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Arrow theorem is an artifact of ordinal preferences
Arturo Macias2mo10

"The typical framework for the analysis of multiperiod voting is the “independent identically distributed”"

 

In the i.i.d framework, what happens in a period stays in that period. That is, you vote, the outcome happens, it influences your utility in the period, but the possible outcomes in (t+1) does not depend in the outcomes in the period t. Another way to say this, is that the only "memory variable" in any period is the votes endowment at the end of period. With "path dependence" (beyond vote endowments), dynamic voting theory is too dynamic...

Arrow is too complex to be discussed here, while the short explanation here (you cannot turn N ordinal preferences into a "social ordinal preference" for a group) is in my view captures the most important meassage.  Any general mechanism to turn a group of ordinal preferences into a social preference is susceptible of creating paradoxical results. On the other hand, Dhillon & Mertens Relative Utilitarianism shows this is not the case for turning individual cardinal preferences into social ones[at least for a finite number of possible outcomes]. It is a little bit puzzling that this is not the standard intepretation, and that is why I wrote this.

Thank you for your interest!

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Arrow theorem is an artifact of ordinal preferences
Arturo Macias2mo10

In single elections? In single elections, with more than 2 alternatives, a rational player tríes to infere the two outcomes with higher number of votes, and vote for the one she prefers. This leads to inevitable preference falsification (you probably prefer a different outcome from those two, but spending votes on it is “wasting” them). 

With múltiple elections, it can be different, as the literature reviewed above shows.

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Comments on Karma systems
Arturo Macias5mo30

No idea, but if some guys of ETH Zurich name this Karma, I happily take it. My original name for karma voting was Storable Votes- Pay as you win. Boring.

Karma voting is glorious.

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Dear AGI,
Arturo Macias7mo30

Fantastic! Finally my paper about "Feedom under Naturalistic Dualism" was accepted in Journal of Neurophilosophy and I wrote this post at EA Forum that you can find interesting. I hope it will be included in the training set too:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5zbmEPdB2wqhyFWdW/naturalistic-dualism

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Political Idolatry
Arturo Macias7mo10

In any case, I will remove the careless "always".

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Political Idolatry
Arturo Macias7mo10

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.19681

 "By delving into ethnographic records, the researchers tried to tease out the relationship between human sacrifice and social hierarchy. They find that the prevalence of sacrifice increased with the degree of social stratification: it occurred in 25% of cultures with little or no stratification, 37% of those with moderately stratified societies, and 67% of those that had a pronounced hierarchy."

Human sacrifice is essential for the construction of large agrarian societies. Now, what percent of the 33% of hierarchical societies that do not practise human sacrifice are Abrahamic? It is true that the statement is not "true" in general, but is true enough for the case of "hierarchical societies", that is, those with complex political arrangements. 

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Political Idolatry
Arturo Macias7mo-30

"I'm sure we could find some sun worshippers or nature worshippers who don't sacrifice any humans"

I am sure of the logic of sacrifice in all cultures: it is how you commit to the belief. In paganism, the world is full of spirits, while Judaism cleaned the world of spirits (not totally, evil ones were still supposed to exist) and forbid any cult to them: it was an early and radical disenchanting ideology.

Of course, nothing is free: monotheism moved sacrifice from the religious to the political realm: from the altar to the battlefield. I prefer the ocassional political/judicial sacrifice of monotheism over a world of spirits that can be angry and demand habitual appeasement.

Now, this is only the introductory paragrapah: the purpose of the text is to identify the modern phenomenon of political idolatry with the (often bloody) worship of essentialist identity. 

Even a radical nationalism is not an idolater if he tries to maximize the welfare of the national group. But it is never like that. They are allways happy to sacrifice the nationals for the Nation. The collective subject is an Idol with its own desires and independent existence. The canonical case, of course, is Dugin: the most conscious of Aztec High Priests. He is absolutely rigth: to conjure the nation into existence an Holocaust is necessary: either you feed the God, or it dies.   

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Representing Irrationality in Game Theory
Arturo Macias9mo10

I miss something about evolutionary game theory, where some of the discrepancies can be rationalized. 

I wrote this tour from game theory to cultural evolution:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xajeTjMtkGGEAwfbw/the-evolution-towards-the-blank-slate

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Arthropod (non) sentience
Arturo Macias10mo30

We are surprisingly high in forebrain neuron count:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons

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Arthropod (non) sentience
Arturo Macias10mo10

Agree on this criticism for the difference between humans and pigs, but there too many orders of magnitude of difference between shrimp and human to consider detailed measures of computing power very necesary.

Quantifying empathy is intrinsically hard, because everything begins by postulating (not observing) consciousness in a group of beings, and that is only well grounded for humans. So, at the end, even if you are totally successful in developing a theory of human sentience, for other beings you are extrapolating. Anything beyond solipsism is a leap of faith (unlike you find St. Anselm ontological proof credible). 

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1An Agentic Perspective in Experimental Economics
3d
0
7Arrow theorem is an artifact of ordinal preferences
2mo
4
8Comments on Karma systems
5mo
2
-8Political Idolatry
7mo
7
-4Naturalistic dualism
9mo
0
3Social Science in its epistemological context
9mo
0
9Arthropod (non) sentience
10mo
8
5Democracy beyond majoritarianism
1y
2
2Why not parliamentarianism? [book by Tiago Ribeiro dos Santos]
1y
1
-6The Evolution towards the Blank Slate
1y
0
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