Macro Ethics

Of course I love this quote, it affirms everything I believe

2011-12-14T21:44:00.000-08:00

I'm still going to enjoy it though.

"That’s quite true. And all societies use institutions to enforce delayed gratification. Well, that is, all societies that are culturally homogenous enough that status signals are agreed upon. And our society has intentionally dismantled the institutions that enforce delayed gratification over the past century – and it has done so in order to rewrite signaling rules under the pretext that signaling rules are arbitrary – but they’re not. They’re Hayekian – they matter." -Curt Doolittle

Towards a healthy diet

2011-12-09T23:32:00.001-08:00

I've been intensely studying nutrition for the last several months and one thing I am sick and god damn tired of is the ambiguity. Every other article suggests way too many alternatives and the combinations quickly get out of hand. Cross referencing foods against their micronutrient content, price, ease of preparation, etc. is exhausting. I guess min-maxing multiple criteria is never really fun.

Based on the huge variance I see in successful macro splits from people on everything from high carb diets (bulking/bodybuilding) to keto (as close to zero carb as possible) I think micros should be dialed in first. If you are eating nutrient dense foods you will reach all your micro goals and still have 50% of total calories left to fill. This leaves plenty of room to hit whatever macros you want with WAY less worry.

Nutrient dense foods you need to eat everyday, are cheap, and easy to prep/eat:

Broccoli

Sardines: better O3 content than most fish oil caps + a mega dose of calcium.

Prunes: very high in antioxidants and much easier/cheaper to buy and eat in bulk vs things like blueberries.

Eggs: egg yolk is basically a multivitamin, I eat 4 a day.

Pumpkin seeds/almonds: for the magnesium which is also a common deficiency, can sub other nuts but they are inferior.

Dairy: Milk is highly controversial with studies pointing to increased cancer risk and cancer reduction with a slight edge to the former in terms of power. This effect disappears at doses of 1 cup a day or less. A cup of milk a day along with a serving or two of cottage cheese (CC and ricotta cheeses are correlated with reduced cancers) is the best middle ground as far as I can tell at this time.

I would be willing to bet money that someone eating at least a couple servings of each of the above and being fairly loose with the rest of their diet would have superior outcomes to someone strictly meeting macros but not necessarily hitting micros. Why do i say this when so many health researchers talk about macros all day? Because macros are important for *unhealthy people*. When you have someone eating 500+g of processed carbs and 200 grams of processed fats rich in O6 a day then fixing that is going to dominate health outcomes. In large scale studies of nutrient content of foods it was found that seasonal swings in mortality were strongly correlated with seasonal swings in the nutrient content of foods.

Supplements that EVERYONE should take:

Vitamin D3: Very few supplements have strong evidence of better health outcomes with the notable exception of D.

Fiber: Unless you really are chowing down on tons of veggies almost no one gets as much fiber as is suggested by health studies. Fiber supplements are one of the few supplements where you don't have to worry about their absorption vs whole foods as humans don't absorb fiber. I take psyllium caps with every meal.

Any other supplement you think you need you are almost certainly meeting/exceeding RDA's with the above food list.

This post to be updated if I find anything useful.

Edit: whole grain high protein pancakes recipe reproduced here.

Cottage Cheese pancakes

1 cup rolled oats

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

4 eggs

1 cup cottage cheese

2 tablespoons butter or olive oil

Vanilla extract, Cinnamon, and nutmeg to taste

you can mess with ratios to your hearts content. It's really hard to screw these up and I just eyeball everything.

For syrup a good alternative is blackstrap molasses (you can mix with a bit of butter and milk to make it more syrup like) It is very rich in magnesium, containing the same magnesium/ounce as peanuts.

Supposedly healthy foods that should be avoided:

beetroot, radishes, turnip greens, lettuce, spinach (avoid eating leaves in general). Nitrite content isn't worth it given that you can eat much healthier vegetables like broccoli and asparagus.

skim or low fat milk. Skim milks often have oxidized cholesterol and nitrates as a result of the processing. Reduced fat milk is made by adding skim back to regular milk. Stick with full fat milk.

Get off your ass and experiment

2011-08-21T03:26:00.001-07:00

When researchers are trying to build a model of rat behavior they might observe rats in the wild, but this isn't all they do. The vast majority of research involves stimulating rats under controlled conditions. It would be highly inefficient to stand around watching rats in the wild and hoping a situation analogous to some test you're interested in will happen eventually. Similarly you aren't going to build a very accurate model of humans standing around watching them. Go provide some stimulus.

Rejection therapy

2011-08-07T21:11:00.000-07:00

I was unsatisfied with both the "official" deck of cards and ideas I found around the web so I created my own list. I will add to this if I can find any more.

* Ask a random person for their phone number without introducing yourself, explaining why, or anything.

* Ask people for money.

* Ask some store employee if it's alright for you to explore some employee-only area of the store, e.g. their back room, or behind a door marked "authorized personnel only".

* In general, go somewhere you're not supposed to be where someone is likely to discover you and kick you out.

* When you're leaving Point A for Point B, ask a stranger at Point A out of the blue if they'd like to travel to Point B with you.

*”Do you have a minute to talk about [insert issue]?" Save some time by inventing your own issue.

* Ask someone on the street if you can have your picture taken with them.

* Ask for hugs/neck massages.

* Come to some sort of event. Ask if you can give a quick presentation on something before the main event.

* Ask someone to tie your shoes.

* Ask to trade clothes.

* Ask people to give you a ride to wherever you’re going.

* Ask for a bite/sip of someones’ food/drink.

* Ask someone to sing or dance right there in the street with you.

* Try to buy people’s personal effects, i.e. watches, glasses, phone, for a dollar

*Try to sell your own personal effects.

* Ask someone to rate your theatrical death.

* Ask to cut in line (start at the back and see how far forward you can get!)

* Ask to have a staring contest or thumb wrestling match.

* Ask for a discount on a purchase, or a free sample.

* Ask where people are going, then ask if you can come.

*Ask if you can pick someone up (if they are smaller) or if they can pick you up (if they are bigger).

What do the causal nets we build actually look like?

2011-07-24T17:22:00.000-07:00

...

Pavlov-ing Yourself

2011-07-24T17:18:00.000-07:00

We do not have direct access to the part of our brain that rewards certain sensory inputs. However we can indirectly influence it because it is somewhat simple. For example, if we want to desire something that we currently don't (exercise) we can pair the sensory input of exercise with some other rewarding experience. Over time our brain will build up this correlation. We can pavlov dog ourselves.

Attempting to reason carefully about decision theory

2011-07-24T16:30:00.001-07:00

I have been failing to notice my confusion about several aspects of decision theory. I am going to attempt to rectify this.

I am something that can perceive sensory data.

I notice that various sensory experiences are highly correlated.

I construct a large causal network from these correlations. This is a model of the world.

I notice that I have certain types of sensory experience that I can cause directly.

I notice that my sensory inputs are correlated with my caused outputs.

I add myself to the world model as a causal node.

I desire some sorts of sensory data over others.

I look for the sensory data I desire in my world model and work backwards, creating a plausible causal chain from the sensory input I desire to my current sensory input.

This screens off large portions of the space of all possible actions I have available to me.

Distinctions between "myself" and "the world" are a convenience for keeping track of things I can cause directly and things I can not.

This at least seems how the part of our mind we have access to reasons, what about the part we don't have access to? If it works forwards instead of backwards then presumably it screens off the action space and prunes the decision tree based on past correlations.

Hitting wall, must find sledgehammer, will email some people.

Out of order computation of human brain states

2011-07-16T05:03:00.000-07:00

There is an algorithm that can compute the nth digit of pi without computing any other digit.

Granted the relationship that pi describes is very simple (kolmogorov complexity is low)

There seems no reason to assume that a human couldn't be computed out of order as per dust theory.

Low hanging fruit

2011-07-11T01:06:00.000-07:00

For most technically oriented people the utility gained from adding a marginal unit of technical expertise vs a marginal unit of social effectiveness is quite clear. My attempts to proselytize this point has been met alternately with applause lights or signalling displays (if I admit that's true I'm admitting I'm not a master of socializing! etc.).

I want to outline some low hanging fruit in this space.

Concept: Fear of Confrontation

Practice: Rejection Therapy, Toastmasters

Concept: Self Consciousness

Practice: Focusing on others rather than own internal state

Concept: Body language

Practice: Eye contact, Smiling, Touching

Concept: "Nerd syndrome" Correcting people, Being a know-it-all etc.

Practice: Reminding yourself that truth is relative to goals. Rather than critiquing other's methods, figure out their goals and mention effective ways of reaching those goals when appropriate using impersonal examples. People regard critiques as personal attacks unless you have some rapport with them.

Concept: Signalling in language

here I will paste in an earlier comment from Less Wrong:

Language is not about communication of abstract concepts, it's about communication of status.

An intelligent rationalist likes to have incorrect reasoning pointed out so they can correct it. A normal person perceives corrections as an assertion of higher status.

An intelligent rationalist enjoys discussing difficult subject mater that stretches the limit of their understanding. A normal person perceives such topics as an assertion of higher status.

An intelligent rationalist is interested in pragmatic solutions to problems. A normal person uses stances on known problems to signal their social affiliations.

An intelligent rationalist explicitly reasons about social norms and ignores them when advantageous. A normal person implicitly views such behavior as signaling group disloyalty.

An intelligent rationalist values intelligence terminally (okay this isn't strictly rational, but is a common pattern). A normal person values intelligence instrumentally.

I'm sure there are many more, and you could write pages about each one, but I think this covers some broad swaths.

Practice: Still thinking about this one. Becoming status conscious is not a simple thing for people who are unaware of it.

I want to come up with more.

Negative Income Tax

2011-01-16T03:04:00.001-08:00

Watching the excellent Free to Choose series on freetochoose.tv I was reminded of the excellent idea of the negative income tax. All in all this probably is the only way to get out from under the increasing financial burden of the welfare state. I was however struck by an apparent contradiction in that the negative income tax would set up a de facto minimum wage, which is something that proponents of the NIT are against (as indeed is every decent economist).

On further reflection I realized this could ultimately be a benefit. Let me explain.

Under the current regime households earning less than ~35k a year are being subsidized. Under a NIT the burden they place on people earning more than this (and thus paying into the welfare system) would be reduced. People earning less than whatever level is set up by the NIT and those near the margin might decide not to work and this is the primary critique of the idea. However, being freed from the burden of working menial jobs would allow many of these people to pursue the bettering of their own value in the workforce.

This would be an acceleration of a process that is happening already where the US is becoming a skilled economy and relatively unskilled jobs are leaving. The NIT provides a much gentler transition that is going to occur whether we prepare for it or not.

violence

2010-02-28T04:44:00.000-08:00

there is no natural reason embedded within the universe why violently coercive acts should be more expensive than voluntary ones. it is up to humans to design a system where there is a sharp increase in cost for using violent methods. natural rights libertarians often describe the problem as an ethical one and then simply neglect to even try to answer the engineering question.

