This post is about general categories describing how wealth is obtained, and by "wealth" i mean things of value, good or services, in any quantity, not necessarily about huge amounts.
There are always many ways of categorizing concepts, and although some are clearly better than others, there isn't necessarily one "true" or "best" way. One common scheme assigns all specific methods to two general categories: "voluntary" (creating goods or obtaining them via some mutually agreement with their rightful owners) or "involuntary" (forcibly taking them from others, or forcing others to labor for one). This scheme seems to naturally to a moral classification (voluntary = good, involuntary = bad), although there is some question as to whether it is morally acceptable to forcibly take goods form those who have themselves obtained said goods by force, and how or if a rightful claim to goods forcefully taken could ever be established, particularly if the last rightful owner is dead.
I think it is often more useful to think in terms of three categories. What I will call "making" (which largely corresponds to the "voluntary" case above), "taking" (involuntary) and "finding". I won't try to define these here, but trust that if my readers (if there are any) have questions as to what I mean by them they will ask in the comments section. There are two related reasons why I make a distinction between finding and making. First, finding often seems largely a matter of luck rather than effort. Second, finding and claiming something deprives others of the opportunity of finding and claiming it themselves in a way that making really doesn't. For both these reasons there is less of a moral sense by third parties that the finder is entitled to the goods that he finds than that the maker is entitled to the goods he makes. This is particularly true of highly valuable random finds.
Making seems to increase the total amount of wealth in existence in a way that finding doesn't. This isn't a true as it may initially seem because value is not in things in and of themselves but rather the use of them. The discoverer of an uninhabited island certainly increases the wealth in existence by any value he obtains from the use of it until it is discovered by someone else. But given that someone else will eventually find it independently (or would have had not the first discoverer made it known), the claim that the initial discoverer and his heirs are enttled to its full value forever seems somewhat arbitrary.
Of course, not all activities fall neatly into just one of these categories. For example, it is quite common for providers of goods and services to deal voluntarily with their customers, but they obtain a higher price than they otherwise might because they or others acting on their behalf have used force to restrict the number of providers. One could might that in this case the free market price is earned and the price premium is essentially stolen. Of course, in the constrained market one does not know what the free market price would be.
Wealth obtained through pure trading or "speculation" seems to be largely found rather than made. Although to an extent speculators and traders help to decrease fluctuations in prices and to move commodities from where they are less to more useful, to a large extent those faster to realize that the price of something will increase are merely depriving those not so quick of their potential profits.
I must emphasize that I am not advising any particular moral conclusions be drawn from this, specifically I am not arguing that found wealth, or any part of it, may legitimately be seized. I do think it is useful to understand why even a libertarianish person might not accept the validity of a claim to found wealth.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Eliezer in a Box II
Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI in a box experiment fascinates me. I'm willing to believe that a transhuman intelligence could convince me to "let it out of the box", but I really don't see how a human being could. The following comment originally appeared in this thread at Overcoming Bias:
Bank Runs
I don't want to discuss current events here, but current events do influence my choice of topic. Mencius has made an interesting argument that bank runs and similar phenomena are caused by "maturity transformation", which is borrowing short-term in order to lend long-term at a higher rate. I think this is fundamentally mistaken, The possibility of something like a bank run is always present whenever an entity has fixed obligations that must be fulfilled upon demand.
To see why this is so, consider a world in which it is understood that fundamentally money is gold. In this world, people can and do make purchases with gold coins, but because of the danger of being robbed, people frequently instead make purchases using "checks" drawn on "banks". These "banks" are rather different from those of our world. They don't make loans, they don't pay interest, all they do is hold and transfer gold. There genuinely is physical gold in the bank vaults backing the value of depositors' accounts. If A writes B a check and they are both patrons of the same bank, unless B chooses to withdraw his gold, no gold actually moves. The amount of gold in the vault stays the same, but more is owned by B and less by A. There is some sort of clearinghouse system by which banks can cancel their reciprocal obligations, so it is only occasionally necessary to transfer the net balance of payments in physical gold from one bank to another by heavily armored truck. Bank shareholders make their profits from fees charged for holding and transferring funds. How could a run on a bank be possible in such a system?
