Tag Archives: Project

Shoulda-Listened Futures

By Robin Hanson · April 27, 2021 6:45 pm · Comments (1)

Over the decades I have written many times on how prediction markets might help the intellectual world. But usually my pitch has been to those who want to get a better actionable info out of intellectuals, or to help the world to make better intellectual progress in the long run. Problem is, such customers seem pretty scarce. So in this post I want to outline an idea that is a bit closer to a business proposal, in that I can better identify concrete customers who might pay for it.

For every successful intellectual there are (at least) hundreds of failures. People who started out along a path, but then were not sufficiently rewarded or encouraged, and so then either quit or persisted in relative obscurity. And a great many of these (maybe even a majority) think that the world done them wrong, that their intellectual contributions were underrated. And no doubt many of them are right. Such malcontents are my intended customers.

These “world shoulda listened to me” customers might pay to have some of their works evaluated by posterity. For example, for every $1 saved now that gains a 3% real rate of return, $19 in real assets are available in a century to pay historians for evaluations. At a 6% rate of return (or 3% for 2 centuries), that’s $339. Furthermore, if future historians needed only to randomly evaluate 1% of the works assigned them, then if malcontents paid $10 per work to be maybe evaluated, historians could spend $20K (or $339K) per work they evaluate. Considering all the added knowledge and tools to which future historians may have access, that seems enough to do a substantial evaluation, especially if they evaluate several related works at the same time.

Given a substantial chance (1% will do) that a work might be evaluated by historians in a century or two, we could then create (conditional) prediction markets now estimating those future evaluations. So a customer might pay their $20 now, and get an immediate prediction market estimate of that future evaluation for their work. That $20 might pay $10 for the (chance of a) future evaluation and another $10 to establish and subsidize a prediction market over the coming centuries until resolution.

Finally, if customers thought market estimate regarding their works looked too low, then they could of course try to bet to raise those estimates. Skeptics would no doubt lie waiting to bet against them, and on average this tendency of authors to bet to support their works would probably subsidize these markets, and so lower the fees that the system needs to charge.

Of course even with big budgets for evaluations, if we want future historians to make reliable enough formal estimates that we can bet on in advance, then we will need to give them a well-defined-enough task to accomplish. And we need to define this task in a way that discourages future historians from expressing their gratitude to all these people who funded their work by giving them all an A+.

I suggest we have future historians estimate each work’s ideal attention: how much attention each particular work should have been given during some time period. So we should pick some measure of attention, a measure that we can calculate for works when they are submitted, and track over time. This measure should weigh if the dissertation was approved, the paper was published and where, how many cites did it get, etc. If we add up all the initial attention for submitted works, then we can assign historians the task of (counterfactually) reallocating this total attention across all the submitted works. So to give more attention to some, they’d have to take away attention from others.

Okay, so now they can’t give every work an A+. (And we ensure that bet assets have bounded values.) But our job isn’t done. We also need to give them a principle to follow when allocating attention among all these prior works. What objective would they be trying to accomplish via this reallocation of attention?

I suggest that the objective just be intellectual progress, toward the world having access to more accurate and useful beliefs. A set of works should have gotten more attention if in that case the world would have been more likely to have more quickly come to appreciate valuable truths. And this task is probably easier if we ask future historians to use their future values in this task, instead of asking them to try to judge according to our values today.

These evaluation tasks probably get easier if historians randomly pick related sets of works to evaluate together, instead of independently picking each work to evaluate. And this system can probably offer scaled fees, wherein the chance that your work gets evaluated rises linearly with the price you paid for that chance. There are probably a lot more details to work out, but I expect I’ve already said enough for most people to decide roughly how much they like this idea.

Once there were many works in this system, and many prediction markets estimating their shoulda-been attention, then we could look to see if market speculators see any overall biases in today’s intellectual worlds. That is, topics, methods, disciplines, genders, etc. to which speculators estimate that the world today is giving too little attention. That could be pretty dramatic and damning evidence of bias, by someone, evidence to which we’d all be wise to attend.

One obvious test of this approach would be to assign historians today the task of reallocating attention among papers published a century or two ago. Perhaps assign multiple independent groups, and see how correlated are their evaluations, and how that correlation varies across topic areas. Perhaps repeating in a decade or two, to see how much evaluations drift over time.

Showing these correlations to potential customers might convince them that there’s a good enough chance that such a system will later correctly vindicate their neglected contributions. And these tests may show good scopes to use, for related works and time periods to evaluate together, and how narrow or broad should be the expertise of the evaluators.

This whole shoulda-listened-futures approach could or course also be applied to many other kinds of works, not just intellectual works. You’d just have to establish your standards for how future historians are to allocate shoulda attention, and trust them to actually follow those standards. Doing tests on works from centuries ago here could also help to show if this is a viable approach for these kinds of works.

Added 7am 28Apr: On average more assets will be available to pay for future evaluations if the fees paid are invested in risky assets. So instead of promising a particular percentage chance of evaluation, it may make more sense to specify how fees will be invested, set the (real) amount to be spent on each evaluation, and then promise that the chance of evaluation for each work will be set by the investment return relative to the initial fee paid. Yes that induces more evaluations in state of the world where investments do better, but customers are already accepting a big chance that their work will never be directly evaluated.

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Try-Two Contest Board

By Robin Hanson · April 22, 2021 2:15 pm · Comments (0)

Imagine that a restaurant wants to ask its associates (cooks, servers, etc.) what are the best two menu items to put on its menu as specials on a particular night. They have a large set of possible menu items to consider, the measure of success is menu item sales revenue, and they want a mechanism that is both fun and easy. (Which rules out conditional prediction markets, at least for now.)

Here’s an idea. Start with a contest board like this, on a wall near associates:

Continue reading "Try-Two Contest Board" »

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Super Hostile Takeovers

By Robin Hanson · March 24, 2021 2:15 pm · Comments (1)

For a brief period in the late ’50s, until the mid-’60s, when modern hostile takeover techniques were perfected, we had a pretty much unregulated market for corporate control. Shareholders received on average 40% over the pre-bid price for their shares. But… 1968 … Williams Act … made it vastly more expensive for outsiders to mount successful tender offers. The highly profitable element of surprise was removed entirely.

The even stronger inhibition on takeovers resulted from actions taken by state legislatures and state courts in the ’80s. The number of hostile tender offers dropped precipitously and with it the most effective device for policing top managers of large, publicly held companies. … now, with the legal power to shift control in the hands of the incumbent [managers], they, rather than shareholders, will receive any premium paid for control. … It should come as no surprise then that, as hostile takeovers declined to 4% from 14% of all mergers, executive compensation started a steep climb. (more)

As this quote shows, current laws make it crazy hard to buy public firms, which has the effect of greatly entrenching CEO power and raising their compensation. Like blackmail laws, this is another way in which law goes out of its way to favor powerful elites. Law pretends to dislike and oppose elite dominance, but key details show otherwise.

Even during U.S. historical period when takeovers were easiest, still “shareholders received on average 40% over the pre-bid price for their shares.” That means those trying to takeover in essence faced a 40% tax; no point in taking over a firm if you can’t make it worth at least this much more. So this most effective device for policing top management would be even more effective if we could cut this tax, so takeovers could help in more cases.

The key problem is that when a takeover attempt starts to buy up lots of stock in a firm, people start to notice and then bid up their prices, expecting that a takeover will improve the value of the firm. Can we fix this problem?

Yes, consider that when the government wants to buy a bunch of land properties to build a project like a road, it faces a similar problem, that after the first few purchases the other property owners will greatly raise their price, knowing that the government can’t do its project without all the needed properties. 

The standard solution to this problem is eminent domain, where the government forces them all to sell at some official “market price”. But, as I’ve discussed, a better solution is to use a Harberger tax, where each property owner must always declare a value for their property, a value which is used both to set their property tax, but also to be an always-available sales price for the property. These values will generally be reasonable, due to owners trying to avoid paying high taxes, allowing the government or any other party to quickly assemble large property bundles for any big project without needing any special powers.

We could use the same trick for stocks. Tax stock ownership, and require every stock owner to declare a value for their stock, a value used both to set their tax, and also available to takeover attempts as a sales price. Then a takeover could happen overnight, as 51% of the stock is suddenly purchased at its declared Harberger tax value.

Most speculators might want to declare a value just above the current stock price, and we’d make it easy for them to just declare a percent increment, like say “My value is always 10% over the current market price.” If most did that, a takeover might only face a 10% tax, instead of the 40% tax described above.

I gotta admit that cases like current policy discouraging hostile takeovers makes me despair of trying to introduce any more complex or less effective innovations. The case for allowing more hostile takeovers seems to me especially simple and strong. If even a change this valuable and simple can’t be done, what hope is there for other policy changes?

Added 3p: The tax seems to be about the same size today, but so the main extra problem now is allowing far fewer takeovers:

In large-sample studies, the winning offer premium typically averages approximately 40%–50% relative to the target price two calendar months before the initial bid announcement. (more)

Of course we should also make it easier for someone who owns 51% of stock to actually control the firm. So not using poison pills, staggered boards, supermajority voting rules, voting vs non voting stock, required prior notice of or plan to purchase, etc.

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Personal Energy Apps

By Robin Hanson · October 20, 2020 2:10 pm · Comments (0)

Long ago I noticed that the most successful people I had met also tended to have pretty high personal ‘energy.’ They talked fast, fidgetted, moved around a room more, needed less sleep, could drink more before they collapsed, etc. It seems to me that high energy people are quite visibly impressive to the people around them, and that personal energy is one of the visible features that impresses people most, especially re men.

I’ve talked recently about publishing objective low-dimensional measures of individual health, wealth, and smarts. (And previously on status apps.) These three features seem quite feasible to measure reasonably well when people cooperate in their measurement. But with energy it seems plausible that we could often measure personal energy with high accuracy even without their cooperation.

Sure if they’d let us film them 24/7, that’s probably plenty enough to measure energy well, but we can probably see a lot about energy from just short recordings. For example, student evaluations of  few-second-long videos of teachers without sound correlated substantially with student evaluations of those teachers.

So we could have people evaluate a large dataset of long audio or video recordings, and then use machine learning to find and apply patterns in that to a much larger space of videos. I’d bet a lot of the variance will be explained by some pretty low level features. And then we might have another well-measured feature of people that we wouldn’t have to put quite so much effort into discerning or showing off.

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Lost Advanced Civilizations

By Robin Hanson · August 18, 2020 2:15 pm · Comments (2)

Did life on Earth start on Earth, or did it start on Mars and move to Earth? If you frame such panspermia as an “extraordinary claim” for which you demand “extraordinary evidence”, you will of course conclude that this should be treated “skeptically” as unlikely and sloppy unscientific “speculation”. To be disdained and not treated as serious by respectable academics and science journalists. But that’s not really fair.

You see the early Mars environment is, a priori, about as likely a place for life to start as the Earth environment. So if the rate at which life is transferred between the planets were high enough, then equal chances of life starting first in both places would result in equal chances for Earth life to have started in either place. We should take the expected time difference between life starting in the two places, and ask how high is the chance that life would move from one planet to the next during that period. The more often rocks are thrown from one place to the other, and the more easily life could survive for the travel period within those rocks, then the more likely it is that Earth life started on Mars.

In addition, Mars, being further from the Sun, would have cooled first, and had a head start in its window for life. Making it more likely that life would start there and spread to Earth than vice versa. Of course life starting first on Mars would have implications for what we might see when we look at Mars. If we had expected Mars life to continue strong until today, then the fact that we see no life on Mars now would be a big strike against this hypothesis. But if we expected Mars life to have died out or at least gone dormant by now, then the issue is what we will see when we dig on Mars. With enough data on such digs, we may come to reject to Mars first hypothesis even given its initial plausibility.

A similar analysis applies to panspermia from other stars. You might think it obvious that the rate at which life-filled rocks from a star make it to seed other stars is very low, but most stars are born in large groups close together in stellar nurseries. So if life arose early enough within our star’s nursery, there might have been high rates of moving that life between stars in that nursery. In which case the chance that Earth life came from another star could also be high, and the best place to look for life outside our star would be the other stars from our stellar nursery.

