I liked this post and your use of numerous examples to pinpoint it, but I wish you hadn’t used political examples. Even if the examples themselves are fine, they can prompt comments in directions that cross the line of getting mindkilled. (E.g. a post summarizing stuff by Dominic Cummings was temporarily frontpaged here, and the comments section devolved into chaos.)
Even I myself got hung up on your first example on pricegouging for reasons similar to shminux’s comment on consequentialist thinking. I might write a comment to elaborate, but if I do, that will further push the comments towards discussing politics, which is a tradeoff I don’t like to make.
Strong disagree. I believe it’s important that we specifically practice being able to look at, think about, and discuss political stuff on LW, especially when the thing being pointed at is not the political beliefs themselves so much as these are the mechanics of how thinking goes sideways in this domain.
I think there’s a thing to be afraid of, here, and that you’re right to have some anxiety and hesitation, but that simply tabooing a huge domain of human thought and action because it’s hard to get right is exactly the wrong move for LW-as-a-whole to make.
To put it another way: just as people sometimes say “if you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports,” I think that if we never have a comment section that devolves into chaos and requires moderator intervention, we’re staying way too far away from a domain where it’s really important to be developing sanity-inducing social technology.
I would prefer a world where we can discuss politics on Less Wrong, and I agree that targeted practice at this would likely help move us closer to that world. But when you put political examples in a post that doesn’t require them that seems less like targeted practice and more like diluting your original goal (here: introducing the concept of Fabricated Options) with politics. Unless you think political examples were required to properly introduce the concept, I guess.
Anyway, I’ve said my piece, and if we do manage to discuss politics here more sanely I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
To put it another way: just as people sometimes say “if you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports,” I think that if we never have a comment section that devolves into chaos and requires moderator intervention, we’re staying way too far away from a domain where it’s really important to be developing sanity-inducing social technology.
Wait what? People actually say that first thing? The expected utility loss due to consequences of missing a flight are usually vastly greater than the time wasted by aiming to get there earlier. If people do say that, I suspect they must be the jet-setting elites who fly more than a hundred times in their life.
Apart from a terrible analogy, your point is perhaps well made. The utility loss from (very occasional!) chaotic messes that need moderators to take action may well be outweighed by the benefits of examining the Sanity Devouring Pit more closely without falling in.
On the other hand, I see that quite a few of the comments to this post take issue with the specific somewhat-political examples given, and not with the concept they were intended to illustrate. I felt the pull of the Pit myself, before reminding myself that the examples are not themselves the concept and that refuting an example has very little weight on whether the concept is useful.
Is the concept useful? Well, the adjective doesn’t seem useful. All options are fabricated, in that they have been created. The connotation is also “a fabrication”, meaning a deliberate untruth. The untruth aspect is fine: all options are untrue to some extent, in that they are based on flawed models that never correspond exactly with reality. Are “fabricated” options deliberately untrue? It seems more likely to me that the crucial distinction is just that the model behind it is more critically flawed, and whether that is accidental or deliberate is irrelevant.
With some reservations about the name, it does seem to be a useful concept, with the proviso that in practice these things seem to be on a scale rather than a dichotomy.
(My partner Logan is currently working on investigating what the act of fabrication actually is/what happens in one’s internal experience when fabricating options, and why we do it/what the process is trying to achieve. Hopefully that content will make it to LW.)
Wait what? People actually say that first thing? The expected utility loss due to consequences of missing a flight are usually vastly greater than the time wasted by aiming to get there earlier. If people do say that, I suspect they must be the jet-setting elites who fly more than a hundred times in their life.
(Anecdote: in my case, the only time I missed a flight I got to my destination at the same time anyway, at no extra cost, albeit my luggage didn’t and there was some hassle about that. The cost of getting to the airport earlier would have been significant, since I’d have had to take a different mode of transport or stay there overnight.)
Of course the utility lost by missing a flight is vastly greater than that of waiting however long you’d have needed to to make it. But it’s a question of expected utilities—if you’re currently so cautious that you could take 1000 flights and never miss one, you’re arriving early enough to get a 99.9% chance of catching the flight. If showing up 2 minutes later lowers that to 99.8%, you’re not trading 2 minutes per missed flight, you’re trading 2000 minutes per missed flight, which seems worth it.
Yes, that was my point. If you set reasonable numbers for these things, you get something on the order of magnitude of 1% chance of missing one as a good target. Hence if you’ve made fewer than 100 flights then having not yet missed one is extremely weak evidence for having spent too much time in airports, and is largely consistent with having spent too little.
Most people have not made 100 flights in their lives, so the advice stands a very high chance of being actively harmful to most people.
It would be more reasonable to say that if you have missed a flight then you’re spending “too much” time in airports, because you’re probably doing way too much flying.
Yes, it’s a question of expected utilities. But if you take the saying literally, someone who has taken ten flights in their life should have taken a >10% chance of missing each flight. At that rate the consequences of missing a flight weigh heavily in the expected utility.
An alternative saying: if you’ve ever missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports, either because your carbon emissions are too high, or because you are taking an excessive risk of missing a flight, or both.
(or you’re a pilot, or you were unlucky, or …)
I think the examples are good but I wish there were more examples that aren’t highly controversial in some way, either politically or interpersonally. (The “parental control” example is the one that least pinged my “eek, drama here” sense, though certainly there are many who would disagree with your point there (but it doesn’t feel like a locally live issue).)
Haven’t you just “fabricated an option” where it’s possible to talk about politics on less wrong without it turning into a mind-killed clusterfuck? I mean yes, it would be lovely.....
In my mind I made a counterexample of opposite leaning that would still get the main phenomena/point across.
Some people would like to have Laissez-faire capitalism that everybody always has perfectly competed cheap goods. Then when a disaster strikes the market mechanism approach shows weaknesses. So you either have to choose that that you regulate that supply gets guaranteed or that you don’t always get the goods. The option of a “invisible hand will provide” capitalism was a fabricated one.
I do fell that calling it an approximation would highlight that it would for some context be proper. Always doing things via all the nitty-gritty details seems likely to be too overwhelming so choosing the appropriate approximations is likely that there is enough modelling depth without losing the big picture.
There is another possibility. Suppose a market participant suspects that there will be a disaster causing a shortage of vital good X. If X can be stockpiled, then they can buy up a bunch of X, sit on it, and hope to rake in the cash if the disaster does happen. (If X has a short shelf life, it’s more difficult; I wonder if futures markets can help here.) (This will raise the price of X in the meantime, encouraging people to manufacture more and use less.) Thus, there exist natural market incentives to stockpile for disasters...
...Unless they anticipate anti-price-gouging interventions. If you’re not going to be permitted to make a large profit on the rare event, then why bother stockpiling anything beyond what you yourself need? The opprobrium towards “price gougers”, “speculators”, “hoarders”, etc., and the expected likelihood of the opprobrium turning into legal action, might well prevent us from being saved by some farsighted speculators.
Or, well, the way it works, elites will probably get what they need, and it’s the majority of regular people who will experience the shortages instead of having the option of paying a high price for what they need.
The more sophisticated views are not that relevant for the fact that the naive view is false / fragile.
Even for the more complicated case if there is anti-gouging it just means you have to price to good for the totality of history rather than a spot time price. This will mean that in calm times the price will be a bit higher. Any seller that would sell at a lower price taking only calm time realities into account would suffer unmitigated shocks from rare events.
With gouging on it means that the financial hit from rare events is borne out mainly with the populace. For example with military one could have a reasonable expectation to be defended from invasions. Say that the goverment runs out of troops and hires private mercenaries to provide the defence. Fullfilling a goverment duty makes sense for the goverment to carry the burden and foot the bill on that. One could imagine that the very same peope could be deployed but instead of the goverment footing the bill the people defended pay the bills. In this arrangement the people themselfs organise the defence and don’t enjoy protection by the state.
One could have a “strategic snowstorm reserve” where goverment does the preparing and upon declaration of an emergency such as a snowstorm would flood shovels outside of the market mechanics. The catch would be that those reserves are not a freebie source of shovels at calm times.
