The dubious lesson of the Carpathia

So right now I'm at LessOnline, the LessWrong conference centered on writing about rationality-related topics, and I encountered a very interesting proposition. There was a session about writing speeches for the LessWrong/rationalist Winter Solstice, a solemn ceremony with musical performances and speeches with a rational, hopeful-but-realistic theme. Towards the end, the speaker gave an example of a Tumblr post that he turned into a speech.

To summarize, it's about the sinking of the Titanic[1], and the captain of the Carpathia, who got the distress call and immediately went heads-down, focusing on the mission to get to the disaster as soon as possible, repurposing his entire ship and its resources for rescue, eventually saving some 700 lives. By pushing limits, he got there faster than should really have been possible, and thus rescuing far more than could have been expected.

A lot about this story rubbed me the wrong way, such that I don't endorse it for its intended purpose, which is to be an inspiring speech given at rationalist events in support of the rationalist worldmodel.

Look at this critical part of the exposition (italics original): 

He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. ... Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. ... They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

...

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark...

Okay, something isn't adding up here. The post clearly emphasizes that ships are not supposed to be pushed past their top speed, and owns up to the fact that it really is reckless, and even acknowledges that the maintaining that speed might as well count as "physical law, violated". The reads as the fantasy of the manager who overcomes physical limits by sheer force of leadership ... which is not how physical systems, or tradeoffs thereon, actually work.

Also -- "dodging icebergs"? That's what got the Titanic into this mess in he first place. Maybe not the right image to use here.

All of that adds up to the fact that any success here really doesn't generalize. Knowing what they knew at the time, it was actually not the rational thing to do. Yes, it looks like a bold, selfless act now, because we know how it turned out: he happened not to sink his ship in the process. But he couldn't know that would be true at the time; for all he knew, this was condemning the ship and its crew to be casualties in addition to that of the Titanic (up to the rescue efforts of a later, more cautious ship). Claiming vindication reeks of hindsight bias. (There's a reason they caution rescuers against "being a hero" -- they may very well end up being yet one more person that needs rescue.)

One of the hurdles in making your thought more rational is accepting that something can be a bad idea despite the fact that it worked. In Blackjack, if you stand on 4, and the dealer busts, you win ... but it's still stupid. The idea that you should push a critical system well past its limits to accomplish a stretch goal is ... not good. Any success would, at most, be an edge case, not a canonical template you should keep repeating.

So ... if I were to make this a speech, it would have to be with some kind of twist like "lol gotcha! You just got seduced by a narrative, and hindsight bias. 'Push past the limits' makes for a rousing story, but in practice, it's how disasters happen." Which is the kind of chain-yanking I prefer not to do to begin with.

I'm not digging into the whether the presented facts are actually true, because I'm just evaluating it as a speech and working from assumptions it sets up. If there are other reasons that justify why this may have been less reckless than it really was, they should have been included to support the conclusion. But, as given, it pumps up the idea that, because you were bold, you had to save lives, and it works, that adds up to it being a good decision. It doesn't.

And there's a lesser issue, too. It also mentions repurposing part of the ship's steam to prepare tea and coffee for the survivors as they were loaded on board. Like, what? I'm sorry, but in a survival situation, coffee and tea are luxuries. They need warmth and drinking water ... the rest isn't a priority.

[1] Because I don't feel obligated to follow ridiculous, ossified conventions, I'm going to refer to ships as "it" and not italicize their names. They're proper nouns. Capitalization is good enough.

Intellectual Property's Ungrateful Hitchhikers

I'm going to discuss an ethical and decision-theoretic intuition that underpins my support for intellectual property rights, and which seems to be absent, or unintuitive, among anti-IP libertarians. (See the discussion linked in yesterday's post for lots of good examples.)

But first let's consider a puzzle in decision theory. This one is known as Parfit's Hitchhiker and, as best I can tell, comes from Derek Parfit's book Reasons and Persons, though the term "hitchhiker" didn't come up in a search of the book.

It goes like this (well, my version does anyway): Assume you're lost in the desert, with nothing of value on you. You're approached by a superpowerful, superintelligent being we'll call Omega. It is willing to take you back to civilization and stabilize you -- but only if you will withdraw $5 from your bank account and give it to Omega once that's over with. (Yes, such a being might have reason to do this.) It has no enforcement mechanism for if you don't pay.

But here's the catch: Omega can scan you in detail and find out if you're really intending to give it the $5 when you're safe, rather than -- I don't know -- reasoning that, "Hey, I'm already safe, I've already got what I need and all, and you know, this Omega thing is powerful enough anyway, I think I'll just keep the $5." And if it finds that you wouldn't give it the money upon reaching safety (i.e. you don't have a decision theory that outputs "pay $5 to Omega" given that you are safe), then it just won't take you back and you can die in the desert.

At this point, a lot of you might be recoiling in horror: "What? Keep a measly five dollars when this thing saved my life? Are you ****in' nuts?" Yeah -- you're the people with the intuition I was referring to at the beginning -- the one that I have, and the anti-IP libertarians don't seem to. More about that in a minute.

Those of you who didn't recoil in horror may be thinking something like, "Whoa whoa whoa, I don't like dying. See, I would just make a contract -- or heck, even a simple promise -- that I will give Omega the $5. Since I feel honor-bound to abide by my promises, of course I would pay, and wouldn't have such diseased thoughts" as I referred to above. But I didn't make it that easy: note that Omega doesn't ask you anything and can't even receive your messages. Its decision is based entirely on what you would do, given that you know the details of the situation.

Here's the neat thing to notice: you will never find yourself in a position to be deciding whether to take that final step and give the Omega-like being $5 unless you adhere to a decision theory (or "ethic", "morals", etc.) that leads you to do things like "give Omega $5 for rescuing you at least in those cases where it rescued you conditional on expecting you to give it that $5" even when you already know what the Omega-like being has decided, and that decision is irreversible.

(I know, I know, I'm doubling up on the italics. Bear with me here.)

Conversely, all of the beings who come out alive have a decision theory (or ethic, etc.) which regards it as an optimal action (or an "action they should do", etc.) to pay the $5. Omega's already selected for them!

Now at this point, those of you who don't have the recoiling intuition I referred to, or are still worried I'll derive implications from it you don't like, may insist that this is a contrived scenario, with no application to real world -- you can't make your decisions based on what capricious, weird, superpowerful agents will do, so why change your decision theory on that reasoning?

And there is something to that belief: You don't want to become a "person who always jumps off the nearest cliff" just because there's some rare instance where it's a good idea.

But that's not what's going on here, is it? Omega makes its decision based upon what you would do, irrespective of what decision process led you to do it. So for purposes of this scenario, it simply doesn't matter whether you decide to pay that $5 because you:

- feel honor-bound to do so;
- feel so grateful to Omega that you think it deserves what it wanted from you;
- believe you would be punished with eternal hellfire if you didn't, and dislike hellfire;
- like to transfer money to Omega-like beings, just for the heck of it;
- or for any other reason.

So, then, is it normal for the world to decide how it treats you based on (a somewhat reliable assessment of) "what you would do"? Yes, it is, once you realize that we already have a term for "what you would do": it's called your "character" or "disposition" (or "decision theory" or "generating function").

Do people typically treat you differently based on estimations of your character? If you know where they don't, please let me know, so I can go there and let loose my sarcasm with impunity.

So, to wrap it up, what does Parfit's Hitchhiker have to do with intellectual property? Well:

- Omega represents the people who are deciding whether to produce difficult, satisfying intellectual works, conditional on whether we will respect certain exclusivity rights that have historically been promised them.

- The decision to rescue us is the decision to produce those intellectual works.

- The decision to pay the $5 represents the decision to continue to respect that exclusivity once it is produced "even though" they're "not scarce anymore", and we could choose otherwise.

The lesson: if you don't believe that the Omegas in your life "deserve", in an important sense, to be paid, you won't find yourself "rescued". We are where we are today because of our beliefs about what "hitchhikers" should do, and we miss out on rescues whenever we decide to become ungrateful hitchhikers. (Edit: that should probably be phrased as "... whenever we decide that it's right for hitchhikers to be ungrateful.")

(Note: this post was heavily influenced by Good and Real, Chapter 7, and by this article on Newcomb's problem.)

Setting spending straight: Now, we're getting somewhere

Setting spending straight: Now, we're getting somewhere

As you might have noticed, I'm quite confounded by the arguments for stimulus, especially monetary stimulus.

In discussing the issue on Less Wrong, I've argued that once you expand out what the economics jargon, it's not even clear that stimulus arguments even claim to be accomplishing something good. And that such schemes are justified with reasoning that would just as wellprove it beneficial to do clearly absurd things, showing a misuse of the term "the economy".

This suggested to me a serious case of lost purpose, where one's policy justifications have become completely disconnected from the original reasoning.

Well, now I've found someone willing to engage these issues: John Salvatier of Good Morning, Economics. He's not Scott Sumner, but he does advocate the same things, and knows his way around the topic.

