Astral Codex Ten Podcast

There was some good pushback on yesterday's article on taxes. But sorry, I'm still right. Many people responded with generic low-tax anti-government positions. Fine. Let's say the government is definitely bad and taxes are definitely too high. The current tax bill is still not the right way to do tax cuts. Budget director Mick Mulvaney claims that the richest 20% of people pay 95% of income tax; the Wall Street Journal's numbers are a little lower, at 84%. Total income taxes are $1.8 trillion, so the poorest 80%'s share comes out to somewhere between 90 and 280 billion. This is around the same order of magnitude as the $100 billion in tax cuts in the current GOP bill. So it looks like one alternative to this bill, no more or less costly, would be to halve income taxes for the bottom 80% of the population, maybe anyone making less than $100,000.

Here is the cost of the current GOP tax bill placed in the context of other really expensive things. Although it's not quite enough money to solve world hunger, it's enough to end US homelessness four times over or fund nine simultaneous Apollo Programs. I'm writing this post sort of as penance. During the primaries, I wrote a post arguing that Sanders' college plan was bad. And compared to any reasonable use of the money, I still think that's true.

About 30% of the victims of sexual harassment are men. About 20% of the perpetrators of sexual harassment are women. Don't believe me? In a Quinnipiac poll, 60% of women and 20% of men said they'd been sexually harassed. Opinium, which sounds like a weird drug, reports 20% of women vs. 7% of men. YouGov poll in Germany finds 43% of women and 12% of men. The overall rates vary widely depending on how the pollsters frame the question, but the ratio is pretty consistent.

Eliezer Yudkowsky's catchily-titled Inadequate Equilibria is many things. It's a look into whether there is any role for individual reason in a world where you can always just trust expert consensus. It's an analysis of the efficient market hypothesis and how it relates to the idea of low-hanging fruit. It's a self-conscious defense of the author's own arrogance. But most of all, it's a book of theodicy. If the world was created by the Invisible Hand, who is good, how did it come to contain so much that is evil? The market economy is very good at what it does, which is something like "exploit money-making opportunities" or "pick low-hanging fruit in the domain of money-making". If you see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk, today is your lucky day. If you see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk in Grand Central Station, and you remember having seen the same bill a week ago, something is wrong. Thousands of people cross Grand Central every week – there's no way a thousand people would all pass up a free $20. Maybe it's some kind of weird trick. Maybe you're dreaming. But there's no way that such a low-hanging piece of money-making fruit would go unpicked for that long.

Earlier this year, Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs wrote an article against school vouchers. He argued that private schools would be so focused on profit that they would sacrifice quality, and that competition wouldn't be enough to keep them in line. I counterargued that yes it would, and cited among other things the success of food stamps (ie "food vouchers"). These give poor people access to the same dazzling variety of food choices as everyone else, usually at reasonable prices and low profit margins. If school vouchers worked as well as food vouchers, they would succeed in their mission of improving choice without sacrificing quality. Now Robinson doubles down, sticking to his anti-voucher position and also proposing A Public Option For Food.

Question I'd never thought to ask before: are we sure it's a good idea to let people know what the laws are? The Chinese legal system originated somewhat over 2000 years ago in the conflict between two views of law, legalist and Confucianist. The legalists, who believed in using the rational self-interest of those subject to law to make them behave in the way desired by those making the law, advocated harsh penalties to drive the equilibrium crime rate to near zero. They supported the ideas of a strong central government, equal treatment under law, and written law available to all. Confucianists saw the issues in terms of morality rather than law and the objective not to modify by behavior by punishing and rewarding but by teaching virtue. They feared that a written law code generally available would lead to rules lawyering and supported unequal treatement based on the unequal status of those to whom the law applied…Some early writers argued against making the law code publicly available.

Medieval Icelandic crime victims would sell the right to pursue a perpetrator to the highest bidder. 18th century English justice replaced fines with criminals bribing prosecutors to drop cases. Somali judges compete on the free market; those who give bad verdicts get a reputation that drives away future customers. "Anarcho-capitalism" evokes a dystopian cyberpunk future. But maybe that's wrong. Maybe we've always been anarcho-capitalist. Maybe a state-run legal system isn't a fact of nature, but a historical oddity as contingent as collectivized farming or nationalized railroads. Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, by anarcho-capitalist/legal scholar/medieval history buff David Friedman, successfully combines the author's three special interests into a whirlwind tour of exotic law.

The Alchemist asked if I wanted a drink. I did, but no amount of staring could make my eyes settle on the color of the liquid in the flask. And the gold the alchemists paid the taxmen smelled funny and made crackling noises. I declined. I took the summons and set it on the table between us. The King's son was dying. The doctors, astrologers, witches, and other assorted wise people of the kingdom could not save him. The King had asked for an alchemist, and been given one. He, too, had failed. But he had let on that there were other alchemists in the guild, greater alchemists, who knew far more than he. So the king had demanded that all the guild's top alchemists come to the palace and try to save his son's life. And the alchemists' guild had refused, saying their studies could not be interrupted. So here I was, come to make the request again, more formally but less politely.

I turn 33 today. I can only hope that age brings wisdom. We've been talking recently about the high-level frames and heuristics that organize other concepts. They're hard to transmit, and you have to rediscover them on your own, sometimes with the help of lots of different explanations and viewpoints (or one very good one). They're not obviously apparent when you're missing them; if you're not ready for them, they just sounds like platitudes and boring things you've already internalized. Wisdom seems like the accumulation of those, or changes in higher-level heuristics you get once you've had enough of those. I look back on myself now vs. ten years ago and notice I've become more cynical, more mellow, and more prone to believing things are complicated. For example:

When I wrote about my experiences doing psychotherapy with people, one commenter wondered if I might be schizoid: There are a lot of schizoid people in the rationalist community from what I can tell. The basis of schizoid is not all the big bad symptoms you might read about. There are high functioning people with personality disorders all the time who are complex, polite and philosophical. You will never see this description because mental health industries center entirely around people Failing At Life, aka "low-functioning". As many radicals have noted, mental health tends to constitute itself mostly around "can't hold a job" or "can't hold a marriage". The only thing you need to be schizoid is to dislike contact with other egos, and to shave off the experience of those other egos ruthlessly before they can reach the fantasy world you retreat to.