That was beautiful and poinant, typical of Le Guin. Thank you.
I read once about a young man who wanted to give away everything he had and go live with the poor and destitute. His uncle told him it would be much more compassionate if he got a job, made alot of money and have that away. I've thought about that alot. His uncle wasn't wrong. If we want to improve humanity as a whole we need alot more people working hard making a lot of money to improve things for everyone. But if no one gives everything away and goes to live in poverty... Something good is lost.
Someone down thread mentioned the obvious solution to the trolley problem being saving more lives. I agree, and also, someone has got to rail against the injustice of whole trolley situation to begin with.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is ethical utility can be good, and we should strain to be better.
You can give away everything, and it certainly was the point - it's unambiguous. The word "everything" is there.
There's always a deliberate conflation between want and need. If an action like that has any value, it can't be in the utilitarian sense. It's monastic. And you can decide whether that "purifies your soul" or whatever else, but it's quite a contrivance to suggest it could help others more than funding charity, or better yet voting for progressive policies.
I used to really look up to him. But he chose to hang out with a convicted child sex abuser, so now I really question whether somebody with, at the very least, extremely poor judgement and empathy should be leading philanthropic missions. I'd rather just have the gov't tax him and have us vote on how to use that money (I understand that doesn't always work in reality, but at least it works in theory, whereas a guy who hangs out with sex traffickers is not somebody I want talking about how to help 'women in poverty in the third world').
What a nice recommendation in this context! This is a great story. My first encounter with it was LeGuin herself reading it as a guest in a PSU science fiction class, 25 years ago.
God I hate drivel like this. There's no insight to be found here. These people can only exist in fiction and have no information with which to adjust the bearing on our moral compasses, which have evolved to function only in a universe where effects have causes.
I think there's a better way of thinking about this subject which leads you to similar conclusions using less imagination. You can actually end up in most people's positions, so it's irrational to promote norms that harm others and benefit you disproportionately. War, economic collapse, disease, disability, climate change, natural disaster, etc. all happen. You can bet on the probabilities all you want, but black swan events do happen and you can become the minority, the immigrant, the homeless, the disabled, etc. in a flash. It's always in your own self-interest to maximize the minimum.
As far as Nozick goes, I think Proudhon addressed that a century earlier.
Important fyi is that in Rawls's conception of justice, you do not have knowledge of the likelihood of characteristics like handicap, immigrants etc. Otherwise an enslaved minority would be worthwhile enough to make a just society, which is clearly incorrect.
I know and that's captured in what I said. You have no idea what could happen to you. This actual fact replaces (or supplements) the need for the Veil of Ignorance. Maximizing the minimum actually reduces the worst case scenario you could end up in and there's nothing hypothetical about that.
I think enslavement and torture aversion are widespread, but some people are likely more tolerant of enslavement and torture risk. The fact that people volunteer for military service and combat duties is some evidence of this.
People's risk aversion changes throughout their lives. Young people, in general, tend to be much less risk averse than older people. This makes sense, since young people have not accumulated as much property and so have a lot less to lose.
There is a simple way around that argument; instead of getting some random (according to whatever distribution) characteristics, be bound to have higher probability of obtaining those characteristics you would be the least bound to be fair to (as individuals). So, if one considers that slavery or torture is perfectly OK, then that person will become a slave or tortured.
Right, many of those people are much less likely to be at the receiving end of enslavement and torture and go on the make generalization errors from that position.
are you sure it's a generalization error? you forget that people experiencing enslavement and torture also have some amount of agency, and historically, have periodically organized to inflict terror upon people who seem to be immune to or supported by the pains of the momentary status quo.
it seems silly to believe that outcome to be impossible and erroneous to consider, when there are people out there actively working towards that objective.
Sorry, just really not convinced by this rebuttal. I don't think the enslavers and torturers today are concerned with Spartacus-type events and that makes them not assume their experiences are generalizable.
This is one of the most important ways to think about accessibility, FWIW.
Even if you've been lucky enough to have full baseline sensory & motor capabilities for most of your life, on a lifetime horizon chances are pretty good you will eventually develop issues with one or another and who knows what else.
Proudhon (IMO) is not nearly as compelling as either Rawls or Nozick, although he is popular among the younger generation of 'professional-class' capitalists.
I've actually read both, although it's been a while since "What is property?". I have not read any other Proudhon.
> makes me suspect you might not know who Proudhon is.
No, I know exactly who he is. Left libertarianism is ironically very popular among rich millenials & Gen Z, probably because it allows them to be cynical about all institutions when in reality governmental, collective action is the only realistic counter to capitalism.
> No, I know exactly who he is. Left libertarianism is ironically very popular among rich millenials & Gen Z, probably because it allows them to be cynical about all institutions when in reality governmental, collective action is the only realistic counter to capitalism.
