Category Archives: Uncategorized

State Rating Agencies

By Robin Hanson · October 16, 2019 2:00 pm · Comments (0)

People who buy cars can often get independent evaluations on them from auto mechanics. Same with house inspectors. More generally, consumers can get help in evaluating products from Consumer Reports, while bond investors can get help evaluating bonds via bond rating agencies like Moody’s. Charity donors can use GiveWell.

Such evaluations can be more useful than mere popularity or subjective ratings, as they can be based on relatively objective evaluation criteria. Due to such objectivity, users have to know less about how much the people who create such ratings share their interests and values. Users mainly need to know that creators are expert and mostly independent, not greatly beholden to folks other than users.

Which gives me an idea: Could we create long-lived independent ratings agencies to help voters around the world evaluate their incumbent governments? Truly global organizations with global reputations, so that they are less vulnerable to local pressures than are local media and organized interest groups?

The idea isn’t crazy, but we’d need to find relatively objective things that such agencies could measure and publicize. Not just general good outcomes like GDP or lifespans, as those tend to be hard to change, especially over short timescales. We’d prefer to measure things that are more directly under the control of incumbent governments.

One good cheap measure sometimes used today is transparency, which is the fraction of national statistics requested by the United Nations that this nation actually provides. Related measures might be produced by accountants who just apply standard accounting metrics to government accounting records. Another useful measure is the private income of politicians, beyond what they are paid publicly. Such income most likely comes from corrupt payoffs. Perhaps a fourth would be some measure of the fraction of trade that happens via black market. What more can we find like these?

Some organizations track which governments have which policies like allowing independent media, or making it easier to start a business. But many people dispute whether these policies are in fact better. So ideally we’d like to track things that most everyone can agree is either good or bad.

Most everyone disapproves of corruption, and governments can in fact change that quickly. So it would be great if independent agencies could measure and report on aggregate corruption. There are obviously relatively expensive but effective ways to do this, such as sending in random parties who try to do things and see how often bribes are demanded. But are there cheaper ways?

This isn’t an easy problem, but it also isn’t ridiculously hard, and solving it even partially would seem to offer enormous benefits. Today voters try to evaluate their incumbent governments based on their personal experience and on recommendations by local parties who are typically deeply enmeshed in local alliances. Which makes it hard for voters to know who to trust.

Wouldn’t it make sense to try to create more trustworthy independent global evaluators, like Consumer Reports and Moody’s, but for states? If voters believed such evaluators, then politicians would try to please them, producing less corruption and more of the good things measured. As they say “What gets measured, gets done.” So let’s work to measure more.

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Let Foreigners Speak

By Robin Hanson · October 10, 2019 7:30 pm · Comments (0)

In our ordinary informal lives of leisure, friendship, romance, and entertainment, we mainly regulate and mitigate the harms of speech with the option to use more speech. If we don’t like what someone says, we say something critical of what they said, or of them. We label, index, dissect, and evaluate, but we don’t ban or require any particular speech, other than via the incentives that our speech can produce.

However, as we move into the worlds of business and politics, we more often endorse censorship and forced speech. For example, regarding contracts, we allow lawsuits alleging fraud, and we require disclosure of safety info. Occupational licensing limits from whom you can get legal or medical advice. We let regulators forbid alcohol firms from making ads that say truthfully that teetotalers are less healthy than others, and require that firms disclosure financial info. We allow lawsuits alleging that slander hurt our business revenue, and require that everyone all carry valid ID. In politics, we require that donors disclose themselves, and we ban foreigners from direct participation in domestic election conversations.

It is worth remembering that most of the worse villains in history were famously far into censorship and required speech. The Catholic inquisition required people to agree with their dogma, and tortured and killed those who disagreed. US south slave owners beat slaves for speaking their minds, and prohibited teaching them to read. Nazi and communist regimes required public vows of allegiance, censored art and books, and punished dissidents. For centuries dictators have repressed dissidents, censored speech, and sought to control schools, newspapers, radio, and TV. Oppressive churches, firms, and other orgs have also sought to censor dissent and to require public agreement with their dogmas.

