ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
If you sit down to play chess against Stockfish, you can say "this is just a matrix of evaluation functions and search trees." You would be correct. But if you actually want to win, you have to model it as a Grandmaster-level opponent. You have to ascribe it "intent" (it wants to capture my queen) and "foresight" (it is setting a trap), or you will lose.
No. When top GMs talk about how they play against computers, they clearly treat it in a significantly different way than how they treat humans. They know what kind of things are included in the evaluation function, like the 'contempt' factor, that can cause it to sometimes behave in non-human ways. They know that it is a perfect calculator (or at least as perfect as it's set to be, so often they're trying to probe how it's set to be), and that colors the way they think about positions and how they choose to spend their own time calculating.
One might occasionally anthropomorphize in terms of "it wants to capture my queen", just because that's easy to do, since one is so used to talking about human opponents in that way. But this is done even when one is not playing against any entity, human or silicon. Take, for example, the process of solving a puzzle. This is just purely a practice exercise. There is no human, no evaluation function or search tree, no model weights (many modern engines also use NNs) actually sitting on the other side of the board making actual moves against you. Sometimes, those puzzles are from actual games, so you can at least see what one other human thought. Sometimes, they have annotations for other lines, so you can see additional thoughts from other humans. Sometimes, they're computer checked (or you check it yourself), so you can see what compy "thinks" (computes). But fundamentally, you're just thinking game-theoretically, which requires you to think about two different (opposed) value functions. Some 'puzzles' aren't even puzzles; they're just evaluation exercises. "Here's a position, what do you think about it?" There's no actual entity on either side. But imprecisely thinking, "What does black 'want' here," "What does white 'want' there," is almost universally helpful, if not mandatory, just to keep in our mind the tension between differing payoff functions and how they interact.
I've done a fair amount of game theory, and it's natural to anthropomorphize purely abstract payoff functions, no model weights or neurons or anything required. When I'm working with new students, it takes work to get them to be able to reason about them, so it's an extremely helpful crutch to regularly poke them with, "...and suppose that player did what you're proposing; now, imagine you're on the other side; how would you respond?" And so, you just sort of get used to imagining a human-like (or for many of my purposes, a human augmented with computational resources) entity on each side, actually thinking in a self-interested way.
But back to GMs playing computers. They've been thinking this way for decades. Sometimes with actual humans on the other side, sometimes just a puzzle, whatever. They've honed the skill of rapidly thinking right past the step of, "What would I do if I were on the other side at that particular moment?" And these days, top GMs are pretty comfortable distinguishing between the different ways that engines "think" about positions. Watch a few of Hikaru's many many videos where he plays against a bunch of different bots. He very clearly understands that they're evaluation functions and search trees, and different combinations of evaluation functions and search trees of varying lengths have different strengths and weaknesses. He still regularly plays variations of 'anti-computer chess' where he's 100% banking on there being a significant difference between modeling it like a particular evaluation function with a particular set of search tree parameters (potentially also with a particular opening book/endgame tablebase) and modeling it like a GM-level human opponent.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Anyone who is an advocate for reducing the price of housing but isn't for building new construction is a liar who is a part of the problem.
The thing is though, if you are for building new construction, possibly in connection to wanting to reduce the price of housing, the predictable surety is the value of houses currently owned by people will go down.
Trump is just being honest in that he is siding with the landowners.
I should have spent more time trying to find the rest of the context of that clip. I debated it, but was lazy. There is a clue in that he briefly says, "We're going to make it easier to buy." A longer clip is here. He talks about this repeatedly. Making it "easier" for people who don't own houses to buy houses. The repeated message of the Secretary of HUD is about how they're making it so that millions more people "can afford" to buy houses. How is it "easier"? How is that they "can afford"? The major talking point is interest rates. ...as if lowering interest rates has no effect on the sale prices of houses. Lowering monthly mortgage amounts, offering lower down payment options like FHA loans or whatever, sure, these things get people into home borrowership, but they have other effects, too. Do people already forget the impacts of the drive to push more and more people into home borrowership twenty years ago, even resulting in significant impacts to government coffers as they were left picking up the pieces.1 These things are the sorts of ridiculous tinkers one comes up with to try to look like one is solving the problem when one hasn't grasped the reality of the core tension.
Trump is honest in that he's saying that he's siding with landowners, and he wants you to believe it. He's honest in that he's saying he's siding with people who want to buy houses, and he wants you to believe it. So we'll keep pushing the same flawed fake solutions, try to play whack-a-mole in the process, and never accept the limit of technocratic solutions.
1 - I've been lucky in that I decided a few years ago to start listening to the entire back catalog of EconTalk. It started in 2006, and I'm around 2011 now. There are plenty of episodes that aren't housing-related, but there is an incredible breadth and regular stream of folks grappling with and trying to understand the housing crisis, the crash, and the process of recovery. I guess I've been stewing in it enough that it's clear what people thought they were trying to do, how it sounded nice, how it all went wrong, and now we're basically repeating the same tune, just a different key.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I almost didn't write this, because from my perspective, "In a world where most people don't have coherent thoughts on Topic X, here's a politician who also doesn't have coherent thoughts on Topic X," may be a bit boring. I decided to write it anyway, because it gives a quick hook to the root of the issue, and I might as well lay it out in detail somewhere.
So, Trump speaks on the price of housing. For some societal context, there has been a bit of a movement toward trying to lower the cost of housing. YIMBY is oriented somewhat in this direction; I've even heard the phrase "Housing Theory of Everything" describing the perspective the high housing costs have a variety of other knock-on effects, and so it would be desirable to lower the cost of housing.
Trump highlights the core of the problem. He doesn't want to lower the value of "existing" housing. "People who own their home" should be kept wealthy with high house prices. But the kicker is that there's no way to economically separate the value of "existing" housing and the "people who own their homes" from, uh, "non-existing" housing? As sure as the day is long, if you have a stock of houses, each worth $1M, and then conjure out of thin air a plentiful amount of previously "non-existing homes" that only cost $500k to buy but are otherwise just as desirable, what's going to happen when an existing homeowner decides to sell their house? They'll list it for $1M, but all the potential buyers will look at that, look over at the same deal for only $500k, look back and think, "WTF? Why would I spend that much?" They're going to buy the cheap one. And so, if the existing homeowner wants to successfully sell his home, he will have to lower the price.
...but since everyone already knows that he would have to lower the price (since the price of whatever magical disconnected-from-existing-housing has been lowered), then everyone already knows that the "value" of that existing home is, uh, lower. These things are obviously connected; you can't just hold one constant and tweak the other.
I continue to maintain that the vast majority of folks out there simply do not have a coherent view on the simple question, "Should the cost of housing be higher or lower (or, I guess, the same)?" They want to magically keep the value just exactly as high or higher for existing homeowners, but somehow magically make housing otherwise generally cheap.
You can try (and oh boy does the government try) to come up with ways to just throw cash at the problem, but these efforts generally run into two major types of problems. First, that cash has to come from somewhere. Almost always, that's taxes. Who do you think is paying those taxes? This one we might file under the "obfuscation theory of government". If you hide it well enough that people don't realize that the cash being thrown at the problem to make it look like their right pocket is just as wealthy as it ever was is in fact coming out of their left pocket, they just might not realize?
Second, most schemes end up having to play endless whack-a-mole for the follow-on effects if they want to maintain general cheap housing while keeping house prices high. For example, all the business about throwing cash at first-time home buyers. Some of that reduces the cost to folks who don't own a house, and some of that increases the price of the houses (going to the sellers), and that seems like it could just solve the problem, right?
Well, consider a renter. They're not getting the bag of cash thrown their way. But the price of the houses that they'd like to rent are going up. So their rent is going up. So the cost of "housing" isn't going down for them. Are you going to play whack-a-mole and start subsidizing rent, too? This way Venezuela lies. What if you just jack up the FTHB cash-throw? Just accept that renting is going to be basically infeasible, because getting into the home-borrowership (to use a phrase from Arnold Kling) carousel is now too economically attractive in comparison. Sure, you'll end up with fake and gay high house prices, but everyone "gets in", right? But even then, your 'wealth' is fake and gay. Suppose you want to sell your house and reap the sweet sweet value that you have. Well, where are you going to live? Renting is infeasible (by design). Are you going to buy a different house that also has a fake and gay high price? Suddenly, your gainz disappear. All the while you're paying more interest, more property tax, and more transactions costs (that realtor still costs 3% of a fake and gay high price).
Someone will surely try to come up with this scheme and that scheme to whack this mole or that mole, but I press X to doubt that you can technocrat your way to a solution, especially one that doesn't cost gigantic bags of cash coming out of the general treasury (and ultimately, taxpayers' pockets).
The fundamental question, "Should the cost of housing be higher or lower (or, I guess, the same)?" confuses a lot of people and is probably one of the core problems of our time that produces a multitude of political dysfunction.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
My thought upon reading these comments was, "How the hell does Congress have the authority to pass such a law in the first place?"
The Wikipedia article on the law references a locked article, but the internet exists and has ways to fix the glitch, so I found that the case that Wiki refers to for noting that a federal district court upheld the law is American Life League, Inc. v. Reno. The opinion helpfully provides a concise little Section III. Congress's Authority to Enact FACE. Concise enough that I'll quote in full, only removing references:
At the outset, the Court rejects the plaintiffs' argument that Congress lacked authority to enact FACE. Congress has the power, under the Commerce Clause, U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 3, and the Necessary and Proper Clause, U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 18, to regulate interstate commerce and intrastate activity that affects interstate commerce. This authority extends to enacting criminal penalties for individual acts, even if not all of the potential defendants had actual connections to interstate commerce. The legislative history of FACE shows that Congress had evidence both of numerous women crossing state lines to obtain reproductive services no longer available in their home states and of anti-abortion organizations crossing state lines in order to orchestrate violence against abortion providers and patients. The Senate hearings also include extensive testimony concerning the inability and, in some cases, unwillingness of local law enforcement authorities to provide adequate protection for reproductive health service clinics, their staffs, and patients. We find that Congress had ample evidence of the impact upon interstate commerce of myriad threats, bombings, stalkings, blockades and assaults inflicted on reproductive health services providers and patients, and that the prohibitions in FACE are a reasonable and appropriate means to address the problem.
Now, if you noticed, the Wiki article says this was in 1995. ...but the opinion says it was June 16, 1994. Lopez was handed down on April 26, 1995. Contrary to what one might have heard, Lopez has aged... well, not perfectly, but at least acceptably well. There is no way that such an argument for Congressional authority flies that easily today. If I had to take a position right now without briefing or oral arguments, I'd say that the hack took place when the law was passed and that it was an unconstitutional overreach of Congressional authority from day one. Would be the peak of irony if a leftist protester raised this challenge now and won, demonstrating that all the harassment of pro-life folks for decades was never legal.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
The claim that governmental action is always backed up by an implicit violence
First, I would make a distinction. In this thread, it was not just claimed that every governmental action is always backed up by implicit violence. Instead, it was that every single action was inherently, definitionally violent. I think the latter claim is pretty bollocks. Your change of the claim to being "backed up" by "implicit" violence is far more defensible.
Generally, what it takes to argue that it is backed up by implicit violence is to posit a sufficiently oppositional figure whose opposition contributes to getting into the "back up" situation, where the implicit becomes explicit.
The claim that governmental action is always backed up by an implicit violence, is bad
I have not said anything about the claim being "bad".
every interaction with any other agent is also backed up by implicit violence based enforcement. So government action being so, is not unique and thus calling it out is not special.
Instead, this is more accurate. It's not unique to government. Because of reasons, many times other agents outsource the back up enforcement, the turning of the implicit violence into explicit violence, to the government, but not always. Regardless of whether they insource it or outsource it, if they want to make a rule/action/decision/what-have-you that controls another individual, and if you posit a sufficiently oppositional individual, there is likely an implicit threat of violence as a back up. Now, this implicit backup threat is not always actualized in every case; of course not; it's not always actualized in every case with the government, either. But it seems to me that the same form of the argument holds.
I've been thinking about this, and I'm not sure I can. There's a lot of little things that stick out. Little nuggets here and there that I remember. If there's anything big picture, it's that most people don't think much about economics or complex systems. Sometimes, the downside to something that sounds good can be right in front of their face, and they won't get it (the price gouging for ice after a hurricane story is legendary). Other times, the dispersed nature of information, thinking, and actions masks implications for how tweaking one thing can change other things. He's very Hayekian in that. It's been kind of a long absorption process, hearing how One Neat Trick failed and Another Neat Trick failed and Another Neat Trick failed that you don't just become skeptical of One Neat Tricks, but you start to gain an intuition for how the next One Neat Trick is likely to fail.
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