I looked him up after reading this post, his blog seems to have a few interesting things but nothing epic. Could someone link me to things they find particularly impressive/interesting?
(For the record I have no memory of him being mentioned before,)
I am also a long-time LW lurker, and this thread finally made me open an account. I’ve read most of the main Moldbug sequences (Cathedral/neocameralism/economics) over the past few months.
I was very pleased to find that this thread existed, particularly in the context of the phenomenon identified in that essay which coined the term ‘insight porn’. I had previously expended many brain-hours pondering the nature of this set of closely affiliated ideas, and I still don’t think I have entirely satisfactory answers.
(None of the linked articles are among what I’d recommend, however. I can’t say if that’s because I can’t understand them and am biased, or because they are mostly hot air and rhetoric.
I cannot comment on Austrian economics as I don’t know what to believe about any economic theory at all, but here, in 1998, Krugman criticises it as a morality fable that doesn’t, in Bayesian terms, pay rent in anticipated experience—and in modern times, he sustains his criticism of its descriptive and predictive worth. Here is some other economist’s brief slam of Austrian epistemology.
Generally the Less Wrong ‘mainstream’ seems to dismiss it out of hand for its non-empiricism and incompartibility with Traditional Rationality.)
Very enjoyable, but not particularly rigorous compare and contrast of Keynesian and Austrian economics here and sequel.
My favorite quote (put in the mouth of Hayek in the second video around 3:40): “If every worker was staffed in the Army and Fleet, we’d have full employment—and nothing to eat.” (This is aimed at the Keynesian argument that WWII ended the Great Depression.)
Personally, I’m doubtful either theory is better—they both run on fundamental assumptions about what is happening in the market. But if the actual market resembles neither assumption, both predictions will be very misleading.
When it comes to monetary theory, there are no controlled experiments possible. So, one has to deduce from first principles. Separately, there is the issue of experts disagreeing, sometimes on basics. Look at what is going on right now, with Krugman disagreeing with Sumner. So, who does one follow: The Nobel Laureate or the man the Federal Reserve seems to be following? Perhaps neither? We certainly cannot follow both.
The leap from “controlled experiments are not possible” to “one has to deduce from first principles” is huge and unsupported. The results of controlled experiments do not exhaust the available empirical evidence by a long shot. We have a lot of data about the effects of monetary policy from around the world. True, inferring causality from this data is not nearly as straightforward as inferring causality from a randomized controlled trial, but it’s still a lot more reliable than deduction from first principles, I would think.
Think about how your argument sounds when applied to cosmological theories about the very early universe. We have a number of different theories that cannot be simultaneously right, and we cannot conduct controlled experiments. Would you endorse deduction from first principles in this instance as well?
Please see my reply above to pragmatist.
To add a bit, the rigor in monetary economics today is so far behind physics, it is not fair to compare the two subjects.
I know it’s been a while since this comment, but I wanted to comment that sound deduction (ie, logical reasoning) on top of correct premises trumps other forms of evidence, even well-controlled, large-sample experiments.
As an analogy, I find fascinating the MWI vs Collapse debate at LW—Eliezer has concluded MWI wins as an outcome of pure reasoning. No empirical evidence required. It will be (is?) wonderful if (when?) we factorize large numbers quickly and that is evidence of MWI, but as above, it would be (is?) superfluous. If the reasoning offered by Eliezer is coherent (I don’t know enough to judge), case closed. Please correct me if I have misunderstood. Thanks
Edit: MWI paragraph added.
Inferring causality from a time-series of various economic variables is incoherent. There first needs to be a deductive understanding of what the causal relationships are between economic variables. That is what is meant by “first principles” here—perhaps the disagreement is semantic.
Data about effects of economic policy tells us nothing if one has not already pre-supposed causal relationships between certain variables (ie, which variable is affecting which). If one had not done so, how does one know which variables to link with which other one? The causality which is being claimed to be derived is actually assumed or it is a result of the data-mining effect.
Thus, the first principles analysis: What is an economy?
I will read the Moldbug article, although I have to say I’m not optimistic, given my past experience with his writing. But I do want to disagree on this:
Inferring causality from a time-series of various economic variables is incoherent… Data about effects of economic policy tells us nothing if one has not already pre-supposed causal relationships between certain variables (ie, which variable is affecting which). If one had not done so, how does one know which variables to link with which other one?