What you said originally is that Proudhon is popular among a subclass of capitalists, which is a contradiction, being that he was an anti-capitalist. Now you're saying libertarian socialism is popular among a subset of rich people, which also seems pretty suspect at this point in time. Then you're giving an explanation of why this is the case but that also seems implausible and you give no argument or evidence for it (and honestly it just sounds like dismissive hand-waving)... Then you say collective action, exactly what Proudhon (and almost all libertarian socialists, including mutualists) argued for, is the alternative, which is also a contradiction: It can't be the alternative if it was part of the original position. What you're saying isn't making any sense to me...
Being a capitalist who thinks they believe in anti-capitalism may be hypocritical but it is not a logical impossibility.
> libertarian socialism is popular among a subset of rich people, which also seems pretty suspect at this point in time
What do you think is the median income of someone who knows who Proudhon even is? I will confess that I am absolutely speaking from anecdata, not from some income survey of Proudhon supporters, but anybody I have ever discussed him with has been quite well off.
Even most libertarian socialists seem to have been aware of this themselves. Straying from Proudhon, consider this essay (Appeal to the Young) [0] by Peter Kropotkin. Look at the audience he is writing to - it is precisely young, rich professionals!
> collective action, exactly what Proudhon (and almost all libertarian socialists, including mutualists) argued for, is the alternative, which is also a contradiction
That's fair enough, I should have been clearer - I was referring to hierarchical, centralized action as in the form of the state. The
"governmental" was modifying the "collective," the comma was not operating as an "or" there.
> Being a capitalist who thinks they believe in anti-capitalism may be hypocritical but it is not a logical impossibility.
I don't think it's hypocritical to not want to live in the system you have to live in.
> Even most libertarian socialists seem to have been aware of this themselves. Straying from Proudhon, consider this essay (Appeal to the Young) [0] by Peter Kropotkin. Look at the audience he is writing to - it is precisely young, rich professionals!
Kropotkin wasn't talking to Gen Z and millennials, which was your claim.
I mean I wish what you were saying were true, but I don't think you're going to find any polls that come even close to supporting popularity among those demographics right now. Maybe in the future.
> I was referring to hierarchical, centralized action as in the form of the state.
So, the opposite of collective action, just dominance by one group over the rest like we already have.
> I don't think it's hypocritical to not want to live in the system you have to live in.
You were the one suggesting it was a contradiction, although I disagree that you have to be a capitalist (ie. have substantial ownership stakes in MOP, like many tech workers do) in our society.
> find any polls that come even close to supporting popularity
My claim is not that most affluent young people are Proudhon lovers (obviously that would be ridiculous, and I understand your ire if you thought that is what I am saying), but rather that most Proudhon lovers are affluent young people.
> the opposite of collective action, just dominance by one group over the rest like we already have.
Yes, that would be the (in my view naive) left libertarian view. I disagree that collective intrinsically means decentralized or non-hierarchical.
> You were the one suggesting it was a contradiction, although I disagree that you have to be a capitalist (ie. have substantial ownership stakes in MOP, like many tech workers do) in our society.
It is and then you equivocated on "capitalist." To ideologically be a capitalist and socialist is a literal contradiction. To own capital and be a socialist is not a literal contradiction, but could be hypocritical or not depending on other actions (Engels usually being considered not hypocritical, for example.) To participate in capitalism because one has no choice and be a socialist is never a contradiction or hypocritical.
> My claim is not that most affluent young people are Proudhon lovers (obviously that would be ridiculous, and I understand your ire if you thought that is what I am saying), but rather that most Proudhon lovers are affluent young people.
I see. My anecdata is quite different.. I see it mostly in blue collar jobs in the reunionization movements. Right now Starbucks is the big one, but a lot of burger flippers, clerks, mechanics, etc. I don't think you'd consider any of them rich or capitalists... I should mention that I actively follow these movements.
> I disagree that collective intrinsically means decentralized or non-hierarchical.
It's not really the will of the collective if it's not democratic and it can't be democratic if its hierarchical, wouldn't you say? Like maybe if you had arbitrary right of recall you could argue that, but even then I don't think so because the hierarchy can both manipulate wills of the subordinates (e.g. media) and also just ignore them. That's not very "collective." I mean I'd say hierarchy is definitively domination. Abandoning that is abandoning the meaning of the word... I guess you're right, people in political science do use the word like that, like how natioanlism can be a collectivism, but again I think that's equivocation or we're just talking about two different concepts using the same word.
> governmental, collective action is the only realistic counter to capitalism
I feel like it's not either-or, and that we ought to acknowledge that there's a very real information gathering / decision making problem that is in some cases but not others very neatly solved by markets. I don't see why market based systems that don't lead to systematic wealth accumulation are seen as unrealistic.
Markets may be valuable, but not as a counter to capitalism. Personally, I'm very sympathetic to a market-based, strong state approach (maybe what might be derided as the "Dengist" approach)
> why market based systems that don't lead to systematic wealth accumulation are seen as unrealistic.
