Open Thread: June 2010

You are magnificent.

(Alternate title for the LW tabloid — "The Rational Enquirer"?)

Less Wrong tabloid magazine

Sweet!

Is your boyfriend a frequentist?

Nearly killed me.

We have a store? Where?

Tabloid 100% gold. Hanson slayed me.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear...

"Aliens ate my baby!"

Lol, although, what does astrology have to do with anything less wrong-ish.

From your link, a further link doesn't make it sound great at SO - 2-4x the utter failure. But they are very positive about it because the cost of implementation was very low. Just top-level posts or no geolocating would be even cheaper.

You may be amused (or something) by this search

That's what I thought as well, until I read this post from "Fake Steve Jobs". Not the most reliable source, obviously, but he does seem to have a point:

But, see, arguments about national averages are a smokescreen. Sure, people kill themselves all the time. But the Foxconn people all work for the same company, in the same place, and they’re all doing it in the same way, and that way happens to be a gruesome, public way that makes a spectacle of their death. They’re not pill-takers or wrist-slitters or hangers. ... They’re jumpers. And jumpers, my friends, are a different breed. Ask any cop or shrink who deals with this stuff. Jumpers want to make a statement. Jumpers are trying to tell you something.

Now I'm not entirely sure of the details, but if it's true that all the suicides in the recent cluster consisted of jumping off the Foxconn factory roof, that does seem to be more significant than just 15 employees committing suicide in unrelated incidents. In fact, it seems like it might even be the case that there are a lot more suicides than the ones we've heard about, and the cluster of 15 are just those who've killed themselves via this particular, highly visible, method (I'm just speculating here).

I'm not sure what to make of this - without knowing more of the details its probably impossible to say what's going on. But the basic point seems sound: that the argument about being below national average suicide rates doesn't really hold up if there's something specific about a particular group of incidents that makes them non-independent. As an example, if the members of some cult commit suicide en masse, you can't look at the region the event happened in and say "well the overall suicide rate for the region is still below the national average, so there's nothing to see here"

The first question that came to mind when I heard about this story was 'what's the base rate?'. I didn't investigate further but a quick mental estimate made me doubt that this represented a statistically significant increase above the base rate. It's disappointing yet unsurprising that few if any media reports even consider this point.

Wasn't there a somewhat well-publicized "spate" of suicides at a large French telecom a while back? I remember the explanation being the same - the number observed was just about what you'd expect for an employer of that size.

ETA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_Telecom

There's a recreation centre, but the engineers I was training told me they had never been there. Then I saw on TV that there's a stress room full of these dolls that look like Japanese warriors. You get a bat and you beat them. That's how they are encouraged to relieve the stress.

Ya, I can see how something like this could happen. By the way, a few statistics don't exactly prove anything. Was there 10 deaths last year? The year before? Do other factories have similiar problems? Etc. To many variables.

I thought of a simple example that illustrates the point. Suppose two people each roll a die privately. Then they are asked, what is the probability that the sum of the dice is 9?

Now if one sees a 1 or 2, he knows the probability is zero. But let's suppose both see 3-6. Then there is exactly one value for the other die that will sum to 9, so the probability is 1/6. Both players exchange this first estimate. Now curiously although they agree, it is not common knowledge that this value of 1/6 is their shared estimate. After hearing 1/6, they know that the other die is one of the four values 3-6. So actually the probability is calculated by each as 1/4, and this is now common knowledge (why?).

And of course this estimate of 1/4 is not what they would come up with if they shared their die values; they would get either 0 or 1.

But in reality, what happens when people try to aumann involves a different set of problems, such as status-signalling, especially the idea that updating toward someone else's probability is instinctively seen as giving them status.

Thanks a lot for both links. I already understood common knowledge, but the paper is a very pleasing and thorough treatment of the topic.

Some sites have gone to an every Friday open thread; maybe we should do it weekly instead of monthly, too.

I don't post in the open threads much, but if I run into a good rationality quote I tend to wait until the next rationality quotes thread is opened unless the current one is less than a week or so old.

How does this make sense exactly? A happy person, with more resources, would be better off not taking risks that could result in him losing what he has. On the other hand, a sad person with few resources, would need to take more risks then the happy person to get the same results. If you told a rich person, jump off that cliff and I'll give you a million dollars, they probably wouldn't do it. On the other hand, if you told a poor person the same thing, they might do it as long as there was a chance they could survive.

My idea of why people were happy wasn't a static value of how many resources they had, but a comparative value. A rich person thrown into poverty would be very unhappy, but the poor person might be happy.

Hi Kaj, I really liked the article. I had a relevant theory to explain the perceived difference of attitudes of north Europeans versus south Europeans. I guess you could call it a theory of unhappiness. Here goes:

I take as granted that mildly depressed people tend to make more accurate depictions of reality, that north Europeans have higher incidence of depression and also much better functioning economies and democracies. Given a low resource environment, one needs to plan further, and make more rational projections of the future. If being on the depressive side makes one more introspective and thoughtful, then it would be conducive to having better long-term plans. In a sense, happiness could be greed-inducing, in a greedy algorithm sense. This more or less agrees with kaj's theory. OTOH, not-happiness would encourage long-term planning and even more co-operative behaviour.

In the current environment, resources may not be scarce, but our world has become much more complex, actions having much deeper consequences than in the ancestral environment (Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes this point in Black Swan) therefore also needing better thought out courses of action. So northern Europeans have lucked out where their adaptation to climate has been useful for the current reality. If one sees corruption as a local-greedy behaviour as opposed to lawfulness as a global-cooperative behaviour, this would also explain why going closer to the equator you generally see an increase in corruption and also failures in democratic government. Taken further, it would imply that near-equator peoples are simply not well-adapted to democratic rule, which demands a certain limiting of short-term individual freedom for the longer-term common good, and a more distributed/localised form of governance would do much better. I think this (rambling) theory can more or less be pieced together with kaj's, adding long-term planning as a second dimension.

Disclaimer: Before anyone accuses me of discrimination, I am in fact a south European (Greek), living in north Europe (the UK), and while this does not absolve me of all possibility of racism against my own, this theory has formed from my effort to explain the cultural differences I experience on a daily basis. Take it for what it's worth.

And a very condensed note I wrote to myself (in brainstormish mode, without regard for feasibility or testability):

Emotions are filters on the brain, brain subsystems activated for different reasons in response to different cognitive stimuli. This would explain why those who are happy have a hard time remembering things that are saddening or vice versa (possibly causing cascades). It seems that flow is the opposite of suffering, as both are responses to difficult problems such as the ones the brain evolved to solve. Pain asymbolia may be the opposite of something like bipolar disorder or multiple personality disorder, and the difference may be strength of emotion or the cognitive subsystems similar to emotion. It is odd that people who suffer are more often negative utilitarians: this is probably because the suffering filter is affecting what sorts of memories of experience they have access to, and biasing their thoughts in that direction.

I don't have Searle's book, and may be missing some relevant context. Does Searle believe normal humans with unmodified brains can consciously affect their external behavior?

If yes, then there's a simple solution to this fear: do the experiment he describes, and then gradually return the test subject to his original, all-biological condition. Ask him to describe his experience. If he reports (now that he's free of non-biological computing substrate) that he actually lost his sight and then regained it, then we'll know Searle is right, and we won't upload. Nothing for Searle to fear.

But if, as I gather, Searle believes that our "consciousness" only experiences things and is never a cause of external behavior, then this is subject to the same criticism as Searle's support of zombies.

Namely: if Searle is right, then the reason he is giving us this warning isn't because he is conscious. Maybe in fact his consciousness is screaming inside his head, knowing that his thesis is false, but is unable to stop him from publishing his books. Maybe his consciousness is already blind, and has been blind from birth due to a rare developmental accident, and it doesn't know what words he types in his books at all. Why should we listen to him, if his words about conscious experience are not caused by conscious experience?

