10 ms·

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Is That Your True Rejection?

164 points by rms 15y ago

tokenadult 15y ago
I'm not sure if Eliezer (who participates here) has seen either of the links below before. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20(2008).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20(2009).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... I post these links to HN from time to time, because they are from top-notch authors on heritability research and join issue directly with a very common misconception about what heritability figures show about human behavioral traits. Simply put, whatever the numerical figure is for heritability of this or that human behavioral trait says NOTHING about how malleable (changeable or controllable by environment) the trait is. Let me be clear: all human behavioral characteristics are heritable, with heritabilities above the theoretical minimum of 0 and always strictly less than the theoretical maximum of 1. But no matter what the calculated heritability is of a specific trait, we know NOTHING about how subject that trait is to change under the influence of carefully planned environmental interventions. That is a separate line of investigation, not logically or factually related at all to the heritability calculated by the usual methodologies in studies of correlations of traits among closely related and less closely related individuals. The references provide more details. From the article: "When I ask myself this question, I think my actual political views would change primarily with my beliefs about how likely government interventions are in practice to do more harm than good. I think my libertarianism rests chiefly on the empirical proposition—a factual belief which is either false or true, depending on how the universe actually works—that 90% of the time you have a bright idea like 'offer government mortgage guarantees so that more people can own houses,' someone will somehow manage to screw it up, or there’ll be side effects you didn’t think about, and most of the time you’ll end up doing more harm than good, and the next time won’t be much different from the last time." Similarly, my views on politics and economics are heavily influenced by real-world experience, particularly the real-world experience of living in Taiwan, and visiting Hong Kong and China, in the early 1980s when those three culturally similar areas lived under very different government policies. Government policies make a difference. Actuality trumps theory in political science and economics.
- ellyagg 15y ago
  Turkheimer by no means represents a consensus view in genetic research. Moreover, I find some of his positions to be quite at odds with my view of what scientific philosophy should be. For example, he believes that the study of race and IQ is not a "legitimate matter for scientific inquiry". You can spin all the pseudoscientific rationalizations you want to make that claim, but as soon as you say that some subject is off limits, and that subject just happens to be very related to a taboo social and political topic, your motivations become suspect in my opinion. But then that's why, apropos of the linked article's ending, I'm a libertarian.
  - tokenadult 15y ago
    Turkheimer by no means represents a consensus view in genetic research Who else would you suggest? One of the links I put in my first reply here is co-authored by Bouchard, Gottesman, and Johnson (all of whom I know personally, as they are based at the university where I join their discussions of human behavioral genetics research), and if they are not part of the mainstream, who is? What is the citation for the statement you attribute to Turkheimer and put in quotation marks in your comment? Where could an interested reader look up its context? I invite readers to take a look at Turkheimer's list of publications http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm and see for themselves how his writings fit into current literature on human behavioral genetics. After edit: I just remembered that another reason I especially like recommending Turkheimer's writings, besides the fact that he is an eminent authority on the facts he writes about, is that he is a researcher who changes his opinion on the basis of evidence. I thought that Turkheimer is an especially interesting example for Eliezer in that regard, as Eliezer writes a lot about human beings examining their unspoken biases and fitting their thinking to evidence. Here is a link a bibliography to several scholarly, recent sources about genetic study of human populations, including how uninformative the socially determined category of "race" is in genetic investigations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol... Most bloggers don't look up scholarly sources like this, but my respect for my fellow HN participants prompts me to make use of my alma mater's university library and other libraries in my town to look up the most reliable sources and share them here.
nknight 15y ago
I think the main problem I have with this is that it's not internally consistent. He talks about the evolution of a complex system by incremental improvements, but apparently maintains the libertarian instinct of "This is broken, throw it out." instead of "This is broken, how do we improve it?". There are an enormous number of governance models that have never been seriously tried on a large scale. There is no fundamental reason to believe that the libertarian value of "shut it all down" is going to produce better results than any of the other possible models.
- Jach 15y ago
  I don't believe Eliezer has ever said that evolution works by incremental improvements, only by incremental changes that become increasingly complex as a system when there are dependencies. Therefore even if you have a super-complex system it can still suck, the complexity may add nothing to its goodness, incremental changes can be directly harmful, and the right solution may indeed be to throw it out and start over. This should be clear to any programmer. I'll profess historical ignorance here, though from my knowledge I believe that most instances of government change to a better government (and there have of course been changes to a worse government) have come through sudden revolutions that upset much of the previously existing power hierarchy. Additionally, to me it seems like government is naturally against any change at all, which precludes it from being improved easily. Eliezer has written numerous times elsewhere: "Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change." So I don't think a "scrap the current system" is necessarily a bad idea, though I don't want bloody revolution.
