Monthly Archives: November 2010

Disapproving Via Bans

By Robin Hanson · November 5, 2010 11:00 am · Comments (35)

Adam Ozimek posted on why anti-prostitution laws are inefficient:

Say Ray’s friend Lenore wants to purchase Ray’s prostitution services and she values them at $400. But when Lenore does this it bothers Ray’s other friend Tonya. … The marginal utility gained from prostitution by consumers would vastly exceed the marginal disutility to objectors. (more)

Matt Yglesias responds:

I think Adam Ozimek’s post … nicely illustrates why nobody likes economists: … a big part of the point of prostitution prohibition laws is to express social disapproval of prostitutes and prostitution. … You can [call] a person … you disapprove … as a “whore.” … Its insult status reflects and upholds a social consensus that whores are bad people, not just that whoring is a kind of undesirable nuisance. Side-payments can’t address this issue.

I think the best way to think about prostitution prohibition is just to observe that we’ve historically done a lot of stuff to bolster the privileged position of heterosexual companionate marriage. This has entailed a lot of avoidable cruelty to gays and lesbians, sexually active women, children of unmarried women, and voluntary prostitutes. But the cruelty isn’t a pointless side-effect that can be reduced through better policy design. The cruelty is integral to obtaining the objective. (more)

Adam responds:

One could … [argue] that the costs and benefits of the expressive value of laws should be taken into consideration. .. This would mean weighing the cost of lower status of prostitutes against the benefits of those who wish to lower their status. … Matt seems to think the reason people don’t like economists is because they miss these things or they ignore them. That’s a fair enough criticism. But he should consider Robin Hanson, whose willingness to wrap any cost or benefit into welfare analysis, no matter how egregious, is surely the purest form of economic thinking. No offense to Robin, but I don’t think people would like economists more if [they] conducted economic analysis more like him. (more)

So do people dislike economists like me because we ignore key costs and benefits, or because we try to consider them neutrally, instead of tipping the scales toward their desired conclusions?

Oddly for a post emphasizing the importance of social disapproval, Matt doesn’t say if he approves of banning things to express disapproval, or of disliking economists for neglecting disapproval motives. Nor does Matt says if he thinks bans-to-disapprove are efficient.

So let me say clearly: policies that create real social costs for the purpose of raising the status of some relative to others are usually inefficient, and therefore bad. Those whose status is raised usually gain less than is lost by those whose status is lowered, plus those who suffer the social costs of the policy

We can also see this as some societies trying to look good in the eyes of other societies, by paying real costs to signal their commitment to certain ideals. Even if this benefits such societies, the set of all societies probably loses on net.

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Beware Future Filters

By Robin Hanson · November 4, 2010 4:30 pm · Comments (64)

Though we can now see over 1020 stars that are billions of years old, none has ever birthed a visible interstellar civilization. So there is a great filter at least that big preventing a simple dead star from giving rise to visible colonization within billions of years. (This filter is even bigger given panspermia.) We aren’t sure where this filter lies, but if even 10% (logarithmically) of it still lies in our star’s future, we have less than a 1% chance of birthing a wave. If so, either we are >99% likely to always forever more try to and succeed in stopping any capable colonists from leaving here to start a visible colonization wave, if given such a choice, or we face poor odds of surviving to have such a choice.

Back in March I noted that Katja Grace had an important if depressing insight:

Back in ‘98 I considered the “doomsday argument” … [but] instead embraced “self-indication analysis”, which blocks the usual doomsday argument.  In ‘08 I even suggested self-indication helps explain time-asymmetry. … Alas, Katja Grace had just shown that, given a great filter, self-indication implies doom!  This is the great filter … Alas I now drastically increase my estimate of our existential risk; I am, for example, now far more eager to improve our refuges.

Katja has just finished her undergrad honors thesis at ANU, which reports that all three of the main ways to pick a prior re indexical uncertainty (on who am I in this universe) imply that future filters are bigger than we’d otherwise think.  And not just by small amounts – the bigger the filters, the bigger the boost to future filters.

