Eliezer has said something wise on exactly this point...somewhere. It is somewhat in contention with what you say here, or at least how you say it.
If your foundational principle that you program into in AI is that slavery is bad, taxes become impossible to collect.
So arguing against something by saying that it is qualitatively slavery is suspect, akin to arguing against food because it is qualitatively cyanide. An argument against apples should have to enumerate the quantity of cyanide in the pits and the lethal dose to humans.
I’d rather say current work conditions have specific negative qualities, or if the best way to bring them to mind is with “slavery”, then be careful to say it is bad because it is too much slavery, rather than bad because it is slavery.
While I agree that the discussion could better be furthered by tabooing slavery, I think there is a much stronger analogy here than there is between, say, slavery and paying taxes.
For example, in theory, taxes constitute a high level social agreement to pursue certain goals which benefit all people, executed by an entity that fairly represents the collective interest. (obviously in practice this is a bit different.) In a perfect world, I envision myself willingly paying taxes to a law-enforcing singleton. This seems decidedly unlike “slavery.”
However most people’s day to day jobs are:
Not chosen by them
Required for their economic well-being
Take up the vast majority of their time
Have no autonomy in the work
Basically all of the wealth they create is transferred to their employer
Slavery in the historic sense essentially had these characteristics, although in the sense of slavery in the historic USA it was often coupled with things like physical abuse and an intense loss of legal standing; and while desk jobs are harmful to one’s health and the rich certainly have a different legal standing than the working poor I don’t think that this makes for a good comparison.
Since when do people not choose their jobs or spend the vast majority of their time at work? Even the classic “nine-to-five grind” uses only a third of the day (discounting travel time), and none of the day on weekends.
Rather than saying something from memory, I am going to go through my facebook friends list and tally all of the people that I know that are at jobs simply because they were the only job the person could find. I will also tally people who, due to overtime, strange shifts or stress from work, spend most of their waking time at work, preparing for work, or recovering from work. I will exclude persons that I do now know well enough to know all of this information about, and persons that I know to be on gap years or otherwise temporarily-unemployed-by-choice.
Of 75 persons whose employment status I was familiar with and was not temporary, 17 have jobs that they are in because it is the only job they can get. Five have jobs that, due to odd scheduling or stress, take up the majority of their waking hours. A further 49 I met in college, probably over 40 of these I met in graduate school. Because only about a third of developed world citizens have a college degree and less than 10% of US citizens have advanced degrees (I pulled these figures off wikipedia without looking into them too heavily).
So if I normalize my experience for demographics:
~40 graduate degrees, 2 people with jobs without a choice
~9 more I met at college; 4 people have jobs where they had no choice, 1 has a job which takes the majority of his waking time
25 which I did not meet in college (some do have degrees), among whom 11 have jobs which they did not choose and 4 have jobs which use the majority of their waking time.
-> general population: ~65% no college, 44% of these do not choose their jobs, and 16% take up the majority of their time (not with working hours but because of scheduling, etc.)
25% college population: 44% did not choose their jobs, 11% have their time hogged
10% graduate population: 5% did not choose jobs
This would leave me with 40% of the general population being in a job because it was the only job available to them, as well as ~13% of the population having a job that controls the majority of their time.
I will note that as someone with an opinion, my figures are probably slightly biased. Biases may come from things like remembering where people work only if they have complained about it, or forgetting recent changes in employment status. I would still expect that I have undervalued college degrees after adjusting for them, but I could be wrong.
These figures are definitely different from what I expected; I expected more than 40% to be in jobs with no real choice and I guess I’m pleasantly surprised that so many people are choosing what they do. 40% is still quite significant though.
I also grant that my statement about most people having jobs that take up the vast majority of their time was unfounded, though I believe it to be supported by such things as the introduction to “Living on 24 Hours a Day” and others’ discussions of working lives in this thread.
168 hours a week, minus 56 hours sleeping, leaves us with 112 waking hours. If we spend 11.2 hours per workday dealing with work, lunch, and commutes (say, an hour commute each way, an hour lunch, and an 8 hour shift) then it’s actually entirely possible for work to have managed to eat half our waking hours.
Even for a regular 30 minute commute and 30 minute lunch, you’re still looking at 9.5 hours of work time vs 6.5 hours of personal time during your waking hours.
Work really does consume a huge fraction of our time and energy.
Good points here—I hadn’t considered commute, as I am blessed with a few solid jobs that let me work from home. This post definitely made me think about the whole conventional work schedule and how it can affect people’s lives.
From a consequentialist point of view, it’s not obviously invalid to say no taxes should ever be collected. Humans naturally think in terms of rules, your term “consistency” was a fine one. Hence, in the real world, the consequences of things include how they interact with this delusional proclivity of ours.
For this reason, the slippery slope argument is often not a fallacy. As used it often is a fallacy when an arguer is sufficiently mistaken about the degree to which we think in terms of rules. “If you allow barbers to cut hair, before you know it they’ll be marauding through the streets, dismembering people!”
For us humans, it may be valid to say that we should never collect any tax ever (or, as is popular, any income tax ever), as if one begins to collect any, a line will be crossed in our minds, and we will then collect too much than is good, and be worse off than if none had been collected. This would at least be a coherent libertarian argument, one that would be worthy of some consideration.
In contrast, to claim that for each good or service anyone ever produces, has produced, or will produce, there is no level of tax greater than zero that would have optimal consequences if collected, if only we didn’t think non-reductively in terms of rules, would be a monumentally ambitious claim.
It is possible that only our rule based thinking is making certain otherwise good actions bad. To the extent this is the case, we should overcome our bias, not embrace it and cater to it by pretending accommodating it is the best we can do if it isn’t in fact the best we can do.
As it doesn’t naturally occur to people to apply their pro-tax (which means pro-some tax, some of the time) outlook to endorse actually harmful slavery, it is invalid to raise the consistency argument as a reason to abolish taxation.
“Embracing taxes as good” is a confusing phrase, one with which I think you are intentionally confusing others or have accidentally confused yourself. Yes, he was “embracing” at least some amount of tax on some things some of the time as good. This is a very modest claim. By that standard of rhetoric, one could say of a complete pacifist who would never harm another that they “embrace killing as good”, if they think it good for some people to kill themselves if they are found in bad enough circumstances. Less saliently but more normally, one could say of me that I “embrace killing”, for I endorse some people killing some people who aren’t themselves some of the time, in limited situations, as everyone I know does.
Defense Against the Dark Arts needs to become total and automatic, because it is the foundation upon which the complicated rationalist techniques are built. There’s no point studying some complex Bayesian evidence-summing manuever that could determine the expected utility of studying yoga if an anecdote about Steve Jobs can keep you from even considering it.
How do you know you have mastered this art? When the statements
In his youth, Steve Jobs went to India to be enlightened. After seeing that the nation claiming to be the source of this great spiritual knowledge was full of hunger, ignorance, squalor, poverty, prejudice, and disease, he came back and said that the East should look to the West for enlightenment.
and
For complex historical reasons, the average Westerner is richer than the average Indian. Therefore, there is minimal possibility that any Indian people ever discovered interesting mental techniques.
“Embracing taxes as good” is a confusing phrase, one with which I think you are intentionally confusing others or have accidentally confused yourself. Yes, he was “embracing” at least some amount of tax on some things some of the time as good. This is a very modest claim.
I accept that you found it confusing, though I’m not sure that the analogy with the phrase “embracing killing as good” is on target. I certainly had no intention of meaning anything other than “embracing some level of taxation as acceptable”.
I don’t really want to have an argument about whether some taxes are good, so I’m willing to stipulate for this conversation that it may be that some are, but I did find this interesting:
As it doesn’t naturally occur to people to apply their pro-tax (which means pro-some tax, some of the time) outlook to endorse actually harmful slavery, it is invalid to raise the consistency argument as a reason to abolish taxation.
I note that the only way to make this sentence true was to include “actually harmful”, a phrase which handily excludes any types of slavery it naturally occurs to people to argue for, such as the draft or prison labor.
“Embracing taxes as good” is a confusing phrase, one with which I think you are intentionally confusing others or have accidentally confused yourself.
I have either changed my mind or had inexcusably poorly worded my thoughts. I think you were accidentally sneaking in negative connotations, but do not think you intend to confuse or are confused by this phrase.
My analogy to killing was fantastic, but if you are a deontologist, it is not because this particular phrasing with its strong incorrect connotations has confused you. Categorical thinking leads to the same sort of problem in each case. If you like, they are in the same logical category and the large difference in connotations etc. shows why it isn’t practical to try and align moral intuitions with logical categories.
I certainly had no intention of meaning anything other than “embracing some level of taxation as acceptable”.
When I thought about the issue, the phrase you used did not come to my mind as it seems to me to imply too much. Total quantity of taxation in a society is an important factor, but not as much as other structural arrangements. That is to say, your phrasing with the word “level” offended my libertarian sensibilities, which entertain tax schemes such as only taxing imported luxuries, for which the word “level” seems inappropriate; in my opinion “level” to strongly connotes rates oriented around less differentiated categories, and implies that the most important factor is the amount, whereas in my mind the amount of taxation in society is less important than how it is distributed. Even setting aside issues of proportion paid per class, whether taxes are levied on income or spending, whether they are passed on to consumers or put upon them directly, these are issues I think important. As I believe there to be many important variables distinguishing one tax from another, it is not surprising that I think some combination of those variables produces a good outcome, as there is so much theoretical space for a good solution to be in, as against if I thought the only important thing were, say, tax as a percentage of GDP, in which case it would be more plausible to say no outcome is favorable, because there would only need to be a one-dimensional search along the “how much” axis.
The particular problem for the “taxation is slavery” position that I was thinking of is the lack of boundary between taxes and fees that mirrors the lack of boundary between taxation and slavery, though it is on a different axis. In general, the absolutist position that defines things within a category as bad has these boundary problems. One can change the terms of how the government, directly or indirectly, takes and spends money and one subtle change at a time gradually make something once best described as a “fee” become better and better characterized by the word “tax”.
One could respond by saying all fees are slavery, or that the enactment of too vague structures of appropriation and spending is itself immoral, etc.
excludes any types of slavery it naturally occurs to people to argue for, such as the draft or prison labor.
I confess to having not considered those things when I wrote what I did, I was only thinking of the relationship between taxation and human ownership, and that taxation does not seem to make people think ownership more acceptable. Upon reflection, the implicit absence of absolute private property rights would seem to make the opposite true.
I don’t, however, see how those or any particular cases could be used to rebut what I said, as I offered a general framework: I accept banning good things to the extent we are deluded, by their being allowed, into doing bad things worse than the good things. If it were the case that any taxation is made humans accept kidnapping people and using them to do manual labor, which would be very, very bad, then I would oppose any taxation; if it is the case that any taxation is, all else equal, a necessary condition for humans accepting the draft or prison labor, and those are on net bad, and those bad things outweigh the net good derived from taxation, then I oppose any taxation as a matter of practice until we fix our bias of thinking in unnatural categories that lead us to think moral permissibility is a matter of an act having features of a category such that all acts within the category have the same vector of moral import (if not the same magnitude), and can resume enjoying the otherwise net benefits of taxation.
My argument isn’t a direct policy one, just that taxes being bad would have to be because of consequences, the most important of which likely be human susceptibility to inappropriate categorical thinking. It would not be because taxes take from people unwillingly, or any other such reason that is a direct product of the inappropriate categorical thinking.
As far as the examples go, if they are wrong, it is because they suck, for the victims and by warping state incentives, and in general do more harm than good, and anything that promotes them must count them as a loss on its moral balance sheet. If this loss is turning an otherwise valuable human construct, such as taxation, into a losing one for humanity, then we ought to rescue it by severing the false degree connection in people’s minds, to the extant we can.
It does not seem to me that there is much relationship between taxation and prison labor, and there is much more between taxation and the draft.
I may have a longer response later, but I just want to point out that since no one would suggest that all conceivable taxes are good, the phrase “embracing taxes as good” does not have the connotation you imply I was assigning to it.
( I’m… startled (!) that deleting doesn’t delete. I guess that must have been thrown out in the redesign, but I hadn’t noticed it until now.)
Eliezer has said something wise on exactly this point...somewhere. It is somewhat in contention with what you say here, or at least how you say it.
If your foundational principle that you program into in AI is that slavery is bad, taxes become impossible to collect.
So arguing against something by saying that it is qualitatively slavery is suspect, akin to arguing against food because it is qualitatively cyanide. An argument against apples should have to enumerate the quantity of cyanide in the pits and the lethal dose to humans.
I’d rather say current work conditions have specific negative qualities, or if the best way to bring them to mind is with “slavery”, then be careful to say it is bad because it is too much slavery, rather than bad because it is slavery.
Edit: it was Yvain who said it here
While I agree that the discussion could better be furthered by tabooing slavery, I think there is a much stronger analogy here than there is between, say, slavery and paying taxes.
For example, in theory, taxes constitute a high level social agreement to pursue certain goals which benefit all people, executed by an entity that fairly represents the collective interest. (obviously in practice this is a bit different.) In a perfect world, I envision myself willingly paying taxes to a law-enforcing singleton. This seems decidedly unlike “slavery.”
However most people’s day to day jobs are:
Not chosen by them
Required for their economic well-being
Take up the vast majority of their time
Have no autonomy in the work
Basically all of the wealth they create is transferred to their employer
Slavery in the historic sense essentially had these characteristics, although in the sense of slavery in the historic USA it was often coupled with things like physical abuse and an intense loss of legal standing; and while desk jobs are harmful to one’s health and the rich certainly have a different legal standing than the working poor I don’t think that this makes for a good comparison.
Since when do people not choose their jobs or spend the vast majority of their time at work? Even the classic “nine-to-five grind” uses only a third of the day (discounting travel time), and none of the day on weekends.
Rather than saying something from memory, I am going to go through my facebook friends list and tally all of the people that I know that are at jobs simply because they were the only job the person could find. I will also tally people who, due to overtime, strange shifts or stress from work, spend most of their waking time at work, preparing for work, or recovering from work. I will exclude persons that I do now know well enough to know all of this information about, and persons that I know to be on gap years or otherwise temporarily-unemployed-by-choice.
Of 75 persons whose employment status I was familiar with and was not temporary, 17 have jobs that they are in because it is the only job they can get. Five have jobs that, due to odd scheduling or stress, take up the majority of their waking hours. A further 49 I met in college, probably over 40 of these I met in graduate school. Because only about a third of developed world citizens have a college degree and less than 10% of US citizens have advanced degrees (I pulled these figures off wikipedia without looking into them too heavily).
So if I normalize my experience for demographics: ~40 graduate degrees, 2 people with jobs without a choice ~9 more I met at college; 4 people have jobs where they had no choice, 1 has a job which takes the majority of his waking time 25 which I did not meet in college (some do have degrees), among whom 11 have jobs which they did not choose and 4 have jobs which use the majority of their waking time.
-> general population: ~65% no college, 44% of these do not choose their jobs, and 16% take up the majority of their time (not with working hours but because of scheduling, etc.) 25% college population: 44% did not choose their jobs, 11% have their time hogged 10% graduate population: 5% did not choose jobs
This would leave me with 40% of the general population being in a job because it was the only job available to them, as well as ~13% of the population having a job that controls the majority of their time.
I will note that as someone with an opinion, my figures are probably slightly biased. Biases may come from things like remembering where people work only if they have complained about it, or forgetting recent changes in employment status. I would still expect that I have undervalued college degrees after adjusting for them, but I could be wrong.
These figures are definitely different from what I expected; I expected more than 40% to be in jobs with no real choice and I guess I’m pleasantly surprised that so many people are choosing what they do. 40% is still quite significant though.
I also grant that my statement about most people having jobs that take up the vast majority of their time was unfounded, though I believe it to be supported by such things as the introduction to “Living on 24 Hours a Day” and others’ discussions of working lives in this thread.
168 hours a week, minus 56 hours sleeping, leaves us with 112 waking hours. If we spend 11.2 hours per workday dealing with work, lunch, and commutes (say, an hour commute each way, an hour lunch, and an 8 hour shift) then it’s actually entirely possible for work to have managed to eat half our waking hours.
Even for a regular 30 minute commute and 30 minute lunch, you’re still looking at 9.5 hours of work time vs 6.5 hours of personal time during your waking hours.
Work really does consume a huge fraction of our time and energy.
Good points here—I hadn’t considered commute, as I am blessed with a few solid jobs that let me work from home. This post definitely made me think about the whole conventional work schedule and how it can affect people’s lives.
Was Eliezer really embracing taxes as good, here, as you imply? Seems like more of a consistency argument against taxes.
From a consequentialist point of view, it’s not obviously invalid to say no taxes should ever be collected. Humans naturally think in terms of rules, your term “consistency” was a fine one. Hence, in the real world, the consequences of things include how they interact with this delusional proclivity of ours.
For this reason, the slippery slope argument is often not a fallacy. As used it often is a fallacy when an arguer is sufficiently mistaken about the degree to which we think in terms of rules. “If you allow barbers to cut hair, before you know it they’ll be marauding through the streets, dismembering people!”
For us humans, it may be valid to say that we should never collect any tax ever (or, as is popular, any income tax ever), as if one begins to collect any, a line will be crossed in our minds, and we will then collect too much than is good, and be worse off than if none had been collected. This would at least be a coherent libertarian argument, one that would be worthy of some consideration.
In contrast, to claim that for each good or service anyone ever produces, has produced, or will produce, there is no level of tax greater than zero that would have optimal consequences if collected, if only we didn’t think non-reductively in terms of rules, would be a monumentally ambitious claim.
It is possible that only our rule based thinking is making certain otherwise good actions bad. To the extent this is the case, we should overcome our bias, not embrace it and cater to it by pretending accommodating it is the best we can do if it isn’t in fact the best we can do.
As it doesn’t naturally occur to people to apply their pro-tax (which means pro-some tax, some of the time) outlook to endorse actually harmful slavery, it is invalid to raise the consistency argument as a reason to abolish taxation.
“Embracing taxes as good” is a confusing phrase, one with which I think you are intentionally confusing others or have accidentally confused yourself. Yes, he was “embracing” at least some amount of tax on some things some of the time as good. This is a very modest claim. By that standard of rhetoric, one could say of a complete pacifist who would never harm another that they “embrace killing as good”, if they think it good for some people to kill themselves if they are found in bad enough circumstances. Less saliently but more normally, one could say of me that I “embrace killing”, for I endorse some people killing some people who aren’t themselves some of the time, in limited situations, as everyone I know does.
I am reminded of this:
See also Unnatural Categories.
I accept that you found it confusing, though I’m not sure that the analogy with the phrase “embracing killing as good” is on target. I certainly had no intention of meaning anything other than “embracing some level of taxation as acceptable”.
I don’t really want to have an argument about whether some taxes are good, so I’m willing to stipulate for this conversation that it may be that some are, but I did find this interesting:
I note that the only way to make this sentence true was to include “actually harmful”, a phrase which handily excludes any types of slavery it naturally occurs to people to argue for, such as the draft or prison labor.
