Jimrandomh's Shortform

jimrandomh

This is a special post for quick takes by jimrandomh. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.

This is a special post for quick takes by jimrandomh. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.

Many people seem to have a single bucket in their thinking, which merges "moral condemnation" and "negative product review". This produces weird effects, like writing angry callout posts for a business having high prices.

I think a large fraction of libertarian thinking is just the abillity to keep these straight, so that the next thought after "business has high prices" is "shop elsewhere" rather than "coordinate punishment".

I don't think people who disagree with your political beliefs must be inherently irrational.

Can you think of real world scenarios in which "shop elsewhere" isn't an option?

3thinking2y

Based on the words from this post alone - I think that would depend on what the situation is; in the scenario of price increases, if the business is a monopoly or have very high market power, and the increase is significant (and may even potentially cause harm), then anger would make sense.

5Noosphere892y

This sounds very much like the phenomenon described in From Personal to Prison Gangs: Enforcing Prosocial Behavior, where the main reason for regulation/getting the government to step in has become more and more common is basically the fact that at scales larger than 150-300 people, we lose the ability to iterate games, which in the absence of acausal/logical/algorithmic decision theories like FDT and UDT, basically mean that the optimal outcome is to defect, so you can no longer assume cooperation/small sacrifices from people in general, and coordination in the modern world is a very taut constraint, so any solution has very high value. (This also has a tie-in to decision theory: At the large scale, CDT predominates, but at the very small scale, something like FDT is incentivized through kin selection, though this is only relevant for 4-50 people scales at most, and the big reasons why algorithmic decision theories aren't used by people very often is because of the original decision theories that were algorithmic like UDT basically required logical omniscience, which people obviously don't have, and even the more practical algorithmic decision theories require both access to someone's source code, and also the ability to simulate another agent either perfectly or at least very, very good simulations, which we again don't have.) This link is very helpful to illustrate the general phenomenon: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYt3ZCrBq2QAf3rak/from-personal-to-prison-gangs-enforcing-prosocial-behavior

Jimrandomh's Shortform

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Jimrandomh's Shortform

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