Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Terror panics and the war imperative, in reply to
It sounds like these events have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, other than the perpetrator being a Muslim. It's another mass murder, something which both Australia and NZ unfortunately have long histories of. I guess we'll find out eventually who actually killed who. When police burst into a hostage situation and we hear dozens of shots and several explosions, then it seems prudent to wait for post mortem analysis.
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to
These places, should they be bulldozed, erased?
I think they should be remembered, but I'm not entirely sure that what they've done with Kingseat isn't incredibly tasteless. My aunt received care there, and no one ever actually had their brains eaten. But it is being actively used, and the history is there for people to partake of if they care to, and the site is quite popular, so I just don't know, in the end.
When it was closed down, her continual stream of relocations only continued. Dad read out parts of a letter he wrote to the Ministry urging them not to shut down the place she was in care in towards the end of her life (she died this year), and it was an absolute litany of a person being jerked around as if they have no rights at all, from start to finish. The number of times she'd been uprooted just when she was settling in to a new home went on for pages. As a result of the letter, they kept the last place going, thankfully.
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to
Titivate it up all they like, the new owners, the ghosts of past detainees still haunt the place.
Funny you should say that. The Amazing Maze 'n Maize is set at the site of Kingseat hospital. I took my kids to the maze recently and was quite astonished at how they'd turned the hospital that my Aunt spent some time at into an object of sinister evil. It was really quite effective, I actually did get rising hackles and shivers as I approached the place, so effectively did the dilapidated and abandoned scene resemble so many horror film locations.
I think it says a lot about human nature that we make this association, that a site for the disabled is now a theme park where people can be literally chased around by zombies for thrills.
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First chapter down, and hooked already.
So sorry to hear about Adric. May he wither and die, and his corpse fertilize the brilliant brain it is now plaguing.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to
Yup, that's the trick with dirty politics. Project all of your own properties as a political operator onto someone else. The fact that it would be hard to find two more different people than Hooton and Tiso shouldn't mean that people can't end up seeing them as some kind of continuum. Both of them, after all, contributed to Willie and JT going off air. That Gio did it by the simple method of eloquently telling advertisers what had actually happened on their dime, and Hooton did it by getting juiced and ranting incoherently at them on air until he got thrown out of the premises shouldn't mean that they're not fundamentally the same kind of fish, now, should it?
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Hard News: Word of the Year 2014: The Vote, in reply to
I’m curious: is there a base? Does all of it belong to us?
Who rigs every Oscar night? We do! We do!
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to
>That risks confusing a moral science for a natural one.
He seems to be saying the existing ‘toolkit’ isn’t necessarily up to the job and relying solely on these commonly used tools, “risks confusing a moral science with a natural one”.
I think he's making quite a profound point here. He saying that it's easy to confuse the ability to optimize to some objective with the goodness of doing so. The first is a purely technical thing and often very, very hard, the work of lifetimes. The second is a moral choice. It is disputable whether there even are experts on moral choice. It's something that that sits at the meta-level for economics, something that they don't actually get to decide for us. It is not down to economists to decide whether is a poor but equal society is worse than a richer but unequal one. That's something for society itself to decide. It's not something an optimization tool can decide for us.
This is true even in more pedestrian optimization scenarios, where the choices aren't particularly moral. I can (and have) designed systems that optimize to constraints. But I don't actually get to decide either the constraints OR the objective function itself. If the system produces an answer, the most I can really say is "This is close to the best IF you have correctly identified the constraints and objective". I can also give extremely useful information in the post-optimal analysis (I came to think of this as actually the most useful thing any optimization tool could do) about the extent to which the constraints push upon the objective, so that decisions about how to change the constraints can be made on an informed basis. But actually changing the constraints themselves, or deciding on the objective was well outside my brief as a mere technician.
For instance, in a transport optimization scenario, I can suggest an objective that is entirely about minimizing cost in dollars. But the management might decide their objective actually involves distributing the work fairly amongst the drivers as a partial goal. So be it, that's not my call. All I can say is what that might cost, not whether it's a good or bad thing to do.
I say this having been in this exact situation. So I can fully appreciate what Makhouf is saying about the risk of the confusion. Certainly I was in a very powerful position to make the call myself about what happened for the drivers, and subject to pressures from all sides. And my own interests were in some senses in direct conflict, since our system had been challenged to provide a certain level of saving, with financial incentives tied directly to that. Of course having the drivers happier came at some cost to that. If I was a particularly Machiavellian character, I'd have simply pushed management to tell the drivers to get stuffed and put up with the nasty change in their working conditions. Instead....well I digress. I didn't do that, but I can fully see that there's a blurry boundary between designing/applying the tools one has to achieve an end, and deciding on the ends themselves. By the time you have done that kind of analysis, built that kind of tool, there really is no one more knowledgeable about what it can do, or how it could be better used, so you do quite easily slip into making decisions that aren't really yours to make.
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to
my question is, if so, what would alternative tools look like if they were instead developed with a virtue ethics or a deontological bias?
Do you have any suggestions? My feeling is that it would be extremely difficult, as deontological systems are inherently rule based. They don't even admit of any objective function, so when making decisions amongst multiple permissible actions they don't have much to say about what would be the best one. In other words, they're OK for making laws, but when it comes to economic management, it's hard to see that they provide any kind of framework.
I guess you could try to define tools that analyze the extent to which changes to economic settings increase or decrease the likely violations of rules. But that's mostly geared towards making a lawful, society, rather than a happy or wealthy one.
If you provide an objective function to maximize, so as to get a deontological system to address this, I think that really what you've done is change it to a consequentialist system. Consequentialists can, after all, be rule-based too. Rule Utilitarianism, for instance.
Hence my challenge to show how deontology is not subsumed into consequentialism, if you want to make it actually make practical economic decisions.
You could, for instance, define an objective in a virtue ethics framework, of minimizing deviation from a golden mean in each identified virtue. You'd probably want to define how that applied across more than one person, how you add up deviations to get a single number of total deviation at the end. You'd have to define your loss function. Then you could look at how economic settings affect that total, and aim for the ones that minimizes it. Then you'd have an economic system aimed at maximizing social virtue. But I struggle to see how that's really much different to a Rule Utilitarian framework, in which the various contributors to overall "goodness" are defined by a bunch of rules and their level of violation, coupled with the general objective of maximizing happiness. They just look like different implementations of the same thing, and they both look consequentialist.
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to
Pfft. The Laffer curve’s fine. It’s just you get maximum tax take at 70%, rather than 30%.
Well the main problem is "Who knows what the curve actually looks like?" It's only real purpose is to show that it's conceptually possible that a situation could exist where lowering tax raises revenue. It never really makes any claim about where that local maximum point is, nor does it give a method by which it could be found.
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to
Point is, you are much better read in Greek philosophy than me
Don't count on that! I'm most interested to hear how virtue ethics can give insight into economics. My challenge for you is to show how it isn't subsumed into the consequentialist alternatives, when you actually get down to nuts and bolts.
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