If you do not have compulsory patent licensing with court-set fees, then why should any one patent troll--or even the holder of a rare real patent--stop short of demanding the company's entire profit?

In practice, there are often substitutes for whatever it is that the patent owner has a patent on - if someone has a patent on making wheels out of metal and won't let you license that patent at a reasonable price, you can still make wheels out of wood or stone one instead even if they're not nearly as good. So there is a limit to the amount of revenue that a patent holder can demand.

Additionally, if the patent holder and the licensee don't agree on a price, neither of them gets anything, so they each have an incentive to make an offer the other will accept. The game theory of bargaining over a fixed surplus applies here.

And yet you will observe that in all public political discourse that makes it onto TV, all the sober talking heads in business suits are talking as if by subsidizing people with $120 checks we are causing their bank accounts to go up by $120, rather than talking about how many new universities or doctors or houses the $120 checks will cause to exist.

On the bright side, the discourse might be getting a little bit better in places. Some years ago, a California politician proposed helping renters by making rent tax deductible. The proposal was immediately mocked as being a giveaway to landlords.

I have an objection to the section titled "supply and demand are always equal". In my Econ 101 textbook, "quanitiy supplied" and "quantity demanded" are always equal; the terms "supply" and "demand" only referred to supply curves and demand curves. Maybe this is a nitpick, but I think it's an important one. I'd like to propose some rather significant edits to that section and to the following one about subsidies, but is this the kind of page where it's okay for changes to come from anyone, or is it important that it stay "by Eliezer Yudkowsky"?

It's not agreed among economists which countries today might be suffering from too little aggregate demand, and working under capacity. The economists in my preferred school suspect that it is presently happening inside the European Union due to the European Central Bank being run by lunatics.

This may have been true in 2017, but post-COVID inflation suggests that it's not true anymore.

Are there really people in the world who can do nothing that anybody else with money wants?

Yes. These people are often called "disabled", "retired", or "children". For example, a person with severe Alzheimer's disease or schizophrenia is unlikely to be able to produce much of anything at all. Most people, if they live long enough, will eventually suffer enough damage from aging that they semi-voluntarily remove themselves from the labor force. Similarly, your average two-year-old probably isn't going to be productively employable either, regardless of the wage, because it would cost more to supervise them than they would be able to produce. However, most people who are of prime working age and unemployed are not, in fact, disabled to the point where even in an ideal world there would be nobody that would want to pay them to do something.

many theoretical computer scientists think our conjecture is false

Does that mean that you (plural) are either members of a theoretical computer science community or have discussed the conjecture with people that are? (I have no idea who you are or what connections you may or may not have with academia in general.)

Looking good to his superiors is the one thing the Pointy-Haired Boss is actually good at. Several strips show that some of his ridiculous-seeming decisions make perfect sense from that perspective.

<irony>Robustly generalizible like noticing that bacteria aren't growing next to a certain kind of mold that contaminated your petri dish or that photographic film is getting fogged when there's no obvious source of light?</irony>

Elaborating on The Very General Helper Strategy: the first thing you do when planning a route by hand is find some reasonably up-to-date maps.

One thing that almost always tends to robustly generalize is improving the tools that people use to gather information and make measurements. And this also tends to snowball in unexpected ways - would anyone have guessed beforehand that the most important invention in the history of medicine would turn out to be a better magnifying glass? (And tools can include mathematical techniques, too - being able to run statistical analysis on a computer lets you find a lot of patterns you wouldn't be able to find if it was 1920 and you had to do it all by hand.)

With regards to AI, that might mean interpretability research?

Hmmm. Taking this literally, if I didn't know where I was going, one thing I might do is look up hotel chains and find out which ones suit my needs with respect to price level and features and which don't, so when I know what city I want to travel to, I can then find out if my top choices of hotel chain have a hotel in a convenient location there.

Meta-strategy: try to find things that are both relevant to what you want and mostly independent of the things you don't know about?

For some reason, this story generated a sense of dread in me - I kept waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop.

Well, you could start by looking at the cosmetic differences achieved by dog breeders as a lower limit to what it is possible to acheive by tinkering with a genome...

Straight-up diminishing marginal utility of wealth, then?

Well, that's the Bay Area for you - ground zero for both computer-related things and the hippie movement.

The answer to your specific question about the Fermi Paradox is that, after an AI destroys its creators, the AI itself would presumably still be there to do whatever it wanted, which could include plans for the rest of the universe outside its solar system. So "AI that kills its creators" still leaves us with the question of why we haven't seen any AIs spreading through our galaxy either.

I live in New Jersey and have no job and lots of free time. How can I do this for someone without moving to the Bay Area?

Human capital is worth nothing after you die, though.

Does the answer to "should I buy insurance" change if the interest rate that you earn on your wealth is zero or even negative?

Although I don't quite fit the broader diagnosis, the phrase "demand avoidance" does describe how I've been at my low points - what I wanted most at those times in my life was to be free from obligations in general, such as the obligation to go to school, the obligation to get out of bed, the obligation to eat food, etc. - for there to be absolutely nothing that I would "have to" do if I preferred not to do it. Unfortunately, taking that impulse - to be free to do absolutely nothing, without anyone or anything influencing me otherwise - to its logical extreme would mean being dead, because, given physics, nonexistence is the only state in which that condition actually holds.

I did have an "internship" right after college for a few months and was completely miserable during it. The other problem was that one thing I valued highly was free time, and regardless of how much money and status a 40 hour a week job gives you, that's still 40 hours a week in which your time isn't free! There are very few jobs in which, like an Uber driver, you have absolute freedom to choose when and how much to work and the only consequence of not working for a period of time is that you don't get paid - you can't "lose your job" for choosing not to show up. Unfortunately, most jobs that fit that description, such as Uber driver or fiction novel writer, usually pay very poorly.

Yet another problem is that I feel like applying for jobs will be futile. Spending time submitting resumes into a metaphorical black hole and never getting any interviews or even a form letter in response, even from grocery stores, has left me in despair and even starting to think about job hunting consistently and reliably makes me start to feel incredibly depressed.

Quite possibly. I did get an ADHD diagnosis as a kid...

Yeah, except that sometimes I'm weirdly insensitive to punishments and other threats. For some reason, my brain often (mistakenly?) concludes that doing the thing that would let me avoid the punishment is impossible, and I just shut down completely instead of trying to comply.

As I once wrote before:

Guy with a gun: I'm going to shoot you if you haven't changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.

Me: AAH I'M GOING TO DIE IT'S NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I'M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM

Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just... change the sheets?

ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I'M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I'M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN'T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM

Also, the "worse consequences" were often projected to happen years in the future: you need good grades to get into a good college and then get a good job, etc. The fear of being homeless years in the future when your money runs out isn't really all that great when the "good" future you can imagine for yourself doesn't seem very appealing either - the idea of having a full-time job horrified ten-year-old me for various reasons, and I never really managed to get over that, to the point where I never did manage to get and keep a "real" job after college. There were years I lived with the constant worry that my parents might one day decide to stop supporting me financially and kick me out of their house...

Pets often make their needs quite obvious if you "forget" to take care of them. When my dog wants something from me, he won't leave me alone until I figure out what it is.

They can also be immediately rewarding and stay that way. I wouldn't necessarily recommend a goldfish, but if you're already an animal lover it's hard to become bored with a dog or cat.

Ten-year-old me had an objection to the idea of "willpower" on principle. Obviously, "Willpower" is the process by which people get themselves to do unpleasant things. I don't want to do unpleasant things. Therefore, having as little Willpower as possible will minimize the unpleasant things I end up doing.

Another way I've found myself with a lack of ability to motivate myself seems related to the post's original thesis. Up until I finally graduated college, my typical use of "willpower"-based motivation would be to do something I'd rather not have to do (usually homework) in order to avoid consequences that were supposed to be worse than doing the unpleasant thing. Unfortunately, this led to a bad feedback loop. My brain would predict that homework would be less fun than video games, I'd do it anyway, it would indeed be less fun than video games, and the lesson my brain would learn would be "pay less attention to that voice screaming that undone homework leads to doom" instead of "good, we successfully avoided the problem of undone homework". Eventually, doing homework became so aversive that I actually did stop caring about what might happen if I stopped doing it...

I donated $100. I'm fairly income-constrained at the moment so I'd be nervous about donating more.

That might be okay. But I reserve the right to refuse to treat any possible "mind" that does not participate in the arrow of time as though it did not exist.

A while back, I decided that any theory of cosmology that implies that I'm a Boltzmann brain is almost certainly wrong.

Something like that!

I've heard that, in Las Vegas, if you put yourself on the government's "compulsive gambler" list, you can still walk into any casino, give them your money, and place a bet - the only difference being that, if you happen to win, the casino keeps your money as if you had lost.

I think it should work the other way around, making it the casino's responsibility to avoid accepting bets from self-proclaimed problem gamblers - if you're on the list and the casino doesn't stop you from betting, the casino has to give you back any money you lose.

It's also trivial to make a perpetual motion machine with Portal portals. Just have a portal in the floor that teleports you to the ceiling directly above it, then drop a ball into it. It'll fall forever, accelerating until it hits terminal velocity (at which point all the gravitational potential energy goes to heating the air it falls through).

If you don't want to just throw out conservation of energy, using a portal to "lift" things would have to take the same amount of energy as lifting it through normal space does.

Sometimes I remember having had the thought "this is a dream" while dreaming, but doing that doesn't really give me any extra "conscious" control over what happens - all it does is let me "decide" to wake up.

What about the other way around?

I have yet to be able to successfully make a Google search during a dream - what I "intend" to search for is never what appears in the box I'm trying to "type" the search query into.

Jacen Solo became an evil Sith because the people in charge of the Star Wars franchise at the time thought having the brother named Anakin Solo be the one to do it would be too ridiculous. The rest is writers trying to make the decisions of a Pointy-Haired Boss make sense.

I think I've probably spent the majority of my 42 years of life in a laziness death spiral. ☹️

In other words, aggressively run away from your goals, and reflect on how miserable it is to live that way. The reflection is crucial: if you’re self-forgetful / not mindful about it, you’ll risk staying in that state. Do it for a week or two, reflect on how much it sucks, and in doing so you’ll condition your mind to view the goal as a valuable opportunity to escape that misery (which it is).

When I do this kind of thing, it tends to be called "depressive rumination". Rather than decide "not doing the thing sucks, therefore I should go do the thing", some part of me assumes that "doing the thing" isn't actually an option (because otherwise I would have done it already) and I just stay miserable. On a more general note, I also somehow managed to live for 42 years without gaining the capacity to do something at a time I don't "feel like" doing it, even though a lot of other people tried very hard to instill that capacity in me through force and threats.

In a different context, I once gave a deliberately exaggerated example of one way my motivational system actually works in practice:

Guy with a gun: I'm going to shoot you if you haven't changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.

Me: AAH I'M GOING TO DIE IT'S NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I'M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM

Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just... change the sheets?

ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I'M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I'M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN'T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM

The other problem I have is the same one I've had for much of my adult life - I don't know what to do wity my life other than live in a laziness death spiral, because a lot of the common alternatives also seem terrible and I do not know what I want.

You see, 10-year-old me was a hedonist, and probably had a relatively sophisticated philosophy of hedonism for a 10-year-old. He divided the world into "fun", defined as "pleasurable things I do because I choose to, such as play video games", and "work", defined as "anything I'm being forced to do, such as schoolwork or laundry," and his goal in life was to maximize "fun" and minimize "work". He resented school for keeping him away from his video games and thought that having a 40-hour a week job, the way most adults did, must be an even worse fate than being a child in school, because you were still doing "work" on behalf of other people instead of doing the thing that's the most pleasurable, and it takes up even more of your time than school does.

I still have a view of paid employment that equates it with misery and coercion. I don't know how much I can blame my father in particular for this, and I also tried my hardest to avoid internalizing a value system that said that someone who was capable of working for money but preferred not to was a worthless person, but I also spent a long time living under clouds of sentiments like "your parents aren't going to be around to support you forever" and "people who don't work end up homeless and starving" and "people won't respect you for being good at things that don't make money." Instead of working, I spent most of the past 20-ish years as an unpaid family caregiver for sick relatives. I didn't have any close friends I saw in person on a regular basis, and I didn't think Hello, my name is ----, I'm unemployed and live with my parents would actually work on a dating site profile, so I spent a lot of time lonely and feeling bad about myself.

Perhaps ironically, the thing that actually did help me - besides the antidepressant medication I've been on since high school - was when a woman reached out to me online after a brief encounter and ended up becoming my first girlfriend ever and, later, my wife. That was about ten years ago. I couldn't motivate myself on my own behalf, but I could do it for her, and that was enough. Was, because she died last March and I once again am left drifting without a purpose in life. Sigh...

I have no idea!

Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.

-- John Harrington

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

-- Arthur C. Clarke

The quote is from an appendix that consists entirely of epigrams that are attributed to one of the characters in the play - it's not actually part of the play as performed. (Shaw was tired of "smart" characters in plays that don't actually do anything to show that they're smart so he wrote it to justify the character's asserted intelligence.)

(The joke here is that, given the other axioms of ZF set theory, each of these three things can be used to prove the other two - they're either all true or all false, regardless of how plausible or implausible they might seem on their own.)

If things go wrong[1] then our neural net will conclude that it has high status despite all evidence to the contrary. We have programmed schizophrenia.

No, you've programmed grandiose delusions - a lot more goes wrong with schizophrenia than just that.

I wrote a two paragraph argument for AI risk a while back. Does it work?

There's an old joke...

An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, and an AI researcher were asked to name the greatest invention of all time.

The engineer chose fire, which gave humanity power over matter. The physicist chose the wheel, which gave humanity the power over space. The mathematician chose the alphabet, which gave humanity power over symbols. The AI researcher chose the thermos bottle.

"Why a thermos bottle?" the others asked. "Because the thermos keeps hot liquids hot in winter and cold liquids cold in summer.", said the AI researcher. "Yes - so what?" "Think about it.", intoned the researcher reverently. "That little bottle - how does it know?"

Don't forget Baumol's cost disease: if one part of the economy gets a lot more productive per labor-hour, then wages in other parts will go up to compensate. I don't think that the number of employees per patient in a hospital or the number of employees per student in a university is lower today than it was in the 1980s, even if hospitals and universities have improved in other ways.

In terms of food prices in particular, what I've heard is that prices at the grocery store and in restaurants depend much more on the cost of labor than on anything else. Grocery stores themselves operate on razor-thin margins, and changes in the price of wheat and other "raw materials" have only tiny effects on grocery store prices. Most of the actual expense of putting food on grocery store shelves comes from the cost of food processing (turning wheat into bread, cutting up dead animals into cuts of meat, etc.), which is a fairly labor-intensive industry.

I can't speak for humanities degrees, but if you're going to an engineering school, you're almost certainly going to need at least some of what you learn in college in order to work as an engineer. (To paraphase a saying, half of what you learn as an engineering student might never get used in a real job, but you can't predict which half!) Furthermore, programming is unusually easy to self-study compared to most STEM disciplines (no need to learn differential equations!), and it's a lot easier to show you can work as a programmer by writing and demonstrating your own computer program than it is to demonstrate that you can work as an aerospace engineer by building and demonstrating your own airplane.

I imagine the same thing is true of other professional degrees: you're not going to become a physician or nurse without first attending the appropriate institutions.

Also, if you're like my brother and have "make a fuckton of money" as a major life goal, "be a smart person and attend a prestigious college" opens up a lot of doors to ridiculously high paying positions. He's not "unicorn startup founder" rich, but he is a multimillionaire who has been paid more money in a single year working at a hedge fund than my father, a retired professor of electrical engineering, made in his lifetime. (I wouldn't trade lives with him, incidentally - I don't want to have an 80 hour work week, and video games are cheap.)

Sometimes, you might as well solve the Rubix Cube by peeling the stickers off and sticking them back on.

TvTropes calls this Cutting the Knot, after the story of Alexander and the Gordian Knot.

Do things like major surgery or bomb defusal have those kinds of constraints?

Strong upvote because I really, really hate quackery.