AM

Arturo Macias

Economist, Risk Manager @ Banco de España
17 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)

Bio

I am an Economist working at the Financial Risk Department of Banco de España (Spanish Central Bank). I was born in 1977 and I have recently finished my PhD Thesis (See ORCID webpage:  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1623-0957 ).

How I can help others

Risk Management, banking regulation, energy and commodities, mechanism design.

Comments
210

Yes, there are some measures, but beware of Goodhart Law: if you over-incentive consensus, you get herd behaviour. Many "consensus building" mechanisms end producing the same kind of problems as "peer review": conformity, statu quo bias, and above all, guild mentality. In Law, external measures of goodness (that counterbalance statu quo bias) are even more difficult to create than in academy...

https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/02/the-academic-culture-of-fraud/

I disagree. Blindness is the main attribute of Justice. Rawls and the Romans were right. Meritocracy is nice at the gates of the career, but how do you measure merit among the chief justices? Any mechanism different from the lottery will become a battlefield.

Moreover, I don’t believe in merit among the experienced Justices. Law is not like chess or Physics. It is about consensus, and intuitiveness. There is not a real object to be discovered by the jurisconsult, but a mix of system, continuity, social agreement, and a bit of game theoretical intuitions. Who is the “best” at that?

Regarding the views of the population, I am for judicial review by the legislature, but not in the late stages of the career, because the closer to the high court is the political intervention, the higher becomes the risk of capture.

I find that ending "factory farming" in the western world is possible in less than 40 years. The real problem here is veganism: people need animal proteins, and by pushing veganism, the animal welfare activist look like crazy bolsheviks. 

What is the animal welfare equivalent of socialdemocracy? In my view, expanding the rumninants husbandry (becuase the true horror is farmed hens and pork), killing fishes by electrical stunning instead of suffocation, and above all, join with western farmers for total protectionism, because farmers are for efficiency (and cruelty) mostly for fear of foreing competition.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L6wdRBCh3izCD244t/farmers-in-the-animalist-coalition

At the end, electrical utilities are the main lobby for climate change mitigation. Western farmers can be the same for animal welfare.  

But even if you think that more can be done, what do you think as its use to create “expert panels” including the Supreme Court?

It looks so natural that it is increíble that Sortition (among professional justices) for High Courts is not universal.

I would use it for expert panels (above all, the Supreme Court), never for the executive or the Legislative.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PyqPr4z76Z8xGZL22/sortition

I entirely support your cause, while is there any similar regulation to avoid the importation of Frankenchicken meat? In animal welfare, for me the most important policy is to support protectionism in the meat/dairy/eggs markets. Animal welfare activist and farmers have a common enemy: imports. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L6wdRBCh3izCD244t/farmers-in-the-animalist-coalition

We are designed for social computation, not for individual rationality. Beyond the papers I comment in the pre-print, this book is a modern synthesis of Cultural Evolution Theory:

Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences

https://www.amazon.es/Cultural-Evolution-Darwinian-Synthesize-Sciences/dp/0226520447

Thank you for your reference of Gonzalez's paper. 

Of course! The detailed historical examples. No amount of abstract knowledge can substitute historical discussion.

In fact the academic version (the logic of political survival) is for me less interesting, because it is too much based on data analysis instead of cases.

Thank you very much! I think you will find this interesting:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aCEuvHrqzmBroNQPT/the-evolution-towards-the-blank-slate

The second epigraph is where it gets interesting for you:

This article surveys the evolutionary and game theoretical literature and suggests a new synthesis in the nature-nurture controversy. Gintian strong reciprocity is proposed as the main synthetic theory for evolutionary anthropology, and the thesis here defended is that the humanization process has been mainly one of “de-instinctivation”, that is, the substitution of hardwired behavior by the capabilities to handle cultural objects.

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