What tends to rather happen is that existing logisitical lines are repurposed or dual purposed for such alternate distribution means. If you want to have shovels in peoples hands shovel stores are atleast on okay delivery vector. You could do it so that it is nationalised for the duration of the execptional circumstances. Or you could do less drastic adjustments just as long as it works as an effective delivery vector. If people not being able to cough up big cash fronts stops shovels being delivered then it becomes ineffective. One could even do stuff like letting everybody be gouged but in the next calm time goverment will make up the difference between gouge and calm market price. If everybody knows this then this will lessen hesistance to fork over the money. (There could be a problem here when if the sellers know the check is open what is the difference between x3 x10, x100 and x1000 markup?)
Even with naive price gouging on there would be a reason to prebuy shovels. WIth untenable pricing in stressed time the sellers will find every excuse not to list the item or the item will be in short supply so there is a low chance to get it anyway. After all the “convenient price at stress time” was a false option.
With full on leisse-faire capitalism everybody gets incentives to be a full on prepper to stock drinking water and such because at any disturbance they might cease to live in a society. Preparation isn’t free and if it is done at group level it can easily lead into more taxes being paid to upkeep facilities/structures which are unsure whether they will get used. Thus one might do stuff like dismanttle an epidemic demartment because there has not been epidemics in years and it has running costs with no pay off.
Even for the more complicated case if there is anti-gouging it just means you have to price to good for the totality of history rather than a spot time price. This will mean that in calm times the price will be a bit higher. Any seller that would sell at a lower price taking only calm time realities into account would suffer unmitigated shocks from rare events.
With inflation increasing over time, this ‘totality price’ becomes less and less possible or effective.
I guess I should have shot for possiblity rather than temporal extent. I for example believe that retail stores track and factor in theft ie they will assume and calculate that 1000$ worth of goods will just disappear off the shelfs with no transaction involved. Then if a secruity guard can for 600$ make only 200$ disappear in the same period it makes financial sense to hire the guard. The 600$ salary for the guard will be from legitimate purchaces of the product. So if the profit target of the company is kept the same a shop in a low crime area can afford lower prices as they don’t have to source security guard salaries on it.
If the shop is exposed to risk of not being able to have access to a functioning market at crisis times it will have to hedge against it or perish like a shop that didn’t hedge against theft would go under when robbed.
I liked this post and your use of numerous examples to pinpoint it, but I wish you hadn’t used political examples. Even if the examples themselves are fine, they can prompt comments in directions that cross the line of getting mindkilled. (E.g. a post summarizing stuff by Dominic Cummings was temporarily frontpaged here, and the comments section devolved into chaos.)
Even I myself got hung up on your first example on pricegouging for reasons similar to shminux’s comment on consequentialist thinking. I might write a comment to elaborate, but if I do, that will further push the comments towards discussing politics, which is a tradeoff I don’t like to make.
Strong disagree. I believe it’s important that we specifically practice being able to look at, think about, and discuss political stuff on LW, especially when the thing being pointed at is not the political beliefs themselves so much as these are the mechanics of how thinking goes sideways in this domain.
I think there’s a thing to be afraid of, here, and that you’re right to have some anxiety and hesitation, but that simply tabooing a huge domain of human thought and action because it’s hard to get right is exactly the wrong move for LW-as-a-whole to make.
To put it another way: just as people sometimes say “if you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports,” I think that if we never have a comment section that devolves into chaos and requires moderator intervention, we’re staying way too far away from a domain where it’s really important to be developing sanity-inducing social technology.
If LW doesn’t make inroads here, no one will.
I would prefer a world where we can discuss politics on Less Wrong, and I agree that targeted practice at this would likely help move us closer to that world. But when you put political examples in a post that doesn’t require them that seems less like targeted practice and more like diluting your original goal (here: introducing the concept of Fabricated Options) with politics. Unless you think political examples were required to properly introduce the concept, I guess.
Anyway, I’ve said my piece, and if we do manage to discuss politics here more sanely I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
That seems fair. It’s not necessarily the case that this kind of practicing-talking-about-politics is the best way to go about it.
What would be a more apt situation in which to bring up politics on LW?
Wait what? People actually say that first thing? The expected utility loss due to consequences of missing a flight are usually vastly greater than the time wasted by aiming to get there earlier. If people do say that, I suspect they must be the jet-setting elites who fly more than a hundred times in their life.
Apart from a terrible analogy, your point is perhaps well made. The utility loss from (very occasional!) chaotic messes that need moderators to take action may well be outweighed by the benefits of examining the Sanity Devouring Pit more closely without falling in.
On the other hand, I see that quite a few of the comments to this post take issue with the specific somewhat-political examples given, and not with the concept they were intended to illustrate. I felt the pull of the Pit myself, before reminding myself that the examples are not themselves the concept and that refuting an example has very little weight on whether the concept is useful.
Is the concept useful? Well, the adjective doesn’t seem useful. All options are fabricated, in that they have been created. The connotation is also “a fabrication”, meaning a deliberate untruth. The untruth aspect is fine: all options are untrue to some extent, in that they are based on flawed models that never correspond exactly with reality. Are “fabricated” options deliberately untrue? It seems more likely to me that the crucial distinction is just that the model behind it is more critically flawed, and whether that is accidental or deliberate is irrelevant.
With some reservations about the name, it does seem to be a useful concept, with the proviso that in practice these things seem to be on a scale rather than a dichotomy.
My general reply is “if you think you’re spending too much time at the airport now, try missing a connecting flight”.
Different airports vary greatly in how much it sucks to unexpectedly spend the night in the terminal.
(TBC I have never missed a flight “on purpose” in this way, by just saying “eh, I’d rather spend less time at the airport.”)
(My partner Logan is currently working on investigating what the act of fabrication actually is/what happens in one’s internal experience when fabricating options, and why we do it/what the process is trying to achieve. Hopefully that content will make it to LW.)
i linked this as a top level comment, but i figure i should put it here too: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NjZAkfio5FsCioahb/investigating-fabrication
Afaik this is the post that popularized the phrase: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=40
(Anecdote: in my case, the only time I missed a flight I got to my destination at the same time anyway, at no extra cost, albeit my luggage didn’t and there was some hassle about that. The cost of getting to the airport earlier would have been significant, since I’d have had to take a different mode of transport or stay there overnight.)
Of course the utility lost by missing a flight is vastly greater than that of waiting however long you’d have needed to to make it. But it’s a question of expected utilities—if you’re currently so cautious that you could take 1000 flights and never miss one, you’re arriving early enough to get a 99.9% chance of catching the flight. If showing up 2 minutes later lowers that to 99.8%, you’re not trading 2 minutes per missed flight, you’re trading 2000 minutes per missed flight, which seems worth it.
Yes, that was my point. If you set reasonable numbers for these things, you get something on the order of magnitude of 1% chance of missing one as a good target. Hence if you’ve made fewer than 100 flights then having not yet missed one is extremely weak evidence for having spent too much time in airports, and is largely consistent with having spent too little.
Most people have not made 100 flights in their lives, so the advice stands a very high chance of being actively harmful to most people.
It would be more reasonable to say that if you have missed a flight then you’re spending “too much” time in airports, because you’re probably doing way too much flying.
Yes, it’s a question of expected utilities. But if you take the saying literally, someone who has taken ten flights in their life should have taken a >10% chance of missing each flight. At that rate the consequences of missing a flight weigh heavily in the expected utility.
An alternative saying: if you’ve ever missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports, either because your carbon emissions are too high, or because you are taking an excessive risk of missing a flight, or both. (or you’re a pilot, or you were unlucky, or …)
I think the examples are good but I wish there were more examples that aren’t highly controversial in some way, either politically or interpersonally. (The “parental control” example is the one that least pinged my “eek, drama here” sense, though certainly there are many who would disagree with your point there (but it doesn’t feel like a locally live issue).)
Haven’t you just “fabricated an option” where it’s possible to talk about politics on less wrong without it turning into a mind-killed clusterfuck? I mean yes, it would be lovely.....
In my mind I made a counterexample of opposite leaning that would still get the main phenomena/point across.
Some people would like to have Laissez-faire capitalism that everybody always has perfectly competed cheap goods. Then when a disaster strikes the market mechanism approach shows weaknesses. So you either have to choose that that you regulate that supply gets guaranteed or that you don’t always get the goods. The option of a “invisible hand will provide” capitalism was a fabricated one.
I do fell that calling it an approximation would highlight that it would for some context be proper. Always doing things via all the nitty-gritty details seems likely to be too overwhelming so choosing the appropriate approximations is likely that there is enough modelling depth without losing the big picture.
There is another possibility. Suppose a market participant suspects that there will be a disaster causing a shortage of vital good X. If X can be stockpiled, then they can buy up a bunch of X, sit on it, and hope to rake in the cash if the disaster does happen. (If X has a short shelf life, it’s more difficult; I wonder if futures markets can help here.) (This will raise the price of X in the meantime, encouraging people to manufacture more and use less.) Thus, there exist natural market incentives to stockpile for disasters...
...Unless they anticipate anti-price-gouging interventions. If you’re not going to be permitted to make a large profit on the rare event, then why bother stockpiling anything beyond what you yourself need? The opprobrium towards “price gougers”, “speculators”, “hoarders”, etc., and the expected likelihood of the opprobrium turning into legal action, might well prevent us from being saved by some farsighted speculators.
Or, well, the way it works, elites will probably get what they need, and it’s the majority of regular people who will experience the shortages instead of having the option of paying a high price for what they need.
The more sophisticated views are not that relevant for the fact that the naive view is false / fragile.
Even for the more complicated case if there is anti-gouging it just means you have to price to good for the totality of history rather than a spot time price. This will mean that in calm times the price will be a bit higher. Any seller that would sell at a lower price taking only calm time realities into account would suffer unmitigated shocks from rare events.
With gouging on it means that the financial hit from rare events is borne out mainly with the populace. For example with military one could have a reasonable expectation to be defended from invasions. Say that the goverment runs out of troops and hires private mercenaries to provide the defence. Fullfilling a goverment duty makes sense for the goverment to carry the burden and foot the bill on that. One could imagine that the very same peope could be deployed but instead of the goverment footing the bill the people defended pay the bills. In this arrangement the people themselfs organise the defence and don’t enjoy protection by the state.
One could have a “strategic snowstorm reserve” where goverment does the preparing and upon declaration of an emergency such as a snowstorm would flood shovels outside of the market mechanics. The catch would be that those reserves are not a freebie source of shovels at calm times.
What tends to rather happen is that existing logisitical lines are repurposed or dual purposed for such alternate distribution means. If you want to have shovels in peoples hands shovel stores are atleast on okay delivery vector. You could do it so that it is nationalised for the duration of the execptional circumstances. Or you could do less drastic adjustments just as long as it works as an effective delivery vector. If people not being able to cough up big cash fronts stops shovels being delivered then it becomes ineffective. One could even do stuff like letting everybody be gouged but in the next calm time goverment will make up the difference between gouge and calm market price. If everybody knows this then this will lessen hesistance to fork over the money. (There could be a problem here when if the sellers know the check is open what is the difference between x3 x10, x100 and x1000 markup?)
Even with naive price gouging on there would be a reason to prebuy shovels. WIth untenable pricing in stressed time the sellers will find every excuse not to list the item or the item will be in short supply so there is a low chance to get it anyway. After all the “convenient price at stress time” was a false option.
With full on leisse-faire capitalism everybody gets incentives to be a full on prepper to stock drinking water and such because at any disturbance they might cease to live in a society. Preparation isn’t free and if it is done at group level it can easily lead into more taxes being paid to upkeep facilities/structures which are unsure whether they will get used. Thus one might do stuff like dismanttle an epidemic demartment because there has not been epidemics in years and it has running costs with no pay off.
With inflation increasing over time, this ‘totality price’ becomes less and less possible or effective.
I guess I should have shot for possiblity rather than temporal extent. I for example believe that retail stores track and factor in theft ie they will assume and calculate that 1000$ worth of goods will just disappear off the shelfs with no transaction involved. Then if a secruity guard can for 600$ make only 200$ disappear in the same period it makes financial sense to hire the guard. The 600$ salary for the guard will be from legitimate purchaces of the product. So if the profit target of the company is kept the same a shop in a low crime area can afford lower prices as they don’t have to source security guard salaries on it.
If the shop is exposed to risk of not being able to have access to a functioning market at crisis times it will have to hedge against it or perish like a shop that didn’t hedge against theft would go under when robbed.