So, Yvain posted a blog post recently. I was disappointed. I’m posting about it here because I’ll have an easier time following a conversation about my thoughts here than in livejournal comments. I will note that he claims the post is, at most, 60% serious, but that seems at least ten thousand times too high.
A major supporting claim is that if modafinil were legal, it would become expected, and everything would be harder to match the increased ability of humans to be productive.
So the religious people flunk out, everyone else has to work much harder, and in the end no student gains. Arguably future patients might gain from having better trained doctors, but I think this wildly overestimates the usefulness of the medical education system.
A parable:
In the Old Country, the people once did not know of iodine. It was not illegal, but only a very specific kind of geek would eat dried seaweed carried long miles on the backs of beasts and men. One day, a stranger came to the village, preaching of this mysterious substance, claiming that its consumption would make all men cleverer.
The elders convened and discussed this ‘boon,’ if you could call it that. If one man is cleverer, he profits, but if all men are cleverer, then no man profits. No elder spoke this more loudly than the one whose wife feasted on seaweed, and whose children were free of the stunted look of cretinism. To spare the people from having harder lives, the elders sent this stranger on his way, to not change the ways of the village.
A commentary:
Yvain has seen the misery of Haiti and India firsthand; but it seems only with his eyes.
What is his main proposition? He has a model of the world in which enormous amounts of energy and money are being spent running a rat race where the satisfaction only comes from winning it, not from running it, and meanwhile there are numerous places where just a small fraction of that energy and money could be spent, creating great and lasting benefits. His proposition is that in the current situation, modafinil is known mostly to a minority which includes people working on some of those important neglected matters, but if modafinil becomes as well known as Prozac or Viagra, its main consequence will be that the rats in the rat race will all run faster, with no net benefit.
Your comments imply that you disagree with this model, but you need to say where and why.
I think that Yvain’s thoughts on the matter are poisoned by working in a poisoned field. Would doctors be better if they studied 16 hours a day, instead of 10? Some, but not much. Perhaps people would live a bit longer- but better for everyone to adopt intermittent fasting than to slightly improve the quality of doctors.
But why only give modafinil to studying medical students, and not those who hold lives in their tiring hands instead of books? Given the hideous prevalence of medical errors, and their known association to fatigue, I would far prefer a doctor chemically warded against fatigue to one without such armor.
(I might agree that financiers all turning to modafinil would not noticeably improve the world, and make them worse off- but, truly, he made his example doctors?)
Few engineers, scientists, or programmers that I know would give voice to the complaint that others might work harder. Their whole fields are suffused with positive externalities. When the other groups in my field discover more truths, I am enlightened by their work. When an engineer designs a better device, I am the richer for it. When a programmer writes more and better code, the world hums along more smoothly for it. If more of the world moved at startup speed, and it took new chemicals to make it that way, then all hail the new chemicals! As mentioned in the comments on the livejournal post, caffeine and tobacco are linked to the industrial age, as firmly as alcohol is to the agricultural age. If modafinil becomes the drug of choice for the information age, we will all be the richer for it.
To put it in terms of the model: yes, enormous amounts of energy and money are being spent on positional goods. But modern man’s hampster wheel is enough of a ladder that spinning it around faster will result in it climbing more swiftly. Why think that it is solely our tribe that propels the world forward? We do not wear shoes made by rationalists, but by rats.
Indeed, consider what it would look like if Prozac or Viagra were Schedule IV substances, only used by a very specific kind of geek. Would the world be superior, or are happiness and horniness absolute goods, not positional? It seems to me as ridiculous to declare that it is good that the teeming masses do not use modafinil as it would be to declare that it is good that the teeming masses do not use antidepressants. Such altruism and love for one’s fellows!
Given the hideous prevalence of medical errors, and their known association to fatigue, I would far prefer a doctor chemically warded against fatigue to one without such armor.
No, the new equilibrium would be 96-hour shifts, with doctors to their physical limits and making as many errors (modulo differences in attention at constant fatigue induced by modafinil, if any).
That’s a very long winded way of objecting to Yvain’s model of the American economy as largely zero-sum games (eg. poker). If the village is a static economy with fixed output… Then sure, modafinil is fairly questionable. But this story is a way of asserting it is not with hypothetical examples.
Of course, it’s not obvious that iodine is necessarily a good thing. Malthusian models come to mind: if intelligence has no effect on subsistence wage, then it can have no effect on per capita wealth and so any effects are redistributional, and if you want to argue it’s a good thing you need to appeal to extra things like quality of life… which actually probably would affect subsistence wage since now you don’t need so much wages, your quality of life has been improved. Intelligence might come with a one-time increase in wealth, which of course simply causes the population to expand and that the temporarily-increased-per-capita-wealth will eventually fall back down to equilibrium as people reproduce more. :)
“It was a bit sloppy essay of Yvain—cool idea, kinda weak execution” is what I might say if he had posted it to Main instead of his blog.
That’s a very long winded way of objecting to Yvain’s model of the American economy as largely zero-sum games (eg. poker).
Agreed. That is the heart of my objection, but if I simply say “the economy is not zero-sum!” then those that agree with me will agree with me and those that disagree with me might not see why. I do wish that I had thought to use the reversal test as my example.
I disapprove of this thread on the principle that people should be able to idly speculate on their own blog without being harangued elsewhere.
I disapprove of your use of parables to smuggle in your economic hypotheses, rather than arguing for them competently and clearly.
I disapprove of your commentary, because I agree with wedrifid here:
(Claiming to have) mind read negative beliefs and motives in others then declaring them publicly tends to be frowned upon. Certainly it is frowned upon me.
On second thought, you make a good point. The problem wasn’t Vaniver bringing it up, the problem was me not putting clear muflax-like epistemic state warnings on my blog.
I disapprove of your use of parables to smuggle in your economic hypotheses, rather than arguing for them competently and clearly.
Very well.
First, people prefer longer lives to shorter ones.
Second, just as it is difficult to think of goods that are only absolute, it is difficult to think of goods that are only positional. The used car provides $4,500 in transportation value; the Ferrari provides $50,000 in transportation value.
Third, many professions create durable value and large positive externalities. 25% more lawyering or 25% more derivative trading may not have obvious positive benefits, but 25% more programming or 25% more engineering or 25% more science obviously do. Crunch time may be 20 hours a day instead of 16, and so the programmers have just as little time to themselves, but the product will actually be superior, which seems like a Pareto gain.
Fourth, phase changes have effects that are difficult to anticipate. A world that moved at startup speed- where more people were massively productive and focused- could be far more glorious, delightful, and pleasant than our world. It is difficult to imagine just how miserable conditions were when society was liquid, rather than a gas; similarly, it is difficult for a gas to imagine the joys of being a plasma.
I disapprove of your commentary
I agree it was insufficiently clear. I meant that Yvain has seen societies that are both liquid and gas, and I do not see how someone who grasped the difference between those phases could write a post like his.
I agree it was insufficiently clear. I meant that Yvain has seen societies that are both liquid and gas, and I do not see how someone who grasped the difference between those phases could write a post like his.
You are overestimating the value of reasoning by metaphor and the extent to which your metaphors are shared by others.
When I take a pot of water and heat it, it becomes gas. If I seal the pot and keep heating, it won’t become plasma. It will blow up in my face. See, a metaphor!
I agree it was insufficiently clear. I meant that Yvain has seen societies that are both liquid and gas, and I do not see how someone who grasped the difference between those phases could write a post like his.
Haiti is miserably poorer than America, in large part because of its people and its institutions. Not just in the sense of physical goods, but in most of the things that make life grand, and the things that make life annoying.
Similarly, we are poorer than the future will be- again, because of people and institutions. (Technology- as in, knowledge about reality and devices that make clever use of that knowledge- is the result of people and institutions.)
Importantly, this is not just in the sense of physical goods. It is one thing to compare a McMansion to a comfortably sized home; it is another to compare the sort of life lived by someone who lives in a world where they can buy a customized continent to someone who lives in a world where they can buy a McMansion.
And so, in light of those changes, to look at a spark that could ionize our gas and say “but we’ll just be running in circles faster!” seems to miss the point. No, when every manager is a clear-headed executive, commercial organizations will be better run and more pleasant to deal with, and the sorts of things we can do will go from great to fantastic. What does it matter that the yachts will be longer and the quays more crowded with them?
I disapprove of this thread on the principle that people should be able to idly speculate on their own blog without being harangued elsewhere.
I disagree with your disapproval. While perhaps one wouldn’t want to be “harangued”, it is entirely appropriate to comment on publicly-available texts, and the open thread here is a perfectly acceptable place to do so.
I link to Yvain’s livejournal from my comment on LW, but I don’t link to my comment on LW from a comment on Yvain’s livejournal, because I don’t have a livejournal account and am not interested in making one.
I didn’t look into it very hard (maybe they let you post comments anonymously?) because it wasn’t clear to me which option was more polite.
I’m not super opposed to your not posting a link to the livejournal page. I just think it would definitely unquestionably have been legit if you did that, whereas it’s about 3% shady the way you did it right now, to give a super rough estimate of the level of shadiness I feel coming off of that.
The emphasis (and hence the use of the word “harangued” over neutral variants like “discussed” or “criticized”) was on the inappropriateness of Vaniver’s repeated emotional appeals and status attacks against Yvain.
Forum switching is a well-known trolling technique that dates back to Usenet, and indeed possibly further.
Yvain has seen the misery of Haiti and India firsthand; but it seems only with his eyes.
I very specifically mentioned potential First World outlays to Third World countries as exceptions to my point. For example, I said:
There may be useful indirect actions, like advancing technology, increasing tax revenue that can be spent on useful absolute goods, and increasing the amount that flows as charity to the Third World (emphasis added)
Other than that, my entire argument was based on the “happiness follows economic growth up to a certain point, then stops” argument that has been mentioned here so many times before. That means a parable talking about how great certain interventions could be for the Third World is irrelevant; the post was very specifically and explicitly aimed at the First.
(I also think the benefits from lack of iodine deficiency are a lot less siphon-away-able)
The “60% serious” number may indeed be too high, though. I meant it to signal that I thought the argument was correct in all of its main points, but probably falls apart because the increase in productivity would produce very small benefits rather than no benefits, and “very small benefits” multiplied by the entire economy still end out pretty huge, especially if some of them end out in the Third World through the indirect methods I mentioned earlier.
I very specifically mentioned potential First World outlays to Third World countries as exceptions to my point:
The other organ I was looking for was not the heart but the head. Why are some people poor, and others rich? We run on our golden treadmills faster and longer, and what do we get out of it? Something, it would seem; the indigent in America do not eat mud to feel something in their belly.
Other than that, my entire argument was based on the “happiness follows economic growth up to a certain point, then stops” argument that has been mentioned here so many times before
Happiness! A life’s value is not denominated in smiles. How does satisfaction relate to economic growth?
(I also think the benefits from lack of iodine deficiency are a lot less siphon-away-able)
One day, a stranger came to the village. He carried with him a curious dried herb and sack of seed. The herb’s leaves, he claimed, could be brewed into a soporific tea. Those that took it he would sleep twelve hours a day, instead of eight.
The elders again convened to consider the stranger’s tea. If one man took it, that man would get less done- but if all men took it, then one man’s loss would be balanced by the other’s. Many in the village were fond of their dreams, they said to each other, and so the weed seemed a boon.
When they brought the tea before the village, many nodded at the wisdom of the elders, but one farmer, so poor he had to pull his plow himself, balked. “If you shorten my day,” he said with despair, “then I must shorten my fields, for there are only so many days in the year one can plow, and my poor feet can only move so quickly.”
A woman spoke next. “Sixteen hours of spinning buys me four fish; enough to feed myself and my three children. If I can only spin for twelve hours, then I will only get enough cloth for three fish- and which of my children would you have me not feed?”
The elders did not answer, but then one of the elder’s sons spoke. “I already pay for candles to make my day longer,” he said, “as the sun does not give me as many hours to read as I would like. If you shorten my day, then you shrink how large my mind may grow, for there are more books out there than a lifetime of reading, and yet I would read as many as I can.”
A singer was next, her mellifluous voice carrying easily across the village square. “I enjoy my dreams as much as the next woman, but I enjoy the sound of my voice more.” There were chuckles as she admitted to one of the village’s many jokes. “To only sing for twelve hours a day would make me and my listeners that much poorer.”
Others moved to speak, but the elders were elders because they could see which way the wind blew. “We will run this stranger and his poison weed out of our village!” they declared, and the stranger was soon running towards the woods, watched by angry eyes.
I meant it to signal that I thought the argument was correct in all of its main points, but probably falls apart because the increase in productivity would produce very small benefits rather than no benefits, and “very small benefits” multiplied by the entire economy still end out pretty huge
By 60% serious you mean you expect it is wrong? That is not how I treat my seriousness.
Happiness! A life’s value is not denominated in smiles.
It’s not denominated in dollars either, and if I had to pick one word to stand for humans’ terminal values it would be much ‘closer’ to “happiness” than to “economy”.
If every spinster drinks the sleeping tea, less cloth will be made, but people will need it just as much. Thus cloth will become more precious, and people will be willing to pay 4⁄3 of the old price. The kids won’t starve.
If every spinster drinks the sleeping tea, less cloth will be made, but people will need it just as much. Thus cloth will become more precious, and people will be willing to pay 4⁄3 of the old price. The kids won’t starve.
Instead, someone else goes unclothed.
More generally, if everyone drinks the tea and produces only 3⁄4 as much, everyone, on average, will be 1⁄4 poorer. Price movements only affect how the poverty is distributed. (Of course, they also affect what new resources are tapped, what new inventions are made, how hard people will work during their reduced hours, how existing resources are redistributed among their uses, and how effort will be redistributed among the different productive activities, but that is going beyond the purpose of the parable.)
Yvain’s premise is that the country is warm, so people only make clothes to show off their wealth, ability to sew, and taste in fashion. Someone decides “I was already reluctant to buy those expensive rags, now they’re just too expensive” and joins the ranks of streakers.
I (arguably incorrectly) brought attention to the usage of “spinster”. The snark I intended came off as chiding. Plus, my post cited the recent philosophy poll in a way that was pedantic at best.
If there was anything of redeeming value, I would have left it up rather than blanking the post pre-retraction...
if modafinil were legal, it would become expected, and everything would be harder to match the increased ability of humans to be productive.
I tend to agree that this is a silly argument, especially given that it can be applied to coffee as much as to modafinil, so we better ban coffee, lest those allergic to it be at a disadvantage.
Or indeed to any technology. You may think you are better off using a combine harvester instead of a sickle, but actually it just shifts the expectation of how much grain you need to produce.
Yvain says in his posts’ comments that coffee doesn’t work, as tolerance builds up. This seems disputed.
But why not ban coffee? Because, like alcohol, it’s now too ingrained in our culture. But if it wasn’t—preventing headaches, irritability, concentration troubles, and the expectation that everyone can pull all-nighters? Fuck yes.
So, the world would be a better place if people like me (who drink butter-coffee everyday) had to give up their favorite health food or risk jail time? Consider me skeptical.
Coffee may not work to generate more virtual hours of productive time in the long run but that doesn’t mean that it’s use in time shifting sleep requirements etc isn’t still of net benefit.
I’ve been thinking about qat a lot these past few days, so I’ll tap out of the Far mode discussion. Just this: my problem with coffee is that people are often given too much work, which they require coffee and similar stimulants to accomplish. (Witness: programmers’ love for soda; project deadlines at university.) Qat doesn’t seem to have that problem.
It does have another problem: if you don’t want coffee, it’s usually socially acceptable to drink another hot beverage (though if you don’t want tea either you’re kinda screwed), whereas qat lacks an alternative.
Given the third world’s fondness for tobacco (eg. apparently China is now the largest and growing tobacco market in the world), isn’t chewing tobacco an alternative?
So legalizing modafinil (with corresponding reduction of stigma) leads directly to you having to work four hours more every day, gain an extra item on your budget (modafinil: $1000-$3000/year), get four hours less sleep (admittedly without restfulness cost, but still unpleasant especially for a lucid dreaming hobbyist like myself), plus suffer any unknown side effects of the drug that might turn up. And for all this, you get the chance to earn money that the economy immediately siphons off and throws away on more positional goods.
There is a number of fallacies in the above paragraphs, unusually many for a smart person like Yvain, so I assume that his “60% serious” disclaimer was missing a minus sign.
There is a number of fallacies in the above paragraphs, unusually many for a smart person like Yvain, so I assume that his “60% serious” disclaimer was missing a minus sign.
More generally, while very interesting, I find much of what he writes on his blog substantially less logically sound (but also more light-hearted, which I enjoy) than what he writes on LW, to the point that I constantly have to remind myself they’re the same person because I can hardly alieve that. (His writings on raikoh.net are somewhere in between.)
I apologize for accusing you of not reading the post.
I think your sarcastic coffee analogy is not quite apt. Yvain is advocating the status quo, which is more like “There is a ban on coffee from which me and people like me are exempt.”
Yeah, and that kind of people would still use coffee if it were a Schedule IV substance. And I can see no obvious reason why we are in an optimum, where restricting more or fewer stimulants would both be net negatives. (EDIT Actually, before even finishing to read the post, I thought ‘wow—if what he says about medical students etc. is right, we might want to restrict caffeine! I know I want to become stronger rather than my competition to become weaker, but I don’t know if that applies to others, so...’.)
I have not tried to write a mathematical model (should be reasonably easy), but my intuition tells me that the status quo is an unstable equilibrium. It will likely slide toward more universal acceptance, followed by either legalization or enforced prohibition (like with LSD).
I might endorse a certain very specific reversal test.
If I could choose between the current world except that freethinkers are at a significant disadvantage relative to everyone else, versus a world with a four hour workday but we all had to sleep four hours more per night so we still had the same amount of free time, plus our economy was at the same level as in the 1990s...
...then actually I would choose the current world, because the four hours more sleep per night would also apply on the weekends and so totally disrupt the balance, which I hadn’t thought of at all in the original post. So never mind.
This assumption that all the change in the amount of waking hours would go towards increasing (or decreasing) labour time is suspect. I mean, why couldn’t people keep the current ratio, work 50-hour workweeks and get 14 additional hours of leisure time per week? The rich get better yachts and everybody has more fun.
Although I’m unsure of the etiquette of posting about personal blogs on other sites, I was also disappointed with the blog post in question. It was the first time that Yvain wrote something I disagreed with after reading his post in full and digesting in. I’ve often disagreed with him before reading it, but he usually persuades me.
This post seemed to rely on the principle that having more spare time is a positional good, with which I disagree strongly. Essentially, giving everyone another four hours of awake, productive time, is the same as extending your life by four hours for each day you are alive [and you do so in good health—extending the human lifespan from 80 to 95 might or might not be a good thing, but adding years to your healthy, productive life, seems a good thing]
Yvain’s claim seems to be that 100% of the extra four hours will be diverted into work, but to me that’s a) almost certainly not true [the figure would be more than 0% and less than 100%], b) not a bad thing.
a) It seems very likely that, given that our day is > 0% work and > 0% leisure, an extra four hours a day will add more than 0 hours of leisure.
b) If all med students get more studying done, it’s far from obvious that the net result is a bad one. I assume that there is some value to med students’ knowledge of medicine [okay, for anatomy courses this might not hold]. If, say, Apple workers work 50% more, then we stand to get better and faster Macs]
What might convince me that Modafinil is a bad thing would be if a lot of people actively disliked the time they spent working. I personally assume most people roughly like or are neutral towards their jobs and mainly want to work shorter hours because it gives them more time for things outside of work, but I’m almost certainly generalizing from the example of me.
If Yvain had made this argument I would understand more about where he was coming from and why.
In some professions saying that you “love you work” is a signal of a good employee. So I would expect some dishonesty in self-reporting.
How could we ask the question to reduce this signalling? I imagine only silly questions like this:
Imagine that for some external reasons your workplace must be closed for two weeks. During those two weeks you will receive your normal salary, and those two weeks will not be taken from your holidays. How does this message make you feel? a) awesome! b) mildly happy c) neutral d) mildly sad e) depressed
On the second thought, is this question really silly, or does it show our true preferences? And the silliness is merely a reflection of dissonance between our professed values and real values.
This doesn’t quite answer the question. I would be very happy if my place of work were closed and I could do fun things for two weeks. My objection to working isn’t that work is unpleasant; it’s that there’s a high opportunity cost [all the fun people I could hang out with, the great books I could read, etc]. A better question is “imagine you are asked for your employer to take part in an experiment where you instead have your brain turned off. Your body ages by eight hours, but your brain experiences it as “you step into the office, then step out”.
It retains the silliness but solves the opportunity cost problem.
You are right about the opportunity costs. The work is actually not bad—it’s the idea of all the things I could have done in the same time that’s driving me crazy.
Your question is better (although it does not contain learning during the job, which is important too).
I think it genuinely shows our preferences. Of course, I also would be fairly neutral about this (and would probably seek other work for those two weeks).
In general, if people are able to get more done in a day, would this give an advantage to the makers or the takers? I don’t have a general principle which gives an obvious answer.
By advantage, do you mean subtracting their benefits from each other, to see who benefits more? Or do you think it might be a case where one group is actually made worse off, and another group made better off?
I don’t think the benefits are measured in the same denomination, and so it’s somewhat difficult to subtract them (which agrees with you not having a general principle to give a clear answer). Would more politics get done with more hours in the day? Perhaps. More trading? Certainly. With the whole world more productive, there will certainly be more to skim off the top- but what percentage do the takers take? In aggregate terms, it looks like the makers win more, but in per capita terms, it looks like the takers win more. But that’s just looking at income distribution- who gets more of the positive externalities? Here, the per capita seems only slightly better for the takers, and the aggregate far better for the makers.
So, Yvain posted a blog post recently. I was disappointed. I’m posting about it here because I’ll have an easier time following a conversation about my thoughts here than in livejournal comments. I will note that he claims the post is, at most, 60% serious, but that seems at least ten thousand times too high.
A major supporting claim is that if modafinil were legal, it would become expected, and everything would be harder to match the increased ability of humans to be productive.
A parable:
In the Old Country, the people once did not know of iodine. It was not illegal, but only a very specific kind of geek would eat dried seaweed carried long miles on the backs of beasts and men. One day, a stranger came to the village, preaching of this mysterious substance, claiming that its consumption would make all men cleverer.
The elders convened and discussed this ‘boon,’ if you could call it that. If one man is cleverer, he profits, but if all men are cleverer, then no man profits. No elder spoke this more loudly than the one whose wife feasted on seaweed, and whose children were free of the stunted look of cretinism. To spare the people from having harder lives, the elders sent this stranger on his way, to not change the ways of the village.
A commentary:
Yvain has seen the misery of Haiti and India firsthand; but it seems only with his eyes.
What is his main proposition? He has a model of the world in which enormous amounts of energy and money are being spent running a rat race where the satisfaction only comes from winning it, not from running it, and meanwhile there are numerous places where just a small fraction of that energy and money could be spent, creating great and lasting benefits. His proposition is that in the current situation, modafinil is known mostly to a minority which includes people working on some of those important neglected matters, but if modafinil becomes as well known as Prozac or Viagra, its main consequence will be that the rats in the rat race will all run faster, with no net benefit.
Your comments imply that you disagree with this model, but you need to say where and why.
I think that Yvain’s thoughts on the matter are poisoned by working in a poisoned field. Would doctors be better if they studied 16 hours a day, instead of 10? Some, but not much. Perhaps people would live a bit longer- but better for everyone to adopt intermittent fasting than to slightly improve the quality of doctors.
But why only give modafinil to studying medical students, and not those who hold lives in their tiring hands instead of books? Given the hideous prevalence of medical errors, and their known association to fatigue, I would far prefer a doctor chemically warded against fatigue to one without such armor.
(I might agree that financiers all turning to modafinil would not noticeably improve the world, and make them worse off- but, truly, he made his example doctors?)
Few engineers, scientists, or programmers that I know would give voice to the complaint that others might work harder. Their whole fields are suffused with positive externalities. When the other groups in my field discover more truths, I am enlightened by their work. When an engineer designs a better device, I am the richer for it. When a programmer writes more and better code, the world hums along more smoothly for it. If more of the world moved at startup speed, and it took new chemicals to make it that way, then all hail the new chemicals! As mentioned in the comments on the livejournal post, caffeine and tobacco are linked to the industrial age, as firmly as alcohol is to the agricultural age. If modafinil becomes the drug of choice for the information age, we will all be the richer for it.
To put it in terms of the model: yes, enormous amounts of energy and money are being spent on positional goods. But modern man’s hampster wheel is enough of a ladder that spinning it around faster will result in it climbing more swiftly. Why think that it is solely our tribe that propels the world forward? We do not wear shoes made by rationalists, but by rats.
Indeed, consider what it would look like if Prozac or Viagra were Schedule IV substances, only used by a very specific kind of geek. Would the world be superior, or are happiness and horniness absolute goods, not positional? It seems to me as ridiculous to declare that it is good that the teeming masses do not use modafinil as it would be to declare that it is good that the teeming masses do not use antidepressants. Such altruism and love for one’s fellows!
No, the new equilibrium would be 96-hour shifts, with doctors to their physical limits and making as many errors (modulo differences in attention at constant fatigue induced by modafinil, if any).
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Now this is getting political, ain’t it?
A lot of code is written to win arms races, not improve the world. Online ads, algorithmic trading, the defense industry...
Arms races are strong driver of world improvement.
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That’s a very long winded way of objecting to Yvain’s model of the American economy as largely zero-sum games (eg. poker). If the village is a static economy with fixed output… Then sure, modafinil is fairly questionable. But this story is a way of asserting it is not with hypothetical examples.
Of course, it’s not obvious that iodine is necessarily a good thing. Malthusian models come to mind: if intelligence has no effect on subsistence wage, then it can have no effect on per capita wealth and so any effects are redistributional, and if you want to argue it’s a good thing you need to appeal to extra things like quality of life… which actually probably would affect subsistence wage since now you don’t need so much wages, your quality of life has been improved. Intelligence might come with a one-time increase in wealth, which of course simply causes the population to expand and that the temporarily-increased-per-capita-wealth will eventually fall back down to equilibrium as people reproduce more. :)
“It was a bit sloppy essay of Yvain—cool idea, kinda weak execution” is what I might say if he had posted it to Main instead of his blog.
Agreed. That is the heart of my objection, but if I simply say “the economy is not zero-sum!” then those that agree with me will agree with me and those that disagree with me might not see why. I do wish that I had thought to use the reversal test as my example.
I disapprove of this thread on the principle that people should be able to idly speculate on their own blog without being harangued elsewhere.
I disapprove of your use of parables to smuggle in your economic hypotheses, rather than arguing for them competently and clearly.
I disapprove of your commentary, because I agree with wedrifid here:
Is this meant to apply just to LessWrongers? Because it seems kosher to discuss and critique blog posts generally in open threads.
On second thought, you make a good point. The problem wasn’t Vaniver bringing it up, the problem was me not putting clear muflax-like epistemic state warnings on my blog.
Very well.
First, people prefer longer lives to shorter ones.
Second, just as it is difficult to think of goods that are only absolute, it is difficult to think of goods that are only positional. The used car provides $4,500 in transportation value; the Ferrari provides $50,000 in transportation value.
Third, many professions create durable value and large positive externalities. 25% more lawyering or 25% more derivative trading may not have obvious positive benefits, but 25% more programming or 25% more engineering or 25% more science obviously do. Crunch time may be 20 hours a day instead of 16, and so the programmers have just as little time to themselves, but the product will actually be superior, which seems like a Pareto gain.
Fourth, phase changes have effects that are difficult to anticipate. A world that moved at startup speed- where more people were massively productive and focused- could be far more glorious, delightful, and pleasant than our world. It is difficult to imagine just how miserable conditions were when society was liquid, rather than a gas; similarly, it is difficult for a gas to imagine the joys of being a plasma.
I agree it was insufficiently clear. I meant that Yvain has seen societies that are both liquid and gas, and I do not see how someone who grasped the difference between those phases could write a post like his.
You are overestimating the value of reasoning by metaphor and the extent to which your metaphors are shared by others.
When I take a pot of water and heat it, it becomes gas. If I seal the pot and keep heating, it won’t become plasma. It will blow up in my face. See, a metaphor!
It would seem so, and I will try to adjust my style from here on out. Writing was easier when most were a step or two removed from the farm.
I don’t think I understand the metaphor here.
Haiti is miserably poorer than America, in large part because of its people and its institutions. Not just in the sense of physical goods, but in most of the things that make life grand, and the things that make life annoying.
Similarly, we are poorer than the future will be- again, because of people and institutions. (Technology- as in, knowledge about reality and devices that make clever use of that knowledge- is the result of people and institutions.)
Importantly, this is not just in the sense of physical goods. It is one thing to compare a McMansion to a comfortably sized home; it is another to compare the sort of life lived by someone who lives in a world where they can buy a customized continent to someone who lives in a world where they can buy a McMansion.
And so, in light of those changes, to look at a spark that could ionize our gas and say “but we’ll just be running in circles faster!” seems to miss the point. No, when every manager is a clear-headed executive, commercial organizations will be better run and more pleasant to deal with, and the sorts of things we can do will go from great to fantastic. What does it matter that the yachts will be longer and the quays more crowded with them?
Thank you.
Thank you :)
EDIT: Actually, see here
I disagree with your disapproval. While perhaps one wouldn’t want to be “harangued”, it is entirely appropriate to comment on publicly-available texts, and the open thread here is a perfectly acceptable place to do so.
It would have been legit if there was a link posted to the blog.
There is one. And no edit marker on the comment. Confused.
Can you point me to it? I control +F’d it for “less”, “wrong”, and “Vaniver” and found nothing.
I link to Yvain’s livejournal from my comment on LW, but I don’t link to my comment on LW from a comment on Yvain’s livejournal, because I don’t have a livejournal account and am not interested in making one.
I didn’t look into it very hard (maybe they let you post comments anonymously?) because it wasn’t clear to me which option was more polite.
I’m not super opposed to your not posting a link to the livejournal page. I just think it would definitely unquestionably have been legit if you did that, whereas it’s about 3% shady the way you did it right now, to give a super rough estimate of the level of shadiness I feel coming off of that.
The emphasis (and hence the use of the word “harangued” over neutral variants like “discussed” or “criticized”) was on the inappropriateness of Vaniver’s repeated emotional appeals and status attacks against Yvain.
Forum switching is a well-known trolling technique that dates back to Usenet, and indeed possibly further.
I very specifically mentioned potential First World outlays to Third World countries as exceptions to my point. For example, I said:
Other than that, my entire argument was based on the “happiness follows economic growth up to a certain point, then stops” argument that has been mentioned here so many times before. That means a parable talking about how great certain interventions could be for the Third World is irrelevant; the post was very specifically and explicitly aimed at the First.
(I also think the benefits from lack of iodine deficiency are a lot less siphon-away-able)
The “60% serious” number may indeed be too high, though. I meant it to signal that I thought the argument was correct in all of its main points, but probably falls apart because the increase in productivity would produce very small benefits rather than no benefits, and “very small benefits” multiplied by the entire economy still end out pretty huge, especially if some of them end out in the Third World through the indirect methods I mentioned earlier.
The other organ I was looking for was not the heart but the head. Why are some people poor, and others rich? We run on our golden treadmills faster and longer, and what do we get out of it? Something, it would seem; the indigent in America do not eat mud to feel something in their belly.
Happiness! A life’s value is not denominated in smiles. How does satisfaction relate to economic growth?
One day, a stranger came to the village. He carried with him a curious dried herb and sack of seed. The herb’s leaves, he claimed, could be brewed into a soporific tea. Those that took it he would sleep twelve hours a day, instead of eight.
The elders again convened to consider the stranger’s tea. If one man took it, that man would get less done- but if all men took it, then one man’s loss would be balanced by the other’s. Many in the village were fond of their dreams, they said to each other, and so the weed seemed a boon.
When they brought the tea before the village, many nodded at the wisdom of the elders, but one farmer, so poor he had to pull his plow himself, balked. “If you shorten my day,” he said with despair, “then I must shorten my fields, for there are only so many days in the year one can plow, and my poor feet can only move so quickly.”
A woman spoke next. “Sixteen hours of spinning buys me four fish; enough to feed myself and my three children. If I can only spin for twelve hours, then I will only get enough cloth for three fish- and which of my children would you have me not feed?”
The elders did not answer, but then one of the elder’s sons spoke. “I already pay for candles to make my day longer,” he said, “as the sun does not give me as many hours to read as I would like. If you shorten my day, then you shrink how large my mind may grow, for there are more books out there than a lifetime of reading, and yet I would read as many as I can.”
A singer was next, her mellifluous voice carrying easily across the village square. “I enjoy my dreams as much as the next woman, but I enjoy the sound of my voice more.” There were chuckles as she admitted to one of the village’s many jokes. “To only sing for twelve hours a day would make me and my listeners that much poorer.”
Others moved to speak, but the elders were elders because they could see which way the wind blew. “We will run this stranger and his poison weed out of our village!” they declared, and the stranger was soon running towards the woods, watched by angry eyes.
By 60% serious you mean you expect it is wrong? That is not how I treat my seriousness.
It’s not denominated in dollars either, and if I had to pick one word to stand for humans’ terminal values it would be much ‘closer’ to “happiness” than to “economy”.
If every spinster drinks the sleeping tea, less cloth will be made, but people will need it just as much. Thus cloth will become more precious, and people will be willing to pay 4⁄3 of the old price. The kids won’t starve.
Instead, someone else goes unclothed.
More generally, if everyone drinks the tea and produces only 3⁄4 as much, everyone, on average, will be 1⁄4 poorer. Price movements only affect how the poverty is distributed. (Of course, they also affect what new resources are tapped, what new inventions are made, how hard people will work during their reduced hours, how existing resources are redistributed among their uses, and how effort will be redistributed among the different productive activities, but that is going beyond the purpose of the parable.)
Yvain’s premise is that the country is warm, so people only make clothes to show off their wealth, ability to sew, and taste in fashion. Someone decides “I was already reluctant to buy those expensive rags, now they’re just too expensive” and joins the ranks of streakers.
So is demand for cloth elastic, or is it not?
That’s the parable of the broken window.
How many fish does the fisherman catch in an hour?
Aimed for cleverness, failed. Apologies. Retracting.
It’s the right word.
Bludgeoning people with poorly-constructed polls isn’t kosher, particularly when you’re wrong in the first place.
What was this about? Just curious.
I (arguably incorrectly) brought attention to the usage of “spinster”. The snark I intended came off as chiding. Plus, my post cited the recent philosophy poll in a way that was pedantic at best.
If there was anything of redeeming value, I would have left it up rather than blanking the post pre-retraction...
Downvoting you for attempting to abuse my vote.
I tend to agree that this is a silly argument, especially given that it can be applied to coffee as much as to modafinil, so we better ban coffee, lest those allergic to it be at a disadvantage.
Or indeed to any technology. You may think you are better off using a combine harvester instead of a sickle, but actually it just shifts the expectation of how much grain you need to produce.
Yvain says in his posts’ comments that coffee doesn’t work, as tolerance builds up. This seems disputed.
But why not ban coffee? Because, like alcohol, it’s now too ingrained in our culture. But if it wasn’t—preventing headaches, irritability, concentration troubles, and the expectation that everyone can pull all-nighters? Fuck yes.
So, the world would be a better place if people like me (who drink butter-coffee everyday) had to give up their favorite health food or risk jail time? Consider me skeptical.
Does it not work with decaf?
Coffee may not work to generate more virtual hours of productive time in the long run but that doesn’t mean that it’s use in time shifting sleep requirements etc isn’t still of net benefit.
Coffee may be too Near to discuss; I suggest a different even-older expensive teeth-staining addictive stimulant plant popular in social gatherings.
I’ve been thinking about qat a lot these past few days, so I’ll tap out of the Far mode discussion. Just this: my problem with coffee is that people are often given too much work, which they require coffee and similar stimulants to accomplish. (Witness: programmers’ love for soda; project deadlines at university.) Qat doesn’t seem to have that problem.
It does have another problem: if you don’t want coffee, it’s usually socially acceptable to drink another hot beverage (though if you don’t want tea either you’re kinda screwed), whereas qat lacks an alternative.
Given the third world’s fondness for tobacco (eg. apparently China is now the largest and growing tobacco market in the world), isn’t chewing tobacco an alternative?
You should read the post first.
I have, before replying to the OP.
There is a number of fallacies in the above paragraphs, unusually many for a smart person like Yvain, so I assume that his “60% serious” disclaimer was missing a minus sign.
More generally, while very interesting, I find much of what he writes on his blog substantially less logically sound (but also more light-hearted, which I enjoy) than what he writes on LW, to the point that I constantly have to remind myself they’re the same person because I can hardly alieve that. (His writings on raikoh.net are somewhere in between.)
I apologize for accusing you of not reading the post.
I think your sarcastic coffee analogy is not quite apt. Yvain is advocating the status quo, which is more like “There is a ban on coffee from which me and people like me are exempt.”
Yeah, and that kind of people would still use coffee if it were a Schedule IV substance. And I can see no obvious reason why we are in an optimum, where restricting more or fewer stimulants would both be net negatives. (EDIT Actually, before even finishing to read the post, I thought ‘wow—if what he says about medical students etc. is right, we might want to restrict caffeine! I know I want to become stronger rather than my competition to become weaker, but I don’t know if that applies to others, so...’.)
I have not tried to write a mathematical model (should be reasonably easy), but my intuition tells me that the status quo is an unstable equilibrium. It will likely slide toward more universal acceptance, followed by either legalization or enforced prohibition (like with LSD).
Probably, but that may take decades to happen.
It bothers me that no one is applying a reversal test here. The paper even calls out intelligence augmentation as the prime example!
I’m inclined to trust Bostrom’s well thought out paper on the matter, but I’d be curious to hear opposing views.
I might endorse a certain very specific reversal test.
If I could choose between the current world except that freethinkers are at a significant disadvantage relative to everyone else, versus a world with a four hour workday but we all had to sleep four hours more per night so we still had the same amount of free time, plus our economy was at the same level as in the 1990s...
...then actually I would choose the current world, because the four hours more sleep per night would also apply on the weekends and so totally disrupt the balance, which I hadn’t thought of at all in the original post. So never mind.
This assumption that all the change in the amount of waking hours would go towards increasing (or decreasing) labour time is suspect. I mean, why couldn’t people keep the current ratio, work 50-hour workweeks and get 14 additional hours of leisure time per week? The rich get better yachts and everybody has more fun.
Vaniver has, now. EDIT: and shminux had already done so.
Although I’m unsure of the etiquette of posting about personal blogs on other sites, I was also disappointed with the blog post in question. It was the first time that Yvain wrote something I disagreed with after reading his post in full and digesting in. I’ve often disagreed with him before reading it, but he usually persuades me.
This post seemed to rely on the principle that having more spare time is a positional good, with which I disagree strongly. Essentially, giving everyone another four hours of awake, productive time, is the same as extending your life by four hours for each day you are alive [and you do so in good health—extending the human lifespan from 80 to 95 might or might not be a good thing, but adding years to your healthy, productive life, seems a good thing]
Yvain’s claim seems to be that 100% of the extra four hours will be diverted into work, but to me that’s a) almost certainly not true [the figure would be more than 0% and less than 100%], b) not a bad thing.
a) It seems very likely that, given that our day is > 0% work and > 0% leisure, an extra four hours a day will add more than 0 hours of leisure.
b) If all med students get more studying done, it’s far from obvious that the net result is a bad one. I assume that there is some value to med students’ knowledge of medicine [okay, for anatomy courses this might not hold]. If, say, Apple workers work 50% more, then we stand to get better and faster Macs]
What might convince me that Modafinil is a bad thing would be if a lot of people actively disliked the time they spent working. I personally assume most people roughly like or are neutral towards their jobs and mainly want to work shorter hours because it gives them more time for things outside of work, but I’m almost certainly generalizing from the example of me. If Yvain had made this argument I would understand more about where he was coming from and why.
In some professions saying that you “love you work” is a signal of a good employee. So I would expect some dishonesty in self-reporting.
How could we ask the question to reduce this signalling? I imagine only silly questions like this:
Imagine that for some external reasons your workplace must be closed for two weeks. During those two weeks you will receive your normal salary, and those two weeks will not be taken from your holidays. How does this message make you feel?
a) awesome!
b) mildly happy
c) neutral
d) mildly sad
e) depressed
On the second thought, is this question really silly, or does it show our true preferences? And the silliness is merely a reflection of dissonance between our professed values and real values.
This doesn’t quite answer the question. I would be very happy if my place of work were closed and I could do fun things for two weeks. My objection to working isn’t that work is unpleasant; it’s that there’s a high opportunity cost [all the fun people I could hang out with, the great books I could read, etc]. A better question is “imagine you are asked for your employer to take part in an experiment where you instead have your brain turned off. Your body ages by eight hours, but your brain experiences it as “you step into the office, then step out”.
It retains the silliness but solves the opportunity cost problem.
You are right about the opportunity costs. The work is actually not bad—it’s the idea of all the things I could have done in the same time that’s driving me crazy.
Your question is better (although it does not contain learning during the job, which is important too).
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I think it genuinely shows our preferences. Of course, I also would be fairly neutral about this (and would probably seek other work for those two weeks).
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Doctors don’t take courses in modafinil, or anything, so I’m not sure what you expect them to base their advice on besides the FDA prescribing guides like http://www.erowid.org/smarts/modafinil/modafinil_provigil_prescribing_info1.pdf
A pharmacist might be a better bet.
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In general, if people are able to get more done in a day, would this give an advantage to the makers or the takers? I don’t have a general principle which gives an obvious answer.
By advantage, do you mean subtracting their benefits from each other, to see who benefits more? Or do you think it might be a case where one group is actually made worse off, and another group made better off?
I was thinking about subtracting their benefits from each other.
More hours in a day and more focused attention might have been able to give the financial industry even more ability to cause havoc.
I don’t think the benefits are measured in the same denomination, and so it’s somewhat difficult to subtract them (which agrees with you not having a general principle to give a clear answer). Would more politics get done with more hours in the day? Perhaps. More trading? Certainly. With the whole world more productive, there will certainly be more to skim off the top- but what percentage do the takers take? In aggregate terms, it looks like the makers win more, but in per capita terms, it looks like the takers win more. But that’s just looking at income distribution- who gets more of the positive externalities? Here, the per capita seems only slightly better for the takers, and the aggregate far better for the makers.