Morality can pertain to states-of-affairs (states of affairs can be moral or immoral, or one can be more moral than another), but insofar as we can do anything about it, morality pertains to thoughts and actions.
Consequentialism ranks actions based on how they affect states of affairs. Deontology ranks the actions in themselves, without regard for how they affect states of affairs. That is, it deontology tries to create rules for judging actions. It tries to put actions into classes. It tries, in short, to abstract actions.
This is why deontology fails. Abstractions do not exist, they are mental tools (concepts). It is not possible to come up with perfect abstractions -- the map is not the territory. Exceptions to deontological claims can always be found, or examples of where deontological moral rules conflict.
Consequentialism does not have these problems.
Monday, 25 February 2019
Rawls
Rawls' "original position"/"veil of ignorance" doesn't work.
The idea is that, since you don't know before you are born what your position in a society will be, you should want an equal society, to make the worse-case scenario as palatable as possible.
There are various problems with this. One is that "maximin" is not necessarily the correct strategy. You might be willing to risk poverty if you improve your expected outcome. Another is that you are not in fact behind a veil of ignorance, you do know what your position in society is. It's not clear why the idea of a veil of ignorance is supposed to motivate you. Rawls called his idea "a theory of justice" but he does not try to show that equality is just and therefore self-motivating. (Moldbug remarked that Rawls just took the word "justice" and slapped it on his idea, ignoring that "justice" already had a perfectly good meaning: pacta sunt servanda.
The chief problem with Rawls is that his theory is not a dynamic theory; he does not consider time. There is no acknowledgement that changing the level of inequality in a society will have other effects. It is true that in the short run, you can improve the position of the poorest in society by magically redistributing wealth. But this would likely make them and everyone else worse off in the long run, because incentives matter. The historical record is clear that the poorest people under capitalist, somewhat redistributive states, are better off than those in fully-redistributive communist states. Ask somebody behind the veil of ignorance whether they would like to live in a society that had just endured a century of communism, or in a society after a hundred years of technological innovation driven by entrepreneurs motivated by wealth. The answer is obvious. Rawls might as well ask whether you would rather live in 1800 or 2000. Rawls' veil of ignorance does not add anything to traditional arguments about the effects of enforced equality.
But there is another, less well known idea in "A theory of justice". In addition to trying to justify full equality, not just of money but also of other "primary" goods like social status and beauty (good luck redistributing that), Rawls also attempts to justify liberalism.
He argues that people have different "life plans", and if one type of society is selected, most people's life plans will go unfulfilled. However, liberalism supposedly gives everyone the maximum chance to satisfy their life plan.
Firstly, again, just because someone would agree to liberalism before a veil of ignorance, there is no reason for them to continue to go along with it after the veil is lifted. It is difficult to see Stalin being persuaded by this argument.
More crucially, it is not true that liberalism allows all life plans to be satisfied. Life plans conflict all the time. Kaczynski's desire to live in quiet countryside conflicts with someone else's desire to build a motorway. Many life plans rely on living in a society where everyone else shares that life plan -- and not in a liberal democracy!
Only egalitarian individualists could agree to Rawls' arguments. Muslims, the Amish, hunter-gatherers such as Amazon tribesmen or American indians, Mongol horsemen, Aztec priests: all want something different. Ancient Greeks and Romans thought the purpose of the state was to promote glory, not equality or individual life plans. Anyone who values anything above the condition of the poor wants something better.
The idea is that, since you don't know before you are born what your position in a society will be, you should want an equal society, to make the worse-case scenario as palatable as possible.
There are various problems with this. One is that "maximin" is not necessarily the correct strategy. You might be willing to risk poverty if you improve your expected outcome. Another is that you are not in fact behind a veil of ignorance, you do know what your position in society is. It's not clear why the idea of a veil of ignorance is supposed to motivate you. Rawls called his idea "a theory of justice" but he does not try to show that equality is just and therefore self-motivating. (Moldbug remarked that Rawls just took the word "justice" and slapped it on his idea, ignoring that "justice" already had a perfectly good meaning: pacta sunt servanda.
The chief problem with Rawls is that his theory is not a dynamic theory; he does not consider time. There is no acknowledgement that changing the level of inequality in a society will have other effects. It is true that in the short run, you can improve the position of the poorest in society by magically redistributing wealth. But this would likely make them and everyone else worse off in the long run, because incentives matter. The historical record is clear that the poorest people under capitalist, somewhat redistributive states, are better off than those in fully-redistributive communist states. Ask somebody behind the veil of ignorance whether they would like to live in a society that had just endured a century of communism, or in a society after a hundred years of technological innovation driven by entrepreneurs motivated by wealth. The answer is obvious. Rawls might as well ask whether you would rather live in 1800 or 2000. Rawls' veil of ignorance does not add anything to traditional arguments about the effects of enforced equality.
But there is another, less well known idea in "A theory of justice". In addition to trying to justify full equality, not just of money but also of other "primary" goods like social status and beauty (good luck redistributing that), Rawls also attempts to justify liberalism.
He argues that people have different "life plans", and if one type of society is selected, most people's life plans will go unfulfilled. However, liberalism supposedly gives everyone the maximum chance to satisfy their life plan.
Firstly, again, just because someone would agree to liberalism before a veil of ignorance, there is no reason for them to continue to go along with it after the veil is lifted. It is difficult to see Stalin being persuaded by this argument.
More crucially, it is not true that liberalism allows all life plans to be satisfied. Life plans conflict all the time. Kaczynski's desire to live in quiet countryside conflicts with someone else's desire to build a motorway. Many life plans rely on living in a society where everyone else shares that life plan -- and not in a liberal democracy!
Only egalitarian individualists could agree to Rawls' arguments. Muslims, the Amish, hunter-gatherers such as Amazon tribesmen or American indians, Mongol horsemen, Aztec priests: all want something different. Ancient Greeks and Romans thought the purpose of the state was to promote glory, not equality or individual life plans. Anyone who values anything above the condition of the poor wants something better.
Very low probabilities
Humans are bad at dealing with very high and very low probabilities.
- Some are not computable. Bank runs can be set off by sunspots.
- The probability can only be estimated (underestimated!) from historical data.
- Pascal's mugging
- You need exponentially more evidence to get probabilities closer to 1 or 0.
- Probabilities cannot be zero or one, because then you cannot change your mind, as per Bayes' Theorem
Taleb on investment strategies and time horizons
Taleb points out that investment strategies can appear to work for a long time, but eventually fail. He also says that whatever works cannot be stupid.
There is no time horizon after which we can say that a strategy has worked. However, we can say for certain if a strategy has failed, and you lose all your money. A species can survive for a million years -- it appears to be successful -- then it goes extinct.
There is no time horizon after which we can say that a strategy has worked. However, we can say for certain if a strategy has failed, and you lose all your money. A species can survive for a million years -- it appears to be successful -- then it goes extinct.
Unambiguous forecasting
FiveThirtyEight.com is a website which aggregates political polls. It has a reputation as being more successful in its political predictions than other pollsters. How deserved is this reputation?
In the 2016 United States presidential election, the markets thought Trump had about a 20% chance of winning. FTE thought he had a 29% chance of winning, which is better than the market (Trump did win). Other pollsters were giving him a 15% chance. So if we trusted FTE, we would have bet on Trump and would make money over the long run, making similar bets.
But FTE does not make bets! Your performance at prediction depends not only on whether your odds are better calibrated than your opponents, but also on how much of your wealth you allocate to each bet. Bets function as a second-order expression of the error bars you assign to your odds. For example, if the market probability is 20%, and your odds are 29% plus or minus 10 percentage points, you might not make the bet.
We cannot judge the performance of FTE because they are not allocating bets, so we don't know how their confidence varies across their predictions.
If you make a bet, it forces you to make the question sufficiently unambiguous, enough so that it can be judged by a third party. Most predictions are not sufficiently unambiguous, and people claim undeserved victory afterwards.
That is not to say that predictions are worthless if criteria for success are too ambiguous to bet on. But one shouldn't crow about them.
In the 2016 United States presidential election, the markets thought Trump had about a 20% chance of winning. FTE thought he had a 29% chance of winning, which is better than the market (Trump did win). Other pollsters were giving him a 15% chance. So if we trusted FTE, we would have bet on Trump and would make money over the long run, making similar bets.
But FTE does not make bets! Your performance at prediction depends not only on whether your odds are better calibrated than your opponents, but also on how much of your wealth you allocate to each bet. Bets function as a second-order expression of the error bars you assign to your odds. For example, if the market probability is 20%, and your odds are 29% plus or minus 10 percentage points, you might not make the bet.
We cannot judge the performance of FTE because they are not allocating bets, so we don't know how their confidence varies across their predictions.
If you make a bet, it forces you to make the question sufficiently unambiguous, enough so that it can be judged by a third party. Most predictions are not sufficiently unambiguous, and people claim undeserved victory afterwards.
That is not to say that predictions are worthless if criteria for success are too ambiguous to bet on. But one shouldn't crow about them.
Competing monies
What is the probability of the price of gold falling to less than $100/oz before the year 2100? (Currently over $1000.) Approximately 0%?
It could be replaced by bitcoin, though it hasn't been replaced by any other currency yet.
What is the probability of the price of bitcoin falling to less than $100 before the year 2100? (Currently over $3000.) More than 1%?
It could be replaced by another cryptocurrency.
Demand for stores of value is distributed over various commodities. If demand remains constant, one currency's gain is another's loss.
It could be replaced by bitcoin, though it hasn't been replaced by any other currency yet.
What is the probability of the price of bitcoin falling to less than $100 before the year 2100? (Currently over $3000.) More than 1%?
It could be replaced by another cryptocurrency.
Demand for stores of value is distributed over various commodities. If demand remains constant, one currency's gain is another's loss.
Bubble dynamics
In a bubble, prices rise gradually, but they can crash suddenly. The stock market can fall 30% in one day, but it will never rise 30% in one day, though it might in one week. The reason people were so terrified about the 2010 Flash Crash was because it could have turned into a real crash, kicking off a depression.
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