Roko, do you think you could lay out, in some detail, the argument for why rational people should busy themselves with getting rich? I’m familiar with some of the obvious arguments at a basic level (entrepreneurship is usually win-win, money can be used to help fund or attract attention for just about any other project or argument you care to have succeed, getting rich should be relatively easy in a world full of both arbitrage opportunities and irrational people), but still don’t quite find them convincing.
money can be used to help fund or attract attention for just about any other project or argument you care to have succeed
So, we have a lot of people here who claim to want to save the world or live forever or be a consequentialist altruist.
Money has high leverage on these problems. Furthermore, since there are many such people here, if we all just acted together and made an extra $100,000 each on average in the next 3 years, problems such as FAI could get a cash bonus of approximately 500*100,000 = $50M.
I’m familiar with some of the obvious arguments at a basic level (entrepreneurship is usually win-win, money can be used to help fund or attract attention for just about any other project or argument you care to have succeed, getting rich should be relatively easy in a world full of both arbitrage opportunities and irrational people), but still don’t quite find them convincing
I do find them convincing. Unfortunately, I don’t find them motivating. Making a sustained effort to do something usually depends for me on :
earning enough money to sustain my lifestyle (I could live on welfare if I really wanted to but I find that ethically wrong).
finding it interesting
My lifestyle tends to be rather minimalistic so that even an average to low income is more then enough to sustain it. I also find it a lot easier to just forgo some comfort or gadget instead of working more to pay for it (such wants are for me usually fleeting anyway). Finding something interesting is for the most part out of my control so I can’t do much there.
I have to admit however that I’m in a rather comfortable position so that I don’t have to really care about money all that much. I live in Europe so medical care is compared to the USA cheap. I’m building my own house now but I’m getting a lot of help from my family both financially & practically. Still, the same reasoning holds.
This is why I found (when I was younger) communism a better idea than capitalism. I had to recognize however that most people don’t think my way and that communism is unsustainable. One of the most surprising experiments in found in this regard is the one where someone can choose between :
getting a 100 dollar raise while giving anyone else a 200 dollar raise
getting a 50 dollar raise while giving anyone else no raise
Assume that prices of goods stay equal in both cases i.e. that fact that everyone else gets a 200 dollar raise in the first option has no influence on the price of goods. When I first read this to my great surprise most people choose option 2 while I found option 1 the blindingly obvious correct choice.
This epitomizes the problem with Less Wrongers’ instrumental rationality:
I do find them convincing. Unfortunately, I don’t find them motivating.
My lifestyle tends to be rather minimalistic so that even an average to low income is more the enough to sustain it. I also find it a lot easier to just forgo some comfort or gadget instead of working more to pay for it
We’re a bunch of linux-hacking post-hippies who don’t care enough about the socially accepted measures of influence ($ and status) to motivate ourselves to make a difference. Hence, we are sidelined by dumb cave-men who at least have enough fire in their bellies to win.
We’re a bunch of linux-hacking post-hippies who don’t care enough about the socially accepted measures of influence ($ and status) to motivate ourselves to make a difference.
This suggests to me that someone with political skills should create a startup which is owned by the singinst. Where hackers can donate their time to a project which makes shedloads of money. Lemons to Lemonade etc.
If you’re a “rationalist”, but not rich and not on your way to being rich, you’re probably just deluding yourself.
I assumed that with ‘rich’ you mean world top 100 millionaire levels (Correct me if I’m wrong here). You are right that I don’t care enough about $ and status to reach those levels but I wouldn’t say I am poor enough to make absolutely no difference at all.
My minimalistic lifestyle coupled with a average income allows me to save a lot of money. Probably more then my older colleagues who probably earn more then me. And I’m sure that I have more money in the bank that most of the people in my age bracket. (Had anyway. I spend most of it to buy land for my house).
In the future, I’m planning to donate a portion of my income but I’m waiting until my expenses have stabilized and don’t expect any major financial costs.
EDIT : My apologies, just reread your top post and realized I overlooked
Vote this comment down if your net worth is >= $100k, vote up otherwise
I’m assuming that $100K is your limit for being rich and as
I just have a bit more it makes my original comment invalid.
However, it does proof that not caring much about $ and status is not an insurmountable barrier to acquiring a lot of money. By reversing it (i.e. instead of working harder/smarter and earn more, just spend less) you can still get enough to make a difference (but indeed not to the levels like Bill Gates did).
However, it does proof that not caring much about $ and status is not an insurmountable barrier to acquiring a lot of money. By reversing it (i.e. instead of working harder/smarter and earn more, just spend less) you can still get enough to make a difference (but indeed not to the levels like Bill Gates did).
You can make a difference, yes. The relevant equation is:
Difference you make = (Earnings-Spend) x Altruism x 10^(charity rationality)
Since you are considering giving money to some highly efficient charity like SIAI, you will in the future make more of a difference than almost anyone else in the world, if you do so.
