Monthly Archives: February 2010

The Future of Sex

By Robin Hanson · February 7, 2010 1:40 pm · Comments (38)

Our descendants will be different from us. In a competitive world, they’ll have to be; our design is hardly optimized for their world. But since they will evolve incrementally from us, they won’t be completely different.  For example, many features of the ways we talk between minds, and within minds, may lock in as interface standards.  Also, our descendants will prefer to reuse and modify complex workable modules rather than reinventing such things from scratch.

Which brings us to everyone’s favorite topic: sex. Our minds have been evolved in great detail to handle human sex. How might our descendants reuse and adapt those well-honed capabilities to deal with future mental challenges?

First, it is pretty obvious that within a century or two at most our descendants just won’t be creating descendants by randomly mixing the features of two parents, any more than firms today design new products via random mixes of old product features. No, our descendants will be more deliberately designed, with design components inspired by, if not directly taken from, a great many predecessors.  They just won’t make babies the bio-sex way.

Even so, our distant descendants will continue to form long-term alliances between minds whose qualities and loyalties are opaque. Even when one can directly peer inside, most complex minds simply have no clear place to look to see their overall abilities and loyalties. Such features are instead spread across such minds and best seen in actual behavior.  So to infer such features it can help to probe and test such minds in particular ways.  Our mental sexual toolkit is full of such ways to probe and test.

Also, when complex minds last longer than the multi-mind tasks they tackle, they must choose which minds combine to do which tasks.  And to create good incentives, minds must share some consequences of their joint performance, while committing in certain ways to outcomes they might not prefer after the fact.  Our sexual toolkit also has many useful ways to deal with these issues.

Our descendants will therefore likely recruit variations on our sexual toolkit to such tasks.   They will distinguish flings from “true love” while adapting human feelings of lust, romance, attachment, jealousy, and intimacy, and also variations on our mating dances of watching, displaying, flirting, wooing, testing, seducing, accusing, betraying, etc.

Our descendants may also distinguish male from female patterns of such behaviors. For example, some will pursue while others evaluate, some will take more risks while others play it safer, some will invest more vs. less in each relation, and some will protect against outside dangers while others nurture inside growth.

Our mental adaptations to sex are subtle and well-tuned for our mating task of slowly teasing out the abilities and intentions of others while becoming increasingly committed to and dependent on those others.  Our distant descendants will likely adapt such abilities for their many purposes.  Future sex may well change greatly to meet future needs, but it will still be recognizably sex all the same.  Long live sex!

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Capital In Conflict

By Robin Hanson · February 6, 2010 3:00 pm · Comments (16)

Until a few centuries ago economic growth rates were well below feasible population growth rates.  This gave a “Malthusian” state, as in most animal species, where population was near its max sustainable level.  To learn more about our distant future, which will probably be in such a state, let us learn more about our Malthusian past.  In particular, consider two important clues:

  1. Slack – As measured either by kids per mom or hours of work a day, most recent pre-industrial societies were ~30-70% below their simple Malthusian limit.
  2. Interest – Even after correcting for depreciation and failure-to-pay, for many thousands of years interest rates have been far above population growth rates.

(Data on both clues in Greg Clark’s Farewell to Alms.)

The slack clue can be explained via local cultural norms (i.e., signaling equilibria).  For example, pre-industrial English women married at ~26; those who married earlier had more kids, but at the cost of lower husband quality and threatened kid survival.  In societies with low work hour norms, harder workers faced ridicule and theft.  They attracted worse spouses and couldn’t use all their extra product to feed more kids.

Since social norms varied greatly across societies, however, it is puzzling that competition between neighboring societies didn’t favor societies with norms that put them closer to the Malthusian limit.  When neighboring groups clashed, why didn’t those with norms favoring denser populations tend to win out?

Interest rates appear in prices for renting land, borrowing silver, etc.  Social norm variety also makes high interest rates puzzling.  Local subgroups with a norm of saving capital and reinvesting as much as possible should in principle quickly outgrown groups who instead borrowed, rented, etc.  Soon even a small fraction of the interest on their wealth could paid for many more kids.

