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Quantum mechanics is pretty well established, and we may suppose that it describes everything (at least, in low gravitational fields). Given that, pointing at a thing and saying "quantum mechanics!" adds no new information.
Are you making this argument?
- P1: Quantum mechanics is well established.
- P2: Quantum mechanics describes everything in low gravitational fields.
- C1: So, calling a thing a “quantum system” doesn’t convey any information.
First of all, if everything is mathematically equivalent to an EU maximizer, then saying that something is an EU maximizer no longer represents meaningful knowledge, since it no longer distinguishes between fiction and reality.
I’m confused about your claim. For example, I can model (nearly?) everything with quantum mechanics, so then does calling something a quantum mechanical system not confer meaningful knowledge?
Except his name is George. He has a personality. He once had parents, maybe a school, maybe hopes and dreams. He is not detritus, but a person. Something terrible has gone wrong in his life, and we are of the opinion that it was his own fault. Karma. Just desserts.
I’m fascinated by the bolded claim. Are you asserting that there was a part of his life that was terrible AND that it, the terrible part, has gone wrong? Please clarify.
There is also this (incredibly well known?) website where (among other things) you can try to stay alive on a trip to Mars.
edit: And there is also No Vehicles in the Park.
Does the preference forming process count as thinking? If so, then I suspect that my desire to communicate that I am deep/unique/interesting to my peers is a major force in my preference for fringe and unpopular musical artists over Beyonce/Justin Bieber/Taylor Swift/etc. It's not the only factor, but it is a significant one AFAICT.
And I've also noticed that if I'm in a social context and I'm considering whether or not to use a narcotic (eg, alcohol), then I'm extremely concerned about what the other people around me will think about me abstaining (eg, I may want to avoid communicating that I disapprove of narcotic use or that I'm not fun). In this case I'm just straight forwardly thinking about whether or not to take some action.
Are these examples of the sort of thing you are interested in? Or maybe I am misunderstanding what is meant by the terms "thinking" and "signalling".
I think the way LLMs work might not be well described as having key internal gears or having an at-all illuminating python code sketch.
What motivates your believing that?
Would anyone like to have a conversation where we can intentionally practice pursuit of truth? (eg, ensure that we can pass eachother ITTs, avoid strawmanning, look for cruxes, etc)
I'm open to considering a wide range of propositions and questions, for example:
- What speech, if any, should be prohibited in high schools?
- Why don't universities do more explicit rationality training?
- Is death a harm?
- Under what conditions are centrally planned economies better than market economies?
- Is monarchy superior to democracy?
I'd define "genuine safety role" as "any qualified person will increase safety faster that capabilities in the role". I put ~0 likelihood that OAI has such a position. The best you could hope for is being a marginal support for a safety-based coup (which has already been attempted, and failed).
"~0 likelihood" means that you are nearly certain that OAI does not have such a position (ie, your usage of "likelihood" has the same meaning as "degree of certainty" or "strength of belief")? I'm being pedantic because I'm not a probability expert and AFAIK "likelihood" has some technical usage in probability.
If you're up for answering more questions like this, then how likely do you believe it is that OAI has a position where at least 90% of people who are both, (A) qualified skill wise (eg, ML and interpretability expert), and, (B) believes that AIXR is a serious problem, would increase safety faster than capabilities in that position?
There's a different question of "could a strategic person advance net safety by working at OpenAI, more so than any other option?". I believe people like that exist, but they don't need 80k to tell them about OpenAI.
This is a good point and you mentioning it updates me towards believing that you are more motivated by (1) finding out what's true regarding AIXR and (2) reducing AIXR, than something like (3) shit talking OAI.
I asked a related question a few months ago, ie, if one becomes doom pilled while working as an executive at an AI lab and one strongly values survival, what should one do?
Can I request tabooing the phrase "genuine safety role" in favor of more detailed description of the work that's done?
I suspect that would provide some value, but did you mean to respond to @Elizabeth?
I was just trying to use the term as a synonym for "actual safety role" as @Elizabeth used it in her original comment.
There's broad disagreement about which kinds of research are (or should count as) "AI safety", and what's required for that to succeed.
This part of your comment seems accurate to me, but I'm not a domain expert.
Can you clarify what you mean by "completely unjustified"? For example, if OpenAI says "This role is a safety role.", then in your opinion, what is the probability that the role is a genuine safety role?
I don't think science is a good framework for non-scientific things. If you wrap spirituality in science, you kill whatever substance you had by reducing it to something mundane and mechanical.
I find it somewhat difficult to understand exactly what you mean here and in the rest of the comment. Could you maybe define the terms "science", "spirituality" and "non-scientific things" as you are using them here?
What you seek is joy, fulfillment and wisdom, so why not aim at that directly? Using science to fix the problems that science caused feels a bit like putting out a fire using fire. Let me also warn you that meta-science is worse than science. The more degrees of separation to reality, the worse you're off mentally.
Are you recommending here that people should not use science in their attempts to pursue joy, fulfillment and wisdom?
And when you say "The more degrees of separation to reality, ...", what is the thing that you are talking about that is being separated from reality?
This is most homeless! Most people who are homeless are not homeless long. The majority, the vast majority, are on the come up. Never forget it.
I hadn't realized that was the case. Do you have any good data on this?
I think East Asian islands have a combination of 1 and 2. In Taiwan, the 30-40 year boom saw most people getting a piece of the pie. Few are desperate enough to resort to violent crimes. Does this seem reasonable?
It looks to me like here you are saying "Reducing the number of impoverished people causes a reduction in violent crime." I believe this proposition is at least plausible. But isn't it a quite different claim from "Reducing the amount of wealth disparity causes a reduction in violent crime."?
Specifically, the number of impoverished people and the amount of wealth disparity are not the same thing (although empirically they may have some common relationship in the contemporary world). Consider two possible societies of 100 people:
- (A) Each person has a net worth of $500.
- (B) Half the people have a net worth of $75,000 and the other half have a net worth of $3,000,000.
Notice, (B) has more wealth disparity than (A), but it also has fewer impoverished people than (A). And I would expect (B) to have less violent crime than (A).
Does this seem correct to you?
Did Taylor have any techniques for trying to increase the number of Type 2 disagreements and decrease the number of Type 1 disagreements among his staff?
You should consider attending law school, I guess.
Sure, that's one option, but requires a lot of time.
There's a LARGE body of contract and debt-collection law and precedent, and relatedly, inheritance and probate law.
I have no doubt that this is true. Are you aware of a good short introduction?
It's worth reading your credit card or mortgage agreement to get a sense of it.
I agree with you, but I've already done this.
Sorry that I wasn't clear.
I want to know which laws and judicial precedents are most relevant to the situation that you are describing.
Again, this is a general point. One can bring in additional details to support the claim that the existing outcome is optimal or to support the claim that it is not optimal. But that was the point of my comment. We cannot just start with market outcome and claim success.
You've convinced me that my initial comment was mistaken in another way. Specifically, if I haven't specified an objective (eg, less than 150 incidents of people shitting in San Francisco streets each year, or, every point in San Francisco is within .25 miles of at least 4 free to use bathrooms), then it is meaningless to suggest that it is currently being satisfied. So, insofar that I suggested that an objective involving bathrooms was likely being satisfied (specifically I suggested that we don't need more bathrooms, but relative to what objective?) without actually specifying that objective, my comment was meaningless.
(Maybe I made this mistake because in my thinking I failed to distinguish between the market equilibrium and objectives.)
If the lens of public goods is not helpful then perhaps look at positive externalities. The two are fairly closely related with regard to the question you're asking about. Tyler Cowan's blurb (scroll down a littel) on Public Goods and Externalities notes how markets will under produce goods with positive external effects.
Thanks for the link. Is it the case that people not shitting in the street is a positive externality?
And when you say "under produce" do you mean relative to the market equilibrium for bathrooms or some objective involving bathrooms?
In most real-world formal debts, disappearance of the debtor or creditor does not void the debt. If Bob disappears, Alice collects from Bob's estate. If Alice disappears, Alice's heirs collect from Bob.
That seems interesting to me. I presume this is the case in large part because of some combination of laws and judicial precedents. So, exactly what legal things are involved here?
Taking a step back, let me just grant that people shitting in the streets is good evidence that the current price of using a bathroom is too high for some people who would, all else equal, rather use a bathroom than shit in the streets (So, insofar that my original comment suggested that the cost of using the bathroom was cheap enough that anyone who wanted to shit could afford to use a bathroom, I am retracting it.).
And if one's goal is to reduce the amount of shitting in the streets, then reducing the cost of using the bathroom is a good strategy. And it is possible that the best way to reduce the cost of using the bathroom is to fund bathrooms with tax money.
Then I suspect we are just having a straightforward disagreement over:
- Should the government make using the bathroom cheaper?
- If so, how?
While I think you can get to my point with either of the links, a lot more is going on in those links that will confuse and complicate the path. The simple point is that without available resources (typically money) to bid for additionaly output one simply has no way to bid resouces away from other production/uses and increase output of X (here public toilets) in a market.
I agree that destitute people are unable to bid resources away from other uses. And that this is relevant in the case of any good a destitute person may desire (food, bathroom access, XBox games, airline tickets, etc). I suspect that you believe toilets are a special case where the government should intervene because destitute people will pollute public spaces if they are unable to access toilets. Is that right?
