The timeline you establish here by extrapolating present trends isn’t convincing to me, but I think the basic message that “this can’t go on” is correct. It seems to me that this insight is vastly more important to understand the context of our century than any particular estimate of when we might reach the theoretical limit of utility.
Sometimes, tasks are one-offs, unreliable, or demand that you take steps dynamically on some trigger condition, rather than as a series of steps. For example, if I’m working in the bio-safety cabinet in my lab, I need to re-wet my hands with ethanol if I take them out. If I spill something, I need to re-sterilize. Each experiment might place its own demands.
So in addition to checklists, I think it’s important to develop the complementary skill of cognizance. It’s a habit of mind, in which you constantly quiz yourself with each action about what you’re trying to do, how it’s done, why, what could go wrong, and how to avoid those outcomes.
For some tasks, the vast majority of errors might be in a few common categories, most effectively addressed with a checklist. For others, the vast majority of errors might come down to a wide range of hard-to-predict situational factors, best avoided with a habit of cognizance.
In fact, come to think of it, this is the thesis of More from Less by Andrew McAffee, who points out that in numerous categories of material products, we’ve seen global GDP growing while using less material resources, in both relative and absolute terms.
Edit: though see multiple 1-star reviews from non-anonymous Amazon reviewers with economics PhDs who say the core premise of McAffee’s book is incorrect. Sounds like there is better research out there than he presents in this book.
An alternative point of view is in Decoupling Debunked, which seems to feed into degrowth literature. Makes me worry that both McAffee’s and this piece will suffer from the same issues we find when we look for a consensus viewpoint among economists on the effect of the minimum wage.
A more optimistic 2020 peer reviewed article on decoupling, “A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights”, claims:
We find that relative decoupling is frequent for material use as well as GHG and CO2 emissions but not for useful exergy, a quality-based measure of energy use. Primary energy can be decoupled from GDP largely to the extent to which the conversion of primary energy to useful exergy is improved. Examples of absolute long-term decoupling are rare, but recently some industrialized countries have decoupled GDP from both production- and, weaklier, consumption-based CO2 emissions.
As a concrete example, let’s imagine that sending an email is equivalent to sending a letter. Let’s ignore the infrastructure required to send emails (computers, satellites, etc) vs. letters (mail trucks, post offices, etc), and assume they’re roughly equal to each other. Then the invention of email eliminated the vast majority of letters, and the atoms they would have been made from.
Couple this with the fact that emails are more durable, searchable, instantaneous, free, legible, compatible with mixed media, and occupy only a miniscule amount of physical real estate in the silicon of the computer, and we can see that emails not only reduce the amount of atoms needed to transmit a letter, but also produce a lot more value.
In theory, we might spend the next several thousand years not only finding ways to pack more value into fewer atoms, but also enhancing our ability to derive value from the same good or service. Perhaps in 10,000 years, checking my email will be a genuine pleasure!
Insecurity and shame feel to me like having a high probability on being disliked or in the wrong, and of this having high consequences. This leads to a “reasonable suspicion” standard of jurisprudence, and a sort of stop-and-frisk approach to self-policing.
Security feels like moving to a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. If I get worried about being disliked or in the wrong, then if I can construct an argument for why this might not be so, or that it doesn’t matter, then I’m “free to go.”
As a result, I think my inner prosecutor has realized that it shouldn’t waste so much time with needless accusations and investigations. It has a lower probability of success, so it comes at me less often. Even when it does bring frivolous lawsuits, my inner defender feels more confident that they’re nothing to be truly afraid of, even as it does the work to mount a defense.
I think this might also operate in social relationships, not just personal psychology. If I think you experience a lot of insecurity or shame, then I might tend to coddle you. It feels uncomfortable to be coddled, at least to me, and so if somebody treated me that way, I think it might reinforce my insecurity and create a positive feedback loop.
Also, if John Doe is interested in calculus, but never finds your post, then it will also be a silly post to write. In general, the ability of writing to produce value is bottlenecked by our ability to get the right piece of writing to the right person at the right time.
It’s also relevant to worry about externalities and information asymmetries.
Persistent frustrations with social media originate from posts that are at the Pareto frontier, having traded a lot of nuance and accuracy off in exchange for fun and signaling. Such posts do this because the writer gets more clicks and shares by writing posts like this. This is “good” for the individual readers and sharers in the moment, if we believe their behavior reflects their preferences, but it may be bad for society as a whole if we’d prefer our friends to focus more on accuracy and nuance.
Readers may use signals of credibility when they pursue nuance and accuracy in order to judge the accuracy of a text. They optimize, therefore, for credibility, because they can’t directly optimize for accuracy. Perhaps they also want accessibility. If you then write a post optimized for credibility and accessibility, but the post isn’t accurate, then you can be at the Pareto frontier while also doing the reader a disservice.
That being said, the basic concept here seems right to me. Being at the Pareto frontier is correlated with creating value for the reader, and a search for such correlates of value is helpful.
