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I appreciate it. If I do write a longer version, it won't be on here, because I have no tools to moderate the comment section.
How would the enforcement perpetuity be valued? I agree, it would not be worth $1T at the moment before default because the market would assign some probability that the legislators would follow through the land value tax. Now, the important question is, “Does that matter?” I say no, it doesn't, and my reasoning is as follows.
If you bought a $100M lottery ticket, what's it worth before the numbers come out? Basically zero. But what if the numbers come up and they match your ticket? You've won the jackpot, literally. Now what if that happens, but the lottery owners don't pay? Are you going to be okay with that? Are you going to say, “The ticket was never worth much anyway, so it doesn’t matter”? No, that's a huuuuge breach of contract! You don't just get to not pay $100M dollars and have no impact on your financial credibility. That's crazy talk. If they didn't pay, you’d be very upset, and rightfully so.
I don't think that because “It's a one-off, not a repeat lottery business” is a meaningful distinction here. The government issuing debt is a repeat business.
My actual work is at an investment fund. If I saw a government being like “Nah, we're not paying that $1T perpetuity because it's a weird security”, I am selling every regular bond of theirs that we own as fast as I reasonably can. If they can just not pay that $1T contract, what else are they capable of? I am significantly increasing my probability of them defaulting.
People like me would sell the government's regular bonds ASAP, which drops the bond's prices, thereby increasing the rate of interest that the government has to pay on new debt. The fund managers who didn't do this are having to explain to their investors why they didn't sell before the prices dropped. The government just defaulted on a major debt, and their reaction was to do nothing. That's not a good career move. Fund managers don't want to be in that position, so even if they personally don't think it's a huge risk, they know that other fund managers do, so they're forced to sell as well.
An issue I see is that policy makers are not that committed to reducing public debt, since it doesn't affect them personally and can always kick the can down the road/pass the buck/blame it on past legislatures.
You're right, but you're not fully thinking a selfish policymaker. If I were a selfish policymaker, I would implement the land value tax regardless of what I think of it, so now the government now doesn't have to pay $1T of debt. So now I create $1T worth of new debt, and spend it on public services that will buy me more votes. Governments do not have access to infinite debt, despite what some crackpots say. (If government did have access to infinite debt, most of our problems are solved.)
I don't know if I'll respond to your next message. I'll send you a private message on where I'll be writing in future.
I’ll leave it to others to decide how plausible it is that the courts would make those arguments (especially when the post explicitly handles compensation). And it looks like I called it with your complete inability to accept error. Please don’t comment on my posts anymore.
Then surely you can twist some part of the constitution to find some relevance to land value taxes as I’ve proposed them. If you can, then credit where credit’s due, you have a point worth considering. If you can’t, then your concerns seem a lot less plausible.
Also, do you concede you were wrong about the U.S. not taking on $1T of debt? Because it seems like you’re really confident about things that you shouldn’t be confident about. Like, stuff that a simple google search would disconfirm. I suspect you have a real problem admitting error. In our other conversation, you totally just Smoke Bombed without so much as a “Oh, my bad”.
Let me put it this way, I don’t think it was sarcasm.
I explicitly asked for "legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution", because that's what's actually relevant here. Then you bring up legislation that was struck down based off the 14th amendment's equal protection and due process clauses.
Have you got any examples that actually meet the specified criteria (i.e. within the last 100 years, laws that are legislation, that were struck down by the supreme court without even a tenuous reference to the constitution)? If you don't have any examples, then you need to concede that point, and then reference any places in the constitution that could, even unfairly, be used to invalidate my specific proposal (land value tax).
The type of law my proposal falls under is legislation. So you should give an example in the last 100 years where the supreme court invalidated legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution. (Roe vs Wade not being an example, because it's not legislation.)
Or concede that the supreme court hasn't overturned legislation that has nothing to do with the constitution in the last 100 years, and then point to any constitutional reason the court could give for overturning the specific policy I've advocated for (land value tax with a delay and a debt).
And I am following that norm. Mentioning the word “ChatGPT” is not cause for suspicion. I suggest you don’t accuse people on such flimsy evidence. Please don’t comment on my posts anymore.
Edit: To Habryka, I didn't “Miss the point”. I'm just not going to engage with someone this rude:
The opinions are mostly written in normal college level English so you should be fine in comprehension with some focused effort
Pretending to be smarter than me is a bit rich when the guy posted a question asking whether babies without brains have consciousness, and the very topic he's trying to school me on is one in which he doesn't know basic facts like why the constitutionality of a law was relevant to my argument.