I have either changed my mind or had inexcusably poorly worded my thoughts. I think you were accidentally sneaking in negative connotations, but do not think you intend to confuse or are confused by this phrase.
My analogy to killing was fantastic, but if you are a deontologist, it is not because this particular phrasing with its strong incorrect connotations has confused you. Categorical thinking leads to the same sort of problem in each case. If you like, they are in the same logical category and the large difference in connotations etc. shows why it isn’t practical to try and align moral intuitions with logical categories.
When I thought about the issue, the phrase you used did not come to my mind as it seems to me to imply too much. Total quantity of taxation in a society is an important factor, but not as much as other structural arrangements. That is to say, your phrasing with the word “level” offended my libertarian sensibilities, which entertain tax schemes such as only taxing imported luxuries, for which the word “level” seems inappropriate; in my opinion “level” to strongly connotes rates oriented around less differentiated categories, and implies that the most important factor is the amount, whereas in my mind the amount of taxation in society is less important than how it is distributed. Even setting aside issues of proportion paid per class, whether taxes are levied on income or spending, whether they are passed on to consumers or put upon them directly, these are issues I think important. As I believe there to be many important variables distinguishing one tax from another, it is not surprising that I think some combination of those variables produces a good outcome, as there is so much theoretical space for a good solution to be in, as against if I thought the only important thing were, say, tax as a percentage of GDP, in which case it would be more plausible to say no outcome is favorable, because there would only need to be a one-dimensional search along the “how much” axis.
The particular problem for the “taxation is slavery” position that I was thinking of is the lack of boundary between taxes and fees that mirrors the lack of boundary between taxation and slavery, though it is on a different axis. In general, the absolutist position that defines things within a category as bad has these boundary problems. One can change the terms of how the government, directly or indirectly, takes and spends money and one subtle change at a time gradually make something once best described as a “fee” become better and better characterized by the word “tax”.
One could respond by saying all fees are slavery, or that the enactment of too vague structures of appropriation and spending is itself immoral, etc.
I confess to having not considered those things when I wrote what I did, I was only thinking of the relationship between taxation and human ownership, and that taxation does not seem to make people think ownership more acceptable. Upon reflection, the implicit absence of absolute private property rights would seem to make the opposite true.
I don’t, however, see how those or any particular cases could be used to rebut what I said, as I offered a general framework: I accept banning good things to the extent we are deluded, by their being allowed, into doing bad things worse than the good things. If it were the case that any taxation is made humans accept kidnapping people and using them to do manual labor, which would be very, very bad, then I would oppose any taxation; if it is the case that any taxation is, all else equal, a necessary condition for humans accepting the draft or prison labor, and those are on net bad, and those bad things outweigh the net good derived from taxation, then I oppose any taxation as a matter of practice until we fix our bias of thinking in unnatural categories that lead us to think moral permissibility is a matter of an act having features of a category such that all acts within the category have the same vector of moral import (if not the same magnitude), and can resume enjoying the otherwise net benefits of taxation.
My argument isn’t a direct policy one, just that taxes being bad would have to be because of consequences, the most important of which likely be human susceptibility to inappropriate categorical thinking. It would not be because taxes take from people unwillingly, or any other such reason that is a direct product of the inappropriate categorical thinking.
As far as the examples go, if they are wrong, it is because they suck, for the victims and by warping state incentives, and in general do more harm than good, and anything that promotes them must count them as a loss on its moral balance sheet. If this loss is turning an otherwise valuable human construct, such as taxation, into a losing one for humanity, then we ought to rescue it by severing the false degree connection in people’s minds, to the extant we can.
It does not seem to me that there is much relationship between taxation and prison labor, and there is much more between taxation and the draft.
I may have a longer response later, but I just want to point out that since no one would suggest that all conceivable taxes are good, the phrase “embracing taxes as good” does not have the connotation you imply I was assigning to it.
( I’m… startled (!) that deleting doesn’t delete. I guess that must have been thrown out in the redesign, but I hadn’t noticed it until now.)