Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

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[wirehead-wannabe]

Jesus this is the most frustrating thread ever. I get banning guns and knives, but who in their right fucking mind would ban goddamn pepper spray? What the fuck do they think people are gonna do if they’re allowed to have it? I keep seeing people talk about how the need to defend yourself is rare and letting people have weapons would make things worse but I don’t see how that applies to mace at all.

[mitigatedchaos]

I’m so glad the 2nd Amendment covers my right to military-grade prosthetic limbs.

Edit: More seriously, erosion in this direction is what they’re worried about.

[wirehead-wannabe]

I feel like you could very easily make things like “does this cause permanent harm” or “is it useful in muggings” as your criteria, though. The thing that makes pepper spray good from a societal standpoint is the fact that it’s significantly more useful defensively than offensively.

[mitigatedchaos]

That is not the logic under which weapons are restricted, though. I suppose things would be better if it were.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

Very very few people are actually anti-immigration. It’s the ILLEGAL part that people don’t like.

seriously tho? a shit-ton of people are actually anti-immigration, this is hardly a fringe view, jesus.

[akaltynarchitectonica]

I’ve never inderstood why the legality or not of immigration is supposed to have moral force. a) Its pretty commonly agreed that hte current immigration laws arent fit for purpose, and are only that way due to political deadlock. b) The moral obligation to obey a law comes from being part of the country/community that sets the law, if you are not an american citizen you have no obligation to obey US law.

[mitigatedchaos]

A) Just ignoring them is almost equivalent to Open Borders, which if you’re a Nationalist, is something you don’t want.  (Maximum rates of assimilation, wanting to be allowed to have a country of your own to at least some level culturally, effects on wages, effects on crime, etc.)  Ignoring them isn’t really a compromise, either, it’s basically just giving the Leftists what they want.

What they really want is more complicated, but using legality as a fence is much simpler and faster to communicate, and is part of expressing that they are not-racist.

B) You should really be careful with that knife since it has a two-sided blade.  If they don’t have any obligations, then they don’t have any rights, either.  Furthermore, isn’t that like saying a trespasser has no obligation to obey the property owner when they aren’t even supposed to be trespassing in the first place?  

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

reddit.com

reddit: the front page of the internet

[wirehead-wannabe]

Jesus this is the most frustrating thread ever. I get banning guns and knives, but who in their right fucking mind would ban goddamn pepper spray? What the fuck do they think people are gonna do if they’re allowed to have it? I keep seeing people talk about how the need to defend yourself is rare and letting people have weapons would make things worse but I don’t see how that applies to mace at all.

[mitigatedchaos]

I’m so glad the 2nd Amendment covers my right to military-grade prosthetic limbs.

Edit: More seriously, erosion in this direction is what they’re worried about.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

@argumate

superheroes only work because they are given perfect information; even when the Avengers screw up they never seem to screw up in ways that would get them fired, like accidentally mistaking some normie for a supervillain and punching their head right off.

Well, that’s a good reason for superheroes to have no-kill policies, even when it sometimes seems obvious that they should just kill the villains that keep coming back every few episodes and endangering the city, since one failure could cost thousands of lives.  

Usually superheroes find criminals in the act, but even so, tying them up and leaving them for the cops after beating them up has a much better failure mode, limited in part by the quality level of local law enforcement.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

how bad can I possibly be??

The problem is not that the Onceler is morally bad, but that he is rationally responding to bad incentives which lead to bad outcomes: he is indeed “doing what comes naturally” in the current (lax) regulatory environment.

If the only way to avoid bad outcomes is for everyone in your society to be morally virtuous and to have access to perfect information then you have a problem!

A better way would be to pay attention to outcomes and have a system of checks and balances that provides a feedback loop to correct the incentives that led to them, combined with an enforcement mechanism to punish violators.

[mitigatedchaos]

My my, Argumate, what a novel idea.

Are you suggesting that perhaps we should also judge the rule systems themselves by their outcomes?

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.

even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.

[mitigatedchaos]

Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.

[argumate]

I think the fundamental problem is this assumes that government’s role is to search the space of possible policies looking for optimal outcomes, when in fact it’s a formalised way of handling power struggles and dividing up the spoils with less bloodshed.

[mitigatedchaos]

I still think it can be improved to behave more like the former. Governments routinely spend over 30% of GDP in nations with GDPs in the trillions. Improving them even small amounts could yield huge dividends for human civilization, not to mention allocate the spoils in a way that makes them worth more.

Large gains are probably possible (based on the existence of states like Singapore). It wouldn’t even have to come with lower taxes. We could just buy another five hundred billion dollars in social goods. Seeing all sorts of raindance policies and wasteful policies is aggravating.

[collapsedsquid]

I think it runs afoul of so many measurement, externality, long tail, and other issues that what you’re going to get is a mess, especially if you try it on everything at once.

[mitigatedchaos]

It’s part of a general vein of policies that don’t have to be implemented all at once.

For instance, we could start by requiring legislators to make non-binding predictions about the legislation they pass when it’s passed, with specific, measurable outcomes, like “the annual murder rate will decline by 3-5% with 80% confidence”.  No differences in pay, no firing, just a formal record to compare to.  It might not sound like much, but it’s a step towards explaining the expected outcomes of massive bills in clearer language that can be verified.

Then if that works, we can expand it and start awarding compensation based on the outcomes.  (Although I admittedly have been thinking about a far deeper version where percentile score in a legislative outcome prediction market is part of a formula that determines public funding of parties, with lots of delegated voting and other things.)

Other options to improve governance include automatically putting sunset provisions in bills and various regulations so that they don’t just keep accumulating and accumulating if they aren’t actually that politically important.  Again, small step that can be reversed.

If people weren’t such idiots, we could get cities to volunteer to test various policies like basic income or wage subsidies before national rollouts instead of just kinda assuming they’d work because it’s morally virtuous without successively larger scales of testing.

We could probably also pay more to legislators, like they do in Singapore.  It was only about $250 million or something to give all the congressmen $500k-$1M salaries, plus another $30M for the President.  For a bit more, we could pay them significant pensions and forbid them from working for anyone but the government afterwards.  If it saves the US economy well under 1% of GDP (0.0014%?) due to getting a better quality of legislator, it comes out to a net gain.  The exact numbers here are less important than the orders of magnitude.  Congress has an enormous amount of power over the economy, but they aren’t paid based on that.  However, they can use that power to get wealth by converting it via corruption.

There have got to be a hundred things we could do better.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.

even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.

[mitigatedchaos]

Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.

[argumate]

I think the fundamental problem is this assumes that government’s role is to search the space of possible policies looking for optimal outcomes, when in fact it’s a formalised way of handling power struggles and dividing up the spoils with less bloodshed.

[mitigatedchaos]

I still think it can be improved to behave more like the former. Governments routinely spend over 30% of GDP in nations with GDPs in the trillions. Improving them even small amounts could yield huge dividends for human civilization, not to mention allocate the spoils in a way that makes them worth more.

Large gains are probably possible (based on the existence of states like Singapore). It wouldn’t even have to come with lower taxes. We could just buy another five hundred billion dollars in social goods. Seeing all sorts of raindance policies and wasteful policies is aggravating.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.

even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.

[mitigatedchaos]

Or to put it another way, Argumate, Capitalism is ludicrously powerful, and I’m searching for a way to do that for government but with a different utility function.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[argumate]

the other issue with prediction markets is that we already have a wide range of ways to invest based on our beliefs about the future, eg. not becoming an apprentice buggy whip crafter after the invention of the automobile.

even betting on civilisation collapse can be done by stockpiling supplies or what have you.

[mitigatedchaos]

Right, but one might want organizations to make decisions based on more accurate information, not just individuals, and measuring the rate of underground bunker construction doesn’t tell you which apocalyptic scenario is most likely - and thus needs to be most addressed.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Patching Prediction Markets

The following assume the prediction markets are being used to help evaluate the standing of government bureaucrats or employees in another very large organization.  In this instance, the resource being bet is not currency per se, but a “credibility score” used in hiring and other decisions.

Reselling Shares of Predictions

One issue with making bets is that they may take longer than your lifespan in order to pay out.  Shares of bets on, for example, global temperature in the year 2100 should be something that can be traded by itself.  In this sense these kinds of bets become a long-term investment that can be used to hold one’s credibility score, particularly if bet payoffs are indexed to prediction market inflation.

Catastrophe Bets Reserve Catastrophe Goods

A basket of catastrophe goods are held in reserve for those who make predictions of incidents which would cause the prediction market to end.  This might include gold, guns and ammo, priority access to bunkers, and so on.  These would be distributed by the market operator in preparation for the event, but are only held by the bettor unless the actual catastrophe kicks in.

Prohibition of Close Involvement

Based on the level of control someone has over the outcome of a scenario being bet on (1/N?), they may be prohibited from betting on it.

Alternatively,

Prohibition of Betting Against Own Success

If you’re on a project, you can only bet on it succeeding, not coming late or failing.  Colluding with outsiders to get payment for the project failing is a punishable offense, and these will be monitored and punished.

Alternatively,

Randomization of Selection of Betting Participants with Self Recusal

Spread bets over the organization at random to lower the probability that any participant has too much control over the outcome and is thus able to sabotage it.  This may result in a hit to accuracy, depending on the estimating capabilities of your organization.

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There are probably other mechanisms that can be added to try and get better / less corrupt behavior from the prediction markets.