The average number is 2. For every man that had more, other men had fewer.
daedalus2u
I am quite sure you are correct and the mode is 0.
If males who died in childhood are included it almost certainly has to be correct. It must be correct if childhood mortality is 50% or greater.
You don’t have infinite pies, but if you can only consume one pie, a pie and a half might as well be infinite. If everyone has a pie and a half and no one can consume more than one pie, then there is zero value attached to the extra half pie that everyone has. There is even negative value attached to it because the excess pie needs to be disposed of or it will attract vermin and become moldy.
If you can thwart the pie-making abilities of others, such that they can only make half a pie, then your pie and a half is worth more. Thwarting the positive sum efforts of others is part-and-parcel to success with a zero-sum mindset.
If you make infinite pies and give them away for free, then pie-making skills do become valueless.
This is classic monopoly activity. If you have a monopoly, you can extract a disproportionate share of the value added from that monopoly and use that monopoly power to expand into other areas by giving away products,, driving competitors out of business and then charging for what had been given away for free.
To use another example, suppose you have a monopoly in an operating system. You can use revenues from that monopoly to subsidize developing and giving away a web browser. Because of the barriers to entry for web browsers, no one can compete with you with a stand alone browser unless they have revenues from some other source. If no competitors develop a browser (from which they can derive no income), then you have another monopoly and can begin to charge a monopoly premium for your web browser.
If there are a multitude of browsers, some of which are given away, then there is no value associated with a proprietary browser and so there is no monopoly.
The browser market is approximately zero-sum (over the short term). There are a finite number of computers needing a browser, once that need is satisfied there is no additional need. A zero-sum mindset with a monopoly then causes obsolescence so more browsers are needed. A positive-sum mindset makes something new so now there is a browser and something that does something else, a wowser, then a flowser, a smowser, a growser and all manner of other -owsers.
Regarding the anathema some people have for giving away things for free. There was a recent article by Terry Savage in the Chicago Sun Times on some children giving away free lemonade at a lemonade stand. She proceeded to lecture them that they couldn’t give away the lemonade for free, and then used that anecdote to explain all the problems of the nation on the idea that giving away things for free was ok. The mindset that she expressed is what I was thinking about when I wrote what I did.
The story was picked up and there are are a number of responses that show her logic to be somewhat flawed. If you google it you can find them.
Jonathan, you are discribing a situation that never happened. The gender ratio is about 1:1. The average number of children is 2 because a different number than 2 results in numbers of humans we know did not happen.
If one man had 100,000, then 49,999 men would have to have zero to make the averate equal to 2.
That was my first post on less wrong. I posted before understanding the ground rules and how karma worked, and how precise people like things to be. I will try to be more careful and will edit my comment.
I did mean only some conservatives and now realize that was not really the right term and did not really express what I was trying to convey. I was thinking about the free lemonade example. I was thinking much broader than money when I posted that, in particular I was thinking about social power, in a top-down social power hierarchy (which is always zero-sum), where money is only one of the fungible zero-sum exchange media.
You have neglected the negative-sum lose-lose situation being mislabled as win-lose.
War is the classic lose-lose situation that is mislabeled as win-lose. No one “wins” a war. After a war, everyone is worse off, just some are more worse off than others.
I think the problem is that the zero-point shifts, where if you survive a war, you feel like you have won something where in reality you just didn’t lose your life.
Hi, my name is Dave Whitlock, I have been a rationalist my whole life. I have Asperger’s, so rationalism comes very easily to me, too easily ;) I have a blog
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/
Which is mostly about nitric oxide physiology, but that includes a lot of stuff. Lately I have been working a lot on neurodevelopment and especially on autism spectrum disorders.
I comment a fair amount in the blogosphere, Science Based Medicine, neurologica, skepchick, Left brain-right brain and sometimes Science blogs; pretty much only under the daedalus2u pseudonym. Sb seems to be in a bit of turmoil right now, so it is unclear how that will fall out.
I am extremely liberal and I think I come by that completely rationally coming from the premise that all people have the same human rights and the same human obligations to other humans (including yourself). This is pretty well codified in the universal declaration of human rights (which I think is insufficiently well followed in many places).
Even in that case, the war as a whole is a negative sum. The sum of resources after a war is less than the sum of resources before a war. Net resources have been lost due to consumption in the war.
If you discount the value of resources owned by your opponent in war to zero (while your opponent owns them), but not when you own them after the war you can come up with something positive, but I see that as an accounting gimmick.
If you look at resources before and after the war with the same metric, then resources have been expended and lost. If you are using a different metric to measure resources before and after the war, then it is the metric that has changed, not the positive sum generation of resources.
Once you start killing people (as is an inherent part of war), then any talk of gains and losses goes out the window unless you attach a specific value to specific human lives before and after and are willing to compare those lives lost with material resources. Since victims usually attach a higher value to their lives than do perpetrators, mutually agreeable values for the gains and losses can not be achieved.
Compelling people to do something against their will (i.e. slavery) is a negative that can not be “balanced” by what ever positive things the slaves might generate. That is why slavery is wrong, no matter how “productive” the slave masters compel the slaves to be. You do not make slavery “less wrong” by compelling the slaves to be ever more productive.
Once you privilege the values that you attach to things, then so long as you have gains, then you will perceive every interaction to be positive-sum because you have gained even if everyone else loses.
I think that the original poster was meaning “zero-sum” in circumstances where all parties have equivalent knowledge, that a transaction with asymmetric information (such as where one party knows the flea-market painting is a rare masterpiece and worth millions and not the $10 sticker price) isn’t in the same class of transactions.
In other words the idea is that the transaction actually be positive sum and agreed to be positive sum before and after the transaction. A transaction with asymmetric information is more of (as I see it) a “gaming” the transaction and doesn’t really achieve a true positive-sum.
The Afghan war didn’t generate resources, those resources were always there. Buying the $10 masterpiece didn’t turn it into a masterpiece, it already was one.
Simply discounting self-bias in valuing a life doesn’t give you a correct value. The opposite of self-biased is not unbiased.
Human skills can be a positive resource. What ever skill are generated during a war, it does not take a war to generate those skills. Those skills could be developed in the absence of war. That those skills are not developed in the absence of war is not an argument I find persuasive that war has provided the benefit of the development of those skills.
I don’t consider that responses that people make to mitigate adverse circumstances can ever completely negate the adverse consequence. I think the idea that people have that a “silver lining” can completely mitigate an adverse event is part of the zero-sum bias the OP was talking about. Maybe if the war had not happened, then even better skills would have been developed and without all the damage the war brought.
Part of the issue is that different events and consequences are to some extent orthogonal and can’t be directly compared against each other. Part of that is that we can’t know the actual consequences of paths not taken. Maybe one of the victims of WWII would have gone on to invent something that would have triggered a phase change in space-time and destroyed the whole universe.
I understand what you are saying, but depression happens to be a not good example.
Depression is a necessary “feature” in the control system that physiology uses to modulate its hedonic state. During a near death physiological state, the state one can attain while running from a bear, where to be caught is certain death, physiology induces a state of euphoria. The near death physiological state has to be euphoric, so that organisms can willingly run themselves to death. This is the source of the euphoria of autoerotic asphyxiation (what killed David Carradine). That state has to be euphoric because all the “safeties” that prevent organisms from damaging themselves (pain, fatigue, extreme pain, extreme extreme pain) are turned off to allow even a very slim chance of escaping from a bear. If organisms could enter a euphoric state easily, they would, and would risk death uselessly. There must be an aversive state between “normal” and the euphoric near death state. I am pretty sure this aversive state is depression. I say that as someone who has been depressed most of my life, and has been on antidepressents just about half my life now, so I do understand depression.
It isn’t that depression is something good, but that an organism that can support a depressive state has superior survival characteristics to one that cannot. So evolution has configured all organisms to have the equivalent of a depressive state.
I think the reason people imagine there is a “silver lining” to depression is because depressed people are easier to control and bullies feel less guilty when they bully someone into a depressed state because they fantasize there is a “silver lining” to the depression.
NancyLebovitz, yes, almost exactly. My hypothesis of bipolar disorder is that the trade-off of normal-depression-mania is the normal-depression-euphoria of the near death metabolic state when one is running from a bear. I think what the euphoria does is more change the “discount rate” that organisms apply to their actions, immediate gratification vs long term gratification. When you might be dead in a few minutes (because the bear catches you), the time-value of risk-reward has different values. Any risk is worth taking if it might extend your life beyond the certain death of the bear catching you.
I suspect that this is the same physiology behind the stimulant drugs of abuse; it triggers the same near-infinite discount rate, where continued good health a few days from now is worth nothing compared to the next injection from a shared needle which might have HIV in it. I think this is why deterrence has been shown to not work to deter drug abuse. The lives that addicts already live are worse then what you can impose on them as punishment. If the addict lifestyle doesn’t deter drug abuse, certainly the relative cake-walk of a stay in prison isn’t going to.
The changing of the “discount rate” isn’t under conscious control. It can’t be because non-conscious human ancestors needed to do the equivalent calculations too (so it it from deep evolutionary time), and there isn’t time (or cognitive capacity) to do those calculations consciously.
I think this changing of the discount rate is part of the problem of zero-sum bias. To an addict, an injection of drug from an HIV infected needle is worth dying for. The shifting of the discount rate occurs on a continuum. Lesser amounts of stress shift it less. Trigger an infinite discount via stress-induced bullying, and victims will agree to anything to get the bullying to stop. I think this is a common ploy of some politicians.
Blueberry, pain, fatigue, and depression signal different things. Pain signals local injury, fatigue signals not enough ATP in your muscles to do what ever it is you are trying to get your muscles to do, depression signals more of a global energy crisis, particularly in the brain. These things are to limit physical activity to reduce the damage that the physical activity will cause.