Your argument is too powerful. And by that, I mean it classifies all policy arguments as dumb. “Oh you want to do X? Well the whole system is screwed up, so you’re naïve for even suggesting it.” Substitute any policy that could conceivably involve the courts for X. That’s your argument. If your arguments can’t delineate between good and bad ideas, your arguments have no value.
Why should I take your legal claims more seriously than something that can pass the bar exam, when you’re unable to? If you still don’t like that source, you could have googled my claim and found that you’re incorrect:
https://www.google.com/search?q=U.S.+judges+cannot+overturn+laws+unless+they+are+unconstitutional
Yeah, it's pretty crazy hey.
It is not possible for the debt to be anywhere near 1T because the government is going to refuse to get into debts that high, not because the number is not mathematically possible.
You're really not doing yourself any favours by claiming that the U.S. would never take on $1T of debt. It's currently $33T, and they need to continually roll over expiring debt. (Not to mention the fact that the exact number, $1T, plays no role in my argument whatsoever other than "big number that the government would not want to pay".)
ChatGPT4, which passed the bar exam, says you're wrong and that U.S. judges cannot overturn laws unless they are unconstitutional. This was my understanding. Speak to a legal professor, and see who's right here. There's no point discussing further until you do that.
Right, but I'm not arguing against gay marriage. Again if you can explain how land value taxes are unconstitutional, I'm all for it. You're saying "people can misclassify". So? Tell me how I've misclassified it as constitutional, even potentially. If you're going to duck my actual question yet again, I'm not interested in discussing further.
Oh, by “prove your proposal” I thought you were referring to the policies I would advocate for. Did you mean prove the enforcement perpetuities would work? In that case, it’s just a payoff matrix, and I’d have to show not reneging on the policy is the best course of action, which I've done in previous comments, but I'll summarise it one last time.
And even then all it would take is a single digit number of judges and the top decision makers in the debt market to disagree in 50 years time and the effort will be negated.
I have been very clear, I am not advocating for unconstitutional policies, so judges can’t overturn it. If you can find a constitutional reason to overturn a 50-year-delayed land value tax, I’m all ears. Nobody as of yet has come up with an answer for that, and they keep avoiding that particular question, instead saying “Oh some policies are unconstitutional”, which again, is irrelevant to what my claims are. If you disagree with this, reread my previous comment.
So, overturning the land value tax would be solely up to the legislators. If the legislators renege on the policy, the debt is effectively a perpetuity. Meaning they have $1T worth of debt that they could have avoided (see the formula for valuing perpetuities). But what if they just don’t pay the debt? That is called a default, and defaults have serious negative consequences for a country.
Defaulting on $1T of debt, no matter how odd the conditions of that debt are, would significantly affect the credit-worthiness of a country. Saying otherwise is akin to a government claiming “Oh don’t worry, we’re just defaulting on the debt issued in 2023, the rest of our debt is safe”.
Let’s say you argue that “It’s not worth $1T at the time of default anyway because the market would assign some probability that the legislators would follow through the land value tax”. True, but irrelevant. It’s like if you bought a $1M lottery ticket and you won but they didn’t pay out. Is it true that “The ticket was never worth much anyway, so it doesn’t matter”? No, that logic doesn’t fly. You’d be very upset, and rightfully so.
So yeah, it’s either enact the policy, continue to pay the debt, or default and have huge negative ramifications for the country. The best outcome for the legislators is obviously to enact the land value tax. If you don’t agree with this, ask a finance professor; I’m not going to continue to try to change your mind.
It reflects poorly on someone when they don’t concede points that they’re wrong about. For instance, “It’s not possible for the debt to be anywhere near 1T.” It is wild how overconfident you are. The perpetuity formula is taught in most finance 101 classes.
Your understanding of debt and defaults is equally poor.
As I said, I’m a finance professional, but you don’t have to take my word for whether these assets would create the right incentives. Go to your local university, and ask finance professors about it. Don’t make the judgement yourself, because you lack really basic knowledge of finance. Until you do that, there’s no point to this conversation.
I think your point is that this strategy only works if the voting block’s short-term interests conflict and their long-term interests don’t conflict. I fully agree with that.
