ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
17d ago
I definitely had prediction markets in mind. There have been plenty of conversations in rationalist-adjacent spaces about whether or not you can pump money into prediction markets to change the odds and affect the outcome of an election. It's a weird, indirect thing, though. This is a more direct way of trying to use your money to affect the election. Presumably, it would be a partial substitute for that action. If anything, I wonder if it pulls the money that is more interested in affecting the outcome (possibly trying to make money through influencing federal regulation), while leaving the money that is more interested in predicting/making money directly.
ControlsFreak
18d ago
Now you want them to be able to just directly buy votes which will not reduce at all the influence they can exert through other means of funding politicians, journalists, NGOs.
I'm confused. Presumably, these would be substitute goods. That is, suppose someone is spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs right now. Then, an alternate means of political influence arises, say, the money vote. It may, in fact, be plausible that they might even want to increase their total spending, but the nature of substitute goods would imply to me that they would even then spend something more like (made up numbers) 70 units on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs; 60 on the money vote. It seems unlikely that they'd continue spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs... and another 30 on the money vote.
One of the things I actually sort of like about the scheme is that it would be a substitute way of channeling money. Probably one that I'm even a bit more comfortable with than the traditional ways folks use money to buy political influence. We might even get some data about relative values of things, which could help with election design in the future.
Most of the rest of your comment seems almost entirely inapplicable, as it completely ignores the two main features of the proposal - the limited strength of the money vote in comparison to the traditional election, and the strong secrecy. I kinda feel like your response is just sort of irrelevant if it doesn't consider those features.
ControlsFreak
18d ago
At least as far as (1) goes, I think Scott included PAC spending in his comparison to almonds, so that's not currently pumping our numbers up enough. We have to do better. (2) is more interesting/nuanced/complicated. Definitely a part of what Elon was buying with his $40B was political influence, and it's in a way that would not be captured by Scott's numbers. It's hard to know how expensive it was relative to the political influence it bought.
One of the things I like about my idea is that it gives a direct connection between dollars spent and election outcomes, rather than a fuzzy, "Oh, maybe you're buying political influence by buying Twitter or donating to a left-leaning university/think tank, but we have no idea how to connect those things in a quantitative fashion. I'd actually kind of love a more complicated scheme than what I presented here, one that allowed us to then do some math to estimate things like what the implied marginal values of electoral outcomes are in terms of dollars. But the best idea I had in that direction was to make the money EC votes proportional rather than winner-take-all. I don't super love that for other reasons, but perhaps there's a nice design that could help us make better estimates.
On this antepenultimate day of election, I've been thinking about how there is too much dark money in almonds. Or really, the dual question from that post, "[W]hy is there so little money in politics?" Naturally, I wonder, if those numbers are rookie numbers, how do we pump those numbers up?
I'd like this comment chain to primarily be a house for other people's whacky ideas to increase the amount of money in politics, in a way that is most productive, least damaging, etc. This is somewhat self-serving, because I'm also going to throw out a half-baked, whacky idea of my own, and I'd prefer if all the comments aren't solely beating up on my terrible idea. Spread the love; make it a target-rich environment; help by offering up your own whacky idea, so that at least some number of comments are beating up on your whacky idea rather than 100% of the comments just beating up on my whacky idea.
Some general thoughts that I'm trying to work with along the way. First, the idea of having money in politics isn't necessarily automatically 100% bad. I've seen a variety of defenses over the years that it is actually somewhat good to value the opinions of more economically-productive folks over others. Obviously, there are also plenty of criticisms of how this could go poorly, but I don't think it's completely incoherent to vaguely think that there could be value in getting political opinions from people with a proven track record of providing economic value, who have an economic stake in getting the outcomes right, and by making them put their money where their mouth is.
People have definitely proposed what were once very whacky ideas to channel money to some specific purpose. Prediction markets are very much that. Scott joked about just putting prediction markets in control of elections and how it could go horribly wrong. This is the kind of whacky ideas I'm wanting, even if I'm going to try to make my own much more moderate/measured.
A second general thought is that people probably do get a bit too hysterical about the results of elections. I know, I know, there are real differences; there are real choices; we can all point to specific examples of how things could or did get significantly better/worse depending on who was ultimately selected, but in many cases, the actual election process already has some level of stochasticity built-in, and we already accept this non-perfection, even though it could give the "wrong" result and end up with a worse president who does bad things. I can't find the Scott Post now, but I vaguely recall him saying something at some time about how an election outcome could be flipped if it happens to rain on election day in this county of Pennsylvania rather than rain in that county, where it is assumed that rain depresses voter turnout by some single-digit percentage.
To some extent, what I've somewhat extended this to mean is that, especially with a race that appears to be a dead heat (as this one is), since some level of randomness very well may come into play anyway, and we're fine with it, from the perspective of building electoral processes, how much does it really matter, anyway? Both candidates seem to have significant support from wide swaths of the country, and since this is after many months or years of public vetting, we've probably already cut out a good chunk of the really pathological cases if we're thinking about making relatively minor changes to the system. I'll come back to this point later.
I'm also thinking about tech. We've talked a bit before about digital elections. I know, I know, many people are against them. Hopelessly insecure, they say. But, I think, bitcoin seems mostly secure, right? At least good enough that a random search tells me that people have put something like $1.3T worth of economic value into it. I will hypothesize some extensions of tech that don't actually exist now, and perhaps there are true barriers to them existing. I'm kind of okay with pointing them out, but I'd prefer if it's not all complaints that the tech is impossible. I've already accepted that I'm probably further toward the side of "it is probably possible for us to build tech systems that at least mostly work well enough to do what we want, even if there are theoretical (or even practical) security issues along the way, at least to the level of insecurity that we generally accept from banks, bitcoin, current elections, etc." than most people in these communities. So, the objections will be noted, but I may not be all that interested in engaging at this time.
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up secrecy in voting. I've made a big deal about this in the past. I do think it's a big deal. And a big part of what's going in to my half-baked thoughts is to ask, "If we can use tech to allow us to inject dark money directly into politics, but ensuring that this money truly is dark, like really truly secret/anonymous, can we possibly leverage that for good?!"
Secrecy/anonymity are related in a way. An individual's vote being secret means that when you're looking at the pile of votes, they're all anonymous. One of the reasons why I've pointed out that this is important is because it makes coercion and quid pro quo harder. I won't choose any particular article to link to concerning Elon Musk paying people to sign a pledge, but you can pay people to sign a pledge, they can take your money, sign the pledge, then walk into the voting booth and vote whatever the hell way they want, and there's nothing Elon Musk can do about it. Similarly with corruption going the other way. I can't remember where I heard it, I think it was EconTalk, maybe in their discussion of crony capitalism, but right now, when someone gives money to a politician's campaign, it's important to them that the politician knows that they, specifically, gave that money to the politician's campaign. If the politician couldn't tell who gave money to his campaign, he could be corrupt in many ways, but at least he couldn't act corruptly in the specific way of just looking to the people who gave the most money to his campaign and doing the things they tell him to do.
There are a lot of whacky ideas possible here already, and I vaguely recall thinking along these lines in the past. Maybe someone else will flesh out a more specific idea for how to focus on the campaign contribution part, but I want to keep in mind my second general thought and get even more whacky.
What if we just said, yes, we'd like to give money some amount of say in presidential elections. People can just put their money where their mouth is and directly pay money to affect the election. The not-perfect idea for what to do with that money is to just put it in the government's general fund, because some folks view that as, itself, a politically-undesirable endpoint. I have vague-but-not-great alternative ideas, but would be open to others. But we want a balance of some sort, like how the electoral college tried to balance state-level interests with population-level interests. I don't want to throw away one man one vote or the state-level interests that the electoral college gives us, so let's just make a minor modification to give money some say. Let's just give money some EC votes. Five, ten, twenty, I don't know how many exactly. Enough to make it a thing. Not enough to make it the main thing. If it's able to sway the election, that means the election was close enough that maybe a rainstorm in Pennsylvania could have switched the outcome anyway, so probably either option was okay-ish. At least, probably not catastrophic.
