posted on January 24, 2021 05:26 PM by
u/textlossarcade
94
u/DELETED80 pointsat 1611511290.000000
Does yud actually think the major constraint on vaccine development
at the moment is lack of money? Like, I know Yud’s not that smart but
I’d figure even a really mediocre high-school economics student would
have an intuitive sense diminishing returns quickly set in when you’re
dealing with massive, well-funded pharma companies.
What’s so puzzling about this take is combines a weird amount of
blind faith in the power of corporations unfettered (got-dang price
controls tellyawhat) with a sense Pfizer & BioNTech completely
dropped the ball on an obvious solution.
If getting a five billion dollar loan in April would have
significantly increased production, does Yud really think it would have
needed to pull this scheme to get it? Like, when Trump was touting
“Operation Warp Speed”, the U.S. was offering about bn in R&D funds
– but Pfizer actually turned it down. I don’t see how you can square
that with the idea all that was keeping us from nirvana was a loan.
To certain kinds of people, money has moved from being the signal for what's possible, to being the only thing that really matters.
Nevermind that logistical issues, manufacturing yield, skilled staff hiring, etc, etc are the real choke points. But money can solve everything... kinda, but you have to harness it effectively. And sometimes you can't buy the things you need.
That's why the Biden admin harnessing FEMA, and possibly the military to run vaccinations in areas that are underserved is an important move. But Mr Only Money Matters Yud can't figure any of that out, it's below his level of abstraction it seems.
In light of his doubling down, I feel like this is also the product of the rationalist tendency to turn “it’s possible that these things are connected” into “these things, and only these things, are connected” because it confirms their priors (e.g. “it’s possible that there’s a genetic component to IQ, therefore IQ is entirely determined by genetics, therefore our racism is totally scientifically valid, you guys!”).
Like, easy counterexample: there is a shortage of apples. There is also a price control on apples. (Unstated: The price of apples is capped at $5,000 each.) *What happened here?*
Last year, at the start of the pandemic, didn't we have a spate of articles about manufacturing and logistics to explain to all the newly birthed armchair experts why it takes more than piles of money to produce PPE and ventilators? He could start there, if he cared to spend a little less time "thinking" for himself.
This is the problem with first principle thinking... it's only as good as you understand the system.
And frankly.... math is relatively simple. It's HARD but simple.
Real life is.... simple but COMPLEX. Which means it's hard to understand because gathering the data and knowledge isn't easy either.
His arguments are completely neoliberalism-pilled. "Human wellbeing = economic value", so anything that reduces our maximum potential economic value must be inherently, axiomatically, be bad.
The idea of using price controls to assure vaccines go to people who need them, rather than people who pay for them, is nonsensical to neoliberals. Because to them, "economic demand" (i.e., the ability to pay) is the only means of assessing who benefits from what. "Economic value is the only method of interpersonal utility comparisons", as David Friedman says.
This is the logic of "revealed preferences": If you can't "reveal it" (i.e, pay for it), that must mean you don't really want it. Poor people aren't willing to pay $10,000 for vaccines, which must be evidence that they don't really want them, so we should give them to rich people instead. It really is that dumb. Chicago School brainworms.
> Poor people aren't willing to pay $10,000 for vaccines, which must be evidence that they don't really want them, so we should give them to rich people instead.
[If the demand vastly outstrips supply, then him selling it at a higher price seems to have a value in that he sells to whoever values it the most.](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ffzcei/coronavirus_containment_thread/fkj3swq?context=2) [+13 on the motte about price gouging hand sanitizer]
I like your comment. Thanks for it.
So true - when you use price as your metric for life, then you are subject to manipulation in various ways. Eg: check out the GME stuff.... the people buying and holding don't think GameStop is worth so much, they just know the market mechanics will short-squeeze and fuck the hedge funds, and they hate them.
The idea of using price controls to get vaccines to people who "need" them is indeed nonsensical. If you have a method of identifying people you consider to have particularly high need and getting vaccines to them, then using that \*instead\* of monetary auctions is a valid strategy. But simply attacking monetary auctions, rather than replacing them with some thought out plan, is an absurd strategy, and simply causes non-monetary auctions to spring up, such as who-is-willing-to-stand-in-line-the-longest auctions (which then tend back towards to monetary auctions with extra steps as people use their money to subvert the process).
>If you have a method of identifying people you consider to have particularly high need and getting vaccines to them, then using that *instead* of monetary auctions is a valid strategy. But simply attacking monetary auctions, rather than replacing them with some thought out plan, is an absurd strategy
I didn't feel the need to elaborate on the alternative strategy to using market prices, because the alternative *is what we're doing now*. The state has determined certain categories of people who need the vaccine and distributes the vaccine based on these, instead of by ability to pay. And this is good. It could be made better, sure, but switching to a price system would certainly make it worse.
But just for the sake of argument, let's pretend the state has no distribution plan other than "cap the price, and see what happens". You are right, this would replace monetary auctions with non-monetary systems, such as "who is willing to stand in line the longest".
But you know what? *This is still superior*, as "willingness to stand in line" is a better proxy for how much utility an individual receives from the vaccine, compared to "ability to pay". Using markets, there's no way to determine what people actually value vs. what they don't, because of the diminishing marginal utility of money (i.e., a dollar to a rich person is worth very little, compared to a poor person). But the variation between humans in "ability to wait in line" is less than the variation in "ability to pay", so "sanding in line" actually gives you better utility-information: People who fear for their lives will be bringing their blankets and pillows to sleep on the sidewalk, people who aren't really scared won't waste their time.
>I didn't feel the need to elaborate on the alternative strategy to using market prices, because the alternative
>
>is what we're doing now
1. From what I've read, what we're doing right now is a lot of non-monetary auctions such making people wait in lines.
2. You use the definite article "the", as if there is a unique alternative strategy, but there isn't.
3. The clear meaning of "price caps" is "price caps", not "price caps plus some measure that I expect you from context to infer".
> "willingness to stand in line" is a better proxy for how much utility an individual receives from the vaccine, compared to "ability to pay".
Is it? Ability to wait in line is negatively correlated with health, and less healthy people quite possibly will suffer health effects from waiting in line. Furthermore, people engaged in essential work are less able to take off a day from work.
> Using markets, there's no way to determine what people actually value vs. what they don't, because of the diminishing marginal utility of money
That's just silly.
> People who fear for their lives will be bringing their blankets and pillows to sleep on the sidewalk
People afraid for their lives will go out in public and spend the night around other people who may already the virus?
At least with a monetary auction, wealth is being transferred. With waiting in line, wealth is simply being destroyed.
>Ability to wait in line is negatively correlated with health
Lack of income is also strongly negatively correlated with health. Auctioning off vaccines deliberately transfers them to the income brackets who need them the least. Lines aren't perfect, but if you are going to make me choose, I'll choose lines since there's at least some correlation between willingness to wait and valued gained from the vaccine. It beats the market system any day on this front.
>That's just silly.
No, it's 100% correct. Neoliberal economics is an ideological castle of sand. The diminishing marginal utility of money is an arrow to the heart of the concept of using aggregated economic value as a proxy for aggregated utility. People intuitively understand this, but it's possible to beat it to a dull numbness in their minds through decades of libertarian-capitalist propaganda.
>People afraid for their lives will go out in public and spend the night around other people who may already the virus?
Oh, you got me! No one knows about social distancing yet in 2021.
>At least with a monetary auction, wealth is being transferred. With waiting in line, wealth is simply being destroyed.
Fuck your wealth. I will gladly destroy economic value in the name of human utility. Give me a volcano to throw it in.
> there's at least some correlation between willingness to wait and valued gained from the vaccine.
There's also correlation between willingness to pay and need.
> The diminishing marginal utility of money is an arrow to the heart of the concept of using aggregated economic value as a proxy for aggregated utility.
Your original claim was that markets give no information about preferences. Now you're changing the subject to a bunch of socialist propaganda. I could present an argument against your new position, but you'd probably just shift it to another again.
> Oh, you got me! No one knows about social distancing yet in 2021.
I see you prefer sarcasm to articulating a point. Social distancing does not eliminate risk, let alone perceive risk.
> Fuck your wealth.
It's not \*my\* wealth. It's the wealth of poor, sick people.
> I will gladly destroy economic value in the name of human utility.
Economic value \*is\* human utility.
> There's also correlation between willingness to pay and need.
I don't see any reason to assume this.
>Economic value *is* human utility.
lol no it isn't
Let me spell it out:
Let's say not dying form Covid is worth 100 utils, and not having a (non-fatal) case of Covid at all is worth 2 utils.
A poor person who needs the vaccine to live, may be willing to offer a maximum of $10,000 for the vaccine (everything he owns). This would net +100 utils
A healthy billionaire who doesn't want to ruin his week with a fever, may be willing to offer $30,000 for the vaccine. This nets +2 utils
However, the market auctioning off the vaccine to the billionaire clearly nets more *economic value* than transferring it to the poor person. (As you appear to be someone with a working baseline of economic knowledge, I presume I don't need to explain why this is).
So in this straightforward example, a relative increase in aggregated economic value actually results in relative drop in aggregated utility.
>I don't see any reason to assume this.
You don't see any reason why, everything else being equal, someone with a high need for a vaccine would pay more than someone with a low need?
>lol no it isn't
You are attacking a straw man. I said that economic wealth is utility. As applied to the current situation, a world that differs from ours only in that no one had to wait in line for a vaccine, with no other difference, would have more utility. I didn't say money is a perfect measure of utility.
>So in this straightforward example, a relative increase in aggregated economic value actually results in relative drop in aggregated utility.
That depends on how you measure economic value and aggregated utility. And if you object to uneven distribution of money, then once the rich person has bought the vaccine, money is slightly less unevenly distributed. And that slight decrease in unevenness is larger than the amount that the difference between the utility of the two uses of the vaccine.
>You don't see any reason why, everything else being equal, someone with a high need for a vaccine would pay more than someone with a low need?
The "all else being equal" part transfers us from a world we exist in, into one that we don't. So long as wealth inequality exists, you cannot say that a person who pays more for a vaccine needs it more than someone who doesn't. I'm not interested in gaming out scenarios of what might happen in a hypothetical world with perfect wealth equality right now.
>And if you object to uneven distribution of money, then once the rich person has bought the vaccine, money is slightly less unevenly distributed. And that slight decrease in unevenness is larger than the amount that the difference between the utility of the two uses of the vaccine.
If you are poorer than a pharmaceutical company, buying the vaccine from them actually *increases* wealth inequality.
But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that you are part of the minuscule group of billionaires for whom buying vaccines actually transfers wealth downward. You are trying to tell me that the utility gained from this nearly-insignificant compression of wealth (billionaires -> pharmaceutical companies) *outweighs* the utility gained from state distribution of the vaccine based on need (to sick people, healthcare workers). Why??? How????
the charitable thing to say is "yes, he does actually think this incredibly stupid thing, because he's a complete dunce"
the uncharitable thing to say is "no, he doesn't think this stuff, but he knows peter thiel wants him to say it, so he must say it nonetheless"
He's playing 5D chess. This is all just to soften up investors for a $5bn investment in MIRI, so that AIs can invent new vaccines, pay back the investors, and put those investors on the "don't recycle for resources yet" list.
The Yud doesn’t have an (accurately) intuitive sense of anything really, except perhaps that he needs to afford his lifestyle somehow. He’s reached that point where he’s geared his entire personality towards making money. He knows his audience and by God he’s going to rip them off.
It’s all a bit sad really, he’s like Elizabeth Holmes with less artistic talent.
The most interesting thing about “the whole LessWrong project” in light of /u/IsThisSatireOrNot is that if you’d done a bit of analytic philosophy (like me) you could have seen the whole thing coming from the start.
The Yud embraces all the reductionist metaphysics of the boring kind of minor-league analytic philosophers, and simultaneously draws out of that all the most boring politics you would expect from the kind of reductionist philosopher who grew up with a certain politics and wants to prove it - without actually doing the back-and-forth of trying out whether it’s right.
He’s the Kathleen Stock of his chosen field.
[responding in insufferable rationalist voice]: Ah, Yudkowsky’s
reflexive desire to “do something!” has, as my priors
predicted, failed to consider the unintended consequences of
meddling with our established economic institutions. Has he even
considered why norms (such as price controls) on life-saving
vaccines even exist? Chesterson’s Fence strikes again…
Does yud actually think the major constraint on vaccine development at the moment is lack of money? Like, I know Yud’s not that smart but I’d figure even a really mediocre high-school economics student would have an intuitive sense diminishing returns quickly set in when you’re dealing with massive, well-funded pharma companies.
What’s so puzzling about this take is combines a weird amount of blind faith in the power of corporations unfettered (got-dang price controls tellyawhat) with a sense Pfizer & BioNTech completely dropped the ball on an obvious solution.
If getting a five billion dollar loan in April would have significantly increased production, does Yud really think it would have needed to pull this scheme to get it? Like, when Trump was touting “Operation Warp Speed”, the U.S. was offering about bn in R&D funds – but Pfizer actually turned it down. I don’t see how you can square that with the idea all that was keeping us from nirvana was a loan.
EDIT: LMAO he’s doubling down. To quote the great philosopher GPT-Psych-V-Moe: Sasuga, Yudkowsky-san.
Eliezer sounds like a gamer trying to theorycraft reality.
[responding in insufferable rationalist voice]: Ah, Yudkowsky’s reflexive desire to “do something!” has, as my priors predicted, failed to consider the unintended consequences of meddling with our established economic institutions. Has he even considered why norms (such as price controls) on life-saving vaccines even exist? Chesterson’s Fence strikes again…
(surveying the Venutian hellscape with my big market-brain) Remember: If we had implemented an emissions trading scheme of my own design…
Wouldn’t hurt for this guy to follow the Yud around 24/7 as a kind of grounding influence.
The US government committed bilions of dollars to buy hundreds of millions of doses from companies before they even finished phase III trials.
Real sociopath hours.
It’s weird to see Matty having the good take for once.
Jesus Yudkowski is absolutely noxious in his world-outlook here. Yeah buddy, because that’s the systemic problem with the vaccine.
Deep-throating capitalism, folks. Don’t do it.
The good: Pfizer gets money they could have gotten anyway.
The bad: You live under a regime of amateur economists who award each other points for coming up with the most offensive policies.