If you do discover some method to prove this proposal with the rigor of a bonafide mathematical proof then that may be promising but otherwise…
Yeah, voting theory probably has the level of mathematical rigour that would satisfy you. I suggest diving into the topic on your own time. The pattern of explanation is essentially: “We want a policy in the domain of interest (e.g. voting) to satisfy criteria C because it would be ridiculous to argue against that criteria for reasons X, Y, Z. Here’s a logical proof that policy P satisfies criteria C.”
I’m highly confident in such proposals when the assumptions of their logical argument are unobjectionable, and rightly so. Another example would be something like the relatively recent switch to a better kidney donation system.
But I wouldn’t constrain myself to such arguments. As I said,
Denying [that there are policies we can be confident in over the long term] would require you to think that no such policies exists. Which would commit you to say, “Hey, maybe the Saudi Arabian policy of cutting off a child-thief’s hand shouldn’t be revoked in 50 years. Who can say whether that’ll be a good policy at that point?” And to be honest, if morals do drift that much, I’m very okay with preventing them from acting on that. I think it’d be weird if you weren’t okay with that.
As of the time of writing, it’s a very small set of policies that I have this level of confidence in. So no, I don’t need to defend policies that I would never defend. I know that this strategy could be “misused” by my standards. I’m not defending that misuse. I’m merely saying, “This is a strategy that binds future governments to past agreements, and we can use the strategy to pass policies that we know to be good but have short-term consensus hurdles.” There’s a reason I’m sharing this on LessWrong rather than a forum that supports Trump. It’s because it gives us an advantage. Though, if all the comments are anything to go by, I can say that I disagree with almost all of you, so posting here was a probably a mistake.
Everyone arguing against this is acting like constitutions don’t exist, or that the constitution was a huge mistake. Frankly, it’s a ridiculous position. It reeks of isolated demands for rigour.
I’ve given you quite a lot of thorough explanation as to why that position is wrong. I don’t think there’s any point discussing further.
Why are you ignoring my actual point?
That underlying point still stands: We should be confident that changing the electoral system is good, no matter what the future holds. Or rather, that we should be as confident as we can be about any policy change.
Since society can change a lot in 50 years, this issue could very well be, in 2073, the equivalent of trying to make gay marriage illegal today.
I am confident that you don’t know much about land value taxes. I don’t think you wouldn’t make this claim if you did. From a broad theoretical perspective, they’re sound, though I’m not 100% sold on some implementation details. But as I said in the earlier article, “the examples I’ve given are simply for clarity”. I probably should have restated that here.
To give you an actual example of a policy that I’m 100% certain of, take changing the electoral voting system from First-Past-The-Post to any number of decent alternatives.
You’re asking a very similar question as someone in my other post.
The fact that I claim to know that a small set of very well-justified policies will be good in 50 years is not overconfidence on my part; it’s just I’ve written quite extensively on optimal policy methodology. Have a read here, The Benevolent Ruler’s Handbook (Part 1): The Policy Problem.
A good question someone else asked was, “Fifty years ago, what policies would you have advocated for?” Well, we didn’t have a theoretical foundation for optimal policy at that point. Given that, there is no policy I would have tried to have advocated for in this way (even though the land value tax was invented before 1879). The article that I linked you to contains my attempt to lay those theoretical foundations (or the start of it anyway, I haven’t finished it yet).
Once you have these foundations, you can say things like “I know this policy is optimal, and will continue to be so”. Moral drift is irrelevant for such policies. I’m not arguing for a policy against something like polyamory, just because it’s weird by today’s standards. There are policies that we can be extremely confident in.
Why is it that mathematicians are confident about their results? It’s evident that they are highly confident. And it’s evident that they’re justified in being confident. Their results literally hold for the rest of time. They’re not going to flip in 100 years. So why is this the case?
Basically, there are a few stages of belief. Sometimes a belief is stated on its own without anything else. Sometimes a justification is given for that belief. And sometimes it’s explained why that justification is a reliable indicator of truth. Now, you may think you have infinite regress here, but that’s wrong in practice: You eventually reach a point where your justification is so trivially obvious that it almost feels silly to even list those justifications as assumptions in your argument.
Voting systems have been figured out to the level of standard mathematical detail (i.e. belief + justification). And my methodology post that I linked to you is explaining why justifications of the form they use are unambiguously correct in the world of policy. (Again that series is not finished yet, but the only roadblock is making it entertaining to read, I’ve already figured out the mathematical details.)
So to me, arguing against a voting system change is like saying “Maybe there are a finite number of primes” or “Maybe this table I’m resting my arms on right now doesn’t actually exist”. I.e. these really are things that we can, for all intents and purposes, be certain of. And if you’re not certain of these basic things, we can’t really ever discuss anything productively.
