Douglas_Knight's Shortform

How much of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is just feudalism?

That is, that is, taking on a patron-client relationship is a discrete change with abrupt ethical consequences.

I think that feudalism explains a lot about the ethics of employment. In particular, the employer is responsible for a living wage, not supplemented by charity, which is for wards of the state; and the employer is responsible for the sins of the ward. I'm not sure it explains the examples Jai's original post. He did a good job of producing diverse examples that aren't explained by a common factor like employment. But I wonder whether it is an echo of feudalism.

Nothing in academic biology makes sense except in the light of feudalism.

A common pedagogical example of the perils of correlation analysis that ice cream consumption is correlated with homicide. The common cause is seasonal variation. This is usually presented as an absurd example, a mistake no one would make, but there is an extremely similar example that was nationally prominent. Polio was blamed on ice cream consumption because they had the same seasonal pattern. I wonder if the standard example was engineered from the real example. Perhaps it is better (eg, more absurd), but one doesn't have to choose just one example; surely it is better to also include the historical example.

What is calculus? Who invented it? I don't mean Newton vs Leibniz, but Newton vs Archimedes.

If it is the ability of calculate certain things, Archimedes calculated many of those things. If it is a single particular theorem, the obvious candidate is the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, connecting tangents to areas, due to Isaac Barrows, Newton's mentor.

I sometimes see people claiming that Newton bequeathed us a black box which was a giant step forward and now people learn it in high school and can do everything Newton could do. This is wildly wrong, but it is a natural benchmark to measure learning. If you believe that about calculus, or any other tool, you can go back and look for the problems it was intended to solve and see whether you can solve them. Archimedes computed the area under the parabola, which is now routine. He asked for his tomb to represent his hat-box theorem, which is not too difficult, and is often covered in multivariable calculus classes. He studied the center of gravity of paraboloids as a model for stability of boats and found a bifurcation phase transition. I haven't gotten around to trying this, but it sounds way beyond the curriculum. Newton famously invented calculus to derive Kepler's orbital laws from the inverse square force law. The second law, saying that time is proportional to area, is pretty easy and is covered in physics with calculus, or maybe even multivariable calculus, but the other laws, about the ellipse and the semi-major axis are difficult.

The meaning of the word calculus doesn't matter, but a course of calculus doesn't subsume Greek mathematics, let alone Newton.

The essence of systems thinking: Every persistent biological or cultural structure exists because of a positive feedback loop. Sometimes it’s hard to see. But to understand the structure, you must understand the loop.

— Kevin Simler

Elaboration:

Positive loops by themselves are unstable, yes, and both are needed for stability, but positive loops are primary. Without a positive loop, there would be nothing for a negative loop to stabilize.

It's pretty common for there to be coverups with no crime protected. People just close ranks and reflexively lie. So coverups are rarely good evidence of the primary crime. But they are evidence of a sick culture.

A common historical paradox is that centralizing forces can break apart large organizations. Usually what happens is that the large organization was fake, nominally claiming wide domain while actually being weak. When real power centralizes enough to defy the fake power, it secedes, producing the appearance of decentralization.

At least, my cached thought is that it's common. I can't remember what examples lead me to it. The only example I can think of right now is the Holy Roman Empire. A less paradoxical situation is that rapidly changing power produces uncertainty and civil war. Maybe my previous examples were things like the English Bill of Rights, where the King makes an explicit concession, but this is only necessary because the centralizing forces made the king powerful enough to need to clarify how powerful. (And Parliament is almost as centralized as the King, so this hardly even has the appearance of decentralization.)

I was reminded of this by people pushing back on Samo Burja's claim on the centralizing effects of the printing press. I think that this is a logical error. Just because the press broke the Western Church, doesn't mean that it did so for decentralizing reasons. On the other hand, a false argument doesn't mean a false conclusion. You have to look at the details to decide whether the mechanism was centralizing or decentralizing, which is a lot to ask for a tweet. FWIW, Burja only claimed a net centralizing effect, classifying the effect on the Church as decentralizing:

The printing press reduced the Catholic Church’s control over intellectual institutions. But it also paved the way for the standardization of language and for more direct control by state bureaucracies. Society was vastly more centralized in 1750 than it was in 1400.

