[extropy-chat] POLITICS: 537 Economists Criticize Bush and Kerry

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Hal Finney wrote:
>>>>>See <http://www.openlettertothepresident.org/> and
>>>>><http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_comment/release_bc04_economists.html>.
> 
> Eliezer writes:
>>
>>I admit that you have to look at this pretty closely, knowing in advance 
>>what economists can be expected to agree upon, to see how both sets of 
>>signatories managed to phrase their criticism without saying anything that 
>>would depart from the standard model.
> 
> But still, they gave contradictory advice.  They may agree on some broad
> principles, but they apparently apply them differently in the present
> situation.  Do you think the anti-Bush signers would agree that rolling
> back his tax cuts would "sap the economy's vitality, ...inhibit capital
> formation, depress productivity growth, and make the United States less
> competitive internationally"?

My guess?  They would probably try to phrase it differently, or duck the 
question, in some way that avoided their needing to argue in a peer-visible 
forum that the statement above was actually false.

> For another data point take a look at this Economist article,
> <http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3262965>.
> It has some nice bar charts showing the results of a poll of 100 randomly
> selected academic economists.  Again, strong disagreements are present.
> These economists appear to be as polarized as the uninformed public as
> far as which policies are better.

Ah, but they were asked if they approved or disapproved.  They were not 
asked to predict consequences.

>>>If so, maybe someone did sign them both!
>>
>>Unlikely; how many economists are likely to be both partisan Republicans 
>>and partisan Democrats?
> 
> Which came first; the partisan positions, or the economic opinions?
> Did the ones who claim that the Bush tax cuts were disastrous say that
> because they are Democrats; or did they determine that such policies lead
> to disaster, and on this basis decide that they should become Democrats?

Given human nature, and the likely causal history, I would guess with a 
very, very high degree of probability that the partisan positions came first.

> The first case would be intellectually dishonest,

Macroeconomists are not Bayesian masters, Hal.  Only the 
heuristics-and-biases folks would even have begun to accumulate the skills 
of rationality.  Macroeconomists are just ordinary human beings who happen 
to be macroeconomists.  They play politics, they pick dimwit positions on 
the basis of the politics they started with and find some way to 
rationalize it.

By far the greatest determinant of your choice of political party is the 
party your parents belonged to.  95% correlation.  That's human nature for ya.

> and I will reject that for now.

Reject the obvious and most probable explanation so you can carry through 
the moral you selected in advance as your conclusion?  Isn't that 
intellectually dishonest?

> The second case further shows the paradox that different
> people, equally intelligent and following the same course of study,
> can come to diametrically opposite conclusions on such issues as whether
> cutting taxes in present circumstances leads to disaster.
> 
> In that case, if I decided that I was going to learn all there was to know
> about economics and decide for myself the truth of the matter, it would be
> entirely random which conclusion I would come to.  Maybe I would become
> one of the people who believe that the Bush tax cuts lead to disaster;
> or maybe I would become someone who believes that rolling back those
> tax cuts would be harmful.  It apparently will be as random as flipping
> a coin.  So wouldn't it make more sense just to flip the coin rather
> than to expend all those years of study?  Neither approach is going to
> bring me any closer to the truth, and the coin is a heck of a lot easier.

If nothing else, study would tell you which ideas are universally agreed to 
be stupid.  This helps.  A lot.

We've clashed over this before, Hal, and my position remains the same as 
last time:  Advanced rationality is a massively interdisciplinary science 
and a high-level martial art, and one who has not mastered the skills will 
use their intelligence to defeat itself.  It takes a hell of a lot of 
rationality for someone to transcend political silliness.  Why would you 
expect it of macroeconomists?  Rationality is not their specialty.  They're 
just, like, macroeconomists.  When it comes to politics, most economists' 
brains switch off just like most people's.  But you can probably get a fair 
amount of agreement from macroeconomists on consequences, so long as 
they're not allowed to say "good" or "bad", just flatly describe probable 
consequences.  You can get even more agreement if you ask them about past 
outcomes in similar cases instead of futures, and if you don't tell them 
which candidate is endorsing which policy.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence