Can you think of any example which doesn’t have exceptionally low elasticity of supply? I can imagine such a situation for goods with no supply elasticity (ie, land, certain kinds of collectors’ items) but not for the vast majority of goods.
peralice
Karma: 95
Yeah, ability is one of the exceptions.
The other major exception I can think of is with regards to antisocial behaviour. If you are a habitual liar, for instance, it is in your best interest for the people you interact with to think as few people lie as possible; that way they won’t be on guard against you lying to them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone try to argue that antisocial behaviour they exhibit is rare, though. It seems like the urge to excuse antisocial behaviour by claiming that “everyone does it” is way way stronger.
Good point WRT that first line—I edited it to something more clunky but I think more accurate. Hopefully the intended meaning came across anyway.
WRT the second point—I agree that this is the weakest/most speculative argument in the post, although I still think it’s worth considering. Evolution obviously “had the ability” to make us much more baby-obsessed, or have a higher sex drive, and yet we do not. This indicates that there are tradeoffs to be made; a human with a higher reproductive drive is less fit in other ways. One of those ways is plausibly that a human with a lower reproductive drive gets more “other stuff” done—like maintaining a community, thinking about its environment, and so on—and that “other stuff” is very important for increasing the number of offspring which survive. And, indeed, we have a very important example of some “other stuff” which massively increased the total number of humans alive; it doesn’t seem absurd to suggest that it was no “mistake” for us to have the reproductive drive that we do, and that if God reached down into the world in the distant past and made the straightforward change of “increase the reproductive drive of humans”, this would in fact have made there be fewer humans in the year 2026.
Now, this is all very tangential with regards to the actual analogy being made; it’s unclear what if anything this has to do with AI, in large part due to the many other disanalogies between evolution and AI training. But insofar as all we are doing is judging the capacity of the human species to “fulfill the goal of evolution”, it’s relevant that our drives are what they are in large part because having them that way does “fulfill the goal”, even in part because the drive does not perfectly match the goal.
I’m not sure this holds.
Suppose that I’m a redhead, along with 10% of the female population, and I want the most attractive possible man to date me (assuming for the sake of the simplicity that everyone agrees on who the most attractive people are, and everyone knows how attractive they are too, etc. etc., as is typical in matching problems). I’m a 50th percentile woman myself. Say that 10% of men near-exclusively want to date redheads, they know this, and the rest don’t at all. Men rate women with their preference of hair higher than all women without it (but otherwise match the general attractiveness rankings; i.e. a man who prefers redheads prefers me to 95% of other women). In the equilibrium with full knowledge for all participants, everyone matches with their counterpart at precisely their level of attractiveness and kind of hair/hair preference (I think this strategy is the only rationalisable strategy by weak dominance, but it’s not the only NE; at the very least the silly equilibrium with all players matching on the first round is a NE).
If I meet a man in the most attractive 1%, and I can convince him that redheads are extremely rare, say 0.1% of the population, I would be able to convince him to date me (since 0.1% of the male population is both more attractive than him and attracted to redheads, and he should expect them to snatch up the female redhead population; a 50th percentile redhead is much better than he can hope for). So it seems like convincing such men that I’m rare would benefit me. But let’s suppose instead that I can press a button to make every man think that redheads are 0.1% of the population. Does this help me? Well, again, if I meet a man in the most attractive 1% who is still single, I’ll be able to convince him to date me. But the chance I will ever meet such a man is very low, since any other redheaded woman can also convince such a man to date them! By a symmetry argument (ie, any strategy I can take, other women can too: the expected quality of dates among all redheads can’t be improved by this and my 50th percentile attractiveness dooms me to a median expected payoff) we can see that my expected match can’t be improved by pressing this button. And indeed my expected match becomes worse: 9.9% of men prefer redheads but believe that they cannot date one, so will consent (if they see a non-redhead of the appropriate attractiveness) to match with a non-redhead. Thus the expected quality of dates among redheaded women decreases, and my expected date quality is worse (also, some non-redhead-prefering men will never match).
So I don’t think it usually helps me to make men falsely believe that I’m rare, since my competition benefits just as much as I do and it makes the average outcome worse for all of us (there are probably ways you can make the numbers work out for the button being better, but I think you’d have to try moderately hard).
On the other hand, if I somehow convince all men that 99.9% of women are redheaded, then my position is improved, since the position of non-redheaded women is made worse (some non-redhead-preferers will accept a redheaded woman, and no redhead preferers will accept a non-redheaded woman) and my position is made better in equal proportion. This is assuming that traits are entirely immutable; if we reverse it and talk about a redhead-preferring man pressing a button that convinces all women that all men like redheads, then the same logic applies and also some women may dye their hair. This effect (people changing their presentation to match what they perceive as common tastes) is the one I wrote the post about.