Sacredness (is that word different from sanctity?) of certain behaviors and transactions is sometimes a useful shortcut, but at root it’s an epistemological mistake. It’s very similar to the shortcut of certainty—one should never actually assign 100% or 0% to any belief, but it’s way more convenient to express it that way than to figure out how many 0s or 9s you actually have.
Likewise for things you talk about as “sacred”—in fact, there is a different-currency trade value you’d accept. It’s just that you think you won’t get that value in trade, so you “protect” your private value by trying to prevent all trades.
No question that there’s a trade value you’d accept.
But as the old joke goes, once we start solving for that value, we’ve established what you are, and now we’re talking price. What we’re trying to protect is sometimes the pressure to accept bad deals, but it’s also that putting those deals on the table at all is inherently devaluing and destructive, and also that others doing such deals carries a negative externality for you by doing the same. If you think that effect isn’t real (or isn’t substantial) I’d be curious to hear more about why.
I think the epistemological mistake is taking the framework too seriously on the wrong meta-level. Which can be quite bad!
I’m worried that this is pushing towards a selective demand for rigor, unless we acknowledge explicitly that the same mistake can be made about the trade orientation, which tends to collapse the map-territory distinction, and in particular confuse exchange rates (i.e. prices) and stores of value.
I honestly don’t think that considering trades devalues anything. I think I’ve seen enough different people acting offended at trade offers that I can’t say the effect isn’t real, but I personally don’t feel it very strongly and I think it can prevent good trades. Kidney pricing is a great example—lots of people would be better off with one fewer kidney and lots more money, and lots of people would be better off with one more kidney and that much less money. Preventing this trade is either a moral mistake or pure evil, depending on your framework.
I think it’s actually stronger in acknowledging the map-territory distinction. Every action that every agent takes, including trade, is helping to select (or make more probable in that agent’s estimation) a preferred future state of the universe.
lots of people would be better off with one fewer kidney and lots more money
Because of how money works, it seems much more likely to me that any one very poor person, on the margin, would be better off with one fewer kidney and lots more money, than that all the very poor people would be better off, in a way that didn’t make others substantially worse off, by executing that trade.
There’s offering a trade, and there’s extortion. Sometimes people are honestly uncertain or mistaken about which one is happening, or correctly believe that something described as the former is in fact the latter.
When you’re proposing a trade that gives the poor a fungible resource, you should wonder whether rent extraction will, in the long run, keep pace with their ability to pay. Except now they’ve all been through an elective surgery and have less kidney. (Artist’s depiction of the thing.) This is the sort of thing it’s hard to see inside the trade intuition, but easier to see if you think about the systems involved.
When you’re proposing a trade that gives the poor a fungible resource, you should wonder whether rent extraction will, in the long run, keep pace with their ability to pay.
I am very grateful to this sentence – before I had a nagging sense that something was wrong with the kidneys-want-to-be-free!-argument but no idea what, and not sure whether or not I should trust the intuition. And now I have a pretty gears-level-understanding of why it might be bad. (Still not sure if I should trust that reference class of intuition – I think my intuitions about sweatshops came from a similar place and now I have a more gearsy/empirical belief in the opposite direction)
On sweatshops in particular, my sense based on Chris Blattman’s research is that it depends a lot on the concrete details of the case, and sweeping judgments that “sweatshops” are “good” or “bad” are just not granular enough to ground out in material reality.
Thank’s for that. I think this applies to a lot of things that people put in the “sacred” category by intuition. The problems are not with the item/action being transferred, but with the state of the world and participants. There are certainly some people who should be prevented from making long-term decisions like borrowing money for college or selling a kidney. But the transactions and topics aren’t sacred—some participants are.
Yuppers – I had read that, and that was why your short sentence was enough for things to fully click for me. I just hadn’t made the connection that this was a reason why kidney selling may not help people if fully realized.
Wait, what?! How does making a poor person richer in money and less rich in kidneys possibly harm non-participants? I have a hard time reading this as anything other than “poor people are trapped and can’t be trusted to make decisions”. I’m sure that’s not your intent, nor is “let’s hold rich people with kidney problems hostage until they fix the system”.
