moultano
1mo ago
You can tell that moderator that I sympathize as a former active reddit moderator myself. I probably deleted many posts that looked just like this.
moultano
1mo ago
One piece of evidence in favor of a model something like this is that active users of many social media platforms wish that they didn't exist. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20231468
moultano
1mo ago
Comments either place are fine. It would be interesting to model with diminishing returns for each activity for each agent, I would like to see what that produces. My guess would be that it has overall similar character, where more of the variance in activity comes from where on the marginal returns curve each agent is than the variance in overall extroversion. I do think it would be much less likely to bottom out at 0, but I don't really know. Try it! :D
moultano
1mo ago
Yeah I think that's fair. I spelled out the situations I think it's realistic for in the middle a bit, though probably should have made that more front and center instead of presenting it as a totalizing view of society.
For now assume that this is a niche interest or a small community where the number of people doing it still has incremental returns, things like “Are there kids playing in the local park” or “Does your block have a block party” or “Do my friends of friends host house parties that I’m invited to.” This also models things that require a very large amount of effort to organize that few people are willing to do, so you need a large amount of people choosing to invest in your community to get just a few willing to put in the hours, things like “Does your grade school have an active cub scout troop” or “Are there community choirs nearby.” At minimum, the density of people willing to do the thing determines how far you have to drive to do the thing, and how much of a pain it is to do.
Sorry! I should have posted it at the time. Also serves me right for not posting enough here, and not writing frequently enough.
moultano
1mo ago
Submission statement: This post was the outcome of a long debate on BlueSky about whether social isolation and the decay of in-person communities should be considered to be revealed preference or not. I decided that rather than continue to talk, I should just write the code and specify the model, which thankfully Gemini lowered the activation energy of to zero. This is a toy model that I'm intending to demonstrate that entertainment can have deadweight loss, especially in small communities.
Ok nevermind, it made it. I probably should have asked an LLM to optimize the title for me.
moultano
2yr ago
I have a feeling this post could get to the top of HN and become famous, but it's too long to get off of new without a catchier title than I've been able to come up with.
I think a handful of the things I've written are semi famous, not particularly me. 😆
moultano
2yr ago
Thanks. I haven't read enough of less wrong and haven't posted anything there so don't know what the posting norms are. But I do think it's the kind of thing they'd be interested in.
moultano
2yr ago
To the extent that ads cause you to make purchases that you're retrospectively happy about, I agree. The limit case of a really good advertising system is a recommendation engine for arbitrary products, which is super useful. There are a few reasons why I think they don't converge to that though.
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Different products have different margins that are uncorrelated with how useful they are to use, and this distorts the recommendations.
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Advertising systems are competing to cause you to buy via them, and that causes them to expose you to more ads than your desire to purchase things would warrant.
Submission statement: There is a popular model of subjective time which holds that your perception of an interval is proportional to what fraction of your life so far it is. Taking this seriously recontextualized a lot of things felt about the nature and purpose of life, which inspired this essay.
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