Dear Ali,
Your conclusion:
Any account of self interest that ignores how power,
information and access mitigate or effect it will be missing a big piece of the
puzzle.
seems reasonable, but that part is not
self interest; it is the set of choices that are available to each individual.
Generally, the wider and more comprehensive the set of available choices, the
better the individual can find a choice to maximize her self interest. Think
of the difference between potential (i.e. voltage) and actual (i.e. current) –
both are needed to actually implement a choice, but knowing which choice of the
available ones to make is the issue of self interest.
Power, information and access are, as you
point out, major influences on the outcome of anybody’s self interest when
actually applied. But I am still working on the more modest goal of how to
understand and represent self interest in an effective way. I will worry about
the available choices after I get a workable model of self interest.
Thanks for your insights,
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ali SH
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2011
1:37 PM
To: Rich Cooper; [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Self Interest Ontology
On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 4:09 PM, Rich Cooper <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Global financial crisis (GFC)? That was based on far more
complicated issues than JUST self interest. It is also way past my pay
grade to try to explain why the GFC occurred. I am simply trying to work
on the AI issue of embodied self interested agents.
Odd, this article would seem to claim it largely came down to unrestrained self
interest in combination with imbalances of power, imbalances of information,
and imbalances of access (to both)...
[The Atlantic
wrote:] But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity:
elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a
central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the
implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More
alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of
reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The
government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
...
In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer
that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of
the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was
good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith in
free financial markets grew into conventional wisdom—trumpeted on the editorial
pages of The Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.
...
But it was never clear (and still isn’t) what combination of interests was
being served, and how. Treasury and the Fed did not act according to any publicly
articulated principles, but just worked out a transaction and claimed it was
the best that could be done under the circumstances. This was late-night,
backroom dealing, pure and simple.
Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to
upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic
outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked
Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings
attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers
suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the
problem off the banks’ hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic
assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make
such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.
Any account of self interest that ignores how power, information and
access mitigate or effect it will be missing a big piece of the puzzle.
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