jack

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/11/sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/12/clarification-to-sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/

Almost everything Scott posts is interesting, even when I disagree with it. Sometimes I decide I absorbed an important idea anyway despite superficial disagreements. Sometimes I decide he's just wrong, but said interesting things along the way.

Here he describes a case where a student group invited a couple of deliberately controversial speakers as a pro-free-speech point. This is probably a bad idea for a variety of reasons, whether it was well meant or not. But he and I were thinking of the details about *why* it was a bad idea.

Was that effectively pro free speech whether or not it caused harm in other ways?

His point was, separate to which ideas *should* be covered under free speech, deliberately choosing controversial ones uses up people's tolerance and moves us a notch closer to associating free speech with mostly being used for horrible things and make everyone dislike it.

And I'm sort of torn. Because on the one hand, that sounds completely true. Things that are sufficiently harmful are NOT covered under free speech (morally or legally depending on culture or country), and this is deliberately expanding that category by making potentially-harmful things a lot more of a problem.

On the other hand, defending horrible things as legal if undesirable feels like it sets a standard for free speech: we know other speech is ok, because we allow this.

Did it cause harm in other ways?

Everything above is true whether you chose speakers you personally sympathise with but don't want to say so, or speakers you massively disagree with but want to engage with. However, there's definitely an awful trend that when talk about free speech, they don't mean "lets invite some communists" or "lets burn some american flags". No. They mean, "lets find some supposedly-intellectual research which has been seized on by a rallying cry by the alt-right".

People attacked by the alt-right have done MORE THAN THEIR FUCKING SHARE of being attacked with little recourse. If you're convinced that inviting speakers who are incredibly threatening to a certain proportion of people on campus is necessary, can you at least choose some DIFFERENT subset? Invite some revolutionaries who want to guillotine people with inherited wealth. Invite some over-the-top animal rights types who want to bomb all non-vegans. Or, preferably, find views which are *controversial* but not *immediately threatening* to make your point with.

I originally tried to list some views which were very controversial to the point I can easily imagine protests etc about them, but (a) from all over the political spectrum and (b) not personally threatening. Some of which I secretly agreed with, some of which I hated. But I decided that would just cause a worse argument right now.

No we actually want to hear them, we're not just being controversial for the sake of it, honest

Scott talked about, if you actually *want* to hear a speaker, you should use different criteria than if you're trying to air controversial views. If you're being controversial on purpose, I feel you need a greater weight on "not harming people" in addition to "does this help or hurt freedom of speech".

But if you really want to hear a speaker, even one I find vile, I generally don't think banning them is that useful -- provided you do sensible things like, advertise to people who actually want to hear them, and for fuck's sake don't try to make it at some mandatory event, or even some organisation-wide event, to show you just want to have a speaker, not that you want to force a speaker on people who will be harmed by it. Most of the "bans" have been because people have been deliberately bullying people they expect to object, not because they were genuinely trying to have a quiet meeting and then got invaded by protesters.

I sometimes think of things I enjoy doing, just like things I need to be able to do, as skills. Not that the main enjoyment of reading a book is the challenge, but I think *some* of it is. I enjoy reading books where I DO have to work to follow what's going on, even though I enjoy that less often than I enjoy reading books that aren't as hard work.

But that partly means, I'm always slowly getting bored with the sort of books I used to like. Because if you can read the first few pages and say, "right, I bet the tough protagonist talks like an asshole but actually always does the right thing and the female lead flirts with him for some reason and the morally ambiguous manipulators switch sides several times but end up essentially working with the protagonist in the climax even if he doesn't like it", and all that happens, the only bits I'm really experiencing are the bits that *don't* fit into that mold.

And it also means, reading books in a different genre can be *difficult*, I need to consciously practice in order to follow when much more of the book is new to me. But rewarding, because a bit of practice can open up a lot of other books.

And it also means, "how much do you like this book" can vary a lot, "it's good, but only if you're familiar with that sort of thing" or "it's good, but you may have read it all before", can be the norm, not the exception.

I've a lot of unformed thoughts related to this topic recently. Likely there some existing theory of value I don't have the concepts for which would resolve it, anyone know?

Preamble: minimum price, maximum price, real-world price, and "fair" price

Suppose Alice does some work for Bob (making something, repairing something, helping with something). I'm going to start by considering the simplest case of "they agree what Bob will pay Alice, then she does it" and try to work towards what would actually happen if this was a repeated (eg. as a wage for ongoing employment, or as advertising goods/services for sale en mass). There are going to be a LOT of complications which overwhelm this basic idea coming shortly.

What price might they agree? I'm considering four relevant prices. Firstly, the minimum price Alice will accept, presumably the minimum that she expects to cover materials, any intangible benefits, and the minimum compensation for her time that will make it preferable to do this rather than something else. Second, the maximum price Bob will pay, presumably the benefit he expects to gain (in pleasure, or in saving spending money elsewhere, or making more money).

These may be very subjective and hard to quantify! I'm not saying they need to be fixed, or known, just that they're a way I find it useful to think about the question in principle. The third price, is the price actually agreed at in real life. Most of the time this will be between the minimum and the maximum, though there will be exceptions when people make mistakes. But the place in the range varies wildly depending on lots of messy real world factors, and a lot of theoretical and practical economics cover describing HOW it varies.

Both people will have limited knowledge of their own position and even more limited knowledge of the other person's, so will not always know what offer to make that might be accepted. There are significant transaction costs in reaching an agreement, eg. if one party strings the other along and then adds price at the last minute, or if Alice's main job is working for Bob, it will take her a lot of effort to get a different job which may or may not be better. If there are lots of Alices and only one Bob, or vice versa, the single party will almost automatically negotiate a more favourable price, as the multiple parties compete against each other. Is it more advantageous for Alice to mass-produce what she can offer and sell to as many Bobs as possible, or seek out the few Bobs to whom it's most valuable and sell it to them for more? Or both?

The "fair" price

Most people have some intuition what constitutes a "fair" price, although I'm not sure if there's a single best definition. Some people say that whatever people agree to is "fair". Most people would say that a deal that is massively one-sided, paying Alice the absolute minimum you can get away with -- even if it's better for her than doing nothing -- is unfair, if it means that she can barely eat, or that her work produces tens of millions of pounds of profit, of which she gets none.

People disagree about whether how unique Alice's offer is should affect what's a "fair" price. If she's got a talent most people lack, most people accept she deserves to earn more, but is that because she has a stronger bargaining position, or because the maximum price is higher so a fair point "somewhere between" is higher?

Supply and Demand

The idea of supply and demand, that if a market is at least somewhat liquid, it will reach a natural level is so embedded in a lot of discourse, it's easy to assume that's what's "fair". Many people naturally accept that if someone is the only person in the world who can do something, they get SOME benefit from doing that for people. Others say, no, everyone should put in the same EFFORT and get the same reward, and the benefits of natural talent, luck, etc, should be divvied up amongst all people equally. I suspect the best answer is toward the direction of "divide equally", but there are benefits to everyone in allowing people freedom to choose what benefits they want and what work they want to do for whom, and that implies _some_ amount of some people getting more (as long as everyone gets enough).

What did other people think? That supply and demand has something to do with a fair price? Or everything? Or nothing? Or not sure? Or you think something different after reading this?

Waste

Another implication, is that the COMBINED benefit to Alice and Bob is mostly determined by whether Alice does the work or not. The effort spent negotiating may be necessary to make things more fair, or may be perverted to make things less fair, but is a zero-sum game -- it's pure loss to humanity as a whole, Alice only engages in it to avoid being screwed over by Bob (or to screw Bob over) and vice versa.

Sometimes we're fortunate and the obvious best strategy for one party happens to be the best strategy for everyone, eg. something is useful to EVERYONE and there's no benefit to trying to negotiate individual deals, it's best to just sell it to as many people as possible as cheaply as possible and you'll make lots of profit and help lots of people.

Other times, the best strategy for one party generates almost no benefit at all: they have a monopoly over something, and it doesn't provide any benefit AT ALL over the alternatives, but network effect, or cost of switching, or corrupt legislation, etc, etc, prevent people switching away unless they can all do it at once.

You always need SOME willingness to negotiate, if you just accept whatever the other party offers, then everything in the world gets gobbled up by the greediest least scrupulous people. But not to get into ongoing bidding wars about it. It would be better for both parties if "fair" could be imposed from above, even imperfectly, although it's impractical, there would often be too much temptation to game the system.

What WOULD be a "fair" price?

