My book is out! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wyclifs-Dust-Western-cultures-printing/dp/B0B5PPXSQH/
I’m a social scientist in an economics department in Britain. Two of my interests are experimental economics and the social causes of genetic variation. I have a newsletter at https://wyclif.substack.com.
I understand your point. Probably I’m overestimating. Which quotes were hard? I’m guessing that e.g. “the commandement, or example of our superiours” and “grant [sin] but her little, and this little will quickly come to a great deale” are relatively clear.
Reading C17 English isn’t hard to learn: it’s modern English (not Middle or Old) but just in an antiquated style and sometimes words have different shades of meaning. By “not hard” I mean you can teach yourself, simply by reading stuff and picking it up as you go along—I did Shakespeare at school, then Hobbes’ Leviathan and Locke’s Treatises on Liberty. (I wouldn’t start with Puritan self-help literature!) It’s worthwhile, because you get access to a bunch of people who thought in ways very different to your own time. That helps you surmount historical parochialism (https://wyclif.substack.com/p/parochialism-in-time-and-space).
There are definitely differences. One is that NNs are trained on training data and then let loose on real world (or testing) data. Markets are always training online. Another is that NNs (are supposed to) approximate a true hidden function, whereas markets are adapting to changing conditions not necessarily to a single underlying truth. But markets do adapt to inputs they haven’t seen before, and there are economic theories describing that process, like adaptive expectations and tatonnement. I suspect that markets are more likely to adjust quite quickly, and also to “forget” old data quite quickly.
Thank you! Yes, this guy adds details.
Also, the nuclear family is absurd and unnatural, and we evolved to be raised by entire communities, not just by one mother and maybe one father. With too few adult caretakers, of course outcomes will be far worse.
Citation needed. Parents are biologically related to their children. Entire communities are not. Is there any evidence that humans have any evolved characteristics which make the nuclear family worse than community upbringing?
I think almost everyone (who isn’t daft) accepts IQ is partly genetic—and the author does too. But the question is whether there’s a gene-environment interaction in parenting styles, which is slightly different.
So the argument is based on substitutability. If you don’t do (global good thing X) - and if it is truly important—someone else probably will.
That is true, but I also think journal editors will internalize that. And it’s easy to fetishize this stuff – electronic formats die out, so let’s engrave all our journals on stone tablets! – but arguably, any important article exists in 50 versions on the web, and will eventually be preserved, so long as anyone cares about it. At least, that seems to have happened so far.
I think that’s a weird take. A cooperation game typically has actions where you lose, but others gain more (whatever actions others take). Prisoner’s Dilemmas and public goods games are simple examples. The only wrinkle is “what counts as more” if you take seriously the idea that utility is non-comparable across persons. But a weaker criterion is just “everyone would be better off if everyone cooperated”, which again the PD and public goods games satisfy.
You’re right. I didn’t distinguish between the two concepts, because I think cooperation in the colloquial sense – working together for a shared goal – typically involves elements of both.
At its simplest, the internet makes communication easier, especially public communication. That should certainly help to solve coordination problems. It’ll also help solve cooperation problems insofar as (1) communication shapes preferences; (2) people are susceptible to social norms, and communication helps to spread norms, clarify them and make them salient; (3) people can coordinate on structures which enforce cooperation, e.g. punishment for non-cooperators. Examples of (3) might be non-cooperators getting “cancelled”, or e.g. consumer boycotts of firms who exploit labour unethically. And of course, points 1-3 can all also be (ab)used to enable bad kinds of cooperation.
For social science, here are some I’d throw in:
Are there questions nobody is asking?
Is there a real world phenomenon that nothing in the field addresses?
The best social science follows George Orwell’s dictum: it takes huge effort to see what is in front of your face.
The Scheidel review is worth reading, though it’s rather hurried. Their argument is quite complex and sometimes a bit fuzzy, and the book has a lot of detail; I think it’ll take some time for academics to chew through it and understand exactly what’s at stake.
Other academic reviews I’ve read haven’t been great—the typical stuff has been “how can they ignore [my narrow narrow subfield]”.
You might be interested in the concept of “license”, which was widely used until about the 18th century. License was like liberty, but license was bad, liberty was good, and the difference was that liberty presupposed self-restraint. So, liberty would be in the middle of your line, license on one end of it, and on the other maybe “tyranny”.
Sure, I find that take on moral intuitions plausible. But if society has to make a real choice of the order of “how much to tax carbon”, I think that collectively we would not want to make the decision based on people saying “meh, no strong opinions here, future world X just seems kinda prettier”. We need some kind of principled framework, and for that… well, I guess you need moral philosophy!
The point is whether they exist conditional on us taking a particular action. If we do X a set of people will exist. If we do Y, a different set of people will exist. There’s not usually a reason to privilege X vs. Y as being “what will happen if we do nothing”, making the people in X somehow less conditional. The argument is “if we do X, then these people will exist and their rights (or welfare or whatever) will be satisfied/violated and that would be good/bad to some degree; if we do Y then these other people will exist, etc., and that would be good/bad to some degree.” It’s a comparison of hypothetical goods and bads—that’s the definition of a moral choice! So saying, “all these good/bads are just hypothetical” is not very helpful. It’s as if someone said “shall we order Chinese or pizza” and you refused to answer, because you can’t taste the pizza right now.
Now I hear the Life of Brian playing in my head: “Always look on the bright side of life! De-duh, de-duh de-duh de-duh!”
Hume didn’t always take his own rhetoric or ideas too seriously. He said he couldn’t prove that his friends even existed, but when he played billiards with them, these doubts vanished.
Here’s another thought experiment for those convinced by this gloomy view… suppose you find a large red switch marked “Universe: on/off”. Flipping it will cause the immediate painless non-existence of everyone everywhere. Do you flip it? Think how much suffering you’ll save! This suggests an alternative perspective for AI alignment research: we need to bring forward the arrival of the Paperclip Maker, to put us all out of our misery.
Yes, I wouldn’t say suicide is the be-all and end-all indicator, though it is quite suggestive. I’d also lay weight on simple common sense and intuition here. Most people today like life. If you read about ordinary people from 200 years ago or before, it doesn’t seem like unremitting misery. (Piers Plowman, the “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare, the peasants in the Georgics or in medieval Books of Hours, the ordinary people in the Old and New Testaments. Maybe these were just elites idealizing peasants? Hmm… up to a point.) Reporters and anthropologists who live with peasants and the poor today similarly paint a picture with light as well as shade.
Saying “it’s good to be alive” is not the same as saying people have a moral imperative to bring children into the world. It would probably improve human welfare if I gave all my assets to the poor and starved to death, but I don’t have a moral imperative to do it. Judgments of overall welfare are ways of deciding what to do collectively, but no individual has an absolute duty to maximize overall welfare at the expense of his own basic desires and life choices.
(This is my personal view, not especially carefully thought-out. Some people probably do think we have an absolute duty to maximize welfare. I think your example of having to have 10 children is a reductio ad absurdum of that view, not of the view that the marginal extra human life is a good thing.)
Well, he says he does. I think it would be very sad if he acted on the idea, and I bet you agree.
I don’t know about population sizes either. Maddison (cited at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population#By_world_region) says that in 1500, Americans were only about 4% of global population, with 20% being in Europe and 68% in Asia.
A little meta-advice… you’re in a weird community – not nec bad, but quite unusual – and one that is far from guaranteed to have a high level of experience and expertise with childrearing. But yet also, one that is quite likely to confidently express numerous opinions on the topic.