The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.
Seemed to jump out to me.
While I don’t always follow my own advice I do most of the time approach others from a view point that I can learn something from anyone and everyone.
While I’ve not actually seen this argument, I suspect one answer to the decline in popularity of Georgism might be found in the Coase Therom. Government taxing all land rends is merely a transfer of ownership and results in the known transfer aspect of the assignment of property rights in Coase’s example. But the allocative impact of that assignment is supposed to be zero, resources still get allocated to the highest valued use. As such, I would wonder if market prices (i.e., rental prices for a place to live) would actually change or that somehow more of the assumed withheld land actually comes to market.
Maybe, but I have to also put this all in a somewhat different frame. Is the universe populated by birds or mice? Are the resources nice ground full or worms or perhaps dangerous traps with the cheese we want?
So if we’re birds and the universe resources are worms, maybe a race. If we’re all mice and resources are those dangerous traps with cheese, well, the old saying “The early bird might get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.” In a universe populated by mice & cheese, civilation expansion may well be much slower and measured.
Perhpas we can add one of the thoughts from the Three Body Problem series—advertising your civilation in the universe might be a sure way to kill yourself. Possibly fits with the Grabby Aliens thought but would argue for a different type of expansion patter I would think.
That, and I’m not sure how the apparent solution ot energy problems (apparenly a civilization has no engery problem so accelleration and decellerations costs don’t really matter) impacts a desire for additional resources. And if the energy problem is not solved then we need to know the cost curves for accelleration and decelleration to optimize speed in that resource search/grab.
Could that just shift the problem a bit? If we get a class of really smart people they can subjugate everyone else pretty easily too—perhaps even better than some AGI as they start with a really good understanding of human nature, cultures, failing and how to exploit for their own purposes. Or they could simply be better suited to taking advantage of and surviving with a more dangerous AI on the loose. We end up in some hybrid world where humanity is not extinct but most peoples’ life is pretty poor.
I suppose one might say that the speed and magnitude of the advances here might be such that we get to corrigible AI before we get incorrigible super humans.
I’m currious about your thought.
Quick, caveate, I’m trying to say all futures are bleak and no efforts lead where we want. I’m actually pretty positive about our future, even with AI (perhaps naively). We clearly already live in a world where the most intelligent could be said to “rule” but the rest of us average Joes are not slaves or surfs everywhere. Where the problems exist is more where we have cultural and legal failings rather than just outright subjugation by the brighter bulbs. But going back to the darker side here, the one’s that tend to successfully exploit/game/or ignore the rules are the smarter ones in the room.
I’m not sure I agree with the two system rejection here. Not saying it’s not correct but I think before suggesting that system redundency is not an evolutionary outcome here merely because we don’t see other species developing magnetic sensing seems wrong.
First, I think we need to consider just how critical such an ability is for survival of the species. If most other species have near 0 benefit from sensing the magnetic fields then one should not be surprised they don’t have it.
On the other hand, I’ve seen a suggestion that primates (I actually don’t recall the claim limited to primates but seems most accurate) only evolved two arms, legs, ears, eye because more added little value but if they only had one lossing it would essentially result in nonsurvival.
I think you’re making a really large ask when one can do a simple google search to get a good start. One could also just access one of the several LLM available online, pose the question and work through some subsequent questions with the LLM.
However, in light of being helpful and making positive and not just negative contributions I think you’ll find this goole search link of immediate help in getting started on answering your own questions.
If the lens of public goods is not helpful then perhaps look at positive externalities. The two are fairly closely related with regard to the question you’re asking about. Tyler Cowan’s blurb (scroll down a littel) on Public Goods and Externalities notes how markets will under produce goods with positive external effects.
Again, this is a general point. One can bring in additional details to support the claim that the existing outcome is optimal or to support the claim that it is not optimal. But that was the point of my comment. We cannot just start with market outcome and claim success.
I think the second point is a bit problematic. That might depend on the type of debt you’re considering. But limiting my comment to purely financial, and especially documented, debt then I don’t think Bob has any actual incentive here. Why? Even if Alice is removed the ownership of the loan and the right to repayment transfer to the estate and heirs. So Bob’s position doesn’t change.
