The Trustee Model of Child Care

There is an idea, in some circles, that parents effectively own their children. This risks leading to various abuses, and also doesn’t line up with all moral intuitions. On the other hand, most children do not have the capabilities, including executive function, to adequately evaluate and act on long-term preferences that will become important when they become adults.

I propose a rather simple-but-vague model that has no doubt been proposed before. The child is effectively held in a trust owned by their future self. The duty of the parents, therefore, is to safely deliver a well-developed adult to be inherited at the point of hand-off. They are the trust’s operators, not the trust’s owners, and thus they have a variety of duties, abilities, and limitations.

A parent can have vaccines administered. They can’t remove a significant portion of the child’s body, or demand a tattoo of their choice. They can enact ordinary disciplinary measures, but not abusive ones. They can require that the child attend school and do well at it, but they are not allowed to engage in pure ideological indoctrination. And, if they fail to meet the terms, they can be removed from administration of the metaphorical trust.

The exact details might vary. In many ways this is what people are acting on already - thus why Child Protective Services exists in the first place - but it isn’t explicitly specified. I outline it here mostly so that it can be brought up as a counter-model when people suggest either ownership of children, or treating children as atomistic adults with fully-formed executive functioning and experience.

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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.

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

flagpost prediction markets

silver-and-ivory

mitigatedchaos

The Mitigated Chaos Plan for School

@silver-and-ivory

…that’s true.
I don’t know what a good solution would look like, but it doesn’t have to involve any more high-IQ individuals than we have now, just a better distribution of resources schools already have.
I want to test solutions to the current system, and to find many different possible set-ups that are different from the one we have now. (They might not scale well, of course.)
Even improvement in a limited geographical area or to some minor aspects, for relatively affluent middle-class individuals, would be really valuable to me.

Roight, let me suggest my plan, which would only help matters that you want tangentially most likely.

Are you familiar with Spaced Repetition? It’s used in programs like Anki. The basic summary is this: your brain flags things as important by whether or not you use them, and forgets them gradually over time. Spaced repetition brings the item up again at a certain point in the forgetting, so that your brain goes “oh hey this came up again, it must be important, I better remember it!”

Gamification is also a thing, and I have a theory that a big part of why people don’t like school stuff is that it doesn’t feel applicable, or that it will ever be applicable. But while I do not enjoy math for its own sake, I feel almost no resistance to doing math when I have to in order to accomplish some other task.

I’d like @argumate to read this post, too, and probably a few of the others as well.

So here’s my proposal:

1. This will be primarily implemented as a computer program. It will be implemented on a custom computer system that is not easily compromised.

2. All textbooks will be presented in both a fuller, contextualized format, and as semi-atomic facts of information, ready for use for spaced repetition memorization.

3. Exercises will be split between grinding and synthesis. Synthesis exercises will sometimes be in the form of game-like programs that have a complex problem which the students must integrate their knowledge of the subject to perform. (That is, students must be able to take the knowledge and use it and apply it, not just repeat it.) Other times, for other subjects like English, they will be items like essays that are manually graded by teachers. Students earn resource points to attempt synthesis exercises through grinding exercises, which are the rote learning component intended to reinforce the knowledge and speed up processing (e.g. of doing math). If you fail the synthesis exercise, you may have to do more grinding to attempt it again.

4. The computer program will conduct a review of all the subjects the student needs to know, based on spaced repetition algorithms and data about the student and their previous performance. This prevents the constant information loss that is pervasive in the American school system.

5. All of this is individualized. Students go at their own pace, and graduate when it has all been completed, or are pushed out of the school system at 21.

6. Homework is mostly rare or non-existent. Instead, students will stay another hour or two at school. Homework is for doing exercises, which we are having them do at school.

7. The school day will be broken up by various social activities to let students’ brains relax in between blocks of studying, which will still be somewhat unified by subject of study to make #8 easier.

8. In addition to grading work, teachers will also act as tutors to individual students. Students will be grouped in classes with students who are in a similar position of progress within the system. Teachers will go around the room answering various questions and helping students with items they are having trouble with. There may be some small lecturing sections, maybe.

The following is less necessary, but additional depending on your balance of Nationalism/Capitalism/Technocracy/etc.

9. Students will be awarded points based on a mix of (about 1/3 each) progress, attendance, and and percentile academic standing within their school. These points can be spent on a very larger variety (over 100) of uniform parts, snacks, media, and other items at participating retailers. This has the virtue of aligning the school’s social hierarchy more closely with the desired outcome of learning & academic performance, as well as giving students practical experience with small amounts of “money”.

10. Research shows that teaching math below a certain age doesn’t actually accelerate learning progress on it much at all, so for very young students, the system will focus on “moral/social” education and socialization and potentially language skills.

policy flagpost education

Never give someone else direct write access to your mind.

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The National Delegation

In case you haven’t noticed recently, democracy has major issues. Every major developed state is strewn with dysfunction and programs that are actively at odds with their intended purposes. Our politicians are either incompetent idiots or shrewd operators working against our interests.

Policies routinely have reasonable stated values, but terrible efficacy.

Organizations such as the RAND Corporation knew the Iraq War would be a lot tougher than the Bush administration said it would be. Policy plans coming out of think tanks seem to be better than the actual policies we get.

If we didn’t know they’d immediately get subverted, we’d almost be better off with think tanks running the country.

Better results are necessarily different results, and systems produce the outcomes they incentivize, so to change the results it is necessary to change the system.

The truth is, it may be possible to get something like think tanks in charge of the government, a hybrid between them and political parties, but we will have to add selection pressure to ensure they work towards correctness.

I propose a new legislature, composed of a new kind of corporate entity, the Delegate Candidate Organization (DCO).

Every three years, at election time, each voter delegates their vote to a DCO. The top 50 Delegate Candidate Organizations then form the legislature, becoming that term’s Delegate Organizations. This legislature is known as the National Delegation.

In a second election, those DCOs that did not make the cut delegate their votes to members of the top 50.

(In an optional alternative, the vote could be split between DCOs by categories by voters, allowing a truly innovative level of representation. Bills would have to pass on all categories to pass, and the tax category would determine how funding is obtained, but not total expenditures. Sadly, this is probably too complex for typical voters.)

A Delegate Candidate Organization receives its funding exclusively from the State. For each delegated vote it receives, the DCO receives $5 in annual funding, and an additional $5 times its percentile standing in a legislative outcome prediction market.

(That might sound like a lot. America has around 300 million people, so you could potentially be looking at three billion dollars. I would answer that the 2016 Presidential election cost $2.6 billion by itself, and that money had to come from somewhere and is already influencing our political process. The size of the US economy is $18,570 billion dollars. The real question is whether better policy by the DCOs could improve that by 0.016% or more, which would make the National Delegation pay for itself. I believe that it would.)

The key factor that makes DCOs behave more like think tanks is that a significant chunk of their funding depends on correctly estimating the outcomes of legislation. What keeps them honest? First, competition with other DCOs that will pressure them against spoiling the metrics. Second, voters.

When a piece of legislation is to be passed, DCOs make predictions on outcomes and bet on them in a virtual currency called Credibility Score (or just “Cred”). Each outcome must be represented by a basket of multiple metrics, to prevent min-maxing.

This structure allows us to build a differentiation between a policy’s values and its efficacy. Previous discourse has often viewed policy as solely a matter of efficacy, but of course in practice people have different preferences and are not a unified mass just waiting for enlightenment into [your political ideology]. Preserving the values component (in part through voting) also allows bits of efficacy that have slipped through to be represented on the other side of the equation.

The bets serve two purposes. The first is to reward policymakers that are actively effective at achieving their stated objectives, and punish policymakers that are too unaligned with reality. The second is to effectively tell voters what the plans will actually do, not just wishy washy language pols want people to hear.

“This bill will reduce gun crime.”
“By how much?”
“Uh… a, uh, lot.”

Not only can the DCO specify what its % estimate for a decrease in gun crime is, but it can also communicate its level of certainty - by how much it bets on the outcome as a percentage of its current Cred reserves, data that can be mined by political scientists and journalists.

DCOs must be able to amend predictions when new legislation is passed. A court will also be required to punish those who tamper with metrics, and resolve other disputes. The details of that are a challenge in themselves, but should be feasible to work out.

Each DO has as many votes in the legislature as have been delegated to it. A majority is required to pass legislation.

The accumulated Credibility Score/Cred across all bets is used to determine the percentile standing of all DCOs, used to determine funding (as above). Percentile standing is listed on the ballot next to the DCO’s name, but to simplify things for voters, DCOs are listed in the order of votes received in the previous election.

Practical experiments will be necessary to assess the viability of this model, but I have high hopes for it. If we want to advance as a civilization, then we must develop new organizational technologies.

politics policy victory for national technocracy national technocracy flagpost longpost the national delegation

What GOP Must Do to Avoid an American NHS

Alright, US Republicans, listen up.

You think your goal right now is to “Repeal Obamacare”.

But that has issues. Given your values, your goal should not just be to repeal Obamacare, but to prevent the emergence of a single-payer healthcare system in the United States, in which the US Federal government monopolizes 1/5th of the US economy in a botched attempt at recreating the NHS.

This does not mean trying to pass laws to sabotage the attempt. They’ll just get overturned, and that will be celebrated as a Democratic party victory.

You have to deflate the demand for single-payer healthcare. That is what is necessary for market-based healthcare to continue to exist in the United States. As long as the demand is there - and it is growing, as middle-class families come under increasing pressure - the desire for single-payer will re-emerge.

Yelling at people about how they don’t deserve healthcare because they haven’t worked hard enough will not help. You just picked up a bunch of rural voters that got laid off at the factories and can’t meet their deductibles. You have to focus on preserving the market-based allocation.

There is a simple way to do this.

Each year, every American receives a healthcare voucher for $2,500. (Maybe more - this is way below our per-capita healthcare spending - but even you can do this much.) You can hide this as an earned income tax credit for the poor, a tax deduction for the middle class, etc, if you have to.

The voucher can only be used to purchase valid medical services and medical insurance. We have licensing for doctors, so this shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

Any of the voucher not spent rolls over into a no-tax/low-tax Health Savings Account, where it builds up.

Private money can also go into the account.
Tax is only assessed above a certain amount / on death.
By default, it goes to a zero-interest government account, but this can be changed by opening a suitable interest-earning HSA account at any American bank or credit union.

Hospitals are still required provide emergency care for the uninsured/poor, however, up to ½ of future vouchers can be garnished, proportional to the size of outstanding claims.
Vouchers and money from the HSA can be given to spouses or children for their HSAs, though not other relations (normally). It can also be disbursed in a will, but if so then it will be taxed as normal income.

Now, first objection is probably that this will bid up the price of medical care to the new floor. I believe that is unlikely - because the voucher accumulates and people don’t actually like randomly buying healthcare, it makes much more sense to save it up and spend it later as you normally would, or else just buy insurance.

Second objection is that people might launder the money to get it for themselves. In this case, the person they are screwing over is mostly their future self, so they have incentive not to do this.

Third objection, which I’m likely to get from my left-wing readers, is that this isn’t enough money. That’s probably true, but this is likely of more benefit than whatever the Republicans are currently cooking up. In the current situation we have some poor people buying the mandated insurance, but unable to actually get medical care because they cannot afford the deductible. Under this system, they can go get medical care tomorrow. Likewise, for pre-existing conditions, this ensures that at least the value of the voucher is available each year to pay for it.

Later administrations could raise the amount, but the benefit for the Republicans here is the preservation of the market mechanism. This is likely to be a popular program.

This could be coupled with a variety of other reforms to reduce overall healthcare costs, such as requiring hospitals to post information about their prices, success rates, etc. Don’t just cross your fingers and hope the market works. Education alleviates information asymmetry and lubricates markets. Create the right framework for suitable informed competition to take place in.

policy politics healthcare republicans flagpost

anaisnein

mitigatedchaos

I cannot trust it will actually turn out like that at all due to how this has gone previously.
Why I specified “agreement to execute anyone who commits an honor killing” is that it’s an ideological sin to do that, and thus serves as a costly signal that they actually care and aren’t just trying to pull one over like they have previously, when they promised this stuff would not happen.
(Also it would de-normalize honor killings, but you get the idea.)

anaisnein

It brings in the whole existing orthogonal discourse over the death penalty and complicates the already complicated debate terrain. Also, summary execution is more of a What’s Wrong With Those Others thing and less a What’s Right About Us Here thing and I would think you wouldn’t be enthusiastic about that, it instantiates the cultural decay you’re postulating.

Well, let’s assume that the plan is to create an international-thinking city-state that values this free migration.

Right off the bat, the existing high-immigration city-state that does not have an issue with honor killings is Singapore, where the sentence for murder is death by hanging. Until 2012, this was mandatory. So flat out, if you engage in an “honor killing” in Singapore, they will kill you.

But of course, we don’t have to just copy-paste Singapore.

Cultural practices have inertia. Apply that inertia to Italian cuisine and you get Chicago-style deep dish pizza. Apply that inertia to throwing acid on women to control them, and you get acid attacks by British gangs.

They have to be stopped before that inertia can take hold.

And since we’re being so heavily about freedom of movement, we want to put the brakes on this within one generation, since we can’t necessarily rely on other methods, like limiting the maximum size of one incoming ethnic group and where they live in order to fragment them such that their number of cultural graph edges is insufficient to sustain their culture.

That leaves responding to barbarism and medieval behaviors, to some degree, with medieval means.

To some degree you can rely on liberal atomization, but only if the conditions are right for that atomization to have an effect, which means no cousin marriages or other barriers that honor-killers and the like can use to stop their families from atomizing. (And note that banning all new cousin marriages is, itself, not without controversy.) It also takes a while.

The sharper the change, the greater the degree of braking force necessary. It must be communicated not just to the men involved, but to the entire community they are a part of that this activity is not just socially disapproved of by the ethnic majority (who they may not care about), but that it is bullshit for chumps that only an idiot would engage in.

Getting executed because your took up arms against the state might be martyrdom, but getting executed because you honor-killed your sister is just stupid (and therefore low-status).

Otherwise you risk a long-burning change that could ride under the surface until it obtains enough political support (which may not be legalization, but just deliberately ignoring the problem).

If 5% of your population cousin marry, it takes a congressman to end it.
If 10% of your population cousin marry, it takes a President.
If 30% of your population cousin marry, it takes a King.
The right time to end it, then, is before it cracks 6%.

Source: mitigatedchaos politics death cw ban cousin marriage flagpost

Who captures a wage subsidy?

Basically every benefit we give to the working poor ends up being an indirect subsidy for business - see, for example, employers telling their employees how to obtain food stamps.

One of the complaints about a wage subsidy over a higher minimum wage is that it will just be captured by employers, who will pay their employees less by that amount. That’s also potentially true of a basic income, and with a minimum wage, employers may opt to gain non-monetary compensation (e.g. terrible hours).

Now, here’s where the limits of my economics education probably show a bit, in that I’m not familiar with the literature on how, empirically, this works out. (Maybe @xhxhxhx can chime in.)

I realized that this is actually related to the marginal productivity of labor - how much revenue (and thus, potentially, profit) does each additional employee bring in, across the whole economy? There are limits to this based on the amount of equipment/capital needed for a marginal employee or marginal hours, including facility size, as well as the potential customers it might bring in (e.g. why haven’t they hired additional labor already?).

The reason for this is that to determine the leverage of a low-wage employee under a wage subsidy system, we need to know how many potential jobs our wage subsidy can create, and at what quality. How easy is it for an employee to just walk right out of the store, walk right in to another store, and get a new job? Even if the pay is somewhat lower, this creates a much stronger incentive against bad hours, bad bosses, and unsafe practices, about which employees will then either demand higher pay, or just tell the employers to knock it off.

However, that increase in leverage only occurs if enough potential jobs emerge, and this is more or less an empirical question.