Added: So, of course, I wrote this because my first thought on seeing the tweets was that Reformation was an example of this, but then I became uncertain about the example. Now I'm wondering if it was actually the motivating example when I first cached this thought. Anyhow, I do think that the nominal power and organization of the Church are misleading. Added: Yes, I think the Western Schism was my original example. I still think that's right, that it was caused by centralizing forces. I'm just not sure how the printing press fits in.

There's an extremely common argument that the reason that ancient Greek science didn't lead to Greek engineering is that Athens was a slave society and slave societies are brimming with labor and have no demand for labor-saving devices.

I have never been able to make head or tail of this argument. Also, the conclusion and premise of the argument are false. Conclusion: Greek engineering was better than Roman engineering. It was awesome and we're really not sure how far it went. Premise: Greek scientists weren't in Athens, but in many places in the Hellenistic world, especially Alexandria. Was Alexandria a slave society? I don't think anyone really knows. Some sources claim that it was full of slaves; some empty. Some that it had slaves everywhere, but others only in the fields, not in the workshops.

An alternate theory is that in (some) slave societies, the master is not supposed to think about the kind of work performed by slaves.

Here is a third argument that slave societies are not inventive. I just ran across Carroll Quigley:

a society whose productive system was based on slavery would probably be uninventive, because the slaves, who knew the productive process most intimately, would have little incentive to devise new methods since these would be unlikely to benefit themselves, while the slaveowners would have only a distant acquaintance with the productive processes

This argument seems too narrow to me. Is this about slavery, or about big organizations? I thought Adam Smith wrote something broader, but he actually wrote exactly the same:

A great part of the machines made use of in those manufactures in which labour is most subdivided, were originally the invention of common workmen, who, being each of them employed in some very simple operation, naturally turned their thoughts towards finding out easier and readier methods of performing it. — Book I, Chapter 1

Slaves, however, are very seldom inventive; and all the most important improvements, either in machinery, or in the arrangement and distribution of work, which facilitate and abridge labour have been the discoveries of freemen. Should a slave propose any improvement of this kind, his master would be very apt to consider the proposal as the suggestion of laziness, and of a desire to save his own labour at the master's expense. The poor slave, instead of reward would probably meet with much abuse, perhaps with some punishment. In the manufactures carried on by slaves, therefore, more labour must generally have been employed to execute the same quantity of work, than in those carried on by freemen. — Book IV, Chapter 9

Again, what's special about slaves? Why would the master think any differently of the slave than of the apprentice? Doesn't "at his master's expense" apply both times? Is the master's reaction supposed to be correct or prejudiced? Perhaps the master should be willing to let the underling try out cheap experiments, but should be cautious about investing in building the machine. The master tradesman is different from the slave driver in having more experience in the task, but that's mainly a question of the depth of the hierarchy, not the legal status. My memory was that Smith went on to say that the master was right that the apprentice was crying wolf and that real progress required the apprentice to set up his own shop and try out his inventions at his own expense, with skin in the game. I wouldn't be surprised if he does say something along these lines elsewhere, but not connected to this passage.

Bonus: here are the sentences before and after the second quote. They sound rather odd to me, perhaps like the first theory I rejected above:

the great body of the people were in effect excluded from all the trades which are, now commonly exercised by the lower sort of the inhabitants of towns. Such trades were, at Athens and Rome, all occupied by the slaves of the rich, who exercised them for the benefit of their masters, whose wealth, power, and protection made it almost impossible for a poor freeman to find a market for his work, when it came into competition with that of the slaves of the rich. [Slavery and invention.] The Hungarian mines, it is remarked by Mr. Montesquieu, though not richer, have always been wrought with less expense, and therefore with more profit, than the Turkish mines in their neighbourhood. The Turkish mines are wrought by slaves; and the arms of those slaves are the only machines which the Turks have ever thought of employing. The Hungarian mines are wrought by freemen, who employ a great deal of machinery, by which they facilitate and abridge their own labour.

First, there is the mystery of why the Turks don't copy the Hungarians next door. It's one thing to ignore innovations from slaves, but why do they ignore proven innovations? Second, if the Hungarians can compete with the Turks, why can't free tradesmen of Athens and Rome compete with the slave tradesmen? One possibility is vertical integration ("for the benefit of their masters"). Another is that something outside of economics has been smuggled in with the words "power and protection." It seems like most of the sentences exists to refute the first few, so what's going on?

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith is a great book. My favorite part is Book III, Chapter 4 on the end of feudalism. In particular, I like these two paragraphs:

In a country which has neither foreign commerce, nor any of the finer manufactures, a great proprietor, having nothing for which he can exchange the greater part of the produce of his lands which is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators, consumes the whole in rustic hospitality at home. If this surplus produce is sufficient to maintain a hundred or a thousand men, he can make use of it in no other way than by maintaining a hundred or a thousand men. He is at all times, therefore, surrounded with a multitude of retainers and dependants, who, having no equivalent to give in return for their maintenance, but being fed entirely by his bounty, must obey him, for the same reason that soldiers must obey the prince who pays them.
…
In a country where there is no foreign commerce, nor any of the finer manufactures, a man of ten thousand a year cannot well employ his revenue in any other way than in maintaining, perhaps, a thousand families, who are all of them necessarily at his command. In the present state of Europe, a man of ten thousand a year can spend his whole revenue, and he generally does so, without directly maintaining twenty people, or being able to command more than ten footmen not worth the commanding. Indirectly, perhaps, he maintains as great or even a greater number of people than he could have done by the ancient method of expense. For though the quantity of precious productions for which he exchanges his whole revenue be very small, the number of workmen employed in collecting and preparing it must necessarily have been very great. Its great price generally arises from the wages of their labour, and the profits of all their immediate employers. By paying that price he indirectly pays all those wages and profits and thus indirectly contributes to the maintenance of all the workmen and their employers. He generally contributes, however, but a very small proportion to that of each, to very few perhaps a tenth, to many not a hundredth, and to some not a thousandth, nor even a ten-thousandth part of their whole annual maintenance. Though he contributes, therefore, to the maintenance of them all, they are all more or less independent of him, because generally they can all be maintained without him.

Georgism

I'm going to write some things about Georgism, prompted by the review of George in the SSC contest. I had a pretty positive view of Georgism before, but had a pretty negative reaction to the review. I have not read George, but it gave me an impression of monomania. It is implausible that land is the root of all evil: of the Irish famine, the 19th century Depression, and modern urban dysfunction. I had first heard of Georgism and LVT for the coordination of modern cities, but I never gave much thought to what it was originally about. 

I expect to write a bunch of comments as replies to this comment, which will serve to keep them together. I want multiple comments mainly because I expect to write them on different days and don't want one to prevent the publication of the other. For good or for ill, this will avoid bridging topics.

Recently I've run across several people offhandedly offering disclaimers that they've never personally checked that the earth is round. I've never thought to check either, but a moment's reflection reveals that I've traveled far enough, both north-south and east-west that the curvature is obvious. 

Time zones are a measure of the curvature of the earth. When I travel from New York to California, I know that noon has changed, trusting only my wristwatch. In fact, it was pretty clear to my circadian rhythm. Or just make a phone call to someone you trust on the other coast. Most of the time I don't discuss sunlight on such calls, but it has come up.

I've traveled shorter distances north-south. I've been to Glasgow, which is 15 degrees north of NYC. If I went in the spring, there's probably little to notice, but I went near the solstice, when it was obvious that the nights were much shorter. Similarly, if you go south 15 degrees to Miami, I'm told that the winter and summer day lengths are obviously moderated.

Accurate clocks and instant communication give us a big advantage over the ancients, but the north-south method is largely unchanged.

Added: East-West travel produces a linear effect. North-South travel produces non-linear effects, which can be easy to notice. If I were measuring the height of the sun at noon, that would be linear in the latitude. 15 degrees might be enough to measure without instruments, if I chose to think about it. But the length of the night is not linear. Summer solstice night heads to zero not at the north pole, but just at the arctic circle. So summer solstice in Glasgow was obviously shorter than any night I had previously experienced, maybe cut in half. Whereas summer solstice in Miami is shorter than summer solstice in New York, but just an ordinary length day from other times of the year. Maybe if I had thought to ask the question I could have told the difference without a clock, but I didn't think about it, whereas the night in Scotland was striking and a topic of conversation. If someone from Miami comes to New York for the solstice, he will experience the shortest night of his life, which might be obvious, but it won't as dramatic as half the length he's used to. I knew a guy who moved from Miami to New York and he noticed it, but I think it was about the experience of life, not a single night. There is another non-linear effect as you head to the tropics, which is the solstice shadows at noon shorten to zero. That might be obvious to some people, but it's not the kind of thing I pay attention to.

Are there compendiums or classifications of trolley problems?

What is the most extreme real-world trolley problem? By "real-world" I mean something that really happens, emphasis on the plural. I don't want one-off examples where one person has the moral luck of having to face it and everyone else can breathe easy that they didn't have to think about it. I want examples where there is a definite, known policy. By "extreme," I mean something that really pushes people's buttons. By a classification, I mean a classification of which features make it more like a visceral trolley problem and which more like a blurry statistical haze that allows trading lives.

I propose a candidate: the dengue vaccine. In any event, I think people will find it interesting.

Dengue fever is an often-fatal mosquito-born tropical viral disease. People develop immunity, so we could make a vaccine. Obvious candidate, except ... Since we are all now experts in antibodies, we all know about the crazy phenomenon of antibody-dependent enhancement, mainly observed in dengue. It is not one virus, but four closely related strains with different envelope proteins and different immunity. If you get one, it's a non-lethal disease and you become immune to that strain. But you're still vulnerable to the other strains and, for not entirely clear reasons, infection with a new strain is much worse.

If you've already had some variant of dengue, any vaccine is better than none. But if you've never been exposed, it might be worse than not vaccinating. So of course the vaccine is a combination of all four variants. What if each of the four vaccines had a 95% chance of working, independent? Then someone receiving the vaccine would have about a 20% chance of not being vaccinated for all four. Let's say that's worse than nothing. Vaccinating everyone is a trolley problem benefiting people who have been exposed at the expense of those who have not been exposed. Both the benefit and harm is statistical (you don't know that you'll ever get dengue in the future), but the two groups of people can be identified ahead of time, not in a God's eye view of who will be bitten, but in a really potentially testable way. You could just test people for antibodies. If you're first-world-rich, perhaps a tourist from the first world, you can get repeated testing for antibodies and if you ever test positive, then you should get the vaccine. But the testing is more expensive than the vaccine (and logistically complicated) and Filipinos are poor, so we're not going to pay to test them. Should we choose some simple criterion like an age threshold and living in a badly hit area and just vaccinate everyone?

This was a hypothetical and I'm not sure if people were ever faced with this decision. If so, they decided not to pull the switch and instead kept working on the vaccine until it was much better than 95% effective. It was so effective (at least as measured by producing antibodies) enough that they rounded it off to 100% declared the problem solved and vaccinated a bunch of Filipinos who were old enough that they'd probably had it once.

And then the data trickled in and it saved lots of (net) lives, but it wasn't quite as good as hoped. People who had been vaccinated still got dengue, just not as often. But surely that meant that people who hadn't been exposed before were promoting mild to severe dengue? This seems pretty obvious, but they put their fingers in their ears and waited for the data to pin that down. That waiting, or maybe something else, burned their credibility and now the WHO policy is that you shouldn't give anyone the vaccine without an antibody test. Practically speaking, that means no vaccines.

This is a trolley problem that happened in the real world and the fact that the groups of people are potentially knowable seems to really important to reluctance to switching tracks. But the rejection of the vaccine is not purely the result of the trolley problem, but also about burnt credibility.

Someone just told me that the solution to conflicting experiments is more experiments. Taken literally this is wrong: more experiments just means more conflict. What we need are fewer experiments. We need to get rid of the bad experiments.

Why expect that future experiments will be better? Maybe if the experimenters read the past experiments, they could learn from them. Well, maybe, but maybe if you read the experiments today, you could figure out which ones are bad today. If you don't read the experiments today and don't bother to judge which ones are better, what incentive is there for future experimenters to make better experiments, rather than accumulating conflict?

Self-driving cars are famously bad at left turns. That is, they're inhumanly slow. But the goal is not human-like performance. Maybe the self-driving cars are doing the right thing; super-human patience is not a difficult task for computers. But once you've decided that you're going to wait a long time to make left turns, you should change your routing algorithm to avoid left turns. UPS stopped making left turns in 2004. Why is Google/Waymo still making them? In 2016, Google's other W-driving subsidiary reduced left turns. Maybe they just reduced Waze lefts down to Maps lefts, but even so, it should make this parameter salient. Or maybe they do avoid left turns, but the few that they do make are seen and mocked. Talking to riders should give an unbiased sample, and, indeed, the rider talks about it going out of its way to avoid left turns. 

But the Waymo spokesman was defensive, insisting that they do make left turns regularly. Similarly, GM/Cruise brags about its ability to make left turns. It's hard for me to articulate why, but I think that this is bad and they should brashly embrace the difference; of course self-driving cars will be different! But this option is not open to Tesla with its incremental approach. Humans would probably be upset if it navigated them through lots of right turns.

Robin Hanson tweets:

Many expect to see a correlation between cynicism, thinking that low motives drive behavior, and pessimism, thinking the future will be bleak. I defy this, being both cynical and optimistic. But I'm curious; is this correlation real, and if so why? If not, why expect it?

I am skeptical that most people have beliefs and, in particular, I'm skeptical that these terms are for describing beliefs. 

Taking these definitions as given, what do they predict? An outside view extrapolation of the future from the present should not depend too much on understanding how the present works, only whether it works and how it has changed in the past. If we live in a time of progress, recognizing that should not depend on understanding what drives progress. Trying to call the peak may depend on details, but if people's motives haven't changed over the centuries, the mere opinion on motives should not single out the present day for a reversal of trends. 

But people with specific different beliefs about how the world works should make different predictions about specific proposals and have different beliefs about their likelihood of success. Cynics should be pessimistic about idealistic proposals and idealists should be pessimistic about cynical proposals. This is symmetric, but if public speech is idealistic, proposals will be systematically idealistic and more convincing to idealists than to cynics. 

I see many people say that we should have done vaccine challenge trials, that would have been so much quicker. But we did challenge trials. They were "approved" in September and actually begun in February. If you want fast trials, it makes just as much sense to demand that the regulators run regular trials fast. There is much more to gain on that front.

The actual efficacy trials only took about 2 months* that would have been saved by challenge trials. Most of the time was spent not studying vaccines, but waiting for approval to move on to the next step of the trial, just as all a year was spent waiting for approval for challenge trials. The criterion for moving from phase 2 to phase 3 is very simple and should not have taken any time at all, nor any explicit permission. It is perfectly reasonable for regulators to not want to trust the drug companies, but they can check the data after the fact. And if there are analyses that they did not foresee, they can do those after the new trials has already begun.

* The amount of time for efficacy in a non-challenge trial depends on the prevalence of the disease. The actual duration of 2 months was not predicted ahead of time. The FDA's late addition of 2 months of safety data suggests that it was surprised how fast the efficacy data came in. Also, challenge trials don't provide safety data, only efficacy. It's good to separate safety from efficacy and make an explicit decision, a decision that the FDA tried to avoid for half of the trial. When people say that challenge trials save time, they are ignoring this, implicitly endorsing no such medium-term safety data. That's probably the right choice, but people who make it should say it loud, not dodge responsibility like the FDA.

Hypothesis: "Flatten the curve" took off because it allows people to participate without 1. signaling they care what happens to them. 2. think things will get bad or 3. think bad things are preventable.

— Elizabeth

Bulverism, also known as the Aumann Agreement Theorem.

two tweets:

[Carl Schmitt is a good philosopher but] One nightmarish way to understand The Discourse is that somehow Carl Schmitt became the obvious, agreed-upon, common-sense interpretation of politics. All sides nod sagely, but each fetishizes a different book.

So the left gets Political Theology, the right gets Nomos of the Earth. Quilette-style centrists are 100% indebted to the Concept of the Political.