Homo Anti-Economicus

May 22
John Stuart Mill worked to define that humans would be efficient with their actions
John Stuart Mill worked to define that humans would be efficient with their actions

For misinformation to work, it has to be treated as factual.

This is the central conceit of a recent Bryan Caplan1 post, “Misinformation About Misinformation”:

Misinformation won’t work unless the listeners are themselves naive, dogmatic, emotional, or otherwise intellectually defective. In economic jargon, the problem is that the story mistakes an information problem for a rationality problem.

Bryan Caplan
“Misinformation About Misinformation”

John Stuart Mill was a British economist who, in the mid-1800s, worked to define the term homo economicus: that humans would be economical (efficient) with their actions. Said a different way: Man would act in their own economic self-interest. And, if they did, markets would work themselves out.

Rational choice theory underscored the economic (monetary) aspect of this, which is why I believe Caplan emphasized this word in his piece. People will make decisions in their lives that make the most economic and social sense for them.

The problem is: They don’t. We’ve known humans act irrationally. It’s funny that I have to say that because if you’re reading this sentence, you’re nodding your head because you know someone who is in debt and just bought a new car. In the face of disease, people are unwilling to act in order to take preventative measures and instead hope to avoid infection.

I agree with Caplan’s premise: It’s not the fault of the entities who produce the poor product. Rationally, their market should cease to exist. If they kept selling a bad product, rational actors would not buy in and the market would dry up.

Except we all know that’s not the case.

via Tyler Cowen

1 Professor of Economics at George Mason University who authors a Substack called Bet On It

Netflix Paints Its Picture With AI

May 3
Daybreak Premiered On Netflix On Oct. 24, 2019. "It was just god awful. And there's a ton of these shows."
Daybreak Premiered On Netflix On Oct. 24, 2019. “It was just god awful. And there’s a ton of these shows.”

From Ryan Broderick, podcaster at The Content Mines and author of the highly entertaining Garbage Day newsletter:

2019. The show Daybreak came out. It is horrible. It is what radicalized chuds on YouTube think of all Netflix shows. It’s, like, a perfomatively woke, algorithmically generated, teen-not-comedy thing about what it would be like to live in a high school that was in the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max kind of… thing. And it was just god awful. And there’s a ton of these shows. Where you’re like — you can just see the robot going, ‘This genre’s performing well and this genre’s performing well. Let’s combine them.’

Ryan Broderick
“The Facebookification of Netflix”
The Content Mines

Broderick paints a damning picture of how Netflix managed to become its own echo chamber. The machine learns what it’s programmed to do, the business green-lights the results. Soon, the system itself is flooded with an AI-generated list of shows that all seem to get canceled before a third season.

In related news, this is what artificial intelligence creates when I tell it to paint a picture of “a teenage student in high school surrounded by zombies”:

I asked AI to paint me a picture of “a teenage student in high school surrounded by zombies”

It’s a questionable result. When you give questionable art to consumers who have, sight unseen, already paid for it, the results seem to be speaking for themselves.