LW - The ants and the grasshopper by Richard Ngo

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The ants and the grasshopper, published by Richard Ngo on June 4, 2023 on LessWrong. One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food. “Did you not store up any food during the summer?” the ants ask. “No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.” The ants, disgusted, turn away and go back to work. One winter a grasshopper, starving and frail, approaches a colony of ants drying out their grain in the sun, to ask for food. “Did you not store up any food during the summer?” the ants ask. “No”, says the grasshopper. “I lost track of time, because I was singing and dancing all summer long.” The ants are sympathetic. “We wish we could help you”, they say, “but it sets up the wrong incentives. We need to conditionalize our philanthropy to avoid procrastination like yours leading to a shortfall of food.” And they turn away and go back to their work, with a renewed sense of purpose. ...And they turn away and go back to their work, with a flicker of pride kindling in their minds, for being the types of creatures that are too clever to help others when it would lead to bad long-term outcomes. ...And they turn away and go back to their work—all except for one, who brushes past the grasshopper and whispers “Meet me outside at dusk and I’ll bring you food. We can preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.” ...“Did you not store up any food during the summer?” the ants ask. “Of course I did”, the grasshopper says. “But it was all washed away by a flash flood, and now I have nothing.” The ants express their sympathy, and feed the grasshopper abundantly. The grasshopper rejoices, and tells others of the kindness and generosity shown to it. The ants start to receive dozens of requests for food, then hundreds, each accompanied by a compelling and tragic story of accidental loss. The ants cannot feed them all; they now have to assign additional workers to guard their doors and food supplies, and rue the day they ever gave food to the grasshopper. ...The ants start to receive dozens of requests for food, then hundreds, each accompanied by a compelling and tragic story of accidental loss—and while many are fraudulent, enough are real that they are moved to act. In order to set incentives correctly, the ants decide to only give food to those who can prove that they lost their food supplies through no fault of their own, and set up a system for vetting claims. This works well for a time—but as fraudsters grow more sophisticated, the ants’ bureaucratic requirements grow more onerous. In order to meet them, other creatures start to deposit their food in large group storehouses which can handle the administrative overhead. But now the food supply is exposed to systemic risk if the leaders of those storehouses make poor decisions, whether from carelessness or greed. One year several storehouses fail; in trying to fill the shortfall, the ants almost run out of food for themselves. To avoid that ever happening again, they set up stringent regulations and oversight of permissible storehouses, funded by taxes levied throughout the year. At first this takes only a small proportion of their labor—but as their regulatory apparatus inevitably grows, they need to oversee more and more aspects of the ecosystem, and are called upon to right more and more injustices. Eventually the ants—originally the most productive of all creatures—stop producing any food of their own, so busy are they in tending to the system they’ve created. They forget the mud and the muck of working the harvest, and are too preoccupied to hear feedback from those they're trying to help. And some, despite starting out with the best of intentions, are swept away by the heady rush of wielding power, ...