  - nknight 15y ago
    But start over with what? I don't interpret libertarianism as "throw it out and start over", but as "throw it out and do nothing". They seek to strip government down and put it in a sealed box of predetermined size that can never change. It should be equally clear to any programmer that boxing yourself in eventually leads to disaster.
    - Jach 15y ago
mkopinsky 15y ago
The article he's responding to is at http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/06/michael-shermer/liberty-and-science/ http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/06/michael-shermer/liber...
- pjscott 15y ago
  And the rest of the discussion is playing out on their main site this month: http://www.cato-unbound.org/ http://www.cato-unbound.org/
ChuckMcM 15y ago
I found the concept of being 'logically rude' insightful. I have been on both sides of that.
- aangjie 15y ago
  Yep, i would be satisfied it if we all can take away only that lesson from that article. And i think we may all be better off as a society. I am willing to abandon that belief, if empirical evidence shows the delay in decision-making resulting from that change will minimize impact of the decision. Ofcourse, testing it is a lot harder. But still.
wybo 15y ago
A very thoughtful article, especially the notion of something being ones true reason, and variance as causal impact, but isn't what he describes as libertarianism with a small 'l', what has been known as the Social Democrat way in Europe for decades...; only have the state be involved in those things where the market and other societal provisions (charity, etc.) fail. Not much new here, except for the content of it being quite reasonable... :)
- speleding 15y ago
  Quite the opposite. Social Democrats in Europe are a diverse bunch from one country to another and even within countries, but all most all of them believe in the governments ability to improve society. (Because of this many European countries have a ministry of Culture, a ministry of Sports, etc.) Europe does have liberal parties that look like the discussed libertarians with a small "l", especially in Northern Europe, but they usually take third place behind the socialist and christian democrats.
carbocation 15y ago
In a community where everyone is genetically and epigenetically identical, variance attributable to additive genetic factors (heritability) is zero. In a community where everyone is genetically diverse but their living and work situations are exactly identical (a very hard scenario to imagine), all variance is attributable to genetic factors. (The heritability is potentially 1, but since the definition of heritability is that it pertains to additive genetic factors, it may not be 1 in this case.) A few things flow from this. The first is that population-level estimates of heritability may change over time, even if only because environments change, sometimes wildly, over time. The second is that estimates of heritability for one population may not tell you about another population, and the population-level estimate itself is a blend of the community-level constituent values. (Even when you derive your estimates from twin studies, you can imagine how this is true.) The third is that even if you drive heritability to 1 because you have made everyone's environment uniformly awesome, this does not mean that you cannot make everyone's environment even more awesome and thereby increase productivity/output/whatever. Say that Trait X is one's "widget production ability." If Trait X's variability is now 100% genetic, it does not at all follow that Trait X's mean cannot be increased by changing the environment. (It merely follows that Trait X's variance, not its mean, is currently completely explained by genetic differences.) The fourth is that with substantial state intervention, you can probably manipulate the heritability of any human behavioral trait to whatever value you want it to be, given enough dedication of resources and willingness to flout norms.
araneae 15y ago
Interesting perspective, but it does ignore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balancing_selection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balancing_selection. It's possible that a certain amount of variation in the population is kept around through evolutionary processes. On the whole, though, I do agree that humans are basically the same.
doomlaser 15y ago
The hospital example he ends with is strange. It's my understanding that under libertarian philosophy, children would not have access to any care in that society unless their parents happened to be able to afford it.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  It's my understanding that under libertarian philosophy, children would not have access to any care in that society unless their parents happened to be able to afford it. Libertarians are very happy to see philanthropists devoting their own money to helpful causes. They are also happy for voluntary private associations to work for their mutual benefit. They can point to many examples of people doing just that in history. http://www.amazon.com/Market-Education-History-Studies-Philosophy/dp/1560004088/ http://www.amazon.com/Market-Education-History-Studies-Philo... Indeed, historically, most hospitals that treat poor children and most schools that educate poor children were founded without government support, all over the world.
  - doomlaser 15y ago
    Before the public education system in the United States, schools were localized and constrained to the wealthy class. Edit: Why am I being downvoted? Am I wrong?
    - alan-crowe 15y ago
      You are indeed wrong > High and Ellig sum up the experience of the 18th and 19th centuries by noting that "the available evidence strongly indicates that Americans of the period took an active interest in education. ... The private supply was extensive, not only in the number of children served but in the spectrum of social classes involved." http://www.sntp.net/education/school_state_3.htm http://www.sntp.net/education/school_state_3.htm
      - doomlaser 15y ago
        I'm not so sure that's true. "Still, the opportunity to attend schools was limited. Formal schooling was largely restricted to those who could afford to pay. Even "free" schools often required payment of tuition, and primary schools required entering students to be literate, barring children who had not been taught to read by their parents." Here's a link with period testimonials from actual early 19th century private school instructors. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=38 http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cf...
flourpower 15y ago
