Title: Prediction Markets Are Not a Drop-In Replacement for Concepts
-Date: 2024-11-20 20:00
+Date: 2024-12-21 09:35
Category: commentary
Tags: Eliezer Yudkowsky, literary criticism, worldbuilding, prediction markets
-Status: draft
In ["Comment on a Scene from _Planecrash_: 'Crisis of Faith'"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/), I criticized a scene in which Keltham (a [magical universe-teleportation victim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai) from an alternate Earth called dath ilan) plays dumb about why a pre-industrial Society would only choose males for military conscription.
>
> And after you've added in prediction markets to actually get all of the information that anybody has, what remains to be gained by creating a law that asymmetrically treats different sapient beings in a way based not on predicted outcomes?
-Good question.[^good-question] I'd like to generalize it: in the absence of a reason why "creating a law" and "sapient beings" would change the answer, we can ask: when making a decision about some entities X<sub>i</sub>, after you've added in prediction markets to get all of the information that anybody has, what remains to be gained by using a decision procedure P that asymmetrically treat the X<sub>i</sub> in a way based not on predicted outcomes?
+Good question.[^good-question] I'd like to generalize it: in the absence of a reason why "creating a law" and "sapient beings" would change the answer, we can ask: when making a decision about some entities X<sub>i</sub>, after you've added in prediction markets to get all of the information that anybody has, what remains to be gained by using a decision procedure P that asymmetrically treats the X<sub>i</sub> in a way based not on predicted outcomes?
[^good-question]: Not really. I'm being polite.
-The answer is: nothing—with two caveats having to do with how the power of prediction markets has precisely to do with that they're agnostic about how traders make decisions: we assume that whatever the winning answer is, greedy traders have an incentive to figure it out.
+The answer is: nothing—with two caveats having to do with how the power of prediction markets relies on their being agnostic about how traders make decisions: we assume that whatever the winning answer is, greedy traders have an incentive to figure it out.
Nothing is gained—_if_ you already happen to have sufficiently liquid prediction markets covering all observables relevant to the decisions you need to make. This is logistically nontrivial, and almost certainly much more computationally intensive. (If there are a hundred traders in your market, each of them using their own decision procedure which is on average as expensive as P, then delegating the decision to the market costs Society a hundred times as much as just using P once yourself.)
Imagine being a programmer needing to implement a sorting algorithm: code that takes a list of numbers and rearranges the list to be ordered smallest to largest. You're thinking about using [quicksort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort), which involves recursively designating an arbitrary "pivot" element and then partitioning the list into two sublists that are less than and greater than (or equal to) the pivot, respectively.
-Your teammate Albert objects to the idea of moving elements based on whether they're greater or less than the arbitrary pivot, rather than whether it will achieve the goal of the list being sorted. "Why are you writing code that asymmetrically treats different numbers differently in a way not based on predicted outcomes?" he asks.
+Your teammate Albert objects to the idea of moving elements based on whether they're greater or less than an arbitrary pivot, rather than whether it will achieve the goal of the list being sorted. "Why are you writing code that asymmetrically treats different numbers differently in a way not based on predicted outcomes?" he asks.
"What would you suggest?" you ask, regretting the question almost as soon as you've finished saying it.
----
-I wrote the restaurant-choice scenario as an illustrative example for this blog post, but I want you to imagine how you would react if someone _actually behaved that way in real life_: stopped you when you searched for Italian restaurants and insisted you start a prediction market instead. That would be pretty weird, right?
+I wrote this restaurant-choice scenario as an illustrative example for this blog post, but I want you to imagine how you would react if someone _actually behaved that way in real life_: stopped you when you searched for Italian restaurants and insisted you start a prediction market instead. That would be pretty weird, right?
It's not that there's anything particularly wrong with the idea of using prediction markets to get restaurant suggestions. I can easily believe that you might get some good suggestions that way, even in a sparsely-traded play-money market on Earth, _i.e._, the real world. (In a similar vein, Yudkowsky has [a "What books will I enjoy reading?" market](https://manifold.markets/EliezerYudkowsky/what-book-will-i-enjoy-reading).)
But what's at issue isn't whether making decisions _solely_ on the basis of category membership is a good idea, but whether institutions should be able to take category membership into account as a matter of explicit policy (rather than only implicitly via the black box of a prediction market, whose traders are allowed to notice things that the policy isn't).
-Real-world militaries that practice conscription _don't_ just take males indiscriminately with no other requirements than having a Y chromosome, because that would be crazy. The draft board [does](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_System#Classifications) administer fitness tests and psych evals, consider relevant skills, _&c_. (Similarly, real-world diners craving Italian food also take Yelp ratings into account.) But one of the features real-world militaries _do_ consider is sex, because in the real world, the conjunction of the effect sizes of the group differences in various job-relevant traits, cost of individual trait measurements, and error in individual trait measurements, makes that an effective policy,[^empirically-contingent] and real-world militaries trying to win wars don't care about running afoul of a principle of not asymmetrically treating different sapient beings in a way (allegedly) "based not on predicted outcomes." For example, [Israel drafts women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Israel_Defense_Forces), but [doesn't use them in all combat roles](https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5089566,00.html)—and correspondingly, [the קבוצת איכות ("quality group") score used for role placement includes an interview portion for men only, and weights education more highly for women](https://garinmahal.com/kaba-dapar). There are a few mixed-sex battalions, like [the 33rd "Caracal"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracal_Battalion), named after [a species of cat with low sexual dimorphism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracal), but it's an exception rather than the norm.
+Real-world militaries that practice conscription _don't_ just take males indiscriminately with no other requirements than having a Y chromosome, because that would be crazy. The draft board [does](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_System#Classifications) administer fitness tests and psych evals, consider relevant skills, _&c_. (Similarly, real-world diners craving Italian food also take Yelp ratings into account.) But one of the features real-world militaries _do_ consider is sex, because in the real world, the conjunction of the effect sizes of the group differences in various job-relevant traits, cost of individual trait measurements, and error in individual trait measurements,[^measurement-error] makes that an effective policy,[^empirically-contingent] and real-world militaries trying to win wars don't care about running afoul of a principle of not asymmetrically treating different sapient beings in a way (allegedly) "based not on predicted outcomes." For example, [Israel drafts women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Israel_Defense_Forces), but [doesn't use them in all combat roles](https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5089566,00.html)—and correspondingly, [the קבוצת איכות ("quality group") score used for role placement includes an interview portion for men only, and weights education more highly for women](https://garinmahal.com/kaba-dapar). There are a few mixed-sex battalions, like [the 33rd "Caracal"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracal_Battalion), named after [a species of cat with low sexual dimorphism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracal), but it's an exception rather than the norm.
+
+[^measurement-error]: Measurement error matters because, in Bayesian terms, the less reliable your individual measurements are, the more your posterior depends on your priors rather than the evidence of the measurements.
[^empirically-contingent]: Obviously, this is empirically contingent: you could get a different answer in a world with different effect sizes and different measurement affordances, but [a world with different stuff in it would admit different categories to describe it](http://unremediatedgender.space/2023/Dec/beyond-the-binary/). "That wouldn't work against a different data distribution" isn't a good argument against the use of some statistical model, because [no model would work against all possible distributions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem).
-If Keltham's objection to Osiriani patriarchy (which restricts women's education and right to hold property) also condemns real-world Israel (which doesn't), it would appear that something has gone wrong with his reasoning. If the problem is that excluding women from education and property ownership is oppressive and not justified on the empirical merits, Keltham should expect to make that case on the empirical merits: that women's economic liberty works great in dath ilan, and the Osiriani don't seem to be a different species for which the empirical merits would be different.
+If Keltham's objection to Osiriani patriarchy (which restricts women's education and right to hold property) also condemns real-world Israel (which doesn't), it would appear that something has gone wrong with his reasoning. If the problem is that excluding women from education and property ownership is oppressive and not justified on the empirical merits, Keltham should expect to make that case on the empirical merits: that women's economic liberty works great on dath ilan, and the Osiriani don't seem to be a different species for which the empirical merits would be different.
That's not what we see in the text. Keltham challenges a native to explain things that would go wrong if foreigners imposed a strict Equal Rights Amendment, and when presented with a sensible example (military conscription), rather than saying, "okay, I can see how that one makes pragmatic sense, but that doesn't explain or justify the property thing", he persistently refuses to acknowledge the point. "[H]ow is [unusually strong women being drafted] more terrible than strong men being forced to join an army for less than their self-set wage for that?" [he asks](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1817425#reply-1817425), and when he receives sensible answers to _that_ (the women might get taken advantage of sexually, which would have lasting consequences for them), he [objects that truthspell-enabled governance would prevent rapes, and patronizingly wonders whether the Osiriani are aware of the human gestation period](https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1817432#reply-1817432).
One could try to construe Keltham's line of questioning as deliberately trying to play the anti-oppression Schelling point strategy against Osirion: it's not that Keltham is denying that predictively useful categories are also useful for making decisions; he just doesn't trust Osirion's patriarchal culture to do that fairly and is eager to explain how good decisions can be recovered in terms of lower-level features at some extra expense.
-I just don't think the balance of textual evidence supports this interpretation. If Keltham's "dreadful meddling foreigner" thought experiment is only meant to put pressure on Osirion's patriarchal ideology without the implication that dath ilan thinks Governance should be demographic-category-blind as a matter of principle, I would expect the text to clarify this somewhere—and the case that Keltham doesn't get that Bayesianism is not on his side here is strengthened by the case that Yudkowsky doesn't get it. The effectiveness of the Israel Defense Forces might or might not be improved by incorporating prediction markets for personnel selection, but the notion that the current קבוצת איכות system is obviously foolish for "asymmetrically treat[ing] different sapient beings in a way based not on predicted outcomes" is both hard to take seriously, and is inconsistent with the general portrayal of Civilization in the dath ilan mythos.
+I just don't think the balance of textual evidence supports this interpretation. If Keltham's "dreadful meddling foreigner" thought experiment is only meant to put pressure on Osirion's patriarchal ideology without the implication that dath ilan thinks Governance should be demographic-category-blind as a matter of principle, I would expect the text to clarify this somewhere—and the case that Keltham doesn't get that Bayesianism is not on the meddling foreigner's side is strengthened by the case that Yudkowsky doesn't get it. The effectiveness of the Israel Defense Forces might or might not be improved by incorporating prediction markets for personnel selection, but the notion that the current קבוצת איכות system is obviously foolish for "asymmetrically treat[ing] different sapient beings in a way based not on predicted outcomes" is both hard to take seriously and inconsistent with the general portrayal of Civilization in the dath ilan mythos.
Almost everywhere else in the dath ilan mythos that dath ilan is compared to Earth (_i.e._, the real world) or Golarion, the comparison is unflattering; we're supposed to believe that dath ilan is a superior civilization, a utopia of reason where average intelligence is 2.6 standard deviations higher, where everyone is trained in Bayesian reasoning from childhood. One of the rare places in canon that dath ilan is depicted as not having already thought of something good and useful in the real world is in [the April Fool's Day confession](https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/81447230971/my-april-fools-day-confession), when [NGDP targeting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_income_target) is identified as a clever and characteristically un–dath ilani hack. Dath ilan is accustomed to solving coordination problems by the effort of "serious people [...] get[ting] together and try[ing] not to have them be so bad": the mode of thinking that would lead one to propose automatically canceling out the sticky wage effect by printing more money to keep spending constant is alien to them.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff