site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31296 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What happens when we, individual human beings without exceptional skills (and eventually them too), are no longer productive in any job?

I suggest you read about the microeconomic term "comparative advantage".

I suggest you read about the microeconomic term "comparative advantage".

Right back at you.

I hate it when people brandish "comparative advantage" as a talisman against the idea of technological unemployment, illustrating that they fail to understand it. Ricardo, the very economist who originally coined the term "comparative advantage" recognized that technological unemployment was still possible, even likely, despite it.

"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. 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. 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. There's nothing in "comparative advantage" that prevents large portions of the population from joining them.

I'd point to this quote from economist Karl Smith back in 2012:

My longer thesis is that the rising return to unskilled labor is a function of industrialization and that industrialization is unique in this. The wage rate on unskilled labor never benefited before and its not immediately clear that it will ever benefit again.

This is because rents always accrue to the scarce factors of production. Industrialization meant that the only thing we were short on were “control systems” everything else in the production process was effectively cheap.

However, any mentally healthy human being is a decent control system. So, this meant huge returns to being a human. It also meant collapsing returns to being a horse. Though, people think of this as a difference in kind, I urge you not to. Horses are not so different than you and I.

As it so happened the wage rate for horses fell below sustenance and they died off. There is simply no basic reason this cannot happen to humans, save for the fact that other humans will enact policies to stop it. The market itself will not differentiate.

See also Smith in Forbes here. I can't find the specific passage at the moment, but I remember Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms also making a similar comparison to what happened to horses as an example of what could await most of us.

While human wants may be infinite, jobs depend on humans being able to meaningfully contribute to the production of those wants. 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. I'll point to Kevin Kohler's Substack post here:

So, are we destined to eventually follow the path of the horse in the economy? Daron Acemoglu & Pascal Restrepo (2018) argue that “the difference between human labor and horses is that humans have a comparative advantage in new and more complex tasks. Horses did not. If this comparative advantage is significant and the creation of new tasks continues, employment and the labor share can remain stable in the long run even in the face of rapid automation.” In other words, the high human general intelligence allows us to be more adaptive and shift to new tasks as the automation of more established tasks rolls forward.

The economists Anton Korinek & Donghyun Suh (2024) have created a model specifically considering why humans might run out of new tasks in the face of AGI and what would happen to wages in such a scenario. Their basic approach is that all possible tasks that could be performed by humans are ordered in terms of computational complexity and as digital computation expands more and more tasks can be automated moving the automation frontier from left to right. This is essentially a restatement of Moravec’s metaphorical landscape of human competences and automation (see figure below). In this metaphor the peaks reflect the most complex human competences, whereas AI automation is represented as a rising tide that continuously moves the shore line up.

…

If the complexity of economic tasks performed by humans is bounded (in other words, if there is no infinitely high mountain in Moravec’s landscape of human competences), automation will eventually cover all tasks, leading to complete automation. In the short term, automation increases productivity and boosts wages for non-automated tasks. In the long term, humans run out of tasks at which they can outperform machines and the labor share of income collapses fairly steeply as we approach full automation.

…

My judgement is that it’s likely that AI will eventually be able to outperform humans even on tasks with unbounded complexity and irreducible uncertainty. First, in some domains the ability of AI to perform complex tasks can already not be matched by humans. No human can filter mails or social media posts based on 10’000-dimensional decision boundaries. Second, the exponential growth of parameters in artificial neural networks means that, given enough training data and compute, AI can represent an exponentially growing amount of complexity, whereas our biological neural networks have fairly fixed upper limits.

…

If, at some point in the future, AGI can work at or below the cost of human labor and masters the meta-ability to learn novel tasks at least as quick and as well as humans, we have permanently lost the reskilling race. Then, new tasks can be automated as quickly as they are created.

And what this leaves out, is that human capacities are not only finite, but unequal; 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 — before others. (As a disabled individual surviving by parasitizing of hard-working taxpayers via the public dole, this is quite an acute point for me.)

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.

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.

He said:

than if they try to be fully self-sufficient.

To try is not to be.

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.

That's your block quote. The second quote in my comment is from Capital_Room. They do not match as you say they do.

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.

Even if we assume your empirical evidence is sufficient to ensure humans can be self-sufficient (now and always), Capital_Room did not acknowledge that and you base much of your post on a gotcha that he allegedly did.

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?

More comments

I don't know if I'm missing something, but I occasionally harp about how even in an opyimistic scenario, comparative advantage is not looking like Rats expect it to pan out. It's not going to be automating away the drudgery so we can devote ourselves to artistic and intellectual pursuits, if anything it's shaping up to be automating away artistic and intellectual pursuits, so we can artisinally mine quartz for the Quartz God.

Comparitive advantage only holds true in very limited circumstances that, quite frankly, simply do not exist in the real world; perfect interchangability of goods produced, infinitely elastic consumer demand for the goods in question, no risk in sudden changes in demand, and limited parties.

Hypothetically arguing that because America can produce wheat, and Japan can produce cars, so who cares if the Detroit auto industry collapses because "Comparative Advantage baby!" ignores that Detroit can't just immediately shift to production of wheat;even if they could, what happens when excess production pushes prices so low that it's simply not worth it to employ them as farmers; what happens if another country can grow wheat more efficiently (and these all just barely scratch the surface of the actual problems with Comparative Advantage)

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats