It was the connection to the ethos of the early Internet that I was not expecting in this context, that made it a sad reading for me. I can’t really explain why. Maybe just because I consider myself to be part of that culture, and so it was kind of personal.
Martin Sustrik
Karma: 2,528
Agency in Politics
Antitrust as Controlled Creative Destruction
Controlled Creative Destruction
Coincidentally, here’s Bryan Caplan (quoting Jim Flynn) on intelligence vs. wisdom:
Performance on the traditional problem-solving task or cognitive measure decreased linearly after age 20. Performance on the practical problem-solving task increased to a peak in the 40 and 50 year-old groups, then declined.
There must have been a group of solitary men, but there was no social stigma attached to being a bachelor. Zweig discusses the topic in a chapter dedicated to women and does not mention solitary men per se. However, there are few pages about prostitution and how crazy widespread it used to be. He compares it to inter-war period—which itself may seem pretty bad to us today. The prostitution of course cuts in only one way and the whole chapter sheds some light on the dynamic. The entire book is worth reading. Recommended.
The Wisdom of Living for 200 Years
Let me try a different example:
Let’s say you are an opposition politician and your pet constitutional issue is to replace majority voting by proportional voting. You believe that FPTP has some genuinely detrimental consequences for the society and you are such a selfless person that you are willing to push for the change even against your best object level interests.
The party currently in power loves majority voting. They love it, however, on the object level: It gives them far larger representation in the parliament than would otherwise be reasonable. 55% voters vote for them, yet they get 80% of MPs. They don’t care about meta level and are not willing to sacrifice object-level interests for it.
The situation is stable for the time being. There’s no “political will” to enact proportional voting. So you wait.
At some point the voting patterns change and the ruling party suddenly faces defeat in the upcoming elections. Now they would do better with the proportional voting system.
They care only about the object level, that is, winning the election, and proportional voting is as good means to win as is majority voting.
You, on the other hand, care only about the meta level. You may lose the upcoming election if proportional system is adopted, but you think it’s still worth it.
Suddenly the two parties are aligned, each side prefers the proportional system, albeit for different reasons. The proportional voting gets adopted.
Unfortunately no, they didn’t. But exactly observing this kind of effects would make studying it from the point of view of political science interesting. (See Hirschmanian “exit”).
LARPing the Veil of Ignorance: Someone told me yesterday that there is a group of people role playing a medieval village each summer. They meet for a week, some of them play aristocrats, some of them are artisans, some are peasants. It must suck to be a peasant, I said. The answer was that the roles are chosen by lot. If you are unlucky you become a peasant you are just going to work on a field, but you don’t know that in advance. Which, of course, is the classic Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” thought experiment. And a repeated one at that!
If those people were dedicated to improving the societal system within the game, the thought experiment would become a real experiment. What would that be good for? At the very least it would highlight the shortcomings of the veil of ignorance system—would people game it? And if so, how? But it also may work like a laboratory of governance systems. Whatever emerges in the laboratory can then be tried in a company, an NGO, or, say, a ministry department.
Are there any trade-offs that make you feel moral satisfaction?
Thinking about taboo trade-offs, e.g. the study where people felt outrage at a hospital administrator who decided not to save a life of a kid who needed an expensive surgery, but rather decided to spend the money on running the hospital.
Isn’t it that any trade-off causes at least some un-satisfaction, which then naturally masquerade as moral outrage?
Isn’t it the case that anyone willing to publicly do a trade-off is going to be hit by a wave of moral outrage? On the other hand, someone who’s willing to promise the impossible, that is, who avoids the trade-off, will just make few people slightly annoyed.
One man’s singularity is another man’s Tuesday:
The Singularity [is] the future point at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, whereupon immediately thereafter (as the story goes) the machines make themselves rapidly smarter and smarter and smarter, reaching a superhuman level of intelligence that, stuck as we are in the mud of our limited mentation, we can’t fathom.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
What’s easy to overlook in the above definition is that in the real world there’s no generic “human intelligence”, just the intelligence of individual human beings.
Not all of us are thus going to experience singularity at the same time. Some of us will have to deal with it sooner, some later.
Technological singularity, in other words, isn’t an objective phenomenon. It’s a subjective thing. In reality, unlike in the simplistic model, it does not resemble the absolute, indisputable physical singularity at the center of a black hole. It is more like black hole’s event horizon, an imaginary border, a point of no return, through witch we pass, one at a time and often not even noticing.
Thinking about it in this way gives the discussion an empirical basis. We could ask: If the singularity is a subjective phenomenon, are there already people who have experienced it? Are there people for whom the world is already too fast-moving and too complex to follow? Are there people, who, stuck in the mud of their limited mentation, as Stanford Encyclopedia mercilessly puts it, can’t fathom what’s going on?
If so, we don’t have to guess how the post-singularity world will look like. We can just ask.
And yes, there are flat-earthers out there and there are conspirational theorists of all flavours, so we definitely have something to work with...
And there seems to be a dilemma here:
Either you believe that the world that is too fast and too complex to follow is still somehow tractable—and it that case you should prove it by taking a flat-earther and helping them to adopt a better model of the world...
Or you believe that changing their mind is impossible and then you have to worry that once you cross the technological event horizon yourself, you will get lost yourself, that you will become just a high-IQ version of a conspiration theorist.
Thanks for the link. I’ve noticed the trend of avoiding the salient issues among those who get things actually done, but I haven’t had a name for it. Pulling the rope sideways—nice.
I don’t think this works very well. If you wait until a major party sides with your meta, you could be waiting a long time.
Correct. This could be countered by having multiple plans and waiting for several possible situations/alliances in parallel.
if you get what you were waiting for, you’re definitely not pulling sideways
Why? It’s known that people care a lot about object-level issues and little about meta-level ones (procedural stuff, e.g. constitution). If you get what you want at the meta level, the voters won’t care and politicians thus have little incentive to make it a partisan/salient issue.
Dumbing down
Fair enough. The information was taken from some book, it’s a long time, I don’t remember exactly, possibly Dawkins. Anyway, I’ve fixed the article. Thanks for pointing that out!
Protestants Trading Acausally
Admittedly, I haven’t read about the problem of sex since ’90s but back then the argument against the naive “sex is good because it allows all the good genes to get into a single organism” was that that made sense from the point of view of the species, but not necessarily from the point of view of the individual—while the natural selection works on the individual level.
In particular, when a female has a choice to reproduce either sexually or via parthenogenesis, in the former case she loses 50% of the fitness (because half of her genes get recombined out). Thus, the advantages of the sexual reproduction must outweight this huge drop in fitness. Even worse, it must outweight it quickly. “Your progeny is going to be better off after 100 generations” is not going to work, because when your fitness drops by 50% you’ll die out in few generations.
Anyway, if the newer research found a solution to this problem, it would be interesting to hear about it.
Yes, it does. Any better ideas?
This is aimed at those who can’t make an informed opinion themselves. (And most of us can’t. Even a scientist can’t often make an informed opinion about a result from a different discipline.) What it means is: “Trust the official scientific institutions. However broken they may be you are still better off trusting them than trusting the alternative sources of information.”
Shareholders have the voting rights. If they feel that they will profit more from two smaller, but growing companies than from a single stalled one, that’s how it’s going to be.