However, if you fix charity rationality or you’ve already found the most efficient charity in the world, then it seems to me than Increasing earnings is probably more effective than decreasing spend. You can earn $10^6 .year (I know of a major SIAI donor who has achieved this) , but if your current spend is $10k, you can’t increase -spend by more than a few k.
Right, but the fact remains that most of the influence in this world is going to people with high values of “earnings” and little altruism or charity-rationality, and that if we could get away from this timid, minimalist mentality, we could really change that.
So you have $100k of worth tied up in land for the house, I presume?
I didn’t mean to say that having at least a net worth of $100k was sufficient for being instrumentally rational, more that it is a necessary condition in most cases. If you’re 50 years old, say, then it is far from sufficient. Earnings trajectories tend to be superlinear, so accumulated total earnings grows in a highly superlinear fashion on average, making it relatively hard to set a clear and simple financial boundary.
I think it’s difficult to care about $ and status while also caring about rationality and altruism, don’t you? It’s one thing to say that “X is the optimal instrumental value for Y,” and it’s another to pursue X on a full-time basis while still being passionate enough about Y to trust yourself to trade X for Y when the time comes. I find that my “terminal values” realign alarmingly quickly when I start pursuing different goals -- 6 to 9 months is about as long as I can spend on a side-project before I start unconsciously thinking of the side-project as one of my actual goals. How about you?
I’m not sure that I agree with this point, but I think considering it is quite important.
On a somewhat related note, I’ve been contemplating a top-level post on whether paying attention to status is useful for becoming more rational, leaving aside any discussion of whether it is useful for winning; the two issues should be treated very differently, and in the discussion of status on LW that doesn’t always seem to be the case.
On a somewhat related note, I’ve been contemplating a top-level post on whether paying attention to status is useful for becoming more rational, leaving aside any discussion of whether it is useful for winning; the two issues should be treated very differently, and in the discussion of status on LW that doesn’t always seem to be the case.
One of the reasons that I suggest it is useful is that it allows us to realize how status related biases are changing the way we personally think. Roughly speaking our cognitive biases are either “artifacts, weaknesses and limitations of the way the brain manages to process information” or “things we think that are sub-optimal epistemologically because it helps us bullshit our way to more status”.
Agreed, and I would emphasize that status-related biases can specifically hinder the pursuit of rationality itself. For example, asking people questions seems to often be interpreted as an attempt to lower their status, which seems kind of counterproductive, especially for a community like this one. Really, there are a whole range of common reactions related to the idea of “taking offense” that seem to hinder communication but affect status.
Part of my problem with making money today is that most of the methods of making money are benefiting from status games that do not help society.
Pretend for a moment I am a cool shades seller. I sell someone some cool shades. They are happy, they get more status girls etc. Everyone else wants some cool shades, so I sell them some. Now we are back to the status quo, everyone has some bits of plastic that are no better for keeping the sunshine off than some uncool shades and I have some money. The dangerously hip sunglasses took some energy to produce and oil to create that could have been used for producing something of lasting value or preserving some life. Also I needed to have been advertising my sub zero shades with images of women clinging to suave men, in order to compete with other makers of eye wear.
So not only am I exploiting the fact that the world is mad, I am excaserbating it as well. As most consumption is about status or other signalling, it is hard to get away from it when entering the world of business. Even if you aren’t a customer facing company, you will supporting and enabling other companys that do play off the biases of the individual. Not to mention things like cigarettes.
Edit: Now if we were perfect rationalists we would swallow our distaste for creating more madness if we thought that we could do more good with the money from the sunglasses, than the waste of resources and increased irrationality engendered by the advertisement.
I don’t know if you have a named bias there, but I think seeing a situation that’s pretty bad, and then not looking for good possibilities in the odd corners, counts as a bad mental habit.
I’ll note that one of the biggest new fortunes is Google, and their core products aren’t status related, even if many Google ads are. What’s more, Google’s improvement of search has made people generally more capable.
I don’t think it makes sense for you to try to make the most possible money by trying to create The Next Big Thing. Maybe I’m too indulgent, but I don’t think people are at their best trying to do what they hate, and I think it’s easier to create things that serve motivations you can understand.
Not all LW discussions should be taken as assuming status/money feeds back into UFAI prevention. Where it does, I obviously agree with you, but if the question of what’s the right thing to do in the absence of existential risk considerations is something people find themselves thinking about anyway, they may as well get that question right by paying sufficient attention to positional vs nonpositional goods.
they may as well get that question right by paying sufficient attention to positional vs nonpositional goods.
True except that my intuition is that whpearson has somewhat got it wrong on that too, because he is trying to other-optimize non-nerds, who find keeping up with the latest fashion items highly enjoyable. They’re like a hound that enjoys the thrill of the chase, separate from the meat at the end of it.
