Oceans Yet to Burn

slartibartfastibast

Source: resistdrumpf the invisible fist the iron hand flagpost policy my politics national technocracy politics

argumate

Anonymous asked:

i'm starting to think universla basic income for is not perfect, but could really help. for example, victims of abuse, at home, in jobs etc would have some means at least to get out when they know it's time

argumate answered:

right, it’s not a panacea, but it helps to put a floor on exactly how terrible things can get.

mitigatedchaos

Though it does create a risk of potentially unlimited obligation, depending on national population policies.

politics policy

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.

mitigatedchaos

Reblog for context for new readers.

Source: silver-and-ivory politics policy national technocracy

andrewbatson.com

Can economics offer more than a counsel of despair to struggling places?

I just finished Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs, an admirably clear book about one of the most important trends of the day: the increasing concentration of American jobs, wealth an…

[epistemic status: significant fatigue is being masked by caffeine and other effects]

The best time for your city to be built for efficiency is the year 1950, when it was initially laid out. The next best time for your city to be built for efficiency is now.

Rent - Housing is a very significant expense. It can range from 22%-50% of income. Every dollar that your citizens spend on housing is a dollar that they cannot spend on something else.

There must be enough housing units, but they must be built in a way that is intelligent, and which does not conflict with other goals of efficiency. The regulatory regime for both renovation and new housing construction must be both effective and efficient.

If median household income in your city is $50,000, each one point reduction in rent frees $500 per household per year. If the city has 500,000 households, this amounts to $250M annually, which could be

spent on another government program (or infrastructure)
used to potentially lower wages without lowering standard of living, making the city more competitive for employers
allowed to escape untaxed, raising standard of living for citizens

Transport - In the US, a car costs over $8,000 a year. If the average household in our city has an income of $50,000, this is 16% of total annual income. At one car per household for 500,000 households, this amounts to $4,000M annually.

We can work to make car usage less frequent or necessary, which prolongs car lifespans and reduces accidents (and associated costs). However, the real binary is deciding whether to own a car at all.

For every 5% of our city that does not own a car, we free up $200M, minus the cost of our public transport network, to spend on something else that could be making our city more competitive, each year. If our public transport network were free, we could send 5% of our city’s population to university with this money (using a series of expiring loans that only have to be repaid if the person moves out of the city).

At the regional level, our city should have good commercial (airport) and industrial (seaport, river, rail) transport options, for cost-effective shipping of raw materials and goods and cost-effective business meetings.

Regulations - Regulations do not have to be non-existent. If we let companies step all over our city too much, the resulting social and environmental damage will render the city uncompetitive, and the costs pushed off onto the citizens will lower their effect standard of living. However…

Our regulations should be predictable and easy to comply with. Companies can plan for costs that they can foresee, but unplanned costs are significantly more expensive. Additionally, while allowing companies to pollute without consequence pushes costs off on everyone else and may decrease net efficiency, any regulations beyond those which are necessary is a loss - it is a form of waste.

Infrastructure & City Services - We want our infrastructure and city services to be cost-effective, as again, any money we save can either be spent on something else, or spent on more city services. Nailing the efficiency on every other aspect of the city will help with this - if half of our city doesn’t own a car, we’re talking a potential average %8 decrease in the cost of our cops, clerks, and judges. If our rent is only %25 of income, compared to other cities we could be looking at at 45% of income, our cops might cost $14,000 less, or we could get cops that are $14,000 better, because they have an effective wage which is 28% higher.

Triage - As the city’s population is falling, however, we may want to look at in-city relocation programs for residents which would allow us to de-urbanize subsections of the city.

In particular, this would allow us to maintain service levels by keeping density high enough for infrastructure and city services to remain cost effective. Infrastructure in the de-urbanized areas would be shut off and no longer maintained, and buildings would be demolished to prevent the pro-crime effect of vacant buildings.

Attracting Talent - You probably won’t attract all the talent of the cool, hip places, like New York - but you don’t have to. If your city offers high quality of life with low cost of living (a profit for employees!), it can attract sensible, competent people that are attractive to employers that aren’t looking to skim the cream of the crop from the entire country in a desperate arms race of absurd rent prices along the coasts.