Re-enter the tech. Imagine the tech allows a person to simply allocate some amount of cryptocurrency to this money vote. It does so with all those fancy bits of 'receipt freeness' that the digital election nerds talk about. Maybe it allows you to freely withdraw/switch your money vote later, making it harder for you to prove to a candidate that you money voted for him/her by just showing them your computer when you do it. Maybe go further and make people have to go to an in-person voting booth, after being scanned for electronics so they don't have a camera or whatever, and give their money vote that way. Whatever it is, imagine this tech allows people to just give their money vote, but it's (within a margin of error that will always exist for real systems) completely secret/anonymous.
Do we care how much people give? I don't know that I do. One side has their billionaires; the other side has their own. If those billionaires want to literally give away billions of their own dollars, that seems fine? I imagine they won't be billionaires for much longer if they're dumping significant fractions of their wealth into an election every four years.
...do we even just let foreigners have a money vote? Remember, we're significantly limiting the impact by only giving them a small number of EC votes. Do we care? We still need to have the regular votes of regular US citizens be close enough for this to come into play. Might as well be rain in Pennsylvania. If a foreign government wants to dump billions of dollars directly into the coffers of the US government (or whatever else we decide to do with this fund), maybe this is fine? It's not like they could actually just buy a candidate, anyway, since Russia's billions of dollars are fighting China's billions of dollars, and the candidate literally cannot know who gave what. Besides, the American public was mostly okay with either result, anyway.
Obviously, this is a whacky idea. Obviously, you'd need to hammer out significant technical implementation details and compromises on things like how many EC money votes to have. Obviously, this is a completely whacky hypothetical that isn't actually going to be adopted by the US any time soon. One last thing floating around in my head is that perhaps whacky ideas like this get incorporated in one of those charter city concepts, which are already whacky anyway. Any thoughts? More importantly, any other completely whacky election ideas?
EDIT FOR POSTERITY: Thanks to @haroldbkny for finding the original Scott Post I was remembering about the "rain in Pennsylvania" thing.
ControlsFreak
18d ago
My Roborock works great. You need to have lidar mapping. You have to be okay with China having a floor plan of your house (who cares) and some information about your schedule (who cares)... and possibly a persistent footprint in your local network (much more concerning; you can cut it off and make it local only, but you might lose some features, depending on model). It sucks at mopping; I don't even bother with it for that.
ControlsFreak
20d ago
I want to point people back to my old comment on Grants Pass, because this logic has really infected tons of things. They were so successful in playing this game with sexuality (going all the way to effectively banning Christian groups from campuses) that it's almost hard to blame them for thinking that they could get away with it everywhere else, too. I don't really like to let my mind drift to partisan politics (rather than just focusing on understanding what is actually true), but it's hard to not have the thought floating around that we could easily have been two Clinton appointees in place of two Trump appointees away from this stuff metastasizing even more. Frankly, it just makes it annoyingly harder to simultaneously follow the news in the legal realm while also trying to stay personally philosophically coherent when to even explain what has happened requires constantly reminding yourself, "Of course this is complete philosophical bollocks."
ControlsFreak
20d ago
A comment from @JTarrou from many years ago still lives in the back of my mind:
The current Republican president is always the worst person in history. The last one is always surprisingly human. The one before that is always a pretty decent dude.
The current Democratic president is Star Trek Jesus with sprinkles, the last one was a corrupt liar who wasted his vast potential, and the one before that was a Republican.
I don't know that Obama has quite followed that trajectory yet, but since the connection to Biden is so strong and he is still 'around' and influential enough in the party that some folks think he's still pulling many strings, maybe he'll just be a bit delayed on the path. I'm watching that one as well as looking forward to Trump's trajectory once he's actually out of the picture politically.
ControlsFreak
21d ago
No real comment on the efficacy of treatment programs that California mandates through Prop 47. It sounds like they're probably not very effective.
You don't need efficacy numbers, or really any reasoning at all, if you have the magical incantation of "treatment". The author tells us exactly how magical she thinks "treatment" is:
But tougher sentences don't keep fentanyl off the streets, and treatment does.
What plausible causal mechanism could be behind this sorcery? Especially since I have it on good authority, from advocates at the highest court in the land, that a person cannot go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I've never seen anyone unable to grasp the concept of return on investment before. That's the line! If you are making decisions about energy usage, determining whether an activity or idea returns a net positive amount of energy or a net negative amount is extremely useful.
Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
I think the best interpretation of your current statement is whether we are investing anything on keeping something burning. So, like, if our ancestors had built an oil tap, and it was producing a flame, but we didn't have to do anything to keep that flame going; just the oil comes up itself with some pressures and such, and the flame keeps going, then we don't count the energy in the fuel?
You didn't address this question.
yes, you should care about calories - but you should care about nutrition as well.
Ok, interesting. So now, calories aren't the only metric. Seems like it's starting to get fuzzy and complicated...
Where was the spike of 'old' pollutants?! Why did we have to completely abandon the old predictions?
Look out the window...
...why don't those things show up in the data? Where are they in the figure?
How can we tell the difference? What sort of test could falsify your theory?
You wait a bit and watch the trend-line on the graph.
We've been waiting for decades. At what point can one conclude that a theory has been falsified?
If you have a bank account with 5000 dollars in it and which will only be refreshed with another 5000 dollars in 10 years, there is a big difference between having a yearly expenditure of 1000 dollars as opposed to a yearly expenditure of 400 dollars.
Right. This is precisely what I've been asking about. Presumably, consumption rates matter, but it's not clear how they're coming into play in your view. It's just calories, except for when it's fuzzy not-calories, on your view. And it's only calories in compared to calories out, but that doesn't really have any term in there for a consumption rate. Is it normalized by something? How does it work?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
To use solar as an example: we only account for the energy invested in creating and installing the solar panel, because we don't invest anything to make the sun keep burning and hence don't care about the energy content of the fuel (in this case sunlight). If you are putting oil into your car, you care about the energy of the fuel because that's on the "energy invested" side of the equation.
I think I'm just going to have to continue to focus on this, because either you're just so impossibly unclear that it seems like you're being inconsistent... or you're really really dedicated to being inconsistent.
I mean, I think the best interpretation of your current statement is whether we are investing anything on keeping something burning. So, like, if our ancestors had built an oil tap, and it was producing a flame, but we didn't have to do anything to keep that flame going; just the oil comes up itself with some pressures and such, and the flame keeps going, then we don't count the energy in the fuel?
Honestly, this seems really absurd and an incredibly hokey way of trying to carve out an answer to, "Do we count the energy in the fuel?" in a way that just happens to not count it for the fuel sources you like, but counts it for the fuel sources you don't like. It doesn't make any other sense whatsoever. At least when there was some chance that you legitimately just meant "we don't ever count the energy in the fuel; we just count the energy used to refine/whatever the fuel and make it usable", it was plausible. There are other plausible lines, but yours is just getting more and more strained and implausible.
For some purposes, yes. But acknowledging that something is relevant for some purposes does not mean that it is basically The Only thing. For many folks, the protein content of food is considered extremely important, but no one would say that Protein In/Protein Out is The Metric.
Yeah, you didn't really discuss this. I like calories in a variety of ways, but I can't see why it's The Only Thing. Hell, climate alarmists were all up in a tizzy that, even though increasing CO2 increased caloric yields bigly, they slightly decreased the per-calorie content of certain micronutrients. So, should I care about that, like they tell me... or should I just care about calories? Why/why not?
They focused much more on carbon in the atmosphere
Which is even debatable as "pollution". It certainly isn't the central case, and this major shift really takes a whole lot of rhetorical claims that the old predictions were actually good. Where was the spike of 'old' pollutants?! Why did we have to completely abandon the old predictions?
this particular data can be pretty noisy. Sharp spikes up and down in various numbers can happen for a variety of reasons without actually changing the longer-term trends that underlie them.
How can we tell the difference? What sort of test could falsify your theory?
if it takes longer than a million years to renew itself, it isn't relevant to modern humans.
Why do I care about "renewing itself"? I thought we were talking about how consumption rates come into play for timescales relevant to humans. How does that work?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
So do you count the energy content of fossil fuels?
Your response is trying so hard to be unclear. My best interpretation of your "yes, but" is that you really mean, "No, we do not count the energy content of the fuel when we count Energy In." And we don't really count the energy content of the fuel when we count Energy Out, either; we just count something about what we've been able to harvest from the fuel. Do you disagree? I'm not sure why it's so hard to get an answer for something that you're saying is super simple and easy.
The caloric content of food is generally considered extremely relevant information
For some purposes, yes. But acknowledging that something is relevant for some purposes does not mean that it is basically The Only thing. For many folks, the protein content of food is considered extremely important, but no one would say that Protein In/Protein Out is The Metric.
I actually still agree with their conclusion - global population growth is starting to slow down, and I can look out the window right now to see the impacts of pollution on the environment.
Global population growth is one correct out of many. Conversely, levels of pollution in developed countries is going down significantly, and it's plausible that this will come to developing countries as they develop. The latest update pushed the pollution people significantly into the future (magically, btw, being one of the biggest differences from past predictions).
If you actually do want to bet on those figures, the shape of the curves in question can only really be worked out sometime around 2040
The peaks in those images are clearly pre-2025. The drops are precipitous. Why would you need another fifteen years to see the drop?
I still have no idea how to use numbers and math to determine whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans".
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I'm questioning the broader doctrine built around that motte, including the claim that calorie tracking always works
I mean, no? It's pretty consistent in the literature that in lab-controlled settings, calorie tracking always works, but 'out in the wild', it's far more mixed.
it's impossible to eat 4000 calories a day and not gain weight
Not impossible. Everyone knows the legend of Michael Phelps, and I'm pretty confident I could come up with a variety of other examples of folks who are in that domain.
If you're suggesting that counting calories is as difficult and complex as building semiconductors
Not as difficult. I had said that that analogy was pushing various factors to the extreme to make a conceptual point. If you're accepting the conceptual point and want agreement that counting calories is less difficult/complex than building semiconductors, I think we're fully in agreement! Success!
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I'd dispute that most modern people could achieve self-sufficiency if they stopped specializing in their comparative advantage. After all, we're pretty much all "specialists," even the farmers.
What capability do most modern people lack in comparison to ye ancients? I'm not asking about current habits/practices or individual skills. Those things can be learned and adopted. And we're certainly not lacking in access to knowledge that can be leveraged to get there. So, what capability are modern people lacking that would prevent them from becoming self-sufficient?
try being self-sufficient without any land, for example
Good news! We have gobs of land. It's going to be pretty much abandoned by all those farmers who are currently specialized in growing crops for trade. I mean, it's not going to be worth anything to them if they can't sell in trade. We'll basically have new frontiers for a new homesteading era.
No, for most of those millennia, many were specializing and trading (even if just within family/household/tribe).
Sounds perfectly fine, then. Since you're predicting that their family/household/tribe is also going to shunned by TPTB, then those folks might want to trade with you in your little group. Everything is just like it was! Proven capability!
Humans have agency, can understand (or at least act as if they understand) opportunity cost and comparative advantage.
Irrelevant.
ROFL. If you just deny it without even bothering to engage with it, I'm mostly going to just laugh at you. Because it's hilariously bad.
I mean, at least try. Try to tell me why it's irrelevant. To do so, you have to say something about what it is and how it works. You can't just declare it irrelevant and then talk about something else entirely.
now a cheap, plentiful substitute is coming
That sounds pretty nice, then. How much will this cheap, plentiful substitute cost? Is it like, $10 to replace a gigahuman worth of labor/knowledge/etc.?
The problem is in the middle, when large fractions of the population have become parasites upon the fraction that's still productive.
This is a complete distraction. You had specifically predicted that humans will be unable to maintain subsistence. I argue that we do not lack any capability to maintain subsistence, that we have gobs of empirical evidence that it is, in fact, possible, that even if you think small group trade was important to this process, your own predictions imply that we will have plenty of similarly-situated humans who would like to engage in precisely the same small group trade that you think is critical, that humans are in fact different from horses in part because we can understand opportunity cost (at least well enough to realize that if the opportunity cost of just sitting there doing nothing and hoping for a handout is sufficiently large to jump the gap between 'starve to death' and 'not starve to death', we can make the choice to use our capabilities at the very least to sustain ourselves), and that if we're getting magical super cheap everything anyway, you have significant explaining to do in terms of a model for what this price point is, what it gets you, etc.
We can't even get to discussions about transitory whatever until you even have a basic model that has even the most elementary components in it. Like, no, we're not going to jump to questions about dynamics if we don't have any sense of even partial equilibrium, much less general equilibrium.
Many material resources will remain scarce even as the value of human labor declines, which limits how cheap the machines can become.
So they're going to be expensive? How expensive? What are the limiting factors? Don't we have magic automated mining equipment? That stuff is going to have to be cheaper than it is now, resulting in lower costs of materials, otherwise folks might consider employing humans again. Unless you're positing a paperclip-maximizing-scale increase in use of resources, but that doesn't make sense, because in reality, technological advances that are increasing efficiency have actually resulted in us using less resources than we did in the past.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I learned my sneering for the purpose of papering over the point that "more of the same, which had absolutely terrible results" is transparently a very bad idea from only the very best.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Oh goody! I know you won't want anything that could be cast as "more of the same, which had absolutely terrible results", so I'm sure you'll be very forthcoming with your incredible, innovative solutions to current problems, solutions which don't look anything like what has come before. I so look forward to that little red bell icon.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Sure. He has not yet actually assented to the empirical evidence that people can mostly be self-sufficient. I did not claim that he assented to this, and if he would like to disagree with this, he is still able to (so are you). I pointed out that he did claim that self-sufficiency was a lower bound for purposes of comparative advantage. I then also addressed his stated concern that a small class of people cannot attain self-sufficiency (e.g., severely disabled folks). But for all of the other folks, who I pointed out empirically can attain self-sufficiency, his lower bound holds that comparative advantage will still make them better off. Which would contradict his conclusion that a vast majority of folks will end up at sub-subsistence levels.
Now that we've cleared up that I have not claimed any assent to the empirical evidence and clarified further how the argument goes, do you have any objection to the logical portion of the argument? Or are you just happy that we've agreed that we're still waiting to see if he assents/objects to the empirical evidence?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
From the linked comment:
...which, of course, brings us back to where everything ultimately brings us back to - Donald Trump. I can't pass up incredible hypotheticals that cut to the crux of things and make all the partisans want to switch sides. Suppose Trump made what could have been argued to be a false business record in the state of New York with the intent to conceal something about Assange's actions related to this guilty plea. Would the NYT still think the true reality is that Assange actually pled guilty to a non-crime? Would they say that Trump could have an appeal to the courts of law, not the courts of fact, by saying, "No dawg, that's not a crime"? Or would they say that Assange's plea deal settles the matter, thoroughly establishing the fact that such actions absolutely are a crime, with no First Amendment defense?
The search/replace is "Assange" and "Cohen". So many people are perfectly happy saying that Cohen's guilty plea settles the matter that a campaign finance violation actually occurred and that there is no First Amendment defense against it. I think it's entirely reasonable to think that both Assange and Cohen actually pleaded guilty to non-crimes.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I'm really not following what you're trying to say. Can you try again? Capital_Room did, indeed, use the word "try". You pointed out that there is a gap between "try" and "be". I pointed out that I've already covered that gap with empirical evidence. I have no idea what you're trying to say.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration I pleaded guilty to journalism.
Tiny reminder that there are loads of people who will nod their head yes, agree that it is totally possible for someone to plead guilty to a non-crime, yet not be willing to keep that thought in their head while thinking about other cases.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Right in that first block quote is:
That is, excepting the severely disabled, the vast vast majority of able-bodied humans can, indeed, be self-sufficient, as evidenced by millennia of history.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
We care about fuels to the extent that we have invested energy into them to render them usable.
So do you count the energy content of fossil fuels? Honestly, I don't know how much clearer I could make the difficulty in your current statements than I did in my last comment. You're really going to need to show at least an indicia of engaging with the question or I'll probably just have to write you off as non-responsive and give up.
Your current response doesn't tell me anything about how I go through the process of factoring in consumption rates. When I'm determining whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans", I need to do some math on some numbers, and one of the variables I have is, possibly, consumption rates. How does that variable fit in?
I don't think your latest response actually gave me anything to go on here. I still have no idea how to use numbers and math to determine whether something is on a "timescale relevant to humans".
Energy is the fundamental unit of investment because the measure under discussion is ENERGY RETURNED ON ENERGY INVESTED.
Ah yes, ipse dixet. I'm starting to get the feeling that you're not really trying to engage.
That's an appropriate measure to use when discussing sources of energy! We are talking about energy
I mean, are we? I thought we were talking about agriculture. Why is energy the real topic when we're talking about agriculture?
If it makes it easier to think about, then picture an incredibly tiny power plant which costs 100 calories to build and fuel, which then generates 90 calories worth of usable power as a result.
Do you count the energy content of the fuel?
the actual answer is that we're talking about energy rather than money
Why? I thought we were talking about agriculture. Why are you talking about energy rather than money or any of the other things that could be involved in the discussion?
As I mentioned, I already went through that article 9 months ago. I quoted the authors because I agree with their understanding of their own results - agreeing with something doesn't mean that I just scanned through for a sentence I agree with.
In that case, you could probably say something relevant concerning my remarks on the data contained therein, rather than simply resting on one of their quotes.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Comparitive advantage only holds true in very limited circumstances
Nah, there's plenty of work that extends the concept to much more robust circumstances. And most of the time, when they're talking about limitations, it's like, "Yeah, gains from trade are still obviously positive and a major factor, but it's a bit trickier to make mathematically-precise statements that also work perfectly for predicting observational data, since there are all sorts of things like trade barriers and other refinements." This is throwing out all intuition gained for some strained belief that some fourth-order term that is mathematically-difficult to solve in closed form is going to actually magically reverse the sign of the result.
immediately
A claim literally no one has ever made.
what happens when excess production pushes prices so low that it's simply not worth it to employ them as farmers
Good news! We went from a world where some 90+% of people were employed as farmers to a world where ChatGPT tells me that the global figure is about 28%, but regions that are hardest hit by comparative advantage are down to 1-2%. I'm sure I would hate to live in one of those areas where it's down that low; those places probably suck from all the unemployment, starvation, etc.
what happens if another country can grow wheat more efficiently
That's literally the question of comparative advantage. Are you just worried about going beyond the two-country model in Econ 101? I'm pretty sure that even in Econ 301, they do multi-country models.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Ok, let's work through this. Let's actually start here:
Indeed, there are some people alive right now, among the most severely disabled, whose labor is worth less than what it costs to keep them alive.
I agree that there are, and have always been, severely disabled people who are simply unable to support themselves.
"Comparative advantage" says that the value of an individual's labor will never fall to zero, and that they will still be better off specializing in something, and trading the products of that specialty for the things they don't specialize in, than if they try to be fully self-sufficient.
Here, you acknowledge, but skip right over something key. You acknowledge that being fully self-sufficient is a lower bound. That is, excepting the severely disabled, the vast vast majority of able-bodied humans can, indeed, be self-sufficient, as evidenced by millennia of history. Comparative advantage means that you will be better off than being self-sufficient, by your own acknowledgement.
It does not at all guarantee that the maximum value of an individual's labor, when they specialize in their comparative advantage, cannot fall below their cost of living.
But here is where you contradict yourself. You just said that they will be better off than being self-sufficient. That is, better off than their cost of living.
humans are horses
Humans are not horses. They're still not horses. This is literally a meme on the badecon subreddit, for good reason. Humans have agency, can understand (or at least act as if they understand) opportunity cost and comparative advantage. Like, the primary things under discussion here are a major reason why humans are not horses. Horses are more like hammers than they are humans.
Humans are finite, and thus, I would argue that our capacities are finite, and thus, the number of ways we can meaningly contribute to the production of goods and services is ultimately also finite.
Sure. Irrelevant, but sure.
automation will eventually cover all tasks, leading to complete automation
You're telling me that delivering me an even better standard of living than I currently have is going to be fully automated? And the marginal cost of such automation is going to be basically zero? (At the very least, lower than the cost of convincing someone to switch from their life of abundance and leisure to helping out.) Huh. Sounds pretty nice.
Like, what is even your model here? A magic robot that can provide all your food, shelter, luxury desires, etc., it costs how much? Why does it cost that much? Who is being paid when one is purchased? It must be obscenely cheap to beat out how cheap those things would be otherwise. $10? $100?
some of us will "run out" of ways to meaningfully contribute — again, the value of contributing will never hit zero, but it can fall below subsistence
Nah, you already agreed that subsistence is a lower bound for anyone who is not severely disabled.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
there are revisionist interpretations pushed by those who want to do it again
Nah. I think a lot of the data requires a pretty significant revision on the standard narrative, but I also don't want to do it again.
And the US drug prohibition has not, regardless of your protestations, covered itself in glory.
The good news here is that we now have memorialized that this is your standard. Not covered in glory. Oof, you are a pure child of light, and I'm sure this standard will never come back to bite you ever.
I do think there would be some technical challenges to be solved, but I think we have a lot of really useful pieces that could help solve those problems. I'm not going to pretend that I have a fleshed-out whitepaper with full technical specification or anything, but I can give you some of my general thoughts.
A lot of work has gone into anonymization protocols. They're probably not perfect yet. There are all sorts of timing issues or side channel issues and even just the fundamental problem that metadata is hard. But I think progress is being made. To the extent that one is bullish on the idea that real anonymization is plausible in the not-too-distant future for some form of cryptocurrency, I think they can be bullish on something here, too. Moreover, it's not just cryptocurrency where work is being done on anonymization. TOR was a big leap forward on that front, even if there are still some challenges there, too. Again, to the extent one is bearish/bullish on any hope there, I'd expect them to be likewise bearish/bullish here.
Consider some TOR-like properties. A message can be routed through multiple intermediaries, such that those intermediaries mathematically cannot know the content of the message in question. Those intermediaries aren't even really trusted. They can refuse to pass your message along, but you can realize that it hasn't been passed along by the non-response or inappropriate response you receive. I don't think it's too big of a step to imagine that one can leverage intermediaries, even perhaps untrusted ones, in a way such that those intermediaries are mathematically unable to determine the content of your message (who you're voting for or how much you're spending). Those intermediaries can choose things like random delay times, which can help thwart timing attacks. I agree that timing attacks may pose unique challenges, and again, I haven't solved all of them right off the top of my head, but I think the idea would be to try to show some property that so long as some low percentage of those untrusted intermediaries are observing random delays, we could get in front of those problems.
Tornado Cash gave us a significant step toward anonymity in the transactions, as well. The very basic idea is that you dump a bunch of things into a pot, mix them up, divide them out, and make it significantly more difficult to correlate inputs/outputs. Details here are more complicated; I'd say that it's probably still not perfect, but to the extent that there are lessons to be learned, I think we can learn them and continue to iterate. Again, general bearish/bullish sentiments.
Of course, I'd like to also call back to the 'receipt-freeness' business that the digital election nerds really like. The idea is that they want a way that the the final election tally can be 'published', but in a way that is still specially encrypted. Thus, while people can perform the proper cryptographic operations on the output to determine what the result was, no one can determine from the encrypted, published final tally what any of the individual votes are. Even the people who voted do not have sufficient information to prove how they voted, but they do retain sufficient information to prove that their vote was counted correctly in the final tally. Side note here would be that if you have a system where someone can freely rescind their vote later, even if you had someone watching your computer when you initially voted, and even if they kept that piece of information which could be used to prove that the initial vote was correctly counted, they would not have sufficient information to prove that it was not later rescinded. (There are still tricky choices here, perhaps, and I do think more work would need to be done to decide on every detail.) In any event, this would be another check to make sure that intermediaries couldn't just refuse to include your vote.
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