Martin Sustrik

Euro­pean Progress Conference

• Martin SustrikSep 19, 2024, 3:15 PM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: p.b.’s comment on: Slave Mo­ral­ity: A place for ev­ery man and ev­ery man in his place

  At your service!

Slave Mo­ral­ity: A place for ev­ery man and ev­ery man in his place

• Martin SustrikSep 2, 2024, 5:04 AM

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: Referen­dum Me­chan­ics in a Mar­ket­place of Ideas

  Currently in Switzerland, you vote four times a year, each time on some five of six referendum questions. But some of those are or cantonal or municipal level and thus not super interesting for the national media. Let’s say there are three Swiss-wide referendums each quarter, that is 12 a year. I think media can manage that.

  Number going up 100x would be a problem, but the load is limited by:

  1. For a referendum to take place at all, a certain amount of signatures have to be gathered. Lots of oddball referendums fail at this stage.

  2. Significant portion of referendums is solved by negotiation (see article) and does not reach the voter at all.

  3. Even if the voter is not properly informed they can either not vote (with no quorum that has no impact on the result) or vote “no” (which means “keep the status quo”).

Referen­dum Me­chan­ics in a Mar­ket­place of Ideas

Mu­sic in the AI World

SRE’s re­view of Democracy

Agency in Politics

• Martin SustrikJul 11, 2024, 2:34 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Joachim Bartosik’s comment on: An­titrust as Con­trol­led Creative Destruction

  Shareholders have the voting rights. If they feel that they will profit more from two smaller, but growing companies than from a single stalled one, that’s how it’s going to be.

• Martin SustrikJul 10, 2024, 10:25 PM

  13 points

  4

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Daniel Koko­ta­jlo’s Shortform

  It was the connection to the ethos of the early Internet that I was not expecting in this context, that made it a sad reading for me. I can’t really explain why. Maybe just because I consider myself to be part of that culture, and so it was kind of personal.

An­titrust as Con­trol­led Creative Destruction

Con­trol­led Creative Destruction

• Martin SustrikJul 2, 2024, 12:01 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: The Wis­dom of Liv­ing for 200 Years

  Coincidentally, here’s Bryan Caplan (quoting Jim Flynn) on intelligence vs. wisdom:

  Performance on the traditional problem-solving task or cognitive measure decreased linearly after age 20. Performance on the practical problem-solving task increased to a peak in the 40 and 50 year-old groups, then declined.

  https://​​www.betonit.ai/​​p/​​age_and_commonhtml

• Martin SustrikJun 28, 2024, 2:59 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The Wis­dom of Liv­ing for 200 Years

  There must have been a group of solitary men, but there was no social stigma attached to being a bachelor. Zweig discusses the topic in a chapter dedicated to women and does not mention solitary men per se. However, there are few pages about prostitution and how crazy widespread it used to be. He compares it to inter-war period—which itself may seem pretty bad to us today. The prostitution of course cuts in only one way and the whole chapter sheds some light on the dynamic. The entire book is worth reading. Recommended.

The Wis­dom of Liv­ing for 200 Years

• Martin SustrikJun 26, 2024, 3:35 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Martin Sus­trik’s Shortform

  Let me try a different example:

  Let’s say you are an opposition politician and your pet constitutional issue is to replace majority voting by proportional voting. You believe that FPTP has some genuinely detrimental consequences for the society and you are such a selfless person that you are willing to push for the change even against your best object level interests.

  The party currently in power loves majority voting. They love it, however, on the object level: It gives them far larger representation in the parliament than would otherwise be reasonable. 55% voters vote for them, yet they get 80% of MPs. They don’t care about meta level and are not willing to sacrifice object-level interests for it.

  The situation is stable for the time being. There’s no “political will” to enact proportional voting. So you wait.

  At some point the voting patterns change and the ruling party suddenly faces defeat in the upcoming elections. Now they would do better with the proportional voting system.

  They care only about the object level, that is, winning the election, and proportional voting is as good means to win as is majority voting.

  You, on the other hand, care only about the meta level. You may lose the upcoming election if proportional system is adopted, but you think it’s still worth it.

  Suddenly the two parties are aligned, each side prefers the proportional system, albeit for different reasons. The proportional voting gets adopted.

• Martin SustrikJun 24, 2024, 3:03 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Martin Sus­trik’s Shortform

  Unfortunately no, they didn’t. But exactly observing this kind of effects would make studying it from the point of view of political science interesting. (See Hirschmanian “exit”).

• Martin SustrikJun 23, 2024, 5:57 AM

  4 points

  0

  on: Martin Sus­trik’s Shortform

  LARPing the Veil of Ignorance: Someone told me yesterday that there is a group of people role playing a medieval village each summer. They meet for a week, some of them play aristocrats, some of them are artisans, some are peasants. It must suck to be a peasant, I said. The answer was that the roles are chosen by lot. If you are unlucky you become a peasant you are just going to work on a field, but you don’t know that in advance. Which, of course, is the classic Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” thought experiment. And a repeated one at that!

  If those people were dedicated to improving the societal system within the game, the thought experiment would become a real experiment. What would that be good for? At the very least it would highlight the shortcomings of the veil of ignorance system—would people game it? And if so, how? But it also may work like a laboratory of governance systems. Whatever emerges in the laboratory can then be tried in a company, an NGO, or, say, a ministry department.

• Martin SustrikJun 19, 2024, 4:55 AM

  2 points

  0

  on: Martin Sus­trik’s Shortform

  Are there any trade-offs that make you feel moral satisfaction?

  Thinking about taboo trade-offs, e.g. the study where people felt outrage at a hospital administrator who decided not to save a life of a kid who needed an expensive surgery, but rather decided to spend the money on running the hospital.

  Isn’t it that any trade-off causes at least some un-satisfaction, which then naturally masquerade as moral outrage?

  Isn’t it the case that anyone willing to publicly do a trade-off is going to be hit by a wave of moral outrage? On the other hand, someone who’s willing to promise the impossible, that is, who avoids the trade-off, will just make few people slightly annoyed.

• Martin SustrikJun 14, 2024, 4:34 AM

  4 points

  1

  on: Martin Sus­trik’s Shortform

  One man’s singularity is another man’s Tuesday:

  The Singularity [is] the future point at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, whereupon immediately thereafter (as the story goes) the machines make themselves rapidly smarter and smarter and smarter, reaching a superhuman level of intelligence that, stuck as we are in the mud of our limited mentation, we can’t fathom.

  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

  What’s easy to overlook in the above definition is that in the real world there’s no generic “human intelligence”, just the intelligence of individual human beings.

  Not all of us are thus going to experience singularity at the same time. Some of us will have to deal with it sooner, some later.

  Technological singularity, in other words, isn’t an objective phenomenon. It’s a subjective thing. In reality, unlike in the simplistic model, it does not resemble the absolute, indisputable physical singularity at the center of a black hole. It is more like black hole’s event horizon, an imaginary border, a point of no return, through witch we pass, one at a time and often not even noticing.

  Thinking about it in this way gives the discussion an empirical basis. We could ask: If the singularity is a subjective phenomenon, are there already people who have experienced it? Are there people for whom the world is already too fast-moving and too complex to follow? Are there people, who, stuck in the mud of their limited mentation, as Stanford Encyclopedia mercilessly puts it, can’t fathom what’s going on?

  If so, we don’t have to guess how the post-singularity world will look like. We can just ask.

  And yes, there are flat-earthers out there and there are conspirational theorists of all flavours, so we definitely have something to work with...

  And there seems to be a dilemma here:

  Either you believe that the world that is too fast and too complex to follow is still somehow tractable—and it that case you should prove it by taking a flat-earther and helping them to adopt a better model of the world...

  Or you believe that changing their mind is impossible and then you have to worry that once you cross the technological event horizon yourself, you will get lost yourself, that you will become just a high-IQ version of a conspiration theorist.