The “energy crisis” of depression is in the brain, but the current experience of depression is more of a problem with malfunctioning of the control pathways that regulate brain ATP levels. Low ATP in the brain is associated with depression. There are some other examples, vascular depression which is common in the elderly, there is reduction in ATP levels in the brain coincident with reductions in brain perfusion. Fix the perfusion and you fix the depression (and vice-versa because they are coupled). Bipolar disorder has similar low ATP status. ATP status is extremely well regulated. Depression and allied mental disorders are disorders of that regulation (which is very poorly understood).
alexflint, I agree with you. Just because something has evolved (or may have evolved) is not a reason to continue it.
I suspect that violence against women may have an evolved component (to reduce maternal death from cephalopelvic disproportion), but now cannot be justified for that because there are much better options (medical c-section). There may be other “features” of violence against pregnant women (epigenetic programming of the fetus to be more violent via the ’cycle of violence”), but I think the downsides of violence against women greatly outweighs any positives that may have existed during evolutionary time.
I think if we could eliminate violence against women we should do it. What ever positives there might be for individuals, for society it is a net negative (in my opinion).
Induced miscarriage, preterm birth, low birth weight. There is evidence that all of these are associated with violence against women, and also violence against women by her mate increases while she is pregnant. I looked and was unable to find any data suggesting any non-human males commit violence againt a female while she is pregnant with his fetus.
Humans are unique among mammals for the degree of placental difficulties, birth dificulties and cephalopelvic disproportion they have.
Extreme metabolic stress is euphoric, as in autoerotic asphyxiation and I think the runner’s high. I think exercise addiction is addiction to the euphoria of extreme metabolic stress.
Euphoria is a complex physiological state. I presume that for simple drugs to induce euphoria, they are actually triggering already existing pathways.
I deduce you are lying.
If you were an AI and had simulated me for 3^^^3 times, there would be no utility in running my simulation 3^^^3+1 times because it would simply be a repetition of an earlier case. Either you don’t appreciate this and are running the simulation again anyway, or you and your simulation of me are so imperfect that you are unable to appreciate that I appreciate it. In the most charitable case, I can deduce you are far from omnipotent.
That must be quite torturous for you, to have a lowly simulation deduce your feet of clay.
I agree if the utility function was unknown and arbitrary. But an AI that has already done 3^^^3 simulations and believes it then derives further utility from doing 3^^^3+1 simulations while sending (for the 3^^^3+1th time) an avatar to influence the entities it is simulating through intimidation and fear while offering no rationale for those fears and to a website inhabited by individuals attempting to be ever more rational does not have an unknown and arbitrary utility function.
I don’t think there is any reasonable utility function that is consistent with the actions the AI is claiming to have done. There may be utility functions that are consistent with those actions, but an AI exhibiting one of those utility functions could not be an AI that I would consider effectively omnipotent.
An omnipotent AI would know that, so this AI cannot be omnipotent and so is lying.
Zero sum bias is an extremely important issue. I think it is the dominant issue adversely affecting economic growth.
During evolutionary time there were many, many things that were all zero-sum. It is hard to think of any that were not. You have to remember that over evolutionary time, the average number of children that each person had was 2. The average woman had 2 children, the average man had 2 children. We know the average was 2 because if the number was different than 2, then over 1,000 generations humans would have expanded to levels we know did not happen, or humans would have gone extinct. (1.025^1,000 = 5e10).
Territory is zero-sum. That is, there is only so much territory and if one person has it, another person doesn’t.
The number of fertile mates per generation is fixed, and so is subject to zero-sum allocation.
Social status is also zero-sum. There are a fixed number of individuals. In the social hierarchy, you are either above someone or below them. If one person moves up, other people have to move down. There is no “absolute” social status, social status is only relative. Social status is only zero-sum.
The dominant mindset in a zero-sum system is to generate a monopoly of a necessity, then use that monopoly in one zero-sum system to get things that are in another zero-sum system. To the extent that zero-sum things are fungible, one zero-sum thing can be traded for another. Money can be used to get mates, territory, social status, food, etc. But only when money is zero-sum (short term limit), when there is hyperinflation, money is not zero-sum and it doesn’t work.
This strategy only works when there are multiple systems that truly are zero-sum. If a system is not zero-sum, then supplies of it are not as limited and so it is of much less value in trading for things that are limited.
This is the mindset of those who are trying to acquire power in a top-down social hierarchy; to compel things to exist only in zero-sum systems where another zero-sum system (money) must be used to exchange for other things (health care, food, living space, internet access, education).
This is why the concept of “free” is so anathema to those who are trying to acquire power in a top-down social hierarchy. If people can get what they want/need for free, then zero-sum property/systems have no special value and in the limit have no value.
This relates to a recent blog, where I discuss my ideas of what causes xenophobia.
http://daedalus2u.blogspot.com/2010/03/physiology-behind-xenophobia.html
I see xenophobia as the feeling that someone is at the bottom of the social power hierarchy, below the cut-off where someone is sufficiently like you to be considered to be “human-enough” to treat well and with respect. Moving people down the hierarchy causes you to move up.