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that this is just the kind of thing that happens when retailers are foolishly prevented (by public opinion, if not by law) from charging the true market price.
Retailer console base prices are set by the manufacturer. A first-party retailer is not allowed to charge more than the RRP as part of their agreement.
Perhaps an important economic point here is that consoles are generally sold below-cost. Console manufacturers lose money on every product they sell from hardware costs. This is because consoles make their money on games, where the margins are much fatter.
The issue here is that the manufacturers and retailers are working in a commodity mindset, whereas the market for these items has shifted away from a commodity and into a luxury due to the high demand compared to supply.
In general though, I'm optimistic about scalpers collapsing under increasing liqudity. Sony poured a lot of resources into automating their manufacturing pipeline and has been churning them out as fast as they can since day 1, with no sign of slowing. The number of consoles in the world is increasing at a much faster rate than the number of people who want consoles.
This idea seems like it has several large issues:
- It disproportionately targets people who are poor and directly ties how much risk you can take on to how much disposable income you are able to leverage. This doesn't seem particularly just, especially considering these are the people who have been most disadvantaged by coronavirus so far.
- Big taxes like this can be used in a myriad of ways, but whether they ever are used in those ways is another question entirely. That's just not typically how modern governments handle tax revenue. And are the things you list really not done simply because we don't have the money? I don't think so.
- You're placing a big inefficiency on industries already operating at fairly small margins in dire straits. The live music industry does not need any more weight on its back, it's already broken at this point. Many pubs and restaurants are only barely hanging on. If your intention is to drive the final nail into the coffin of many of these industries, this is a good way to do so.
- People are strongly incentivised under this scheme to obfuscate, minimise or completely hide their social gatherings. When you force people away from things like nightclubs, pubs, bars, or festivals you just shift that activity into a gray area. People still act and organise to fulfill their social needs, and they're always going to be better at getting around any monitoring you build than you will be at building it.
Thanks for your thoughts ACrackedPot 🙂
Sounds like a stressful model to think about! Maybe I'm just too much of a pacifist for that mindset. But I agree that friction is absolutely a critical part of democracy. A big part of that is giving people a non-violent way to settle disputes and come to consensus over limited resources.
What does it mean for a cryptocurrency to "transition from PoW to PoS"? What does it mean for decentralized entities to come to a consensus on a massive change to how they operate?
Decentralized governance is really hard, and chains split all the time - remember Bitcoin Classic? Ethereum Classic? All pretty dead now, but in their day they represented substantial chain splits that took a long time to fully resolve.
So, I would say that such a transition is mostly a question of decentralized governance, not a question of technology. If Bitcoin "transitioned to PoS", what actually would have happened is that someone invented a whole new PoS cryptocurrency with very little relationship to Bitcoin, and managed to convince everyone that this new cryptocurrency was actually Bitcoin and that they should all immediately switch. That's really really hard to do!
So, one might wonder why Ethereum seems to be able to do this and yet Bitcoin is a much harder nut to crack. I think the biggest reason is the nature of the decentralized governance of both cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was effectively released into the wild to fend for itself from Satoshi's initial implementation. Ethereum, on the other hand, has always had a strong steering hand in the Ethereum Foundation. Because there is a concept of legitimate governance within the Ethereum ecosystem, it's a lot easier to roll out breaking upgrades. But make no mistake - even with this stronger governance, the Ethereum PoW->PoS upgrade is effectively the same as the one described above, where we're swapping out the existing protocol with something pretty different and just trying to convince everyone that its the "legitimate continuation" of that protocol.
First, it labels a society that's in civil war where decisions are made by the sword as democratic provided everyone has equal power and is equally effected.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply ChristianKl :)
Such a broken-down society doesn't have a system of governance, and we explicitly say that this is a property of a system of governance. A power vacuum within which a system would normally sit is distinguishably different to a functioning state. So, it seems like we would fully expect this definition to fail here at no fault of its own.
Secondly, it ignores delegation of power. By the nature of delegation of power it means that the person who's the recipiant of delegated power has more power then the people who delegate their power.
Yes, this is in support of radical and direct democracy, not the watered-down versions we see today which depend far too heavily on delegation. It is a very intentional ignoring of delegation, because delegation is directly counter to maximizing this property. I do propose Liquid Democracy as a just solution for sometimes temporarily delegating power in the "Counter-Arguments: The Average Punter" section, because it is sometimes necessary for decisions where the average voter isn't proficient.
Delegation of power not only happens through elections. If many people read an article by an investigative reporter, that gives the investigative reporter power which in turn means that a single man can create change when something isn't working. Free speech is a central part of the Western notion of democracy because it allow such interactions to happen.
We are not merely describing democracy as "elections", as I try to outline in the opening "What Is Democracy". You will notice that I describe agency as not merely the agency of an individual within a political system, but general agency of action, which I believe encompasses your views on free speech.
Thanks very much for your thoughtful reply MakoYass, I agree with everything you've said here. It's certainly a strange line to straddle personally, where I'm totally on-board the crypto train but also a radical environmentalist. But I also look forward to speculation being ripped out of the crypto ecosystem as much as possible and replaced with functional value. One day soon, we can hope.
But that isn't what I want, and it's not what I'm saying here. At no point do I make the claim that the values represented by the safety team are or should be static. I understand the point you're making, I've even written about it pretty extensively here, but as far as I can see it's a much more general ethical issue than the domain of this essay. It applies just as readily to literally any organisation as it does to the theoretical organisations proposed here.
Specifically what values wider society holds and how they evolve those values is not the purview of this essay. Whatever those values are - within a reasonable domain of the possibility space - the orthogonality of the production team and those values remains. E.g if your society is single-mindedly focused on religious fervour, your societal values are still orthogonal to any good production team, so it doesn't really affect the point I'm making all that much.
I'm not 100% sure if your intention is to equate democratic governance with this lottery hypothetical, but I'm not quite sure the two can be compared. As to how important or nominally good I might perceive value drift as, well I think it's rather like how important the drift of your car is - rather dependent on the road.
So the concept of "redistributing equally" gets kind of complicated.
Ah yes, you're right in redistributing the 50 tokens when refunding the winners in the same proportion is tricky. Probably necessitates being able to have fractional tokens so you can refund someone 0.1 token or something like that. I imagine it will be very simple for the losing choices.
Also, I don't mean a regular Dutch auction, I mean a blind one where all bidders submit their bid at once (like an election). My understanding of a blind Dutch auction is that it resolves this "people don't bid because they don't think they could win" result in general auctions.
This was absolutely an intuitive suggestion from reading about voting theory and auctions, you've got a much deeper understanding of the VT maths than I do. I do think that thinking about elections like an auction for a decision can be a useful way of thinking about it, but I don't have professional experience with this beyond helping to design some videogame economies. Don't take this as any kind of standard suggestion - just mine :)
Why would it bother?
We can't really speculate too strongly about the goals of an emerging AGI, so we have to consider all possibilities. "Bothering" is a human construct of thinking that an AGI is under no obligation to conform to.
An AI that isn't using all it's compute towards it's assigned task is one that gets replaced with one that is.
This is why I specify that this is an emerging AGI, where we are in a situation where the result of the iterator is so complex that only the thing iterating it understands the relationship between symbols and output. We can provide discriminators - as I also describe - to try and track an AGI's alignment towards the goals we want, but we absolutely can't guarantee that every last bit of compute is going to be dedicated to anything in particular.
I'd be lying if I claimed to fully grok the maths, but I'm glad it was a useful suggestion!
The tyranny of the rocket equation means that we're going to really struggle to make it worth it. For the same reason that we can't just make fuel tanks bigger, it is very inefficient to send fuel out from the same gravity well as you want to refuel from - orders of magnitude.