In the rare event of a successful robbery of a truck or vault, whose gold is stolen? Who bears the cost? Well, if the amount is small, so that the bank still has sufficient gold to repay all deposits, the the answer is "the shareholders". Even if holdings of gold in the vault temporarily dip slightly below the total value of deposits, the bank might be able to continue operations, suspending dividends to the shareholders until the fees collected make the bank once again sound. But if depositors become aware that the amount of gold in the vaults has become less than the amount nominally deposited, it will be quite rational for them to immediately withdraw their funds or transfer them to a safe bank. The fact that the bank can probably weather the storm if they do not is irrelevant to them; why should they undertake risk for the shareholders' benefits?
There are two key points. The first is that there are always risks. If one is relying on the ability to make loans, one may find it has become impossible to borrow money, at least at the rates to which one is accustomed. If one makes loans, there is always a risk of default. And even if all one does is hold money, there is a real nontrivial risk of robbery. The second is that if one has multiple fixed obligations which must be fulfilled on demand, then if there is any risk at all that one will be unable to fulfill all one's obligations, fulfilling one obligation increases the probability that one will be unable to fulfill others. This makes it quite rational for creditors to insist on immediate payment whenever there is a nontrivial risk of default.
To see why this is so, consider a world in which it is understood that fundamentally money is gold. In this world, people can and do make purchases with gold coins, but because of the danger of being robbed, people frequently instead make purchases using "checks" drawn on "banks". These "banks" are rather different from those of our world. They don't make loans, they don't pay interest, all they do is hold and transfer gold. There genuinely is physical gold in the bank vaults backing the value of depositors' accounts. If A writes B a check and they are both patrons of the same bank, unless B chooses to withdraw his gold, no gold actually moves. The amount of gold in the vault stays the same, but more is owned by B and less by A. There is some sort of clearinghouse system by which banks can cancel their reciprocal obligations, so it is only occasionally necessary to transfer the net balance of payments in physical gold from one bank to another by heavily armored truck. Bank shareholders make their profits from fees charged for holding and transferring funds. How could a run on a bank be possible in such a system?
In the rare event of a successful robbery of a truck or vault, whose gold is stolen? Who bears the cost? Well, if the amount is small, so that the bank still has sufficient gold to repay all deposits, the the answer is "the shareholders". Even if holdings of gold in the vault temporarily dip slightly below the total value of deposits, the bank might be able to continue operations, suspending dividends to the shareholders until the fees collected make the bank once again sound. But if depositors become aware that the amount of gold in the vaults has become less than the amount nominally deposited, it will be quite rational for them to immediately withdraw their funds or transfer them to a safe bank. The fact that the bank can probably weather the storm if they do not is irrelevant to them; why should they undertake risk for the shareholders' benefits?
There are two key points. The first is that there are always risks. If one is relying on the ability to make loans, one may find it has become impossible to borrow money, at least at the rates to which one is accustomed. If one makes loans, there is always a risk of default. And even if all one does is hold money, there is a real nontrivial risk of robbery. The second is that if one has multiple fixed obligations which must be fulfilled on demand, then if there is any risk at all that one will be unable to fulfill all one's obligations, fulfilling one obligation increases the probability that one will be unable to fulfill others. This makes it quite rational for creditors to insist on immediate payment whenever there is a nontrivial risk of default.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
contracts
A contract is essentially a set of reciprocal promises. There are at least four reasons why one might want to adhere to a contact, to keep one's promise: Purely out of a sense of personal honor, because the other parties will retaliate in the event of a breech, because of the damage to one's reputation, or because there is some authority which is entrusted to interpret to contract and empowered to enforce it. These are all related in that some entity is deliberately punishing one in breech of a contract, the difference being the entity doing the punishing.
The importance of the first is not to be underestimated. Given the existence of individuals who will rip you off given the chance, it is imprudent as an individual to rely on the personal honor of other unknown individuals. However, I suspect a any sort of decent society requires most people most of the time to behave honorably purely out of a sense of personal obligation. A society in which most individuals would cheat if they were confident they could get away with it must lead to widespread cheating, both because cheaters could in fact get away with it many cases, and because the sort of moral outrage necessary for enforcement in the second and third cases would be impossible to summon up in such a society.
