Author Topic: Another fun challenge to political views  (Read 7511 times)

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Offline puppies

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I haven't read the entire thing yet, and I probably won't.  I did read the first bit about economics.  I was reminded of Bastiat
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There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

Individuals always do that which they find more preferable to that which they find less preferable.  These preferences are shaped by the current state of your mind.  Much of this state of mind is the result of the accumulated knowledge we have built up over our years and years of observation.  Everyone still with me.  Good.  This is where I usually lose some people.  It is impossible to know with certainty, what your future state of mind will be, because it is impossible to know with certainty what knowledge you will obtain in the intervening time.  This makes it impossible to predict future human behavior (even your own) with certainty.  In short the study of human action is not and will never be an empirical science.  If you believe my logic is in error, please let me know.

The author of this FAQ seems to believe that their preferences, or perhaps the preferences of 51% of a given population, are in fact objectively better than the preferences of others, and that in pursuit of those preferences the initiation of force is justified.  What is not seen, or even considered, is of course the moral aspect, the preferences of unpopular yet harmless minorities, the time preference of anyone at all,  capture theory, The inability of experts to reliably forsee the unitended consequences of their meddling, the fact that politicians, and central planners are subject to the same flaws as the general population, and of course the utility of relying upon utilitarian arguments (I know that last one is a circle) 

We also need to look at how people actually act.  According to most of these arguments no one would ever give to charity, or give a bum their spare change, or tip their waitstaff at a restaurant they will never return to.  But of course millions of people do these things every day.  Are they being irrational?  Do they say to themselves, now that bum can go get an apartment, or now that waitress can go to college.  Do they expect to profit monetarily from the output of these funds?  Of course not.  They do exactly that which they find most preferable.  Even if others might view it as irrational
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Offline starspirit

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Somebody starts a poll to impose a boycott on factories that do not provide transparent audited evidence of non-pollution, and to give business to those that do provide this evidence. No action is taken until the poll builds up enough critical mass to be effectively punitive and rewarding to successfully affect the behaviour of the factories involved. In this way, there is no immediate cost to any consumer in electing to participate, until such time as their participation is guaranteed to be meaningful. As the numbers participating build, and the probability of an action builds, this changes the cost/benefit outcome for factories, and more and more will begin to non-pullute and provide evidence of such. If all the factories do so, its possible there may even be no action required in the end, but if there is, it should be guaranteed effective. So I think this process can work with public goods also.

So, the crux of the matter is this:

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until such time as their participation is guaranteed to be meaningful

The problem is that an individual's participation is nearly meaningless if no one else participates, because the boycott fails either way, and it's nearly meaningless if many others participate, because the boycott succeeds either way. The probability of an individual actually being in that tiny sliver where they are pivotal is very very tiny.


I see it a bit differently. At the point of just having reached critical mass, in fact nearly everyone's action is critical for success. Every individual's participation at that point is meaningful, because they can sway the outcome from complete success to complete failure or visa versa.

It's a bit like if you had a chain of a million dominoes. Every domino is critical for the success of the entire chain. The reality in this case is that every single individual is not as critical as that (some minor slippage may be possible), but everyone needs to bear in mind that a small group could completely sway the result. This known fact creates an obligation on each individual to the group, which presumably they are each happy with given their initial poll indication.

So the payoff table for participation, once critical mass of indicated participation is reached, and assuming the extreme case of individual criticality to the outcome and a low cost, is now completely altered:

                     You
Others    Yes           No                                             
Yes       ( 1 , 1)    ( 0.1 , possible 0)                     
No        ( 0 , 0.1) ( 0.1 , 0.1)

(your utility, group utility)

I would think nearly everybody who has willingly indicated participation would therefore participate for success, allowing for the odd change of heart or intervening circumstance.


Offline Troglodactyl

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...
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That's an issue with the entire approach, given it's based in consequentialism.  Unless he argues that he is guided by an objective and superior value system, the whole argument boils down to taking away people's freedom simply because he wants to. If all value is truly subjective, it's hard to point to any problem with that.

For that we have his other FAQ.
...

It's not consequentialism itself I have a problem with.  I accept consequentialism as a general framework capable of supporting basically any other moral system inside it depending on the standard of value used within it.

