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This isn't a great way of thinking about intangible value, since most people are far less liquid than the value of the things in their lives. If your mom needs life-saving treatment for $10,000 and you can't afford to pay it, does that mean your mom is really worth less than $10,000 to you? No - her existence might contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars of devotion, emotional support, and sage advice to you. It's just that nobody will accept those things as collateral for a loan.
The Colosseum doesn't have as stark a value proposition going for it, but by a similar argument it's easy to imagine the public benefit of some building being greater than the amount of money that can be raised to support it. Personally, I think the Colosseum is mostly only valuable to the Italian state for the legitimacy that it buys it, a little self-justifying scheme of wasting taxpayer money to manufacture taxpayer assent.
I disagree about the transfer costs making Harberger tax unworkable, that gets priced into the self-assessed property value. You pay taxes on the use value of the property to you, not the market value, which is typically lower. When you want to sell, you'll offer at the lower market rate.
But this actually points to an even larger problem. Harberger taxes as such would be incredibly destructive to communities. The stronger the community, the higher the use value, meaning the higher the self-assessed tax rate would have to be in order to reflect the worth to you. But the value from community is uncashable, meaning that there's an unjust tax burden for having a better community. And people are usually only liquid to a minute proportion of the value of the intangible things in their lives.
Thus, people likely have to assess below their use value, which means the community can be eroded by compulsory sale and eviction. This already occurs in rent-paying communities, which are destroyed when property value goes up and they can no longer afford to rent there.
Tbh, you probably end up fighting this by having your neighbors in the community firebomb the property which got bought out from under you.
I think you can just drop the 'zero notice' part, add something like a 90 day delay between sale and transfer, and things would be a lot more workable.
There's another problem that your comment makes me think of - in a lot of cases, the easiest and most profitable thing to do will be to just buy the property and offer to lease it back to the previous owner at a higher rate than they were last paying in Harberger tax. With capital accumulation, you'll probably end up with giant extractive leasing company monopolies practically owning unwilling renters with no outside options - not sure what to do about this.
If anything, it'll be more common for the previous owner to trash the place on their way out with some excuse for avoiding legal damages.
I think in the typical Harberger scheme, in order to compel transfer of property rights, you pay the entire capital cost of the property, not some portion as a temporary rent.
My proposed solution to both your problem and Richard's, explained further in a separate comment, is that payment and transfer be separated by enough time to vacate amicably, or sue to enjoin transfer.
where the value to an actor of some property might be less than the amount of value they have custody over via that property.
I don't think those are separate things? The value of a roof is the value of everything underneath it when it rains.
Property owners are only going to assess their property for tax purposes at perceived market value if they're ready to sell. Otherwise they'll assess it higher, factoring in moving costs. The Harberger buyer is usually overpaying.
For this reason, I think most Harberger extortion is easily avoidable by adding a sufficient delay between sale time and transfer time. For example, for most categories of residential and commercial real estate, a reasonable expectation for compulsory sale would be perhaps 90 days between purchase and transfer. (This is already the custom for foreclosures, I think.) The compelled seller, having priced in moving costs, will have time to decide how to put their new liquidity to use and make the proper adjustments or sue to enjoin the transfer if maliciousness such as repeat harassment is suspected.
This leaves the problem of sudden price changes. One solution is to make compulsory sales begin as blind auctions. If someone submits a blind bid for your property at or above your self-assessed tax value, you get a short period of time to submit a reassessment, and if your bid is higher you pay back taxes on that reassessment within that tax year, otherwise they buy from you at their assessment. I think this scheme gets both bidders to bid their true rates, and discourages holdouts approximately the same amount? It makes the market slightly less efficient but keeps the same tax efficiency.
You correctly imply something worth restating clearly: despite their initial framing, impact markets are not a way to achieve public goods per se, they are a way to efficiently achieve funder goals in contexts where the path to that goal is uncertain, there are many plausible options, and there is lots of information that can be potentially priced into the market about those options.