I’ve been reading LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media and at the end the authors bring out the problem of AI. It’s interesting in that they seem to be pointing to a clear AI risk that I never hear (or have not recognized) mentioned in this group. The basic thrust is about how the deep fake capibilities can allow an advanced AI to pretty much manufacture realities and control what people think is true or not so can contol both political outcomes and even incentives towards war and other hostilities both within a society and between countries/societies/cultures/races. (Note, that is a very poor summary and follow a lot of documenting the whole leadup from social media and internet failing to realize the original views how they would lead to a better world where good ideas/truth drive out bad and lies/falsehoods and has in fact enable the bad and promoted lies and falsehoods. The AIs just come in at the end and may or may not be working in the interests of some group, e.g., Russia, China, the USA, ISIS...)
But this (the book itself is a documentation of the very real, and obervable risks and actual events) area holds very real, (largely) observable outcomes that lead to significant harms to people. As such I would think it might be a ripe area for those feeling that the general public is not grasping the risk (which to me do often seem rather sci-fi and Terminator/Matrix type claims that most people will just see as pure fiction and pay little attention to).
Why is a million not a legitimate unit? I don’t really get that as I see pretty much every financial statement using millions (or in some cases billions) as the unit of reporting amounts (with specific and clearly identified exceptions like per share data). As you say, units mean something and million means 6 zeros after whatever numbers are stated. Additional units can also be present, dollars, people or sheep.
The problem (and one I glossed over myself initially) was in the treatment of the units when dividing. They should have cancelled but they were not. If the numbers were presented as units of 1, so all the trailing zeros were considered I don’t think the mistaken claim would have been made. So I do think the issue is about how we keep track of the units and how we need to treat them in different contexts.
I think Matt Parker could have illustrated the problem better by including people as a unit in his breakdown. That would have made it very clear that the end result was the 1.5x $/person and not the > 1 million $/person as claimed.
While I think you can get to my point with either of the links, a lot more is going on in those links that will confuse and complicate the path. The simple point is that without available resources (typically money) to bid for additionaly output one simply has no way to bid resouces away from other production/uses and increase output of X (here public toilets) in a market.
In a pure sense public goods only exist in theory. But there are good that seem to behave a lot like the theoretical good. Looking at a situation through the lens of public goods then provides some useful insights. In this case, the idea of public bathrooms is all about making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one. In other words it really is not about specific bathroom/toilets but toilet services where one will be available to anyone needing it rather than them needing to use the alley or pay for access.
So if some are shitting in the alleys, and they are not doing so even when they could have used a toilet, then seems the view that current market equalibrium might be off. The two points above just point to reasons why it might be off. Note, that doesn’t mean it is, it’s generally understood that the social equalibrium is not expected to be a 0 (be it polution, or people shitting on the street) solution. We should not assume what is is what should be.
Homeless people may have narrow interests but they have no direct political infulence generally; they cannot do lobbying well and don’t represent a concentrated voting block (probably cannot vote at all lacking a home address). The general public is not a narrow, well organized group that wants to eliminate shitting in the alley by providing increased levels of toilet services. So in some way the poltical eonomy equalibrium is some shitting in the alley, and the (to me at least) kind of obvious under provision of some public good (which might be public toilets, cleaner streets and healthier envionments)
Perhaps it’s just the terminolgoy of the story but are tools modeled as physical objects or are they more general than that? For example, I often think of things like government and markets (and other social institutions) as tools which exists at a social level problem space.
With footnote 4, is the point that there is not tight problem-tool mapping, in the sense that we will have problems/subprobles that are solved without the use of a tool (as you have them modeled/defined)? Or is it better understood as saying we will have gaps we have not yet solved, or not yet solved in some way that has converged to some widely shared conception of a tool that solves the problem?
There are a number of rather interesting side threads that have emerged from this post. But I’m not at all sure why. From that perspective I’m not sure how I might rate the overall comments section present here.
[This will not be well detailed but hope provides a sense of why I made the claim.]
