[ExI] Meta question

[William Flynn Wallace]

If utility is purely about merely maximizing the money you have, then
there's a problem, but if being treated equitably is also part of a
person's utility, then accepting a unfair payout might lower their utility,
no

dan

Yes, of course.  I posted it to poke a little fun at people who think they
know how to measure utility..  When I went to law school I learned about
the rational man idea - what would he do or think.  Then along comes
economic theory, which in the older form seems to think that everyone is
the same as far as interpreting economic value and such.  Some people may
think mostly about money and some about equity and some, like those of us
on in the group, are ornery and may change our values according to the
situation.

Just how can Anders group parse that?  How do you put all that into
equations?  Seems pretentious or maybe over-simplifying human behavior.
 (now I could get an even more complicated response from Anders that I will
fail to follow in its entirely)

bill w

On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 11:42 AM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 2:14 AM, Anders <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> > I was deeply moved by Spike's story about the Messerschmitt engineer.
> Yes,
> > this is what real moral education is about.
>
> It's been a long time, but I can't remember _any_ moral eduction in
> school.  Still, I think I made the right choices even without such
> education.
>
> It's a well known story that I was fired in 1972 for refusing to sign
> a document certifying some isolation amplifiers for 250,000 hours
> MTBF.  (The design had shortcomings that made it likely to fail in a
> couple of thousand hours.)
>
> There was an earlier event.  When I first started school, I was
> offered a job at the engineering research lab.  I was to replace
> someone who had graduated.  He had been working on a project to
> measure the solids content in stream water.  He was trying to do so by
> measuring the drop in capacitance of the muddy water because the
> capacitance should fall since water has such a high dielectric
> constant.  I needed the work, but after reviewing the documents and
> seeing the one graph the previous work had produced, it was obvious
> they did not know what they were doing.  In particular, the
> capacitance went up as you added more mud to the water.  Pointing this
> out to the lab director lost me the job.
>
> > One should regularly check that one is not working for the bad guys. Or
> has
> > become one of them.
>
> Yes.
>
> Keith
>
> >
> >
> > On 2016-08-17 21:57, spike wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > From: spike [mailto:spike66 at att.net]
> >
> >
> >
> >>…I am struggling to tone down the political content of my own posts, but
> I
> >> am thinking about writing a full explanation, after which you read, you
> may
> >> understand why I keep talking about hearing the footsteps…spike
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > I decided to go ahead and explain some things.
> >
> >
> >
> > When I was a young controls engineer just starting out my career, I went
> to
> > work for a company that did anti-crime technology, which sounded really
> > cool, but had very little funding or market, so I was assigned as a TDY
> over
> > to support a USNavy effort while they tried to sell these early 80s
> remote
> > controlled flying camera drones (!)  We sold zero point zero of the RC
> cams,
> > and I ended up working with the Navy full time for the next several
> years.
> >
> >
> >
> > I was in an engineering society in 1985.  We had a keynote speaker who I
> > will never forget.  He was introduced as a retired Boeing engineer who
> > became an engineering professor at one of the local schools, then retired
> > from that.  But he explained in his crisp German accent, that wasn’t how
> he
> > started.  He went to work in 1936 just out of the university for an
> aircraft
> > company in Augsburg Germany, as a structural engineer on the team led by
> > Willy Messerschmitt.
> >
> >
> >
> > The war came along; he and his colleagues were busy developing war
> > technology, particularly a plane designed around the anticipated jet
> engine.
> > They had no particular political ideology in general; they were engineers
> > and scientists, the math geeks of the day.
> >
> >
> >
> > So they came up with a plane and had built some prototypes of the Me262,
> > began testing them with those marvelous jet engines.  Since that plane
> was
> > the fastest thing in the air, there was little reason to think anything
> > would be coming up from behind.  So the engineers designed the 262 as a
> > fighter plane, but it could carry bombs aft.
> >
> >
> >
> > During this time, which was already way into the war, they got orders
> from
> > Berlin asking them to see what engineering changes would be needed to use
> > the 262 as a bomber.  It is difficult to retrofit a fighter as a bomber
> > however, for several reasons.  The tactic used by the allies to fight an
> > ME262 was a head-on guns-ablazin’ joust.  The allies already knew the
> Kraut
> > had the option of just shoving the throttles forward and getting out of
> > town; they couldn’t catch it.  So… head-on attacks.
> >
> >
> >
> > The German engineers anticipated this (as German engineers do) and had
> armor
> > up front with a long slopey nose up there, so that a bullet hitting at an
> > oblique angle would likely be deflected.  They put the guns up there
> too, so
> > that if facing a head-on barrage, the guns would keep firing.  It was one
> > hell of a flying weapon.
> >
> >
> >
> > By this time, British bombs began falling on London, and the orders came
> in
> > to study a bomber version of the ME262, so they did, but soon found out
> that
> > the expendable parts were all forward.  Removing them would make the
> > aircraft so tail-heavy, most of the weight would need to be replaced with
> > useless ballast.  The existing ballast mount was structurally
> insufficient
> > for the amount needed to rebalance, so they (being clever German
> engineers)
> > found a way to shorten the tail, reduce aerodynamic surface area which
> > reduced its maneuverability, increase the capacity of the bomb bay which
> put
> > even more weight aft, and so on, but when they were finished, the plane
> had
> > some big problems: the armor around the pilot was now easily penetrable
> from
> > any direction, he had little defense in a head-on attack.  All he could
> do
> > was run away quickly in an air battle.
> >
> >
> >
> > The engineering team made a report that the ME262 couldn’t be effectively
> > retrofitted as a bomber.  “Fortunately, Herr Hitler was an idiot.”  (His
> > words, not mine, hard to forget after these three decades.
> >
> >
> >
> > They received word that Der Fuhrer was coming to the factory.  They
> assumed
> > he was coming to give them a pep talk on their work, but when the haggard
> > Fuhrer showed up, he gave no speeches, but rather asked to see the jet
> > fighter, and began asking technical questions, specifically: how much
> does
> > that armor around the pilot weigh, and what do those guns weigh.  When
> they
> > told him, he ordered that it be removed, that the lowered weight be
> replaced
> > with every bomb they could get aboard the aircraft, even if it had to be
> > carried externally (which that aircraft was never designed to do and was
> > poorly suited for the task.)  They tried to explain the notion of balance
> > and how removing a thousand kg of armor might only allow a hundred kg of
> > extra bombs.  But he did come there to listen, he came there to issue
> > orders.  He wanted to make a 1940s version of a stealth bomber, which
> would
> > take off from a forward base in France, fly across the channel all alone,
> > unarmored and unarmed except for the bombs, drop the ordnance over London
> > and fly back.  Everything about that plane was wrong for that mission.
> >
> >
> >
> > Hitler was accustomed to hearing Ja vol, heil Hitler, and guys jumping to
> > it.  He didn’t ask for anyone to point out the insanity of the plan.  But
> > the young engineers realized that if der Fuhrer was issuing crazy
> > nonsensical orders to his premier aircraft designers and not listening to
> > their logical objections, he was doing likewise up, down and across the
> > entire military.  He and at least three others concluded that Hitler was
> > crazy, stupid, completely blinded by having arbitrary power, or perhaps
> all
> > of these, and that the war was lost.  This was in 1943.  He decided to
> try
> > to escape.  He and one other guy somehow made it to Switzerland where
> they
> > waited out the war, and later he ended up in the USA, working on
> passenger
> > airliners for Boeing.
> >
> >
> >
> > During his talk, one of the most memorable things was the emotion in this
> > man’s voice.  He spoke of waking up and realizing to his horror that he
> was
> > working for the bad guys.  So overwhelming was this feeling that he
> chose to
> > leave his family, his childhood friends, colleagues, everything he had
> grown
> > to know and love, take a huge risk of getting killed; to not work for the
> > bad guys.
> >
> >
> >
> > Any American who works in, with or for the military knows what an awesome
> > force is at our disposal, and why it is that military discipline is
> taken so
> > very seriously.  We know that power corrupts, and the military wields
> > astonishing power.  It isn’t a game.  I am not even talking about the
> nukes;
> > I have very little firsthand knowledge of that world, never worked in
> it.  I
> > mean the appalling destructive power of the conventional military.  If
> the
> > US military decides to destroy something, it can make that happen, and it
> > will stay destroyed.
> >
> >
> >
> > I have been out of that world for several years now, but… I am getting
> that
> > dreaded feeling right now.  I woke up one day in the spring of this year
> > realizing that regardless of which of the major political parties
> prevails
> > in November, we will be led by the bad guys.  We are a nation of
> > astonishing, appalling military might, and we are about to choose between
> > leaders who we do not trust with all that power.  Even followers of
> either
> > of the two majors will sheepishly admit they are not big fans of their
> > party’s leader, but the other one is worse.  Still, plenty of us will
> openly
> > admit that these are both very bad choices.
> >
> >
> >
> > If you read that story, you understand better where I am, and why I am
> > getting the dreaded feeling described by my German colleague, of having
> > worked for the bad guys.
> >
> >
> >
> > spike
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > extropy-chat mailing list
> > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
> >
> >
> > --
> > Dr Anders Sandberg
> > Future of Humanity Institute
> > Oxford Martin School
> > Oxford University
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > extropy-chat mailing list
> > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
> >
>
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