David_J_Balan

Karma: 274

David_J_Balan 21 Aug 2011 17:57 UTC
9 points
on: Why We Can’t Take Expected Value Estimates Literally (Even When They’re Unbiased)
I think other commenters have had a similar idea, but here’s one way to say it.

It seems to me that the proposition you are attacking is not exactly the one you think you are attacking. I think you think you are attacking the proposition “charitable donations should be directed to the highest EV use, regardless of the uncertainty around the EV, as long as the EV estimate is unbiased,” when the proposition you are really attacking is “the analysis generating some of these very uncertain, but very high EV effect estimates is flawed, and the true EVs are in fact a great deal lower than those people claim.”

The question of whether we should always be risk neutral with respect to the number of lives saved by charity is an interesting and difficult one (one that I would be interested to know what Holden thinks about). But this post is not about that difficult philosophical question, but simply about the technical question of whether the EV estimates that various people are basing themselves on are any good.

David_J_Balan 11 Feb 2010 3:55 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: How Much Should We Care What the Founding Fathers Thought About Anything?
It’s not totally clear to me how narrow or broad the ambit of LW posts should be in terms of how far they can stray from core questions of rationality. This post seems no farther from that core than other posts that appear here, but then maybe some of those shouldn’t be here either.

In any case, the thing that I think gives this an LW-type flavor is that it’s an example of how you can use a certain kind of argument to bully your opponents. One side in the argument takes a legitimate value that no one can dispute (unlimited power by judges is bad) and then, by what pretty much amounts to a rhetorical trick, sets things up so that anyone who attempts to reasonably trade that value off against other values stands accused of abandoning the value entirely. This leads to a situation where the guy on the other side of the argument comes out sounding unpersuasive, but only because he’s got to conduct the argument within the unfavorable constraints set up by the first guy.

Maybe you still don’t buy this as being close enough to core LW topics to belong here, or maybe I didn’t make the link explicit enough in the post.

David_J_Balan 18 Jan 2010 6:34 UTC
9 points
on: Sorting Out Sticky Brains
Very nice.

David_J_Balan 3 Nov 2009 20:22 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Psychohistorian’s comment on: Our House, My Rules
Such a bias could exist, and it would indeed cut the other way. As a practical matter, I’ll worry about it when too much grooviness starts doing ¹⁄_1,000,000th the damage in the world that is caused by too much cruelty

David_J_Balan 18 Feb 2010 18:06 UTC
6 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Hayekian Prediction Markets?
In the original post, I said regarding our sole conversation on the subject that I can reall:

“I asked Robin Hanson about this once at lunch a few years ago, and we had an interesting chat about it, along with some other George Mason folks. I won’t try to summarize everyone’s positions here (I’d feel obligated to ask their permission before I’d even try), but suffice it to say that I don’t think he foreswore the Hayekian idea entirely as an argument in favor of prediction markets.”

Then I added:

“And there is a quote by him here that seems to embrace it. In any case, I’d be interested to know what he thinks about it.”

That sentence had a link to an article that contained the quote in my comment above. Taken all together, does that really strike you as me “attibuting overly strong claims” to you? It sure doesn’t strike me that way. I pointed out that you’ve said some things that seem to lean in a pretty “Hayekian” direction, explicitly acknowledged that I’m not certain to what extent you are making those kinds of claims on behalf of prediction markets (I’m still not), and asking you to clarify. If you think that’s a debating tactic, then you and I have very different ideas of what a debating tactic is.

