The other surprising thing about Amenta is that apparently there’s a lot of people who want to RP as social conservatives, even though they themselves are (probably) not social conservatives. As an actual IRL social conservative, I wouldn’t have expected this to be a thing that people would do.
Dude, RPing as a social liberal is the easiest thing in the world. I could elaborate on why I found it surprising that people wanted to do the reverse, but you for some reason make your response un-rebloggable, so I think this part of the conversation is kind of done.
Presumably it mostly leans on “thinking X isn’t harmful”, which shouldn’t be that hard to simulate depending on just how Socon you are.
But as you can tell from my blog, I’m not really a Socon. Yet. They haven’t moved the line far enough yet.
There’s a well-documented attitude where humans will twist themselves into mental knots trying to come up with reasons why death or work are actually good. The thing is, even the anti-deathists (looking at you, Big Yud) will turn around and do the exact same thing about suffering, telling themselves that OF COURSE humans need suffering to be happy (just like *~death gives meaning to life~*, right?).
We COULD be working on destroying the hedonic treadmill, or making a version of MDMA without tolerance or negative side effects, or figuring out how to make wireheading work without interfering with our ability to earn a living, but instead we’ve decided to make all of that illegal.
I still haven’t seen Inside Out yet, but I get the sense that I would hate it, since really Sadness needs to be taken out behind the toolshed and put out of her misery, and out of the misery of her host.
The sensation of physical pain. I asked wirehead actually but that was a rhetorical question so I will answer.
Pain is the body signalling “something is wrong!”. It’s of course very unpleasant, and thus technically “bad”. On top of that, the human body doesn’t deal with it all that well: it keeps telling us something is wrong when we are already aware, misreports the damage, etc.
There are people who don’t feel pain. They don’t live long.
Even every human having the ability to flip the switch to say “hey, I’m aware something is wrong, got it, bye” might have catastrophic consequences when the social expectation for manual laborers becomes “ignore the pain forever”.
Sadness is most likely exactly like that, and intentionally experiencing sadness is much more of a universal human experience.
Yep.
I think abolishing suffering kind of includes “abolish need for manual labor” as a sub-point… Just a slight hunch.
#FullyAutomatedLuxuryCommunism
#MouseUtopiaHereWeCome
Okay, but major depression and chronic pain are probably both pretty worthless, as compared to, say, the feelings of loneliness and dejectedness one might have in an exotic relationship type one has entered for ideological reasons, or the fatigue one gets to signal it’s time to stop exercising.
Also we should unbundle chest pain so it’s easier to diagnose heart attack vs just other issues. (Or slap a monitor on it. You get the idea.)
Actually, the reason that lusting after anime girls is degenerate is that the offspring would have a mix of 2D and 3D traits, and would not be well-adapted to either the 2D or 3D environments, putting them at a significant disadvantage.
Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.
Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.
I mean, it‘s probably doable, but step 1 is to enforce a ban on cousin marriage for 1000 years.
Ah, but you see, Neocons are ideologically prohibited from acknowledging this, because hey, what is a foreign culture but food and clothing waiting to be sold in the United States?
You could do it in far fewer generations, but you’d have to install a 20-year military governorship, still ban cousin marriages out to the third degree, enforce village exogamy, and seize total control of the educational system to wipe out non-trivial parts of the culture and replace them with ideology necessary to support Liberal Democracy.
That’s a pretty big ideological price, and it would require a long troop presence to enforce.
It’s hardly impossible. Afghanistan was liberalizing at one point. But if you’re too hooked on the ideology that democracy flowers in all soils, it isn’t possible for you to carry it out.
The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”
So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?
Also complaints that ‘pandering’ is somehow an epidemic of caving to pressure from various social justice activist movements are unfounded.
Pandering is 100% a marketing tactic. Rainbow French-fry cups sold during pride month is pandering, and is 100% because it exploits desperate gays. Female roles in films exist because women go to the cinema. Rewriting roles after-the-fact to be women or PoC or whatever is often done not for artistic reasons.
Let’s have more pandering, but never forget it is a marketing tactic. Pandering is not respect, it is not a substitute for human rights, it is not victory.
How do you extricate the pandering from the bad writing, and the discourse around the bad writing from the discourse around the pandering?
What if you’re offended by marketing tactics designed to profit off your good intentions while not in the least supporting them? What if the most marketable media examples of queering and testing boundaries are also the most implausible and ridiculous? E.g. a woman beating up a room full of men is weirdly sexy, but also simply does not happen. Ever. In the world. Go on worldstarhiphop. Find the Amazonian giantess that the microwaveable plastics tell you is surely out there. Prove me wrong.