Smokers love the first cigarette of the Day. People who buy lottery tickets love the feeling of potentially winning lots of money. Nerds love to ignore the world and burrow into safe controllable minutia. It doesn’t mean that any of them is good for them in the long term.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with other optimising. Every one in society other optimizes each other all the time. People try and convince me to like football and to chase pretty girls. To conform to their expectations. You’ve been other-optimizing the non-status oriented in this very thread!
I don’t normally air my views, because they are dull and tedious. My friends can buy their fancy cars as much as they want, as long as they have sufficient money to not go into unsustainable debt, and I won’t say a word.
But you asked why altruists might have a problem with making money, and I gave you a response. It might be irrational, I’m unsure at this point, but like akrasia It won’t go away in a puff of logic. If it is irrational it is due to the application of the golden rule as a computationally feasible heuristic in figuring out what people want. I don’t want a world full of advertising that tries to make me feel inadequate, so I would not want to increase the amount of advertising in others worlds.
But maybe “non-people like me” do want this. I don’t know, I don’t think so. The popularity of things like tivo and ad-block that allow you to skip or block ads. Or pay services without ads suggests that ads are not a positive force in everyone’s world.
I also see people regret spending so much money on positional goods they get into debt or bankruptcy. This I am pretty sure is bad ;) So I would not want to encourage it.
But maybe “non-people like me” do want this. I don’t know, I don’t think so. The popularity of things like tivo and ad-block that allow you to skip or block ads. Or pay services without ads suggests that ads are not a positive force in everyone’s world.
I believe you are mistaken. Having adds out there is a significant factor driving the production of content on the internet. Without adds we would not have google in its current form and we wouldn’t have gmail at all! By personally avoiding adds we derive benefits for ourselves from the presence of adds while not accepting the costs. Let people who aren’t smart enough to download AdBlock maintain the global commons!
Without adds we would not have google in its current form and we wouldn’t have gmail at all!
Without advertising, there would be far less demand for television and similar media, because its effective price, as perceived by consumers, would be much higher. Query what people would have done with their extra 20 − 30 hours a week over the last 40 years or so if they hadn’t spent all of it consuming mindless entertainment.
Also, without advertising, there would be far less demand for useless products, because their effective benefits, as perceived by consumers, would be much lower. A few corporations that completely failed to make useful products would have gone out of business, and most of the others would have learned to imitate the few corporations that already were making useful products. Query whether (a) having most companies make useful products and (b) having most workers be employed by companies that make useful products might be worth more than having Google.
If there were no free television, people would still have a lot of low-intensity timekillers available—gossip, unambitious games, drinking.
If they had to pay for television, they might have been so accustomed to paying for content that they’d have subscribed to google.
The more interesting question is how different would people need to be for advertising to not be worth doing. I think it would take people being much clearer about their motivations. I’m pretty sure that would have major implications, but I’m not sure what they’d be.
There are people who try to raise their kids to be advertising-proof, but I haven’t heard anything about the long term effects.
It seems to me that whpearson’s reasoning is an instance of the “ends don’t justify means” heuristic, which is especially reasonable in this case since the ends are fuzzy and the means are clear.
If we grant that businesses that feed into status games (and other counterproductive activities) are likely to be much more profitable than businesses more aligned with rationalist/altruistic/”nerd” values, then arguing that one should go into the latter kind of business undermines the argument that ends do justify means here. And if the ends don’t justify going into business despite a lack of intrinsic motivation, what does?
How plausible is it to believe that the businesses which feed into counterproductive activities are likely to be much more profitable?
If we go with the very pretty Austrian theory that profits tend to be equal across all parts of the economy (unusually high profits draw capital in, unusually low profits drive it out), then the conspicuous profits in fashion-driven industry are counterbalanced by lower odds of making those profits.
I don’t know how good the empirical evidence for the Austrian theory is.
If you build keeping independent into your plans, you’re more likely to succeed at it.
I’ve become somewhat dubious about the whole system of maximizing shareholder value. Anecdotally, companies become worse places to work (including less focus on quality) when they go public.
And I don’t believe maximizing shareholder value is a real human motivation (not compared to wanting to make good things or please people you know or be in charge of stuff), and I suspect that a system built on it leads to fraud.
There’s a fair amount of evidence that suggests that greater management ownership of a firm correlates with better performance. In other words maximizing shareholder value appears to work better as a motivation when the management are significant shareholders.
I didn’t mean that you would intrinsically want to maximise shareholder value. Simply that if you passed up business opportunities due to your ethics and you didn’t have a controlling share you might be out of a job.
This is a pretty inaccurate interpretation of what maximizing shareholder value actually means in practice. Generally corporate management are only considered to have breached their fiduciary duty to shareholders if they take actions that are clearly enriching themselves at the expense of shareholders, making an acquisition that is dilutive to shareholders for example.
It is highly unusual for corporate management to be accused of breaching their fiduciary duty by making business decisions that fail to maximize profit due to other considerations. For one thing this would generally be impossible to prove since management could argue (for example) that maintaining a reputation for ethical conduct is the best way to maximize shareholder value long term and this is not something that could easily be disproved in a court.