The problem I often have with consequentialists is that they often seem to assume they have a complete understanding of all potential value and disregard the possibility of unintended consequences in their pursuit of it.

Offline bitmarley

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Wow so much unoriginal hogwash.   
+5%

What the author defines as 'externalities' being intimately linked to the sale of property are actually completely unrelated separate incidents of property damage. Under his definition anything you sell makes you liable for the future actions of the new owner and anything you buy makes you liable for the past actions of the supplier. The whole reason libertarians separate the two is that individuals can only be responsible for their own actions and NOT the actions of other people who are, if defined as being free, outside of their control.

The sheer stupidity is tiring and the violence hurts but kudos to all libertarians out there who stand squarely to speak their peaceful reasoning toward the apparently never ending tsunami of ridiculous contradictions in support of aggression. 

I'm sure the author is well intentioned so the lesson perhaps that needs to be taught is that the justice system isn't really functioning as it should. Taking action in court against people who damage property is too expensive and complex. The justice system needs simplification and more open access. That's the crux of these kind of confusions.
« Last Edit: January 22, 2015, 04:48:38 am by bitmarley »

Offline vbuterin

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I am not keen on voting in DPOS, but at least it is stake based and not per-person. 

Voting for positions with LIMITED roles is very different than voting for positions with UNLIMITED roles backed by a gun. 

I plan to address several of these topics in a blog post in the near future.

Thoughts on https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/21/introduction-futarchy/ ? :)

Offline vbuterin

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Somebody starts a poll to impose a boycott on factories that do not provide transparent audited evidence of non-pollution, and to give business to those that do provide this evidence. No action is taken until the poll builds up enough critical mass to be effectively punitive and rewarding to successfully affect the behaviour of the factories involved. In this way, there is no immediate cost to any consumer in electing to participate, until such time as their participation is guaranteed to be meaningful. As the numbers participating build, and the probability of an action builds, this changes the cost/benefit outcome for factories, and more and more will begin to non-pullute and provide evidence of such. If all the factories do so, its possible there may even be no action required in the end, but if there is, it should be guaranteed effective. So I think this process can work with public goods also.

So, the crux of the matter is this:

Quote
until such time as their participation is guaranteed to be meaningful

The problem is that an individual's participation is nearly meaningless if no one else participates, because the boycott fails either way, and it's nearly meaningless if many others participate, because the boycott succeeds either way. The probability of an individual actually being in that tiny sliver where they are pivotal is very very tiny.

Now, what you can do is make a recursive boycott, where if a boycott is large enough you also boycott non-participants (or, as a softer version, agree to pay a 50% "vountary tariff" that gets donated to charity, so that companies that really really depend on specific providers are not hurt too bad). Such schemes theoretically can work; it's just a matter of whether they're easier or harder than just having the government coordinate mandatory "boycotts" instead.

Offline bytemaster

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Offline starspirit

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I've been considering some of the arguments in this piece. Section 2 covers co-ordination problems (why boycotts don't work etc), and I wondered if the following solution could work as co-ordination tool without the need for state law. Let's say a polling tool is available, whereby passionate people can request a public call to action on some issue. But the agreed action is not taken until some specified critical mass supports the action. When that critical mass is reached, all participants know that their action will be effective, and the action goes ahead successfully. For example, it might be boycotting a consumer product for a month, which is more than the company can bear, but which is not a difficult (and only temporary) sacrifice for each individual. This might overcome the hurdle of people not willing to make a sacrifice when they are uncertain others will act similarly and that their sacrifice will be meaningful. Thoughts?

I'd like to give a couple of examples of how this concept could be applied to some of the situations presented...


1. The English language spelling system is horribly bad. Just about every letter has multiple potential sounds that it can map to, and vice versa, there are combinations of letters that are completely silent in some cases but not others, and even the best possible formalizations of English spelling rules work only 85% of the time. Hence, we could try to switch to a system that is better, yusing the saem leters to olways refur tu the saem sounds so yu kan noe hou tu pronouns a wurd from looking at it just liek mor siviliesd languages. If we all switch over, then that is better for all of us. But if you switch over and no one else does, then you are stuck writing posts that no one can understand well, and so you suffer.

