At times the signal house was densely populated and a bunch of people got sick. These problems went away over time as some moved out, and we standardized better health practices (hand sanitizer freely available, people spreading out or working from their rooms if sick, etc).
Gentzel
The most up to date version of this post can be found here: https://theconsequentialist.wordpress.com/2017/12/05/strategic-high-skill-immigration/
We have lived in a multi-polar world where human alignment is a critical key to power: therefore in the most competitive systems, some humans got a lot of what they wanted. In the future with better AI, humans won’t be doing as much of the problem solving, so keeping humans happy, motivating them, etc. might become less relevant to keeping strategic advantage. Why Nations Fail has a lot of examples on this sort of idea.
It’s also true that states aren’t unified rational actors, so this sort of analysis is more of a course grained description of what happens over time: in the long run, the most competitive systems win, but in the short run smaller coalition dynamics might prevent larger states from exploiting their position of advantage to the maximal degree.
As for happiness, autonomy doesn’t require having all options, just some options. The US is simultaneously very strong, while also having lots of autonomy for its citizens. The US was less likely to respect the autonomy of other countries during the cold war when it percieved existential risks from Communism: centralized power can be compatible with increased autonomy, but you want the centralized power to be in a system which is less likely to abuse power (though all systems abuse power to some degree).
I suspect high skill immigration directly helps probably with other risks more than with AI due to the potential ease of espionage with software (though some huge data sets are impractical to steal). However, as risks from AI are likely more immanent, most of the net benefit will likely be concentrated with reductions in risk there, provided such changes are done carefully.
As for brain drain, it seems to be a net economic benefit to both sides, even if one side gets further ahead in the strategic sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight
Basically, smart people go places where they earn more, and send back larger remitances. Some plausibly good effect on home country institutions too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital_flight#Democracy,_human_rights_and_liberal_values
The book does assume from the start that states want offensive options. I guess it is useful to breakdown the motivations of offensive capabilities. Though the motivations aren’t fully distinct, it matters if a state is intruding as the prelude to or an opening round of a conflict, or if it is just trying to improve its ability to defend itself without necessarily trying to disrupt anything in the network being intruded into. There are totally different motives too, like North Korea installing cryptocurrency miners on other countries’ computers, but I guess you could analogize that to taxing territory from a foreign state without engaging its military.
The book basically argues that even if cybersecurity is your goal, a more cost-effective defense will almost always involve making intrusions for defensive purposes since it becomes prohibitively expensive to protect everything when the attacker can choose anywhere to strike.
I could see an argument that very small actors would do better to focus purely on defenses, since if their networks are small enough, it may be easier to map them and to protect everything extremely well, while it could require more talent to make useful intrusions into other networks. The larger an actor is, (like a state) the more complex its systems are, and the harder to centrally control and monitor those systems are, presumably the more effective going on the offensive becomes to counter intruders. I think states do make this calculation, and that’s why they often also have smaller air-gapped systems that are easier to defend.
For defending the public though, it would be a nightmare to individually intervene in millions of online businesses, just as it would be a nightmare if the government had to post guards outside every business to prevent intrusion by foreign soldiers. When the landscape is like that: far more vulnerabilities than adversaries, potential adversaries are a rational point of focus.
While it may sound counter intuitive, I think you want to increase both hegemony and balance of power at the same time. Basically a more powerful state can help solve lots of coordination problems, but to accept the risks of greater state power you want the state to be more structurally aligned with larger and larger populations of people.
https://www.amazon.com/Narrow-Corridor-States-Societies-Liberty-ebook/dp/B07MCRLV2K
Obviously states are more aligned with their own populations than with everyone, but I think the expansion of the U.S. security umbrella has been good for reducing the number of possible security dilemmas between states and accordingly people are better off than they would otherwise be with more independent military forces (higher defense spending, higher war risk, etc.). There is some degree of specialization within NATO which makes it harder for states to go to war as individuals, and also makes their contribution to the alliance more vital. The more this happens at a given resource level, the more powerful the alliance will be in absolute terms, and the more power will be internally balanced against unilateral actions that conflict with some state’s interests, though at some point veto power and reduced redundancy could undermine the strength of the alliance.
