FCCC

Anec­dotes Can Be Strong Ev­i­dence and Bayes The­o­rem Proves It

The Benev­olent Ruler’s Hand­book (Part 1): The Policy Problem

The S&P 500 Will Drop Below 3029 Be­fore July 16 (65 per­cent con­fi­dence)

Far-Fu­ture Com­mit­ments as a Policy Con­sen­sus Strategy

• FCCC 19 Oct 2020 8:22 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: waveman’s comment on: Bet On Biden

  Let’s say Trump actually had a 50% chance of winning last time

  What do you mean by this? That human behaviour is non-deterministic? Or that, given the publicly available information at the time, the best guess was 50 percent? If the latter, it’s easy to get a better credence after the event happened. Look at Nate’s track record. An event that he gives an $x$ percent chance happens pretty damn close to $x$ percent of the time. You could’ve just as easily said he underestimates the winners when he got it “right” (i.e. he said > 50 percent chance), and therefore Biden has an even higher chance of winning.

The Benev­olent Ruler’s Hand­book (Part 2): Mo­ral­ity Rules

• FCCC 6 Nov 2020 3:07 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: waveman’s comment on: Bet On Biden

  Here’s what would make me question Nate’s credibility: If we look at the 538′s former projections and compare them to the betting markets prior to election, make Kelly bets, and lose money.^[1] Note that 538 can be on the wrong side of the market some of the time and still be profitable.

  Saying Nate lacks enough credibility when he is well calibrated and on the right side of the market doesn’t make any sense and seems like an extreme case of hindsight bias. For example, you use the 2016 election to undermine 538′s credibility, but (if I recall correctly) 538′s forecast gave Trump a greater chance than the market’s odds implied, so if you bet based on 538′s forecast you would have bet on Trump and made money. I could be remembering wrong, so if someone links this data, they’d get an upvote from me.

  ---

  1. ↩︎

     Looking at all orderings of elections

• FCCC 18 Dec 2020 15:03 UTC

  4 points

  on: The Power to De­mol­ish Bad Arguments

  Can you help me paint a specific mental picture of a driver being exploited by Uber?

  I’ve had similar “exploitation” arguments with people:

  “Commodification” and “dehumanization” don’t mean anything unless you can point to their concrete effects.

  I think your way of handling it is much, much better than how I’ve handled it. It comes across as less adversarial while still making the other person do the work of explaining themselves better. I’ve found that small tricks like this can completely flip a conversation from dysfunctional to effective. I’ll have to remember to use your suggestion.

• FCCC 13 Nov 2020 1:09 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: mabramov’s comment on: Bet On Biden

  Agreed. The best prediction would have been to assign Biden 100% credence. A defence of their position might say that “Given the information 538 had at the time, the best possible prediction machine would have less certainty than Nate”, but this is too hard to prove, and it’s inconsistent with the fact that Nate is a calibrated forecaster who (as far as I know) consistently beats the market.

• FCCC 3 Oct 2020 14:15 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: “Zero Sum” is a mis­nomer.

  I think the more self-descriptive the terminology is, the better. Fewer syllables is better too.

  • Pareto-frontier games

  • My-gain-your-loss games

  • Inverse-reward games

  “Completely adversarial” sounds a bit too much like “negative sum” games.

• FCCC 3 Oct 2023 3:13 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: En­forc­ing Far-Fu­ture Con­tracts for Governments

  Yeah, it’s pretty crazy hey.

  https://​​law.stanford.edu/​​2023/​​04/​​19/​​gpt-4-passes-the-bar-exam-what-that-means-for-artificial-intelligence-tools-in-the-legal-industry/​​

• FCCC 28 Sep 2023 2:07 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Ben’s comment on: Far-Fu­ture Com­mit­ments as a Policy Con­sen­sus Strategy

  Hmm, I didn’t have the zero-carbon commitment in mind when I wrote this, but you’re right, this post’s idea is basically just a wider application of that. Although I do think my subsequent post is probably more novel (see here: Enforcing Far-Future Contracts for Governments).

