From: Camp, Christopher (CCamp@omm.com)
Date: Wed Jun 18 2003 - 13:56:14 MDT
It turns out that economists can trace most of the social problems in the
world to secrets, things some people know that other people do not. It also
turns out that verifiable secrets are not really much of a problem. When
there is something that someone knows, but they could reveal and prove it to
someone else, a variety of institutions can induce people to reveal that
information. So the real problem is unverifiable secrets.
---- I'm not sure I follow you here. I'm going to take secrecy and imperfect information to be virtually synonymous and I think that any level of imperfect information is going to associate itself with some level of market inefficiency - i.e. increased cost. If a market mechanism exists to reveal some secrets it should still be observed that this mechanism (as described above (i.e.: "induction to reveal") takes some amount of time and that every moment where some level of secrecy remains is a moment where some level of market inefficiency remains. So from this perspective I don't think the problem can be so quickly reduced to "unverifiable secrets" - but of course we are not working from the same base of information and although I am familiar with many of your papers it is quite likely I've missed something that may resolve this problem - if so please point me in the right direction. ---- For example, if a nation wants to make an arms treaty, but is concerned about the possibility of the other side cheating, they might each agree to open their military bases or production facilities to inspection. When corporate directors want to convince investors that they are not stealing the money, they hire accountants to reveal corporate spending. When individuals want to insure a home, they allow an insurance company representative to inspect their home's current condition. So why do individuals still have secrets? Some of their secrets are verifiable, but only at a prohibitive cost. ---- It seems a bit strong to say some secrets are verifiable. At this point I think there is only justification for saying some secrets may be verifiable. Verifiability seems to be a high order procedure that rests itself upon concepts like truth - which seem to be rather undeveloped. Thus the cost may be more than the universe could bear - that is to say...verification may be impossible. This is, at some level, a philosophical question and given the perceived lack of information we humans have and the open ended questions of other minds, translation(quine/wittgenstein), truth (as evidenced by recent extro-list threads) etc... we may not want to push things beyond what the evidence allows. It should be noted that as a practical matter verifiability has it's place - but there should be some attention given to the possibility that these words and concepts may be employed incorrectly by their operators. ---- Insurance companies could set insurance rates based on how carefully you drive, but it is now too expensive for them to put a recorder on your car that records exactly how carefully you drive. This may change in the next decade, however. And in general as costs fall we should expect to see people agreeing to reveal more verifiable info about themselves to solve secrecy problems. Some of the secrets people have, however, are in their heads. Is my spouse still happy with me, or is he thinking of leaving? Does my business partner really plan to work hard, or is he hoping I'll do most of the work? Now some of this info is revealed in our observable behavior so far; humans have evolved to be "leaky", and to be good at detecting such leaks in the behavior of others. ---- Leaks are subject to the difficulties of interpretation - the process of interpretation/translation does not seem to have perfected itself as a science but I certainly put some value in the utterances, faces and body language of my spouse - I'm just not sure, at the ultimate level - that I'm entirely right. ---- And as we have been discussing in the "Why believe the truth" thread, this leakiness has induced evolution to bias our beliefs, in order to impress others. The need to be close enough to others to detect such leaks is one of the key obstacles limiting telecommuting and other long-distance relationships that otherwise seem so attractive. Some day cheap long-distance communication may have enough bandwidth to allow us to detect such leaks as we usually do, and we may perhaps also develop automation that can detect such leaks up close, so we don't need the bandwidth. How leaky will our distant descendants be? How far will they want to go, and be able to go, in agreeing to reveal their secrets to each other, to avoid the social problems that secrets cause? It seems plausible that our descendants will be constructed so that they can allow outsiders to directly inspect the internal state of their minds, to verify the absence of certain harmful secrets. It also seems plausible that our descendants will feel a pressure to standardize the internal state of their mind to facilitate such inspection, just as corporations now feel pressure to standardize their accounting. Of course we already expect other pressures to standardize, such as to take advantage of improvements in mind modules. Even so, our descendants will probably not reveal everything to everyone; not all possible agreements will be made, and there will remain some advantages to non-standard mind parts, which can then become costly to verify (sure I see these bits here in your mind, but what the hell to they mean?). Nevertheless, as an overall long term trend, I'm leaning toward expecting not only a move toward a transparent society (a la Brin), but then toward transparent minds as well. And one disturbing implication of this is that we may well evolve to become even *more* self-deceived than we are now, as believing one thing and thinking another becomes even harder than now. ---- Increased 'self-deception' does seem possible even in Brinworlds. It may be the case that transparency reaches its apex when 'the other' is eliminated or subsumed. Aside from this 'solution' I'm not sure whether we'd be able to conclusively say that secrecy has been eliminated even in a culture where technological wizardry allows the public access to a variety of sources of personal information (The Ultimate Reality TV - where utterances, facial expressions and general body movements, continuous nano-level brain scans, etc...). All of this 'transparency' may still not give access to the subjective experience of the entity under observation. Despite all this information we may still not have access to the direct experience - the method of translation employed by the entity in question - how speech, brain waves and movement translate into actual experience. Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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