In my opinion, what we focus on is sort of like SCUBA diving. Some overall training is helpful, so that you can understand what the equipment is for and how to use it. It does decompose into parts. But it’s not a high-pressure sport, and skill comes from mainly going through the overall process and dealing with the random challenges that come up in individual circumstances. So you could teach it as “katas,” but that would be a relatively inefficient way to learn.
John Wentworth and asjayan’s framing exercises seem to fit the bill, but I’m the only one consistently participating as of late…
You could argue that workers signed up for certain risks, and this is exactly what employers used to argue in many cases.
Is a person’s level of responsibility for the risks they assume proportional to the level of knowledge they had about those risks in advance?
Here’s a line of thinking we might imagine in the mind of a worker taking full personal responsibility for an unknown level of risk:
I need a job, and working in the steel mill seems like good-paying work. But I know that people get hurt or killed there, sometimes. I’ll try to be careful, but I can’t control what other people do, and the equipment isn’t too reliable either. Plus, I might have a bad day, be forgetful, and cause a disaster. I don’t want to die for this job. But I don’t know how likely it is that I’ll get hurt or killed, and it’s hard for me to say whether or not, if I really knew my true chances, I’d feel this was the job for me… I guess I’ll do it, though. What am I going to do otherwise? Something else that’s just as dangerous? Or lower-paying?
This line of thinking seems like a plausible account of how a cautious person might have tried to do a risk assessment for factory work. I don’t look at it and think “clearly, this man is fully liable for anything that happens to him in the steel mill.” Nor do I look at it and think, “anything that happens to this man is his employer’s moral and fiscal responsibility.”
Instead, I tend to think that we should do our best to get an expert assessment of the risk, make the factory as safe as we can, create a culture of safety, and take care of people who get hurt—both for their sake and so that we can keep a feeling of relative confidence in the workers who will continue to do the job after one of their colleagues suffers an accident. Having the moral debate is a symptom that your system has broken down and can’t find a satisfactory deal for everybody. It feels like camoflage for a business negotiation rather than a true intellectual debate. Real progress is having to have fewer moral debates.
Yes, the market analogy seems like a valuable one to lean into. Textbooks tend to focus on a control systems approach to describing protein and cellular regulation and action. The body is viewed as an intricate machine, which is not designed, but has a design determined by evolutionary forces which acts to achieve functions conducive to reproduction. This tends to make me frame cells and proteins as components of a machine, which only gain an independent “agency” of their own in the case of cancer.
I can see two broad strategies for incorporating this into our understanding.
One is for communication and study purposes. By using familiar and vivid frames, we might be able to teach about biology in a more compelling manner.
This seems useful, but even better would be to use economic frames to derive truly novel insights. In my lab, control systems are the dominant framework for understanding the systems under study. It’s a large, old, world-class lab populated by scientists who are smarter and more experienced than me, so I find it likely that this tradition has resulted at least in part from its massive, sustained, demonstrated utility.
What sort of predictions or strategies can we make by using economic frames, beyond simply repackaging known mechanisms into novel language and analogies? How can economic frames lead us to concrete experimental techniques in order to test and build on these novel insights? What are the challenges and limitations of an economic framing of cellular biology?
Market size is central in other cases as well. It is what permits specialization of labor. Comparative advantage is a mechanism for permitting this development even when one of the producers has an absolute advantage, such as Yuma in this example. However, the most important factor in specialization is sheer market size. This is why I’m excited to consider this frame further in the future.
General system components:
Two or more producers
Two or more products with differing costs for each producer
Consumption
A coordinating mechanism
Scientific hierarchy and specialization. When a new graduate student does wet lab work for a PI in a large and well-funded lab, they’re generally foregoing only an opportunity to do wet lab work somewhere else. They don’t have the resources, scientific knowledge base, or position to pursue their own high-level research strategy, even if they had one. If a well-funded PI were to do wet lab work, they’d be giving up time they could be devoting to high-impact strategy work. Hence, even though the PI might be better at the bench than any of their graduate students, they nevertheless don’t actually do any wet lab work themselves. On occasion, though, they might step in to perform a critical procedure in a crunch if the assigned grad student isn’t able to do it.
Furthermore, successful labs probably specialize not only to advance the state of the art in their field, but also in order to be able to provide services to other labs. If lab A is run by a highly competent PI who has a large but limited supply of labor and capital, they could develop competency in any of a wide range of advanced skills and techniques. But if lab B, even if run by a modestly competent PI, can specialize in a component of work relevant to lab A, then they might have a comparative advantage in that area. Lab A will let them have it, so that they can produce more of the things lab B is not able to do.
Hibernation vs. winter foraging. Ground squirrels hibernate; hares do not. One speculative explanation is that, in energy-sparse environments, species specialize not only in different particular food sources, but in different seasons. Hares specialize in exploiting winter food sources; ground squirrels specialize in maximally exploiting summer resources through more complex patterns of behavior. In a sense, they’re finding different comparative advantages. They may evolve with these patterns in a way that reflects a sort of “evolutionary trade.” Hares focusing on a pattern of energy consumption and expenditure that can run at a uniform moderate level, sustainable in summer against competition from lots of hungry squirrels, and also in winter when food sources are scarce. Squirrels focus on a pattern that maximally exploits abundant summer resources, and then shuts down during the winter, “leaving the rest” for the hares. This isn’t symbiosis, and it’s not just “specialization” in the narrow sense of, say, growing a beak adapted to a particular flower shape. Beak specialization is equivalent to a firm producing better tools for its workers to do the job it’s focused on; hibernation vs. winter foraging lifestyles are equivalent to the process by which firms choose which jobs to focus on in the first place.
Can we apply other economic principles to understand evolution and predict or explain patterns in our observations? We might use “market size” to understand the evolution of multicellular organisms. The more cells we have in the body, the more they’re able to specialize. This predicts that we’d find increased cellular diversity in larger organisms, even within analogous organs.
Cellular differentiation. Pluripotency and mature function are two different cell “products.” Stem cells can offer cheap pluripotency, but it’s expensive for them to differentiate all the way to maturity. Partially differentiated cells can reach maturity in a narrower set of endpoints cheaply, but cannot naturally revert to pluripotency (as far as I know). The body uses these cells, and coordinates their reproduction, differentiation, and maturation.
This makes me curious about the extent to which cellular proliferation and differentiation is controlled vs. incentivized. The body is certainly heavily controlled by intercellular signaling, which controls the behavior of cells. This is analogous to a command economy. When, if ever, is the body regulated (in a healthy way, i.e. not cancer) by creating “rewards” of energy or oxygen to select for cells maximally able to exploit that reward?
When thinking about comparative advantage, I find it helpful to frame it in terms of the lowest opportunity cost. I think this points attention in the most useful way to explain the concept.
If Xenia can produce 1 unit of apples or 0.5 units of bananas, this is just saying that the amount grown of one fruit is the opportunity costs of growing the other fruit. Xenia has a lower opportunity cost of growing apples than Yuma.
Also, it would be nice to do one of these for market size as well.
One way of looking at biases is that the bias is a heuristic with its own selection criteria. For example, people decide who to trust with authority based on how tall they are. The tall-bias is a heuristic with its own selection criteria (tallness) that doesn’t perfectly match what its’ supposed to be optimizing for (trustworthiness).
You might predict that people would take steps to create the appearance of tallness in order to manipulate this form of selection. Hillary Clinton apparently requested that her podium for a debate with Donald Trump be modified so that both candidates appeared to be the same height relative to the podium when standing in front of them, and for a step stool so that she’d appear to be the same height as DT when they stood behind the podium.
One way of looking at the rationality project is that our social systems have optimized themselves to exploit common biases in the human mind. That intersection will feel “normal.” Pointing out these biases isn’t just about moving from less truth → more truth. It’s also about moving from more commonly exploited heuristics → less commonly exploited heuristics. It may be that the new heuristics also have serious failure modes. But if society isn’t set up to systematically take advantage of them, being divergent might still be beneficial, even if it’s not fundamentally any more secure. It’s sort of like choosing an operating system or program that is obscure, because there’s less attention devoted to hacking it.
This has a curious relationship to some math ideas like the golden ratio. Take a rectangle proportioned in the golden ratio. If you take away a square with side length equal to the smaller side length of the rectangle, the remaining smaller rectangle is equal to the golden ratio. Information is propagated perfectly.
Imagine that we were given a rectangle, and told that it was produced by modifying a previous rectangle via this procedure (by “small-side chopping”). We couldn’t recover the original precisely unless it was in the golden ratio. But if it is in the golden ratio, we can recover it. Intuitively, it seems like we could recover an approximation, depending on how close the rectangle we’re given is to the original. We can certainly recover one of the side lengths.
Edit: You actuall can reconstruct the previous rectangle in the sequence. If a rectangle has side lengths a and b, then small-side chopping produces a rectangle of side lengths [a, b—a]. We still have access to perfect information about the previous side lengths.
It also seems possible that if you start with a randomly proportioned rectangle, then performing this procedure will cause it to converge on a rectangle in the golden ratio. Again, I’m not sure. If so, will it actually reach a golden rectangle? Or just approach it in the limit?
Edit: Given that we preserve perfect information about the previous rectangle after performing small-side chopping, this procedure cannot ultimately generate a golden rectangle.
If these intuitions are correct, then a golden rectangle is a concrete example of what the endpoint of information loss can look like. Often, we visualize loss of information as a void, or as random noise. It can also just be a static pattern. This is odd, since static patterns look like “information.” But what is information?
The number of MHC class I loci. As the number of loci increases, the organism gains an ability to respond to a greater diversity of pathogens and avert evasion of an immune response. At the same time, with each new locus, any T cells that respond to self peptides bound to the new MHC class I molecule must be removed to maintain self tolerance. There is an optimal balance of MHC class I diversity and T cell count. In the case of humans, the optimal number of MHC class I loci appears to be 3.