Yvain’s post is confused in a number of ways, in fact I get the feeling that he hasn’t added much to the articles he links at the beginning.
The most blatant problem is his Las Vegas example. He asserts:
Like all good mystical experiences, it happened in Vegas. I was standing on top of one of their many tall buildings, looking down at the city below, all lit up in the dark. If you’ve never been to Vegas, it is really impressive. Skyscrapers and lights in every variety strange and beautiful all clustered together. And I had two thoughts, crystal clear:
It is glorious that we can create something like this.
It is shameful that we did.
What reason does Yvain give for it being shameful? That it’s an inefficient use of resources. This is an interesting objection, given that the rest of the essay consists of him objecting to the process of Moloch/Gnon destroying all human values in the name of efficiency. So when faced with an example of Gnon doing the opposite, i.e., building something beautiful the the middle of the desert despite concerns about inefficiency how does he react? By declaring that “there no philosophy on earth that would endorse” its existence.
It doesn’t seem to me that the author’s objection to Las Vegas is that it is an inefficient use of resources. He does mention use of resources, but that isn’t the main point of that section. (Italics in the original; boldface added.)
Like, by what standard is building gigantic forty-story-high indoor replicas of Venice, Paris, Rome, Egypt, and Camelot side-by-side, filled with albino tigers, in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in North America, a remotely sane use of our civilization’s limited resources?
And it occurred to me that maybe there is no philosophy on Earth that would endorse the existence of Las Vegas. Even Objectivism, which is usually my go-to philosophy for justifying the excesses of capitalism, at least grounds it in the belief that capitalism improves people’s lives. Henry Ford was virtuous because he allowed lots of otherwise car-less people to obtain cars and so made them better off. What does Vegas do? Promise a bunch of shmucks free money and not give it to them.
Las Vegas doesn’t exist because of some decision to hedonically optimize civilization, it exists because of a quirk in dopaminergic reward circuits, plus the microstructure of an uneven regulatory environment, plus Schelling points. A rational central planner with a god’s-eye-view, contemplating these facts, might have thought “Hm, dopaminergic reward circuits have a quirk where certain tasks with slightly negative risk-benefit ratios get an emotional valence associated with slightly positive risk-benefit ratios, let’s see if we can educate people to beware of that.” People within the system, following the incentives created by these facts, think: “Let’s build a forty-story-high indoor replica of ancient Rome full of albino tigers in the middle of the desert, and so become slightly richer than people who didn’t!”
It isn’t just that Vegas pours money into a hole in the desert that could be better used on something that makes people a lot better off. It’s that Vegas makes people worse off by exploiting a bug in human cognition. And that the incentive structure of modern capitalism — with a little help from organized crime, historically — drove lots of resources into exploiting this ugly bug.
A self-aware designer of ants would probably want to fix the bug that leads to ant mills, the glitch in trail-following behavior that allows hundreds or thousands of ants to purposelessly walk in a loop until they walk themselves to death. But for an ant, following trails is a good (incentivized) behavior, even though it sometimes gets “exploited” by an ant mill.
The point isn’t “Vegas is bad because it’s not optimal.” It’s “Vegas is a negative-sum condition arising from a bug in an economic algorithm implemented cellularly. Reflection allows us to notice that bug, and capitalism gives us the opportunity to exploit it but not to fix it.”
Ants aren’t smart enough to worry about ant mills. Humans are smart enough to worry about civilization degenerating into negative-sum cognitive-bug-exploiting apparatus.
The Elua thing about Las Vegas isn’t that people can be snagged by intermittent reward, it’s that people would like to have some sparkle with their intermittent rewards, so you get the extravagant architecture.
Yvain’s post is confused in a number of ways, in fact I get the feeling that he hasn’t added much to the articles he links at the beginning.
The most blatant problem is his Las Vegas example. He asserts:
What reason does Yvain give for it being shameful? That it’s an inefficient use of resources. This is an interesting objection, given that the rest of the essay consists of him objecting to the process of Moloch/Gnon destroying all human values in the name of efficiency. So when faced with an example of Gnon doing the opposite, i.e., building something beautiful the the middle of the desert despite concerns about inefficiency how does he react? By declaring that “there no philosophy on earth that would endorse” its existence.
Yeah, Yvain is not off to a good start here.
It doesn’t seem to me that the author’s objection to Las Vegas is that it is an inefficient use of resources. He does mention use of resources, but that isn’t the main point of that section. (Italics in the original; boldface added.)
It isn’t just that Vegas pours money into a hole in the desert that could be better used on something that makes people a lot better off. It’s that Vegas makes people worse off by exploiting a bug in human cognition. And that the incentive structure of modern capitalism — with a little help from organized crime, historically — drove lots of resources into exploiting this ugly bug.
A self-aware designer of ants would probably want to fix the bug that leads to ant mills, the glitch in trail-following behavior that allows hundreds or thousands of ants to purposelessly walk in a loop until they walk themselves to death. But for an ant, following trails is a good (incentivized) behavior, even though it sometimes gets “exploited” by an ant mill.
The point isn’t “Vegas is bad because it’s not optimal.” It’s “Vegas is a negative-sum condition arising from a bug in an economic algorithm implemented cellularly. Reflection allows us to notice that bug, and capitalism gives us the opportunity to exploit it but not to fix it.”
Ants aren’t smart enough to worry about ant mills. Humans are smart enough to worry about civilization degenerating into negative-sum cognitive-bug-exploiting apparatus.
The Elua thing about Las Vegas isn’t that people can be snagged by intermittent reward, it’s that people would like to have some sparkle with their intermittent rewards, so you get the extravagant architecture.