Sure, but it’s really hard to anticipate which side will benefit more, so in expected value they’re equal. I’m sure some people will think their side will be more effective in how it spends money...I’ll try to persuade them to take the outside view.
HonoreDB
Karma: 2,261
Thanks, I’ll look him up.
I think those contributors will probably not be our main demographic, since they have an interest in the system as it is and don’t want to risk disrupting it. In theory, though, donating to both parties can be modeled as a costly signal (the implied threat is that if you displease me, the next election I’ll only donate to your opponent), and there’s no reason you can’t do that through our site.
It seems to be implicit in your model that funding for political parties is a negative-sum arms race.
What army1987 said. The specific assumption is that on the margin, the effect of more funding to both sides is either very small or negative.
In my own view, the most damaging negative-sum arms race is academia.
This is definitely an extendable idea. It gets a lot more complicated when there are >2 sides, unfortunately. Even if they agreed it was negative-sum, someone donating $100 to Columbia University would generally not be equally happy to take $100 away from Harvard. I don’t know how to fix that.
Thanks!
I’m happy to specify completely, actually, I just figured a general question would lead to answers that are more useful to the community.
In my case, I’m helping to set up an organization to divert money away from major party U.S. campaign funds and to efficient charities. The idea is that if I donate $100 to the Democratic Party, and you donate $200 to the Republican party (or to their nominees for President, say), the net marginal effect on the election is very similar to if you’d donated $100 and I’ve donated nothing; $100 from each of us is being canceled out. So we’re going to make a site where people can donate to either of two opposing causes, we’ll hold it in escrow for a little, and then at a preset time the money that would be canceling out goes to a GiveWell charity instead. So if we get $5000 in donations for the Democrats and $2000 for Republicans, the Democrats get $3000 and the neutral charity gets $4000. From an individual donor’s point of view, each dollar you donate will either become a dollar for your side, or take away a dollar from the opposing side.
This obviously steps into a lot of election law, so that’s probably the expertise I’ll be looking for. We also need to figure out what type of organization(s) we need to be: it seems ideal to incorporate as a 501c(3) just so that people can make tax-deductible donations to us (whether donations made through us that end up going to charity can be tax-deductible is another issue). I think the spirit of the regulations should permit that, but I am not a lawyer and I’ve heard conflicting opinions on whether the letter of the law does.
And those issues aside, I feel like there could be more legal gotchas that I’m not anticipating to do with Handling Other People’s Money.
What’s the best way to get (U.S.) legal advice on a weird, novel issue (one that would require research and cleverness to address well)? Paid or unpaid, in person or remotely.
(For that matter, if anyone happens to be interested in donating good legal advice to a weird, novel non-profit organization, feel free to contact me at histocrat at gmail dot com).
Arthur Prior’s resolution it to claim that each statement implicitly asserts its own truth, so that “this statement is false” becomes “this statement is false and this statement is true”.
Pace your later comments, this is a wonderfully pithy solution and I look forward to pulling it out at cocktail parties.
I like people’s attempts to step outside the question, but playing along...
LW-rationalists value thinking for yourself over conformity. A LW sport might be a non-team sport like fencing, a team sport in which individuals are spotlighted, like baseball, or a sport that presents constant temptation to follow cues from your teammates but rewards breaking away from the pack.
LW-rationalists value cross-domain skills. A LW sport might involve a variety of activities, like an n-athlon, or facing a quick succession of opponents who all trained together so that lessons learned against one are likely to apply to the next.
LW-rationalists value finding ways to cooperate with people whose values are different. A LW sport might involve a tension between behavior that supports the team and behavior that wins personal glory, like basketball, or it might involve more than 2 sides and more than 1 winner with potential for cooperation.
LW-rationalists value an ability to recognize when a previously useful heuristic isn’t working, and break out of it. A LW sport might involve subtle shifts in the playing field that weaken some strategies and strengthen others.
the effects of poverty & oppression on means & tails
Wait, what are you saying here? That there aren’t any Einsteins in sweatshops in part because their innate mathematical ability got stunted by malnutrition and lack of education? That seems like basically conceding the point, unless we’re arguing about whether there should be a program to give a battery of genius tests to every poor adult in India.