The thing to remember when we talk about "kg of fuel per kg of cargo" is that the vast majority of that fuel is burned in the lower atmosphere. The majority of the work of shooting a rocket off to space is just getting it moving. So if you want to ship enough rocket fuel up to form a fuel dump with something like hydrogen rocket fuel, then you need to expend vastly more fuel than you end up storing.
Interesting, you make some great points here and I don't think I have any good refutations to any of them. Perhaps if we play around with the auction structure by which we take away and refund these tokens?
Hello Gerald! For sure. To be honest the Kessler syndrome was an afterthought and I may be overestimating its impact. I think the far more relevant danger is active measures against a launching or landing craft. Things like fuel dumps (you are totally right in that it doesn't make sense to take fuel from Earth up into LEO, I was more thinking about bringing fuel from some other much-lower-energy gravity well like the moon) would probably be better placed in Lagrange points.
I imagine something similar would be true of space; in times of war, some nations would be unable to access their colonies
Maybe I'm vastly underestimating how self-sufficient these colonies will be, but my impression from current plans for permanent habitation is that they will depend on shipments from Earth for basic supplies for quite some time. Strong claim held weakly, someone please prove me wrong on that. But I imagine it's going to be a heck of a lot of extra straw on an already overloaded camel's back.
Kessler syndrome isn't a huge issue when you're just shooting off somewhere else and not spending a lot of time in LEO. But I think not having the ability to have infrastructure like satellites, fuel dumps, stations, skyhooks, or whatever the heck else you feel like putting there is going to be a problem and again make the whole operation a lot less efficient.
Mary aquires the new, novel experience of believing that she has seen the color red, when she previously held the belief that she only had perfect, but non-subjective knowledge. Qualia does not necessarily need to be new information as this attempts to demonstrate, it just is whatever is different about your mind when you actually experience a thing.
That's a great point! There is that possibility, but do we need to make that assumption? I'm not sure.
Mary would be able to tell us if "qualia did not differ in ways known only to the person who had them", even if she might not be able to describe to us exactly how. She'd be able to say "that was different", even if the precise words to describe how it was different escaped her, and that true/false response is enough to draw some meaningful conclusion about the existance of something, even if it doesn't tell you anything about the nature of that thing. And if it's completely imperceptable to Mary, then it can't be qualia, as qualia is by definition about subjective perception.
Is this true? e.g. Gallup shows the fraction of US vegetarians at 6% in 2000 and 5% 2020 (link), so if there is exponential growth it seems like either their numbers are wrong or the growth is very slow.
Well the nature of exponential growth includes a long tail, but yes, it does appear that over the past few decades there has been substantial growth in many areas, with the UK reporting 150,000 vegans in 2006 compared to 600,000 vegans in 2018. Additionally, the vegan food industry "$14.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $31.4 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 10.5% from 2019 to 2026." That's a really high growth rate - I doubt that there is no other sector of the food industry expanding as rapdily as that, though I can't say for sure.
It seems implausible to me that the individual benefits from reducing climate change are comparable to the costs or benefits of diet change over the short term. Even if everyone changing their diet decreased extinction risk by 1% (I think that's implausible, but you could try to tell a story about non-extinction environmental impacts being crazy large), being vegetarian would reduce your grandchildren's probability of death by well under < 1/billion which is completely negligible.
Culture is a thing, and the decisisons that you express shape the social valuations of the people around you. A single person going against a carnivorous tide will indeed change nothing, but a single person choosing to engage in a wider, growing movement can have substantial knock-on effects. I think you may be underestimating the impact of modern animal agriculture here, I would say that the difference between a timelines that drastically reduces its meat intake would be measureably better environmentally - primarily because it would drastically reduce the land requirements of feeding the world, which would in turn mean we could rewild large parts of it for a lot cheaper. No drastic change means that the freefall collapse of the biosphere continues unabated, whereas change could plausibly improve the situation like I describe.
May I clarify, when you said:
Maybe that is subjectivity itself. Maybe qualia are how observes perceive their own brain states.
You then said that this summary was a departure from physicalism. Could you explain what you meant by that? It was that statement that made me think you were saying that a belief was non-physical, as you said qualia being a belief was a departure from physicalism.
If you are saying that qualia are just beliefs that is a different claim, and one that you havent supported.
Oh dear... I think we might be in a bit of trouble, as I'm under the impression that's pretty much the claim we've been talking about this whole time. It seems like another rephrasing of your previous summary, and exactly what I've been trying to say. The testable differences are the beliefs about that memory, and beliefs are a physical thing, so qualia don't need to be supernatural or immeasureable.
Was that your point/conclusion?
I mean it was a point that I made from just playing around with the thought experiment. I don't know if it is the point, that's why I'm trying to dissect it a little here.
What I'm not understanding is your argument for getting there. Either it's not valid, or I don't understand what you mean.
I would be happy to keep trying to explain. Let me try to lay it out again in a different way, and I'd be interested to hear what you think:
- Mary has perfect knowledge - that is, all knowable information she possibly can - about an experience
- At the start of the experiment, Mary knows with certainty that they have not actually had that experience
- Mary goes through a door, and I randomly flip two coins - one to determine if we implant the memory or actually give Mary the experience, and one to determine if we inform Mary of the first coin flip. I don't tell you about the outcomes of either flip.
- Mary comes back through the door, and your task is to interrogate Mary to find out the coin flips.
What questions can you ask Mary to determine these answers? When can you be confident, and when is the answer indeterminable?
A second way to think about it is if you sent Mary through the door a 2nd time, in which scenarios would Mary learn something new - and therefore experience the qualia they did not posess at the start of the experiment, despite their perfect information?
Gotchas aren't an entirely bad thing, because at least you would be making a discernable point.
Well, I apologize that this has not been clear for you. I am somewhat surprised that you can so elegantly summarize my position while simultaneously saying I haven't made that position, but maybe I'm just a lot, lot worse at expressing myself than I think I am haha.
I asked you directly whether you were asking or answering ...and you did not answer!
Sorry, I'm not sure what this is regarding exactly. As in, am I asking Mary questions? Yes. Or am I asking a question about the thought experiment? Also yes. Or if the thought experiment is designed to provide a question as to what qualia is, or an answer? You tell me! I think it reveals something about what qualia is, at least, as the distinction between information about a thing and subjective experience of a thing.
Well, I think that is technically a departure from physicalism. But you said you are a physicalist!
Why is a belief a non-physical thing? It's just a state within a system, arrangement of neurons, etc. The fact that it is a belief, and therefore something that has physical and real presence, is my whole refutation of Jackson's view that it is something immeasurable or materially unknowable.
I apologise TAG, I can't say I'm trying to "gotcha" anything intentionally, just to discuss an interesting thought experiment.
I don't know what the test is that you could perform, though I tried to present one possibility - your beliefs around that memory.
It matters here because I am specifically addressing Jackson's views on Physicalism as presented in the original thought experiment, not all general views of qualia. The core of the question is if that is because of some physical phenomena.
Maybe that is subjectivity itself. Maybe qualia are how observes perceive their own brain states.
Yes, that is a good summary of what I am proposing here.
Because that test reveals what the actual qualia of the experience is - what separates all of the information about an experience from the subjective essence of that experience. The qualia of an experience is not simply the ability to recall that experience, or simulate that experience in your mind.
Hi gilch! I apologise that this was confusing, hopefully I can clarify what I am trying to say here. Thanks for your in-depth response.
Nothing.
Yes, this was the answer that was meant to be inferred here. Maybe I could have been more clear that this is the correct answer. There isn't really any question that you can perform to determine which Mary genuinely had the experience and the Mary which did not.
I think it might be useful to think about Mary's room in more abstract terms, to avoid these contextual assumptions we make about the nature of qualia like with colour. Because colour is a general qualia of existence, as opposed to a specific experience (e.g. the example given elsewhere in the comments of the qualia of climbing Mt. Everest) we have different expectations around it. I would be curious to know if the more abstracted version of Mary's Room outlined in this comment here would make this clearer.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Joachim!
