Governments don’t earn their money through market savvy, so they tend lack the experience and skill to recognize talent when they see it. Without that, it becomes very difficult to hire the most capable people, even when you have large amounts of money.
Hi Heller. How are we determining that they are the most capable? I feel like there are many ways to measure, and I think science includes the type of studying that allows people to create good websites and computer software and hardware, and good music and movies and so on (I think all these things can be researched formally). With that in mind, I’d say that the most capable science is being done by private companies.
Hopefully that makes sense. This isn’t intended to muddle the term “scientist.”
I think science includes the type of studying that allows people to create good websites and computer software and hardware, and good music and movies and so on
Thats so incredibly broad as to be a useless definition of “scientist.” Lets use “scientist” as someone engaged in basic research oriented around the natural word (as opposed to an engineer involved in more applied research). My categorization isn’t perfect, but your grouping puts musicians,actors, programmers, actuaries,engineers,etc all in to an umbrella category of “scientist.”
Most fundamental research happens at public institutions under public grants (even the private institutions get massive public subsidy). Also, as a matter of public-goods, economic theory would expect private institutions to be systematically underinvested in basic research.
I’m not suggesting that everyone who does those things is a scientist, but that those things CAN be studied scientifically.
For example, not all singers are scientists, but the people who created auto-tune probably did so through scientific research, and, at least in an objective note-matching sense, it makes singers better.
Take weapons systems as an example. Few would claim that the government has been a failure at building nuclear arsenals, conventional-weapons fleets, remote weapons-control systems, etc. Of course, it may do so inefficiently, and the US military may sometimes perform poorly (e.g., Vietnam, Iraq), but on the whole nobody in the world would dare go up against it. The same could be true for a government AGI.
The US military has certainly developed some extremely powerful weapons. But as you said and I agree, we have understand if it was done more efficiently or capably then a market would’ve produced, and I’m not sure if there’s a good example to use for weapons development.
Maybe we should look at government space programs compared to private spaceflight?
Yes, companies can sometimes produce technologies at lower cost. But my thinking is that when the technology is as much of a security threat as AGI, governments would use their power to prohibit private development of it (just as governments prevent private selling of advanced military weapons). Combined with the fact that governments are not totally ineffective, this makes it plausible that the first AGI will be built by a government. Of course, governments might not be first, especially if private companies are fast enough to outrun government prohibitions.
Agreed. It’s an interesting question whether we want governments to realize it or not. I lean toward the “yes” side (in general, it seems better when governments understand catastrophic risks), but we should debate the question more before taking action.
This may sometimes be the case, but note that “market savvy” isn’t necessary to gain useful experience in recognizing skill in prospective employees. You just need effective feedback mechanisms that tell you whether or not you’re doing a good job.
May government institutions operate in the absence of such feedback mechanisms, but not all.
I think the question in this case is whether feedback mechanisms outside of proper free market forces should be labeled “effective,” since many of us consider the accuracy of free market feedback to be light-years beyond that of rough individual human judgement.
(apologies if this is sliding into an inappropriate political discussion)
Free market feedback is generally strong, but often subject to perverse incentives. There are matters I would be more comfortable leaving in the hands of free market than the government, and other matters where I would be much less comfortable seeing them handled by the free market. I think that a “general case” where the balance clearly lies in favor of one or the other is probably mythical.
I’ve read and seen some really thought-provoking material on ways in which the free market could supposedly do a lot of traditional government roles. There are also sites like judge.me which are testing some of it out, including private contract enforcement and law. So I wouldn’t automatically say that government is better at certain things.
What kind of perverse incentives are you concerned with? There is certainly some incentive to do things like using force and deception to get money or resources, but the market also includes a mechanism for punishing this and disincentivizing that type of behavior, and I’d say the same incentive exists in governments.
What kind of perverse incentives are you concerned with?
There are a huge number of potential perverse incentives idiosyncratic to the specific cases; again, I don’t think this is an issue where there’s a practical “general case” address.
If you want to ask me to, say, name a few specific cases, I could do that, but it should be with the understanding that they shouldn’t be taken as representative examples whereby, if we solve them, we can generalize those methods to all remaining perverse incentive scenarios. I can definitely think of examples off the top of my head that require neither the use of force of deception.
The government is also subject to some perverse incentives, some of which do not apply to markets, but in some cases it fares better because, while businesses are required to keep their own interests at the bottom line, and in some situations those interests can diverge significantly from those of their consumer base, the intended purpose of the government is to serve the populace.
This book has a reasonable concentration of examples of businesses operating under perverse incentives, but also some examples of free market enterprises offering services with higher costs and lower efficiency than government bodies offering the same services, and might be worthwhile food for thought.
Thanks for the link. Of course, I felt like it would be easiest to discuss some quick examples from your point of view, as I don’t want to mischaracterize you. But if you’d prefer not to that’s fine. As I said, I don’t want to get too far into political arguments anyway.
Judge.me was shutdown in July 2013, but evidently Net-Arb is another service carrying on the Judge.me torch and focusing primarily on internet arbitration.
Governments don’t earn their money through market savvy, so they tend lack the experience and skill to recognize talent when they see it. Without that, it becomes very difficult to hire the most capable people, even when you have large amounts of money.
A theoretical argument, but does it hold empirically? In my experience, the most capable scientists all work for government organizations.
Hi Heller. How are we determining that they are the most capable? I feel like there are many ways to measure, and I think science includes the type of studying that allows people to create good websites and computer software and hardware, and good music and movies and so on (I think all these things can be researched formally). With that in mind, I’d say that the most capable science is being done by private companies.
Hopefully that makes sense. This isn’t intended to muddle the term “scientist.”
Thats so incredibly broad as to be a useless definition of “scientist.” Lets use “scientist” as someone engaged in basic research oriented around the natural word (as opposed to an engineer involved in more applied research). My categorization isn’t perfect, but your grouping puts musicians,actors, programmers, actuaries,engineers,etc all in to an umbrella category of “scientist.”
Most fundamental research happens at public institutions under public grants (even the private institutions get massive public subsidy). Also, as a matter of public-goods, economic theory would expect private institutions to be systematically underinvested in basic research.
I’m not suggesting that everyone who does those things is a scientist, but that those things CAN be studied scientifically.
For example, not all singers are scientists, but the people who created auto-tune probably did so through scientific research, and, at least in an objective note-matching sense, it makes singers better.
Take weapons systems as an example. Few would claim that the government has been a failure at building nuclear arsenals, conventional-weapons fleets, remote weapons-control systems, etc. Of course, it may do so inefficiently, and the US military may sometimes perform poorly (e.g., Vietnam, Iraq), but on the whole nobody in the world would dare go up against it. The same could be true for a government AGI.
The US military has certainly developed some extremely powerful weapons. But as you said and I agree, we have understand if it was done more efficiently or capably then a market would’ve produced, and I’m not sure if there’s a good example to use for weapons development.
Maybe we should look at government space programs compared to private spaceflight?
Yes, companies can sometimes produce technologies at lower cost. But my thinking is that when the technology is as much of a security threat as AGI, governments would use their power to prohibit private development of it (just as governments prevent private selling of advanced military weapons). Combined with the fact that governments are not totally ineffective, this makes it plausible that the first AGI will be built by a government. Of course, governments might not be first, especially if private companies are fast enough to outrun government prohibitions.
This assumes that the government recognizes AGI development as a security threat which is not a given.
Agreed. It’s an interesting question whether we want governments to realize it or not. I lean toward the “yes” side (in general, it seems better when governments understand catastrophic risks), but we should debate the question more before taking action.
This may sometimes be the case, but note that “market savvy” isn’t necessary to gain useful experience in recognizing skill in prospective employees. You just need effective feedback mechanisms that tell you whether or not you’re doing a good job.
May government institutions operate in the absence of such feedback mechanisms, but not all.
I think the question in this case is whether feedback mechanisms outside of proper free market forces should be labeled “effective,” since many of us consider the accuracy of free market feedback to be light-years beyond that of rough individual human judgement.
(apologies if this is sliding into an inappropriate political discussion)
Free market feedback is generally strong, but often subject to perverse incentives. There are matters I would be more comfortable leaving in the hands of free market than the government, and other matters where I would be much less comfortable seeing them handled by the free market. I think that a “general case” where the balance clearly lies in favor of one or the other is probably mythical.
I’ve read and seen some really thought-provoking material on ways in which the free market could supposedly do a lot of traditional government roles. There are also sites like judge.me which are testing some of it out, including private contract enforcement and law. So I wouldn’t automatically say that government is better at certain things.
What kind of perverse incentives are you concerned with? There is certainly some incentive to do things like using force and deception to get money or resources, but the market also includes a mechanism for punishing this and disincentivizing that type of behavior, and I’d say the same incentive exists in governments.
There are a huge number of potential perverse incentives idiosyncratic to the specific cases; again, I don’t think this is an issue where there’s a practical “general case” address.
If you want to ask me to, say, name a few specific cases, I could do that, but it should be with the understanding that they shouldn’t be taken as representative examples whereby, if we solve them, we can generalize those methods to all remaining perverse incentive scenarios. I can definitely think of examples off the top of my head that require neither the use of force of deception.
The government is also subject to some perverse incentives, some of which do not apply to markets, but in some cases it fares better because, while businesses are required to keep their own interests at the bottom line, and in some situations those interests can diverge significantly from those of their consumer base, the intended purpose of the government is to serve the populace.
This book has a reasonable concentration of examples of businesses operating under perverse incentives, but also some examples of free market enterprises offering services with higher costs and lower efficiency than government bodies offering the same services, and might be worthwhile food for thought.
Thanks for the link. Of course, I felt like it would be easiest to discuss some quick examples from your point of view, as I don’t want to mischaracterize you. But if you’d prefer not to that’s fine. As I said, I don’t want to get too far into political arguments anyway.
Judge.me was shutdown in July 2013, but evidently Net-Arb is another service carrying on the Judge.me torch and focusing primarily on internet arbitration.
Thanks for the updated information.