I think he should have treated the set of all government actions with more granularity. Imagine that you partitioned that set into two subsets. The first subset would be actions on policy issues that libertarians find it necessary for governments to act on. The second subset would be actions on policy issues that they don't think it's necessary for governments to act on. It could simultaneously be true that 99% of actions in the second subset will tend to have bad results and only 1% of actions in the first subset will have bad results depending on the relative size of the sets. If you're not clear about which subset you're talking about, you'll get people saying things like "you must be wrong that most government policies have a bad results, this country (that mostly performs actions in the first subset) tends to have very good results."
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
Interestingly enough, my own small-l libertarianism has nothing to do with the innate properties of people. It's about how those properties come together into groups. I have found, again and again, that when people organize into large groups and form systems of getting along it never works. The larger the group, the more complex the system, the longer the system has been in place, the worst the results are. I don't think there is any intervention, nature or nurture, that would change this. To feel otherwise, to me, would be to say that there is a perfect person. That seems more than a little scary. I find our defects, when working together, give us adaptability. Counter-intuitively, I believe that the properties most of us would desire in a population are probably reverse-correlated to growth and evolution. [insert long explanation about the value of variance across multiple dimensions here] Representative democracies are kind of a hack to this law. You try to pick somebody to represent you and make decisions, you split up powers among various competing branches of government, etc. What is happening in the west, though, is the idea of a "restart" is mostly gone. It's just the same guys wearing different hats that take turns ruling. But to me these are properties of how systems of people operate. The word "government" has little to do with it. The reason to fight as hard as possible for individual freedom has nothing to do with selfishness: the more freedom the individual retains, the less the stakes are, and the slower the process of system corruption becomes. My ultimate rejection would be a demonstration of a stable, creative, dynamic, adaptive, and productively chaotic society of non-trivial size that had been in existence for more than a century or so. Hate to set the bar that high. Need to think about that some more to see if I could make my position more logically approachable.
- josephg 15y ago
  I totally agree with your premise. I used to work at google, and every time I go back there / talk to my old friends it breaks my heart a little. That said, you've made two claims in your post: 1. All groups will get worse over time 2. Therefore, we should keep government as small as possible The refutation to the argument is that many other modern democracies have (proportionally) bigger governments than the US. These countries certainly get advantages from big governments (like social welfare, decent education systems, state sponsored medical attention, etc) but don't seem to pay much of a cost for it. As an Australian citizen, I will get paid a dole if I can't find work, all my important medical expenses are covered or heavily subsidised, our schools are decent everywhere, and so on. My taxes are a bit higher than yours, but not unreasonably so. I suspect the important difference might just be scale - Australia has just 20M people. Most European countries have similar sizes. Maybe if the US were lots of small countries instead it would work better? Its hard to tell...
nazgulnarsil 15y ago
There is variance within the libertarian community and this confuses a lot of people. The many viewpoints are united by a respect for contract law and property rights. The main split is down to people who believe these two things are an ethical imperative and those who believe them to be pragmatically optimal. Many believe in a jumbled mix of the two. That is, they are a little shaky on the differences between normative and positive statements, and thus have difficulty clarifying their position.
danielson 15y ago
"Over to you, Carter." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEegK7Df1tQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEegK7Df1tQ
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
guelo 15y ago
I always find it weird about libertarians how they're so skeptical of big institutions in the form of government but don't seem to worry about big institutions in the form of corporations when it is obvious to everyone how dysfunctional big corps can get. And how much damage big corporations can do. The magical belief in the "free market" fairy is incredibly naive. Anyone that has ever run genetic algorithms knows how easy it is for even a moderately complicated system to get stuck in obviously inefficient local maxima. A nation's economy is much more complicated.
- chwahoo 15y ago
  Exactly. I really liked Yudkowski's framing of the rationale behind his political beliefs and agreed with his progression of ideas until he reached his conclusion. In particular, I liked his stating the issues in terms of pragmatism rather that principles because it allows for some consideration of "the public good" (which idealistic libertarians bristle at), even though that idea is admittedly hard to pin down. I won't hesitate to acknowledge the (seemingly inherent) problems with government. However, laissez-faire capitalism has it's own inherent failings: every non-libertarian has their own list but they tend to include externalities (environment, public health, ...), ideas of "fairness" (large income inequality, valuing lives in terms of income, opportunity, ...), commons (turning things that are naturally shared---public spaces, roads, ideas, water---into private monopolies). There are well-worn libertarian responses to all of these concerns, but each issue is complex and I've not generally been satisfied with purely laissez-faire approaches (so far). I like the idea of government serving as an (imperfect) check-and-balance on corporations, just as voters and separate branches are imperfect checks on government. As broken as government tools like regulation can be, I suspect the threat of their use is government's most effective tool.
aufreak3 15y ago
For reference - Eliezer's Dec 2008 post on this - http://lesswrong.com/lw/wj/is_that_your_true_rejection/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/wj/is_that_your_true_rejection/

