Category: Philosophy
Good sentences
This leads us to the next of Freud’s major contributions to neuroscience: his realization that cognition is, at bottom, wishful.
That is from the new and notable Mark Solms, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. This is a good book for people who underrated Freud, or think he is a mere charlatan.
The Happiness Crash of 2020
From the still-active Sam Peltzman:
I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court.
Here is the paper, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
My very interesting Conversation with Arthur C. Brooks
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you’ll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that’s not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI’s effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he’s reading Josef Pieper, how he’ll face death, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What do you think of the view that books on happiness or the meaning of life, they’re a kind of placebo? They don’t help directly, but you feel you’ve done something to become happier, and the placebo is somewhat effective.
BROOKS: I think that there’s probably something to that, although there’s some pretty interesting new research that shows that the placebo effect is actually not real. Have you seen some of that new research?
COWEN: Yes, but I don’t believe it. Nocebos also seem to work in many situations.
BROOKS: I know. I take your broader point. I take your broader point. I think that the reason for that is that when people read most of the self-improvement literature, not just happiness literature, what happens is that they get a flush of epiphany, a new way of thinking. That feels really good. That feels really inspirational. The problem is it doesn’t take root.
It’s like the seeds that are thrown on a path in the biblical parable. They don’t go through the algorithm that I just talked about, and so not all of these things can be compared. I would not have gotten into this line of research and this line of teaching if I thought that it was just going to add another book to a long line of self-improvement books that make people feel good but don’t ultimately change their lives.
COWEN: Say a person reads a new and different book on happiness once a year at the beginning of the year. Now, under the placebo view, that’s a fine thing to do. It’ll get you a bit happier each year. Under your view, it seems there’s something wrong. Isn’t the placebo view doing a bit better there? You should read a book on happiness every year, a different one. It’ll revitalize you a bit. Whether or not it’s new only matters a little.
BROOKS: Yes. It might remind you of some things that you knew to be the truth that you had fallen away from. One of the things that I like to do is I like to read a good book by one of the church fathers, for example. They’re more or less saying the same thing. It reminds me of something that I learned as a boy and that I’ve forgotten as an adult. It might actually remind me to come back to many of these practices and many of these views.
I think that there are real insights. There’s real value that can come from science-based knowledge about how to live a better life. I think that you and I are both dedicated to science in the public interest and also science in the private interest as well. I think there is some good to be gotten through many of these ideas. Not all. Once again, not all happiness literature is created equal.
And:
COWEN: Why not cram all that contemplation of death into your last three months rather than your last 18 months? Do intertemporal substitution, right? Accelerate it. Ben Sasse probably is facing a pretty short timeline, but he’s done a remarkable job, even publicly, of coming to terms with what’s happening. Isn’t that better than two years of the same?
And:
COWEN: I think it’s fair to say what we call the right wing in America, it’s become much, much more Trumpy. Does this shift you to the left or make you question what the right wing was to begin with, or do you just feel lost and confused, or do you say, that’s great, I’m more Trumpy, too? How have you dealt with that emotionally and intellectually?
BROOKS: Yes. I’ll answer, but you’re going to have to answer after me, will you?
COWEN: Sure.
Interesting throughout.
Social Security Should Be a Forced Savings Program Not a Welfare Program
There is a growing movement to eliminate the wage cap on Social Security taxes while capping benefits. The argument, often from the center-right, is that Social Security is insolvent and that “tough” choices are needed to save it. But this moves the system in exactly the wrong direction.
One of the better features of Social Security is that it has never been purely redistributive. It has also functioned, in part, as a forced-savings program. The Social Security Administration itself emphasizes that benefits depend on earnings history: earn more, retire with more. Why do some people receive large Social Security checks? Because they paid a lot more into the system.
Eliminating the wage cap while capping benefits weakens, and in the limit destroys, that connection. It turns Social Security away from forced saving and toward retirement welfare financed by a broader tax on earnings. That is a bad idea.
The problem is not just that this creates another welfare program. It also worsens marginal incentives. A tax that buys you a claim on future benefits is not the same as a pure tax. Suppose 10 percent of your salary goes into a 401(k). That reduces current consumption, but it is not simply money lost to the state. You receive an asset in return. It is closer to a purchase than to a tax–a reason to work more not a reason to work less.
Social Security is not a personal retirement account, but it does contain that logic. There is a connection between taxes paid and benefits received. To the extent that workers understand that connection, the payroll tax is less distortionary than an ordinary tax of the same size. Part of what workers pay is offset by the expectation of future benefits.
Gut that connection, however, and the tax becomes more distortionary even if total taxes paid and total benefits received stay the same. The averages can remain unchanged while the marginal incentives deteriorate. Once additional taxes no longer generate additional benefits, the system looks much more like a straight tax on work.
A much better reform would move in the opposite direction: strengthen the link between contributions and benefits. Make Social Security more like what many people already think it is—an individual account that accumulates benefits over time. The stronger that link, the lower the effective tax wedge.
This would also improve the politics of the system. A welfare program invites zero-sum conflict: my benefit comes at your expense. A claim-based system is less divisive. It ties benefits more clearly to contributions and makes rising prosperity good for everyone. In that kind of system, we can all become richer—including low-wage immigrants—without treating retirement policy as a fight over who gets to pick whose pocket.
Addendum: James Buchanan first made these points here. John Cochrane gets the economics right, of course.
My excellent Conversation with Harvey Mansfield
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Harvey discuss how Machiavelli’s concept of fact was brand new, why his longest chapter is a how-to guide for conspiracy, whether America’s 20th-century wars refute the conspiratorial worldview, Trump as a Shakespearean vulgarian who is in some ways more democratic than the rest of us, why Bronze Age Pervert should not be taken as a model for Straussianism, the time he tried to introduce Nietzsche to Quine, why Rawls needed more Locke, what it was like to hear Churchill speak at Margate in 1953, whether great books are still being written, how his students have and haven’t changed over 61 years of teaching, the eclipse rather than decline of manliness, and what Aristotle got right about old age and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: From a Straussian perspective, where’s the role for the skills of a good analytic philosopher? How does that fit into Straussianism? I’ve never quite understood that. They seem to be very separate approaches, at least sociologically.
MANSFIELD: Analytic philosophers look for arguments and isolate them. Strauss looks for arguments and puts them in the context of a dialogue or the implicit dialogue. Instead of counting up one, two, three, four meanings of a word, as analytic philosophers do, he says, why is this argument appropriate for this audience and in this text? Why is it put where it was and not earlier or later?
Strauss treats an argument as if it were in a play, which has a plot and a background and a context, whereas analytic philosophy tries to withdraw the argument from where it was in Plato to see what would we think of it today and what other arguments can be said against it without really wanting to choose which is the truth.
COWEN: Are they complements or substitutes, the analytic approach and the Straussian approach?
MANSFIELD: I wouldn’t say complements, no. Strauss’s approach is to look at the context of an argument rather than to take it out of its context. To take it out of its context means to deprive it of the story that it represents. Analytic philosophy takes arguments out of their context and arranges them in an array. It then tries to compare those abstracted arguments.
Strauss doesn’t try to abstract, but he looks to the context. The context is always something doubtful. Every Platonic dialogue leaves something out. The Republic, for example, doesn’t tell you about what people love instead of how people defend things. Since that’s the case, every argument in such a dialogue is intentionally a bad argument. It’s meant for a particular person, and it’s set to him.
The analytic philosopher doesn’t understand that arguments, especially in a Platonic dialogue, can deliberately be inferior. It easily or too easily refutes the argument which you are supposed to take out of a Platonic dialogue and understand for yourself. Socrates always speaks down to people. He is better than his interlocutors. What you, as an observer or reader, are supposed to do is to take the argument that’s going down, that’s intended for somebody who doesn’t understand very well, and raise it to the level of the argument that Socrates would want to accept.
