#reward hacking

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Solar is a market for (financial) lemons

There are only four more days left in my Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Rooftop solar is the future, but it's also a scam. It didn't have to be, but America decided that the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, clean and renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it's in terrible trouble. which means we are in terrible trouble.

There's a (superficial) good case for turning markets loose on the problem of financing the rollout of an entirely new kind of energy provision across a large and heterogeneous nation. As capitalism's champions (and apologists) have observed since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, markets harness together the work of thousands or even millions of strangers in pursuit of a common goal, without all those people having to agree on a single approach or plan of action. Merely dangle the incentive of profit before the market's teeming participants and they will align themselves towards it, like iron filings all snapping into formation towards a magnet.

But markets have a problem: they are prone to "reward hacking." This is a term from AI research: tell your AI that you want it to do something, and it will find the fastest and most efficient way of doing it, even if that method is one that actually destroys the reason you were pursuing the goal in the first place.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/engineering/failure-modes-in-machine-learning

For example: if you use an AI to come up with a Roomba that doesn't bang into furniture, you might tell that Roomba to avoid collisions. However, the Roomba is only designed to register collisions with its front-facing sensor. Turn the Roomba loose and it will quickly hit on the tactic of racing around the room in reverse, banging into all your furniture repeatedly, while never registering a single collision:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/04/when-ais-start-hacking.html

This is sometimes called the "alignment problem." High-speed, probabilistic systems that can't be fully predicted in advance can very quickly run off the rails. It's an idea that pre-dates AI, of course – think of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. But AI produces these perverse outcomes at scale…and so does capitalism.

Many sf writers have observed the odd phenomenon of corporate AI executives spinning bad sci-fi scenarios about their AIs inadvertently destroying the human race by spinning off in some kind of paperclip-maximizing reward-hack that reduces the whole planet to grey goo in order to make more paperclips. This idea is very implausible (to say the least), but the fact that so many corporate leaders are obsessed with autonomous systems reward-hacking their way into catastrophe tells us something about corporate executives, even if it has no predictive value for understanding the future of technology.

Both Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross have theorized that the source of these anxieties isn't AI – it's corporations. Corporations are these equilibrium-seeking complex machines that can't be programmed, only prompted. CEOs know that they don't actually run their companies, and it haunts them, because while they can decompose a company into all its constituent elements – capital, labor, procedures – they can't get this model-train set to go around the loop:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Stross calls corporations "Slow AI," a pernicious artificial life-form that acts like a pedantic genie, always on the hunt for ways to destroy you while still strictly following your directions. Markets are an extremely reliable way to find the most awful alignment problems – but by the time they've surfaced them, they've also destroyed the thing you were hoping to improve with your market mechanism.

Which brings me back to solar, as practiced in America. In a long Time feature, Alana Semuels describes the waves of bankruptcies, revealed frauds, and even confiscation of homeowners' houses arising from a decade of financialized solar:

https://time.com/6565415/rooftop-solar-industry-collapse/

The problem starts with a pretty common finance puzzle: solar pays off big over its lifespan, saving the homeowner money and insulating them from price-shocks, emergency power outages, and other horrors. But solar requires a large upfront investment, which many homeowners can't afford to make. To resolve this, the finance industry extends credit to homeowners (lets them borrow money) and gets paid back out of the savings the homeowner realizes over the years to come.

But of course, this requires a lot of capital, and homeowners still might not see the wisdom of paying even some of the price of solar and taking on debt for a benefit they won't even realize until the whole debt is paid off. So the government moved in to tinker with the markets, injecting prompts into the slow AIs to see if it could coax the system into producing a faster solar rollout – say, one that didn't have to rely on waves of deadly power-outages during storms, heatwaves, fires, etc, to convince homeowners to get on board because they'd have experienced the pain of sitting through those disasters in the dark.

The government created subsidies – tax credits, direct cash, and mixes thereof – in the expectation that Wall Street would see all these credits and subsidies that everyday people were entitled to and go on the hunt for them. And they did! Armies of fast-talking sales-reps fanned out across America, ringing dooorbells and sticking fliers in mailboxes, and lying like hell about how your new solar roof was gonna work out for you.

These hustlers tricked old and vulnerable people into signing up for arrangements that saw them saddled with ballooning debt payments (after a honeymoon period at a super-low teaser rate), backstopped by liens on their houses, which meant that missing a payment could mean losing your home. They underprovisioned the solar that they installed, leaving homeowners with sky-high electrical bills on top of those debt payments.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it shares a lot of DNA with the subprime housing bubble, where fast-talking salesmen conned vulnerable people into taking out predatory mortgages with sky-high rates that kicked in after a honeymoon period, promising buyers that the rising value of housing would offset any losses from that high rate.

These fraudsters knew they were acquiring toxic assets, but it didn't matter, because they were bundling up those assets into "collateralized debt obligations" – exotic black-box "derivatives" that could be sold onto pension funds, retail investors, and other suckers.

This is likewise true of solar, where the tax-credits, subsidies and other income streams that these new solar installations offgassed were captured and turned into bonds that were sold into the financial markets, producing an insatiable demand for more rooftop solar installations, and that meant lots more fraud.

Which brings us to today, where homeowners across America are waking up to discover that their power bills have gone up thanks to their solar arrays, even as the giant, financialized solar firms that supplied them are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, thanks to waves of defaults. Meanwhile, all those bonds that were created from solar installations are ticking timebombs, sitting on institutions' balance-sheets, waiting to go blooie once the defaults cross some unpredictable threshold.

Markets are very efficient at mobilizing capital for growth opportunities. America has a lot of rooftop solar. But 70% of that solar isn't owned by the homeowner – it's owned by a solar company, which is to say, "a finance company that happens to sell solar":

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solarcity-maintains-34-residential-solar-market-share-in-1h-2015/406552/

And markets are very efficient at reward hacking. The point of any market is to multiply capital. If the only way to multiply the capital is through building solar, then you get solar. But the finance sector specializes in making the capital multiply as much as possible while doing as little as possible on the solar front. Huge chunks of those federal subsidies were gobbled up by junk-fees and other financial tricks – sometimes more than 100%.

The solar companies would be in even worse trouble, but they also tricked all their victims into signing binding arbitration waivers that deny them the power to sue and force them to have their grievances heard by fake judges who are paid by the solar companies to decide whether the solar companies have done anything wrong. You will not be surprised to learn that the arbitrators are reluctant to find against their paymasters.

I had a sense that all this was going on even before I read Semuels' excellent article. We bought a solar installation from Treeium, a highly rated, giant Southern California solar installer. We got an incredibly hard sell from them to get our solar "for free" – that is, through these financial arrangements – but I'd just sold a book and I had cash on hand and I was adamant that we were just going to pay upfront. As soon as that was clear, Treeium's ardor palpably cooled. We ended up with a grossly defective, unsafe and underpowered solar installation that has cost more than $10,000 to bring into a functional state (using another vendor). I briefly considered suing Treeium (I had insisted on striking the binding arbitration waiver from the contract) but in the end, I decided life was too short.

The thing is, solar is amazing. We love running our house on sunshine. But markets have proven – again and again – to be an unreliable and even dangerous way to improve Americans' homes and make them more resilient. After all, Americans' homes are the largest asset they are apt to own, which makes them irresistible targets for scammers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

That's why the subprime scammers targets Americans' homes in the 2000s, and it's why the house-stealing fraudsters who blanket the country in "We Buy Ugly Homes" are targeting them now. Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/

America can and should electrify and solarize. There are serious logistical challenges related to sourcing the underlying materials and deploying the labor, but those challenges are grossly overrated by people who assume the only way we can approach them is though markets, those monkey's paw curses that always find a way to snatch profitable defeat from the jaws of useful victory.

To get a sense of how the engineering challenges of electrification could be met, read McArthur fellow Saul Griffith's excellent popular engineering text Electrify:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

And to really understand the transformative power of solar, don't miss Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works, where you'll learn that we could give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder) by capturing just 0.4% of the solar rays that reach Earth's surface:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

But we won't get there with markets. All markets will do is create incentives to cheat. Think of the market for "carbon offsets," which were supposed to substitute markets for direct regulation, and which produced a fraud-riddled market for lemons that sells indulgences to our worst polluters, who go on destroying our planet and our future:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

We can address the climate emergency, but not by prompting the slow AI and hoping it doesn't figure out a way to reward-hack its way to giant profits while doing nothing. Founder and chairman of Goodleap, Hayes Barnard, is one of the 400 richest people in the world – a fortune built on scammers who tricked old people into signing away their homes for nonfunctional solar):

https://www.forbes.com/profile/hayes-barnard/?sh=40d596362b28

If governments are willing to spend billions incentivizing rooftop solar, they can simply spend billions installing rooftop solar – no Slow AI required.

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28 - TOMORROW!) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/#sign-here

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image:

Future Atlas/www.futureatlas.com/blog (modified)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/87913776@N00/3996366952

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CC BY 2.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

J Doll (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Sky_%28140451293%29.jpeg

CC BY 3.0

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[fipindustries]

i love this idea that the reason humanity didnt evolve to manipulate the MM field was because instead of using it to rewrite the timeline to give us ourselves great powers we would have used it to makeourselves just happy and satisfied and would die of thrist and hunger without knowing

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

ADHD & Chronic Task Avoidance

Future ADHD

[abirddogmoment]

Rory pointed a grouse so good this morning, it was so awesome to see the conviction in her point and her steadiness until I moved closer to her and sent her to flush it !!!!!!!

[crypticcanidae]

okay so i saw a post recently that introduced me to. several kinda badly written vg codex entries. but specifically the entries 'halla's resolve' and 'contract: the next march'. i didn't find either of those when i played the game, so when i read them i kinda just. yknow. fucking what???

i have Some Thoughts about them. and some of the implications they have for. thedas' worldbuilding? idk. i've done my best to make this readable

halla's resolve mentions 'mutual respect that began when Antiva stood strong with the Dales'.

this is a retcon, right? i know that's been thrown at a lot of things in vg regardless of if it's correct or not but. this for sure is i think? there's never been mention of anything like this before?

antiva and the dales are pretty far apart, geographically. they have orlais, nevarra, and the free marches between them on land. by sea, antivan ships could follow the coast down into the waking sea, but that's assuming the dales have access to the sea and weren't cut off by orlesian territory. the dales also seem to have been fairly isolationist, and happy to keep to themselves as long as no one bothered them - understandable, given the elves had only been freed from the imperium for. a couple hundred years? but not really conducive to forming alliances with neighbours.

overall, the dales and antiva weren't close enough for sheer proximity to have forced any sort of friendship to form, and even if they were, the elves may not have been interested (which again. fair enough, honestly.), but there was also little reason for them to form any sort of relationship through trade or anything else. the dales don't really seem to have had any ties to the human nations around them, and none of those nations would really have had any reason to be willing to oppose the orlesian empire for the dales.

also. during the exalted march against the dales, antiva was. kinda busy? fending off an invasion? so they probably wouldn't have been able to help, even if they wanted to. (this is how i can tell i'm putting more thought into a 30-word codex entry than the writers did, i spent like half an hour on the wiki throwing together a timeline to figure out what events were happening around the fall of the dales lmao. and i looked at a map of thedas. i'm not entirely convinced the writers did that either.)

mutual respect between who exactly? the nations of the dales and antiva, one of which was destroyed? the nation of antiva and the dalish people? we don't have reason to believe antiva's elves are treated any better than in the rest of thedas.

if we ignore all that and assume that antiva was, for some reason, involved in the exalted march, on the side of the dales. shouldn't this have had consequences we would have heard about? given that they lost? was the antiva of the glory age more supportive of elves than every other andrastian nation, and those elves were simply blamed for dragging antiva into their war until any support had vanished? did orlais seek any sort of retribution against antiva for siding with their enemy? we know thedas' people can hold grudges for centuries, given that elves and mages are still mistreated for actions over seven hundred and a thousand years old, respectively. what impact did siding with the elves and then losing actually have??

contract: the next march has the line 'If nations march on the elves, Antiva will not be silent. Never again.'

does this not directly contradict halla's resolve? to me, this one implies that when the dales were destroyed antiva stayed out of it, but the other one implies antiva directly involved itself in some way. which is it?? (or is this just another casualty of vg being scraped out of joplin and morrison's corpses in. what. 2 years? like how the griffons are simultaneously both a decade old and also still babies. yes im still pissed abt that.)

or is the implication here that the crows wouldn't allow antiva to be silent in the event of another march? in which case. other people have already said plenty abt vg portraying the crows as a family of friendly freedom fighters (and i do not buy the justification that house arainai was actually the only house buying slaves and abusing it's assassins. arainai was first, then second talon until shortly before the fifth blight, if anything they would have been the gold standard for how crow houses operate. also. zevran deserves better.) the crows are an organisation of contract killers. yes, entire houses can be hired for an operation, and presumably the crows as a whole, if you had enough money, but that brings up another problem for me (actually a couple):

who hired the crows for this contract? with what money? and what are the targets? 1. presumably, the dalish in an effort to protect themselves in the future, but was this something arranged by one elf, or one clan, or was this debated and decided by every clan at an arlathvhen or several? 2. the dalish are self-sufficient nomads, with only a few clans willing to trade with humans. they can likely make a decent amount of coing through that, but not enough to hire enough crows to ensure a response from all of antiva. the most valuable things most clans probably have are artifacts from the dales, which they would never part with willingly given that their culture is built around preserving and recovering as much of the dales as possible (which. why are the veiljumpers dedicated to recovering arlathan? where did they even come from? what was bellara's clan like? was she their first? did she want to be a keeper? and also. how does the lords of fortune's dalish expert work? do the lords get paid for returning elven artifacts? with what money? what about old human or dwarven artifacts? how many advisors do the lords have? which cultures get advisors?). 3. if a march is called against the elves. do the crows murder every chantry official in antiva? blackmail the nobility into noncompliance? what are they actually supposed to do against a march??

contract: the next march's wiki page also notes the game files have a comment abt this entry, 'A standing contract should the elven nation come to threat.'

as i've noted before, there currently isn't an elven nation. unless vg is canonising the origins boon of the elves being granted land in ferelden! (and it's somehow survived the unspecified incident alistair can mention in da2). which is an odd choice but at this point. what the hell sure. that's why there's no dalish or city elves in vg, they're all actually getting blighted to starvation down in ferelden. which, if we're ignoring worldstate canons, could have three circles now! kinloch hold, the orzammar circle (the chantry prevents an independent circle so mages might head to orzammar anyway), and the jainen circle (from da legends, the mobile? game) which is mentioned in this crossroads note (the only good thing vg did).

also that timeline i mentioned, just in case anyone wants to check what i'm working off here

-165 ancient - land of the dales given to the elves

-30 ancient - nation of antiva formed

1:05 divine - darkspawn emerge in anderfels, second blight begins

1:16 divine - battle of cumberland

1:20 divine - nevarran accord signed, circle/templars/seekers founded

1:25 divine - darkspawn nearly destroy montsimmard, dales provide no assistance

1:31 divine - darkspawn assault minrathous, city survives but imperium is weakened. drakon's forces relieve siege of weisshaupt, conquer and convert anderfels.

1:40 divine - ferelden alamarri unite against darkspawn

1:45 divine - drakon dies, andrastianism becomes popular in antiva

1:50 divine - alamarri defeat chasind and avvar

1:65 divine - anderfels declare independence from orlais

1:95 divine - zazikel killed at starkhaven

2:09 glory - dales-orlais war breaks out after red crossing

2:10 glory - elves capture montsimmard, reach val royeaux. exalted march called, only orlais provides troops.

2:15 glory - starkhaven begins conquering free marches and antiva with tevinter support

2:20 glory - halamshiral conquered, elves split between city and dalish elves

2:33 glory - antivan cities ally with each other and free marches cities for defence

2:45 glory - starkhaven betrayed and annexed by tevinter

and some notes i couldn't really fit into the timeline

the imperium abandons the anderfels as the darkspawn spread east, at some point in the 26 years between the blight beginning and the darkspawn assaulting minrathous

drakon's armies are present at every major battle against the darkspawn across thedas, and they spread the chant of light everywhere they go

the elves don't help against the blight because they don't consider the orlesian empire to be any better than the imperium - this one's difficult because. yknow. the blight's an apocalypse, how can you not try to fight that? but also again. the elves have good reason not to trust humans. and if they had sent soldiers to combat the blight, who's to say orlais wouldn't have taken the chance to conquer the dales while they were weakened, even in the middle of a blight? they did exactly that in the anderfels, after all.

drakon's heir is ineffective militarily and politically, leading to a lot more damage from the blight, and creating the conditions for the anderfels to seek independence

the first dated crow contract (possibly just the first notable enough to be recorded?) was in 3:09 towers. the crows themselves began as an arm of the chantry in antiva. andrastianism, and then the orlesian chantry, was only becoming popular in antiva by 1:45 divine. the crows aren't mentioned in regards to starkhaven's invasion attempt in the glory age - does that mean they didn't quite exist yet, or that they just didn't have the power/influence to make an impact?

[bluejaybytes]

hey guys rate my build

[chasing-chimeras]

my kingdom for a thiam edit using "various storms & saints" by florence, but it's past sceo, current (tense) thiam, with a heavy dose of tara ripping her heart out of theo's chest at "hold onto your heart" as it transitions from s5-s6 heavy scenes. does anyone see the vision? like opening with sceo, then liam killing scott at theo's instigation, then tara, then painful post-sceo s6 and thiam's staggered progression with past sceo lingering throughout?? is this making sense??? anyone who makes edits who sees the vision please i'm crawling on all fours across broken cobblestone and frothing at the mouth

[seabeck]

I decided I’m going to add Eevee to an earlier route in my ROM hack (currently have it spawning in its Let’s Go route and some grass I added to Celadon city) because you get Eevee as soon as you can buy evolution stones so, unless you don’t evolve it asap, you’re not spending much time with Eevee.

Now I gotta decide what Pokémon to change the gift eevee to.

[satancopilotsmytardis]

it genuinely never fails to amaze me how quickly you're able to write such phenomenal work. like who did u sell ur soul to

Thanks! No demon deal needed tho, the more you write, the faster you'll get at it. When I started in middle school, 50k for Nanowrimo seemed impossible. Now I can bang that out in 5 days if I don't have other work to do. Writing is a skill, and just like any other, practice will make you better at it and able to produce things of a consistent quality faster

[fe4rm0nger]

Yay i finally did it yippee :>

[heinrixvancunt]

i do want to play an evil karma courier in fnv bc i'm bored of always being everyone's saviour 🙄

[freegiftcard1000]

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[abirddogmoment]

Never not eating vegetation

[codderanged]

Using my math homework and Catching Strays to get stuff done... Every time I get a question right I write a little sentence as reward. Constant positive feedback loop...

[angelmotifs]

this has been such a boring year for television that its either going to make the emmys really interesting or really boring

[starbuck]

15/28 books for the coming year have been secured… i’m trying to be financially strategic, so the remaining ones are all scheduled to be read AFTER my birthday except for a mythical copy of Anna Karenina my mom is trying to track down for me. We’ve been looking for three days and every time i suggest we might have given it away, she invents a new place it might be.