I am an Economist working at the Financial Risk Department of Banco de España (Spanish Central Bank). I was born in 1977 and I have recently finished my PhD Thesis (See ORCID webpage: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1623-0957 ).
Arturo Macias
Karma: 70
“Instead of setting up regulations to prevent overfishing, the oceans could be privatised, and then the companies owning them would have an incentive to prevent the collapse of fish stocks”
If you do not put physical barriers, fish would move across different properties, making overfishing profitable anyway. It is like two “private” oil fields over the same oil reservoir.
“I think global warming may well be beneficial in many regions. However, at least for countries wanting to decrease it, I suppose taxing CO2eq would make sense”.
It is the canonical case for an immediate Pigovian tax: the externality is global, uniform, circulates in the atomosfere… Regarding imports, you can charge a carbon tariff.
I find this criticism not so good in general, because there are many externalities and “measuring” them means nothing. To some extent an externality is simply “what the market does not measure for us”, so Pigovianism is more a framework than a theory.
On the other hand, the lack of Pigovian taxes on carbon (the canonical case where the framework is almost a theory by itself) and the incredible roundabouts to avoid the simple and well known solution proves the utter disgrace that are our social systems.
Intelligence is the only chance of some redemption to the massive suffering probably associated to the emergence of consciousness.
This is the age of danger, we are the first species on Earth that has figured out morality, so we shall survive at allmost all cost.
All those proxies tell us they have the wires to feel the pain. But what abour the self? You need the side of penalty and the side of self to have real pain. Pain shall inflicted to a conscious mind.
With their ridiculously small brains, how likely is a self on the receiving side of penalty?
[I post here the same than in the original Asterisk Magazine article [https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/yes-shrimp-matter/comment/96031154]
I completely disagree: their brains are very simple neural networks, and their degree of consciousness is in the same range as electronic devices.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3nLDxEhJwqBEtgwJc/arthropod-non-sentience
All arguments based on behavioral similarity only proof we all come from evolution: “we are neural networks trained by natural selection. We avoid destruction and pursue reproduction, and we are both effective and desperate in both goals. The (Darwinian) reinforcement learning process that has led to our behavior imply strong rewards and penalties and being products of the same process (animal kingdom evolution), external similarity is inevitable. But to turn the penalty in the utility function of a neural network into pain you need the neural network to produce a conscious self. Pain is penalty to a conscious self. Philosophers know that philosophical zombies are conceivable, and external similarity is far from enough to guarantee noumenal equivalence.”
Now, regarding how much information is integrated, supperativity implies that the ammount of resources devoted to the shrimp shall be propotional to their number, but (at most!) to their brain mass:
“As a rule, measures of information integration are supper additive (that is, complexity of two neural networks that connect among themselves is far bigger than the sum of the original networks), so neuron count ratios (Shrimp=0.01% of human) are likely to underestimate differences in consciousness. The ethical consequence of supper additivity is that ceteris paribus a given pool of resources shall be allocated in proportion not to the number of subjects but (at most!) to the number of neurons. ”
Remember that other countries can step in the gap:
No private effort can replace USAID, but Europe needs more weapons and more aid, because wars are won first in the temple, then in the battlefield.
Yes!
Consequently, we suggest that the concept of utilitarian impartiality must be replaced by that of “inclusive reciprocity”. Considering the well-being of everyone equally, making no difference between those who belong to a reciprocity scheme and those who do not is non-sustainable. On the other hand, the universalism of utilitarian ethics can be maintained by keeping reciprocity schemes open to all. A human group with a pledge for mutual support and open to those who are willing to assume those obligations regardless of their origin could be sustainable and even could be close to be the social version of a Darwinian optimal replicator.
I will happily do as you propose!
Political pressure shall be applied on the European Comission and the UK Government:
My God! Misspelling a surname is probably the worst you can do when are asking for something. Thanks for correction.
Thank you for the redaction suggestions. I have decided to use “must” and I have corrected the misspelling in the president surname.
Regarding individual donations, I do not have suggestions, because this is too big for individuals. In my view this is a political opportunity for Europe: we know that the program works well, so it is low risk.
I would say that being replaced by the europeans is not exactly the optics that the current US government want in this issue, so probably the offer would increase the probability of continuation.
In which sense? Any suggestion for a more clear one? In fact I changed once already, because it did not fit well in the Forum (was too long).
I have written a post to address the President of the European Comission to prepare to totally or partially cover the gap if the US defunds the program. The program is expensive, but there shall be a replacement prepared if finally the worst happens.
This is a marvelous question, that is partially adressed in the book: “Finally, after facing the abyss of the nature of power and those who wield it, the authors describe the social checks and balances that make the sustainability of pluralistic political regimes possible”[...]”Democratic competition turns the natural brutality and cynicism of political actors into a virtuous competition to provide the public with maximum material prosperity.”
Regarding cultural change and evolution I wrote a long essay whose cover note you can read here (and if interested, the link to the essay is there):
There you can see how I see the relation between Gintian “strong reciprocity” and cultural evolution. “But it turns out that existing hominids are more like water molecules (attracted by the powerful van der Waals forces of strong reciprocity) than the quasi-ideal gas helium atoms of abstract philosophy. The moralization of human existence has occurred through the creation of incentive schemes generating social surplus and distributing it in such a way that the social organization itself was reinforced in the process.”
Thank you, some time ago I wrote this piece, thinking that nobody in the field was working in credible certifications. If farmers become used to welfare certifications, soon they can discover that it is in their collective economic interest to support it (as electric utilities have done with climate change).
Your article is extremely useful! Thx.
Oh, it is not an objection! I mean, you have given some arguments that go against the use of citizen juries for general policy issues. Still you think juries are good for that use case.
But for expert panels, there are not substantial arguments against choice by sortision!. Still the US President (and often european parliaments) chose supreme justices. I am quite pessimistic because this mechanism is not used even when its superiority is almost impossible to dispute.
Sortision is not used even for expert panels (including high courts), where objections are truly inexistent.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PyqPr4z76Z8xGZL22/sortition
I have read both the RP and the post against neuron counts, and I find them unconvincing. Let’s take this: “There are studies that show increased volume of brain regions correlated with valanced experience, such as a study showing that cortical thickness in a particular region increased along with pain sensitivity”.
There is no way to know what is related to “pain sensitivity”, because all we know about consciousness comes from extrapolation. The only valanced experience you can observe is your own. Even if you find that a given part of the brain is related to pain, what matters most is not the size of that part of the brain but if there is a self to feel the pain.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3nLDxEhJwqBEtgwJc/arthropod-non-sentience
There are not “royal paths” to understand consciousness. There is a “pretty hard problem of consciousness” between you and any exercise of consciousness attribution and no checklist nor neural similarity will easily bridge that gap.
I think that the real divide is CAFO (Concentrated Animal Farming Operation) species vs non-CAFO. Runminants (sheep and beef) are at least partially fed on pastures, so they do not live in permanently overcrowded farms, with high agression and stress.
Between the two main CAFO species (chicken and pork) I have not strong opinions: given neuron counts and brain weigth, I think pigs are more morally valuable than chicken, while chicken live worse lives: hard to decide.
While I find vegetarianism utopic, in my view, CAFOs can be overcame (see here).
If fish move across properties, your own overfishing affects fish density in neighbouring properties. It is like two oil wells extracting from a common reservoir. Of course, both “privatization” and “Coasian bargaining” are better than Pigouvian taxation, but none of this mechanism is necessarily available.
I remind you the entire sequence:
Theorems of welfare economics: under the hypotheses of the theorem all Pareto optimal outcomes can be obtained by market clearing and [tailored] lump sum taxation. Unfortunately, to “lump sum” tax you need private information on productivity, so the best you get is “pareto optimal” with the usual deadweight loss of income taxation.
Property is not perfect: there are externalities. Then you try to use “Coasian bargaining”, for small cases where externalities and property is well defined.
Multilateral bargaining is too complex, or property rights are not easy to establish: Pigouvian taxation on the externality as long is easy to measure and you have some sovereign to impose it.
Now, a funny thing is that on one side you complain on the lack of Pigouvian mechanisms, and then even for the canonical case of the carbon tax, soon you find arguments against it (!). Yes, of course, the total value of the externality is the world average impact of carbon emissions: there are winners and losers. The consensus based on detailed simulation is that the global externality of an additional molecule of CO2 is negative (at least given the current location of human population: given how costly and destabilising is large human reallocation, better not to remove that hypothesis).