Yes, it’s arbitrary. On the other hand, governments historically have a mixed track record at keeping their word when they promise not to wreck the currency. It’s easy and tempting to cheat if there isn’t some physical limit to expanding the money supply.
asr
Karma: 1,676
Yes. I didn’t mean to say anything about their current legal status—my point was just that if the government doesn’t want you to use something as a medium of exchange, they can make it extremely inconvenient.
By the way, it’s not quite true that ” If I hire a plumber to clear my drains, I can legally pay him with whatever we can both agree on.”
If you agree to pay in cocaine, no US court will enforce the contract—it is void as against public policy. Likewise, starting in 1934, the US government declared Gold clauses in contracts unenforceable.
(Edit: As gwern notes below, this was repealed about 40 years later; my point was that the government can de facto stop you from using Gold or Silver as a medium of exchange, if they so wish)
What else would I use anyway? Tobacco? Farm produce? Old Master paintings? Oh, actually, all of those have been used at various times and places.
You’re certainly right that some governments, some of the time, allow payment in-kind and don’t impose a currency. Most modern governments, however, do require you to pay your taxes in the national currency. Can you pay HMRC in anything other than UK pounds?
Which governments force people to accept and use their currency?
The US government and most other Western governments, impose their currencies whenever there are transactions with the government. You typically have you pay your taxes in the national currency. Likewise, the government will pay its employees in the local currency, it will pay its debts in its currency, and when it exercises eminent domain, it can force you to take currency in exchange for property.
If you look at a dollar bill, it says “this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” As you note, you can contract to be paid in anything you like, but that only gets you so far. When there is a debt, the debtor has the right to pay in dollars. This limits your ability to opt out of the national currency. If you go to court in the US to enforce a contract, the court won’t typically require “specific performance”—instead, the court will impose money damages, which are a debt, payable in dollars. You can agree to pay the plumber in silver, but if you don’t, the plumber will have to accept dollars.
Yes, there is a rationale for having a commodity-backed currency.
Fiat currency has a failure mode in which there’s a self-reinforcing mutual lack of confidence. If I think that the Ruritanian Lira is wastepaper, I will try to get rid of my Lira—I will spend as fast as possible. And this is inflationary. And once other people see the inflationary pressure, they also will head for the exits. Purely fiat currencies can go effectively to zero within a period of a few years—particularly if they are backed by a weak government that isn’t reliably able to force people to accept and use the currency.
With metal or other commodity currencies, there’s a floor on that process. Whatever you think of the Ruritanian government, you can use silver for jewelry, wiring, and so forth. Silver does have an intrinsic value separate from its use as a currency. Put another way—if the currency depreciated badly enough, people would limit the money supply by melting down the silver and using it for wiring, and that would limit the inflationary pressure.
That doesn’t necessarily make silver currency a good idea or even a good investment—it might happen that the market-clearing price, if you ignore the currency uses, leaves a lot of room for depreciation.
Point of order—Your comment is not a point of order. A point of order is an interjection about process in parliamentary process. Your comment was a clarification about terminology, which does not have the precedence of a point of order.
[This is meant to be silly, not harsh; but if you want to make fussy terminological points on LW, I will do likewise...]
I don’t see how that addresses the problem. You’re linking to a philosophical answer, and this is an engineering problem.
The claim you made, some posts ago, was “we can set an AI’s goals by reference to a human’s utility function.” Many folks objected that humans don’t really have utility functions. My objection was “we have no idea how to extract a utility function, even given complete data about a human’s brain.” Defining “utility function” isn’t a solution. If you want to use “the utility function of a particular human” in building an AI, you need not only a definition, but a construction. To be convincing in this conversation, you would need to at least give some evidence that such a construction is possible.
You are trying to use, as a subcomponent, something we have no idea how to build and that seems possibly as hard as the original problem. And this isn’t a good way to do engineering.
I guess I was thinking mostly of the absence of the idea of free will from Greek philosophy.
I took a course on ancient and medieval ethics as an undergraduate. We spent a lot of time on free will, talking about Stoic versus Epicurean views, and then how they show up in Cicero and in Thomas. My impression (as a non-expert) is that Aristotle doesn’t have a term that equates to “free will”, but that other Greek writers very much do.
I would find it helpful to see this calculation carried through for some concrete actual computing device that is specified completely. A 32-bit adder circuit, say, or a thermostat.
I don’t understand how such an operator could work.
Suppose I give you a big messy data file that specifies neuron state and connectedness. And then I give you a big complicated finite-element simulator that can accurately predict what a brain would do, given some sensory input. How do you turn that into a utility function?
I understand what it means to use utility as a model of human preference. I don’t understand what it means to say that a given person has a specific utility function. Can you explain exactly what the relationship is between a brain and this abstract utility function?
the implied prior
Which implied prior? My understanding is that the problem with Multiverse theories is that we don’t have a way to assign probability measures to the different possible universes, and therefore we cannot formulate an unambiguous prior distribution.
Can you give additional example of this? I’m looking for parallels elsewhere in life where something is apparently useful, but is only useful in cases where you don’t really need it, and nothing leaps to mind.
What do you think are the reasons that humanity has largely started to treat their prisoners and foes in ways that do not involve horrors such as torture?
The history of this is relatively tangled. In medieval European warfare, knights were routinely taken prisoner, and were treated well. Often they could go home under parole—basically a promise not to take up arms again until formally exchanged. (Barbara Tuchman has a long discussion of this in A Distant Mirror). Upper-class combatants were basically a transnational military caste who extended professional courtesy to each other.This only applies to nobility of course. Peasant combatants could be slaughtered out of hand.
Likewise today, different prisoners are treated differently. We have some pretty dreadful prisons in the United States.
In summary, there’s an incredible diversity of how prisoners are treated and there always has been. There may have been a general rise in standards, but it hasn’t been systematic and I don’t think it’s been monotonic.
I think the “EY facts” goes the other way. That’s not hero worship, that’s making a joke of hero worship.
“Chuck Norris status” is the opposite of hero-worship. Is there anybody who seriously believes that Chuck Norris is actually possessed of superhuman powers? Heck, is there anybody who even seriously believes he’s a uniquely talented actor?
You are using preference to mean something other than I thought you were.
I’m not convinced that the CEV definition of preference is useful. No actual human ever has infinite time or information; we are always making decisions while we are limited computationally and informationally. You can’t just define away those limits. And I’m not at all convinced that our preferences would converge even given infinite time. That’s an assumption, not a theorem.
When buying pasta sauce, I have multiple incommensurable values: money, health, and taste. And in general, when you have multiple criteria, there’s no non-paradoxical way to do rankings. (This is basically Arrow’s theorem). And I suspect that’s the cause for my lack of preference ordering.
Sure. I’ll go to the grocery store and have three kinds of tomato sauce and I’ll look at A and B, and pick B, then B and C, pick C, and C and A, and pick A. And I’ll stare at them indecisively until my preferences shift. It’s sort of ridiculous—it can take something like a minute to decide. This is NOT the same as feeling indifferent, in which case I would just pick one and go.
I have similar experiences when choosing between entertainment options, transport, etc. My impression is that this is an experience that many people have.
If you google “intransitive preference” you get a bunch of references—this one has cites to the original experiements: http://www.stanford.edu/class/symbsys170/Preference.pdf
Yes. And you might also worry that high pay gives impostor candidates a very strong incentive to try to masquerade as talented—that your applicant pool might be worse if you offer 300k per year than 200k per year.
I would reject the completeness axiom. I often face choices where I don’t know which option I prefer, but where I would not agree that I am indifferent. And I’m okay with this fact.
I also reject the transitivity axiom—intransitive preference is an observed fact for real humans in a wide variety of settings. And you might say this is irrational, but my preference are what they are.
Governments can indeed do this—the usual term is “devaluing.” But a devaluation is a blatant obvious politically costly thing, in a way that letting inflation gradually creep up from 2% to 4% to 8% isn’t. So it’s not “just as easy.”