David Chalmers discusses this particular passage by Searle extensively in his paper "Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia":
http://consc.net/papers/qualia.html

He demonstrates very convincingly that Searle's view is incoherent except under the assumption of strong dualism, using an argument based on more or less the same basic idea as your objection.

I've been talking to various people about the idea of a Rationality Foundation (working title) which might end up sponsoring or facilitating something like rationality dojos. Needless to say this idea is in its infancy.

I'm a draftsman and it always struck me how absolutely terrible the English language is for talking about ludicrously simple visual concepts precisely. Words like parallel and perpendicular should be one syllable long.

I wonder if there's a way to apply rationality/ mathematical think beyond geometry and to the world of art.

According to wiki: "Tacit knowledge (as opposed to formal or explicit knowledge) is knowledge that is difficult to transfer to another person by means of writing it down or verbalizing it"

Thus: "Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact and trust. Another example of tacit knowledge is the ability to ride a bicycle."

Supports the dojo idea...perhaps in SecondLife once the graphics are better?

I think it would be great to systematically explore and develop useful skillsets, perhaps in a modular fashion. We do have sequences. I would join a rationality dojo immediately.

What do you mean practical ways? I understand the difficulty of transferring kinesthetic or social understanding, but how can we overcome that in nonverbalized fashion?

2nd one "ANTHROPIC SHADOW: OBSERVATION SELECTION EFFECTS AND HUMAN EXTINCTION RISKS" - is good reading.

Speaking of the Simulation argument, I just stumbled across (but haven't read) http://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000338/index.html / http://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000338/article.pdf :

"Theological Implications of the Simulation Argument"

"Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument (SA) has many intriguing theological implications. We work out some of them here. We show how the SA can be used to develop novel versions of the Cosmological and Design Arguments. We then develop some of the affinities between Bostrom’s naturalistic theogony and more traditional theological topics. We look at the resurrection of the body and at theodicy. We conclude with some reflections on the relations between the SA and Neoplatonism (friendly) and between the SA and theism (less friendly)."

Reminded me of one of my favorite movie dialogues - from Sunshine. Context was actually physics, but the complexity of the situation and the time frame but the characters in the same situation as you with the Cabinet ministers.

Capa: It's the problem right there. Between the boosters and the gravity of the sun the velocity of the payload will get so great that space and time will become smeared together and everything will distort. Everything will be unquantifiable.

Kaneda: You have to come down on one side or the other. I need a decision.

Capa: It's not a decision, it's a guess. It's like flipping a coin and asking me to decide whether it will be heads or tails.

Kaneda: And?

Capa: Heads... We harvested all Earth's resources to make this payload. This is humanity's last chance... our last, best chance... Searle's argument is sound. Two last chances are better than one.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448134/quotes?qt0386955

I am not at all like you. I don't have much interest in policy at all, and I do tend to refuse to hold a position, being very mindful of how easy it is to be completely off course (Probably from reading too much history of science. It's "the graveyard of dead ideas", after all.). I'm likely to tell the Cabinet Ministers to get off my back or they'll have absolutely useless recommendations.

However, I think you have hit upon the point that makes Bayesianism attractive to me: it's rationality you can use to act in real-time, under uncertainty, in normal life. Traditional Rationality is slow.

Good quality government policy

There is no more evidence for that than there is for God. Indeed:

Indeed, belief in the legitimacy and wisdom of government seemed to require more blind faith than belief in God. - - George H Smith, Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies

DSvsT was not directly an argument for utilitarianism, it was an argument for tradeoffs and quantitative thinking and against any kind of rigid rules, sacred values, or qualitative thinking which prevents tradeoffs. For any two things, both of which have some nonzero value, there should be some point where you are willing to trade off one for the other - even if one seems wildly less important than the other (like dust specks compared to torture). Utilitarianism provides a specific answer for where that point is, but the DSvsT post didn't argue for the utilitarian answer, just that the point had to be at less than 3^^^3 dust specks. You would probably have to be convinced of utilitarianism as a theory before accepting its exact answer in this particular case.

The stick-hitting example doesn't challenge the claim about tradeoffs, since most people are willing to trade off one person getting hit multiple times with many people each getting hit once, with their choice depending on the numbers. In a stadium full of 100,000 people, for instance, it seems better for one person to get hit twice than for everyone to get hit once. Your alternative rule (maximin) doesn't allow some tradeoffs, so it leads to implausible conclusions in cases like this 100,000x1 vs. 1x2 example.

I don't think maximising the minima is what you want. Suppose your choice is to hit one person 20 times, or five people 19 times each. Unless your intuition is different from mine, you'll prefer the first option.

"Hitting with a stick" has some constant negative utility for all the people.

I don't think you can justifiably expect to be able to tell your brain something this self-evidently unrealistic, and have it update its intuitions accordingly.

I went through a lot of comments on dust specks vs. torture. (It seems to me like the two sides were miscommunicating in a very specific way, which I may attempt to make clear at some point.)

Oh, and I'd love to hear what you mean about this.

There's one difference, which is that the inequality of the distribution is much more apparent in your example, because one of the options distributes the pain perfectly evenly. If you value equality of distribution as worth more than one unit of pain, it makes sense to choose the equal distribution of pain. This is similar to economic discussions about policies that lead to greater wealth, but greater economic inequality.

I think the point of Dust Specks Vs Torture was scope failure. Even allowing for some sort of "negative marginal utility" once you hit a wacky number 3^^^3, it doesn't matter. .000001 negative utility point multiplied by 3^^^3 is worse than anything, because 3^^^3 is wacky huge.

For the stick example, I'd say it would have to depend on a lot of factors about human psychology and such, but I think I'd hit the one. Marginal utility tends to go down for a product, and I think that the shock of repeated blows would be less than the shock of the one against ten separate people.

I think your opinion basically is an appeal to egalitarianism, since you expect negative utility to yourself from an unfair world where one person gets something that ten other people did not, for no good or fair reason.

I'd analyze your question this way. Ask any one of the ten people which they would prefer: A) to get hit B) to have a 1/10th chance of getting hit 9 times.

Assuming rationality and constant disutility of getting hit, every one of them would choose B.

I was thinking something similar just today:

Some people think out loud. Some people don't. Smart people who think out loud are perceived as "witty" or "clever." You learn a lot from being around them; you can even imitate them a little bit. They're a lot of fun. Smart people who don't think out loud are perceived as "geniuses." You only ever see the finished product, never their thought processes. Everything they produce is handed down complete as if from God. They seem dumber than they are when they're quiet, and smarter than they are when you see their work, because you have no window into the way they think.

In my experience, there are far more people who don't think out loud in math than in less quantitative fields. This may be part of why math is perceived as so hard; there are all these smart people who are hard to learn from, because they only reveal the finished product and not the rough draft. Rough drafts make things look feasible. Regular smart people look like geniuses if they leave no rough drafts. There may really be people who don't need rough drafts in the way that we mundanes do -- I've heard of historical figures like that, and those really are savants -- but it's possible that some people's "genius" is overstated just because they're cagey about expressing half-formed ideas.

I'm not a psychologist but I thought I could improve on the vagueness of the original discussion.

There are a few factors which determine "smartness" (or potential for success):

1. Speed. Having faster hardware.

2. Pattern Recognition. Being better at "chunking".

3. Memory.

4. Creativity. (="divergent" thinking.)

5. Detail-awareness.

6. Experience. Having incorporated many routines into the subconscious thanks to extensive practice.

7. Knowledge. (Quality is more important than quantity.)

The first five traits might be considered part of someone's "talent." Experience and knowledge, which I'll group together as "training", must be gained through hard work. Potential for success is determined by a geometric (rather than additive) combination of talent and training: that is, roughly,

potential for success=talent * training

All this math, of course, is not remotely intended to be taken at face value, but it's merely the most efficient way to make my point.

The "super-smart" start life with more talent than average. The rule of the bell curve holds, so they generally do not have an overwhelming cognitive advantage over the average person. But they have enough talent to justify investing much more of their resources into training. This is because a person with 15 talent will gain 15 success for every unit of time they put into training, while a unit of training is worth 17 success for a person with 17 talent. The less time you have to spend, the more time costs, so all other things being equal, the person with more talent will put more time into training. Suppose the person with 15 talent puts 100 units of time into training, and the person with 17 talent puts 110 units of time into training. Then:

person with 15 talent * 100 training => 15000 success

person with 17 talent * 110 training => 18700 success

Which is 25% more success for only 13% more talent.

There's probably some more formal work done along these lines, I'm not an economist either.

If you're interpreting "super-smart" to mean always right, or at least reasonable, and thus never severely wrong-headed, I think you're correct that no one like that exists, but it seems like a rather comic bookish idea of super-smartness.

Also, I have no idea how good your judgment is about whether what you call brain-hurtful is actually ideas I'd think were egregiously wrong.

I think there are a lot of folks smart enough to be special people-- those who come up with worthwhile insights frequently.

And even if it's just a matter of generating lots of ideas and then publishing the best, recognizing the best is a worthwhile skill. It's conceivable that idea-generation and idea-recognizing are done by two people who together give the impression of one person who's smarter than either of them.

How would you describe the writing patterns of super-smart people? Similarly, how would meeting/talking/debating them would feel like?

Have you never had an in-person conversation with a super-smart person?

Also, hi folks, I'm back. It is surprisingly difficult to dive back into LW after leaving it for a few weeks.

Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos.

I winced.

I would like to see a top-level link post and discussion of this article (and maybe other related papers).

So... If a quantum event has a 30% chance of going LEFT and a 70% chance of going right . . . you'll have a 30% probability of observing LEFT and a 70% probability of observing RIGHT.

So why is this surprising?

The surprising (or confusing, mysterious, what have you) thing is that quantum theory doesn't talk about a 30% probability of LEFT and a 70% probability of RIGHT; what it talks about is how LEFT ends up with an "amplitude" of 0.548 and RIGHT with an "amplitude" of 0.837. We know that the observed probability ends up being the square of the absolute value of the amplitude, but we don't know why, or how this even makes sense as a law of physics.

Delightful, and has a nice breakdown of the sort of questions to ask yourself (what exactly is the problem, how much precision is actually needed, what is the condition of the tools, etc.) if you want to get things done efficiently.

It doesn't look encouraging. The discussions just don't converge, they meander all over the place and leave no crystalline residue of correct answers. (Achievement unlocked: Mixed Metaphor)

It is problematic but necessary, in my opinion. Politics IS the mind-killer, but politics DOES matter. Avoiding the topic would seem to be an admission that this rationality thing is really just a pretty toy.

But it would be nice to lay down some ground-rules.

I don't think anyone has mentioned a political party or a specific current policy debate yet. That's when things really go downhill.

My feelings on this are mixed. I've found LW to be a refreshing refuge from such quarrels. On the other hand, without careful thought political debates reliably descend into madness quickly, and it is not as if politics is unimportant. Perhaps taking the mental techniques discussed here to other forums could improve the generally atrocious level of reasoning usually found in online political discussions, though I expect the effect would be small.

As a start, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy is a branch of psychotherapy with some respect around here because of the evidence that it sometimes works, compared to the other fields of psychotherapy with no evidence.

I can't help you with the Denver area in particular, but the general answer is a definite yes. In an interesting juxtaposition, American Psychologist magazine had a recent issue prominently featuring discussion of how to get past the misuse of statistics discussed in this very LW open thread. And it's not the first time the magazine addressed the point.

Does cognitive rationalist therapy count as both rationalist and psychology for purposes of this question?

I think Learning Methods is a more sophisticated rationalist approach than CBT (it does a more meticulous job of identifying underlying thoughts), and might be worth checking into.

We already have these buttons on LessWrong... ;)

What would happen in such a world?

Classical game theorists establish a scientific consensus that the only rational course of action is not to push the buttons. Anyone who does is regarded with contempt or pity and gets lowered in the social stratum, before finally managing to rationalize the idea out of conscious attention, with the help of the instinct to conformity. A few free-riders smugly teach the remaining naive pushers a bitter lesson, only to stop receiving the benefit. Everyone gets back to business as usual, crazy people spinning the wheels of a mad world.

A social custom would be established that buttons are only to be pressed by knocking foreheads together. Offering to press a button in a fashion that doesn't ensure mutuality is seen as a pathetic display of low status.

Interesting. I have read several of Loftus's books, but the last one was The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse over ten years ago. I think I'll go see what she has written since. Thanks for reminding me of her work.

The caveat is of course that Counterfactual Mugging or Newcomb Problem are not to be analyzed as situations you encounter in real life: the artificial elements that get introduced are specified explicitly, not by an update from surprising observation. For example, the condition that Omega is trustworthy can't be credibly expected to be observed.

The thought experiments explicitly describe the environment you play your part in, and your knowledge about it, the state of things that is much harder to achieve through a sequence of real-life observations, by updating your current knowledge.

Whatever our prior for encountering No-mega, it should be counterbalanced by our prior for encountering Yes-mega (who rewards you if you are counterfactually-muggable).

Surely the last thing on anyone's mind, having been persuaded they're in the presence of Omega in real life, is whether or not to give $100 :)

I like the No-mega idea (it's similar to a refutation of Pascal's wager by invoking contrary gods), but I wouldn't raise my expectation for the number of No-mega encounters I'll have by very much upon encountering a solitary Omega.

Generalizing No-mega to include all sorts of variants that reward stupid or perverse behavior (are there more possible God-likes that reward things strange and alien to us?), I'm not in the least bit concerned.

I suppose it's just a good argument not to make plans for your life on the basis of imagined God-like beings. There should be as many gods who, when pleased with your action, intervene in your life in a way you would not consider pleasant, and are pleased at things you'd consider arbitrary, as those who have similar values they'd like us to express, and/or actually reward us copacetically.

Twentysomethings like her are filling up the workforce.

Do you mean young people with unrepayable college debt, or young people with unrepayable debt for degrees which were totally unlikely to be of any use?

Arnold Kling has some thoughts about the plight of the unskilled college grad.

1 2

The amount you could slow down Moore's Law by any strategy is minuscule compared to the amount you can contribute to FAI progress if you choose. It's like feeling guilty over not recycling a paper cup, when you're planning to become a lobbyist for an environmentalist group later.

Uninformed opinion: space weather modelling doesn't seem like a huge market, especially when you compare it to the truly massive gaming market. I doubt the increase in demand would be significant, and if what you're worried about is rate of growth, it seems like delaying it a couple of years would be wholly insignificant.

I would say that there seem to be a lot of companies that are in one way or another trying to advance Moore's law. For as long as it doesn't seem like the one you're working on has a truly revolutionary advantage as compared to the other companies, just taking the money but donating a large portion of it to existential risk reduction is probably an okay move.

(Full disclosure: I'm an SIAI Visiting Fellow so they're paying my upkeep right now.)

Personally trying to slow Moore's Law down is the kind of foolishness that Eliezer seems to inspire in young people...

If you get an opportunity like that, take it. It's one thing to gain emotional comfort from believing fantasies about computers with magical powers, but when fantasy is being used as a reason to close off real life opportunity, something is badly wrong.

There is a small remark in Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making about insurance saying that all insurance has negative expected utility, we pay too high a price for too little a risk, otherwise insurance companies would go bankrupt.

No -- Insurance has negative expected monetary return, which is not the same as expected utility. If your utility function obeys the law of diminishing marginal utility, then it also obeys the law of increasing marginal disutility. So, for example, losing 10x will be more than ten times as bad as losing x. (Just as gaining 10x is less than ten times as good as gaining x.)

Therefore, on your utility curve, a guaranteed loss of x can be better than a 1/1000 chance of losing 1000x.

ETA: If it helps, look at a logarithmic curve and treat it as your utility as a function of some quantity. Such a curve obeys diminishing marginal utility. At any given point, your utility increases less than proportionally going up, but more than proportionally going down.

(Incidentally, I acutally wrote an embarrasing article arguing in favor of the thesis roland presents, and you can still probably find on it the internet. That exchange is also an example of someone being bad at explaining. If my opponent had simply stated the equivalence between DMU and IMD, I would have understood why that argument about insurance is wrong. Instead, he just resorted to lots of examples of when people buy insurance that are totally unconvincing if you accept the quoted argument.)

Risk is more expensive when you have a smaller bankroll. Many slot machines actually offer positive expected value payouts - they make their return on people plowing their winnings back in until they go broke.

I'd like to pose a related question. Why is insurance structured as up-front payments and unlimited coverage, and not as conditional loans?

For example, one could imagine car insurance as a options contract (or perhaps a futures) where if your car is totaled, you get a loan sufficient for replacement. One then pays off the loan with interest.

The person buying this form of insurance makes fewer payments upfront, reducing their opportunity costs and also the risk of letting nsurance lapse due to random fluctuations. The entity selling this form of insurance reduces the risk of moral hazard (ie. someone taking out insurance, torching their car, and then letting insurance lapse the next month).

Except in assuming strange consumer preferences or irrationality, I don't see any obvious reason why this form of insurance isn't superior to the usual kind.

Obviously if you know your utility function and the true distribution of possible risks, it's easy to decide whether to take a particular insurance deal.

The standard advice is that if you can afford to self-insure, you should, for the reason you cite (that insurance companies make a profit, on average).

That's a heuristic that holds up fine except when you know (for reasons you will keep secret from insurers) your own risk is higher than they could expect; then, depending on how competitive insurers are, even if you're not too risk-averse, you might find a good deal, even to the extent that you turn an expected (discounted) profit, and so should buy it even if you have zero risk aversion. Apparently in California, auto insurers are required to publish the algorithm by which they assign premiums (and are possibly prohibited from using certain types of information).

Conversely, you may choose to have no insurance (or extremely high deductible) in cases where you believe your personal risk is far below what the insurer appears to believe, even when you're actually averse to that risk.

Of course, it's not sufficient to know how wrong the insurer's estimate of your risk is; they insist on a pretty wide vig - not just to survive both uncertainties in their estimation of risk and the market returns on the float, but also to compensate for the observed amount of successful adverse selection that results from people applying the above heuristic.

I suppose it may also be possible that the insurer won't pay. I don't know what exactly what guarantees we have in the U.S.

We should form large nonprofit risk pools.

Some insurances are not worth getting, obviously. Like insurance on laptops or music players. But that insurance in general has negative expected utility assumes no risk aversion. If you can handle the risks on your own - if you are effectively self-insuring - then you probably should do that. But a house burning down or getting a rare cancer that will cost millions to treat: these are not self-insurable things unless you are a millionaire.

Thanks for the link.

If people's desires are influenced by parasites, what does that do to CEV?

I don't see where dualism comes in. Specifically what kind of dualism are you talking about?

Being a monist means believing that if things don't make sense, it is due to limited knowledge and a limited brain. But the problem of existence is such that no amount of knowledge will solve it: there's nothing we could ever learn (or even believe) within X that would solve this problem. ... So to the extent that I am correct that this problem is not in theory solvable in X means that X is incomplete.

A problem being unsolvable within some system does not imply that there is some outer system where it can be solved. Take the Halting Problem, for example: there are programs such that we cannot prove whether or not they will never halt, and this itself is provable. Yet there is a right answer in any given instance — a program will halt or it won't — but we can never know in some cases.

That you say "I cannot understand what the answer to the problem could possibly be" suggests that it is a wrong question. Ask "Why do I think the universe exists?" instead of "Why does the universe exist?". I have my tentatively preferred answer to that, but maybe you will come up with something interesting.

By "problem of existence" you mean why we exist and how we came to exist? Why do you think that can't be answered within our world? And what do you think a world would look like if you could solve the problem in it?