We can explain each of these puzzles by assuming that labor and capital have a different value relative to labor in conflicts, relative to more directly making food etc.  However these two explanations are somewhat at odds.

On the slack clue, cultures that limited their fertility and work hours should have had more capital per person.  In conflicts with neighboring cultures, perhaps low capital cultures were more often intimidated or seduced by folks from individually-richer high capital cultures.  Or perhaps such capital was especially useful in warfare.

On the interest clue, subgroups in a society who accumulated more wealth, relative to other groups, would end up with more capital relative to labor than other subgroups.  Other groups would then be tempted to steal that capital.  Perhaps labor is just especially useful in stealing capital, while capital is especially easy to steal relative to labor, especially given very large capital to labor ratios.  Perhaps this Biblical rule was to limit harm from predictable periodic predation:

The Jubilee year … required the compulsory return of all property to its original owners or their heirs, except the houses of laymen within walled cities, in addition to the manumission of all Israelite indentured servants.

Problem is, these two explanations are somewhat at odds – the first assumes that capital is especially strong, relative to labor, in conflicts with neighboring societies, while the second assumes that capital is especially weak, relative to labor, in conflicts within a society.  Can both really be true?

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Show, Sort, Shill

By Robin Hanson · February 5, 2010 11:20 pm · Comments (29)

The point of writing is to help others see, but what exactly do we help others see?  Consider:

  • Show – Show the world new ideas (or insights).
  • Sort – Attach quality signals to shown ideas.
  • Shill – Push ideas, via other sorts of influences.

Many new ideas or insights can be expressed clearly in just a few paragraphs.  Others may take a few pages; a few need whole books.  With more work, one can express ideas in different ways, for more chances to connect to different readers, and attach good descriptors and connections, so that folks searching for such things can find your idea.

The vast majority of intellectual effort, however, is not such “showing”, but instead “sorting” and “shilling.”  Advocates push ideas via repetition, celebrity endorsement, etc., pundits are witty, engaging, elegant, etc, and academics make impressive-looking math models, theorems, data collections, stat studies, prototypes, etc.

When readers have good reasons to think that ideas with certain associations are objectively more true or valuable, I’ll say efforts to create such associations “sort” ideas.  Otherwise, such efforts “shill”, i.e., they direct attention or belief but not preferentially to objectively better ideas.

Now sorting is no doubt a required function — we need to know where to focus attention and belief.  But while intellectuals often suggest that their effort is efficiently directed toward this goal, I am skeptical.  Instead, I suspect audiences of pundits and academics mainly want to affiliate with credentialled-as-impressive folks.  Academics are mainly rewarded for doing impressive-looking idea-work, that can be credentialled as such.  Pundits, wonks, columnists, etc. are similarly rewarded for writing that is witty, engaging, elegant, etc.

Now academics and pundits do sometimes have original ideas and news, and such contributions can add a bit to impressiveness.  And many audiences, all else equal, prefer to hear news.  But mostly the finding and showing of such ideas and news is a side effect of trying to be and affiliate with impressiveness; institutions designed primarily to achieve that function would do it far more effectively.

To me, the great charm of blogging is that I can think about interesting things, have an apparently-original insight about something, and then in a few paragraphs I can show that insight to the world.  If an idea seems especially valuable, I can re-express it again in future posts, to better explain and index it.

My great anxiety about blogging is my fear that merely-blogged ideas will not get the attention or belief they deserve, if they do not get the usual quality signals, and that if I don’t give my ideas such quality signals, no one will.

I could take a ton of time and effort to give very standard quality signals, but I can only do this for a tiny fraction of my ideas and I might really just be trying to seem impressive.  I could work to make more efficient signals of quality for a selection of my ideas, signals that do indicate their truth or value of an idea, but that do less well at showing impressiveness.  But how many would attend to such signals, and would that be worth the neglect of other insights I could instead find and show via more blogging?

Which of these options is the most fun, and how much do I really care about anything else?  I remain honestly torn and uncertain here.

Added 8a: Both sorting and shilling both have positional aspects that concern me; they both raise ideas only at the expense of other ideas.  Overconfidence could easily trick one into over-estimating the value of such efforts.

