Libertarianism vs Pragmatarianism

[The Two Jerseys]

it is expensive, so more and more people are growing it. as the supply goes up the price will come down. just like what happened with dragon fruit.

Huh. If I was growing it, I'd like as few as possible doing so. It's against my interest for the price to go down after all.

Hi Adam Smith, you're as usual not serving Xero's position very well.

Don't worry Farmer Therns, in a pragmatarian economy the consumers will massively overpay for your fruit to signal how much they like it, so your profits are safe!

[Fractalnavel]

Introduce a bit of meta: apply the donation selection system to that system itself. Though not sure of a minor design point: donate to make it go away, or donate to make it stay?

[Forsher]

As a Xero thread old hand, it is interesting to learn that he still calls his position pragmatarianism; it hadn't been a major feature of his thread for quite a number of years at this point.

I think it's been a while since anyone has called me a libertarian.

Sure, but I've been spending a lot of time reading Sordhau's posts lately and she probably says she's a communist once every twenty posts. You used to be like that, too... every thread was explicitly about pragmatarianism as a whole rather than just money weighted voting.

the hell are you talking about?

Xero has taken two common criticisms of modern life and tried to solve them.

In the first case he agrees with the proposition that voting is an inadequate signal because it doesn't convey strength of preference. For example, you might have two people whose level of interest in a bike lane is 1/100 versus one person whose level of interest is 100/100... don't think about "out of a hundred what?" because at this stage it's just illustrative. Now suppose that there's a referendum on whether there should be a bike lane. Everyone gets one vote and everyone gets one equally valuable vote. The two people who have nearly no interest in the bike lane just so happen to oppose it, while the interested party wants it. Thus, you get two largely indifferent votes against outweighing one extremely invested vote for. The argument runs "is this really fair?".

The second criticism is sort of about credibility, but Xero, at least ten years ago, tended to frame it mostly through the notion of revealed preference and in the popular consciousness it's called "skin in the game". That is, what someone actually does is more meaningful than what someone says they want. You can apply this to voting because you don't have to sacrifice anything to vote, right? It becomes less action and more speech.

Xero's solution is monetary voting/donation voting/whatever you want to call it. He argues that you get more honest/valuable signals using it and therefore better outcomes.

If the only thing that was going on was these two points, donation voting would make a lot of sense! The person who values the bike lane a lot can donate more money, so donation voting reflects strength of preference, and because you can spend your money by voting for stuff or on, say, food, you have to sacrifice... so we can believe that you really do care about bike lanes because, look, you actually sacrificed quite a lot.

In reality, of course, money simply doesn't work like this. To use a simple example, if you spend 50% of your weekly income on rent, it makes a hell of a lot of difference if you've got $100 or $1000 or $10,000 left over after doing that. Xero's argument is built on the unstated premise that the value of money is consistent across all groups.

[Fractalnavel]

[...]In reality, of course, money simply doesn't work like this. To use a simple example, if you spend 50% of your weekly income on rent, it makes a hell of a lot of difference if you've got $100 or $1000 or $10,000 left over after doing that. Xero's argument is built on the unstated premise that the value of money is consistent across all groups.

Could use marginal value... Or give everyone a bucket of votes to allocate. Votes as a type of currency. Investing, trading, ... Ok, this will end well /s.

[Forsher]

[...]In reality, of course, money simply doesn't work like this. To use a simple example, if you spend 50% of your weekly income on rent, it makes a hell of a lot of difference if you've got $100 or $1000 or $10,000 left over after doing that. Xero's argument is built on the unstated premise that the value of money is consistent across all groups.

Could use marginal value...

Either I don't understand marginal value or I don't see how that resolves the problem?

Or give everyone a bucket of votes to allocate. Votes as a type of currency. Investing, trading, ... Ok, this will end well /s.

The former has been put to Xero before, but I'm not sure about the latter.

[Tangatarehua]

The title of this thread looked interesting but then I saw who the OP was and realised without needing to read it that it was going to be something incoherent and insane.

And I wasn't wrong.

[The United Penguin Commonwealth]

I think it's been a while since anyone has called me a libertarian.

Sure, but I've been spending a lot of time reading Sordhau's posts lately and she probably says she's a communist once every twenty posts. You used to be like that, too... every thread was explicitly about pragmatarianism as a whole rather than just money weighted voting.

the hell are you talking about?

Xero has taken two common criticisms of modern life and tried to solve them.

In the first case he agrees with the proposition that voting is an inadequate signal because it doesn't convey strength of preference. For example, you might have two people whose level of interest in a bike lane is 1/100 versus one person whose level of interest is 100/100... don't think about "out of a hundred what?" because at this stage it's just illustrative. Now suppose that there's a referendum on whether there should be a bike lane. Everyone gets one vote and everyone gets one equally valuable vote. The two people who have nearly no interest in the bike lane just so happen to oppose it, while the interested party wants it. Thus, you get two largely indifferent votes against outweighing one extremely invested vote for. The argument runs "is this really fair?".

The second criticism is sort of about credibility, but Xero, at least ten years ago, tended to frame it mostly through the notion of revealed preference and in the popular consciousness it's called "skin in the game". That is, what someone actually does is more meaningful than what someone says they want. You can apply this to voting because you don't have to sacrifice anything to vote, right? It becomes less action and more speech.

Xero's solution is monetary voting/donation voting/whatever you want to call it. He argues that you get more honest/valuable signals using it and therefore better outcomes.

If the only thing that was going on was these two points, donation voting would make a lot of sense! The person who values the bike lane a lot can donate more money, so donation voting reflects strength of preference, and because you can spend your money by voting for stuff or on, say, food, you have to sacrifice... so we can believe that you really do care about bike lanes because, look, you actually sacrificed quite a lot.

In reality, of course, money simply doesn't work like this. To use a simple example, if you spend 50% of your weekly income on rent, it makes a hell of a lot of difference if you've got $100 or $1000 or $10,000 left over after doing that. Xero's argument is built on the unstated premise that the value of money is consistent across all groups.

so basically the rich have even more power than they already do. great. just what we need.

[Fractalnavel]

Could use marginal value...

Either I don't understand marginal value or I don't see how that resolves the problem?
[...]

Marginal value: here I'm thinking that the person with $10k would need to 'donate' (allocate, whatever) 100 times as much as the person with $100 to have the same weighted vote. The cost is the same in terms of relative proportion of assets to each person. "value of money" is different depending on how much you already have. Simplified, of course.

[Neutraligon]

Either I don't understand marginal value or I don't see how that resolves the problem?
[...]

Marginal value: here I'm thinking that the person with $10k would need to 'donate' (allocate, whatever) 100 times as much as the person with $100 to have the same weighted vote. The cost is the same in terms of relative proportion of assets to each person. "value of money" is different depending on how much you already have. Simplified, of course.

Unfortunately that isn't really the case. As the value of a dollar doesn't really scale linearly.

[Fractalnavel]

Marginal value: here I'm thinking that the person with $10k would need to 'donate' (allocate, whatever) 100 times as much as the person with $100 to have the same weighted vote. The cost is the same in terms of relative proportion of assets to each person. "value of money" is different depending on how much you already have. Simplified, of course.

Unfortunately that isn't really the case. As the value of a dollar doesn't really scale linearly.

Yep. There's a raft of complications. And not just nonlinear, there's also discontinuities. But it can be worked out with the overall concept still intact, it's just easier to use a simple model and not get bogged down in details until they matter.

"Bucket of votes" is probably easiest to deal with. And even that quickly gets messy.

[Forsher]

Unfortunately that isn't really the case. As the value of a dollar doesn't really scale linearly.

Yep. There's a raft of complications. And not just nonlinear, there's also discontinuities. But it can be worked out with the overall concept still intact, it's just easier to use a simple model and not get bogged down in details until they matter.

"Bucket of votes" is probably easiest to deal with. And even that quickly gets messy.

The way actual countries resolve these issues is qualitative, basically. That is, they ask for submissions in consultations and other sacrifices of time. This tends to devolve to what I call Karenocracy, however. That is, you get retirees, the independently wealthy and other people who are time rich, i.e. the kind of people who have enough time to become Karens, who are the only people who make submissions.