For technological risks, racing increases risk in the short-run between the competitors but will tend to reduce the number of competitors. In the long-run, agreeing not to race while other technologies progress increases the amount of low hanging fruit and expands the scope of competition to more possible competitors. If you think resource-commandeering positive feedback loops are not super close, there might be a degree of racing you would want earlier to establish front-runners to win and deter potential market entrants from expanding the competition during a period of high-risk low-hanging fruit. You might be able to do better yet if the near term leading competitors can reach agreement to not race, and then team up to defeat or buyout new entrants. The leaders obviously can’t hold everything completely still and expect to remain leaders though, and businesses should deliver measurable tech progress if they want to avoid anti-monopoly regulation.
Anyway, basically preventing races isn’t as simple as choosing not to race, and even if your goal is just to minimize risk you either have to credibly commit a larger and large number of actors to not defect over time as technology and know-how diffuses, or you should want more aligned competitors to win and to cooperate to slow the risky aspects of racing.
Apologies if this wasn’t clear from the post, the post was intended as a minor update to one I wrote several years ago, and I didn’t expect to see it get copied over to LessWrong, haha.
Thanks, some of Quester’s other books on deterrence also seem pretty interesting books also seem interesting.
My post above was actually intended as a minor update to an old post from several years ago on my blog, so I didn’t really expect it to be copied over to LessWrong. If I spent more time rewriting the post again, I think I would focus less on that case, which I think rightly can be contested from a number of directions, and talk more about conditions for race deterrence generally.
Basically, if you can credibly build up the capacity to win an arms race (with significant advantages in the relevant forms of talent, natural resources, industrial capacity, etc.) then you may not even have to race. Limited development could plausibly serve to make capacity credible, gain the advantages of positive externalities from cutting edge R&D, but avoid actually sinking a lot of the economy into the production of destabilizing systems. By showing extreme capability in a limited sense, and credible capability to win a particular race, you may be able to deter racing if the communication of lasting advantage is credible. If lasting advantage is not credible, you may get more of a Sputnik or AlphaGo type event and galvanize competitors toward racing faster.
For global tech competition more generally, it would be interesting to investigate industrial subsidies by competing governments to see in what conditions countries attempt strategic protectionism and to get around the WTO and in which cases they give up a sector of competition. My prior is that protectionism is more likely when an industry is established, and that countries which could have successfully entered a sector can be deterred from doing so.
Basically, if even if there are adaptations that could happen to make an animal more resistant to venom, the incremental changes in their circulatory system required to do this are so maladaptive/harmful that they can’t happen.
This is a pretty core part of competitive strategy: matching enduring strengths against the enduring weaknesses of competitors.
That said, races can shift dimensions too. Even though snake venom won the race against blood, gradual changes in the lethality of venom might still cause gradual adaptive changes in the behavior of some animals. A good criticism of competitive strategies between states, businesses, etc. is that the repeated shifts in competitive dimensions can still result in Molochian conditions/trading away utility for victory, which may have been preventable via regulation or agreement.
I think capacity races to deter deployment races are the best from this perspective: develop decisive capability advantages, and all sorts of useful technology, credibly signal that your could use it for coercive purposes and could deploy it at scale, then don’t abuse the advantage, signal good intent, and just deploy useful non-coercive applications. The development and deployment process basically becomes an escalation ladder itself, where you can choose to stop at any point (though you still need to keep people employed/trained to sustain credibility).
I would probably rephase the “good guys” statement in terms of value alignment. For competitions where near term racing risks are low, long-term racing risks are high, the likely winner from starting race conditions earlier would be more value aligned with your goals, then racing may make sense. If initial race risks are high, or a less aligned actor is disproportionately likely to gain power, then pushing for more cooperative norms at the margin makes sense. You want to maximize your ability to foster or engineer risk reducing cooperation before the times of highest risk, and you want to avoid forms of cooperation that increase risk.
Yea, when you can copy the same value function across all the agents in an bureaucracy, you don’t have to pay signaling costs to scale up. Alignment problems become more about access to information rather than having misaligned goals.
I think those two cases are pretty compatible. The simple rules seem to get formed due to the pressures created by large groups, but there are still smaller sub-groups within large groups than can benefit from getting around the inefficiency caused by the rules, so they coordinate to bend the rules.
Hanson also has an interesting post on group size and conformity: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/towns-norm-best.html
In the vegan case, it is easier to explain things to a small number of people than a large number of people, even though it may still not be worth your time with small numbers of people. It’s easier to hash out argument with one family member than to do something your entire family will impulsively think is hypocritical during Thanksgiving.
The goal is to standardize a floor, not to chop up the ceiling. People would be free to buy whatever they want if they opt out. Those that opt-in benefit from central coordination with others to solve the adverse selection problem with housing that incentivizes each local area to regulate things bigger and bigger than people need to keep away poor people, making housing more expensive everywhere than it needs to be and curtailing any innovation in the direction of making housing smaller. It probably isn’t a coincidence that Japan has capsule hotels, better zoning, low housing costs, more spread out high speed transit and a lot of wacky houses given its barriers to immigration. Don’t forget that most large group houses that people live in are illegal (though enforcement is lax unless something else goes wrong) and that cities all over the place have all sorts of NIMBY policy and rent controls that distort the market. That is the counterfactual you are replacing, there isn’t a pure market counterfactual in any big city I can think of, but would be interested to hear. The current equilibrium in most places creates an extremely strong incentive to create barriers to housing innovation, and accordingly they do. Singapore is hyper market oriented and rich as a country, but nevertheless did central coordination on housing to drive down costs and erode the support base for communism (not saying one should copy all their policies of course).
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/singapore-affordable-housing-freedom/#:~:text=In%20Singapore%2C%20housing%20is%20affordable%2C%20diverse%20and%20impeccably%20maintained.&text=80%20percent%20of%20Singaporeans%20live,Singaporean%20context%20in%20a%20moment.)
On the lack of paternalist services, I am getting at why the market doesn’t do them by default. If there are so many can you give one example? If you are just talking about gov ones, then we are talking about different things.
On GiveDirectly, I am incredibly skeptical of unconditional cash transfer vs. other targeted interventions in terms of direct effectiveness and vs. or institutional interventions for the long-term: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/givedirectly_not_so_fast
In abstract, interventions like this have always been possible since there have been political entities that use money, and yet you don’t see any country anywhere getting rich via this mechanism. Governments through history instead coordinate and provide services that would otherwise be difficult to provide. When there are systematic transfers, they are usually conditional in order to sustain good incentives over the long-term.
More concretely, the costs the GiveDirectly RCT gives for roofing costs seem a bit strange once you start reasoning about local prices. If people are so poor they are earning like a dollar or two per day, it isn’t going to cost $55 to thatch a tiny roof unless it someone actually has to spend about a month doing it… if metal roofing is less than $1 per square foot in materials I have no idea how you get to a $400 roof when labor wages are so low.
I think this is a good argument in general, but idk how it does against this particular set-up.
When spending levels are pegged, and you are starting out with a budget scope similar to current social programs, some particular company or bureaucracy is only going to capture a whole market if they do really good job since: A: people can opt-out for cash, B: people can chose different services within the system, and C: people can spend their own income on whatever they want outside the universal system.
As long as you sustain fitness pressure on the services, and constrain the competition to performance rather than anti-competitive capture maneuvers, I think it could go well.
Singapore’s health system comes to mind since it is a very low percentage of GDP, has both public and private options, and there is still universal care (though you always face some degree of cost when getting care in order to avoid bad rationing).
This sort of thing could go very poorly in practice if the government is too corrupt, but in that particular case it seems like there is sufficient fitness pressure on government hospitals from the private sector that they are probably doing a good job.
I agree that it is a huge problem if the rules can change in a manner that evaporates the fitness pressure on the services: you need some sort of pegging to stop budgets from exploding, you can’t have gov outlawing competition, etc.
I also don’t have a strong opinion on how flexible the government should be here. The more flexible it is, the less benefit you get from constraining variance and achieving economies of scale, the more flexible it is, the more people can get exactly what they want, but with less buying power. I do think it is helpful to have the ability to individually opt out of services, and this would be a very useful signal for forcing both the government and service contractors to adapt. I’m not sure just how many services should be competing for a given service niche within the broader system. One idea would be you have a competition to come up with cheap standardized services, and then companies compete to provide them.
The big thing you are trying to achieve is providing a welfare floor at a much more sustainable cost via competitive pressure combined with the ability to centrally coordinate consumer preferences. The coordination doesn’t just give market power benefits, you also have increased legibility that decreases search and transaction cost for consumers and potentially the ability to do better large scale (though still not randomized) experiments in nutrition science and regulation design (e.g. food standards far exceeding regulatory requirements cheaply, exceptions to housing size requirements, etc.)
I think I agree with the time-restricted fund idea on competitive commodities as being better than just providing the commodities since there aren’t going to be a lot of further economy of scale benefits.
Having competing services and basic income coming out of the same gov budget does create pressure to not make things as poorly as past gov programs. The incentives should still be aligned, because people can still choose to opt out just like the normal market.
On food, the outcomes shouldn’t be as bad as food stamp restrictions over time not just because of the opt-out option, but also because the data will be more legible to the government and enable better standards over time where we otherwise have pretty bad food science.
I think people would only opt-in to the food plan if it basically allows them to capture benefits somewhere else within the service package they select (e.g. extra basic income via reducing expected medical bills). Otherwise basic income should dominate a food plan as an option unless the person is looking for a way to tie their own hands.
I agree with your point in general. In these cases, I’m specifically focusing on regulations for issues that evaporate with central coordination:
- Government is doing the central coordinating, so overriding zoning shouldn’t result in uncoordinated planning: gov will also incur the related infrastructure costs.
- If you relax zoning and room size minimums everywhere, the minimum cost to live everywhere decreases, so no particular spot becomes disproportionately vulnerable to concentrating the negative externalities of poverty while simultaneously you decrease housing cost based poverty everywhere.
Issue there is that implicitly U.S. R&D is subsidizing the rest of the world since we don’t negotiate prices but others do. Seems like an unfortunate trade-off between the present and the future/ here and other places, except when there is a lack of reinvestment of revenue into R&D.
Vouchers could be in the range of competition, but if people prefer basic income to the value they can get via voucher at the same cost-level then there has to best substantial value that the individual doesn’t capture to justify it. School vouchers may be a case of this, since education has broader societal value.
While it can depend on the specifics, in general censorship is coercive and one sided. Just asking someone to not share something isn’t censorship, things are more censorial if there is a threat attached.
I don’t think it is bad to only agree to share a secret with someone if they agree to keep the secret. The info wouldn’t have been shared in the first place otherwise. If a friend gives you something in confidence, and you go public with the info, you are treating that friend as an adversary at least to some degree, so being more demanding in response to a threat is proportional.
I think it is better to assess personal fit for the bootcamp. There are a lot of advantages I think you can get from the program that would be difficult to acquire quickly on your own.
Aside from lectures, a lot of the program was self study, including a lot of my most productive time at the bootcamp, but there was normally the option to get help, and it was this help, advice, and strategy that I think made the program far more productive than what I would have done on my own, or in another bootcamp for that matter (I am under the impression longer bootcamps may develop specific skills at using the software better, but they don’t convey nearly the same level of conceptual understanding of statistics in data science, and likewise there are many types of mistakes graduates of other programs will make that graduates of Signal’s cohort have been taught not to). When there was not the option to get help, I usually shifted my work schedule and it wasn’t much of a problem: there are so many projects to work on, that there was almost always something productive to work on where I wouldn’t get stuck (optional exercises on prior projects or making prior projects better). I can see this being very frustrating for some people though, as getting stuck and not having immediate feedback interrupts flow.
Many of the organizational problems didn’t seem to really be problems, and seemed more like differences which are good for some and not for others. Pair programming was not always optimal due to the large degree of differences between students. It wouldn’t have made sense for everyone to pair program since it would have been holding back some of the faster students. A more rigid structure would have helped people who were less naturally self directed/focused though. Organizational problems that happened with respect to the first cohort in terms of setting up (furniture, internet, whiteboards, etc.) are unlikely to be problems for future cohorts now that the instructors have learned from experience and have a place set up. The first cohort took the risks and costs of such things, which later cohorts probably won’t have to worry about.
This is not like other bootcamps, it is less expensive, more individually focused rather than having the entire group doing all the same curriculum, and there are a bunch of rationalists iteratively helping you decide which jobs are best to apply to, who can network you into what position, and which skills actually matter most for aiming for the specific jobs you are aimed at. I don’t expect you to be able to have the same opportunities at a normal bootcamp, but a normal bootcamp is probably also lower risk if you don’t trust yourself to make things work out (other programs may have quizzes where they throw you out if you fail, and essentially force you to remain focused, with Signal you are more in control yourself, and can take time off to apply to jobs.