But this doesn’t seem to be what we are seeing empirically: northern europe is a lot more secular than the US, yet it is the US that has the problems with excessive medical malpractice litigation.
Pfft
Karma: 1,172
You ought to cite the text you are quoting.
I claim that it is unethical to objectify people. By “objectify”, I mean to think of, talk about as, or treat like a non-person. A good heuristic is to see how easily a given sentence could be reworked to have as a subject something inanimate instead of a person.
Ultimately each person’s ethics are probably axiomatic and impossible to justify or discuss, but this injunction seems extremely odd to me, and trying to follow it would seem to have very bad consequences for the kind of thinking we could do.
For instance, consider the sentences “if falling freely, a car will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2” and “if falling freely, a person will accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2″. We are not allowed to say or think the second one. But that means that it is impossible to work out the answers to problems like “how long would it take me to fall from a building”—which surely is a question which almost everyone has considered one time or another, and which seems intrinsically harmless.
The fact of the matter is, people are objects, and we ignore it at our peril. Some questions are best considered working “inside-out” , starting with and reasoning from our subjective experience, and some are best considered “outside-in”, starting with what we know about our material make-up. (Especially questions about bias seem to fall in the latter category!)
Nor is there are clean separation between subject matters which requires “person-specific” reasoning and ones that do not. For instance, the topic of clinical depression brings in considerations about happiness and unhappiness, things that go to the core of the experience of being human. But even so, studies about serotonin—a neurotransmitter with we share with common ants—turn out to be very relevant.
The same actually goes for the “falling from a building” example. The reason I was originally interested in the question is of course from imagining the subjective experience—what would it be like, hurling towards your death, how much would you have time to think, etc—but even so, to get the relevant information we have to take the objective viewpoint.
And, I would argue, exactly the same applies to dating. The whole reason we are interested in the topic of dating in the first place is because of the associated subjective experiences. Even so, in thinking about certain aspects of it, it is useful to take the objective viewpoint.
To not raise the status of the pointer-outer, we could require that the pointing out is done anonymously.
To make it formal, it might be useful to make it part of the UI: rather than posting a reply in free text, you would click a “bad language” button and mark a checkbox for the policy you consider violated. Reducing the bandwidth of the channel in this way might make it harder to communicate elaborate moves in a social-status game using it.
Not lowering the status of the pointed-out speaker seems harder: one could make the whole exchange not publicly visible, but would a private message be sufficient to enforce the guidelines, especially since there might be disagreement about what constitutes a violation?
Sure, but there are also situations where people seem to seek out and value the sensation of pain itself: masochism, self-injury, and of course The Onion’s pain-inducing Advil comes to mind. In these cases I would not say that the pain itself is bad. So the badness still seems to have to do more with the circumstances involved (e.g. involuntariness) than with the sensation itself.
This is exactly my take on it also.
There is a model which is standard in economics which say “people maximize expected utility; risk averseness arises because utility functions are concave”. This has always struck me as extremely fishy, for two reasons: (a) it gives rise to paradoxes like this, and (b) it doesn’t at all match what making a choice feels like for me: if someone offers me a risky bet, I feel inclined to reject it because it is risky, not because I have done some extensive integration of my utility function over all possible outcomes. So it seems a much safer assumption to just assume that people’s preferences are a function from probability distributions of outcomes, rather than making the more restrictive assumption that that function has to arise as an integral over utilities of individual outcomes.
So why is the “expected utility” model so popular? A couple of months ago I came across a blog-post which provides one clue: it pointed out that standard zero-sum game theory works when players maximize expected utility, but does not work if they have preferences about probability distributions of outcomes (since then introducing mixed strategies won’t work).
So an economist who wants to apply game theory will be inclined to assume that actors are maximizing expected utility; but we LWers shouldn’t necessarily.
I think I and John Maxwell IV mean the same thing, but here is the way I would phrase it. Suppose someone is offering me the pick a ticket for one of a range of different lotteries. Each lottery offers the same set of prizes, but depending on which lottery I participate in, the probability of winning them is different.
I am an agent, and we assume I have a preference order on the lotteries—e.g. which ticket I want the most, which ticket I want the least, and which tickets I am indifferent between. The action that will be rational for me to take depends on which ticket I want.
I am saying that a general theory of rational action should deal with arbitrary preference orders for the tickets. The more standard theory restricts attention to preference orders that arise from first assigning a utility value to each prize and then computing the expected utility for each ticket.
Do you mean concave?
Yes, thanks. I’ve fixed it.
It’s a great book, but in my experience, it’s more useful as a motivator than as a source of information. That is, after reading Girard’s cryptic and tantalizing off-hand remarks, you are dying to know what on earth he is talking about.
I think part of the reason is that the book is based on notes from a series of lectures Girard gave; in my experience oral lectures tend to be a lot more sketchy than things which are written down (others disagree...). The other part of the reason is that this is Girard. :)
For readers who are new to lambda calculus or proof theory but are interested to learn, I’d recommend supplementing it with a gentler text like Sørensen and Urzyczyn’s Lectures on the Curry-Howard Isomorphism (book, shorter free online version), which contains actual explanations. The first few chapters of this covers the same material as the first few chapters of Girard’s book. (They diverge a bit towards the end).
defining large parts of normal human variability as illness is a lie, but if that’s what society needs to work around its taboos against human enhancement, so be it.
I agree that it is better than not getting any human enhancement at all, but it still seems extremely distorted. If I am unsatisfied with my attention span I can get subsidized amphetamine to deal with it—as long as I convince a doctor that my problems are sufficiently severe that I meet the criteria for ADHD. But the benefits from the drug are not at all bimodal: basically there seems to be some kind of sweetspot for dopamine levels, and moving anyone towards it will help them. Since the current discourse speaks of illness instead of suboptimality, we end up with the wrong vocabulary for doing any kind of sensible risk/benefit analysis.
Interestingly, plastic surgery has somehow avoided this trap. Why is it that plastic surgeons can carry out procedures simply because the patients want them too, while psychiatrists can’t prescribe mediation unless the treatment guidelines indicate it?
If the contract L = {¥20 000 if a certain coin comes up heads} were freely tradable, it would cost ¥10 000.
This is wrong. Certainly if there was also a tradable contract for the same coin coming up tails, then both of them has to trade for 10,000. But in isolation, there is nothing forcing the price on one of the contracts.
This is one of the first examples in Mark Joshi’s The Concepts and Practice of Mathematical Finance. Market prices in general work the same way—some risks can be avoided by buying other assets so that the random elements cancel out, while some can’t, and the latter is what controls the pricing of the asset.
The phrasing incidentally is still a bit off. LH and LT are not indistinguishable contracts, since the contingencies in which they pay out is different. The things you should apply the law of one price to is the portfolio consisting of two units of “always pay 10,000” versus the portfolio consisting of one unit of LH and one unit of LT. Those two portfolios behave the same in all possible worlds, and therefore must have the same price.
Whether a risk can be hedged against or not is kindof the ultimate question of all financial markets—almost all interesting instruments (futures, options, CDSs, etc) are designed specifically to make hedging easier. Clearly some risk can’t be hedged—if Omega drops by and says “I’ll give you 10,000 iff my quantum coin comes up tails”, then that introduces some irreducible uncertainty into the system, and some speculator somewhere has to be compensated for taking it on. Of course, you can always buy insurance for the event that the coin does not come up tails, but then the person selling the insurance is taking on the risk and will want to be compensated according to their risk preferences.
On the other hand, suprisingly many risks can be hedged against. Figuring out how to hedge some risk which other people had not seen how to is the basis for all clever arbitrage trades.
A particularly interesting example of this is option pricing. A put option essentially is a tool for reducing variance (by eliminating cases where you lose much money because your stock decreases in value), so the price of the put option should be a direct indication of how much a risk-averse investor values the resulting decrease in variance. However, what Black and Scholes noticed was that, actually, provided the underlying stock price changes smoothly enough (follows log-normal Brownian motion), the same risk that the option allows you to eliminate can already be hedged away by just shorting the right amount of stock. So the risk is hedgable, writers of the option should not be compensated for taking it on, and option prices are exactly the same as if everyone was risk-neutral.