It is sometimes reported that organisations that try to address the time wealth inequalities by making submission templates end up doing nothing but having technocrats ignore all template based submissions. I don't know if this is actually true or not.

[Xerographica]

Either I don't understand marginal value or I don't see how that resolves the problem?
[...]

Marginal value: here I'm thinking that the person with $10k would need to 'donate' (allocate, whatever) 100 times as much as the person with $100 to have the same weighted vote. The cost is the same in terms of relative proportion of assets to each person. "value of money" is different depending on how much you already have. Simplified, of course.

A rich person would have to pay $100 for 1 vote, while a poor person would have to pay $1 for 1 vote. This system would certainly be more fair but would it be more effective?

Let's consider a scenario where there's a surplus of bananas. Would it be effective for a poor farmer in Guatemala to spend his money to plant bananas on his land? Well no, when there's already too many bananas the last thing we need is more bananas. The poor farmer would become even poorer. Nobody wins, everybody loses.

In real life, if there truly was an overabundance of bananas, then their price would reflect this and no farmer in his right mind would plant them. Naturally they would endeavor to plant the fruit that has the greatest shortage, which would be reflected in its price.

There's a problem with prices though. Obviously you can't buy something that isn't available. For example in the US there aren't any achachas to buy. And even if they were available, what are the chances that their price would accurately reflect my perception of their scarcity?

Ranking fruit by donations doesn't have either problem. Achachas do not need to be available, and the amount I donate to rank them would accurately reflect my perception of their scarcity (relative to other fruits).

So when you endeavor to make the ranking more fair, you're essentially putting the cart before the horse. What matters most is creating the most accurate treasure map for poor farmers in Guatemala. When they plant the fruit trees that are truly the most wanted, then we all win.

[Fractalnavel]

Yep. There's a raft of complications. And not just nonlinear, there's also discontinuities. But it can be worked out with the overall concept still intact, it's just easier to use a simple model and not get bogged down in details until they matter.

"Bucket of votes" is probably easiest to deal with. And even that quickly gets messy.

The way actual countries resolve these issues is qualitative, basically. That is, they ask for submissions in consultations and other sacrifices of time. This tends to devolve to what I call Karenocracy, however. That is, you get retirees, the independently wealthy and other people who are time rich, i.e. the kind of people who have enough time to become Karens, who are the only people who make submissions.

It is sometimes reported that organisations that try to address the time wealth inequalities by making submission templates end up doing nothing but having technocrats ignore all template based submissions. I don't know if this is actually true or not.

Thinking about that for a moment, it seems that the marginal value of time available is so discounted for those folks that it's effectively worthless. Seems somewhat reasonable.

Marginal value: here I'm thinking that the person with $10k would need to 'donate' (allocate, whatever) 100 times as much as the person with $100 to have the same weighted vote. The cost is the same in terms of relative proportion of assets to each person. "value of money" is different depending on how much you already have. Simplified, of course.

A rich person would have to pay $100 for 1 vote, while a poor person would have to pay $1 for 1 vote. This system would certainly be more fair but would it be more effective?

Let's consider a scenario where there's a surplus of bananas. Would it be effective for a poor farmer in Guatemala to spend his money to plant bananas on his land? Well no, when there's already too many bananas the last thing we need is more bananas. The poor farmer would become even poorer. Nobody wins, everybody loses.

In real life, if there truly was an overabundance of bananas, then their price would reflect this and no farmer in his right mind would plant them. Naturally they would endeavor to plant the fruit that has the greatest shortage, which would be reflected in its price.

There's a problem with prices though. Obviously you can't buy something that isn't available. For example in the US there aren't any achachas to buy. And even if they were available, what are the chances that their price would accurately reflect my perception of their scarcity?

Ranking fruit by donations doesn't have either problem. Achachas do not need to be available, and the amount I donate to rank them would accurately reflect my perception of their scarcity (relative to other fruits).

So when you endeavor to make the ranking more fair, you're essentially putting the cart before the horse. What matters most is creating the most accurate treasure map for poor farmers in Guatemala. When they plant the fruit trees that are truly the most wanted, then we all win.

Right, that's one of the twists. If the "vote" is an actual transaction of buying something valued for itself, and not symbolic of something else, it's just a sale. There's differences in handling for luxuries vs. necessities vs. monopolies etc. That's where the economics-as-voting model / analogy falls apart. Better to think of it in direct terms. Which, iirc, is where this proposal has gone off the rails before. Might be useful in very specific circumstances, but there is no one-size-fits-all method that is always 'fair', since fairness itself depends on what's being dealt with. Goes for democracy too, of course, and various implementations there. Although you might be able to warp the model enough such that it could represent something like a dictatorship or a military command structure. 'Warp' being the operative term.

[Xerographica]

Right, that's one of the twists. If the "vote" is an actual transaction of buying something valued for itself, and not symbolic of something else, it's just a sale. There's differences in handling for luxuries vs. necessities vs. monopolies etc. That's where the economics-as-voting model / analogy falls apart. Better to think of it in direct terms. Which, iirc, is where this proposal has gone off the rails before. Might be useful in very specific circumstances, but there is no one-size-fits-all method that is always 'fair', since fairness itself depends on what's being dealt with. Goes for democracy too, of course, and various implementations there. Although you might be able to warp the model enough such that it could represent something like a dictatorship or a military command structure. 'Warp' being the operative term.

i'm not sure that i follow. let's say we use donations to rank fruit...

result: jackfruit > soursop

Forsher complains that the system is unfair and would prefer a weighted vote...

result: soursop > jackfruit

with donations the poor Guatemalan farmers grew jackfruit, but with more fairness they grow soursop.

system change -> ranking change -> behavior change

did their behavior become more beneficial?

[Fractalnavel]

Right, that's one of the twists. If the "vote" is an actual transaction of buying something valued for itself, and not symbolic of something else, it's just a sale. There's differences in handling for luxuries vs. necessities vs. monopolies etc. That's where the economics-as-voting model / analogy falls apart. Better to think of it in direct terms. Which, iirc, is where this proposal has gone off the rails before. Might be useful in very specific circumstances, but there is no one-size-fits-all method that is always 'fair', since fairness itself depends on what's being dealt with. Goes for democracy too, of course, and various implementations there. Although you might be able to warp the model enough such that it could represent something like a dictatorship or a military command structure. 'Warp' being the operative term.

i'm not sure that i follow. let's say we use donations to rank fruit...

result: jackfruit > soursop

Forsher complains that the system is unfair and would prefer a weighted vote...

result: soursop > jackfruit

with donations the poor Guatemalan farmers grew jackfruit, but with more fairness they grow soursop.

system change -> ranking change -> behavior change

did their behavior become more beneficial?

That's ranking it twice in two different ways, constructed by intent to be inconsistent. Garbage in, garbage out? In addition to being consistent, the rules should be appropriate to the category. Fairness for things that are required of all, for example, and "unfair" for discretionary things. Still oversimplified. And that's not unbiased either, just as ignoring that difference is also not unbiased. It's a choice.

You can construct whatever you want. But the world isn't so simple that a single principal will optimize everything. Would be nice, but it's a trap. And 'optimize' is subjective anyway.

[Forsher]

The way actual countries resolve these issues is qualitative, basically. That is, they ask for submissions in consultations and other sacrifices of time. This tends to devolve to what I call Karenocracy, however. That is, you get retirees, the independently wealthy and other people who are time rich, i.e. the kind of people who have enough time to become Karens, who are the only people who make submissions.

It is sometimes reported that organisations that try to address the time wealth inequalities by making submission templates end up doing nothing but having technocrats ignore all template based submissions. I don't know if this is actually true or not.

Thinking about that for a moment, it seems that the marginal value of time available is so discounted for those folks that it's effectively worthless. Seems somewhat reasonable.

Just to be clear, you're saying the Karenocracy hypothesis is reasonable as in "seems likely to be true"? As opposed to saying the existence of Karenocracy is reasonable?

[Dumb Ideologies]

>when you hate "barriers to entry" but then spend decades on internet forums insisting we add systematic barriers to participation by requiring people to pay.

[The Holy Therns]

>when you hate "barriers to entry" but then spend decades on internet forums insisting we add systematic barriers to participation by requiring people to pay.

The time is right, everyone's expenses being so low and all.

