If you like analytic philosophy and mechanism design, consider checking out my blog.
B Jacobs
Karma: 474
Ah thanks! I’m probably just in an unlucky timezone then.
The literal, narrow interpretation of what you say is true, but what is implied is not. Coops do work well as many-billion-dollar enterprises, not just as a local consumer-service organization. E.g. Mondragon had a total revenue of 11 billion euros in 2023, while maintaining growth, since that was a 5% increase from the year before.
Also, you don’t necessarily need to think about investment strategy or influencing corporate decisions in a coop, since you can grant someone a proxy.
Also also, why are socialist-vibe blogposts so often relegated to “personal blogpost” while capitalist-vibe blogposts aren’t? I mean, I get the automatic barrage of downvotes, but you’d think the mods would at least try to appear impartial.
Why giving workers stocks isn’t enough — and what co-ops get right
How Democratic Is Effective Altruism — Really?
Problems with Bayesianism: A Socratic Dialogue
Since I talked about existing worker co-ops I obviously knew co-ops exist, and this was (I had hoped clearly) talking about conventional firms, which do not have that structure. Even when workers own stocks in conventional firms, they (in the vast majority of cases) do not have control. I made a whole post about this if you’re interested.
Thanks! Yeah, I think I’ll do that (in a couple weeks)
How worker co-ops can help restore social trust
How prediction markets can create harmful outcomes: a case study
Which meat to eat: CO₂ vs Animal suffering
This post does not talk about strength of preferences so this seems a bit off topic. Nevertheless I think this misses some important considerations. You say:
the probability that one would actually go ahead and vote in a race does correlate with the strength of one’s preferences. So, perhaps, this is indeed working as intended.
This doesn’t take into account voter suppression. Take for example Texas; from 2012 to 2018, 542 polling places were closed in counties with significant increases in African-American and Latino populations, while counties with fewer minority increases saw only 34 closures.
They also placed restrictions on absentee ballots and limits on drop-off locations. For example; Harris County, which had only one drop-off location for 2.4 million voters.
It’s not so much the strength of preferences that determines who votes, as much as who is systematically discouraged from voting.
the best-researched article I know of on gender differences in chess
So I read this article and occasionally checked the sources and while it’s not a bad article by any stretch, the scientific backing is not as strong as they imply. For example they write:
the sexes differ in their -preferences- for competition. As both Kasparov and Repková have intuited, men are simply -more competitive-
With the words “preferences” and “more competitive” being hyperlinks to their source. This implies (especially in the context) a “nature” explanation, but the source doesn’t show that. And that’s another thing, it’s one study. Of course you can link to the same study twice, but it feels a bit icky to do so this close together about the same claim. A link to a study implies you have evidence for your claim, and if your claim has two links a couple words apart a reader will naturally assume you have two studies, which is a much stronger reason to believe someone. I think this is therefore a bit misleading.
I’m also missing some social explanations that an academic/leftwing article would surely have mentioned. Take for example “stereotype threat”, the idea that stereotypes change how people perform. There is a semi-famous study about this in chess: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.440
The female players in the experiment were misled. They always played against men, but sometimes the researchers would say they were playing against women. When they believed they were playing against a woman their performance would improve even with the exact same opponent (e.g. they would play multiple games against the same man, and they would score better against him when they believed he was a woman). Performance was reduced by 50% when they believed the opponent was a man and they were reminded of the stereotype. To my academic/leftwing brain, this seems like a pretty glaring omission.
Should we abstain from voting? (In nondeterministic elections)
When to join a respectability cascade
Hmmm, I don’t know if that works. There have definitely been times were I (phenomenologically) felt inconsistent preferences at the same time, e.g. I simultaneously want to hang a painting there and not hang a painting there. I do get this a lot more with aesthetic preferences than with other preferences for some reason. I think the proposed solution that we’re multiple agents is quite plausible, but it does have some problems, so that’s why I proposed this solution as a possible alternative.
This is a false dilemma. By granting a proxy you can keep the money while relinquishing control. But even if it was true that you’d be sacrificing money there are still people who don’t want to think about corporate governance but do want to fight the evils of capitalism and thus would be happy to give a fellow co-op member a proxy rather than earning a bit more (e.g. me).
No it’s the vibe, I ran a natural experiment to test it and it’s clearly just the vibe. I posted the same measured even-handed post on co-ops to the EA forum and LW, but in the former they were called co-ops in the latter socialst firms. The former was upvoted, the latter was downvoted. Also, the most venerated posts on LW (e.g. the sequences) often don’t even cite their sources, while that post cited dozens of scientific studies. Also also, my other recent post on co-ops was also data-heavy and it also got downvoted. Rationalists just have an anti-socialist bias.