You still have to resolve Nozick's wilt chamberlain problem and it's not always unclear how that works.
If it isn't possible to accumulate wealth in your market, what is the incentive for participants? Personally, I think inherited wealth is a big, big problem, but also one that can hopefully be eliminated without too much of an impact on the functioning of markets.... while people do accumulate wealth in order to pass on to their children, I am not sure the primary reason people accumulate millions of dollars is just to pass it on to their kids.
> If it isn't possible to accumulate wealth in your market, what is the incentive for participants?
Obviously the answer is to produce things that they and others want. That's a sufficient incentive proven by everyone that does subsistence farming or has a hobby... We don't need profit and capital accumulation to survive and do cool shit.
I have no problem with the idea of the veil of ignorance, but what's wrong with the discussion is the fundamental idea that you can use your imagination to design a society.
Itself is supposed to be a thought experiment, it has no pretention or suggestion that the imagined design could work. Buuuuuuut, tons of people confuse the two and they start think the society can work as how they imagined.
It's like when someone designs a machine, he/she begins with: let's assume there is no gravity. Well, in science actually you can do a thought experiment like that, but that's not how you design a machine! You need to know what the reality is and work with the reality!
If you want to design a society, you need to start with knowledge about the human nature and the nature of a society. You can't just assume everyone is selfless, or assume nobody is going to kill/rob anybody, or assume everyone will work hard, or assume everyone has the same capabilities, or assume a community of a hundred will work like a community of a thousand. There are lots of fundamental knowledge you need to learn. While you are learning more and more about human nature and societies, you will find out there are lot of common features across cultures and societies, and you will find out the whole idea of imagining a society with your simple rule of justice is just so superficial that it's totally laughable.
>You do not know your gender, race, wealth, or facts about your personal strengths and weaknesses, such as their intelligence or physical prowess. Rawls thought these facts are morally arbitrary: individuals do not earn or deserve these features, but simply have them by luck.
That's what makes the whole concept nonsensical. This implicitly assumes the existence of a soul. If 'you' were born as someone else, you wouldn't be you! The only actually coherent thought experiment is being born the same, just in a different environment, but that leads to completely different conclusions. Wealth is an external property, but intelligence, race, gender - aren't.
I've never read A Theory of Justice, but a few years ago I read a short book by Rawls called The Law of Peoples, which is basically an attempt to apply his theory to international relations, and he suggests that if one country is governed by a state that clearly violates the international consensus of how to treat people then the other nations should get together, invade, overthrow that government and replace it with a new one. And it seems like...we tried that about ten years after the book came out, with not-such-great results.
Seems like there should be a lesson in that, but I'm not quite sure what it is.
Rawls for some reason focused only on "within a country" so he failed to recognize that the true application of veil of ignorance should push us towards open borders and more aid to developing nations.
ps - "veil of ignorance" is probably the best perspective to take when thinking about all the "trolley problems" - because it leads you to recognize the correct (utilitarian) solution (of saving more people).
Excuse me, I wasn't aware all the philosophers got together and voted utilitarianism as being correct? In fact, Rawls suggestion for maximin helps deal more elegantly with a major problem in utilitarianism which is downwards facing risk often being more important than just expected value.
While the standard trolley problem lends itself to utilitarian analysis, things get far more complicated with variations such as involuntary organ donation while the donor is still living (i.e. kill one person to get a heart, lungs, kidneys, etc. which can save multiple lives).
To support your point, there was actually a vote[1] and consequentialism in general only came out at 24.1% (of which utilitarianism only makes up a portion.)
> Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?
> Other 558 / 1803 (30.9%)
> Accept or lean toward: consequentialism 435 / 1803 (24.1%)
Utilitarianism can easily deal with downside risk by adding a discounting factor to the moral worth of higher utilities. (E.g. Instead of aggregating utilities by summing them all up, sum their logs, and pick the action that leads to the highest log-sum.)
The real problem that Rawls's theory (and other alternatives) solves is the issue of aggregation in itself. If you could save one life at the cost of many, many headaches, a utilitarianist must say that, given sufficiently many minor headache sufferers, you must prevent the headaches. This seems implausible — some believe that no matter how many headaches occur, you must save the person's life instead.
Also, this is a nitpick, but it is a common misconception that trolley problems are problems on whether you should turn the trolley or not. In most trolley scenarios that philosophers study, the correct answer (to turn or not) is really quite clear, and ethical theories tend to arrive at the same answer. The real trolley problem is a meta-problem: why is it in situation X we think it acceptable to turn the trolley, but in situation Y which is very similar, we think it not acceptable? What is the morally distinguishing factor between X and Y?
For example, we think that it is appropriate for a bystander to turn a trolley to kill one, saving five lives. But most philosophers also think it inappropriate for a doctor to kill one healthy patient, harvesting her organs to transplant into five sick people, saving their lives (your example). In both circumstances we kill one to save five, but the second seems unacceptable. What is the morally distinguishing factor? And what are the morally distinguishing factors in more complicated trolley scenarios?
> Rawls for some reason focused only on "within a country" so he failed to recognize that the true application of veil of ignorance should push us towards open borders and more aid to developing nations.
Rawls discussed this in the later work "The Law of Peoples".
> he failed to recognize that the true application of veil of ignorance should push us towards open borders and more aid to developing nations.
I'll agree to international aid, but why open borders? Plenty of people enjoy having a national identity (no man is an island), and open borders essentially forbid that. You may as well demand parents not show favor to their own children compared to the children of others.
> I'll agree to international aid, but why open borders?
Because it's in everyone's interest. The need to migrate can arise unexpectedly at any time.. natural disasters, wars, climate change, economic collapse, etc, etc, etc. You want to promote norms that will help you if you were in the same situation, which you can be quite easily.
To be fair, open borders being necessarily beneficial is a bit of a presumption though. Some people are open to foreign aid, but not all of those people are open to open borders, and that being imposed could also affect their stance on aid.
Humans generally don't think hard about big issues (perhaps because) in general they have very little they can do about them anyway. Humans consistently feel overconfident (and are incorrect) about many things. On the topic of ethics, many seem to go with gut feelings (an evolutionary kludge to get small groups of people to cooperate, and to cohere as a tribe).
People consistently overestimate (by many orders of magnitude) the amount of their taxes that goes to foreign aid. Many people in the US are reluctant to have open borders because of racism. But most moral frameworks would endorse open borders - and there is tremendous economic benefit to open borders as well. Consider https://openborders.info/
> Many people in the US are reluctant to have open borders because of racism.
Or, because they understand lifeboats.
Or, because they know that open borders screw people on the bottom of the economic ladder.
Or, because they ask "why didn't those people fix their country?" or "if the US takes the best people from that country, who's going to fix it for the ones who stay?"
That said, it's important in any moral discussion to attribute immorality to someone with whom you disagree.
> Or, because they're too stupid to realize it's in their own self-interest because they could end up in the exact same situation at any time.
How would open borders in a country be necessarily beneficial to people in the country?
Are you presuming that if Country A opens its borders, all other countries will?
And, considering first world countries and the countries from which people who would benefit from borders being open, is it likely that conditions in the first world countries will degrade to the point that it would be advantageous for them to immigrate to one of the countries whose citizens would benefit from open borders?
> How would open borders in a country be necessarily beneficial to people in the country?
The benefits of immigration have been addressed many places. It works fine in Europe. The point is not to open only one countries borders though, but all of them, because that's what's really in everyone's interest.
> Are you presuming that if Country A opens its borders, all other countries will?
No, I'm not presuming, I'm saying that's what is in everyone's interests to advocate for.
> And, considering first world countries and the countries from which people who would benefit from borders being open, is it likely that conditions in the first world countries will degrade
The point is to help people, which is not free. Anyway, you should think about what makes such degradation possible in the first place. If things would be more equal otherwise, then clearly borders are exploitative in the first place. In any case, everything would reach an equilibrium in the end. It'd be a free market of location.
>> How would open borders in a country be necessarily beneficial to people in the country?
> The benefits of immigration have been addressed many places.
It is true that immigration has some positive benefits in many cases, but this does not necessarily (which was in the question) demonstrate that it is net beneficial.
> It works fine in Europe.
Can you put "fine" in quantitative terms?
How did you measure this?
How did you measure it against the counterfactual?
> The point is not to open only one countries borders though, but all of them, because that's what's really in everyone's interest.
It's fine to hold an opinion or belief that "that's what's really in everyone's interest", but there is an important difference between belief and knowledge.
If those things happen, Guatemala will not be better off than "poor in the US".
More to the point, those are unlikely possibilities (in a given lifetime), while the negative effects of unlimited immigration on US poor are pretty much guaranteed.
You chose the dumbest place to migrate to. The point is you'd be able to move to wherever is good if the world were free.
> while the negative effects of unlimited immigration on US poor are pretty much guaranteed.
> More to the point, those are unlikely possibilities (in a given lifetime),
There are no probabilities, small or large, for black swan events. That's the point. Most of the things I listed though are inevitable though, so the unpredictability is more about when than if.
You keep saying this like it's a fact but there's an entire continent as a counterexample and a lot of research on the benefits.
> The point is you'd be able to move to wherever is good if the world were free.
Which pretty much guarantees that said "wherever is good" ceases to be good.
> There are no probabilities, small or large, for black swan events. That's the point.
Actually, there are. The probability of a black swan event is unknown in some sense, but we do know one of the bounds.
Or rather, we do know something about how often they occur. We may under-estimate, but the fact that it hasn't happened often enough for us to have good bounds is, in itself, information about "how often".
But, let's run the experiment. Let Europe take in everyone who wants in and we'll see how things work out in a couple of decades.