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No English Gene Classes

By Robin Hanson · February 5, 2010 8:45 am · Comments (10)

Greg Clark gave a talk here Thursday, and presented data showing that in the long run, England has no social classes!  When English surnames were first created, they marked the status of folks.  The village smith, for example, was called “Smith.”  But by now, those rich and poor surnames are totally mixed – a surname tells you little about someone’s status.  For example, this table describes a sample of once-rich names with especially low rates of mistaken names changes:

surnamehistory2

Clark claims this does not contradict the main thesis of his recent book:

A Farewell to Alms argued that for 800 years at least in pre-industrial England the rich were taking over the society demographically, and replacing the poor.  The evidence above of the dominance of regression to the mean may seem to contradict that argument.  But there is no conflict.  The rich can still have a reproductive advantage within each generation.  It is just that the rich change from generation to generation under the forces of regression to the mean.  But if the argument of A Farewell to Alms is correct then the rich in 1600, or in any generation, should have many more descendants by 1851 than the poor, even though by 1851 they are no longer distinguishable by occupation, income, or wealth. While there was complete regression to the mean in terms of economic status, we do observe that the rich of 1600 left many more descendants than the poor.  … Economic success by a man in 1600 substantially increased his share of their genes in the English gene pool by 1851, as was predicted in A Farewell to Alms.

Substantially increased?  Going from 0.45% to 0.59% of the population is a gain of 31%, but a 31% gain by the rich in six centuries is hardly enough to “take over” England genetically in anything less than tens of thousands of years!  Even if we assume twice this gain from illegitimate kids, clearly Clark’s new work has shown his main book thesis false.

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Two Movies

By Robin Hanson · February 4, 2010 11:25 pm · Comments (25)

I have two movies to recommend.

  1. Nobody Knows is terribly touching, and for exactly that reason, hard to watch.  It depicts dramatic story-like events, but it doesn’t give the usual cues to suggest you process it in a story-like far mode.  The main characters are children, who you see in near mode, up close and personal, mostly without words.  If you love children, you will love these children.  Things happen to them, but slowly, and without clear “here is a key event” markers.  So you process the events as near, with less story-mode emotional distance; you are more naked to the full terror of bad possibilities.  It makes me wonder what other stories would feel like, if we felt them as nearby.  And if I would dare to watch them.
  2. The Third & The Seven, a free ten minute entirely CG (computer graphics) clip, is a truly spectacular demo of what CG can do today.  I’ve watched it daily for two weeks now and still marvel at its details. See the hidef version if you can.  If you doubt at all that virtual reality could really be as detailed and vivid as our reality, take a look. (HT Rob Wiblin).
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Not Guilty By Reading

By Robin Hanson · February 3, 2010 7:05 pm · Comments (15)

[In England] after 1170, … as part of the Compromise of Avranches, Henry … agreed that the secular courts, with few exceptions (high treason being one of them), had no jurisdiction over the clergy. … Defendants demonstrated their clerical status by reading from the Bible. This opened the door to literate lay defendants’ also claiming the benefit of clergy. In 1351 … the benefit of clergy was officially extended to all who could read. …

The Biblical passage traditionally used … [was the first verse of] Psalm 51 [which] …. became known as the neck verse, because knowing it could save one’s neck by transferring one’s case from a secular court, where hanging was a likely sentence, to an ecclesiastical court, … [where] if the defendant swore an oath to his own innocence and found twelve compurgators to swear likewise … he was acquitted. … By the 15th century, most convictions in these courts led to a sentence of penance. …

Henry VII decreed that non-clergymen should be allowed to plead the benefit of clergy only once … [and] were branded on the thumb, and the brand disqualified them from pleading the benefit of clergy in the future. (In 1547, the privilege of claiming benefit of clergy more than once was extended to peers [i.e., Nobleman] of the realm, even illiterate ones.)

In 1512, Henry VIII further restricted the benefit of clergy by making certain offences “unclergyable” offenses; … This restriction was condemned by Pope Leo X … [and led] to Henry VIII splitting the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church in 1532.  In 1575, a statute of Elizabeth I … the benefit of clergy … it did not nullify the conviction, but rather changed the sentence for first-time offenders from probable hanging to branding and up to a year’s incarceration.

More here.  The English literate classes had quite a conspiracy going to help themselves at the expense of others!  HT Greg Clark.

Added 11a: From stats Clark showed in a talk, it seems most folks people did not invoke this benefit.  This was not a benefit given to all.

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Risk Rating Reluctance

By Robin Hanson · February 2, 2010 9:50 pm · Comments (34)

Managers of many financial organizations are arguably tempted to take too much risk with organizational investments.  Reputation-wise, such managers often gain more from stellar investments than they lose from disastrous ones.  Many regulations try to address this problem by limiting such organizations to “safe” investments, as determined by a few official ratings agencies.  This creates a demand by such managers for assets that are actually risky, but which are officially rated as safe.

Apparently the recent financial crisis was due in part to those official risk rating agencies supplying this demand; they are private firms and profited from applying too little skepticism to whether certain key assets really were as safe as some claimed.  No doubt those agencies say that this was all a terrible accident, that they never intended to profit from mistakenly calling risky things safe, but since they seem to have suffered little from the harm they assisted in creating for others, I have my doubts.

In all the financial reform discussions, I haven’t heard any proposals to address this specific problem.  And I’ve always wondered why we need investment ratings agencies anyway.  In principle, the right financial assets can give any elements you like from a full joint probability distribution over asset returns; how could a ratings agency expect to do consistently better?

At lunch today I asked my wise colleague Garett Jones about this, and he suggested that big financial orgs like being rated by people they can pressure. If they don’t like a rating, they can work their elite-school-alum networks of contacts to apply pressure to the ratings agencies to change unwanted ratings.  Such pressure is much less effective on financial market prices.  Garett also pointed me to this passage of his:

[Remember] the debate over subordinated debt in the early 2000’s, surveyed in Stern and Feldman’s Too Big to Fail. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley financial reform bill attempted to create a class of subordinated debt that would be explicitly banned from any future bailouts.  Major financial institutions would have been be required to hold some portion of their liabilities in the form of subordinated debt in order to give financial markets and regulators alike a market-based measure of firm health: If yields on a major firm’s subordinated debt spiked, that would be a warning sign.  But financial institutions and the Federal Reserve Board both pushed back against this market-based indicator, and so the subordinated debt requirement never made it through the regulatory process. … Firms will resist issuing debt that is bailout-free, and will overwhelmingly prefer debt that is bailout-qualified.

Bailouts mess up the connection between asset prices and their inherent risks.  Ordinarily, market prices only tell you the chance that a debt will be paid, not whether it would have been paid without a bailout.

This is all moderately bad news for prediction markets in such firms.  Apparently well-connected managers already know they prefer estimates by officials who respond to social pressure, over hard-to-manipulate market estimates, even if the later are more accurate.  Of course less well-connected managers should prefer the opposite, but who wants to signal their bad connections by endorsing independent markets?

Added 8a: Unnamed points us to Matt Yglesias responding in Sept. to Kevin Drum and an August Policy Report by Mark Calabria.  Kevin says:

Over the past decade ratings agencies were, at best, negligent, and at worst, perpetrators of outright fraud.

but doesn’t think raters were a big problem because other orgs used similar risk models and both buyers and sellers liked the mis-labeling.  Yet this is just what a corrupted regulator model predicts.  These folks consider switching who pays the raters, or making them a direct government agency, but not replacing them with direct market price risk estimates – why so blind to such an obvious solution?

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Coordination Is Hard

By Robin Hanson · February 2, 2010 8:50 am · Comments (40)

When we tell our limited-government friends that we have written a book … about how government can better accomplish what it sets out to do, the reaction is often horror.  “I don’t want to make government work better, I want it to go away” … This way of thinking is deeply misguided. … This is not to disparage the argument that government is too large, for which the case is strong. But holding government in sneering contempt is a misinformed corruption of that sentiment.

More here.  Will Wilkinson agrees, as do I.  Two ideological attitudes are common, but insensibly stupid:

  1. All government activity is bad, no matter what it does.
  2. The only reason to oppose a government program with a purported goal is because that goal is bad; program opponents must oppose its goal.

The key thing to understand is: governance is hard, especially in a democracy.  Fundamentally, this is because coordination is hard.

It can be very hard for even a single owner to coordinate with a dozen subordinates that each coordinate with a dozen employees in an ordinary firm to achieve a simple clear goal like making and selling a simple product at a profit. Organizations fail at this task all the time, and for thousands of different reasons.  Most new organizations attempting this fail, and most that are succeeding now will fail in a few decades.  When they fail, they will fail so badly that it will not be worth trying to save them; better to throw them away and start anew.

Once one appreciates the difficulty of coordinating even small organizations, and that bigger coordination is harder, one can see why it can be extremely difficult to manage the vaster coordination required by government.  How can ordinary citizens continue over centuries to coordinate to support interest groups that coordinate to support politicians who coordinate to approve and manage policies that empower agency heads to coordinate to manage thousands of agency employees to achieve the vague incoherent goals of many millions of citizens?

Types of government activities vary both in how valuable are their possible impacts, and it how difficult is their coordination task (both relative to private coordination and to doing nothing).  If your politics were about policy, and you were reasonable, then you’d support programs with high value impacts and easy coordination, and oppose programs with low value impacts and difficult coordination.  Ideologues who oppose all government programs no matter how valuable or easy, or who support all programs with laudable goals no matter now difficult their coordination task just don’t get it.  That might signal their values and blind faith or hatred in leaders, but not their reason.

One can more reasonably disagree about the value of possible impacts, and about the coordination difficulties of particular programs.  But reasonable people should also admit others may hold different values, and that coordination techs continue to improve, both in and out of government.  New ways to coordinate government can make its programs more reasonable, and new ways to coordinate private action can make once-reasonable government programs obsolete.  We should also keep trying new programs, just to see.  The devil, as always, is in the details.

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Come The Em Rev

By Robin Hanson · February 1, 2010 9:30 am · Comments (35)

China on Friday unveiled a shake-up of the way land is seized for redevelopment. … Land seizures over the past decade have been central to the rapid modernization of hundreds of Chinese cities, which in turn has been one of the main drivers of the nation’s economic growth. But they also have been the source of often-violent conflicts, especially in the past year, as huge volumes of stimulus funds have gone into building projects.  Post

Rich stable nations, comfortable and safe on top of the global game, feel little inclination to consider big disruptive changes.  The price they pay for internal peace is the steady accumulation of Olsonian veto groups, who can block big changes.  Stable inflexible institutions seem acceptable when change is slow and life seem good enough.

This frustrates rich-nation would-be-rebels like me who see our business, legal, political, etc. institutions as far from optimal.  Such rebels want to explore big changes, but must either: 1) accept only tinkering around the edges, 2) move to a place more willing to make changes, or 3) wait for crises where larger changes might fly.

So what crises loom?  In the US we can expect the long foreseen budget “train wreck” within a decade or two.  This must be addressed by huge tax increases, spending decreases, or both.  Foresighted politicians are positioning their blame and solutions for that crisis.  Since we spend so much on military and medical benefits, I’ve wondered if we’ll consider “Med is a waste, cut it way back” or “Let the world defend itself, cut our military.” Alas, neither seems likely.

In two to five decades, the US will probably start to take seriously global competition from big fast growing nations like China or India.  The US might then consider adopting policies credited with growing those nations fast, though national pride may block that.  Foresighted advocates will position their credit and solutions for that crisis.

But if you lust after huge institutional change in long-rich nations, if you long to say “come the revolution,” you might wait three to fifteen decades for the “em rev“, the whole brain emulation revolution.  The em rev is my best guess for the next “singularity” scale change, like the farming or industrial revolutions, each of which sped world growth rates by more than a factor of a hundred, within less than a previous doubling time.  We now double in fifteen years, so within a few years an em-econ could double monthly! Continue reading "Come The Em Rev" »

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Open Thread

By Robin Hanson · February 1, 2010 6:00 am · Comments (22)

Here is our monthly place to discuss relevant topics not covered in recent posts.

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