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Jacob Lyles's blog
Battlestar Political-Economica?
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Sat, 2010-03-20 03:58.I just started watching the first season of Battlestar Gallactica and I find it curious that the Cylons don't appear to have any politics or economic activity. I would think that beings advanced enough to be sentient would have disagreements, factions, problems of collective action, specialization, and trade. Maybe the writers reveal more about Cylon society later in the show.
It is an interesting choice to make the cybernetic lifeforms monotheistic (I'm guessing based on hints through the first six episodes and Caprica). The BSG writers have a more creative imagination than most when it comes to envisioning the culture of killer robots. I'll be disappointed if it stops at that one little detail. Also, I would have been more impressed if the robots developed a religion themselves instead of apparently inheriting it from their human creators.
In episode 3 the humans were wise to choose democracy as a form of rule. Libertarians often criticize democracy because voting acts as an "opiate of the people". By dangling the hope of non-violent change through the ballot box in front of discontents it stifles the growth of revolutionary movements. This is a priceless feature for the government of a tiny human society in constant threat of military annihilation. Governing by the consent of the governed reduces the chance of conflicts that would split the human remnant and leave them weakened. Besides, with only 50,000 survivors they will not have to worry about the danger of a government growing too large, entrenched, and powerful.
I won't be reading any comments so as to avoid spoilers. And yes, I know I am terribly late to the party.
Economics Puzzle
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Sat, 2010-03-20 02:17.This one has been bugging me for awhile: Why does McDonald's charge 20 cents more for a single cheeseburger than a double cheeseburger?
A Whopper to the commenter with the best answer!
Democrats vote to keep poor kids out of good schools
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Thu, 2010-03-18 03:26.I guess the more accurate headline would be "Democrats vote to preserve teacher union monopoly". For the second time this week, a party line vote denied funding for the DC Opportunity Scholarship fund.
There are some issues where I am closer to the Democrat platform than the Republican. But on issues like this, the Democrats' shameless bowing to the unions turns my stomach. I doubt that I can ever vote for a Democrat without breaking out in hives.
Markets and Culture
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Tue, 2010-03-09 01:57.(I wrote this in response to a professor's complaint on a mailing list about the rampant commercialization of modern culture)
Markets enable coordinated action between anonymous individuals. They are essential for the functioning of large-scale society. But they have popped up rather recently in our evolutionary history so they don't sit well with our subconscious. They feel, well, anonymous and impersonal. As they are.
So in the classroom we organize interaction to look like much older social structures that sit better with our subconscious, namely tribes or extended families. One could imagine the professor as an older hunter, passing along his knowledge of tracking game animals in the forest to the tribe's children. Markets for labor and material are used to make the university function but on the inside it doesn't look that way.
It is considered rude for a boss to influence his employee by reminding him that "I pay your salary", although it would be an accurate statement to make. Politeness requires us to temporarily forget that market forces were often responsible for drawing us together in the first place; we remember only when we get a paycheck or a tuition bill comes due. Even at the checkout line in a grocery store we make small talk with the clerk and inquire after his well-being while the true nature of our interaction is as plain as the money we hand over.
At the risk of sounding Panglossian, this seems pretty optimal. There is wisdom in choosing the correct social structure to apply to any given interaction. Markets enable us to build and run structures like universities, but it would feel wrong if a professor charged students for attending his office hours, or if students paid his salary by handing over a $10 bill at the beginning of every class.
But I do think our innate suspicion of markets may be stronger than what is rational and we sometimes fail to use markets in situations that make sense. I also think we tend to underestimate the good qualities of markets, especially when we harken back to halcyon times when markets figured less prominently in everyday life. Yes, life was more personal then, maybe even happier. But people also had a lot less freedom in how they organized their lives. Freedom is one of the market's two most compelling virtues (the other is economic growth).
Who created civilization?
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Mon, 2010-03-01 01:53.My own opinion towards religion is that its ontological correctness is one of its least interesting attributes.
Your Future
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Tue, 2010-02-09 05:05.I'm not sure which is more frightening: the dystopian future presented in this advertisement, or the fact that a company thought this vision would appeal to some people.
Structuralists @Cato
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Mon, 2010-02-01 14:29.Cato offers some marginal structuralist ideas in lieu of campaign finance reform:
Life Terms Members of Congress serve for life. Few special interests will throw money at the political process in this system, because the cycle of funding and response won’t exist anymore. Elections will be hard to predict and infrequent, and once the election’s over, the member-elect can vote however he wants till he kicks the bucket. Parties and partisanship will be vastly weaker — also a good thing as reformers see it.
Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment We hear much about the corporate influence in politics, and many worry that it is bought through campaign contributions. The solution to the problem of faction, as our founders understood it, was not to prohibit faction, which would restrict liberty, but to set one faction against another. Let the corporate interests have the House of Representatives. The Senate will once more be elected by state legislatures, which will use their powers to advance interests not necessarily in line with the corporate agenda. Faction will check faction, and free speech will survive.
Election by Lot In ancient Athens, important officers were commonly chosen by lottery among all the citizens. This method, called sortition, may be asking a bit much of our citizens today, but it would certainly end the problem of shady campaign contributions. This measure would be most effective if it came with a life pension for former members, to avoid all fears of bribery and to compensate citizens for their interrupted lives.
The Old Legislators’ Home Much like sortition, ostracism has a fine pedigree in western democracy. Here’s to bringing it back.
We hear a lot about the “revolving door” between lobbying and serving in Congress. Let’s end it once and for all, not by restricting lobbying groups, but by restricting congressmen. Whenever anyone retires from Congress, they aren’t allowed to go back to work in the private sector… as anything. They’re permanently retired.
We’ll send them to the remote, though very pleasant, Hawaiian island of Molokai, where they will be maintained in idleness, with all reasonable expenses paid, for the rest of their lives. (An inducement to early retirement would also do much of the same good work as term limits.)
Unlike Seasteading, these ideas are too dependent on the whims of the majority of a Democratic populace to ever get enacted. But it's still good to see people think outside of the policy box from time to time.
Lefty Structuralists
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Sun, 2010-01-31 20:29.Lessig makes a structuralist case against US Govcorp
Question for Open Borders Folks
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Sat, 2010-01-30 13:57.What do believers in open borders do about terrorists who want to immigrate, or other people of an unsavory character? What if the extent of a potential immigrant's transgressions was praising terrorists in public press? He hasn't actually harmed anyone, so to prevent him from immigrating would be unjust according to an open borders philosophy.
I think it clear that the government should prevent such a person from immigrating. In the worst case scenario, he is actually a peaceful person and our country will lose a tiny bit of economic benefit through the loss of economic exchange with him. But if he is not a peaceful person then the decision to let him immigrate is disastrous.
Odd Ends
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Fri, 2010-01-29 04:29.In discussing politics, I prefer to focus on outcomes over ethics. This sounds like I am taking a stand on the ageless means versus ends controversy but I'm not. Rather I consider the use of good means to be part of a good outcome. Means and ends are fungible; they can be traded off against each other.
To sum up my political values in one phrase: I don't like to treat people poorly and I don't like for awful things to happen. This captures the way that many people think about politics, maybe even most people.
However, libertarians tend to elevate means above ends to an extent that is unpalatable to the popular conscience. The standard way that libertarians wiggle out of this criticism is to deny that libertarian means ever lead to anything but the best possible outcomes. But that is when the movement takes on an air of a religious phenomenon - economic scientology. It assumes the existence of a benevolent world that is not guaranteed.
If you can't think of one instance where libertarian policy might create a sub-optimal outcome under some circumstances, then we're not going to have very interesting policy conversations. Anyways, I'd rather discuss structure instead of policy.
Libertarian ethics has a weird effect when it comes to the policy decisions which shape the substantive character of the world in which we live. Current governments possess an odorless, colorless quality called "publicness", and therefore libertarian ethics condemns these entities as illegitimate managers of the land they possess. Moreover, it strictly limits the policies they may ethically pursue. Governments may not create a public safety net which alleviates the worst suffering of citizens from sudden illness or injury - the taxes to pay for it would be coercive. Nor may governments seek to shape immigration policy in favor of well-educated and highly-skilled persons, or prevent pollution in situation where the cost of doing so through courts is infeasible (e.g. pigovian gas taxes), or offer incentives to have children to a population breeding below the replacement rate. A manager cursed with the quality of publicness must sit on its hands and hope that everything works out for the best.
But in some future world where all governments have passed through at least a momentary period of "privateness" (think seasteads or burbclaves) libertarian ethics allows managers to enact any set of policies they damn well please. If every government in the world were a fundamentalist theocratic mormon dictatorship that flogged gays and banned coffee, libertarian ethics would consider that perfectly fine as long as the management was put in place by some legitimate owner.
Libertarian ethics can lead to weird outcomes in some extreme circumstances, outcomes that most libertarians wouldn't like. I suggest we should allow outcomes to shape our decisions in concert with our ethics so we can live in a world that is pleasant to be in and not just a world that satisfies all the checkboxes of our moral philosophy.
This is the Libertarian Paradox again. It is also a good case for Moldbug's Formalism, which is less about ethical navel gazing and more about designing governments that have the incentive to function well.
Pirate Government Pirates
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Wed, 2010-01-27 01:26.Econ Talk is my new addiction. Today I listened to Patri's interview on seasteading and I had a thought on the problem of piracy.
One of the obvious difficulties with seasteading that occurs to everyone when they first hear of it is the problem of pirates. Seasteading supporters often respond to these fears by noting that pirates will not have an incentive to attack seasteads because the vessels will provide little booty of value compared to the pirates' normal prey, cargo ships.
But this answer is incomplete. There is one obvious piece of booty of high value on a seastead, namely the seastead itself. What pirate wouldn't kill to have a permanent, mobile, highly-engineered, self-sustaining sea base?
My objection is not unanswerable. I get the impression that most modern pirate operations are small and located in coastal waters, so it isn't hard to avoid or outgun them. Pirates would have to make major changes to their organizational strategy to pursue well-defended seasteads in deep ocean waters. But given the value of a seastead, making the change may just cross the 1:1 benefit/cost ratio threshold.
Keynes vs. Hayek (Music Video)
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Tue, 2010-01-26 16:37.This video deserves to be posted on every blog:
Written by Russ Roberts, the producer of the excellent and entertaining podcast, Econ Talk
The Libertarian Paradox and Bad Policy
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Tue, 2010-01-26 01:46.I don't want to live in an area that indiscriminately lets in millions of poor immigrants from the third world. I believe such a place would be unpleasant to live in. At least I want my government to keep out the crazies with bombs.
Libertarian moral philosophy clearly allows me to pursue this goal privately. I am allowed to band together with other people, buy up some land, and prevent immigrants we don't want from moving to our gated community. Furthermore, in some future anarchist seasteading utopia where governments were privately owned and operated, libertarian philosophy allows me to choose to patronize a seastead government that is discriminating in how many and what kinds of immigrants it accepts (I'm moving to the one with Megan Fox). What's more, judging from public opinion polls I believe such discriminating seasteads would be vastly more popular and profitable than open borders seasteads.
But because we do not live in a libertarian world and much of the property in the United States is owned by the government, many libertarians (example) hold that we have no moral choice but to pursue an open borders policy and let in any immigrant who wishes to come.
This is an example of what I am christening the "libertarian paradox". Because of the governing systems currently in place, libertarian moral philosophy compels us to advocate for bad policies that nobody really wants. Because the roads and borders are not private property, it would be immoral for us to use government force to prevent some immigrants from using them to move here.
And then libertarians wonder why their message is so unpopular, all the while they are advocating policies that nobody, not even most libertarians, would voluntarily choose to live under if they had the personal free choice.
I'll give you another example of the L-paradox. A few months ago I read a blog post in support of a policy of mandatory paternity tests at birth. The author, and myself, think this policy would prevent severe injustice and provide incentive for people to act in more moral and honest ways. But then the author, a libertarian, backed off from his advocacy because he felt uncomfortable making any policy mandatory and thereby using government force on anybody.
But if we had a free choice between living in a society with mandatory paternity testing and one without it, both the author and myself would cheerfully choose the first. Again, libertarian moral philosophy compels us to pollute our real, current world with bad policy, saving our good ideas for a future world of private governments.
I'm a structural libertarian. I think we will have a more pleasant, productive, prosperous, and just world if people had substantive individual choice over the political systems in which they live. I believe modern governments are incurably insane, and most policy is too expansive. But I think it perverse that libertarian moral philosophy constrains us to make bad decisions until we achieve libertopia.
Funny story.
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Mon, 2010-01-25 03:14.Three years ago I started working for an investment bank that raised money for firms that sold CDOs - one of the financial derivatives that caused the grand market shit storm in whose splatter we are still living. As a fledgling young analyst, I experienced a feeling of disquiet because I couldn't understand how CDOs created value. I felt dumb. I was especially embarrassed because I had a degree in Economics and did well in school, so I assumed I should be able to grasp the idea behind financial products at least at a high level. But my doubts were soon drowned out by a torrent of work. I blamed my ignorance on my inexperience and moved on.
After all, "they" wouldn't build a trillion-dollar market based on bullshit, would they?
For those not current on financial jargon, a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) is made by taking a $100 million worth of mortgages, throwing them in a box, and then selling pieces of the box for a total of about $105 million. ~ $1 million gets paid to the investment bank who sells the pieces and the rest of the profit gets kept by the firm who owned the mortgages. Not a bad gig.
In fact, CDOs weren't always composed of mortgages. You could put other financial assets in the box, too. You could even buy pieces of other CDOs, throw them in a new CDO, and sell the pieces for more money. These are called "CDOs-squared". I-shit-you-not.
By now you might understand why I was puzzled by how this activity constituted a valuable economic enterprise. Theoretically, CDOs created value because owning half of two mortgages is safer than owning 100% of one mortgage. And that's true. If one mortgager defaults, you still have 50% of a mortgage that's sending you monthly payments. But that line of reasoning is a lot more true if you're the kind of person who buys one mortgage than if you're the kind of person that buys 10,000 mortgages. If you have a large budget, then you can already diversify pretty well on your own. CDOs are a convenient source of diversification, but is the convenience enough to justify paying some yahoo middleman a 5% cut?
As it turns out, the answer is "no". Part of that 5% value creation was generated from convenient diversification, but part of it came from the fact that once you throw all the mortgages in the box it's harder to figure out how risky it is to own them. So "value" was created by temporarily hiding the down-side behind a chain of opaque securitizations. This later blew up in our collective faces.
When the economy started to collapse partially from the collective weight of toxic unpriceable CDO slices, I remembered my earlier confusion and laughed. Maybe I wasn't so dumb after all.
Seasteading: the Anti-Wall
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Mon, 2009-11-09 16:52.Patri provides a solid analogy to illustrate the basic economic mechanisms behind Seasteading on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
How to think like a Conservative
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Mon, 2009-11-09 03:26.To a conservative, the character of a society is derived from more than the structure that law gives it. If you are going to reduce Conservatism to one simple phrase, one distinguishing thesis, it would be this: culture matters.
Conservatism argues that people with a healthy culture can form a happy society even with a poor structure of laws. It also posits the converse: that people with an unhealthy culture will not thrive even under the best legal structure.
Libertarianism focuses solely on the structure of laws. To the extent that it acknowledges the culture of a society at all, it insists that culture be left to laissez-fare as a matter of morality. Libertarians assume that societies with any arbitrary culture will turn out okay if the incentives of the law are well-designed.
Change. Hope.
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Wed, 2009-11-04 00:15.Every generation must relearn the lesson: don't trust politicians.
A year later our candidate that valued technology, openness, and government transparency, the darling of Silicon Valley, is up to the same old bullshit.
No Guarantee of a Benevolent World
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Wed, 2009-10-28 12:48.(My apologies, this post was inspired by another person's blog post, but I can't seem to recall whose)
Imagine a world where there is perfect equivalence between the set of policies that are just and the set of policies that are beneficial. In this world there is never any trade-off between justice and utility. Many libertarians believe in this beautiful equivalence. Furthermore, they believe that libertarianism describes the set of policies that lie at the optimum point for both curves.
But there is an epistemological problem with this belief. However much we desire this equivalence to be true, we can not prove it a priori, because "beneficial" is an empirical quality. This makes the truth of the equivalence contingent on the scrutiny of evidence. And the sad fact is that I observe more evidence against the hypothesis than for it.
For example, I hold Western values towards gender equality and individual autonomy. They seem just and desirable to me. But all the peoples that hold such views are breeding below the population replacement rate, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "Demographic Winter".
This raises the possibility that free expression of human individuality is an unstable cultural/policy position for society to adopt. It may be that women's ambitions must be constrained to reproduction and family for a society to survive. Otherwise, too few people will voluntarily choose the pain and effort that comes with raising a family over modern pursuits more carefully tuned to stimulating the pleasure centers of our brains.
Rationalists like the folks over at Less Wrong take the beautiful equivalence a step further by adding a third term: truth. The three-way equivalence is "truth = justice = utility". (I must apologize, it has been awhile since I have read their writing, it could be that any views I attribute to them have changed. I remember it as a naively optimistic place.)
But again, there is no a priori reason for this equivalence to hold. No less than Less Wrong's own Robin Hanson tackles the link between truth and utility, when he opines:
Rationality certainly can have instrumental advantages. There are plenty of situations where being more rational helps one achieve a wide range of goals. In those situtations, "winners", i.e., those who better achieve their goals, should tend to be more rational. In such cases, we might even estimate someone's rationality by looking at his or her "residual" belief-mediated success, i.e., after explaining that success via other observable factors.
But note: we humans were designed in many ways not to be rational, because believing the truth often got in the way of achieving goals evolution had for us. So it is important for everyone who intends to seek truth to clearly understand: rationality has costs, not only in time and effort to achieve it, but also in conflicts with other common goals.
Yes, rationality might help you win that game or argument, get promoted, or win her heart. Or more rationality for you might hinder those outcomes. If what you really want is love, respect, beauty, inspiration, meaning, satisfaction, or success, as commonly understood, we just cannot assure you that rationality is your best approach toward those ends. In fact we often know it is not.
The truth may well be messy, ugly, or dispriting; knowing it make you less popular, loved, or successful. These are actually pretty likely outcomes in many identifiable situations. You may think you want to know the truth no matter what, but how sure can you really be of that? Maybe you just like the heroic image of someone who wants the truth no matter what; or maybe you only really want to know the truth if it is the bright shining glory you hope for.
Rationality is also not necessarily beneficial on a group level. For example, I am a good atheist; I believe that religion is false. However, I also believe that religion may benefit individuals and groups that follow it. Any atheist who believes that religion is solely a scourge upon the human race needs to explain its amazing resilience in human history.
Religion might even be the least bad solution to Demographic Winter - American Mormons live lives that are relatively free compared to most of humanity, but their faith and values still drive them to marry and have babies. If this is the case, then it severs the link between rationality and utility at the level of society. The beautiful equivalence is in tatters.
Assuming the beautiful equivalence is false, we still have choices to make. We can make ourselves martyrs to justice, choosing policies that we believe to be right; knowing that societies with fewer scruples will thrive while we whither away. We can choose policies that make an explicit trade-off between utility, truth, and justice. But if the equivalence is broken, then we must choose. We cannot have everything we desire. The universe is not benevolent.
I brought these worries up at Less Wrong, but nobody was willing to debate with me before I had familiarized myself with dozens of Eliezer's old essays. So, I post them here. Have at them.
Greatness
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Sun, 2009-05-03 04:33.It is of nights like these that legends are built. Manny Pacquaio was a war god in the ring - inhuman, immortal. His fists were lightning, crossing the chasm to his opponent instantaneously. When the counter-punches came, he was mist.
Thus Manny destroys one of the best boxers in the world with an effortless six minutes of work. Such speed. Such polish. There is not a finer fighter living. My children's children will know his name.
A Cultural Note
Submitted by Jacob Lyles on Sat, 2009-04-25 03:54.While I agreed with many of their positions, in retrospect the anti-Bush movement was poisonous to the level of discourse in this country. At the time, I thought it was healthy for citizens to be vocal and active critics of the powerful. But millions of people, most of them my generational and cultural peers, became accustomed to viewing their political opponents as evil idiots. The battle lines drawn, they are incapable of thinking through a policy issue for themselves, adopting valid ideas from political movements other than their own, or perceiving a debate with a viewpoint uncolored by rank partisanship. Their politics reside at an unfortunate intersection of boring group-think and dangerous, assertive self-righteousness.
Moreover, the fanaticism of the anti-Bush movement fueled the emotional, messianic campaign of Barack Obama, whose Presidency has wiped out any remaining impulse to be critical of power. The smug assuredness professed by young urbanites in the rightness of Barack's policies, no matter how questionable the merit, eerily mirrors the manner of their cultural hero, Jon Stewart. All their critics get from them is a clever, sneering label. Repeat it enough, and the "debate" is won. Repeat it loudest, and receive adulation.
The battle of ideas is never engaged. Why should it be? Their opponents have silly and awful ideas. They know this because they laugh at their opponents and call them names. If they had any ideas worth listening to, then why would they be so widely ridiculed?
On the internet it has become widespread custom, even in places that profess political neutrality, to accept boorish and uncivil behavior towards those who hold incorrect opinions. If you don't believe me, try to say something nice about Mormons or Republicans in a mainstream online community. This author is not responsible for the flamewar that results.
Finally, the attitude has spread into real life. Hoodlums at UNC recently created a disturbance, and even broke a window, to prevent Tom Tancredo from speaking at their university. The irony that students who loudly support diversity and tolerance should act so violently in suppression of "dangerous" ideas is lost in a rush to action. If any in the crowd were to feel the tiniest pang of guilt, perhaps Jon Stewart will crack a joke about Tancredo, and that wonderful tonic of self-righteousness will soothe any doubts and return their minds to a smooth, untroubled state.
The ghosts of the French Revolution stir on our continent. Youths on the internet receive a hundred "up-votes" on social news sites for suggesting that bankers should be slain in the streets, a thousand for suggesting the same of Republicans (who, just to be clear, I don't like nearly as much as bankers). When discussing the morality of this, the voice of modesty that suggests that rich people, Republicans and Mormons have done nothing deserving of capital punishment is down-voted into oblivion. The idea that members of unpopular groups ought to have human rights, too, is met with the contention that they have forfeited their rights by behaving in unpopular ways. A finer group of Robespierres have never been seen outside of France.
The older folks have to tell me - was it always this way?