If you're right, Europe will finally be able break free of US hegemony. If I'm right,...
> Many people in the US are reluctant to have open borders because of racism.
And most people tend to speak in forms where their statements can be technically correct yet misinformative, potentially missing out on the opportunity to improve upon the tendencies you point out.
For example, if you were to convert "many" to a quantitative term such as "% of people in the US reluctant to have open borders because of racism" or "% of people in the US reluctant to have open borders, by reason (of which one is racism)", it would be much more difficult to be correct.
I doubt you speak this way with malicious intent, but the unknown effects remain. And this is just one bug among thousands.
I agree with your point about being precise with statements. I tried to be vague with words because I didn't look up any statistics for the statement I was making (especially that "racist" is an attitude that comes in degrees, and depending on definition we would have a different % of racist people in the US). No one doubts that racism in America has been a problem for centuries (look at how immigrants have been treated over the years).
I was trying to make the generic point that besides the reasons people give against a policy, the actual reasons may be different than those voiced. I would not be surprised if of those opposing immigration, at least 50% hold different attitudes for non-white immigrants.
And so as to give some deeper insight into the motivation for my question: I often wonder....might the degree to which agents within a system communicate accurately (both in the sending and the receiving) have any substantial effect upon events and the evolving state within the system over time?
Say, if we consider two planets: one whose inhabitants speak "highly" accurately, and one who inhabitants speak.....well, like we do here on planet Earth, circa 2022 (opinions are facts, fantasy is reality, etc - and everyone does it, despite fantasies to the contrary) - all other things being equal, might this cultural norm contribute to some of the issues on this planet that people complain about constantly?
To be clear: I am asking in general, not as an attack on your comments here.
I think one big problem with Rawls’s position is that it has no room for desert (as in, the idea that people can deserve their fates). His thought experiment wants me to consider the risk that I be born a very bad man. But why should I want to design my society for the benefit of the dishonest, the slothful, and the wicked?
I want a society designed for the benefit of the good, of the excellent, of the virtuous. We should of course have humanity and mercy for everyone.
Yes, Rawls' position is explicitly anti-'desert' and entitlement. I find his critique relatively compelling.
Nothing about his position is saying that you must design a society specifically for the benefit of "the dishonest, the slothful, and the wicked," if such a design would be worse off under the difference principle. Indeed, many societies would benefit from punishing or disincentivizing such behavior.
What Rawls critiques is the (Christian) notion that the slothful are apriori deserving of punishment or the hard-working apriori deserving of reward, if such a reward structure is not one that would benefit a society of free individuals.
> But why should I want to design my society for the benefit of the dishonest, the slothful, and the wicked?
It's not designed to benefit them, it's designed to benefit the least fortunate.
Put it this way: what's the "harm" of dishonesty? If a dishonest person ends up being the worst off in society, then dishonesty has no advantage. Can you even say in that case that dishonesty causes harm? Whereas if someone uses dishonesty to gain personal advantage, then that person is not the worst off in society, and so the society is not designed to benefit them. You might even say that the society is designed to benefit the victims of dishonesty, not the perpetrators.
It’s not assuming the worst. The whole point of the veil is that you don’t know the circumstances of your birth and what traits you are blessed or cursed with.
For a predecessor that makes more sense but includes many of the same underpinnings, Amartya Sen's notion of a Human Development Index is a great thought exercise and tool. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
One of the most harmful and anti-utilitarian legal theories to ever become popular. It's baby's first attempt at first-order anthropic utilitarianism, with disastrous entailments.
Rawls' proposed social optimization strategy is basically, implicitly, minimaxing (although I doubt he would describe it in similar terms), which is terrible for social outcomes. The return/variance pareto frontier for societal optimization is super sharp, so minimaxing makes almost everyone way worse off than expected utility maximization. Even if you're critical of EV maximization in general, it's really hard to claim that minimaxing performs acceptably at society-scale.
So for a specific example, in a world in which (say) 50% of people earn a dollar a day, and 50% a hundred dollars a day, and we are judging two potential policies: 1), that reduces the number of people on a dollar a day to 25%, so that now 75% of people earn a hundred dollars a day; or 2) that means that no one is an a dollar a day, but that everyone is now on 50 dollars a day. Rawls would say go to option 2, where plenty of people are worse off, but now no one is terribly off. Is that a fair example? Net, the situation is worse; but now no one is destitute.
Sure, the values you picked for your example make the Minimax strategy look reasonable. You can just as easily choose values which make it look silly:
1) 1% of people earn $1 per day, and 99% of people earn $100 per day
2) Everyone earns $1.01 per day
I think most people, myself included, would take their chances with the first option. The Veil of Ignorance is a useful thought experiment, but I don't think many people would consider a simple Minimax algorithm to be reasonable, and would take into account the well-being of the average person as well.
To be clear, personally I think a world in which everyone has less but no one has none is, on a moral level, a better world. If this is a fair example of Rawls' thought, then I'm with Rawls, and am not a utilitarian.
> Net, the situation is worse; but now no one is destitute.
How do you measure this? I think if you could measure subjective suffering, the situation may be better. Did you assume that people needed the extra $50 for something?
I agree, but only to the extent that we need to consider a cutoff somewhere for extraordinary bad luck. Maybe we only consider maximizing the well-being of the 99.9% or the 99.99% of people like how we mostly ignore the maximum response time for a server in favor of looking at 95th percentile.
Do you have any evidence for the claim that minmaxing causes a steep drop off in overall expected utility? I'm not sure if research has been done about this with traffic lights, but I think that could be a good case study about this. Minmax for traffic light timings would mean minimizing the maximum wait time at a traffic light, though I could see how such a strategy might hurt the overall throughput of the intersection. In the extreme case, you have one granny trying to cross a 6-lane stroad during rush hour; in the pure throughput model, the road would never stop for granny and in the minmax model, she would only need to wait about as long as it takes her to cross the road. Obviously, different models would still allow granny to cross the road eventually and maybe with less of a throughput hit than pure minmax. All of this is speculation though and I'm curious what the throughput hit would be for minmax.
> Do you have any evidence for the claim that minmaxing causes a steep drop off in overall expected utility?
My evidence is just experience with optimization/utility theory. If you're looking for a paper describing this one takeaway out of thousands from this body of theory, I'm not sure what it's called.
In general, any strategic constraint reduces EV, unless the constraint happens to already be a component of the optimal strategy. That doesn't tell you how steep the dropoff is, just that it exists. Determining the variance/EV tradeoff precisely depends entirely on the structure of the optimization space.
However, any complex optimization space exhibits essentially the same behavior; crushing the outcome distribution to be super narrow (latency, wealth, ROI, test scores, etc.) is typically only possible at great cost to the median and average cases.
Uh, source for your claim? I think that diminishing marginal utility of wealth probably means that EV maximization and so-called "maximin" overlap a considerable amount of the time.
The source is common sense, experience, and original thought. I don't copy every thought I have from an NYT article or whatever you're looking for.
Minimax is emphatically not even remotely close to EV maximization, especially for high-dimensional optimization spaces with sharp risk/return curves as I described.
You're making empirical claims about the world as if they are obvious, so I expected you would have a shred of evidence backing what you were saying, but I guess I forgot we were on HN.
Unsure why you would think I was expecting a NYT article (except as some weird cultural signaling point?), I was thinking more along the lines of a welfare economics or econometrics journal article.
The two likely possibilities are that you have enough background in utility/optimization/portfolio/whatever theory to reverse-engineer my thought process, or you need a lot of additional background that I can't feasibly provide in a single HN comment. Either way, linking to some random economics journal article is unlikely to help. I might as well link to a bunch of textbook pages defining all the words I used. As I said, this is an original thought of mine, so if an article reiterating what I said exists, I am in not much better a position to find it than anyone else on here.
Apologies if this seems harsh, but people's habit of asking for a source on every original or propositional claim on this website really bugs me. Sometimes people are sharing new observations!
I have a background in economics and optimization and have not seen a claim as strong as the one you are making. Again, given that you are making an empirical claim about the world as we find it, I would expect you would be basing that on something you could point to - but I guess not.
Not going to keep responding, I've said all I wanted to.
Look above you in the thread[1] for a very simple demonstration of how "EV maximization and so-called "maximin" overlap a considerable amount of the time" can be false.
I am not really clear on what background you could have such a background but be unable to generate this fact, Wikipedia seems to suggest it strongly when it points out that "In non-zero-sum games, this is not generally the same as minimizing the opponent's maximum gain, nor the same as the Nash equilibrium strategy" [2].
This isn't a personal attack, but you really could have got this one solved by looking at either the thread or Wikipedia, but chose to assign someone else research homework instead. If you're curious, check! It's really fun and you learn a lot.
The Veil seems nice and useful in theory. But someone wrote once (don’t remember who) that people who advocate for it still end up defending the liberal status quo, where the lottery of life still plays a big part.
There's a lot more to say there. For instance, many[0] have argued that the things Rawls places behind the veil are precisely the things that make us human, and ignoring them to make a procedural argument therefore begs the question: his conclusion (i.e. liberal democracy) is built-in to the premises.
Then there are purely distributive arguments: if everyone wants to pay a bunch of money to go see Lewis Hamilton race, thereby enriching Lewis and producing an unequal distribution of goods, can we reasonably say this situation is unjust?[1]
The literature on replies to Rawls is extremely rich, and Rawls himself went on to respond to critics and amend his views in 1993's Political Liberalism. The influence of his earlier work has been longer lived in the public mind than in his own.
[0] Usually communitarians, especially Charles Taylor.
[1] This is a variation of Robert Nozick's "Wilt Chamberlain argument", updated to use my preferred sports star.