In a pure sense public goods only exist in theory. But there are good that seem to behave a lot like the theoretical good. Looking at a situation through the lens of public goods then provides some useful insights. In this case, the idea of public bathrooms is all about making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one. In other words it really is not about specific bathroom/toilets but toilet services where one will be available to anyone needing it rather than them needing to use the alley or pay for access.
I agree that "making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one" is a genuine policy objective. But the policy objective and the related service, toilet access, are not the same thing. And there is no question of whether or not the policy objective is a pubic good, as that's just a category error. And toilets are distinctly excludable, so they are not even quasi-public goods.
But maybe I'm still misunderstanding you regarding the public goods issue.
Okay, I think you've convinced me that there are important ways in which pay toilets might offer a better service than cafe bathrooms.
(I suspect that I was getting myself confused by sort of insisting/thinking "But if everything is exactly the same (, except one of the buildings also sells coffee), then everything is exactly the same!" Which is maybe nearby to some true-ish statements, but gets in the way of thinking about the differences between using a pay toilet and a cafe bathroom.)
(Also, I share your view that bathrooms are excludable and therefore not public goods. And I'm curious as to why @sunwillrise and @jmh believe that they are in fact public goods.)
I'm following up here after doing some reading about public goods.
Public goods are (broadly speaking) better served through intervention by a central authority such as a government. As such, correctly identifying something as a public good helps explain why the (private) market has not provided a socially optimal quantity of that good.
I'm inclined to believe that bathrooms are excludable (because, for example, an entrepreneur can just put a lock on the bathroom that will only open after a credit card swipe/payment) and so are not public goods. Am I getting this wrong?
I want to clarify a few things before trying to respond substantively.
The most obvious one, and perhaps directly revelant here, is the concept of effective demand - in a market setting those without the money to buy goods or services lack any effective demand. I would concede that alone is not sufficient (or necessary) to reject the claim. But it does point to a way markets do fail to allocate resources to arguably valuable ends. But effective demand failures often produce social and governmental incentives to provide the effective demand for those without resources to pay themselves.
I don't have a well-developed understanding of economics and I'm confused about what meaning the term "effective demand" has in this context.
Are you using it the same way that Keynes uses it in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money?
Or, are you using the term as it is used in this Wikipedia article?
Or, maybe instead, can you tell me what is the difference between demand and effective demand?
I suspect that you are trying to highlight that destitute people still have preferences even though they do not have any resources to aid in realizing those preferences, but I'm not sure.
I think one can see two lines of though pointing towards under provision when considering social/government responses to the presense of ineffective demand. The standard economic market failure of under provision of public goods.
After doing a bit of reading, it appears to me that one of the required criteria for something to be a public good is for it to be non-excludable. But aren't bathrooms very excludable? Just put a lock on the door that will only open after swiping a credit card.
The other is the issue of narrow and broad insterest in how government/public funds get spent. It's not clear to me how strong any narrow interest for increasing public toilets are in terms of driving that spending.
Are you pointing out that the homeless have a narrow interest (in the technical economic sense) in the government operating free to use bathrooms?
I think in general it's mostly 1); obviously "infinite perfect bathroom availability everywhere" isn't a realistic goal, so this is about striking a compromise that is however more practical than the current situation.
Then I believe that I understand your previous comment, so I'm going to respond to your proposed solutions.
Now one possible solution would be to have "public bathroom" as a business. Nowadays you could allow entrance with a credit card (note that this doesn't solve the homeless thing, but it addresses most people's need). But IMO this isn't a particularly high value business, and on its own certainly not a good use of valuable city centre land, which goes directly against the fact that you need bathrooms to be the most where the most people are. So this never really happens.
I'm not sure where you live, but as others have pointed out (and as you are aware of), some cities and states (including California according to Wikipedia) ban pay toilets. If this ban was lifted, then would you expect the public bathroom situation to meaningfully improve?
(And I grant that this doesn't address your concerns about people who cannot afford to use paid toilets.)
Another solution is to have bathrooms as part of private businesses doing other stuff (serving food/drinks) and have them charge for their use. Which is how it works now. The inadequacy lies into how for some reason these businesses charge you indirectly by asking you to buy something. This is inefficient in a number of ways: it forces you to buy something you don't really want, paying more than you would otherwise, and the provider probably still doesn't get as much as they could if they just asked a bathroom fee since they also need the labour and ingredients to make the coffee or whatever. So why are things like this?
I agree that these are important questions (also, is it illegal for a cafe to charge someone just to use the bathroom? and, have any cafes tried to offer this service?). Before anyone takes any public policy action I would want them to get to the bottom of these matters.
I'm not sure - I think part of it may be that they don't just want money, they want a filter that will discourage people from using the bathroom too much to avoid having too many bathroom goers. If that's the case, that's bad, because it means some needs will remain unfulfilled (and some people might forgo going out for too long entirely rather than risking being left without options). Part of it may be that they just identify their business as cafes and would find it deleterious to their image to explicitly provide a bathroom service. But that's a silly hangup and one we should overcome, if it causes this much trouble. Consider also that the way things are now, it's pretty hard of the cafes to enforce their rules anyway, and lots of people will just use the bathroom without asking or buying anything anyway. Everyone loses.
These seem to be plausible hypotheses to me. Also, cafe entrepreneurs may just not have had the idea to offer a 'Use Bathroom' service. And insofar that they are interested in making money, that may overcome a desire to not do something weird.
Or you could simply build and maintain public bathrooms with tax money. There are solutions to the land value problem (e.g. build them as provisionary structures on the sidewalk) and this removes all issues and quite a lot of unpleasantness. You could probably use even just some of the sales tax and house taxes income from the neighbourhood and the payers would in practice see returns out of this. Alternatively, you could publicly subsidize private businesses offering their bathrooms for free. Though I reckon that real public bathrooms would be better for the homeless issue since businesses probably don't want those in their august establishments.
I agree that this might be the best solution. I'm generally skeptical of government services (although many municipalities do IMO an okay-ish job of delivering police, fire and water services) because they are not enmeshed in the market pricing mechanism (ie, they aren't threatened by bankruptcy and they aren't trying to make profit). But other commenters have argued that bathrooms are public goods and that free markets don't do public goods well, so maybe I'm mistaken. I still haven't thought about their argument.
Since the discussion here started around homelessness, and homeless people obviously wouldn't be able to pay for private bathrooms (especially if these did the obvious thing for convenience and forgo coins in exchange for some kind of subscription service, payment via app, or such)
Why can homeless people obviously not pay for private bathrooms? I've seen homeless people use phones, but maybe most of them don't have phones. And I've seen homeless people have money (eg, panhandling then buying food), but maybe they don't have enough, or maybe they don't have credit or debit cards.
But maybe I'm missing the point and the real question is just, what about the people (regardless of what percentage of the homeless they are) who cannot afford to use private bathrooms? If the number is tiny, then just putting them in jail for shitting in the streets seems good enough to me. If it's larger, then maybe more public bathrooms are necessary, or maybe the destitute should be (de facto) banned from certain areas of cities, or maybe something else, I'm not sure.
Lower wealth disparity also results in lower crime, particularly lower violent crimes.
Is your claim that reducing wealth disparity causes violent crime reduction, or just that smaller wealth disparity is correlated with lower violent crime rates? If the former, then I'm quite interested in reading your epistemic justification for it.
Thanks for providing this detailed account of your reasoning. I understand most of what you are saying, but I'm a little confused about the first two paragraphs.
On one hand, obviously going to the bathroom, sometimes in random circumstances, is an obvious universal necessity. It is all the more pressing for people with certain conditions that make it harder for them to control themselves for long. So it's important that bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, and distributed reasonably well everywhere. I would also argue it's important that they have no barrier to access because sometimes time is critical when using it. In certain train stations I've seen bathrooms that can only be used by paying a small price, which often meant you needed to have and find precise amounts of change to go. Absolutely impractical stuff for bathrooms.
On the other, obviously maintaining bathrooms is expensive as it requires labour. You don't want your bathrooms to be completely fouled on the regular, or worse, damaged, and if they happen to be, you need money to fix them. So bathrooms aren't literally "free".
Here I take you to be laying out the problem/goal that the rest of your comment addresses with various candidate solutions. But what exactly is the goal?
- Bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, well distributed and with no barrier to access (while taking into account the fact that bathrooms are expensive to maintain).
- Literally every potential visitor to a given geographical region (regardless of the person's medical, biological or economic idiosyncrasies) has unencumbered access to clean and functioning bathroom facilities.
- <something else>
My confusion is being prompted by the suspicion that different neighborhoods have different optimal bathroom regimes (unless the goal is trying to make every neighborhood accommodate the same set of people (eg, all people, or all Americans, or middle class residents of the city, etc)). For example:
- Neighborhood A is mostly a bunch of expensive boutique clothiers and almost all of their customers are wealthy women. It turns out (and I might be totally wrong about this specific case) that nearly all wealthy American women do not suffer from conditions that would require them to ever need short notice immediate access to a bathroom (eg, IBS). But this is not true of the wider American population. How many bathrooms should be in neighborhood A?
- Then suppose that over time neighborhood A shifts from being mostly boutique clothiers to restaurants frequented by middle class tourists. Now how many bathrooms should be in neighborhood A?
So, I'm just looking for clarification on precisely what problem/goal the comment is addressing.
Or you could simply build and maintain public bathrooms with tax money. There are solutions to the land value problem (e.g. build them as provisionary structures on the sidewalk) and this removes all issues and quite a lot of unpleasantness.
And so that my comment isn't just harassing you for clarification, I like the idea of building bathrooms in places that would not crowd out other businesses, but what about re-zoning (maybe "re-zoning" isn't the right term) parts of the sidewalk so that entrepreneurs could setup bathroom businesses on it?
But it is not the only relevant consideration: often times, people do not reason on the basis of stand-alone monetary considerations, but also in terms of other, more ineffable concepts, such as principles or values.
I roughly agree. (Although, values are always involved in decision making, right? Or maybe you believe that value, as in, don't steal, and value, as in, I'd rather spend money on XBox games than a jet ski, are different sorts of things and you just mean the first sort here.)
In this specific case, I believe there are a lot of people that would hate the idea of having to pay for something they don't care about (again, like coffee) in order to access the bathroom, independently (and in addition to) the fact that they must part with some of their cash.
You might be right about this, I'm not sure. That isn't how I think about the situation so I might be committing a typical mind fallacy. I'm interested in why you believe that to be the case, but I recognize that it might be quite a bit of work for you to try to nail down an explanation.
I don't see what evidence or reasoning we have to single out "heuristics that call for one to immediately render aid to someone else" as worthy of specialized treatment as compared to just "heuristics" more broadly.
My intuition is that it's usually neutral to pretty bad to rush off and offer someone else assistance without thinking it over carefully. I believe this because (i) most people do a bad job of modeling other people, and, (ii) people are generally quite good at helping themselves, (iii) it sometimes triggers a wasteful arms race of people competing to appear to be the most caring, (iv) people straightforwardly pursuing their own interests is a good recipe for improving the world.
Public goods are (broadly speaking) better served through intervention by a central authority such as a government. As such, correctly identifying something as a public good helps explain why the (private) market has not provided a socially optimal quantity of that good.
Okay, I now understand your reasoning, but I will have to think about it more before offering a substantive response.
By "original comment" are you referring to "This, and how completely unrelated specifically the "buy a coffee" thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B."? I actually took that as to be about the individual problem, so that may explain some of our failure to get on the same page. But, looking at the comment again now, the rest of it does seem to me to be more about the systematic problem, "The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they're not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don't work out to it being a good use of capital or land.".
This comment of yours on the other hand struck me as being more about the systematic problem.
Sorry for any misinterpretation of your comments.
I do agree that the mere fact "markets" are not providing some quantity of publicly accessable bathrooms is hardly an argument that we have a good equalibrium quantity -- or even a good nominal/social want quantity.
Would you provide your reasoning for this? I'm interested in understanding it.
I tried to stipulate that I was not proposing barista tips as a solution to the "on-going and systematic" problem, specifically I said, "And I realize that just you and I tipping instead of buying is entirely insufficient for solving the resource misallocation problem."
warning meta: I am genuinely curious (as I don't get much feedback in day to day life), have you found my comments to be unclear and/or disorganized in this thread? I'd love to improve my writing so would appreciate any critique, thanks.
Why do you disagree with (P1)? Do you explain it here: ...
Yes. I believe there is significant (and currently unmet) demand for publicly-accessible bathrooms that do not require the users to purchase some other good or service (such as coffee) that they are not interested in (which a private establishment could, and in many cases does, require).
Okay. I don't understand your reasoning. Are you specifically suggesting that there are people who would pay some $X to use the bathroom, but the cheapest item on the cafe menu is $Y where X < Y, and so those people are unable to access a bathroom? Otherwise I'm not sure why someone who needed to use the bathroom would be unwilling to spend $ on some unrelated good in order to use the bathroom.
Why is the demand of the people only interested in using the bathroom not being satisfied? I expect them to buy the cheapest thing and then use the bathroom. But maybe I'm confused.
For the reasons mentioned in my paragraph above, I model these as two different types of goods for our discussion. It seems to carve reality at the joints in a meaningful way.
Okay, you may be right to do so, but from my perspective your reasoning is still opaque.
I also roughly prefer that other people avoid using such heuristics.
This preference, valid as it may be, cannot be met in practice, at least at a large scale (in terms of number of people).
While individualized assessments contain benefits, they also impose significant costs on those who engage in them, namely the increased expenditures of time and mental energy needed to analyze situations on their individual merits.
I want to be clear that I am specifically opposing the use of heuristics that call for one to immediately render aid to someone else. I am not opposing the use of all heuristics. I agree that it would be a mistake for someone to never use heuristics, because as you say, humans have limited time and mental energy.
Are we talking past one another here?
Are you done discussing the matter of bathrooms as public goods? I'm not sure if that line of discussion is worth continuing or not.
Well, public bathrooms are approximately public goods, for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning
That seems plausible to me, but I still don't understand why you are pointing out that bathrooms are approximately public goods. (I speculated as to why in my initial response to you.)
I agree that such a tip is roughly a bribe. But why is that a problem? Maybe you believe it is a problem because many people are inclined not to accept bribes, and so such a move would frequently not work.
From your response it seems to me that I've understood your question and position, so I'm responding to it here.
epistemic status: I am a public policy and economics amateur. I do not have extreme cognitive ability and I thought about the question for < 1 hour.
I'm going to suggest some other possible ways to stop homeless people from shitting in the streets and then I will nominate my current preferred solution.
- Remove legal restrictions to running just-bathroom businesses.
- Reduce the number of homeless people (by, for example, giving them homes and/or letting developers build more homes).
- Start a charity that operates bathrooms for the homeless.
My current preference is a mix of (a) punishing people who shit in the streets with jail time, (b) reducing the number of homeless by facilitating more housing development, (c) and removing legal restrictions on running just-bathroom businesses.
AFAICT I prefer my solution to yours because I am wary of the San Francisco Division of Public Bathrooms turning into a permanent boondoggle (I'm generally suspicious of government activity, although I do accept that, for example, the Apollo Program and Manhattan Project are very impressive, and IMO most American police departments do an okay job.) and because I suspect the situation is being heavily influenced by anti-housing-development policies and anti-just-bathroom-businesses policies.
If you have a good critique of my solution, please offer it. As I said, I'm a public policy noob.
Economically speaking, if to acquire good A (which I need) I also have to acquire good B (which I don't need and is more expensive), thus paying more than I would pay for good A alone, using up resources and labor I didn't need and that were surely better employed elsewhere, that seems to me like a huge market inefficiency.
I had not thought of this until you and gwern pointed it out, so thanks.
I agree that this is a good candidate for a way in which buying-a-cup-of-coffee-that-one-doesn't-want-in-order-to-use-the-bathroom as a common activity within a society causes harm (via resource misallocation) to most members of that society.
But I do insist that this isn't a way in which the particular act of giving $X to a cafe for a cup of coffee in order to use their bathroom is worse for the particular consumer than giving $X to a just-bathrooms business. (I'm not sure what the appropriate words are for distinguishing these two different types of concerns, maybe, "on-going & systematic" and "one shot".)
(Have you considered just tipping the barista half the amount of the cup of coffee instead of buying the coffee? This would at least save you some $ and you wouldn't be contributing to the resource misallocation problem. And I realize that just you and I tipping instead of buying is entirely insufficient for solving the resource misallocation problem.)
I wouldn't expect so, why would you think that?
I explained my reasoning here. Also note that most people who have demand for using the bathroom are not penniless homeless people.
Why pay extra to dispose of your waste properly if you can get away with dumping it elsewhere?
I agree. A self-interested rational agent would just shit in the streets if they could get away with it.
As a matter of public health, it's better for everyone if this type of waste goes in the sewers and not in the alley, even if the perpetrators can't afford a coffee.
I agree.
How would you propose we stop the pollution? Fining them wouldn't help, even if we could catch them reliably, which would be expensive. Besides, they don't have any money to take. Jailing them would probably cost taxpayers more than maintaining bathrooms would. Taxpayers are already paying for the sewer system (a highly appropriate use of taxation). This is just an expansion of the same.
I understand you to be raising the question, "What is the best way to stop homeless people from shitting in the streets?". And then you've suggested four possible solutions:
- Government operates more free to use bathrooms.
- Government pays private businesses to make their bathrooms available to everyone.
- Government fines people who shit in the streets.
- Governments jails people who shit in the streets.
And you claim that (1) and (2) are the best options.
Do I understand you correctly?
I completely disagree with (P1).
Why do you disagree with (P1)? Do you explain it here: "in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their 'demand' for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms)."?
And I completely grant that I might be mistaken about (P1). I haven't spent many cycles investigating this topic.
I think (P2) has a somewhat strange framing, particularly given the fact that 'private bathrooms' can refer to either bathrooms in the homes/dwellings of people, which does not really have much to do with the conversation here, or to auxiliary goods in private establishments
I tried to give a definition of "private bathrooms" in my previous comment, specifically, "... bathrooms owned-operated by private businesses (ie, private bathrooms)...". But to be more explicit, by "private bathrooms" I mean the auxiliary goods in private business establishments (eg, cafes) and the primary goods offered by just-bathroom businesses.
Does that clear up the strangeness?
in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their 'demand' for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms).
Why is the demand of the people only interested in using the bathroom not being satisfied? I expect them to buy the cheapest thing and then use the bathroom. But maybe I'm confused.
And why is their demand not causally impacting the creation of such bathrooms?
In any case, going from (P1) and (P2) to (C1) does seem locally valid to a reasonable extent.
So given that you find the inference to be of good-ish quality and assuming that we can clear up the strangeness with (P2), then does it follow that you would accept (C1) if you became convinced that (P1) was likely true?
Are you describing a heuristic here? Specifically that, if some need is (i) universal among humans, (ii) widely understood and (iii) unpleasant, then often one should immediately act to accommodate anyone who reports that they currently have that need.
Yes, that is the general heuristic I am describing, perhaps with the following added requirement: (iv) the person reporting they need it appears genuine and doesn't appear to try to exploit you in a bad-faith manner.
Okay. AFAICT I try to avoid using heuristics that call for me to drop whatever I'm doing and act to assist someone else. I also roughly prefer that other people avoid using such heuristics. But I do understand that if someone were using that heuristic, then they might be outraged or upset that people are being turned away from bathrooms.
(I'm also open to the possibility that there are some good heuristics of this type.)
I would suspect it means he thinks it is bad in such a clear and manifest manner that it is an instance and a signal of general civilizational inadequacy and insanity.
Yes, I suspect this is a good guess as to what @dr_s meant. And thanks for the interesting-to-me link.
Are you done discussing the matter of bathrooms as public goods? I'm not sure if that line of discussion is worth continuing or not.
Most obviously, so someone can provide just a bathroom, rather than wrapping an entire cafe around it as a pretext to avoid being illegal - a cafe which almost certainly operates only part of the time rather than 24/7/365, one might note, as merely among the many benefits of severing the two. As for another example of the benefits, recall Starbucks's experiences with bathrooms...
First, I want to note some points of agreement. I agree that there are differences between a just bathrooms business and a cafe with bathrooms. And I agree that having longer hours is a potential benefit of just bathroom businesses. And I prefer (as I infer that you do as well) that just bathroom businesses not be illegal.
Second, in my previous post I was trying to ask about whether or not there were any genuine differences as a user when paying $X for a cup of coffee to a cafe in order to use the bathroom versus paying $X to a just bathroom business to use the bathroom. (I was responding to @dr_s saying this: "This, and how completely unrelated specifically the "buy a coffee" thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.")
And in an effort to avoid being a weasel, let me clearly state that insofar that just bathroom businesses would remain open 24/7, or have very clean bathrooms, or be cheap, then they would offer benefits to people which are unavailable from cafes.
'A bathroom' is quite a different thing from 'an entire cafe plus a bathroom'. 'A bathroom' prefab fits into many more places than 'a successful cafe so big it has an attached bathroom for patrons'.
Yes, you are right.
Which is probably why there were apparently >50,000 pay bathrooms in the USA before some activists got them outlawed, and you see pay toilets commonly in other countries.
Thanks for the relevant historical information.
what are some situations in real life, other than "AI takeoff", where the early/mid/late game metaphor seems useful?
I suspect it's easy to find games or situations that have nice-ish three phase maps, for example:
- Choosing a particular chess move: (I) assess the board, (II) generate some candidates moves, (III) find the best move of the candidates
- Getting new work as a contractor: (I) get a rough idea of what the potential client wants, (II) create a detailed specification and work plan, (III) finalize financial, ownership, termination, etc details in a contract
- Discovering a mathematical proof: (I) gather some foundational knowledge relevant to the problem/proposition, (II) search for ways to connect knowledge (and tricks) into a proof, (III) having found a good candidate strategy, try to develop a proof
In strategy board games, there's an explicit shift from "early game, it's worth spending the effort to build a longterm engine. At some point, you want to start spending your resources on victory points." And a lens I'm thinking through is "how long does it keep making sense to invest in infrastructure, and what else might one do?"
Maybe my examples miss the spirit of the early/mid/late game map. Do you agree that in strategy games the three phases are roughly: (I) develop engine, (II) use engine to create relative advantage, (III) try to win.
Like, in Chess you start off with a state where many pieces can't move in the early game, in the middle game many pieces are in play moving around and trading, then in the end game it's only a few pieces, you know what the goal is, roughly how things will play out.
IMO one of the most important distinctions between middle and late game in chess is that the number of okay to good moves on any given turn is severely reduced in the late game compared to the middle game.
This, and how completely unrelated specifically the "buy a coffee" thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.
Why is it better to pay an explicit bathroom providing business, then to pay a cafe (in the form of buying a cup of coffee)? It strikes me as a distinction without real difference, but maybe I'm confused.
The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they're not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don't work out to it being a good use of capital or land.
Maybe bathroom services are just one of a cafe's offerings, but for whatever reason aren't explicitly put on the menu. Similarly, bars sell access to people interested in hooking up, but it's not explicitly on their menu of products.
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I'm skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I'd expect the market to produce them.
The fact that the market demonstrably hasn't provided this good is little (in fact, practically no) evidence regarding its desirability because the topic of discussion is public bathrooms, meaning precisely the types of goods/services that are created, funded, and taken care of by the government as opposed to private entities.
I disagree. My reasoning is as follows. I believe that (P1) there is a high correlation between demand for additional bathrooms owned-operated by private businesses (ie, private bathrooms) and demand for additional bathrooms owned-operated by a government (ie, public bathrooms), and that (P2) there is little demand for additional private bathrooms. So, I infer that (C1) there is little demand for additional public bathrooms.
Do you then object to (P1), (P2) or my inference?
In particular, these are built on public land (where private developers do not have property rights) for public use (with no excludability) and with little-to-no rivalry, at least across mid-to-long-term timeframes (past the point where another person is physically occupying the bathroom or dirtying it). As such, they fit the frame of public goods to a reasonable extent.
I'm not sure why you are arguing that bathrooms are public goods (or are you arguing that just public bathrooms are public goods?). Is it because you are implicitly making this argument?
- P3: Free markets do not do a good job of supplying public goods.
- P4: Bathrooms are public goods.
- C2: So, free markets do not do a good job of supplying bathrooms.
(Sorry for my awkward usage of the term "good job", my economic knowledge is weak.)
I suspect the argument that it is ridiculous comes from an intuition that the need to go to the bathroom is such a human universal that we are all accustomed to, and the knowledge that having to hold in your urine is seriously unpleasant is so universal, that it becomes a matter of basic consideration for your fellow human beings to provide them with the ability to access the bathroom in an establishment when they clearly need to.
Are you describing a heuristic here? Specifically that, if some need is (i) universal among humans, (ii) widely understood and (iii) unpleasant, then often one should immediately act to accommodate anyone who reports that they currently have that need.
And taking a step back, I suspect that I made a mistake and should have initially asked "What do you mean by the term 'ridiculous' here?" As I'm not sure if @dr_s is just reporting that he doesn't like the current situation, or that it makes him laugh, or that it causes harm, or that it could be easily improved, or something else entirely.
But thanks for trying to explain the reasoning to me.
There is probably some connection to be drawn here with the debates and intuitions people have over/regarding price gouging, since the person needing to go to the bathroom is in a position of such a temporarily increased demand that it becomes massively unpleasant for them to even make it to other establishments, putting the current establishment owner in a position of power (benefitting from a restricted supply, from the perspective of the customer) that they are "abusing" by compelling the customer to buy something they did not care about in order to gain access to the toilet.
Interesting. I do not share the intuition that price gouging ought to be made illegal, so maybe you are on to something.
I point this out to help locate what your heuristic is really approximating[1]. I.e., two components of something like memetic fitness: (1) a reason to care, (2) low entanglement with other beliefs.
By the term "reason to care" do you mean that the claim is relevant to someone's interests/goals?
- eg, a claim of the form "X is healthy" is probably relevant for someone who highly values not dying
- eg, a claim of the form "Guillermo del Toro's new movie is on Netflix." is probably not relevant for someone who does not value watching horror films
I agree that it is certainly morally wrong to post this if that is the persons real full name.
Because you expect that doing so would cause the person harm?
It is less bad, but still dubious, to post someones traumatic life story on the internet even under a pseudonym.
Why is it dubious? Do you expect that it will cause harm to the person?
We honestly just need more public bathrooms, or subsidies paid to venues to keep their bathrooms fully public.
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I'm skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I'd expect the market to produce them.
but it's ridiculous even for those who do have the money that you're supposed to buy a coffee or something to take a leak (and then in practice you can often sneak by anyway).
Why is it ridiculous?
The article makes this claim:
Competition propels us towards artificial superintelligence, as any AI firm slowing its pace risks being overtaken by others, and workers understand that refusing to engage in capacity research merely leads to their replacement.
And I agree that even if a worker values his own survival above all else and believes ASI is both near at hand and bad, then plausibly he doesn't make himself better off by quitting his job. But given that the CEO of an AI firm has more control over the allocation of the firm's resources, if he values survival and believes that ASI is near/bad, then is his best move really to continue steering resources into capabilities development?