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Money, the Unit of Caring (2009)
- noelwelsh 3y agoPlease don't take this post seriously. It is fundamentally flawed. People are not rational. Homo economicus does not exist, outside the fictions of the simple models of classical economics. Money is not an expression of virtue or caring, and economics is not a moral framework.
- loeg 3y agoNothing in your comment addresses the article beyond the headline.
- noelwelsh 3y agoMy apologies for only addressing the premise of the article, and not the rest that derives from that premise.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- loeg 3y agoYou managed to address several premises that aren't actually present in the article.
- noelwelsh 3y agoYou seem to want me to guess the premises you believe the article builds on but I haven't addressed, but I'm really not interested in playing this game. If you have something to say beyond "you're wrong", just say it.
- ke88y 3y agoThe article starts with a "folk theorem" which is more of a tautology/definition suited to the author's priors. It meaning hinges on the meanings of at least a half dozen very fancy sounding but conveniently undefined terms. You'll have to excuse me for not even wanting to read much further. From there, the article gets exponentially worse by the paragraph. It's pseudo-mathematical and pseudo-philosophical nonsense. The final claims are fundamentally sociological(!!!) But the author makes zero effort to empirically or rationally interrogate how his prescribed behavioral modifications would impact human individual behavior or human group dynamics. He fails to make any testable hypotheses. Here's a counter-theory: the prescribed course of action would have the effect of alienating the wealthy from the poor, resulting in worse outcomes for everyone involved than a society where there is more fraternity between class categories but in which man hours are slightly less "efficiently" allocated. I also suspect that wealthy people throw money at rationalists because "continue being On Top And In Charge because you are Better and it's morally justified as long as you Donate To Help The Poors" is far less dangerous to the status quo wealth distribution than telling every middle and upper income person "maybe you should spend a few weeks volunteering in a homeless shelter".
- quinnjh 3y agoOeconomicus comes from the Ancient Greek words oikos for home or house and nemein which means management, literally translated to 'household management'.
- FearNotDaniel 3y ago"Nice" comes from the Latin "nescius" meaning "ignorant, stupid". Etymology is fun, but often completely irrelevant to the matter at hand.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoThe most obvious flaw is that money is printed by the government, and the value of it is also manipulated by the government, and ~40% of it is spent by the government. Money says more about the government than it says about the people who use it.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoIf you had perfectly rational people, all uniform in their rationality, one might want to distribute that trait along the bell curve, such that most were "mostly" rational, with a few highly irrational individuals and a few highly rational ones. It's like the ant colony... send agents out along all the possible paths simultaneously, see who comes back with cake. Even in that model though, they all average out to "mostly rational". People do too. What about this argument requires that people be individually rational rather than on-average rational?
- polygamous_bat 3y agoHave you ever lived with a roommate who doesn't flush the toilet after they use it, so you always have to flush the toilet twice, once before you use it and once after? What's up with this system that requires everyone to individually flush rather than every person on average to flush once?
- flushit 3y agoWow. Best comment I've read this year! (Like, seriously. Kudos!)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoIf all we're counting is the number of flushes (which we are) why would that matter? You're injecting some weird morality into it which just doesn't belong. Economics works not despite the fact that some are irrational, but because all the irrationality averages out.
- troelsSteegin 3y agoI read the article as asserting that all action must be economically observable in order to be action. That action requires concrete allocation of resources, and that in order to care, you have to do something. Otheriwse, I agree.
- flushit 3y agoIt's all approximate. People are not fully rational, but they are not fully irrational either. Seen the blog? It's literally called "Less Wrong". It's not perfect, but it provides interesting insights. As such, I found that article valuable.
- bibanez 3y agoI feel like the person writing this is perhaps too arrogant. > In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure of how much society cares about something. > > This is a brutal yet obvious point, which many are motivated to deny. This is not a definition, and I don’t think it is obvious. What “society” are you talking about? Your national borders? Also, as a counterexample, society whatever it may be cares about motherhood, that doesn’t mean it pays money to mothers…
- teekert 3y agoActually, some northern European countries have over a year of parenting leave to be distributed among 2 parents, one could argue that that is paying parents to be parents because society cares.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- polygamous_bat 3y agoThis is a common fallacy, since "society" doesn't care unless it is made to care by the people that makes it up. Unless there is combined social pressure to care, the most psychopathic among us will always delegate the social responsibility to those who are "soft-hearted" and choose to hoard their money or spend it in a self-centered way. The rationalists always make this mistake, intentionally or unintentionally, to take the average person and think that that's all there is in society.
- bux93 3y agoAn arrogant writer? On lesswrong.com?
- timmytokyo 3y agoNot just any old writer, but Eliezer himself, the less wrongest of less wrongers. I can see why he wrote this. He founded the Singularity Institute for AI, which eventually became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which ultimately provides him with his sinecure. Despite producing no research of any value, MIRI has been funded with "units of caring" by people like Peter Thiel, Vitalik Buterin and Dustin Moskovitz. Now Eliezer has transformed fully into a modern Cassandra, prophesying imminent AI apocalypse from which there is no escape. Sadly, for him, there are not enough units of caring to save us.
- teekert 3y agoIt's a very Ayn Rand-ish piece. I like this quote: "There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone to work for five hours at the soup kitchen." Of course, in that simple quote nothing is included about how much the Lawyer is enjoying the work, what value she gets from it in other ways than that expressed directly in money. So it may still be a "rational" exchange. Atlas Shrugged changed my relationship with money, also changed my self esteem. As someone brought up in a, what I can only call, overly social way, a very christian way (self-sacrifice is holy etc), rational self-interest is liberating. And indeed I find it more ethical. Us westerners in Christian based societies somehow always like to say that money is the root of all evil, but I feel that that stance (at the very least) doesn't take into account what the alternative is to money, and what money has enabled for us. This quote sums it up for me: "The act of donating money is not the momentary act of writing the check, it is the act of every hour you spent to earn the money to write that check—just as though you worked at the charity itself in your professional capacity, at maximum, grownup efficiency." (Edit, I know, I shouldn't say this, I apologize Dang, I deserve the downvotes, but this is one of those posts that generates a lot of replies and I see it going up and down in karma. It's somehow "engaging". Mentioning Ayn Rand does that every time.)
- PopAlongKid 3y ago>Christian based societies somehow always like to say that money is the root of all evil A common mis-quote of the biblical verse. "The Christian condemnation relates to avarice and greed rather than money itself."[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_of_money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_of_money
- randomdata 3y ago> In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure of how much society cares about something. Price is the measure of how much someone cares about something; specifically with respect to how much they are willing to give up in order to get that something. While price is often recorded relative to units of currency, that does not make them equivalent. Currency, or "money", is an IOU. It is used when one does not have present value available to make a trade, but offers future value in exchange for something of present value. In the future, one can redeem currency for something of value, ultimately satisfying the trade made.
- photochemsyn 3y agoThe underlying theme here is that people can do good and demonstrate their benevolent nature by (1) first making a lot of money and (2) then donating a percentage of that money to philanthropic organizations which will act to improve societal conditions. However, a good chunk of POs today are little more than tax shelters and semi-covert influence operations aimed at protecting and consolidating wealth. A better and fairer approach is to have a tax structure that progressively increases relative to one's income, as was the case in 1960s America. Yes, there were many loopholes but they also pushed individuals in certain directions - for example, corporations could avoid high taxation rates by plowing a good chunk of their profits into R & D programs, there was a high estate tax so children of the ultra-wealthy would be encouraged to develop marketable skills rather than just inheriting their wealth, and the tax revenue was used to build robust domestic infrastructure, quality public schools, and a public healthcare system accessible to all - along with services like police, fire, emergency services, national defense, scientific research, etc. Incidentally, modern neoclassical economics is fundamentally flawed, as humans are not rational actors, utility is not energy, externalities are not a valid concept, etc. It has little if any predictive power and serves more as a propagandistic justification of a failing economic system. See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-economist-has-no-clothes/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-economist-has...
- JohnFen 3y ago> people can do good and demonstrate their benevolent nature by (1) first making a lot of money and (2) then donating a percentage of that money to philanthropic organizations which will act to improve societal conditions. But that entirely depends on how they make a lot of money. If someone has harmed others (or supported those that harm others) to do that, donating the money to philanthropic organizations doesn't make it right or good.
- bigbluesax 3y agoWell, it certainly reads like a lesswrong post. > Economies of trade and professional specialization are not just vaguely good yet unnatural-sounding ideas, they are the only way that anything ever gets done in this world. Money is not pieces of paper, it is the common currency of caring. Ask your mom how much money she made raising you. I'm not even opposed to the basic ideas of effective altruism and I agree that giving your money to a cause isn't inherently lesser than giving your time. But why add all of this borderline incoherent babble at the start of the article?
- Detrytus 3y ago> Ask your mom how much money she made raising you. You got that backwards: ask your mom how much money she SPENT on raising you, especially in comparison to her total income.