The most obvious one, and perhaps directly revelant here, is the concept of effective demand—in a market setting those without the money to buy goods or services lack any effective demand. I would concede that alone is not sufficient (or necessary) to reject the claim. But it does point to a way markets do fail to allocate resources to arguably valuable ends. But effective demand failures often produce social and governmental incentives to provide the effective demand for those without resources to pay themselves.
I think one can see two lines of though pointing towards under provision when considering social/government responses to the presense of ineffective demand. The standard economic market failure of under provision of public goods. The other is the issue of narrow and broad insterest in how government/public funds get spent. It’s not clear to me how strong any narrow interest for increasing public toilets are in terms of driving that spending.
I don’t think the public good → under provision (outside some expected range of what a proper market equalibrium should produce) is something one just assumes. Would have to look into things more closely. But the same holds for the “we have markets so it’s all good” type argument too. As is generally the case, the devil is in the details and not the general propositions.
I think there are some disconnects here.
I do agree that the mere fact “markets” are not providing some quantity of publicly accessable bathrooms is hardly an argument that we have a good equalibrium quantity—or even a good nominal/social want quantity.
However, my experience in the USA is that the overwhelming (like on the order of 80%) of the bathrooms I’ve used in public were in fact on private property and privately provided—be they gas stations, shopping malls/stores, restaurants/cafes and the like. Sometimes I will use ones in a (mostly public?) place such as state tourist stops on interstates or highway reststops or in airports and some subway systems. (Many of those as actually private but clearly a contract out solution with government specifying what the services will be). I also note that in a sizable number of cases the more public solutions are pretty poor, unsanitary and often even dangerous.
I do have some agreement with the eye96458 in that it seems a very localized problem for some urban centers and not really a general issue for the USA in general.
By ‘work “for the man”’ do you mean collect whatever welfare he can get or that he works as an informant in some way?
Two questionson this.
First, if AI is a big value driver, in a general economic sense, is your view that NVIDIA is over prices against its future potential or just that relatively NVIDIA will under perform other investment alternatives you see.
Second, and perhaps an odd and speculative (perhaps nonsense) thought. I would expect that in this area one might see some network effects in play as well so wondering if that might impact the AI engineering decisions on software. Could the AI software solutions look towards maximising the value of the installed network (AIs work better on a common chip and code infrastructure) than will be true if one looks at some isolated technical stats. A bit a long the lines of why Beta was displaced by VHS dispite being a better technology. If so, then it seems possible that NVIDA could remain a leader and enjoy its current pricing powers (at least to some extent) for a fairly long period of time.
Cannot say this is a good source, but was a quick on. It does seem to speak to the question you’re asking though so might be of interest. Might support the view that the additional produce you eat if not washing could out weigh the costs of the increased pesticide comsumption. But, I suspect that might be a very uncertain conclusion given the potential variability in factors regarding your specific situation—where are the produce grown (what’s in the soil), what pesticides, and what quantity, might be in use, what is the post harvesting process (any washing at all).
The other aspect might be what consumption levels you have with and without washing. I am sure there is a level over which additional intake is adding little value. So if you’re still eatting plenty of fresh produce even with the additional effor of washing you probably don’t really need the additional nutriants (concentration levels in your body are already sufficient for the needed chemical reactions) but are avoiding things we know are not helpful to human biology.
I would assum they have the math right but not really sure why anyone cares. It’s a bit like the Voter’s Paradox. In and of it self it points to an interesting phenomena to investivate but really doesn’t provide guidance for what someone should do.
I do find it odd that the probabilities are so low given the total votes you mention, and adding you also have 51 electoral blocks and some 530-odd electoral votes that matter. Seems like perhaps someone is missing the forest for the trees.
I would make an observation on your closing thought. I think if one holds that people who are not well informed, or perhaps less intelligent and so not as good at choosing good representatives then one quickly gets to most/many people should not be making their own economic decisions on consumption (or savings or investments). Simple premise here is that capital allocation matters to growth and efficiency (vis-a-vis production possibilities frontier). But that allocation is determined by aggregate spending on final goods production—i.e. consumer goods.
Seems like people have a more direct influence on economic activity and allocation via their spending behavior than the more indirect influence via politics and public policy.