If you're interested, take a look at our ongoing exchange on the basis for stimulus (and this shorter thread).

Setting monetary stimulus straight

In light of my recent link to Gennady Stolyarov's post about the gloomy future of the economy (especially for young people), I thought it would be a good idea to put it against the backdrop of mainstream economics and the "experts'" solutions.

A characteristic post is this one by the relatively libertarian Scott Sumner. Like pretty much every day, his idea is for the Federal Reserve to do a "monetary stimulus" by injecting money into the economy to prop up nominal GDP. (Yes, nominal GDP -- you know, the one that doesn't mean anything until you adjust it to real GDP and even then commits you to a easily-abused framework.) This, it would do by various mechanisms, all of which aim to "get banks lending". Stop paying interest on reserves, buy more of banks' (junky) securities, rapidly debase the currency ("quantitative easing") so they have to loan or else hold worthless cash, etc.

In frustration at such a stupid policy, I made this sarcastic comment on that post:

Yes, the economy will definitely collapse if the Fed doesn’t print up more money to make shoddy loans for purchases people don’t want, and it’s a shame that folks at the Fed are stopping Bernanke from such a wise action.

And to my utter surprise, Sumner replied:

Silas. I agree. :-)

Note: the smiley was in recognition of my sarcasm, not to indicate he's changed his mind.

So, Sumner realizes exactly what he's asking for, and still thinks it's a good idea. But since it apparently isn't obvious to everyone what's wrong with such a policy, I thought I'd spell it out clearly for once:

Banks aren't lending (in sufficient numbers). Mainstream economists want to prod them into lending. But why won't they lend in the first place? Because they don't expect the future loan payments to justify the loan. Now, when you grip them so tightly that they have to, for some reason or another, make these loans, have you changed the factors causing banks to believe loans won't be paid? No, you haven't. So, the loans will just throw money after wasteful projects, destroying output and making everyone poorer.

Note: even if you -- quite reasonably -- care about unemployed workers, and you dismiss this concern about wastefulness on the grounds that, "hey, at least it will lift off the joblessness albatross for so many families", that still wouldn't make such policies a good idea. The wastefulness means that reality will eventually rear its head and force these projects to be abandoned. Then, all the new skills workers could have developed while working on sustainable projects that satisfy actual demand, instead don't get developed, and whatever they did do has just retooled them for a useless activity, leaving them even worse off. Doesn't sound too compassionate to me ...

But let's say I'm wrong about that. Let's put aside, for the moment, our skepticism about economists' claims that the same policy that forces banks to lend, also causes these loans to work out and get repaid, making them not such stupid loans to begin with. Even then, you're still causing inefficient activities to happen that cause workers and investors to dig themselves deeper on unsustainable activities.

Looking back, one has to wonder how economists ever came to the consensus that making ultra-underpriced loans to clumsy, inflexible banks could ever possibly be a good idea. My suspicion is that it is a kind of Goodhart phenomenon: at the time these economic models were created, the metrics economists cared about did serve as good proxies for general economic health. But as they were targeted by policy, they lost their value as indicators.

Furthermore, economists failed to continually ground their concept of a "good economy" in what is meant by the term in common parlance. They don't keep checking back to see whether their policies would mean that people get the best combination of work, leisure, and consumption (all broadly defined). No: if an improvement doesn't show up as a cash exchange, it doesn't matter. If people aren't spending enough, then obviously that's hurting the economy and they should spend more.

You would almost think the economy is some god that demands sacrifices, given the way economists talk, rather than a characterization of our collective ability to satisfy wants.

So please, understand my anger when I read about how young people have all of their options cut off by the earlier generation, how they can't save or invest because of how much will be taken to make up for the failures of poorly run enterprises, how genuinely productive ventures are quashed by an outdated mentality of how the world should work ... and then Scott Sumner swings in to tell us that the best way to improve "the economy" is with ridiculously underpriced loans from newly-printed money to aging, inefficient companies that just wasted trillions of dollars destroying our productive capacity.

Advice for economists: Ask whether, not why.

-Don't ask, "What can we do to increase aggregate demand?"
Ask, "Why should we increase aggregate demand?"

-Don't ask, "What can we do to keep people from saving so much?"
Ask, "Why does 'the economy' so crucially depend on people not saving, and why do I care about the health of the 'economy' in that sense?"

-Don't ask, "What can we do to get (traditionally measured) output back up?"
Ask, "Why is it necessary for that measure of output to go up? Would it be so terrible for people to produce less, if that's what they really want, based on honest assessments of the future?"

Get the picture?