Metablog

Excuse my sappy title. Why is it that so many elections in the US are so close? Is there a dynamic that leads to really close elections? Party leaders wanting to pursue their own agendas, but not to compromise more than they have to on ideology, and that leads naturally to selecting the politicians that can appeal to just barely enough of the voters to win the election? Then again, I guess there haven’t really been that many close elections in the US. I wonder if the recent trend will continue, or if it’s a fluke.

And I think we’ve all heard about the study that 90% of our past presidents have been the more handsome of the candidates, or something along those lines. Is there a source for that? (A few seconds of googling puts the number for elections in general at 56%, but that’s not what I remember.)

Why is it that one’s salary is such an incredibly sensitive topic in America? (Do other countries have this attitude as well?) Not knowing what other people in your company make is harmful to you, because you can’t be sure you’re not getting screwed. Why can’t more companies have open compensation policies? And further, why can’t workers push for this? Is open pay much more standard in unionized industries?

Having a minimum wage increases unemployment among the low-skilled. It also makes it more expensive for companies to get low-skill tasks done. But without a minimum wage, our poor would become even more impoverished, and the country would be a pretty terrible place to live. A universal basic income (a policy I support) would alleviate the negative aspects of this associated with poverty, but it wouldn’t really help with the inefficiency concerns. With a UBI, companies would still have to pay more (perhaps 50-100% more) to get low-skill tasks done, because the jobs are generally distasteful, and the marginal utility of the salary to the workers would be much lower. If the UBI were a guarantee, where the government makes up the difference between the basic income line and the person’s salary, the situation for employers would be worse — the guarantee line would form an effective minimum wage higher than itself. If the UBI were independent of the person’s other income, the effective minimum wage would probably be considerably less than the UBI level.

Whether the minimum wage is effective, though a UBI, or actual, it would create incentives for companies to automate, which I think is a Good Thing.

I triggered an interesting thread at Unfogged today, wherein I get the commentariat there (mostly liberals) to give their various opinions on Libertarianism by expressing puzzlement at the animosity between the two groups, since in my limited experience they don’t see to be all that much opposed. I have quite little to say there, except for this:

Private enterprise leads to perverse incentives. So does government. Those incentives affect different kinds of services and products differently, such that for some things government will be largely free of perverse incentives and private enterprise full of them, and for others it’s vice versa. Deciding which incentives apply in which situations, and which are better and worse, is a matter for careful analysis, and it’s terribly unlikely that any blanket statements can be made.

Can’t everyone agree to that?

Words of wisdom.

Should the manager of an online community be responsible to its commenters, or to its anonymous readers?

Say I put a blog post out, and someone comments (on my blog? hah!) politely and articulately with a question that I think is utterly trivial and silly. (Let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that my judgement accords with that of most readers, which it normally won’t reliably do.) Now, if I want to engage with the commenter, I have to respond to the comment, and enter into a conversation whose starting point is an inane question. This exchange could have value for the commenter, if they’re open-minded. Otherwise, they’re a troll. Let’s assume they’re openminded.

So, a polite, articulate, openminded, and ignorant or slightly stupid person asks a silly and trivial question. I can give that commenter value by answering it. But how much does reading that inane exchange cost my other readers? Is the total cost more than the value I give to that one commenter? Should I delete the comment, and save my other readers the trouble? What if the question is obvious and trivial, but not quite inane or silly?

There are a lot of people worrying nowadays about the global energy crisis. Peak oil. The lack of alternative energies. The practicality of solar and hydroelectric and wind and the politics of actually getting it implemented. But why are comparatively few people concerned about the graver dangers facing humanity? Things like genetic engineering, which has the potential to allow a terrorist to create a supervirus, or nanotechnology, which could create something like a supervirus, only that acts much quicker and affects all life instead of just a few species (including humans). You would think people would be worried about this. Well, you would think that if you thought that people were rational. But they’re not, not, not, not. The field of heuristics and biases tells us that humans make scads of different errors, in predictable ways, when we do reasoning. The paper I link, by Eliezer Yudkowsky, gives a great overview, with a specific eye as to how they affect evaluations of global risks.

His next paper (to be published in the same book), deals with another specific threat facing humanity. That is, the creation of a smarter-than-human intelligence. A smarter-than-human intelligence is not simply an intelligence with a very large IQ. You see, IQ (as far is it really does measure general intellectual ability) covers the infinitismal range of intelligence from dumb human to smart human. That complete range, compared to the range from no intelligence to human intelligence, is an extremely tiny dot. And when we sucessfully program an AI, it starts out with no intelligence, and quickly travels along the line until it reaches human intelligence. Is there any reason it should stop there? No, if it gets to human intelligence in the first place, it’s quickly going to go far, far past that. (That’s even besides recursive self-improvement.)

Anyway, that’s just a small taste of the article. He has another great piece of writing here. What is truth?

Theoretically, money is the same thing as “value”. Some generic entity that can be transferred, in continuous quantities, between people. An entity that people are concerned with maintaining a rough balance, or even inflow, of.

In reality, when people do valuable things for each other, the context (whether it’s a business transaction) is very important in determining whether money can be exchanged for it. Non business transactions can be very much transactions, in the full sense that business transactions are. For instance, if you’re dating some guy, starting out expecting to spend some X number of hours a week together (determined implicitly and approximately, of course,) and he starts to blow you off, the reason you’re mad at him is because he violated an implicit contract, which is, in a restricted yet practical sense, the same kind of contract as any business contract. If you marry a guy on the expectation that he’s going to be an active parent, and then he turns out to be more interested in his career or his pub, then you’re going to be mad because he violated a contract.

In fact, these implicit contracts can really pop up all the time. If you bake some sort of dessert for an acquaintance, accepting it is going to indebt them to you, in your and their own minds, to at least maintain a certain level of friendliness and interest in your life until that debt is repaid. Now, people never put it in these terms, and rarely think about it in these terms, but the terms actually describe pretty well what goes on in these situations. People get offended if you don’t reciprocate a certain level of conversational interest in their life.

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A comment about some columnist or another I just read gave me an idea. Any division of labor that divides enough so that a task goes below the minimum threshold for the employee to be fully engaged and challenged by it, creates long-term inefficiences in that machines can always do rote tasks much better than people, and that people who are less than fully engaged by their work will have less opportunity to invent these machines. Far from Adam Smith’s firetruck boy, who replaces his job with some well-placed scrap of metal so that he has more time to play, the vast majority of workers actually have incentive *not* to replace their own jobs with machinery.

Incidentally, while I strongly believe that worker unions are necessary to keep quality of life reasonably high for workers, it seems to me like unions also have the effect of slowing down automation, which is a really good thing in the long term. But unions have a strong incentive to oppose any developments that automate and deprecate jobs.