Now existential risk is important even if its odds are low – so much is at stake in whether our descendants die out or colonize a big chuck of the visible universe. But the bigger the odds, the more important it gets. Let’s review the main ways to estimate existential risk:

  1. Inside Model – using an internal model of how a particular risk process works, use your best guesses on likely model parameters to estimate the chance this process happens.
  2. Outside Scaling – Use prior rates of smaller events similar to a particular risk, and how such rates scale with size, to estimate the chance of events so big as to be a filter.
  3. Doomsday Argument – Assuming self-sampling and a reference class, estimate the chance of doom soon based on our time order in the reference class.
  4. Great Filter – Using estimates of total filter size and the chances of prior filters of various sizes, to estimate distributions over the total future filter size.
  5. Indexical Filter Boost – Redo the great filter analysis given all the main ways to get indexical priors, and weigh answers accordingly.

Now while many folks use approach #1 to estimate big chances of particular dooms, most such “models” have little formal structure; they are mostly vague intuitions.  So this approach usually influences my opinions rather weakly. Approach #2 is pretty solid, but usually leads to pretty low estimates. Using this approach, war and pandemics seem most likely to destroy half of humanity, but not very likely, and the odds of destroying us all see much lower. Approach #3 gets some weight, but less for me as I find self-sampling pretty implausible relative to self-indication.

This leaves #4, #5 as the main reasons I worry about existential risk. So having to take #5 seriously in addition to #4 is quite a blow. There is some tension between this and the results of #2, so I must wonder: what big things future could go wrong where analogous smaller past things can’t go wrong? Many of you will say “unfriendly AI” but as Katja points out a powerful unfriendly AI that would make a visible mark on the universe can’t be part a future filter; we’d see the paperclips out there.  Neither would the risk that our descendants’ values diverge from ours, nor  the risk of a rapidly expanding wave of (nanotech) grey goo – only slowly spreading grey goo could count in the future filter.

Browsing Nick Bostrom’s survey, that leaves us with: weak grey goo, engineered pandemics, sudden extreme climate change, nuclear war, totalitarianism ends growth, and unfriendly aliens. While these all risks seem apriori unlikely, either the entire great filter is in our past, or one of these (or something not listed) is far worse than it seems. But which?

Also, how likely is it really that such events would destroy all advanced life on Earth, to prevent other primates or mammals from recreating intelligence? After all the fact that human level intelligence arose so soon after human size brains appeared suggests that it was not a past filter of ours. The most likely resolution of all this still seems to me that almost all the filter is in our past, perhaps at the origin of life. But I’m not willing to bet our future on that.

The good news is that refuges seem effective against most these risks.  While unfriendly aliens mights dig us out of any holes, and prevent other Earth life from re-evolving intelligence, the other risks aren’t intelligent enough for that.  So: let’s make more and better refuges, and for #$@&* sake please stop broadcasting to aliens!

Added 10a: Refuges would also not protect much against totalitarian world culture and/or government that stops growth. So let’s also try extra hard to avoid that too.

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What Tech Wants

By Robin Hanson · November 3, 2010 4:00 pm · Comments (18)

Kevin Kelly’s new book What Technology Wants quotes the Unabomber at length:

I have read almost every book on the philosophy and theory of technology and interviewed many of the wisest people pondering the nature of this force. So I was utterly dismayed to discover that one of the most astute analyses of the technium was written by a mentally ill mass murderer and terrorist. What to do? A few friends and colleagues counseled me not to even mention the Unabomber in this book. Some are deeply upset that I have.