I think you are either underestimating the tools at our disposal for causal discovery, or you have an evidential standard for causality that is way too high. Are you familiar with Judea Pearl’s work on inferring causation from probabilities? Check out this sweet post by Eliezer if you’re not.
ETA: I’m only a few paragraphs into the Moldbug piece and my hackles are already rising. He has already declared that a conscious being must be rational “by definition” and that other peoples’ desires are unknowable, also “by definition”. I don’t think either of these claims are true (assuming the words have their usual meanings), let alone true by definition. This doesn’t bode well, but I’ll keep reading.
Thanks. I have read that post by Eliezer before. The issue with monetary economics is the number of variables. Money is one half of every single transaction, in a sophisticated economy.
Re definitions, the meaning of rational there is that the person acts based on his internal map of the world (this is how Mises used the word way back when and it is part of parlance in Misesian economics). It does not mean what LW thinks it means.
Re unknowable desires, it is a way of saying that economically relevant desires are revealed by economic actions. Demand means being willing and able to pay.
Semantic issue in both cases :)
I mean that in a monetary economy, one always buys goods and services with money. One side of the transaction is money, whatever it is. Sophisticated here means an economy that has progressed beyond barter and developed a medium of exchange and a store of value, ie, Money.
Inferring causality from a time-series of various economic variables is incoherent. There first needs to be a deductive understanding of what the causal relationships are between economic variables. That is what is meant by “first principles” here—perhaps the disagreement is semantic.
If I replace “economic variables” with “astronomy” what part of this sentence changes in implication? Why is this incoherent for some fields? The level of rigor cannot be the only difference: Physics and astronomy have become more rigorous over time, not by discussing first principles, even when moving from Aristotle to Medieval physics to Newtonian physics, but rather by adopting principles based on the empirical data. The same goes for the switch from Ptolemaic systems to Copernicus and then Kepler. It is the empirical data that matters, the apparent time-series of planetary and stellar motion.
Thus, the first principles analysis: What is an economy?
So that’s true, but until the late 1700s (essentially post Newton) no one had any capacity to do so (because no ideas anyone had connected the two at all in a useful way). Would this sort of claim then been valid in 1650?
Re the Q about rent-paying: Yes. You should rightly be skeptical now, but please read the Economics sub-section at Moldbuggery with an open mind. Or if you prefer, start with Rothbard’s ‘Man Economy and State’.
Economics—of all subjects—pays rent.
This doesn’t answer the question. Note that no one is arguing that economics doesn’t pay rent. The question was whether arguing over ’”what is an economy” pays rent or not.
I misunderstood the Q. In my opinion, yes. It is, I think, the intuitive way to get a sound (ie, based on sheer deductive coherence) grasp of the subject.
Well, in a sense every definition carries an implicit assertion that the described object corresponds to a cluster in thing space. See also 37 ways that words can be wrong.
Re Physics, please correct me as required but in the way I use the phrase “first principles” here, Physics does not have any first principles.
Yes it does. They’re just so implicit in our intuition about how the world works that we don’t notice them. For example, consider all the implicit assumptions necessary for statements like “these two sticks have the same length” to be meaningful.
So, who does one follow: The Nobel Laureate or the man the Federal Reserve seems to be following? Perhaps neither? We certainly cannot follow both
If you didn’t accept the wisdom of the Federal Reserve before in its policies and theoretical choices, why would you accept the wisdom of the Federal Reserve after they have supposedly begun listening to Sumner? Why, indeed, does their choice matter at all to someone considering whether to believe Krugman, Sumner, or neither?
Imagine a square matrix in which our n commodities are rows and columns. How much real information is there in this matrix? Obviously, the oil-oil exchange rate is always 1, and the oil-wheat and wheat-oil rates are the same thing. So half our boxes, plus n, become blank.
But this is by no means enough blanking. Because we note an interesting fact—if this entire marketplace clears, it cannot be possible to construct a cycle of exchanges through which one ends up with more wheat, or oil, or silver, or anything, than one started with. This is obviously a desirable trade, and yet in a cleared market there are no desirable trades.
