I made the grave error of framing this post in a way that invites a definition debate. While we are well familiar that a definition debate is similar to a debate over natural categories, which is a perfectly fine discussion to have, the discussion here has suffered because several people came in with competing categories.
I strongly endorse Ben’s post, and will edit the top post to incorporate it.
Darmani
Karma: 1,198
definitional gimbal lock
I really like this phrase. :)
Mostly agreed with what you say about the word “capitalism.” But with the NYSE example, I think it would be natural to say that the company did something not particularly capitalist. Is the CCP-owned Air China a capitalist entity? It’s certainly less capitalist than Southwest.
I think there’s at least two ways meanings can be combined. The easy one is words with multiple meanings. For example, “capitalist” has two meanings: someone who believes in free markets, and someone who owns a lot of capital. Some rhetorical tricks are played by trying to dance from one to the other, usually by denouncing libertarians as greedy corporates who benefit from the system. The second is concepts that include multiple constituents. For example, “capitalism” is a major concept that includes the things you brought up.Inasmuch that capitalism is a centuries-old concept with a lot of philosophy behind it, I think it’s worth keeping “capitalism,” in its sense as an organization of political economy, to its broader meaning which contains both freedom of labor and market-based allocation. They are correlated enough to be a sensible cluster. We can use other terms for the constituents.
For comparison, “security” contains many concepts, such as integrity (untruster party can’t influence trusted output) and confidentiality (untrusted party can’t read input from trusted party). But we can talk about security as a whole, with other terms for its individual dimensions.
I had the movie version in my mind, where the disbelieving parent comes around on seeing the kid’s success (c.f.: October Sky, Billy Elliott). I myself felt a version: my parents were very against me applying for the Thiel Fellowship, up until it became clear that I might (and did) win.
A gap in the proposed definition of exploitation is that it assumes some natural starting point of negotiation, and only evaluates divergence from that natural starting point.
In the landlord case, fair-market value of rent is a natural starting point, and landlords don’t have enough of a superior negotiating position to force rent upwards. (If they did by means of supply scarcity, then that higher point would definitionally be the new FMV.) Ergo, no exploitation.
On the other hand, if the landlord tried to increase the rent on a renewing tenant much more than is typical precisely because they know the tenant has circumstances (e.g.: physical injury) that make moving out much harder than normal, then that would be exploitative per this definition.
I really like this thinking. I don’t necessarily like the assignment of labels to concepts in this post. E.g.: I use capitalism in a manner mutually exclusive with slave labor because it requires self-ownership. And I don’t think a definition of “exploitation” should require a strategic element; I would say that not allowing an employee to read mystery novels when customers aren’t around is exploitative. But this idea of using an asymmetry of power to deepen the asymmetry is a clearly useful concept.
My intended meaning of the wording is that the “infliction” is relative to a more Pareto-optimal trade. E.g.: in the ultimatum game, us splitting a dollar with 99 cents to me and 1 cent to you is a positive-benefit trade, but is still inflicting a cost if you assume the negotation begins at 50⁄50.
The idea of the subtrade is an interesting thought, but I think any trade needs to be considered an atomic agreement. E.g.: while I might physically hand the convenience store clerk a dollar before they give me the candy bar, it can’t be broken down into two trades, because the full agreement is there from the outset.
But if they demand an extra $1 bribe in the middle, giving me the choice “Pay another $1 and get candy bar, call authorities and waste a lot of time, or pay $0 and get no candy bar,” then that’s a new tradeA trade is exploitative when it decreases a society’s wealth generating ability.
Suppose my son really wants to be a circus performer, but I want him to go to college; he says that, if he couldn’t be a circus performer, he’d be a doctor. My son is about to enter a big circus competition, and I tell him that, if he wins, I’ll give my full blessing and financial support for him to attend circus academy instead.
By that definition, it sounds like my offer to let him pursue his dream is actually exploitative!
if you are twice as good at wealth-creating than me, you should have about seven times as many dollars
This is for me the most interesting part of your comment. I want to know how this was derived.
I see. So the maximalization is important to the definition. I think then, under this definition, using Villiam’s pie example from another thread, the person taking 90% of the pie would not be exploiting the other person if he knew they could survive with 9%.
I think this definition would also say that a McDonald’s employee who puts me into a hard upsell is exploiting me so long as they never physically handle my credit card and don’t have the capacity to trap me or otherwise do more than upselling. But if they handle my credit card and don’t steal the number, then they’re no longer an exploiter.
That is to say:
1. The maximization criteria is unstable
2. There needs to be some condition about the manner in which they extract value; otherwise, plenty of ordinary business transactions in which one side does its best would be considered “exploitation”
An interesting proposal that I’ll have to think about. I’m still uneasy with throwing lying in with uses of power.
Also, this one clearly does include the parenting example I gave, and is strictly broader than my proposed definition.
We have different intuitons about this term then.
I was very surprised after posting this then some commenters considered things like wage theft and outright fraud to be exploitation, whereas I consider such illegal behavior to be in a different category.
In the pie example, the obvious answer is that giving the other person only 10% of the pie prevents them from gaining the security to walk away next time I present the same offer.
Can you give some examplse of something contained by my definition which you think shouldn’t be considered exploitation?
What would this look like for the example of the parent, the girlfriend, or the yelling boss?
If all trade is voluntary, then what is “exploitation?”
When I was a kid and 9/11 happened, some people online were talking about the effect on the stock market. My mom told me that the stock exchange was down the street from the WTC and not damaged, so I thought the people on the Internet were all wrong.
warns not to give it too much credit – if you ask how to ‘fix the error’ and the error is the timeout, it’s going to try and remove the timeout. I would counter that no, that’s exactly the point.
I think you misunderstand. In the AI Scientist paper, they said that it was “clever” in choosing to remove the timeout. What I meant in writing that: I think that’s very not clever. Still dangerous.
I’m still a little confused. The idea that “the better you can do something yourself, the less valuable it is to do it yourself” is pretty paradoxical. But isn’t “the better you can do something yourself, the less downside is there in doing it yourself instead of outsourcing” exactly what you’d expect?
Hmmm? How does this support the point that “the better you can do something yourself, the less valuable it is to do it yourself.”
I went from being at a normal level of hard-working (for a high schooler under the college admissions pressure-cooker) to what most would consider an insane level.
The first trigger was going to a summer program after my junior year where I met people like @jsteinhardt who were much smarter and more accomplished than me. That cued a senior year of learning advanced math very quickly to try to catch up.
Then I didn’t get into my college of choice and got a giant chip on my shoulder. I constantly felt I had to be accomplishing more, and merely outdoing my peers at the school I did wind up going to wasn’t enough. Every semester, I’d say to myself “The me of this semester is going to make the me of last semester look like a slacker.”
That was not a sustainable source of pressure because, in a sense, I won, and my bio now reads like the kind I used to envy. I still work very hard, but I only have the positive desire to achieve, rather than the negative desire to escape a feeling of mediocrity.
In high school, I played hours of video games every week. That’s unimaginable to me now.
My freshman year, I spent most of the day every Saturday hanging out with board game club. Now that seems insanely decadent.
In Chinese, the words for “to let someone do something” and “to make someone do something” are the same, 让 (ràng). My partner often makes this confusion. This one it did not get even after several promptings, up until I asked about the specific word.
Then I asked why both a Swede and a Dane I know say “increased with 20%” instead of “increased by 20%.” It guessed that it had something to do with prepositions, but did not volunteer the preposition in question. (Google Translate answered this; “increased by 20%” translates to “ökade med 20%,” and “med” commonly translates to “with.”)
But then I made up a story based on my favorite cognate*, and it nailed it.
So, 2⁄4.
* Yes, this is a true cognate. The German word “Gift” meaning “poison” allegedly descends from euphemistic uses of the English meaning of “gift”
Am I the only one who finds parts of the early story rather dystopian? He sounds like a puppet being pulled around by the AI, gradually losing his ability to have his own thoughts and conversations. (That part’s not written, but it’s the inevitable result of asking the AI every time he encounters struggle.)