It’s not a matter of the Dunning–Kruger effect; it’s that experts understand these problems well enough. You can find professors who specialise in voting theory and ask them. Ask them “Is there any chance that replacing the current presidential voting system with any of the most promising current alternatives will be a mistake in 100,000 years?” The amount of time is totally irrelevant when you understand a problem well enough. One plus one will always equal two.
To be clear, I’m not saying every policy problem is solved. But some policy problems are solved. (Or in the case of voting theory, sufficiently solved as to far outperform the current system, and we know that there is no unknown system will blow our current proposals out of the water due to Arrow’s impossibility theorem.) And establishing some of those policies is difficult because of short-term incentives. This delay tactic is a way to implement that specific subset of policies, and only that subset.
Denying this would require you to think that no such policies exists. Which would commit you to say, “Hey, maybe the Saudi Arabian policy of cutting off a child-thief’s hand shouldn’t be revoked in 50 years. Who can say whether that’ll be a good policy at that point?” And to be honest, if morals do drift that much, I’m very okay with preventing them from acting on that. I think it’d be weird if you weren’t okay with that.
It’s not possible for the debt to be anywhere near 1T.
I suggest you look up the formula for the value of a 50-year inflation-adjusted annuity, and the value of an inflation-adjusted perpetuity, and plug in some realistic values. You’re 100% wrong here, so I don't know why you're making this claim so strongly. (A caveat, which I've already stated, is that the discount rate at the 50-year mark is around the same as it was upon issuance.) It's $1T exactly because of the lottery argument I gave.
You can’t have a debt which disappears only if gay marriage is illegal, if the courts say that there’s a right to gay marriage.
To be clear to other readers, I didn’t recommend making gay marriage illegal.
I asked you specifically what constitutional reason an enforcement perpetuity for a land value tax could be voided. If you can point to a reason that my actual proposal could be constitutionally voided, that’s fantastic, I will change my mind. But you keep avoiding the class of policies that I would advocate for (illustrated by the land value tax). Instead, you try to make me defend a class of policies that are arguably unconstitutional (illustrated by your anti-gay marriage example), which I wouldn’t advocate for.
It’s like if I said “Ukraine should continue the war against Russia”, and then you say “But some wars are unjust”. So? It’s not that even that your claim is wrong, it’s that the truth value of your claim is entirely irrelevant to my claim. I don’t need to defend “all wars” in order to correctly claim that “Ukraine should defend itself”.
You’re essentially trying to get me to defend the class of “all possible policy proposals”, which is just silly.
The pure mathematics of voting systems, being mathematics, exists likewise, but its application to the physical world, like all applied mathematics, is contingent on the real world conforming to its ontology and its axioms.
I never would have disputed this. But you’re being binary: basically “either we know it or we don’t”. It's not that you're wrong, it's that your categories aren't useful in practice. You're implicitly bucketing things you're 99.9% sure about with things that you're 20% sure about.
In contrast, my view is that you should assign some credence to your set of assumptions being true. And given that, we can say that your credence in a valid logical argument’s conclusion must be at least as high as your credence in its assumptions. (It’s higher because, of course, there can be other sound logical arguments that support your conclusion.)
If you're restricting your knowledge to known mathematical truths, you're not going to make any government policies at all.
it seems vanishingly unlikely that the Presidency or the US will even exist in 100,000 years
Conceded, but that’s not a substantive issue to my argument. The electoral system of an office that doesn’t exist anymore hardly matters, does it? I only posed the 100,000-year question to illustrate my point. That underlying point still stands: We should be confident that changing the electoral system is good, no matter what the future holds. Or rather, that we should be as confident as we can be about any policy change.
On the first point, if they renege on the policy, the debt is worth $1T if they don’t default (assuming the same discount rate as it was upon issuance). It’s like if you bought a $1M lottery ticket and you won but they didn’t pay out. By your argument, “The ticket was never worth much, so it doesn’t matter”. In reality, that logic doesn’t fly. You’d be very upset, and rightfully so. Again, you could ask other finance professionals their opinion; I don’t think I’m going to convince you.
But yeah, good second point, I retract the method of default not mattering. Is it likely though? What possible constitutional reason could the courts use to overturn the validity of this debt, i.e. specifically the debt I’ve proposed? And why would the courts have waited 50 years instead of acting before the debt is issued?
