Factoid of the Day

Public Choice wins:

[...] Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.

PoTD

Devin on Being King. As usual, thought provoking, and well thought.
Most notably to my sights, I see

(a) a negative income tax.
(b) partial direct democracy (for passing regulations)
(c) reduced power to administrative agencies.

My response...

1. Given that effectively all the systems Devin proposes are in use somewhere...they would almost certainly work, and almost certainly better than (a) most current places, and (b) anything actually new.
2. It's an amazingly balanced mix of my 3 countervailing positions (progressive -- weak-protecting, libertarian -- pro-liberty, conservative -- don't break stuff).
   
3. Even so, I would personally prefer a place with substantially less central power.
   
4. It's much closer to happy-for-me than I'd expect
5. BRAVO!
   

Article OTD

Licensing Witches in Salem. HT: Tyler Cowen.

Book Review: Married Man Sex Life

Athol Kay writes a blog, and he wrote a book. Regular readers of the blog will not find that much new in the book, but they will find it to be a complete, well-organized presentation of the ideas.

I think it's probably the most important book on marriage to read for folks who are either married or thinking of getting married. Two of my friends, in particular, I want to just buy copies and send to them.

Having said that, I don't LIKE the book much. It grates on my (admittedly very narrow) approach to thinking about LUE. Perhaps it's too well targetted as an action plan. Perhaps it's too well-targetted at the median or upper-median audience...and I'm not that audience. It's too matter of fact, when (IMO) the reality is that there's a range, and a reasonable quantity of variance.

As always, Athol Kay is the best thinker on Marriage for the general topic of what I call Evolutionary Realism. No bullshit; Here's how it really is. If you're a man who's not happy in the marriage (usually, from insufficient sex), Athol has a plan. If you're a woman whose not that into your guy any longer (because he's gotten worse, or you've gotten better) then Athol has a book for you.

If you're a 4+ sigma geek with hundreds of hours already spent in the PUA community, hundreds of hours spent on relationship quality issues, and A peculiar cognitive style...this might not be the book for you.

So...out of 1000 people...I'd recommend it to 999. It is now #2 on my most important marriage books...after Howard Markman's Fighting for Your Marriage. I'd personally recommend everyone to read them both.

Memorial Day

Do you think that politicians are trustworthy during wartime, even though they're lying scum the rest of the time?

What, then, do you think when a young man signs up to defend his country, and then is used in an unjust war of aggression by politicians?

Do you exalt the young man for his bravery? Or do you pity the young man who has been so poorly used by the scum who send him to die, or to kill others for their interests? Or do you hate the system that tricks young men to declare allegiance to always-malfeasant leaders under the guise of defending the country?

I choose a mix of all three. Courage and bravery are real, masculine virtues. The defense of the tribe, and even "defending the tribe" as a cover for offensive action having nothing to do with defense are as old as mankind itself. Certainly we need to appreciate men for being men. At the same time, we should pity them, that they are tricked into serving interests that have NOTHING to do with the good of the country...and we should hate the system that builds such a trap, and figure that the leaders who drive the system deserve at least the same results as the accidental casualties caused by the soliders.

Evolutionary purpose of knowledge

In the evolutionary environment, there appears to be three distinct purposes for statements.

1. Predictive: Predict the future, so as to be able to act upon it.
2. Narrative: Make up a story that causes folks to act differently.
3. Social/Emotive: Content is primarily in social behavior. "How 'bout them Cubs"
   

The Aretae position: All truth-statements fall into one or both categories. Since most assertions are not predictive, they're instead attempts to convince.

Fundamentally...science is the business of predictive statements. If you make a testable predictive statement, it constitutes a part of science, and if it isn't, it doesn't.

Narratives come in many flavors: However, most of them are highly divorced from the predictive nature of science. Most interestingly...most folks think they "understand" something when they have a narrative around the thing...whether or not the narrative successfully predicts at all.

Some areas of quantum physics take the precise opposite position on predictivity: Shut up and calculate. I don't have a pretty narrative at all, but I can predict what's happening. And then you get ugly narratives like Copenhagen added on after the fact.

Newton was brilliant in building predictivity into gravity. Darwin constructed a narrative. Much interpersonal interaction is social only. This blog post, like most, is a narrative. Aretae's first law (Feedback Dominates) is a prediction.

Since most narratives conclude with a morality tale...Be suspicious of narratives when seeking truth. Predictivity is the path to truth. Narratives are a path to feeling good.

other QoTD

McArdle:

Thankfully, we didn't have a credit card on file with our Playstation account, because neither of us really enjoys getting shot repeatedly by fourteen year old boys with nothing better to do than develop their twitch reflex. But many people did, and the hack of the network means they have to worry that this data was stolen.

QoTD

Dan Mitchell:

Redistribution from rich to poor is not a good idea, but it is far more offensive when the coercive power of government is used to transfer money from ordinary people to the elite.

It's why I find welfare to be unfortunate, but people working regulatory agencies for large salaries to be a form of moral degeneracy.

Channelling Roissy (mean, bad language)

Hard to not present this in a mean, sarcastic fashion:

Bryan Caplan and Charles Murray disagree over the effects of divorce on kids. Murray says that if you divorce with kids, you fuck up your kids irreperably. Caplan says that if you divorce, it's because you are a fuckup and your divorce just signifies that your genes already condemned your kid to a shitty life. Strange to see Murray out-genetically-determined in a debate.

Conflicts

My personal ethic -- substantially biologically determined, I suppose, but also moderately well researched --- suggests that the primary good worth pursuing is Individual Autonomy. It is undisputably a first-order good. People pursue autonomy, because autonomy is a high value to everyone, regardless any 2nd/3rd/10th order effects. Autonomy is, like happiness, a good that will be pursued for its own sake, and not as an instrumental goal. It is by no means the only goal, nor is it for most folks the highest goal...but it seems to be a superior good. As you get richer, you spend MORE of your income on autonomy.

Of course, as an economist, I have concluded that Wealth, and particularly economic growth rate is the god-metric...As folks get richer, they buy more of EVERYTHING they want.

As an economist I can't pretend that all actions which increase wealth increase autonomy, or that all actions which increase autonomy increase wealth. Pursuit of any one goal NECESSARILY conflicts from time to time with any other goal that isn't identical. Purchases are about opportunity cost. Tradeoffs are inevitable.

I furthermore have no patience for people who claim superior ethics and opinions about what people SHOULD find valuable. What people DO find valuable...what they pursue...that's the relevant metric. For instance, I find an awful lot of conservative ethical positions to be mostly crazy as presented. Basically: "You should want the same things I do, and if you don't, you are broken".

I consider the core position of conservatives, libertarians, and progressives all tremendously important:

1. Conservatives: Don't break the good things we already have.
2. Libertarians: More freedom is better.
3. Progressive: Protect of the poor/weak from the rich/powerful

On the other hand, I consider the core position of the elites to be evil:

4. More power to us, less autonomy to you.

I don't think you can necessarily pursue conservative, libertarian, and progressive goals all at the same time, even though they're all very important.

Plato's Cave

So...What is the right strategy for folks in Plato's cave? Listen to some bloke who tells them that they're in a cave? Or something else?

Ok...so in Plato's cave, folks are released from the Cave, and shown The Truth ™ , but that's an inconsistent metaphor even for his system. Rather...the question should be how should one (a) recognize the truth, and (b) decide whether the guy telling them that his truths are better should be believed?

If you assume that some position is correct...and then ask questions as Plato did...then one might get the allegory of the cave. If, on the other hand, you don't know which position is correct up front, and someone comes to tell you "You're in a cave...", or offers you the red pill...how do you know if they're even to be taken seriously?

Simple answer: Bayes.

Aretae Burger Recipe

5 burgers, done aretae-style

Ingredients:

1/2 onion

1 tbsp chopped garlic

2 slices of ham lunchmeat

1 jalepeno

5 mushrooms

bacon

Avocado

Mrs. Renfrow's Ghost Pepper Salsa

Other burger toppings.

Prep:

Bacon.

Cook bacon -- tonight: thick bacon ... 5 people, 4 slices = 1/2 pound of bacon. -- I used a microwave bacon tray, and cooked the thick bacon in the microwave bacon tray on auto-cook for microwave bacon -- but I had to double the time, because the bacon was SO thick.

Aretae Burger Topping.

Pour bacon grease into a skillet. chop onions, jalepeno, mushrooms, ham, and garlic, and put them all in the skillet with the bacon grease. Cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally until mushrooms and onions are well cooked (10 min?).

Burgers:

Take about 1/2 lb of ground meat per burger, shape them into thick (1 inch?) patties with dimples in the middle (to prevent center burger bulge). Salt + pepper both sides liberally.

Place a large pan on the stovetop on high heat. Heat the pan ... ~5 minutes. Ensure the pan is large enough to hold all the burgers you'll cook. Place burgers on pan, cook for 4 minutes on a side. Today, I used a 3-4 inch deep, anodized aluminum pan, covered to 90% with a lid while cooking...and when flipping the burgers, I poured off the burger-grease. Remove promptly.

Buns:

Preheat oven to 400 ... slice cheese (sharp cheddar usually, but feta occasionally) onto buns. Place cheese on buns. Cook 4 minutes. Healthy alternative: Romain Lettuce leaf instead of bun. No cheese, or else place cheese on burger for last 30 sec of cooking.

Standard burger:

Bottom bun

1 tsp salsa (Ghost pepper salsa is spicy ... not mellow like the Habenero stuff)

ketchup

mustard

burger

3/4 slice of bacon

Aretae Burger Topping

thick slices of avocado

Fresh tomatoes/pickles optional

Top bun with cheese melted on.

Yum. My 5yo can apparently eat a whole 1/2 pound burger with avocado, bacon, and ketchup in a sitting.

Factoid oTD

Matt Zwolinski:

In politics, today, you can almost get away with saying that marijuana ought to be legal and still have a shot at national office. Not, of course, without a large number of people claiming that your endorsement of legalization could only be driven by your clandestine desire to smoke as much dope as you can.

Among philosophers, in contrast, it is difficult to find anyone who is willing to argue for the moral defensibility of the status quo. Nobody I’ve read thinks it is morally proper for the state to lock people up in jail for the mere use or possession of marijuana, or of heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamines either as far as I can tell.

Footwear observation

It's very odd how differently I walk when wearing even a barefoot shoe (I wear this one), and walking barefoot. The motions seem entirely different. The impact on my feet over the course of a standing-up day is entirely different. Very very odd. Perhaps I need a better retraining for walking?

Forget the Rapture

An event even less likely has come to be. HT: Chris Byrne

Aretae's Question

How do you balance the reality that all new solutions to problems, and most old solutions in new situations fail against the reality that new methods/recipes are the whole of economic growth.

Term of The Day

Tragedy of The Policy Commons -- Aretae

Seems that public choice just explains the tragedy of the commons as applied to policy. And that the solution, as with all tragedies of the commons is to privatize the thing.

NOTE: This is formulation supports both the formalists position and that of the econo-secessionists. Though...Elinor Ostrom may be able to explain other viable choices that I don't understand yet.

QoTD

Don Boudreaux pulls up Macaulay on state action:

The most probable conjecture is that he was actuated by an inordinate, an unscrupulous, a remorseless zeal for what seemed to him to be the interest of the state. This explanation may startle those who have not considered how large a proportion of the blackest crimes recorded in history is to be ascribed to ill regulated public spirit. We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or to avenge themselves. At a temptation directly addressed to our private cupidity or to our private animosity, whatever virtue we have takes the alarm. But virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is in his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church, on a commonwealth, on mankind. He silences the remonstrances of conscience, and hardens his heart against the most touching spectacles of misery, by repeating to himself that his interventions are pure, that his objects are noble, that he is doing a little evil for the sake of a great good. By degrees he comes altogether to forget the turpitude of the means in the excellence of the end, and at length perpetrates without one internal twinge acts which would shock a buccaneer.*

Two conceptions of truth-seeking

1. Science: Hypothesize, attempt to disconfirm hypothesis, succeed, new hypothesis, repeat 352 times, finally find hypothesis that we fail to disconfirm.
2. Rhetoric/Law: Decide which conclusion you wish to pursue. Search for evidence that supports your conclusion. Look further for evidence that devalues the opposing evidence.

Several questions

1. Which way does normal human cognition work?
2. Which way do your rhetorical opponents usually work?
3. Which way do your rhetorical compatriots usually work?
4. Which way do scientists usually work?
5. Which way do YOU usually work?

If you answered (A) to ANY of the above questions, consider trying again.

UPDATE (Organization above, and this):

If you feel particularly generous, you MIGHT opt to believe (mostly on wishful thinking) that on questions 4&5 there is some initial science before the shift to rhetoric.

Libertarian economics in 2 numbers

Reihan Salam:

32% of a labor tax cut, and 51% of a capital tax cut are self-financing, in the sense that lowering those taxes raises economy activity, which itself generates additional taxes, and partially offsets lower tax revenue.

So quick calculations say...we can either have an economy which produces 1000 $ of stuff, with 30% going to the government, or we can have an economy which produces 1150 $ of stuff with 21% going to the government. Which kind of economy do you want to live in?

Remember economic growth is the god-metric.

Aretae on Outgroupism -- 1 sentence

Race issues are fundamentally scarcity issues, and only relevant in scarcity contexts.

In Houston, where we have a good economy (best in the country?), the town is 3:3:3:1 white/black/hispanic/asian. And no one (when I was there) cared. The economy...the fact that you can get rich by working hard regardless of race...trumped all the race issues. Race is an issue that comes up in times of scarcity... and scarcity is LARGELY government generated. If you fix the government's doing stupid shit to create artificial scarcity, the race issue vanishes...and everyone works hard to make money and make their own family happy. If the government has LOTS of rules to make it so folks can't work and get wealthy....then we have race problems. Race issues are fundamentally about scarcity...and when you're in the business of wealth CREATION, scarcity isn't very relevant.

PoTD

Day's short so far on this side of the pond, but AnomalyUK nails it re: leftism, rightism. RTWT. Really. Before you continue even...

Can't find citations for most of the following, so I'm working from memory...

The evidence is pretty strong for McGuinn's position. We've got analyses of the US Senate which one can predict with startling accuracy who voted for what IF you have only the vote totals. Fundamentally, most of politics in the legislature is about coalition, not policy.

Additionally, though, there is the 2nd question: Who is at the political table. I'm not convinced that the 2-dimensional politics space holds in a non-2 party system. The Germans with their minority parties and representational seating...the swiss with their direct democracy? For sure it holds in the US, though. On the other hand...I consider it a basic premise that anyone NOT at the negotiating table is getting systematically screwed. And the position that doesn't exist in the government is less government.

Hence...I'd redo AMcGuinn slightly. Politics is a left-right minor disagreement in the legislature, with more power always accruing to the government. The real fight is between top-down institutions like the legislature, and bottom-up institutions and individuals. But that fight isn't represented in politics at all.

Additional information: Robin Hanson has found pretty strong evidence in massive inter-cultural surveys that the range of all views held by almost all people can summarize as Rich/Poor + East/West.

Left Libertarianism in 1 sentence -- Part 998

The fact that Government is not your friend STARTS with the police.

While most right-libertarians want to argue for a night watchman state of police, courts, and a military...and while I have some good friends who are cops...we left-libertarian anarchists don't see it the same way.

Oppression occurs when agents of the state have privileges different from those of the general public. Outsource the police entirely with NO extra powers given to police over the citizenry, and we're in pretty good shape. With an assymmetric relationship...the ability of the police to beat you up for filming them, and get away with it...that is evil.

Of course, top-down law is also a problem...but that's a different post.

Game Theory explains everything

Ingroup/outgroup behavior:

In interacting with your ingroup, the proper game theory construct is the indefinitely iterated prisoner's dilemma. You should be nice most of the time, and forgive first trespasses. Tit-For-Two Tats is the killer strategy.

In interacting with folks you are not likely to interact with again (outgroup/everyone else), the proper game theory construct is the single-play prisoner's dilemma, which also has a clean solution: defect. Given no future interaction, and no reputational concerns, defecting is the only reasonable play.

It is also true that the ingroup interaction is better than the outgroup interaction. And so, to whatever extent you can transform your interactions into ingroup interactions (expectation of repetition), this is a massive positive.

I'd suggest that Deirdre McCloskey's work is moving in this direction...suggesting that the transformation of outgroups to ingroup-rules interactions is responsible for the growth of the modern age (via trade).

Health Care reframing resolution

Henceforth, when someone asks how to contain health care costs, reframe the question:

Since ALL (+/- 3%) of health care cost changes are more USAGE...don't you mean how do we get folks to use medicine less?

Known approaches to usage containment:

• Europe contains consumption SLIGHTLY better than we do by rationing care, but being subject to democratic pressures makes this approach fail over time.
• Germany and Kaiser contains consumption substantially better than the US does by providing substantial incentives to doctors to avoid repeat visits for the same problem.
• Singapore contains consumption by eliminating 3rd party payments (What we call insurance in the US doesn't exist).
• It is possible to cut usage increases by eliminating new procedures/technologies. Part of the European rationing approach follows this approach.

Yes, there are other cost drivers...but they're not part of the current cost-change analysis. The other cost driver that matters is supply restriction:

• AMA-managed health law prohibits both Veterinarians and Nurses and uncredentialed folks from taking blood and setting bones, both things they are quite competent to do.
• FDA massively increases the cost of drug development...which massively decreases supply.
• IP law further decreases supply...but with the FDA and without IP law, we might have NO new drug development.

Relaxing supply restriction is SO far off the table as to not be worth talking about.

Paperwork/Management is another small cost-component.

• If you repealed the 900,000 laws applicable to Health Care management, the paperwork/administration costs would probably drop off

If you magically pushed administrative costs to ZERO, it would not have an appreciable (> 2 year) impact on the increasing cost of health care. It's all supply and demand. Demand is increasing and supply is legally restricted.

Attacks by Mammals

Isegoria lists danger factors for interacting with humans black bears:

But if you [get attacked by one], it’s likely to be young, male, and single.

Eric Raymond on Religion

Eric thinks through his religious response to bad science. I think it's simpler, and that you don't have to call it religious at all...and that to call Eric non-religious is silly in the first place. He was a General in the Open Source wars.

A much simpler explanation than Eric's is Jon Haidt's: Humans have a small set of moral faculties:

Justice/Fairness

Harm/Care

Ingroup/Loyalty

Authority/Respect

Purity/Sanctity

Liberty/Freedom

Eric has a purity/sanctity attachment to science. FULL STOP.

Doesn't require religion, unless one considers all ethics religious (A position I find silly).

Important ideas

Sebastian Marshall thinks a while on traits that are important for wealth, and comes up with a list that is rather similar to the Aretae liturgy for success in anything:

Motivation

Patience

Practice/Conscientiousness

IQ

Nobody takes uncertainty seriously

What would it mean to your daily life to take seriously the following:

• This
• This
• This

Fundamentally, belief is an exclusively emotional construct. Rational constructs say: I assess a 70% chance that opinion X is correct, and a 30% chance that opinion X is not correct.

Singularity approaches, part II

My prior post on post-material scarcity generated a bunch of critique. Let me then lay out the position more clearly:

1. The ability of Robots to do things that humans previously did has been slowly drifting up the IQ scale for some time now. Robots, for instance, build microchips, with a couple human operators doing the work that used to be done by lots of human assemblers. While it's true that we need SOME tech support for that, it's also true that ROBOTS + robot operators + tech support means that it requires 6 people to do a job that used to take 100.
2. Not all of it is low-IQ work. Some of it is just routine work (Tax preparation is now frequently done by Quicken, rather than a tax preparer).
3. The complexity of the tasks that robots/software can do has been increasing for a long time now. Stuff robots used to do poorly is now stuff that robots/software can do well. For instance, there has been measureable increase in quality in automated telephone systems over the last 5 years.
4. AI has been around the corner for 20 years for at least 40. I've got friends deep in the field as well. So one should expect AI to remain a forever-unsolved problem? NO. Moore's law has been stable for >100 years, and every 5 years, someone announces a new reason to believe that Moore's law will fail. No luck on either changing yet.
5. IF Moore's law continues unabated, we have a question of whether AI is a hard problem, an easy problem, or a medium difficulty problem. FWIW: I define a medium difficulty problem as being: we will get Human-equivalent AI when we have Human-brain equivalent processing to throw at the problem. Standard desktops will, under Moore's law, hit this target near 2040. I count easy problems as one that takes 1-3 orders of magnitude less processing...and hard problems as ones that take 1-3 orders of magnitude more processing. Under Moore's law, we have a range for human-equivalent AIs of 2030 to 2050.
6. Even under crazy Cartesian dualistic positions on the impossibility of AI, we'll still get Artificial Stupids as per Michael Flynn, which can do HUGE amounts of work for us.
7. Basically, that means that the cost of labor for IQ-100 intellectual work (answering phones) should drop to zero sometime in that range. And when stuff drops to zero cost...you get more of it. Similarly for low-IQ occupations in the physical world (fruit picking, janitorial, dishwashing).
8. What we will have then is a labor force that offers (at near-zero cost) ALL of the physical/intellectual jobs that a person with a 100 can do. Farm work and industrial work will be 100% (+/- 3, as per all Aretae claims) automated, and much Service work will as well.
9. What happens when the price of labor equivalent to 50% of the labor market is zero (+/- 3%)?
1. Material scarcity stops being an issue.
2. The idea that work will define how much of your material needs/wants get met also fails.
3. Socialism is the only word we've currently got for a system where your NEEDS are taken care of.

My favorite Anti-Immigration thinker

Data stick king of the blogosphere, Tino, writes beautifully in response to a pro-immigrationist.

I also think that the Sanandaji Principle is very well stated:

you can only pick 2 out of 3 of:

1. Limited Government
2. Open Borders
3. Democracy

However, it's not clear that this is true. Singapore is a democracy, with open borders and limited government. Hong Kong, now less so, but largely as well. So, I'd suggest to Tino that he needs to clarify 2+3. Switzerland, for instance has very open borders, and uber-democracy, and limited government, and has for 800 years. But it doesn't allow the open-borders bit to impinge upon its democracy by means of a citizenship by blood-only (or close to only) method.

The libertarian answer is to bail on #3, at least partially.

As to Tino's argument...Tino argues for citizens owning the territory. The primary argument against Tino is the freedom of association issue.

If Me, Steve Sailer, Foseti, and Tino live in a 4-person town, and then Bobu from Africa comes by...I want the other 3 to get out of my way.

I think it the other 3 should not use the government's guns to prevent me from renting a room to Bobu. Or to prevent me from trading for the shoes that Bobu the cobbler makes by hand. Or to prevent me from paying Bobu $100 to cut and clear the tree that's blocking my view in my back yard. Very simple position. My interaction with Bobu is none of their business.

They want to prevent Bobu from using the free schools in the country? I don't mind. But then they also want to force Bobu to send his kids to school. Now I'm getting annoyed.

They want to prevent Bobu from using free-ish emergency room service? Again, I don't mind. But then they also want to prevent Bobu from going to a vet who knows how to set broken legs for $100. Now I'm upset.

There are thousands of laws that prevent Bobu from doing what is good, just, and fair, and what would naturally be positive sum for everyone...and when folks start blaming the immigrant instead of the stupid shit the government does...it's just wrong.

Left-Libertarianism in 1 sentence -- part 997

Free markets are bad for capitalists.

(Without government-enforced creation of scarcity, competitive markets occur, and the return on capital approaches zero. All profit goes to rents...and the only scarce resource worth paying for is [specifically] skilled labor). EITHER you're pro- big-business and implicitly anti-free(d)-markets OR you're anti-free(d) markets and implicitly pro-big-business..

Russ Roberts has more.

PoTD

Matt Yglesias: Taking the future seriously:

If the “robots” are really mere machines, then it should be easy to peacefully divide up the surplus more-or-less equitably, we’ll transition to socialism and everyone will be happy—it’ll be like Star Trek

Anyone want to bet on this one? in 2050, barring the singularity, Robots will do most work, including most work we currently consider to be intellectual work, and 90+% of the population will live largely useless (n the historical sense) lives, because robots can do EVERYTHING better than they can. Socialism will prevail, because caring for fellow humans is higher priority than abstract principles for almost everyone...and the almost everyone will besides have HIGH monkeybrain motivation to believe that this is right (it applies either to them or their close friends).

In the world of Iain Banks Culture, where material wants are gone...socialism is a brain-dead default state. Tyler Cowen has been on this theory-path for at least 5 years (I saw him post something maybe 5 years ago about the topic). I've been here quite a bit longer than that.

Title of the Day

What the Future Holds: A Hanson-English Translation, by Bryan Caplan

Exit part MMCMLXVIII

Foseti comments that I'm being unfair to his position in my last post on exit...perhaps I am. He's simply my principal antagonist on the topic, and so I may be attributing views to him that I oughtn't.

My position on exit:

1. Meaningful ability to exit is the primary determinant of quality of institution. If folks CAN switch from one choice to a meaningfully different choice, then the institutions improve or die.

2. Meaningful ability to exit is a primary moral determinant as well. If there's no ability to exit, someone is acting the thug.

3. Meaningful ability to exit is a substantial motivator, allowing folks to take risks with potential large social upsides.

Meaningful is my weasel word of the day.

short epistemology post

As is apparent, I've been chewing on the ideas for 20+ years...I keep trying to narrow the phrasing into something coherent. Trying again:

Knowledge is often/usually philosophically defined as true justified belief.

Justified under logic can only really be interpreted to mean Bayesian justification, unless you go all Cartesian and start with a mind/body disjunction.

True means either justified (Coherence theory)

OR

Truth is unknowable (Correspondence theory)

In either case, the standard understanding of knowledge is incoherent.

Justified, contrarily, is a coherent term, so long as it's only used in a probabilistic, Bayesian fashion.

On the other hand, justified at a 83.5% probability kinda sucks for whipping the tribesfolk into a frenzied mob.

This week's catchphrase:

Probabilities are for understanding...Truth is a rhetorical device.

4 sided politics:

Because I've had several new commenters recently...

I count politics as being 4-sided, with ALL players having something important to say:

Libertarians -- Freedom is very important.

Liberals -- Protection of the weak is very important.

Conservatives -- Not breaking what's already good is very important.

Elites -- If we have (more) power, we can make things better.

I think that the primary problem in politics is that elites naturally colonize the political system, thus transforming the very important liberal goal (protect the weak/Equality) into the elite goal (make government stronger -- in order to protect the weak). Similarly, elites have colonized the conservative discourse, converting the very important conservative goal (don't break what good we have) into the elite goal (stay in your place). Even the libertarian position (freedom is good) was coopted by the elites (corporations are good).

My politics: Libertarians, Liberals, and Conservatives ALL have very important goals to pursue. The elites are the problem in the way of all of them.

Exit in 1 sentence + commentary

We libertarians say frequently that exit is the end-all of political arrangements. Foseti has complained a couple times about the formulation. Just getting ready to get dinner together, and the phrasing hit me.

Changing circumstances so that you MUST have sex (no exit option) converts sex from a very good thing to a very bad thing.

Even given that most (>50%) women have rape fantasies from time to time...actual rape is a very bad thing for the victim...and that even when committed by someone who would otherwise be a wonderful choice for sex.

Exit is not much more than the claim that there is a HUGE difference between sex with someone you're choosing and sex forced upon you.

Foseti seems to be saying...well, shucks, if it's bad sex with a "2"...what's the difference? It shouldn't be shocking that my response is incredulity.

Perhaps there are some folks for whom the distinction between rape and bad sex is not that clear. I can even imagine that there's of a bell curve even in tendency to find being forced to do things unpleasant. My guess is that it's at least partly testosterone based...folks with higher testosterone find it less tolerable to be told what to do...while lower-T types tolerate it somewhat better.

On the other hand...I'd hope that most folks find the distinction to be an impassable ravine.

To work inside Foseti's example...I don't like bad sex whether it's coming from someone I picked out of all the other crappy options, or whether it's coming because someone is forcing me to f*** this person...but the case where someone is forcing me to do it is in an entirely different category of shitty than in the case of my choosing among bad options.

Amplifying Kling

Kling said it, and all I can do is amplify:

Until somebody listens, I will keep shouting that it is not health care "costs" that are out of control. It is the utilization of medical services. To put it in terms that will provoke some, it is the consumption of medical care.

Transition

I think at the end of the month I'll need to transition off blogger to wordpress: Patri, Althouse, etc. If you're not already on Wordpress, I'd consider this week to be the end of a given large companies good guy image.

How to think about the future

This is Tyler Cowen, correctly assuming how to think about the future, while discussing health care:

Circa 2080, imagine a world with two classes, the very rich and the fairly poor. The very rich pay thirty percent of their $1 million a year incomes on health care. The fairly poor earn $100,000 a year.

RTWT, but stop and ponder what economic growth means. And those are 2010 $, not 2080 $.

AFAICT, there are 4 choices for the future (when my young kids are grandparents):

1. Apocalypse, everyone dead or close enough.
2. Huge prosperity: Welfare moms run $100K/y in modern $
3. Insane prosperity: The next economic transition/singularity happens. Doubling time transitions from years to weeks, probably with Artificial/Assisted I.
4. Growth falls/stops, + we're Malthusian again (ONLY through government activity).

Robin's newest line

It's not conceptual new, but it's fabulous phrasing:

Now I’m sure clever folks can think up justifications for such preferences. But as with the common preference to redistribute money but not grades, I expect few folks could quickly come up with those reasons, even though most embrace preferences. This again suggests that the clever reasons some offer are not the actual reasons most folks support such biases.

As always...it's not a bad assumption to make that your opponents, your friends, and yourself all get opinions first, and justifications second. Of course 100/100 people will agree with me about their opponents. 3/100 people will agree with me about their friends, and 0/100 people will agree with me about themselves. How odd.

Book Review: Out Of Character

So, I managed to sneak my way into the Amazon Vine program somehow, and thus am getting pre-release books from Amazon now, so long as I review them. I just read Out of Character, and found it worth the time I spent reading. My review:

The best book out there covering the notion that the human mind isn't unitary. Nominally, the book is about acting out of character, but really what the first 95/98% of the book is about is psych research that validates the notion that the unitary self is illusory.

If I were to distill the essence of the book into a single paragraph, I'd say it thusly:

The mind cannot be correctly understood as a cohesive whole but rather should be understood as a battleground of warring forces, like in the cartoons with a devil and an angel on either shoulder. Of course, the warring forces are not angels and devils, not clearly good and clearly bad, but rather the easiest to understand would be as the ant and grasshopper from the fable. Neither ant nor grasshopper is good or evil, but the future-oriented ant wants different things than the present-oriented grasshopper. And circumstance, having nothing to do with the decision, can make massive differences in the bargaining power of the players and thus our decision.

As an example, given a hard, self-graded exam, with financial incentives for success (up to $10), dimming the lights increased the average cheating by $1. Shredding the test after the self-grading increased average cheating by $2. Another known/obvious cheater in the exam-room increased cheating by $1.

Many topics covered, but the format is always the same: Hook example. General discussion. The difficulty of measuring. The experiments that give us the clear picture.

Topics:

Love/Lust/Jealousy
Pride/Hubris
Compassion/Cruelty
Fairness/Trust
Risk Taking
Bigotry/Tolerance

To end, here's my favorite datum in the book:

When people saw images of those who belonged to what sociologists consider extreme outgroups (such as drug addicts and homeless people--those who we think are most unlike us), the social categorization areas of their brains (the ones that are involved in making judgments about humans) were quiet, while the areas involved in processing objects lit up like fireflies.

Well written, targetted at the popular (smart) audience, and easy to read.

4 stars.

Omnibus theory

I keep trying to clarify where I sit foundationally, so that the rest of this stuff makes sense:

1. We start with goals + (crappy) sense perception. To not understand human reason as goal-seeking first is a massive error.
2. Hume is correct that sense perception/induction CAN'T give us logical certainty.
   
3. Logic, math are all conclusions from our sense perception that work pretty well to solve problems.
4. Hume is still correct: conclusions from sense perception (like 2+2=4) can't give us certainty.
   
5. Certainty is an epistemological fiction, and a strong emotion.
6. The calculus lets us validly pretend some things are certain because they look an awful lot like the limit-case.
   
7. For everything else, Bayes is god. Playing real $ poker for a couple thousand hours (enough to rewire your brain properly), and/or reading Eliezer on Bayesianism will get you most of the rest of the way to sane approaches to uncertainty in life. Hoping to be guess right 1 time in 3 is a good approach.
   
8. Poker is a poor guide only in that in poker, there's limited, known choices, while in life there are nearly unlimited, and unknown choices.
9. Predictive, experimental science is the next thing after Bayes that you should understand about how the world works.
10. Science theory is best understood as maps in the map vs. territory distinction. Maps let us predict what will happen...but they don't tell us what's there (Hotter temperatures are simply not redder). Frequently, two dissimilar maps will predict the same result. As we're goal-directed creatures, that's just fine.
11. Science is effectively all connected, and often rather tightly. Computers were built off the quantum-mechanics map. That computers work is a strong validation of QM. QM was built off (special) relativity. Modern medicine is built off the modern evolutionary synthesis of Darwin + Mendel + Watson/Crick. Therefore, it's all inter-reinforcing in the Bayesian weightings.
    
12. The 2 most impressive science discoveries ever are: (a) Newton: You can use math to predict the future in some fields, and (b) Darwin/Smith: systems can work without a designer, and frequently/usually work better with no central control.
13. Following Darwin...our own selves, and therefore our own brains are subject to evolution.
14. The most interesting results in brain science are that basically the brain is fundamentally non-unitary. Standard decision-processes go like this: Conflicting mind-modules neural-network their way through decisions for us, and after the decisions are made, the conscious mind makes up reasons for the decisions. Whether this model covers 95% or 100% of decision-making is as-of-yet unclear.
    
15. The most interesting of the brain-module conflicts to me is the conflict between future-watching self and present-watching self.
    
16. Humans evolved as top-pack-predators for at least most of the last 2-3M years, and HUGE chunks of psychology are identical to that of any other moderately polygynous (sexually dimporphic) pack predator.
    
17. Top pack-predators have, as evolutionary drivers, intra-group competition and intergroup competition. The rest of the environment appears to be a small player in the past ~2-3M years.
    
18. Genetic/brain-based sex roles, gut bacteria, and group differences in geographically semi-isolated areas were substantially evolved in that time-frame.
    
19. Ethics are evolved as well. Given the blind watchmaker + game theory's real results...there are 3 distinct overlapping ways to phrase ethics: goal-based, rule-based, and virtue-based. Furthermore, there are ~6 basic (evolved) ethical capacities in humans: Harm/Care, Justice/Fairness, Ingroup/Loyalty, Purity/Sanctity, Authority/Respect, and Liberty/Freedom.
20. Two events in the last 10,000 substantially outclass all others in importance: the transition from an egalitarian hunter/gatherer existence to a hierarchical agricultural existence; and the transition from malthusian limits to the post-malthusian rich modern world (Inter-malthusian in very long time scales, we think). Our bodies and psyches are still not comfortable with the 10Kya agricultural revolution (paleo-, independence), much less the 200ya industrial revolution.
    
21. Trying to understand anything about the modern world without noting that the material conditions are unlike anything ever before in history, due to exponential economic growth is crazy.
22. Authority is a scarcity-based / agricultural-age artifact. So is marriage. It is unknown whether they CAN survive the transition to prosperity.
    
23. The key question, therefore is how to create and encourage said exponential growth. The difference between 2% growth and 9% growth in 40 years is the difference in wealth between Jamaica and Singapore. In 80 years, it's the difference between America and Sierra Leon.
    
24. What we know about economic growth can be summarized as: (a) stable enforced physical property rights are good (b) systems where it is easy to try, and especially to fail are good (c) regulation in general and central planning in particular is very bad. (d) trade is essential.
    
25. Feedback systems dominate systems. Education, Manufacturing, Software, combat, everywhere else too. How good is your feedback system is equivalent to how good will your system be in 5 years. How good=cycle time from action to adjustment.
26. Power is all scarcity all the time. Exit effectively nullifies power.

I'm sure there's more...25/26 are poorly explained, but important.

Hanson, Jacobs, Scarcity, and Immigration

Two of my always well-thought commenters, Jehu + RightSaidFred, suggest that low-ingroup focus in ethics leads to extinction. I'd like to nuance that position a bit.

The Aretae position is that which ethic is appropriate is fundamentally a question of what kind of world we live in.

Jane Jacobs suggested that folks whose job it is to protect (Military, Police, Firefighters, perhaps doctors) need one ethic, while folks whose job it is to trade stuff (Merchants, business folks) need another ethic.

Much later, Robin Hanson proposed an analagous ethical pairing: Forager/Farmer. Fundamentally, folks who are rich need a different ethic than folks who are poor. This is observable by noting that in fact folks who are rich (Rich Americans now, comparatively rich hunter/gatherers of 20,000 years ago) have very different ethics from folks who are poor (normal Americans 75 years ago, Egyptian peasants 5,000 years ago).

I will argue that it comes down to a relatively small distinction: Do we live in a world of high scarcity, and low possibility, or the opposite.

If we live in a world where survival is questionable, and where the primary questions in survival are distributive justice, because we're already awful close to our Malthusian limits....in that case, to not follow a high ingroup-morality is group-destructive.

If, on the other hand, we live in a world far removed from the malthusian limits, and the questions in life are about flourishing or wealth-creation, then a high-ingroup morality is nuts...in that case, the quality of life one experiences is significantly to substantially a question of how effectively one trades. Wealth (the mega-metric) is fundamentally a question of trading. The tighter your ingroup ethic...the less you get along with the fact that comparative advantage (interacting with folks who are unlike you, and the more unlike, the better ) is the basis of economic growth.

In different words...I am with Virginia Postrel...the fundamental dispute is not liberal-conservative....it's wealth-creation dynamism vs. wealth-maintenance stasism.

Immigration IV

As with most issues that aren't science/solved problems...the immigration debate comes down (at least substantially) to a disagreement over values. If you have a case where LOTS of thoughtful people disagree on the topic...then the question is likely around values, not around facts.

The question I've been attempting to address, apparently poorly, over the last few days is this:

What value/ethics disagreements lead to disagreements over immigration policy?

My hypothesis is that the disagreement is a simple one:

In Haidt's ethical typology, the value disagreement sits primarily on the ingroup ethic. Folks with strong ingroup ethics are anti-immigration. Folks with weak ingroup ethics are pro-immigration.

Qualifiers: The opinions of most folks are highly colored by what groups they belong to. A low-ingroup person in a strongly anti-immigration community will be impacted by that. Furthermore, the purity/sanctity/disgust ethic will also be recruited to the anti-immigration cause.

Because I have a low ingroup ethical response, I probably come off as rather judgemental on the topic (you high-ingroup ethic types are heartless bastards!!!). However, the intent is to nail the hypothesis to the wall...not to assert that my own anti-ingroup-ethic (which implies pro-immigrationism) is correct.

Immigration III

Here's the imigration situation I see (rephrasing from my comments last time)

Bobu from Ethiopia has saved about half of his above-average salary of $2/day for 5 years. He would like to spend that $1500 to get on a boat with his family of 6 (Bobu, Mrs. Bobu, and 4 junior Bobus), travel to America, and work his traditional 14 hour days, 6.5 days a week to make a better life for his family. If he stays, he knows that there's a 50% chance that one of his present or future children will die of hunger, violence, or disease before they turn 14.

Should the US government use force to prevent him from coming to the US in order to trade his labor for money?

Are there other questions in immigration? For sure. But the first question is the above...should the US government stop Bobu?

My core claim...if Bobu and his children count AT ALL...you don't reach the anti-immigrationist position.

2 Birthdays

Apparently, Hume and Hayek, my votes for greatest thinkers of the 18th and 20th centuries respectively, were born on the 7th and 8th of May. Tribute to Hume. I discovered Hume's position on Government today...which is perhaps midway between my own position and that of the formalists. Smaller tribute to Hayek.

QoTD -- Hanson's Razor Edition

Blunt Object:

Furthermore, since voting is by its nature irrational, calling attention to the matter makes acutely uncomfortable the people who (a) like to showcase their tribal loyalties but (b) don’t like to admit that all they’re doing is showcasing their tribal loyalties. As a friend of mine is fond of pointing out: grass-eaters get awfully dangerous when they stampede.

Sentence of the Week

Statism is a moral vice, like racism or sexism.

Roderick Long, in comments on his post.

QoTD -- Obtuseness Edition

In my local print paper, this article says:

So, when I saw the live video of the young crowd in front of the White House celebrating, chanting “U-S-A” and raising their beer bottles, I was disappointed and discouraged. I wanted to tell them that killing people isn’t a football game, and that it’s a sad and serious business.

Umm...yeah. Football isn't the same as killing folks. Football is the sport we use here in America to substitute for cheering the killing of the enemy. Definitely not the same thing.

Borepatch Bait

I'm surprised I haven't already seen it there. Prison dogs with Titanium Teeth.

PoTD + Epistemology

Via Illka, we have John Hasnas arguing that rule of law is a myth:

[...] I intend to establish three points: 1) there is no such thing as a government of law and not people, 2) the belief that there is serves to maintain public support for society's power structure, and 3) the establishment of a truly free society requires the abandonment of the myth of the rule of law.

RTWT. But then come back, because John has understated his point. Warning...after part 10, he veers into anarchist territory, which, I think is a natural flow for his argument, but which other folks may find less persuasive.

One of his best lines:

Because the law is made up of contradictory rules that can generate any conclusion, what conclusion one finds will be determined by what conclusion one looks for, i.e., by the hypothesis one decides to test.

The problem, of course, is that this explains about 99.93% of human reasoning. There are 2 basic approaches to figuring out what to believe.

A. Find a hypothesis you like and attempt to figure out how it's supported.
A2. Find a hypothesis you don't like and attempt to find holes in its support.
B. Look at lots of incoming information, and use each piece of incoming information to adjust your likelihood up or down.

Rough estimate...how many of your rhetorical opponents do B? What's that you say? Zero? Since you can only critically analyze the opposition, let's assume for the sake of argument that from inside our own veil of ignorance, we're no better than our opposition...so we should put our own side's likelihood of B roughly equivalent to that of the other side.

Human argument is designed to convince...and has NOTHING to do with finding truth. It is as honest a method of dispute as law, or gladiatorial combat. But to pretend that verbal argument moves folks towards truth? Surely you're joking. That's like saying that one lawyer is likely to convince another lawyer of the truth of their case. Truth simply has nothing to do with the argument.

I know that I'm not really talking about the PoTD any longer, but...what happens once you buy this position? AFAICT, there are only 3 paths:

1. Ignore or attempt to rebut this insight; live as normal. (Kant, Reid)
   
2. Inhabit the rhetoric space, and ignore silly notions of truth. (Neitzche)
   
3. Radically downgrade your own opinion of your own correctness, operate off aggregates and betting markets (Hanson)
   

I believe that the fact that I pick 3 as the only sane position, while 90+% choose 1 says something about my own sanity. My choosing Robin Hanson as the only sane epistemological choice leads in roughly the same direction, I suppose.

Comment issues?

I've got a report of some failed comments. Anyone else having comment issues? My contact info is on the blog, top right, just below the picture.

Models of Children as Economic Goods

1. Children as Investment Good. I put in Work now, I get out Value later. This is the pre-1950s model, and it's still good throughout much/most of the world. Furthermore, it appears that in terms of emotional investment it still works. Grandchildren apparently rock.
   
2. Children as a Status Good. "Oh, I do so miss little Bobby, who is studying in Boston this year."
3. Children as a Consumption Good. I like spending time with my kids. Incidentally...this is the killer app for homeschooling. ALL schoolers who transition to homeschooling find this to be either the #1 value, or awful close. Average massive improvement in academics, lack of crazy social BS at school, lack of drugs/sex/violence in 7th grade...those are comparatively minor.
   
4. Children as a Status Good II: I'm such a good mom. My child has never spent 30 seconds waiting for me, and has had 3 course lunches for her entire 7 years of life. I am providing everything possible to make her a better person.
5. Children as a Consumption Good II. Bryan Caplan: Kids are fun, in spurts, and hard to break. Play, and don't worry much.
   

Julian Simon II

In a long post that I'll need to respond to in parts, Devin disses Julian Simon:

I didn't remember who Julian Simon was. So I checked this wiki page, and found he won a bet by predicting falling resources prices. Yet on that page is this graph. Looks like Julian was pretty darn lucky with the end points of the bet. We had a good decade in the 90's, but on the whole, our most important resource has significantly risen in price in the last 40 years.

Julian Simon in 1 paragraph:

Running out of resources is the secular equivalent of doomsday prophesy. Several hundred years of predictions, always wrong, and effectively guaranteed to be wrong in ANY situation even resembling the current one. The ONLY resource we are in real danger of running low on in any meaningful sense is insufficiently many people. And that's a big problem that needs fixin'.

Aretae on Julian Simon:

You either read and understand Julian Simon, or you disagree. Pick one.

He is among the most careful thinkers of the past 50 years. He set out to test a hypothesis (running out of stuff), demonstrated the opposite, and proceeded to explain why not only he had been wrong, but how it couldn't really be otherwise. It's simple economics.

The Book is rather large, and rather dry. The first few, and last few chapters are the theory...the middle 400 pages are the data.

Nature-Environment

The Evolutionary Psychiatry blog, recently discovered, has a great summary of the modern Nature/Environment debate, as applied to Schizophrenia. Short:
Optimal nature + optimal environment avoids disease/disorder in most folks. If the environment is notably sub-optimal, optimal genetics are required to maintain optimum functioning. If genetics are sub-optimal, then optimal environment is necessary to maintain optimum functioning. Don't try sub-optimal environments with sub-optimal genetics or else you're screwed.

Adapt -- Complete

UPDATE: rewritten for tone, clarity.

Adapt is a well written book with compelling examples that covers, in my opinion, the single most important topic in how to think about thinking:

To a first approximation, rational deduction fails 100% of the time, when applied to the messy real world. The ONLY path to success is to try, fail, and adapt.

The examples are engaging, the writing is pleasant, and there are soundbites throughout that are wonderful. My favorite in the second half of the book was a joke making fun of self-help and business books.

The flow of the book goes roughly:

1. We all fail a lot.
2. What can we do? Feedback + Adaptation
3. What about situations where we have to get it right (Nuclear power plants?)
4. How do organizations adapt (Low central control).
5. How do individuals adapt (It's hard).

The book was generally very strong. The variety of examples throughout was particularly impressive. Anyone who doesn't already understand the idea that we all are wrong up front most of the time should have this book stapled to their hands. Considering myself well read in this space, I saw a new example I was unfamiliar with every third page.

2-3 years ago, I concluded that there was a wide open market for a book on the twin topics of ubiquitous error and feedback. Part of why I started a blog was that the topic needed addressed, and it hadn't been addressed in the modern literature. Indeed, it was contradicted by most of the modern discussions. on any topic.

This book is easily the most important of the modern big idea-books. Malcolm Gladwell's minor insights are tiny details in comparison.

Quibbles:

I was less than impressed by his treatment of point 3 above...but I'm less than impressed by my treatment of the topic as well...I don't think there is a good answer, and while Harford seems to admit as much at the end of the chapter (6), the rest of the chapter seems to be attempting to suggest a solution.

If I had written the book...I'd have pulled in 2 additional topics:

1. What does this mean for government?
2. My favorite prior thinkers in this direction are: John Boyd, W. Edwards Deming, and Kent Beck, and Frederich Hayek. Only Hayek is referenced.

Minor quibbles aside...the book is official Aretae required reading.

Adapt: subchapter 4.7

The title may have seen on this blog:

"We should not try to design a better world. We should make better feedback loops"

Adapt III -- Word of the Book

FUQ'd.

Fundamentally UnIdentified Question...
A case where we can't identify what to measure to solve the problem.

Adapt II

Halfway through the book now.

After the introduction, the first quarter of the book discusses how badly plans work in and around war. Specific topics include: Robert McNamara & Donald Rumsfeld (bad on adaptation); David Petraeus and H.R. McMaster (good on adaptation); the Spitfire Unlike everyone else who writes about these kinds of mistakes, Dr. Hartford draws the same lesson I do: It is not that the wrong strategy was used, but that we could not have predicted the right strategies up front.

The patron saint of planning failure, the inestimable Mr. Hayek, makes his first appearance on page 74. Darwin and Jacobs visit as well.

The next quarter of the book surveys planning failure in medicine, development economics, and aviation...and then starts to outline a solution: Fail a lot. Significant improvement (revolution?) and failure appear to be inextricably linked. The more you try that's wierd, the more you fail, and the more likely you are to succeed dramatically. The more you try that's normal, the less likely you are to fail, and the less likely you are to do anything special. Prizes make an appearance as a partial solution...but the history of prizes as something which undermines the established order, and which are themselves undermined by the established order at every opportunity also makes an appearance.

So far, two thumbs up.

Adapt

Reading my advance copy of Tim Hartford's new book Adapt, I am immediately struck by two things.

1. I was telling my family I wanted to write this book 2 years ago.
2. Tim is a better writer (and researcher) than I am.

Best factoids from the first 20 pages:

A. Tetlock: Non-experts really really suck at making predictions. Experts suck only very slightly less. And monkeys with darts are just ahead of them (mostly kidding, but not far ahead of them).

B. Paul Ormerod ran math models of corporate extinctions that lined up pretty well with math models of species extinctions. However, the math models only worked (had decent predictivity) if the assumption was that none of them were any good at all at predicting the future:

It was possible to build a model that mimicked the real extinction signature of firms, and it was possible to build a model that represented firms as moderately successful planners; but it was not possible to build a model that did both.

The fundamental #1 core truth of complex problems is that whatever new solution we try is going to be wrong, and there is simply nothing we can do about it...except to prepare to respond to being wrong. More on the book throughout the evening as I read the rest of it.

Immigration again

I, as a proxy for the pro-immigration forces argue that exactly 1 question will determine how you stand on the immigration question. How much weight do we put on the lives of the immigrants?

If my life (friends/ingroup/neighbors/etc.) is the only one (group) that matters...then we keep them out. If we count the Quality of Life of an immigrant, though, as having even 1/10 the value of the QoL of a native...the utilitarian calculus is a slam dunk. We let them in...preferably barred from welfare for 2 generations.

The Immigration Dispute summarized

Anti-Immigration: Immigrants hurt us in lots of ways. [not intended facetiously]
'
Pro-Immigration: Immigrants are so much worse off than we are that even if immigration does hurt at least some Americans some, it helps the immigrants by so much so as to be obligatory. Let in 1 extra Hatian...and the Hatian's income moves from $1/day to $40/day, while 1 native-born American's income drops from $50/day to $48/day (incomes are not zero-sum) [UPDATE FOR FAIRNESS]: What if the American loses value equivalent to $10/day? $15/day? [/UPDATE] How is this not massively good, and morally obligatory? Only possible answer is to discount the impact on the immigrant to near zero. [UPDATE]One person's standard of living drops by 4-30%...the other person's standard of living goes up by 4000%[/UPDATE]

PoTD

Robin Hanson: Summary: Slavery only occurs when life is above the malthusian poverty limit...when there's enough surplus to pay folks more than subsistence... then the rulers try to keep all the surplus for themselves, and you get slavery.

Exit and Left-Libertarianism

Foseti comments on both exit and left-libertarianism, and I'm inclined to believe he misunderstands both, and that the misunderstandings are related.

Exit:
There is an entirely different KIND of relationship between me and the guy who sells me oranges at the local farmer's market than there is between me and a robber.

In case #1, I can (a) decide to buy oranges from a different guy, or (b) decide not to buy oranges. My interaction with him is entirely based on positive sum trades. We are BOTH better off, by choice, and in our own cognition after we trade than before.

In case #2, (a) do as I'm told, (b) get shot, (c) both. After the trade, he is better off, and I'm screwed.

The difference is simple...and obvious to anyone who isn't trying to argue something that relies on conflating the two. In one case, it's trade/ voluntary /autonomy/etc. In the other case...it's violent evil thuggery. Why do we organize to suppress #2. Because we all know it's bad/not fair/immoral/strong taking advantage of the weak. Duh!

Case #3 is the case of government monopoly: (a) do as I'm told (b) get shot (c) go somewhere else where I have the same choices. Fundamentally, it's an interaction where I get screwed by having the interaction at all.

Exit: The notion that voluntary interactions are better than involuntary ones. Not real complicated.

Libertarianism is the notion that #3 is roughly equivalent to #2.

Left Libertarianism is the notion that many things that we think of as case #1 are, due to the actions of thugs who label themselves a government, much closer to #2/3 than #1. Libertarians who lean mildly left think that IP is 90% government violence deployed to make rich folks richer. More left would be the position that the Federal Highway System constitutes a massive subsidy to large corporations contra smaller local enterprises. Further left-ness would specify that any property rights not based on value-added use are a case of #2/3 instead of #1.

Links

• Kling on Education & Hierarchies
• Tino on Rich folks: Europe vs. US.
• Julian Simon on Optimism.
• Steve Blank on Entrepreneurship
• The Great Fact. Human standards of living were mostly flat for 2 Million years...shifted down, then were flat again for 10,000 years, then changed ~200 years ago, and life is good finally. Why? Any history that doesn't include the fact that life sucked for everyone for at least 10,000 years isn't useful. What changed in the last 200 years, in Europe 1st, that made the world we know.
• Matt Crawford: Education destroys Truth-Seeking. Math Circles Work. Both of these are pretty easy to explain if motivation is the killer factor in learning.
• Post It Guerrillas
• Standard Police Interactions.
• Keynesians: Epic Fail?
• RWCG: Play is important
• Seth Roberts: What feedback systems work.
• Rod Long explains all politics using the Lord of the Rings.
• May 1: Victims of Communism Day
• Sebastian Marshall: On Buying things. On Unsolicited Advice
• Penn & Teller on risk (Vaccines).
  
• Paper on protests and oppression.