Results for “ostrom”
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Pareto Principles in Infinite Ethics

by  Tyler Cowen in

I’ve been reading the dissertation of that title by Amanda Askell, following her podcast with Robert Wiblin.  And there is also the work of Nick Bostrom on “infinite ethics.”

In the thesis, Amanda considers the possibility that world-states might simply be incomparable when there are an infinite number of relevant beings and infinite total utility in the universe, as seems to be implied by some cosmologies.

That in turn conflicts with the notion that agents are “locations of goodness.”  If you give me some chocolate ice cream, it seems I am better off, and that judgment ought to be allowed to proceed without undue attention being paid to the broader cosmos.  Yet that will imply pairwise comparisons are possible in an infinite universe, if only through the Pareto principle.  But when you compare two overall states of the (infinite) universe in pairwise fashion, it is hard to see what value the “new” ice cream cone brings, because both ex ante and ex post there is an infinite consumption of ice cream.

Maybe the view that agents are locations of goodness doesn’t make sense when paired with infinities.  Might the apparent increase in ice cream mean — whether in some causal sense or not — that still the total number of ice cream-eating beings in the universe has not increased, because if it had the infinity would not have held in the first place?  Metaphysically speaking, one ice cream might push out the other.  Sadly, my (finite) mind cannot readily deal with the intuitions, nor what happens if you try to imagine what kind of infinities we are dealing with, a’la Cantor.

Still, I will gladly accept the assumption of incomparability across different world-states in an infinite universe.  In fact I view incomparability in the infinite universe case as the friend of comparability in the world we live in.  It is by no means certain that the universe is infinite, but there is some chance it is infinite.

When doing expected value calculations, we need to take account of both possibilitites, namely that the universe may or may not be infinite.  But if the infinity scenarios all lead to incomparability across various options (if indeed they are “options” to begin with), you can argue that the calculations for the finite universe scenario dominate the final calculus that we face today, operating under agnosticism about the nature of the universe (infinite or not).  Which brings us back to finite universe ethics and persons being locations of value.  And chocolate ice cream.

Another way to put this is that worrying about infinities “too much” ends up meaning you don’t have to worry about them at all.

Michael Nielsen, standing on one foot

by  Tyler Cowen in

A highly sophisticated MR reader demanded a dose of Michael Nielsen.  I wrote to Michael, and he was kind enough to oblige.  Everything that follows is from Michael, here goes:

I started with the question “What might amuse Tyler?”, and it became very easy.

Three opinions that may amuse MR readers:

1. Peter Thiel has said: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 (280) characters.” Thiel is wrong: 280 characters are much, much better than flying cars. Twitter is misunderstood as being an online service; it’s merely the online component of a much improved offline experience. Twitter DM’s are a superpower, one of the most valuable ways of connecting people ever invented. More on one way of using Twitter here.

2. Movies are primarily a visual form; movie criticism and the popular conversation about movies are primarily a literary form, and informed by literary sensibilities. This is why good movies such as Transformers are so underrated. People who dismiss such movies are mostly revealing their own ignorance.

3. Many corners of the internet have a culture of judgement or argument. Typical subtexts in online conversation are: is this good or bad? What’s wrong with it? But until and unless healthy conversational norms are formed, argument and judgement are mostly useless status-seeking by participants. Much better is a “Yes, and” culture.

Three books or papers which should be better known:

1. Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons.  Ostrom dismantles the market / government dichotomy, sketching out ways common pool resources (and, to some extent, public goods) can be provided using non-market, non-government solutions.

2. Alex Tabarrok’s paper introducing dominant assurance contracts. Cryptocurrencies have huge potential as a way of creating entirely new types of market, using ideas like this. This potential is mostly unrealized to date.

3. Bret Victor on Media for Thinking the Unthinkable.

Blog posts don’t really get going until about 5,000 words in. Here are three favourites of mine:

1. Thought as a Technology, on how imaginative designers invent fundamentally new modes of thought.

2. If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?

3. Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence (with Shan Carter).

Despite the fact I’m well short of 5,000 words, I’ll stop here.

You can follow Michael on Twitter here.

Will the proliferation of affordable AI decimate the middle class?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Here is how I think about these issues. The Artificial in AI can sometimes mislead so let’s start by getting rid of the A and asking instead whether more NI, Natural Intelligence, will decimate the middle class. For example, will increasing education in China decimate the American middle class? I don’t think so.

