I agree with your comment, but I think it’s a scale thing. If I analyze every time you walk into a room, and every time you kiss someone, I can derive that you kiss [specific person] when you see them after being apart. And this is already being done in corporate contexts with Deep Learning for specific questions, so it’s just a matter of computing power, better algorithms, and some guidance at to the relevant questions and variables.
Ericf
Karma: 191
I was attempting to answer the first point, so let me rephrase: Even though your ability to affect prisoners in North Korea is miniscule, we can still look at how much of it you’re doing. Are you spending any time seeking out ways you could be affecting them? Are you voting for and supporting and lobbying politicians who are more likely to use their greater power to affect the NK prisoner’s lives? Are you doing [unknown thing that the AI figures out would affect them]? And, also, are you doing anything that is making their situation worse? Or any other of the multiple axis of being, since happiness isn’t everything, and even happiness isn’t a one-dimentional scale.
“Who counts as a moral agent? (And should they all have equal weights)” Is a question of philosophy, which I am not qualified to answer. But “who gets to decide the values to teach” it’s one meta-level up from the question of “how do we teach values”, so I take it as a given for the latter problem.
With reference specifically to this:
The happiness of people I will never interact with is a good example of this. There may be people in the world whose happiness will not ever be significantly influenced by my choices. Presumably, then, my choices cannot tell us about how much I value such peoples’ happiness. And yet, I do value it.
and without considering any other part of the structure, I have an alternate view:
It is possible to determine if and how much you value the happiness (or any other attribute) of people you will never interact with by calculating
What are the various things you, personally, could have done in the past [time period], and how would they have affected each of the people, plants, animals, ghosts, etc. that you might care about?
What things did you actually do?
How far away from your maximum impact / time were you for each entity you could have affected. (scaled in some way tbd)
Derive values and weights from that. For example, if I donate $100 to Clean Water for Africa, that implies that I care about Clean Water & Africa more than I care about AIDS and Pakistan, and the level there depends on how much $100 means to me. If that’s ten (or even two) hours of work to earn it that’s a different level of commitment than if it represents 17 minutes of owning millions in assets.
Run the calculation for all desired moral agents, to average out won’t-ever-see-them effects.
While the system should discourage utility transfers, if you build in a bias against transfers of nominal wealth, that favors certain political platforms over others.
Depending on your sensitivity filter, there are over 300,000 US patents, of which perhaps 10% have been incorporated into a commercially successful product. https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/h_counts.htm
If you are going to try to make $ via prediction markets, consult an actual licensed tax preparer, cpa, or financial advisor. You will likely have to set up a business of some sort (flat filing fee in most states in the hundreds of dollars range) in order to properly net out your costs against your winnings. The 2016 tax law changed the rules about hobby and gambling income to no longer allow you to deduct your costs, unless you itemize, which means unless you were already close to itemizing you end up paying 15% of your gross winnings, not of your net.
Structural effects are, indeed, super important. Deciding what the options are (or even just what order the options are presented in: imagine United States elections, but with the general election held first (voting only for party) and then the party with the most votes picks the officeholder afterwards—you get a very different set of incentives).
Also, knowing how others are going to vote: as detailed elsewhere, if there are two close options, the exact mechanics of the election and the knowledge available to strategic voters can allow either (or neither) of them to win, even with the same set of preferences in the population.
It’s nuanced. Apparently you do need to be itemizing deductions: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc419 On the plus side, if you keep each individual payout below $600, you can avoid it entirely. I see that the rules were likely changed with the Trump tax changes in 2016, I apologize for spreading outdated information.
Which claims, specifically, do you have evidence against (of any weight)?
The fact that people are making mouth noises that could be interpreted as disagreeing with the accuracy of a claim (ie, the claim is contentious) is not evidence against the claim. And such mouth noises should not discourage the distribution of true information.
That is correct (for US taxpayers). You take all your gambling winnings, from whatever source derived, and subtract all your gambling costs to get your taxable gambling income (minimum $0/yr, no carry-over of losses). I don’t know how many of the fees count, but the $85 certainly does. If you are more than an occasional gambler (eg “professional” poker player) you can do your own accounting, and report your net take. So, if you keep proper records, you should be able to report “on Jan 1, my predictit balance was $5,000. I deposited an additional $5,000 during the year, and withdrew $10,000 during the year, and ended with a balance of $7,500. Therefore, I had $7,500 in gambling winnings this year.”
It’s important to explicitly say that at the top of your post. That goes for any morally questionable discussion. If you don’t put a disclaimer like:
“Notwithstanding the facts that 1) the first order effects of regulations are to save lives and improve the physical and mental health of the people protected by them 2) allowing corruption for some things weakens protections against corruption in other areas; let us consider …”
As the first part of your post, reasonable people might think you either didn’t know those things (because nobody knows everything, and nothing is known by everyone) or didn’t believe it (because millions of people act in a way consistent with believing the opposite, and you could be one of them.)
Is it? You apparently didn’t take “most regulation is not stifling” into account when you made your original post. And you gave the impression that you think the relative cost benefit is somewhere in the realm of reasonable (by even making the post), which implied that you might not be accounting for all the costs of “using corruption”
I’m not commenting on either of those theses. Just pointing out that there are substantial costs to moving corruption from “verboten” to “kinda not ok”
In my estimation, the cost/benefit here is like burning your furniture for heat.
I don’t see how that’s relevant to the original question. “Does X contribute to Y” is investigating “why care about X” “Can Z mitigate X” is investigating “how can we affect X” The question of “is it worth the costs of Z in order to reduce Y” is a higher level question. Analyzing it in a thread under the sub-question is the wrong place to have such a discussion.
Dumping SO2 into the atmosphere isn’t progress. Delivering cars without seat belts isn’t progress. Building a factory without guard rails on the walkways isn’t progress. I could go on. The examples of stifling regulation, even on a cursory glance, are few and far between.
Attempting to distinguish between stifling regulation and ordinary “prevent defections” regulation is an inherently political process.
Bypassing regulations is very rarely progress
Progress has both winners and losers. Often, the difference between progress and regression is only visible with hindsight (eg leaded gasoline)
So, the key question is not “is X a viable antidote to overregularion” but rather “who gets to decide when a regulation has overstayed its welcome. And any process that doesn’t include the voices of those currently benefiting from the regulation (eg bribery between the enforcer and someone who wants to bypass the regulation) is not a good choice.
Of you taboo “Probability” you are left with two options: “Good morning. If we ran this experiment 100 times, how many times would we flip Tails?” And “Good morning. If we ran this experiment 100 times, how many times would the correct answer to the question “what was the flip?” be Tails”
I can see how it would make sense for the convention to be that “Probability” means the second thing. Is there any deeper reasoning for picking that one, other than “it makes the math easier”?
Can you cite someone else using the word evidence to refer to a theory or explanation? I can’t recall ever seeing that, but it might be a translation or regional thing. As a souther california Jewish native American English speaker, saying “gravity is evidence that” just sounds wrong, like saying “a red, fast, clever fox”
That’s the mode he wrote the post in, so it warranted an extra mention
Congratulations to the two oscillator bots for lasting longest with no complexity, even beating out “silly 2” and TFT. Interesting how much variance there was among the 4 TFT bots based only on what they played first!