The payoff matrix looks like this:

You don't switchYou switch
Other people don't switch(1, 1)(0, 0.99)
Other people switch(0, 1.99)(2, 2)

Where the values are (your utility, society's total utility). Hence, even though everyone would switch over, no one benefits from switching over unilaterally.


Somebody starts a poll. Anyone signs up at zero cost, and can change their mind at any time. If enough numbers build up to say they will make the change (a critical mass event is reached), there is a guaranteed payoff to all individuals participating, and the change is made simultaneously. Everyone else changes also, because now there is a cost in remaining on the old system. (As an aside, I just had a vision of the way neurons fire in the decentralised brain, when a critical energy level is reached).


2. You run a factory. Do you install filters in order to reduce the amount of pollution you emit? You suffer slightly from your own pollution, but not enough to notice; however, everyone's pollution together significantly affects your health and you would rather no one did. But then, installing filters is expensive.

Now, we have:

You don't polluteYou pollute
Other people don't pollute(2, 2)(2.1, 1.7)
Other people pollute(0.9, 1.3)(1, 1)

Here, in all cases it's 0.1 units better for you to pollute, regardless of where others do. Coordination problems are solvable through many mechanisms; assurance contracts are perhaps the simplest one, and dominant assurance contracts also work well. Public good problems, however, are much more tricky, because there is always an incentive to defect; it's not just a matter of finding a way to move a rock from one valley to another, it's a matter of moving a rock up a 45 degree slope to a point at the top where the slope is still 45 degrees, and keeping it there. I think that solving coordination problems specifically really should be a primary objective of the crypto-mechanism-design community.


Somebody starts a poll to impose a boycott on factories that do not provide transparent audited evidence of non-pollution, and to give business to those that do provide this evidence. No action is taken until the poll builds up enough critical mass to be effectively punitive and rewarding to successfully affect the behaviour of the factories involved. In this way, there is no immediate cost to any consumer in electing to participate, until such time as their participation is guaranteed to be meaningful. As the numbers participating build, and the probability of an action builds, this changes the cost/benefit outcome for factories, and more and more will begin to non-pullute and provide evidence of such. If all the factories do so, its possible there may even be no action required in the end, but if there is, it should be guaranteed effective. So I think this process can work with public goods also.

This would not require a state to intervene in these individual cases. The biggest problem, I think, may be one of efficiency. There would need to be a way to make such an action or behavioural change more efficiently monitored in future, and more widely implemented so that the same issue doesn't keep repeating itself in a thousand different places at a thousand different times, competing for the attention of the community. The question is how to do that without the establishment of a public organisation to do so, or alternatively, how to establish such a public organisation without the perceived flaws of current state institutions.

I'd be interested to know what other ideas might exist for how such coordination problems could be resolved, and whether there are tools that could be developed toward these in the (distant?) future. Is coordinated action even necessary?

Offline bytemaster

I am not keen on voting in DPOS, but at least it is stake based and not per-person. 

Voting for positions with LIMITED roles is very different than voting for positions with UNLIMITED roles backed by a gun. 

I plan to address several of these topics in a blog post in the near future.
For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.

Offline vbuterin

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So, one place where I think Scott errs is that he fails to make a distinction between coordination problems and public goods. To see the difference, consider the following two situations.

1. The English language spelling system is horribly bad. Just about every letter has multiple potential sounds that it can map to, and vice versa, there are combinations of letters that are completely silent in some cases but not others, and even the best possible formalizations of English spelling rules work only 85% of the time. Hence, we could try to switch to a system that is better, yusing the saem leters to olways refur tu the saem sounds so yu kan noe hou tu pronouns a wurd from looking at it just liek mor siviliesd languages. If we all switch over, then that is better for all of us. But if you switch over and no one else does, then you are stuck writing posts that no one can understand well, and so you suffer.

The payoff matrix looks like this:

You don't switchYou switch
Other people don't switch(1, 1)(0, 0.99)
Other people switch(0, 1.99)(2, 2)

Where the values are (your utility, society's total utility). Hence, even though everyone would switch over, no one benefits from switching over unilaterally.

2. You run a factory. Do you install filters in order to reduce the amount of pollution you emit? You suffer slightly from your own pollution, but not enough to notice; however, everyone's pollution together significantly affects your health and you would rather no one did. But then, installing filters is expensive.

Now, we have:

You don't polluteYou pollute
Other people don't pollute(2, 2)(2.1, 1.7)
Other people pollute(0.9, 1.3)(1, 1)

Here, in all cases it's 0.1 units better for you to pollute, regardless of where others do. Coordination problems are solvable through many mechanisms; assurance contracts are perhaps the simplest one, and dominant assurance contracts also work well. Public good problems, however, are much more tricky, because there is always an incentive to defect; it's not just a matter of finding a way to move a rock from one valley to another, it's a matter of moving a rock up a 45 degree slope to a point at the top where the slope is still 45 degrees, and keeping it there. I think that solving coordination problems specifically really should be a primary objective of the crypto-mechanism-design community.

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I also expect that interested consumers would voluntarily pay for services from expert private organisations to report on safety and environmental research in certain areas relevant to them.

Well, the problem is that safety and environmental research is a public good. Although, note that this argument is a rationale for the existence of a government-funded certification agency, not for making its certifications mandatory (for that you have to appeal to either irrationality, or a rather weird countersignalling argument which is really clever and cool in its economath but that I'm not sure applies that strongly in many situations).

Quote
That's an issue with the entire approach, given it's based in consequentialism.  Unless he argues that he is guided by an objective and superior value system, the whole argument boils down to taking away people's freedom simply because he wants to. If all value is truly subjective, it's hard to point to any problem with that.

For that we have his other FAQ.

Quote
The problem with everyone voting to pass a law is the same "coordination problem" that already existed.  There is a rational ignorance where the cost of learning how to vote responsibly is greater than the value of the vote.  Thus no one learns how to vote responsibly. 

Now I wonder why you are so keen on DPOS :)

Offline starspirit

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Section 4 on Lack of Information I think is becoming ever less an issue as more information can be collated by a decentralised network of billions of people than can be collected by any government bureaucracy (except perhaps the NSA!). You can see this in the number of product and shop customer reviews littering the internet. The only problem is one of filtering that information in the best way possible, and making it as convenient to access as possible at the point of the consumers decision. Technology there seems to be improving. Without government agencies to fulfil this function funded by tax dollars, I also expect that interested consumers would voluntarily pay for services from expert private organisations to report on safety and environmental research in certain areas relevant to them. Companies that fail to disclose information would naturally be deemed more suspect by the public.

Offline Troglodactyl

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Section 3 of the article on irrational choices is an illogical argument IMO. The author identifies that in certain situations people make predictably irrational choices. The example he gives is inaction often reflects a lack of mental energy applied to the problem rather than a preference. While this is true, it only justifies changing how the choices are arranged or presented for individuals, rather than constraining those choices. Second irrationality is most often subjective. Taking away the choice considered irrational by a majority, academics or some bureaucracy would harm those for whom that is a clear and purposeful preference that benefits them.
That's an issue with the entire approach, given it's based in consequentialism.  Unless he argues that he is guided by an objective and superior value system, the whole argument boils down to taking away people's freedom simply because he wants to. If all value is truly subjective, it's hard to point to any problem with that.

Offline starspirit

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Section 3 of the article on irrational choices is an illogical argument IMO. The author identifies that in certain situations people make predictably irrational choices. The example he gives is inaction often reflects a lack of mental energy applied to the problem rather than a preference. While this is true, it only justifies changing how the choices are arranged or presented for individuals, rather than constraining those choices. Second irrationality is most often subjective. Taking away the choice considered irrational by a majority, academics or some bureaucracy would harm those for whom that is a clear and purposeful preference that benefits them.

Offline Troglodactyl

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Like Kickstarter, or the Free State Project.

Offline starspirit

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FYI.  Voting is a coordination problem.
I'm not sure if this is in reference to my idea above. The way I see this tool working is that, apart from the need for an initiator, it can be self coordinating. There is not even a need for widespread publicity in the beginning - there is no cost to signing up early (and indeed this can be reversed if desired), so only as critical mass builds and word spreads, are more and more people engaged to participate if they desire. And then when the critical mass point is reached, effective group action takes place.