  As far as the tax changes go, I completely agree, forewarning is great, and totally underutilised. There’s also a faster alternative, which is to nullify any immediate wealth transfers that result from the change. So for instance, if you’re lowering the corporate tax, stock prices will increase, which disproportionately benefits people who are more invested in stocks than, say, real estate. The downside of this is that it requires a very large number of accurate counterfactual valuations (in order to determine the difference). So it’s much easier just to give forewarning.

• FCCC 26 Sep 2023 6:10 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Far-Fu­ture Com­mit­ments as a Policy Con­sen­sus Strategy

  I’ve just written a post on how exactly to enforce these contracts: Enforcing Far-Future Contracts for Governments.

  Let me know what you think!

• FCCC 24 Sep 2023 7:36 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Far-Fu­ture Com­mit­ments as a Policy Con­sen­sus Strategy

  Depends on domain we’re talking about. The post I linked in the last paragraph will probably answer your question in more detail than you’d ever want, but I’ll answer it briefly here.

  I’d very happily back the two examples that I gave. And that’s because we can define reasonable optimality criteria for each of those areas (voting systems and tax policy) and show that our policy proposals satisfy those criteria under some reasonable assumptions.

  The key point here is that, for the land value tax, the optimality criteria and the assumptions required are extremely weak, i.e. every person informed on the matter would agree with them.

  For the voting system change, there’s actually a proof that you can’t satisfy all the conditions that you probably want for that system (Arrow’s impossibility theorem). So in that example, there could be reasonable debate about which property set we want, but I’d be happy If America changed to any number of proposed voting systems. For an introduction on the topic, see CGP Grey’s video.

  This delay strategy is definitely a last resort. If you can implement a good policy today, then do that. But if you face insurmountable road blocks, and you know the policy is optimal (by some reasonable definition), then it may very well be the best option available to you.

  As for the 1923 question, I’d say we didn’t have a theoretical foundation for what makes a policy optimal. Given that, there is no policy I would have tried to have advocated for in this way (even though the land value tax was invented before 1879). The article that I linked you to contains my attempt to lay those theoretical foundations (or the start of it anyway, I haven’t finished it yet).

• FCCC 24 Sep 2023 7:10 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Things I Learned by Spend­ing Five Thou­sand Hours In Non-EA Charities

  Great post!

  I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of EAs see my takes here as a slippery slope to warm glow thinking and wanton spending that needs to be protected against.

  It’s a shame that we have to caveat things like this when we write. Some readers, perversely, see what they don’t want to see and will attack you for it.

• FCCC 10 Oct 2021 10:58 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Richard Horvath’s comment on: Bet­ting That the S&P 500 Will Drop Over 30 Per­cent (i.e. Below 3029)

  A counter point could be that due to cheap index ETFs and the prevalence of passive investing it is possible that in general a lot of metrics will have a higher base level.

  I completely agree. I made that point in the post (“Note that there could be reasons why the CAPE and PS ratios might not return to their historical average, e.g. increased savings chasing investments, which are not perfectly elastic. There may be risk of persistent inflation, which stocks hedge against.”)

  I’m not basing this off of any one indicator. When inflation rose, that made every indicator I was looking at go bearish. I have this position because of the combination of all of these things, plus some other things I didn’t write down (indications of mania, like investment in zero-NPV “assets”). Price to sales ratios, which don’t have the same problems as PE ratios, are about 50 percent higher than it’s ever been. Margin-to-debt was 3 percent, yes, and now it’s nearly 4 percent, which is 33 percent higher.

  The main thing I’m worried about is increased savings. (Second is persistent inflation without a corresponding increase in interest rates, but the Fed would have to be insane to do that, even if they are “overly optimistic” about future inflation.) As I said, 65 percent chance, not a guarantee. I could be wrong for some reason.

  So, my question is: in a counterfactual world in February 2017, if I were to argue based on above data that you should move from equity to bond/​cash/​short positions as I am expecting 30% drop in US stocks within 2 years, how would you know that it was still too early?

  Good question, essentially you’re asking for backtesting. If it helps, I didn’t short the market back then. I’d have a much lower credence because those indicators that I’ve mentioned weren’t at record levels across the board. Except in exceptional circumstances, go long on the market.

• FCCC 7 Oct 2020 12:08 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Dokler’s comment on: In­dus­trial literacy

  “Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years,” says Armelagos, “but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years...

  Neither of these numbers sound great. Living past 80 sounds a lot better to me. Why did pre-agricultural communities have early deaths compared to us if “the ills that you highlight all came about following the establishment of agricultural societies”? They had to die somehow.

  Early farmers had health issues because they had a handful of crops and just ate those things. If you just eat corn and potatoes, you’ll die early. They didn’t have nutritional science. To say poor nutrition is a fundamental problem with farming is just incorrect. So I’ll concede agriculture made the average people worse off temporarily, but considering our life expectancy increases, I don’t see how you can say that the last few decades are still worse than hunter-gathers. In fact, he says as much:

  Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day.

  … [In agricultural societies, elites were healthier]

  To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite...

  So people in rich countries are better off. Then the question becomes “Will the poor countries stay poor?” If they don’t, his whole argument is wrong. (Also the “Everyone’s poor, so there’s no inequality! Hurray!” argument is a bit strange.) I’ll bet that before China’s wealth increase, he would have said China would stay poor.

  Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed.

  Why is he assuming that had those same people stayed hunter-gathers, they would treat their women better? It seems like a completely unwarranted assumption.

  Some epidemic diseases, I’ll concede, have been brought to us by farming, indirectly through increased population and population density, and directly through the farming of animals.

  You’re also neglecting the massive population increases that he discusses. An extra life worth living is a net gain. The associated decreases in average wellbeing haven’t held up because of better nutritional science and healthcare so there’s not even a “repugnant conclusion” trade-off.

• FCCC 7 Oct 2020 3:27 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Dokler’s comment on: In­dus­trial literacy

  I agree that there are trade-offs between time periods but, for me, those trade-offs favour the present.

  I did mention addictive innovations as negatives, but they can be handled. For example, I have to type in a long password every time before I can watch a Youtube video, which prevents me from mindlessly entering the website.

  As for you not asking people for directions, you’re also talking to me (in text form, admittedly) probably from the other side of the world. And since we’re both on this website, we probably have a lot more in common than we would with a random person off the street.

  Any advantage gained by technology is given back in pursuit of more. Faster transport leads to people being more spread out, not better connected.

  Do people want faster transport? Yes. People then spread out because it’s a trade-off they want to make. It means they can retire earlier because they pay lower rental prices, and that’s more important than being a neighbour to as many friends as possible. By transitivity, this is an overall increase in wellbeing. It’s three steps forward and one step back, not one step forward and two steps back.

  People can set bad goals that don’t make them happy when they achieve them. I think that’s what causes some people to want more and more. Because they are rarely actually satisfied. I suspect these people would have the same problem in earlier time periods (“Honey, the neighbours have a bigger grass hut than we do”), except they’d have a greater chance of dying from an infection. If you really want to, and you don’t think you’re permanently ruined modern technology, you can move to a less-industrialized society. They’re still around today. I’d note that the flow of immigration is away from those countries and towards more technologically advanced countries.

  People of the past had terrible lives. Correct me if I’m wrong, but racial slavery was more common, witch trials were more common, war killed a greater proportion of the population, more people died from starvation or poor hygiene, religious and homosexual persecution was more common, child brides were more common, women were treated as second-class citizens (if they were citizens at all). To make a convincing case, you’d have to pick a specific time and place to live, show that it’s representative of “sometime between the end of the ice age and the first agricultural society”, and show, at the very least, that’s it’s not terrible time to live. Without that, you may be idealizing what it was actually like.

• FCCC 6 Oct 2020 4:35 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: In­dus­trial literacy

  Yes, I think you’re right.

• FCCC 5 Oct 2020 2:01 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: In­dus­trial literacy

  I’m skeptical of that reasoning because it suggests that the happiest man in the world would be born without limbs and sight and hearing.

  I do think that people buy a new car and it’s the best thing ever, and then it just becomes their car. This happens to some people more than others, and it happens for some goods more than others. For instance, computers with internet access generate novel experiences all the time, which (for me at least) boosts you above baseline perpetually. I think it’s a mistake to forego good experiences to make your experience better.