Of ideologies and mating strategies

2009-07-12T00:03:00.000-07:00

Liberalism is the ideology of the alpha male. He supports sexual freedom for women because given a choice, women mate with him.

Conservatism is the ideology of the beta male. In a conservative society with strict monogamy the largest number of males are guaranteed at least one mate.

Libertarianism is the ideology of the omega male. Nerdy high IQ males with low mating opportunities resent a system that does not confer higher status for higher intelligence.

logical consistency, moral justification, and any other rationalization for ideology will never be able to compete with sex.

A comment worth saving

2009-06-27T00:39:00.000-07:00

I know this now, because in the last month or so, I’ve been struggling to identify my “top-level” master control circuits.

And you know what I found they were controlling for? Things like:

* Being “good”
* Doing the “right” thing
* “Fairness”

But don’t be fooled by how harmless or even “good” these phrases sound.

Because, when I broke them down to what subcontrollers they were actually driving, it turned out that “being good” meant “do things for others while ignoring your own needs and being resentful”!

“Fairness”, meanwhile, meant, “accumulate resentment and injustices in order to be able to justify being selfish later.”

And “doing the right thing” translated to, “don’t do anything unless you can come up with a logical justification for why it’s right, so you don’t get in trouble, and no-one can criticize you.”

Ouch!

Now, if you look at that list, nowhere on there is something like, “go after what I really want and make it happen”. Actually doing anything – in fact, even deciding to do anything! – was entirely conditional on being able to justify my decisions as “fair” or “right” or “good”, within some extremely twisted definitions of those words!
-PJ Eby

retreading

2009-06-26T06:11:00.001-07:00

ideology is a narrative that allows you to do what you wanted to do anyway and defend it as morally justified.

morals arise from competing preferences and the need for cooperation. morality means things that will benefit you that you are reasonably certain you can convince other people that it will benefit them as well.

ideology is adaptive. therefore modern ideologies should be viewed with particular suspicion since they are more likely to prioritize convincing the average person than about accurately modeling reality.

the egalitarian ideology has seized our schools and media institutions. this deprives other ideologies of an avenue towards large scale adoption.

ideology will tend to reinforce bias rather than compensate for it. but this is a tricky path to walk. as orwell notes, in order for the apparatus of society to keep functioning 2+2 has to equal 4. truth is a slippery slope.

Priorities

2009-06-15T04:10:00.001-07:00

Eliezer Yudkowsky is finally posting about something important over on Less Wrong: in-group out-group dynamics. Now I think that a lot of other areas of economics, sociology, cognitive psych etc are interesting. But if you want to talk about the things that have the largest impact on all these fields...it isn't esoteric thought experiments, it's group dynamics and status signaling. Everything else is practically superfluous. These two explanantions for behavior account for the vast majority of all human actions. Ever.

blog vacation

2009-05-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

back from my blog ennui. I've been reading Being and Time by Heidegger and about 1/3rd of the way through I've only gleaned one insight:
There are several different things that people mean when they say that they care about something. Confusion between the ways is one of the aspects of a failure to communicate between people of differing ideologies. This arises due to conflicting preferences. Cooperation is a spectrum. It runs from sharing one goal to sharing all goals.

Statistical Correlations

2009-02-18T11:29:00.000-08:00

watch this asshole cavort for 20 minutes if you can stomach it.
Dan Gilbert on Happiness

so your results are reproducible. the self-reported happiness of a bunch of morons does not concern me. Much of humanity shares similar biases (such as justifying a choice by ranking the choice we didn't make lower than we otherwise would if we had no investment in the choice as in the video)

This does NOT justify you dictating what will make me happy. I am not the average person.
The problem with happiness research is socialists will grab onto it as justification for central planning. "You don't really know what makes you happy, these decisions are best left to experts".

FUCK THAT SHIT

Welfare as a Return to Elitism

2009-02-06T09:42:00.000-08:00

Elitists don't like the free market. In the words of Professor Ebeling:

The privileged classes of pre-capitalist society hated the market. The individual was freed from subservience and obedience to the nobility, the aristocracy, and the landed interests. And for these privileged groups, the market meant loss of cheap labor, the disappearance of "proper respect" from their inferiors, and the economic uncertainty of changing market-generated circumstances.

In a welfare economy the noble has simply been replaced with the legislator and the regulator. This is not a hereditary nobility in the strict sense but it does tend towards one. Who achieves the highest positions within the civil service and elected legislature? The people who went to the most progressive, most prestigious institutes of higher learning (who just happen to receive huge grants and tax exemptions from the government). If your parents went to an ivy league school you are more likely to go to one. The legislator and the regulator hate nothing more than things that fall entirely outside their scope. Better to bring as much as possible into the fold...you know...just to make sure everything is on the up and up. Areas of life formerly left to the private citizen are now subject to the examination, and approval process of a government employee. The economy now tends towards pleasing the regulator moreso than serving the market. See the FDA for the most egregious example.

Factual vs Value Statements

2009-02-05T14:48:00.000-08:00

One of the main things that prevents reasonable discussion in my experience is the conflating of the truth with human value systems.
There are several permutations of this:

1. You falsify a supposedly factual statement that someone used to justify their values. The person thinks that your main motivation is in destroying their value system and that the facts are only tangential.

2. You disagree with someones value statement. They assume that you must disagree with the supposedly factual underpinning of said belief. (this ignores differing axioms leading to different interpretations of the same data)

3. You make a factual statement about something and a person thinks that you are making a value statement (i.e. it is true so it must be good).

4. You make a value statement and a person thinks you must be drawing on the same factual justifications that they would in your shoes. (once again disregarding differing axiomatic values).

Social/Political groups tend to coalesce as groups of people who happen to have the same axiomatic beliefs. It is very difficult to change a person's axiomatic beliefs. When two people with the same axiomatic beliefs disagree one of them has generally made a logic error or simply hasn't been exposed to some piece of data.
When two people of differing axiomatic beliefs disagree they can both be arguing from the same set of data and not making any logical errors and still disagree.

And yes, this is a sort of restatement of the "is-ought" problem in that the relationship between factual and value statements is exceedingly tenuous.

Nerd Heaven

2009-02-04T13:55:00.000-08:00

A lot of people refer to the Technological Singularity as the Rapture of the Nerds. This is apt. The motivation for believing in the singularity is much the same as that which powers supernatural belief: despair at the trends of the current world. I want to talk about a related possibility. Nerd Heaven. One of the assumptions about the singularity is that lifespans will be dramatically increased, if involuntary death is not done away with altogether. But what about people who didn't make it to the singularity? Do people of truly unlimited means have a moral responsibility to them?
Given unlimited energy and knowledge of physics a kind of pseudo time-travel is simple: Take a snapshot of the current universe and simply run every interaction of matter backwards. Using this method we could easily "go back" to a time before the singularity and save people from death by scanning their brain's quantum state right before they die.
Of course this brings up a sticky problem. If we're running a 1:1 simulation of the universe are we actually saving anyone or are we actually doubling the amount of pain experienced on our particular timeline?

The 4 scarcities

2008-12-28T10:43:00.000-08:00

Time
Labor
Raw Materials
Ingenuity

to deny scarcity is to live in a fantasy world. ideologies that deny one of these scarcities come up with horribly flawed solutions to social problems.

Latency

2008-12-28T03:14:00.000-08:00

humans naturally have a high time-preference (known as hyperbolic discounting) due to our adaptation to an environment with an extremely uncertain future (leopards in the trees!). The economic systems that will be most successful for humans are successful mostly because they are the systems that naturally offset this by incentivizing a low time-preference. this long term planning naturally leads to more efficient allocation of resources, since we live in a much less risky environment now (life expectancy 75 years).

If true, other efficient social systems should follow this exact pattern. Compensating for our cognitive bias and thus allowing people to function more rationally without requiring any deep thought or consideration by the participants.

Does this nessecitate central planning?

Techno Hedonism

2008-12-24T13:29:00.000-08:00

Replicators and holodecks will not be the end of humanity. Nor will wireheading. Rather, these phenomena will simply weed out those who are prone to opting out of reality. The people left will be luddites, stoics, or various others not given over to hednoistic tendencies. What sort of society will these people create? Well, who cares? We'll all be either wireheading or living in an interconnected series of holodecks engaging in limitless permutations of fun. Right? Well unless we all leave the solar system at relativistic speeds such that catching us is not feasible, we have to worry about these jerks shutting down our fun. Why would they bother? Who knows what crazy ideology they'll come up with in the absence of rational people. It seems quite probable that at some point they'll become jealous of all the fun we're having and yet refuse to engage in it themselves and subsequently decide to deprive us. I believe this is known as the "If i can't have it no one can" principle. (okay I don't know the actual cognitive bias).

Killing the party poopers off might be safer than keeping them on reservations.

Of course this discounts the notion of rebellion from the inside. But can people raised in a society with a homogeneous viewpoint on some subject ever spontaneously decide that that viewpoint is wrong? I'm unaware of any examples of this.

Knowing what you want is the first step

2008-12-16T12:16:00.000-08:00

"If you do investigate what you would wish from a genie, isn't it possible that one of your wishes might be easy enough for you to grant without the genie? You do say you haven't thought about the question yet, so you really have no way of knowing whether your wishes would actually be that difficult to grant.

Questions like "what do I want out of life?" or "what do I want the universe to look like?" are super important questions to ask, regardless of whether you have a magic genie. I personally have had the unfortunate experience of answering some parts of those question wrong and then using those wrong answers to run my life for a while. All I have to say on the matter is that that situation is definitely worth avoiding. I still don't expect my present set of answers to be right. I think they're marginally more right than they were three years ago.

You don't have a genie, but you do have a human brain, which is a rather powerful optimization process and despite not being a genie it is still very capable of shooting its owner in the foot. You should check what you think you want in the limiting case of absolute power, because if that's not what you want, then you got it wrong. If you think the meaning of life is to move westward, but then you think about the actual lay of the land hundreds of miles west of where you are and then discover you wouldn't like that, then it's worth trying to more carefully formulate why it was you wanted to go west in the first place, and once you know the reason, maybe going north is even better. If you don't want to waste time moving in the wrong direction then it's important to know what you want as clearly as possible."

-Marcello from a cooment on Overcoming Bias

Fractional Reseve Banking

2008-12-11T14:27:00.001-08:00

Here is the rationale behind FRB. Even if the bank doesn't keep all its deposits on hand it can still be solvent by virtue of the fact that the net worth of all its loans and investments is greater than net deposits. If the bank starts to lose money it can easily sell off some loans and investments at a discount, tighten its belt, and continue operating. Right?
This actually works fine if this is the only bank doing FRB and other banks are 100% reserve. A problem arises when all banks are FRB and financially tied together as closely as the credit default swap market made them. The problem is that in aggregate the banks constituted a large proportion of all the loans on the market. When an economic downturn brought all the banks closer to insolvency they all tried to sell off some loans to regain their balance at the same time. You can imagine what this does to the demand curve for long term loans. The market went into free fall. This exacerbated the original problem, and now you have all the banks going insolvent at the same time.