So to the extent that all great books have the character of this downward shift, all great books have the character of speaking down to someone and presenting truth in an inferior but still attractive way. The reader has to take that shift in view and raise it to the level that the author had. What I’m describing is irony. What distinguishes analytic philosophy from Strauss is the lack of irony in analytic philosophy. Philosophy must always take account of nonphilosophy or budding philosophers and not simply speak straight out and give a flat statement of what you think is true.
To go back to Rawls, Rawls based his philosophy on what he called public reason, which meant that the reason that convinces Rawls is no different from the reason that he gives out to the public. Whereas Strauss said reason is never public or universal in this way because it has to take account of the character of the audience, which is usually less reasonable than the author.
And yes he does tell us what Straussianism means and how to learn to be a Straussian. From his discussion you will see rather obviously that I am not one. Overall, I found this dialogue to be the most useful source I have found for figuring out how Straussianism fits into other things, such as analytics philosophy, historical reading of texts, and empirical social science.
Perhaps the exchange is a little slow to start, but otherwise fascinating throughout. I am also happy to recommend Harvey’s recent book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy.
Understanding Demonic Policies
Matt Yglesias has a good post on the UK’s Triple Lock, which requires that UK pensions rise in line with whichever is highest: wages, inflation, or 2.5 percent. Luis Garicano calls this “the single stupidest policy in the entire Western world” — and I’d be inclined to agree, if only the competition weren’t so fierce.
The triple lock guarantees that pensioner incomes grow at the expense of everything else, and the mechanism bites hardest when the economy is weakest. During the 2009 financial crisis wages fell and inflation declined, for example, yet pensioner incomes rose by 2.5 percent! (Technically this was under a double-lock period; the triple lock came slightly later — as if the lesson from the crisis was that the guarantee hadn’t been generous enough.)
Now, as Yglesias notes, if voters were actually happy with pensioner income growing at the expense of worker income, that would be one thing. But no one seems happy with the result. The same pattern is clear in the United States:
As I wrote in January, there is a pattern in American politics where per capita benefits for elderly people have gotten consistently more generous in the 21st century even as the ratio of retired people to working-age people has risen.
This keeps happening because it’s evidently what the voters want. Making public policy more generous to senior citizens enjoys both broad support among the mass public and it’s something that elites in the two parties find acceptable even if neither side is particularly enthusiastic about it. But what makes it a dark pattern in my view is that voters seem incredibly grumpy about the results.
Nobody’s saying things have been going great in America over the past quarter century.
Instead, the right is obsessed with the idea that mysterious forces of fraud have run off with all the money, while the left has convinced itself that billionaires aren’t paying any taxes.
But it’s not some huge secret why it seems like the government keeps spending and spending without us getting any amazing new public services — it’s transfers to the elderly.
The contradictions of “Elderism” are an example of rational irrationality. Individual voters bears essentially no cost for holding inconsistent political beliefs — wanting generous pensions and robust public services and low taxes is essentially free, since no single vote determines the outcome. The irrationality is individually rational and collectively ruinous. Voters are not necessarily confused about what they want; they simply face no price for wanting incompatible things. Arrow’s impossibility theorem adds another layer: even if each voter held perfectly coherent preferences, there is no reliable procedure for aggregating them into a coherent social choice. The grumpiness Yglesias documents may not reflect hypocrisy so much as the incoherence of demanding that collective choice makes sense — collective choice cannot be rationalized by coherent preferences and thus it’s perfectly possible that democracy can simultaneously “choose” generous pensions and “demand” better services for workers, with no mechanism to register the contradiction until the bill arrives.
Jürgen Habermas, RIP
Here is one obituary. My favorite book of his was
The moralization of artificial intelligence
We started by asking how moralized AI has become in public discourse. Analyzing 69,890 news headlines from 2018 to 2024, we found that AI was moralized at levels comparable to GMOs and vaccines, technologies whose moral opposition has been studied for decades. It ranked above both. The sharpest spike came within weeks of ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022.
When we surveyed representative samples of Americans, a majority of AI opponents said their views wouldn’t change even if AI proved safe and beneficial. That’s consequence insensitivity, the hallmark of moral conviction, not practical calculation. Across art, chatbots, legal tools, and romantic companions, AI moralization loaded onto a single latent factor. A global moral stance, dressed up in whatever practical language is available.
The behavioral data make this concrete: a one standard deviation increase in moralization scores predicted a 42% drop in actual AI usage, even when it would have benefited that person personally. The conviction preceded the behavior by up to 573 days.
The next time someone gives you three different reasons to oppose AI, each one dissolving under mild scrutiny, you’re probably not watching someone think. You’re watching someone feel.
Here is the tweet storm, here is the paper by de Mello, et.al.
Liberalism.org
…on March 12 we’ll be launching Liberalism.org, a new project from IHS [Institute for Humane Studies]. We’re aiming to build something akin to a modern-day coffee house of the liberal tradition—a digital gathering place where today’s most innovative liberal thinkers can weigh tradeoffs, think across differences, and apply liberal values to the challenges of today and the future.
The idea is to create a space that is serious but accessible—a home for exploring political, economic, intellectual, and civic freedom as a coherent and evolving tradition. We’re hoping it will serve as both an outlet for the ideas and a public-facing resource for those who care about the future of liberalism in its broad, classical sense.
A Fly Has Been Uploaded
In 2024, the entire neuronal diagram of the fruit-fly brain–some 140,000 neurons and 50 million connections–was mapped. Later research showed that the map could be used to predict behavior. Now, Eon Systems a firm with some of the scientists involved in the fruit-fly research and with the goal of uploading a human brain has announced that they uploaded the fruit fly brain to a digital environment.
The digital fly appears to behave in the digital environment in reasonably fly like ways–this is not a simulation, the fly’s “sensors” are being activated by the digital environment and the neurons are responding. Some more details here.
N.b. this work is not yet published.
Addendum 1: Of course Robin Hanson is an advisor to Eon Systems.
Addendum 2: In other news, human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom. No word on whether they were conscious or not.
A simple way to improve your thought and conclusions
Take some policy, action, or person whom you regard as morally questionable and indeed is morally questionable. That same policy, action, or person does some bad things, bad in conquentialist terms I now mean. Practically bad, utilitarian bad.
The odds are that you overrate the badness of those consequences by some considerable degree.
Even very smart people do this. Sometimes they do it more, because they can come up with more elaborate arguments for why the bad consequences are completely disastrous.
They might overrate the badness of those consequences by as much as 5x or 10x (gdp is a huge mound of stuff!).
So if you want to have better opinions, look for the cases where you do this and stop doing it.
Easy-peasy!
And good luck with that.
My Conversation with the excellent Henry Oliver
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. In the first half of the episode we discuss Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and then move on to other topics. Here is the episode summary:
Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry’s conviction that great literature is where ideas “walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world” in a way no other discipline can match. Tyler, who has called Henry’s book Second Act “one of the very best books written on talent,” sat down with him to compare readings of Measure for Measure and range across English literature more broadly.
Tyler and Henry trade rival readings of the play, debate whether Isabella secretly seduces Angelo, argue over whether the Duke’s proposal is closer to liberation or enslavement, trace the play’s connections to The Merchant of Venice and The Rape of Lucrece, assess the parallels to James I, weigh whether it’s a Girardian play (Oliver: emphatically not), and parse exactly what Isabella means when she says “I did yield to him,” before turning to the best way to consume Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift may be the most practically intelligent writer in English, how advertising really works and why most of it doesn’t, which works in English literature are under- and overrated, what makes someone a late bloomer, whether fiction will deal seriously with religion again, whether Ayn Rand’s villains are more relevant now than ever, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, before doing your current work, you were in advertising for almost a decade. How do you feel that work in advertising has shaped how you read literature?
OLIVER: [laughs] I try to keep them very separate. I try not to let advertising—
COWEN: You try, but I’m sure you fail.
OLIVER: —pollute my readings of literature.
COWEN: Why is it a pollution?
OLIVER: Because advertising is not a great art, and to apply the principles of advertising to literature would be a diminishment.
COWEN: You don’t have to apply the principles. Advertising gives you insight into what people value, how people respond, and that’s also a part of literature.
OLIVER: It is if you take advertising not to mean headlines and banner ads and things like that, but to mean the calling of attention to some particular thing of importance. You can see that a lot of the great writers were very good advertisers of their own work, of their own ideas.
COWEN: Swift in particular.
OLIVER: Swift is very, very good at advertising. If you wanted to be obtuse, you could reframe his whole career as an exercise in lobbying and PR, and realize that no one’s ever been as good at it as he was.
COWEN: So, your favorite authors are the ones who are best at advertising is what you’re now telling us.
OLIVER: I have a very catholic view of literature, and I admire those writers who are practical and can do a lot of different things. I love Samuel Johnson, and one reason is that he can write a sermon, a legal opinion, an advert—almost anything you want. I think the literary talent can often be turned to those multiple uses.
COWEN: Why isn’t there more creativity in advertising? So much of it, to me, seems stupid and boring.
OLIVER: Yes.
COWEN: You would think, well, if they had a clever ad that people would talk about, it would be better, but that doesn’t happen. Is it a market failure, or it’s actually more or less optimal?
OLIVER: I don’t think it’s optimal. We don’t know how well advertising works, and we’re still impeded in that because of the laws about who you can and cannot target on the internet. I think most people would actually be surprised, if they went into an advertising agency, to learn just how poorly we can target people. Everyone thinks they’re being targeted all the time, but being followed by a toaster advert is really quite basic, and everyone uses the same toaster example because everyone’s being followed by the same bloody toaster. That’s not targeting.
I think they’ve been taken over by bad ideas. There are two competing schools of advertising. One of them is the hard sell, where you put a lot of information and facts, and you name the product a lot. “Buy this aspirin. It cures headaches three times quicker than other brands. We did a study—38 percent of people . . .” And you just hammer it all the time.
The other advertising school is image-based. Arthur Rubicam wrote those wonderful Steinway adverts. The instrument of the immortals. Have you brought great music into your home? The woman in the dress at the piano. You’re buying a whole mood or a vibe. The peak of that is like the tiger on the Frosty cereal packet. You don’t need words. Or the Marlboro Man—you buy these cigarettes. You’re going to look like that cowboy in that shirt, and you’re going to smoke. You’re going to feel like a man, and it’s just going to be great. Coors Light does that now.
Then there was this terrible, terrible thing called the Creative Revolution in the 1960s, where supposedly—this is like the modernism of advertising.
Definitely recommended, and do get out your copy of the Shakespeare.
Addendum: Here are comments from Henry.
*Being and Time: An Annotated Translation*
Translated from the German by Cyril Welch.
Periodically I am asked if I have read Being and Time, and I always give the same response: “I have looked at every page.”
I also have spent time with it in German, though not for every page. But have I read it? Read it properly? Can anyone?
Is the book worth some study? Yes. But.
People, this volume is the best chance you are going to get.
Gaurav Ahuja interviews me
I very much enjoyed this exchange, print only, here is the link. Excerpt:
Gaurav: Going back to Iceland for a moment. I’ve never truly appreciated how old that parliament is. A thousand years is extraordinary. What is it about Iceland that has allowed that kind of continuity?
Tyler: Iceland was taken over by Denmark for quite a while. But the Icelanders persisted as an autonomous culture with their own language, not simply becoming Danish. They had this tradition of individualism, which you can read in the Icelandic sagas. Their own kind of common law, a good system of incentives built into the legal code, traditions of autonomy based on food supply and how you deal with the cold and the weather. For a long time, they just played defense. Then after World War II, they had a chance to transform it into what I think is one of the world’s most successful countries.
Their total population is around four hundred thousand. To do that with such numbers in a place that is not always hospitable is remarkable. They have almost entirely green energy. They’re super resourceful, very highly educated. Book sales per capita are through the ceiling. There’s something about their interest in poetry, legal codes, reading, what they do with those long winter nights, that has been quite persistent. That’s an informal institution, and it’s been very durable.
Is there anything in US policy that you see drawing us toward a short-term siren call that makes it harder to create a lasting democracy?
Our government fiscal policy is irresponsible. I hope we can survive it. I’m not a doom-and-gloomer, but thirty-eight trillion dollars in debt is not ideal. I don’t think we should try to run a balanced budget. T-bills play a key role in the world economy, and some amount of debt and deficit is good for us, good for the world. But we’re pushing it too far. We underinvest in our young people, underinvest in parts of our education. But look, we’re a pretty successful country.
There’s this interesting tension between wanting a stable environment to build something that lasts and needing to ride a new wave for something to emerge in the first place.
I was recently thinking about how much the bad weather in the United States is functional for some larger purpose. You learn early that you have to deal with things. You need a certain kind of independence, planning, and preparation.
British weather is quite benevolent. Maybe it’s too gray, but it’s not going to kill you. American weather, hurricanes, blizzards, flooding, is very volatile. We don’t always feel it because we’ve become wealthy, but maybe in part we had to become wealthy to deal with that volatility. That might be a blessing in disguise. It’s related to the earlier point about Iceland. It’s tough there. You’d better be pretty adaptive. A perfectly stable environment is not ideal either.
Interesting throughout, and plenty of fresh material. The weather point I owe to conversations with Henry Oliver and Rebecca Lowe.
Colin McGinn’s “My Honest Views”
I think David Lewis was off his rocker, I think Donald Davidson was far too impressed by elementary logic and decision theory, I think Willard Quine was a mediocre logician with some philosophical side-interests, I think Daniel Dennett never understood philosophy, I think Michael Dummett was a dimwit outside of his narrow specializations, I think P.F. Strawson struggled to understand much of philosophy, I think Gilbert Ryle was a classicist who wanted philosophy gone by any means necessary, I think Gareth Evans had no philosophical depth, I think John Searle was a philosophical lightweight, I think Jerry Fodor had no idea about philosophy and didn’t care, I think Saul Kripke was a mathematician with a passing interest in certain limited areas of philosophy, I think Hilary Putnam was a scientist-linguist who found philosophy incomprehensible, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosophical ignoramus too arrogant to learn some history, I think Bertrand Russell was only interested in skepticism, I think Gottlob Frege was a middling mathematician with no other philosophical interests, I think the positivists were well-meaning idiots, I think Edmund Husserl had no interest in anything outside his own consciousness, I think Martin Heidegger and John-Paul Sartre were mainly psychological politicians, I think John Austin was a scientifically illiterate language student, I think Noam Chomsky was neither a professional linguist nor a philosopher nor a psychologist but some sort of uneasy combination, I think the vast majority of current philosophers have no idea what philosophy is about and struggle to come to terms with it, I think philosophy has been a shambles since Descartes, I think Plato and Aristotle were philosophical preschoolers, I think no one has ever really grasped the nature of philosophical problems, I think the human brain is a hotbed of bad philosophy (and that is its great glory).
Here is the link, via The Browser. My honest view is that he is worrying too much about other people, and not enough about issues.