The greater the marginal increase in the number of jobs per marginal decrease in minimum wage prior to subsidy, the more of the subsidy that will be captured by the workers. However, if cutting the minimum wage creates no new jobs, then leverage doesn’t change much at all and employers capture the majority of the subsidy.

If the leverage is high enough, wages may even be driven higher than they were prior to the subsidy, depending on employer margins that they were exploiting leverage over against employees.

However, since employers capturing part of the subsidy is potentially true for all subsidies for the working poor, even rental vouchers or healthcare, it has to be compared with other alternatives (such as basic income).

(For my preferred implementation, the accompanying decrease in minimum wage should be lower than the wage subsidy, and the wage subsidy should be paid directly to the employee, thus at least not resulting in a decrease in effective income even if the entire subsidy is captured.)

the invisible fist the iron hand economics flagpost policy

It’s not Time Travel Ethics

Suppose there is a girl who was born when her mother was sixteen. And her mother was born when her grandmother was sixteen. And suppose this burden of caring for a child at the age of 16 has contributed to an intergenerational cycle of poverty that has harmed her family and her education.

A boy of sixteen comes to her and says (roughly translated),

“Hey girl, your mother recklessly had a kid at age 16, and her mom recklessly had a kid at age 16, so you should get with me and recklessly have a kid at age 16! After all, if they didn’t do the same thing, you wouldn’t exist!”

Is this a good idea? I mean, after all, if they didn’t do it, she wouldn’t exist.

No, it is not a good idea. In fact, this argument does not make sense…

unless, implicit in the argument, you have access to a time machine and can change the past.

However, if one did have a time machine, that opens up an entirely different bucket of ethics which this argument completely fails to address.

This applies to abortion regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if your mother aborted you…” implies time travel.

This applies to immigration, regardless of whether other arguments are also valid - “but if immigration laws were different…” implies time travel.

philo flagpost politics culturepol

A Price Paid in National Will

We’ve all seen various Leftists denouncing “Nationalists and their dumb wars.” While it can be tempting to argue the point regarding past interventions, the future of Nationalism must lay in the future, not the past.

It’s important, in attempting to define a new form of Nationalism, to understand that dumb wars don’t just have a price paid in blood and treasure, but also in the national spirit. Dumb wars undermine and destroy Nationalism.

Nationalism is not only an ideology, but it’s also a form of ideological or political capital. The will of the people to support the government and fight on behalf of the country, while necessary to secure the national defense, is an exhaustible resource. It is very precious, for without it there cannot be a nation. Therefore, in addition to acting to promote it, we must also act to conserve it. A nation that can rise up as one in military response has far greater power and sovereignty than those with only fragmented support, as both its threats and defense are more credible.

Propaganda cannot be the answer, as truth has odds of coming out eventually, since it is less in conflict with reality. And it was some truth or another that lead many of us to become Nationalists in the first place.

Think about it. Suppose you get into some dumb, unwinnable war in the middle east or southeast Asia. In order to pay for the war, you have to raise taxes (if not now, then later), diverting resources from the civic goods those taxes might have paid for. To get the necessary manpower, you must either create a draft, which creates opposition to the draft and thus empowers internal opposition and counter-culture, or your have to raise taxes higher and send some of your most loyal men to get shot at.

Then the history comes along later and says that not only was the mission not a success, but you didn’t even get any resources out of it for the country.

Not only does this make people less likely to sign up for or provide material support for the nation’s wars, but they may come to believe that the nation is bad and turn against Nationalism itself.

How much less powerful would left-wing anti-Nationalists be without the Iraq War? How much less powerful would they be without the Vietnam War?

On top of this all, it may end up preventing the country from having the ability to fight wars in ways that it can win. Having sowed substantial doubt about the virtue of the nation’s military action itself, it will be harder to obtain the necessary political will for the required partial cultural conversion needed to ensure the invaded territory is permanently no longer an enemy.

(Of course, there are other factors that can lead to declines in Nationalism, even in countries with less substantial military adventurism. But those must be addressed separately.)

politics flagpost national technocracy

ranma-official

theonion:
“SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass....

Source: theonion queue

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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The Mitigated Chaos Plan for School