Activist shareholders may sometimes try and force management out due to disagreements over business strategy but this is a separate issue from any legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value. In the US this is also quite difficult (which is a situation that I think should be improved) and so is fairly rare.
Thanks. I was pretty sure that management wasn’t getting sued for failing to maximize shareholder value through ordinary business decisions—if that were possible it would be really common.
Society as a whole over-consumes positional goods, and under-consumes non-positional goods. However, non-positional goods are not being consumed at a level of zero, so why not make money selling those? If you can make an improvement to an existing non-positional good, or come up with entirely new ones, that would also shift some consumption from positional goods to non-position ones, which would further satisfy your altruistic values.
Part of my problem with making money today is that most of the methods of making money are benefiting from status games that do not help society.
Can we be sure of that? Reasoning from the observation that society seems to get rather a lot of benefits from something and that this something doesn’t seem to be pure charitable contribution the endless battle to make money must be of some marginal value!
Reasoning from the observation that society seems to get rather a lot of benefits from something and that this something doesn’t seem to be pure charitable contribution the endless battle to make money must be of some marginal value!
In that case, it must be the government that generates the benefit!
It is the manipulation of the status game that does not help society, the economic knock on effects might.
Could we have generated more marginal value with the same resources? Belief in super intelligence would indicate yes. Would it have been possible to generate more marginal value whilst keeping human psychology as it is currently? That is hard to argue conclusively either way. We couldn’t switch off the desire for money/fame entirely, but it may have been able to have been moderated and channelled more effectively (science and reason has been fashionable in the past).
Altruists, worth the name, that enter business would have to make sure they were part of the consumerist system that generated value rather than part that detracted from the value other people generated. That would constrain their money making ability.
Could we have generated more marginal value with the same resources?
Absolutely. But lets be clear that for all their faults these status games account for nearly all the value that society creates for itself. In fact, since group selection does not imply in the case of humans these games are the very foundation of civilization itself. I hate status games… but I refuse to let myself fall into that all to common ‘nerd’ failure mode. Rationalization from bitterness from and contempt for status games that just don’t seem to matter to us as much as to others to the conclusion that they have no value.
Altruists, worth the name, that enter business would have to make sure they were part of the consumerist system that generated value rather than part that detracted from the value other people generated. That would constrain their money making ability.
Only in the “No True Scotsman” sense of ‘worth the name’. Altruists push fat men in front of Trolleys. Altruism is not nice. That is just the naive do-gooderism that we read in fantasy and Sci. Fi. stories.
Altruists need not artificially constrain themselves unless the detriment from making money is sufficiently bad that the earnings can not be spent to generate a net benefit to their society (as they personally evaluate benefit). Ways to make money that fit such category are extremely hard to find. For example earnings activities up to and including theft and assassination can be used to easily give a net altruistic benefit. In fact, the marginal value of adding additional zero or negative sum players to the economy is usually fairly small. You just make the market in ‘evil’ slightly more efficient.
You don’t need to, and I know I myself don’t. (My ethical unease is based on my ersonal ethics, mind you). What I responded to was the general claim about “altruists worth the name”. In the previous response I similarly responded to your rationalization, not the conclusion that you were rationalizing. I am comfortable disagreeing on matters of fact but don’t usually see much use in responding to other people’s personal preferences.
1) There is working at something you dislike for a greater good (as long as you are very very sure that it will be a net positive. All the talks of cognitive deficits of humans do not inspire confidence in my own decision making abilities)
2) Improving society through being involved in the consumerist economy as it is a net positive force in itself.
My comment about “worth the name” was mainly about 2 and ignoring 1 for the moment, as I had already conceded it in my initial comment.
2) Improving society through being involved in the consumerist economy as it is a net positive force in itself.
My comment about “worth the name” was mainly about 2
Then on this we are naturally in agreement. No sane altruist (where sane includes ’able to adequately research the influence of important decisions) will do things that have a net detriment and there are certainly going to be some activities that fit this category.
I would add another category that specifically refers to doing things that are directly bad so that it allows you to do other things that are good.
Hence, we are sidelined by dumb cave-men who at least have enough fire in their bellies to win.
Of course, if you’re going to talk like that it seems essential to then frame the situation as “we’re going to beat those fools at their own game, muahaha!” rather than “achieving conventional success is something dumb cavemen do, eww” or “I was born a nerd, what hope do I have”. I suspect that the default framing is closer to the bad sort, and am somewhat concerned that such talk makes things worse by default. (I’m also not sure what, if any, framing could defeat the seemingly-likely effect where considering successful non-nerds dumb makes one less likely to try to steal their powers, and simply makes it harder to get along with them.)
If one only cared about material goods, then you’re right.
Otherwise, it depends on how much you need to be relatively richer than others in order to attract the kind of social interaction you like. Think of the stereotypical well-dressed man hoping to land a winning bid on a pretty gold digger.