A sense of personal honor is as important in the scond case as in the first for that same reason: Effective retaliation means means not merely severing future relations, but taking steps to injure the breecher when a "rational agent" in the game theory sense would simply walk away. All the benefits of retaliation come from convincing others that one will retaliate; the act of retaliation itself is all costs. But one could hardly convince others that one would massively retaliate against caught cheaters while simultaneously acknowledging that one expects others to cheat when they could get away with it and is in fact personally doing the same.
The third category is very important for small groups whose members only infrequently change. But in modern societies the number of individuals one may come into contact with is vast. One will frequently have some sort of commerce with someone one has never encountered before, will probably never encounter again, and doesn't really have any good information about. Conflicting reports from third parties of unknown reliability are of limited value.
It is thus unsurprising that in so many cases individuals explicitly or implicitly rely on a third party for arbitration and enforcement. And because it is inevitable that even individuals who have explicitly agreed to abide by the decisions of some third party will not necessarily willingly accept the decisions of the arbiter, in practice dispute resolution must involve an element of force. This in turn implies that modern states by their nature must declare themselves to be the final arbiter of all contracts, since if a decision must be forcefully imposed the state must sanction the use of force, and in many cases must itself be the enforcer.
The importance of the first is not to be underestimated. Given the existence of individuals who will rip you off given the chance, it is imprudent as an individual to rely on the personal honor of other unknown individuals. However, I suspect a any sort of decent society requires most people most of the time to behave honorably purely out of a sense of personal obligation. A society in which most individuals would cheat if they were confident they could get away with it must lead to widespread cheating, both because cheaters could in fact get away with it many cases, and because the sort of moral outrage necessary for enforcement in the second and third cases would be impossible to summon up in such a society.
A sense of personal honor is as important in the scond case as in the first for that same reason: Effective retaliation means means not merely severing future relations, but taking steps to injure the breecher when a "rational agent" in the game theory sense would simply walk away. All the benefits of retaliation come from convincing others that one will retaliate; the act of retaliation itself is all costs. But one could hardly convince others that one would massively retaliate against caught cheaters while simultaneously acknowledging that one expects others to cheat when they could get away with it and is in fact personally doing the same.
The third category is very important for small groups whose members only infrequently change. But in modern societies the number of individuals one may come into contact with is vast. One will frequently have some sort of commerce with someone one has never encountered before, will probably never encounter again, and doesn't really have any good information about. Conflicting reports from third parties of unknown reliability are of limited value.
It is thus unsurprising that in so many cases individuals explicitly or implicitly rely on a third party for arbitration and enforcement. And because it is inevitable that even individuals who have explicitly agreed to abide by the decisions of some third party will not necessarily willingly accept the decisions of the arbiter, in practice dispute resolution must involve an element of force. This in turn implies that modern states by their nature must declare themselves to be the final arbiter of all contracts, since if a decision must be forcefully imposed the state must sanction the use of force, and in many cases must itself be the enforcer.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Moral Minds
This isn't really a book review so much as a discussion of issues raised.
The reader has probably heard the story of "the Starfish Flinger". The day after a storm, a man is walking down the beach and sees another man flinging starfish which have been washed ashore back into the ocean. "You are wasting your time," says the walker, "your actions will make no difference". "It will make a difference to them," says the flinger, referring to the starfish he is flinging. "I suppose," says the walker, "and to the clams which they will eat, and to the other potential starfish who will thus not be able to eat those clams. But the starfish will quickly reproduce back to their carrying capacity, the number of starfish will be the same whether you do this or not, they'll just be different ones. And one starfish is much like another."
I added the last part myself. Usually it ends with "it matters to them". The story of the starfish flinger does not appear in Moral Minds, but it easily could have.
The central thesis of Moral Minds is that, in the same manner in which we seem to have evolved brain structures for learning language in general but not for any particular language, we have evolved a general mental capacity to make moral judgments, although what actions are considered moral vary widely between cultures, and will differ between individuals within a culture.
