The UK saw this evening how LessWrong rationalism plays out when you try to apply it to real things - not so well. Here's poptart on precisely how Dominic Cummings, the World's Most Famous LW Rationalist, messed this one up. #classicdom
(https://irrationallyspeaking.home.blog/2019/10/22/dominics-basilisk-part-1/)
posted on October 22, 2019 10:58 PM by
u/dgerard
57
u/Ambrose_bierce8933 pointsat 1571788299.000000
But unfortunately to explain how and why and why that matters I need
a ridiculously long preamble about Nazi legal theory.
Gimme a break, I've spent 5 years and more writing cleanly analytical philosophy for the disinterested benefit of other academic philosophers, having a bit of space to stretch and be entertaining is a godsend for me
It's kind of happened by fits and starts and hints (sometimes my hints, sometimes other people's) to such a degree already that I don't really mind. I don't have anything on this account that I'm ashamed of and if there is anything I'm *supposed* to be afraid of then a lot of it is buried under layers of long posts about philosophy of science and so on. My twitter account had my name behind it from the beginning about two years ago as well so whatevs and that's where most of the crossover has happened.
Fears about doxxing are mostly based on the amount of risk you take in online shit and as a card-carrying member of the woke establishment I don't really take those risks (like posting inflammatory racism on /r/TheMotte or fucking with people who SWAT video-game rivals), and before while the anonymity was nice on its own terms my objections to very mild doxxings such as this self-doxx was more about propriety than anything else.
Unlike someone like Nathan Oseroff-Spicer (a personal friend) I'm not really exposed to online abuse.
I don't have the profile to raise their attention
I've encountered them a couple of times but they don't really notice much
Even the ones who find out I'm mates with drunkentune etc.
It’s funny that this describes the rationalist attitude as a faith in
human reason and perfectibility. I usually get the opposite impression -
that they are bending way over backwards to say that humans are
virtually incapable of reason and that thus any given action is
practically as likely to have the opposite result as the intended one.
“We must trust in the invisible hand of the market because any attempt
to intentionally do better is bound to fail” and all that.
It's a bit contradictory in this way. The formulation of "rationalism" by LW was that "rationality is systematized winning." So it falls in that sort of self-help genre. I'm not sure what Yud's opinions on macro-economics are, but since he used to blog with Robin Hanson, I'd guess they fall somewhere in that neo-liberal/techno-"libertarian" zone. In that view, no matter how much winning you do, you can't outsmart the mega-information processor that is The Market.
Yud (predictably) endorses the conservative/libertarian end of the economics mainstream, and I'm pretty sure his favourite namecheck is Scott Sumner. Sumner is a or indeed *the* market monetarist (originally from - you guess it - Chicago), meaning roughly that he endorses a rehabilitation of vaguely Friedman-style laissez-faire in monetary policy but without the nutty stuff about fixed interest rates and automatic monetary expansion.
Sumner is particular known for about two main ideas:
Monetary policy is the primary tool of economic policy for fostering growth even in a recession (i.e. not public works, or other Keynesian deployments of fiscal policy), and therefore supports e.g. quantitative easing;
NGDP targetting, whereby rather than set target rates of inflation in the economy, central banks should have target rates of Nominal Gross Domestic Product, this is a bit harder to sum up but the basic idea is that NGDP is more informative about the state of the economy because it responds more quickly and directly to up and down swings in business investment.
My impression is that Yud is mostly just following his nose, as you suggest, to "which is the more technocratic libertarian policy" and I doubt he really understands or even cares about the messy details. I would be *very* surprised if he were able to accurately describe the reasons for favouring a more interventionist or more stereotypically "left-wing" fiscal policy beyond a headline or Paul Krugman blog post.
Here is Sumner himself re-upping a LessWrong Yud post on the subject which I vaguely remember skimming most recently a few months ago, and I'm pretty sure I skimmed Sumner's commentary too, but frankly I'm not very interested in either market monetarism or Yudkowsky's opinions on macro so I confess I may be missing something:
www.econlib.org/archives/2017/11/central_banks_s_1.html
It's certainly very telling that when speaking outside his expertise (specifically about particle physics), Sumner defers to "Yudkowsky, David Deutsch, Scott Aaronson, Robin Hanson, etc." all of whom either don't know particle physics or are just blog-famous talking heads he's heard of because they're internet famous.
Geez, actual economist citing Yud is scary. IIRC, Yud wrote some creepy-looking novella or something that was supposed to be an allegory for Keynesian economics, so I thought he might have been somewhat unorthodox for rationalists on that issue.
To some extent he is, at least in the sense as is usual for Yud to keep a few fairly conventional pop ideas in his back pocket. Remember he's - for example - pretty good on surface level LGBT stuff. Here is Sumner recommending Yudkowsky's market monetarism takes (only, by again just linking to the same dialogue he linked to in my other Sumner link).
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/12/whats_my_core_m.html
The book is this one:
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/oLGCcbnvabyibnG9d
And I'm not very interested in reading it.
Scott Alexander, predictably, reifies the book as uniquely prescient on the incentives of Japanese central bankers and Scott Sumner concurs in the above link:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate-equilibria/
But as Sumner's own commenters by the line of the above blog post point out these issues with Japanese central banking had been identified for years by people across the political spectrum and with far greater expertise than Yudkowsky. Paul Krugman is probably the most famous public economist in the West for commenting on issues with Japanese fiscal and monetary policy, and comes to very different conclusions than Yudkowsky in spite of minimally advocated some similar policies, and Krugman has the advantage of having got there by actually talking to Japanese economists. I doubt that Alexander has an especially strong grasp of either the similarities or differences.
It should be revealing that Alexander couches his endorsement of Yudkowsky twofold: "he (and many others) thought [Japanese central bank policies] were stupid; "A friend told Eliezer that the professionals at the Bank surely knew more than he did". The combination of these two retreats renders Alexander's endorsement both meaningless and tendentious. The former because it makes Yudkowsky no more right than your da who reads the op-eds; the latter because there is no reason to take this notion that Japanese professionals were wrong and Yud was right at face value. Many people were suggesting that these things were obvious from the beginning, professional opinion is often highly motivated, why is that interesting unless we're casting tendentious aspersions about expert opinion?
> https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/30/book-review-inadequate-equilibria/
Jesus fucking Christ.
>The same is true, more tragically, for housing prices. **There’s no way to short houses**. So if 10% of investors think the housing market will go way up, and 90% think the housing market will crash, those 10% of investors will just keep bidding up housing prices against each other.
It is *absolutely* possible to "short houses" (ie - bet against the housing market). People do it all the time. They literally made an Oscar-winning movie about it, called "The Big Short". What the fuck is he talking about?
It's not true that people bet against the housing market (and win) "all the time". Alexander is wrong here but not for that reason. He's simply out of his depth as to why people don't bet against the housing market.
His model where 90% of investors are bears and 10% bulls is not only unexplicated (and I do think it's funny that he smugly gives you the model without explaining what it does), but basically irrelevant. You win on a short-sell if you bet against somebody else's overconfidence, whether it's one person with bad assets they think are good, or a whole market that's overvalued. Doing that for housing is generally unwise because (a) the value of housing overall *generally* trends upwards and (b) individual houses aren't especially what you'd call liquid (and for short-selling if you want a profit you want a liquid asset, something that can change hands and release value fairly easily, not to mention you want to know that your buyer is going to be able to fulfil your contract - not possible if they don't have the liquidity or credit to do so).
In Alexander's model you're trying to get people in an already madly bear market to overvalue their assets (themselves rapidly dropping in market value) which just isn't the strategy that people would use if they're trying to short housing.
He's got a toy model that does no explanation whatsoever and bears no relation to how short-selling is practiced, so the Big Short example - which was an outlier in terms of shorting housing in the first place - is just irrelevant even as a counter-example, but I guess it sounded clever to him to say what he did and he got to pretend that he knows what Finance PhDs are up to as well so good for him.
hey idk if you'd even care about this minor nitpicky thing, but i'm gonna point it out in case you do
>but they can further invent troubling hierarchies which rank individual people and worse, groups of people [7], according to the degree to which they approach that perfection.
I think you meant to reference footnote [8] there
Currently that cult’s most febrile platform is a subreddit called
/r/TheMotte, but for reasons connected to the proliferation of
commentary, the second law of thermodynamics, and the heat death of the
universe, I won’t go into details about that.
Quality sneer
He who fights Motteniks, must take care not to become a pompous, rambling writer himself
It’s funny that this describes the rationalist attitude as a faith in human reason and perfectibility. I usually get the opposite impression - that they are bending way over backwards to say that humans are virtually incapable of reason and that thus any given action is practically as likely to have the opposite result as the intended one. “We must trust in the invisible hand of the market because any attempt to intentionally do better is bound to fail” and all that.
Followup: /r/TheMotte on Dominic Cummings today
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/dkvpb6/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_21/f515lzc/
Much love for this