As I understand it, it is a comparative advantage argument. More rational people are likely to have comparative advantage in making money as compared to less rational people, so the utility maximizing setup is for more rational people to make money and pay less rational people to do the day to day work of implementing the charitable organization. Thats the basic form of the argument at least.
It definitely seems the other way around to me: very high rationality may help a lot in making money, but it’s not a necessary condition, while it does appear to be necessary for most actually effective object-level work (at the current margin; rationalist organizations will presumably become better able to use all sorts of people over time).
Roko, do you think you could lay out, in some detail, the argument for why rational people should busy themselves with getting rich? I’m familiar with some of the obvious arguments at a basic level (entrepreneurship is usually win-win, money can be used to help fund or attract attention for just about any other project or argument you care to have succeed, getting rich should be relatively easy in a world full of both arbitrage opportunities and irrational people), but still don’t quite find them convincing.
So, we have a lot of people here who claim to want to save the world or live forever or be a consequentialist altruist.
Money has high leverage on these problems. Furthermore, since there are many such people here, if we all just acted together and made an extra $100,000 each on average in the next 3 years, problems such as FAI could get a cash bonus of approximately 500*100,000 = $50M.
Same with status. I made a similar argument in this exchange, in case you haven’t already seen it.
I do find them convincing. Unfortunately, I don’t find them motivating. Making a sustained effort to do something usually depends for me on :
earning enough money to sustain my lifestyle (I could live on welfare if I really wanted to but I find that ethically wrong).
finding it interesting
My lifestyle tends to be rather minimalistic so that even an average to low income is more then enough to sustain it. I also find it a lot easier to just forgo some comfort or gadget instead of working more to pay for it (such wants are for me usually fleeting anyway). Finding something interesting is for the most part out of my control so I can’t do much there.
I have to admit however that I’m in a rather comfortable position so that I don’t have to really care about money all that much. I live in Europe so medical care is compared to the USA cheap. I’m building my own house now but I’m getting a lot of help from my family both financially & practically. Still, the same reasoning holds.
This is why I found (when I was younger) communism a better idea than capitalism. I had to recognize however that most people don’t think my way and that communism is unsustainable. One of the most surprising experiments in found in this regard is the one where someone can choose between :
getting a 100 dollar raise while giving anyone else a 200 dollar raise
getting a 50 dollar raise while giving anyone else no raise
Assume that prices of goods stay equal in both cases i.e. that fact that everyone else gets a 200 dollar raise in the first option has no influence on the price of goods. When I first read this to my great surprise most people choose option 2 while I found option 1 the blindingly obvious correct choice.
This epitomizes the problem with Less Wrongers’ instrumental rationality:
We’re a bunch of linux-hacking post-hippies who don’t care enough about the socially accepted measures of influence ($ and status) to motivate ourselves to make a difference. Hence, we are sidelined by dumb cave-men who at least have enough fire in their bellies to win.
This suggests to me that someone with political skills should create a startup which is owned by the singinst. Where hackers can donate their time to a project which makes shedloads of money. Lemons to Lemonade etc.
Your original post said :
I assumed that with ‘rich’ you mean world top 100 millionaire levels (Correct me if I’m wrong here). You are right that I don’t care enough about $ and status to reach those levels but I wouldn’t say I am poor enough to make absolutely no difference at all.
My minimalistic lifestyle coupled with a average income allows me to save a lot of money. Probably more then my older colleagues who probably earn more then me. And I’m sure that I have more money in the bank that most of the people in my age bracket. (Had anyway. I spend most of it to buy land for my house).
In the future, I’m planning to donate a portion of my income but I’m waiting until my expenses have stabilized and don’t expect any major financial costs.
EDIT : My apologies, just reread your top post and realized I overlooked
I’m assuming that $100K is your limit for being rich and as I just have a bit more it makes my original comment invalid.
However, it does proof that not caring much about $ and status is not an insurmountable barrier to acquiring a lot of money. By reversing it (i.e. instead of working harder/smarter and earn more, just spend less) you can still get enough to make a difference (but indeed not to the levels like Bill Gates did).
You can make a difference, yes. The relevant equation is:
Difference you make = (Earnings-Spend) x Altruism x 10^(charity rationality)
Since you are considering giving money to some highly efficient charity like SIAI, you will in the future make more of a difference than almost anyone else in the world, if you do so.
However, if you fix charity rationality or you’ve already found the most efficient charity in the world, then it seems to me than Increasing earnings is probably more effective than decreasing spend. You can earn $10^6 .year (I know of a major SIAI donor who has achieved this) , but if your current spend is $10k, you can’t increase -spend by more than a few k.
You are correct off course. I was merely reacting against your statement that I can make no difference at all.
Right, but the fact remains that most of the influence in this world is going to people with high values of “earnings” and little altruism or charity-rationality, and that if we could get away from this timid, minimalist mentality, we could really change that.
I don’t think the minimalist part is the problem.
So you have $100k of worth tied up in land for the house, I presume?
I didn’t mean to say that having at least a net worth of $100k was sufficient for being instrumentally rational, more that it is a necessary condition in most cases. If you’re 50 years old, say, then it is far from sufficient. Earnings trajectories tend to be superlinear, so accumulated total earnings grows in a highly superlinear fashion on average, making it relatively hard to set a clear and simple financial boundary.
I think it’s difficult to care about $ and status while also caring about rationality and altruism, don’t you? It’s one thing to say that “X is the optimal instrumental value for Y,” and it’s another to pursue X on a full-time basis while still being passionate enough about Y to trust yourself to trade X for Y when the time comes. I find that my “terminal values” realign alarmingly quickly when I start pursuing different goals -- 6 to 9 months is about as long as I can spend on a side-project before I start unconsciously thinking of the side-project as one of my actual goals. How about you?
I’m not sure that I agree with this point, but I think considering it is quite important.
On a somewhat related note, I’ve been contemplating a top-level post on whether paying attention to status is useful for becoming more rational, leaving aside any discussion of whether it is useful for winning; the two issues should be treated very differently, and in the discussion of status on LW that doesn’t always seem to be the case.
Edited for clarity.
One of the reasons that I suggest it is useful is that it allows us to realize how status related biases are changing the way we personally think. Roughly speaking our cognitive biases are either “artifacts, weaknesses and limitations of the way the brain manages to process information” or “things we think that are sub-optimal epistemologically because it helps us bullshit our way to more status”.
Agreed, and I would emphasize that status-related biases can specifically hinder the pursuit of rationality itself. For example, asking people questions seems to often be interpreted as an attempt to lower their status, which seems kind of counterproductive, especially for a community like this one. Really, there are a whole range of common reactions related to the idea of “taking offense” that seem to hinder communication but affect status.
Agreed that this is important, but note that the real incompatibility is not between rationality and $/status, but between altruism and $/status.
So we should focus on the tradeoff between altruism and desire to win in society’s little games.
Part of my problem with making money today is that most of the methods of making money are benefiting from status games that do not help society.
Pretend for a moment I am a cool shades seller. I sell someone some cool shades. They are happy, they get more status girls etc. Everyone else wants some cool shades, so I sell them some. Now we are back to the status quo, everyone has some bits of plastic that are no better for keeping the sunshine off than some uncool shades and I have some money. The dangerously hip sunglasses took some energy to produce and oil to create that could have been used for producing something of lasting value or preserving some life. Also I needed to have been advertising my sub zero shades with images of women clinging to suave men, in order to compete with other makers of eye wear.
So not only am I exploiting the fact that the world is mad, I am excaserbating it as well. As most consumption is about status or other signalling, it is hard to get away from it when entering the world of business. Even if you aren’t a customer facing company, you will supporting and enabling other companys that do play off the biases of the individual. Not to mention things like cigarettes.
Edit: Now if we were perfect rationalists we would swallow our distaste for creating more madness if we thought that we could do more good with the money from the sunglasses, than the waste of resources and increased irrationality engendered by the advertisement.
So sell information. These days, you don’t even have to have it made into a physical product.
I don’t know if you have a named bias there, but I think seeing a situation that’s pretty bad, and then not looking for good possibilities in the odd corners, counts as a bad mental habit.
I’ll note that one of the biggest new fortunes is Google, and their core products aren’t status related, even if many Google ads are. What’s more, Google’s improvement of search has made people generally more capable.
I don’t think it makes sense for you to try to make the most possible money by trying to create The Next Big Thing. Maybe I’m too indulgent, but I don’t think people are at their best trying to do what they hate, and I think it’s easier to create things that serve motivations you can understand.
It seems that this comment is saying “I’d rather the world ended through unfriendly AI disaster than that I sold a positional good”
Yes?
In what sense is this not madness?
Not all LW discussions should be taken as assuming status/money feeds back into UFAI prevention. Where it does, I obviously agree with you, but if the question of what’s the right thing to do in the absence of existential risk considerations is something people find themselves thinking about anyway, they may as well get that question right by paying sufficient attention to positional vs nonpositional goods.
True except that my intuition is that whpearson has somewhat got it wrong on that too, because he is trying to other-optimize non-nerds, who find keeping up with the latest fashion items highly enjoyable. They’re like a hound that enjoys the thrill of the chase, separate from the meat at the end of it.
Smokers love the first cigarette of the Day. People who buy lottery tickets love the feeling of potentially winning lots of money. Nerds love to ignore the world and burrow into safe controllable minutia. It doesn’t mean that any of them is good for them in the long term.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with other optimising. Every one in society other optimizes each other all the time. People try and convince me to like football and to chase pretty girls. To conform to their expectations. You’ve been other-optimizing the non-status oriented in this very thread!
I don’t normally air my views, because they are dull and tedious. My friends can buy their fancy cars as much as they want, as long as they have sufficient money to not go into unsustainable debt, and I won’t say a word.
But you asked why altruists might have a problem with making money, and I gave you a response. It might be irrational, I’m unsure at this point, but like akrasia It won’t go away in a puff of logic. If it is irrational it is due to the application of the golden rule as a computationally feasible heuristic in figuring out what people want. I don’t want a world full of advertising that tries to make me feel inadequate, so I would not want to increase the amount of advertising in others worlds.
But maybe “non-people like me” do want this. I don’t know, I don’t think so. The popularity of things like tivo and ad-block that allow you to skip or block ads. Or pay services without ads suggests that ads are not a positive force in everyone’s world.
I also see people regret spending so much money on positional goods they get into debt or bankruptcy. This I am pretty sure is bad ;) So I would not want to encourage it.
I believe you are mistaken. Having adds out there is a significant factor driving the production of content on the internet. Without adds we would not have google in its current form and we wouldn’t have gmail at all! By personally avoiding adds we derive benefits for ourselves from the presence of adds while not accepting the costs. Let people who aren’t smart enough to download AdBlock maintain the global commons!
Without advertising, there would be far less demand for television and similar media, because its effective price, as perceived by consumers, would be much higher. Query what people would have done with their extra 20 − 30 hours a week over the last 40 years or so if they hadn’t spent all of it consuming mindless entertainment.
Also, without advertising, there would be far less demand for useless products, because their effective benefits, as perceived by consumers, would be much lower. A few corporations that completely failed to make useful products would have gone out of business, and most of the others would have learned to imitate the few corporations that already were making useful products. Query whether (a) having most companies make useful products and (b) having most workers be employed by companies that make useful products might be worth more than having Google.
If there were no free television, people would still have a lot of low-intensity timekillers available—gossip, unambitious games, drinking.
If they had to pay for television, they might have been so accustomed to paying for content that they’d have subscribed to google.
The more interesting question is how different would people need to be for advertising to not be worth doing. I think it would take people being much clearer about their motivations. I’m pretty sure that would have major implications, but I’m not sure what they’d be.
There are people who try to raise their kids to be advertising-proof, but I haven’t heard anything about the long term effects.
I make an effort to do this with my kids. It will be interesting to see how it effects things as they get older.
Still, there are probably useful things to be made and done which have little or no fashion component.
For example, there don’t seem to be any child and pet-proof roach traps on the market.
It seems to me that whpearson’s reasoning is an instance of the “ends don’t justify means” heuristic, which is especially reasonable in this case since the ends are fuzzy and the means are clear.
If we grant that businesses that feed into status games (and other counterproductive activities) are likely to be much more profitable than businesses more aligned with rationalist/altruistic/”nerd” values, then arguing that one should go into the latter kind of business undermines the argument that ends do justify means here. And if the ends don’t justify going into business despite a lack of intrinsic motivation, what does?
How plausible is it to believe that the businesses which feed into counterproductive activities are likely to be much more profitable?
If we go with the very pretty Austrian theory that profits tend to be equal across all parts of the economy (unusually high profits draw capital in, unusually low profits drive it out), then the conspicuous profits in fashion-driven industry are counterbalanced by lower odds of making those profits.
I don’t know how good the empirical evidence for the Austrian theory is.
True. If you can keep independent you would be okay. If you have share holders you would be bound to maximise shareholder value.
If you build keeping independent into your plans, you’re more likely to succeed at it.
I’ve become somewhat dubious about the whole system of maximizing shareholder value. Anecdotally, companies become worse places to work (including less focus on quality) when they go public.
And I don’t believe maximizing shareholder value is a real human motivation (not compared to wanting to make good things or please people you know or be in charge of stuff), and I suspect that a system built on it leads to fraud.
There’s a fair amount of evidence that suggests that greater management ownership of a firm correlates with better performance. In other words maximizing shareholder value appears to work better as a motivation when the management are significant shareholders.
I didn’t mean that you would intrinsically want to maximise shareholder value. Simply that if you passed up business opportunities due to your ethics and you didn’t have a controlling share you might be out of a job.
This is a pretty inaccurate interpretation of what maximizing shareholder value actually means in practice. Generally corporate management are only considered to have breached their fiduciary duty to shareholders if they take actions that are clearly enriching themselves at the expense of shareholders, making an acquisition that is dilutive to shareholders for example.
It is highly unusual for corporate management to be accused of breaching their fiduciary duty by making business decisions that fail to maximize profit due to other considerations. For one thing this would generally be impossible to prove since management could argue (for example) that maintaining a reputation for ethical conduct is the best way to maximize shareholder value long term and this is not something that could easily be disproved in a court.
Activist shareholders may sometimes try and force management out due to disagreements over business strategy but this is a separate issue from any legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value. In the US this is also quite difficult (which is a situation that I think should be improved) and so is fairly rare.
Thanks. I was pretty sure that management wasn’t getting sued for failing to maximize shareholder value through ordinary business decisions—if that were possible it would be really common.
Agreed. I was explaining why I’m dubious about publicly owned companies in general.
Society as a whole over-consumes positional goods, and under-consumes non-positional goods. However, non-positional goods are not being consumed at a level of zero, so why not make money selling those? If you can make an improvement to an existing non-positional good, or come up with entirely new ones, that would also shift some consumption from positional goods to non-position ones, which would further satisfy your altruistic values.
Can we be sure of that? Reasoning from the observation that society seems to get rather a lot of benefits from something and that this something doesn’t seem to be pure charitable contribution the endless battle to make money must be of some marginal value!
Money makes the world go round.
In that case, it must be the government that generates the benefit!
It is the manipulation of the status game that does not help society, the economic knock on effects might.
Could we have generated more marginal value with the same resources? Belief in super intelligence would indicate yes. Would it have been possible to generate more marginal value whilst keeping human psychology as it is currently? That is hard to argue conclusively either way. We couldn’t switch off the desire for money/fame entirely, but it may have been able to have been moderated and channelled more effectively (science and reason has been fashionable in the past).
Altruists, worth the name, that enter business would have to make sure they were part of the consumerist system that generated value rather than part that detracted from the value other people generated. That would constrain their money making ability.
Absolutely. But lets be clear that for all their faults these status games account for nearly all the value that society creates for itself. In fact, since group selection does not imply in the case of humans these games are the very foundation of civilization itself. I hate status games… but I refuse to let myself fall into that all to common ‘nerd’ failure mode. Rationalization from bitterness from and contempt for status games that just don’t seem to matter to us as much as to others to the conclusion that they have no value.
Only in the “No True Scotsman” sense of ‘worth the name’. Altruists push fat men in front of Trolleys. Altruism is not nice. That is just the naive do-gooderism that we read in fantasy and Sci. Fi. stories.
Altruists need not artificially constrain themselves unless the detriment from making money is sufficiently bad that the earnings can not be spent to generate a net benefit to their society (as they personally evaluate benefit). Ways to make money that fit such category are extremely hard to find. For example earnings activities up to and including theft and assassination can be used to easily give a net altruistic benefit. In fact, the marginal value of adding additional zero or negative sum players to the economy is usually fairly small. You just make the market in ‘evil’ slightly more efficient.
I won’t just ignore all ethical unease.
You don’t need to, and I know I myself don’t. (My ethical unease is based on my ersonal ethics, mind you). What I responded to was the general claim about “altruists worth the name”. In the previous response I similarly responded to your rationalization, not the conclusion that you were rationalizing. I am comfortable disagreeing on matters of fact but don’t usually see much use in responding to other people’s personal preferences.
We are talking at cross purposes somewhat.
There are two points.
1) There is working at something you dislike for a greater good (as long as you are very very sure that it will be a net positive. All the talks of cognitive deficits of humans do not inspire confidence in my own decision making abilities)
2) Improving society through being involved in the consumerist economy as it is a net positive force in itself.
My comment about “worth the name” was mainly about 2 and ignoring 1 for the moment, as I had already conceded it in my initial comment.
Then on this we are naturally in agreement. No sane altruist (where sane includes ’able to adequately research the influence of important decisions) will do things that have a net detriment and there are certainly going to be some activities that fit this category.
I would add another category that specifically refers to doing things that are directly bad so that it allows you to do other things that are good.
The only incompatibility I see is between rationality and (pure) altruism but I’m aware that’s a minority position here.
Spot on as a personal observation and also as a general statement about human nature.
(IAWYC)
Of course, if you’re going to talk like that it seems essential to then frame the situation as “we’re going to beat those fools at their own game, muahaha!” rather than “achieving conventional success is something dumb cavemen do, eww” or “I was born a nerd, what hope do I have”. I suspect that the default framing is closer to the bad sort, and am somewhat concerned that such talk makes things worse by default. (I’m also not sure what, if any, framing could defeat the seemingly-likely effect where considering successful non-nerds dumb makes one less likely to try to steal their powers, and simply makes it harder to get along with them.)
If one only cared about material goods, then you’re right.
Otherwise, it depends on how much you need to be relatively richer than others in order to attract the kind of social interaction you like. Think of the stereotypical well-dressed man hoping to land a winning bid on a pretty gold digger.
As I understand it, it is a comparative advantage argument. More rational people are likely to have comparative advantage in making money as compared to less rational people, so the utility maximizing setup is for more rational people to make money and pay less rational people to do the day to day work of implementing the charitable organization. Thats the basic form of the argument at least.
It definitely seems the other way around to me: very high rationality may help a lot in making money, but it’s not a necessary condition, while it does appear to be necessary for most actually effective object-level work (at the current margin; rationalist organizations will presumably become better able to use all sorts of people over time).