I totally get that there are some people who are unable to make good choices for multiple reasons, but the correlation between that and poverty is low, and the causality is very unclear. It’s certainly the case that not all of those who’d like to sell a kidney would be harmed.
How does making a poor person richer in money and less rich in kidneys possibly harm non-participants?
In the rent-seeking model cited by Benquo above, various bad actors are constantly trying to extort as much rent (in the economic sense) as possible from poor people, so giving a poor person money has the effect of mostly slightly enriching these rent-seekers.
Worse, it might have the effect of breaking a Schelling fence around not offering poor people money for their organs, and to the extent that there’s free energy available here, people are going to show up to extract all of the available free energy (offering to buy all of the organs that people—poor, desperate people—are willing to sell). There’s a plausible story where this sort of thing is bad for poor people in the same way that predatory loans are. Choices are Bad, etc.
The toy model: The poor person rents an apartment that he can barely afford. He discovers that he can now sell his kidney, but so does his landlord. Suddenly his landlord raises everyone’s rent by the price of a kidney, so they all sell their kidneys to pay the increased rent. He and everyone in his situation are now worse off than before; only the landlord and the kidney buyers are better off.
Also… if you’re up for it, could you just sort of ramble a bit about what this video is about, on the object and meta level? (I wouldn’t have put effort into interpreting it if I’d come across it randomly, it’s now elevated to my attention as something I might want to be put effort into interpreting, but I think given time constraints I’m more interested in hearing what it means to you.)
The protagonist is fixated on an image that’s been marketed to her by someone wealthy enough to control a planet. The image isn’t very high-content, and she’s willing to undertake a dangerous and arduous journey, which implies that things aren’t very good at home.
She’s in a world where travel is expensive. Somehow, improbably, in outer space, she has to pay a toll. This should clue us in that something sketchy is going on. Tolls are one of the classic modes of rent extraction, second only to land rents in their centrality as an image. There’s a plausible excuse for tolls on improvements like bridges, but you don’t need bridges in space—you can only collect the toll by preventing people from going around you. This should inform how we interpret the subsequent interactions where she pays for fuel, repair to her spaceship, and repair to her body; it’s not obvious how much of the price is needed to pay for the cost of the service, and how much is a rent extracted by a predatory monopolist.
At each stage, the protagonist sacrifices capacity (in the form of mobility affordances, maybe the most concrete and central instance of capacity, from the Latin capere, meaning to take hold of something—she trades away her hand, then her leg, then her remaining limbs, then her spaceship (albeit getting a fully functioning body back as far as we know)) for some progress towards her destination. Then, once she gets there, she finds that she’s traded away her ability to move, for relocation to a place that’s no longer providing the service it advertised. It’s true at each point that you wouldn’t be helping her by preventing her from making the trade, but focusing on that aspect of the situation makes one a price-taker in a case where that attitude doesn’t actually unlock any value.
The resort planet owner likely never colluded with the toll collector, the fueling station, the repair station, or the rescue team. They just imposed complementary negative externalities. The resort planet owner doesn’t pay the price of disappointed customers who arrive after the resort shuts down, so they simply don’t bother pulling their ads. The other actors don’t need to know why people want to go from point A to point B, they just know that they can interpose themselves in the middle and take resources they want.
It’s important to bear in mind that no one overtly cheats anyone else in this scenario—all the parties are operating as honest traders, at least when considered within the bounds of the specific transaction they’re executing. And yet, the whole situation is horrible in a way that the trades don’t actually alleviate.
I can’t pass an ITT for people who think the other way (I understand people who intuit that direction, I just think those intuitions are wrong). I acknowledge that it seems more common than my view, and it’s unsatisfying to think that it’s mostly signaling (either virtue signaling or just to help them get better prices). That’s why I’m posting on this thread, hoping that someone can explain why a voluntary trade by competent individuals (let’s just say euvoluntary, as sacredness seems distinct from prevention of attractive-but-harmful trades).
Please tell me. Why, in the modern world (aside from pragmatic reasons like difficulty of price discovery and protection from bad trades), would you disallow sales of sex, organs, etc.? Especially when you allow sales of water, housing, and babysitting?
It sounds like you’re deliberately not taking “pragmatic reasons” into account. Why? This is a discussion about what the effects of allowing trade are in the actual, real world.
Oh, maybe I completely misunderstood based on use of the word “sacred”. If you’re just saying “these trades can easily go wrong, so I’m especially suspicious of them”, fine. That’s quite different from “these things are categorically special and even considering trades sullies them”.
Sacredness is a heuristic and the thing that it’s a heuristic for is defending against particular kinds of bad trades. The way it gets implemented in most human minds is the latter and the reason this isn’t completely dumb is the former, plus Schelling fences.
These two possibilities you are trying to distinguish, are not different things.
If trades in these areas are possible at all, then they will take place. The incentives, the market pressures, to extract rents, to profit, are so overwhelming that no amount of mere “suspicion” will withstand them—no amount, that is, short of infinite suspicion… or, in other words: sacredness.
Or, to put it another way: the property of sacredness is the mechanism by which we resist the incentives toward a certain sort of trade. It is the only mechanism which is up to the task (and even then it’s imperfect—in no small part due to iconoclasts, who look upon the sacred with suspicion).
Fair enough. Acknowledging that it’s a heuristic and exists to reduce the frequency of “most humans” getting taken by bad deals helps a lot.
I’m ok being an iconoclast on this topic, even if Pinky calls me “noodle noggin”. Understanding that this is just a social hack makes me much more comfortable using black markets when needed.
It’s worth noting that one can think that sacredness is an important and valuable tool, and still think that any given invocation of that principle, or regulation/restriction of the market, is deeply stupid or at least misguided.
My prior does remain that any given actually existing restriction on trading is net bad.
Sacredness (is that word different from sanctity?) of certain behaviors and transactions is sometimes a useful shortcut, but at root it’s an epistemological mistake. It’s very similar to the shortcut of certainty—one should never actually assign 100% or 0% to any belief, but it’s way more convenient to express it that way than to figure out how many 0s or 9s you actually have.
Likewise for things you talk about as “sacred”—in fact, there is a different-currency trade value you’d accept. It’s just that you think you won’t get that value in trade, so you “protect” your private value by trying to prevent all trades.
No question that there’s a trade value you’d accept.
But as the old joke goes, once we start solving for that value, we’ve established what you are, and now we’re talking price. What we’re trying to protect is sometimes the pressure to accept bad deals, but it’s also that putting those deals on the table at all is inherently devaluing and destructive, and also that others doing such deals carries a negative externality for you by doing the same. If you think that effect isn’t real (or isn’t substantial) I’d be curious to hear more about why.
I think the epistemological mistake is taking the framework too seriously on the wrong meta-level. Which can be quite bad!
I’m worried that this is pushing towards a selective demand for rigor, unless we acknowledge explicitly that the same mistake can be made about the trade orientation, which tends to collapse the map-territory distinction, and in particular confuse exchange rates (i.e. prices) and stores of value.
I honestly don’t think that considering trades devalues anything. I think I’ve seen enough different people acting offended at trade offers that I can’t say the effect isn’t real, but I personally don’t feel it very strongly and I think it can prevent good trades. Kidney pricing is a great example—lots of people would be better off with one fewer kidney and lots more money, and lots of people would be better off with one more kidney and that much less money. Preventing this trade is either a moral mistake or pure evil, depending on your framework.
I think it’s actually stronger in acknowledging the map-territory distinction. Every action that every agent takes, including trade, is helping to select (or make more probable in that agent’s estimation) a preferred future state of the universe.
Because of how money works, it seems much more likely to me that any one very poor person, on the margin, would be better off with one fewer kidney and lots more money, than that all the very poor people would be better off, in a way that didn’t make others substantially worse off, by executing that trade.
There’s offering a trade, and there’s extortion. Sometimes people are honestly uncertain or mistaken about which one is happening, or correctly believe that something described as the former is in fact the latter.
When you’re proposing a trade that gives the poor a fungible resource, you should wonder whether rent extraction will, in the long run, keep pace with their ability to pay. Except now they’ve all been through an elective surgery and have less kidney. (Artist’s depiction of the thing.) This is the sort of thing it’s hard to see inside the trade intuition, but easier to see if you think about the systems involved.
I am very grateful to this sentence – before I had a nagging sense that something was wrong with the kidneys-want-to-be-free!-argument but no idea what, and not sure whether or not I should trust the intuition. And now I have a pretty gears-level-understanding of why it might be bad. (Still not sure if I should trust that reference class of intuition – I think my intuitions about sweatshops came from a similar place and now I have a more gearsy/empirical belief in the opposite direction)
On sweatshops in particular, my sense based on Chris Blattman’s research is that it depends a lot on the concrete details of the case, and sweeping judgments that “sweatshops” are “good” or “bad” are just not granular enough to ground out in material reality.
Thank’s for that. I think this applies to a lot of things that people put in the “sacred” category by intuition. The problems are not with the item/action being transferred, but with the state of the world and participants. There are certainly some people who should be prevented from making long-term decisions like borrowing money for college or selling a kidney. But the transactions and topics aren’t sacred—some participants are.
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Michael Vassar got there first.
Yuppers – I had read that, and that was why your short sentence was enough for things to fully click for me. I just hadn’t made the connection that this was a reason why kidney selling may not help people if fully realized.
Wait, what?! How does making a poor person richer in money and less rich in kidneys possibly harm non-participants? I have a hard time reading this as anything other than “poor people are trapped and can’t be trusted to make decisions”. I’m sure that’s not your intent, nor is “let’s hold rich people with kidney problems hostage until they fix the system”.
I totally get that there are some people who are unable to make good choices for multiple reasons, but the correlation between that and poverty is low, and the causality is very unclear. It’s certainly the case that not all of those who’d like to sell a kidney would be harmed.
In the rent-seeking model cited by Benquo above, various bad actors are constantly trying to extort as much rent (in the economic sense) as possible from poor people, so giving a poor person money has the effect of mostly slightly enriching these rent-seekers.
Worse, it might have the effect of breaking a Schelling fence around not offering poor people money for their organs, and to the extent that there’s free energy available here, people are going to show up to extract all of the available free energy (offering to buy all of the organs that people—poor, desperate people—are willing to sell). There’s a plausible story where this sort of thing is bad for poor people in the same way that predatory loans are. Choices are Bad, etc.
The toy model: The poor person rents an apartment that he can barely afford. He discovers that he can now sell his kidney, but so does his landlord. Suddenly his landlord raises everyone’s rent by the price of a kidney, so they all sell their kidneys to pay the increased rent. He and everyone in his situation are now worse off than before; only the landlord and the kidney buyers are better off.
Inflation
Also… if you’re up for it, could you just sort of ramble a bit about what this video is about, on the object and meta level? (I wouldn’t have put effort into interpreting it if I’d come across it randomly, it’s now elevated to my attention as something I might want to be put effort into interpreting, but I think given time constraints I’m more interested in hearing what it means to you.)
Sure!
Here are a few interesting characteristic facts:
The protagonist is fixated on an image that’s been marketed to her by someone wealthy enough to control a planet. The image isn’t very high-content, and she’s willing to undertake a dangerous and arduous journey, which implies that things aren’t very good at home.
She’s in a world where travel is expensive. Somehow, improbably, in outer space, she has to pay a toll. This should clue us in that something sketchy is going on. Tolls are one of the classic modes of rent extraction, second only to land rents in their centrality as an image. There’s a plausible excuse for tolls on improvements like bridges, but you don’t need bridges in space—you can only collect the toll by preventing people from going around you. This should inform how we interpret the subsequent interactions where she pays for fuel, repair to her spaceship, and repair to her body; it’s not obvious how much of the price is needed to pay for the cost of the service, and how much is a rent extracted by a predatory monopolist.
At each stage, the protagonist sacrifices capacity (in the form of mobility affordances, maybe the most concrete and central instance of capacity, from the Latin capere, meaning to take hold of something—she trades away her hand, then her leg, then her remaining limbs, then her spaceship (albeit getting a fully functioning body back as far as we know)) for some progress towards her destination. Then, once she gets there, she finds that she’s traded away her ability to move, for relocation to a place that’s no longer providing the service it advertised. It’s true at each point that you wouldn’t be helping her by preventing her from making the trade, but focusing on that aspect of the situation makes one a price-taker in a case where that attitude doesn’t actually unlock any value.
The resort planet owner likely never colluded with the toll collector, the fueling station, the repair station, or the rescue team. They just imposed complementary negative externalities. The resort planet owner doesn’t pay the price of disappointed customers who arrive after the resort shuts down, so they simply don’t bother pulling their ads. The other actors don’t need to know why people want to go from point A to point B, they just know that they can interpose themselves in the middle and take resources they want.
It’s important to bear in mind that no one overtly cheats anyone else in this scenario—all the parties are operating as honest traders, at least when considered within the bounds of the specific transaction they’re executing. And yet, the whole situation is horrible in a way that the trades don’t actually alleviate.
woah.
Link was region-blocked for me, I guess this is the same thing.
Yes, thanks for pointing out the issue
Many people throughout history had, and many people today have, strong intuitions the other way, e.g. about sex. Can you pass their ITT?
That you don’t care doesn’t imply that other people don’t or shouldn’t care, and that people are sometimes not doing X enough does not imply that people aren’t also sometimes doing X too much.
I can’t pass an ITT for people who think the other way (I understand people who intuit that direction, I just think those intuitions are wrong). I acknowledge that it seems more common than my view, and it’s unsatisfying to think that it’s mostly signaling (either virtue signaling or just to help them get better prices). That’s why I’m posting on this thread, hoping that someone can explain why a voluntary trade by competent individuals (let’s just say euvoluntary, as sacredness seems distinct from prevention of attractive-but-harmful trades).
Please tell me. Why, in the modern world (aside from pragmatic reasons like difficulty of price discovery and protection from bad trades), would you disallow sales of sex, organs, etc.? Especially when you allow sales of water, housing, and babysitting?
It sounds like you’re deliberately not taking “pragmatic reasons” into account. Why? This is a discussion about what the effects of allowing trade are in the actual, real world.
Oh, maybe I completely misunderstood based on use of the word “sacred”. If you’re just saying “these trades can easily go wrong, so I’m especially suspicious of them”, fine. That’s quite different from “these things are categorically special and even considering trades sullies them”.
Sacredness is a heuristic and the thing that it’s a heuristic for is defending against particular kinds of bad trades. The way it gets implemented in most human minds is the latter and the reason this isn’t completely dumb is the former, plus Schelling fences.
These two possibilities you are trying to distinguish, are not different things.
If trades in these areas are possible at all, then they will take place. The incentives, the market pressures, to extract rents, to profit, are so overwhelming that no amount of mere “suspicion” will withstand them—no amount, that is, short of infinite suspicion… or, in other words: sacredness.
Or, to put it another way: the property of sacredness is the mechanism by which we resist the incentives toward a certain sort of trade. It is the only mechanism which is up to the task (and even then it’s imperfect—in no small part due to iconoclasts, who look upon the sacred with suspicion).
Fair enough. Acknowledging that it’s a heuristic and exists to reduce the frequency of “most humans” getting taken by bad deals helps a lot.
I’m ok being an iconoclast on this topic, even if Pinky calls me “noodle noggin”. Understanding that this is just a social hack makes me much more comfortable using black markets when needed.
It’s worth noting that one can think that sacredness is an important and valuable tool, and still think that any given invocation of that principle, or regulation/restriction of the market, is deeply stupid or at least misguided.
My prior does remain that any given actually existing restriction on trading is net bad.