The Mugwumpery

It seems many humans don’t have world models. They just think what the people around them think.

Some of us – lucky enough to be unusually thoughtful or observant or open-minded or intelligent in some way – do have world models.

We develop these world models over our lives based on observation and theory, and on evaluating the often conflicting claims of others.

Once we build the world model, we use it to determine what we think, and what we should do. Most of these determinations are crystallized as heuristics – for most decisions we don’t directly reason about the situation but use the heuristic. When events diverge from our predictions and we therefore see flaws in our world model, we modify the model and the heuristics.

For most of us by age 50 or so our world model is pretty stable. Few changes need to be made, and many of those are because the world itself has changed – our environment has changed.

By the time we reach our 60s and 70s, most of us appear to lose the ability to modify the world model. We keep using the same model, the same heuristics. We become stuck in our ideas and unable to adapt them to changing realities. Or even to correct old errors in our models. We become ossified.

We keep on using the heuristics we developed when we were younger. To the extent the world hasn’t changed, they still work. To the extent it has changed, they don’t.

“Change” in ecology is always bad and “change” in politics is always good.

Or so it seems from what I read online.

Re ecology, if “climate change” makes the poles warmer and the equator cooler, isn’t that good for humans? More arable land for farming, more human-friendly temperatures.

Re politics, the status quo reflects thousands of years of human experience.  Our default should be to assume political change – however wonderful it may sound – is actually bad (and the burden should be on the proposer to convince us otherwise).

The single most surprising thing about the human world is how perfected it is. Almost everything is tuned to be easy, safe, and convenient. Stores are full of goods, roads conveniently go where most people want to travel, police exist to deter crime, cinemas exist to entertain us in comfort, hospitals exist to heal us, courts exist to settle our differences fairly and peacefully, hotels exist to house us away from home, pens come in shapes and sizes perfectly fitted to the human hand. We notice the few exceptions where imperfection occurs only because they’re so rare and unexpected.

The human world is full of optimizations everywhere. Very very few things are broken. This is something we should be celebrating. Instead many people think human society sucks.

And sucks compared to what? Residents of first-world countries live in the wealthiest, healthiest, safest, most fair societies that have ever existed in the history of the Earth. Every other type of society that ever actually existed was vastly worse.

People think political change for the better is easy, but if such changes were both easy and possible, they’d have been accomplished long ago.

Beware of proposals for “change”. Assume they are either not for the better, or not possible to implement.

At least for large and rapid changes (climactic, political, and otherwise). We need small gradual changes to stay adapted and to optimize what isn’t already optimized. And to be ready to reverse them if they don’t work out.

Perhaps it would be good if most of the small gradual changes (that we have a say about) are ones that seem likely to be improvements. But then we are not perfect at prediction – some small level of random change (even change we think bad) would let us stumble on improvements we might never have thought of.

(I think Hayek said this. The more I think about it, a lot this blog is rephrasing Hayek.)

Every movement is a coalition of those who think it’s moral even if it won’t work, those who think it’ll have good results even if it’s not moral, those who think it’s good for them personally even if it’s not moral and won’t work. And those who aren’t sure those are 3 different things.

Crime is the default complaint in capitalist societies. When unemployment isn’t too high, inflation isn’t too high, there’s no war, no crisis, people complain about crime. Because crime is always there in the background. With rare exceptions, widespread perception of crime as a big problem is a sign that things are going pretty well.

Poverty is the default complaint in all other societies.

Beauty isn’t everything because inclusive fitness is a function of both genes and environment. Plus, you know, beauty has been Goodharted by evolution.

Apocryphally, Oscar Wilde said “A gentleman never gives offense unintentionally”. Perhaps there’s something to that.

I prefer my own definition: “A gentleman never obtains by force that which he can obtain with money”.

We don’t have to be polite about the dead. Because they can’t get back at us. (Unless they have vengeful living relatives.)

If we know nothing, we can’t assign a Bayesian prior. What do you do when you don’t have a prior? Seems to be the central problem here. And intrinsically unsolvable.

To get an LLM to give an opinion on a topic it’s trained not to (ex: politics), ask it what a hypothetical future superintelligence would think.

Ultimately good and bad are about what we think leads to survival and extinction. We disagree about consequences, so we disagree about values. Also there’s always the question “who’s survival?”; what’s good for you might be bad for me.

Beware of asking LLMs for their take on opinions, esp. for validation (or invalidation) of your own thoughts. Never assume that if (even multiple different) LLMs say your idea is good that it’s actually good. They will say whatever they think you want them to say, even if you ask them not to do that.

Background: “OSP” stands for “Omit Sycophancy Please”; part of my standing instructions to Claude.ai.

In my feed today is a little tease to inspire greed and envy:

The article explains that we can figure this out using division: $237 billion/341,891,315 = $693 per US resident. Not exactly a life-changing amount.

US federal, state, and local governments run thru about $10 trillion a year, so if we gave it to them, Bezos’s $237 billion would fund them for about a week.

Either way his companies would no longer exist, and the 1.5 million people who work for those companies would lose their jobs. Plus of course no more Amazon packages.

You might wonder – how did Bezos get all that wealth (I won’t say “money” because almost all of it is invested in companies – warehouses, factories, etc.)? Well, he’s one of those super talented people who create giant companies out of little more than talent and work (and of course the work of those 1.5 million people who get paid for helping).

Such people are really rare – there are only a few dozen of them in the world. But when they have large amounts of capital, they can do great things. People with $700 in their pocket can’t do much to change the world. So how about instead we leave the wealth with the single person who has proven that they can do something wonderful with it? Jeff Bezos.

(Plus, you know, he earned it…paid the taxes due and everything.)

Freedom, if it means anything, means the right to make choices society disapproves of and thinks unwise, provided those choices don’t violate others’ rights.

If it doesn’t mean that, whatever does it mean?

Serious question.

All societies, including totalitarian ones, permit socially approved choices. Making only approved choices is simply obeying rules. What distinguishes free societies is the right of individuals to make disapproved choices – provided only that they don’t violate the legitimate and equal rights of others.

AI has made cheating so easy that professors complain they spend more effort detecting cheating than they do teaching.

The problem is that higher education is attempting to do two different things: (1) educate and (2) certify.

Split them.

Universities shouldn’t grant degrees – they should just teach. If the students don’t want to learn, that’s their own problem.

Those who want degrees (certification of skills/knowledge) should have to pass a test. It doesn’t matter if they took courses or how they got the skills or knowledge – if they can prove they have it, they get the degree.

Post coming, eventually.

Nothing new here other than the phrase itself. Think Popper, Shannon, Bayes.

We can have beliefs that don’t confer predictive ability. They may even be true. But not knowledge.

Note that mathematical knowledge can be interpreted as a set of predictions about the results of counting or measuring.

And knowing Caesar crossed the Rubicon predicts consistent records and artifacts.

We can have knowledge about probabilities as well as binary (true/false) facts.

Update, 2025-10-30: I’ve seen a claim that this phrase is a F.A. Hayek quotation. The claim is re Alan Ebenstein’s Hayek (2001), or his Hayek’s Journey (2003), page 96; of which I don’t yet know.

I haven’t checked either yet, but I find this plausible – for years I thought it was a Hayek quote but couldn’t find any evidence of him ever using the phrase; eventually I decided I must have come up with it. (I said “ability” in my version; I’ve updated the post.)  Still, this deserves a longer exposition…someday.

Update 2025-12-01: It’s indeed Hayek. From “Economics and Knowledge,” Economica, 1937; reprinted in Individualism and Economic Order, note 17. 

With a little more context:

“All knowledge is the capacity to predict…The concept of equilibrium merely means that the foresight of the different members of society is correct. Correct foresight is the defining characteristic of a state of equilibrium.”

Per ChatGPT 5.1:

Hayek is not saying “all knowledge whatsoever, in every philosophical sense, just is prediction.” The full sentence is more careful:

• He’s defining “knowledge, in the sense in which the term is here used” – namely, the kind of knowledge relevant for equilibrium theory and coordination in the economy.

• In that sense, he says, knowledge is identical with foresight only in the sense that all knowledge (so understood) is capacity to predict. Online Library of Liberty+1

So as an aphorism it’s fine, but philosophically it’s rooted in a very specific context: the role of expectations and foresight in economic equilibrium and in the division of knowledge.

But I think the phrase is more literally and broadly correct than Hayek claimed. I think it’s a useful definition of “knowledge”. It also fits with Bayesian epistemology (all knowledge = posterior predictive distributions), Popper’s ideas about science (falsifiability = prediction test),  Shannon information theory (information as reduction of uncertainty = narrowing the distribution of possible futures) , and modern machine learning.

Someday I should do a proper writeup. But these are the core ideas.

I didn’t say “individual”.

I didn’t say anything about the specific property regime.

This seems relevant in the context of ASI and humans living with them (or not).

The March 2022 Reason magazine explains in “Free the Art! Sell the Art!” that public museums display as little as 2 percent of the artworks they hold (the rest in storage), and have a habit of buying up art only to hide it away for decades where nobody will ever see it or know it exists.

And, worse, the Association of Art Museum Directors has a policy enforcing exactly that!

My response:

It’s not often I say “there ought to be a law”, but there ought to be a law. Taxpayers do not fund museums for the purpose of hiding art in storage. Any work held by an institution that receives public funds should be on public display at least 6 hours a day for 100 days out of every 2 years (excluding limited periods for restoration or maintenance) – or promptly auctioned to the highest bidder.

Charitable foundations that fund museums should insist on the same rule.