From dc077499330e09f3b0334f794c75c1a3fc481dd5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Zack M. Davis" Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2024 17:23:57 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] polish and revise "Prediction Markets Are Not" --- ...-not-a-drop-in-replacement-for-concepts.md | 22 +++++++++---------- 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/prediction-markets-are-not-a-drop-in-replacement-for-concepts.md b/content/drafts/prediction-markets-are-not-a-drop-in-replacement-for-concepts.md index 6c93d2c..0dd182d 100644 --- a/content/drafts/prediction-markets-are-not-a-drop-in-replacement-for-concepts.md +++ b/content/drafts/prediction-markets-are-not-a-drop-in-replacement-for-concepts.md @@ -150,28 +150,28 @@ Perhaps at this point the advocate of prediction markets will complain that I'm 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, thereby running afoul of the 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). (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, 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. + +[^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. 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). -[Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) claims that "Keltham isn't proposing to actually enforce that prohibition [of laws that mention sex] on Osirion, he's trying to figure out _what the laws are trying to do and why_".[^word-of-god] I find this hard to square with the [nearest-unblocked strategy](https://arbital.com/p/nearest_unblocked/) behavior Keltham is displaying in this scene: when presented with a reason for why sexism has good outcomes in some domain, Keltham immediately starts searching for ways to get the good outcomes without the sexism, even at greater expense. (You don't need to buy truthspells for your Title IX compliance officers if you don't have Title IX compliance officers.) However Yudkowsky might "explain" it after the fact, this is the behavior of someone trying to minimize sexism while being sensitive to outcome-based pragmatic constraints, rather that someone solely trying to optimize outcomes without particularly caring whether the means happen to be sexist. +[Word of God](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) claims that "Keltham isn't proposing to actually enforce that prohibition [of laws that mention sex] on Osirion, he's trying to figure out _what the laws are trying to do and why_".[^word-of-god] I find this hard to square with the [nearest-unblocked strategy](https://arbital.com/p/nearest_unblocked/) behavior Keltham is displaying in this scene: when presented with a reason for why sexism has good outcomes in some domain, Keltham immediately starts searching for ways to get the good outcomes without the sexism, even at greater expense. (You don't need to buy truthspells for your Title IX compliance officers if you don't have Title IX compliance officers.) However Yudkowsky might "explain" it _post hoc_ in response to criticism, this is the behavior of someone trying to minimize sexism while being sensitive to outcome-based pragmatic constraints, rather than someone trying to optimize performance outcomes without particularly caring whether the means happen to be sexist. [^word-of-god]: [Eliezerfic Discord server, #dath-ilan channel, 12 June 2022](/images/yudkowsky-keltham_isnt_proposing.png) -[TODO: it's OK to have values, but noticing where your values come from is how you avoid embarrasing yourself as a rationalfic author] - -(I'm a religiously devout American, too. This is a _heresy_ blog, not an _apostate_ blog.) +Which, to be clear, might be the right way to behave, if those are your true values! (I'm a religiously devout American, too. This is a _heresy_ blog, not an _apostate_ blog.) It's just that one would hope for the literary tradition of rationalist fiction to do a better job of distinguishing between contingent values and convergent strategies. Connoisseurs of diamond-hard science fiction can't help but cringe at the writers' lack of imagination when the heroes of your standard science fantasy space opera come across a planet of supposed aliens who [just happen to look exactly like humans and have produced a verbatim copy of the Constitution of the United States](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Omega_Glory_(episode)). It's not out of disdain for the Constitution, which is a fine document,[^fine-document] but out of respect for the complexity of the real physical universe in all its rawness, that ["the beauty that jumps out of one box, is not jumping out of _all_ boxes"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile), that values have antecedents. Deluding yourself into thinking that your home culture's sacred traditions fall naturally out of Bayesian decision theory does a disservice to both. -As I mentioned in ["Comment on a Scene"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/), anti-discrimination policy makes sense as game theory: [if you don't trust decisionmakers not to misconstrue group differences in a way that benefits them, forcing them to behave as if all groups were equal is the obvious Schelling point for preventing exploitation](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts). (The government can't oppress people on the basis of sex if the government isn't allowed to see sex.) +[^fine-document]: From an American perspective, natch. -[TODO: and to the extent that Americans have reified antisexism as a terminal value, it's as a result of dynamics like this] +As I mentioned in ["Comment on a Scene"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/), anti-discrimination policy makes sense as game theory: [if you don't trust decisionmakers not to misconstrue group differences in a way that benefits them, forcing them to behave as if all groups were equal is the obvious Schelling point for preventing exploitation](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts): the government can't oppress people on the basis of sex if the government isn't allowed to see sex. (American progressivism's elevation of antisexism and antiracism to terminal values is probably a reification of this strategy, rather than something that would make sense in the absence of the political problem and an instinct to reify contingent political strategies as terminal values.) -One could construe Keltham's line of questioning as deliberately trying to play that 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 irrationally sexist culture to do that sanely and is eager to explain how good decisions can be recovered in terms of lower-level features at some extra expense. +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. -[TODO: Yudkowsky's comment throws doubt on this interpretation; it looks like Keltham doesn't get it because it lookks like Yudkowsky doesn't get it. It's hard to believe that the lack of prediction markets in particular is what makes the IDF bad] +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 _buy it_. 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. +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. -Anti-discrimination norms are like NGDP targeting: prohibiting certain probabilistic inferences in order to cancel out widespread irrational bigotry is similar to printing money to cancel out a widespread irrational tendency to fire workers instead of lowering nominal wages in that it's not something you would think of in a world where people are just doing decision Bayesian decision theory—and it's not something you would _portray as superior_ if you came from a world that prides itself on just doing Bayesian decision theory and were trying to enlighten the natives of a strange and primitive culture. Yudkowsky's reply to "Comment on a Scene" tries to patch the problem by suggesting that Civilization doesn't need to make those probabilistic inferences anyway because it has prediction markets, but this is an obvious rationalization. (If you disagree, I have an amazing new sorting algorithm that may interest you ...) +Anti-discrimination norms are like NGDP targeting: prohibiting certain probabilistic inferences in order to cancel out widespread irrational bigotry is similar to printing money to cancel out a widespread irrational tendency to fire workers instead of lowering nominal wages in that it's not something you would think of in a world where people are just doing decision Bayesian decision theory—and it's not something you would _portray as superior_ if you came from a world that prides itself on just doing Bayesian decision theory and were trying to enlighten the natives of a strange and primitive culture. If you think prediction markets render this moot, then I have an amazing new sorting algorithm that may interest you ... -- 2.17.1