With some impact market designs decentralized self interest can in fact come into play, perhaps in the form of bounty pools pledged into escrow by some subset of the people who would benefit from the existence of the public good they are offering the bounty for. In this case funders have a vested interest in what is achieved, and will evaluate based on such. Maybe in the long run markets that enable such a design will gain reputability relative to markets solely funded and assessed by fly-by philanthropists.
I agree with you that disinterested funders often end up having counterproductive goals, although not in all domains. The above example of generic pharmaceutical repurposing trials might be such, where the market can bear useful information about which of many interventions would have the highest impact and chance of success, but the work to achieve that goal is kind of hard to do serious harm with, given that the risk profiles of those drugs is already well quantified. In such cases I see especially little risk to encouraging philanthropy.
If some funder intentionally wishes to achieve nefarious goals with impact markets, I admit the existence of impact market infrastructure might facilitate that. But we have legal and social tools to counteract bad ends and I don’t think that impact markets are so powerful as to enable an end run around these.
Even granting that there are grabby aliens in your cosmic neighborhood (click here to chat with them*), I find the case for SETI-risk entirely unpersuasive (as in, trillionths of a percent plausible, or indistinguishable from cosmic background uncertainty), and will summarize some of the arguments others have already made against it and some of my own. I think it is so implausible that I don't see any need to urge SETI to change their policy. [Throwing in a bunch of completely spitballed, mostly-meaningless felt-sense order-of-magnitude probability estimates.]
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Parsability. As Ben points out, conveying meaning is hard. Language is highly arbitrary; the aliens are going to know enough about human languages to have a crack at composing bytestrings that compile executable code? No chance if undirected transmission, 1% if directed transmission intended to exploit my civilization in particular.
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System complexity. Dweomite is correct that conveying meaning to computers is even harder. There is far too much flexibility, and far too many arbitrary and idiosyncratic choices made in computer architectures and programming languages. No chance if undirected, 10% if directed, conditioning on all above conditions being fulfilled.
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Transmission fidelity. If you want to transmit encrypted messages or program code, you can't be dropping bits. Do you know what frequency I'm listening on, and what my sample depth is? The orbital period of my planet and the location of my telescope? What the interplanetary and terrestrial weather conditions that day are going to be, you being presumably light-years away or you'd have chosen a different attack vector? You want to mail me a bomb, but you're shipping it in parts, expecting all the pieces to get there, and asking me to build it myself as well? 0.01% chance if undirected, 1% if directed, conditioning on all above conditions being fulfilled.
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Compute. As MichaelStJules's comment suggests, if the compute needed to reproduce powerful AI is anything like Ajeya's estimates, who cares if some random asshole runs the thing on their PC? No chance if undirected, 1% if directed, conditioning on all above conditions being fulfilled.
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Information density. Sorry, how much training is your AI going to have to do in order to be functional? Do you have a model that can bootstrap itself up from as much data as you can send in an unbroken transmission? Are you going to be able to access the hardware necessary to obtain more information? See above objections. There's terabytes of SETI recordings, but probably at most megabytes of meaningful data in there. 1% chance if undirected, 100% if directed, conditioning on all above conditions being fulfilled.
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Inflexible policy in the case of observed risk. If the first three lines look like an exploit, I'm not posting it on the internet. Likewise, if an alien virus I accidentally posted somehow does manage to infect a whole bunch of people's computers, I'm shutting off the radio telescope before you can start beaming down an entire AI, etc, etc. (I don't think you'd manage to target all architectures with a single transmission without being detected; even if your entire program was encrypted to the point of indistinguishability from entropy, the escape code and decrypter are going to have to look like legible information to anyone doing any amount of analysis.) Good luck social engineering me out of pragmatism, even if I wasn't listening to x-risk concerns before now. 1% chance if undirected, 10% if directed, conditioning on all above conditions being fulfilled.
