Peter Singer considers himself a hedonistic utilitarian. My understanding is that (broadly speaking) lying is nearly intrinsically bad to the preference utilitarians (most people have a preference against being lied to) but not the hedonistic utilitarians (if the lied-to-party never finds out, their hedonism is not impaired).
Which is to say... if we're going to use his affair as evidence of anything, it should be to discredit hedonistic utilitarians.
More specifically, I think classical utilitarianism as a whole suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near in ways that this sort of misconduct highlights
No comment on whether utilitarianism "suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near", but I really don't see how Peter cheating on his wife is related to this. Like, if he was sleeping with people to get them to donate to malaria charities, you'd have a point - but, per your summary, he was enjoying sex for purely selfish reasons.
Ehh, Griggs vs. Duke Power is overrated by HBD/IQ folks. It's not like IQ tests were ubiquitous before Griggs, were they?
I think the more important problem for large companies is that the PR costs might be large and that PR costs are very salient/legible in a way that employee quality is not, at least no in the short-term (and people are hardly paragons of rationality in the long-term). Like, if you were a CEO and added IQ tests, you can be certain of a media backlash and you're also risking subsequent punishment by the board. Even if you're certain it would improve employee quality, that would (a) be hard to prove and (b) even if you could, it would take years...
Smaller firms,
- often just copy larger firms (they are often, in a sense, even more risk-averse than big firms, since all the financial risk is borned by the owner)
- often aren't super g-loaded anyway (e.g. mom-and-pop shop, contractor laying flooring, etc)
- have less principle-agent problems (arguably, IQ-esque tests are most valuable, because they partially displace hiring favoritism) - like, if I'm mostly hiring people I know and have worked with before, the additional value of an IQ test is ~0
KnotGodel
3mo ago
KnotGodel
3mo ago
Ahh, gotcha.
We're interested in class/socioeconomic status. This variable is fairly abstract, and income is merely a proxy for it. If, for instance, the causal graph goes
genes -> status status + noise -> income
then, even if status is 100% heritable, the heritability of income will only be equal to the correlation between income and status.
The paper effectively models reality as
status + noise -> occupation
and uses surnames and the model (i.e. Figure 7) to try to circumvent making any strong assumptions about how good of a proxy occupation is for status.
Well, except if you're with a group of people bonding by bullying someone, you perspective implies I should start bullying them too...
ETA: though, I do admit, definitionally that taking the selfish perspective does "better serve" you
Other evidence exists. For instance, in Sweden, social status decays by about 25% per generation, which is consistent with it being (a) entirely genetic and (b) approximately perfect assortative mating. Similar estimates are found for the US, England, Chile, and China - Japan and India have even smaller levels of decay.
ETA: The alternative interpretation is that there is an absolutely enormous environmental factor. However, given many twin studies (feel free to ask for link) that collectively show ~0 impact of environment on earnings, this seems exceedingly unlikely.
Assortative Mating and the Industrial Revolution: England, 1754-2021:
Abstract:
Using a new database of 1.7 million marriage records for England 1837-2021 we estimate assortment by occupational status in marriage, and the intergenerational correlation of occupational status. We find the underlying correlations of status groom-bride, and father-son, are remarkably high: 0.8 and 0.9 respectively. These correlations are unchanged 1837-2021. There is evidence this strong matching extends back to at least 1754. Even before formal education and occupations for women, grooms and brides matched tightly on educational and occupational abilities. We show further that women contributed as much as men to important child outcomes. This implies strong marital sorting substantially increased the variance of social abilities in England. Pre-industrial marital systems typically involved much less marital sorting. Thus the development of assortative marriage may play a role in the location and timing of the Industrial Revolution, through its effect on the supply of those with upper-tail abilities.
ETA: bolded the most important sentence
KnotGodel
3mo ago
If we had proof that intermarriage between class was as (in)frequent as intermarriage between race, how would you change your mind?
KnotGodel
3mo ago
Statistical Structure of the Supreme Court
Inspired by earlier discussion on The Motte, I decided to statistically investigate the voting patterns of the Supreme Court.
The obvious place to start is by looking at how frequently each justice's opinions aligned with each other's. We can interpret the percent-of-times-disagreed as a measure of how "far apart" justices are. We can then use a variety of approaches to plot this onto a 2d graph (e.g. using sklearn.manifold.MDS)
I found data from back when Breyer was on the Court rather than Jackson. My preferred model results is this graph and fairly consistent with @Walterodim's characterization:
- Sotomayor as a left outlier
- Kegan (and Breyer) on the left
- Kavenaugh, Roberts, and Barrett towards the center
- Thomas and Alito on the right
Finally, he characterizes Gorsuch as a "Maverick", which is admittedly a little hard to formalize in a 2d projection of a high-dimensional space, and the model just spits him out between Barrett and Thomas.
KnotGodel
3mo ago
My point is not saying "Americans are better than Nigerians." My point is that this kind of "mirrored-weight utilitarianism" avoids some of the unintuitive ethical results of normal utilitarianism.
KnotGodel
3mo ago
I guess you should define "a lot".
I was mostly thinking along the lines of most of them presumably not earning-to-give and then donating almost of all of it to third world health charities - i.e. the Effective Altruist way.
I'm open to the idea that they would overall, as a country, do 50% more for us, or whatever.
KnotGodel
3mo ago
I actually have pondered a more universalized application of this to utilitarians: I care as much about other people as they care about me.
For instance, if Nigeria and the US swapped economic places in a parallel universe, how much would they be doing for us? Realistically, this suggests being as selfish/altruistic as the average person, maybe correcting a bit for some bias. Likewise, most animals probably wouldn't mind much eating humans if they had the desire to.
IMO, this kind of mirrored-weight utilitarianism matches human intuition better than normal utilitarianism.
KnotGodel
3mo ago
I think there are great arguments against the gold standard, but I disagree with these.
To be fair, these aren't my arguments against the gold standard; these are my counterarguments against @jeroboam's arguments in favor of the gold standard.
Perhaps. But that's not what tends to happen to fiat currencies. Most decline precipitously or fail entirely. The USD is the exception not the rule.
I suppose the main problem is we haven't framed the discussion sufficiently. Are we talking about
- whether the US should adopt a gold standard (my implicit assumption given the Texan framing)
- whether the typical (developed?) country should adopt a gold standard rather than run their own currency
- whether any country should adopt a gold standard rather than run their own currency
- whether any country should adopt a gold standard (e.g. as opposed to other alternatives such as USD-pegging or using the USD directly)
- etc
The government shouldn't artificially create recessions but they should allow them to happen. I think the same thing about forest fires, BTW.
Why?
But just because today's king is good doesn't mean tomorrow's king will be.
I could say the same thing about the "king of gold". Say China starts buying it all up in the 2030s, causing mass deflation. Say China starts offloading in the 2040s, causing mass inflation. Or we discover a huge gold deposit. etc.
I think this is somewhat contradicted by the evidence. The U.S. government actually received large amounts of gold from the debtor countries as collateral. By the end of the war, the US owned 75% of the world's gold reserves.
I'm tempted to debate the historical facts, but I think it'd be more fruitful to ask you to explain the mechanism by which the gold standard constrains government borrowing.
KnotGodel
3mo ago
- SBF is not the same as either of those. ETA: not to mention the incredible irony, since this website stems from literally the same lineage
- Why does it matter who says the argument?
- Given your bad luck so far, I don’t know why you’re being so picky about where the argument comes from
KnotGodel
3mo ago
Do you know that many Effective Altruists and LessWrong-style-rationalists are vegans? Seems like a pretty good place to start.
KnotGodel
3mo ago
I’m making the more narrow point about whether depreciating dollar is good or bad
In that case, I think my points re savers-v-debtors and Cantillion effects still stand. More broadly, the main benefit of inflation imo is that it reduces the distortions created by sticky wages.
Re volatility, yeah - I agree it's only a model, but I'm going to consider it the best guess until someone gives me either (a) a more plausible model or (b) empirical evidence to the contrary.
I want to ask "In what sense is a gold standard more 'natural' than fiat currency?".
I feel like the actual intuition is that the gold standard leads to an economy that is closer to the Econ 101 Textbook Competitive Economy (E1TCE). I think this intuition lacks sufficient evidence to be believed. As a counter-argument, one of the most important differences between the actual economy and the E1TCE is that wages are sticky downwards. This stickiness is necessary for cyclical unemployment and, therefore, is largely the cause of recessions as we know them. A fiat currency with low and consistent inflation significantly reduces this problem and therefore makes the economy more like the E1TCE. A gold-standard-currency is typically deflationary and therefore makes the problem even worse. Is there a similarly important reality-E1TCE discrepancy the gold standard improves on?
Alternatively, imagine a parallel universe in which gold deposits were more randomly distributed, resulting in more volatility in the supply of gold. Is the optimal economic volatility for growth higher in that universe merely because of the distribution of gold deposits? Obviously not. So, we have no reason to think the distribution of gold deposits should predict optimal monetary policy in this universe either.
Fine, you might say - the point isn't "gold" per-se, the point is a fixed money supply, which we use gold to imperfectly enforce. But, we're still privileging the hypothesis that the volatility created fixed money supply is somehow optimal for economic growth without any justification. [Edit: also why a gold standard then? Just have the constitution forbid making more dollars instead]
if it is true that growth was higher before central banks started recession proofing, then there's an argument to be made that natural volatility is more optimal then our current level of volatility
That argument is literally correlation-implies-causation, and, given the enormous number of other differences between the 19th and 21st centuries, extremely unpersuasive.
KnotGodel
3mo ago
Inflation helps debtors and hurts savers
Unexpected inflation helps debtors and hurts savers. That's a pretty big difference, and I see no reason to expect the market to be biased in its inflation forecasting with either a gold standard or fiat currency.
you’d kind of suspect a country that money isn’t sound to become less interested in investing long term
Sure, price/inflation volatility is bad. The obvious next question is whether a gold standard makes inflation volatility smaller or larger. My money is on "larger" for the US, but I admit it's a hard question to answer.
perhaps more likely to invest in more volatile assets
I don't think so?
Per the Markowitz Model, if you are allocating your money between a risk free asset that returns R and a risky asset that returns Norm(µ, V), you should put this proportion in the risky asset to maximize expected utility:
(µ - r) / (2 * e * (1-t) * V)
where e is a risk aversion parameter and t is the capital gains tax rate. Inflation should push both µ and r up the same, so it shouldn't affect how much is invested in risky assets. If you add extra variance, U, to both the risky and riskless investments, the formula doesn't change, either, so I'm skeptical price volatility changes asset allocation either.
Also, you’d suspect bankers to become worth more as the Cantillion effects run rampant encouraging the financialization of the economy.
Again, I'm pretty sure the Cantillion effects are only worse if you believe the gold standard reduces CPI volatility. That has yet to be argued here, let alone proven.
KnotGodel
4mo ago
Why do you believe natural volatility equals optimal volatility?
ETA: Though, tbh, I'm not sure "natural" is even remotely well-enough defined to be useful to talk about.
KnotGodel
4mo ago
- There's virtually no actual cost in having money depreciate slowly over time.
- This is a fully general argument in favor of greater economic volatility. If you believe that, you shouldn't just be arguing for a gold standard - you should be arguing for the government to artificially create recessions.
- If this is tyranny, sign me up for another!
- Plenty of governments had no issue borrowing enormous amounts during WWII, so I have a hard time viewing a gold standard as much of an impediment to that.
KnotGodel
4mo ago
The entire purpose of this exercise is to consider how likely the South was to either choose to end slavery on its own or consent to have it chosen for them without bloodshed. The relevant metric, therefore, is how important slavery was to the South.
More concretely, the Civil War depended on individual state governments choosing to secede, so the geographic concentration of slavery in the US is extremely relevant. If slavery was evenly distributed in the US, I
- strongly don't think the Civil War would have been on the table to begin with
- tentatively think slavery would have been ended in the 1870s or 1880s
KnotGodel
4mo ago
I went digging for numbers and found:
- In 1833, Britain abolished slavery (mostly); about about 1% of the population were slaves
- In 1837, Mexico abolished slavery; about about 0.1% of the population were slaves
- In 1860, the South fought a ware to keep slavery; about 32% of the population were slaves
- In 1867, Spain largely freed its slaves; I can't find specific numbers :(
- In 1888, Brazil abolished slavery; about about 5% of the population were slaves
Slavery was a much bigger deal in the South than other places that freed slaves. The only other place I'm familiar with that had a similar proportion of slaves was Cuba, where slavery was abolished in 1886. However, as with the South, this wasn't chosen by Cuba - it was imposed by an outside power (Spain).
Given the trend in when slavery was abolished across the world, I think it's quite reasonable to suppose, if given the choice, the South would've continued with slavery into the 20th century. None of this requires assuming Southerners were "uniquely horrible or monstrous" - all it requires is assuming the more reason you give someone to avoid uncomfortable moral reasoning, the more they will avoid said reasoning.
Here's are the two questions one really needs to answer to argue whether we should have postponed ending slavery to avoid a Civil War:
- How many additional generations would you be willing to consign to chattel slavery in order to avoid the Civil War?
- How many additional generations would it have taken for the South to change its mind?
The Civil War resulted in ~700k deaths and free 4m slaves. If I assume a year lived as a slave is half as valuable as a year lived as a free man, the naive utilitarian answer to (1) is something like 18 years. I personally rather doubt the South would've gone along with ending slavery before 1879, so I think the utilitarian answer is to prefer the Civil War.
The non-utilitarian answer is, imo, "wtf you monster - slavery is wrong".
To clarify: are you arguing that subscribing to utilitarianism causes people to be more likely to cheat on their romantic partners?
Or are you merely exploring how utilitarians rationalize cheating - as opposed to how people of other ethical persuasions rationalize it?
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