How come in some social situation (the Mafia, sports teams, etc) the older/more respected individuals demand that the newer individuals pay for them at meals, and in other power social situations (such as a future father-in-law, a boss taking out an employee) the more respected individual pays for the newer individual?
Michael, I think that post misunderstands what is going on rhetorically when someone uses the expression, "I am humbled." The sentiment being conveyed is not directly: "Your presence here makes me feel humble." It is that -- but only after passing through another assumed rhetorical move. The full sentiment is: "You have come here to see me / hear me / read me because you value me. Your valuing of me reminds me of how little I truly am, and how embarrassed I am to be valued by you. This thought humbles me."
I think unpacking it fully actually brings up two even more interesting questions:
1. Do they actually feel humble when they say that? a. Probably not bc it is rote and lacking in intention when used and bc generally ppl feel pride, as the original post says.
2. However! I have often felt some shame and humility when being honored for something in life, as though I did not deserve it. Which keeps with probably the original intention of the phrase. With regard to signaling, why would someone feel shame when being honored?
Prediction markets made it into today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a famously geeky webcomic that often jokes about topics like Economics, Cryonics, and the Singularity.
>close to saturating the space of useful objects.
The actual problem is more that there is an explosion of potential drug candidates, that is there are more chemical compounds as molecular size gets larger, so it is more expensive and slower to develop, and more likely for any particular candidate to fail, than in the past. Put simply each potential new drug is surrounded by a vast number of useless compounds that it needs to be differentiated from, and the total number has been growing steadily. The problem is that testing compounds is far more expensive and time consuming than generating ones to test.
And the attempts at using genetics and other target information for designing compounds that are more likely to be valuable hasn't worked very well at all.
Leo Katz has been guest-blogging at Volokh about his book "Why the Law Is So Perverse". He brings up the idea of letting prisoners opt for torture instead of prison, and promises to explain why he rejects it in his next post:http://volokh.com/2011/11/0...
mjgeddes, OWS is not a revolution. It is a bunch of people sitting in a park. Anonymous said they were going to shut down NYSE, but that didn't happen. Then they said they were going to reveal Zeta identities, and backed down.
Is there any research into the third party costs of HOV lanes? I'm interested in the lost highway real estate and the cost in accident damage, injuries, and deaths related to the use of HOV lanes. From an n=1 anecdotal standpoint most all accidents I witness (drive by) on the highway involve the HOV lane (80%+). I'm wondering if any statistics are kept.
Readers may recall in a previous thread by Robin on science fiction I made some predictions that there would soon be world-wide 'revolutions' involving hackers. In another of Robin's threads talking about the waste of government resources on the misguided 'war on terror', I also warned that the day of revolution was near. I was told by one poster to 'lay off the drugs'.
So have you been watching the news?
Literally days after I made my predictions, the OWS movement begun, soon spreading to cities around the world, and now involving hundreds and thousands of participants. Within days, anon hacker groups were getting involved. Here is a statement by an anon hacker activist shortly after the revolution begun, summarizing the initial success of OWS:
Occupy The PlanetStill laughing?---In other news of great import: there's been a big break-through in aging research, where purging senescent cells in mice was found to combat aging. Google, check news reports, could be very significant!
The problem of innovation is not with the number of new good ideas. The problem is with the legacy power of old not-as-good ideas.
The legacy power thwarts implementation of any ideas that threaten the legacy power. Doesn't matter how good the new idea is, if it threatens legacy power the legacy power will try to destroy it.
Why thank you! I agree that the more people --> more ideas thing seems plausible (at least, as you say, all other things being equal), but:
1. Caplan et al. deploy the "more people --> more ideas" argument specifically as a counterargument to the predictable, measurable harms of overpopulation (scarcity of finite resources, etc.). For this to be effective, we'd have to be VERY certain that not only does the correlation hold, but that "all other things" are in fact "equal."
2. If new ideas are a strong enough motivator for us to ignore water shortages, genocide, and other problems associated with overpopulation, then new ideas must be really important. If there are other ways to get new ideas that are more efficient than across-the-board baby making, we should pursue those instead. It's hard to look at the distribution of e.g. patents and Nobels and maintain that raw population is what's driving innovation; it seems to be other things.
3. Matt Herper's paper on declining pharmaceutical innovation (and a few others) indicate that there may be a real, measurable innovation decline, not an innovation surge as predicted by the "with more people everybody gets more choices" model.
4. I am concerned with all kinds of harm - both to existing people and to merely possible people.
OK, I took a look at your blog post on these articles. You raise good reasons that natalists shouldn't be so confident in their premises, but do you really think Caplan's assumption (that more population leads to more ideas, all other things being equal) is obviously wrong? It seems very plausible to me, though my uncertainty is large.
In any case, I don't think the crux of your disagreement with Caplan or others is with the empirical question of whether extra children have net positive externalities on the margin. It's with the mostly-normative question of whether extra children are a net moral improvement (in the absence of externalities).
If you're down for a formal (but readable for non-economists) treatment of this, you might like Vernon L. Smith's constructivist/ecological rationality stuff.
Douglas, here is one particularly egregious example:http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl...
That's a great question!
But I don't know about the Mafia and sports teams. Could you provide evidence of your claim? or at least be more specific about the kinds of dinners?
How come in some social situation (the Mafia, sports teams, etc) the older/more respected individuals demand that the newer individuals pay for them at meals, and in other power social situations (such as a future father-in-law, a boss taking out an employee) the more respected individual pays for the newer individual?
Michael, I think that post misunderstands what is going on rhetorically when someone uses the expression, "I am humbled." The sentiment being conveyed is not directly: "Your presence here makes me feel humble." It is that -- but only after passing through another assumed rhetorical move. The full sentiment is: "You have come here to see me / hear me / read me because you value me. Your valuing of me reminds me of how little I truly am, and how embarrassed I am to be valued by you. This thought humbles me."
I think unpacking it fully actually brings up two even more interesting questions:
1. Do they actually feel humble when they say that? a. Probably not bc it is rote and lacking in intention when used and bc generally ppl feel pride, as the original post says.
2. However! I have often felt some shame and humility when being honored for something in life, as though I did not deserve it. Which keeps with probably the original intention of the phrase. With regard to signaling, why would someone feel shame when being honored?
Many Thanks!
Prediction markets made it into today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a famously geeky webcomic that often jokes about topics like Economics, Cryonics, and the Singularity.
>close to saturating the space of useful objects.
The actual problem is more that there is an explosion of potential drug candidates, that is there are more chemical compounds as molecular size gets larger, so it is more expensive and slower to develop, and more likely for any particular candidate to fail, than in the past. Put simply each potential new drug is surrounded by a vast number of useless compounds that it needs to be differentiated from, and the total number has been growing steadily. The problem is that testing compounds is far more expensive and time consuming than generating ones to test.
And the attempts at using genetics and other target information for designing compounds that are more likely to be valuable hasn't worked very well at all.
Leo Katz has been guest-blogging at Volokh about his book "Why the Law Is So Perverse". He brings up the idea of letting prisoners opt for torture instead of prison, and promises to explain why he rejects it in his next post:http://volokh.com/2011/11/0...
mjgeddes, OWS is not a revolution. It is a bunch of people sitting in a park. Anonymous said they were going to shut down NYSE, but that didn't happen. Then they said they were going to reveal Zeta identities, and backed down.
Is there any research into the third party costs of HOV lanes? I'm interested in the lost highway real estate and the cost in accident damage, injuries, and deaths related to the use of HOV lanes. From an n=1 anecdotal standpoint most all accidents I witness (drive by) on the highway involve the HOV lane (80%+). I'm wondering if any statistics are kept.
Readers may recall in a previous thread by Robin on science fiction I made some predictions that there would soon be world-wide 'revolutions' involving hackers. In another of Robin's threads talking about the waste of government resources on the misguided 'war on terror', I also warned that the day of revolution was near. I was told by one poster to 'lay off the drugs'.
So have you been watching the news?
Literally days after I made my predictions, the OWS movement begun, soon spreading to cities around the world, and now involving hundreds and thousands of participants. Within days, anon hacker groups were getting involved. Here is a statement by an anon hacker activist shortly after the revolution begun, summarizing the initial success of OWS:
Occupy The PlanetStill laughing?---In other news of great import: there's been a big break-through in aging research, where purging senescent cells in mice was found to combat aging. Google, check news reports, could be very significant!
The problem of innovation is not with the number of new good ideas. The problem is with the legacy power of old not-as-good ideas.
The legacy power thwarts implementation of any ideas that threaten the legacy power. Doesn't matter how good the new idea is, if it threatens legacy power the legacy power will try to destroy it.
Why thank you! I agree that the more people --> more ideas thing seems plausible (at least, as you say, all other things being equal), but:
1. Caplan et al. deploy the "more people --> more ideas" argument specifically as a counterargument to the predictable, measurable harms of overpopulation (scarcity of finite resources, etc.). For this to be effective, we'd have to be VERY certain that not only does the correlation hold, but that "all other things" are in fact "equal."
2. If new ideas are a strong enough motivator for us to ignore water shortages, genocide, and other problems associated with overpopulation, then new ideas must be really important. If there are other ways to get new ideas that are more efficient than across-the-board baby making, we should pursue those instead. It's hard to look at the distribution of e.g. patents and Nobels and maintain that raw population is what's driving innovation; it seems to be other things.
3. Matt Herper's paper on declining pharmaceutical innovation (and a few others) indicate that there may be a real, measurable innovation decline, not an innovation surge as predicted by the "with more people everybody gets more choices" model.
4. I am concerned with all kinds of harm - both to existing people and to merely possible people.
This was in response to Jeffrey Soreff's comment above but I mis-clicked, if that makes it clearer.
OK, I took a look at your blog post on these articles. You raise good reasons that natalists shouldn't be so confident in their premises, but do you really think Caplan's assumption (that more population leads to more ideas, all other things being equal) is obviously wrong? It seems very plausible to me, though my uncertainty is large.
In any case, I don't think the crux of your disagreement with Caplan or others is with the empirical question of whether extra children have net positive externalities on the margin. It's with the mostly-normative question of whether extra children are a net moral improvement (in the absence of externalities).
If you're down for a formal (but readable for non-economists) treatment of this, you might like Vernon L. Smith's constructivist/ecological rationality stuff.
Sorry, my sarcasm comes across better when I use a funny voice and an exaggeratedly sincere facial expression. <3