It probably still pays to develop a university that has excellence synergistic with a key industry in the area to build up a unique talent pool allowing for city specialization competitive globally (although this is still somewhat risky).

However, I’d like to reiterate the idea of conditional loans here, depending on how much funding the city has available. These would go to promising people pursuing degrees in key local industrial/commercial sectors, which would gradually be paid off by the city so long as they remained in the city, or until paid off completely. This allows us to build a talent pool which is unique to our city, providing an indirect subsidy for employers, employees, and potentially improved economic productivity.

(Low cost of living per quality of living also helps us attract professors for our university!)

How do we get there?

That, I think, is a very good question. It is economically infeasible to rebuild the city into a more efficient form all at once. You’d go bankrupt if you tried.

I think, aside from some of these matters that exist primarily at the municipal level, the answer is that we redevelop subsections of the city around principles of efficiency over time. This allows us to maintain a productive base to keep our city alive long enough to build the next one, and as we connect these areas together with public transport, the overall value of each one will improve.

For some locations, even a genius invested with absolute municipal power could not pull it off, as the fundamentals of the location are not viable within the current economic context, but IMO, it is likely that combining everyone into a few ultra-dense, ultra-high-rent coastal cities is not actually the most economically efficient possible use of resources.

concrete and steel flagpost i guess policy

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

xhxhxhx

mitigatedchaos asked:

What is your opinion of me? And what do you think of my plot to replace congress with a new legislature of political party/think tank hybrids that bet on outcomes of legislation (as outlined in my "The National Delegation" posts, where I still owe squid another post but I won't have sit down access to a computer for a while)?

xhxhxhx answered:

on The National Delegation:

I think it’d be hard to legitimate such a goofy system ex nihilo and I don’t think its performance would be enough to legitimate it in action
I have a bunch of cavils about specification: I don’t think you could define policy outcomes or contract conditions with sufficient precision to make the market deep or efficient under most outcomes, and I don’t think you can define values with sufficient precision to make that constraint binding
I don’t think the policy outcomes would be much better, except to the extent that you might fix the system by excluding ‘incoherent’ or ‘imprecise’ values – which would mean the system wouldn’t really be doing what it promises
I’m deeply skeptical of any regulatory system that’s this hard and finicky – it’s like you’re putting the FDA or the FTC in charge of the whole system of government, and I don’t think market discipline is enough to get federal agencies to behave themselves
I think its worse than electoral democracy, although that’s not an especially strong belief, and I think it’d underperform purer technocracies or a purer liberal states

on you:

you put effort and thoughtfulness into your work – that’s good and that’s rare
I’m too much of a liberal to appreciate your commentary
you’re very kind and thoughtful, and I haven’t done enough to return the favor

mitigatedchaos

Oh, there appears to be a point of confusion - values are informal, not rigidly specified. And values are not explicitly what is bet on. It’s more along the lines of both parties claiming their legislation would reduce gun crime, as they often do, and betting against each other and with amounts, and “gun crime” is defined as a bundle of metrics to prevent min-maxing. It occurs to me that because so much policy is just flat out wrong at achieving its supposed aims, some fairly large improvements should be possible with even that much of a check on whether it works.

Ofc, there is also the question of what a purer technocracy would look like.

politics policy national technocracy the national delegation

One of the classic problems around requiring regulations is that people just don’t have, and cannot easily obtain, that much information about businesses sometimes, which is required for markets to actually work.

(Even when information is free or nearly-free, the Market pays people to sabotage it, just like it pays people to sabotage Market competition through buying politicians.)

This is part of my interest in substituting mandatory insurance schemes for explicit regulations, provided the insurance regulations are themselves well-designed. The customer may not know much about the safety of the business, but the insurance company, which has a long-standing relationship with the business, does.

And the less the insurance company knows about the business, the more money it charges for insurance, offsetting some of the risk of harm and potentially communicating risk information to customers.

the invisible fist policy politics the iron hand

mitigatedchaos

The National Delegation

mitigatedchaos

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.

mitigatedchaos

Think you need to take a closer look at Robin Hanson, something I thought I’d never say
Specifically, the problem is that predicting the results isn’t the issue, it’s predicting the change in results given some policy change
I think Hanson has people bet on outcome both with and without policy

I may have to look into that, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable. Betting for outcomes based on whether the bill passes or fails to pass certainly provides more information for our voters/etc.

One big problem is that people are going to use this not to predict, but to hedge
It will be financialized
If you believe Hanson that markets are perfect, that’s not a problem it will all work out
if you haven’t had your skull smashed with a brick every day for the past 20 years or worked in the econ dept at GMU, you should be skeptical.

Sorry, I guess I should have been more clear in my intentions earlier.

While the probability estimates produced by the prediction market are interesting, the real purposes are more like:

1. Punish politicians that are actively at odds with the truth/reward those who have some idea what they’re doing, so that eventually the system is dominated by more clueful politicals who spend less time huffing ideology. Hopefully, this will result in more effective policy which is more aligned with reality.

(I’m of the opinion that there are many policies that it’s said you can’t do, because markets etc, but which you could do if you were smart about it. So I want those to come up, actually testing some of these policies before they come up, etc.)

2. Make politicians be more specific and truthful about the outcomes of policies in measurable ways, making it more difficult to do one thing and say another.

3. Track the effectiveness of policies over time so that better policy can be created in the future (through the metrics gathered to feed the market, not the market itself).

Would hedging interfere with those? I’m not so sure. It is, itself, information. It may also depend on the market’s design itself.

mitigatedchaos

@collapsedsquid

Alright, then you’re gonna have the problem of “who gets to decide what comes up for prediction and how?” with the various possibilities for manipulation.

Yes, a challenge in itself. My opinion is that it must be easier to get stuff into the prediction pool than it is to pass the legislation. Otherwise, it just degrades to normal legislature with some fluff on top.

So, off the top of my head, it may require 30-40% approval to get an item into the prediction pool, perhaps with a limit on the number of items each DCO can put into the pool.

Second and related is that you can basically rewarding people who are connected rather than accurate
To some extent, this doesn’t matter, connections are a part of effective policy too, much as I wish they were not
But it comes down to who can manipulate the outcomes and who has the inside track on what people will do.

- court will be needed so they can sue each other when they cheat

- baskets of metrics harder to game than single metric, so all metrics must be baskets

- hard to actually game some of the more challenging ones by outside interference if metric collection is at all accurate, simply too costly, borders on cost of actually fixing the problem

I’ll expand on this when I have access to an actual computer, which will be a while.

politics policy national technocracy the national delegation

squareallworthy

theage.com.au

Melbourne's recycling mountain grows higher each day as industry hits 'dead end'

Hundreds of tonnes of plastic and paper pile up at Melbourne's recyclers every day.

Liam Mannix

argumate

ironically the recycling plants catch fire so frequently that they are essentially just incinerating the waste instead of recycling it.

voxette-vk

Post-consumer recycling of most non-metallic resources is just pointless.

squareallworthy

There is a point, but it’s not obvious. There’s a good article on this on Cato Unbound here. The unseen benefit of recycling is to divert material away from landfills, which are expensive. So expensive, in fact, that if we charged people the true cost of landfill disposal, they would resort to illegal dumping. We don’t want that, so we subsidize garbage disposal at the consumer level, and post-consumer recycling programs are an attempt to mitigate the cost of that subsidy.

mitigatedchaos

It’s putting the charge at the wrong end of the system. Put a landfill deposit on new products based on their rough contents, use the principal to buy the land and the interest to operate the landfills. Pay out money from the fund when recycling firms permanently recover waste from the landfill, based on rough contents.

Efficient land and resource usage, recycling, purchasing of used goods thereby incentivized.

Source: argumate politics policy national technocracy

ranma-official

theonion:
“WASHINGTON—After persistent efforts by Republicans to wipe out the healthcare law over the past seven years, experts warned Wednesday that the repeated attempts at eradicating Obamacare may have created an ultra-resistant super law. “Given...

Source: theonion politics policy

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

The Mitigated Chaos Plan for School

Can economics offer more than a counsel of despair to struggling places?

Who captures a wage subsidy?

The National Delegation

Melbourne's recycling mountain grows higher each day as industry hits 'dead end'