This statement is misleading economics—markets work because individuals preferences do not match the general consensus. Because of comparative advantage, there’s no particular reason to expect individual valuations to ever exactly match the market rates.
Later, Moldbug notes people want accumulate money, but rejects the explanation that it is valued because it is the medium of exchange. It is confusing when the monetary object is actually of some value (i.e. gold or silver), but no one uses the gold standard any more. There’s really no reason to treat fiat money as a good. And all of the discussion assumes that treating money as a good makes sense.
Finally, Moldbug’s discussion of the transition from gold-standard to fiat money without discussing private currency at all seems like more selective history. All selective history is worthless—it’s like throwing out all the data from an experiment that does not agree with your hypothesis.
My response, based on my current understanding, such as it is. Note the qualifier “marketplace clears”. In the process of clearing, a market undergoes price-discovery and any arbitrage opportunities are taken and thus removed. Fiat money is a good, in economic terms. It exchanges for other goods.
Note the qualifier “marketplace clears”. In the process of clearing, a market undergoes price-discovery and any arbitrage opportunities are taken and thus removed.
“Marketplace clears” doesn’t imply that everyone agrees that the price = the value. McDonald’s has cheeseburgers on sale for ~$1. That’s probably the market clearing price. I still don’t think a cheeseburger creates $1 of value for me.
If Moldbug makes a basic econ error (by conflating value and price), then there’s no reason to trust any other part of his “return to first principles of economics.”
Fiat money is a good, in economic terms. It exchanges for other goods.
“exchanges for other goods” is a bizarre definition of good. The hoarding-of-physical-objects metaphor is misleading.
“Here at UR, “economics” is not the study of how real economies work. It is the study of how economies should work ”
should not bring to mind this:
“Here at Fantasy University, “physics” is not the study of how real physical principles work. It is the study of how physics should work.”
or should not raise giant red flags that you are about to be fed a steaming pile of horse shit. I don’t know about everyone else but for me the moment anyone purports to dictate how the world ought to be over and above how it actually is they are engaged in creative fiction not science.
When someone begins from such massive thought errors what follows, if they are at all rigorous, cannot but help be equally flawed and is therefore not worth my time.
“Here at Fantasy University, “physics” is not the study of how real physical principles work. It is the study of how physics should work.” or should not raise giant red flags that you are about to be fed a steaming pile of horse shit.
Alright, let’s start with the basics like Galileo and Newton’s laws of motions. Assume a frictionless plane in a vacuum on which we place a perfectly rigid body—hey wait where are you going?
Vacuums exist. Nearly frictionless planes and more or less perfectly rigid bodies actually exist. There is nothing wrong with abstraction based on objective reality. Claiming that one is about to declare how economies ought to work is not a abstraction based on a preexisting reality. It is attempting to impose one’s own subjective needs wants and desires on reality.
That is not science, that is pseudoscience.
Spherical cow is not “how science is done”. It is a joke. Jokes rely on reversing expectations, going counter to reality, for the surprise element. How science is actually done is you begin with the intent to describe the real world and from there you use whatever tools, intellectual or actual, at your disposal in order to accomplish your goal.
If one’s goal is not to describe how economies actually work you are not doing science. Declaring what one’s ideal economy ought to be is not the same as describing how a real economy would behave under ideal conditions. If I declare how photosynthesis ought to work I am not doing the same thing as describing how photosynthesis actually works under ideal conditions. It seems like a subtle distinction but it is not and failing to understand this difference has lead to a lot of bad science by lesser minds.
Suppose a man goes to the supermarket with a shopping list given him by his wife on which are written the words “beans, butter, bacon and bread”. Suppose as he goes around with his shopping cart selecting these items, he is followed by a detective who writes down everything he takes. As they emerge from the store both the shopper and the detective will have identical lists. But the function of the lists is quite different. In the case of the shopper’s list the purpose of the list is, so to speak, to get the world to match the words; the man is supposed to make his actions fit the list. In the case of the detective, the purpose of the list is to make the words match the world; the man is supposed to make the list fit the actions of the shopper. This can be further demonstrated by observing the role of “mistake” in the two cases. If the detective gets home and suddenly realizes that the man bought pork chops instead of bacon, he can simply erase the word “bacon” and write “pork chops”. But if the shopper gets home and his wife points out that he has bought pork chops when he should have bought bacon he cannot correct the mistake by erasing “bacon” from the list and writing “pork chops”.