164 points by rms 15y ago

I'm not sure if Eliezer (who participates here) has seen either of the links below before. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20(2008).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20(2009).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... I post these links to HN from time to time, because they are from top-notch authors on heritability research and join issue directly with a very common misconception about what heritability figures show about human behavioral traits. Simply put, whatever the numerical figure is for heritability of this or that human behavioral trait says NOTHING about how malleable (changeable or controllable by environment) the trait is. Let me be clear: all human behavioral characteristics are heritable, with heritabilities above the theoretical minimum of 0 and always strictly less than the theoretical maximum of 1. But no matter what the calculated heritability is of a specific trait, we know NOTHING about how subject that trait is to change under the influence of carefully planned environmental interventions. That is a separate line of investigation, not logically or factually related at all to the heritability calculated by the usual methodologies in studies of correlations of traits among closely related and less closely related individuals. The references provide more details. From the article: "When I ask myself this question, I think my actual political views would change primarily with my beliefs about how likely government interventions are in practice to do more harm than good. I think my libertarianism rests chiefly on the empirical proposition—a factual belief which is either false or true, depending on how the universe actually works—that 90% of the time you have a bright idea like 'offer government mortgage guarantees so that more people can own houses,' someone will somehow manage to screw it up, or there’ll be side effects you didn’t think about, and most of the time you’ll end up doing more harm than good, and the next time won’t be much different from the last time." Similarly, my views on politics and economics are heavily influenced by real-world experience, particularly the real-world experience of living in Taiwan, and visiting Hong Kong and China, in the early 1980s when those three culturally similar areas lived under very different government policies. Government policies make a difference. Actuality trumps theory in political science and economics.