- bigbluesax 3y agoAh, your right. It still doesn't make much sense, if you ask me. I spend way more on cycling than I do on my parents and friends (we don't do large gifts), does this mean I care more about my bike than I do my parents?
- notacoward 3y agoI don't know about you, but it certainly seems to be true for many. IMO any counterexample that's based on monetary expenditure is doomed to failure because it adopts OP's framing. Whoever can decide the rules can decide the outcome, and all that. Perhaps focusing on time is better. There's little money involved when I cook food for my family, or clean up after, but there is time. I spend that time because I think it matters - not only that the thing gets done, but that I personally should do it as a contribution and example in a social situation. I certainly could pay someone else to do those things. The fact that I don't, or that others do, has absolutely nothing to do with my motivations or how much I care. We all spend time on the things we care about. Money only becomes important when it's exchanged for time. Perhaps another way to look at it is: how do people with "more than enough" money show that they care about something? How do people with no money do so? For many, money has been taken out of the equation but time is still relevant.
- circlefavshape 3y agoAll models are wrong, some are useful. I don't think this is useful. Do Americans care twice as much about health as Swedes do, given that they spend twice the amount (% of GDP) on healthcare? Does random-SV-billionaire care three thousand times as much as I do about time, given that he has spent $300k on an AP watch, and I've spent $100 on a swatch?
- monktastic1 3y agoWhile I agree with your overall point, your final sentence is addressed in the essay (see "up to a positive scalar factor").
- skulk 3y agoSo if this positive scalar factor adjusts different people's values, why can't it also adjust a single person's value from time-to-time, or mood-to-mood? I can find very few interesting conclusions to draw from this article.
- bee_rider 3y agoCould the first just be an issue in the ambiguity of the word “care?” A person hurtling toward the edge of a cliff cares a whole lot more about their brakes than a person driving down a nice calm road, this doesn’t indicate that the former person is generally interested in brakes, they just have some emergency driven care.
- semitones 3y agoAmericans would love to spend less on health if they could - health is a unique category here, because allowing your health to completely run down to "zero" means you die, which is unique from other markets. Also, someone that spends $300k on a watch isn't doing it because they care about time.
- aetherson 3y agoI think you can plausibly give explanations here: Does the billionaire care more than you do about looking extremely wealthy, and do Americans care more than Swedes about not fighting with doctors and pharmaceutical companies than Swedes? I think reasonably yes. But, to your point about useful models, even if you do grant that on some level society does "care" more about something when it expends more money on it, can you tell from the outside view what it actually cares about? Most things that we spend money on are hopelessly complicated, and, like, some of the value we get out of, say, our expenditures on schools are "political favor for Democrats through the Teacher's Union" (and some of what we get from our expenditures on police are "political favor for Republicans through the Policeman's Union.") So do you get much useful information by saying, "Ah, we spend $X on thing A and $Y on thing B"? I mean, not much.
- btilly 3y agoThe flaw in this is right here, "There is this very, very old puzzle/observation in economics about the lawyer who spends an hour volunteering at the soup kitchen, instead of working an extra hour and donating the money to hire someone to work for five hours at the soup kitchen." The lawyer does not truly spend the hour in the soup kitchen for the purpose of feeding people. But rather for what the lawyer gets out of spending that hour. Things like motivation and understanding the problem better. Here is a concrete illustration of the principle. Back in the 1960s, Robert Townsend made it a requirement at Avis that everyone had to work a certain amount of time each year behind the service desk. Having vice presidents do that work was certainly not cheaper than hiring a random person to do it. But having vice presidents be directly aware of where the problems were in that job was in the long run far cheaper than letting them remain unaware and therefore not fixing the problems. This is not what Robert Townsend is best known for though. He's known for having come in to a failing company, and turning it around. In particular he is the CEO under whom the slogan "We try harder" was begun. A slogan that, incidentally, was produced by his inspiring the ad people to try harder themselves! He tells the story in his book Up The Organization! He didn't have a big ad budget. So he asked how he could best motivate the ad people to work on his account. A friend advised him that what they really most wanted was creative freedom. So he told them that he'd accept whatever they said was their best idea, sight unseen. This is why they dared come up with a slogan that undermined standard assumptions about how to do business - and it worked!
- rcoveson 3y agoThat comparison doesn't work unless the lawyer is also donating lawyer-work to the soup kitchen, either directly or indirectly (with money earned). Then you could say the time at the soup kitchen is for the sake of motivation and understanding, as is the case with the mandatory time behind the Avis service desk. But if the lawyer is doing the volunteer manual labor hour instead of donating the much more valuable specialized work hour, then it's nothing like the Avis example.
- slothtrop 3y agoRight it's not mutually exclusive, but they are suggesting that the donation potential would be higher if they chose to work overtime instead of volunteering. This could only matter if said lawyer was attempting to maximize the dollars donated - no one does this anyway. And scarcely you'd find someone motivated to work lots of overtime (why have an arbitrary number of 1 hour?) just to give it all away immediately. People have more than one incentive and desire in play. The "utility-maximizing" choice, if both "effectiveness" and "feeling good" matters, would be to donate whatever one cares to and volunteer as much as one cares to.
- TrackerFF 3y agoI don't know, it probably depends on culture. In some countries, there's a big emphasis on voluntary work - Nordic countries is a good example of that. There's a strong culture of volunteering, to the point where it's frowned upon if you say no. I'm talking about stuff like spring cleaning around parks, living areas, recreational areas, sports fields, shoreline, and the list goes on. You don't get paid anything, but people still do it. There's no "deeper" value or experience learned with those tasks, other than contributing to a nicer neighborhood and surroundings. In a world where money reigns supreme, no-one would care to do those tasks.
- flushit 3y ago> I'm talking about stuff like spring cleaning around parks, living areas, recreational areas, sports fields, shoreline, and the list goes on. You don't get paid anything, but people still do it. As somebody living in a "Nordic country", I respectfully disagree. The municipality often pays "volunteers" for this. It's usually sports clubs and similar organisations that need funding, and instead of just pouring it into them, the municipality "hires" them to do some cleaning, for example. So, after a big event in the city, you see folks all over the place cleaning up, often times kids from soccer clubs or such, but they don't do it entirely voluntarily, they do it because that will pay for their shirts next season or their trip to the training camp in the summer. That said, it's also common to get involved in neighborhood activities that make things nice, planting some trees, painting some 300-year-old cabin in the woods with a bunch of neighbors that do care, this kind of thing, but I've lived in the U.S. for a while as well and we did that there too. Perhaps mostly with what you'd call hippies that participated mostly, but over here in $nordic_country, it's not like it's everybody who is contributing either. There are the more bourgeios who don't contribute and the I-don't-care-f*k-off type of neighbors as well.
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- ke88y 3y agoIn classic LessWrong fashion this post entirely ignores everything human about society while simultaneously making a complete mockery of rationality. Consider the Folk Theorem. It's not a theorem. It's an arbitrary definition pretending to rationality. The author is simply asserting something without bothering to explain what any of the preconditions actually mean. The "Folk Theorem" uses four (undefined, lol) terms. None of these terms reasonably describe human behavior. Even worse, none of these terms describe human behavior that would necessarily result in a better world. So the assumptions are neither descriptive NOR prescriptive! 1. Rationality. Humans aren't always rational. And when they are rational they aren't always good; humans will rationalize even horrific evils such as racialized eugenics. So "rational" isn't a good model of all human behavior and it's also not a model of necessarily good human behavior! 2. "Self-modifying agent" Humans are bad modifying human behavior. Just ask anyone who is overweight why they don't simply work out more and eat healthier, or a smoker why they don't stop, or an abuser why they aren't nicer. And when humans are able to modify human behavior the results are not always good (eg, adtech and propaganda). So "self-modifying agent" is not a good model of all human behavior and it's also not a model of necessarily good human behavior! 3. "the marginal benefit of investing" is a nonsensical way to think about the effect human effort, both because humans are not robots and also because predicting the impact of one's labor is not always straight-forward. I suppose if "employee"/"robot"/"non-rich-western human"/"$$$" are interchangeable in your brain and you've got MBA-level brain damage about the measurability and predictability of knowledge work then this makes sense... 4. "resources" is undefined and prone to various types of "lump of ___" fallacies. My general impression is that this entire genre functions as an excuse for the upper and upper-middle class to never have to look income inequality in the eyes and feel the human impact of the social structures their lifestyles depend upon. Maybe if the wealthy spend more time in homeless shelters the shape of society would slowly shift toward distributions that result in fewer homeless shelters, and the downtrodden wouldn't need to depend upon acts of blogpost-inspired generosity. In any case, I firmly believe that writing an article like this one is almost certainly less useful to society than helping out in a soup kitchen.
- skulk 3y ago> Humans aren't always rational I'm not at all supporting the pointless ramblings found in the OP, but Yudkowsky sidesteps this criticism by inserting the following intelligent-sounding words before "rational": "first-order approximation of"