Suggestions? One answer is a completely marxist economy, but even if you view that as "an economy where everything is fair", you need to know what "fair" is. Maybe it DOES depend on the value created (eg. two jobs might be equally morally valuable, but if one is more immediately valuable to the other person, it's paid more), but DOESN'T depend on how good your bargaining position is (but you might have to strengthen it in order to reach a fair offer, eg. by presenting a united front with other buyers/sellers to counteract a monopoly on the other side)?

I feel I left out the important examples, but I think I need to get this posted and get to bed... I will try to follow-up later if possible.

On the scale between "raw libertarianism" and "wealth and jobs completely allocated by central fiat", I think we need less capitalism than we've got now, but a lot more than zero.

I'm not sure exactly what my ideal society would look like, economically it's based on more on practical questions of "what works" than what I want ethically. But from here, much more monopoly controls, higher wages, less large-scale tax-evasion, and also more redistributive.

So, um, basically "less capitalism". But OTOH, I want to stop a long way short of no capitalism. I think we should be employed for wages, or given money to support them if we don't have wages, and should be able to spend that how we like, and that generally leads to a more useful distribution of resources than fiat-ing what we get. I think people should be able to start organisations and see if people are willing to buy from them. I want the government to shape and curate the market and nationalise and ban things when there's a clear benefit, not all the time.

I'm not sure that's all right, I don't know enough about it, but that's my general direction by default. I think that makes me "socialist", but does that make me "a capitalist?" I feel like "yes", but I also think "capitalist" has strong connotations of more free market than we've got now, which I want in some areas, but not most. Is this just another word which is useless to use now?

Via emperor http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30976610

I wish articles wouldn't conflate every sort of e-voting. I have very different views of:

1. MPs allowed to vote in absentia -- since the votes aren't private, risk of shenanigans seem a lot lot lower, basically a good idea.

2. Jumping straight to allowing remote electronic voting without even a cursory look-over by a security expert -- I have no idea why anyone even contemplates this it seems criminally irresponsible. We have a pretty good voting system, let's not destroy it on a whim?

(Likewise, using electronic voting machines in polling stations produced by partisan companies, with no oversight from all parties or election officials, that are trivially hackable, seemed an obviously bad idea, I don't know how it happened.)

(Although, I would be interested to see what the possible trade-offs were, if it were designed by somebody competent.)

3. Investigating ways of using electronic vote counting in polling stations -- extreme caution, but possibly worth investigating, because the convenience is definitely something people want, and it would be good to have actual pros and cons, not just "NO". I agree there are lots of risks and I'm not eager to explore it, especially if it's conflated with #2. But it seems like you could make machines which were sufficiently simple they couldn't boot off SD cards, and had oversight from representatives from all parties (as elections do currently), and it might be worth trying??

Good question. There's lots of things I might talk about, and it's hard to pick a particular one. Like most geeks, I would be happy if space travel existed as much as science fiction hoped. But even we do start building towards missions to mars and asteroid mining, it probably won't be a revolutionary change. I hate the energy wasted (by me and society as a whole) on travelling to places we need to be, I'd be interested to see how society would change if you could open a zero-hour almost-free transport link from the middle of one area to another, or even from each house.

Many fictional inventions have come a long way to existing. I'm really used to always having a map and encyclopaedia in my pocket, and widely-used asynchronous communication that lets me build friendships with people who are similar to me as well as people who live in geographical proximity to me. And being able to deal with many bills, forms, etc, with the press of some buttons, without having to go places. I don't think I was cut out for the 20th century :)

But one example that especially springs to mind is Bujold's uterine replicator, that can safely gestate a baby without a human womb, for what it symbolises about society. It's the sort of thing that sometimes rubs some hard science fiction fans the wrong way, because it's not physics or mechanical engineering, and the focus is on the societal implications, not how the technology could be built. But I think the same is often true of hard sci-fi, of building something which seems plausible, but not always from actual blue-prints, and seeing where you go with it.

On the one hand the uterine replicator is a symbol of how society could change, if gestating babies wasn't randomly assigned to half of the population. And all sorts of secondary potential changes: like Athos, the planet of only men[1]; or the possibility of centralising child-rearing completely, and people can be parents only if they'd like to be; or of reducing the need to unwanted pregnancies.

On the other hand, a lot of the inequality in society is cultural, not biological, in the assumptions that mothers should be primary child-rearers more than fathers, even apart from gestation and breast-feeding. So maybe it wouldn't make that much of a difference :(

Footnotes

[1] I thought Athos was interesting example of Bujold's worldbuilding, in that she postulated Athos as originally populated by monastics, but that after a couple of generations there was a mix of monastic celibate farmers, and essentially gay cosmopolitan culture, but because she didn't NEED to, she never specified if the proportions were 90%/10% or 10%/90% and the reader could assume either way.

This post brought to you in the past from the future by the power of cheating! :)

I have the idea that things like price, wage, rent controls are very useful to correct imbalances in bargaining position or imbalances in bargaining information -- eg. employers and landlords often have more power in the short term, and can use that to impose unreasonable contract terms, if they were not stopped, and the same could apply to prices.

But that they don't usually work to change the value long-term, because if the "official" value doesn't reflect the market for a long time, it distorts the market and the problems bubble up elsewhere: eg. either black markets (if prices are significantly too high) or bribes (if the prices are significantly too low). And often "bribes" are really inefficient, eg. the school catchment area system is supposedly fairer than paying for education, but leads to people overpaying for houses to get to the right catchment area, which can lead to everyone living somewhere that's less efficient for them.

And if the changes are short-term or not-too-large it works because it's not worth anyone's while avoiding the official answer. And sometimes we don't have a better solution, and using the only tool we have available and hoping the side-effects are not too bad is better than ignoring the problem. But it would be better if the demand could be addressed directly (either by meeting it or ameliorating it) rather than pretending it can be legislated out of existence.

Is that right? I'm not sure I'm thinking about this the right way.

It's painful for me to say so, because there's lots of things I wish were distributed "fairly" rather than on the basis of "who can pay a ridiculously extortionate sum", from education to concert tickets. But I'd rather everyone were taxed a lot more and then things were priced according to demand, rather than trying to fix individual unfairnesses piecemeal.

http://solopoly.net/2012/11/29/riding-the-relationship-escalator-or-not/

There's a famous concept of a relationship escalator, that people have a shared expectation of a relationship progressing in a natural order from first interest, to being "a relationship", to potentially being legally recognised, and potentially to long-term commitments like having children together.

Obviously this concept was coined by people who _didn't_ want that process to be inevitable, because people who were happy with (or resigned to) the process didn't have any reason to re-examine it.

However, like many ideas from polyamory, I think it has a lot to say about any relationship.

Specifically, even for people happy with the rough order of the steps, I think it's useful to recognise what stage you're at and what range of stages you'd like to be at. When you're first experimenting with flirting, usually as a teenager, most people don't want a relationship which is expected to quickly progress all the way to the top and get married, they actually want to flirt with a few people and audition them for short-term relationships, with the possibility but not always expectation of become serious long-term relationships. Conversely, many people have dated enough and actively want marriage and children, and are looking for someone compatible: someone who knows what they want and is eager to progress up the scale very fast.

Having the concepts and vocabulary is very useful to describe what you actually want, and understand how miscommunication can occur. There's a fairly large amount of leeway -- people at a "actively want short-term dating, open to long-term dating" state may work with people at a "auditioning short-term dates to find someone compatible for long-term dating" stage, with only a few false starts.

But if there's a large mismatch, everyone will feel hard-done-by, and often feel they were misled. As with most sitcoms which assume half of people want casual sex and expect to reluctantly dragged into a serious relationship after that, and half of people only want sex as a step directly on the way to a serious relationship.

And it's useful consciously recognising what level you're content with. If you've got marriage and don't want children, then you've found the place you want to stay in, then that's perfect if both parties agree. But disaster if one party wanted to go to the top, and one party wanted to go 2/3 of the way up and then they'd be happy, and they both assumed that went without saying and never told each other.

However, even for poly people, it's useful to describe exactly what relationships you'd look for. Eg swingers who might say, "I have a primary relationship progressing most of the way up the escalator already, I'd like casual sex, but don't want to progress any further". Eg. people in a primary relationship, who might be eager for another relationship, but content with that not progressing to equal-primary status.

If I were designing Betan relationship status earings, I think _this_ is what they should encode. Not whether someone has a relationship, but what relationships they're open to. And it's a detail you normally have to ask, if they're "interested in a short-term relationship but not a long-term relationship" because they've already got one and don't want two; or because they're going to another planet in 9 months; or because they're happy without one and don't want one at all. And of course, it only works if people can be honest about what they want now and might want one-day without people barraging them with innapropriate offers.

Every six months I come back to thinking about free will, and wishing it were easier to grok the latest received wisdom... As I posted elsewhere, I have a couple of my own thoughts.

One is that on the apparent contradiction between free will and predestination is that if you imagine "me" is some abstract supernatural spirit completely divorced from matter, but mysteriously acting in concert with it, then you face all sorts of logical problems, including "if what I chose to do is determined by the laws of physics acting on neurons in my brain, then am I constrained by that". However, if (as I do) I think I am the arrangement of neurons in my brain, then I'm not being controlled by anything else, I am those physical processes. I think that's as free as you can ask for.

I prefer to call that "the concept of free will is an approach to several different things we understand intuitively, but doesn't correspond to a single coherent concept, and coherent definitions of it are either obviously valid or obviously invalid". But as far as I can tell, it's the same idea as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism, even though I disagree with the name.

The second thought is, as with any question, to ask "what would it mean for us NOT to have free will". Well, actually, we have very good examples of that. What we think of as our will is often overridden by impulses: impulses to be generous, impulses to be lazy, etc, etc, that pretend at the time there's a good reason for them, but really, we act on them on impulse because our rational brain doesn't override it quickly enough. In fact, both the impulsive and rational parts of me are all "me", but that process of being overridden is a very good illustration of what it means to not have free will. If that's NOT having free will, then it at least gives hope that the rest of the time, we do have free will.

A last thought, what is the evidence that we DO have free will (if that means anything). I've read many people trying to explain this, and I'm not sure if there's good arguments I'm missing. Because to me, most arguments boil down to "I really want to believe this is true" and "it feels like it's true" both of which apply all the time to things that actually aren't true.

Souls in scifi

I always like fantasy about the nature of the soul or the nature of gods. I think it's because I'm drawn to the idea of a primal sort of understanding of people, one of the greatest mysteries. But to me, it means I'm drawn to things vaguely reminiscent of a popular conception of old academic theology, people making massive strides into the nature of reality by pure reason, and embracing towering arguments about some theological point, whether or not they're any good, or what's good about them is actually something else.

I like the same thing in science fiction. In Anathem, I love the idea of concents where intellectual pursuits are encouraged all day (even if I don't think it's a good idea per se). And I love the idea that human brains are build on some sort of quantum trick (even though I think it's complete hokum). I'm drawn to that sort of thing and resentful when -- inevitably -- it turns out not to be as insightful as it looks, because you can't easily overturn the nature of reality in one book.

Likewise, I like "real" science fiction, which seriously explores some unusual premises (physics or otherwise) -- sometimes I can read pages and pages of just worldbuilding. And the same in fantasy which is harder to do, but worlds with consistent metaphysics about what makes gods tick, etc, I can't get enough.

Wish fulfilment

But what's bugging me is -- how much is that harmless wish fulfilment, and how much is it dangerous wish fulfilment? Some wish fulfilment is harmless because it talks about something that would be nice whether or not we can get it. Some wish fulfilment is good because it inculcates in us an idea of what our life or society should be like, from the small (I wish I had a lovely friend) to the large (I wish we had a techno-utopia).

Some wish-fulfilment is harmless in moderation, but dangerous in surfeit. Books like Atlas Shrugged or Ender's Game are valuable for their intended audience (small business owners in USSR and intelligent bullied children) to say "you don't have to give in to them, you can be awesome". But can be very dangerous in the hands of people who are already prone to being powerful selfish and narcissistic, and find in the book an excuse why stealing from the rest of humanity is actually a moral thing to do.

Some wish-fulfilment is harmless but can be addictive. Which is where I think my "understand the world" urge falls. Some authors actually say interesting things about our minds (Greg Egan, Ted Chiang). But many more capture that moment of "Aha! I understand!" without giving any actual understanding. Which is fine in fiction, but I'm not sure how much it's a good thing in itself, and how much it's a trick.

And whether the same can apply in real life -- I am drawn to people who claim to show me how to understand everything, but am also cynical, because I know most such people are misled, but I don't WANT to be cynical, but it's preferable to the alternative, or is it?