That’s sort of moot for 2 reasons. Firstly what I have proposed would be the game theoretically optimal approach to solving the problem of a super terrbad ai. There is no better approach against such a player. I would also suggest there is no other reasonable approach. And so this speaks to the speed in relation to other possible proposed solutions.
Now of course we are still being theoretical here, but its relevant to point that out.
The currently known means for finding game-theoretically optimal choices are, shall we say, impractical in this sort of situation. I mean, chess is game-theoretically trivial (in terms of the sort of game theory I take it you have in mind) -- but actually finding an optimal strategy involves vastly more computation than we have any means of deploying, and even finding a strategy good enough to play as well as the best human players took multiple decades of work by many smart people and a whole lot of Moore’s law.
Perhaps I’m not understanding your argument, though. Why does what you say make what I say “sort of moot”?
So lets take poker for example. I have argued (lets take it as an assumption which should be fine) that poker players never have enough empirical evidence to know their own winrates. It’s always a guess and since the game isn’t solved they are really guessing about whether they are profitable and how profitable they are. IF they had a standard basis for value then it could be arranged that players brute force the solution to poker. That is to say if players knew who was playing correctly then they would tend towards the correct players strategy.
So there is an argument, to be explored, that the reason we can’t solve chess is because we are not using our biggest computer which is the entirety of our markets.
The reason your points are “moot” or not significant, is because there is not theoretically possible “better’ way of dealing with ai, than having a stable metric of value.
This happens because objective value is perfectly tied to objective morality. That which we all value is that which we all feel is good.
there is an argument [...] that the reason we can’t solve chess is because we are not using our biggest computer which is the entirety of our markets.
“The entirety of our markets” do not have anywhere near enough computational power to solve chess. (At least, not unless someone comes up with a novel way of solving chess that’s much cleverer than anything currently known.)
That which we all value is that which we all feel is good.
It sounds as if this is meant to be shorthand for some sort of argument for your thesis (though I’m not sure exactly what thesis) but if so I am not optimistic about the prospects for the argument’s success given that “we all” don’t value or feel the same things as one another.
“The entirety of our markets” do not have anywhere near enough computational power to solve chess. (At least, not unless someone comes up with a novel way of solving chess that’s much cleverer than anything currently known.)
It is the opinion of some well established (and historical) economics philosophers the markets can determine the optimal distribution of our commodities. Such an endeavor is at least several orders of magnitudes higher than the computing power required to solve chess.
“It sounds as if this is meant to be shorthand for some sort of argument for your thesis (though I’m not sure exactly what thesis) but if so I am not optimistic about the prospects for the argument’s success given that “we all” don’t value or feel the same things as one another.”
You have stepped outside the premise again, which is a stable metric of value, this implies objectivity, which implies we all agree on the value of it. This is the premise.
It is the opinion of some well established [...] economics philosophers that markets can determine the optimal distribution of our commodities. [...]
Let me know when they get their Fields Medals (or perhaps, if it turns out that they’re right but that the ways in which markets do this are noncomputable) their Nobel prizes, and then we can discuss this further.
[...] we all agree on the value of it. This is the premise.
Oh. Then your premise is flatly wrong, since people in fact don’t all agree about value.
(In any case, “objective” doesn’t imply everyone agrees. Whether life on earth has been around for more than a million years is a matter of objective fact, but people manage to disagree about it.)
Well I am speaking of Hayek Nash and Szabo (and smith) and I don’t think medals makes for a strong argument (especially vs the stated fellows.
“Oh. Then your premise is flatly wrong, since people in fact don’t all agree about value.”
By what definition and application of the word premise, is it “wrong”? I am suggesting we take the premise as given, and I would like to speak of the implications. Calling it wrong is silly.
“(In any case, “objective” doesn’t imply everyone agrees. Whether life on earth has been around for more than a million years is a matter of objective fact, but people manage to disagree about it.)”
The nature of money is such that “everyone agrees” that is how it becomes money and it is therefore and thus “objective”. But I am not yet speaking to that, I am speaking to the premise which is a value metric that everyone DOES agree on.
I don’t think medals makes for a strong argument (especially vs the stated fellows).
Maybe you are misunderstanding my argument, which isn’t “a bunch of clever people think differently, so Hayek et al must be wrong” but “if you are correctly describing what Hayek et al claim, and if they are right about that, then someone has found either an algorithm worthy of the Fields medal or a discovery of non-algorithmic physics worthy of a Nobel prize”.
I am suggesting we take the premise as given, and I would like to speak of the implications.
I am suggesting that if I take at face value what you say about the premise, then it is known to be false, and I am not very interesting in taking as given something that is known to be false. (But very likely you do not actually mean to claim what on the face of it you seem to be claiming, namely that everyone actually agrees about what matters.)
The nature of money is such that “everyone agrees” that is how it becomes money
I think this is exactly wrong. Prices (in a sufficiently free and sufficiently liquid market) tend to equalize, but not because everyone agrees but because when people disagree there are ways to get rich by noticing the fact, and when you do that the result is to move others closer to agreement.
In any case, this only works when you have markets with no transaction costs, and plenty of liquidity. There are many things for which no such markets exist or seem likely to exist. (Random example: I care whether and how dearly my wife loves me. No doubt I would pay, if need and opportunity arose, to have her love me more rather than less. But there is no market in my wife’s love, it’s hard to see how there ever could be, if you tried to make one it’s hard to see how it would actually help anything, and by trading in such a market I would gravely disturb the very thing the market was trying to price. This is not an observation about the fuzziness of the word “love”; essentially all of that would remain true if you operationalized it in terms of affectionate-sounding words, physical intimacy, kind deeds, and so forth.)
Yes Nash will get the medals for Ideal Money, this is what I am suggesting.
I am not proposing something “false” as a premise. I am saying, assume an objective metric for value exists (and then lets tend to the ramifications/implications). There is nothing false about that....
What I am saying about money, that you want to suggest is false, is that it is our most objective valuation metric. There is no more objective device for measuring value, in this world.
The rest you are suggesting is a way of saying we don’t have free markets now, but if we continue to improve we will asymptotically approach it at the limits. Then you might agree at the limits our money will be stable in the valuation sense and COULD be such a metric (but its value isn’t stable at present time!)
In regard to your wifes love the market value’s it at a constant in relation to this theoretical notion, that your subjective valuation disagrees with the ultimate objective metric (remember its a premise that doesn’t necessarily exist) doesn’t break the standard.
I am saying, assume an objective metric for value exists. [...] There is nothing false about that
If, in fact, no objective metric for value exists, then there is something false about it. If, less dramatically, your preferred candidate for an objective metric doesn’t exist (or, perhaps better, exists but doesn’t have the properties required of such a metric) and we have no good way of telling whether some other objective metric exists, then there’s something unsatisfactory about it even if not quite “false” (though in that case, indeed, it might be reasonable to say “let’s suppose there is, and see what follows”).
What I am saying about money [...] is that it is our most objective valuation metric.
Ah, now that’s a different claim altogether. Our most objective versus actually objective. Unfortunately, the latter is what we need.
a way of saying we don’t have free markets now, but if we continue to improve we will asymptotically approach it at the limits.
The first part, kinda but only kinda. The second, not so much. Markets can deviate from ideality in ways other than not being “free”. For instance, they can have transaction costs. Not only because of taxation, bid-offer spreads, and the like, but also (and I think unavoidably) because doing things takes effort. They can have granularity problems. (If I have a bunch of books, there is no mechanism by which I can sell half of one of them.) They can simply not exist. Hence, “only kinda”. And I see no reason whatever to expect markets to move inexorably towards perfect freedom, perfect liquidity, zero transaction costs, infinitely fine granularity, etc., etc., etc. Hence “not so much”.
I don’t understand your last paragraph at all. “The market values it at a constant in relation with this theoretical notion”—what theoretical notion? what does it mean to “value it at a constant”? It sounds as if you are saying that I may be wrong about how much I care how much my wife loves me, if “the market” disagrees; that sounds pretty ridiculous but I can’t tell how ridiculous until I understand how the market is supposedly valuing it, which at present I don’t.
If, in fact, no objective metric for value exists, then there is something false about it
I doubt it is accepted logic to suggest a premise is intrinsically false.
.>If, less dramatically, your preferred candidate for an objective metric doesn’t exist (or, perhaps better, exists but doesn’t have the properties required of such a metric) and we have no good way of telling whether some other objective metric exists, then there’s something unsatisfactory about it even if not quite “false” (though in that case, indeed, it might be reasonable to say “let’s suppose there is, and see what follows”).
Yes this. I will make it satisfactory, in a jiffy.
Ah, now that’s a different claim altogether. Our most objective versus actually objective. Unfortunately, the latter is what we need.
No we need both. They are both useful, and I present both, in the context of what is useful (and therefore wanted).
The first part, kinda but only kinda. The second, not so much. Markets can deviate from ideality in ways other than not being “free”. For instance, they can have transaction costs. Not only because of taxation, bid-offer spreads, and the like, but also (and I think unavoidably) because doing things takes effort. They can have granularity problems. (If I have a bunch of books, there is no mechanism by which I can sell half of one of them.) They can simply not exist. Hence, “only kinda”. And I see no reason whatever to expect markets to move inexorably towards perfect freedom, perfect liquidity, zero transaction costs, infinitely fine granularity, etc., etc., etc. Hence “not so much”.
Yes all these things I mean to say, as friction and inefficiency, would suggest it is not free, and you speak to all Szabo’s articles and Nash’s works which I am familiar with. But I also say this in a manner such “provided we continue to evolve rationally” or “provided technology continues to evolve”. I don’t need to prove we WILL evolve rationally and our tech will not take a step back. I don’t need to prove that to show in this thought experiment what the end game is.
I don’t understand your last paragraph at all. “The market values it at a constant in relation with this theoretical notion”—what theoretical notion? what does it mean to “value it at a constant”? It sounds as if you are saying that I may be wrong about how much I care how much my wife loves me, if “the market” disagrees; that sounds pretty ridiculous but I can’t tell how ridiculous until I understand how the market is supposedly valuing it, which at present I don’t.
You aren’t expected to understand how we get to the conclusion, just that there is a basis for value, a unit of it, that everyone accepts. It doesn’t matter if a person disagrees, they still have to use it because the general society has deemed it “that thing”. And “that thing” that we all generally accept is actually called money. I am not saying anything that isn’t completely accepted by society.
Go to a store and try to pay with something other than money. Go try to pay your taxes in a random good. They aren’t accepted. Its silly to argue you could do this.
I doubt it is accepted logic to suggest a premise is intrinsically false.
I’m not sure what your objection actually is. If someone comes along and says “I have a solution to the problems in the Middle East. Let us first of all suppose that Israel is located in Western Europe and that all Jews and Arabs have converted to Christianity” then it is perfectly in order to say no, those things aren’t actually true, and there’s little point discussing what would follow if they were. If you are seriously claiming that money provides a solution to what previously looked like difficult value-alignment problems because everyone agrees on how much money everything is worth, then this is about as obviously untrue as our hypothetical diplomat’s premise. I expect you aren’t actually saying quite that; perhaps at some point you will clarify just what you are saying.
all these things [...] as friction and inefficiency, would suggest it is not free
Many of them seem to me to have other obvious causes.
“provided we continue to evolve rationally” or “provided technology continues to evolve”
I don’t see much sign that humanity is “evolving rationally”, at least not if that’s meant to mean that we’re somehow approaching perfect rationality. (It’s not even clear what that means without infinite computational resources, which there’s also no reason to think we’re approaching; in fact, there are fundamental physical reasons to think we can’t be.)
You aren’t expected to understand how we get to the conclusion
If you are not interested in explaining how you reach your conclusions, then I am not interested in talking to you. Please let me know whether you are or not, and if not then I can stop wasting my time.
I am not saying anything that isn’t completely accepted by society.
You are doing a good job of giving the impression that you are. There is certainly nothing resembling a consensus across “society” that money answers all questions of value.
I’m not sure what your objection actually is. If someone comes along and says “I have a solution to the problems in the Middle East. Let us first of all suppose that Israel is located in Western Europe and that all Jews and Arabs have converted to Christianity” then it is perfectly in order to say no, those things aren’t actually true, and there’s little point discussing what would follow if they were. If you are seriously claiming that money provides a solution to what previously looked like difficult value-alignment problems because everyone agrees on how much money everything is worth, then this is about as obviously untrue as our hypothetical diplomat’s premise. I expect you aren’t actually saying quite that; perhaps at some point you will clarify just what you are saying.
Yes exactly. You want to say because the premise is silly or not reality then it cannot be useful. That is wholly untrue and I think I recall reading an article here about this. Can we not use premises that lead to useful conclusions that don’t rely on the premise? You have no basis for denying that we can. I know this. Can I ask you if we share the definition of ideal: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ogt/do_we_share_a_definition_for_the_word_ideal/
I don’t see much sign that humanity is “evolving rationally”, at least not if that’s meant to mean that we’re somehow approaching perfect rationality. (It’s not even clear what that means without infinite computational resources, which there’s also no reason to think we’re approaching; in fact, there are fundamental physical reasons to think we can’t be.)
Yes because you don’t know that our rationality is tied to the quality of our money in the Nashian sense, or in other words if our money is stable in relation to an objective metric for value then we become (by definition of some objective truth) more rational. I can’t make this point though, without Nash’s works.
If you are not interested in explaining how you reach your conclusions, then I am not interested in talking to you. Please let me know whether you are or not, and if not then I can stop wasting my time.
Yes I am in the process of it, and you might likely be near understanding, but it takes a moment to present and the mod took my legs out.
You are doing a good job of giving the impression that you are. There is certainly nothing resembling a consensus across “society” that money answers all questions of value.
No that is not what I said or how I said it. Money exists because we need to all agree on the value of something in order to have efficiency in the markets. To say “I don’t agree with the American dollar” doesn’t change that.
You want to say because the premise is silly or not reality then it cannot be useful.
Not quite. It can be interesting and useful to consider counterfactual scenarios. But I think it’s important to be explicit about them being counterfactual. And, because you can scarcely ever change just one thing about the world, it’s also important to clarify how other things are (counterfactually) changing to accommodate the main change you have in mind.
So, in this case, if I understand you right what you’re actually saying is something like this. “Consider a world in which there is a universally agreed-upon currency that suffers no inflation or deflation, perhaps by being somehow pegged to a basket of other assets of fixed value; and that is immune to other defects X, Y, Z suffered by existing currencies. Suppose that in our hypothetical world there are markets that produce universally-agreed-upon prices for all goods without exception, including abstract ones like “understanding physics” and emotionally fraught ones like “getting on well with one’s parents” and so forth. Then, let us consider what would happen to problems of AI value alignment in such a world. I claim that most of these problems would go away; we could simply tell the AI to seek value as measured by this universally-agreed currency.”
That might make for an interesting discussion (though I think you will need to adjust your tone if you want many people to enjoy discussions with you). But if you try to start the same discussion by saying or implying that there is such a currency, you shouldn’t be surprised if many of the responses you get are mostly saying “oh no there isn’t”.
Even when you do make it clear that this is a counterfactual, you should expect some responses along similar lines. If what someone actually cares about is AI value alignment in the real world, or at least in plausible future real worlds, then a counterfactual like this will be interesting to them only in so far as it actually illuminates the issue in the real world. If the counterfactual world is too different from the real world, it may fail to do that. At the very least, you should be ready to explain the relevance of your counterfactual to the real world. (“We can bring about that world, and we should do so.” “We can make models of what such a currency would actually look like, and use those for value alignment.” “Considering this more convenient world will let us separate out other difficult issues around value alignment.” Or whatever.)
No that is not what I said or how I said it.
OK. But it looks to me as if something like the stronger claim I treated you as making is actually needed for “ideal money” to be any kind of solution to AI value alignment problems. And what you said before was definitely that we do all agree on money, but now you seem to have retreated to the weaker claim that we will or we might or we would in a suitably abstracted world or something.
Actually, it was visible to me too, but I didn’t see any particular need to introduce it to the discussion until such time as Flinter sees fit to do so. (I have seen a blog that I am pretty sure is Flinter’s, and a few other writings on similar topics that I’m pretty sure are also his.)
(My impression is that Flinter thinks something like bitcoin will serve his purposes, but not necessarily bitcoin itself as it now is.)
After painting the picture of what Ideal Money, Nash explains the intrinsic difficulties of bringing it about. Then he comes up with the concept of “asymptotically ideal money”:
The idea seems paradoxical, but by speaking of “inflation targeting” these responsible official are effectively CONFESSING…that it is indeed after all possible to control inflation by controlling the supply of money (as if by limiting the amount of individual “prints” that could be made of a work of art being produced as “prints).~Ideal Money
M. Friedman acquired fame through teaching the linkage between the supply of money and, effectively, its value. In retrospect it seems as if elementary, but Friedman was as if a teacher who re-taught to American economists the classical concept of the “law of supply and demand”, this in connection with money.
Nash explains the parameters of gold in regard to why we have historically valued it, he is methodical, and he also explains golds weaknesses in this context.
Its too difficult to cut to, because the nature of this problem is such that we all have incredibly cognitive bias towards not understanding it or seeing it.
But it looks to me as if something like the stronger claim I treated you as making is actually needed for “ideal money” to be any kind of solution to AI value alignment problems.
I did not come here to specifically make claims in regard to AI. What does it mean to ignore Nash’s works, his argument, and the general concept of what Ideal Money is...and then to say that my delivery and argument is weak in regard to AI?
And what you said before was definitely that we do all agree on money, but now you seem to have retreated to the weaker claim that we will or we might or we would in a suitably abstracted world or something.
No you have not understood the nature of money. A money is chosen by the general market, it is propriety. This is what I mean to say in this regard, no more, no less. To tell me you don’t like money therefore not “everyone” uses it is petty and simply perpetuating conflict.
There is nothing to argue about in regard to pointing out that we converge on it, in the sense that we all socially agree to it. If you want to show that I am wrong by saying that you specifically don’t, or one , or two people, then you are not interesting in dialogue you are being petty and silly.
It means, in this context, “the first word of the technical term ‘ideal money’ which Flinter has been using, and which I am hoping at some point he will give us his actual definition of”.
If I start by saying there IS such a currency? What does “ideal” mean to you?
You began by saying this:
I would like to suggest, as a blanket observation and proposal, that most of these difficult problems described, especially on a site like this, are easily solvable with the introduction of an objective and ultra-stable metric for valuation.
which, as I said at the time, looks at least as much like “There is such a metric” as like “Let’s explore the consequences of having such a metric”. Then later you said “It converges on money” (not, e.g., “it and money converge on a single coherent metric of value”). Then when asked whether you were saying that Nash has actually found an incorruptible measure of value, you said yes.
I appreciate that when asked explicitly whether such a thing exists you say no. But you don’t seem to be taking any steps to avoid giving the impression that it’s already around.
I did not come here to specifically make claims in regard to AI.
Nope. But you introduced this whole business in the context of AI value alignment, and the possible relevance of your (interpretation of Nash’s) proposal to the Less Wrong community rests partly on its applicability to that sort of problem.
What does it mean to ignore Nash’s works, his argument, and the general concept of what Ideal Money is … and then to say that my delivery and argument is weak in regard to AI?
I’m here discussing this stuff with you. I am not (so far as I am aware) ignoring anything you say. What exactly is your objection? That I didn’t, as soon as you mentioned John Nash, go off and spend a week studying his thoughts on this matter before responding to you? I have read the Nash lecture you linked, and also his earlier paper on Ideal Money published in the Southern Economic Journal. What do you think I am ignoring, and why do you think I am ignoring it?
But your question is an odd one. It seems to be asking, more or less, “How dare you have interests and priorities that differ from mine?”. I hope it’s clear that that question isn’t actually the sort that deserves an answer.
No you have not understood the nature of money. A money is chosen by the general market, it is propriety.
I think I understand the nature of money OK, but I’m not sure I understand what you are saying about it. “A money”? Do you mean a currency, or do you mean a monetary valuation of a good, or something else? What is “the general market”, in a world where there are lots and lots of different markets, many of which use different currencies? In the language I speak, “propriety” mostly means “the quality of being proper” which seems obviously not to be your meaning. It also (much less commonly) means “ownership”, which seems a more likely meaning, but I’m not sure what it actually means to say “money is ownership”. Would you care to clarify?
This is what I mean to say in this regard, no more, no less.
It seems to me entirely different from your earlier statements to which I was replying. Perhaps everything will become clearer when you explain more carefully what you mean by “A money is chosen by the general market, it is propriety”.
To tell me you don’t like money therefore not “everyone” uses it [...]
Clearly our difficulties of communication run both ways. I have told you neither of those things. I like money a great deal, and while indeed not everyone uses it (there are, I think, some societies around that don’t use money) it’s close enough to universally used for most purposes. (Though not everyone uses the same money, of course.)
I genuinely don’t see how to get from anything I have said to “you don’t like money therefore not everyone uses it”.
There is nothing to argue about in regard to pointing out that we converge on it, in the sense that we all socially agree to it.
I think, again, some clarification is called for. When you spoke of “converging on money”, you surely didn’t just mean that (almost) everyone uses money. The claim I thought you were making, in context, was something like this: “If we imagine people getting smarter and more rational without limit, their value systems will necessarily converge to a particular limit, and that limit is money.” (Which, in turn, I take to mean something like this: to decide which of X and Y is better, compute their prices and compare numerically.) It wasn’t clear at the time what sort of “money” you meant, but you said explicitly that the results are knowable and had been found by John Nash. All of this goes much, much further than saying that we all use money, and further than saying that we have (or might in the future hope to have) a consistent set of prices for tradeable goods.
It would be very helpful if you would say clearly and explicitly what you mean by saying that values “converge on money”.
[...] you specifically [...] or one, or two people [...]
I mentioned my own attitudes not in order to say “I am a counterexample, therefore your universal generalization is false” but to say “I am a counterexample, and I see no reason to think I am vastly atypical, therefore your universal generalization is probably badly false”. I apologize if that wasn’t clear enough.
It means, in this context, “the first word of the technical term ‘ideal money’ which Flinter has been using, and which I am hoping at some point he will give us his actual definition of”.
Ideal, the standard definition, means implies that it is conceptual.
You began by saying this:
I would like to suggest, as a blanket observation and proposal, that most of these difficult problems described, especially on a site like this, are easily solvable with the introduction of an objective and ultra-stable metric for valuation.
which, as I said at the time, looks at least as much like “There is such a metric” as like “Let’s explore the consequences of having such a metric”. Then later you said “It converges on money” (not, e.g., “it and money converge on a single coherent metric of value”). Then when asked whether you were saying that Nash has actually found an incorruptible measure of value, you said yes.
Yes he did and he explains it perfectly. And its a device, I introduced into the dialogue and showed how it is to be properly used.
I appreciate that when asked explicitly whether such a thing exists you say no. But you don’t seem to be taking any steps to avoid giving the impression that it’s already around.
It’s conceptual in nature.
Nope. But you introduced this whole business in the context of AI value alignment, and the possible relevance of your (interpretation of Nash’s) proposal to the Less Wrong community rests partly on its applicability to that sort of problem.
Yup we’ll get to that.
I’m here discussing this stuff with you. I am not (so far as I am aware) ignoring anything you say. What exactly is your objection? That I didn’t, as soon as you mentioned John Nash, go off and spend a week studying his thoughts on this matter before responding to you? I have read the Nash lecture you linked, and also his earlier paper on Ideal Money published in the Southern Economic Journal. What do you think I am ignoring, and why do you think I am ignoring it?
Nope, those are past sentiments, my new ones are I appreciate the dialogue.
But your question is an odd one. It seems to be asking, more or less, “How dare you have interests and priorities that differ from mine?”. I hope it’s clear that that question isn’t actually the sort that deserves an answer.
Yes but its a product of never actual entering sincere dialogue with intelligent players on the topic of Ideal Money so I have to be sharp when we are not addressing it and instead addressing complex subject, AI, in relation to Ideal Money but before understanding Ideal Money (which is FAR more difficult to understand than AI).
I think I understand the nature of money OK, but I’m not sure I understand what you are saying about it. “A money”? Do you mean a currency, or do you mean a monetary valuation of a good, or something else? What is “the general market”, in a world where there are lots and lots of different markets, many of which use different currencies? In the language I speak, “propriety” mostly means “the quality of being proper” which seems obviously not to be your meaning. It also (much less commonly) means “ownership”, which seems a more likely meaning, but I’m not sure what it actually means to say “money is ownership”. Would you care to clarify?
Why aren’t you using generally accepted definitions?
the state or quality of conforming to conventionally accepted standards of behavior or morals.
the details or rules of behavior conventionally considered to be correct.
the condition of being right, appropriate, or fitting.
Yes money can mean many things, but if we thing of the purpose of it and how and why it exists it is effectively that thing which we all generally agree on. If one or two people play a different game that doesn’t invalidate the money. Money serves a purpose that involves all of us supporting it through unwritten social contract. There is nothing else that serves that purpose better. It is the nature of money.
It seems to me entirely different from your earlier statements to which I was replying. Perhaps everything will become clearer when you explain more carefully what you mean by “A money is chosen by the general market, it is propriety”.
Money is the general accepted form of exchange. There is nothing here to investigate, its a simple statement.
Clearly our difficulties of communication run both ways. I have told you neither of those things. I like money a great deal, and while indeed not everyone uses it (there are, I think, some societies around that don’t use money) it’s close enough to universally used for most purposes. (Though not everyone uses the same money, of course.)
Yes.
I genuinely don’t see how to get from anything I have said to “you don’t like money therefore not everyone uses it”.
Money has the quality that it is levated by our collective need for an objective value metric. But if I say “our” and someone says “well you are wrong because not EVERYONE uses money” then I won’t engage with them because they are being dumb.
I think, again, some clarification is called for. When you spoke of “converging on money”, you surely didn’t just mean that (almost) everyone uses money. The claim I thought you were making, in context, was something like this: “If we imagine people getting smarter and more rational without limit, their value systems will necessarily converge to a particular limit, and that limit is money.” (Which, in turn, I take to mean something like this: to decide which of X and Y is better, compute their prices and compare numerically.) It wasn’t clear at the time what sort of “money” you meant, but you said explicitly that the results are knowable and had been found by John Nash. All of this goes much, much further than saying that we all use money, and further than saying that we have (or might in the future hope to have) a consistent set of prices for tradeable goods.
We all converge to money and to use a single money, it is the nature of the universe. It is obvious money will bridge us with AI and help us interact. And yes this convergence will be such that we will solve all complex problems with it, but we need it to be stable to begin to do that.
So in the future, you will do what money tells you. You won’t say, I’m going to do something that doesn’t procure much money, because it will be the irrational thing to do.
It would be very helpful if you would say clearly and explicitly what you mean by saying that values “converge on money”.
Does everyone believe in Christianity? Does everyone converge on it? Does everyone converge on their beliefs in the after life?
No but the nature of money is such that its the one thing we all agree on. Again telling me no we don’t just shows you are stupid. This is an obvious point, it is the purpose of money, and I’m not continuing on this path of dialogue because its asinine.
I mentioned my own attitudes not in order to say “I am a counterexample, therefore your universal generalization is false” but to say “I am a counterexample, and I see no reason to think I am vastly atypical, therefore your universal generalization is probably badly false”. I apologize if that wasn’t clear enough.
Yes you live in a reality in which you don’t acknowledge money, and I am supposed to believe that. You don’t use money, you don’t get paid in money, you don’t buy things with money, you don’t save money. And I am supposed to think you are intelligent for pretending this?
We all agree on money, it is the thing we all converge on. Here is the accepted definition of converge:
tend to meet at a point.
approximate in the sum of its terms toward a definite limit.
That’s sort of moot for 2 reasons. Firstly what I have proposed would be the game theoretically optimal approach to solving the problem of a super terrbad ai. There is no better approach against such a player. I would also suggest there is no other reasonable approach. And so this speaks to the speed in relation to other possible proposed solutions.
Now of course we are still being theoretical here, but its relevant to point that out.
The currently known means for finding game-theoretically optimal choices are, shall we say, impractical in this sort of situation. I mean, chess is game-theoretically trivial (in terms of the sort of game theory I take it you have in mind) -- but actually finding an optimal strategy involves vastly more computation than we have any means of deploying, and even finding a strategy good enough to play as well as the best human players took multiple decades of work by many smart people and a whole lot of Moore’s law.
Perhaps I’m not understanding your argument, though. Why does what you say make what I say “sort of moot”?
So lets take poker for example. I have argued (lets take it as an assumption which should be fine) that poker players never have enough empirical evidence to know their own winrates. It’s always a guess and since the game isn’t solved they are really guessing about whether they are profitable and how profitable they are. IF they had a standard basis for value then it could be arranged that players brute force the solution to poker. That is to say if players knew who was playing correctly then they would tend towards the correct players strategy.
So there is an argument, to be explored, that the reason we can’t solve chess is because we are not using our biggest computer which is the entirety of our markets.
The reason your points are “moot” or not significant, is because there is not theoretically possible “better’ way of dealing with ai, than having a stable metric of value.
This happens because objective value is perfectly tied to objective morality. That which we all value is that which we all feel is good.
“The entirety of our markets” do not have anywhere near enough computational power to solve chess. (At least, not unless someone comes up with a novel way of solving chess that’s much cleverer than anything currently known.)
It sounds as if this is meant to be shorthand for some sort of argument for your thesis (though I’m not sure exactly what thesis) but if so I am not optimistic about the prospects for the argument’s success given that “we all” don’t value or feel the same things as one another.
It is the opinion of some well established (and historical) economics philosophers the markets can determine the optimal distribution of our commodities. Such an endeavor is at least several orders of magnitudes higher than the computing power required to solve chess.
“It sounds as if this is meant to be shorthand for some sort of argument for your thesis (though I’m not sure exactly what thesis) but if so I am not optimistic about the prospects for the argument’s success given that “we all” don’t value or feel the same things as one another.”
You have stepped outside the premise again, which is a stable metric of value, this implies objectivity, which implies we all agree on the value of it. This is the premise.
Let me know when they get their Fields Medals (or perhaps, if it turns out that they’re right but that the ways in which markets do this are noncomputable) their Nobel prizes, and then we can discuss this further.
Oh. Then your premise is flatly wrong, since people in fact don’t all agree about value.
(In any case, “objective” doesn’t imply everyone agrees. Whether life on earth has been around for more than a million years is a matter of objective fact, but people manage to disagree about it.)
Well I am speaking of Hayek Nash and Szabo (and smith) and I don’t think medals makes for a strong argument (especially vs the stated fellows.
“Oh. Then your premise is flatly wrong, since people in fact don’t all agree about value.”
By what definition and application of the word premise, is it “wrong”? I am suggesting we take the premise as given, and I would like to speak of the implications. Calling it wrong is silly.
“(In any case, “objective” doesn’t imply everyone agrees. Whether life on earth has been around for more than a million years is a matter of objective fact, but people manage to disagree about it.)”
The nature of money is such that “everyone agrees” that is how it becomes money and it is therefore and thus “objective”. But I am not yet speaking to that, I am speaking to the premise which is a value metric that everyone DOES agree on.
Maybe you are misunderstanding my argument, which isn’t “a bunch of clever people think differently, so Hayek et al must be wrong” but “if you are correctly describing what Hayek et al claim, and if they are right about that, then someone has found either an algorithm worthy of the Fields medal or a discovery of non-algorithmic physics worthy of a Nobel prize”.
I am suggesting that if I take at face value what you say about the premise, then it is known to be false, and I am not very interesting in taking as given something that is known to be false. (But very likely you do not actually mean to claim what on the face of it you seem to be claiming, namely that everyone actually agrees about what matters.)
I think this is exactly wrong. Prices (in a sufficiently free and sufficiently liquid market) tend to equalize, but not because everyone agrees but because when people disagree there are ways to get rich by noticing the fact, and when you do that the result is to move others closer to agreement.
In any case, this only works when you have markets with no transaction costs, and plenty of liquidity. There are many things for which no such markets exist or seem likely to exist. (Random example: I care whether and how dearly my wife loves me. No doubt I would pay, if need and opportunity arose, to have her love me more rather than less. But there is no market in my wife’s love, it’s hard to see how there ever could be, if you tried to make one it’s hard to see how it would actually help anything, and by trading in such a market I would gravely disturb the very thing the market was trying to price. This is not an observation about the fuzziness of the word “love”; essentially all of that would remain true if you operationalized it in terms of affectionate-sounding words, physical intimacy, kind deeds, and so forth.)
Yes Nash will get the medals for Ideal Money, this is what I am suggesting.
I am not proposing something “false” as a premise. I am saying, assume an objective metric for value exists (and then lets tend to the ramifications/implications). There is nothing false about that....
What I am saying about money, that you want to suggest is false, is that it is our most objective valuation metric. There is no more objective device for measuring value, in this world.
The rest you are suggesting is a way of saying we don’t have free markets now, but if we continue to improve we will asymptotically approach it at the limits. Then you might agree at the limits our money will be stable in the valuation sense and COULD be such a metric (but its value isn’t stable at present time!)
In regard to your wifes love the market value’s it at a constant in relation to this theoretical notion, that your subjective valuation disagrees with the ultimate objective metric (remember its a premise that doesn’t necessarily exist) doesn’t break the standard.
If, in fact, no objective metric for value exists, then there is something false about it. If, less dramatically, your preferred candidate for an objective metric doesn’t exist (or, perhaps better, exists but doesn’t have the properties required of such a metric) and we have no good way of telling whether some other objective metric exists, then there’s something unsatisfactory about it even if not quite “false” (though in that case, indeed, it might be reasonable to say “let’s suppose there is, and see what follows”).
Ah, now that’s a different claim altogether. Our most objective versus actually objective. Unfortunately, the latter is what we need.
The first part, kinda but only kinda. The second, not so much. Markets can deviate from ideality in ways other than not being “free”. For instance, they can have transaction costs. Not only because of taxation, bid-offer spreads, and the like, but also (and I think unavoidably) because doing things takes effort. They can have granularity problems. (If I have a bunch of books, there is no mechanism by which I can sell half of one of them.) They can simply not exist. Hence, “only kinda”. And I see no reason whatever to expect markets to move inexorably towards perfect freedom, perfect liquidity, zero transaction costs, infinitely fine granularity, etc., etc., etc. Hence “not so much”.
I don’t understand your last paragraph at all. “The market values it at a constant in relation with this theoretical notion”—what theoretical notion? what does it mean to “value it at a constant”? It sounds as if you are saying that I may be wrong about how much I care how much my wife loves me, if “the market” disagrees; that sounds pretty ridiculous but I can’t tell how ridiculous until I understand how the market is supposedly valuing it, which at present I don’t.
I doubt it is accepted logic to suggest a premise is intrinsically false.
.>If, less dramatically, your preferred candidate for an objective metric doesn’t exist (or, perhaps better, exists but doesn’t have the properties required of such a metric) and we have no good way of telling whether some other objective metric exists, then there’s something unsatisfactory about it even if not quite “false” (though in that case, indeed, it might be reasonable to say “let’s suppose there is, and see what follows”).
Yes this. I will make it satisfactory, in a jiffy.
No we need both. They are both useful, and I present both, in the context of what is useful (and therefore wanted).
