LessWrong 2.0 Reader

GDP is a rather poor measure of wealth, and was never intended to be a measure of wealth but of something related to productivity. Since its inception it has never been a stable metric, as standards on how the measure is defined have changed radically over time in response to obvious flaws for any of its many applications. There is widespread and substantial disagreement on what it should measure and for which purposes it is a suitable metric.

It is empirically moderately well correlated with some sort of aggregate economic power of a state, and (when divided by population) some sort of standard of living of its population. As per Goodhart's Law, both correlations weakened when the metric became a target. So the question is on shaky foundation right from the beginning.

In terms of more definite questions such as price of food and agricultural production, that doesn't really have anything to do with GDP or virtual reality economy at all. Rather a large fraction of final food price goes to processing, logistics, finance, and other services, not the primary agriculture production. The fraction of price paid by food consumers going to agricultural producers is often less than 20%.

It makes sense to one-box ONLY if you calculate EV by that assigns a significant probability to causality violation

It only makes sense to two-box if you believe that your decision is causally isolated from history in every way that Omega can discern. That is, that you can "just do it" without it being possible for Omega to have predicted that you will "just do it" any better than chance. Unfortunately this violates the conditions of the scenario (and everyday reality).

Writing collaboratively is definitely something David and I have been trying to figure out how to do productively.

A lot of the reason why Second Life isn't a big part of the economy is that Second Life doesn't matter in general. It has few users and little social significance.

In China you had dating apps where people could signal their wealth by buying the most expensive virtual good available. The number I found via google is USD 67.5 billion as the global virtual goods market in 2021.

People pay a lot of money for luxury fashion items. Whether those have a physical representation isn't the main point.

I think a (slightly cartoony) real life example is servants. Rich people today are richer than rich people in Victorian times, but fewer rich people today (in developed countries) can afford to have servants.

It's not really a question of developed countries. Singapore is a developed country and it's much cheaper to hire servants over there. 

Western ideas of equality and migration policy are what's making servants more expensive.

In applied quantum physics, you have concrete situations (Stern-Gerlach experiment is a famous one), theory gives you the probabilities of outcomes, and repeating the experiment many times, gives you frequencies that converge on the probabilities. 

Can you, or Chris, or anyone, explain, in terms of some concrete situation, what you're talking about? 

Someone asked basically this question before, and someone gave basically the same answer. It's a good idea, but there are some problems [LW(p) · GW(p)] with it: it depends on your and your counterparties' risk aversion, wealth, and information levels, which are often extraneous.

The thing about Newcomb's problem for me was always the distribution between the two boxes, one being $1,000,000 and the other being $1,000. I'd rather not risk losing $999,000 for a chance at an extra $1,000! I could just one-box for real, take the million, then put it in an index fund and wait for it to go up by 0.1%.

I do understand that the question really comes into play when the amounts vary and Omega's success rate is lower - if I could one-box for $500 and two-box for $1,500 total and Omega is wrong 25% of the time observed, that would be a different play.

This all looks correct to me! Thanks for this.

There are other reasons to be wary of consciousness and identity-altering stuff. 

I think under a physical/computational theory of consciousness, (ie. there's no soul or qualia that have provable physical effects from the perspective of another observer) the problem might be better thought of as a question of value/policy rather than a question of fact. If teleportation or anything else really affects qualia or any other kind of subjective awareness that is not purely dependent on observable physical facts, whatever you call it, you wouldn't be able to tell or even think of/be aware of the difference, since thinking and being reflectively aware are computational and physical processes! However we humans are evolved without reliable copying mechanisms, so our instincts care about preservation of the self because it's the obvious way to protect our evolutionary success (and we can be quite willing to risk personal oblivion for evolutionary gains in ways we have been optimized for). This is just a part of our survival policy and is not easy or even safe to change just because you believe in physicalism. For one thing, as others have said, ethics and social theory becomes difficult because our sense of ethics (such as agency, punishment and caring about suffering) are all evolved in relation to a sense of self. It's possible that if teleportation/copying tech becomes widely useful, humans will have to adapt to a different set of instincts about self, ethics and more (edit: or maybe abandon the concepts of self and experience altogether as an illusion and prefer a computation-based definition of agency or whatever), because those who can't adapt will be selected against. But in the present world, people's sense of value and ethics (and maybe even psychological health) depend on an existing sense of self, and I don't see a good way or even a practical reason to transition to a different theory of self that allows copying, if doing so may cause unpredictable mental and social cost. See also discussions about meditation that lowers sense of ego and subjective suffering that can have serious side effects (like motivation and social norms) - I don't know what it subjectively feels like, but if the meditation is purely changing subjective qualia without doing anything to the physical brain and computation, there should be no observable effects, good or bad! The problem is subjective experience and sense of identity is not independent from other aspects of our life.