This seems to me like a mis-characterization of the Veil of Ignorance idea.
An unequal distribution of goods is not, per se, unjust. It merely needs to be justified on the basis that it makes everyone collectively better off, not on the basis that someone deserves more goods for being born into better circumstances.
Some degree of unequal distribution is probably justified because it is necessary to incentivize people born with the potential for running fast to put in the work necessary to achieve that potential.
> if everyone wants to pay a bunch of money to go see Lewis Hamilton race, thereby enriching Lewis and producing an unequal distribution of goods, can we reasonably say this situation is unjust?
I think we can. The individuals involved in the transaction all consent to it, but they are not the only ones affected. Lewis Hamilton being rich (beyond a certain level) has a detrimental affect on all in society as it undermines the market system we rely on to drive our economy towards productive ends.
I don't see why Lewis Hamilton being rich has a detrimental effect on society. After all, it's likely that his wealth is being stored as investments which are providing capital and liquidity to productive firms. I suppose hoarding cash or gold would be detrimental though.
In the best liberal democratic countries of the present day, even being born poor is usually a pretty decent existence. I don't know if this is really a problem.
I consider myself a socialist-leaning individual who favors the abolition of large portions of inherited wealth and I am very sympathetic to Rawls' arguments.
I think you are reasoning backwards (from the preferred social/political outcome, rather than starting with the ethical principles that make one social/political outcome preferred over another).
Because you are saying that Rawls' argument is flawed because the people who believe it tend to support the liberal status quo, supposing apriori that the liberal status quo is bad and then reasoning that therefore Rawls' arguments must be bad if they provide some ethical mooring for that status quo.
Not a priori. A posteori the lottery of life plays a big part in liberal praxis.
Dunno why my reasoning is “backwards”. Politics from first principles is fruitless and I don’t intend to play that game. But he can play it if he wishes.
For a much more critical take on Rawls, see Michael Huemer's "John Rawls is an Awful Reasoner" [0]
Huemer is definitely writing in a polemical style that might turn some folks off, but I think the basic point -- that Rawls contorts himself to avoid a framework that just boils down to 'maximize utility' -- is more or less on point.
This is a horrible take. Huemer dismisses the risk way too quickly despite risk being a tremendous, possibly most important, concern in microeconomics. The goal is still to maximize utility, but subject to certain constraints within a certain level of risk tolerance. I'm not sure why this would be so controversial within the realm of ethics when it is widely accepted in economics.
Maximin is also pretty widely accepted in software engineering (though modified to use percentiles) since the 99th percentile response time is much more important than the average response time.
Id argue the framework is more interesting than Rawls' conclusion.
I don't agree with Rawls that it tends to imply maximin (most humans aren't that risk averse) but it doesn't imply maximising expected utility either (it's pretty rational to prefer 'levelling down' to an incredibly unequal society with a low chance of elite status). And whilst the implied risk of the "veil of ignorance" is a hypothetical thing (as are many utilitarian arguments and arguments against utilitarianism) it underlines the fact humans reason differently about value when downside risks are significant.
Am I understanding this correctly? The idea of the veil of ignorance is we do a thought experiment where we pretend there are no societal standards and then imagine what proper justice may look like? If this is the correct understanding, what an asinine and inane idea that as an individual I can do better at imagining how justice should work then the thousands of years of cultural development that have gone before me.
I don't care how smart you are, if you literally throw out all of our societal standards and think you can do better using your imagination, you're a fool. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water, our justice today has a lot of good ideas. If we want reform, that involves extracting the good ideas and getting rid of the bad ones. Otherwise we're not reforming justice, instead we're coming up with our own standards that we pulled out of our arse.
Please consider steelmanning (as opposed to strawmanning) ideas you come across. To call an idea considered by numerous people as important "inane" seems inappropriate. You do suggest you may be misunderstanding the idea, but rather than inquisitively asking for an elaboration, you call it stupid.
You should try to think of a more charitable interpretation of the idea. Here's a thought: in a society as unequal as ours, with many people in power satisfied with the status quo, what Rawls is asking them to do is to imagine that they could have been born randomly into any of the families in our society.
I prefer the way my ethics professor explained what I believe is the same, or at least similar, topic.
Imagine you are not born yet. You do not yet exist. You can be born at any location, of any race, with any birth defect, of any gender, of any societal class. Now, what kind of societal structure would you like to exist if you had to be born into such world? Would you be ok with large wealth/social inequality if you could be born into the bottom rung? Or about survival of the fittest without collective support with the chance you might be born with a inhibiting birth defect?
There was a lot I didn't like about how that class was taught, but this thought experiment alone made it worth taking.
It depends on whether everyone will be born into the first and only generation or the random assignment to people has a time component as well.
Much like how the strategies of prisoners dilemma change If you are playing an iterated game.
For your birth defect example, consider 2 societies, where 1 bans cousin marriage and the other encourages it. In 50 years time the chance of being born with a birth defect is 5x higher in 1 than the other.
That wouldn't matter for the first generation but imagine you will be born to a random generation between now and 1000 years from now. Which do you choose?
Once you take into account time, then growth, social institutions and incentives come into play. You may prefer to bet on a much richer, healthier society that had a bit less equality or freedom in the past for a while.
Is there a reason to assume we will be born as a human being? In this hypothetical, I'm already asked to discard everything that makes me who I am. It seems like the logical extension would be to apply it to all life.
The veil of ignorance is where we pretend we're gods designing a society and putting social rules and standards in place, and we will be incarnated as humans within that society -- but we don't know specifics about what kind of humans we'll be, what race or gender or class or whatever (the "ignorance" part). So if you put in place rules that favor one group of people over another, you might get screwed when you are incarnated into this society.
Rawls wasn't proposing throwing anything out. He was asking the question, if a bunch of gods got together and set down some social rules under these conditions, what would the society they created look like if they didn't want to end up screwing themselves? His answer was "something like liberal democracy". I don't know if he'd be right, or even if we should pattern our society in the manner of these hypothetical gods. It may be asking the wrong question entirely. Current trends in social justice, for instance, favor rules oriented toward payback for past injustices toward real groups.
The past few thousand years of the history of justice have been full of such great ideas as the divinity of Kings and suttee. The norms which you live in and are familiar with on the other hand, are quite heavily based on Rawls.
Under the veil of ignorance I fail to see how people, unaware of their own race, would agree that certain races were inferior and should be subject to slavery, such as that of the early United States. This is because they would know that they might end up being part of the subjected underclass. Societal standards on the other hand, brought us the institution of slavery. The veil of ignorance is a lens for viewing society through and arguing whether or not someone that came from societal standards is just.
One major problem is “what’s included/removed in this veil of ignorance?”
Rawls likely would have excluded sexual orientation and gender identity.
It also requires imagination some people don’t have: “I’m a member of the elite caste, but if I were a member of the lower caste I would accept my position.” And perhaps they would have.
It's not that at all? It's simply "We live in a society in which everyone is born with different RPG loadouts, and so we should set it up from the POV of, 'What if I didn't know what my loadout was going to be?'"
> Rawls is the guy who is probably most responsible for corruption of the word "justice", which used to mostly mean "the proper administration of law".
Oh, you mean before Aristotle? Yeah, those Orwellian Greeks... and Buddhists, and Muslims and that damned Confucius. Plato should have died with Socrates, I agree. Down with the gadflies!
And here I thought it came from English and that the Romans would have used iūstitia for the same universally debated concept. You learn something new every day.
> Rawls is the guy who is probably most responsible for corruption of the word "justice", which used to mostly mean "the proper administration of law".
The definition of justice has been debated since at least Plato's "Republic" more than 2000 years ago.
> "justice", which used to mostly mean "the proper administration of law".
Citation needed.
That isn't what that word has meant since, at least, Socrates. Read academic works of jurisprudence from the past 3 centuries, and you'll see that most people are concerned with defining "law" as subsidiary to "justice", just as Rawls does, rather than the other way around (as suggested by you).
Rawls didn't suddenly come out of nowhere and change the game completely. He's just another voice in a conversation that is thousands of years old. Namely, how can we say with confidence that a set of laws is just?
You may not like his answer, but Rawls is certainly not the first (nor the last) to pose the question.
Small aside but their is something particularly humorous to me in this relatively recent phenomena where people who worry about "wokeness" start pointing to fairly vanilla and historical Western philosophers as the authors of contemporary social ills. Foucault and Derrida? I can understand the way that thought process went, but now increasingly its figures like Kant and Rawls. How far will it go? In a few months people will say Kierkegaard was a SJW and Husserl was responsible for decadent Liberal introspection and pronouns in the bio.
Idk, nobody is going to be talking about these people in a year, but it is very interesting to see this now.
I agree largely with what you are saying, although (as a fan of Rawls) I don't really think linking Rawls to "social justice" as a concept is as far-fetched as you seem to think. Kant? Yes.
Yes I guess you are right about that, and I don't know enough about Rawls to say much more.. But if an analytic 20th century social philosopher is going to be a "woke" guy now, I don't know who is not vulnerable to that charge anymore. But I guess thats the point.
Wittgenstein's had a poignant and simple conception of words as bags for meaning. We can put meaning into them, and take it out, and put different meanings instead, again and again. They've always been variable in meaning, and its difficult to say any two people, let alone cultures from different eras, will impart the same meaning to a term.
You may be right, I'm no expert on his work. Though one thing I do recall is that he had different professional periods, in which he had very different conceptions, or at least approaches, to philosophy; so perhaps that resolves the discrepancy?
Words mean different things to different people. Your premise that "justice" had some universally agreed upon meaning prior to Rawls' "orwellian" corruption is silly.
http://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf