Alice strikes me as the poster child for the old saying about good intentions and roads to hell. Ultimately, I think she ends up causing much more harm via the toxic and negative experience those around her have than any good she can do herself.
jmh
Karma: 1,199
Yes, that book/monograph.
I’m not sure if this is really reanalyzing but I would be interested in seeing analysis of the firm through a hard Public Choice lens. I suspect there is plenty of implicit analysis in that general vein within IO and theory of the firm research but I’ve not seen any (which hardly means it does not exist) that explicitly does so.
Another might be market efficiency from a total surplus value generation perspective. Specifically in terms of financial markets. Are individual stocks trading in a more efficient manner than mutual funds; the former being a streaming exchange as buyers-sellers interact though out the trading session while the latter is priced end of day (much more like the Walrasian auction process).
I think you are missing the point about the timing of the advice. If advice is offered at a time that a person is not in a suitable frame of mind to even digest the information it’s not useful to them. Save it for later is may claim.
I distill this down to a pretty simple statement: truth/true is external to the mind while beliefs are internal to the mind. Is that a good bumper sticker type summary?
BTW, related to the last image, have you read The Flatlands? If not, you might find it has some insights for you thinking here.
I think the whole victim blaming thing, or the bike theft QA in the post, really miss the target. ALL that advise is of zero value at the time it is offered. The cows have left the barn. Water passed under the bridge. The milk was spilled and the eggs broken. The type of advice one need ex post is how to deal with the repercussion.
Once you offer that type of advice or, if you really cannot/should not if you lack experience with the situation, you’ve offered you sympathies and moral support that they can come through okay and the person is in recovery mode—be it ready to buy a new bike or whatever—then you can start offering advice about how to prevent a recurrence of the violation.
While I agree that such advice an be very useful how, and particularly when, it is offered with matter a lot in terms of how it sounds and how it is received.
Has anyone explored the potential of AGI agents forming friendships, or genuine interests in humans (not as pets or some consumable they “farm”)?
Simple update for those interested. Looks like some are taking a similar idea to market, as it were, in Honduras to fight dengue.
The mosquitoes Enriquez unleashed in his El Manchen neighborhood — an area rife with dengue — were bred by scientists to carry bacteria called Wolbachia that interrupt transmission of the disease. When these mosquitoes reproduce, they pass the bacteria to their offspring, reducing future outbreaks.
I think that approach has merit as long as one can be sure that the problems are in fact separable and not interdependent.
That said, some times taking a break and working on the simpler tasks can spur progress in the more complex/difficult ones. But I do not think that is really at odd with your approach.
but that the are under-provided: either they are not provided or are of low-quality relative to what is economically efficient.
I find that bit something of a problematic claim.
If economic efficiency is the criteria one has to show that marginal costs and marginal values are misaligned. I’m not sure that is the general case. The claimed misalignment seems to be based on one of 2 general propositions: 1) that people will choose a persistently worse position over a better one or 2) Increasing the output of any good will be beneficial. In the first case I don’t think such situations last very long. In the latter, it seems based on some partial equilibrium analysis that is ignoring the opportunity costs of the resources shifted to increase the output of the public good.
I do agree that coordination costs can be a factor in production of public goods but considering what institutional setting can best reduce the coordination costs—thereby making the production possible/increased—is the question. I think both mentioned articles, and others present in the book, point out that largely private settings have found ways to accomplish the coordination side.
Interesting. The graph seems to fit Viliam’s intuition rather well. It is a noisy dataset (not to mention that “movie” is probably a poorly defined item so might have both apples and oranges here) so I’m not quite sure one can easily make the claim of increasing or constant very easily.
You might find some of the discussion here of interest on the subject. This listing of John Wayne movies, with run time listed might also be of interest.
I have been under the impression that they had been getting shorter—say from the 70s to the 90s/00s but then started lengthening again a bit somewhat after that until now. Nothing very scientific about my recollection of that observation though.
It’s been decades for me but the two best known examples are probably Coase’s (IIRC) “The lighthouse in economics” and (forget the author) “The fable of the bees”.
The first covers the reality that lighthouses in Britain were getting built, largely via private funding and initiatives. These were very clearly of great value for the local community that relied on boats for many activities but it also served to provide protection/warning for all shipping that was merely passing through as it were.
The second covered how bee hives were privately owned and negotiation with local farms or orchards that needed bee pollination services for harvest success—or improved output—even though the bees can and apparently do, service farms that are not paying for the service.
Both studies argued that no only was government type forced production/cost support needed but that there did not seem to be any meaningfully measured under production from some optimal level.
I may have to come back and read the entire post just to fully understand your position. That said, I have not been a big fan of using PD in a lot of analysis for a very key reason (though I only recently recognized the core of my disagreement with others.).
Note—the below is quickly written and I am sure has a lot of gaps that could be filled in or fleshed out.
As I learned the story, it was the jailer who actually constructed the payoffs to produce the incentives to defect. But that was because everyone knew the two stole the good but didn’t have good evidence to go to court. In other words, the PD was actually a sub-game in a larger social game setting where the defection in the PD game actually produced a superior equilibrium and outcome in the larger social game.
Putting in a bit of economic parlance, it is a partial equilibrium game that perhaps we don’t want to see achieve the best equilibrium for the market players (the “jailer” isn’t a player but observer).
So when we see something that looks like a PD problem seems to me the first thing to look into is what is constraining players to that payoff matrix—what is stopping the accused from talking to one another. Or perhaps more in line with your post, why have crooks not established a “never talk to cop” and “rats die” set of standards? In that case of real crooks those escapes of the PD are not really what we want from a social optimum but most of the time the PD is cast in a setting where we actually do want to escape the trap of the poor payoff structure.
For me it seems the focus is often misplaced because we’ve actually miscast the problem characterization as PD rather than some other coordination problem settings.
Have you looked at Cowan’s The Theory of Market Failure? If not you might find it of some interest.
Personally I would challenge the claim the claim of under provision due to a free-rider problem. The above collection of essays show a number of example of largely private provision of public goods where there are very clear potential for free-riding.
While the cases described in the book are not such that they could be said to be the last word on the question of public goods and under provision they do point to need to deal with the question in a more detailed manner related to specific cases I think.
My intuition is that if one does go meet the devil in the details on some case where some public good is not getting produced we’ll find that the production costs actually well exceed the total consumption value. Pushing that type of project through then changes the free-rider problem into one of forced carrying (and I think well studied under different names in Public Choice literature).
In cases where we’re saying we’re not producing “enough” of the public good, I think we’re equivocating a bit here. Clearly that call implies we’re not actually dealing with a public good, in the true definitional sense, as the complaint here is that some are being under served/excluded. In other words, the good is not really non-rival or non-excludable. In these cases I wonder if it would not be better to think of these types of goods in the same way classical economists thought about economic rents—some value that is getting captured because of locational impact (be it closer to market or greater fertility of the land). In this type of situation I don’t think the public good solution will necessarily be a good solution for the actual problem—wrong tool is getting used. The case of all someone has is the hammer so all problems look like nails.
There was a story in NewAtlas about a computer—brain tissue merge that seems to have produced some interesting features. Perhaps such a union is the type of evolutionary next step for human cognitive improvements rather than genetic screening/engineering or chemical additives.
I liked the post. It fits quite well with a simple quip I’ve known and sometimes use: “Practice makes permanent, perfect practice makes perfect.”
In other words, without that good feedback loop in the process one may well simply be reinforcing bad habits or bad thought processes with all the hard practice.
What I think would be very interesting, though highly difficult I suspect, would be a control variable related to social institutional factors. While improvements in both economic productivity and technology should support increased population growth, so would more stable and peaceful societies.
In that regard I think I would start looking at for the decline in the first millennia AD would be related to social environment and institutions rather than economic—accepting that there will be some close links between social and economic outcomes that might be hard to separate.
A great example of why conducting polls/surveys is difficult to do well and not in some leading way.
No. She was “asking” for a lot more than just if he could work harder. Moreover, my comment had little to do with some claim she wanted others to talk like her.