On the other hand, if the price of the underlying stock does not change smoothly—if it has random “chrashes” where it suddenly jumps a lot—then the risk mitigated by the option is not hedgable, and we can no longer price the option without knowing what the risk preferences of the investors are. Real-life option prices do not exactly follow the Black-Scholes model (they have so-called “volatility smiles”), which indicates that in the real world, for whatever reason, the corresponding risks are actually not completely hedgable.
Think about a farmer who will get a good harvest of the sun shines. So he can sell a contract saying “pay 10,000 if the sun shines this summer”. Someone who buys that contract and want to hedge the risk needs to find someone who wants to sell an anti-contract: “pay 10,000 if it rains”. Maybe there is such a person on the market (mushroom pickers?), in which case the risk can be hedged. Or maybe everyone in the world is actually better off with sunshine (or at least, the total productivity in the economy will be higher), in which case the amount of sunshine is a systematic risk which cannot be hedged.
(Perhaps using a measure of computation performed, instead of a static measure of entropy, would address that.)
This is exactly what I have been thinking for a while also. In this view, when thinking about how bad it would be to destroy something, one should think about how much computation it would take to recreate it. I think this seems like a really promising idea, because it gives a unified reason to be against both murder and destruction of the rain forests.
Still, it is probably not enough to consider only the amount of computation—one could come up with counterexamples of programs computing really boring things...
Are you 99.999999% sure that picking up that penny won’t kill you?
This argument does not seem to be a valid reply to the post you link to. Picking up pennies does not seem very risky—in particular it seems no more risky than many other jobs we would be willing to perform for $36/h. This is the beauty of quantifying it in terms of hourly wage—we won’t have to perform insanely complicated calculations about the risk and reward, we can just compare the risk and the reward to other routine things we do for a living.
That said, I’m a bit doubtful about his assertion that picking it up takes less than a second. 5 seconds seems like an equally reasonable estimate to me, and that would put the problem in a quite different light.
And on a personal note I throw a huge pile of pennies in the trash every other year, so having one more carries a negative utility for me. :)
Ah, but surely Yvain has high enough status in this particular community that we can consider him (her? zim? zer? What z-pronoun goes here?) as a groundbreaking visionary instead?
From looking at the diagram, aren’t we starting the decade with such a system (gasoline)?
More seriously, not only is the question the same, the answer is the same too: “Why yes, you can live forever! And it’s easy! Just pay this reasonable fee to the Organization, and we will take care of it.”
If religion teaches us anything, it is that people really don’t want to die, and will happily be convinced by very poor arguments that they aren’t going to.
Therefore, the fact that a given person is convinced that cryonics will work is much weaker evidence about whether cryonics will work or not than if that that person were convinced it will not, since it would require less high-quality evidence to convince him or her in the “yes” direction.
This argument holds even if the person is yourself—we should be more doubtful about our convictions if they happen to be the kind of thing that we are inherently predisposed to believe.
Very true! So a clever man will know that the cryonist was convinced against the odds, and so the fact that the cryonist was convinced is strong evidence; clearly the clever man should believe also. But! this must have been how the cryonist reasoned, which explains why he was easily convinced with a minimum of evidence. That means that it is actually very easy to be convinced about effectiveness of cryonics, so other peoples’ belief is weak evidence after all. So I can clearly not believe in cryonics!
A classic blunder!
Indeed, I think gender (and the way it is intertwined with hetero-normativity) is one of the factors causing us to have less sex than we could have.
For instance, suppose that there is some evolutionary-psychology reason which makes biologically male persons like short sexual encounters higher, and biologically female persons value long-term relationships. (This whole discussion is predicated on the existence of biological-sex based psychological traits, after all, so let’s go out on a limb). The expected outcome might be that men seek out men for casual hook-ups and women for longer-term relationships. But this is generally not what we are seeing.
Why not? One explanation might be that most people are not even a little interested in same-sex sex. But that does not seem to be the case, consider for example environments like single-sex prisons.
I would instead argue that the reasons is that “men do not have sex with men” and “women do not have sex with women” is a cornerstone of the socially constructed part of gender, and going against this would necessitating people to drop a big part of their identity, which is unpleasant.
On this view, the existence of gender is actually preventing us from optimally partaking of that obvious good, copious sex.