RoR: Forum

Regarding sustainable altruism and aggregate tax rates, I need to make an amendment. Evolutionarily, the sustainable level of altruism in a society is estimated to be:

1) 13.3% for isolated, warrior gangs
2) 7% for warrior societies
3) 2.9% for peaceful societies

And earlier I assumed that all of the taxes that one pays are altruistic, but that is not actually the case. Under a conservative estimation*, you could say that half of all of the taxes that you pay are altruistic (and half of all the taxes you pay somehow help you out in some manner or fashion). This would mean that

1) small, isolated warrior gangs of people -- those who live largely off of raiding neighboring tribes -- could have a sustainable aggregate tax rate of 26.6% of their GDP
2) larger warrior societies could have a sustainable aggregate tax rate of 14% of GDP
3) peaceful societies could have a sustainable aggregate tax rate of 5.8% of GDP

Anything beyond that is (slow) suicide.

Ed

*Alternative estimates would include the estimate that 75% of all of the taxes you pay are altruistic. Conversely, estimates approaching 0% -- where every, or almost every, tax dollar you pay is automatically turned around and put to your own personal benefit -- are unreasonable and do not reflect reality.

p.s. Also, in post 39 above, I mentioned how you refute existing socialists on their own terms. While this scientifically proves wrong the existing socialists, it doesn't prevent them from popping up again. The long-term solution -- the one that prevents them from popping up again -- is an objective morality such as Objectivism (the long-term solution is philosophical).

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 12/02, 7:11am)

Post 41

Wednesday, December 19, 2012 - 4:51am

Note: For those with the interest, I just added a 20+-minute video to my "loneRambler" YouTube account entitled "Comte, Game Theory, and funding a Public Sector." It's got errors in it, but they are minor and do not detract from my main thesis.

Ed

Post 42

Thursday, December 27, 2012 - 6:19am

Here is a recap of main points of the video mentioned above:

1) Comte said "Live for others" but you can't do that (you can only die for others)
2) Bowles discovered that large, peaceful societies can only tolerate 2.9% altruistic sacrifice
3) An estimated half of all taxes paid does not find its way back into the service of your very own well-being (making taxes about 50% altruistic)
4) Therefore, total tax receipts should be limited to 5.8% of non-government GDP (private sector GDP)

Side note: According to scientist Andrew Boyd, if you play a chance game with a panalopy of random prizes that you get to see and reject only once (like on the TV game show Price is Right), you maximize your success by opening 37% of the curtains before making your choice for a standard. If you see 37% of all of the prizes, you will pick the best prize more of the time than with any other strategy. I'll call it the 37% rule, but I don't know where I'm going to integrate it into my larger project of solving all of man's problems with nothing other than simple computer games.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 12/27, 6:20am)

Post 43

Sunday, February 3, 2013 - 4:07pm

Research update

Retaliation and the role for punishment in the evolution of cooperation.
"We show a punishing strategy can pave the way for a partially cooperative equilibrium of conditional cooperators and defecting types and, under positive mutation rates, foster the cooperation level in this equilibrium by prompting reluctant cooperators to cooperate."

Recap:
Even if you let criminals retaliate against their punishers, cooperation among humans can still naturally evolve.

Evolving righteousness in a corrupt world.
"Because the total societal payoff of righteousness exceeds that of corruption, groups that have attained righteousness are likely to out-compete those that remain corrupt."

Recap:
When there is power asymetry among humans and then corruption develops, things eventually fall apart. Alternatively, righteous indignation against power asymetries (and to a lesser extent, against corruption itself) steers mankind toward a possible paradise on earth.

Corpus-based intention recognition in cooperation dilemmas.
"In addition, we show how intention recognizers do indeed prevail against the best-known successful strategies of iterated dilemmas of cooperation, even in the presence of errors and reduction of fitness associated with a small cognitive cost for performing intention recognition."

Recap:
If you question the motives of people in power, you prevail and human cooperation becomes the standard.

Emergence of responsible sanctions without second order free riders, antisocial punishment or spite.
"If interactions are non-anonymous, cooperation and punishment evolve even if initially rare, and sanctions are directed towards non-cooperators only. Thus, our willingness to punish free riders is ultimately a selfish decision rather than an altruistic act; punishment serves as a warning, showing that one is not willing to accept unfair treatments."

Recap:
Perpetuated human evil requires a measure of anonymity or trickery; you can't cheat an honest man. It is natural and normal for men to get along with each other, trading goods and improving their well-being. When this isn't happening, then it is time to suspect skullduggery, most likely originating from a power asymetry (i.e., from corrupt politicians duping the populace into believing something untrue about their fellow man), which itself originates from incorrect philosophy, such as the philosophy of Plato or Kant.

Ed

Post 44

Wednesday, February 6, 2013 - 6:55pm

Authors of that last linked study above claim that punishing bad behavior -- i.e., enforcing a measure of justice in your world -- is selfish, rather than altruistic. This clashes with the common, Hobbes-Machiavelli-Straussian view that man will not stick his neck out for justice (because there is a cost or risk which comes with that), as long as he can escape the immediate effects of whatever type of injustice is in play.

This is a main reason which these 3 men gave in support for the claim that we need strong leaders to keep us in check -- preventing a war of all against all (i.e., the bold "nasty, brutish, and short" conjecture).

Ed

Post 45

Thursday, February 7, 2013 - 11:23am

Retaliation can be performed anonymously too. So then maybe a strong leader isn't necessary to approach paradise, so long as there is enough retaliation.

Post 46

Thursday, February 7, 2013 - 8:34pm

Gotta love Charles Bronson!

Post 47

Friday, February 8, 2013 - 7:31pm

Good point, Dean.

And, as Marotta has pointed out, simply altering your purchasing patterns -- not doing business with bad guys -- is one way to retaliate against their unjust corruptions. Sometimes, just walking away is enough retaliation.

Jules,

Gotta love Charles Bronson!

Now don't get too fast and loose with your words here. The image of Bronson is the image of a gun -- i.e., of "street justice" -- like Dirty Harry or something. But, due to recent goings on, I would like to take a minute to make public my disagreement with the use of guns to settle simple or early disputes among humans. Besides hunting and sportsmanship, gun use should be reserved for life-threatening situations. You can still love Bronson, but you have to agree to love him nonviolently.

Oh crap. That didn't come out quite right now, did it?

:-)

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 2/08, 7:42pm)

Post 48

Saturday, February 9, 2013 - 8:15am

Yes you are correct Ed.
In Canada we are allowed to own firearms for hunting and sports/target shooting. However due to the restrictive nature of "safe storage laws" home defence is for all intensive purposes made ILLEGAL! The law states that all firearms must be stored in a gun safe. All guns must have trigger locks as well. All ammo and clips are to be stored elsewere and no clips may remain loaded.

So if an armed(or unarmed) perp enters your house uninvited and you shoot him you can be arrested for unsafe storage and discharge of a firearm which could land you in prison for up to 10 years. The circular logic being by the time you went to your gunsafe, unlocked the trigger guard, loaded a clip, put clip in gun, and then fired a warning shot, waited to see if he leaves and then killed him "legally" you could not possibly have done those actions in time to save your life. Therefore you broke the law by not storing it in a safe manner.

Stabbing or beating him into submission is ok! Only if you used equal force though and were in imminent danger of losing your life!

Post 49

Saturday, February 9, 2013 - 5:14pm

Oh, jeez-louise, Jules.

I didn't know it was THAT bad in Canada. Holy crap, it'd be a good place for criminals to live (if it weren't so cold)!

You are more economically free than us down here, but that is such a terrible gun law you have. With your fighting skills however, it's very likely that even an armed intruder would meet an early demise should he make the mistake of targeting your house. I wonder, in Canada, can you kill an intruder with his own gun -- or would that also be illegal because if you had the fighting skills to take a gun away from an armed man, then you are not matching equal force with equal force (i.e., the fight was never fair for him in the first place); so you cannot go ahead and finish his career permanently?

Makes you think about taking some serious injuries -- injuries that would show up on a police examination -- from him before defending yourself, doesn't it? Or, perhaps you could just pay the piper and submit yourself to the court system afterwards -- asking for forgiveness rather than permission. It seems like the law there is against the innocent victim (i.e., that it is an inherently unjust law).

Ed

Post 50

Saturday, February 9, 2013 - 7:47pm

Post modernist "liberal thinking" put into practice.. Things are getting a bit better, they finally scrapped the money wasting long gun registration act. This allowed police to enter your home without a warrant to make sure any gun owner was complying with the safe storage laws at any time of the day or night. A further attempt to criminalize innocent people. What did it accomplish? Nothing of course as the real criminals still purchased illegal firearms to commit crimes with. Actually what it did do was create an even bigger black market for fire arms as it increased the prices of illegal firearms so in effect it had the opposite effect of what the laws intended. People should learn one very important caveat from this. When ever government enacts a law that does not uphold individual rights it almost always has the opposite effect of what that law was meant to combat. This includes especially actions where by the powers that be attempt to mess with the economy...

Post 51

Sunday, February 10, 2013 - 6:07am

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/full-comment/blog.html?b=fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/02/01/lorne-gunter-why-hang-ian-thomson-for-the-crime-of-protecting-himself

See what I mean? In my eyes the only thing this poor man did wrong was he fired warning shots. I am sorry but a group of thugs that throws multiple moltov cocktails at your house while you are inside it are in serious need of a lead lobotomy...

The prosecutors are the real criminals here. By making this man endure months of harassment over his moral gun use in protecting his life and property the government is sending not only a message to homeowners that "if you defend yourself you will be punished" but it sends a BIG clarion call to thugs "go ahead and rob,steal, hurt people this government will endure it is easy for you to do so...

Spread this article...this is what Obama has in store for gun owners..oh but it is progressive! Civilized people do not need guns!!

Post 52

Sunday, March 3, 2013 - 1:14pm

Research Update

Evolution of fairness in the one-shot anonymous Ultimatum Game.

A canonical example is the Ultimatum Game: one player proposes a division of a sum of money between herself and a second player, who either accepts or rejects. ...

Here we show that using stochastic evolutionary game theory, where agents make mistakes when judging the payoffs and strategies of others, natural selection favors fairness. Across a range of parameters, the average strategy matches the observed behavior: proposers offer between 30% and 50%, and responders demand between 25% and 40%. Rejecting low offers increases relative payoff in pairwise competition between two strategies and is favored when selection is sufficiently weak. Offering more than you demand increases payoff when many strategies are present simultaneously and is favored when mutation is sufficiently high. We also perform a behavioral experiment and find empirical support for these theoretical findings: uncertainty about the success of others is associated with higher demands and offers; and inconsistency in the behavior of others is associated with higher offers but not predictive of demands. In an uncertain world, fairness finishes first.

Recap:
Empirical research indicates that markets work without intervention (that laissez-faire works well when humans are allowed to engage in it). People like Rob Reich or Paul Krugman are wrong to postulate that free market mechanics somehow create exploitation or some other kind of "injustice." People in America and around the world should be allowed to freely engage others in trade-to-mutual benefit (capitalism is right for mankind). Science supports this view. The very foundation of the argument for interventionism -- that free exchange would be unfair -- is falsified. The government should not be in the business of regulating markets, whether it's the market for health care or whatever else.

Ed

Post 53

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - 1:21pm

Ed I have a question. Reading the selfish gene by Dawkins I got the impression that reproduction is the standard of value as opposed to rand's talk about life. How exactly do you differentiate between the two? It seems that you have to assume a teleological goal but isn't that ironicaly theistic in a sense
(Edited by Michael Philip on 3/05, 1:46pm)

Post 54

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - 3:21pm

Hopefully, neither Ed nor Michael will mind me offering my two cents....
-----------------

Standard for whom, or what - and in what way?

Reproduction where those genetically transmitted traits that promote survival over competitors within an ecological niche is certainly the standard for genetic evolution, hence one could say that reproduction is a primary value to the species, and for the gene-line, but not necessarily of universal value for the individual organism. Reproduction is always of crucial value to the genes, whose line would end without it - same for the species - same for all of life taken as a group. But any given individual organism might be placed at increased risk of dying by engaging in reproduction and the reproduction might not benefit the parent at all.

Even when viewed from the perspective of the species, I'd not say that reproduction is not a standard of value, because success has more complex requirements. Rabbits reproduce like... rabbits, but they can have years where no matter how many bunnies are born, a great many just get eaten, or their competitors are more efficient at eating their food and they starve. Reproduction alone can't be the standard by itself.

The standard of value for animals that are not sentient or volitional (as individuals, genes, or species) is still life, but it isn't a value for those animals/genes/species in the way a value functions for a human.

We humans are volitional (in addition to being genetic organisms) and we must fasten upon a standard of value, as an individual, to arrange our hierarchy of values which we have to do to drive our choices. (Obviously some people people absorb their values and their hierarchy like some kind of dumb cultural sponge - then it is the accidental part they drift into in the on-going cultural memes war that ends up having directed their lives).

We humans are under the causal effect of genetics AND memetics AND our agency (volition).

Key to all of this is Rand's discussion of life as the standard of value is about man's life qua man - a standard is a measurement and we measure man's life differently than the life of rabbits. That is, we have to see what constitutes flourishing given our nature as humans.

Post 55

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - 9:21pm

Steve, here is a counter-argument

there is no reason objective reason for why we should favor survival over reproduction. Any argument for survival of the species is moot, but because the whole process of evolution has to do with changes in allele frequency. Survival plays a role, but only when it comes to reproductive success. But again, even that POV is simply a point of view. There is no objective purpose as far as we can tell.

Post 56

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - 10:08pm

Michael,

In the context of genetic evolution, you said there is no objective reason we should favor survival over reproduction.

Well, the first question that comes to mind is who are we talking about? A human individual, all humans, a non-human organism, or a non-human species? And the next question is what is meant by "favor" one over the other. For example, if a species fails to survive, then no aspect of its reproduction got the job done - the species became moot.

One argument has been what do we see as the unit of selection. Is it the species? Is it the individual phenotype? Is it the gene? I agree with Dawkins - that the gene is the unit of selection (I suspect that is what you were referring to when you mentioned 'frequency of alleles"). For the Dawkins' Selfish-Gene view, the survival of the gene IS reproduction, and reproduction IS survival (of the gene).
--------------

You said, "There is no objective purpose as far as we can tell." I'm not entirely sure I know what you are saying... but maybe it is about teleology. We know what 'purpose' means when we talk about human behavior, and we infer a purpose to other animals... as in when a dog trots over to his food bowl, he has a 'purpose' of satisfying his hunger. But it becomes problematic when we try to talk about the purpose of evolution, or the purpose involved in the action of, say, a bacterium. I haven't thought much about this, but I think it might sort out to be a valid application of natural laws to entities that face the alternatives of life or death. In that context a set of values arise as long as we see life as a value. Then all actions (whether determined by genes or with humans, by a choice) that arise out some kind of system that supports that base value of life, is seen as 'purposeful.'

Post 57

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 - 11:28pm

sorry for the confusion. My point from the counter-argument is this:

Rand takes a set of empirical observations. Evolution is also a set of empirical observations (let's just call it that for the sake of simplicity). Rand assumed the teleological principle of survival. One can infer reproduction from evolution. It's the same thing.

Post 58

Wednesday, March 6, 2013 - 6:29pm

Steve,

I don't mind at all when you interject. Please do so at will. The way I see it, the value from interaction dwarfs little, tiny things like the superficial feeling that someone is stepping on your toes. If it turns out that you say something better than I was going to say it, then I would welcome that. I have told people here when they said something better than I was going to. I remember both you and Bill for sure, and there are several others, too.

Michael,

I'm going to answer you in snippets, some of which will be repetitious or otherwise unnecessary. I think best by chopping it up like that ...

Reading the selfish gene by Dawkins I got the impression that reproduction is the standard of value as opposed to rand's talk about life. How exactly do you differentiate between the two? It seems that you have to assume a teleological goal but isn't that ironicaly theistic in a sense

First of all, I gather that what brought Dawkins into your mind was when that evolutionary game theory study used the term: "natural selection." I'll show further down why that lacks relevancy here, but let's first take your question just as it was asked. Commensurate with what Steve said, we should differentiate humans from non-human animals -- making life the standard, not reproduction -- because that's where the value is it. For non-human animals, the value is reproduction. With non-human animals, there is no ongoing process of behavioral perfection. Instead, all beavers act like all other beavers -- building dams the very same way. All spiders act like other spiders -- weaving the precise web that is specific to their species. More beavers or spiders is always more of the same -- the only way to make things better is to make more (not better) beavers and spiders

This makes value for non-human animals quantitative -- it is simply a game of numbers, and nothing increases numbers like reproduction (which is why reproduction is the standard of value for non-human animals).

With humans, it's different. First of all, instead of adapting to our environment, we adapt the environment to ourselves. This relieves our pressure to reproduce and allows our standard of value to be higher than mere reproduction -- it allows, for the first time in the history of life, for a qualitative standard of value. Rand called it 'man-qua-man' to show that there is a brand new standard of value on the scene -- with the advent of mankind.

Regarding the last part of your question, I don't agree with you when you use the words: "you have to assume a teleological goal." It's as if you think teleology is a dirty word or something. Something which can only ever be merely assumed, and only then by theologians. Perhaps you have been educated at a university, however, so I would be willing to forgive you for thinking like that (i.e., like it is a smart thing to do to decry, or even merely to mystify, teleology). A lot of self-proclaimed expert thinkers think that teleology is a philosophically-speaking "dirty word." It's just the recognition of natural ends, however. If you are a being who is capable of achieving non-contradictory joy, then the attainment of non-contradictory joy is a natural end for you.

You can just look at the nature of man to figure that out (you don't need to postulate a god in order for these facts about man to be true).

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 3/06, 7:50pm)

Post 59

Wednesday, March 6, 2013 - 6:56pm