ellyagg 15y ago
Turkheimer by no means represents a consensus view in genetic research. Moreover, I find some of his positions to be quite at odds with my view of what scientific philosophy should be. For example, he believes that the study of race and IQ is not a "legitimate matter for scientific inquiry". You can spin all the pseudoscientific rationalizations you want to make that claim, but as soon as you say that some subject is off limits, and that subject just happens to be very related to a taboo social and political topic, your motivations become suspect in my opinion. But then that's why, apropos of the linked article's ending, I'm a libertarian.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  Turkheimer by no means represents a consensus view in genetic research Who else would you suggest? One of the links I put in my first reply here is co-authored by Bouchard, Gottesman, and Johnson (all of whom I know personally, as they are based at the university where I join their discussions of human behavioral genetics research), and if they are not part of the mainstream, who is? What is the citation for the statement you attribute to Turkheimer and put in quotation marks in your comment? Where could an interested reader look up its context? I invite readers to take a look at Turkheimer's list of publications http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm and see for themselves how his writings fit into current literature on human behavioral genetics. After edit: I just remembered that another reason I especially like recommending Turkheimer's writings, besides the fact that he is an eminent authority on the facts he writes about, is that he is a researcher who changes his opinion on the basis of evidence. I thought that Turkheimer is an especially interesting example for Eliezer in that regard, as Eliezer writes a lot about human beings examining their unspoken biases and fitting their thinking to evidence. Here is a link a bibliography to several scholarly, recent sources about genetic study of human populations, including how uninformative the socially determined category of "race" is in genetic investigations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol... Most bloggers don't look up scholarly sources like this, but my respect for my fellow HN participants prompts me to make use of my alma mater's university library and other libraries in my town to look up the most reliable sources and share them here.

nknight 15y ago

I think the main problem I have with this is that it's not internally consistent. He talks about the evolution of a complex system by incremental improvements, but apparently maintains the libertarian instinct of "This is broken, throw it out." instead of "This is broken, how do we improve it?". There are an enormous number of governance models that have never been seriously tried on a large scale. There is no fundamental reason to believe that the libertarian value of "shut it all down" is going to produce better results than any of the other possible models.

Jach 15y ago
I don't believe Eliezer has ever said that evolution works by incremental improvements, only by incremental changes that become increasingly complex as a system when there are dependencies. Therefore even if you have a super-complex system it can still suck, the complexity may add nothing to its goodness, incremental changes can be directly harmful, and the right solution may indeed be to throw it out and start over. This should be clear to any programmer. I'll profess historical ignorance here, though from my knowledge I believe that most instances of government change to a better government (and there have of course been changes to a worse government) have come through sudden revolutions that upset much of the previously existing power hierarchy. Additionally, to me it seems like government is naturally against any change at all, which precludes it from being improved easily. Eliezer has written numerous times elsewhere: "Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change." So I don't think a "scrap the current system" is necessarily a bad idea, though I don't want bloody revolution.
- nknight 15y ago
  But start over with what? I don't interpret libertarianism as "throw it out and start over", but as "throw it out and do nothing". They seek to strip government down and put it in a sealed box of predetermined size that can never change. It should be equally clear to any programmer that boxing yourself in eventually leads to disaster.
  - Jach 15y ago

mkopinsky 15y ago

The article he's responding to is at http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/06/michael-shermer/liberty-and-science/ http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/09/06/michael-shermer/liber...

pjscott 15y ago
And the rest of the discussion is playing out on their main site this month: http://www.cato-unbound.org/ http://www.cato-unbound.org/

ChuckMcM 15y ago

I found the concept of being 'logically rude' insightful. I have been on both sides of that.

aangjie 15y ago
Yep, i would be satisfied it if we all can take away only that lesson from that article. And i think we may all be better off as a society. I am willing to abandon that belief, if empirical evidence shows the delay in decision-making resulting from that change will minimize impact of the decision. Ofcourse, testing it is a lot harder. But still.

wybo 15y ago

A very thoughtful article, especially the notion of something being ones true reason, and variance as causal impact, but isn't what he describes as libertarianism with a small 'l', what has been known as the Social Democrat way in Europe for decades...; only have the state be involved in those things where the market and other societal provisions (charity, etc.) fail. Not much new here, except for the content of it being quite reasonable... :)

speleding 15y ago
Quite the opposite. Social Democrats in Europe are a diverse bunch from one country to another and even within countries, but all most all of them believe in the governments ability to improve society. (Because of this many European countries have a ministry of Culture, a ministry of Sports, etc.) Europe does have liberal parties that look like the discussed libertarians with a small "l", especially in Northern Europe, but they usually take third place behind the socialist and christian democrats.

