This is powerful. It’s such simple (and blatant) ‘framing’ … and yet it really does make me feel better about considering whether the world is (much) worse than I now believe.
Thanks!
I didn’t think your comment was too long, nor would it even if it was twice as long. Nor did I find it rambly. Please consider writing up portions of your thoughts whenever you can if doing so is much easier than writing up your full thoughts.
Wait a few years and Dwarf Fortress might have implemented those gears.
Open source projects, especially (or maybe just most saliently for me) software projects, desperately need sidekicks. I write ‘desperately’ because most such projects die from ‘over-forking’, i.e. everyone wanting to be the leader (hero) of their own project (adventure).
What I’ve learned most recently is that being even a moderately competent sidekick is really hard. It takes a lot of work to even be able to contribute without creating lots of extra work for the heroes and their more-devoted sidekicks.
I think it’s important to keep in mind a few things about this (or any other ‘weird’ social rule/trick/technology/norm/etc.):
It doesn’t have to be used all the time, let alone frequently, often, or even at all!
It doesn’t have to replace any other form of trading favors (i.e. exchanging social/friendship capital)!
It seems like you’re imagining a world, or even just a single relationship/friendship, where each person is frequently, or always, using cheerful pricing instead of all of the existing social/friendship favor trading forms.
But I’d be surprised if you couldn’t think of any examples where this would work better than the ‘social norms’ you’d otherwise use.
Have you never asked a friend for a favor that involved their professional expertise? That seems like an excellent scenario for this kind of thing – to me anyways. Whereas, under ‘social norms’, this might require considerable exchanges of social/friendship capital, even with the ‘professional’ friend offering a ‘friend discount’, asking them to name a cheerful price signals that you value your friend’s expertise and their time, and at a significant premium too. And more too that you’re willing to solicit a price from them that’s higher than they’re willing to ask for or demand. Regular favors also have the problem of being hard to reject sometimes.
I’d expect this to be even more useful when the favor directly requires some kind of financial cost to the friend as well. I’ve often found that, even when there seems like there might be some kind of mutually beneficial exchange possible, the ‘transaction costs’ of not having a norm for simply paying for things with money can swamp the (potential) positive gains to both parties.
When you pay someone to do things, you briefly become their employer, and that’s not a good kind of relationship to have with a friend.
I find a similar dynamic to be at work even when a friend agrees to do a favor ‘for free’ (i.e. for $0) – their commitment to do the thing is also something like you being their employer, e.g. you can reasonably be upset if they fail to do what they agreed to do.
I also don’t get the sense often that any two friends are perfectly on “even footing”.
But I also pay many people to do things for me where I don’t feel like their employer, e.g. plumbers, delivery people, consultants, contractors. There are lots of trades where even a ‘failure’ in the transaction or exchange being completed doesn’t give me significant latitude to punish the other party.
It also seems important to keep in mind that this whole ‘trick’ only even works if both parties are generally okay with it at all, i.e. asking each other for their cheerful prices and respecting each other’s answers as honest.
Lastly, on probability theory and Newtonian mechanics: I agree that you shouldn’t question how much sense it makes to use calculus in the way that you described, but that’s because the application of calculus to mechanics is so clearly-defined that it’d be very hard for the type of confusion I talked about above to sneak in. I’d put evolutionary theory halfway between them: it’s partly a novel abstraction, and partly a novel empirical truth.
I think this might be a big part of the disagreement/confusion. I think of evolution (via natural selection) as something like a ‘Platonic inevitability’ in the same way that probability theory and Newtonian mechanics are. (Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea does a good job I think of imparting intuitions about the ‘Platonic inevitability’ of it.)
You’re right that there are empirical truths – about how well some system ‘fits’ the ‘shape’ of the abstract theory. But once you’ve ‘done the homework exercises’ of mapping a few systems to the components of the abstract theory, it seems somewhat unnecessary to repeat that same work for every new system. Similarly, once you can ‘look’ at something and observe that, e.g. there are multiple ‘discrete’ instances of some kind of abstract category, you can be (relatively) confident that counting groups or sets of those instances will ‘obey’ arithmetic.
I must admit tho that I very much appreciate some of the specific examples that other commenters have supplied for applications of expected utility theory!
I liked this post a lot, but I did read it as something of a scifi short story with a McGuffin called “The Solomonoff Prior”.
It probably also seemed really weird because I just read Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity [PDF] by Scott Aaronson and having read it makes sentences like this seem ‘not even’ insane:
The combined strategy is thus to take a distribution over all decisions informed by the Solomonoff prior, weight them by how much influence can be gained and the version of the prior being used, and read off a sequence of bits that will cause some of these decisions to result in a preferred outcome.
The Consequentialists are of course the most badass (by construction) alien villains ever “trying to influence the Solomonoff prior” as they are wont!
Given that some very smart people seem to seriously believe in Platonic realism, maybe there are Consequentialists malignly influencing vast infinities of universes! Maybe our universe is one of them.
I’m not sure why, but I feel like the discovery of a proof of P = NP or P ≠ NP is the climax of the heroes valiant struggle, as the true heirs of the divine right to wield The Solomonoff Prior, against the dreaded (other universe) Consequentialists.
It’s a good piece; I liked the end a lot:
TV helped me to understand people who were worlds away from how I grew up. It gave me an understanding of the ingredients of social mobility. What I can’t quite disentangle is whether it taught me how to get what I had always wanted or taught me what to want.
I’d imagine art in general does both things to an extent.
Why is this a good idea?
I understand that this is great opportunity to scrape otherwise-inaccessible sites, but whom is this intended to benefit? Is it just the people scraping?
Is this not malicious abuse of charitable giving?
I would think the title is itself a content warning.
I guess someone might think this post is or could be far more abstract and less detailed about the visceral realities than it is (or maybe even just using the topic as a metaphor at most).
What kind of specific content warning do you think would be appropriate? Maybe “Describes the dissection of human bodies in vivid concrete terms.”?