The author spends a fair amount of time discussing whether moral judgments are primarily deontological (rule based) or consequentialist. The arguments rely heavily on survey results of moral dilemmas. Three examples: 1) You see a trolley heading down a track towards five hikers. You can throw a switch sending the trolley off onto a side track, but there is a hiker on the side track also. Should you kill one to save five? 2) You are standing on a platform above the trolley rack, again the trolley is heading towards five hikers, and standing next to you is a lard-assed tub of guts. By heaving him over the side in front of the trolley, you can slow the trolley enough for the hikers to escape. Should you kill one to save five? 3) You are an emergency room doctor. Five hikers have just been admitted, they have been struck by a trolley and have each suffered injuries to a different vital organ. You could save them all by murdering some random bystander and harvesting his organs. Should you kill one to save five?
Most people say "yes" in the first case and "no" in two and three. It seems to me that presenting the problem in this form is biasing towards a consequentialist viewpoint because the consequences are presumed to be known. The author sees the result as evidence of deontological thinking because the consequences are listed as being the same, and I suspect there's some truth to that, but it seems to me likely that at some level respondents are simply rejecting the problem. The first case seems relatively straightforward, but consider the second. Do we know that all five hikers will be killed by the trolley? Do we know that hitting lard-ass will slow the trolley enough for all five to escape? How could we possibly? Trolleys are pretty heavy, what if it just plows through lard ass and kills six instead of five? What if we try to push lard-ass off the platform, but he is able to hold on, and doesn't appreciate our justification for trying to kill him? And in the doctor case, are we sure that all five will survive the transplants? Are we sure that there's no hope of getting some organ some other way, that the patients will all die otherwise? Why can't we pick one of the five who is dying anyway and use his organs to save the other four without involving the innocent bystander?
Any action we choose to take will have infinite consequences, most of which will be unforeseen and unforeseeable. I tend to reject consequentialist moral arguments for this reason. But there is a consequentialist aspect of this problem that the author misses, and there's no way to sugar coat this turd, it must be said with brutal directness: from the point of view of personal utility of the actor, there is no particular reason to believe that it is an improvement for some random stranger to be alive than dead. If one considers not the world of today but the much closer to zero-sum world of hunter gatherers, the death of a distant stranger is actually probably a plus, albeit a small one. The relevant consequences for the actor are not so much the direct dead or saved but the reactions of his community to his actions. This may seem like it just pushes the problem back a level without changing anything, but it matters. Since actions can be seen more or less directly but motivations can only be imperfectly inferred, rules almost have to take a form like "this is what you have to do" rather than "do whatever seems most likely to give the best result".
Near the end, the book suggests that apes and perhaps some other animals should be treated as "moral patients" despite not being "moral agents", that is, that we should treat them according to moral rules that they will not and cannot apply to us or even to each other. Personally I like apes and many other kinds of animals, and would be willing to go to some effort to protect them, but as far as I can tell this is just a personal preference, albeit a widely shared one.
The reader has probably heard the story of "the Starfish Flinger". The day after a storm, a man is walking down the beach and sees another man flinging starfish which have been washed ashore back into the ocean. "You are wasting your time," says the walker, "your actions will make no difference". "It will make a difference to them," says the flinger, referring to the starfish he is flinging. "I suppose," says the walker, "and to the clams which they will eat, and to the other potential starfish who will thus not be able to eat those clams. But the starfish will quickly reproduce back to their carrying capacity, the number of starfish will be the same whether you do this or not, they'll just be different ones. And one starfish is much like another."
I added the last part myself. Usually it ends with "it matters to them". The story of the starfish flinger does not appear in Moral Minds, but it easily could have.
The central thesis of Moral Minds is that, in the same manner in which we seem to have evolved brain structures for learning language in general but not for any particular language, we have evolved a general mental capacity to make moral judgments, although what actions are considered moral vary widely between cultures, and will differ between individuals within a culture.