Yes all these things I mean to say, as friction and inefficiency, would suggest it is not free, and you speak to all Szabo’s articles and Nash’s works which I am familiar with. But I also say this in a manner such “provided we continue to evolve rationally” or “provided technology continues to evolve”. I don’t need to prove we WILL evolve rationally and our tech will not take a step back. I don’t need to prove that to show in this thought experiment what the end game is.
You aren’t expected to understand how we get to the conclusion, just that there is a basis for value, a unit of it, that everyone accepts. It doesn’t matter if a person disagrees, they still have to use it because the general society has deemed it “that thing”. And “that thing” that we all generally accept is actually called money. I am not saying anything that isn’t completely accepted by society.
Go to a store and try to pay with something other than money. Go try to pay your taxes in a random good. They aren’t accepted. Its silly to argue you could do this.
I’m not sure what your objection actually is. If someone comes along and says “I have a solution to the problems in the Middle East. Let us first of all suppose that Israel is located in Western Europe and that all Jews and Arabs have converted to Christianity” then it is perfectly in order to say no, those things aren’t actually true, and there’s little point discussing what would follow if they were. If you are seriously claiming that money provides a solution to what previously looked like difficult value-alignment problems because everyone agrees on how much money everything is worth, then this is about as obviously untrue as our hypothetical diplomat’s premise. I expect you aren’t actually saying quite that; perhaps at some point you will clarify just what you are saying.
Many of them seem to me to have other obvious causes.
I don’t see much sign that humanity is “evolving rationally”, at least not if that’s meant to mean that we’re somehow approaching perfect rationality. (It’s not even clear what that means without infinite computational resources, which there’s also no reason to think we’re approaching; in fact, there are fundamental physical reasons to think we can’t be.)
If you are not interested in explaining how you reach your conclusions, then I am not interested in talking to you. Please let me know whether you are or not, and if not then I can stop wasting my time.
You are doing a good job of giving the impression that you are. There is certainly nothing resembling a consensus across “society” that money answers all questions of value.
Yes exactly. You want to say because the premise is silly or not reality then it cannot be useful. That is wholly untrue and I think I recall reading an article here about this. Can we not use premises that lead to useful conclusions that don’t rely on the premise? You have no basis for denying that we can. I know this. Can I ask you if we share the definition of ideal: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ogt/do_we_share_a_definition_for_the_word_ideal/
Yes because you don’t know that our rationality is tied to the quality of our money in the Nashian sense, or in other words if our money is stable in relation to an objective metric for value then we become (by definition of some objective truth) more rational. I can’t make this point though, without Nash’s works.
Yes I am in the process of it, and you might likely be near understanding, but it takes a moment to present and the mod took my legs out.
No that is not what I said or how I said it. Money exists because we need to all agree on the value of something in order to have efficiency in the markets. To say “I don’t agree with the American dollar” doesn’t change that.
Not quite. It can be interesting and useful to consider counterfactual scenarios. But I think it’s important to be explicit about them being counterfactual. And, because you can scarcely ever change just one thing about the world, it’s also important to clarify how other things are (counterfactually) changing to accommodate the main change you have in mind.
So, in this case, if I understand you right what you’re actually saying is something like this. “Consider a world in which there is a universally agreed-upon currency that suffers no inflation or deflation, perhaps by being somehow pegged to a basket of other assets of fixed value; and that is immune to other defects X, Y, Z suffered by existing currencies. Suppose that in our hypothetical world there are markets that produce universally-agreed-upon prices for all goods without exception, including abstract ones like “understanding physics” and emotionally fraught ones like “getting on well with one’s parents” and so forth. Then, let us consider what would happen to problems of AI value alignment in such a world. I claim that most of these problems would go away; we could simply tell the AI to seek value as measured by this universally-agreed currency.”
That might make for an interesting discussion (though I think you will need to adjust your tone if you want many people to enjoy discussions with you). But if you try to start the same discussion by saying or implying that there is such a currency, you shouldn’t be surprised if many of the responses you get are mostly saying “oh no there isn’t”.
Even when you do make it clear that this is a counterfactual, you should expect some responses along similar lines. If what someone actually cares about is AI value alignment in the real world, or at least in plausible future real worlds, then a counterfactual like this will be interesting to them only in so far as it actually illuminates the issue in the real world. If the counterfactual world is too different from the real world, it may fail to do that. At the very least, you should be ready to explain the relevance of your counterfactual to the real world. (“We can bring about that world, and we should do so.” “We can make models of what such a currency would actually look like, and use those for value alignment.” “Considering this more convenient world will let us separate out other difficult issues around value alignment.” Or whatever.)
OK. But it looks to me as if something like the stronger claim I treated you as making is actually needed for “ideal money” to be any kind of solution to AI value alignment problems. And what you said before was definitely that we do all agree on money, but now you seem to have retreated to the weaker claim that we will or we might or we would in a suitably abstracted world or something.
I have a suspicion that there is a word hanging above your discussion, visible to Flinter but not to you. It starts with “bit” and ends with “coin”.
Ideal Money is an enthymeme. But Nash speak FAR beyond the advent of an international e-currency with a stably issued supply.
Actually, it was visible to me too, but I didn’t see any particular need to introduce it to the discussion until such time as Flinter sees fit to do so. (I have seen a blog that I am pretty sure is Flinter’s, and a few other writings on similar topics that I’m pretty sure are also his.)
(My impression is that Flinter thinks something like bitcoin will serve his purposes, but not necessarily bitcoin itself as it now is.)
After painting the picture of what Ideal Money, Nash explains the intrinsic difficulties of bringing it about. Then he comes up with the concept of “asymptotically ideal money”:
Nash explains the parameters of gold in regard to why we have historically valued it, he is methodical, and he also explains golds weaknesses in this context.
I’m impatient and prefer to cut to the chase :-)
Its too difficult to cut to, because the nature of this problem is such that we all have incredibly cognitive bias towards not understanding it or seeing it.
To the first set of paragraphs...ie:
If I start by saying there IS such a currency? What does “ideal” mean to you? I think you aren’t using the standard definition: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ogt/do_we_share_a_defintion_for_the_word_ideal/
I did not come here to specifically make claims in regard to AI. What does it mean to ignore Nash’s works, his argument, and the general concept of what Ideal Money is...and then to say that my delivery and argument is weak in regard to AI?
No you have not understood the nature of money. A money is chosen by the general market, it is propriety. This is what I mean to say in this regard, no more, no less. To tell me you don’t like money therefore not “everyone” uses it is petty and simply perpetuating conflict.
There is nothing to argue about in regard to pointing out that we converge on it, in the sense that we all socially agree to it. If you want to show that I am wrong by saying that you specifically don’t, or one , or two people, then you are not interesting in dialogue you are being petty and silly.
It means, in this context, “the first word of the technical term ‘ideal money’ which Flinter has been using, and which I am hoping at some point he will give us his actual definition of”.
You began by saying this:
which, as I said at the time, looks at least as much like “There is such a metric” as like “Let’s explore the consequences of having such a metric”. Then later you said “It converges on money” (not, e.g., “it and money converge on a single coherent metric of value”). Then when asked whether you were saying that Nash has actually found an incorruptible measure of value, you said yes.
I appreciate that when asked explicitly whether such a thing exists you say no. But you don’t seem to be taking any steps to avoid giving the impression that it’s already around.
Nope. But you introduced this whole business in the context of AI value alignment, and the possible relevance of your (interpretation of Nash’s) proposal to the Less Wrong community rests partly on its applicability to that sort of problem.
I’m here discussing this stuff with you. I am not (so far as I am aware) ignoring anything you say. What exactly is your objection? That I didn’t, as soon as you mentioned John Nash, go off and spend a week studying his thoughts on this matter before responding to you? I have read the Nash lecture you linked, and also his earlier paper on Ideal Money published in the Southern Economic Journal. What do you think I am ignoring, and why do you think I am ignoring it?
But your question is an odd one. It seems to be asking, more or less, “How dare you have interests and priorities that differ from mine?”. I hope it’s clear that that question isn’t actually the sort that deserves an answer.
I think I understand the nature of money OK, but I’m not sure I understand what you are saying about it. “A money”? Do you mean a currency, or do you mean a monetary valuation of a good, or something else? What is “the general market”, in a world where there are lots and lots of different markets, many of which use different currencies? In the language I speak, “propriety” mostly means “the quality of being proper” which seems obviously not to be your meaning. It also (much less commonly) means “ownership”, which seems a more likely meaning, but I’m not sure what it actually means to say “money is ownership”. Would you care to clarify?
It seems to me entirely different from your earlier statements to which I was replying. Perhaps everything will become clearer when you explain more carefully what you mean by “A money is chosen by the general market, it is propriety”.
Clearly our difficulties of communication run both ways. I have told you neither of those things. I like money a great deal, and while indeed not everyone uses it (there are, I think, some societies around that don’t use money) it’s close enough to universally used for most purposes. (Though not everyone uses the same money, of course.)
I genuinely don’t see how to get from anything I have said to “you don’t like money therefore not everyone uses it”.
I think, again, some clarification is called for. When you spoke of “converging on money”, you surely didn’t just mean that (almost) everyone uses money. The claim I thought you were making, in context, was something like this: “If we imagine people getting smarter and more rational without limit, their value systems will necessarily converge to a particular limit, and that limit is money.” (Which, in turn, I take to mean something like this: to decide which of X and Y is better, compute their prices and compare numerically.) It wasn’t clear at the time what sort of “money” you meant, but you said explicitly that the results are knowable and had been found by John Nash. All of this goes much, much further than saying that we all use money, and further than saying that we have (or might in the future hope to have) a consistent set of prices for tradeable goods.
It would be very helpful if you would say clearly and explicitly what you mean by saying that values “converge on money”.
I mentioned my own attitudes not in order to say “I am a counterexample, therefore your universal generalization is false” but to say “I am a counterexample, and I see no reason to think I am vastly atypical, therefore your universal generalization is probably badly false”. I apologize if that wasn’t clear enough.
Ideal, the standard definition, means implies that it is conceptual.
Yes he did and he explains it perfectly. And its a device, I introduced into the dialogue and showed how it is to be properly used.
It’s conceptual in nature.
Yup we’ll get to that.
Nope, those are past sentiments, my new ones are I appreciate the dialogue.
Yes but its a product of never actual entering sincere dialogue with intelligent players on the topic of Ideal Money so I have to be sharp when we are not addressing it and instead addressing complex subject, AI, in relation to Ideal Money but before understanding Ideal Money (which is FAR more difficult to understand than AI).
Why aren’t you using generally accepted definitions?
Yes money can mean many things, but if we thing of the purpose of it and how and why it exists it is effectively that thing which we all generally agree on. If one or two people play a different game that doesn’t invalidate the money. Money serves a purpose that involves all of us supporting it through unwritten social contract. There is nothing else that serves that purpose better. It is the nature of money.
Money is the general accepted form of exchange. There is nothing here to investigate, its a simple statement.
Yes.
Money has the quality that it is levated by our collective need for an objective value metric. But if I say “our” and someone says “well you are wrong because not EVERYONE uses money” then I won’t engage with them because they are being dumb.
We all converge to money and to use a single money, it is the nature of the universe. It is obvious money will bridge us with AI and help us interact. And yes this convergence will be such that we will solve all complex problems with it, but we need it to be stable to begin to do that.
So in the future, you will do what money tells you. You won’t say, I’m going to do something that doesn’t procure much money, because it will be the irrational thing to do.
Does everyone believe in Christianity? Does everyone converge on it? Does everyone converge on their beliefs in the after life?
No but the nature of money is such that its the one thing we all agree on. Again telling me no we don’t just shows you are stupid. This is an obvious point, it is the purpose of money, and I’m not continuing on this path of dialogue because its asinine.
Yes you live in a reality in which you don’t acknowledge money, and I am supposed to believe that. You don’t use money, you don’t get paid in money, you don’t buy things with money, you don’t save money. And I am supposed to think you are intelligent for pretending this?
We all agree on money, it is the thing we all converge on. Here is the accepted definition of converge: