Category: Philosophy

"Playboy Archives Go Digital," so read The Wall Street Journal headline from last week.  That’s right, 636 issues, on six discs, $100 per disc.

Have you noticed that storage is really, really cheap these days?  Have you studied the durable goods monopoly problem?  Once you’ve accumulated a stock of durable material, at some point you will sell off successive units very very cheaply.  Have you noticed that costs of electronic reproduction — call it marginal cost — are really, really low these days?  Have you noticed there is a massive stock of accumulated pornographic images?

Hmm…try graphing that equilibrium.

Call me clueless, as I have very little direct knowledge of pornography.  But I don’t understand why buyers demand such a regular flow of material.  Why don’t they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um…busy…for many years?  I believe also that fetishes are fairly stable and predictable.  You don’t need to see "the new porn" to know what you will want to get off on.

As I observe the sector, buyers cough up new money all the time, and they buy relatively small units of output, and at relatively high prices.

Please "splain" it to me, as they say…

One possibility is the neuroeconomics explanation that buying the material yields more pleasure than "using" it.  Maybe porn and cookbooks have something in common after all.

“The secret of boring people lies in telling them everything“

That is from Anton Chekhov, of course today is his birthday.  Here are other quotations from Chekhov.

For my forty-fifth birthday we ate brunch at a now-in-slight-decline Bob’s Noodle 66, saw the excellent Pan’s Labyrinth, and I slow-cooked a Chinese lamb casserole for dinner.  My presents included a snow brush to clear the car — which I needed today –, a CD of electric guitar desert music from Niger, and Neuberger dark chocolate from Sao Tome.

I am not close to starting Civilization IV, I am slowly reading through the works of Roberto Bolaño, watching Monty Python on YouTube with Yana, and interviewing four job candidates in the next week and a half. 

I am continually reminded what wonderful readers Alex and I have — one of the best such groups in the world — and we thank you for visiting the blog and making our lives richer. 

I am already grateful for what the next year will bring, and now to ponder tomorrow’s posts…

Eric Schwitzgebel reports:

Philosophers since Descartes have been taken with the idea that we know our
own conscious experiences or "phenomenology" directly and with a high
level of certainty.  Although infallibilism in this regard has been under
heavy attack since the 1960’s, philosophers still generally assume that our knowledge
of our own phenomenology is quite good and that, for example, we are extremely
unlikely to be grossly mistaken about our own current phenomenology when we
concentrate extended attention on it.  I argue against this claim.

In "How
Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation",
Michael S. Gordon and I argue that although there is something it is like for a
human being to echolocate, we have very poor knowledge of the experience of
echolocation.  In "How
Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Imagery" I
suggest that our knowledge of even something as basic and prevalent as our
visual imagery is surprisingly poor.  In "Why Did
We Think We Dreamed in Black and White?", I present the common 1950’s
opinion that we dream primarily in black and white as an example of a case in
which people have been grossly mistaken about their own subjective experiences.
("Do People Still Report Dreaming in Black and White? An Attempt to Replicate a Questionnaire from
1942" provides empirical evidence that popular opinion about the
presence of colors in our dreams has indeed changed since that period.)

"The
Unreliability of Naive Introspection" provides a brief general overview
of several domains in which introspection of conscious experience appears to be
unreliable.  A more ambitious general paper on this topic is in the works.

"Introspective
Training: Reflections on Titchener’s Lab Manual" explores, through an
examination of the historical case of E.B. Titchener, the prospects of training
to improve the quality of introspective judgments.  "Difference
Tone Training: A Demonstration Adapted from Titchener’s Experimental Psychology"
provides the reader the opportunity to train herself in a roughly Titchenerian
way.

