Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck Kindle Edition

Some of the useful things inside:
- Microeconomic tools for judging the epistemic incentives of groups of experts
- Concise and useful explanations for how major insitutions (academia, medicine, politics, venture capitalism) break
- Case studies in how to successful use Aumman's agreement theorem in real life

The most valuable part of this book by far is chapter 3, which is an extended dialogue between a cynical conventional economist ("C.C.E" or 'Cecie') and a visitor from a different world, trying to explain why a particular institution is killing babies. The example is a real one - the FDA hasn't approved a simple set of fats for intravenous baby food, causing severe brain damage in something like dozens of babies per year. And the explanation is a whirlwind tour of how our institutions work and how they break, with many concepts that I've been able to use elsewhere to great benefit.

Above all, this book has changed the way I think about learning from experts. I'll end my review with an example of how I analyse things like this now.

Recently someone came to me proposing a project for building a math-education website - combining math explanations and machine learning algorithms, connecting you with the best explanation given your background knowledge. And of my first 3 thoughts, 2 were about how the site would function and how a user would interact with it - it's important to concretely visualise a product to figure out if it feels like it would work. However, my 3rd thought was to do an adequacy analysis - I looked for data points about whether I should expect that, if this is a good idea that can work, why hasn't someone already done it? Think about all the money and time people spend on education each year - all the tutors in universities, all the teachers in high schools, all the assistant lecturers and support staff and government subsidies. Surely, if this project was a good idea, someone would've built it and it would be a common website we all use. Is the fact that this doesn't exist already enough evidence that it won't work?

In general I don't see the educational marketplace of resources changing rapidly in response to new tech and research. There was a bunch of research about spaced repetition and how memorisation works, that nobody has jumped to incorporate into how universities work. Many people can tell you the best physics/math textbooks (e.g. Feynman Lectures) but most students will never read them. It *doesn't* look to me like a space where it would require a great deal of effort to out-do the best in the field. You might counter by pointing out the success of Khan Academy, but personally I'm not sure I'd consider the fact that a single dad can make lots of videos and do better than everyone else, a sign of success for the educational market.

I'm not actually very confident in this analysis. However, the best part is that I can learn about the whole field by working on the one project. If the project fails, or I find out that someone else has tried this and failed, then I'll change my assessment of other projects in this space. On the other hand, if the project succeeds, I will update about how good the educational market is at incentivising people to create useful things like this.

I wouldn't have made these models and hypotheses before, and for that reason I'm really glad I read this book.

"Freely mixing debates on the foundations of rational decision-making with tips for everyday life, Yudkowsky explores the central question of when we can (and can’t) expect to spot systemic inefficiencies, and exploit them."

The book explores foundational questions of "inside-view" vs "outside-view" reasoning, all the while developing an understanding of how a civilization can achieve obviously-awful outcomes *without* anything special is going on.
Analyzing situations via the *equilibria* they involve provides much of the answer, as Yudkowsky examines how to reason about and understand them.

Spends too much time arguing against "modest epistemology", but the insights on when and why our social systems can be systematically broken, with nobody able to fix them, make this book well worth reading and pondering.

Equity markets are efficient in the sense that all stock prices instantly adjust to new information--there are no genuine bills on the ground waiting to be picked up. Thus you can safely ignore someone tells you that INTC is overpriced because of the recent problems with its chips.

But largely because of varying incentive structures, not every domain is efficient in this way. Thus it is feasible for a mere decision theorist to correctly diagnose problems with the Bank of Japan's monetary policy, even though the BoJ is run by domain experts.

How is this possible? And why do some people insist that it is not possible?

It is possible because (a) the BoJ governor cannot personally profit handsomely by making correct monetary policy, and (b) an outsider who lacks object-level expertise can still possess meta-level expertise, allowing him to correctly identify worthy object-level experts whose opinions to trust.

Some people insist this is not possible, and that adjusting your beliefs to those of a wider reference class is always preferable. They do this at least in part because of status-related emotions.

This book is basically an extended meditation on why EY should not have to quit his contrarian ways just because of Aumann's theorem. That's putting it glibly. It's actually pretty insightful and a quick read.

I loved the part explaining housing bubbles. As a bit of a real estate nerd that was a valued insight. I personally do not experience modest epistemology much myself,but when I do witness it there does not seem to be a universal epistemological adoption by the individual expressing it. I think this is common in the Midwest, where people seem to oscillate wildly from modest epistemology “We can’t possibly understand God’s plan” to arrogant epistemology “I could turn this economy around with a few simple tweaks to the budget”. I’m not sure what demographic the author interacts with that adheres so entirely to modesty, but I haven’t met many of them. As an entrepreneur I appreciated the balanced insight.

The first half of the book is outstanding, in identifying clearly the causes of suboptimal situation in the world we live in. The second half of the book disappoints as the narrative borders on meandering.

The easy to read discussion on a pressing topic that constantly sparks heated debate is refreshing. I learned a lot about myself and the world.

It was an OK read, but not memorable