Scientists are detectives attempting to describe how the world behaves. If the world behaves differently than we expect we erase bacon and write down pork chops even if we really would prefer bacon. Idealists, fantasists and Austrian school economists want bacon on the detective’s list so they write down bacon and blame reality for not living up to their desires.
Vacuums exist. Nearly frictionless planes and more or less perfectly rigid bodies actually exist. There is nothing wrong with abstraction based on objective reality. Claiming that one is about to declare how economies ought to work is not a abstraction based on a preexisting reality. It is attempting to impose one’s own subjective needs wants and desires on reality.
I don’t see any difference between the idealizing in either case.
Spherical cow is not “how science is done”. It is a joke. Jokes rely on reversing expectations, going counter to reality, for the surprise element. How science is actually done is you begin with the intent to describe the real world and from there you use whatever tools, intellectual or actual, at your disposal in order to accomplish your goal.
Really? I always thought it was a veiled criticism of abstraction gone wrong—sterile abstractions, abstractions which can’t then be linked back to the real world.
Actually, the is/ought distinction is omnipresent in the complete Moldbug thesis, as espoused in his, uh, sequences. Hence the reformulation of politics as an amoral engineering challenge.
There’s a lot of deliberately inflammatory language present, as well as a relatively high inferential distance, to which the inflammatory language mostly serves to filter the audience for, or at least a positive affect.
Translated into English, all that statement says is “Here is a presentation of classical or Austrian economics. This is not practised at large anywhere on earth today (for reasons which will be divulged elsewhere).”
Yes, I looked at a few posts from that before posting. None of it seemed especially interesting. As far as I can see he has a few unique ideas, but they’re not explained or substansiated enough to take very seriously.
To clarify, I was hoping for examples of what people considered his ‘best’ or most readable posts so I could see if the ones I’d read were unrepresentative.
I looked him up after reading this post, his blog seems to have a few interesting things but nothing epic. Could someone link me to things they find particularly impressive/interesting?
(For the record I have no memory of him being mentioned before,)
I am also a long-time LW lurker, and this thread finally made me open an account. I’ve read most of the main Moldbug sequences (Cathedral/neocameralism/economics) over the past few months.
I was very pleased to find that this thread existed, particularly in the context of the phenomenon identified in that essay which coined the term ‘insight porn’. I had previously expended many brain-hours pondering the nature of this set of closely affiliated ideas, and I still don’t think I have entirely satisfactory answers.
http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.co.nz/2012/09/trying-to-see-through-unified-theory-of.html
Upvoted for practicing what you preach.
(None of the linked articles are among what I’d recommend, however. I can’t say if that’s because I can’t understand them and am biased, or because they are mostly hot air and rhetoric.
I cannot comment on Austrian economics as I don’t know what to believe about any economic theory at all, but here, in 1998, Krugman criticises it as a morality fable that doesn’t, in Bayesian terms, pay rent in anticipated experience—and in modern times, he sustains his criticism of its descriptive and predictive worth. Here is some other economist’s brief slam of Austrian epistemology.
Generally the Less Wrong ‘mainstream’ seems to dismiss it out of hand for its non-empiricism and incompartibility with Traditional Rationality.)
Very enjoyable, but not particularly rigorous compare and contrast of Keynesian and Austrian economics here and sequel.
My favorite quote (put in the mouth of Hayek in the second video around 3:40): “If every worker was staffed in the Army and Fleet, we’d have full employment—and nothing to eat.” (This is aimed at the Keynesian argument that WWII ended the Great Depression.)
Personally, I’m doubtful either theory is better—they both run on fundamental assumptions about what is happening in the market. But if the actual market resembles neither assumption, both predictions will be very misleading.
The leap from “controlled experiments are not possible” to “one has to deduce from first principles” is huge and unsupported. The results of controlled experiments do not exhaust the available empirical evidence by a long shot. We have a lot of data about the effects of monetary policy from around the world. True, inferring causality from this data is not nearly as straightforward as inferring causality from a randomized controlled trial, but it’s still a lot more reliable than deduction from first principles, I would think.