carbocation 15y ago

In a community where everyone is genetically and epigenetically identical, variance attributable to additive genetic factors (heritability) is zero. In a community where everyone is genetically diverse but their living and work situations are exactly identical (a very hard scenario to imagine), all variance is attributable to genetic factors. (The heritability is potentially 1, but since the definition of heritability is that it pertains to additive genetic factors, it may not be 1 in this case.) A few things flow from this. The first is that population-level estimates of heritability may change over time, even if only because environments change, sometimes wildly, over time. The second is that estimates of heritability for one population may not tell you about another population, and the population-level estimate itself is a blend of the community-level constituent values. (Even when you derive your estimates from twin studies, you can imagine how this is true.) The third is that even if you drive heritability to 1 because you have made everyone's environment uniformly awesome, this does not mean that you cannot make everyone's environment even more awesome and thereby increase productivity/output/whatever. Say that Trait X is one's "widget production ability." If Trait X's variability is now 100% genetic, it does not at all follow that Trait X's mean cannot be increased by changing the environment. (It merely follows that Trait X's variance, not its mean, is currently completely explained by genetic differences.) The fourth is that with substantial state intervention, you can probably manipulate the heritability of any human behavioral trait to whatever value you want it to be, given enough dedication of resources and willingness to flout norms.

araneae 15y ago

Interesting perspective, but it does ignore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balancing_selection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balancing_selection. It's possible that a certain amount of variation in the population is kept around through evolutionary processes. On the whole, though, I do agree that humans are basically the same.

doomlaser 15y ago

The hospital example he ends with is strange. It's my understanding that under libertarian philosophy, children would not have access to any care in that society unless their parents happened to be able to afford it.

tokenadult 15y ago
It's my understanding that under libertarian philosophy, children would not have access to any care in that society unless their parents happened to be able to afford it. Libertarians are very happy to see philanthropists devoting their own money to helpful causes. They are also happy for voluntary private associations to work for their mutual benefit. They can point to many examples of people doing just that in history. http://www.amazon.com/Market-Education-History-Studies-Philosophy/dp/1560004088/ http://www.amazon.com/Market-Education-History-Studies-Philo... Indeed, historically, most hospitals that treat poor children and most schools that educate poor children were founded without government support, all over the world.
- doomlaser 15y ago
  Before the public education system in the United States, schools were localized and constrained to the wealthy class. Edit: Why am I being downvoted? Am I wrong?
  - alan-crowe 15y ago
    You are indeed wrong > High and Ellig sum up the experience of the 18th and 19th centuries by noting that "the available evidence strongly indicates that Americans of the period took an active interest in education. ... The private supply was extensive, not only in the number of children served but in the spectrum of social classes involved." http://www.sntp.net/education/school_state_3.htm http://www.sntp.net/education/school_state_3.htm
    - doomlaser 15y ago
      I'm not so sure that's true. "Still, the opportunity to attend schools was limited. Formal schooling was largely restricted to those who could afford to pay. Even "free" schools often required payment of tuition, and primary schools required entering students to be literate, barring children who had not been taught to read by their parents." Here's a link with period testimonials from actual early 19th century private school instructors. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=38 http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cf...

flourpower 15y ago

I think he should have treated the set of all government actions with more granularity. Imagine that you partitioned that set into two subsets. The first subset would be actions on policy issues that libertarians find it necessary for governments to act on. The second subset would be actions on policy issues that they don't think it's necessary for governments to act on. It could simultaneously be true that 99% of actions in the second subset will tend to have bad results and only 1% of actions in the first subset will have bad results depending on the relative size of the sets. If you're not clear about which subset you're talking about, you'll get people saying things like "you must be wrong that most government policies have a bad results, this country (that mostly performs actions in the first subset) tends to have very good results."

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

Interestingly enough, my own small-l libertarianism has nothing to do with the innate properties of people. It's about how those properties come together into groups. I have found, again and again, that when people organize into large groups and form systems of getting along it never works. The larger the group, the more complex the system, the longer the system has been in place, the worst the results are. I don't think there is any intervention, nature or nurture, that would change this. To feel otherwise, to me, would be to say that there is a perfect person. That seems more than a little scary. I find our defects, when working together, give us adaptability. Counter-intuitively, I believe that the properties most of us would desire in a population are probably reverse-correlated to growth and evolution. [insert long explanation about the value of variance across multiple dimensions here] Representative democracies are kind of a hack to this law. You try to pick somebody to represent you and make decisions, you split up powers among various competing branches of government, etc. What is happening in the west, though, is the idea of a "restart" is mostly gone. It's just the same guys wearing different hats that take turns ruling. But to me these are properties of how systems of people operate. The word "government" has little to do with it. The reason to fight as hard as possible for individual freedom has nothing to do with selfishness: the more freedom the individual retains, the less the stakes are, and the slower the process of system corruption becomes. My ultimate rejection would be a demonstration of a stable, creative, dynamic, adaptive, and productively chaotic society of non-trivial size that had been in existence for more than a century or so. Hate to set the bar that high. Need to think about that some more to see if I could make my position more logically approachable.

josephg 15y ago
I totally agree with your premise. I used to work at google, and every time I go back there / talk to my old friends it breaks my heart a little. That said, you've made two claims in your post: 1. All groups will get worse over time 2. Therefore, we should keep government as small as possible The refutation to the argument is that many other modern democracies have (proportionally) bigger governments than the US. These countries certainly get advantages from big governments (like social welfare, decent education systems, state sponsored medical attention, etc) but don't seem to pay much of a cost for it. As an Australian citizen, I will get paid a dole if I can't find work, all my important medical expenses are covered or heavily subsidised, our schools are decent everywhere, and so on. My taxes are a bit higher than yours, but not unreasonably so. I suspect the important difference might just be scale - Australia has just 20M people. Most European countries have similar sizes. Maybe if the US were lots of small countries instead it would work better? Its hard to tell...

nazgulnarsil 15y ago

There is variance within the libertarian community and this confuses a lot of people. The many viewpoints are united by a respect for contract law and property rights. The main split is down to people who believe these two things are an ethical imperative and those who believe them to be pragmatically optimal. Many believe in a jumbled mix of the two. That is, they are a little shaky on the differences between normative and positive statements, and thus have difficulty clarifying their position.

danielson 15y ago

"Over to you, Carter." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEegK7Df1tQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEegK7Df1tQ

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

guelo 15y ago

I always find it weird about libertarians how they're so skeptical of big institutions in the form of government but don't seem to worry about big institutions in the form of corporations when it is obvious to everyone how dysfunctional big corps can get. And how much damage big corporations can do. The magical belief in the "free market" fairy is incredibly naive. Anyone that has ever run genetic algorithms knows how easy it is for even a moderately complicated system to get stuck in obviously inefficient local maxima. A nation's economy is much more complicated.

chwahoo 15y ago
Exactly. I really liked Yudkowski's framing of the rationale behind his political beliefs and agreed with his progression of ideas until he reached his conclusion. In particular, I liked his stating the issues in terms of pragmatism rather that principles because it allows for some consideration of "the public good" (which idealistic libertarians bristle at), even though that idea is admittedly hard to pin down. I won't hesitate to acknowledge the (seemingly inherent) problems with government. However, laissez-faire capitalism has it's own inherent failings: every non-libertarian has their own list but they tend to include externalities (environment, public health, ...), ideas of "fairness" (large income inequality, valuing lives in terms of income, opportunity, ...), commons (turning things that are naturally shared---public spaces, roads, ideas, water---into private monopolies). There are well-worn libertarian responses to all of these concerns, but each issue is complex and I've not generally been satisfied with purely laissez-faire approaches (so far). I like the idea of government serving as an (imperfect) check-and-balance on corporations, just as voters and separate branches are imperfect checks on government. As broken as government tools like regulation can be, I suspect the threat of their use is government's most effective tool.

aufreak3 15y ago

For reference - Eliezer's Dec 2008 post on this - http://lesswrong.com/lw/wj/is_that_your_true_rejection/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/wj/is_that_your_true_rejection/