Yes In the same sense that’s there’s no such thing as being optimal but not optimising anything in particular, or optimising everything in general, there is no sense that a market being unspecifically efficient will solve a problem that has never been fed into it.
There is also a constant confusion between unregulated markets and free markets. Unregulated markets can be captured by monpolies, and thereby cease to be free in important senses.
What is the utility function of a market, absent regulation?
I’m not 100% sure I understood the first paragraph, could you clarify it for me if I got it wrong?
Essentially, the “efficient-markets-as-high-status-authorities” mindset I was trying to describe seems to me that work as such:
Given a problem A, let’s say providing life saving medicine to max number of people, it assumes that letting agents motivated by profit act freely, unrestricted by regulations or policies that even be aimed to try fix problem A, would provide said medicine to more people than an intentional policy of a government that’s trying to provide said medicine to max number of people.
The market doesn’t seem to have a utility function in this model, but any agent in this market (that is able to survive in it) is motivated by an utility function that just wants to maximise profit.
Part of the reason for the assumption that “free market of agents motivated by profit” should be so good at producing solution for problem A (save lives with medicine) is that the “free market” is awesomely good at pricing actions and at finding ways to get profits, because a lot of agents are trying different things at their best to get profit and everything that works get copied. (If anyone has a roughly related theory and feels I butchered or got wrong the reasoning involved, you are welcomed to express it right, I’m genuinely interested).
My main objection to this is that I fail to see how this is different by asking an unaligned AI that’s not super intelligent, but still a lot smarter than you, to get your mother out of a burning building so you’d press the reward button the AI wants you to press.
If I understood your first paragraph correctly, we are both generally skeptic that a market of agents set about to maximise profit would be, on average in many different possible cases, good at generating value that’s different than maximising profit.
Thank you for the clarification between unregulated and free.
I was aware of how one wouldn’t lead to the other, but I’m now unsure about how many of the people I talked to about this had this distinction in mind. I saw a lots of arguments for deregulation in political press that made appeals to the idea of the “free market”, so I think I usually assumed that one arguing for one of these positions would assume that a free market would be an unregulated one and not foresee this obvious problem.
Yes In the same sense that’s there’s no such thing as being optimal but not optimising anything in particular, or optimising everything in general, there is no sense that a market being unspecifically efficient will solve a problem that has never been fed into it.
There is also a constant confusion between unregulated markets and free markets. Unregulated markets can be captured by monpolies, and thereby cease to be free in important senses.
What is the utility function of a market, absent regulation?
I’m not 100% sure I understood the first paragraph, could you clarify it for me if I got it wrong?
Essentially, the “efficient-markets-as-high-status-authorities” mindset I was trying to describe seems to me that work as such:
Given a problem A, let’s say providing life saving medicine to max number of people, it assumes that letting agents motivated by profit act freely, unrestricted by regulations or policies that even be aimed to try fix problem A, would provide said medicine to more people than an intentional policy of a government that’s trying to provide said medicine to max number of people.
The market doesn’t seem to have a utility function in this model, but any agent in this market (that is able to survive in it) is motivated by an utility function that just wants to maximise profit.
Part of the reason for the assumption that “free market of agents motivated by profit” should be so good at producing solution for problem A (save lives with medicine) is that the “free market” is awesomely good at pricing actions and at finding ways to get profits, because a lot of agents are trying different things at their best to get profit and everything that works get copied. (If anyone has a roughly related theory and feels I butchered or got wrong the reasoning involved, you are welcomed to express it right, I’m genuinely interested).
My main objection to this is that I fail to see how this is different by asking an unaligned AI that’s not super intelligent, but still a lot smarter than you, to get your mother out of a burning building so you’d press the reward button the AI wants you to press.
If I understood your first paragraph correctly, we are both generally skeptic that a market of agents set about to maximise profit would be, on average in many different possible cases, good at generating value that’s different than maximising profit.
Thank you for the clarification between unregulated and free.
I was aware of how one wouldn’t lead to the other, but I’m now unsure about how many of the people I talked to about this had this distinction in mind.
I saw a lots of arguments for deregulation in political press that made appeals to the idea of the “free market”, so I think I usually assumed that one arguing for one of these positions would assume that a free market would be an unregulated one and not foresee this obvious problem.