I am definitely not saying that NFTs are not bad for the environment - they are, as is anything that draws on the mains grid and creates demand. It is absolutely correct to judge cryptocurrency negatively, just as it is correct to judge things like driving a gas guzzler or flying 20 times a year. But it seems like we completely ignore some ways in which the energy we produce is wasted, and hyperfocus on others, and we just end up with a completely screwed up valuation of what needs changing.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply Daniel!
Cheaper spaceships are definitely cheaper to replace if some oppositional nation-state blows them up, but there's only so many times you can play that game before you end up with the Kessler syndrome issues.
If you're referring to the vertical launch and takeoff of SpaceX shuttles, that really only affects the last moments of reentry. A SpaceX shuttle still does the vast majority of its braking in the atmosphere.
Launching in weird orbits is absolutely a strategy that nation-states could use to mitigate these risks, but in a field where your margins are already white-knuckle tight, such an arbitrary restraint is at best a huge inefficiency on our ability to progress space exploration.
- The $/kg price point is the driving metric of how quickly we can expand our space colonization, so increasing that by an order of magnitude because we can't just get along seems suboptimal.
- Ships cannot simply be allocated to arbitrary launch manuevers - fuel tanks need to be made bigger, designs adjusted, missions planned.
- Hohmann transfers, as mentioned, carry with them an arbitrary amount of LEO over an arbitrary stretch of airspace. Restricting your space of possible Hohmann transfers to only "safe" ones will possibly reduce your launch windows to an unmanageable level.
At a minimum they also impose harms on the people who you convinced not to eat meat (since you are assuming that eating meat was a benefit to you that you wanted to pay for). And of course they make further vegetarian outreach harder .
- The primary argument for convincing someone to not eat meat is that the long term costs outweigh the short term benefits, so I'm not sure that you can categorically state that convincing someone to stop eating meat is causing them harm. Sure, they don't get to eat a steak, but the odds of their grandchildren not dying from catastrophic climate collapse go up.
- If we expected increased outreach and prosletyization from vegetarians to uniformly make further outreach harder, would we expect to see the rapid and exponential growth of vegetarianism (as it seems to be)?
I think the largest issue with the general concept of moral fungibility is the following:
- Moral consequences cannot be reliably predicted - "what if that chicken solved cancer" is an obviously spurious but relevant example.
- Moral consequences cannot be reversed - one cannot make chickens out of chicken nuggets, and new chickens are not the same as the old ones.
- Morality does not necessarily sum - "two wrongs do not make a right" - I cannot necessarily justify the torture of billions through the ectasy of other billions.
- Most people optimize for price, not morality - anyone with the financial capacity and moral freedom to not buy the cheapest or most available eggs is probably already doing so.
The "free-range chicken" scenario does place some nice constraints on this. The slaughter of a single chicken may never be the thing which prevents a medical miracle. Though, at the same time, I very much doubt that the original architects of the poultry market foresaw the long-term consequences of rapid growth, for instance in ecological damage.
But I think the final point is the most significant - you are substantially increasing (doubling!) the number of decisions I need to make when buying an egg. An average person's default response to any new, non-impactful choice is going to be "no". Anyone who has a moral system within which they do buy an offset would probably already be seeking to minimise their ecological impact. The issue is not people being unwilling to minimise their impact - it is that minimizing their impact is not the optimal solution. So, this system would likely just preach to the choir and not really substantially impact the amount of damage we're doing to our world. Anyone who cares enough to alter their decision already is - so if you want to have more people care more, then you need to make those decisions easier, not harder.
Sorry TAG I'm not quite sure I follow, but I do appreciate your feedback. This post is a refutation of Jackson's view, so I'm not surprised that it is focusing on a negative. Whether something would alter the quality of those experiences is the crux of Jackson's whole thought experiment - asking what changes between a mind with perfect information about an experience, and a mind who has genuinely had that experience. So, that question does seem at the heart of this thought experiment.
Perhaps a different way to think about Mary's Room is the following:
You have two identical minds, A and B. You know that one mind has perfect information about an experience, and the other mind has genuinely experienced it. What questions can you ask each mind to determine which is which? Are you always able to determine an answer? Whatever pops out the end as the distinction between the perfect information and the subjective experience is, by definition, what the qualia of that experience was.
If there are any experiences or qualia, even changeable ones, Jackson has made his point.
Has he? As I understand it, Jackson is arguing specifically for a non-physicalist interpretation of qualia in his work, not just for the existance of qualia. He is arguing that you can have perfect information about an experience, yet actually experiencing that thing will still bring some new aspect to the experience, and whatever that aspect is is the qualia. The issue is with the nature of what the qualia of an experience is, and whether there is a physical manifestation of it, not whether it is a thing. It obviously is, as we constantly experience it. So, no, sorry if I have come across as arguing that qualia do not exist, that is not the position I'm trying to discuss here.
We were looking for to disappear, indicating that the probability of a candidate no longer factors into our considerations.
I'm surprised that we are looking for to disappear entirely, I'm not sure I understand that. Quadratic voting shines when you have lots of votes with the same voting token pool, because you force people to allocate resources to decisions they really care about. It's absolutely not meant to decide one decision - it's meant to force people to allocate limited resources over a long period, and by doing so reveal their true valuation of those decisions. I would therefore fully expect to play a part in every agent's considerations, as they must consider the probability of success in each vote in order to plan allocation of voting tokens for every other vote.
Hey TAG, thanks for your reply and your great points.
If you could show that Mary never experiences a colour quale, whether as the result of a direct experience, or a real memory, or an implanted memory, you refute the argument.
Well, I don't believe I'm trying to say that the color quale doesn't exist - rather that the quale is the subject's beliefs around that experience or memory, and that those beliefs are entirely physical constructs that exist within a physical brain.
What's the problem? If Mary has a present experience of a blade of grass, she will have a novel colour quale, and she also will if she experiences a sufficiently vivid recollection... and that still applies if the memory was an implant.
This is based on an admittedly wild assumption that experiences memories that you know to not be yours would alter the quality of those experiences. The impact I think is lost when we deal with something as ubiquitious to the human experience as color. But Jackson seems to be making a general claim about all experiential qualia with this thought experiment, not a specific claim about color qualia, even if that is the example he chooses.
Maybe another example is implanting a memory of climbing Mount Everest - euphoric king-of-the-world moment included when you reach the peak. The belief around the veracity of that memory would alter your relationship to it, and you would gain some new qualia experience if you actually went and did it.
Another solution to "Objection 1: Quadratic voting discourages voting on losing propositions" is the idea that only the winners of a quadratic vote actually pay an average of the tokens, and everyone else gets a refund - sort of like a blind Dutch auction of the decision.
For example, a quadratic vote is taken between two binary options A and B. A receives 400 votes, B receives 500. B wins the vote, so an average of 450 is taken from the voting token pool of B and 50 tokens are redistributed equally amongst B. Everyone who voted for A gets a full refund.
Consider in your example of selecting a head of state. If a political party overextend their voting to elect their guy - that is, that they overvalue the position - then they will be punished by a lack of voting tokens compared to the opposition for other cabinet positions.
I suppose the question is whether we can predict the "hidden inner mind" through some purely statistical model, as opposed to requiring some deeper understanding of human psychology of an AI. I'm not sure that a typical psychologist would claim to be able to predict behaviour through their training, whereas we have seen cases where even simple, statistical predictive systems can know more about you than you know about yourself - [1].
There's also the idea that social intelligence is the ability to simulate other people, so perhaps that is something that an AI would need to do in order to understand other consciousnesses - running shallow simulations of those other minds.