The talent can manifest as early as arithmetic, which is taught to a great many poor people, I am given to understand.
Not all of them, I don’t think. And then you have to have a talent that manifests early, have someone in your community who knows that a kid with a talent for arithmetic might have a talent for higher math, knows that a talent for higher math can lead to a way to support your family, expects that you’ll be given a chance to prove yourself, gives a shit, has a way of getting you tested...
I’m fairly confident that confessing to poisoning someone else’s food usually gets you incarcerated, and occasionally gets you killed (think feudal society or mob-ridden areas), and is at least a career-limiting move if you don’t start from a privileged position.
Really? Then I’m sure you could name three examples.
Just going off Google, here: People being incarcerated for unsuccessful attempts to poison someone: http://digitaljournal.com/article/346684 http://charlotte.news14.com/content/headlines/628564/teen-arrested-for-trying-to-poison-mother-s-coffee/ http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=85968
Person being killed for suspected unsuccessful attempt to poison someone: http://zeenews.india.com/news/bihar/man-lynched-for-trying-to-poison-hand-pump_869197.html
Sorry, I can only read what you wrote. If you meant he lacked tact, you shouldn’t have brought up insanity.
I was trying to elegantly combine the Incident with the Debilitating Paranoia and the Incident with the Telling The Citizenship Judge That Nazis Could Easily Take Over The United States. Clearly didn’t completely come across.
Really? Because his mathematician peers were completely exasperated at him. What, exactly, was he politic about?
He was politic enough to overcome Vast Cultural Differences enough to get somewhat integrated into an insular community. I hang out with mathematicians a lot; my stereotype of them is that they tend not to be good at that.
- “Oppenheimer wasn’t privileged, he was only treated slightly better than the average Cambridge student.”
I’m sorry, I never really rigorously defined the counter-factuals we were playing with, but the fact that Oppenheimer was in a context where attempted murder didn’t sink his career is surely relevant to the overall question of whether there are Einsteins in sweatshops.
Do you really think the existence of oppression is a figment of Marxist ideology? If being poor didn’t make it harder to become a famous mathematician given innate ability, I’m not sure “poverty” would be a coherent concept. If you’re poor, you don’t just have to be far out on multiple distributions, you also have to be at the mean or above in several more (health, willpower, various kinds of luck). Ramanujan barely made it over the finish line before dying of malnutrition.
Even if the mean mathematical ability in Indians were innately low (I’m quite skeptical there), that would itself imply a context containing more censoring factors for any potential Einsteins...to become a mathematician, you have to, at minimum, be aware that higher math exists, that you’re unusually good at it by world standards, and being a mathematician at that level is a viable way to support your family.
On your specific objections to my conjugates...I’m fairly confident that confessing to poisoning someone else’s food usually gets you incarcerated, and occasionally gets you killed (think feudal society or mob-ridden areas), and is at least a career-limiting move if you don’t start from a privileged position. Hardly a gross exaggeration. Goedel didn’t become clinically paranoid until later, but he was always the sort of person who would thoughtlessly insult an important gatekeeper’s government, which is part of what I was getting at; Ramanujan was more politic than your average mathematician. I actually was thinking of making Newton’s conjugate be into Hindu mysticism instead of Christian but that seemed too elaborate.
I think it can be illustrative, as a counter to the spotlight effect, to look at the personalities of math/science outliers who come from privileged backgrounds, and imagine them being born into poverty. Oppenheimer’s conjugate was jailed or executed for attempted murder, instead of being threatened with academic probation. Gödel’s conjugate added a postscript to his proof warning that the British Royal Family were possible Nazi collaborators, which got it binned, which convinced him that all British mathematicians were in on the conspiracy. Newton and Turing’s conjugates were murdered as teenagers on suspicion of homosexuality. I have to make these stories up because if you’re poor and at all weird, flawed, or unlucky your story is rarely recorded.
Huh, that does make a lot more sense. I guess I’d been assuming that any reference to someone “averting” a prophecy was actually just someone forcing the better branch of an EitherOrProphecy (tvtropes). Like if Trelawney had said “HE WHO WOULD TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN IF NONE STAND AGAINST IT.” The inference that prophecies don’t always come true fits Quirrell’s behavior much better.
Quirrell seems to have been counterfactually mugged by hearing the prophecy of the end of the world...which would mean his decision theory, and psychological commitment to it, are very advanced.
Assume Quirrell believes that the only possible explanation of the prophecy he heard is that the apocalypse is nigh. This makes sense: prophecies don’t occur for trivial events like a visitor to Hogwarts destroying books in the library named “Stars in Heaven” and “The World,” and the idea of “the end of the world” being a eucatastrophe hasn’t occurred to him. Assume Quirrell believes that prophecies are inevitable once spoken. Then why is Quirrell bothering to try to save the world?
Given that he hears the prophecy, Quirrell can either try T or not try ~T to avert it. Given that he tries, Quirrell is either capable C or incapable ~C of averting it. If T and C, by inevitability Quirrell will never hear the prophecy, which means that it is less likely the end of the world will occur (massive events always produce a prophecy that is heard by a wizard, so either Time finds some way to stop the end of the world or someone else hears it but fails to avert it). Say the end of the world causes −100 utility to Quirrell, and trying to stop it causes −1 utility. Then if C, a Quirrell that would try never hears the prophecy, so he never loses any utility, while a Quirrell that would not try hears the prophecy, goes out in a blaze of hedonism rather than fighting the inevitable, and loses 100 utility from the end of the world. Unfortunately, the actual world is the ~C world, where T brings −101 utility and ~T brings −100. So T looks like an irrational choice, but actually maximizes Quirrell’s utility across counterfactuals.
This isn’t the only explanation for Quirrell’s actions; he could just prefer to go out fighting, or be betting on the slim chance that prophecies actually can be averted, or just trying to delay the end of the world as long as possible, or acting on other, weirder motives. But it’s an interesting illustration of how alien a being that has truly internalized a really sophisticated decision theory might be.
T was supposed to do a bit more than it did, but it had some portability bugs so I hastily lobotomized it. All it’s supposed to do now is simulate the opponent twice against an obfuscated defectbot, defect if it cooperates both times, otherwise play mimicbot. I didn’t have the time to add some of the obvious safeguards. I’m not sure if K is exploiting me or just got lucky, but at a glance, what it might be doing is checking whether the passed-in bot can generate a perfect quine of itself, and cooperating only then. That would be pretty ingenious, since typically a quine chain will go “original—functional copy—identical copy—identical copy”, etc.
The bad news is there is none. The good news is that this means, under linear transformation, that there is such a thing as a free lunch!
I’m standing at a 4-way intersection. I want to go the best restaurant at the intersection. To the west is a three-star restaurant, to the north is a two-star restaurant, and to the northwest, requiring two street-crossings, is a four-star restaurant. All of the streets are equally safe to cross except for the one in between the western restaurant and the northern one, which is more dangerous. So going west, then north is strictly dominated by going north, then west. Going north and eating there is strictly dominated by going west and eating there. This means that if I cross one street, and then change my mind about where I want to eat based on the fact that I didn’t die, I’ve been dutch-booked by reality.
That might need a few more elements before it actually restricts you to VNM-rationality.
This seems like a good sketch of the endgame for histocracy, my own pie-in-the-sky organizational scheme. If you start with people voluntarily transitioning management of a resource they own to an open histocratic system with themselves as the judges, and then iterate and nest and stuff, you get something like this in the limit. I hadn’t been able to envision it quite as elegantly as you do here.
I’m not sure the recursive argument even fully works for the stock market, these days—I suspect it’s more like a sticky tradition that crudely mimic the incentive structure that used to exist, like a parasitic vine that still holds the shape of the rotted-away tree it killed. When there’s any noise, recursion amplifies it with each iteration: a 1-year lookahead to a 1-year lookahead might be almost the same as a 2-year-lookahead, but it’s slightly skewed by wanting to take into account short-scale price movements and different risk and time discounting. By the the time you get to a 1-year lookahead to a 1-year lookahead to a...*10, it’s almost completely (maybe completely) decoupled from the actual 10-year lookahead, with no way to make money off of that decoupling.