posted on July 29, 2021 02:24 AM by
u/textlossarcade
93
u/typell67 pointsat 1627527793.000000
the year is 2100. we live in rationalistworld where all
decisionmaking is done through prediction markets. sentencing is done
through prediction markets. legislation is done through prediction
markets. medical diagnoses are decided by prediction markets.
we only keep the doctors, judges and politicians around so they can
give their ‘baseline’ verdicts, to which the predictions are compared
and paid out against. once prediction markets were determined to be
sufficiently accurate, the actual result of their decisions started to
be ignored in favour of the prediction markets’ results
elections are also prediction markets. the actual results of votes
are ignored, meaning your only relevant vote is how much you can pay
into the prediction market betting on your favoured candidate
the results of sports games are decided by prediction markets. the
teams still play, but nobody watches them
The Rationalists now no longer talk about prediction markets themselves (which they think is passe, and a sign you are an object level conflict thinker), they go all in on prediction markets about prediction markets (metamarkets), the place they think true objective truth lies.
It takes a special sort of mind to look at all injustices in United
States and conclude: “You know what the problem is here? Rich people
aren’t powerful enough”
It will average sentences out, incentivising judges to give maximum or minimum sentences because they know their score will be averaged via the markets, but less so if they only deal in extremes.
WHICH MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE, because the score could easily vary wildly according to the market, AND there is literally no way in this theory for the averaged sentence to be the one you actually WANT
Im looking at it from the perspective of judges trying to influence the final sentence (by not betting, but judging), but for this while betting market system to work you also need multiple judges to compete. There is no way a betting market can improve 'one judge gives a verdict' system. Which makes as much sense as his system (make up a prediction before the judge expresses his sentence (works great on closed cases)).
I can see what you’re going for, but it’d be remiss of me to model what he’s going for without having any more detail.
Nonetheless I’m gonna be remiss: as far as I can work out what he’s saying is much more general, because a sentencing betting market doesn’t work - as you rightly point out - if only participating judges are placing bets. For the implied Efficient Market Hypothesis thinking to work as it is supposed (supposed) to do on prediction markets, you need a much wider pool of people with skin in the game to make bets, from defendants to the accused, advocates, politicians, and so on - and Hanson surely is aware of this, he’s an idiot but he knows his own field of expertise. There’s essentially no way to make this work without opening the market to the broader populace who *already vote on the law*.
Which brings me to another point: if I remember correctly you’re from The Netherlands, which legally operates according to a very different system from America. Under Civil Law as in TN and as inherited from the Napoleonic Code, judges hand over sentences according to prescribed rules - or their interpretation thereof - strictly according to the reasoning of the polity in *making* the law. But in the US it’s very different, juries can move the judge this way or that as to what the law even means, even if indirectly: this means that at the heart of the sentencing disparity Hanson is so concerned about there’s no fixed gap between the law and sentencing to base his proposed system on.
Ah yes, the whole jury system forgot about that. (Our judges have some leeway themselves btw, so sentences can differ depending on context).
And yes, there I agree there is no way to make this work. We all here prob spend more time thinking about it now than he did with his tweets.
I was more discussing the degree that a jury can influence the judge, which changes the relationship between the polity and the judiciary, but yes good point
Otherwise we agree
Well if the market is really good, it should just ~perfectly predict the verdict, based on scrubbing judge's facebook and what the judge had for lunch and what time of day it is and what the defendant looks like and such.
But the thing I mentioned in another comment in this thread is that *even under ordinary market extremism* this wouldn’t make any fucking sense.
Hanson is implicitly advocating such an insane hyperdrive Efficient Market Hypothesis that he’s gone beyond the usual defences thereof to lean hard into a stereotype that even the most libertarian economics people I know/of frequently complain is some bullshit people make up because they don’t understand what it’s for: the standard complaint is that the EMH isn’t supposed to fucking apply to anything but finance, which as awful as it is is governed by regulations and laws and all that.
Hanson on the other hand is going so full nutjob that *these* people, who work in economics or financial economics or finance and worship at the altar of Milton Friedman would assume, if they didn’t know who was saying this, it’s an extremely online communist teenager satirising economists and *getting the economic theory wrong*.
Yeah it sounds like hes saying that what one would normally take for an inaccuracy of the market (inexact prediction of the sentence that the judge will give), actually makes sentence more accurate somehow.
And to be honest: I actually kind of get it. You know me, I’m full on for communism and/or anarchism or whatever. But Hanson’s argument makes some kind of sense if you take his (apparently implied, or so he would flippantly say upon being accused of being a charlatan) premise that the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Fine. Maybe a prediction market would genuinely be an improvement over the current utterly broken sentencing system of the United States of America. But that doesn’t satisfy what I think are even reasonable ends I’m willing to co-operate over with people further to the centre than I am.
And just mathematically, or in philosophy of action, or in decision theory: the application of prediction markets has absolutely zero justification even in hardcore libertarian economic theory. What do we say about who is able to game the market (who is even included in that transaction and why? Well now we’re back to legal theory so the question is moot and the prediction market has to lean on a legal question fucking *anyway*). You just don’t get rid of any of this shit without a much more serious analysis of what’s *currently* going on, and Hanson is just not in any fucking intellectual position to provide that.
ISTM that a prediction market that determines sentences untethers the judge's sentence from the one that is actually imposed. Over time the prediction market may more and more accurately reflect what sentence the judge gives, but that just untethers the sentence imposed from material facts about the case. The best predictions will more accurately reflect knowledge of the judges, rather than the cases. At the very best, an accurate prediction market just adds noise to whatever “accuracy” in sentencing the judge already provides (and you are hoping they continue to provide going forward, when you have removed the case by case incentive).
I don’t see how that could possibly result in a system that’s better. Just because something is not very good, it doesn’t mean it can’t get worse.
“ISTM”? Otherwise yeah I agree on instinct. I don’t know if it could be actually worse than the current system just because it’s so fucked, but instinctually - rather than analytically - I think you’re on the money.
I guess his idea is that it aligns sentencing with an equitable average of what sentencing *should* look like, since in the Robin Hanson Alternate Universe the Efficient Market Hypothesis isn’t just true, it’s an epistemic hyperdrive. The part I don’t get and which I assume he hasn’t even thought about is why this would be desirable or produce the kind of epistemic outcome we want: even in EMH Hyperdrive World you would assume that value conflict exists, and people would lose unjustly. I guess his reply would be that it’s better than the alternative he’s talking about right now, but then the reply to *that* would be that with his “em” book he already laid out a futurist vision that was deliberately and explicitly pessimistic, so we’re back full circle to asking if he’s really advocating a better-than-nothing system **at all**, or just proposing the kind of economic dystopia he thinks is inevitable, because he’s a fucking asshole.
Hanson’s other natural reply would be that he’s essentially just trolling because contrarianism is an ideas machine.
The fundamental "why" here is that people like Hanson are against democratic governance (Hanson is quite explicit about this, see: "Futarchy") He does not believe in the concept of democratic legitimacy. Like many extreme libertarians, he sees "market transactions" as the only legitimate form of interpersonal human behavior.
The problem in Hansons view, is that judges are elected democratically (or are at least appointed by politicians who are), instead of being bought on the marketplace.
Hanson does not give one shit that the rulings are "arbitrary". This is just a rhetorical move he is half-heatedly throwing out there, to try to warm up normies to the idea of privatizing the law itself. If it turns out that the judges in Hanson's privatized law "futarchy" (i.e. governance by rich people) are more arbitrary as our democratically elected judges, I'm sure he'd be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> (Hanson is quite explicit about this, see: "Futarchy")
Everyone who hears this term for the first time makes the same joke, right? It's not just me that's a bit broken, right?
In which Robin Hanson gets grumpy that Holden Karnofsky dismisses the
detailed prophecies of his ridiculous book out of hand and someone in
the comments has to explain to him how feudalism works (again).
Joking aside, I think the only real way to make sentencing more
consistent is to remove ‘tack-on’ charges as much as possible and
disincentivize prosecutors from over-charging to plea down.
In other words, you have to charge people for crimes you can prove
they committed, not fake crimes that don’t matter that you’re using as a
proxy for knowing they probably committed a real crime.
In other words, no more drug laws, gun laws, etc.
The possible downside of this would be prosecutors being literally
unable to prove crimes so they just release repeat offenders do kill
again. However they do this now when it suits them and I suspect we have
enough technology and with the right incentives I think we could
convince prosecutors to take violent ‘real’ crime seriously instead of
just trying to lock up whoever they can the most easily to check off
boxes.
the year is 2100. we live in rationalistworld where all decisionmaking is done through prediction markets. sentencing is done through prediction markets. legislation is done through prediction markets. medical diagnoses are decided by prediction markets.
we only keep the doctors, judges and politicians around so they can give their ‘baseline’ verdicts, to which the predictions are compared and paid out against. once prediction markets were determined to be sufficiently accurate, the actual result of their decisions started to be ignored in favour of the prediction markets’ results
elections are also prediction markets. the actual results of votes are ignored, meaning your only relevant vote is how much you can pay into the prediction market betting on your favoured candidate
the results of sports games are decided by prediction markets. the teams still play, but nobody watches them
Robin Hanson should hand his Twitter over to a prediction market that predicts what Robin Hanson will tweet about prediction markets next.
It takes a special sort of mind to look at all injustices in United States and conclude: “You know what the problem is here? Rich people aren’t powerful enough”
How is it possible to shit out an idea for a dystopian novel every time you try to have a serious take on politics?
[removed]
Wow, it’s almost as if legal formalism is bullshit and judicial decisions depend almost entirely on the identity of the judge making them.
Does anybody else get giggly at the word “futarchy?”
imagine talking to people and asking them why they did things? thank god* statistics has made this barbarism irrelevant. excelsior!
Yeah, there’s no way that a prediction market will replicate the biases of the society that it’s selected from….
But… why?
Robin Hanson’s takes on prediction markets are in every way worse than his talk on aliens. Let’s get back to the UFO posts!
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/07/will-tech-help-totalitarians.html
In which Robin Hanson gets grumpy that Holden Karnofsky dismisses the detailed prophecies of his ridiculous book out of hand and someone in the comments has to explain to him how feudalism works (again).
At the risk of wearing out my catchphrase: wat
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1419319072173535237
Did this take into account local vs federal law?
can someone tell me what the joke is, i would like to sneer but i flatly refuse to think this through
Joking aside, I think the only real way to make sentencing more consistent is to remove ‘tack-on’ charges as much as possible and disincentivize prosecutors from over-charging to plea down.
In other words, you have to charge people for crimes you can prove they committed, not fake crimes that don’t matter that you’re using as a proxy for knowing they probably committed a real crime.
In other words, no more drug laws, gun laws, etc.
The possible downside of this would be prosecutors being literally unable to prove crimes so they just release repeat offenders do kill again. However they do this now when it suits them and I suspect we have enough technology and with the right incentives I think we could convince prosecutors to take violent ‘real’ crime seriously instead of just trying to lock up whoever they can the most easily to check off boxes.