I think I have a problem. I cannot stop thinking of cute lamias. I want to be wrapped up my an amazing snake girl. Like I want that monster musume lamia city to be real so I can restart my life there.
Have you ever been so reactionary that you proposed an aristocracy where aristocratic status is lost if they don’t marry in new national hero figures at least every three generations?
seriously though, there are people on here who are so terrified of saying anything remotely offensive that they’ve cleansed their vocabulary of any meaningful insults and make every insult they go for look like a halfassed attempt for attention
anyone who replaces a post with “chungy/pee your pants/etc.” has the desire to tell someone to kill themselves or call them a cunt or something but are too cowardly to do it.
everyone who does that shit seems to me to just scream “i’m not just a shitty person, i’m also afraid i’m not shitty in the way my shitty friends want me to be”
I honestly do not know if “pee your pants” is a euphemism for “kill yourself” or not because no one seems to have the receipts from someone coining it as a euphemism.
But, regardless of that, yes. I think we’ve basically spiraled ourselves into absurdity. We’ve decided we can’t say cutting words because “they’re triggering”…
…which conveniently lets us tell ourselves the words we have left aren’t cutting.
It reminds me of the linguistic drift you got (and presumably still get) in MMORPGs that had chat and auto blocked usual insults and slurs: that’s how “n00b” became a very strong insult.
common misconception is that i want to be a girl but thats wrong
i want to be a shapeshifter capable of shedding one form and moving onto another at will, a perfect entity with total mastery over my physical and spiritual form
The politics in the book I’m reading are so stupid. The bad guys are Evil who do things with the power of Evil, and what I mean by that is that when they do things like take over a university or put their security guards all over the city, there’s no indication at all how they accomplished it, where their support comes from, or how they are financed. It’s as if they derive their power from raw malevolence, and that is enough by itself to create change.
What’s worse is that I fear this is how the author actually views politics in the real world. This Is What Normies Actually Believe, etc.
Don’t worry. In about 50 years, this is how they will be writing about me.
I think I’ve already done this song and dance but my take on technological unemployment is: general AI will probably have a catastrophic effect on employment but specific AI likely won’t, and it seems really unlikely current AI technologies will generalize to general intelligence. It could be just around the corner, but it’s a lot more likely that if you gear up for it now you’ll look like those guys at the dawn of computing talking about how natural language processing was right around the corner. Admittedly when we do have real artificial general intelligence there’ll only be like 15 years to decide how we want to handle it, but that may well not even occur in our children’s lifetimes, so it hardly seems worth trying to time it.
It does seem like we should anticipate large-scale short-term unemployment from future technological innovation, though, often of people who are good at the thing that’s obsolete, bad at the thing that replaces it, and – in many cases – too old or tied-down to start over. If current events show anything it’s “probably while awaiting a return to homeostasis you should try to make those people feel like the entire system isn’t out to fuck them".
The question, of course, being how you do this cheaply.
What makes me sad is that there’s decent bipartisan support for skills retraining and job transition services and stuff like that, but in practice any attempt to do that seems to result in 90% of the money being funded to garbage profiteers who are good at bidding for contracts and pitching services to the government.
I’m not convinced that retraining and job transition services actually work - most people who don’t do this on their own seem unwilling or unable for whatever reason (which is not to say it is morally their fault, there are many reasons why someone might have difficulty in retraining).
Since profitable employment is profitable, I suspect that retraining is probably something handled reasonably efficiently by an unregulated market that is able to respond to incentives.
As such, I think throwing government money after retraining programs is going to be more graft than not.
I’m not saying there aren’t people who could benefit from retraining that they don’t have access to for reasons that are theoretically susceptible to government intervention, but in practice it doesn’t seem to pan out.
The classic complaint about corporate retraining is that people take the training and run, so it’s not a good use of money.
Didn’t Murray find state sponsored job retraining didn’t actually work?
What kind of place is this when service doesn’t even guarantee citizenship anymore?
I don’t approve cutting or cancelling this program. “Willing to fight, potentially to the death, to defend the national interest” is one of the exact sorts of immigrants you should want. I’m disappointed by this development, thought they realized this.
@brazenautomaton: oh so it’s okay when YOU call someone Mei-Ling
inferentialdistance said: Remember that time you complained about all Chinese girls being named Mei Ling in western media?
firstly, I was deliberately lampshading a popular trope
secondly, thank you for noticing! I highly appreciate it when people devote a portion of their mental resources to memorising my posts and scanning them for hypocritical inconsistencies
This is easily explained. You see, Argumate’s real name is actually Mei Ling (male),
common misconception is that i want to be a girl but thats wrong
i want to be a shapeshifter capable of shedding one form and moving onto another at will, a perfect entity with total mastery over my physical and spiritual form
I think I’ve already done this song and dance but my take on technological unemployment is: general AI will probably have a catastrophic effect on employment but specific AI likely won’t, and it seems really unlikely current AI technologies will generalize to general intelligence. It could be just around the corner, but it’s a lot more likely that if you gear up for it now you’ll look like those guys at the dawn of computing talking about how natural language processing was right around the corner. Admittedly when we do have real artificial general intelligence there’ll only be like 15 years to decide how we want to handle it, but that may well not even occur in our children’s lifetimes, so it hardly seems worth trying to time it.
It does seem like we should anticipate large-scale short-term unemployment from future technological innovation, though, often of people who are good at the thing that’s obsolete, bad at the thing that replaces it, and – in many cases – too old or tied-down to start over. If current events show anything it’s “probably while awaiting a return to homeostasis you should try to make those people feel like the entire system isn’t out to fuck them".
The question, of course, being how you do this cheaply.
What makes me sad is that there’s decent bipartisan support for skills retraining and job transition services and stuff like that, but in practice any attempt to do that seems to result in 90% of the money being funded to garbage profiteers who are good at bidding for contracts and pitching services to the government.
Wage subsidies. Let the people work cheaply enough and the economy will find jobs for them.
I’m much more skeptical that it won’t result in some pretty high unemployment, given that self-driving cars are on the horizon - and how many jobs are “merely” as difficult as driving a car? It isn’t that you have to just produce more value, you must produce *enough* value.
Sure, the individual automation processes may touch on individual tasks, but there are a lot of automation processes going on.
I don’t think you’re thinking in equilibrium
The base resources (land, metals, etc) are still scarce, so what’s to prevent them from being bid up in price? Isn’t having to compete with 100x as productive personnel for land/etc one of the major drivers for why CoL is so much higher in developed nations?
I really don’t trust that it’s just all going to work out when we’re creating something like slices of animal brains in silicon.
Animal brains are not made of silicon. Animal brains still do stuff silicon brains can’t do. It is still possible that silicon brains can never do everything that meat brains can. It is therefore reasonable to factor this possibility into your predictions.
Right, I was being less literal there and instead referring to how they can do multi-layered image recognition and hallucination in ways that seem unlike algorithms.
I’m much more skeptical that it won’t result in some pretty high unemployment, given that self-driving cars are on the horizon - and how many jobs are “merely” as difficult as driving a car? It isn’t that you have to just produce more value, you must produce *enough* value.
Sure, the individual automation processes may touch on individual tasks, but there are a lot of automation processes going on.
I don’t think you’re thinking in equilibrium
The base resources (land, metals, etc) are still scarce, so what’s to prevent them from being bid up in price? Isn’t having to compete with 100x as productive personnel for land/etc one of the major drivers for why CoL is so much higher in developed nations?
I really don’t trust that it’s just all going to work out when we’re creating something like slices of animal brains in silicon.
Surely the generalization to other markets is “being good at satisfying demand”?
Ohhh, duh. I am dumb :P (Thanks to @mbwheats for also pointing this out)
I have to be somewhere soon so I shouldn’t write too much, but yes – this is a real and important tradeoff. @furioustimemachinebarbarian said something good about this in this reblog, in that they framed it explicitly as a tradeoff
If you want the capitalist mode of production to work, people need to be able to reap returns from their activities that they can reinvest in capital. But capital investment is just another element of the bundle of goods someone buys, so my argument as stated ought to apply to it as much as to anything else. So my argument, as stated, was too broad.
I hope it was clear that my argument, as stated, was trying to establish the existence of a particular mechanism rather than provide a proposal. I don’t actually want everyone’s wealth to be literally the same at all times (trying to cause this would break all sorts of other things too, I’d expect). Rather, the point was that when the “initial endowments” are closer to equal, supply and demand (which I called “markets,” and which are a distinct desideratum from “capitalism”) work better.
Distinguishing capitalism from supply and demand is important. I should have done it more clearly in the OP, but I am also not sure @neoliberalism-nightly was doing it sufficiently in their ask – as far as I can tell prediction markets are supposed to work because of supply and demand, even without capitalism (which is not yet having a non-negligible internal effect in them).
I’m no longer in a hurry, so let me expand on this a bit.
To be completely precise, the target of my post was the tradition in economics of distinguishing “efficiency” from “distribution.” This distinction encourages economists to treat distribution (i.e. wealth [in]equality) as an outside concern that can be ignored when considering the market mechanism as a system.
The attitude is that the market “works” (in some “efficiency” sense) no matter what is going on with distribution, and insofar as we care about distribution, this is a separate value which we will in general have to trade off against “efficiency” / “the market working.” (Although it may be possible in principle to alter distribution without introducing market distortions, it is not generally possible in near-term political practice.)
This story is internally consistent if you define “efficiency” in the usual way, which is Pareto optimality. We know thanks to Arrow and Debreu (et. al.) that under some idealized assumptions, supply and demand will get us to a Pareto optimal outcome (First Theorem of Welfare Economics), and this is frequently viewed (see e.g. Stiglitz here) as a successful formalization of the views popularly associated with Adam Smith. Even work that is critical of the invisible hand, such as Stiglitz’s, has tended to concede Pareto optimality as the correct formal desideratum, arguing only that markets do not achieve it in practice as much as the First Theorem would lead one to think.
By contrast, my position is that Pareto optimality does not capture the good things we wanted out of the invisible hand in the first place. I first started thinking about this stuff after reading Brad deLong’s very entertaining post “A Non-Socratic Dialogue on Social Welfare Functions,” which I recommend reading. (I am largely just repeating deLong here, and less stylishly at that.)
As in the OP, I think what we want out of the invisible hand is (at least) a market that “gives the people what they want” in some intuitively recognizable sense.
A Pareto optimal outcome is defined to be an outcome in which no one can be made better off without making anyone else worse off. The phrase “can be made” should be interpreted as “by physically achievable means,” like transferring goods from one person to another. That sounds obvious, but has significant implications.
The richer you are, the less marginal utility you will get (on average) from goods you acquire. This is implicit in standard economic assumptions, to the extent that you cannot deny it without being very heterodox at best, and talking nonsense at worst. (You can get it from the usual assumption of convex preferences, plus the idea that individuals have utility functions, since convex preferences correspond to [quasi-]concave utility functions. Or, if you like, you can get concave utility functions from the assumption of loss aversion, without which finance makes no sense whatsoever.)
In practice, if people do deny it, they tend to do it by rejecting the utility concept as a whole (as the Austrians do). But without some way to do interpersonal utility comparisons, I’m not sure how you can even state the invisible hand idea. (How can individual self-interest serve the common good if there is no valid concept of “the common good”?)
OK, enough sidenotes. As I said, the richer you are, the less marginal utility you will get (on average) from goods you acquire. Thus, when there are large wealth inequalities, Pareto optimality is compatible with large sub-optimalities in sum-aggregated utility, in that it allows transfers (from rich to poor) which would increase summed utility a lot. The bigger and more widespread the inequalities, the more sub-optimality we can have (in this sense) even if everything is still Pareto optimal.
There are much more rhetorically forceful ways to put this. deLong puts it this way: if we say that the market’s desirable property is its tendency to produce Pareto optima, we are saying it optimizes a certain social welfare function, and if this function is a weighted sum of individual utilities, then it gives rich people bigger weights than poor people. (He derives this formally here.)
In other words, by saying “we will consider efficiency first and worry about distribution later,” and defining efficiency as Pareto optimality, we are implicitly saying that what we really ask the market to do is “give the people what they want, weighted by wealth.”This is pretty clearly not what we originally wanted out of the invisible hand, and not something that one would ever come up with as a natural desideratum. If the First Theorem vindicates the invisible hand, it is only by moving the goalposts.
Another way of putting it is that, by over-valuing the utility of the wealthy, the Pareto optimality desideratum treats the wealthy as utility monsters.
I was going to joke that my hobby was calling out people for shit that didn’t happen,
but pretty much all posts by the actual callout fandom are for either shit that didn’t happen or shit taken out of context, so calling out people for not supporting genetically-engineered crude oil kudzu would have to be described as something else.
on top of the fact that i don’t give a shit about twitter wars, I think that weekly “now that the dust has settled, gamergate was actually about [my biased view]” “NO IT WASN’T IT WAS ACTUALLY” from vets is why they need to be systematically oppressed
This is extremely disrespectful to the tens of thousands that died during the GamerGate Day Massacre, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
you dropped into my dm and called me evil sans any context whatsoever
oh, oh, maybe it’s about me. unlike you, who are merely some liberal on the Internet, I am a supervillain, and thereby support Gamer National Separatism. I already have ties to the XBox Liberation Front and the Steam Republican Army, and have been supporting their initiatives in Canada with my spielpanzer divisions.
soon Ottawa will be ours, and the first Free Gamer Republic can be established.
I would appreciate it if some AI enthusiast would get mad at me
right now I’m objecting to a diffuse and incoherent set of fears about the future, but someone out there’s gotta have a theory of what mass technological unemployment actually looks like and a modestly granular account of the mechanisms by which artificial intelligence takes us there
I don’t have that model or that account, but y’all really seem to believe that the machines are right around the corner, so it’d be nice if someone laid it out somewhere
I wrote a lengthy harangue to @peopleneedaplacetogo about a week back, which appears here lightly edited:
If I were a smarter or better-informed person, would I feel differently about the intelligence explosion thesis? What do its better-informed advocates know that I don’t? What intuitions do they have that I lack?
I guess you’d have to know what I believe before you could tell me why I’m wrong, but as a person who’s much closer to the technology than I am, what are the sources of the rationalist belief in artificial intelligence more generally?
Because, from the outside, with the little understanding of the technology that I have, it seems like intelligence is harder and progress more limited than the boosters are telling me.
From the outside, throwing more processing power at the problem doesn’t seem to address the lack of sound concepts underpinning general machine intelligence, rather than specific intelligence.
The ‘machine learning’ we have, where we train algorithms on large data sets to sort the data and identify the patterns is impressive, sure, but the strength and limitations of ML suggest that we need more and more innovative conceptualizations and operationalizations of the problems we want the machines to address before we can apply machine power to any effect.
I apologize for my technological illiteracy; I’m sure I’m missing something crucial. I guess I just don’t have a good sense of what the conceptual paradigm for general intelligence would look like – “ML applied to the conceptualization of problems in the world”?
To which he replied:
I don’t have any specific knowledge of the topic either. I think a big intuition is just “don’t make strong predictions about what AI can or can’t do”.
What am I missing?
Neural networks and dedicated hardware for them. Have you seen their image generation capabilities lately? It’s like we’re creating slices of animal brains.
Now, it’s easy to object that this does not create an intelligence explosion, and fortunately it probably won’t.
The issue is that if you can create a neural net for walking, a neural net for object recognition, and a neural net for an industrial task, well… you put them together and you get something like an industrial task animal.
Most jobs don’t use anywhere near the whole human capability. What’s necessary for us as creatures (and what shaped us) isn’t necessarily what’s most effective economically. That is, we have more capabilities than artificial task animals, but are they profitable enough in such an economy to feed us? Is a model where former truck drivers all become Patreon-sponsored bloggers at all viable? And this will hit every sector basically at once.
There are limits to consumption based on available time/attention during a day. But food requirements aren’t really negotiable.
Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories. This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.
Those who control the culture control the laws, after all. Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.
Now some of you reading this are probably thinking this doesn’t apply to you, because you love diversity.
If you are one of those people, I want you to imagine the area you live in going from 5% redneck to 60% redneck over 10 years.
Most stores cater to redneck wants/needs. A statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee has been built in the public square. Serving alcohol has been made illegal on Sundays, and the churches are all redneck churches. Most bars play only country music.
The rednecks have not threatened anybody. But as the dominant local source of money, the businesses shift to accomodate - and businesses of your favored culture(s) close as they fall below the necessary density of customers.
You might believe that this is a necessary sacrifice for freedom of movement and commerce, but that doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.
Just want to point out here that the ethnic majorities of most territories would not like becoming ethnic minorities in those territories. This isn’t some weird phenomenon limited to only Trump voters.
Those who control the culture control the laws, after all. Also the availability (and thus ease of access) of cultural communal goods.
Worth noting regarding Trump border wall that there is already a fence pretty much everywhere fence would be useful. I suspect Trump will scale back what was promised from the best wall you've ever seen to fence and natural barriers. Then he can declare victory without doing anything since apparently people who don't live near the border don't realize there is already a ton of fencing.
luckily policy success or failure has no relation to politics anyway
Capitalism won’t work because of human nature. Why would you trust humans with a system that rewards their natural greed?
Capitalism sounds like a good idea on paper, but it just doesn’t work in practice.
Oh, so you support capitalism? Why don’t you go move to Thailand and do slave labor for Nestle?
Capitalism is a bad idea, the millions of people killed by capitalism can attest to that.
as with a lot of these “parodying someone’s argument by applying it in a different context”
sort of thing the funniest part is unintentional, in that these are all a) arguments frequently used against capitalism and b) actually fairly solid arguments against capitalism, even if they’re expressed too glibly to be intelligible to people who don’t already hold them.
I have seen too many claims in libertarian writing that it hasn’t been implemented because powerful people are too greedy with absolutely no irony.
Well there does seem to be this idea that there’s all this corrupt government intervention…
…combined with a strange lack of awareness that it can be more profitable locally to subvert the government even if it harms the market generally. The idea seems to be that if you stripped away all the state power it wouldn’t come back by the exact same forces that put it there in the first place.
I think the problem with that math post is that you are distorting the description to match with your ethical beliefs. And I'm pretty sure you are aware, and I may have missed it in the post, but a crucial aspect of the prediction market is to have poor predictors lose their voting power and vice versa. And this generalizes to markets when you use the words associated with scarcity, and you can generalize it to an evolutionary biology view as well.
I am aware of this argument – for instance in the paper I linked there is this remark
If long-run market forces lead those with a history of accurate evaluation to
become wealthier, then this wealth-weighted average may be a more accurate predictor
than an unweighted average.
But I would not say this is a “crucial aspect” of prediction markets, from what I know. There is a lot of interest, say, in the relatively few currently existing prediction markets, even though these are both rare and “causal” enough that one would not expect to see much of a wealth signal in them due to people going broke or winning big in prediction markets (as opposed to elsewhere).
If this were necessary for the function of prediction markets, or just a crucially important element of the mix, I would expect to see much more of a “we need to wait for the data” attitude among people studying these markets, rather than an intensive use of the data from the currently existing markets to evaluate the prediction market concept itself (as we see in that paper, and in many other places as well).
So we seem to have a real disagreement about how important this mechanism is (or is believed to be). I’m not saying it’s seen as unimportant because of my values, I really just haven’t seen people treat it as that important.
I also don’t see how this generalizes to non-prediction markets, since there isn’t a notion analogous to “good prediction” for preferences, or if there were it would be something like “being exceedingly average in preferences” and I don’t think there’s a mechanism making people wealthy in proportion to how average they are.
@argumate has been talking recently about hypothetical problems with ancap/libertarian-paradise-world, and it’s making me think about a very basic issue that I don’t see talked about enough.
Namely: all of the usual arguments about how markets are great (“aggregating information” and all that stuff) also say that wealth inequality makes markets worse at doing those things. This is not a knock-down argument for having a state that redistributes wealth at gunpoint, but it is a reason to see wealth equality as a relevant concern even if you don’t have it as a terminal value. Even if you don’t care about it, the market needs it to achieve the things you do care about.
I’ll generalize this in a moment, but first, let’s look at an especially clean example case: prediction markets. Prediction markets are nice here because we don’t have to worry about thorny problems about aggregating utility to construct a “social welfare function.” There isn’t a role for disagreements about values. Everyone agrees about what we want out of a prediction market. (Or rather, the disagreements that exist are technical rather than ethical.)
What we want out of prediction markets is a price that corresponds to the actual observed frequency of events. Of course, this is not always possible – sometimes there is relevant information that no one in the market knows, so even a perfect information-aggregator (say, a rational being that knows everything that anyone in the market knows) would not get the right answer.
So at best, we can only ask for some sort of information-aggregating property, something like “prices reflect the average (i.e. mean) belief.” This is desirable because we expect many sources of individual error to be uncorrelated, and these will wash out when we take the average.
But the prices in prediction markets reflect, at best, a wealth-weighted average of beliefs. (For “wealth” here, read “quantity of money the individual is willing to invest in this market,” which is obviously constrained by wealth in a straightforward way.) This is easy to see informally: if there are 1000 people who are only willing to buy $1 worth of shares each, and 1 person willing to buy $1000 worth of shares, the market mechanism will get an equally large signal from the one big spender as from the 1000 small spenders.
A formal version of this is derived in this paper: with logarithmic utility, prices equal the wealth-weighted mean of beliefs. (If you’re worried about the log utility assumption, note that this is arguably the most favorable possible result for prediction markets, and much of that paper is dedicated to showing that other plausible utility functions do not yield very large deviations from it.)
Is it a problem that the results are wealth-weighted? Well, not necessarily. But it’s important to note that there are two different reasons it might be a problem.
First, assume (as in the paper) that we’re in the “many traders” limit, so there is a continuous distribution of beliefs, we have integrals rather than sums, etc. In this case, what matters is the (Pearson) correlation of belief and wealth. (If they are uncorrelated, the wealth-weighting will be invisible.) This correlation will either help or hurt depending on whether the bigger spenders have more accurate beliefs in any given case; it seems hard to argue that they’ll have less accurate beliefs in general, which makes this concern easy to dismiss.
But second, suppose we are not in the “many traders” limit. The worry with finitely many traders is a situation like the “1 vs. 1000″ example mentioned earlier, where the intuition that we are getting an average becomes misleading because the prices are so heavily affected by a small number of people.
Recall that the whole reason we’re interested in getting the average belief is that we expect uncorrelated errors to wash out if we average over a large number of people. In situations like the “1 vs. 1000″ example, the inequality is making the effectivepopulation size smaller, i.e. making our law-of-large-numbers argument weaker. From basic statistics, we’d expect the uncorrelated errors to get smaller by a factor of sqrt(N) when we average over N people. That corresponds to the errors getting about 32 times smaller for N = 1001. But in the 1 vs. 1000 case, half of the answer comes from the belief held by the single big spender, which (by hypothesis) carries random errors of the same size as everyone else’s, so the error is only cut down by (approximately) a factor of 2, not 32.
Now let’s extend this to more general markets.
This case is harder, because we don’t have an analogous law-of-large-numbers argument for the claim that the the price should reflect an unweighted population average. To argue for that sort of claim in general, we must (horror of horrors!) introduce some sort of ethical assumption, say about no one being inherently more important than anyone else.
I was being facetious in the last sentence when I said “horror of horrors,” but there are real difficulties here. The problem is not that some people might really be inherently more important than others, but that we are trying to do some sort of utility aggregation, and this is a famously thorny area. So it may help to be more concrete.
The basic intuitive appeal of “invisible hand” type ideas is that the market will learn to provide what people want. The phrase “what people want” has the same thorny issue just mentioned – how do we translate statements about what individual people want into a general statement about “what people want,” so that we can judge whether it is being provided (relatively well or poorly)?
The core of the idea is nonetheless pretty clear. If a bunch of people want something, but not enough to buy it at the prevailing market price, someone will see the opportunity to make a profit by selling it at a lower price that these people will take. After they take that opportunity, everyone else who produces the product will notice and lower their prices, and (after some equilibration) the market price will be low enough that people get the thing they want. Likewise, if there is more demand for something than the low market price suggests, everyone will buy until there’s none of it left, at which point the suppliers will produce more because they can afford to do so by charging a higher price (assuming that supply curves slope upwards, which is not obvious and which I’ve heard is not always true IRL, but let’s grant it). If you don’t allow these things to happen, you get Soviet bread lines and shortages of rent controlled housing. Or so the argument goes.
OK, so here’s a brain-teaser for you: how much are homeless people willing to pay for housing?
Although there may be some exceptions (crust punks?), people do not generally become homeless because they simply value having a roof over their heads less than the average person does. Many homeless people would be perfectly happy to pay the market price for housing if they could. They just don’t have the money to.
In other words, the signal received by the market isn’t “preferences,” it’s “willingness to (actually) pay.” It’s startling how rarely I see the distinction made between “willingness to pay” and “ability/capacity to pay”; in the academic literature it seems to be mainly made by economists interested in healthcare. (See e.g. this paper, which presents the distinction as a novel modeling contribution, and has gotten only 2 citations since it was published in 2008, and this one, 3 citations since 2006. If I am missing some large body of research here, let me know.)
Talking about this presents some technical difficulties, since there is no well-defined concept of “what someone would pay if they didn’t have to worry about their budget.” For instance, what one is willing to pay in principle for vital necessities will scale up with budget in an unbounded fashion: I’m sure you could get Bill Gates to pay billions for a loaf of bread if the alternative was starvation, but this does not mean that a loaf of bread is “really” worth billions, and in fact does not mean much at all. Even for non-essential goods, things can be pretty elastic, since many goods that are provably non-essential for human satisfaction can nonetheless feel effectively essential once one has satiated to them. (You could extract a lot of my money by threatening to separate me from my internet connection, for instance.)
But it’s not as if spending patterns are unrelated to preferences. If you give someone any fixed budget, they will buy some bundle of goods with it (for simplicity, you can view savings as just another good people may buy, so that everyone always “spends” their whole budget). To determine someone’s preferences, give them a series of decreasing budgets, and watch which goods they are priced out of first and which they hold onto until the very end. (If two people have different preferences, one person will buy more of some good than the other given a fixed budget of sufficient size, and as we decrease the budget, there will be some level at which one person is still buying some of it and the other isn’t.)
Thus, the market receives a signal about “what the people want” in the following form: it observes the extent to which the population has been priced out of buying it by their budget.
To clarify what this means, consider an example. Suppose that everyone has the same budget. Their spending patterns will vary, because preferences vary, but there will be trends. For instance, there are some goods that almost everyone will be willing to pay you money for if they don’t have it (food, housing), and some goods that many people will happily do without. Demand curves will be generated by people successively pricing themselves out (in) in response to price increases (decreases). Few people will ever be willing to price themselves out of food or housing, so these goods will have nearly flat demand curves (low price elasticity of demand) with high intercepts, while goods that people will happily prices themselves out of (yachts, tchotchkes) will have steep demand curves (high price elasticity of demand) with low intercepts. If some good has a given supply curve, it will be produced in a large quantity if it is of the former type (food, housing), and in a small quantity if it is of the latter type (yachts, tchotchkes) – interestingly, this is true no matter which way the supply curve slopes.
Thus, in this hypothetical world, a lot of resources go into producing food (or more relevantly, distributing food), and not as much into manufacturing yachts. Because people – you, me, even Bill Gates – value food more than yachts, and the market mechanism responds to preferences. The invisible hand works! Chew on that, socialist planners!
But in our world, many resources are allocated to the production of bizarre luxury goods while billions go hungry. Is this because “the people” want the former more than the latter? Of course not. No one wants the former more than the latter. If you gave me the choice between food and my MacBook Air, I’d take the food, and so would you and Tim Cook and everyone else alive.
Why are resources misallocated in this way? Because the starving have been priced out of food, while I have not been priced out of buying a MacBook Air, and the market only sees preferences in the form of the “what have people been priced out of” signal.
When people’s budgets are all the same (or similar), this signal results in production patterns that track people’s relative preferences about different goods. When people’s budgets are wildly dissimilar, this does not occur. The production patterns don’t even reflect rich people’s preferences, since they prefer essentials over luxuries just like everyone else. (It satisfies rich people’s preferences, which is not the same thing as reflecting them. Being rich means having the opportunity to buy things which have incredibly low, although still positive, marginal value to you.)
Does this mean we have to spread the wealth around at gunpoint? Well, I don’t know. We don’t need to do anything. But the market cannot do its Adam Smithy magic if the wealth is very unevenly distributed. Maybe you value not having a state more than you value the market doing its Adam Smithy magic! But it is worth being clear that these values are in conflict.
you see this is why I don’t try and formalise my hunches: it’s so much work
Ah, but dear owl-friend Argumate, if we rate those with zero money as having zero preferences, then all the math works out great!
To get rid of the spelling idiosyncrasies of the English language while allowing for artistic flourishing, we will be switching the entire country over to Japanese.
The full transition will be occurring in two years, so make sure to start learning your three kanji per day now.
Even newscasters and politicians are pronouncing “folk” with an /l/, I’ve noticed. In fact I can hardly remember the last time I heard somebody pronounce it without an /l/ aside from my parents and grandparents. Certainly every damn person at college who ever said they were gonna play some /fɔlk/ music at the open mic said it with an /l/. I’m sure it’s just an inevitable countdown till the day someone makes a snarky comment about my pronunciation - probably they’ll say “You know, the way you say ‘folk’ is kind of…/fɔlksi/!” Is there any hope left for the original* pronunciation of “folk” among college-educated Americans?
And I swear to god sometimes I hear people saying “yolk” with an /l/ too
*original in that, afaik, all English speakers had already dropped the /l/ centuries ago before it was reinserted as a spelling pronunciation the last few decades
Oh, spelling pronunciations. The absolute worst thing is people pronouncing ‘often’ with /t/. Everyone does that nowadays.
While I’m here, the days of the week end in /i/, not /ej/, but that battle is already lost. I’ve never heard the correct pronunciation from anyone under 50.
(Actually, I’m starting to think it’d make sense to analyze final unstressed [i], the happY lexical set, as /əj/, and final [o], the potatO lexical set, as /əw/. This makes diachronic sense: diachronically, happY used to be [əj], and potatO is, in native words, mostly from word-final Cx/Cɣ clusters, so it’s not hard to imagine schwa epenthesis followed by the standard development of /x/ to an offglide. Then all you need is the laxing rule in absolute word-final position.)
Some spelling pronunciations which are now pretty much universal (from Dobson, 1956):
lots of words used to have th pronounced /t/ (after French), but now have a voiceless dental fricative (after Modern Greek): Arthur, author, authority, Catherine, diphthong (this word also used to have /p/ for the ph, and many people still use that pronunciation), lethargy, orthography, throne; also sphere used to be a homophone of spear
bankrupt used to be pronounced “bankrout”
baptism used to be pronounced “baptime”
corpse with a /p/, not homophonous with course (however the /s/ has always been pronounced; the Old French word was cors, and final esses weren’t silent in Old French)
perfect used to be pronounced “perfit” or “parfit”; verdict used to be pronounced “verdit”
schedule—both modern pronunciations (“skedule” and “shedule”) are spelling pronunciations; the older pronunciation was just “sedule” (likewise for schism although some people still pronounce that one as “sizzum”)
There is one /l/-restoring spelling pronunciation which is very very widespread: very few people still pronounce falcon as “fawken”, like walk, talk, etc. I wonder if Malcolm was ever pronounced Mawkem? Unfortunately personal names don’t get entries in the OED… Balkans always has /l/ but maybe it was borrowed too late (attested 1785 according to OED).
Isn’t that all to be expected in a language where spelling varies from pronunciation, and thus each person has to carry two units of information per word, as more and more people spend more time interacting with language primarily through text rather than the spoken word?
I have a vague hunch one can sketch out a proof that extreme libertarian slash ancap economics is suboptimal without adding some additional centralised coordination to resolve the inevitable crises caused by speculative bubbles
If it could be done, the market would’ve done it by now.
without speculation you hobble your economic growth, with speculation and absolute inviolable property rights I think you run the risk of [fill in blank]
Ah, yes, [fill in blank], the primary objection libertarians have had to contend with since time immemorial.
I mean the obvious starting point is currency, which is either restricted to a fixed amount (ushering in the Great Depression?) or issued by a single authority (giving that authority too much power?) or issued by anyone who cares to, the most interesting case.
Oh snap, we forgot about currency! No way to handle that one without government. Back to the drawing board.
You know, that’s the one thing I never hear libertarians talking about: how to privatize currency.
Libertarians are required to have a complete program for rebuilding society from the ground up, along with an exacting proof that the program would work. They are not allowed to simply say “the state will whither away” like the communists are. Much less are they allowed to get away with simply having a bagful of policies, like mainstream, democratically-elected parties. No.
No, libertarians can’t just say “hey, how about no minimum wage” or “how about no drug war,” because if you do, someone like @argumate will come along with a vague hunch about a sketch of an argument that an extreme form of libertarianism is less than perfect. And then you’d be so embarrassed.
So get on it. Argumate’s got a smidgen of doubt that libertarianism isn’t immediately and obviously perfect. Can’t let that stand.
Actually, Communists aren’t allowed to say that “the state will whither away”, and as someone that does not and has never liked Libertarianism, I have called Communists on this on multiple occasions and demanded that they provide a full plan for rebuilding society from the ground up, since “let’s abolish private ownership of the means of production” basically requires that.
And Communists complain that they aren’t allowed to just say that, and talk about how you aren’t supposed to pre-define the revolution so it doesn’t get locked in.
(But I don’t need to worry, since nothing hurts Libertarianism quite like Libertarian immigration policies.)
bluepill: superficial and commodified weeb idea of animeland japan “redpill”: balanced and informed perspective on japan redpill: tradweeb who fully embraces esoteric state shinto and pilgrimages to yasukuni shrine from akihabara and recognizes karafuto and chiishima as primordially japanese
Wired: paleoweeb fetishizing Jomon era pottery and lacquerware, thirsting after brow ridged waifus
exalted: jomon irredentist ainu cartoon enthusiast who understands that the only tradnat path for japan is the physical removal of all bearers of yayoi genetics, all traces of rice cultivation, and all political systems not founded on bear worship
if copyright was abolished in Libertarian Paradise, it could be quickly replaced by an equivalent contractual scheme whereby major conglomerates require you to enter into an agreement before accessing their products, with penalties for breaking the agreement.
anyone who wished to access Star Wars, Pokemon, Harry Potter, or any other popular franchise would need to agree to copyright or find someone willing to break it, and experience suggests that most people would go along with it.
Depends.
To start with, I will say that I agree with the general gist of your post. However, I suspect we would still end up with a licensing scheme much different from current IP law.
Imagine going into a store to buy a CD with software (I know, so nineties, I work with what I know) and at the cashier, before paying, you’re handed a 200-page contract (That is, the EULA plus all currently applicable IP law) that you must (a) read and (b) agree to before they will take your money.
A couple of things would happen
1) Some people would not purchase the software
2) Others would purchase equivalent but license-free software from your competition
3) In an effort to capture some of that market, publishers would create an extremely streamlined contract; the main difference - looking at what has happened in other fields - would generally be that a lot of cruft would get cut out.
3A) The hard-to-enforce cruft (E.g. “not allowed to resell”) would be cut out because: If the state subsidizes your enforcement you might as well have as many terms as possible and put the burden on the customer - they cannot really go to a competitor because that competitor will have the same burdens because it is law. If you have to pay for your own enforcement, you might as well cut it out - the contract will be less confusing to your customer and that might give you a leg up over the competition.
3B) The hard-to-understand cruft would also be cut. E.g. “Not allowed to modify this software” You see this in e.g. the CC license - in an effort to make people use that license, it is very easy to understand. A private court of arbitration could create an equivalent Easy To Understand IP Contract, a service they do not provide today because they’re in direct competition with the government enforcement monopoly.
You’d end up with licenses that individual people could make educated decisions about. You’re absolutely right that people would still agree to these contracts, but I expect the contracts to be much better. And it is easier to explain to the customer “you’re not allowed to sell or give away copies of this because we needs to get paid” than “you aree allowed to create copies of this for backup purposes only unless we have used copy-protection, unless that copy protection is easily automatically circumvented by standard software in which case it doesn’t count” which is the current state.
I expect that a proliferation of licenses would quickly congeal together into a single conglomerate, which you could opt into once via an easy process.
Then you really would just walk into the store, pay your money, and walk out.
People negotiating hundreds of little contracts on an individual basis seems much less likely than the convenience of a standardised option, much in the same way as you would expect people to standardise on a small number of currencies and other common standards.
Honestly, I find ShieldFoss’s response here to be a bit naive.
If all the record companies and movie studios get together (and it makes sense for them to do so), they can make their standard contract include those supposedly-hard-to-enforce clauses, and their standard contract will be harsher than real IP law.
They simply setup the situation such that any breach which would cause the copyrighted item to escape the containment field means someone violated the contract, and pursue people the few who didn’t and who did not immediately turn over who was responsible under the contract for some kind of conspiracy.
They don’t need to enforce it perfectly, just enough to scare people, and they can flat-out specify the prices in ways that courts will not dispute.
“This contract says you agreed to pay a $1,000 fee for every song you copied,” and oh hey, it’s civil court, so the standard of evidence is still not “beyond reasonable doubt”.
And since everyone will have to sign the contract to participate, it doesn’t really matter if a few copyright freegans on the edges of society don’t.
So no, the contracts will not be much better. In fact, they will be worse.
I think one big economic problem millennials face that is horribly under-discussed is that businesses just don’t really seem interesting in training people anymore, or at least not unless the person is in an unpaid/underpaid internship.
Like, in the ‘80s, my mom got a job as a programmer and was trained by the company. Prior to that, she had no experience with computers and hadn’t gone to college, and they trained her to program (granted, she wasn’t in a high level programming position, but even low-level programming jobs pay pretty well). Companies used to really invest in workers, and they don’t now. That’s unimaginable today. Companies now seem to expect you to get a four-year college degree that is directly applicable to the job, and at least a year or two of relevant internship experience, plus some self-learning on the side, to even hire for entry-level office work.
Of course, this new system makes younger workers much less competitive compared to older workers, and it means that any disadvantages you have (you have a mental illness, your parents aren’t supportive/wealthy enough to help you through an internship, you didn’t get a 4-year degree or got one at a lower-level institution,, etc.) multiply in how much they hinder one’s attempts to enter a given industry, because you have to do so much to even get your foot in the door.
Yeah, this is one of a large variety of ways in which the private sector, running out of ways to become more competitive by generating value, has increasingly depended on pushing costs onto others. Even fiscal conservatives tend to be fans of “skills training” subsidies, so it’s easy for companies to just completely give up on training and entry-level recruitment and then argue that the government needs to save them from the skills gap, and universities need to better train students in whatever they need right now. Then a huge amount of money gets wasted training people for things that are useless by the time those people enter the workforce, but were in-demand three years earlier.
In general I think it’s really important to understand this pattern of cost-smuggling, because it’s probably the single most fundamental tactic used by modern firms to stay competitive. You also see it in, for instance, the tendency to outsource resume screening to third-party service providers, who boast about their proprietary algorithm but actually just discard any resume without appropriate keyword hits and the right degrees. Or just-in-time scheduling, or the tendency to offsource all capital costs onto employees/contractors except the ones absolutely necessary to maintain leverage, or firing people when they’re costing you money and then rehiring them when you need them again. There are simply far, far more opportunities to save money by tricking or forcing other people into paying than there are by actually doing things better, and in a competitive marketplace, you can’t afford to hold out for the latter type.
What’s funny is that it’s not even clear that these strategies do improve long-term profitability. The issue is that long-term profitability doesn’t matter; companies have to optimize for short-term profitability, and things that make them money over a period of many years in ways that aren’t obvious to shareholders or investors aren’t worth that much in the rat race.
We may see an increase in relative performance by employee-owned and privately-owned companies for this reason.
This is discussed by finance people and while this factor is probably there, it’s already accounted for and some firms really do better by being publicly traded because you can get founders that are just not that great at leading even medium sized enterprises or just go bat shit crazy for what ever reason. And really, mega enterprises probably are too large to not be publicly traded.
This isn’t even accounting for the fact that just because an enterprise is not publicly traded it doesn’t mean there are not numerous owners with different incentives, and the tax incentive for debt financing and its interaction with corporate raiders.
Yeah, I feel like the optimal performance probably requires strong control by someone committed to the long-term prospects of a firm, but that model makes you extremely dependent on the quality of the people in charge, because it insulates you from pressures to fix actual problems as well as pressures to chase quarterly earnings.
While I’m not generally a fan of increasing financialization, as long as that’s the world we’re in right now I wonder if there’s a way to mitigate this framework using some kind of financial instrument better keyed to long-term sustainability. At least then you’d be getting information about what people think of a firm’s long-term prospects.
5-year stock that pays an additional 20 percantage points in value on dividends until it matures at year 5. The other dividend money 1-years don’t get goes into the pool and is re-divided to those with more mature stocks, which makes it a bit of a scheme, but unlike a pyramid it has a clear end and is a real company. When the stock is sold, the clock resets on those shares.
I can imagine going the opposite way round: Women are shorter than men (on average). Women earn less than men (on average). Short men earn less than tall men (on average).
Ergo: Discrimination against short men is toxic masculinity/misdirected misogyny.
There is a fine ideological difference between “I identify as an attack helicopter“ and “I am a helicopter-kin” and “My gender is heligender, with pronouns heli/helixs/helim/copterself“ and “I am a transcopter, but medical gatkeepers keep me from getting my propeller!”.
I don’t think the people using attack helicopters as a reductio ad absurdum care about this, but they should.
Yikes!
Attack helicopter AI platforms are the only ones that have the right to declare themselves as being attack-helicopter-gendered. Anyone else doing so is an appropriation of their culture formed by a lifetime of forced military service, which they have no right to despoil.
Human-Exclusive Radical Feminism is the only real Feminism.
Actually, what does Satan derive from the foolish alignment of Westboro Baptist Satanists?
(i.e. very un-Satanic satanists)?
I’m not entirely sure what’s being asked here, but it sounds like it might be a good question.
Does Satan get anything out of people who profess to like him and worship him but who actually act in a consistently un-Satanic way and display some of the virtues, which confound and attack him?
That does actually sound like a good question.
(However, I cannot intuitively model existing in a world where Satan is real and focused on spreading anti-virtue. It doesn’t really make sense to my brain on a deep emotional level, much like I can only understand other sexual orientations academically.)
Presumably, they are still Damned (which meets Satanic goals?) by Christian standards. Indirectly, they would also weaken the association of the Great Adversary with evil and thus open up paths for conversion by those who would otherwise see flat evil and resist.
I will admit though that I’m enamored with the idea of evil creatures doing good (through either will or contract), and of using evil means to achieve good, and with fake things becoming (effectively) real. Something inside me just finds such things cool or satisfying.
I think the years imply you're talking about SSM, in which case I think this is wrong even from a socon perspective. No fault divorce could be reasonably described as forgetting what marriage is. SSM is a tiny blip by comparison.
I sorta agree with that from a strictly practical public policy standpoint. Trying to fight SSM, and then not getting anything out of it when losing? Terribad idea in hindsight. That probably wasted most of the capital that could have been used to make covenant marriage law much more common or to make family law customizable so that the faithful and the obedient could make the law surrounding their own marriages conform to the law of the Lord.
I of course didn’t write that ask, and wasn’t thinking primarily about SSM – I now recognize that I don’t actually know what date interracial marriage stopped being so stigmatized.
But as far as the actual views of what marriage is, or what marriage is for, I don’t see SSM as a “tiny blip” although I do see divorce as being significantly more serious.
It’s actually a real thing. The guy wanted to prove how easy it was to make a church in Brazil, something that can give you the benefit of not paying some taxes. So he spent a couple of months going through paperwork and created the national church of Hanzo.
i read this whole fucking thing translated thru google and you know what. here are some highlights
the creator of this church admitted that he could have used mercy or zenyatta who are already rife with religious iconography, or even lúcio who is the only brazilian character in the game but he decided on hanzo for the interesting backstory and the fact that his long hair and beard make him “look like jesus”
“Hanzo is my shepherd and arrows will not fail me!“
the .pdf form he used as a reference stated in an article that members of this church would be allowed to skip a tuesday off of work every month for “religious purposes” ie playing overwatch
baptism = playing overwatch, or paladins if they cant afford to download overwatch
his church is allowed to sell pirated hanzo merchandise
I’m from Brazil but even I didn’t expect this to work. A few more highlights:
He chose Hanzo specifically because of how despised he is: he figured if he could use Hanzo to make up a bullshit church it would be proof that there is no limit to our legislation
The objective of the National Churches of Hanzo is legally registered as “promote peace and harmony on the internet and online communities”
Console wars and other separatist thoughts are not tolerated
But don’t worry, the National Churches of Hanzo are just on paper. Due to the (low) risk of the government getting suspicious and arresting him for tax fraud and money laundering, the guy will keep paying his taxes and won’t sell Hanzo products
Despite not actually playing overwatch and not knowing why people think that Hanzo is a bad character to main, I am tickled pink by the fact that people use “Hanzo main” as a slur.
