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We are optimizing for the wrong things. Instead of optimizing for happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that, we are optimizing for GDP and killing

by api 6y ago

We are optimizing for the wrong things. Instead of optimizing for happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that, we are optimizing for GDP and killing ourselves to make abstract numbers go up.

aaron-santos 6y ago
GDP is an easy to calculate metric. Everyone here knows what happens when an easy to calculate metric becomes a target.
- qznc 6y ago
  Is "easy to calculate" a necessary property? Is it ok to use a "hard to calculate" metric as a target?
  - aaron-santos 6y ago
    No, it is just casual word choice. The audience here, being mostly compsci oriented, likely consider metrics like happiness or fulfillment incalculable, when it is more precise to label them as latent as opposed to observable variables.
throwaway201103 6y ago
> Instead of optimizing for happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that Humans didn't evolve optimizing for those things. We evolved hunting and scrapping for food and shelter, and looking for opportunities to have more. So that's what we're prone to do.
rubin55 6y ago
Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"? If "we" is not "the entire earth population" those that optimize for "happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that" lose to those, for whatever reasons or circumstances, optimize on price alone (arguably to the detriment of their happiness, health, etc). Case in point: outsourcing: 10 devs in the west cost more than 10 devs elsewhere in the world, meaning a global market for dev skills will move elsewhere, where those devs are cheaper for a reason (quality of life, living standards, infrastructure, are not spent on, so labour is cheaper). Of course globalists will argue that this ultimately will "level", look at incomes going up where we outsource-to for example, but I think this misses the point. We will just keep optimizing, pointing the needle so to speak to the next cheapest place, which might in the future be a country that used to be "more expensive" but now, forced to compete, lowers its standards to accomodate the market. We're stuck in a Malthusian Trap. Thinking we can simply escape it by not playing the game is missing the point: the question we need to solve is: "how do we stop competing for resources as individuals or arbitrary groups (neighbourhoord/cities/countries/continents), and start having a real shared understanding of our habits, genetic behaviour and use of resources".
- api 6y ago
  > Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"? "We" is a complex system. It is nobody and everyone. I really don't think humans are actually intelligent. I think we are extremely clever, but a truly intelligent species would learn to countermand the emergent properties of the systems in which it embeds itself and take charge of its own history. We are not intelligent enough to do that. Clever means we can understand one-cause-one-effect or few-causes-one-effect, and you can see that this is how all our engineered systems are built. They are very sophisticated versions of "hit thing with rock." Our machines are full of single parts with single functions. Living systems on the other hand are all-causes-cause-all-effects fully concurrent feedback loops. Every part has every function with varying weights, like the weights in a neural network. That's totally beyond our intelligence to understand. We can barely do parallel programming with a few threads... this is like parallel programming where every instruction executes at once. So far what look like attempts to control our destiny, like communism and fascism, are nothing but resentment driven tribal purges thinly veiled in complex language. They've done more harm than good. Right now just leaving things alone is possibly the best we can do. BTW I think this is also why the promised dividends from sequencing the human genome and understanding genetics have not materialized. Genomes and the living phenotypes they help form are complex all-causes-all emergent systems much like our societies and economies. We are not cognitively capable of understanding them. Studying biology is like studying alien technology from a civilization a billion years beyond ours.

by api 6y ago

aaron-santos 6y ago

GDP is an easy to calculate metric. Everyone here knows what happens when an easy to calculate metric becomes a target.

qznc 6y ago
Is "easy to calculate" a necessary property? Is it ok to use a "hard to calculate" metric as a target?
- aaron-santos 6y ago
  No, it is just casual word choice. The audience here, being mostly compsci oriented, likely consider metrics like happiness or fulfillment incalculable, when it is more precise to label them as latent as opposed to observable variables.

throwaway201103 6y ago

> Instead of optimizing for happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that Humans didn't evolve optimizing for those things. We evolved hunting and scrapping for food and shelter, and looking for opportunities to have more. So that's what we're prone to do.

rubin55 6y ago

Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"? If "we" is not "the entire earth population" those that optimize for "happiness, health, learning, or anything else like that" lose to those, for whatever reasons or circumstances, optimize on price alone (arguably to the detriment of their happiness, health, etc). Case in point: outsourcing: 10 devs in the west cost more than 10 devs elsewhere in the world, meaning a global market for dev skills will move elsewhere, where those devs are cheaper for a reason (quality of life, living standards, infrastructure, are not spent on, so labour is cheaper). Of course globalists will argue that this ultimately will "level", look at incomes going up where we outsource-to for example, but I think this misses the point. We will just keep optimizing, pointing the needle so to speak to the next cheapest place, which might in the future be a country that used to be "more expensive" but now, forced to compete, lowers its standards to accomodate the market. We're stuck in a Malthusian Trap. Thinking we can simply escape it by not playing the game is missing the point: the question we need to solve is: "how do we stop competing for resources as individuals or arbitrary groups (neighbourhoord/cities/countries/continents), and start having a real shared understanding of our habits, genetic behaviour and use of resources".

api 6y ago
> Any individual would agree with you and herein lies the crux: who is "we"? "We" is a complex system. It is nobody and everyone. I really don't think humans are actually intelligent. I think we are extremely clever, but a truly intelligent species would learn to countermand the emergent properties of the systems in which it embeds itself and take charge of its own history. We are not intelligent enough to do that. Clever means we can understand one-cause-one-effect or few-causes-one-effect, and you can see that this is how all our engineered systems are built. They are very sophisticated versions of "hit thing with rock." Our machines are full of single parts with single functions. Living systems on the other hand are all-causes-cause-all-effects fully concurrent feedback loops. Every part has every function with varying weights, like the weights in a neural network. That's totally beyond our intelligence to understand. We can barely do parallel programming with a few threads... this is like parallel programming where every instruction executes at once. So far what look like attempts to control our destiny, like communism and fascism, are nothing but resentment driven tribal purges thinly veiled in complex language. They've done more harm than good. Right now just leaving things alone is possibly the best we can do. BTW I think this is also why the promised dividends from sequencing the human genome and understanding genetics have not materialized. Genomes and the living phenotypes they help form are complex all-causes-all emergent systems much like our societies and economies. We are not cognitively capable of understanding them. Studying biology is like studying alien technology from a civilization a billion years beyond ours.