I’m always interested in knowing why people disagree with me, but recognize that people have limited motivation to expend the effort to explain to me why I am wrong in a way I can understand.
In case that helps make it take less effort, I am permanently committed to Crocker’s rules.
Also, the LW user artifex0 is a different person.
Either I am missing a point somewhere, or this probably doesn’t work as well outside of textbook examples.
In the example, Frank was “blackmailed” into paying, because the builder knew that there were exactly 10 villagers, and knew that Frank needs the street paved. In real life, you often do not have this kind of knowledge.
Yes, you need to solve two problems (according to Tabarrok) to solve public goods provision, one of which is the free-rider problem. Dominant assurance contracts only solve the free-rider problem, but you need to also solve what he calls the information problem to know how to set the parameters of the contract.
Oh that’s fun, Wikipedia caused me to believe for so many years that “bad faith” means something different from what it means and I’m only learning that now.
Trillions of dollars in lost economic growth just seems like hyperbole. There’s some lost growth from stickiness and unemployment but of course the costs aren’t trillions of dollars.
They did in fact not go far enough. Japanese GNI per capita growth from 2013 to 2021 was 1.02%. The prescription would be something like 4%.
I disagree total working hours have decreased. The number of average weekly hours per person from 1950 to 2000 has been “roughly constant”. Work weeks are shorter but there are more people working.
As an example to explain why, I predict (with 80% probability) that there will be a five-year shortening in the median on the general AI question at some point in the next three years. And I also predict (with 85% probability) that there will be a five-year lengthening at some point in the next three years.
Both of these things have happened. The community prediction was June 28, 2036 at one time in July 2022, July 30, 2043 in September 2022 and is March 13, 2038 now. So there has been a five-year shortening and a five-year lengthening.
Even voting online takes more than five minutes in total.
Anyway, I’d rather sell my votes for money. I believe you can find thousands of people, current non-voters, who would vote for whatever you want them to, if you paid them only a little more than the value of their time.
If the value of voting is really in the expected benefits (according to your own values) of good political outcomes brought forth through voting, and these expected benefits really are greater than the time costs and other costs of voting, shouldn’t paying people with lower value of their time to vote the way you want be much more widespread?
You might not be able to verify that they did vote the way you wanted, or that they wouldn’t have voted that way otherwise, but, still, unless the ratio is only a little greater than one, it seems it should be much more widespread?
If however the value of voting is expressive, or it comes in a package in which you adapt your identity to get the benefits of membership in some social club, that explains why there are so many people who don’t vote and why the ones who do don’t seem interested in buying their votes. And it also explains why the things people vote for are so awful.
Voting takes much more than five minutes and if you think otherwise you haven’t added up all the lost time. And determining how you should vote if you want to vote for things that lead to good outcomes requires extremely more than five minutes.
I don’t know what purpose it serves in the post. There are more significant reasons why copies of deceased persons would never be exact anyway, without needing to go into anything beyond classical physics.
It’s the mainstream view, but not the only one and not necessarily quite correct. The Standard Model is a quantum field theory incorporating special relativity and the particles are thought of as being quanta of fields. Regardless of whether the particles are entirely reducible to fields, fields are clearly more important overall than particles.
This unfortunately means that copies could never be absolutely exact as a consequence of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
The uncertainty principle doesn’t mean what you think: to replicate a person exactly, you just need to replicate exactly the values of each classical field at each point of space occupied by the person (the world is made of fields, not particles). You probably can’t do that, but it’s not the uncertainty principle that says you can’t do that.
What the uncertainty principle says is more like this: there are no wave functions in the phase space of a quantum system evolving according to a Schrödinger equation such that the density given by the Born rule is concentrated on one value of a variable while simultaneously being concentrated on one value of another variable when the two variables are a pair of conjugate variables, because in that case for the density to be concentrated on one value of one of the variables automatically implies a combination of amplitudes for the values of the other variable with which the density is not concentrated on a single value.
The uncertainty principle is about what’s mathematically possible, rather than about what you can know. You can know what the wave function is and that’s really all there is to know. It’s just that the wave function isn’t going to have definite values simultaneously for both of a pair of conjugate variables.
The only real connection seems to be wanting to do math on on how good things are?
Yes, to me utilitarian ethical theories do seem usually more interested in formalizing things. That is probably part of their appeal. Moral philosophy is confusing, so people seek to formalize it in the hope of understanding things better (that’s the good reason to do it, at least; often the motivation is instead academic, or signaling, or obfuscation). Consider Tyler Cowen’s review of Derek Parfit’s arguments in On What Matters:
Parfit at great length discusses optimific principles, namely which specifications of rule consequentialism and Kantian obligations can succeed, given strategic behavior, collective action problems, non-linearities, and other tricks of the trade. The Kantian might feel that the turf is already making too many concessions to the consequentialists, but my concern differs. I am frustrated with this very long and very central part of the book, which cries out for formalization or at the very least citations to formalized game theory.
If you’re analyzing a claim such as — “It is wrong to act in some way unless everyone could rationally will it to be true that everyone believes such acts to be morally permitted” (p.20) — words cannot bring you very far, and I write this as a not-very-mathematically-formal economist.
Parfit is operating in the territory of solution concepts and game-theoretic equilibrium refinements, but with nary a nod in their direction. By the end of his lengthy and indeed exhausting discussions, I do not feel I am up to where game theory was in 1990.
I don’t see “utility” or “utilitarianism” as meaningless or nearly meaningless words. “Utility” often refers to von Neumann–Morgenstern utilities and always refers to some kind of value assigned to something by some agent from some perspective that they have some reason to find sufficiently interesting to think about. And most ethical theories don’t seem utilitarian, even if perhaps it would be possible to frame them in utilitarian terms.
Would you say you are one?
Yes, I consider it very likely correct to care about paths. I don’t care what percentage of utilitarians have which kinds of utilitarian views because the most common views have huge problems and are not likely to be right. There isn’t that much that utilitarians have in common other than the general concept of maximizing aggregate utility (that is, maximizing some aggregate of some kind of utility). There are disagreements over what the utility is of (it doesn’t have to be world states), what the maximization is over (doesn’t have to be actions), how the aggregation is done (doesn’t have to be a sum or an average or even to use any cardinal information, and don’t forget negative utilitarianism fits in here too), which utilities are aggregated (doesn’t have to be people’s own preference utilities, nor does it have to be happiness, nor pleasure and suffering, nor does it have to be von Neumann–Morgenstern utilities), or with what weights (if any; and they don’t need to be equal). I find it all pretty confusing. Attempts by some smart people to figure it out in the second half of the 20th century seem to have raised more questions than they have produced answers. I wouldn’t be very surprised if there were people who knew the answers and they were written up somewhere, but if so I haven’t come across that yet.
Utilitarianism is pretty broad! There are utilitarians who care about the paths taken to reach an outcome.
To put it mildly, this is not really a desiderata at all, it’s actually an extremely baffling property.
How can we decide an axiom used to pin down a bargaining solution is intuitive or baffling without first having a goal in mind? Which axioms are sound for the bargaining solution used to pick deals depends on the purpose that led us to want to apply bargaining theory to a problem. If you’re designing a file sharing protocol, you don’t care about bargaining chips. You just want the files to be distributed quickly. Or if you’re designing a standard for network equipment and you want to minimize spectrum congestion or wireless interference, knowing that you can’t trust the owners of the equipment not to be selfish at the expense of other users. You want the solution that works best and if some solution that isn’t the solution that works best becomes unavailable, that doesn’t change the solution you consider best. Independence of irrelevant alternatives is sound for some of the goals we want to apply bargaining theory to.
Other than water, potatoes are mostly starch, which becomes easily digestible after cooking. This makes your blood sugar level go up and down fast and makes you feel hunger quickly after eating them. I don’t know the implications of eating potatoes on a long-run effect on how hungry you feel generally.
This is a fantastic post. Thank you for writing it!
In the case where there are zero observed successes (so 𝑆 = 0) in the last 𝑛 years, Gott’s formula
for the probability that the next success happens in the next 𝑚 = 𝑍 − 𝑛 years gives
which ends up being exactly the same as the time-invariant Laplace’s rule. The same happens if there was a success (𝑆 = 1) but we chose not to update on it because we chose to start the time period with it. So the time-invariant Laplace’s rule is a sort of generalization of Gott’s formula, which is neat.
I agree with most of this, but as a hardline libertarian take on AI risk it is incomplete since it addresses only how to slow down AI capabilities. Another thing you may want a government to do is speed up alignment, for example through government funding of R&D for hopefully safer whole brain emulation. Having arbitration firms, private security companies, and so on enforce proof of insurance (with prediction markets and whichever other economic tools seem appropriate to determine how to set that up) answers how to slow down AI capabilities but doesn’t answer how to fund alignment.
One libertarian take on how to speed up alignment is that
(1) speeding up alignment / WBE is a regular public good / positive externality problem (I don’t personally see how you do value learning in a non-brute-force way without doing much of the work that is required for WBE anyway, so I just assume that “funding alignment” means “funding WBE”; this is a problem that can be solved with enough funding; if you don’t think alignment can be solved by raising enough money, no matter how much money and what the money can be spent on, then the rest of this isn’t applicable)
(2) there are a bunch of ways in which markets fund public goods (for example, many information goods are funded by bundling ads with them) and coordination problems involving positive or negative externalities or other market failures (all of which, if they can in principle be solved by a government by implementing some kind of legislation, can be seen as / converted into public goods problems, if nothing else the public goods problem of funding the operations of a firm that enforces exactly whatever such a legislation would say; so the only kind of market failure that truly needs to be addressed is public goods problems)
(3) ultimately, if none of the ways in which markets fund public goods works, it should always still be possible to fall back on Coasean bargaining or some variant on dominant assurance contracts, if transaction costs can be made low enough
(4) transaction costs in free markets will be lower due, among other reasons, to not having horridly inefficient state-run financial and court systems
(5) prediction markets and dominant assurance contracts and other fun economic technologies don’t, in free markets, have the status of being vaguely shady and perhaps illegal that they have in societies with states
(6) if transaction costs cannot be made low enough for the problem to be solved using free markets, it will not be solved using free markets
(7) in that case, it won’t, either, be solved by a government that makes decisions through, directly or indirectly, some kind of voting system, because for voters to vote for good governments that do good things like funding WBE R&D instead of bad things like funding wars is also an underfunded public good with positive externalities and the coordination problem faced by voters involves transaction costs that are just as great as those faced by potential contributors to a dominant assurance contract (or to a bundle of dominant assurance contracts), since the number of parties, amount of research and communication needed, and so on are just as great and usually greater, and this remains true no matter the kind of voting system used, whether that involves futarchy or range voting or quadratic voting or other attempts at solving relatively minor problems with voting; so using a democratic government to solve a public goods or externality problem is effectively just replacing a public goods or externality problem by another that is harder or equally hard to solve.
Yes, it makes a lot of sense to say that, but not a lot of sense for a democratic government to be making that assessment and enforcing it (not that democratic governments that currently exist have any interest in doing that). Which I think is why you see some libertarians criticize calls for government-enforced AI slowdowns.