enoch_r

> It's functionally isomorphic to a black box where I make a deposit, every time it denies someone medical treatment I get back monetary reward and I can withdraw my deposit at any time. If we ask ourselves, "Should this black box exist?" I cannot reasonably expect people to say, "Yes." Yet, here we are.

I am honestly extremely baffled about what your mental model here is. When UHC doesn't deny a claim, who is paying for that treatment? You can't just look at one side of the ledger when deciding whether the system is doing good or bad! They deny some claims and they pay for others! You're leaving out the whole second half!

This:

> imagine no market volatility - everything is constant (e.g you've bought bounds)

is where everything breaks down.

Yes, if you keep all your money under your mattress, which is what's actually modeled here (bonds bear interest!) then as long as you don't run out, the unspent amount doesn't matter.

But that would be absolutely bonkers and no one would do it. Instead, you invest in interest-bearing assets. The current inflation-adjusted risk-free rate of return is 1.76%. So if you have a net worth of $2M, you could invest it in bonds and spend $35k a year forever and still pass on the entire principle when you die, essentially guaranteed. If you have a net worth of $500k, on the other hand, you could invest it in bonds and spend $8,800 a year forever.

Of course this would still be crazy - you can get higher yield by taking some risk (and notably, having a higher net worth will allow you to take more risks and get more reward without the risk of running out of money) - but even in the "just buy bonds" scenario, you're much better off with $2M than $500k.

It basically means "trust, but not too much."

If the lottery administrator's daughter wins the lottery, he may say "no, no - don't you see, her probability of getting the winning numbers is exactly the same as anyone else's!"

But in reality, we can say that:

- her probability of winning in the world where her father is cheating is very high

- her probability of winning in the world where her father isn't cheating is very low

Together these two facts give us evidence about which world we're actually inhabiting - though of course we can never be completely certain!

In the same way, yes, it's equally (im)probable that the winning percent will be 51.211643879% or 51.200000000%. But the latter is more likely to occur in a world where Maduro said "get me 51.2% of the votes" and someone just did that mechanically with a pocket calculator, which is good evidence about which world we live in.

Everyone is certainly interested in the long term health of the company. But exogenous shifts like technological change, trade, COVID, etc. might cause the company to go under - or maybe you're just outnumbered by people who make poor decisions.

If this happens, people who have worked at the company for 15 years and have most of their "retirement" in the form of ESOP shares will a) lose their jobs and b) lose most of their retirement savings. On the same day.

Libertarians sometimes fantasize about how if we didn't have the FDA, people would be incentivized to do their own research on food and drug safety. Sure, sometimes dumb people would get it wrong and kill themselves! But that's just the price we (well, they) need to pay for everyone to have good incentives. This seems like the same category.

That book strongly reminds me of this review of "On the Road":

> On The Road seems to be a picture of a high-trust society. Drivers assume hitchhikers are trustworthy and will take them anywhere. Women assume men are trustworthy and will accept any promise. Employers assume workers are trustworthy and don’t bother with background checks. It’s pretty neat.

> But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.

Imagine you're on a snowmachine 10 feet south of the North Pole pointing due east. I tell you to ride for 10 miles without turning. You don't need to worry about map projections or anything - just don't turn. When you stop, are you still 10 feet south of the North Pole? Clearly not, you'll be about 10 miles south of the pole.

It's exactly the same if you start in Seattle. If you drive for 10 miles without turning, when you stop you will no longer be at Seattle's latitude - you'll have gone south.

FWIW I did not get that impression at all, and I'm bewildered by all of the combative comments here. It's a cool thought experiment!

> Travel exactly due East. Now, ignore what East means.

It's "face east, then travel in a straight line," not "travel due East" (though I agree that the title itself is misleading).

IMO, it's a cool thought experiment because it demonstrates that an instruction to "travel in a straight line" is incompatible with an instruction to "travel due East" (unless you're on the equator!) - as the North Pole example illustrates. Start 3 feet south of the North Pole and face east, then start traveling in a straight line. Obviously after 10 or 100 or 1000 miles of travel you'll be essentially due south of the pole - and in fact, if you take a single step to the left, you will be exactly due south of the pole!

To be clear, you're being taxed on the asset's value, not on the unrealized gain. This conversation seems more like:

- you make $100k a year

- you pay $20k in taxes

- one year, you buy a house for $400k

- in the next year, its value doubles to $800k

- I say "your income (including unrealized gains) last year was $500k. You only paid $20k in taxes. That's only a 4% rate! How unfair!"

Among other things, I find the whole thing silly because of course it'll only be used to criticize the low tax rates of people who have unrealized gains. If Amazon crashes and Jeff Bezos's net worth goes down by $20B and he pays $100M in taxes, no one will write an article about how unfair it is to tax the poor guy $100M on his incredibly low income of negative $20B. Poor guy, he'd probably be the lowest-income person in the whole country!

I think the media portrayal is quite wrong, but the reality is far worse for the anarchist ideology.

Around 1% of people are responsible for 63% of all violent crime convictions: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24173408/

So the vast majority of people are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. But a tiny minority of people, even in a world where we try to force "reasonable behavior," cause an unfathomable amount of suffering and destruction. If we completely give up on the idea of "forcing people to behave," you have to have a good answer about what exactly these people do in that world, and what exactly happens as a result.

> Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.

This is an empirical question. It seems to me that even if a good-sized majority of the population is capable of living in this fashion, a small minority is absolutely not. (And this obviously is not due to "deprivation" or "inequality", unless you believe that white collar criminals are "deprived.") A small percentage of people can quite easily ruin things for everyone else, e.g. in NYC where a third of all shoplifting arrests were for 327 people (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...).

Do you use the Ark for software developement? How is it? I've been trying to decide whether to take that plunge since it came out...

> the overwhelming groupthink shows there's clearly little critical thinking amongst OpenAI's employees either

I suspect incentives play a huge role here. OAI employees are compensated with stock in the for-profit arm of the company. It's obvious that the board's actions put the value of that stock in extreme jeopardy (which, given the corporate structure, is theoretically completely fine! the whole point of the corporate structure is that the nonprofit board has the power to say "yikes, we've developed an unsafe superintelligence, burn down the building and destroy the company now").

I think it's natural for employees to be extremely angry with a board decision that probably cost them >$1M each.

> And across all tasks it's only half a standard deviation, meaning the result is far from significant.

I can't read the original article because it's paywalled, but assuming that the original claim is correct ("increased performance by approximately .5 of a standard deviation across all tasks tested") and that by "significant" you mean "statistically significant" then you are spectacularly and confidently wrong.

Imagine we have a normal distribution of IQs around 100 with a standard deviation of 15.

Imagine there were some intervention which resulted in a uniform increase in IQ by half a standard deviation across the board. Perhaps the intervention is "literally add 7.5 points to every single score in the treatment group."

You seem to be asserting that because the effect size is "only" half a standard deviation, we have no way of determining whether or not the intervention actually increased scores, no matter how much data is collected. We could collect 100 million IQ scores in the control group, and 100 million IQ scores in the "treatment" group, and see that the average score in the control group is 100 and the average score in the treatment group is 107.5, and we'd have to say "nope, the null hypothesis looks completely plausible here, because the effect size was just half a standard deviation."

Does that seem like a reasonable claim?

I'm not saying that Gazan civilians deserve to suffer because they voted for Hamas. I am saying that Hamas tries to inflate the death toll for Gazan civilians (both by lying about that toll, and by taking actions with the express purpose of increasing that toll).

If you refuse to go to war with Hamas because of this fact, you incentivize that behavior.

I can't really think of a more just case for war than "the government of a neighbor just brutally, intentionally slaughtered civilians in a surprise attack in our country." It doesn't matter whether the neighboring country is a dictatorship or a democracy.

It very much sucks for the people of Palestine that Hamas chose to start a war with Israel and is using tactics that purposefully result in the death of Palestinians. I hope that they stop putting rocket launchers in and next to schools. I hope that they start allowing people to evacuate. I hope that they stop lying to their people about "psychological warfare" in an effort to get more of them killed. I wish that neighboring countries would allow Palestinians to escape the carnage, and adopt strategies that actually support the Palestinian people rather than the Palestinian cause.

But the IDF and Israel do not control that. And I'm honestly not sure what people expect from them. If you can't fight an enemy that hides behind civilians, then hiding behind civilians is an obvious winning strategy. And personally, I don't want to live in a world where the government most willing to sacrifice their own people automatically wins any conflict.

The numbers we have for IDF civilian deaths in Gaza come from the governmental authority in Gaza. That government authority happens to be Hamas.

- Hamas falsely attributes civilian deaths to Israel (as you can see from the "hospital strike")

- Hamas vastly inflates civilian casualty counts, somewhere between 2-5x as you can also see from the "hospital strike" which was immediately claimed by Hamas to have killed more than 500. US estimates have it between 100-300, and I think the photos of the damaged parking lot are extremely damning for Hamas's claims - yes, an explosion and fire in a crowded refugee camp could kill lots of people, but 500 is absurd.

- Hamas tells civilians in Gaza to ignore text messages from the IDF telling them to evacuate because their residence may be bombed.

- Hamas sets up road blocks to prevent civilians in Gaza from evacuating.

- Hamas sets up military installations and ammunition caches next to or in civilian installations, including kindergartens and mosques. (You can find videos of bombings resulting in massive secondary explosions as ammunition caches pop off.) They hide in refugee camps (https://thehill.com/policy/international/4260111-israel-hama...).

I think it's worth asking whether there is any way to wage a just war against a government like this, that is literally trying to maximize the number of its own civilians killed. And if not, what kinds of behavior does that incentivize?

The author tweeted the following (https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/171333500612114051...):

> To be entirely plain.

> I have always viscerally opposed war. I have dedicated my life to conflict resolution and reconciliation.

> But in the coming Gaza genocide, every act of armed resistance by Hamas and Hezbollah will have my support.

> If that is a crime, send me back to jail.

I think this is pretty clearly supporting Hamas. The "in the coming" bit gives him a bit of leeway, of course, since he's not actually saying he supported the October 7 massacre itself (though presumably he is saying he would support another one, if it were it to occur now?), but he certainly doesn't seem to be making the sort of "I support Palestinians, not Hamas" argument that you assume.

Personally, as an American, I've been told by Europeans here that our attitudes towards free speech are bizarre, and that government has an important role to play in, ah, curating the information ecosystem. Despite that, I still believe that people like Murray should be perfectly free to argue for their views, however much I personally find them abhorrent.

That's fair. The most egregious line, I thought, was: "it means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane." I took this to mean that we should essentially eliminate criminal justice entirely. But of course, that was the article author, not Sapolsky himself.

> This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.

> “The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over,” Sapolsky said. “We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.”

I don't how much the reporter has embellished things but this seems really, really, really silly.

"People have no free will" does not mean that "incentives don't matter." Obviously, or we could simply prove that free will exists by noting that incentives do, in fact, matter.

Would more people create Ponzi schemes if they didn't have examples like Madoff and SBF of it all crashing down? Absolutely. Would more people steal if they knew they couldn't face punishment? Yes. Would more people drink and drive if there were no consequences for doing so? Yes. If Company A offers me more money than Company B, am I more likely to take the offer from Company A? Yes.

Given that incentives matter, it is absolutely fair and reasonable to "reward people and reward people" for their actions.

Even though I think the premise that people don't have free will is likely correct!

(It's also quite odd that Sapolsky would ask people to change their behavior, given his apparent beliefs...)

Not to mention incapacitation! It's really hard to steal cars from prison!

A very small percentage of people commit a shockingly high proportion of crime. In NYC, a third of shoplifting cases were committed by 327 people who were arrested over 6,000 times. That's just the times they were caught and arrested.

I can't find nationally representative data, but in Colorado, a news station looked at 10 randomly selected criminal cases for vehicle theft in 2021-2022. Every single one of the suspects had been accused of stealing cars more than once. Collectively they faced auto theft charges in 43 cases.

This is quite right. Similarly, speeding cameras are incapable of stopping speeding until _AFTER_ the speeding has occurred. Speeding cameras do not prevent crime, they cite people who are accused of speeding.

That's why when a speed camera is installed, it makes no difference whatsoever and everyone goes exactly the same speed they would have gone before.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20927736/

YAML is a superset of JSON, so if you prefer JSON, you can - any valid JSON is also valid YAML.

My claim is that we can't determine what caused a price change by looking at the distributional effects of that price change.

I demonstrated this with an example, where we know what caused a price change (supply chain issues for a substitute product plus increased demand) and know the distributional effect (higher margins for sellers of used cars). If we naively try to explain the price change based on the distributional effect, we would claim that higher prices were purely caused by increased greed. We know this to be false.

Look, perhaps companies really did become more greedy in 2020 and that's what has really caused inflation. Or maybe large amounts of stimulus caused increased demand. Or perhaps the war in Ukraine has caused supply chain issues which drives up prices. My point is that looking at the distributional effects of inflation is just completely disconnected from the question of what caused inflation in the first place.

At the very least, if you're claiming that we can figure out what caused inflation by looking at the distributional effects, can you provide some evidence, or some argument, to support that claim? Because I think my example demonstrates that common sense ("X benefitted from inflation, therefore X caused inflation") is not a good guide here, and if anything, the additional complexity of real markets works against you here - if we can't even explain inflation based on distributional effects in a toy market, what makes you so confident we can do so in the market as a whole?

> “Market price” is a hallucination that you can ignore. You’re not forced to go along with it.

It's a powerful signal containing important information! You don't have to go along with it, but it may be beneficial to others if you do.

As an example, we bought a new car in 2019. We were planning to sell our old car but every time we were about to sell it, it came in handy - family came to town and we needed two cars, or it was nice to be able to go two places at once.

In 2020, prices shot up. Suddenly, it was worth it to sell the car.

Someone who valued it more than us got to use the vehicle. Was that greed?

This argument is completely incoherent. You can't study the cause of inflation by looking at the distributional effects of inflation.

For example, in 2020 there was a huge increase in demand for used cars, and the price of used cars increased by ~40% within a few months. But people who sold used cars did not have their costs increase - they were, after all, selling an already completed product. The IMF would therefore estimate that between 2019 and 2020, ~100% of inflation in used car prices was due to margin increases rather than inflation itself.

This is obviously silly - the increase in prices was because there were too many buyers and too few cars, not because the owners of used cars suddenly because significantly more greedy overnight. It's the same with corporate profits. Inflation has distributional effects which are interesting to study, but we shouldn't confuse ourselves by claiming that the effects are actually the causes.

This is absurd. If you're willing to live somewhere moderately unfashionable, the vast majority of people on HN could easily afford to buy a house. For example, this 4 bed, 2 bath, 1800sf house just sold in Cleveland for $272k: https://www.redfin.com/OH/Cleveland/2548-Cheshire-Rd-44120/h...

That's a much nicer, larger house than almost all of our grandparents grew up in (plus has some great bonuses such as running water). Definitely larger than you need when you're retired, but maybe you want plenty of room for grandkids to visit.

I don't disagree with you at all. My point is that there's a spectrum here from "no cultural value on free speech" to "free speech is the highest principle" and I think it's perfectly coherent to argue that our society should value free speech and the frank discussion of controversial ideas more highly than it does today.

I don't think you're actually grappling with the idea of "a cultural principle of free speech" here.

If I imagine a culture with the maximum level of respect for free speech as a principle - a strong cultural belief that the best way to reach the truth is by debating ideas, even terrible ones - I imagine a culture in which a Nazi can state their piece at a bar, and then everyone calmly discusses their opinions and why they're wrong.

If I imagine a culture with a minimum level of respect for free speech, I imagine a culture in which I might say something anodyne, like "the minimum wage should be increased," and lose all the friends who disagree with me.

Think, for example, about high school debate. In the past, it was an arena in which various controversial proposals were thrown out and discussed. It had a high level of respect for free speech as a principle.

Nowadays, some debate judges say things like (this is an actual quote):

> I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments... Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.

Everyone here is exercising their freedom of speech. That doesn't mean they're showing equal respect for the free expression of ideas.

Intent is absolutely part of the law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373

> Whoever, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony that has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against property or against the person of another in violation of the laws of the United States, and under circumstances strongly corroborative of that intent, solicits, commands, induces, or otherwise endeavors to persuade such other person to engage in such conduct, shall be imprisoned not more than one-half the maximum term of imprisonment or (notwithstanding section 3571) fined not more than one-half of the maximum fine prescribed for the punishment of the crime solicited, or both; or if the crime solicited is punishable by life imprisonment or death, shall be imprisoned for not more than twenty years.

Intent is also one of the key factors that distinguishes between different categories of murder - it varies by jurisdiction, but generally premeditated murder (you intended to kill the person in advance) is different than a "crime of passion" (you intended to kill the person at the moment you murdered them), which is in turn different than an "accidental" murder (you didn't mean to kill the victim, but you did).