YouSaid · the spoken record

David Friedman

lines on the record: 96
first: 2021-08-09
most recent: 2021-08-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A nuclear fusion The nucleus fusion may just be hard, but we know that vaccines aren't hard because they produce a successful vaccine in something less than a week, right? People talk about the fact, isn't it wonderful that we got vaccines in a little under a year? But the truth is that we got vaccines in less than a week and all the rest of the time was the testing procedure. And you couldn't do it to zero. First, it would take time to get to produce substantial quantities. But you could, as far as I can tell, have done a good enough testing so that it should have been available to anybody who wanted to take the risks in maybe two months. What do you do? You do two tests simultaneously. One of them is you give the vaccine to a large random set of people, so old, young, et cetera, and you don't expose them to the disease. All you're trying to do is see the vaccine have serious side effects. You then take 100 or 200 or 300.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is my view then, and I think I may have been too optimistic, was that it's very hard for regulation to stop progress because there are many independent countries. And the evidence against that is that as far as I know, nobody had challenged trials for COVID vaccines.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought that pushing the prediction market in his favor would make people expect him to win, which would then make him more likely to win because you're more likely to donate money to people who you think are going to win, but that his effect got wiped out by the smart money coming in on the other side when they saw that free money lying around. But that does require a market where you can make reasonably large bets because otherwise it's the number of betters and not the not how strongly they feel about, not how confident they are that matters. So, you know, prediction markets are a neat”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was an interesting case back, I remember which election it was, but one of the U.S. presidential elections a few presidents ago, where the relevant market very briefly surged in favor of one of the candidates and then very quickly went back. And my conjecture was that somebody who wanted that candidate to win”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there is going to be a bad harvest, or something else is going to happen that's going to do it. And that's very neat. And in principle, you have to Guess it requires that there is a reason why people want to bet on this, but people like to bet on lots of things. And so, no, I think that's something nice that's developing. And again, I haven't really paid enough attention. I haven't actually ever made a predicted bet, although my younger son has been betting, I think, on predicted and says he's ahead so far. He's doing it mostly for fun, not you don't want to limit people doing it for fun because if you can only make small bets, then the prices are going to be dominated by ideologues. Whereas if you can make bets of any size, then the smart money who doesn't care what's true, they only care what bets make money is likely to take over.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“has as its nominal function allocating capital. And just as a side effect, it generates information because you observe that certain stocks are going up or down and that tells you something about what people who are willing to bet on it believe about those companies or those industries or whatever. So he said, well, look, how about you do it deliberately? There are things we'd like to know. What if you set up a market for that purpose? And that was where prediction markets originated, as was Robin Hansen's idea. So no, they're a neat idea. And some, of course, have always existed if you think about futures markets for agricultural products, are a prediction market, although they now refer to that way, that if you observe that the future price of wheat is sizably larger than the present price as of a year out, you say, oops, looks as though the smart money expects.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I gather that they are developing. I think the ones I know about seem to have limits in the size of the bets you can make and in the amount of house cut if you want to take your money out. So I assume that will develop further. But in principle, now Robin's idea, of course, is that you want the prediction market as a way of generating information. And that was, I mean, a lot of the great ideas are very simple. And his idea was a stock market.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've known about prediction markets for longer than almost anybody else. Because I was corresponding with Robin Hansen back before he switched fields and became an economist. That's sort of my standard example of one of the really nice things about this world is that it used to be that you had to be a university professor because the people you wanted to interact with had to be in the same building you were, so to speak, to interact very much. Now it's no longer true. So I came across Robin very early, discovered that he had these really neat ideas and so I corresponded with him. So no, the prediction markets are a very interesting idea.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had the discussion in machinery of how a stateless market society would work. And he had then said, well, what happens with those ideas if you have strong encryption and had worked out some neat stuff and then I read his stuff and borrowed it back? I can probably claim a little bit of credit, but it's not like I thought up these ideas of the digital clash all by myself. I was partly a part of people who were interacting over that. I wasn't really a part of the cypherpunks, that is, I was on the mailing list for a while and I met some of them once, but I knew what they were talking about and it was neat stuff.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Built into the, in effect, programmed into the money in such a way that if I win the Vat, you suddenly have some less money and I have some more money and vice versa if you win it. And there are ways of doing that, but it requires that this is Ethereum is the one I'm familiar with, which does this sort of stuff. It requires that Ether can find out who won the bet. And that's sort of an interesting project which requires ingenuity to solve. But no, I think, so anyway, I think the, and I should say, my ideas on cryptocurrency are partly because I was interacting with some of the cypherpunks very early. And it was really a case where one of them had stolen a bunch of ideas from me, reprocessed them, and I then stole back his version from him.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“then the problem is you probably know I don't know how much you know about cryptocurrencies the basic problem is you need an Oracle you need a way in which the software can find out what the exchange rate is and I know some clever ways that some of the people not Bitcoin but with the second most popular currency have some interesting ideas about that because I discussed it with them a few years ago their idea is not mine but I don't really know at the moment to what extent people have oracles that they can trust because you need some way in which the software can determine the facts of the real world and of course the more you the more the software can determine facts of the real world the more neat things you can do with it because you know as you may know there's this old idea of smart contracts where you have a I make a bet with you and the bet is in effect”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That both had a reasonably stable value in terms of dollars or euros or Swiss francs in terms of something whose exchange rate to other things didn't change very rapidly, which is what you want. Ideally, of course, you do it in a musical commodity bundle, but I'm not sure how easy that's going to be to set up, that if you had such a thing and if there was easy to make transactions in it, which again, I think is not yet true of Bitcoin, though since I've just held it rather than try to use it, I could be that by now they've made it easier that then it would become a serious alternative to conventional currencies. And if you could do it in a way which proofed it against inflation, which means you don't lock it to the dollar, maybe you lock it to the average of the dollar the Swiss franc and the euro or something.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm sure there are other ways that you could, in a sense, one of the things that ought to be doable, but I'm not enough of an expert to know quite how you do it, is to have a Bitcoin where every time the value of Bitcoin goes up, you get a new subdivision with the same value. So in effect, the value of Bitcoin goes up instead of having 100 units, you're now having 112 units, if it goes down instead of 100 units, you now have 90 units. And then the units themselves could be fixed to the dollar. And I haven't, in a sense, I tend to write more than I read in a sense, so I haven't really made a serious effort to keep track of the various projects for stable coins other than the one that I invented, and I'm not doing anything with that I discussed on my blog. But I think if you had a cryptocurrency,”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's not too much of a problem if you want it as a speculative investment. I, in fact, have some Bitcoin, but it makes it rather inconvenient if you're using it for day-to-day transactions, because if a price is set in Bitcoin, the seller doesn't know what value he's going to get for his good, the buyer looking at the price in Bitcoin can't easily compare it to what somebody else was selling the same good for a month earlier because the price of Bitcoin could have changed 30% over that period of time. So Bitcoin is really not very good for a money for transactions. And that means that you want somebody to produce a stable coin that's easy to use, and there are various projects of that sort. I've got one of my blog posts in which I sketch out one mechanism by which you could get a stable coin, which would be stable in, say, dollars or in something else.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The effect of anonymous digital cash is that money laundering laws become unenforceable. Government is very much dislike that, in part for good reasons and part for bad reasons. Consequently, no country of the sort you would need existed that was willing to put up with it. That's at least my interpretation of why it never happened. And the beautiful thing about Bitcoin is there's no issuer and it does not require, you know, it's just happening invisibly online, as it were, which is very clever. The problem with Bitcoin, but not with cryptocurrency in general, not necessarily, is that the value of a Bitcoin is very unstable over time.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I couldn't have predicted Bitcoin. Nakamoshi was a very smart guy. And I've done computer programming. I've kept an eye on encryption issues because they interested me, but I was never at that level of expertise to realize what he could do. It was a very, very clever idea. And no, the version I was thinking of was Chao Mi in Digital Cash, the math of which had been worked out by Chaum maybe a couple of decades before I was writing, something like that. In a sense, that is the biggest difference is that because Chowmian digital cash requires an issue war, it hasn't happened because you need an issuer which is a reliable institution, which means it almost has to be in some developed country or at least some country with sort of reasonably well-functioning legal institutions.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of reputational costs and so forth. And somebody else online quoted somebody 30 years before Heinlein when this was just happening who was commenting on this effect and quoted as judge who in some rural area probably who said that of the last 30 women who had come before him charged with sexual offenses, which I presume just means having sex, though he didn't clear it, 19 of them had committed them in an automobile. And so that was an interesting case where you have a technological change and it has some obvious effects, but some less obvious effects. And similarly here. So I don't know what the final results are going to be. I don't know how much the whole woke Twitter mob cancellation, that set of phenomena, how much that's only happening because of the internet.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, anyway, the how this is going to pan out is various in general, the internet is going to is having and is going to have non-obvious effects. I'm reminded I just saw somebody online who quoted a bit that Heinlein, science fiction writer, wrote where he was talking about the influence of automobiles. And he was saying that there were people who, when the early automobiles came out, suggested that this would end up entirely replacing the horse. But he doesn't know anybody who had realized how it would affect courtship behavior, that the existence of closed automobiles meant that there was now a place where couples could make out where their parents wouldn't be seeing them and where they could be 15 miles away from anybody who knew them so as to reduce the chance.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it depends a whole lot on whether you are interacting with people where your reputation costs you anything so that if I become part of a Twitter mob online First, Insofar as I have an online identity, that online identity is not doing business with anybody. It's not probably involved in any interactions where people trusting it matters. So it's free to behave as badly as it wants. On the other hand, if I am interacting as I do on a blog or a forum where there is a maybe 100 people who are regular posters to it. In that case, reputation does matter that if I behave in a way that shows me to be an unreasonable person, people won't take what I say very seriously. It's not as serious as people not being willing to sell to me or buy from me, but it's still a real cost.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it seems to me that if anything, the internet means that reputation is less tied to real space interactions and more to online interactions. And we have better mechanisms for keeping track of reputation than we used to, that eBay, for example, as you may know, when you have any eBay transaction, you get the opportunity to report to eBay on how it went. And when you're considering dealing with something, one of the things you see is what's their eBay reputation. How many people have said that they fulfilled what they said they would fulfill? And you get the same thing. If you buy something from Amazon that is not actually being sold by Amazon because Amazon also functions the middleman, books are the context where I'm most familiar with this. And one of the things you see is, well, this seller has it at this price, and here is what his rating is. Here is what people have dealt with and say. So it seems to me that I don't think.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if the person you were being nasty to would never meet you, he probably knew somebody who would meet you. And you didn't want to have your reputation, your real space reputation messed up. So in that respect, I think, but I think that's an effect which will become smaller in the future world, because in the future world, we've got an online version of that. So that in the future world, at least as I've described it, I don't have to know you in real space. And most people I'm interacting with, I won't, many of them won't even be on the same continent I'm on. I've in fact interacted with a number of dealers in India who I have never met, but who I'm willing to trust to deliver what they say they'll deliver because they've done so in the past.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't want to offend somebody who your son might want to want to court his daughter, that there are a bunch of social links within the ethnic group, and even aside from that, you don't want to offend somebody who knows people who know you. I remember observing a long, long time ago online back in the days of USNET, if you're familiar with that, which was really before the web. And one of my hobbies is a group that does historical recreation called the Society for Creative Anachronism. And it had a Usenet group. And it was a whole lot more polite than most Usenet groups that I observed. And I think the reason was that if you behaved really badly on there, if you went around insulting people for no good reason and being unreasonable,”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You might have what you might get, you might get the pattern, which you do already have, where you've got groups of people who have something in common. And so one of the sort of odd patterns you get is some particular market niche, say donut shops, being dominated by some particular ethnic group. I think there's a real, I think donut shops are a real example, but I don't remember which it is. And I know from my own experience that running motels is dominated by Indians. In the US, I don't know why, but that's an observed pattern. So, and part of what maybe happening there is that you have an ethnic group.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do help things, and they ended up giving me a $500 discount to apologize for the month during which they had turned off the solar system that already existed when they installed the battery. And I think there are a lot of other examples you see nowadays, which don't even depend on the transactions being online transactions because companies care about their reputation and they have an online reputation even for real space transactions. But the question is, is there any particular reason why you would trust somebody who agreed with your politics more? And it seems to me that my impression is that woke people quite often fight with each other and attack each other for, can't try to cancel each other because they're the wrong version of wokes, so to speak. So it seems to me”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's interesting. That is the obvious problem that for some people woke is a positive signal and some a negative signal. Certainly for me, it's a negative signal for. And The thing is that the reputation you want is an online reputation which does not have to be linked to your real space identity. And in the kind of world I was discussing wouldn't be linked to your real space identity. That partly it's the fact that it's not linked that means you have to depend on reputational. But of course it's also true that reputational enforcement has been important for a very long time. I would have guessed that most of what makes stores behave themselves, act well is not the legal threat at all. It's the threat of the bad reputation that I've had the experience of I was having problems with the people who were putting in the battery for my solar system and I put up a very negative review online and I immediately got a response from them basically, what can I do?”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spain would still be being ruled by the dictator who ruled it from the guess sometime in whenever the Spanish Civil War was over in 1940 or so until a few decades ago, Franco. So there would be bad things about a world people didn't get old, but I think on net there would be good things. So all of these futures have positive and negative features. And I'm not predicting which ones will happen. I was only trying to explore for each of those futures. And there's a reason I called the book Future Imperfect. Was partly a grammatical pun and partly the fact that none of these futures is perfect. One of the early cypherpunks who were people who were exploring the encryption stuff before anybody else was, his line was encryption is not your friend. Technologies are not your friend. Technologies are what they are.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to be tolerable and ideally get to run it back a couple of decades. That world will have its own features, mostly good, but not all good, because after all, if that had happened a few decades earlier, it would have been Stalin who presided with nuclear weapons over the breakup of the Soviet Union. And he might have had a different view of it than people who were in power.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For that, we've known for, I guess, decades at this point, Bitcoin is newer than that, but cryptocurrencies are the only new part of that world. I wrote this up long before cryptocurrencies existed. And so we could have that world. And it's a really interesting world, which is part of why I talk about things like how you enforce contracts in it. But I'm not predicting it's going to happen. And similarly for the various other things that I discuss that, you know, the one I most want is to solve the aging problem because at the moment it is very, it is under current circumstances the probability that I will be alive 30 years from now is very close to zero. I would like to be alive 30 years from now. I like living is a lot of fun. So the particular future that I am most in favor of is the one where they solve the aging problem where I get at worst to stay at something like my present age, which is a little bit creakier than...”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moment in the real world, the hardest part of being a successful kidnapper is how you collect the money because that's where you're likely to get caught. We can solve that problem. All right, with good cryptocurrency and a world where you've got enough encryption so that people can't follow who's sending message to whom. So that world has downsides as well as upsides. Now, I happen to think that on that governments do more harm than good be a sort of simple way of putting it and that therefore a world in which governments find it harder to control people, although we'll have the disadvantage that some of the things governments do are good and won't be done. We'll have greater advantages. But in any case, so all I'm saying is I'm not predicting that that world will happen. I'm saying that world could happen. There's the technological possibility.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here is a plausible way in which contracts could get enforced using ultimately reputational mechanisms. But I don't know that world is going to happen. That, you know, the National Security Agency has been doing its best for decades to keep that world from happening. And you can see from there, as I try to make clear in the book, there are downsides of that world as well, as well as upsides. And we're in fact seeing one of the downsides already because one of the things I think I discuss, I think I discussed in Future Imperfect is the possibility for cyber ransoming, for getting onto somebody's computer, encrypting the whole contents of the computer, and then say, I'll sell you the key back to decrypt it. And that's a bad thing. And you can think of other bad things that if you kidnap people at the”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They will be enforced in the future. One of the things I try to be careful about in that book is to say I'm not making predictions. I am saying if this technology develops in this way, this is what will happen, but I don't know which technologies are going to develop in which way. So in the case of contracts, what I think you're thinking about is my discussion of how a world online works where you have complete privacy what I refer to as a world of strong privacy that encryption potentially could give you a world where I can do business with you and no third party can observe what we're doing. And that includes making money. And then the question is in that world, how do you enforce contracts? And I say, if that happens, if you end up with that future,”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell you that a competitive market. That doesn't have certain specific problems such as public good problems and externalities would actually produce the efficient outcome. You never quite have that, but that's a whole lot closer than if you try to imagine other institutions such as a centrally planned system where the central planner has neither the right incentives nor the information nor the power, that the competitive market has all the power you want because each person controls himself. So that's control over everybody just in a decentralized form. And a central planner never has that, of course. So I think it's a useful concept, but you have to recognize that once you get to a fully realistic picture of any system, you're not going to achieve it. All you can do is say, well, in this approximation, you would achieve it. And then you have some field of how much breaking the approximation messes it up.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are two issues with regard to economically efficient one of them is what's an improvement, and there, as you know, I go with Alfred Marshall's view of it rather than the more conventional Pareto-Hicks-Caldorf, for anybody who knows these terms in economics approach, which I regard as a way of pretending not to make interpersonal comparisons when you really are doing it. But once you've got your way of comparing, then when you say this is efficient, efficient compared to what? As far as I can tell, the closest I can come is to say, what's the best outcome you could imagine by this criterion? And that's my bureaucrat God. That's if you imagine an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent actor who is controlling everything. And then I say, well, of course nothing will come up to that. But some things will come close, that in particular the standard sort of price theory efficiency theorems.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Except the parents in those societies, the parents have almost enough authority, that is to say they could be rejected, but usually aren't. But they aren't perfectly wise. But yes, no, no. The bureaucrat god basically is my attempt to make sense of what economists mean by economically efficient because”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“you'd like and in principle you could do it what you'd like to say all right here are all the things somebody tells us about himself because that's really all you all you've got in practice let's take all pairs who ended up married or maybe all pairs who dated who made the first try of having a date and how do you figure out from the characteristics of the two parties whether they'll have a second date and you would think they'd want to do that And then ideally you follow that through and you say, which one's got married, which marriages lasted? So ideally, you could actually get sort of statistical data saying, here's how to pair people up. And if you had that, you could then look at couples who were produced by American courtship institutions, and couples who were paired up by their parents and see which one came closer to matching what the computer told you.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My impression is it's not all that uncommon for somebody, you know, a young adult maybe in the tech industry to migrate to the US, then go back to India to marry the wife that his parents have chosen for him, or maybe in some cases the arrangements are made here, and then live in America. So that's as close, in a sense, as you can come to a controlled experiment of separating out quality of choice versus the degree to which the culture supports your marriage, so to speak, which would be interesting. The other way you could do it, but it would be much harder, is that what you would like the computer dating people to do, but I don't think they've really done, is really serious research on what observable characteristics match with what.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A sense, what you'd really want to look at and what exists, though I don't want you their data on it, would be people from India, in particular it's true of all of India, but at least southern India, who live in the US.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you mean? You mean it makes you happy because you don't feel as though it's your fault that you, if you've messed up, that you should have done better?”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She would have had a veto. It required her consent, but the actual search was done by her parents, not by her. She was still happily married. My first marriage had broken up. So the evidence from our little tiny sample was in favor of her system. But what was really fun about it was that here was an intelligent, modern person, an educated contemporary from an entirely different society in terms of that set of institutions. And it's a lot harder to say, well, obviously the way we do it is right when you've actually got someone real there defending the alternative. So I really don't know whether the modern American system, modern Western system of courtship, works better or worse than the traditional system where the parent find a potential partner, then the partners get to decide whether they approve of each other or not. Because, you know, there is the argument.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's, I guess, the interesting question is does it work better than the system where parents choose your spouse for you? Quite a long time ago, one of the most interesting conversations I've had, I was in Bombay waiting for a plane to Sydney, and I got into a conversation with a woman from southern India, and we ended up sitting next to each other and talking a good deal all the way to Sydney. She was flying out to join her husband, who was a physician. She was from southern India. Her husband had been chosen for her by her parents.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since computers came in, the people I know who have been trying to use computer dating haven't found it very successful and so forth. In fact, the story I'm told is that OKCupid, which is one of the most successful of these things, has gotten worse over time, that it was originally designed by enthusiasts who did clever things and then taken over by businessmen who did less clever things. Now, it may be the people I've talked to are just sufficiently different from the mass of the market so that what looks what works for other people doesn't work for them. That's my impression. So is it efficient compared? There's efficiency you've got to compare it to some alternative. It's certainly inefficient compared to the ideal of a world where a perfectly wise, benevolent person paired us all up, but we don't have any of those people around.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem is that a lot of economics ignores search costs because we don't have a very good way of handling them. And yet search costs are really central to the dating problem. And I would have thought that things would get a whole lot better with computer dating because you can take all of the characteristics that are sort of objective and measurable. Tell them to the computer, have each person search a million profiles, find the subset of that who meet the easy characteristics and then interact with each other to find how well they do. But as far as I can tell, it hasn't happened. I don't think that. marriages work better.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your value as a spouse different from somebody else's, your value is a spouse is different to some people than to someone else's. The way I like to put it is that the woman who I eventually concluded was about a 1 in 10,000 catch was not in fact being pursued by anybody else at the time because other people had weird tastes and did not recognize what a desirable partner this was from my standpoint. I should say we're still married. That was 38 years ago or so that we got married. So that's a really hard problem. And I'm not quite sure.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that then means that the ordinary monogamous man still ends up getting a wife put on worse terms. He's got to do more of the dishes. And women either get all of a husband on better terms or half of a husband on terms good enough so that they prefer half of that husband to all of another. And that's sort of a fun argument. And of course, if you legalize polyandry, you allowed a woman to marry multiple husbands, you have the same effect in reverse. So that's the easy, the easy model. And then the harder model is the sorting model. And even then, I only have a simple sorting model. My sorting model is one in which everybody's value as a spouse varies, but it's the same to all potential partners. And the real one is one in which not only do people have only”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of the terms of marriage, how much the husband agrees to do, to what extent the wife gets to make decisions, things like that. And you then allocate people in equilibrium price. And the real point of that section is that I'm arguing that the effect of polygyny or polyandry is the opposite of what people expect. That if you legalize polygyny, you allow it, make it legal for a man to have multiple wives. The result is to benefit women and maybe to harm men. Because if men can have multiple wives, that's going to bid up the price of a wife. It means that some men can, in effect, go on the market and try to bid for two wives instead of one.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh boy, I've been puzzled for quite a while on why online dating doesn't work better than it does, that in principle, a lot of dating is a sorting problem that not only are you not identical to another bearded Indian man of the same Indian ethnic man of the same age, your potential dates have different tastes so that it's really, I actually discussed some of this. I've got a chapter in my price theory text, which is really on what I think of as the marriage market, although it applies to dating more generally. And I have one model, which is the really simple economic model, in which in effect everybody is identical, and you have a market in which there's an implicit price.”
2021-08-09 · Dwarkesh Podcast · David Friedman - Dating Markets, Legal Systems, Bitcoin, and Automation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source