Two things: an expansion on the “employers optimizing for IQ” model, and a defense of regulations as critical tools for *solving* coordination problems.
suppose that there’s a magical tower that only people with IQs of at least 100 and some amount of conscientiousness can enter, and this magical tower slices four years off your lifespan. The natural next thing that happens is that employers start to prefer prospective employees who have proved they can enter the tower.
I think most companies are sufficiently broken that they aren’t even capable of optimizing for the metrics which would earn them the most money. (Before anyone cries “EMH”, It’s a Principal-Agent Problem, and probably unexploitable unless you unilaterally control a whole company. :p)
For example, you’d think that law firms would be as ruthlessly motivated by money as anyone. They should always use the best available metrics to hire the most cost-effective lawyers. But, as Robin Hanson points out, they ignore track records and hire based on fuzzy personal impressions, even when this leads to demonstrably worse outcomes. And, this is pattern repeats in media pundits, teachers, etc. Why? What on earth are we actually optimizing for, if not expected revenue generation by the new hire?
Robin’s answer is that hiring managers are optimizing for looking good to their bosses, and to powerful elites more generally. In short, hiring managers are optimizing for prestige in the eyes of everyone who’s opinion they care about, not money. (At least, not money for the firm.) Maybe they do care about IQ to the degree that it gives them prestige, but not as much as you would expect from assuming they’re maximizing expected profits.
We like to see ourselves as egalitarian, resisting any overt dominance by our supposed betters. But in fact, unconsciously, we have elites and we bow to them. We give lip service to rebelling against them, and they pretend to be beaten back. But in fact we constantly watch out for any actions of ours that might seem to threaten elites, and we avoid them like the plague. Which explains our instinctive aversion to objective metrics in people choice, when such metrics compete with elite advice.
Ok, onto my second point:
I absolutely love the extended Tower metaphor for College burning 4 years of life and money on runaway signaling competitions. (Although it’s never stated explicitly, it screams it once the thought strikes you, and footnote 6 corroborates this. Not sure if footnote 5 was supposed to include a link to the original SSC comment, so I can’t verify that the tower metaphor started as a college metaphor.) At least, I loved everything but this:
simplicio: I agree that trying to build a cheaper Tower Two is solving the wrong problem. The interior of Tower One boasts some truly exquisite architecture and decor. It just makes sense that someone should pay a lot to allow people entry to Tower One. What we really need is for the government to subsidize the entry fees on Tower One, so that more people can fit inside.
That’s a bit of an unfair straw-man of tuition subsidies, conditional on the college metaphor being intentional. If we wanted to read people bashing the outgroup, we’d all go to /r/atheism. Like, I got a strong “childish kicking someone when they can’t kick back” reaction, which I found hard to put aside to read the rest. It’s thinly veiled, so not all liberals will realize they’re being kicked, but that doesn’t help much.
Obligatory defense which I don’t want to give but feel obligated to anyway: tuition subsidies are mostly for community colleges, or are only large enough to cover just what community college would have cost if the student decides to burn the cash on the added prestige of another school. No one is suggesting everyone attend Harvard, or hand out Harvard-sized subsidies.
And, college does offer some real education along with the signaling. The art degrees are a form of countersignaling by the upper class, but if you look at the degrees that lower class people get, I would bet that they skew much more toward trade schools and more practical information. (Also, observation-selection effect may be incredibly strong here.) So, tuition assistance programs likely do far more good than harm. Sure, it would help more if some of it wasn’t going to zero-sum signaling competitions, but the subsidies themselves are hardly as big a driver as they would be in the Tower model.
</end obligatory defense of defenseless punching bag.>
Maybe future chapters will feture more of the Dilbert-scale inadequacies in industry, like Robin Hanson’s point on law firms. But I’m worried not, based on quips like this:
visitor: Do they not have markets on your planet? Because on my planet, when you manufacture your product in a crazy, elaborate, expensive way that produces an inferior product, someone else will come along and rationalize the process and take away your customers.
Although, while scanning through looking for that quote, I noticed the Craigslist thing, which removed about half my worry. The remainder would be solved by explicitly stating that privatizing and/or deregulating everything won’t magically make everything better, as they appear to have on the Visitor’s planet.
(And, for those who need evidence for that claim:
1) Cost Disease is just as bad in for-profit hospitals as not-for-profit ones.
They’re minimally regulated. There’s no credentialing process or anything. There are many different kinds, each privately led, and low entry costs to creating a new one. They can be very profitable – pretty much any rehab will cost thousands of dollars, and the big-name ones cost much more. This should be a perfect setup for a hundred different models blooming, experimenting, and then selecting for excellence as consumers drift towards the most effective centers. Instead, we get rampant abuse, charlatanry, and uselessness.
On the other hand, when the government rode in on a white horse to try to fix things, all they did was take the one effective treatment [which the rehab clinics also strongly discourage], regulate it practically out of existence, then ride right back out again. So I would be ashamed to be taking either the market’s or the state’s side here.”
So, it looks to me that any given regulation has about 1:1 odds of either hurting or helping. I would love to have a density-map of inadequate equilibria by things like different industries, regions, scientific/academic disciplines, section of government, type of organization (publicly traded, privately owned, government owned, charity, church, co-op, hobby, club, sport, and anything else humans do in groups), size of organization, age of organization, organizational structure, etc. Not as a way to choose designs, since honestly most human institutions need to be redesigned from the ground up using game theory, but as a map of what needs fixing.)
So, using all these politicized examples is probably a Bad Idea.This is difficult to avoid, given the subject mater, but your usual habit of using historical examples whenever making inherently political points was a good one. Maybe that could be done for the most controversial ones? (Doing it for all would leave the reader thinking “yeah, but is that even still a problem today?”)
And, I especially don’t want a “yay-markets! Boo-government!” message to dissuade EAs from interacting with politicians or trying to push for legislation. It can be extremely influential to pull sideways in policy tug-of-war. Both parties may be pulling in opposite directions on some issues, and have no spare time (read: no free energy in the system) to invest in researching possible policies on an orthogonal axis. If you do all that for them though, and just hand them a Pareto-improvement, then both sides will likely support it, or at least not oppose it bitterly with every fiber of their being, like with partisan issues.
After all, what politician wants to be the guy to kill a important-sounding thing with no downsides? They might support the regulation or whatever it is, just to avoid the bad press.
Government’s main benefit to humanity is the ability to unilaterally solve coordination problems. It can unilaterally discourage pollutants, or build roads, or regulate monopolistic utilities. Sure, things like unions can fight monopolies too, but nothing else has quite the versatility of government. It’s not the only tool we have in the fight against Moloch, but it’s the biggest single one. Maybe Moloch is corrupting it too, but it hasn’t fully lost that battle yet.
Two things: an expansion on the “employers optimizing for IQ” model, and a defense of regulations as critical tools for *solving* coordination problems.
I think most companies are sufficiently broken that they aren’t even capable of optimizing for the metrics which would earn them the most money. (Before anyone cries “EMH”, It’s a Principal-Agent Problem, and probably unexploitable unless you unilaterally control a whole company. :p)
For example, you’d think that law firms would be as ruthlessly motivated by money as anyone. They should always use the best available metrics to hire the most cost-effective lawyers. But, as Robin Hanson points out, they ignore track records and hire based on fuzzy personal impressions, even when this leads to demonstrably worse outcomes. And, this is pattern repeats in media pundits, teachers, etc. Why? What on earth are we actually optimizing for, if not expected revenue generation by the new hire?
Robin’s answer is that hiring managers are optimizing for looking good to their bosses, and to powerful elites more generally. In short, hiring managers are optimizing for prestige in the eyes of everyone who’s opinion they care about, not money. (At least, not money for the firm.) Maybe they do care about IQ to the degree that it gives them prestige, but not as much as you would expect from assuming they’re maximizing expected profits.
Ok, onto my second point:
I absolutely love the extended Tower metaphor for College burning 4 years of life and money on runaway signaling competitions. (Although it’s never stated explicitly, it screams it once the thought strikes you, and footnote 6 corroborates this. Not sure if footnote 5 was supposed to include a link to the original SSC comment, so I can’t verify that the tower metaphor started as a college metaphor.) At least, I loved everything but this:
That’s a bit of an unfair straw-man of tuition subsidies, conditional on the college metaphor being intentional. If we wanted to read people bashing the outgroup, we’d all go to /r/atheism. Like, I got a strong “childish kicking someone when they can’t kick back” reaction, which I found hard to put aside to read the rest. It’s thinly veiled, so not all liberals will realize they’re being kicked, but that doesn’t help much.
Obligatory defense which I don’t want to give but feel obligated to anyway: tuition subsidies are mostly for community colleges, or are only large enough to cover just what community college would have cost if the student decides to burn the cash on the added prestige of another school. No one is suggesting everyone attend Harvard, or hand out Harvard-sized subsidies.
And, college does offer some real education along with the signaling. The art degrees are a form of countersignaling by the upper class, but if you look at the degrees that lower class people get, I would bet that they skew much more toward trade schools and more practical information. (Also, observation-selection effect may be incredibly strong here.) So, tuition assistance programs likely do far more good than harm. Sure, it would help more if some of it wasn’t going to zero-sum signaling competitions, but the subsidies themselves are hardly as big a driver as they would be in the Tower model.
</end obligatory defense of defenseless punching bag.>
And, more generally, I see this as a symptom of a larger problem. I Agree Denotationally But Object Connotationally with a lot of the libertarian undercurrents.
Maybe future chapters will feture more of the Dilbert-scale inadequacies in industry, like Robin Hanson’s point on law firms. But I’m worried not, based on quips like this:
Although, while scanning through looking for that quote, I noticed the Craigslist thing, which removed about half my worry. The remainder would be solved by explicitly stating that privatizing and/or deregulating everything won’t magically make everything better, as they appear to have on the Visitor’s planet.
(And, for those who need evidence for that claim:
1) Cost Disease is just as bad in for-profit hospitals as not-for-profit ones.
2) SSC on Rehab clinics:
So, it looks to me that any given regulation has about 1:1 odds of either hurting or helping. I would love to have a density-map of inadequate equilibria by things like different industries, regions, scientific/academic disciplines, section of government, type of organization (publicly traded, privately owned, government owned, charity, church, co-op, hobby, club, sport, and anything else humans do in groups), size of organization, age of organization, organizational structure, etc. Not as a way to choose designs, since honestly most human institutions need to be redesigned from the ground up using game theory, but as a map of what needs fixing.)
So, using all these politicized examples is probably a Bad Idea.This is difficult to avoid, given the subject mater, but your usual habit of using historical examples whenever making inherently political points was a good one. Maybe that could be done for the most controversial ones? (Doing it for all would leave the reader thinking “yeah, but is that even still a problem today?”)
And, I especially don’t want a “yay-markets! Boo-government!” message to dissuade EAs from interacting with politicians or trying to push for legislation. It can be extremely influential to pull sideways in policy tug-of-war. Both parties may be pulling in opposite directions on some issues, and have no spare time (read: no free energy in the system) to invest in researching possible policies on an orthogonal axis. If you do all that for them though, and just hand them a Pareto-improvement, then both sides will likely support it, or at least not oppose it bitterly with every fiber of their being, like with partisan issues.
After all, what politician wants to be the guy to kill a important-sounding thing with no downsides? They might support the regulation or whatever it is, just to avoid the bad press.
Government’s main benefit to humanity is the ability to unilaterally solve coordination problems. It can unilaterally discourage pollutants, or build roads, or regulate monopolistic utilities. Sure, things like unions can fight monopolies too, but nothing else has quite the versatility of government. It’s not the only tool we have in the fight against Moloch, but it’s the biggest single one. Maybe Moloch is corrupting it too, but it hasn’t fully lost that battle yet.