Bryan cites one from years ago, but in reality we reprise it in many different forms, about every three days or so:
Tyler: People like to think they’re special, but we’re all pretty much the same.
Me: No we’re not. Some people are really great; others are simply awful.
Tyler: That’s just the kind of thing people say to make themselves feel special.
Me: You don’t really believe that.
Tyler: Do too.
Me: What if we use the metric of your willingness-to-pay to spend an hour with a person?
There are a few awesome people you would pay thousands of dollars to
meet. But you’d pay hundreds of dollars to avoid an hour with most
people.Tyler: [3-second hesitation.] Well, it’s not clear why that should be the relevant metric.
Me: But it’s your metric!
Tyler: What’s so special about my metric?
Me: What’s so special about it? By definition, that metric
captures everything that you think matters. And by that very metric,
people are not "pretty much the same." They’re incredibly different.
It’s funny how Bryan thinks he can cite my actions as evidence against the correct belief. That’s absurd; for instance I also don’t act as if determinism is true, but citing that doesn’t settle the matter. I sometimes describe Bryan’s most basic world view as the belief that what is good is very very good and what is bad is very bad indeed. I am more likely to see endowment effects at work.
You’re going to have to define “pretty much the same” because otherwise you are pretty obviously wrong.
http://heightdifferentials.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Do the same thing to Bryan, find a point/person you disagree on, argue whether one of you is very bad and the other is very good, agree that neither is true, and conclude that people are pretty much the same. Voila!
“I knew a guy stories don’t count” — Russ Roberts
Robin, I can’t help but act as if I think determinism is false…
Why must there be only one relevant metric?
Isn’t the idea that all people are “pretty much the same” close enough to a universal claim that any contradictory evidence disproves it? If we can find one significant dimension in which people vary, couldn’t that justify claims of specialness?
“People” seems a very complex subject. What single metric could possibly cover its entirety?
I sense the need for an economists cage match.
Tyler, if you’re married, have you tried telling your wife that she’s not particularly special? Or have you pointed out to your payroll/HR department that there’s really not much difference between you and, say, any randomly selected teenager, migratory farm worker, convenience store clerk or construction laborer?
I’m with the Unnamed Commenter above — what does it mean to “act as if you don’t believe that determinism is true”? If you knew for sure what was determined, and tried to stop it, then such a statement would make sense; but most determinists don’t actually think they know precisely what it is that is determined.
Catching someone in an apparent contradiction is not the same as proving that person wrong. At best it demonstrates that they are not the best person to be debating.
I agree that the metric is not a good one to measure the specialness of a person. I wonder though whether a better metric would be to have a large group of people assess their willingness to pay for an hour with that person, and then average.
As far as I can tell, though, there’s no such metric that would rate someone with Ebola very highly: Nobody wants to spend an hour with them (and many would pay quite a lot not to), and you can’t even sell their organs for much money. Nevertheless, most of us would instinctively say that such a person is no less special than anyone else. If Bryan were to catch Ebola (god forbid) would he thus be forced to rate himself less special as a result?
Wait a minute. There seems to be money on the table in this game. Maybe I can not manage to be really awesome (if the offer goes to over a million I might surprise myself); however for a hundred dollars an hour or more I damn well can be horribly, excrutiatingly intolerable.
Who is paying – Brian or Tyler?
N.B. I am an ordinary creature that responds to incentives, just like somone special – and I am somewhat peculiar.
Tyler: how would you “act as if determinism is true”? As far as I can tell it’s not even coherent to not think that determinism is true and every way of acting is a subset of acting as if determinism is true.
Determinism cannot affect our actions, because whether free will exists or not (and I believe it does not), we perceive that it does. Regardless of whatever higher understanding we may fancy that we can grasp, we cannot escape our perceptions, therefore the ultimate truth or falsity of determinism is irrelevant.
A glass is usually part full and part empty.
I recently attended a small scientific conference on human evolution and the latest genome results, where the distinguished anthropologists John Tooby, a co-founder of evolutionary psychology, and Henry Harpending, a co-founder of genetic anthropology, squared off over this question of whether people are mostly the same or mostly different:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080512_human.htm
So who is right? Is the human race uniform or diverse?
Well, they’re both right. It all depends upon what you’re interested in at the moment.
That’s usually how it goes—the things that interest us the most, that get us most worked up, are those that are on the knife edge, that look different when viewed from different angles.
Let’s consider a similar question that’s remote enough that we can think about it without political biases getting in the way: Is the universe empty or full?
Outer space is famously empty. You can’t get much emptier than space. By one account, the universe is about 0.00000000000000000000000000001 as dense as water.
And yet, outer space is also famously full of “billions and billions” of stars, as Johnny Carson used to say when parodying astronomer Carl Sagan. In 2003, a team of Australian astronomers estimated that there are 70 sextillion stars in the known universe. That’s 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
Now, it’s perfectly reasonable to conceive of the universe both ways, depending upon what you need to think about at the time. The incredible emptiness of space is terribly important to understand if you are, say, contemplating an interstellar voyage. Nevertheless, to be frank, once you grasp that fact, it gets kind of boring to think about. So, astronomers spend more time thinking about the tiny fraction of space that isn’t empty, those 70 sextillion stars.
Similarly, the Wikipedia article on Human Genetic Variation reports DATE, “Two random humans are expected to differ at approximately 1 in 1000 nucleotides †¦”
Well, that’s not a very big number.
But Wikipedia goes on to say, “However, with a genome of approximate 3 billion nucleotides, on average two humans differ at approximately 3 million nucleotides.”
Well, three million is a pretty big number. (It’s not as big as 70 sextillion, but still †¦)
So, now we can see why, say, the African-American 7′-1″ basketball player Shaquille O’Neal and the Lebanese-Colombian 5′-1″ singer Shakira seem interestingly different.
Of course, probably they would not be very different at all compared to space aliens possibly living on a planet going around one of those 70 sextillion stars.
And if those aliens showed up in hostile flying saucers to conquer the human race, no doubt Shaq and Shakira and everybody else would team up to fight them off. Ronald Reagan said exactly this to the United Nations back in 1987:
“I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”[Address to the 42d Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, New York]
But, we’re not facing space aliens. So the differences between humans are interesting—and important.
When it comes to thinking about race —w hich is all about who your relatives are — it’s all, well, relative.
Unless Tyler actually does pay thousands of dollars for an hour of a person’s time, or hundreds of dollars to avoid another particular person, then this is not evidence regarding Tyler’s behavior, but evidence regarding Tyler’s beliefs about his hypothetical behavior, if a particular market did in fact exist.
1) When it comes to the shared view of Caplan and Cowen, Oscar Wilde’s quip leaps to mind: “An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” In short,to apply the Cowen metric to everything is to engage in philistinism . . . especially as it applies to the world of artistic creativity: literary, painting, sculpture, the theater, movies, and so on.
But then Bryan Caplan has stated at Econlog that he thinks Anye Rand is a great novelist! Whatever the ideological dogma of Rand amounts to, Atlas Shrugged shows her to be a third-rate writer: cardboard characters, wooden dialogue, and a half-disguised heavy-handed tract in the guise of a novel. And he has admitted, unlike other philistines, that he has had a “Randian contempt” for modern art. So do 80% probably of compulsive TV-watchers.
2) Are people equal?
It depends on the values on which they are being measured. In democratic countries, all citizens are equal as voters and should be equal before the law. Morally speaking, the most humble are often the most generous and courageous: the case, say, in Nazi-occupied Europe, when those who risked their lives to help Jews were from the working-class or peasantry . . . not the well-educated upper bourgeoisie. The same standard might apply to a father or mother or spouses.
Are they all equal in artistic, athletic, or professional talent or accomplishment? The question answers itself.
3) Why would anyone pay anyone else to spend time with them unless the payee is a journalist or writer? Or are we supposed to regard Caplan as a celebrity-worshiper . . . however he might define the celebrity in question?
Michael Gordon Aka, the buggy professor http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org
An hour with some big shot would be interesting, and could be expected to attract relatively large discrepancies in willingness to pay. But over longer periods – weeks, months, years, decades – I believe Tyler’s point would become self-evident.
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