Oligopsony

• Oligopsony 3 Aug 2010 20:15 UTC

  13 points

  on: Wel­come to Less Wrong!

  I’ve existed for about 24 years, and currently live in Boston.

  I regard many of the beliefs popular here—cyronics, libertarianism, human biodiversity, pickup artistry—with extreme skepticism. (As if in compensation, I have my own unpopular frameworks for understanding the world.) I find the zeitgeist here to be interestingly wrong, though, because almost everyone comes from a basically sane starting point—a material universe, conventionally “Western” standards of science, reason, and objectivity—and actively discusses how they can regulate their beliefs to adhere to these. I have an interest in achieving just this kind of regulation (am a “rationalist”,) and am aware that it’s epistemically healthy to expose myself to alternative points of view expressed in a non-crazy way. So hopefully the second aspect will reinforce the first.

  As for why I’m a rationalist, I don’t know, and the question doesn’t seem particularly interesting to me. I regard it beyond questions of justification, like other desires.

• Oligopsony 3 Aug 2010 20:49 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Matt_Simpson’s comment on: Fight Zero-Sum Bias

  This is an important point, but can be stated directly, rather than bringing in the “ancestral environment” thing as justification.

  “Status”—or, more concretely, power over others—corresponds a great deal in our (and probably every actualizable) society to wealth. A society with big wealth differentials is going to be one where some members wield great power over others; it’s not simply a question of differential consumption rights. I think this is basically motivates people to find wealth differentials unjust: as supporting evidence, consider that people don’t consider happiness differentials that can’t be translated into power differentials unjust—nobody thinks it unjust that Alice has a better native appreciation for classical music than Bob—and that the people who are most likely to consider huge wealth differentials just, libertarians, are the most likely to narrowly map power differentials to the exercise of physical force.

• Oligopsony 3 Aug 2010 22:41 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Blueberry’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong!

  Thanks for the friendly welcome!

  “I’d love to hear more about this: I also like exposing myself to alternative points of view expressed in a non-crazy way, and I’m interested in your unpopular frameworks.”

  Specifically, I’ve become increasingly interested in Marxism, especially the varieties of Anglo post-Marxism that emerged from the analytical tradition. I don’t imagine this is any more popular here than it is among normal people, but the general mode of analysis is probably less foreign to libertarian types than they might assume—as implied above, we’re both working from materialist assumptions (beyond what’s implied above, this applies to more than one meaning of “materialist,” at least for certain types of libertarians.)

  In general, my bias is to assume that people’s behavior is more rational (I mean this in a utility-maximizing sense, rather than in the “rationalist” sense) than it initially appears. In general, the more we know about the context of a decision, the more rational it usually appears to be; and there may be something beyond vanity for the tendency of people, who are in greatest possession of their own situations, to consider themselves atypically rational. I see this materialist (in the “latter,” economic sense) viewpoint as avoiding unnecessary mulitiplication of entities and (not that it should matter for truth) a basically respectful way of facially analyzing people: “MAYBE they’re just crazy, but until we have more contextual knowledge, let’s take as a working assumption that this is in their self-interest.” This is my general verbal justification for reflexively turning to materialist explanations, although the CAUSE of my doing so is probably just that I studied neoclassical economics for four years.

  “Specifically: cryonics is highly speculative, but do you think there’s a small chance it might work?”

  Of course. The transparent wish-fulfillment seems inherently suspect, like the immortality claims of religions, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be the case; and it doesn’t seem like enthusiasm for cyrogenics seems more harmful than other hobbies. So I wish everyone involved the best of luck.

  Of course I can’t how much I’m generalizing from my own lack of enthusiasm. I don’t put a positive value on additional years of my life—I experience some suicidal ideation but don’t act on it because I know it would make people I care about incredibly upset. (This doesn’t mean that I subjectively find my life to be torturous, or that it’s hard not to act on the ideation; I think my life overall averages out to a level of slight annoyance—one can say “cet par, I’d rather not have experienced that span of annoyance” but one can also easily endure such a span if not doing so would cause tremendous outrage in others.)

  “When you say you don’t believe in human biodiversity, what does that mean?”

  I mean I don’t believe in what the sort of people who say “human biodiversity” refer to when they use that phrase: namely, that non-cosmetic, non-immunity genetic differences between ethnic groups are great enough to be of social importance. (Or to use the sort of moralizing, PC language I’d use in most any social context other than here: I am not a consciously-identified racist, though like anyone I have unconscious racial prejudices.) As above, politico-moral reasons wouldn’t inhabit my verbal justification for this, although they’re probably the efficient cause of my belief.

  It’s probably inevitable that racism will be unusually popular among a community devoted to Exploring Brave Edgy Truths No Matter the Cost, but I’m not afraid that actually XBETNMtC will lead me to racism—both because I consider that very unlikely, and because if reason does lead me to racism, then it is proper to be a racist. (This is true of beliefs generally, of course.)

  “And when you say you don’t believe in pickup artistry, you don’t think that dating and relationships skills exist?”

  Dating and relationship skills exist, but it seems transparent that the meat of PUA is just a magic feather to make dorky young men more confident. (Though one should not dismiss the utility of magic feathers!) I find the “seduction community” repulsively misogynistic, but that’s a separate issue. (Verbal justifications, efficient causes, you know the drill.)

  Being easily confident with strangers is by far the most important skill for acquiring a large number of sexual partners—this is of course a truth proclaimed by PUA, one which has been widespread knowledge since the dawn of time—and for the same time that easy confidence with strangers is the most important skill for politicians, sales professionals, &c. I do think it’s here, for game-theoretic reasons, that the idea of “general social skills” can break down: easy confidence with strangers sabotages your ability to send certain social signals that are important to maintaining close relationships. So there are tradeoffs to make, and I think generally speaking people make the tradeoffs that reflect their preferences.

• Oligopsony 5 Aug 2010 0:15 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Unknowns’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong!

  “It doesn’t follow that there aren’t racial difference based on genetics as well. In fact, the idea that there might NOT be is quite absurd. Of course there are. The only question is how large they are.”

  And what direction they’re in. If social factors are sufficient to explain (e.g.) the black-white IQ gap, and the argument for their being some innate differences is “well, it’s exceedingly unlikely that they’re precisely the same,” we don’t have reason to rate “whites are natively more intelligent than blacks” as more likely than “blacks are natively more intelligent than whites.” (If we know that Smith is wealthier than Jones, and that Smith found a load of Spanish dubloons by chance last year, we can’t make useful conclusions about whose job was more renumerative before Smith found her pirate booty.) Of course, native racial differences might also be such that there are environmental conditions under which blacks are smarter than whites and others in which the reverse applies, or whatever.

  In any event I don’t think we need to hypothesize the existence of such entities (substantial racial differences) to explain reality, so the razor applies.

• Oligopsony 5 Aug 2010 1:01 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Blueberry’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong!

  I wouldn’t say I “subscribe” to Marxism, though it seems plausible to me that I might in the near future. I’m still investigating it. While I wouldn’t say that specific Marxist hypothesis have risen to the level of doxastic attitudes, the approach has affected the sort of facial explanations I give for phenomena. But as I said the tradition I’m most interested in is recent, economics-focused English language academic Marxism. (The cultural stuff doesn’t really interest me all that much, and most of it strikes me as nonsense, but I’m not informed enough about it to conclude that “yes, it is nonsense!”) If I could recommend a starting point it would be Harvey’s “Limits to Capital,” although it was Hobsbawm’s trilogy on the 19th century that sparked my interest.

  I hope this doesn’t sound evasive! I try to economize on my explicit beliefs while being explicit on my existing biases.

  (As a side note, while there are a lot of different LTVs floating around, it’s likely that they’re almost all a bit more trivial and a lot less crazy than what you might be imagining. Most forms don’t contradict neoclassical price theory but do place some additional (idealized, instrumental) constaints in order to explain additional phenomena.)

  By the signaling thing, I mean the following: normal humans (not neurotic screwballs, not sociopath salesmen) show a level of confidence in social situations that corresponds roughly to how confident they themselves feel at the time. Thus, when someone approaches you and tries to sell you on something—a product, an idea, or, most commonly, themselves—their confidence level can serve as a good proxy for whether they think the item under sale is actually worthy of purchase. The extent to which they seem guarded signals that they’re not all that. So for game-theoretic reasons, salesmanship works.

  But it’s also the case that normal people become more confident and willing to let their guards down when they’re around people they trust, for obvious reasons. Thus, lowering of guards can signal “I trust you; indeed, trust you significantly more than most people” if you showed some guardedness when you first met them. There are other signals you can send, but these are among those whose absence will leave people suspicious, if you want to take your relationships in a more serious direction.

  So there are tradeoffs in where you choose to place yourself on the easy-confidence spectrum. Moving to the left makes it easier to make casual friends, and lots of them; to the right makes it easier to make good friends. I suspect that most people slide around until they get the goods bundle that they want—I’ve even noticed how I’ve slid around throughout time, in reaction to being placed in new social environments—although there are obvious dysfunctional cases.

  Sorry for implying that racism is common here if it isn’t! Seeing Saileresque shibboleths thrown around here a few times and, indeed, the nearbyness of blogs like Roissy probably colored my perceptions. (Perhaps the impression I have of PUA from the Game and Roissy is similarly inaccurate.)

• Oligopsony 5 Aug 2010 1:32 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Unknowns’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong!

  I’m not sure that this is the case, given that the confound has a known direction and unknown magnitude.

  Back to Smith, Jones, and Spanish treasure: let’s assume that we have an uncontroversial measure of their wealth differences just after Smith sold. (Let’s say $50,000.) We have a detailed description of the treasure Smith found, but very little market data on which to base an estimation of what she sold them for. It seems that ceteris paribus, if our uninformed estimation of the treasure is >$50,000, Jones is likelier to have a higher non-pirate gold income, and if our uninformed estimation of the treasure is <$50,000, Smith is likelier to.

• Oligopsony 5 Aug 2010 1:51 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lwta’s comment on: Open Thread, Au­gust 2010

  They have plenty of money, and it would make them look like weirdos. (Warning: some celebrities may have no compunction about looking like weirdos.)

• Oligopsony 5 Aug 2010 1:58 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: lwta’s comment on: Open Thread, Au­gust 2010

  Well, for the people presumably feeling uncomfortable, it’s an immortal spirit that houses your personality and gets attached to a body for your pilgrimage on Earth.

  There might be something to this for people who reject this metaphysic, even beyond unconsciously carrying it around. If you’re going to come back, you don’t get the secular heaven of “being fondly remembered after you die.” In a long retirement or vacation, the book hasn’t been shut on you. Perhaps there’s something important many people find in the book being shut—of others, afterwards, being able to evaluate a life as a completed story. Someone frozen is maybe a “completed story” and maybe not.

• Oligopsony 5 Aug 2010 2:08 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity quotes: Au­gust 2010

  How subject ethical intuitions should be to rational analysis (in the sense of being changed by them) depends on how much you endorse the fact-value distinction and how fundamental the intuition is.

  Reason leads me (though perhaps my reasoning is flawed) to conclude that “others’ abject suffering is bad” isn’t any more justified a desire than “others’ abject suffering is good;” they’re as equivalent as a preference for chocolate or vanilla ice cream. But so what? I don’t abandon my preference for vanilla just because it doesn’t follow from reason. Morality works the same way, except that ideally, I care about it enough to force my preferences on others.

• Oligopsony 5 Aug 2010 4:01 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Unknowns’s comment on: Wel­come to Less Wrong!

  I mean “equally likely” in wedrifid’s sense: not that, having done a proper Bayesian analysis on all evidence, I may set the probability of p(W>B)=p(B>W}=.5 (assuming intelligence works in such a way that this implied division into genetic and environmental components makes sense), but that 1) I don’t know enough about Spanish gold to make an informed judgement and 2) my rough estimate is that “I could see it going either way”—something inherent in saying that environmental differences are “sufficient to explain” extant differences. So actually forming beliefs about these relative levels is both insufficiently grounded and unnecessary.