As I said in my TED talk, the brainpower of China and India in the 20th century was essentially “offline”. Instead of contributing to the world technological frontier the people of China and India were just barely feeding themselves. China and India are now coming online and I see the increase in natural intelligence as one of the most hopeful facts for the future. It’s been estimated that a reduction in cancer mortality of just 10 percent would be worth $5 trillion to U.S. citizens (and even more taking into account the rest of the world). A reduction in cancer mortality is more likely to happen with a well-educated China than with a poorly educated China. So we have a huge amount to gain by greater NI.

In the case of low-skill labor the rise of China has hurt some US low-skill workers (although US workers as a whole are almost certainly better off due to lower prices). The US has historically had an abundance of highly-skilled labor and with greater education around the world we have less of a competitive advantage. In the case of high-skill labor, however, I think the opportunities for gains are much greater than with competition for low-skill labor. Ideas are what drives growth and ideas are non-rivalrous, they quickly spread around the world. The more idea creators the better for everyone. At the world level, for example, the standard of living and the growth rate of world GDP have both gotten larger as population has increased.

Greater foreign intelligence and wealth could be a threat if intelligence turns from production to destruction (this is also a potential problem with AI). We probably can’t keep China poor, even if we tried, and any attempt to try to do so would likely backfire in the worst possible way. Thus, if we want to keep high-skill Chinese workers working on medical rather than military breakthroughs, we must preserve a peaceful world of trade. Indeed, peace and trade become ever more important the richer the world gets.

Now let’s turn from NI to AI. For the foreseeable future I see AI as being very similar to additional NI. Smart people in China aren’t perfect substitutes for smart people in the United States and there are also plenty of opportunities for complementarity. Similarly AI is not a perfect substitute for NI and there are plenty of opportunities for complementarity. An AI that drives your car, for example, complements your NI because it leaves more time for more productive tasks.

(What happens when AI does become a perfect substitute for NI? We could easily be 100 years or more from that scenario but my foresighted colleague, Robin Hanson, has a new book The Age of Em that discusses the implications of uploads, human intelligence copied into software—Hanson’s book is the most complete and serious scenario analysis of the implications of a new technology ever written but most of us won’t live long enough to know whether he is right although Robin might.)

Thus, the analysis of AI and NI is similar except for one important fact. As Chinese workers become better educated a significant share of the gains will go to Chinese workers (although by no means all).  AI, however, is produced by capital. But in our world capital isn’t scarce. The world is awash in capital and computing power is getting ever-cheaper. AI isn’t like an oil field owned by a handful of people. AI will be cheap and ownership will be widespread. Just look at your cellphone—it’s faster and more powerful than a multi-million dollar Cray-2 supercomputer of 1990. Moreover, in 1990 there were only a handful of Cray-2s and today there are billions of cell-phone super-computers including hundreds of millions and soon billions in poor countries. The gains from AI, therefore, will flow not to capital but to consumers. So if anything the gains from more AI are even larger than the gains from more NI.

From my answer on Quora.

Sunday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Where did the genius of the Polgar sisters come from?

2. Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom says the discovery of fossilized complex life on another world “would be by far the worst news ever printed on a newspaper cover.”  On Robin Hanson’s “great filter” theory.

3. “Journalist who reported Minnesota county was ‘worst place to live’ is moving there.”  And ostensibly ordinary Pyongyang.

4. Sweden is growing at 4.5% a year.

5. Professional bridge has a cheating problem.

6. Which college majors benefit most from law school?  The paper is here.

Tuesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. How is development economics taught in developing nations?

2. Robin Hanson reviews Garett Jones.  And cities as harems?

3. Lego’s anti-Lego slippers (markets in everything there is no great stagnation).

4. Walter Frick: are successful CEOs just lucky?

5. New Yorker profile of Nick Bostrom.  And Cass Sunstein to write Star Wars book.

6. “While participants assessed parts of the relationship between Christian and Anastasia as exciting and romantic, they consistently indicated an unappealing lack of health in the relationship…”

7. Lots of data on NYC Uber.

The twenty greatest English-language novels

by  Tyler Cowen in

A few of you wrote in and asked me to match this Guardian list of the top one hundred English-language novels of all time.  (It is notable how many second-rate English novels made that list, and how few second-rate American ones did…)  Well, one hundred is too many but here is twenty, in no particular order:

James Joyce, Ulysses

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Wuthering Heights

William Faulkner, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury

Huck Finn

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Mrs. Dalloway

Nabokov, Pale Fire

Henry James, The Golden Bowl

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Sterne, Huxley, Lawrence, Beckett, and Wharton are all knocking on the door and probably would have rounded out a top twenty-five.  Scott and Trollope too, more Hardy.  I consider the omission of Austen to be my flaw, not hers, but I just don’t love them.

You’ll note I made no attempt to be “balanced.”  I gladly would have awarded all twenty spots to the same author, had such a choice been justified.  There is also no attempt at racial, ethnic, gender, or geographic balance, none whatsoever.  I simply picked what I think are the best books.

And if you think there are some obvious omissions, they probably are intentional.  There are plenty of fine books, but no I don’t put 1984 in the top twenty, and while America has many very good novels from the latter part of the twentieth century, only a few (V?)  would receive my serious consideration for a top thirty list or even top forty list.  Not many are better than Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, or for that matter John Galsworthy.

Nick Beckstead’s conversation with Tyler Cowen

by  Tyler Cowen in

Nick is a philosopher at Oxford and he has worked with Larry Temkin and Nick Bostrom.  He typed up his version of our conversation (pdf), it starts with this:

Purpose of the conversation: I contacted Tyler to learn about his perspectives on existential risk and other long-run issues for humanity, the long-run consequences of economic growth, and the effective altruism movement.

Here are a few excerpts:

Tyler is optimistic about growth in the coming decades, but he doesn’t think we’ll become uploads or survive for a million years. Some considerations in favor of his views were:

1. The Fermi paradox is some evidence that humans will not colonize the stars.
2. Almost all species go extinct.
3. Natural disasters—even a supervolcano—could destroy humanity.
4. Normally, it’s easier to destroy than to build. And, in the future, it will probably become increasingly possible for smaller groups to cause severe global damage (along the lines suggested by Martin Rees).

The most optimistic view that Tyler would entertain—though he doubts it—is that humans would survive at subsistence level for a very long time; that’s what we’ve had for most of human history.

And:

People doing philosophical work to try to reduce existential risk are largely wasting their time. Tyler doesn’t think it’s a serious effort, though it may be good publicity for something that will pay off later. A serious effort looks more like the parts of the US government that trained people to infiltrate the post-collapse Soviet Union and then locate and neutralize nuclear weapons. There was also a serious effort by the people who set up hotlines between leaders to be used to quickly communicate about nuclear attacks (e.g., to help quickly convince a leader in country A that a fishy object on their radar isn’t an incoming nuclear attack).This has been fixed in other countries (e.g. US and China), but it hasn’t been fixed in other cases (e.g. Israel and Iran). There is more that we could do in this area. In contrast, the philosophical side of this seems like ineffective posturing.

Tyler wouldn’t necessarily recommend that these people switch to other areas of focus because people[‘s] motivation and personal interests are major constraints on getting anywhere. For Tyler, his own interest in these issues is a form of consumption, though one he values highly.

And:

Tyler thinks about the future and philosophical issues from a historicist perspective. When considering the future of humanity, this makes him focus on war, conquest, plagues, and the environment, rather than future technology.

He acquired this perspective by reading a lot of history and spending a lot of time around people in poor countries, including in rural areas. Spending time with people in poor countries shaped Tyler’s views a lot. It made him see rational choice ethics as more contingent. People in rural areas care most about things like fights with local villages over watermelon patches. And that’s how we are, but we’re living in a fog about it.

And:

The truths of literature and what you might call “the Straussian truths of the great books”—what you get from Homer or Plato—are at least as important rational choice ethics. But the people who do rational choice ethics don’t think that. If the two perspectives aren’t integrated, it leads to absurdities—problems like fanaticism, the Repugnant Conclusion, and so on. Right now though, rational choice ethics is the best we have—the problems of, e.g., Kantian ethics seem much, much worse.

If rational choice ethics were integrated with the “Straussian truths of the great books,” would it lead to different decisions? Maybe not—maybe it would lead to the same decisions with a different attitude. We might come to see rational choice ethics as an imperfect construct, a flawed bubble of meaning that we created for ourselves, and shouldn’t expect to keep working in unusual circumstances.

I’m on a plane for much of today, so you are getting Nick’s version of me, for a while at least.  You will find Nick’s other conversations here.

Noah Webster Defines Rent Seeking

by  Alex Tabarrok in

My latest paper, Public Choice and Bloomington School Perspectives on Intellectual Property (pdf) written with Eli Dourado), gives capsule summaries of the Virginia school of public choice and the Ostrom’s Bloomington School and then applies some of these ideas to the political economy of intellectual property. Here is one bit on the early history of the copyright law illustrating that Disney’s rewriting of the copyright law to extend its rents is nothing new, rent seekers began to expand on the Constitutional clause almost from the day the ink was dry:

Almost immediately after the first session of Congress, writers began to petition Congress for protection for their works. The Copyright Act of 1790 was meant to fill in the administrative details of how copyright law would work. Importantly, the first draft of the new law appears to have been written not by a member of Congress, but by Noah Webster (Patry 1994)! Webster, cousin to Senator Daniel Webster, was the author of numerous textbooks and, of course, the famous dictionary that still bears his name. His draft of the copyright act, which was not adopted in full, would have extended copyright not just to authors, but also to booksellers and printers. As it was, the 1790 law covered not only books but also maps and charts (a rather broad reading of the Constitution’s writings). Webster was also instrumental in getting the 1831 act passed. The 1831 act doubled protections from 14 to 28 years. Writing to Eliza W. Jones, Webster noted,

[My] business in part was to use my influence to procure an extension of the law for securing copy-rights to authors. . . . By this bill the term of copy-right is secured for 28 years, with the right of renewal . . . for 14 years more. If this should become law, I shall be much benefited.

Webster to Eliza W. Jones, January 10, 1831.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Among Others, by Jo Walton.  I loved this book.  It won a Nebula Award, but is more about the power of books than being a work of science fiction per se.

2. Frances Ashcroft, The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body.  One of the remaining popular science topics which has not been exhausted by popular books and so this volume is both instructive and entertaining and comes across as fresh.

3. James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, Meaningful Work and Play.  He really is an anarchist, left-wing at that, but I couldn’t quite find a central core here, much as I admire his other books.

4. Derek S. Hoff, The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History.  Good survey of early 20th century debates on population and birth rates and eugenics; these topics are making a comeback.

5. Roger Scruton, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism.  I like Elinor Ostrom as much as the next guy, and this book is well-written, but I am not persuaded by the argument that environmental issues fundamentally can be handled on a local level.  At least a few important ones cannot.

Also of note are:

6. Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics, by Robert Fogel, Enid Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, and Nathaniel Grotte.

7. Gary B. Gorton, Misunderstanding Financial Crises: Why We Don’t See Them Coming.

Ten conspiracy theories for nerds (or conspiracy theory theory)

by  Tyler Cowen

Not your usual cup of tea, here is one of them:

The Simulation Argument. This is legion in popular culture from “The Matrix” and “Inception” and other sci-fi, so we’ll just refer you to Nick Bostrom’s formulation of it. In theory we could tell the difference if something happened in the manner of The Truman Show where a light labeled “Sirius” falls from the sky. But are there any such events?

We offer one complexity-related observation. Although it is routine to say that classes like {\mathsf{P}} and {\mathsf{BQP}} have universal simulation, this isn’t strictly true. The universal function for {\mathsf{P}} doesn’t belong to {\mathsf{P}}—if it did, then {\mathsf{P}} would be in some fixed polynomial time bound, which it isn’t. Although proving this is technically murkier for “random” or “promise” classes like {\mathsf{BQP}}, the essential idea holds for any reasonable complexity class. Thus a universal simulation involves dropping down to a lower grade than the resources on which you draw. If our universe is convincingly universal, perhaps this is a well-motivated reason to reject the argument.

Perhaps the conspiracy is that so many people are intent on getting us to believe the simulation hypothesis.  Here is another one:

{\bullet } Factoring Really Is Easy. This is similar to the last, but now they can factor in polynomial time on a laptop, rather than need a quantum computer. Ken and I think this one has a much higher prior, almost on the order of “Breaking Engima Really Is Easy” in 1939.

If I understand properly, that is from a collaborative post from Pip and Ken Regan.