So if you were an extraterrestrial civilization trying this strategy, most of the time you'd just end up accomplishing nothing, and if you even got close to accomplishing something, you'd more often be alerting neighboring civilizations about your hostile intentions than succeeding. Maybe you'd have a couple lucky successes. I hope you are traveling at a reasonable fraction of C, because if not you've just given your targets a lot of advance warning about any planned invasion.
I just don't think this one is worth anyone's time, sorry. I'd expect any extraterrestrial communications we receive to be at least superficially friendly, and intended to be clearly understood rather than accidentally executed, and the first sign of hostility to be something like a lethal gamma-ray burst. In the case that I did observe an attempt to execute this strategy, I'd be highly inclined to believe that the aliens already had us completely owned and were trolling us for lolz.
*Why exactly did you click on a spammy-looking link in a comment on the topic of arbitrary code execution?
Composer Christopher Tin has set JFK's "We Choose to go to the Moon" speech to music, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBITb9Zz0rY . Solsticegoers may recognize the opening leitmotif as shared with Sogno Di Volare, another movement from the same work, an oratorio on the theme of flight, To Shiver the Sky.
I've recently gained a better appreciation for how astonishingly good this work is at linear perspective, which had only come about in European art in the prior century. Many things about this painting are good (and some bad to my eye, like the messy color scheme) but those hexagonal details on the curved arches in perspective is 100% Raphael showing off.
An aside, but linear perspective is the most rational part of art, in the older philosophical sense of rational; it's pretty much the only major part of classical art which descends from first principles rather than having an empirical basis.
Okay, this guy sold me as soon as I saw he had an episode on Doc Ing Hay's general store in rural Oregon. I stumbled upon this place once just passing through, at a convenient time to get a guided tour of the little museum they'd made out of it. There's not even a Wikipedia article on it yet; which gives me the impression that this podcaster is committed to both a broad and deep history of the chinese experience
Ah you've got my directionality confused, the bias preventing me from judging History of China podcast dispassionately is in his inability to pronounce Chinese fluently. I'm in the weird position of being fluent enough in Chinese to be a little intolerant of English speakers with bad Chinese pronunciation but not fluent enough to understand the Chinese-language content. I will say though that China History Podcast seems a little better on this very particular axis and I think it would be unreasonable to expect much better. They definitely seem to have a lot of content, and much of it relevant to the modern era!
Latest update: I did not complete the documentary and have no plans to continue working on it in the near future. The 90 hours of footage that I shot is all archived for possible later use, and is partially available to the community upon request.
A bulleted list of answers others have written:
- Generates a new insight (TurnTrout)
- Is good for something (adamzerner)
- Shows its work (bvxn)
- Ties up its loose ends (curi)
- Resolves a disagreement (curi)
- Shows effort (Alexei)
- Well-written (Alexei)
- Surprising (Alexei)
- Credible (Alexei)
- Summarize work (me)
And certain topical interests which LW is a topos for:
- Cognition
- AI
- Self-improvement
I'm throwing in that I like posts and comments that compress knowledge (such as this).
My further two cents are that what people answer here will be somewhat unrepresentative. The answers will be a certain set of ideal practices which your answerers may not actually implement and even if they did, they might not represent the community at large. The honest answer to your question is probably data-driven; by scraping the site you could generate a better predictive model of what content actually gets upvotes than people will tell you here.
But nevertheless there is value to your question. The idealized picture you'll get is in fact the picture of the ideal you want. If you take onboard people's best-case answers, you'll make stuff that the most engaged people want the most of, and that will contribute to a making better community overall.
Thanks! I won't add these to the top list but I hope people will scroll down to see the comments. I should mention that there are a whole bunch of Mike Duncan - inspired "History of X" which are of varying quality. I wanted to get into the History of China dude, but I couldn't give him more than a few episodes due to wincing at his accent, didn't even get to judge his content. Unfortunately my Chinese isn't actually good enough to listen to podcasts in Chinese about Chinese history. History of Byzantium is supposedly also good.
Zvi, thank you for writing this. I’ve been working through Baudrillard too and coming to the same conclusion - he is far more insight porn than philosophy, compared to famous scholars with similar metaphysics such as Foucault and Zizek. I’ve got a long post in the pipeline on this as well.
It’s really frustrating that this community has been spinning up an elaborate schema which is a misinterpretation of a sophist, where the original conversants both admitted they had by that point only read the Wikipedia summary of the book. This feels like the opposite of quality scholarship, not that this is entirely Benquo and jessicataylor’s fault, rather how the discussion ended up picking this up and running with it.
The rationalist community’s reading of Baudrillard tries to put some sense back into what is fairly sophisticated. But the main problem both groups make is assuming that Level 1 is some fallen ideal, rather than something progressively achieved. Baudrillard is baking a hotter take - which most rationalist discussion completely misses - that Level 1 is completely vanished and Level 2 is on its way out too. He thinks we live in a postmodern world (surprisingly to rationalists who haven’t read the postmodernists: like most postmodernist scholars he does not actually think this is very good) where meaning is composed wholly of simulacra, which does not actually reference the real world which our bodies live in, although he says the real world sure references it.
This misinterpretation of him is easy to make - partly because it sounds like he developed a philosophy out of being totally dissociated. He hated the Matrix, which the Wachowskis referenced him in, for this reason: in the Matrix the virtual reality can be escaped.
My alternative proposal is to re-ground the discussion in a better take about power relations and social games, noticing which groups throughout history play these games and which don’t. The basic conclusion is people generally converse as if they were in the 2nd order (level), jump up in simulation order whenever their access to resources they don’t produce are at stake, and jump down when they have a hand in producing resources. Global meaning has no particular order, unlike Baudrillard’s claim that it is of the 4th order.
More to come.
Added AskHistorians podcast! Mentioning Coursera inline.
Added!
I’ve tried to provide a legitimate alternative to every piratical source I’ve mentioned - if others concur with you I’ll reduce the discussion of piracy sites to just a brief gloss of sci-hub.
Thanks! I can’t build that out all myself, since I am obviously US based, but I will work on reducing US-centric claims and I would love it if others could point out what’s available globally or not.
Thanks! In the same vein,
- The inscrutably-organized, subversive, and spasmodic https://the-eye.eu
- Faded Page (works that are public domain and legal to upload in Canada but not necessarily elsewhere): https://www.fadedpage.com/index.php
- Internet Archive also has https://openlibrary.org/
I should roll some of this back into the main article.
This is incredible. I'd never heard of it; adding it to the research section.
On the bus from NYC to Boston for EAGxBoston 2019 I chanced to sit next to a topology professor. I don't have any higher math background, but mentioning that I'd recently read the first few books of the Elements opened the door to a long and interesting conversation. I was amazed that something written two thousand years prior compared so favorably with my own 8th grade geometry experience, which despite having a cool teacher managed to teach me only the rudiments of geometry, and nothing substantial about proofs or theorems.) Minus the annoying long s, I'd gift Byrne's illustrated Elements to any smart kid in a heartbeat - it's surprisingly cheap on Amazon.
Do you use a separate word for the subjective experience of thought and perception?
Another way to succinctly say this is that two distributions may be cleanly separable via a single immeasurable variable, but overlap when measured on any given measurable variable, such that a representation of the separation achieved by a single immeasurable variable is only achievable through multiple measurable variables.
I think that there are a few plausible theories of the rationalist community and how they relate to the mission:
[0] Null hypothesis: no connection. This is obviously implausible if you've spent 3 seconds around the community or its mission.
1. The community and the mission are the same. Even the less immediately relevant activities create an intellectual and social milieu which is conducive to progress. The ability to engage with other intellectuals at low cost to oneself means that insights are shared between key individuals at faster rate. The community provides high value to the mission by enabling it. The mission provides high value to the community.
2. The community exists at least in part to play interference for the missionaries. Being able to do real thinking means a certain degree of insulation from the real world; having fewer demands on your time, having your basic human needs taken care of, having the ability to en. The community provides medium value to the mission by shielding it. The mission provides low value to the community, because the community's strength derives from elsewhere. I think this is what you are advocating, and it's one that I like.
3. The community [in aggregate] puts the minimum effort towards the mission to look convincing because if it were to openly admit that it doesn't actually care about the mission people would leave. People are all here because pretending to have a shared goal is as good as actually having one in terms of bringing people together. The community provides slightly positive value to the mission, but selfishly. The mission provides high value to the community.
4. The community exists as a social pasttime with no clear purpose. It exists as a space not for real concern about x-risk, but primarily as a social outgrowth of the tech sector, a safe space for weirdness. The community detracts from the mission by exerting, even unintentionally, a social pressure upon missionaries to regress to the mean. The mission provides no value to the community.
I generally agree with the call to action. I have a historical critique.
I think you are mistaken about the nature of villages being automatically bound together; I think this error is survivorship bias. Most settlements that have ever existed did so ephemerally: existing primarily for the extraction of a single resource (mining towns), or for a single goal (military garrisons). What you see as natural cultural bonds and communities are a mark of stability, a historical example of a group that has solved (at least for a little time) the problem that the rationalist community is working through, not one that has inherited it by natural right.
To refactor the analysis with this in mind, we will basically look at what makes those communities stable, and how ours compares. I think it is at least the following:
1. The presence of multiple industries. A typical farming village will grow multiple crops, possess hunters and loggers, millers and bakers; be able to provide for itself and also produce a surplus. Think of it as a diverse basket. We're narrow on this front. Mostly concentrated in tech and in the mission.
2. A high degree of intermarriage. Maybe polyamory is a good substitute and quick workaround? Despite certain benefits it provides I still doubt polyamory is sustainable on a multigenerational scale.
3. Not being constantly under siege. Strong communities can get through tough times better than weak ones, but not inevitably so. Historically (think Oxford) the solution for intellectuals is to find wealthy patrons and/or government support. Looks like we've got the first.
I do not think "culture" is actually a factor here; it's a weasel word that deserves a taboo in this community. I think "culture" tends to be, at a population level, an adaptation to political and material circumstances that surround that community. Cultures do not tend towards stability. This is once again survivorship bias.
Works which directly informed this:
The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott
The Intentional Community Movement, Marguerite Guzman Bouvard
There is one in progress, which I am helming. I don't post here much, but I've been active in the NYC community for 2 years. I've been working on the project for about 6 months and have filmed a substantial amount now (~35 hours guesstimate). I've written a brief summary here. You can follow my updates on Discord; message me privately for a link.
From recent releases, I really like Tillie Walden's ultrasoft scifi On a Sunbeam, (2015-2017), and Kieron Gillen's The Wicked + The Divine (2014-ongoing), which has a lot of similarity to American Gods.
For something rationalist-adjacent, I'd recommend Blue Delliquanti's O Human Star (2012-ongoing), which deals with LGBTQ issues in the context of FAI and transhumanism.
Would love to have you in attendance!
Hi, I'm helping to organize this year's NYC Solstice, as raemon has moved to the Bay Area. I've been reading LW, SSC, and rationalist Tumblr since about January and going to NYC meetups semiregularly since April, but haven't yet posted on here, so I thought I'd make a quick introduction.
My name is Rachel, I'm an undergrad senior at NYU completing a communications major. I'm originally from the Bay Area. On the MBTI, I'm an INTJ. Besides rationality, my passions are graphic novels and cooking. My intellectual interests tend towards things that have a taxonomic character, like biology and linguistics. (I'm also a fan of the way that these subjects keep evading a perfect taxonomy.)
I occasionally wear sandals.