Math major from Germany, interested in a bunch of stuff. Find me on limerott.com
limerott
Karma: 94
A misconception about immigration
Let me clarify. If a group decides that it wants X, this does not imply that the individual member of that group wants X. What they usually want is to avoid work and let other’s do it or be told what to do. But if they agree upon the strategy “To achieve X, we agree that every member has to want X and, if he is capable, do X” (rather than “To achieve X, one leader tells everyone what to do”), then things would get done!
You claim that, in politics, rules with high cost of compliance are introduced to keep the fixed pool of resources from being divided between too many people. Is there an example of that? I think that this is mostly done not through laws, but through social affiliations. Those with the best connections get the job or the resources.
I like the idea of a do-ocracy. It’s like saying “The only rule is that don’t look for rules to do what needs doing”. But the crux is that this seeming anti-rule is actually a rule that needs to be followed. If there were absolutely no rule, and everyone were allowed to do what they wanted, nothing would get done. So, for this to work, first, a consensus has to be established that no consensus needs to be established!
I feel that we are getting off-topic and I also think that I don’t follow some of your thoughts.
The danger that you refer to may be laissez-faire capitalism and its effects on governments, societies and the environment. But this has nothing to do with the original post.
I think that you may be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The fact that there are problems with the current implementation of economics (aka globalization, multi-national cooperations, inequality etc.) does not preclude economic ideas, or ideas inspired by economics, having merit.
If you interpret scarcity as scarcity of basic resources, then the robot agent scenario does fit the post-scarcity idea. But to get there, we need technological advancement and higher productivity. And for that, economic thinking may be useful.
I have never suggested to adopt the whole field of economics as one’s dominant way of thinking. I am strictly against taking ideas, from any field, at face value without critical thinking.
Thank you for the post and the analysis. I enjoyed this insight and I recall having the feeling that everything is a trade-off at least once. This explains it clearly and succinctly.
Maybe we should make a collection of solutions that did not make it, just to acknowledge their existence, like all sorting algorithms that are strictly worse than mergesort.
To explain where I am coming from: My primary goal was to make sense of a somewhat fragmented field by developing my own philosophy behind it and turning it into concepts that I can use as thinking tools to better understand the world. My goal is not to make academic progress in that field, but to extract the viewpoint it (in my opinion) offers and use it for my own purposes.
In particular, I noticed that we are prone to treat finite (and even scarce) resources as infinite, such as making overly long book lists that would take 2-3 lifetimes to complete reading. This is non-sense of course and developing a sensibility for this bias (?) can have personal utility. I can imagine plenty of scenarios where this may be helpful, such as a boss overburden his workers with work, ignoring the fact that his workers’ energy is scarce.
Regarding the groceries shopping scenario: The mere fact that you did the analysis, i.e. used deliberate thinking to come up with options and weigh them against each other, implies some degree of finite thinking. Infinite thinking does not refer to explicit assumptions of infinity in your thinking, but rather to the fact that (to put it crudely) no thinking was done at all.
Finite and infinite thinking don’t have to be binary categories. Continuing with the groceries shopping example, consider three agents A, B and C. A is on vacation and does not care about neither time nor price, thus entering the first available shop that satisfies his needs. B is only concerned with price, so he drives to a supermarket that is far away (but offers the most competitive prices). C considers both price and money and decides that the time saved is worth the increase in price. You could formalize this as: What are the parameters of the utility function that I am currently considering? (For C, the utility function u(a,b,c) would be a function of “does the shop contain what I need?”, “what is the expected price?”, “how long will it take me?”). This would make it part of decision theory.
You are right in saying that, technically, what I mean by “infinite thinking” is really “not finite-thinking”, but as you may agree, the first term sounds a lot more catchy. It’s a trade-off that hopefully is not too obstructive.
You touched on the difference between finite and scarce with the Eskimos example. I want to note that what I mean by “switching from infinite to finite thinking” is equivalent to “treating a resource that is factually finite as being scarce”. So, you could say that “finite thinking” is really “scarce thinking”.
Concerning your hypothetical world, you already acknowledge that, in this case, mental resources (speed of thought, concentration, energy) become the bottleneck and thus the scarce resources to be allocated. I don’t think that we will ever attain a state in which we can completely abolish scarcity. When “real” economists talk about post-scarcity, they mean an abundance of elementary goods and services so that people don’t have to fight over water and food. If you take it by the letter, the only post-(formal scarcity) scenario I can imagine is us becoming floating bubbles of consciousness in space, eternally content and peaceful. But that would not be any fun.
I think that math, in its essence, is easy. If it weren’t for our faulty thinking apparatus, we would see that immediately. But the problem is that a lot of things that matter can only be accessed through vague notions without a technical definition at its heart.
With regard to physics: You say at the end of your post that theories should stay inside their domain. I agree. But decision making and analysis of markets are not in the domain of physics, but economics.
Post-scarcity is an illusion. Even if we reach a very high level of development, there will still be scare resources left to distribute, such as time.
Maybe my post was unclear about it, but I am in favor of the time-efficient method of groceries shopping (provided one has enough income). It is definitely the better solution here, as you already pointed out. Thinking finitely about your time will lead you to the conclusion that you should think infinitely about (i.e. without considering prices) which groceries to buy.
While thinking about your comment, I understood that it’s useful to distinguish between implicit and explicit assumptions of infinity. In the first case, you simply ignore the prices and, thus, implicitly treat your wallet as infinite. In the second case, you would explicitly assume that you have an infinite amount of money, which would naturally change your decisions into buying as many valuable and durable goods as possible. With “thinking infinitely” I mean the first case.
I would definitely enjoy reading more about your frankenstein theory.
I think that you need to match the right tool to the right context. I’ve observed that in some contextes, the right tool would be finite thinking, but people tend to apply infinite thinking instead. For example, if you have a model of the world in which the law enforces itself automatically, you will be less likely to endorse policies that increase spending on police. That is a mistake.
I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.
Thanks for the kind words. I will do my best.
Ah, I see. So vectors are treated like abstract objects and representing them in a matrix-like form is an additional step. And instead of coordinate vectors, which may be confusing, you only work with matrices. I can imagine that this is a useful perspective when you work with many different bases. Thank you for sharing it.
Would you then agree to define where is the standard basis?
I agree that once a price has reached equilibrium, it is likely to stay there if the number of traders is large enough. But stability does not imply objectivity. It may be that this equilibrium is an overestimation, as often happens with technological hypes.
There is also no objective value of a stock that would allow us to separate traders into wise and unwise. Every trader is a human with certain experience, skills, investment strategy, available information, cognitive biases that he is unaware of. And the stock value merely represents the sum of all traders’ characteristics.
If the king is too gullible, the vassals have an economic incentive to abuse this through the various methods you described. This eventually leads to a permanent distortion of the truth. If an economic crisis hits the country, his lack of truthful information would prevent him to solve it. The crises would exacerbate, which, at some point, would propel the population to rebel and topple him. As a replacement, a less gullible king would be put into power. This looks like a control loop to me—one that gets rid of too gullible kings.
So, my strategy as detective would be to wait until the situation gets worse and stage a coup.
I want to argue that a healthy dose of artificial optimism can be useful (by the way, isn’t all optimism artificial? Otherwise, we would call it realism). This can be on a personal level: If you expect to have a good day, you are more likely to do things that will make your day good. Or, in your scenario, if a vassal whose region isn’t going great starts to praise it and gets more resources this way, he can invest them into rebuilding it (although I question the policy of assigning more resources to those regions that are faring well anyway).
As a side note, this reminds me of the Great Leap Forward under Mao, which caused millions of death by starvation. The main reason was deceitful reporting: as the information about crops needed to be collected at the central authority and it had to go through multiple levels (farmers themselves, districts, cities, counties, states) and at each level, the representatives exaggerated the numbers slightly, this added up and eventually led the top party officials to believe that everything was going great when millions were dying. (Of course, this is a hierarchical structure of vassals, but it’s still artificial optimism)
Economic Thinking
Hi! I’ve known LW for quite a while, but only now decided to join. I remember reading a comment here and thinking “I like how this person thinks”. Needless to say, this is not a common experience I have on the internet. What I hope to get from this site are fruitful intellectual discussions that trip me over and reveal the flaws in my reasoning :)
Your struggles with coordinate vectors sound familiar. I remember that, in the book I used, they introduced for a basis and called a coordinate vector of iff ( is left general on purpose). This explicit formulation as a simple bijective function cleared up the confusion for me. You can do neat things with it like turn an abstract map into a map from one basis to another: for linear .
But of course, from a practical standpoint, you don’t think about vectors this way. As with proofs, once you heard a plausible argument and accepted it, there is no reason to go back to them. So, I am somewhat critical of your book not introducing matrix-vector multiplication, as this is an obvious centerpiece of linear algebra (especially considering that its historic roots lie in solving Ax=b).
The vague reflections you are referring to are analogous to somebody saying “I should really exercise more” without ever doing it. I agree that the mere promise of reflection is useless.
But I do think that reflections about the vague topics are important and possible. Actively working through one’s experiences, reading relevant books, discussing questions with intelligent people can lead to epiphanies (and eventually life choices), that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise.
However, this is not done with a push of a button and these things don’t happen randomly—they will only emerge if you are prepared to invest a lot of time and energy.
All of this happens on a personal level. To use your example, somebody may conclude from his own life experience that living a life of purpose is more important to him than to live a life of happiness. How to formalize this process so that an AI could use a canonical way to achieve it (and infer somebody’s real values simply by observing) is beyond me. It would have to know a lot more about us than is comfortable for most of us.