This is from 2017, but I only just read it, and it did a lot to clarify for me why MIRI thinks work like Logical Induction is relevant to AI. Also does a good job crystalizing the reasons I (and the author) find this unpersuasive.
Perhaps the ideal society figures out that it has been constructed as a thought experiment to make decisions about the real world, so they construct a simulation of the real world in order to better understand what they will be making decisions about.
Matt Bruenig has published a rebuttal to the criticism of sovereign wealth fund but I think he’s missing the very real things that Konzal’s complaint was based on, such as fund managers for union pension funds working to privatize infrastructure and bust unions as part of their investment strategy.
His rebuttal of the “Decrease Inequality and the Power of Owners“ section is pretty weak too because unless the social wealth fund is really big most of the proceeds will still be going to the rich. It’s reminiscent of the way that 401ks can function as basically a political guarantee of the stock market to the benefit of the rich by ensuring that a large number of politically influential people have a lot riding on the stock market.
His rebuttal of “Regulate the Economy“ seems to be pretty weird too. If I work at one company but gain money from all companies, then the purely selfish solution is for everyone at all those other companies to work as hard as hell even if I would prefer not to work. One of the things about the financial system is that in the course of it’s natural operation it basically makes that decision through maximization of profit, which immediately, and measurably benefits people rather than hard-to-measure things like “worker conditions” or “environmental damage”.
Given the fact that this actual managing of the funds all will be done by fund managers what this can end up doing is just re-contextualizing ownership, everything will be “owned by the public“ but they will be under the control of fund managers who have maximizing profit as their goal which can mean that you’ve just re-shuffled some words and justifications around.
Bruenig characterizes Konzal here as “giving up“ and seeing the left as basically a perpetual opposition who should not be interested in actually seizing capital but I see it as the need to reconsider the entire system rather than just reassigning, reshuffling, and rejustifying titles.
discoursedrome: isn’t the whole appeal of a sovereign wealth fund basically that it’s the smallest possible change that might have a substantial effect? That’s usually how I see it pitched, anyway, like “ok everything is fucked right now but here’s the minimum possible thing that would reduce fuckedness to within tolerances”
which I guess is not a very compelling argument for serious leftists but I do like practicable policy
Part of the thing here is that Matt Bruenig has been sort of selling it as “socialism“ in itself which is I think some of the reason for this. But part of it is I think that if you want to take money from or control business, then just use a tax or regulation. Why play this “ownership“ game that seems harder to get for less benefit?
I’m kind of confused by this discussion. As I understand it (which is not very well, probably), the issues over SWFs break down into:
(1) A purely financial question about how much the state should invest its income, vs. immediately spending it. In principle, this could be assessed from a ruthless state-income-maximizing perspective, without touching on how the income is actually to be spent or invoking socially just outcomes specifically.
(2) Issues about the idea of framing state investments as “publicly owned,” e.g. by typing them to dividend payments for the public. (How much does this matter? If it’s a good thing, is that justification for a higher rate of investment than the mere ruthless accounting of #1 would advise? Can we ensure the management of the fund is actually responsive to the investing preferences of the public?)
The issues under (2) are real and difficult, but some of the anti-SWF arguments seem to be arguing against the very idea of state investment as a financial choice. It’s hard for me to see how these don’t just reduce to “investment is always a bad choice” (clearly false!) and “investment is often a good choice for other entities, but never for the state” (in which case the pertinent difference should be spelled out).
For example, Konczal writes:
The United States needs to spend more money. It needs to spend more on a variety of goals, from basic income to infrastructure to removing key spheres of life like health and education from the market. Let’s abstract from what form that spending should take. Bruenig’s American Solidarity Fund would pay out in a basic income, but we can also imagine the profits of a SWF going to free college, the expansion of Medicare or better infrastructure.
A SWF is a terrible way to try and increase spending in the United States. It introduces a new failure point in the otherwise straightforward mechanism of spending and requires extensive and unnecessary prefunding. Normally we increase taxes on income X to secure spending Y. Here we increase taxes on income X to buy assets Z whose profits then secure spending Y. What is the point of this extra step? There is no economic argument presented that argues you can raise revenues more effectively or efficiently this more complicated way.
This sounds like a generic argument against investing: “why bother putting income into investments so you can pay later expenditures with the returns, when you can just pay expenditures with returns directly, which is simpler?” Not investing is indeed always simpler, but this does not mean no one should invest. The whole point is getting returns, which can make it easier to pay for all future Ys.
Konczal continues:
It also requires saving in order to spend, postponing resources necessary to meet urgent, contemporary needs. Let’s take free public college, which costs about $80 billion a year. We can do that by passing a financial transaction tax. But if we did this with a SWF, assuming a 5% returns on the fund, we’d need to first spend $1.6 trillion dollars buying up financial assets. We’d have to prefund 20 years of free college in order to give the very first person free college. You need to do this in order to secure the assets necessary to make the income necessary to get this spending. This problem presents itself no matter how to go about funding that $1.6 trillion dollars, be it printing money, taxing incomes or putting requirements on public firms. Why not spend that trillion and a half dollars in a useful way right now?
This seems like a stock-flow conflation. $1.6 trillion is a stock; if we spend it on free collage, we’d (under the same simplifying assumptions as the post) get to fund it for 20 years, and then we’d have to find more money. The hypothetical $80 billion returns are a flow: they could fund free college forever, all else being equal.
There is an argument to be had over how much we are willing to forego important state expenditures now in order to have more in the future (a kind of “discount rate”). But once you are arguing about what the discount rate ought to be, you’re implicitly arguing about how much the state should invest, and so you’ve left behind these strange qualitative arguments against investment per se. Well, unless you take the position that the future doesn’t matter at all, only the present, but that’s an extreme position and ought to be defended if taken.
Konczal is a finance guy and I can’t imagine he doesn’t realize all this. Either I don’t understand something, or … I dunno. ???
hello, there are 3 extremely important facts you must know
1. it is definitely me writing this an not anybody else. my wife has not taken my laptop to impersonate me on tumbr dot com. 2. even though i am tired in the mornings i get out of bed to make my wife a cup of tea bc i love her and i am the Only True Male Feminist 3. i have a Very, Very cute face when i am sleeping
nostalgebraist asked: If it strikes your fancy, can I have a Fermi estimate on the number of existing D&D-for-beginners instructors named Tim? I've now met two such beings, and it got me idly curious.
As usual, I’ll limit myself to the US, to keep things simple. But Tim/Timothy is especially an American name anyway, and D&D is likely mostly an Anglophone game, so this assumption is fine.
As you can see in the above chart, there have been over a million Timothys in the US (and 80,000 Tims). Most of those Timothys are from within the last 70 years, so we can assume that most of them are still alive. That gives us a million Tims, more or less. About one in 300 Americans.
I couldn’t find specific numbers on the number of D&D tutors out there, but to set an upper bound, I looked up the number of Fortnite tutors currently working. According to Newsweek this month, “Hundreds of reviews on freelance work websites, including Gamer Sensei, reveal parents are frequently purchasing advanced Fortnite
players to conduct video streaming services with their children as part
of the lessons. Gamer Sensei reported hiring out more than 1,400 Fortnite tutors since early March alone.” So at least some thousands, maybe over 10,000, especially if not all such tutors hire themselves out through websites.
There are surely way more Fortnite players than D&D players, so whatever the number is for D&D, it’s lower. (Though if D&D players are more likely to be adults with disposable incomes, that may reduce the disparity somewhat.) Let’s say there are a thousand D&D tutors.
If so, then there are about three
D&D
instructors named Tim. But realistically, the vast majority of them will be men, which might double the number of Tims. On the other hand, most Timothys are older now, while most D&D instructors are likely younger, which points in the opposite direction. Regardless, you’ve met a lot of them.
Tacky lawn decor is one thing, but try living next to the Abode of Chaos, a 17th-century home-turned-art installation where giant skulls and portraits of N. Korea’s Kim Jong-un have left neighbors miserable.