Now consider the possibility of lost advanced civilizations. Not just civilizations at a similar level of development to those around them in space and time; that’s quite likely given that we keep finding new previously-unknown settlements and developed places. No, the more interesting claims are about substantial (but not crazy extreme) decreases in the peak or median level of civilizations across wide areas. Such as what happened late in the late Mediterranean Bronze Age, or at the fall of the Roman Empire. Could there have been “higher” civilizations before the “first” ones that we now know about in each region, such as the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese Shang dynasty? (I’m talking human civs, not others.) Continue reading "Lost Advanced Civilizations" »

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Toward A University Department of Generalists

By Robin Hanson · June 12, 2020 8:07 pm · Comments (1)

The hard problem then is how to get specialists to credit you for advancing their field when they don’t see you as a high status one of them. (more)

Many of my most beloved colleagues, and also I, are intellectual polymaths. That is, we have published in many different areas, and usefully integrated results from diverse areas. Academia tends to neglect integration and generality, which hurts not only intellectual progress, but also myself and my colleagues. Which makes me especially interested in fixing this problem.

The key problem is that academics and their research are mostly evaluated by those who work on very similar topics and methods. To the extent that these are evaluated by folks at a larger distance, it is by those who control one of the limited number of standard “disciplines” (math, physics, literature, econ, etc.).

Thus we have a poor system for evaluating work and people that sit between disciplines, or that cover many disciplines. Making it harder to evaluate work that combines areas A and B, and maybe also C and D. You might be able to get an A person to evaluate the A parts, and then a B person for the B parts, but that is more work, and the person who knows how to pick a good A evaluator may not know how to pick a good B evaluator. Academics tend to think that interdisciplinary groups do worse work, held to lower standards, and this is a big part of why.

Furthermore, even when specialists can evaluate such things well enough, they have an incentive to say “Maybe that should be supported, but not with our resources.” That is, for people and work that combines A and B, the A folks say it should be supported by the B budget, and vice versa. Often to be accepted by people in A, you must do as much good work in A as someone who only ever works in A, regardless of how much good work you also do in B, C, etc.

Yet generality still gains substantial prestige among intellectuals, which gives me hope. For example, there are usually fights to write more general summaries, such as review articles and textbooks, fights usually won by the highest in status. And Nobel prize winners, upon winning, often famously wax philosophic and general, pontificating (usually badly) on a much wider range of topics than they did previously.

Academic disciplines and departments usually need to do two things: (1) evaluate people to say who can join and stay in them, and (2) train new candidates in a way that makes it likely that many will later be evaluated positively in part (1). I’m not sure there is a way to do part (2) well here, but I think I at least know of a way to do part (1).

I propose that one university (and eventually many) create a Department of Generalists. (Maybe there’s a better name for it.) To apply to join this department, you must first get tenure in some other department. You submit your publication record, and from that they can calculate a measure of the range of your publications. Weighted by quality of course. Folks with very high range are assumed to be shoo-ins, folks with low ranges are routinely rejected, and existing department members have discretion on borderline cases.

How could we calculate publication range? I’ve posted before on using citation data to construct maps of academia. From such maps it seems straightforward to create robust metrics describing the volume in that space encompassed by a person’s research. And something like citations could be used to weigh publications in this metric. No doubt there is room for disagreement on exact metrics, and I’m not pushing to get too mechanical here. My point is that it is feasible to evaluate generality, as we know how to mechanically get a decent first cut measure of a researcher’s range.

So what do people in Department of Generalists do exactly? Well of course they continue with their research, and can continue to serve the departments form which they came. But they are encouraged to do more general research than do folks in other departments. They can now more easily talk with other generalists, work together on more general projects, and invite outside generalist speakers.

Maybe they experiment with training or mentoring other professors at the university to be generalists, people who hope to later apply to join this generalist department. They might be preferred candidates to write those prestigious general summaries, such as review articles and textbooks, and to teach generalist courses, like big introductory courses. And especially to review more generalist work by others.

It would of course be hard work to get such a department going. And you’d need to start it at a university where there are already many generalists who could get along. But I have high hopes, again from the fact that academics so often fight to appear general, as in fighting to write summarizes and to pontificate on more general issues. Once there was a widespread perception that people in the Department of Generalists were in fact better at being generalists, as well as meeting the usual criteria of at least one regular department, they would naturally be seen as an elite. A group that others aspire to join, patrons aspire to fund, reporters aspire to interview, and students aspire to learn under.

And then academia would less neglect work on integration, synthesis, and generality, and work between existing disciplines. Oh academia would still neglect those things, don’t get me wrong, just less. And that seems a goal worth pursuing.

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Missing Model: Too Much Do-Gooding

By Robin Hanson · June 7, 2020 10:45 am · Comments (0)

Grim view of human nature … is mistaken, a persistent and counterproductive myth. … the evidence for mass selfishness is extremely thin. … The surprising truth is that people tend to be­have decently in a crisis. To the British, the all-too-familiar example is the cheerful demeanour of Londoners during the Blitz. … New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina … rumours ran wild about the murder and rape of children inside the Louisiana Superdome; but when the national guard showed up, … met instead by a nurse asking for medical supplies. (more)

Friday I asked the author of a pandemic novel what he thought went most wrong in his fictional world. He said selfishness: blaming others, and not sacrificing enough to protect others from infection. He also said he was surprised to see people acting less selfishly than he predicted in our real pandemic.

As the above quote indicates, that’s a common mistake. In this pandemic I estimate that the bigger problem is people pushing for too much “helping”, rather than too little. That’s a common problem in health and medicine, and this poll says 2-1 that it is the more common problem:

Of course my Twitter followers are probably unusual by this metric; I’d bet most think selfishness is the bigger problem. One reason is that it can look suspiciously selfish to say there’s too much do-gooding, as if you were trying to excuse your selfish behavior. Another reason is that the theory of selfishness is simpler. In economics, for example, we teach many quite simple game theory models of temptations to selfishness. In contrast, it seems harder to explain the core theory of why there might be too much do-gooding.

This seems to suggest a good and feasible project: generate or identify some good simple game theory models that predict too much do-gooding. Not just personal signaling acts that do too much, but acts that push collective norms and decisions toward too much do-gooding. I’d be happy to help with such a project. Of course it would make only a small contribution to the problem, but still I’d guess one worth the trouble.

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Social Network Games

By Robin Hanson · May 4, 2020 12:00 pm · Comments (0)

I’m not very good at social networking, but by now I’m old enough to see the value in many skills that I don’t have. One problem is that you often need to invest in networks many years before you plan to draw on them. Another is that it isn’t at all clear to young nerds, as I was once, what sorts of connections and relations would end up being most valuable later. Especially if you have big doubts about where your career and interests may go.

What if we could create games to show and teach social networking skills? And perhaps even to encourage the creation of useful networks? As nerds like games, we might tempt nerdy kids to play them, and we might subsidize such games as a society, to induce stronger denser social networks. There are plausibly externalities by which we all benefit when we all have longer stronger networks.

The tricky part, of course, is figuring out what exactly should happen in these games. We don’t want them to encourage just any social networks; we want the networks that are actually socially helpful. So we don’t obviously just want to encourage people to have more LinkedIn connections or Facebook friends, or to join and rise within multilevel Ponzi-like marketing systems like Amway. At least we don’t while we remain uncertain about the marginal value of more connections in such systems.

Ideally, we want people to be usefully selective about who they include in their network, and to whom they make referrals. We want to give them incentives to evaluate potential network partners well for suitability in various networking roles. But holding constant such evaluation and selectivity, we also want people to put in the work to collect more network partners.

For example, imagine that we periodically announced prizes shared among everyone in the first network path to connect a person of type X to a person of type Y. Say, a someone with a particular foot problem to someone who knows well how to deal with that problem. From what space of X,Y pairs should we draw for tied prizes to induce the most socially valuable networks?

Being not good at social networking, I’m probably also not good at making such proposals. But I might be better at evaluating such proposals, or more generally at social network game proposals. So please, you of my associates who like inventing games or who understand social networking better, do make such suggestions for I and others to evaluate.

Btw, negative liability would seem to help encourage such networks.

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What Can Money Buy Directly?

By Robin Hanson · April 19, 2020 8:45 pm · Comments (4)

Can money buy oranges? Well obviously, in an indirect sense. With money, you could travel to a place where you’ve heard oranges grow wild, search to find such a plant in the wild, dig it up and try to ship it home, see if it you can make it thrive there, and if it does, take some oranges as your reward. This might work, but success depends not just on the money you pay; it also depends much more on your effort, abilities, and other context. In principle, you might be able to execute this plan without any money, but typically more money will make such a plan a bit easier. So, yes, in this weak sense, you can “buy” oranges with money.

At an ordinary grocery store, however, you can buy oranges much more directly. You go to the produce section, look for the orange color, walk to the pile of oranges, take as many as you want, and pay the price per orange at the register. Or at a full service grocery, you might just say “six oranges please” and a grocer would go find and bag them for you. Online, you might just type in “orange”, enter “6” for quantity, and click “buy”.

These ways to buy oranges are usually pretty reliable even for an ordinary person who knows little about oranges. Using these methods, the number of oranges you get depends mainly on how much money you are willing to pay, and much less on other context. This is what I mean by buying something “directly.” And so regarding the oft-asked question “what can money buy?”, a more interesting version of this question is “What can money buy relatively directly.”

As more money makes most any plan a bit easier to achieve, the many long lists one can find of “things money can’t buy” are in one sense obviously wrong; money helps with most of them. And if they just mean that money can’t guarantee the max level of each thing, that’s obvious, but trivial, as pretty much nothing guarantees that. You can’t even guarantee you’ll get oranges if you order them from a grocery. And if that is the meaning, why pick on money, relative to anything else that might greatly but imperfectly help you get things?

Perhaps what people mean is that money isn’t the main factor that determines if you succeed with such things; money can be a distraction from more important issues. But if so, that seems to claim that you can’t buy such things directly. Which then raises the key question: for what kinds of things can the money you pay be a strong factor in determining how much of it you get? That is, what can money buy directly?

In my last post, I talked about how one can buy higher wages, via a job agent. I wasn’t saying that there are complex and subtle ways to spend money to help your career, ways that could work if only you were clever and skilled enough to understand and apply them. I was instead saying that there is a simple direct way to do this, one most anyone can understand: hire an agent (and anti-agent). That method doesn’t guarantee you any particular wage, but it does let you control how much you pay per wage increase.

In fact, I’ll go further now, and say that there seem to be ways to measure most anything, and as a result we can buy most any measured thing relatively simply and directly. That is, via a simple method that most anyone can come to understand, you can just point to what you want, put cash on the table, and then lose cash in proportion to how much you get of what you want. And the relation is substantially causal; paying more can cause you to get more, even when you have little relevant ability or understanding.

In the academic literature, this method is called an “incentive contract”. You find a way to measure the outcome you want, you offer to give someone access to levers by which they can plausibly influence this outcome, and you contract to pay them more cash the higher is this measure. You might also hold auctions or competitions to see who is best to put into this role.

We have a great many real examples today, and in history, of oft-used incentive contracts. Artists and athletes have agents paid a fraction of their earnings. Line workers are paid “piece rates” per how many items they assemble, or tomatoes they pick. Sales workers are paid commissions, per how many items they sell. Hedge fund managers are paid more if their fund makes higher returns. Lawyers on contingency fees are paid a fraction of court awarded damages. Firm managers are paid in stocks and options which rise in value when firm stock prices rise. Athletes are paid bonuses for individual and team success. Construction contractors are paid more if their work is completed by a deadline. Ships carrying convicts to Australia were paid on the number who arrived alive (which worked much better than the number who started out alive.)

Are the applications we’ve seen the only feasible ones, or could many more yet be developed? Consider beauty. Some say beauty can’t be measured, as it is “in the eye of the beholder”. But if you ask many people to rate someone’s beauty, their ratings are correlated. So imagine taking many standardized pictures and video of a client, across across their usual range of clothes and environments, and then paying many independent observers to rate their attractiveness. Do this at the start to get an initial value, and plan to do it again in, say, six months. A client might pay a beauty agent based on the change in this measure.

Potential beauty agents could bid by offering how much money they want to be paid per unit of increased beauty, how much they would pay up front to gain this role, and which particular beauty decisions they want to control, rather than merely advise, at least until the second measurement. There are probably clever ways to use auctions or decision markets to select from among these bids, but such details need not concern us now.

Yes, it would be a problem if a beauty agent could corrupt beauty measurements, or exploit their biases. But if such effects are modest, expert beauty agents can likely substantially increase a client’s beauty, relative to that client’s amateur efforts. Consider that movies don’t usually let actors pick their own clothes and hairstyle to look good in each movie; beauty experts instead make those choices. Yes, clients may care less about beauty as seen by average people, and more as seen by particular communities. But measuring such local versions of beauty should only cost a bit more.

Now consider happiness. If happiness were an entirely internal mental state that never influenced our external appearances, well then yes it would be hard to measure happiness. At least until we can better read brains. But most humans leak their feelings in many ways. So a 24/7 audio/video feed of a person, especially their facial expression and tone of voice, perhaps augmented by watch-based measures of heart rates, etc., seems plenty sufficient. Especially if processed via self and other reports, rather than artificially. Happiness could be measured pretty accurately from such things, especially for a client who wants it to be measurable, so that they can hire an agent to increase their happiness. (And especially as things like smiles and laughter probably evolved to signal happy internal states.)

A happiness agent is given control over some elements of a client’s life, and can advise on others. Especially on which other agents to hire for beauty, health, career, etc. Happiness agents pay some initial fee to gain this role, and then they are paid in proportion to the client’s measured happiness. Such agents might be big firms that combine many kinds of happiness expertise, and who can take big risks. If there are things that an expert can learn about how to be happy, things an ordinary amateur doesn’t know, then there is likely substantial scope for using agents to directly buy happiness. If so, money can buy happiness, directly.

Well this is enough for one blog post. The key conclusion: it looks feasible to much more directly buy many things we care greatly about, including beauty, happiness, health, career success, popularity, and status. Yes it would be work to set up systems to measure such things, work that could not be recouped for just from one client. But the prospect of many millions of clients should be quite sufficient.

One key question remains: why hasn’t there been more interest in such possibilities? Are these new innovations that could spread widely, or are they blocked by key fundamental permanent obstacles not yet considered in the above discussion?

Added 20Apr: Most seem to actually be comforted by the fact that it can be hard to buy things with money, and seem uninterested in finding ways to make it easier to buy things with money. I suspect they feel that better methods of this sort would give a relative advantage to people with more money, who they see as other people. While everyone could benefit from better ways to buy things with money, that matters little to those focused on relative status.

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Variolation Test Design

By Robin Hanson · April 8, 2020 4:00 pm · Comments (1)

Okay, what the variolation concept needs most now is a trial/test/experiment ASAP. So to help get the ball rolling, let me sketch a tentative plan. I’m NOT saying this plan is now good enough. I’m saying let’s talk together about how to make it better. (Not so interested here in those ever popular “this can never work” comments.)

As with most projects, the obvious first top issue is staffing, especially leaders. This needs leaders who not only have the ability and expertise to execute it, but who can also inspire confidence in its other staff, subjects, patrons, sponsors, and audiences. (The most I’ve ever led is an assistant, so alas I don’t seem a good candidate.) The main point here is to inspire audiences to action, and that won’t happen if audiences don’t believe the project’s purported results, nor if they find its people too odious to associate with.

So the main purpose of this post is to try to attract participants, especially leaders, to pick up this ball and run with it. I’ll run with you, but I can’t run it by myself. When someone makes a good suggestion, such as in the comments, I’m likely to edit this post to include it. You are warned. Continue reading "Variolation Test Design" »

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