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Ah, thanks, okay, I get it now. That's a very different proposition! Updated my post.
MoviePass users are selected for seeing a lot of movies. If MoviePass makes a business plan that models users as average people, it will lose a lot of money. Conditional on someone wanting to buy MoviePass, MoviePass probably should not want them as a customer.
I'm going to nitpick here and note that the marginal cost to the cinema of allowing in an extra customer is often close to zero, seeing as most films don't sell out. It may even be positive, if they spend money on popcorn and drinks, and invite their friends who don't have a pass. It seems from that article that the failure in the business model was partly that MoviePass was just badly managed, partly that people were abusing the system in various ways by scalping/ selling tickets/ getting hundreds of people using the same service. I checked my local cinema chain and they started running an 'Unlimited' service over a decade ago, and it's still in use, so I think it remains a valid model.
Correction: I understand the MoviePass model now and the adverse selection argument makes more sense. Cinemas with a subscription model can work even with a high proportion of power users, but that's because the externalities (popcorn, drinks, inviting friends) accrue to the cinema.
I presume the stated goal of schooling your child in this way is to set the grown-up's mind at ease, rather than ensuring the child is left alone (which is probably the default outcome), and I expect both responses would suffice for this instrumental purpose.
I expect the grown-up would probably look confused, then question the child further. The well-rehearsed child would then explain the negative externalities that society has imposed upon itself by reducing these risks to near-zero, and how it is optimal for society to only reduce these risks until the marginal benefit of further risk reduction is equal to the marginal cost.
At this point, if your child has managed to make the case effectively, the grown-up would realise that the child is probably mature enough to make their own decisions whether to stay outside alone or not.
Technically true, but it's a very unagentic way for a five-year old to respond to something they should have the capability to justify through argument.
I think we should be discouraging unjustified appeals to authority in our children, so...
"Rehearsing with my kids what they’d say if a grownup asks why they’re alone: “My parents said it’s ok for me to be here The socially optimal level of abduction/traffic accident risk is not zero”
Some good thoughts here.
My thinking is that participation in online communities is mostly incentivised through status and inclusion. Upvotes or informal status mechanisms enable someone to be perceived as a valued member of an online community that they identify with. But power and status are subtly different - moderators have the power to ban, admonish, censor, and sometimes signal-boost, but they don't necessarily gain respect or status based on this - in fact, it's often the opposite.
Creators acquire status based on the quality of their output (through formal (Karma) and informal (general reputation) mechanisms), but the power that this affords is usually quite indirect (extra upvoting power on LW and EA forums). This can potentially transform into real-world power over the moderators in the case of a coup or a protest, but I'd say that this attracts a different kind of person to moderation.
I'm not sure how useful the "duty vs. privilege" framing is, but the idea that some of these activities may be over- or under-incentivised is an important question. I'd have thought that moderation would be under-incentivised, which is why I've always been a bit fascinated by voluntary moderation. 4chan-type forums are the most bizarre example; it has always perplexed me that someone is taking this "responsible" social role to make sure that /pol stays "on-topic" despite the sub-forum being an anarchic cesspit, and probably getting influxes of hate from censored/ banned participants while doing so. But the existence of moderation suggests that there must be a type of person who genuinely enjoys the power that it affords.
Writing high-quality original posts is probably appropriately incentivized - there are enough people who like writing and it provides internal and external validation. Like with meta-analysis and replicating in academia, there are probably some curation tasks that are under-incentivized in most online spaces, but LW/ EA seem pretty good at that.
Forgive the unverified sources here, but total potato consumption seems to correlate quite strongly with obesity across Europe, so if there's any causal effect behind the potato, it would have to explain why countries that eat potatoes as staples seem to have slightly higher obesity rates than other countries.
This response is incorrect. Firstly, Google Consumer Surveys is very different from MTurk. MTurk users are paid to pay attention to the task for a given amount of time, and they are not 'paid ads'.
"People are incentivized to complete these as soon as possible and there is little penalty for inaccuracy."
This is generally untrue for MTurk - when you run online surveys with MTurk:
1) You set exclusion criteria for people finishing too quickly
2) You set attention check questions that, when you fail, exclude a respondent
3) A respondent is also excluded for certain patterns of answers e.g. answering the same for all questions or sometimes for giving contradictory answers
4) The respondent is rated on their response quality, and they will lose reputation points (and potentially future employment opportunities) for giving an inaccurate response
You can apply these criteria more or less rigorously, but I'd assume that the study designers followed standard practice (see this doc), at least.
I'm not claiming that MTurk is a very good way of getting humans to respond attentively, of course. There are lots of studies looking at error rates: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.04459.pdf and there are obvious issues with exclusively looking at a population of 'professional survey respondents' for any given question.
So I'm not exactly sure how this survey causes me to update. Perhaps especially because they're slightly rushing the answers, it's genuinely interesting that so many people choose to respond to the (perceived) moderate complexity task (which they assume is: "calculate 110 - 100"), rather than either the simple task: "write out the number 5".
"What is the empirical evidence for decomposition being a technique that improves forecasts?"
I might be misunderstanding here, but I'm fairly confident that the recent history of predicting sports outcomes and developing live betting odds very strongly supports decomposition as a technique (under some conditions).
It seems like the only rational way of predicting the outcome of a multi-stage sports event (like the FIFA World Cup, for example) is decomposing the chances of a team winning the World Cup into the chances of them winning each previous game. (And then adding a K-factor to adjust to recent results).
American capitalism "stealing" food is usually a process of lower-income, unskilled migrants moving to a country and adapting their cuisines to American tastes/ ingredients, which explains the wave of Italian (historically), Chinese, Mexican, Thai and Indian places far better than the quality of their respective cuisines. Not sure about Korean/ Japanese places (higher income), but (in Europe at least) they're mostly run by people from Wenzhou, unless they're high-end, which may be an interesting exception to the rule.
I'd guess you see very few restaurants from countries with low outmigration (East Africa) or higher-income migrants (Northern Europe).
In places in North America where they actually had a significant wave of French migrants, like Quebec, you see a lot of French cuisine.
This wouldn't explain the "German restaurant phenomenon" you identify, but I think you'll need some more evidence to back that up. I tried to get an estimate of this disparity by googling a few US cities, like: "chicago "german restaurant"" and "chicago "French restaurant"". There seem to be 4 times as many results for French.
I'll hazard a guess that there are more French restaurants in the US than restaurants of any other European cuisine except Italian.
A few points:
- Europeans denigrate the American food they are exposed to, which is the "unsophisticated" stuff that they import the most of. It would be weird if they spent their time ripping into gumbo and fried rattlesnake.
- Regular consumers of McDonalds in Europe are not the same people who also denigrate American food. The people who denigrate American cuisine are usually also a little sneering towards domestic consumers of McD.
- Many consumers (in US and Europe) see McD cuisine as an inferior product, but it has obvious benefits beyond taste (convenience/ speed/ child-friendliness/ toilets/ wi-fi).
I was pretty surprised that Peru was so low, as I assumed it was generally recognised as an excellent cuisine. But a lot of the ordering seems to match my understanding of the world, so something strange must be going on with Peru.
It probably has to do with the sample "people who have tried the cuisine in that country", but don't know why that would apply to Peru. It would make sense that, say, Saudi/ Emirati cuisine are under-rated, as the majority of visitors probably just grab an overpriced meal at the airport or in a mall during a stopover.
That's true for fancy meals, the opposite for regular diets. Chinese people have very high-carb diets (200 kg of grains (rice/ wheat) per person, one of the higher grain consumers globally), but fancy meals are intended to signal prestige, so therefore avoid cheap carbs.
Only China and Thailand have it lower than America, and I am guessing that opinion is mostly not about the food.
Small comment- I'm sure it is mostly about the food. Almost every time I've tried Indian cuisine with Chinese people, they make the same comments about the unfamiliar and strange spices.
The perceptions of hygiene/ racism might play a small role, but Chinese people do enjoy some Indian snacks (you get Manda Roti at some tourist locations), so it seems much more parsimonious to me that it's mostly about the flavours.
20% of Gen Z Americans seem to identify as LGBT, so increasing LGBT rates could explain a lot of the variance- especially for women (where there's less variance to explain and more LGBT). Correction: (But it does seem that the B (57%) is more common than the LGT (https://news.gallup.com/poll/389792/lgbt-identification-ticks-up.aspx), which might make it less explanatory - but there could be a reasonable proportion of bi young people avoiding hetero relationships).
Thanks for the positivity! Much appreciated.
I think the counterargument to your "added complexity" point would be that this complexity might be a good thing (returning to the 'theatre/ fun' point and the 'mental practice' point in the piece), so I would only consider it a cost if you're trying to simplify your social interactions. I personally tell the truth almost all the time now, but this is partly just out of laziness- I struggle to harness the energy or creativity to weave and maintain interesting webs of deception (it was both easier and more fun to lie when I travelled more and didn't have a full-time job). On the other hand, I also suspect that it's mentally more difficult to be radically honest than to lean towards the 'mostly honest' part of the spectrum of honesty/ dishonesty.
I'm not sure if people who lie are more likely to believe falsehoods, actually. It seems plausible that liars could be better at detecting deception.
I deliberately wanted to avoid the 'truly adverserial cases' here- I find that the debate around honesty is too closely anchored to the premise that 'lying is always bad' (but what about the murderer at the door?) and I wanted to make the case there might be rational and fairly obvious reasons to lie.
Having said that, I do think honesty norms are generally good, especially with colleagues, close friends and partners- I'm probably more honest than the default in my culture, and would bring a child up with fairly strong honesty norms, at least until they were old enough to weigh up the trade-offs themselves.
But I also think that, when people lie, they should do so with a sense of playfulness, which probably inspired the tone for the post.
Not sure what your point is here...
It's true that virtue ethics and game theory permeate through our experiences, but much of life is comprised of single-shot games, or situations where utilitarian calculus (or even just selfishness) overwhelms virtue ethics.
It's intended as a slightly tongue-in-cheek way of laying out five basic arguments for why lying is desirable.
I do find that satire works better if you're not sure if it's intended as such, but I should stress that it's not intended as satire in the sense that I don't think these are valid arguments and fundamentally disagree with them.
I think they generally are valid arguments, and I do think that if you want to advocate for very strong honesty norms, you should address these simplistic arguments for why people lie.
I allow the reader to make the more nuanced case for when and why each of them do or don't apply.
Very good point. If we want to build a better model of an individual's behaviour or the dynamics of a social group, lying can be an invaluable tool.
Good point- I should have stressed that the overwhelming and undeniable visual effect from the bum in the dress was that of a whale swallowing another larger whale, such that saying anything else would be dishonest in spirit.
Well, inducing a mass societal collapse is perhaps one of the few ways that a small group of people with no political power or allies would be able to significantly influence AI policy. But, as I stressed in my post, that is probably a bad idea, so you shouldn't do it.
KOL = Key Opinion Leaders, as in a small group of influential people within the neo-Luddite space. My argument here was simply that people concerned about AI alignment need to be politically astute, and more willing to find allies with whom they may be less aligned.
I think it's probably a problem that those interested in AI alignment are far more aligned with techno-optimists, who I see as pretty dangerous allies, than more cautious, less technologically sophisticated groups, (bureaucrats or neo-Luddites).
Don't know why you feel the need to use my unrelated post to attempt to discredit my comment here- strikes me as pretty bad form on your part. But, to state the obvious, a 40% shot at a desirable outcome is obviously not a call to action if the 60% is very undesirable (I mention that negative outcomes involve either extinction or worse).
Of course there are no such posts, and I hoped that people would read it in this spirit! I'm in fact arguing against that elephant in many a room where people are discussing collapse and x-risk.
I'm sure many people have thought:
a= x-risk this century, and b= chance of non-recovery post collapse and c= likelihood of future society reaching modernity at a stage when they're better organised than current society at addressing the age of perils.
If a>b and c > 0.5, and we accept longtermism, then collapse seems desirable. If we add fairly pessimistic views about ongoing moral tragedies, or ideas like antinatalism and negative utilitarianism, it tips the balance further towards collapse.
This post is an expression of this dilemma- I feel it captures the tone I was hoping for... but no-one else seems to like it, unfortunately.
Definitely relevant, but not sure if it supports my argument that we shouldn't try to induce collapse.
This post is about unilaterally taking a very radical action to avert a potentially worse scenario that inertia and race dynamics are pushing us towards. That looks like classic 'unilateralist's benediction' territory.
Thanks! I'm actually a more serious EA type in everyday life, but my lesswrong alter ego is proudly Kakistocurious.
Sorry, I think the logic of my 60% figure was imprecise.
If we're just talking about 1 person attempting to deliberately induce societal collapse, the chances of any kind of impact, either way, would be relatively low (depending on the person), so the 60% would seem a bit meaningless there.
If we're talking about whether it's worth developing a more serious movement to initiate societal collapse (potentially in an optimal way) or to plan for it as an option, I think there are arguments both ways, but I'd lean against it being a good idea because of the risks laid out in the post. This is what my 60% figure was aiming at.
If we're talking about a world where we have successfully induced collapse (in a way that allows society to rebuild in some way), would this be a better or worse world, in expectation? This is the question I was really hinting at with this post, and I would definitely dispute your 5 in 1000 claim if this was the question you were thinking of.
If we're Eliezer-level pessimistic about TAI timelines, serious about the horrors of factory farming (and perhaps antinatalism), and optimistic about moral progress in the absence of technological progress, I think this question gets very interesting.
- When considering whether to delay AI, the choice before us is not merely whether to accelerate or decelerate the technology. We can choose what type of regulations are adopted, and some options are much better than others.
We (the AI Safety community/ generally alignment-concerned people/ EAs) almost definitely can't choose what type of regulations are adopted. If we're very lucky/ dedicated we might be able to get a place at the table. Everyone else at the table will be members of slightly, or very, misaligned interest groups who we have to compromise with.
Various stripes of "Neo-Luddite" and AI-x-risk people have different concerns, but this is how political alliances work. You get at the table and work out what you have in common. We can try to take a leadership role in this alliance, with safety/ alignment as our bottom line- we'll probably be a smaller interest group than the growing ranks of newly unemployed creatives, but we could be more professionalised and aware of how to enact political change.
If we could persuade an important neo-Luddite 'KOL' to share our concerns about x-risk and alignment, this could make them a really valuable ally. This isn't too unrealistic- I suspect that, once you start feeling critical towards AI for taking your livelihood, it's much easier to see it as an existential menace.
- Adopting the wrong AI regulations could lock us into a suboptimal regime that may be difficult or impossible to leave. So we should likely be careful not [to] endorse a proposal because it's "better than nothing" unless it's also literally the only chance we get to delay AI.
Expecting anything close to optimal regulation in the current national/ international order on the first shot is surely folly. We should endorse any proposal that is "better than nothing" while factoring potential suboptimal regime shifts into our equations.
I'm not sure if it's better or worse that the longtermist funder is the target of oncoming hate. I think it means that the 'all those nice EAs stopping malaria and giving what they can' narrative should remain positive, while the 'crazy tech billionaire giving his money to stop an AI apocalypse' narrative will be more negative, but quite distinct from the former.
If it were the other way around, and SBF had been the global poverty guy, that probably would have spawned an interesting societal reflection about consequentialism vs deontology. As it is, longtermism/ AI is too niche for it to be generally seen as altruistic rather than a techie pet project to most people, though.
I'd say that, in reality, open borders do require action by the state; just like deregulation, it's something that is often portrayed as 'inaction', but actually ends up quite complex in practice. The EU/ Schengen zone, for example, needs to harmonise residency policies and external borders, develop cross-border policing and justice coordination between nations, harmonise workers' rights and healthcare, all without a common language or a common defence force. Especially as most laws are designed for a world with borders, you would need to change a lot to implement open borders. Of course, you could just completely scrap the border police, visas, and any border checks and see what happens, but I doubt that anyone is seriously suggesting that.
I'm not arguing that we should always invoke a strict precautionary principle based on the status quo, although a mild 'Chesterton's Fence' precautionary principle until we understand the facts on the ground is always prudent. Either way, any change we want to make or campaign for will be marginal, based on a country's specific circumstances (imagine Canada vs. Israel). I presume you agree that it's a bit ridiculous to have a hard border between the US and Canada, but I presume you wouldn't recommend that Israel opens her gates freely to the Arab world.
As for the 'policy paralysis' idea, any policy I would suggest or campaign for would be at a far, far smaller scale than open borders. This is both for practical reasons, and out of a precautionary principle. I think it would probably be more ethical if the UK spent 2+% of its budget on foreign aid, for example, but I think that's both politically impossible and could possibly have adverse consequences (if we cut other parts of the budget), but I've contributed to an (unsuccessful) campaign to keep the aid budget from going down from 0.7%, which I'm very confident is the ethically superior choice, and whose adverse consequences would be much smaller.
With migration, we all have a basic understanding of how migration can work and how it can cause harm, therefore any intervention I'd propose would try to harness these benefits and mitigate the harm based on this model. I might dedicate some time or effort to loosening restrictions concerning a certain population (I would be in favour of post-Brexit free movement to the UK by Aussies and Kiwis, for example), but I might also support restricting certain kinds of migration. I've read Caplan's book and a lot of migration literature, and while I'm generally pro- migration at the margins, I don't think we have anything like good evidence that open borders work, largely because all the evidence is theoretical and/ or based on controlled migration (or migration within a group of similar income countries etc.).
Great review, I agree very strongly with the America-centric nature of the book being annoying and misleading, but I have a few niggling points:
- "Do more populous countries have greater growth in the long run? If so, this points us in the direction of open borders." I think this is true, that populous countries have greater growth on the whole. But this doesn't seem to point to open borders. I think there is a selection effect whereby only countries with a particularly strong system of governance don't split up into other countries, and it's the strong governance that creates growth. And some large nations don't even have open borders between regions; it's actually easier to move from rural Poland to Paris for work, and benefit from public services there, than it is to move from rural Hunan to Shanghai.
- "There are various arguments related to longtermism that Caplan didn’t use. The downsides of immigration (higher crime, perhaps draining the government’s budget) are temporary but the upsides (higher economic growth) bear their fruit over centuries and will likely affect billions of future people." I disagree with this, connected to reasons you mention later. The downsides can continue, even accelerate, for a good few generations, and then become fundamentally unpredictable; in France, for example, children of immigrants are more likely to commit crimes and be unemployed than 1st gen immigrants. Muslim migrants are less likely to want to assimilate to European countries than they used to be; a 2nd gen Muslim woman in Bradford is far more likely now to wear a Burqa than a 1st gen woman was 20 or 30 years ago, for example. For most people concerned about immigration, it's the fact that their country (imagine Ukraine/ England/ Tibet/ Israel/ Luxembourg) won't be their country anymore in a few decades (or centuries) that worries them. Tibetans have seen the number of Han Chinese in their nation rapidly increasing over the past 50 years, and they reasonably fear that once Tibet is 60-70% Han, they'll either have to assimilate or be reduced to something akin to Aboriginals on reservations. Similarly, the theme of Soumission by Houellebecq is arguing something similar for France; if the rate of Islamic immigration continues to increase, then it's possible that within a few decades an Islamist candidate could start implementing Islamic law within a European country (as we see regionally already, with divorce courts). You can only imagine if Israel were to allow open borders with her neighbours... This is to say that negative impacts of open borders may not be temporary, and could affect the mid-to-long-term identity, culture, norms and stability of a nation. It's hard to make concrete predictions, but I'm tempted to predict that low-immigration, high-GDP countries (or countries with very selective migration, like Switzerland) will be more politically stable in the coming few decades. Paul Collier explains this dilemma well in his book, Exodus.
- "The countries that are the closest to having open borders are the Gulf states; they have many migrant workers from countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka." This seems the strangest line of the review. Depending on your definition, I'd say that the Gulf States have the opposite of open borders. They previously had targeted immigration policies allowing other Arabs from the MENA region to work there, then they caused too many social problems, so the Gulf countries threw them all out, and invited targeted immigration from a few specific poor countries (with people who didn't speak Arabic, and therefore wouldn't get involved in local politics). There is actually a decent amount of social mobility in these countries (a strangely high proportion of my friends are Gulf-state Indians based in Europe), so I wouldn't be too worried about long-term racial segregation. If you see this story of poor South Asians taken out of poverty by working in the gulf, the Gulf States are a strong argument for a very 'non-open borders' way of doing mass immigration: inviting large numbers of migrants to come to a country on guest worker schemes, with very limited rights. Although these migrants have no social support, and can be thrown out on the whim of the recipient country, they can make loads of money compared to back home. I actually think this might be a really good idea, and this is also similar to what Chinese cities do with domestic migration, which avoids parts of Beijing and Shanghai turning into huge shantytowns. However, as you mention, having a 'second-class' population sits poorly with European norms and sensibilities.
I don't think your claim that 'the intervention is closed borders' is quite right. The status quo is differing levels of restriction of movement between regions and nations that have developed as a result of long historical processes. As the EU demonstrates, it can be as difficult to manage (relatively) open borders as it is to manage (relatively) closed borders. The status quo is that countries and regions choose different levels of migration, and different kinds of migration, to suit their values and needs, therefore the UK, the EU, the US, Canada, China, the Gulf Countries and Australia have all developed hugely different migration policies, while all remaining largely successful as nations over the last few decades.
Arguing for '100% closed vs. 100% open borders' gets very abstract and it's difficult to argue from the facts rather than ideology, because fully open or closed borders are so rare. Although it can be useful to try and nudge the Overton window, the intervention is always going to be a marginal shift in the status quo, but even then, we should be humble about the downsides of marginal shifts either way.