Think about how your argument sounds when applied to cosmological theories about the very early universe. We have a number of different theories that cannot be simultaneously right, and we cannot conduct controlled experiments. Would you endorse deduction from first principles in this instance as well?
Yes, whenever people try to make this sort of argument I have to wonder how they think we should do astronomy.
I will read the Moldbug article, although I have to say I’m not optimistic, given my past experience with his writing. But I do want to disagree on this:
I think you are either underestimating the tools at our disposal for causal discovery, or you have an evidential standard for causality that is way too high. Are you familiar with Judea Pearl’s work on inferring causation from probabilities? Check out this sweet post by Eliezer if you’re not.
ETA: I’m only a few paragraphs into the Moldbug piece and my hackles are already rising. He has already declared that a conscious being must be rational “by definition” and that other peoples’ desires are unknowable, also “by definition”. I don’t think either of these claims are true (assuming the words have their usual meanings), let alone true by definition. This doesn’t bode well, but I’ll keep reading.
Economies that have multiple currencies are unsophisticated...?
If I replace “economic variables” with “astronomy” what part of this sentence changes in implication? Why is this incoherent for some fields? The level of rigor cannot be the only difference: Physics and astronomy have become more rigorous over time, not by discussing first principles, even when moving from Aristotle to Medieval physics to Newtonian physics, but rather by adopting principles based on the empirical data. The same goes for the switch from Ptolemaic systems to Copernicus and then Kepler. It is the empirical data that matters, the apparent time-series of planetary and stellar motion.
Does arguing over this definition pay any rent?
One can do controlled experiments in physics here on Earth and apply the results to astronomy.
So that’s true, but until the late 1700s (essentially post Newton) no one had any capacity to do so (because no ideas anyone had connected the two at all in a useful way). Would this sort of claim then been valid in 1650?
This doesn’t answer the question. Note that no one is arguing that economics doesn’t pay rent. The question was whether arguing over ’”what is an economy” pays rent or not.
So, can you explain how arguing over the definition of a word can ever pay rent?
Well, in a sense every definition carries an implicit assertion that the described object corresponds to a cluster in thing space. See also 37 ways that words can be wrong.
Yes it does. They’re just so implicit in our intuition about how the world works that we don’t notice them. For example, consider all the implicit assumptions necessary for statements like “these two sticks have the same length” to be meaningful.
So, why does physics have no such first principles but economics does?
If you didn’t accept the wisdom of the Federal Reserve before in its policies and theoretical choices, why would you accept the wisdom of the Federal Reserve after they have supposedly begun listening to Sumner? Why, indeed, does their choice matter at all to someone considering whether to believe Krugman, Sumner, or neither?
From the article:
This statement is misleading economics—markets work because individuals preferences do not match the general consensus. Because of comparative advantage, there’s no particular reason to expect individual valuations to ever exactly match the market rates.
Later, Moldbug notes people want accumulate money, but rejects the explanation that it is valued because it is the medium of exchange. It is confusing when the monetary object is actually of some value (i.e. gold or silver), but no one uses the gold standard any more. There’s really no reason to treat fiat money as a good. And all of the discussion assumes that treating money as a good makes sense.
Finally, Moldbug’s discussion of the transition from gold-standard to fiat money without discussing private currency at all seems like more selective history. All selective history is worthless—it’s like throwing out all the data from an experiment that does not agree with your hypothesis.
“Marketplace clears” doesn’t imply that everyone agrees that the price = the value. McDonald’s has cheeseburgers on sale for ~$1. That’s probably the market clearing price. I still don’t think a cheeseburger creates $1 of value for me.
If Moldbug makes a basic econ error (by conflating value and price), then there’s no reason to trust any other part of his “return to first principles of economics.”
“exchanges for other goods” is a bizarre definition of good. The hoarding-of-physical-objects metaphor is misleading.
I cannot imagine why this:
“Here at UR, “economics” is not the study of how real economies work. It is the study of how economies should work ”
should not bring to mind this:
“Here at Fantasy University, “physics” is not the study of how real physical principles work. It is the study of how physics should work.”
or should not raise giant red flags that you are about to be fed a steaming pile of horse shit. I don’t know about everyone else but for me the moment anyone purports to dictate how the world ought to be over and above how it actually is they are engaged in creative fiction not science.
When someone begins from such massive thought errors what follows, if they are at all rigorous, cannot but help be equally flawed and is therefore not worth my time.
Spherical cow is how science is done. What you are complaining about is in the realm of engineering.
Alright, let’s start with the basics like Galileo and Newton’s laws of motions. Assume a frictionless plane in a vacuum on which we place a perfectly rigid body—hey wait where are you going?
Vacuums exist. Nearly frictionless planes and more or less perfectly rigid bodies actually exist. There is nothing wrong with abstraction based on objective reality. Claiming that one is about to declare how economies ought to work is not a abstraction based on a preexisting reality. It is attempting to impose one’s own subjective needs wants and desires on reality.
That is not science, that is pseudoscience.
Spherical cow is not “how science is done”. It is a joke. Jokes rely on reversing expectations, going counter to reality, for the surprise element. How science is actually done is you begin with the intent to describe the real world and from there you use whatever tools, intellectual or actual, at your disposal in order to accomplish your goal.
If one’s goal is not to describe how economies actually work you are not doing science. Declaring what one’s ideal economy ought to be is not the same as describing how a real economy would behave under ideal conditions. If I declare how photosynthesis ought to work I am not doing the same thing as describing how photosynthesis actually works under ideal conditions. It seems like a subtle distinction but it is not and failing to understand this difference has lead to a lot of bad science by lesser minds.
Suppose a man goes to the supermarket with a shopping list given him by his wife on which are written the words “beans, butter, bacon and bread”. Suppose as he goes around with his shopping cart selecting these items, he is followed by a detective who writes down everything he takes. As they emerge from the store both the shopper and the detective will have identical lists. But the function of the lists is quite different. In the case of the shopper’s list the purpose of the list is, so to speak, to get the world to match the words; the man is supposed to make his actions fit the list. In the case of the detective, the purpose of the list is to make the words match the world; the man is supposed to make the list fit the actions of the shopper. This can be further demonstrated by observing the role of “mistake” in the two cases. If the detective gets home and suddenly realizes that the man bought pork chops instead of bacon, he can simply erase the word “bacon” and write “pork chops”. But if the shopper gets home and his wife points out that he has bought pork chops when he should have bought bacon he cannot correct the mistake by erasing “bacon” from the list and writing “pork chops”.
Scientists are detectives attempting to describe how the world behaves. If the world behaves differently than we expect we erase bacon and write down pork chops even if we really would prefer bacon. Idealists, fantasists and Austrian school economists want bacon on the detective’s list so they write down bacon and blame reality for not living up to their desires.
That’s religion, not science.
Partial vacuums exist. Somewhat frictionless planes, somewhat rigid bodies exist.
I don’t see any difference between the idealizing in either case.
Really? I always thought it was a veiled criticism of abstraction gone wrong—sterile abstractions, abstractions which can’t then be linked back to the real world.
If you say so.
Actually, the is/ought distinction is omnipresent in the complete Moldbug thesis, as espoused in his, uh, sequences. Hence the reformulation of politics as an amoral engineering challenge.
There’s a lot of deliberately inflammatory language present, as well as a relatively high inferential distance, to which the inflammatory language mostly serves to filter the audience for, or at least a positive affect.
Translated into English, all that statement says is “Here is a presentation of classical or Austrian economics. This is not practised at large anywhere on earth today (for reasons which will be divulged elsewhere).”
A formalist manifesto is thought-provoking. The bit there about moderates deeply changed the way I thought about “moderates” thereafter.
http://moldbuggery.blogspot.se/
Yes, I looked at a few posts from that before posting. None of it seemed especially interesting. As far as I can see he has a few unique ideas, but they’re not explained or substansiated enough to take very seriously.
To clarify, I was hoping for examples of what people considered his ‘best’ or most readable posts so I could see if the ones I’d read were unrepresentative.
Two pieces of his that I linked to and have been extensively discussed by LessWrong:
Belief in religion considered harmful?
Five ways to classify belief systems
You might want to check out the recommendations people make there.
I’d add this: Idealism is not great