No MMA ladies vs. gamers tho. There are institutionally supported exceptions to every rule.
Unlike all those millionaire playboys who fight crime without so much as a scratch
Or all those superpowered farmboys from another planet
Or, y’know, all the aliens in time-traveling police boxes
Wow!!! It’s almost like fiction is all about implausible scenarios. Who knew!
Implausible is qualitatively different from physically impossible.
This was addressed in the short film Too Many Cooks.
You can maybe turn the gruff Irish/Italian police chief into a black guy, but if you make him a small Asian woman the plot will have to dramatically change to accommodate the new reality.
This is why I believe more roles should go not just to asian female bodybuilders, but to tall female MMA fighters of all races.
You know how much state effort it took to make Yao Ming?
You know how much effort it takes to make a single Dinka herdsman?
Also, the former wears out after a few seasons. We’re talking about phenotypic bell curves that essentially do not overlap.
I’m like 70% joking. I realize the upper body strength difference is almost bimodal, even at the athlete level.
But I’m like 30% not joking, because if you want to close the gap in visual plausibility of beating up a man, this looks like a lot more force is going to rain down than this.
Fantasizing about having institutional power seems like a loosing proposition. Best case, you wind up disappointed. Worst case, you wind up with institutional power.
The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”
So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?
Also complaints that ‘pandering’ is somehow an epidemic of caving to pressure from various social justice activist movements are unfounded.
Pandering is 100% a marketing tactic. Rainbow French-fry cups sold during pride month is pandering, and is 100% because it exploits desperate gays. Female roles in films exist because women go to the cinema. Rewriting roles after-the-fact to be women or PoC or whatever is often done not for artistic reasons.
Let’s have more pandering, but never forget it is a marketing tactic. Pandering is not respect, it is not a substitute for human rights, it is not victory.
How do you extricate the pandering from the bad writing, and the discourse around the bad writing from the discourse around the pandering?
What if you’re offended by marketing tactics designed to profit off your good intentions while not in the least supporting them? What if the most marketable media examples of queering and testing boundaries are also the most implausible and ridiculous? E.g. a woman beating up a room full of men is weirdly sexy, but also simply does not happen. Ever. In the world. Go on worldstarhiphop. Find the Amazonian giantess that the microwaveable plastics tell you is surely out there. Prove me wrong.
No MMA ladies vs. gamers tho. There are institutionally supported exceptions to every rule.
Unlike all those millionaire playboys who fight crime without so much as a scratch
Or all those superpowered farmboys from another planet
Or, y’know, all the aliens in time-traveling police boxes
Wow!!! It’s almost like fiction is all about implausible scenarios. Who knew!
Implausible is qualitatively different from physically impossible.
This was addressed in the short film Too Many Cooks.
You can maybe turn the gruff Irish/Italian police chief into a black guy, but if you make him a small Asian woman the plot will have to dramatically change to accommodate the new reality.
This is why I believe more roles should go not just to asian female bodybuilders, but to tall female MMA fighters of all races.
The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”
So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?
Also complaints that ‘pandering’ is somehow an epidemic of caving to pressure from various social justice activist movements are unfounded.
Pandering is 100% a marketing tactic. Rainbow French-fry cups sold during pride month is pandering, and is 100% because it exploits desperate gays. Female roles in films exist because women go to the cinema. Rewriting roles after-the-fact to be women or PoC or whatever is often done not for artistic reasons.
Let’s have more pandering, but never forget it is a marketing tactic. Pandering is not respect, it is not a substitute for human rights, it is not victory.
How do you extricate the pandering from the bad writing, and the discourse around the bad writing from the discourse around the pandering?
What if you’re offended by marketing tactics designed to profit off your good intentions while not in the least supporting them? What if the most marketable media examples of queering and testing boundaries are also the most implausible and ridiculous? E.g. a woman beating up a room full of men is weirdly sexy, but also simply does not happen. Ever. In the world. Go on worldstarhiphop. Find the Amazonian giantess that the microwaveable plastics tell you is surely out there. Prove me wrong.
No MMA ladies vs. gamers tho. There are institutionally supported exceptions to every rule.
Unlike all those millionaire playboys who fight crime without so much as a scratch
Or all those superpowered farmboys from another planet
Or, y’know, all the aliens in time-traveling police boxes
Wow!!! It’s almost like fiction is all about implausible scenarios. Who knew!
Implausible is qualitatively different from physically impossible.
This was addressed in the short film Too Many Cooks.
You can maybe turn the gruff Irish/Italian police chief into a black guy, but if you make him a small Asian woman the plot will have to dramatically change to accommodate the new reality.