  I suppose if I had to write some median expectation it’s that they’re equal in the sense that we would regard any other two things in the phenomenal world of everyday experience equal—when you see two jars of peanut butter of the same brand and size next to each other on a shelf in the supermarket, it’s vanishingly unlikely that they have exaaaactly the same amount of peanut butter, but it’s close enough to use the word.

  I don’t think this is really a case of writing things down on the bottom line. What reason would there be to suppose ex ante that these arbitrarily constructed groups differ to some more-than-jars-of-peanut-butter degree? Is there some selective pressure for intelligence that exists above the Sahara but not below it (more obvious than counter-just-so-stories we could construct?) Cet par I expect a population of chimpanzees or orangutans in one region to be peanut butter equal in intelligence to those in another region, and we have lower intraspecific SNP variation than other apes.

• Oligopsony 5 Aug 2010 16:07 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: jtolds’s comment on: The Threat of Cryonics

  If the next couple centuries of human evolution are anything like the last several dozen, the only way we’ll be “improved” by evolution is the addition of a few more disease immunities. If they’re not it will probably be because (a) we can just directly modify the geonome, and what nature would take millions of years to get around to artifice can do nigh-immediately or (b) some sort of terrible disaster has occured (and even then most of the selective forces will just be for immunities.)

  I think it’s hard to dispute that there are more pressing uses of limited resources than cryonics. But this is an argument against frivolties in general. It’s reasonable to say “we should rob the rich and give to the poor, so that more resources are expended on food and basic medicine than smartphones and frozen heads,” if that’s where your values lie, but “cryonics is more objectionable than smartphones” doesn’t follow.

• Oligopsony 6 Aug 2010 0:04 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: The Threat of Cryonics

  Immunities are awfully significant! If you didn’t have them you’d enjoy a swift death.

  Either way, though, it’s not the case that evolution would “continue” “improving” us, just that we’d be different in whatever way we’d be different. We’re not more evolved at later points than earlier points; Azathoth doesn’t care about that kind of directionality.

• Oligopsony 6 Aug 2010 23:50 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TobyBartels’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 2

  A Dark (or Light) Lord could centralize way more than Stalin ever did, thanks to the Marks. (How much do we know about how they work, other than they need to be taken willingly?)

• Oligopsony 6 Aug 2010 23:59 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Jonathan_Graehl’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 2

  I actually liked the didactic parts—generally speaking, I read sf for the infodumps. When I want character or prose style I go for actual literature.

• Oligopsony 8 Aug 2010 14:51 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Apprentice’s comment on: Pur­pose­ful­ness on Mars

  Evolution, Civilization, Intent. Yeah.

• Oligopsony 9 Aug 2010 5:03 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Pur­pose­ful­ness on Mars

  Ah! I’m an idiot!

  Aren’t they all side effects, though?

• Oligopsony 9 Aug 2010 5:08 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: dclayh’s comment on: Christo­pher Hitchens and Cryonics

  This might be easier to investigate if you gave us an operational definition of “awesome.” If it reduces to “those you admire,” and it probably does, it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re all clustered together. You find new people to admire by the recommendations and name-droppings of those who have similar tastes to you.

• Oligopsony 9 Aug 2010 18:32 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Jayson_Virissimo’s comment on: Two straw men fighting

  Not all libertarians reject materialism—there is the view (not mine; I’m a compatibilist) that indeterminism in physical laws is sufficient for libertarian free will.

• Oligopsony 9 Aug 2010 18:40 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Dpar’s comment on: Mak­ing Beliefs Pay Rent (in An­ti­ci­pated Ex­pe­riences)

  What’s important isn’t the number of degrees of removal, but that the belief’s being true corresponds to different expected sensory experiences of any kind at all than its being false. The sensory experience of perceiving patterns of ink on a piece of paper counts.

  Now you could say: “reading about the Crusades in history books is strong evidence that ‘the Crusades happened’ is the current academic consensus,” and you could hypothesize that the academic consensus was wrong. This further hypothesis would lead to further expected sensory data—for instance, examining the documents cited by historians and finding that they must have been forgeries, or whatever.

• Oligopsony 9 Aug 2010 20:00 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Dpar’s comment on: Your Strength as a Rationalist

  No, but only because that would be cognitively burdensome. We’re boundedly rational.