FYI, Mox will also be open to LessOnline ticketholders in the week between LessOnline and Manifest. This is more for people who’ve got a flight out a few days late and just need a place to get work done, for socializing highly recommend buying a ticket to Arbor summer camp!
Rachel Shu
Karma: 330
The code to enter is 1112# ! If you’re new to the space, come up to the 4th floor and I, Mattie, or Austin will help you get oriented :)
The idea of kill markets are of course not so new. One prominent example was the practice of paying bounties for Indian scalps which was practiced by various US government and white civilian entities during frontier conflicts against natives. They were not the first to adopt this practice but they were the ones to spread it across the continent. This incentivized wholesale extermination of native nations, and predation on innocents, rather than mere military submission, a common outcome of those frontier wars.
Reminded me of Ozy’s post “The Life Goals of Dead People”, where guilt/anxiety/trauma makes you choose to live smaller and reduce variance
I did follow that turn, I just am confused by the examples you chose to illustrate it with. The first examples of Bell Labs and VC firms I agree match the claim, but not the subsequent ones.
I am imagining an accountability sink as a situation where the person held responsible has no power over the outcome, shielding a third party. So this is bad as in the airline example (Attendant held responsible by disgruntled passenger, although mostly powerless, this shields corporate structure, problem not resolved), and good as in the VC example (VC firm held responsible by investors for profits, although mostly powerless, this shields startup founders to take risks, problem resolved successfully).
And if this is the frame you’re using, then I don’t see how the ER doctor and ATC controller examples fit this mold?
Maybe I’m just misunderstanding the structure of the essay, but I’m a bit confused by the second half of this essay — you begin to argue that there are benefits to designing accountability sinks correctly, but it seems like most of your subsequent examples to support this involve someone disobeying the formal process and taking responsibility!
The ER doctor skips process, turns over triage, and takes responsibility. His actions are defended by people using out-of system reasoning.
The ATC skips process, comes back, and takes responsibility. Her actions are defended by people using out-of system reasoning.
etc for Healthcare.gov, Boris Johnson, etc. They were operating in the context of accountability sinks which discouraged the thing they ultimately and rightly chose to do, within the system they would have been forgiven for just following the rules.
Likewise, the free market example given feels like the total opposite of an accountability sink! The person who has the problem is in fact the person who can solve it. The free market does have a classic accountability sink, in the form of externalities, but how it’s framed here seems like a perfect everyday example of the buck stopping exactly where it should stop.
Possibly, but then you have to consider you can spin up possibly arbitrarily many instances of the LLM as well, in which case you might expect the trend to go even faster, as now you’re scaling on 2 axes, and we know parallel compute scales exceptionally well.
Parallel years don’t trade off exactly with years in series, but “20 people given 8 years” might do much more than 160 given one, or 1 given 160, depending on the task.
I don’t think this is a good reason: There might be some other way of highlighting its importance in light of recent events, but it’s not core LW content.
I think the strongest thing this fashion norm has going for it is that, without having read or even heard about this post until showing up at solstice, I and at least one other person who also hadn’t heard of it managed to coordinate on the same theme of “black + shiny” simply by wanting to wear something decorative for the occasion. I also like the “wear something you would like to be asked about” as a different kind of fashion coordination point, and think that it would be great for the summer solstice, which has a bit more of that vibe.
Preliminary thoughts on MPOX 1b:
Most recent WHO report: https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/multi-country-outbreak-of-mpox—external-situation-report-35--12-august-2024
Released every other week so next one due in a day or two.
Agree with medical consensus that lockdown-qualifying global pandemic still seems unlikely, but I am concerned enough. I’m guessing <10% chance of global pandemic, <1% chance the median LessWronger gets infected, including tail risk (as in I don’t think that even 10% of Westerners get infected even if it becomes a global pandemic.) Nonsexual transmission is more likely this time around than 2022 but sex parties still seem like a key locus. If you intend to go to sex parties in the next 3-4 months you should get the Jynneos vaccine soon, as it takes 2 doses, and there is some chance of a temporary supply shortage.
Things to worry about:
-
Presymptomatic transmission seems likely.
-
This is more deadly, and higher transmission, than 2022′s MPOX Clade 1I outbreak. 3-5% death rate, more severe among children than adults (opposite of COVID). Unfortunately kids also tend to be in closer proximity to each other than adults.
-
Less clearly associated with sexual contact than 2022, good evidence of nonsexual skin-skin transmission being prevalent.
-
Some possible reported cases of reinfection in people who previously had MPOX (I can’t track this down)
-
Virus is already being reported in non-endemic countries. No person-to-person contact in the West yet, but seems probable in the near future.
-
People vaccinated for smallpox a long time ago have probably lost their immunity by now.
Reasons to not worry:
-
Not a zero-day exploit like COVID was, we already have several proven, reasonably effective vaccines and a process for delivering them, and a decent number of previously vaccinated people. I haven’t looked into supply constraints on vaccine production, and naively expect production to scale well.
-
No stupid refusal to test potential cases this time
-
Probable cross-protection from 2022 outbreak (given that the vaccine is made from an even more distant virus and is protective)
-
A lot of potential superspreaders (assuming sex parties are still a large component of the risk of superspreading) are already vaccinated/recovered, at least in the US.
-
Aerosol or droplet transmission isn’t likely, and the limited evidence we currently have suggests that we’re still looking at skin-skin contact transmission as with MPOX Clade 1I. However, smallpox was primarily droplet-transmitted (with some evidence for aerosol transmission) so it’s not out of the realm of possibility. <Of course, that’s what we said with COVID too.>
Random other things I’ve learned or thought about:
-
After the point at which droplet transmission is established, it seems like co-infection with other, more cough-inducing respiratory diseases is an underexplored risk factor for superspreading, but that’s not super common.
-
Shedded smallpox scabs were not very infectious. Surface-based transmission was most likely during periods peak illness, when it was very obvious that it was smallpox and people knew to stay away.
-
It’s actually feasible with proper planning, I looked into this last December (you have to book 6 months out). If this year is like last year in terms of policy, demand, and reservations meta, I’m 99% confident we’ll get the picnic sites, 95% confident we get 60+ camping spots, 70% confident we get 100+ camping spots.
Do you think it’d influence your decision strongly if the organizers were to charter a small motorboat to take people back to Tiburon on-demand? The ferries run every hour, the boat could make an additional two trips an hour, so average waiting time would be 20 minutes and often the boat would be immediately available. It’s still 45 min from Tiburon back to Berkeley.
This isn’t a great way of thinking about intangible value, since most people are far less liquid than the value of the things in their lives. If your mom needs life-saving treatment for $10,000 and you can’t afford to pay it, does that mean your mom is really worth less than $10,000 to you? No—her existence might contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of devotion, emotional support, and sage advice to you. It’s just that nobody will accept those things as collateral for a loan.
The Colosseum doesn’t have as stark a value proposition going for it, but by a similar argument it’s easy to imagine the public benefit of some building being greater than the amount of money that can be raised to support it. Personally, I think the Colosseum is mostly only valuable to the Italian state for the legitimacy that it buys it, a little self-justifying scheme of wasting taxpayer money to manufacture taxpayer assent.
I disagree about the transfer costs making Harberger tax unworkable, that gets priced into the self-assessed property value. You pay taxes on the use value of the property to you, not the market value, which is typically lower. When you want to sell, you’ll offer at the lower market rate.
But this actually points to an even larger problem. Harberger taxes as such would be incredibly destructive to communities. The stronger the community, the higher the use value, meaning the higher the self-assessed tax rate would have to be in order to reflect the worth to you. But the value from community is uncashable, meaning that there’s an unjust tax burden for having a better community. And people are usually only liquid to a minute proportion of the value of the intangible things in their lives.
Thus, people likely have to assess below their use value, which means the community can be eroded by compulsory sale and eviction. This already occurs in rent-paying communities, which are destroyed when property value goes up and they can no longer afford to rent there.
Tbh, you probably end up fighting this by having your neighbors in the community firebomb the property which got bought out from under you.
I think you can just drop the ‘zero notice’ part, add something like a 90 day delay between sale and transfer, and things would be a lot more workable.
There’s another problem that your comment makes me think of—in a lot of cases, the easiest and most profitable thing to do will be to just buy the property and offer to lease it back to the previous owner at a higher rate than they were last paying in Harberger tax. With capital accumulation, you’ll probably end up with giant extractive leasing company monopolies practically owning unwilling renters with no outside options—not sure what to do about this.
If anything, it’ll be more common for the previous owner to trash the place on their way out with some excuse for avoiding legal damages.
I think in the typical Harberger scheme, in order to compel transfer of property rights, you pay the entire capital cost of the property, not some portion as a temporary rent.
My proposed solution to both your problem and Richard’s, explained further in a separate comment, is that payment and transfer be separated by enough time to vacate amicably, or sue to enjoin transfer.
where the value to an actor of some property might be less than the amount of value they have custody over via that property.
I don’t think those are separate things? The value of a roof is the value of everything underneath it when it rains.
FYI, Mox will also be open to LessOnline ticketholders in the week between LessOnline and Manifest. This is more for people who are flying in a few days early and just need a place to get work done, for socializing highly recommend buying a ticket to Arbor summer camp!