If your economic system relies on the theoretical price of something in the future it is vulnerable to fluctuation. How can people predict the price of things in the future? You can't. Not with anything approaching certainty. This is the exact reason that the FDIC was created. But the FDIC is essentially just a way of scaling up the problem.

the reason FRB is fundamentally fraudulent is that it treats a liability (demand deposits) as an asset to back loans.

Reductionism

2008-12-09T15:34:00.001-08:00

reality "calculates" everything at one level, the fundamental level. when we impose higher layers of organization on reality that is a computational convenience, not a fact about reality. we don't calculate the aerodynamics of an airplane at the quark level, but this does not mean that reality does not.
emergence is a magic box that people use because errors are introduced when we sample reality at low resolution (airplane scale) instead of the fundamental level.

Why is the free-market more efficient than government?

2008-12-09T04:41:00.000-08:00

Economic actions that lack coercion generally involve a pareto improvement. For the individual, this is the only motivation. Government intervention is justified as being pareto improvements that people might not have made on their own. But when the government intervenes it has necessarily done away with all possible pareto improvements that individuals might have made in that sector. Now it might be the case that the chosen improvement actually was optimal, but it is unlikely. Why? The most pareto improvements result when actors are given the maximum number of choices of combinations. This is highest for individuals because making these improvements is all they care about. Less combinations are available to the government because government has rules, regulations and administrative bloat that prevent it from considering certain combinations. Large organizations have their own biases.

The question now becomes: are the biases of individuals bad enough to justify the limiting effects of government intervention?
The answer is of course not. The biases of the individual have very little capacity to harm the market overall. The biases of the government on the other hand can wreak large scale havok. The cases in which the biases of the individual have the potential to do actual harm are extremely limited, giving us little historical data to go with. The disasters of government intervention on the other hand are well documented.

Tocqueville on Democratic Despotism

2008-12-09T04:26:00.000-08:00

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.

...

It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/DETOC/ch4_06.htm

Ideological adaptations

2008-12-09T03:55:00.001-08:00

One of the most important adaptations that ideologies have to undergo is to shed the ability to be falsified by data. The one consistent feature of successful ideologies is that they start with a priori axioms and logically extrapolate from it. Of course any person that does not agree with the axiom will call the entire ideology a house of cards.
The easiest way to achieve this is to adopt a system that does not allow you to make any concrete predictions. If you only make vague predictions you always have an answer for pragmatic critics of your ideology: the predictions haven't come true yet, but they will eventually. Ends justify the means.

It thus seems to me that the most useful ideology would be one that ignored ends and whose means involved a high standard of living for all involved. It may very well be that if humanity pursued this it would lead to extinction, or some other negative outcome such as everyone becoming wireheads. It still seems superior to the alternatives. Do we expand at the cost of the vast majority of humanity living miserable lives?

Making the collectivst case

2008-12-09T03:27:00.000-08:00

Since I almost never see collectivists make a good case for themselves I have to make their case for them:

Firstly, if you assume that humans should be left to decide for themselves what will make them most happy libertarianism is the inevitable result. Collectivists point to research that shows that people are generally quite poor at predicting what will actually make them happy. This is the ultimate justification for central planning. Central planners can correlate statistics and determine what actually makes people happy, then work to maximize this. Individuals are too biased, too stupid, and too lazy to work through the data and apply it to themselves. Therefore the net happiness of mankind will increase if it is left in the hands of those who dedicate themselves to its study. A good example of this is a recent "happiness study" that concluded that income past a certain amount didn't result in any increase in happiness. Of course this was immediately latched onto. If you buy the collectivist argument, this justifies taxation on any amount over this monetary threshold.

Secondly, central planning removes the problem of prisoner's dilemmas from the market-place. The idea here is that there are some limited cases where competing actors will provide a worse outcome for all parties by competing. This is used as justification for areas where the government interferes in commerce such as banking.

Thirdly, central planning can alleviate situations in which economic latency is considered unacceptable. In the free-market it can take time before a satisfactory equilibrium is reached when there is economic instability. For example, in the course of competition a large hospital might go out of business, even though the smaller competing hospital isn;t large enough to handle all patients yet. This justifies the government regulating industries in which any interruption in service is considered unacceptable.

These are the most cogent cases for government intervention. Can you spot the problems?

A Parable of Economy part 1

2008-12-06T20:28:00.000-08:00

In pre-agricultural times the burdens of survival were equally dispersed among the tribe. Everyone did what they could. Those that couldn't or wouldn't were thrown out. There was no division of labor.

But then the agricultural revolution came along. Suddenly small groups are producing much much more. More than they need even. There is now enough of a surplus for banditry and war. So producers produce and trade with their neighbors, occasionally bandits attack and kill people. But then some smart bandit leader named Bob gets an idea. He goes to his friend, the bandit Steve.
"What if instead of killing off the farmers when we take their stuff, we let them live?"
"Why the hell would we do that? I love killing" says Steve.
"They'll probably produce more food and we can come back next season to take it again." says Bob. Steve agrees but when they go to do this the first time they hit a hitch. The farmer starved to death. Bob thinks about it a little more and decides that they have to leave the farmer enough to survive on. He has a hard time convincing the other bandits of this but eventually wins out. Instead of leaving, he bandits start patrolling their usual raiding grounds, keeping other bandits away and letting the farmers do their farming. Every once in a while they come through and take everything the farmers don't need to survive. Eventually, the bandits move in and just send out a guy to collect their taxes. They guard their borders carefully, every farm raided is less tax revenue. Feudalism is born. This is the first division of labor.

The bandits provide defense, the farmers provide things the bandits need. Life is much easier for the bandits, they can settle down and lead stable lives, interspersed with conquering more producers. Life is also much easier for the producers, they no longer have to worry about constant attack. This idea spreads and as the more successful bandit/producer groups grow there arises a need for administration. A smart farmer named Bob notices this and goes to the bandit leader some slob named Steve (who killed the original Bob).
"Let me organize the farmers" says Bob
"Buh?" says Steve
"We could produce more food if each farm focused exclusively on one type of crop. I have come up with a plan to allocate which crops to grow in what percentage for our needs"
Steve doesn't really understand this, but it sounds good. He puts Bob (and a few assistants) in charge of organizing the farmers. These administrators now deal with the farming problems and report back to the bandit leaders. This is the second division of labor.

Towns coalesce at what were once just bandit headquarters as administration centers for swathes of productive land. These places also become meeting centers for producers to come trade whatever small things of value they can make that aren't taxed away by the bandits. At some point food production passes a critical value. The increased supply of food has lowered demand, and equilibrium has been reached. A smart guy named Bob notices that a lot of people seem to want certain things, like plows and Ox harnesses. People always seem willing to trade a lot of food for them. He goes to his farmhand Steve.
"Pack up, we're leaving" says Bob
"Why would we do that?" asks Steve
"Everyone wants plows and Ox Harnesses right?" says Bob
"I guess so" says Steve
"We'll move into town and just make plows and ox harnesses" says Bob
"How will we eat? how will we pay the bandits?!" yells an alarmed Steve
"We'll trade our stuff to the farmers for food" says Bob
So he moves near the town and starts spending all his time making these. Other people notice and do the same, making things that people will trade their excess food for. This is the third division of labor.

This new class of people are able to devote a lot of time to coming up with new things people might want. Some invent things that further boost food production, freeing up even more time and labor for other things. Some of the things invented are in such high demand that lots of people devote themselves to making them. A shirtmaker named Bob notices this. Bob goes to his friend, also a shirtmaker, named Steve who is doing poorly because few people bought shirts from him last season.
Bob tells Steve
"Come make shirts for me. I'll pay you a set amount for each shirt you make. It will be lower than what you would have made selling the shirt yourself."
"Why the hell would I do that?" says Steve
"Because you don't have to worry about any of the problems of actually selling the shirts. All you have to do is make shirts and you're guaranteed to get paid for it."
Now Steve considers this. Bob is offering to assume all the risk of running a business in exchange for a percentage of Steve's productive value. Steve agrees. Freed from dealing with the minutia of selling his shirts to the public, Steve's productivity increases. He's now producing many more shirts. This increase in productivity allows Bob to sell his shirts for a slightly lower price than the going rate at market. Sales increase and Bob is able to hire another shirtmaker, then another. At some point Bob is able to quit making shirts himself. The shirt business is doing so well that Bob is able to live entirely off of the percentage he takes from his employees. He now devotes himself entirely to improving the business. This is the fourth division of labor.

Without cooperation, none of the divisions of labor are possible. People who criticize free-markets for focusing on competition at the expense of cooperation are neglecting the fact that all economic activity is an act of cooperation. Without cooperation we'd still be living in huts getting raided by bandits.

Is Oliver Twist a Rational Actor?

2008-12-05T13:59:00.000-08:00

A contentious point among libertarian models is how to deal with children. Some say children are parental property until they emancipate themselves, some say that they have inalienable rights at the point of conception. Most lie somewhere in between these two extremes.
I think that a functional view of this problem has to take into account when a child actually becomes capable of rational thought. Telling the truth to a person who is incapable of reflection (metacognition) can be detrimental to their decision making process. This is because the metacognition ability is required before one can become aware of cognitive bias on a personal level. Without any knowledge of cognitive bias an individual will pursue a "rationality" that leads to horribly inefficient strategies for decision making.
The best source I found on this is Jean Piaget's The Construction of Reality in the Child.
The important bits for our purposes:

The formal operational period is the fourth and final of the periods of cognitive development in Piaget's theory. This stage, which follows the Concrete Operational stage, commences at around 12 years of age (puberty) and continues into adulthood. It is characterized by acquisition of the ability to think abstractly, reason logically and draw conclusions from the information available. During this stage the young adult is able to understand such things as love, "shades of gray", logical proofs, and values.

Now this would imply that it is around age 11 and after that the child gains the faculty to be self-critical. After this point I think some case could be made for self-determination.

Apparently Piaget's theory doesn't take environmental factors into account and so another theory arose to supplement this, detailed in a book published in 1979. This seems to work off Piaget as a foundation adding that environmental factors can greatly accelerate or retard the process. This makes the task of assigning a child self-determination very tricky. Perhaps some sort of standardized test that tests for full sentience. But I doubt parents want to see their kids taking the tests researchers give chimpanzees.

Macroeconomics: The Emperor is Naked

2008-12-03T23:57:00.000-08:00

This post over on winterspeak is one of the best short pieces on the failure of Keynes I've ever seen.

My take:
Keynes got so ingrained in every facet of economics that everyone forgot it was Keynesian economics and just started calling it economics.

On a lighter note, here's the best thing on the internet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRVi0paZlfI

A Parable of Violence part 1

2008-12-03T03:52:00.000-08:00

Throughout human history, groups of people have forced other groups to do their bidding for material benefit. This seems rational enough. If you can give your own group a better standard of living by enslaving or exterminating another group, and you are actually capable of doing it, why not? But as social groupings have become larger, violence has similarly scaled. As nation-states grew more powerful, larger armies were able to be raised, and ever advancing technology was able to give humans unparalleled killing force. Of course, this was all "external" violence. This was groups competing for resources. Within each group, individuals seek to minimize conflict so as to make the group more effective against other groups. A group with minimal internal violence is far more efficient than one riddled with strife.

We all want less internal violence to the extent that it doesn't interfere with other social variables. The whole point of society rather than Somalia is that we trade some of our freedom of determination for some much needed safety (It is worth noting that safety means comfort. Off-loading the costs of defense frees up wealth to spend on more goods and services, and without the fear that the increase in material wealth will make you a bigger target). We don't want to spend out lives sleeping with one eye open and a revolver clenched in our hands. So we delegate the onus of legitimate violence on some sub-set of the group, who are then de facto the government. The expectation is that this sub-group will then act to minimize non-legitimate violence.

Now we immediately face the problem that actions taken to minimize violence do in fact affect other variables in society. Every action by the government must necessarily deprive some self-determination from the rest of the group. Therefore we will arrive at situations where an individual is deprived of something that they desire. Confronting his options with how to achieve that desire the individual will consider violence. We arrive at the prime benefit of a legitimate force monopoly. Before, if an individual desired to use force to obtain a desire, he only had to reckon with those whom controlled the desire. Now, he must reckon with the entire government. If he wants something from his neighbor he will have to get it through violence concealed from the government, trickery, or mutual consent.

Why would the individual agree to live in this society in which he is expected only to gain through mutual consent (and legitimized trickery in some societies)? Presumably because he has enough of his own wealth that others would attack him, and he doesn't really want to worry about defending his life and his goods 24/7. This wealth need not be material. Outside the city walls even the poor are captured by slavers and put to work for the material wealth of others.

As mentioned before, one of the ways this individual can fulfill his desires is through violence concealed from the government. If the individual can get away with this he has a huge advantage. He gets all the benefits of society and pays none of the costs. So how do we organize the government to minimize the incentive towards this?

Note: this post deals with a society in which all members have similar legal status and protection under the law. Legal "class" based societies have serious complications that I don't want to get into right now.

A Comment Worth Saving II

2008-11-30T20:34:00.000-08:00

"Progressivism requires the government to be responsible for Gramma and the 'tard cousin, thereby relieving the progressive believer from all responsibility. Progressivism is abortion writ large (howdy, Eugenics!).

What progressives don't see, however, is that the government can't ever be responsible (certainly not morally -- especially for the reasons MM lays out) except through control.

They don't understand this because they don't understand that responsibility is control."

-G.M. Palmer from a thread on Unqualified Reservations

Humanity Isn't Going to Save Itself

2008-11-28T19:09:00.001-08:00

I feel that this statement I made in a previous post needs a little justification. When advocates of collectivism want something done, they go crying to the government in the form of lobbying, and social pressure. The government is generally only too happy to oblige them because the things the collectivists clamor for always involve the government being given more power. Who do the libertarians/anarchists/randians and other free-market advocates have to go crying to? Political libertarian institutions are a joke. The last Libertarian presidential candidate voted for the Patriot Act. The conservative party has some vague libertarian streak left over from the previous century, but that is always steam rolled in favor of OMG THE GAYS ARE ATTACKING rhetoric. The entire idea of the libertarians infiltrating the collectivist stronghold of democracy is laughable. And even if the succeeded then what? As mentioned before, even if Ron Paul had been elected dictator for life, libertarian policies would only last as long as he was alive, and then begin their slow march left again. You can't get non-collectivist government out of a democracy.

Collectivists will win by virtue of the fact that collectivism is expansionist while libertarianism is not. Even if you have a libertarian stronghold, if it does not expand, it will eventually be swallowed by those that do.

From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

2008-11-25T14:29:00.001-08:00

Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not insure “good” government; it simply insures that it will work. But such governments are rare--most people want to run things but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the “backseat-driver syndrome.”

there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants “just a few minutes of your time, please--this won’t take long.” Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time--and squawk for more! So learn to say No--and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you. (This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don’t do it because it is “expected” of you.)

-Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein

Morality Selection

2008-11-19T20:44:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't figured me out by now, I'm a Social Darwinist. Or to be more accurate a Social Lamarckianist*. But whereas the founders of the idea thought that this was a good thing, I obviously do not. Just because I believe something to be true does not mean I believe it to be good.

Now obviously we can never have empirical evidence for theories that deal with society because we can have no control groups. All socio-economic theories rely on abduction. To believe that deductive reasoning can be scaled up from individual actions ignores emergent phenomena. After all, interaction between two optimizing agents can be complex in itself. But it does seem that there is some manner of social selection going on in the marketplace of ideas.

If true humanity has a huge problem on its hands. Collectivism and its various flavors do not create a hospitable environment for human life. Left to itself, government will optimize for aggressive resource plundering by any means necessary. It will take a conscious effort to optimize government for other priorities (chiefly low violence and high personal freedom). But it is obvious that humanity isn't going to do this on its own. So what we now have is a race against time.

In order for a society to advance the sciences it requires a surplus of resources to be devoted to them. The only way for that surplus to exist is if the people of that society are collectively productive enough to supply for their basic needs. In the US we had a system of politics that allowed the ultra-productive free reign until around 1933. Then the welfare state kicked into full gear. Why hasn't america crashed and burned yet? Well, largely because WW2 came along and destroyed every other industrialized nation. By the time other nations were able to rebuild they were infected with the welfare virus as well and thus were not able to catch up. With our vaunted modern morality, the productive are held hostage by the unproductive. The productive are simultaneously leeched off of and vilified (in order to justify the leeching). If this continues we can expect to see the entrepreneurial spirit leave our nation and head for a more hospitable environment.

The only problem is that we're running out of hospitable environments. As the numbers of the unproductive increase the amount of wealth needed to sustain them will increase. Eventually there will not be enough wealth left for re-investment in the sciences and every productive person on earth will be bent to the task of simply allowing more humans to exist without dying. Whatever technological innovations result, it can not go on forever. Eventually a wall will be hit and we'll have a massive die-back. This story may already be happening, the only reason that we have 6+ billion people alive today is the invention of an easy way to synthesize nitrogen for fertilizer.

So what could possibly change this story? Well, we could figure out a way of providing the unproductive with a high standard of living without using up important resources. But the research needed to make something of the sort feasible will have to come before we reach a critical point in resource use. In essence, we need a way of turning a renewable form of energy directly into food and entertainment. And we need to do this before the hungry mouths of the world eat up all surpluses needed for scientific pursuits.

*Lamarckianism includes selection of traits that an individual acquires during its life, not just genetic traits. Obviously in social selection ideas change over time without there being discrete "generations" as there are in biological evolution. Also of note is the fact that sexual selection plays a large part in social selection since status is directly tied to mating opportunities: Generally the only male environmentalists are the ones who want to sleep with the female environmentalists, males don't care about the environment as much as females do because males are not as concerned with offspring.

Money is a Dynamic Medium of Exchange

2008-11-18T17:31:00.000-08:00

From a conversation today I realized that a large part of people's failure to understand economic principles is from a basic misconception about money. Many people seem to think that money is some sort of static constant. I suppose it is not very comforting to realize that economic activity can change the very metric that you measure economic activity by.
This realization alone should turn any socialist away from their pyramid schemes, as they realize that giving stipends to the unsuccessful just raises the prices on all the products that those people buy.

4 Possibilites for Ultimate Responsibility

2008-11-18T12:33:00.000-08:00

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Humans seem uncomfortable with there being no higher authority. To wit they tend to invent authorities that
A: Don't constrict their choices in the present
B: Lend legitimacy to their actions

The 4 I have identified so far are:
1. Responsibility to the future (think of the children)
2. Responsibility to the past (tradition)
3. Responsibility to God (set of arbitrary rules)
4. Responsibility to the Self (internal consistency)

Now the last one is obviously the most desirable but people will choose whichever one allows them to add a veneer of legitimacy to whatever they wanted to do anyway. There is responsibility to the State (or similar higher organizations of human beings), but these organizations ultimately rely on one of the other 4 responsibilities to lend them legitimacy.

Unfortunately most people are not satisfied with number 4. They want to feel that they are a part of some organization that is large enough to provide them safety. This gives them peace of mind. People will go to great lengths to artificially manufacture some nebulous group of power whom they can point to as being responsible for goods or ills in their lives. This is most obvious in religion, but conspiracy theories are motivated by the same desire. Even if you believe that some nebulous secret society is manipulating the world for their own nefarious ends, this is still more comforting than the alternative, that there is nothing else. The idea of ultimately being only responsible to yourself is an idea that is frightening when the full implications are considered. This is probably why Nietzsche was considered by some a nihilist even though he preached a philosophy of self-realization.

A Comment Worth Saving

2008-11-11T17:04:00.000-08:00

"The government could redistribute income, but it can't redistribute culture. Unless we resort to monstrous social engineering schemes like allocating children to homes by lottery istead of by birth, we are not going to eliminate the inequality caused by home culture. And we haven't begun to talk about the inequalities caused by genetics.

But working on a solution to inequality is focusing on the wrong problem. It is a symptom of zero-sum thinking that doesn't reflect the issues of the real world. The real problem is how to improve the educational opportunity for each person, not equalize opportunities between people. After all, you can equalize the education everyone receives by banning education."

-Prrometheus, from a comment on Hacker News

Douglas Adams on the anthropogenic god

2008-11-09T20:04:00.000-08:00

Where does the idea of God come from? Well, I think we have a very skewed point of view on an awful lot of things, but let’s try and see where our point of view comes from. Imagine early man. Early man is, like everything else, an evolved creature and he finds himself in a world that he’s begun to take a little charge of; he’s begun to be a tool-maker, a changer of his environment with the tools that he’s made and he makes tools, when he does, in order to make changes in his environment. To give an example of the way man operates compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage or whatever and finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we’ll come and we’ll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who’s a tool maker, doesn’t have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert—he even manages to live in New York for heaven’s sake—and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn’t have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says “I’ll have it off him”. Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better. Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day’s tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in—mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can’t get you; in front of him there’s the forest—it’s got nuts and berries and delicious food; there's a stream going by, which is full of water—water’s delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here’s cousin Ug and he’s caught a mammoth—mammoth’s are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it’s fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, ‘well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in’ and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says ‘So who made this then?’ Who made this? — you can see why it’s a treacherous question. Early man thinks, ‘Well, because there’s only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he’s probably male’. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , ‘If he made it, what did he make it for?’ Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, ‘This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely’ and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

-Douglas Adams giving a speech at Cambridge in 1998

With apologies to Moldbug

2008-11-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

My personal beliefs are most closely congruent with minarchists/libertarians, though I think they are loony in a few important ways.

first is the fact that their ideological origins lie with the founding fathers of america. a bunch of criminals who were good at inciting violence against the british because of their personal debts to the bank of england. (see Ideological Origins of the American Revolution).

second is that libertarianism is usually defined as an ethos. That is, a fundamentally ethical ideology that deserves attention for being right/correct. This is not how the real world works. In the real world ideologies are not successful because they imbue their followers with a more correct picture of reality. Rather, the most successful ideologies are the ones best at convincing their followers to expand aggressively. So unlike libertarians, I think the problem of bad government is an engineering one rather than a moral one. Can we make a benevolent government in the competitive environment of resource grabbers?

Third is Libertarianism relies on the idea of limited government which is a laughable concept. By what force is the government limited? If it is by an external force then the government is not sovereign and we're back to square one. If the government is internally limited, well it can abandon those limits any time it wants to. The latest idea humanity seems to have come up with is the "sacred document" trick. But this has shown to be of limited utility since ways are eventually found to engineer around the wording.

If we are to engineer good government it is obvious that libertarianism is not the way to do it. Libertarianism had its chance (1786-1861) and failed.

People like Ron Paul are a good example of why libertarians don't win. While I agreed with almost everything Ron Paul said, he had no chance of accomplishing anything even if he was elected and given almost unlimited power. why? what Ron Paul wanted was basically a reset. Taking policies back to a time before Woodrow Wilson implemented the Fed and interventionist policies. But what reason is there to believe that things would be any different this time around? In another 80 years (probably a lot less the second time around) we would find ourselves in a similar situation as today.

Reform is not the answer because the democratic process naturally leads us farther left.

Another way of thinking about the political spectrum

2008-11-08T21:40:00.001-08:00

A good demonstration of the impracticality of the extreme ends of the political spectrum is the natural result of each.
Too far right and the individual is allowed too much leeway in improving his situation at the expense of the group. This could be through direct oppression or merely through the ignoring of externalities of his economic activity.
Too far to the left and the mob is allowed too much leeway in fettering dissent. Down this road lies the stagnation of science as objective truth is discarded in favor of social constructivism.

In both cases we must wonder at the role of government as peace keeper. At the far left the use of force by the government is always in line with the will of majority. At the far right the use of force by the government is always in line with protecting private property rights.

I think the far right is easier to fix than the far left. In the case of the far right we forbid the use of force or coercion in economic activity and outlaw monopolies on resources. In the case of the far left we have no solid foundation upon which to build fixes. Even if we choose the classic axiom "the greatest good for the greatest number" as a guiding principle. Someone will have to decide what is the greatest good for the greatest number. If we assign that responsibility to the will of the majority we're back to square one. Either we have an endless feedback loop, or the masses actually approach solutions to problems empirically. In the case of the former we have chaos, in the case of the latter we have the eventual abandonment of social constructivism as objective truth reasserts itself.

The Ethics of Redistribution cliff notes

2008-11-08T21:35:00.000-08:00

redistribution is not about the transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor ( a fundamentally impossible action anyway*) rather it is a redistribution of power from the individual to the state. The state decides what is socially desirable with state funding. The state raises our children with institutions that rest upon taxation. The state removes the incentive towards personal responsibility with safety nets.
This is a feedback loop. As the state grows stronger and the individual grows weaker, he voluntarily exchanges more and more of his freedom of determination in exchange for greater safety. This relies upon a well documented cognitive bias whereby in times of trouble the individual is far more likely to surrender himself to the decisions of the group. The state will always artificially generate times of trouble to achieve this. And not always intentionally. There is no need for improbable conspiracy theories. The statist is doing what he feels is his duty, protecting the people. If he has to lie a little to protect people better, he will.

there's also the issue that people think that corporations and the wealthy have far more money than they actually have. There is no nebulous class of ultra wealthy people and corporations out there. the S&P 500 and the heads thereof constitute the majority of this wealth. Start taxing them heavily, even to 100% past some threshold and you'll find you still don't have enough money for the socialist utopia you dream of. Not nearly enough. Meanwhile huge numbers of people employed by these corporations start losing their jobs.

*you can give money away but you can not give value away. perhaps in small amounts, but not on the scale that is demanded by socialist pyramid schemes. the money that corporations and the wealthy have is just a token of the value that they represent to others in providing goods and services. If you take that money and give it to the poor all that happens is that prices rise because now consumers have more money to spend. the mistake is to believe that price has something to do with the cost of production, and that giving everyone money will simply improve standard of living for all. Price is always set by supply and demand.

Democracy

2008-11-04T02:14:00.000-08:00

The ultimate idea behind democracy is that it results in good government. Or at least that it manufactures the best government that we can manage. But the incentive structure of democracy supports no such thing. You can't incentivize bad government and then expect good government to pop out. Garbage in garbage out.
The incentive structure of democracy is for the elected official to manufacture voter approval by whatever means necessary. The theory goes that an informed populace will sniff out bad officials and give them the boot. In reality what has happened is that a system of natural selection has taken over. The politicians good at convincing the public of their good intentions have been shown to be more fit than those that have genuine good intentions. Each successive generation inherits the successful strategies of the past. New permutations are tried, those that don't work don't get elected again.
Generations (terms of office) pass, and the officials get better and better at saying one thing and doing the other. Democracy is not a self-correcting system. It will get worse without intervention, not better.

Natural selection is nasty

2008-10-18T23:56:00.001-07:00

I often run into people who think natural is better. I can see the appeal. It is a common theme in dramatic works for humans to "overstep their boundaries" and fall flat on their face because they deviated from some ideal of a natural order. But we are all bound by the natural laws of the universe. Either everything is natural or nothing is. Claiming that one thing is natural while the other artificial is just another way of expressing preference.

Particularly curious are the people who would side with natural selection. As if natural selection has more noble motives than humans. Of course this is a fundamental mistake. Natural selection does not have motives. Natural selection favors motives. Specifically the motive of maximal expansion. To think that this motive is for some mystic reason better than others is ludicrous. Natural selection favors expansion at the expense of every other motive in existence. If wiping out billions of sentient life forms in an agonizing way is the best way for some other life from to expand, there is selection pressure to do it. And not on equal terms either. If another species can gain a 1% advantage by completely obliterating an entire other species, there is selection pressure to do it. It is impossible to make the claim that it would be noble for the human race to die in agony so that some alien might have a slightly better chance of getting laid on that particular solar cycle. But there is selection pressure for it.

We should be consciously fighting natural selection when we identify it. Yet because it has shaped the very mental processes of our species, we seem largely blind to it. Psychopaths become leaders. Whole populations are slaughtered. Not because the government of the conquering country is better, or more true. But because it is better at expanding than its neighbors. And of course this is a feedback loop. Other countries are forced to adopt the best strategies for expansion or be obliterated, there is no middle ground. So no, things like communism and libertarianism can not work. Nor can any ideology that has merely human motivations. It is only the ideology that best convinces its people to expand, at any cost, that win out in the end.

Optimizing PeRT

2008-09-30T19:55:00.001-07:00

As mentioned in a previous post, our best course of action is to maximize the amount of capital we accumulate for a given amount of work in order to increase our ability to be free from the whims of others.
How do we go about doing this?
I find that an easy way to think about it is the classic formula of compound interest A=Pe^rt
This formula gives you the amount you will have accumulated with P principle invested at R rate for T time. base e is for continuously compounding interest.
Optimizing our own capital intake is not a simple matter of getting the best job. Lots of investment bankers are barely breaking even with their luxurious lifestyles. So lets break this down.

We want A to be as high as possible. We want to accumulate enough to be able to retire comfortably and early if possible. To do this we don't just maximize one part of the interest equation, we maximize every part.

P, the principle represents you and your earning ability. Optimizing this falls into two categories, one low risk with okay returns, the other higher risk with potentially much higher returns. The low risk option is to get a job with a decent salary and save as much money as possible. This is quite popular and it is possible though unlikely for you to get quite wealthy if you climb the corporate ladder far enough. The second riskier option is to start your own business. This is the route the vast majority of first generation rich in america have taken. riskier? sure, but you can try as many times as you like and you only need one home run. This maximizes the amount of capital we initially have to work with.

Since e is a constant we move on to R, the rate of interest we earn on our principle. We could just sit on our money fairly risk free and watch it get eaten by inflation. It will take us three times as long to earn comparable amounts to the person who earned only average returns. An annual return of 7% doubles your principle every 10 years. The size of the return you aim for depends entirely on how risk averse you are with your capital. So we're not trying to maximize our rate, we're trying to maximize our rate for a given level of risk. Voluminous tomes have been written on the subject, i leave that for the reader.

Our last variable is T. The amount of time the principle is invested for. In a nutshell, maximizing this means investing as early as possible, and letting those investments sit for as long as possible. The man who leaves his portfolio alone earns much better overall returns than the man who switches his portfolio every year if they have the same annual yield. This is largely due to the way capital gains taxes work. Leaving the gains of your portfolio unrealized for longer gives you an advantage in both taxes and inflation.

This is all very obvious advice. Start young, get money, invest wisely. But having a simple system keeps you more aware of how your everyday actions affect your overall existence as an optimizing agent.

Capitalism is an Optimization Process

2008-09-29T15:57:00.000-07:00

And not just a regular optimization process, but a friendly one. You make money in a capitalist economy by supplying people with something they want. Maximizing this doesn't sound bad at all. It is even self-correcting via arbitrage. Inefficiencies fix themselves because if there is money to be made, someone will do it. Profitability is the simple metric by which you know if people want what you have to offer.

Macroeconomics

2008-09-25T15:27:00.000-07:00

I have two problems with macroeconomics as it is practiced today
1:
here is an article on John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employment,_Interest,_and_Money

it is the founding work of modern economics. and the entire book rests upon a fallacious thesis:
"THE outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes." -chapter 24

Fallacy the first: the idea that all members of society can create enough wealth to be worth employing.
Keynes idea here is to create government jobs for all the people unable to find gainful employment elsewhere. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplier_(economics) ) But this naturally leads to a situation in which the vast majority of government workers are incompetent morons who aren't worth the wage they are being paid. sounds about right.

Fallacy the second: the idea that income distribution is arbitrary and inequitable.
a large gap in incomes merely signifies that some people are far more productive than others. I have no problem with the idea that steve jobs is several million times more productive than me. The definition of productivity is producing something that people want. steve jobs created a company that makes things that millions of people want. how is this arbitrary? 80% of the wealthy are self-made millionaires. about 95% of them are small business owners.

taxing the latter (the ultra-productive) in order to support the former (unproductive who can only get government jobs) is foolish. by definition the ultra-productive know how to effectively utilize their capital for further productive gains. by definition the unproductive don't know how to do this, or they would be more productive.

Assuming voting is in line with self-interest, our country should be more economically conservative than it is. approximately 60% of the country are taxpayers, and about 40% are tax eaters. That some part of the taxpayers votes with the interests of the tax eaters is due to ignorance.

(of course no one actually gets the chance to vote for their interests, but that's another post)

2: the field attempts to turn large scale complex phenomena into simple equations. as an example the sum of total consumption in an economy is reduced to this: C = c₀ + c₁Y^d
this would be fine if it was merely a convenience used to approximate something. But no, this equation is used to derive the future, and from that what current policy should be. The idea is ridiculous.

Short Term Politicians in a Long Term World

2008-09-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

Maximizing individual freedom leads to a more efficient economy. I should have all libertarians on board with that statement, if you aren't a libertarian go read mises.org and come back when you are.
The problems with libertarian ideology are nicely enumerated here.

Now, since we all benefit by an increase in freedom of action why are politicians opposed to it? Clearly they are not operating on the same incentives that we are. The politician does better by his personal finances and better by his career by capitulating to either progressives or conservatives rather than the truth. In a game between the Panthers and the Dolphins, you won't get any support rooting for the dissolution of the NFL. This is a problem.

If we ever want public servants who actually serve society, we need to stop appealing to nebulous notions of "the greater good" and start to create actual incentives for good leadership. The reward that politicians get should be directly proportional to how good of a job they do. This is what corporations do with management and it seems to be working out pretty well. Managers that show a net decrease in company assets for their effort are eventually fired. Likewise politicians that show a net increase in public debt for their efforts should be fired.

I'm basically describing a system in which politicians would be more like shareholders than public servants.

A brief aside about the current politics of the U.S.

2008-08-14T17:21:00.000-07:00

It should be clear to you that neither side cares about individual freedom. The arguments are merely about which rights you are going to concede. The liberals want to first take away your right to defend your property and yourself, then to take your property and redistribute it according to their whims. The conservative party want to control your body: who you marry, what sort of sex acts you perform, what you do on sunday mornings, and what substances you ingest.
With the exception of whatever issue is up for debate currently, every other right is either assumed to be given, or assumed to be denied. The middle ground is always moving, the rights that people were arguing for 50 years ago are not the arguments of today. 50 years ago the arguments were over whether or not blacks should be treated the same as whites. This is not up for review in today's election. Just like whether or not they should pay a tax to the British on tea was not up for review then. Every time a new right is issued, several others are quietly taken away. Politicians can do this by making a lot of noise about the issue of the day while quietly acting upon issues that no one had thought about.

Someone should really write a book that would compare and contrast the actual day to day personal freedoms of people before and after major historical events. I fear the data would be hard to find however.

No Peace

2008-08-13T14:01:00.001-07:00

People advocate a peaceful world generally without mentioning exactly how it can come about and how stasis would be achieved.
As I see it there are two types of peace, each of which satisfies only one of two requirements, stability and individual freedom. It is easy to imagine a peaceful world in which one person or body of persons has a monopoly on force to such an extent that no one dares oppose them. The only problem is, in Jefferson's words:

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have"

And I think most people see the problem with centralization when taken to this extreme. On the other hand we have a peace made up of the precarious balancing of force between powers. This can at any scale desired, from hunter gatherer tribes up to the cold war, back down to two men, each armed with a shotgun. This is not a stable situation, as any shift in the balance can result in a total collapse. Libertarians often espouse a return to city-states, forgetting how easily the city-states of Machiavelli's time fell to the invading French.
Others speak of somehow engineering violence out of us. This might be eventually possible, but will it be forced on us? that seems a type of violence itself. Humans are basically geared for three things: finding food, having sex, and killing. trying to engineer any of these basic drives out of us is going to have unintended consequences.

Appreciate what you have

2008-07-13T00:43:00.000-07:00

in the vein of the last posts ending:
enjoy the luxury you are afforded by living in a modern industrialized nation.

you have personal transportation wherever you want, whenever you want
you spend less than 25% of your time working
you eat delicacies from around the world, prepared by natives
you enjoy 24/7 climate control
you have a vast selection of mating opportunities
you enjoy a comparatively long lifespan
you are free from the stress of being raped and killed by rival clans (unless you live in a city)
you have the spare time to cultivate personal interests
you are able to accumulate wealth for the future, rather than just subsisting

You are still subject to insane whims of government, but they are mild compared to the historical norm. And you additionally have the opportunity to isolate yourself from society comfortably.

Back to our regularly scheduled program

2008-07-13T00:05:00.001-07:00

As mentioned previously, everyone has their own ideal social contract. This depends on how much freedom they are willing to give up for safety.
Many people either leave for a country that they feel more closely mimics their personal social contract, or spend their lives fighting to nudge reality a tiny bit closer to their personal social contract.
Let's look at a sample social contract: the current USA.
The current USA is a welfare state. More than half of taxes are spent on socialized medicine or socialized retirement. Whats wrong with a welfare state? It necessarily penalizes success. The successful pay a disproportionate percentage of all taxes. This is based on the theory of decreasing marginal utility of money. Clearly an extra 20 grand isn't going to significantly improve the lifestyle of a successful person, while it could be the difference between life and death for a poor person right?
So what's the problem?
This boils down to the classic question:
Is it justifiable for a starving man to steal a loaf of bread?
Well, how much does the loaf of bread cost?
Let me put it another way.
Is it justifiable to take 1% of someone's private property to save a life?
What about 2%?
What about 10%
What about taking everything that they don't need for immediate survival?
Whose life is it anyway? A saint or stalin? An elderly person who has helped thousands of people, or a spoiled child?

Like everything else, altruism should not be centralized. Individual acts of altruism are fine, but a general policy of helping the unsuccessful means you've just created a disincentive to be successful. This would be fine if we lived in a world of limitless resources, but we do not. The nations with the most successful people will claim a disproportionate amount of the available resources and increase the standard of living of its people. The nations that do not baby their citizens will eventually wind up ahead. The nations that are ahead dictate the rules of the game to the detriment of everyone else. Nations that are uncompetitive therefore wind up servile towards those that are. The US did not become powerful through any particular cleverness of its own. It was merely the only industrial nation not destroyed by WW2. Continuing in the direction of penalizing success will ultimately unseat the US from its #1 spot.

So what is a U.S citizen such as myself to do when i disagree with the social contract of my nation? move? spend my life advocating libertarianism?
No, the prudent course of action is to accumulate enough resources that it is possible to avoid the whims of others entirely.
To do this we simply select courses of action that will maximize our wealth for a given amount of labor.
Unfortunately, this still requires a good chunk of your life to achieve, but merely having the opportunity to emancipate yourself from the whims of others is a privilege few humans have ever had.

Labelling

2008-07-12T23:38:00.000-07:00

Humans love to categorize things. It is comforting, because the mysterious is frightening. We encounter new things, and struggle to fit it into our existing categories. When this doesn't work, we invent a new category. We generally explain this new category in terms of being a hybrid of two old categories or some such. This applies well to the world of physics, where we need a metaphor based on the scale we are familiar with to make sense of things (i.e. particles are like billiard balls, or waves).
However, like most things, we take it too far. We often apply a label to something and allow the label to function as an answer. Q:"Why does matter attract matter?" A:"Matter curves spacetime". I remember hearing this explanation along with a nice little diagram of a ball making a dip that other balls would roll towards. We use a label and feel like we know the answer. We then leave the underlying questions unanswered. Why does matter curve spacetime? What do we mean by spacetime? Is there a uniform background against which we can measure curvature? Why would a curve necessarily lead to attraction anyway?
This type of thinking very handily displays a cognitive bias towards things that are understandable in terms of the environment we are adapted to. Of course our descriptions of reality break down at the very small and the very large. The place where they break down are the natural boundaries beyond which our common sense (adapted to running from predators on a prairie) can no longer make a metaphor out of things we observe at our scale.

Of course this doesn't explain why our math should continue to consistently apply at all scales...maybe it doesn't.

Macro Conditions of Reality

2008-05-24T02:04:00.000-07:00

Humanity has identified a few general principles that seem to govern pretty much everything. One of the big problems is that even though we are aware of these macro conditions we fail to apply them to everything that we should.
here is non-definitive list that I'm going to update as I find more:

Entropy
Natural Selection
Supply and Demand
and possibly Bayesian Probability which might be a subset of entropy since it relates to information theory.

It's interesting to note that these conditions are all based on the finiteness of mass (energy), which really means that they're all based on one macro condition: the conservation of mass. As stated in the previous post, mass is the measure of all things. Space can be measured as an absence of mass, and time can be measured as a change in mass.

The relationship of math to reality.

2008-05-24T01:23:00.000-07:00

Immanuel Kant attempted to reconcile the rationalist and empiricist camps of philosophy. Empiricists believe that all knowledge comes from experience; all human knowledge is trial and error. Rationalists believe that knowledge comes from human reason; knowledge is inferred from logically consistent generalities. Kant explained the difference by classifying knowledge in two ways.

a priori and a posteriori divides knowledge into what can be known before hand and what can only be determined after the fact. An a priori statement would be "a circle is round". (actually this is a tautology, which empiricists claim all a priori statements are) An a posteriori statement would be "When I threw the ball it hit the ground". Analytic and synthetic divides knowledge into statements that are true by virtue of the definitions of the words and statements that make an assertion about the world. An analytic statement would be "water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen". This statement requires no justification because being composed of hydrogen and oxygen is our definition of the word water. A synthetic statement would be "water is delicious". Since deliciousness is not a part of the definition of water this statement needs further justification to be considered knowledge

Combining these classifications of knowledge gives us an interesting matrix. An analytic statement must by virtue of its definition be a priori as any analytic statement requiring a posteriori justification would no longer be analytic. Going back to the example of "water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen", It would be impossible for us to encounter water that wasn't composed of hydrogen and oxygen, since if we did we wouldn't call it water. Similarly a synthetic statement must be a posteriori. Any statement that requires further justification than a simple understanding of the language can only be justified by a posteriori knowledge I can only know that water is delicious by direct experience. The only way to know that water is delicious a priori would be if deliciousness was included in the definition of water.

Kant tried to posit that a priori synthetic knowledge was possible and he used mathematics as his example. At first glance mathematics would seem to be analytic a priori. Take the statement 2 + 2 = 4. This statement requires no further justification than the definitions of two, plus, equals, and four. Once we understand the definitions we need no experience of six to understand that 2 + 2 + 2 = 6.

But, Kant claims, math is not like other knowledge Our definitions of mathematical terms is reliant upon the same justifications that reality is reliant upon (namely space and time). Without assuming space and time (and therefore math) we have no framework within which to hang any knowledge at all. Math is still a priori because we can arrive at mathematical conclusions without any experience, but math can also give us new knowledge about world and is therefore synthetic. So this gives rise to a question. How can math give us new knowledge of the world if the world as we perceive it is not really real but a function of the interaction between the human brain and the sense data that reality feeds us? (the Copernican revolution of philosophy)

We might begin by saying that math doesn't describe objective reality, only our relationship to it. Mathematics can have wonderful internal consistency but the moment we apply it to the world at large we are forced to start describing things in terms of relationships between physical phenomena. For instance, have we gained any knowledge when Socrates illuminates us on Meno's paradox? Or have we simply discovered the ratio between a square's side and area? All applicable math falls under the category of comparing one set of properties to another, such as miles per hour, pounds per square inch and so on. But these unit measures always can be simplified down to a measure of mass. distance can be a subset of mass as it is a measure of how much stuff will fit in between here and there. time can also be a subset of mass as it is a measure of how quickly a measurable change can occur in an object. Here we find Kant's answer. Kant claims that time and space (and math) are fundamental building blocks of not reality, but of our experience of reality. All of our experiences are therefore a function of those fundamental constructs and thus understandable to us.

Explaining Revenge

2008-03-28T00:05:00.000-07:00

This has nothing to do with the main thread of my posts, it is something i thought of while in the shower.

Say someone kills someone close to me. I naturally want to kill him. But It's not enough that he dies. I want him to know it was me who killed him, and that I killed him because he hurt me. (see: The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe)

Why is that? If it were merely to punish him it shouldn't matter. If it were merely to prevent him from hurting others it shouldn't matter. Furthermore, killing him won't bring my loved one back. And two wrongs don't make a right.

So why is revenge so inextricably tied into our nature?
This is putting social punishment aside. Social punishment acts to discourage others from similar actions and/or to rehabilitate the perpetrator so they can contribute to society.

That is a separate subject. Why do individuals seek revenge?
Because we want others to feel the same emotions towards us that we do towards them. If i hate someone, and they don't hate me back, there is a net loss of emotional energy. Try hating someone who doesn't know sometime. It's exhausting. Now try hating someone who hates you back. Much more satisfying. Your antagonism towards each other almost seems to create energy.

So when we hate someone who doesn't hate us we seek to balance the checkbook. Say again that someone kills someone close to me. Not because they're out to get me (in that case revenge is easily explained) but because of some random confluence of unfortunate events. Like a random mugging gone wrong. I want to hurt the person who killed my loved one. Not only that I want them to know why I am hurting them. Why? So they will hate me as much as I hate them. So they can feel some of the same pain that I have felt. Once they hate you back it's easy to feel good about killing them.

Hence the hippy-dippy adage that has been passed down through the ages "hatred begets more hatred" or alternately "only love can conquer hate" are literally true. When you hate someone, you are going to put pressure on them to hate you back to keep things even. When you love someone, you are putting pressure on them to love you back.

This explains a variety of behaviors. Such as when people find out that someone they don't like is in love with them. Their natural response is a mild disgust (mild hatred) to put a downward pressure on the person to stop loving them. This is also why love and hate are the two strongest human emotions. They are self reinforcing. Once someone starts loving or hating someone who feels the same towards them it is self-sustaining, like two mirrors reflecting each other.

Note: last time someone went around loving everyone he got nailed to a tree, please don't try it.

Critical Mass

2008-03-08T00:37:00.000-08:00

Did the problems that modern society faces exist in the time of small bands of hunters living a nomadic lifestyle? Yes, but they were not nearly as acute. Every increase in human density has exacerbated social problems. Dunbar's number has already been mentioned. Human beings are only capable of dealing with about 150 individuals. So what happens when social density forces us into contact with hundreds or thousands of people?
We group.
We start filing people into groups and treating that entire group as if it was one individual. These groups can be "coworkers", "delivery guys" what have you. Or, very commonly, they are things like "Black people", "Jews" etc...
I think you can see the problem.
Forcing humans to deal with an overload of people causes racism, sexism and other social bias. It's not really our fault, it's a psychological handicap.

That's only one problem, there are many others such as resource distribution, ossification of social hierarchies etc. Every problem is exacerbated when you add more people. So why do we continue to cram more and more people in?

Expansion is in our genes. Like individuals, societies that were most effective at spreading themselves the fastest squeezed out those that didn't. What we were left with were a few social systems that were great at expanding. They eventually coalesced into city-states, then nations, then the mega-nations of today (the European Union). How much bigger can they go? Can the whole world be encompassed by the winner?

Monopolies are bad, competition forces good customer service.

Centralization is inefficient at the scale humanity has taken it to. Unfortunately it is the natural result of our evolutionary drive for expansion. How do we solve this problem?

Ideally we return to city-states, a very efficient method of grouping, but I have no idea how to do that.

Slide Rule

2008-03-08T00:24:00.000-08:00

So what causes society to drift towards the left or right?
Economic prosperity. Hard times cause the group to band together to defeat the external foe. Caveman Ugh may be pissed at Caveman Lurg because Lurg stole his favorite mate, but unless they work together to fight off the enemy tribe there aren't going to be any mates at all. In times such as these fear rules. Leaders who promise safety will be much preferred to the ones grumbling about personal freedom.
In times of plenty internal conflicts tend to come to the fore. Everyone is well fed and there is time and excess energy to spend on hierarchal fighting. Leaders who promise to maximize the individual freedom and thus the chance for upward social mobility will win out.
What does this mean in modern times?
During times of economic downturns society will drift towards the utilitarian side. Safety will be the deciding factor in leadership decisions. During economic booms there will be a greater focus on the individual, and individual freedoms will be the deciding factor in leadership decisions.

Now the economy goes in cycles. So too will the left/right drift. The long valuation waves of the economy will coincide with more liberal/more conservative swings of government policy.

Vector man

2008-03-02T01:39:00.000-08:00

First I'd like to clarify my justification of the main drives of humanity.
People seek power in order to broaden their mate selection as well as gather resources for both themselves and their potential offspring. People seek a decrease in conflict in order to ensure the well-being of their offspring.
Men tend towards the former since broad mate selection is the foremost priority of the non-child bearing gender (sowing your seeds across as wide a spectrum as possible). Women tend towards the latter since they are the gender that puts much more energy and risk into childbearing. A man can impregnate hundreds of women. A woman can only have at most perhaps 2 dozen children (there are a few who do more, the world record is something like 33).

Now for something completely different.

I already mentioned that the social contract is constantly changing. It is in a tug of war between the rights of the individual and the efficiency of the group (objectivism vs. utilitarianism).
What happens in a tug of war? Well if the two sides are evenly matched and are diametrically opposed in their vectors of force they cancel each other out. Not so reality. In reality the two sides are always waxing and waning in strength and the two sides are not always pulling exactly 180 degrees apart. This creates a new vector that society moves in. like so:

Forgive my crude MS paint diagram.
What's important here is that society is moving in a direction that no single person is in favor of. Rather the vector is a product of all the different forces pulling society to the right or left. This leaves one with the sense that there is no captain at the helm. This is true. Individuals can be very influential (have more pull), but ultimately no single person can force society onto their personal vector. Great leaders in history generally occur when the movement of society coincides neatly with that particular leaders goals. That is, the vectors were very close already.

A Rational Society, LOL

2008-02-21T22:02:00.000-08:00

What is a rational society? Well for our worldview to be self consistent one must have some basic goal in mind. Theories about reality are only better or worse if they are better or worse at achieving something. So we must define what our society is striving to achieve.

Several axiomatic social goals have been proposed. In brief:
Kant's Categorical Imperative. The idea that all actions must be logically self consistent. This axiom externalizes the drive for a reduction in internal conflict and makes it societies goal.
Rand's Objectivism. The idea that rational self-interest ultimately benefits society. This axiom externalizes the drive for individual power and makes it societies goal.
Formalism. The idea that violence should be minimized. This makes the reduction of external conflict societies goal.

those are fairly straight forward. There is one other that gets a bit trickier.
Utilitarianism. The greatest good for the greatest number of people. On the face of it this would seem a grand idea. Unfortunately a few problems pop up. Firstly it completely ignores the drive for personal power. Second it does not minimize external conflict. An egalitarian policy on resource distribution necessarily involves taking things by force from some people and giving it to other people. Thirdly, whether it minimizes internal conflict is greatly dependent upon the individual. Fourthly, the epistemological underpinnings of deciding what will ultimately produce the greatest good in a world of imperfect information is already shaky at best, when you add the fact that "better" is often hard to quantize at all you have a serious impasse. Theoretically utilitarianism allows for a very efficient society. The only problem is that it totally ignores the basic drives of humans and relies upon perfect knowledge of the future and a homogeneous society that all desire the same things. As such, it can work but generally only for short periods of time. It works best in said homogeneous societies (Northern Europe). That is, societies where every member of the society can relate culturally with every other member of the society.

Back to the other three. The idea that one of these could serve as the basis for a functioning society ignores the other two human drives and will necessarily seem extremist to all but those who place close to 100% priority on one of the three drives (generally crazy people). So how to create a society that balances these? You got me. The founding fathers had a hard enough time balancing the power of the individual with the power of collectivism.
The start I can make is to say that power will override the others given the chance, power must be muzzled.

Need more Vespene Gas

2008-02-19T23:32:00.000-08:00

The reason we have conflict in the first place is uneven resource distribution. What utilitarians don't realize is that uneven resources are inevitable. Even if all people were born with an even share of resources, groups would band together and take away other individual's share by force. A fantastic example of this is in the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer.

Before I mentioned that if a people thought the next country over had a better social contract that country would shortly see a spike in immigration. Uneven resource distribution prevents this idea from always being carried out in reality. A country can have a crappy social contract but enough resources to successfully keep its citizens from leaving. Be it through physical force or coercion.

Rand acknowledged conflict but dismissed it as a result of everyone seeking power. This view only holds if everyone is an alpha male. Some members of the group will seek to avoid conflict instead of seeking power. People will generally defer to the person with the most dominant "power personality" in order to avoid conflict within the group. As we said before how you relate to the group and society at large depends on how much priority you placed on each drive. Some place almost %100 on power. These are generally psychopaths. It is no accident then that leadership and psychosis are related. But what about the conflict side of the equation?

As I see it there are two forms of conflict that we try to avoid. Outer conflict and inner conflict. The desire to avoid outer conflict leads to social constructionism. The desire to avoid inner conflict leads to Kant's Categorical Imperative. Each has a simple basis in evolution. We avoid outer conflict for group cohesion for increased survivability of the group. We avoid inner conflict because being logically consistent helped us reason about and predict reality better.

This helps us explain a number of personality types. People who seek to minimize outer conflict will go with the group and tend to be more extroverted. People who seek to minimize internal conflict will go against the group and tend to be more introverted. And of course people who seek power will be manipulative and become leaders.
Power seekers
Inner Conflict Avoider
Outer Conflict Avoider
Unfortunately it is not as simple as classifying all people under these three headings as each trait is present in everyone. It is the interaction between these drives that gives rise to our complex ideologies and schisms.

Next we use this idea to examine the various basis of an ethical society.

The Compromise

2008-02-18T23:43:00.000-08:00

I do hope to eventually get to the subject for which this blog is titled, but background is important.
So far we've covered what ideologies are, as well as what the current ideology is based upon. Now we are concerned with how the rational individual (one who rejects ideologies) relates to this modern society.

First we must determine what a rational human being actually is. There are so few of them that they don't really have their own -ism or -ists labels. Just calling yourself a rationalist gives people the wrong idea. You'll notice that the article deals with epistemology. We are not concerned with that. The scientific approach is that there is no truth but only better or worse approximations of reality on which to base our decisions. Leave epistemology to the existentialists. We are concerned with ethics.

Ethics are a branch of axiology. If we can not determine a fundamentally ethically correct act we cannot judge any other act. Here is where most treatises on the subject start with the oughts. Well you have to be pretty high up on the horse to start issuing oughts to people. No one has that authority. So lets concern ourselves with what is.

Well, how the heck does one sum up human nature? Again, we're not concerned with truth per se, but what gives us the best explanation for human behavior.

People generally act in what they think is their best interest

Leaving out the italicized part is dangerous. The italicized part allows us to account for a much broader swath of human behavior that would otherwise be troubling and difficult to account for.

How do people go about doing this? If it was as simple as being a single drive humans would be easy to understand. If everyone really sought their own rational best interest all the time then maybe Ayn Rand would have a leg to stand on. Unfortunately Rand left out the other piece of the puzzle. Humans seek power, but they also seek to avoid conflict. Here we have the other side of the political spectrum. On the extreme right we have Rand and pure capitalism and on the left we have socialism of which the logical conclusion is utilitarianism. One side seeks power for the self, the other side gives up that individual power to the whole in exchange for less conflict.

Now obviously we don't live in a Randian society or the powerful would just kill and rape whoever they felt like. We obviously Don't live in a utilitarian society because we don't distribute things evenly. We obviously don't live in either of the two extremes. What we do have is a compromise, and that compromise is the unwritten social contract. Politics isn't about truly major changes, just uproar about whether the social contract will slide a tiny bit to the right or left.

The social contract boils down to the compromise between the two extremes. In the wild you have absolute freedom. How much of that freedom are you willing to give away to purchase the comfort and safety of the group? Note that this has nothing to do with democracy or modern society. The social contract has existed in all societies. Truly choosing to opt out has just become less and less attractive as quality of life has increased. Naturally, leaders seek to minimize the freedom of their subjects. The only thing stopping them has been competition. If the next nation-state over seems to have a better social contract it's going to have an immigration problem shortly.

So we come back to our point. How does the individual decide what level of compromise is acceptable to them? How do they make decisions in a society that does not exactly match this decision? It depends on what priority you place on each drive. Is power or safety more important?

Well the drive for power is easy enough to explain. We wish for the power to control our reality and shape it to our liking. The drive to avoid conflict is a bit trickier and will be examined in depth next.

Mercantilism

2008-01-24T20:26:00.000-08:00

Note: parts of this post are obviously false. I bought into the idea that deflation discouraged investing at the time of writing it.

I hope I've established that ideology has nothing to do with a rational interpretation of reality and everything to do with promulgating itself. So what does this mean for the world at large? Well, I'm going to have to start with a poli-sci and econ 101 fresher.

To see the genesis of the modern era one has to go back to the 1600's and the formation of the nation as we know it. Once capitalism took hold due to its ability to provide seemingly limitless credit, the rulers at the time engaged in competitive wealth and empire building. Expansion brought unprecedented economic growth. The supply of goods and services at this time was growing much faster than the gold supply was. Once the bankers, with help from nobility, succeeding in separating the money supply from gold they were able to grow the money supply at a rate closer to the rate at which things were expanding. This is not a bad thing. This is the point that where many self-proclaimed monetary experts falter. A money supply that closely matches the rate of economic expansion of actual goods and services is in the best interest of everyone. This is also the reason the US first adopted a split gold/silver standard and later completely abandoned a commodity based currency in favor of fiat currency.
If the money supply grows slower than economic expansion it favors people who already have capital and slows the economy. There isn't enough money to pay for the real value (in labor) of all the products on the market. If the money supply grows faster than the rate of economic expansion you have inflation. There is more money in the system than is needed to pay for all the goods and services, making each unit less valuable.

So the Fed and a fiat currency aren't necessarily bad. Why is there a problem?
The problem is that the government can print fiat currency then spend it before the inflation from said printing has effected the value of the currency. By the time it has trickled down to the citizen it has lost that value. This is creating "value" out of thin air which is fundamentally impossible. In theory our current system could work fine. In reality you can't give people the power to create money with no oversight and expect them to act in the best interest of the economy. Human beings will always sink to the lowest acceptable performance they can get away with. It is a natural drive towards efficiency. If I do X work and get $100 reward, why would I do X+2 work for the same reward? Likewise the people with the power to print money will print all that is needed plus whatever they think they can get away with. It is naturally attractive to politicians who can abstract this process from the average citizen and subsequently promise additional entitlement programs without having to raise taxes. Citizens simply pay for it in inflation later.
This is important because it is exactly what you are seeing with the tax rebates recently proposed by Bush and Co.

Back to the creation of value. When the royalty of various powers started doing this there was no problem because the returns on their investments almost always exceeded their obligations to the lenders. That has continued unabated for the last 300 or so years for the most part. We assume any debt we incur now will be more than made up for by our returns later. This is of course dangerous, but works as long as your economy is expanding at a sufficient rate.

So what has changed?
What has changed is globalization. When the Fed issues enough money to inflate the money supply by 3% say. They're betting that economic growth next year will more than make up for it. The government gets to spend that money, the economic growth offsets it, no one is the wiser, and everyone is happier due to increased entitlement programs. Can the market grow forever? At some point we run out of markets to expand into and things come to a screeching halt. The various markets of the world have become absorbed into the world economy and now it is looking like there is nowhere left to go. Had the US stayed a strong industrial power (by reinvesting in infrastructure) things would have been different. We could have exported goods to the rapidly expanding chinese and indian middle classes. Instead the US has exported its jobs and factories to those countries. Now India and China, understandably, would rather just buy domestic, but hey, thanks for subsidizing our infrastructure US!

In summation:

an economic ideology based on constant expansion is fine as long as you have a constant stream of new markets to expand into. lacking that, you need a sustainable model based on real value, not credit.

Have I given up on the US? No, we're still the financial and research capital of the world. That kind of thing doesn't change overnight despite what the doom sayers say. And who knows? Maybe a decent monetary and fiscal policy will actually result from the turmoil that this "market correction" will bring.

Why should we care?

2008-01-21T11:50:00.001-08:00

Disclaimer:
Starting this blog I want to make one thing clear. Trying to understand the world better will not make you a happier person. Not just because of the hedonic treadmill. But because the more puzzle pieces fall into place the harder and more unbearable you will find the casual arrogance and apathy of those around you. Ignorance truly IS bliss. If you care about figuring things out for yourself more than being cozy and safe read on:

Sigmund Freud believed that we all go through three phases as we mature to adulthood
oral, anal, and culminating in the "healthy" genital phase.
The cause of many psychological disorders, he said, could be traced to people stagnating in one of the the first two phases. Male homosexuality could be explained by becoming stuck in the second phase for example. Is this true? Not important. What we're concerned with today is that individuals go through a much more fundamental order of phases in their lives.
World view, philosophy, ideology, paradigm, zeitgeist. There are many words used to describe the way individuals, groups, or whole societies view the world. When groups engage in it I call it social epistemology (I later discovered that social epistemology was already an area of academic study. but no matter, full credit for originality).
What is social epistemology and why should we care?
Social epistemology is how any particular group of people make value-judgments about data. Capitalism, communism, religion. These are all systems that provide their adherents with an easy way to judge the worth of any particular datum. All ideologies are at their core a mental short-cut. "Data point x supports socialism. I already know socialism to be a valid interpretation of reality. Therefore data point x is valid".
The second sentence is the real problem (there are other logical fallacies involved but not as important right now). How has the individual arrived at the conclusion that socialism is a valid and useful interpretation of the role of government? In the vast majority of cases they have not reasoned out the most rational solution for themselves but instead trusted some exterior source, be it the media, a book, their professor, a parent etc. And done only the most cursory of validations on their own if at all, and due to a known cognitive flaw in all humans they will be much more likely to seek out data that supports their view and ignore contradicting evidence.
Why is that? people seek to eliminate cognitive dissonance. So what is easier? Coming up with a fully functioning, completely consistent world view that accounts for all data...or using a nice pre-made one and ignoring evidence that yours doesn't really work? Seeing as no one in the history of the world has fully accomplished the former (philosophy would be dead if they had), most choose the latter. A choice made much easier since everyone else does it. The further mistake, responsible for more death and misery than any other agent in the history of mankind, is confusing the two.
One of two things needs to happen before a rational society can emerge.

A. Someone comes up with a fully consistent world-view that accounts for all data and provides us with clear solutions to social and economic problems (I say clear solutions because ambiguous solutions are what leads to conflict)

B. We all agree that since no-one has accomplished A, we should stop going around killing people who disagree with us because we're wrong too.

Ignorant people refusing to at least do B is bad enough. The real kicker is when otherwise rational people justify violence by claiming that both sides may be wrong, but the other side is MORE wrong (see: every war ever). Sorry, but that moral high ground you're standing on is actually a pile of bodies. There is not a single modern government not built on the backs of dead innocents who were "more wrong".
So what are we saying here? That the world would be a better place if everyone thought for themselves and there was less violence? Man, I must be the first person in history to come up with those ideas!
Again, why should we care?
It's time to dispense with the myth that ideologies are simply a set of ideas that a group uses to figure out what is true and what is not. As the most potent example, Nationalism and the rise of Nazi-Germany should tell us that ideologies are not content to serve us, but would rather become our masters.
How does an ideology go from being a mental convenience to a draconian police state? It's fairly simple and has iterated itself throughout history.

The first generation believes it because it is practical
The second generation takes it for granted
The third generation imprisons anyone who disagrees with it

At this point the original practical reasons have disappeared due to changes in population, circumstance, and environment.

It happens at various speeds, but most social movements ossify in this manner.
So why do we do this to ourselves?
Because we wouldn't be able to sleep at night if we understood what is actually required for society to function. The Spartans had helots, the usa has mexico, russia and china have...well russians and chinese. And it doesn't stop at simply having a dedicated serf class. Policy of demonizing those who have resources that we want as a pretext to invade and take it. Internal propaganda used to brainwash citizens. If you're reading this you probably have several outrages about the US government. Take your pick. But these aren't "mistakes" these aren't missteps of leadership and the fault of greedy corporations. At the national level, all countries are Machiavellian and have no qualms about genocide, human rights violations, etc.
So why isn't that our ideology?
Because people are different in small groups than they are organized into nations. Beyond a group of about 150, for purely biological reasons, humans become tribalistic, xenophobic, and violent. In small groups we are communal, rational, and empathetic. We prefer to think of ourselves as the latter for obvious reasons.
So we fudge things a little. We come up with a lie to tell ourselves so that we can still believe that we are actually communal, rational, and empathetic while as a collective group we loot other groups of their resources and force our ideas on them. So we have social epistemology.

This is all clearly a Bad Idea™
Back to our original topic: what relation does the individual have to these mass ideologies?
idiots go through no phases. they don't think critically about the world around them. they react.
normal people go through 1 or 2 phases. either they believe the story handed to them by their parents, church, school or they initially believe it but later reject it for another fashionable ideology (see liberal arts student communists).
smarter people go through the phases normal people do but eventually realize that something is wrong and spend the rest of their lives learning about the various schools of thought. many wind up libertarians, objectivists, utilitarians, etc.
smarter people who study macroeconomics realize that the ideology game is fundamentally flawed, because:

how good a description of reality an ideology is has much less to do with its success than how successful it is at grabbing resources.

My goal is to convert as many as possible to that last phase.
Comment away and check out this blog for more on viewing reality without a filter.