I quote at length from the Unabomber’s manifesto for three reasons. First, it succinctly states, often better than I can, the case for autonomy in the technium. Second, I have not found a better example of the view held by many skpetics of technology that the greatest problems in the world are due not to individual inventions but to the entire self-supporting system of technology itself. [p.199]

While Kelly agrees a lot with the Unabomber, he disagrees here:

The final problem with destroying civilization as we know it is that … the collapse of civilization would destroy billions [of lives]. … The paradise that Kaczynski is offering … is the tiny, smoky, dingy, smelly, wooden shack that aboslutely nobody else wants to dwell in. It is a “paradise” billions are fleeing from. …

The Unabomber is right that the selfish nature of this system causes specific harms. Certain aspects of the technium are detrimental to the human self, because they defuse our identity. The technium also contains power to harm itself; because it is no longer regulated by either nature of humans, it could accelerate so fast as to extinguish itself. Finally, the technium can harm nature if not redirected.

But despite the reality of technology’s faults, the Unabomber is wrong to want to exteriminate it … [because] the machine of civilization offers use more actual freedoms than the alternative. A lot of people don’t believe this. … They point to the vices that I cannot deny. We seem to be less content, less wise, less happy the “more” we have. …

That leaves one remaining theory: We willingly choose technology with its great defects and obvious detriments, becasuse we unconsciously calculate its virtues. … After we’ve weighted downsides and upsides in the balance of our experience, we find that technology offers a greater benefit, but not by much. [pp.211-15]

I applaud Kelly’s honesty, but he fails to address two key objections. First, Kelly didn’t consider coordination failures, where actions we each take for personal benefit add up to a net harm. For example, if everyone in an auditorium stands up to better see the stage, they can all be worse off than if they all sat. Air pollution is an related example. But I expect Kelly knows about this and would just say that on the whole such harms have been overwhelmed by other gains. And I’d agree.

A second issue that I’m less confident Kelly understands is that the net benefits of tech he sees result mainly from rising per-person wealth, and only indirectly from improving tech. Better tech has only consistently caused more per-person wealth in the last few hundred years, when wealth has grown faster than population comfortably could. This a local, not a global, feature of tech.

For example, the new techs that enabled farming seem to have reduced per-person wealth and prosperity; farming populations easily grew fast enough to keep with with the thousand year time to double farming wealth. Starting within a million years in the future, and continuing on for trillions of years, it seems clear that economic growth rates must become far lower than feasible population growth rates. And with a century or so from today, a new tech enabling rapid population growth, whole brain emulations, may drastically reduce per-person wealth.

For me, our tech-induced future will be good not so much because individuals will be better off, but because it will support a vastly larger population, big enough to balance any plausible reduction in per person wealth or happiness. And honestly, even if we wanted to, we have very little chance anytime soon of derailing the great tech locomotive we ride, short of killing us all.

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The Auto-Auto Race

By Robin Hanson · November 2, 2010 8:00 pm · Comments (36)

Cities are a central engine of the modern economy. Enormous gains come from folks interacting and specializing more in bigger cities. What limits these gains, and keeps us from all living in one mega-city, is transportation costs. While the cost of transporting goods and people once mattered similarly, today people transport costs dominate. And while hopes for mass-transit remain, cars clearly dominate human transport today. Thus the near-term future of cities, and of which cities dominate the world, comes down to how cities handle auto innovation. I see three main innovations to consider:

  • Mass Mass Transit – If a big city could coordinate to create subways, etc. on the scale and quality of New York, it could support densities like New York. The level of investment and coordination required to pull this off, however, seems well beyond what any known city can muster.  New York only achieved it accidentally (a dotcom-like boom in private subway building).
  • Congestion Pricing – Pricing road usage to discourage overuse at peak times offers real gains, by encouraging off-peak work schedules. But these gains are limited by the large coordination gains we achive by having similar work and leisure schedules. This is also up against strong public opinion that roads should be free. A few cities like Singapore, Stockholm, and London have managed limited moves in this direction. I’d guess long run efficiency gains here are somewhere near 5-20%; important, but not revolutionary.
  • Automated Driving – In the last month Google told the world it has developed computer driving tech that is basically within reach of doubling (or more) the capacity of a road lane to pass cars. Pundits don’t seem to realize just how big a deal this is – it could let cities be roughly twice as big, all else equal. The main problems here are not technical but legal (& political) – first to not excessively punish tech sellers for related car accidents, and second to sufficiently reward car owners for their contribution to reducing congestion. Achieving these will require great coordination, more than for congestion pricing, but much less than for mass mass transit.

So a huge upcoming policy question is: when will what big cities manage to coordinate to change road law to achieve these huge auto-auto economic gains? Thirty years from now we may look back and lament that big city politics was so broken that no big cities could manage it. Or perhaps history will celebrate how the first big city to do it dramatically increased its importance on the world scene.

Some related quotes: Continue reading "The Auto-Auto Race" »

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Politics: Info or War?

By Robin Hanson · November 1, 2010 10:40 am · Comments (17)

When elections are far, politics seems far, based more on high ideals. When elections are near, politics seems near, driven more by base desires.

Politics is about two things:

  1. Finding ways to coordinate for our mutual advantage.
  2. Fighting over who gets more of what politics controls.

Most of the time when we discuss government policy, and how much government we should have, policy wonks tend to emphasize #1, that we are just struggling in good faith to figure out what is best overall. Folks who suggest otherwise are being rude and divisive, and interferring with our struggle to aggregate info into useful policy.

But just before an election, the story changes to emphasize #2. Just before an election, the story is that everyone needs to get out and vote, especially those on our side. If you point out that the election outcome would be better informed if those who knew less abstained from voting, you are accused of trying to trick folks into losing the fight. Just before an election, politics becomes not collecting info to create mutual advantage, but war, a raw struggle between us and them (over resources, status, etc.).

Of course people try to have it both ways, by saying they fight for their side’s view on what policies are best overall, for most everyone. But it simply cannot be that on average voters make policy better overall by fighting for their side to win. Sure your side this time might be an exception, but can’t you see that humans assume this way too easily. Are you sure that isn’t you as well?

Perhaps you agree folks are overconfident, but see it as an honest mistake, not a ruse to get more for their side.  If so, you think this bias just accidentally happens to help their side; their net biases could just as easily have helped the other side. I think not.

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New Vs. Old Guard

By Robin Hanson · November 1, 2010 10:00 am · Comments (23)

Jon Stewart can pretend all he wants that the point of his big rally Saturday was just for chuckles, or just to encourage a more reasonable, substantive and civil tone in American politics. The reality is that his own audience on the Mall had an additional agenda, and it was decidedly partisan and decidedly liberal. … It’s self-defeating and even delusional to think progressive policies are going to be achieved just by agitating nobly for a more positive style in politics. (more)

So why is the U.S. left suddenly so eager to emphasize its civility and maturity compared with the right?

In both primitive tribes and modern board rooms, incumbents play out a standard script when arguing with upstarts. When a new guard bids for more influence relative to an old, the new suggests the old is weak, corrupt, out of touch, and past their prime, while the old suggests the new is immature, inexperienced, unrealistic, and untried. The old guard tries to sound calm and reasonable and suggest things are ok, there’s no need for disruptive change, or perhaps that we can’t afford to change captains midstream in a crisis. The new guard will suggest a crisis, with problems getting worse until we change tact, or perhaps that only new leadership can take full advantage of new opportunities.

We are so habituated to expect these patterns that we use these arguments, and are persuaded by them, even when they are unlikely to apply. For example, in a modern two party political system, the party out of power is probably nearly as corrupt and mature as the party in power. Nevertheless, the out party will complain of corruption, while the in complains of immaturity.  The circle of autopilot-thought life continues.

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Open Thread

By Robin Hanson · November 1, 2010 6:00 am · Comments (7)

This is our monthly place to discuss relevant topics that have not appeared in recent posts.

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