Counter-point: All female characters engaging in waif fu are actually paramilitary cyborgs.
It is important to acknowledge this for the benefit of cyborg representation.
Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.
Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.
I mean, it‘s probably doable, but step 1 is to enforce a ban on cousin marriage for 1000 years.
Ah, but you see, Neocons are ideologically prohibited from acknowledging this, because hey, what is a foreign culture but food and clothing waiting to be sold in the United States?
ten dollars says she’s going to twist me pointing out that ada lovelace did not actually invent the computer or programming and therefore men have actually contributed to the development of computers in some way as misogyny somehow
that she made not just significant but seminal (heh) contributions to computer programming. There’s no convincing evidence that Babbage actually wrote her notes about computing the Bernoulli numbers. She was also from a family of wacky geniuses. It’s not unreasonable to call het the mother of computer programming or something like that.
Hobbes, Pascal or Leibniz may also have been the mother of computer programming, if you look at it a certain way, or Babbage or Gauss.
Contributions to computer programming != wrote the first program
The problem here is that all of rat-tumb agrees on the scope of the actual contribution of Ada Lovelace to the history of computing and to the programs to calculate Bernoulli numbers in particular (http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html). We are just arguing semantics here.
Outside of rat-tumb, some people don’t know anybody else other than Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing (from that movie with Benedict Cumberbatch). What about Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Vannevar Bush, Emil Leon Post, Alonzo Church, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann? Grace Hopper or Barbara Liskov might be better candidates for “Women who invented modern computing”.
Outside of rat-tumb, what does it even matter if she did or did not predict symbolic theorem-provers over a hundred years early? Does it matter if you don’t know what a compiler is, but have strong feelings about the subject anyway?
Is the Bernoulli numbers program a computer program? Did she write it? Did anything before it count as a computer program?
Those questions settle the debate. They’re just super hard to answer in a concrete way.
Yes. No. Probably.
You didn’t read the wolfram excerpt I linked to if you really think she didn’t write the program.
So Menabrea did not?
Nope. He wrote about the engine, but it was her notes that contained the first program. Read the Wolfram article.
Ok. Menabrea wrote something non-Bernoulli as an example program, but suggested Bernoulli numbers. Ada Lovelace published the first computer program. Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer, if you set the cutoff right.
While the phrase “no homo” is traditionally frowned upon by the LGBT community, I think it’s actually a wonderful way to contextualize affirmations as entirely platonic, and we should let the straights have it in exchange for us using “no hetero” when delivering affirmations to the opposite sex
Something to think about, but I don’t think it’ll catch on.
Yes, we get it, you’re a centrist with no logical consistency.
so i go to this website, not even having a good time to begin with, and you come on my blog and call me a centrist with your own two stumpy hands
Obviously you just need to go up several tiers of Centrism and seek world conquest under your new radical centrist government. No one will see it coming, because all centrists are boring wishy-washies, right?
The people who complain about things like a female doctor who or female Jedi or whatever almost always swear up and down that they don’t mind the idea of a woman in that role, but then say they have a problem with that particular instance because they think it’s “pandering” or “cheap” or “just for brownie points” or “politically correct”
So when exactly is it not going to be those things? If they say there’s a time and place they’d be fine with it, then when and where? Why does it never seem to come?
Remember that post about how a black reverse Indiana Jones would be great because it would “piss off white guys”?
They know it’s just culture war to take over stuff they currently have for its symbolic value.
If it weren’t just culture war, then it would be about the creation of new media, new stories, rather than insisting “nope, this guy looks too much like you, and you oppress people just by existing, so he must be removed.”
There is already a good test case to differentiate.
Look for people who objected to the idea of a black stormtrooper as a main character in the new Star Wars. As a new Star Wars movie, it wasn’t replacing anyone from the previous movies, therefore you can assume more bad faith of the people who were against having Finn there. (Also the movie is actually enjoyable in itself and the acting was fine.)
Also, they know this sort of stuff only goes one way.
Also also, recall that criticism of the new Ghostbusters that flopped was, to a degree, socially prohibited because it was “girl power!”. But it still flopped. Why wouldn’t a lot of people be suspicious?
“Out of the cities” ? Do you really think people who spend their time watching anime and playing video games are more likely to find people they like in far less densely populated places?
Or is this just another case of “these people would be so much happier if they just had different preferences”
It would actually be possible for them to shift some of their preferences a bit, most likely, but it would require an enormous amount of work, as hidden in the task of “getting them off the internet” - no easy feat!
And by the time you did that, they’d be less likely to be incels.
Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.
Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.
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.