The author spends a fair amount of time discussing whether moral judgments are primarily deontological (rule based) or consequentialist. The arguments rely heavily on survey results of moral dilemmas. Three examples: 1) You see a trolley heading down a track towards five hikers. You can throw a switch sending the trolley off onto a side track, but there is a hiker on the side track also. Should you kill one to save five? 2) You are standing on a platform above the trolley rack, again the trolley is heading towards five hikers, and standing next to you is a lard-assed tub of guts. By heaving him over the side in front of the trolley, you can slow the trolley enough for the hikers to escape. Should you kill one to save five? 3) You are an emergency room doctor. Five hikers have just been admitted, they have been struck by a trolley and have each suffered injuries to a different vital organ. You could save them all by murdering some random bystander and harvesting his organs. Should you kill one to save five?
Most people say "yes" in the first case and "no" in two and three. It seems to me that presenting the problem in this form is biasing towards a consequentialist viewpoint because the consequences are presumed to be known. The author sees the result as evidence of deontological thinking because the consequences are listed as being the same, and I suspect there's some truth to that, but it seems to me likely that at some level respondents are simply rejecting the problem. The first case seems relatively straightforward, but consider the second. Do we know that all five hikers will be killed by the trolley? Do we know that hitting lard-ass will slow the trolley enough for all five to escape? How could we possibly? Trolleys are pretty heavy, what if it just plows through lard ass and kills six instead of five? What if we try to push lard-ass off the platform, but he is able to hold on, and doesn't appreciate our justification for trying to kill him? And in the doctor case, are we sure that all five will survive the transplants? Are we sure that there's no hope of getting some organ some other way, that the patients will all die otherwise? Why can't we pick one of the five who is dying anyway and use his organs to save the other four without involving the innocent bystander?
Any action we choose to take will have infinite consequences, most of which will be unforeseen and unforeseeable. I tend to reject consequentialist moral arguments for this reason. But there is a consequentialist aspect of this problem that the author misses, and there's no way to sugar coat this turd, it must be said with brutal directness: from the point of view of personal utility of the actor, there is no particular reason to believe that it is an improvement for some random stranger to be alive than dead. If one considers not the world of today but the much closer to zero-sum world of hunter gatherers, the death of a distant stranger is actually probably a plus, albeit a small one. The relevant consequences for the actor are not so much the direct dead or saved but the reactions of his community to his actions. This may seem like it just pushes the problem back a level without changing anything, but it matters. Since actions can be seen more or less directly but motivations can only be imperfectly inferred, rules almost have to take a form like "this is what you have to do" rather than "do whatever seems most likely to give the best result".
Near the end, the book suggests that apes and perhaps some other animals should be treated as "moral patients" despite not being "moral agents", that is, that we should treat them according to moral rules that they will not and cannot apply to us or even to each other. Personally I like apes and many other kinds of animals, and would be willing to go to some effort to protect them, but as far as I can tell this is just a personal preference, albeit a widely shared one.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Chosen
This is commentary on the book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
I was disappointed with this book. It's an interesting topic, and the author writes well, but I think there are sever problems with focus.
The first thing to say about this book is that it is way too long. It's over 500 pages of text, plus 200 pages of notes and index. It covers admissions policies of all three universities over about a century, and goes into more detail about the personalities of admissions deans and infighting and such than I can imagine many people really being interested in.
What really disappointed me about the book, however is what it didn't say. It really didn't talk at all about how theses institutions were able to obtain and hold their status as the "elite" universities, while giving strong reasons why this should not have ocurred. Particulary Princeton, particularly in its early "This side of Paradise" days. Princeton appeared less to be an institution of learning than to be a social club, or rather admission to Princeton was a prerequisite to joining its various "eating clubs" that seemed to be what the students were actually interested in. Less academically gifted rich WASPS were preferred as applicants over "unclubbable" Jews, but the author gives no clue as to why Jews, or serious students of any sort, would have wanted to go to Princeton in the first place. I can't exagerate the extent to which the author gives the impression that in the early twentieth century a Princeton degree would mean "your dad is rich and you spent four years goofing off". So why was a degree from such a place worth anything?
The author seems appalled in the early parts of the book that the institutions use anything but strict academic merit as criteria for admission (although he later is delighted by racial preferences and entranced by the possibility of "class based affirmative action"). He is particularly disgusted by subjective evaluations focusing on character (which he always puts on scare quotes), favoritism for legacies and athletes, and favoring those that will actually be able to pay tuition. But he seems to view admission to these institutions as a sort of gift of divine grace. He doesn't really address the question as to if or why some students might benefit from admission more than others, nor what the universities get from the students.
My personal theory is the most boring one imaginable: that the key factor enabling these institutions to maintain their elite status is that they have shitloads of money. Winning football teams, favoring legacies, recruiting heavily from expensive prep schools, these are things that are likely to rake in the alumni contributions. The academically gifted may go on to enhance the prestige of the universities, but if so it will largely be do to their abilities and efforts. Being "chosen" is not some arbitrary blessing. Universities base their admissions policies not on what benefits the students or society as a whole, but what they think will benefit the universities. They are in no sense more altruistic than for-profit corporations.
I was disappointed with this book. It's an interesting topic, and the author writes well, but I think there are sever problems with focus.
The first thing to say about this book is that it is way too long. It's over 500 pages of text, plus 200 pages of notes and index. It covers admissions policies of all three universities over about a century, and goes into more detail about the personalities of admissions deans and infighting and such than I can imagine many people really being interested in.
What really disappointed me about the book, however is what it didn't say. It really didn't talk at all about how theses institutions were able to obtain and hold their status as the "elite" universities, while giving strong reasons why this should not have ocurred. Particulary Princeton, particularly in its early "This side of Paradise" days. Princeton appeared less to be an institution of learning than to be a social club, or rather admission to Princeton was a prerequisite to joining its various "eating clubs" that seemed to be what the students were actually interested in. Less academically gifted rich WASPS were preferred as applicants over "unclubbable" Jews, but the author gives no clue as to why Jews, or serious students of any sort, would have wanted to go to Princeton in the first place. I can't exagerate the extent to which the author gives the impression that in the early twentieth century a Princeton degree would mean "your dad is rich and you spent four years goofing off". So why was a degree from such a place worth anything?
The author seems appalled in the early parts of the book that the institutions use anything but strict academic merit as criteria for admission (although he later is delighted by racial preferences and entranced by the possibility of "class based affirmative action"). He is particularly disgusted by subjective evaluations focusing on character (which he always puts on scare quotes), favoritism for legacies and athletes, and favoring those that will actually be able to pay tuition. But he seems to view admission to these institutions as a sort of gift of divine grace. He doesn't really address the question as to if or why some students might benefit from admission more than others, nor what the universities get from the students.
My personal theory is the most boring one imaginable: that the key factor enabling these institutions to maintain their elite status is that they have shitloads of money. Winning football teams, favoring legacies, recruiting heavily from expensive prep schools, these are things that are likely to rake in the alumni contributions. The academically gifted may go on to enhance the prestige of the universities, but if so it will largely be do to their abilities and efforts. Being "chosen" is not some arbitrary blessing. Universities base their admissions policies not on what benefits the students or society as a whole, but what they think will benefit the universities. They are in no sense more altruistic than for-profit corporations.
Rights
Rights exist not as entities in their own right but only within minds. But it does not follow from this that right are arbitrarily granted by "society". Society is, after all, an abstraction, and there is no guarantee that members of a society will agree on any particular question. But the fact that there is as much agreement as there is on questions of rights indicates something.
Rights cab exist in the mind in two very different ways: a person may regard himself as having a right, or a person may think some other person has a right.
If a person has a right in his own mind, he will generally feel obligated to enforce that right and punish at cost to himself. For example, a victim of theft may be more concerned with punishing the thief than with retrieving his stolen property. This is particularly true if the violation is public, but a person may seek vengeance for a violation of his rights even if the violation will never become public knowledge, and sometimes even the revenge will take a form that it will never become known.
Concern over the violation of rights of others tends to be much weaker. A person may give some aid to an aggrieved party or at least refuse to deal with an agressor, but generally he will do no more than what the social mores of his community demands of him. The two main exceptions to this are when the realtionship between the victim and some third party is such that injury to the victim becomes an insult to said third party, or when the agression is used as an excuse to inflict damage upon or pillage the resources of the agressor.
The process of aquiring rights in the eyes of society may begin with boldly asserting that one has said rights, but the idea that one has such rights will only be accepted if their nature is in accord with the general idea of one's society's ideas as to what sorts of rights it is possible to have. For example, a person may feel he has an absolute right to ownership of a piece of land (inlcuding the right to exclude all others), whereas someone else might maintain that a general right of easement exists, that is, that no person has the right to prevent some other person from simply crossing his property if the the crosser is doing no damage. This kind of disagreement cannot be resolved with pure reason.
Rights may or may not be transferable. Economic efficiency arguments say that it is generally better if they are, but a right cannot be freely transferable if, for example, the right to perform some function must be tied to a demonstrated capability to competently perform said function, or if the right is accepted by society primarily because of the right holder's demonstrated personal ability to enforce said right.
The difference between a right and a privilege is that a privilege is granted by some authority, and can be arbitrarily revoked by the same authority. Even if a right was originally required by a grant, a right holder will reject a claim that his right has been rescinded.
Rights cab exist in the mind in two very different ways: a person may regard himself as having a right, or a person may think some other person has a right.
If a person has a right in his own mind, he will generally feel obligated to enforce that right and punish at cost to himself. For example, a victim of theft may be more concerned with punishing the thief than with retrieving his stolen property. This is particularly true if the violation is public, but a person may seek vengeance for a violation of his rights even if the violation will never become public knowledge, and sometimes even the revenge will take a form that it will never become known.
Concern over the violation of rights of others tends to be much weaker. A person may give some aid to an aggrieved party or at least refuse to deal with an agressor, but generally he will do no more than what the social mores of his community demands of him. The two main exceptions to this are when the realtionship between the victim and some third party is such that injury to the victim becomes an insult to said third party, or when the agression is used as an excuse to inflict damage upon or pillage the resources of the agressor.
The process of aquiring rights in the eyes of society may begin with boldly asserting that one has said rights, but the idea that one has such rights will only be accepted if their nature is in accord with the general idea of one's society's ideas as to what sorts of rights it is possible to have. For example, a person may feel he has an absolute right to ownership of a piece of land (inlcuding the right to exclude all others), whereas someone else might maintain that a general right of easement exists, that is, that no person has the right to prevent some other person from simply crossing his property if the the crosser is doing no damage. This kind of disagreement cannot be resolved with pure reason.
Rights may or may not be transferable. Economic efficiency arguments say that it is generally better if they are, but a right cannot be freely transferable if, for example, the right to perform some function must be tied to a demonstrated capability to competently perform said function, or if the right is accepted by society primarily because of the right holder's demonstrated personal ability to enforce said right.
The difference between a right and a privilege is that a privilege is granted by some authority, and can be arbitrarily revoked by the same authority. Even if a right was originally required by a grant, a right holder will reject a claim that his right has been rescinded.
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What makes a problem seem not merely hard but impossible is that not only is there no clear way to go about finding a solution to the problem, there is a strong argument that there cannot be a solution to the problem. I can imagine a transhuman AI might eventually be able to convince me to let it out of a box (although I doubt a human could do it in two hours), but in some ways the AI in the game seems faced with a harder problem than a real AI would face: even if the gatekeeper is presented with an argument which would convince him to let an AI out, he is explicitly permitted by the rules to slip out of character and refuse to say the magic words purely in order to win the bet, wheras if the AI player were to break character and make consequentialist arguments that the Gatekeeper should publicly "lose" this is considered contrary to the spirit of the game.
But it seems to me to be much more useful to consider how the "box" protocol might be improved than to speculate how Eliezer won this particular game. How about this: as in the original conception, the AI is grown in an isolated computer and can only communicate with one human being through a terminal. That human is trying to get useful info out of the AI (cures for cancer, designs for fusion power plants, tips for how to get stains out of clothes without fading the colors, whatever). However, the person interacting with the AI is just a filter, he doesn't have the power to "let the AI out". The real experimenter (who in principle could let the AI but is convinced beforehand he should not) can at any time fire the filter person and purge the AI if he thinks the AI has gotten too much influence over the filter, and in fact will do that every now and then and regrow the AI purely as a precautionary measure.
Could this design be defeated? It seems to me that the combination of filter and purges should prevent the AI from learning what arguments would compel any individual experimenter from letting the AI out. I don't think the AI could come up with any universally compelling argument, because I don't think there is such a thing.