[Xerographica]

i'm not sure that i follow. let's say we use donations to rank fruit...

result: jackfruit > soursop

Forsher complains that the system is unfair and would prefer a weighted vote...

result: soursop > jackfruit

with donations the poor Guatemalan farmers grew jackfruit, but with more fairness they grow soursop.

system change -> ranking change -> behavior change

did their behavior become more beneficial?

That's ranking it twice in two different ways, constructed by intent to be inconsistent. Garbage in, garbage out? In addition to being consistent, the rules should be appropriate to the category. Fairness for things that are required of all, for example, and "unfair" for discretionary things. Still oversimplified. And that's not unbiased either, just as ignoring that difference is also not unbiased. It's a choice.

You can construct whatever you want. But the world isn't so simple that a single principal will optimize everything. Would be nice, but it's a trap. And 'optimize' is subjective anyway.

The poor Guatemalan farmer can grow jackfruit or poison oak on his land. it's subjective, sure, therefore don't bother with optimization? it doesn't matter whether we derive more benefit from jackfruit or poison oak?

i see you try a new fruit. does it matter whether you 1. die an agonizing death or 2. jump up and down with joy? of course it matters. the amount of harm, or benefit, you derive from a new fruit is extremely useful information for me and everyone else. even if it was possible for everyone to simultaneously eat some new fruit, or read a new book, or travel to a new planet, it wouldn't be smart for us to do so. it is way smarter for us to all try different things and then inform each other about the best things.

there are plenty of different ways to inform each other and they are not equally effective. voting and donating are very different systems, so they will rank things completely differently. one system will result in more benefit than the other. you don't need to take my word for it, the proof is in the pudding. i'm sure you'd find donation rankings to be far more useful than democratic rankings.

[Xerographica]

>when you hate "barriers to entry" but then spend decades on internet forums insisting we add systematic barriers to participation by requiring people to pay.

the option to spend your money on something that you want or need isn't a barrier to entry, it's literally a market

[The Holy Therns]

>when you hate "barriers to entry" but then spend decades on internet forums insisting we add systematic barriers to participation by requiring people to pay.

the option to spend your money on something that you want or need isn't a barrier to entry, it's literally a market

Right now the discussion is free. You're saying I should pay to participate. You're adding a barrier to entry. What do I gain by paying to participate?

[Xerographica]

the option to spend your money on something that you want or need isn't a barrier to entry, it's literally a market

Right now the discussion is free. You're saying I should pay to participate. You're adding a barrier to entry. What do I gain by paying to participate?

i'm saying that you should have the option to pay to promote your favorite discussions, fruits, books, movies, restaurants, and so on

[The Holy Therns]

Right now the discussion is free. You're saying I should pay to participate. You're adding a barrier to entry. What do I gain by paying to participate?

i'm saying that you should have the option to pay to promote your favorite discussions, fruits, books, movies, restaurants, and so on

And if I don't, but talk them up myself, I accomplish that without losing money.

[Dumb Ideologies]

>when you hate "barriers to entry" but then spend decades on internet forums insisting we add systematic barriers to participation by requiring people to pay.

the option to spend your money on something that you want or need isn't a barrier to entry, it's literally a market

Transforming something that is currently free into a market where investment is required to participate introduces barriers to entry in terms of the scarcity of resources.

Those resources are more scarce for people lower down the income scale (particularly in the sense of disposable income) and so the cost barrier for such people to participate in each discussion is relatively much higher. The only way that your system would be more efficient rather than substantially less in signalling preferences would be if you believe that the preferences of wealthy people are qualitatively superior than those of everybody else and therefore worthy of being given this extra weight.

In the examples you provide that would be relatively trivial because the outcomes are not particularly important. But given that you seemingly think this is a genius idea that should be rolled out by society as a method for determining resource allocation and social policy, tilting the field so that the wealthy are given disproportionate say would have rather important social impacts.

The justifications you provide are frankly a total nonsense and appear to be an attempt to smuggle a subjective preference for the opinions of wealthy people past us as "objective" or "efficient".

[Dogmeat]

It's good to know that some things can be counted on in this world. The sky is blue, the snow is white, and "Pragmatarianism" continues to be an idiotic half-baked idea championed by a single person that will never gain traction.