The only reason I gloss over it is its implausibility to me. I think that defaulting on $1T of debt, no matter how odd the conditions are, would significantly affect the credit-worthiness of a country. I think it’s rather obvious that it would. I’d say it’s akin to a government claiming “Oh don’t worry, we’re just defaulting on the debt issued in 2023, the rest of our debt is safe”. Nor does it matter how the debt is defaulted (e.g. by the courts), if you’re an investor.
If you disagree with that assessment, you can speak to other finance professionals. Specifically, I’d recommend people who do credit risk modelling. If you do have those discussions, let me know what they think.
Me: “For the CCP to declare themselves as ‘Communist’ means they are likely to disregard much granularity that good policy must have”
You: “The fact that North Korea someone publically declares themselves to be democratic in the name of their country. That tells you little about how it’s actually governed.”
Again, to highlight the problem, I said “Countries that call themselves communist tend to do this communist thing”, which is demonstrably true. Then you overgeneralised it to “Anything that calls itself an X acts like an X” and then gave an example of your overgeneralisation (North Korea claiming to be democratic) to say the form of my argument was wrong.
The actual form of my argument is that “Certain self-assigned labels convey information”. Sometimes that information is counter to the label, sometimes it matches. But given a specific context, you know which way it goes. For North Korea, “Countries that have ‘Democratic’ in their country’s name tend to be undemocratic” is a true statement. Certain self-assigned labels do convey information. This is not disputable.
Your argument was a total straw man. Honestly, you have a genuine problem admitting error. You care about winning more than truth. Please don’t comment on my posts anymore.
There are cases where there's a consensus among lawmakers that it would be good to do something and there's current opposition that can be circumvented by writing the law into the future
This is exactly my point. It's actually the entire point of the article. Everything else was simply trying to describe this problem and give examples so that it's easier to understand. Whether anyone agrees with the examples does not matter. The article literally emphasises this point: “The examples I’ve given are simply for clarity.”
Actually addressing your specific example is not strawmanning.
Should I have been more general than saying “Republicans and Democrats” interests are the bottleneck? Sure, it's the people in control of the actual vote that matters. But those details are entirely incidental. It's kind of like pointing out a spelling error, and making a huge deal of it.
Now, I do want to hear this. What about your overgeneralisation that “Anything that calls itself an X acts like an X”? Do you not concede that you were straw manning me in that instance?
Well that's good, but regardless of how you feel, having no points on a post makes almost no one see it. At least for the current recommendation system we have. And as I said, LessWrong should be a place where the best ideas can be considered, not hidden. I don't think it currently lives up to that.
No, you're universalising my claim to something that I don't agree with. My claim is not that the short-term interests of those in power always prevent the institution of policies that are in the long-term interests of the country, or that this is always the main barrier.
My actual claim that it is sometimes it is the case. E.g. gerrymandering. E.g. Republicans arguing against the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. And so on. And just because ballot initiatives can be started, doesn't mean they're going to pass into law. They can still have the misaligned incentive problem due to the current voting-age population's interests misaligning with the interests of the unborn. Or due to gerrymandered areas where a minority has control. My proposal solves a subset of these issues.
I'm hoping this comes across as constructive. You've made this same fallacy in another conversion we had. I essentially said “Countries that call themselves communist tend to do communist things”, which is demonstrably true, and you overgeneralised it to “Anything that calls itself an X acts like an X”, which is of course false. And then you knocked down that straw-manned version of my claim.
The reason the U.S. has been able to pay a low interest rate on its debt is because of investors' trust that the U.S. will fulfil its promises (namely, pay its debts on time, and target inflation).
If the U.S. steals money in the eyes of its investors, then the U.S. will be forced to pay a higher interest rate on all of its future debts. Essentially, they would lose some of their customers. So some investors sell, and the only possible buyers are their remaining customers, who would then be overweight on U.S. debt. So the remaining customers would demand a higher discount rate, due to portfolio optimisation concerns.
So will anyone sell? Yes. Investors are the judge, and some of them will judge harshly that a default in one area increases their credence of default in another area. This is a certainty. I know this, because I work in an investment firm and would make this update myself. Sure, other investors might not update their probabilities, but that's irrelevant. The U.S.'s interest rates will increase as a result of their failure to fulfil their promise. The question is, “By how much?”
And if we don't know that answer, will the future government gamble the future of the country on a hope, just so that they can avoid instituting a policy that they should put in place anyway? That'd be a huge mistake. So I stand by the fact that it's a strong enforcement mechanism.
Spitballing is fine, but I feel like in most of those cases, the user should make it a New Question, not a New Post.
Would you downvote a new post that's thoughtful and interesting, but it's one that you strongly disagree with? If so, and if that user is new, basically no one else will see that post. Maybe you don't do this, but others do. I don't think this is a fair response, to essentially negate all of someone's work in writing a good essay. If downvotes didn't affect viewing priority, this would be much less of an issue.
I don't think people know how to downvote. Your idea is interesting and worth discussing, even if most readers strongly disagree with it. Downvoting means that “this is a waste of time”.
I think you've identified a real and serious problem, or at least gotten near it.
Imagine we have a million accounts posting regularly. Then it'll be near impossible for a new account to get their idea heard. If this forum is supposed to be a place where the best ideas can be considered, and we're honest about the fact that most ideas are either trite or wrong (my own included), then we have a serious issue. Especially when it seems like the majority don't understand what the downvote button is for.
What we've got is a less extreme version of that: Not a million accounts, but still too many. And I don't think this problem is a glaring issue to the admins. They have a lot of karma, so their posts can start at 16 points before anyone votes on them, rocketing to the top of the new posts. So if they're immediately downvoted by someone for some inane reason, it doesn't really affect them. They don't actually experience the issue.
So to solve this issue, yeah I do think we need to be more selective with whom we allow to have voting power and posting rights. That said, I think there are probably better ways than money. There are plenty of people who could pay your fee that you would absolutely not want voting or posting. That may involve some sort of test on logic, rationality, thoughtfulness, and manners.
I honestly think there needs to be a confirmation box for downvotes (e.g. “Are you sure? Downvotes are for worthless discussion, not for something you strongly disagree with.”) And maybe the whole system of priority (i.e. which posts go to the top) needs to be rethought, so that it's something more akin to the YouTube video recommendation system (different recommendations for different people).
Whatever is the case, our current system is not fit for scaling, and is facing similar problems that YouTube faced when subscription count was everything to a video's visibility.
I'm not from the U.S., but if I recall correctly, it's the Department of the Treasury who issues new government debt (which is probably why those bonds are called “treasuries”), and I'd keep that responsibility with them. I don't think who issues these securities affects much, as long as they have the same oversight mechanisms as that of the issuance of typical government bonds.
Sure, you can't manipulate the world at will, but you can certainly predict some subset of future actions that will result from some subset of your own actions. People do this every day (e.g. “If I don't go to work, I'll be fired.”).
The plan I've laid out only doesn't work if the incentives fail for some reason.
Your suggested failure mode is that the government can simply not abide by a financial contract. But that is the government defaulting on its debt. I work in the finance industry. Government defaults are a very big deal with serious consequences for the country. So your suggestion is not really an option. Either the future government can enact the policy and get their debt wiped without a default, or they can continue to pay the debt.
Probably not good, which is why I've invented these “enforcement perpetuities”. As far as I know, nobody has used these financial instruments before, so we have no data on them, and must use logic instead. Your question is like asking the inventor of car whether anybody has travelled 100 miles an hour before. It's not only a totally irrelevant question, it's exactly the problem that I'm solving.
So, do you have any logical explanation on why enforcement perpetuities wouldn't sufficiently incentivize future governments? Either the future government can enact the policy and get their debt wiped without a default, or they can continue to pay the debt. Do you think the future politicians, or even the future public, would prefer the latter?
Why is it that mathematicians are confident about their results? It's evident that they are highly confident. And it's evident that they're justified in being confident. Their results literally hold for the rest of time. They're not going to flip in 100 years. So why is this the case?
Basically, there are a few stages of belief. Sometimes a belief is stated on its own without anything else. Sometimes a justification is given for that belief. And sometimes it's explained why that justification is a reliable indicator of truth. Now, you may think you have infinite regress here, but that's wrong in practice: You eventually reach a point where your justification is so trivially obvious that it almost feels silly to even list those justifications as assumptions in your argument.
Voting systems have been figured out to the level of standard mathematical detail (i.e. belief + justification). And my methodology post that I linked to you is explaining why justifications of the form they use are unambiguously correct in the world of policy. (Again that series is not finished yet, but the only roadblock is making it entertaining to read, I've already figured out the mathematical details.)
So to me, arguing against a voting system change is like saying “Maybe there are a finite number of primes” or “Maybe this table I'm resting my arms on right now doesn't actually exist”. I.e. these really are things that we can, for all intents and purposes, be certain of. And if you're not certain of these basic things, we can't really ever discuss anything productively.
It's not a matter of the Dunning–Kruger effect; it's that experts understand these problems well enough. You can find professors who specialise in voting theory and ask them. Ask them “Is there any chance that replacing the current presidential voting system with any of the most promising current alternatives will be a mistake in 100,000 years?” The amount of time is totally irrelevant when you understand a problem well enough. One plus one will always equal two.
Conversely, AI safety's whole problem is that we don't have anything like that. We have no confidence that we can control these systems. We have proposals, we have justifications for those proposals, but we have no reason to believe that those justifications reliably lead to truth.
To be clear, I'm not saying every policy problem is solved. But some policy problems are solved. (Or in the case of voting theory, sufficiently solved as to far outperform the current system, and we know that there is no unknown system will blow our current proposals out of the water due to Arrow's impossibility theorem.) And establishing some of those policies is difficult because of short-term incentives. This delay tactic is a way to implement that specific subset of policies, and only that subset.
Denying this would require you to think that no such policies exists. Which would commit you to say, “Hey, maybe the Saudi Arabian policy of cutting off a child-thief's hand shouldn't be revoked in 50 years. Who can say whether that'll be a good policy at that point?”
Hmm, I didn't have the zero-carbon commitment in mind when I wrote this, but you're right, this post's idea is basically just a wider application of that. Although I do think my subsequent post is probably more novel (see here: Enforcing Far-Future Contracts for Governments).
As far as the tax changes go, I completely agree, forewarning is great, and totally underutilised. There's also a faster alternative, which is to nullify any immediate wealth transfers that result from the change. So for instance, if you're lowering the corporate tax, stock prices will increase, which disproportionately benefits people who are more invested in stocks than, say, real estate. The downside of this is that it requires a very large number of accurate counterfactual valuations (in order to determine the difference). So it's much easier just to give forewarning.
Okay cool. And you didn't misread it the first time, I had to heavily edit it to make it clearer.
I've figured out a solution to the enforcement problem
Let me know what you think
I work at an investment fund. If we held these assets, I assure you we would be trying to get paid if the government reneged. It would be a default, and government defaults are a very big deal with serious consequences for the country. So your suggestion is not really an option. Either the future government can enact the policy and get their debt wiped for free, or they can continue to pay the debt.
It's a very strong enforcement mechanism, since the benefit to enacting the policy is so high.
I see your point about constitutionality, but I think something such as the electoral system falls within its remit, which was my recommendation. But yeah, I would have no problem with extending the uses of the constitution, although I know that others would.
I agree that the financial product is more promising, because of its generality. The interesting thing is that even if they issue the asset with the intention of breaking the promise, they lose basically nothing in net present terms (because those cashflows 50 years into the future are discounted by 1+d to the 50th power). Thus it wouldn't be a mistake to do it (even while planning to renege). Since it's equivalent to issuing regular perpetuities in terms of how much money a given debt would raise, it's outright incorrect to call it a “bomb”. They don't have to pay $1T all at once at the 50-year mark, it's just that the present value of the debt will be worth that amount (assuming the same discount rate is the same as it was upon issuance).
Don't get me wrong, I get that “if you're explaining you're losing”. But LessWrong, of all places, should be an area to discuss such ideas, and not have it dismissed out of hand simply because “People are too stupid/lazy/disinterested to get it”. I don't think we should restrict our posts to 5 words or fewer. I don't think we should avoid novel ideas. And I don't think we should avoid politics.
The fact that everyone said Trump had no chance in the 2016 election shows that people basically don't know what they're talking about when it comes to political plausibility. No offence meant. I just don't see any value in such guesses, when they're so often wrong, and they stifle ideas.
I've figured out a solution to the enforcement problem
Let me know your thoughts
I've just written a post on how exactly to enforce these contracts: Enforcing Far-Future Contracts for Governments.
Let me know what you think!
I think it's rather unfair to classify me as a confidently underinformed fanatic. I've worked in federal government, the country's largest bank, and am now an investment analyst at a large fund. High confidence usually indicates overconfidence, sure, but that correlation breaks down when someone really has thought deeply about a topic. Mathematicians, for instance, are nearly 100% confident of long-known peer-reviewed claims.
I've written quite extensively on optimal policy methodology. Have a read here, The Benevolent Ruler’s Handbook (Part 1): The Policy Problem. As I said in one of my other comments, “As for the 1923 question, I'd say we didn't have a theoretical foundation for what makes a policy optimal. Given that, there is no policy I would have tried to have advocated for in this way (even though the land value tax was invented before 1879). The article that I linked you to contains my attempt to lay those theoretical foundations (or the start of it anyway, I haven't finished it yet).”
Once you have these foundations, you can say things like “I know this policy is optimal, and will continue to be so”.
Let me start by saying I think I really should have said 50 years instead of 100. That seems to a big sticking point for people.
I haven't made myself clear. What I'm saying is create a contract to enforce the institution of a law. The government is the signatory, not any particular person. Governments can and do hold by agreements that past governments made, even if they disagree with their predecessors.
Now, sometimes they break those promises, and that's why I'm talking about creating a binding contract. As in, if you break the contract, a penalty occurs.
For example, let's say the government issues $1T of a particular financial asset. Those assets are basically inflation-adjusted perpetuities, except upon the institution of the delayed law, they cease to pay out. (Unless the law is instituted before the 50-year period, in which case they only cease to pay out after 50 years so that the perpetuity buyers aren't swindled.) If the law is not instituted, then they continue to be perpetuities.
Upon selling those "enforcement perpetuities", the government splits the ownership of land and buildings. So if you own a house, now you own the house itself, as well as a financial asset for the land underneath it. The land asset pays off a cashflow equal to the land value (if you're taxed $1000 on Jan 1st, the government pays you $1000 on Jan 1st). Now, the money raised from the enforcement perpetuities can be used to buy those land assets from all current landowners.
Maybe you'd call this an incentive mechanism, rather than a contract. Whatever, I'm not a legal expert. Whether that's the best solution or not, I don't know. Even if there's something wrong with the contract I just laid out, I would be shocked if there were not a way to do this. I'm sure there are plenty of creative solutions.
Obviously, that particular solution doesn't apply to all delayed laws. Different laws will require different solutions. For the voting system problem, make a constitutional amendment requiring a unanimous vote to overturn it.
I'm not a legal expert, but I'm sure we've solved the problem of how to create a binding contract.
What's weird about the laws I've suggested?
Depends on domain we're talking about. The post I linked in the last paragraph will probably answer your question in more detail than you'd ever want, but I'll answer it briefly here.
I'd very happily back the two examples that I gave. And that's because we can define reasonable optimality criteria for each of those areas (voting systems and tax policy) and show that our policy proposals satisfy those criteria under some reasonable assumptions.
The key point here is that, for the land value tax, the optimality criteria and the assumptions required are extremely weak, i.e. every person informed on the matter would agree with them.
For the voting system change, there's actually a proof that you can't satisfy all the conditions that you probably want for that system (Arrow's impossibility theorem). So in that example, there could be reasonable debate about which property set we want, but I'd be happy If America changed to any number of proposed voting systems. For an introduction on the topic, see CGP Grey's video.
This delay strategy is definitely a last resort. If you can implement a good policy today, then do that. But if you face insurmountable road blocks, and you know the policy is optimal (by some reasonable definition), then it may very well be the best option available to you.
As for the 1923 question, I'd say we didn't have a theoretical foundation for what makes a policy optimal. Given that, there is no policy I would have tried to have advocated for in this way (even though the land value tax was invented before 1879). The article that I linked you to contains my attempt to lay those theoretical foundations (or the start of it anyway, I haven't finished it yet).
Great post!
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of EAs see my takes here as a slippery slope to warm glow thinking and wanton spending that needs to be protected against.
It's a shame that we have to caveat things like this when we write. Some readers, perversely, see what they don't want to see and will attack you for it.
I'm not sure why you think I'm generalising from one example. Sure, I wrote only one example, but this article is not the sum of my knowledge. There are many, many examples of this.
I'll give you another one. Policymakers in the area of university funding saw that universities were underfunded by about 15%. Their solution? Increase student fees by 15%. At no point did they ask themselves, “Why does funding get out of sync every decade?” Or “How could we design a system of scratch so that this will never be an issue, and so that degrees are always priced appropriately?”
Focusing on fixing the current problem is often an incremental approach. It assumes that if we just tweak the dials a little, the problem is solved. And maybe it is. For a while. And then it stuffs up again. Or maybe it creates new issues, because they weren't focused on the things they couldn't yet see. The problem is basically that you can't polish a turd. And a lot of policy is pure shit. No underlying deductive argument with reasonable assumptions. Just “Oh, this sounds alright” and then they go with it.
I am up, compared to the market, yes.