To me the obvious lesson from this history is to be reluctant to endorse banned or required speech; try as much as possible to solve speech problems with more speech. Yes, we might want to limit things like saying “fire” in a crowded theatre, but there’s a vast space of possible added speech solutions to explore, and we’ve seen a lot of innovation there in the last few decades. (Such as search engines and prediction markets.) It seems dangerous to empower some groups to decide what to censor or require; their first priority is too often to censor criticism of them and to require public agreement with them.

Traditionally US courts have declared themselves the most reluctant to regulate election-related speech, as they see promoting effective political competition as the core rationale for free speech. But lately it saddens me to see people especially eager to regulate political speech. People push for such regulation of politically-related “fake news” by our new mass-participation common-carriers like Facebook and Google, even though in past generations related common-carriers like telephones were especially prohibited from regulating political speech.

It also saddens me to see Trump critics focus most on cases where Trump encouraged foreigners to collect and distribute info on Trump’s political rivals. The focus of the Mueller investigation was Trump apparently encouraging Russians to find & distribute true dirt on Hillary Clinton. The focus of the current impeachment process is Trump apparently encouraging Ukrainians to find and distribute true dirt on Joe Biden.

I’m not especially a Trump fan, though I don’t intuitively loathe him remotely as much as so many do. And I understand that his critics see him as having done a great many quite blameworthy things. So it is sad to see this focus on foreign election influence, which will make it harder for us to adopt the global free speech norms that I prefer. I’d rather that everyone in the world was allowed and even encouraged to speak on everything in the world, including everyone’s elections. My reason is just the simple standard free speech arguments outlined above.

I can maybe see limiting the abilities of enemy combatants during wartime to make their case to our citizens that we should quit the war or that we are the morally guilty party. Though even here I’m not very convinced. But outside of war, I’d rather just let foreigners talk as much as they want to our voters. Yes of course they will have agendas they pursue in what they say, but that’s usually true of most everyone not only in election conversations, but in most all kinds of conversations.

Let the listener beware. Don’t believe everything you hear, and if you don’t like what others say, then by all means criticize it. But don’t outlaw it. Or require people to say the opposite. We just shouldn’t consider it treason or espionage to encourage foreigners to influence domestic elections by talking.  (It is fine, of course, to disapprove of assassinations.)

I can see the point of arguing that when a politician tries to negotiate to encourage particular speech, some kinds of pressures or incentives they might offer are legitimate, while others are not. But my understanding is that most backroom politics is largely about offering pressures and incentives to get people to go along with your plans, many of which are driven by selfish career agendas. It is not yet clear to me that Trump’s pressures and incentives in these foreign talk cases were greatly out of line with most politics.

But my main interest here isn’t Trump, it is foreign free speech. Let’s remember the larger lesson of speech in history, that the worst villains ever didn’t like it. So let us be wary of speech bans and requirements, and instead move toward letting everyone talk on everything, and fixing speech problems with more speech.

Added 11Oct: Alas, my Twitter followers don’t agree with me:

Added 13Oct: US law bans on foreigner participation in US elections.

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Separating Redistribution From Hardship Insurance

By Robin Hanson · October 4, 2019 5:00 am · Comments (0)

Today “social insurance” tends to transfer money and other resources to people when they are in relative need, such as when sick, disabled, unemployed, homeless, or too old to work. These policies tend to mix together the functions of redistribution, transferring resources between people, and insurance, for a person transferring resources between different future states of the world.

By mixing up redistribution and insurance, we make it harder for people to get insurance tailored to their individual style, preferences, and circumstances, and we instead push everyone to get the same kind of insurance. Here’s how we could do better.

Imagine that at a standard newly adult age, say 18 years old, everyone makes a big initial payment to gain a long-term hardship insurance contract, covering their future sickness, disability, unemployment, homelessness, retirement, etc. The client who buys this contract can pay more later to upgrade it if they like, but if they do not so upgrade then this contract will cover them for the rest of their life, even if they stop making payments. (Though the contract may specific quality cuts in this case.)

Insurers must be reinsured sufficiently to ensure that they can in fact meet their contractual obligations over a lifetime. And contracts may specify that the client will pay fractions of their future income or wealth to the insurer, to help lower their initial payment. Contracts might also allow groups of new adults to co-insure, in effect agreeing to help each other in the case of hardship.

Those who have larger budgets will of course be able to afford more generous hardship insurance. So the larger society could do a once-per-lifetime redistribution of resources to increase low budgets, enabling those people to buy more generous hardship insurance.

If this once-per-lifetime transfer were this society’s main channel for redistribution, then it would have largely succeeded in separating redistribution from hardship insurance. The rich could help the poor, while also leaving individuals free to choose the details of their hardship insurance to suit their individual concerns, risk-aversion, likely problems, and social resources.

Parents would of course be expected to contribute to their children’s hardship insurance purchase, and redistribution to those with low budgets would in effect be a subsidy paid to parents for having more children. As fertility seems excessively low today, this doesn’t seem such a bad thing now.

When hardships arise later, people may complain about the terms of their hardship insurance if it was chosen by someone else on their behalf, or if they were too young and ill-informed when they made their choice. So hardship insurance should be chosen at the sort of age when it would be legitimate to let someone choose a career or a housing loan, or to choose to get married or emigrate.

Perhaps the choice of hardship insurance should be marked by a solemn ritual, and only done after passing a test showing that one understand the basics of the contract to which one has agreed. And of course regulations might prohibit some hardship contracts terms when authorities believe that such choices would usually be mistakes.

If we also had vouchers for criminal law, it seems natural to consider merging the roles of crime law vouchers and hardship insurer. And if we merged the role of life and health insurer in order to create better medical treatment incentives (an idea I published 25 years ago!), it also seems natural to consider merging in this role as well. Then you’d have a single long-lived organization who vouches not just for your crime, but also for your health and your security.

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Dreamtime Social Games

By Robin Hanson · September 27, 2019 1:30 pm · Comments (2)

Ten years ago, I posted one of my most popular essays: “This is the Dreamtime.” In it, I argued that, because we are rich,

Our descendants will remember our era as the one where the human capacity to sincerely believe crazy non-adaptive things, and act on those beliefs, was dialed to the max.

Today I want to talk about dreamtime social games.

For at least a million years, our ancestors wandered the Earth in small bands of 20-50 people. These groups were so big that they ran out of food if they stayed in one place, which is why they wandered. But such groups were big and smart enough to spread individual risks well, and to be relative safe from predators.

So in good times at least, the main environment that mattered to our forager ancestors was each other. That is, they succeeded or failed mostly based on winning social games. Those who achieved higher status in their group gained more food, protection, lovers, and kids. And so, while foragers pretended that they were all equal, they actually spent much of their time and energy trying to win such status games. They tried to look impressive, to join respected alliances, to undermine rival alliances, and so on. Usually in the context of grand impractical leisure and play.

As I described recently, status is usually based on a wide range of clues regarding one’s impressiveness, and the relative weight on these clues does vary across cultures. But there are many generic clues that tend to be important in most all cultures, including strength, courage, intelligence, wit, art, loyalty, social support etc.

When an ability was important for survival in a local environment, cultural selection tended to encourage societies to put more weight on that ability in local status ratings, especially when their society felt under threat. So given famine, hunters gain status, given war warriors gain status, and when searching for a new home explorers gain status.

But when the local environment seemed less threatening, humans have tended to revert back to a more standard human social game, focused on less clearly useful abilities. And the more secure a society, and the longer it has felt secure, the more strongly it reverts. So across history the social worlds of comfortable elites have been remarkably similar. In the social worlds such as Versailles, Tales of Genji, or Google today, we see less emphasis on abilities that help win in larger harsher world, or that protect this smaller world from larger worlds, and more emphasis on complex internal politics based on beauty, wit, abstract ideas, artistic tastes, political factions, and who likes who.

That is, as people feel safer, local status metrics and social institutions drift toward emphasizing likability over effectiveness, popularity and impressiveness over useful accomplishment, and art and design over engineering. And as our world has been getting richer and safer for many centuries now, our culture has long been moving toward emphasizing such forager values and attitudes. (Though crises like wars often push us back temporarily.)

“Liberals” tend to have moved further on this path than “conservatives”, as indicated by typical jobs:

jobs that lean conservative … [are] where there are rare big bad things that can go wrong, and you want workers who can help keep them from happening. … Conservatives are more focused on fear of bad things, and protecting against them. … Jobs that lean liberal… [have] small chances that a worker will cause a rare huge success … [or] people who talk well.

Also, “conservative” attitudes toward marriage have focused on raising kids and on a division of labor in production, while “liberal” attitudes have focused on sex, romance, and sharing leisure activities.

Rather than acknowledging that our status priorities change as we feel safer, humans often give lip service to valuing useful outcomes, while actually more valuing the usual social game criteria. So we pretend to go to school to learn useful class material, but we actually gain prestige while learning little that is useful. We pretend that we pick lawyers who win cases, yet don’t bother to publish track records and mainly pick lawyers based on institutional prestige. We pretend we pick doctors to improve health, but also don’t publish track records and mainly pick via institutional prestige, and don’t notice that there’s little correlation between health and medicine. We pretend to invest in hedge funds to gain higher returns, but really gain status via association with impressive fund managers, and pay via lower average returns.

I recently realized that, alas, my desire to move our institutions more toward “paying for results” is at odds with this strong social trend. Our institutions could be much more effective at getting us the things we say we want out of them, but we seem mostly content to let them be run by the usual social status games. We put high status people in change and give them a lot of discretion, as long as they give lip service to our usual practical goals. It feels to most people like a loss in collective status if they let their institutions actually focus too much on results.

A focus on results would probably result in the rise to power of less impressive looking people who manage to get more useful things done. That is what we’ve seen when firms have adopted prediction markets. At first firms hope that such markets may help them identify the best informed employees. But are are disappointed to learn that winners tend not to look socially impressive, but are more nerdy difficult inarticulate contrarians. Not the sort they actually want to promote.

Paying more for results would feel to most people like having to invite less suave and lower class engineers or apartment sups to your swanky parties because they are useful as associates. Or having to switch from dating hip hunky Tinder dudes to reliable practical guys with steady jobs. In status terms, that all feels less like admiring prestige and more like submitting to domination, which is a forager no-no. Paying for results is the sort of thing that poor practical people have to do, not rich prestigious folks like you.

Of course our society is full of social situations where practical people get enough rewards to keep them doing practical things. So that the world actually works. People sometimes try to kill such things, but then they suffer badly and learn to stop. But most folks who express interest in social reforms seem to care more about projecting their grand hopes and ideals, relative to making stuff work better. Strong emotional support for efficiency-driven reform must come from those who have deeply felt the sting of inefficiency. Perhaps regarding crime?

Ordinary human intuitions work well for playing the usual social status games. You can just rely on standard intuitions re who you like and are impressed by, and who you should say what to. In contrast, figuring out how to actually and effectively pay for results is far more complex, and depends more on the details of your world. So good solutions there are unlikely to be well described by simple slogans, and are not optimized for showing off one’s good values. Which, alas, seems another big obstacle to creating better institutions.

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Status Apps Are Coming

By Robin Hanson · September 25, 2019 11:15 am · Comments (1)

A person’s social status is a consensus of those nearby on that person’s relative social value and power. Which factors count how much in this status vary across societies and subcultures. (They probably vary more at high status levels.) Most people spend a lot of effort in private thought and in conversations trying to infer the status of they and their associates, and trying to raise the status of their allies and to lower that of their rivals.

Typically a great many considerations go into estimating status. Such as the status of your ancestors and current associates, and your job, income, residence, health, beauty, charisma, intelligence, strength, gender, race, and age. Most anything that is impressive or admirable helps, such as achievements in sports and the arts, looking sharp, and seeming knowledgeable. Most anything that is disliked or disapproved hurts, such as often (but not always) applies for violence, rudeness, unreliability, and filth.

Today we generate shared status estimates via expensive gossip and non-verbal communication, but someday (in 20 years?) tech may help us more in this task. Tech will be able to see many related clues like who talks to who with what tone of voice, who looks how at who, who invites who to what social events, who lives where and has what jobs, etc. Given some detailed surveys on who says who has what status, we may build accurate statistical models that predict from all that tech-accessible data who would say who has what status in what contexts.

Or new social practices might create more directly relevant data. Imagine a future app where you can browse people to see numerical current estimates of their status (perhaps relative to a subculture).  You can click up or down on any estimate to indicate that you consider it too low or too high. Some perhaps-complex mechanism then takes prior estimates, background tech data, and these up/down edits to generate changes in these status estimates, and also changes in estimates of edit source reliability. All else equal, people who contribute more reliable/informative status edits are probably estimated to have higher status.

I don’t know how exactly such an algorithm could or should work. But I’m confident that there are many variations that could work well enough to attract much participation and use. Many people would be tempted to use these status estimates similarly to how they now use the status estimates that they generate via gossip and subtle social clues. They might even use them in even more places than they use status today, if these new estimates were considered more reliable and verifiable.

I’m also confident that governments, firms, and other organizations would be eager to influence these systems, as they’d see some variations as being more favorable to their interests. Yes, that creates a risk that they may push for bad variations, though don’t forget that our informal systems today also have many flaws. For example, many people use false rumors and other underhanded status tricks to hurt rivals and help allies, tricks that may be harder to get away with in a more transparent system.

Yes, this may look like a dystopia in many ways. But it is probably coming whether you like it or not, and this change may offer great opportunities to improve our status systems. For example, today we have many anti-discrimination policies that seem to be crude and awkward attempts to fix perceived problems with our current status systems. A more fine-grained, data-driven, and transparent status system might allow more effective and better targeted fixes. So it seems worth thinking now a bit more about how such systems could and should work, before some big government or tech firm imposes a system that quickly gets entrenched and hard to change.

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Who Vouches For You?

By Robin Hanson · September 21, 2019 8:00 am · Comments (4)

A <600 word summary of my crime law proposal:

Who Vouches For You?: A Radical Crime Law Proposal

The legal system used by most ancient societies was simply A-sues-B-for-cash. But in the last few centuries, states added “crime law,” wherein the state investigates, sues, and imprisons “criminals.” These centrally-run one-size-fits-all bureaucratic systems don’t innovate well or adapt well to individual conditions. And even though most of your “constitutional rights” are regarding such systems, they still seem badly broken.

In the ancient world, a stranger who came to town was trusted more if a local “vouched” for them. We still use vouching today in bonded contractors, in open source software, in organized crime, and in requiring most everyone to get an insurer ready to pay if they cause a car accident. I propose requiring everyone to get an insurer to vouch for them regarding any crimes they might commit. If you are found guilty of a crime, your “voucher” pays the state a fine, and then pays to punish you according to your contract with them. This fine in part pays the private bounty-hunter who convinced the court of your guilt. Competing bounty-hunters obey law because they can’t maintain a blue-wall-of-silence.

To lower your voucher premiums, you might agree to (1) prison, torture, or exile, if caught, (2) prior limits on your freedom like curfews, ankle bracelets, and their reading your emails, and (3) co-liability wherein you and your buddies are all punished if any one of you is found guilty. In this system, the state still decides what behaviors are crimes and if any one accusation is true, and it sets fine and bounty levels regarding how hard to discourage and detect each kind of crime. But each person chooses their own “constitutional rights”, and vouchers acquire incentives and opportunity to innovate and adapt, by searching in a large space of ways to discourage crime.

Some key details:

  1. Judges and juries can retain discretion to consider case details when setting guilt or fines.
  2. If fines vary with wealth or income, then the rich don’t get a free pass to commit crimes.
  3. We could subsidize premiums, or offer a public option, to poor ex-cons for which we feel sorry.
  4. Other poor ex-cons might have to work for a while at isolated ships or mining or logging camps.
  5. Not being vouched is punished severely, not via a fine. Need violations to be rare, as with license plates today.
  6. Perhaps each person/building wears visible QR code or pingable RFID of voucher-client ID (VCID).
  7. It is enough to know VCID to charge with crime, no need to physically detain them.
  8. Key criteria for being a voucher is showing that will have enough money to pay fines.
  9. Vouchers are held to contracts for as long as it takes clients to find new vouchers.
  10. Contracts typically worse for clients over time if not renewed, to cover revealed-criminal scenarios.
  11. Contracts typically do not cover pre-existing crimes or plans, for which prior voucher pays.
  12. Clients can switch at will, though co-liability partners must all agree to switch at same time.
  13. First-to-file bounty hunter has right to prosecute first, though is crime to file with little evidence.
  14. Courts would remain skeptical of both sides’ evidence, with evidence faking being a big crime.
  15. Bounty-hunters access to evidence varies with contract-specified client privacy levels.
  16. Market estimates of fines given privacy levels set extra fine factors paid by clients with high levels.
  17. As immigrants & tourists must be vouched, it matters less if immigrants cause more crime.
  18. Parents must get vouchers for kids, so “majority” age could be when kids can afford it on own.
  19. These or related vouchers might pay for costs to assist folks suffering poverty or unemployment.
  20. May want solemn voucher signing ceremony, after passing test shows that understand contract.

 

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Quality Regs Say ‘High Is Good’

By Robin Hanson · September 19, 2019 6:50 pm · Comments (0)

95% think doctors should be licensed. … 96% oppose legalizing crystal meth. (more)

One of the main ways that our world is not libertarian is that it is full of government rules requiring minimum quality levels for many kinds of products and services. We see this for food, drugs, building codes, auto/plane rules, allowed investments, censorship, professional licensing, school accreditation, sports equipment, and much more. Once you look for them, you find such rules everywhere. So a key basic puzzle is: why do we have so many min quality rules?

Here are some clues to keep in mind:

  1. Though these rules limit consumer choices, they have strong voter support.
  2. Such rules were far less common in the ancient world.
  3. Today these rules are extremely widespread, across many areas of life and types of societies and governments.
  4. These rules are implemented via many channels: liability law, regulatory agencies, and legislation.
  5. Poor nations tend to have lower standards, like rich nations did when they were poor, yet we see few exceptions for poor people or neighborhoods.
  6. Product bans are far more common than are official quality evaluations.
  7. Many such rules are retained even when they seem quite ineffective, such as laws against vaping (little health harm), recreational drugs, and prostitution.
  8. We don’t make exceptions for customers who can show that they clearly understand that the product is considered low quality.

Continue reading "Quality Regs Say ‘High Is Good’" »

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Graziano on a World of Uploaded Minds

By Robin Hanson · September 17, 2019 2:30 pm · Comments (0)

Princeton neuroscience professor Michael Graziano has a new book out today, Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience, which is mostly on his account of consciousness. On Sunday he published a related WSJ article, on his last book chapter (out of 9), which is on how society would change with uploads (= ems). And while most of his observations about an upload/em world are reasonable points, he misses so many other big changes that his picture ends up badly distorted.

Those reasonable points by Graziano (even when I don’t agree):

  1. Uploads are inevitable, but not soon. “I’d guess at least 100 years if not substantially more”.
  2. We will soon have good/cheap enough computers, brain cell models, body emulations, and virtual reality environments.
  3. We are far from good/cheap enough scans at sufficient scale and resolution.
  4. To survive system redesigns & upgrades, uploads need long lasting computer file & emulation system formats.
  5. The very first uploads may suffer due to imperfections in the emulation process.
  6. “mind uploading … may have some major risks, but I think it also has great possibility. … mind uploading will be a cultural and ethical mess that sorts itself out eventually.”
  7. Long-lived uploads would eventually run out of memory, and so either must add memory or use a rolling memory window.
  8. “We” must decide what rights uploads and their copies get.
  9. “We” must decide which humans are uploaded.
  10. Humans will ask themselves if an upload of them is really them.
  11. Uploads and their still-living human originals can have social conflicts over friends, jobs, etc.
  12. You can be bolder in virtual reality as you can’t get physically hurt there.
  13. Uploads never need to go to the bathroom.
  14. Things like tastes and breathing may not feel exactly the same for uploads
  15. Uploads can continue to do jobs and have social relations with humans.
  16. Instead of “dystopian” policies that insist on only one version of each human at a time, it seems better if “the system remains chaotic and freewheeling, with no restrictions on the number of versions of each person, causing a societal revolution in our concept of identity and individuality.”
  17. The ability to prevent people from being uploaded might be a great power, if that were the only route to immortality.
  18. Immortal uploads would help us to preserve wisdom, knowledge and culture, but they’d also slow down cultural and linguistic change.
  19. Immortality allows bad leaders to more easily retrain control, in both politics and academia.
  20. As uploads have more life experience, “the balance of power and culture would shift rapidly to the [upload] world.”
  21. Uploads could more easily travel in space, and could slow down their minds during boring travel periods.
  22. Eventually it may be possible for uploads to communicate via more direct mind reading.

So, the picture Graziano paints is of an inter-mixed world of humans and uploads, sharing culture and doing jobs for and having social relations with each other. The main difference is that the uploads are immortal, and therefore older, wiser, more powerful, and more conservative: Continue reading "Graziano on a World of Uploaded Minds" »

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Yay Democracy Dollars

By Robin Hanson · September 14, 2019 11:00 am · Comments (0)

My proposal is that we give every American 100 democracy dollars that you can only give to candidates and causes that you like. This would washout the lobbyist cash by a factor of eight to one. (Yang in Thursday debate)

Gillibrand proposed this also, as have some law profs, and its been tried in Seattle. In my Twitter poll, the main concern people express re private firms doing things instead of government is that firms might lobby to change policy. I’m personally not so concerned about firm lobbying, as public employees and agencies also lobby, and as academics find it hard to see any substantial effects of lobbying. But there does seem to be a perception problem and $100 a person per year seems to me a small price to pay to address it.

Reading up on this idea, I see that many try to tie it to other policies they want, and so try to require politicians to accept no other money if they accept this, or only allow it to be spent in your state or only at particular points in the election cycle. Yang seems to have it right; spending constraints are mistakes. As Yang says, let people use the money at any time for any political organization, lobbyist, or candidate.

The only criticism I can find online, beyond harms from spending constraints, is this complaint that it might make politicians listen more to the public:

It would simply multiply the amount of money in politics by an order of magnitude, with effects that wouldn’t be good for the political system at large, but would be good for ad buyers and PR flacks and political operatives. … Citizens have no reason to think too hard about how they spend. … Will politicians get more populist or less? Will voters gravitate towards visionary leaders making hard decisions about confounding policy issues? Or will they pick whoever tells the most flattering lies in the most entertaining way? Because we know what that looks like. It’s ugly, and it’s orange. (More)

Yes, overall I might rather slant the system toward the better informed, and elite money in politics might be seen as doing that. But if that’s going to push people to avoid substituting firms for government, I’d rather use some other method to promote informed voters.

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Stamina Succeeds

By Robin Hanson · September 10, 2019 2:10 pm · Comments (5)

You Need the Stamina and Mindset of a Professional Athlete to Make It in Business (more)
a reminder that success takes stamina, and you get stamina by training and experience (more)

It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I finally got to see some very successful people up close for long enough to notice a strong pattern: the most successful have a lot more energy and stamina than do others. Which was a disappointment, as I could clearly see that I didn’t have as much stamina as they.

The quotes above are about business management, but it also seems true in many other achievement areas. And while those above quotes focus on what you can do to increase stamina, I’m not sure you can change your stamina that much. You can do a few things, but stamina seems to me pretty resistant to conscious efforts to change it.

Of course stamina isn’t the only thing you need. It also helps to have motive, drive, intelligence, beauty, connections, charm, and many other things. But without stamina, you won’t be able to use those other things as many hours a day, which in close contests can make all the difference.

I think this helps explain many cases of “why didn’t this brilliant young prodigy succeed?” Often they didn’t have the stamina, or the will to apply it. I’ve known many such people. It helps explain why women have often suffered so much career-wise when they had more family demands, or when they were expected to have such soon. And why ambitious women often seem so sensitive on the topic of fertility.

I also think this explains why so many career paths have early periods with that place huge time and energy demands on competitors. With crazy unproductive work hours, as in medicine, law, and academia. These demands often seem counter productive from the point of view of learning,  production, or flourishing. But they may do well at distinguishing those with the most energy and stamina, and this may be their point.

If this all is true, why don’t we hear more about it when people talk about success? And why, when people do talk about stamina, do they focus so much on attitudes or practice that might improve something that is in fact hard to change? Why not suggest that people gauge their stamina, or potential for it, early on, and then calibrate their hopes for success accordingly?

The obvious answer: honestly about the stamina-success connection conflicts with our (forager-sourced) egalitarian norms, which promise that anyone can succeed if only they try in the right way. We’d rather give everyone hope than help the hopeful to better calibrate their success potential.

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