I am also working on a book manuscript with Russell T. Hurlburt, a
psychologist at UN Las Vegas and a leading proponent of experience sampling as a
means of generating accurate descriptions of moments of conscious
experience.  The book centers around an edited transcript of a series of
interviews Russ and I jointly conducted with a subject who was wearing a random
beeper and who was asked to take note of her experiences whenever the beeper
went off.  In the course of the interview, Russ and I concretely confront
the question of how much to believe the subject’s reports of randomly selected
moments of her experience.  If her reports are largely accurate, then the
transcripts also provide, in unprecedented detail, a portrait of moments of an
ordinary person’s phenomenology.

Read his home page and blog.  Here is Eric on conjugal love.

Addendum: Will Bryan Caplan take the bait and present his argument that such studies are a priori false because the studies themselves rely on data from consciousness?  Of course this counterargument is wrong.  We can make lots of mistakes, but still hold the capacity to measure some of those mistakes.

If we cannot discount the interests of the fetus simply because it is not yet with us as a person, then how can one morally justify legal abortion as a coherent national policy?…I find it hard to construct a really compelling argument in favour of abortion which does not rest in some way on discounting the utility of the fetus-as-future-person.

There is much more at the link.  This is a real ouch, her barbs are directed at left-liberals but they do not stop there.  In my view we should subsidize births, keeping in mind that the long-run is the relevant time horizon.  I also believe a free and wealthy society will, at some point, have many more people than the alternatives, and on an ongoing basis.  As for what kind of restrictions on abortion are a good way to subsidize births, that is a very tricky question, especially keeping in mind I am not a pure utilitarian but rather a pluralist…I am not in Chicago to debate it with all the other economists as we are celebrating Yana’s 17th birthday in Miami…

There are “repeatable” fundamental “kinds”, which explains why there are relations of causal necessity.  Realism about universals confuses the semantic generality of concepts
for ontological generality.  “Instantiation” and “exemplification”
relations add nothing useful to property instances (tropes).

So there, you scoundrels!  Will Wilkinson has more, in his very entertaining post.  Why can’t we get more of this from him?

Life is a business that does not cover the costs.

Artur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

A few points:

1. Whatever the chance that the future (or rather our role in it) simply won’t exist, that should be discounted directly by the relevant probability of extinction.  That said, while I do worry about asteroids, I take this probability to be relatively small over the next five hundred years.

2. Our uncertainty about the future is good reason for performing an expected value calculation, but it does not provide additional reason for time discounting.  It will shape the p’s that go into the expected value calculation.

3. Austrians and Knightians may believe that our uncertainty about the future is deeply radical and that the entire expected value calculation is meaningless. 

I am closer to a Bayesian myself.  But even if we take the Knightian view at face value, it does not diminish the importance of the future.  Whether or not we call expected value calculations "scientific" or "stupid," we still need to make choices about the future.  A woman might think "I simply can’t imagine what sort of man I might marry."  He might even be some hitherto unimagined extraterrestrial being.  But her parents should still set aside some money for the possible ceremony. 

To make the uncertainty stronger and more general, perhaps the parents think "We have *no* idea what will happen with our daughter, marriage or not.  Perhaps she will sell kitchen equipment, perhaps she will be turned into a sweet potato."  In any case there is no general reason for the parents to think they should save less rather than more.  The potential outcome might require a very large expenditure on their part. 

Some of my technically inclined readers are already thinking about the
third derivative of the utility function and the precautionary motive
for saving.  The intuition is this: if the effect of your savings is very uncertain, you might either eschew savings altogether ("who knows what it will bring?"), or you might feel a need to save all the more.  The third derivative will determine which is the correct decision, and this is not a matter of the discount rate per se.

4. The party analogy: Let’s say you have no idea who will show up at the party (or what the future will look like).  How can you buy the food until you know whether the guests are Hindu, Muslim, or whatever.  Fair enough, perhaps we should wait.  But given the  uncertainty, we might want to set aside more savings for future contingencies, and not spend all the money today. 

Let’s consider this "third derivative" business in a little more detail.  When does radical uncertainty justifiably mean the future should be ignored?  A Christian might believe that he should not save up for Rapture.  Perhaps Rapture, once it comes, will be so different and so unexpected in its nature that current precautions simply were not worth making.  Odds are your mutual fund won’t make it into heaven (or hell?).  Fair enough.

Alternatively, let’s say you are worried about an avian flu pandemic, but you don’t have a good idea what such a pandemic would look like.  You probably still should buy more bottled water, not less, and pickle more kimchee, not less.

The practically-minded can debate which of these two cases more closely resembles global warming.

From the comments, Jane Galt asks:

…doesn’t a zero discount rate imply that even something that imposes trivial costs on each future generation should be avoided at catastrophic cost to us?

I would pose the question more broadly.  If a policy imposes a great cost on one person, but involves many small benefits for others, should we always evaluate that policy by summing the respective costs and benefits and finding the net value? 

The same question can be posed in both intertemporal and atemporal contexts.  Philosopher Alastair Norcross made his name by considering Parfit-like conundrums.  Let one person die a terrible and tortured death, but alleviate the headaches of billions of others by one second.  (No, by its construction, this is not an exercise in risk reduction or Rawlsian reasoning.  It is just a brute comparison of certain costs and benefits.)  If the billions are large enough in number, is this worth it?  Or does the suffering of the lone individual hold special status?

If we are willing to swallow this trade-off, we can accept it in the intergenerational comparison as well.  I would myself balk at the notion, citing a mushy mish-mash of philosophic pluralism, quasi-lexical values, and the conceit of my moral intuitions.  My conclusion is that we should modify cost-benefit analysis for (among other things) distributional concerns, but that the cost-benefit analysis should itself be done straight up.  In any case, a non-zero discount rate, applied to consumption streams, would not do justice to the relevant moral intuitions about distribution.  We might wish to count the wealthy for less, but not everyone in the future will be so wealthy, especially when China, India, and Bangladesh matter for the issue at hand.

Addendum: Here is commentary from Jonathan Adler.

Trudie can think of a few approaches:

1. Practice major life shifts, so you get used to regret and thus can bear it more easily.  In other words, try to make the costs of regret smaller. 

2. Hire eminent psychotherapists to administer electric shocks every time you feel regret.  Try to make the costs of regret higher, so that you won’t regret so much.

3. Drink yourself senseless after making life commitments.  Attack your memory.

4. Have so many kids there will be no time or energy for regret.  One should suffice.

5. Hire someone to force the choice upon you, whether by posting a bond with a friendly blogger or approaching the Russian Mafia.  Or, once you get pregnant, do something unpardonable and post it on YouTube, being sure to alert your blogger enemies.

6. Realize that you value control more than any of these options for overcoming regret, so live with the regret and enjoy that sense of control for all it is worth.

7. Get over #6 by studying Leibniz, Holbach, and other determinists.

Trudie believes that Tyler is good at managing regret.  Surely we shouldn’t just let regret manage us.  But what is best to do?

This paper, via Jorge, argues that a credit crunch, and an increase in contract non-enforceability, are major reasons why NAFTA did not benefit Mexico more.  Each Beck album takes a longer time to appreciate than the last one; I’m finally coming around on The Information.  Here is a further smackdown on the TV-autism study.  Panama has voted to expand the Canal; after the Grand Canyon and Iguassu, it is the most impressive sight I have seen.  Go.  A New York Times article notes that Portuguese has 230 million speakers, far more than German or Japanese; yet it is still considered a minor language.  Will Wilkinson, who has been busy lately, has a good post on positive-sum status games.  The Wall Street Journal had a front page article today on the trend to pull the elderly out of nursing homes and pay their relatives, or in some cases their ex-wives, to care for them.  The Business of Health and The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care are two new market-oriented books on American health care; the latter has a blurb from Milton Friedman.  Chutes and Ladders examines the upward mobility of (some of) the working poor; buy it here.  Starbucks succeeds by helping customers feel good about themselves.