David_J_Balan 20 Dec 2009 23:41 UTC
6 points
in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: Mandating Information Disclosure vs. Banning Deceptive Contract Terms
This story wasn’t the main point of the post, but its purpose was to illustrate that it’s pretty easy to imagine something in between purely voluntary and coerced at gunpoint. People can be manipulated into “voluntarily” doing things that hurt them, even if they are not tricked or lied to. This merely raises the possibility of beneficial paternalistic intervention; it certainly doesn’t establish that the benefits of such intervention outweigh the costs. Here are some old posts on that subject, for whatever interest it may have.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/heres_my_openin.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/03/disagreement_ca_2.html

David_J_Balan 16 Feb 2010 5:30 UTC
5 points
on: You’re Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof
The basic point here is a good one, and it’s obviously right as it applies to evolution and very likely to AGW as well, though I know very little about that and rely entirely on the fact of the scientific consensus in forming my opinion. But at the same time it is important to keep in mind that just because someone has worked hard and offered you the best evidence that they could be reasonably expected to muster under current circumstances, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have come anywhere near proving the case.

David_J_Balan 4 Jan 2010 18:47 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Disclosure vs. Bans: Reply to Robin Hanson
Economists are very fond of the argument of the following form:

“if Thing X that you think is bad in a particular market was really bad, some firm have an incentive to enter and offer a product without thing X and get tons of customers. Therefore, Thing X must not really be bad.”

And it is a powerful argument. But not nearly as powerful as it’s sometimes made out to be. The economics literature is full of stories in which bad things happen in stable equilibria. And I suspect that there are many more such stories that have not yet been written down. On the credit card thing in particular, there is the Laibson & Gabaix (2006) paper that I cited in the earlier post. The practices are bad and there is no incentive for an entrant to enter and offer a product that doesn’t use them.

David_J_Balan 2 Nov 2009 3:16 UTC
5 points
in reply to: alyssavance’s comment on: Our House, My Rules
We have a lot of bad impulses that one way or another are the legacy of our monkey origins. The trick is to get better at not giving in to them, and part of that is recognizing that they exist.

David_J_Balan 21 Jul 2009 16:57 UTC
5 points
in reply to: arundelo’s comment on: Chomsky, Sports Talk Radio, Media Bias, and Me
Probably the best examples involve instances of judging the wisdom of a decision made under extreme uncertainty based on how it came out. So the decision to try to steal a base was praiseworthy if the runner was safe but foolish if the runner got thrown out, and things like that. More broadly, the phenomenon is very strong opinions based on limited or misinterpreted evidence. For example, there are a couple of pitchers on the Yankees right now where there is a big debate about whether they are better suited to be starting pitchers or to be relievers. People have incredibly strong opinions about this on the basis of next to no information, and they regard those opinions as being altogether vindicated in each individual instance where the pitcher does well in their preferred role.

David_J_Balan 1 Mar 2010 1:18 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: The Last Days of the Singularity Challenge
Landsburg’s argument is sound, and I mostly follow it and occasionally try to sell others on it. But I can think of one exception, which is if the political power of an organization that you support depends on the number of members it has. So for example I pay membership dues to one organization that is not my main charity because I want them to be able to claim one more member.

And there is one place that I think Landsburg gets it plain wrong. He says*:

To please diverse stockholders, corporations tend to diversify their giving, often through the United Way. For individuals, by contrast, it really is quite impossible to justify that level of diversity. Surely among the hundreds of United Way recipients there are some you consider worthier than others. That means you can target your charity more effectively by bypassing the United Way.

But if you think that the United Way comes tolerably close to sharing your values, but you think that they have better information than you do about relative needs and competencies across different organizations, then it makes perfect sense to donate to them, doesn’t it?

*http://www.slate.com/id/77619/

David_J_Balan 19 Feb 2010 3:31 UTC
4 points
on: Things You Can’t Countersignal
There is a very nice and closely related paper with the excellent title “Too Cool for School? Signaling and Countersignaling,” summarized here:

http://www.zhongwen.com/cs/index.html

Somebody I know once conjectured that this story might not work if there were a continuum of types instead of discrete types. I don’t know if anyone has ever worked that out.

David_J_Balan 21 Dec 2009 3:31 UTC
4 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Mandating Information Disclosure vs. Banning Deceptive Contract Terms
Robin, as you know from our paternalism debate, I do support a limited paternalistic agenda in what I would describe as “well functioning” societies. But as a practical matter, it is often simply not the case that the kinds of prohibitions that I’m talking about would have to be shoved down the throats of the people they are intended to protect. If you had to guess, would you think that the Fed’s recent action referred to in the post would be popular or unpopular with the general public? Or with credit card customers?

David_J_Balan 3 Nov 2009 20:16 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Breakfast’s comment on: Our House, My Rules
I guess people who can’t control their kids might make a virtue of necessity and say that they did it on purpose b/c it’s good for the kid. Nice twist. But the amount of harm that comes from this strikes me as way smaller than what comes from “it’s for their own good.”

Abusing context slightly, I will quote The Souce:

Bart: No offense, Homer, but your half-assed underparenting was a lot more fun than your half-assed overparenting Homer: But I’m using my whole ass.

David_J_Balan 15 Sep 2010 2:31 UTC
3 points
on: Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism
There is a neat paper on this by Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To called “Too Cool for School? Signaling and Countersignaling.”

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3087478

David_J_Balan 4 Jan 2010 18:33 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Bo102010’s comment on: Disclosure vs. Bans: Reply to Robin Hanson
There’s a nice paper by Bengt Holmstrom (Review of Economic Studies, 1999) that has a story about inefficienty high (but still voluntary) work effort in the absence of a policy that limits effort, such as a maximum hours restriction. The idea is that no one worker can cut back effort to the efficient level without appearing to be of low ability, and this is true even though employers know that all the workers aren’t as good as they appear (their high output is largely due to the fact that they work too hard, not to how good they are).

David_J_Balan 21 Dec 2009 21:18 UTC
3 points
in reply to: RobinHanson’s comment on: Mandating Information Disclosure vs. Banning Deceptive Contract Terms
But ignorance in rational agent models of asymmetric information don’t cause people to be tricked, so it’s can’t be ignorance of that sort.

It seems perfectly plausible to me that people understand that the deck is stacked against them, while at the same time not knowing exactly how to protect themselves and so falling for some of the tricks, and would be perfectly happy to have a government they trusted simply remove the bad stuff from the menu. I know that’s how I see it.

David_J_Balan 21 Dec 2009 1:10 UTC
3 points
in reply to: 110phil’s comment on: Mandating Information Disclosure vs. Banning Deceptive Contract Terms
You’re right that not every case is equally severe. But even in your relatively mild case, it’s still a “gotcha.” The term is there because the credit card company knows that people will sometimes not understand or will forget. It’s got nothing to do with efficiently matching people who want to lend money with people who want to borrow money (which is one of the primary legitimate function of credit markets), it’s got to do with figuring out how best to screw people over. Since there is no reason to believe that that contract got to be that way for any efficient purpose, there’s no reason for any great reluctance to interfere with it through policy.

David_J_Balan 20 Dec 2009 23:51 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Mandating Information Disclosure vs. Banning Deceptive Contract Terms
I’m not aware of any general standards for distinguishing between abusive contracts and beneficial ones and I’m not sure there could be any. But the question “would anyone who really understood what was going on ever want this contract?” must be a relevant one. You could argue about how much humility should be applied: after all, just because I can’t see any reason why a rational person would sign this contract doesn’t mean there isn’t one. So as is often the case, the optimal policy is not obvious. But make no mistake. The libertarian policy will result on a whole bunch of vulnerable people (almost none of whom will be libertarians by the way) getting screwed over and over and over again. You could (barely) argue that the libertarian policy has benefits that overbalances these costs, but there is no denying that the costs are real and big.

David_J_Balan 25 Oct 2009 19:15 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: The Value of Nature and Old Books
Anything we do to just about anything has implications for other people (present and future). And hopefully we have a decent moral framework for dealing with that (and if we don’t that’s a whole ’nother problem). But I don’t see how it applies to nature in particular, and the point of the post was to identify reasons (if any) for a privileged place for nature.