I found myself unconvinced by a number of your factual points, though I agree with your overall conclusion for very different reasons. I’ve included three that I think are particularly key.
1.
“Traders who don’t account for their lack of understanding of things like poverty-related policies (by, say, polling poor people on their policy preferences), will lose money to traders who do.
I think this solves part of the problem, but the problem will remain as long as the futarchy markets are not perfect, and as long as bettors whose wealth is mostly independent of the futarchy markets are influential for futarchy.”
The right comparison here seems to be the stock market: obviously markets are imperfect, and some people whose wealth is mostly independent of the stock market are influential. But the overall result is that, once in a long while, you will get an extraordinary event like the recent Gamestop/AMC/etc rise, representing a tiny tiny fraction of the total stock market. This source suggests that they are, at most, on the order of 2.6% of the specific markets that include them. This for a highly unusual event. I do not think it is at all a stretch to suggest that this is mostly a non-problem, presented without numbers.
More broadly, you argue that the rich having more influence than the poor over policy relevant to addressing poverty is bad, but surely that equally implies that the rich having more influence over policy related to wealth is good? While I agree that’s a little extreme and positionality is not equivalent, I generally expect wealthier individuals to be better educated, have more spare time to devote to politics, and be more cosmopolitan. While I am sympathetic to the specific case you bring up, not including this seems like a weak point.
“Many people care about policy decisions, so I don’t think we can expect that bettors whose wealth is mostly independent of the futarchy markets (i.e. the futarchy is not their chief source of income) will have no or little influence. So while wealth may end up slightly correlated with policy assessment skills, I don’t think we can expect that correlation to be strong.”
You argue that the correlation is negative! That is the crux of your point!
2.
“Hanson does not account for the possibility that the wealth landscape could change drastically in the next 10 years (in the near future, there could conceivably be individuals who are orders of magnitude richer than anyone is today).”
I don’t...think that’s particularly plausible? Elon Musk is currently “worth” about 200 billion dollars (standard caveats about why that’s an overestimate aside), and multiple orders of magnitude would imply something closer to two trillion dollars. You don’t cite any source to defend the likelihood of this claim, so I am not sure how to disagree with it.
3.
“It seems possible that futarchy might make us more efficiently pursue whatever metrics most people today genuinely think are good, but which ignore many or almost all moral patients that currently exist or that will exist in future.”
Lots of things are possible: is there any reason to expect this problem to be worse under futarchy than under democracy?
I think these are all reasonable critiques. Re: the third point, I think a possible version of Lizka’s claim is that under futarchy, reification of perceived goals in a very stark, precise and measurable way makes the values more stable and less set to change, such that movements like EA are less capable of making headway via value change, relative to in an anarchic or democratic system.
Wealthier people may bet in ways that favours policies that favour them regardless of their predictions in order to influence policy in their favour, e.g. related to taxation and regulations. This seems hard to do now just on the stock market.
I found myself unconvinced by a number of your factual points, though I agree with your overall conclusion for very different reasons. I’ve included three that I think are particularly key.
1.
“Traders who don’t account for their lack of understanding of things like poverty-related policies (by, say, polling poor people on their policy preferences), will lose money to traders who do.
I think this solves part of the problem, but the problem will remain as long as the futarchy markets are not perfect, and as long as bettors whose wealth is mostly independent of the futarchy markets are influential for futarchy.”
The right comparison here seems to be the stock market: obviously markets are imperfect, and some people whose wealth is mostly independent of the stock market are influential. But the overall result is that, once in a long while, you will get an extraordinary event like the recent Gamestop/AMC/etc rise, representing a tiny tiny fraction of the total stock market. This source suggests that they are, at most, on the order of 2.6% of the specific markets that include them. This for a highly unusual event. I do not think it is at all a stretch to suggest that this is mostly a non-problem, presented without numbers.
More broadly, you argue that the rich having more influence than the poor over policy relevant to addressing poverty is bad, but surely that equally implies that the rich having more influence over policy related to wealth is good? While I agree that’s a little extreme and positionality is not equivalent, I generally expect wealthier individuals to be better educated, have more spare time to devote to politics, and be more cosmopolitan. While I am sympathetic to the specific case you bring up, not including this seems like a weak point.
“Many people care about policy decisions, so I don’t think we can expect that bettors whose wealth is mostly independent of the futarchy markets (i.e. the futarchy is not their chief source of income) will have no or little influence. So while wealth may end up slightly correlated with policy assessment skills, I don’t think we can expect that correlation to be strong.”
You argue that the correlation is negative! That is the crux of your point!
2.
“Hanson does not account for the possibility that the wealth landscape could change drastically in the next 10 years (in the near future, there could conceivably be individuals who are orders of magnitude richer than anyone is today).”
I don’t...think that’s particularly plausible? Elon Musk is currently “worth” about 200 billion dollars (standard caveats about why that’s an overestimate aside), and multiple orders of magnitude would imply something closer to two trillion dollars. You don’t cite any source to defend the likelihood of this claim, so I am not sure how to disagree with it.
3.
“It seems possible that futarchy might make us more efficiently pursue whatever metrics most people today genuinely think are good, but which ignore many or almost all moral patients that currently exist or that will exist in future.”
Lots of things are possible: is there any reason to expect this problem to be worse under futarchy than under democracy?
I think these are all reasonable critiques. Re: the third point, I think a possible version of Lizka’s claim is that under futarchy, reification of perceived goals in a very stark, precise and measurable way makes the values more stable and less set to change, such that movements like EA are less capable of making headway via value change, relative to in an anarchic or democratic system.
Wealthier people may bet in ways that favours policies that favour them regardless of their predictions in order to influence policy in their favour, e.g. related to taxation and regulations. This seems hard to do now just on the stock market.