Category: Philosophy

This is one of the best "time wasters" I've come across in some time.  Here is the upshot:

The email edition of the British Psychological Society's Research
Digest has reached the milestone of its 150th issue…To mark the occasion, the Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves.

Here is Paul Rozin's answer:

I generally believe that we learn from experience. However, a recent study
I did with Karlene Hanko repeats a finding from Kahneman and Snell,
that people are very poor at predicting how their liking will change
for a new product (in our case, two new foods and two new body
products) after using it for a week. We predicted that the parents of
our college undergraduates would be better than their children at
predicting their hedonic trajectory, but 25 more years of self
experience did nothing for them. Nor for me. Every night, I bring home
a pile of work to do in the evening and early morning. I have been
doing this for over 50 years. I always think I will actually get
through all or most of it, and I almost never get even half done. But I
keep expecting to accomplish it all. What a fool I am.

Here is Norbert Schwarz on incidental feelings:

One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still
fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied
how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad — unless one
becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the
gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that
lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still
get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts
– I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such
influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the
immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing
until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?

For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.  By the way, I wonder if those are their real answers; I wouldn't tell you mine.

The Required Reports Prepared by State Agencies and Institutions of Higher Education is not itself listed in the Required Reports Prepared by State Agencies and Institutions of Higher Education.

That is from Texas, where they must file a report on all the reports they have filed.  Here is more.  That report is itself 580 pages and it recommends the abolition of 318 reports and the consoldiation of 58 others.  It is promised:

The next edition of this report will contain a full assessment of all required reports.

I thank Catfish for the pointer.

Probability is the oil of rationalisation.

You'll find it here.  And there is this:

The closest thing you can have to free will is for your actions to be
determined purely by the state of your brain. Free will is determinism.

Things can be obvious if they are simple. If something complicated is
obvious, such as anything that anybody seriously studies, then for it
to be simple you must be abstracting it a lot. When people find such
things obvious, what they often mean is that the abstraction is so
clear and simple its implications are unarguable. This is answering the
wrong question. Most of the reasons such conclusions might be false are
hidden in what you abstracted away. The question is whether you have
the right abstraction for reality, not whether the abstraction has the
implications it seems to.

That's from Katja Grace.  Here is a good post on murder and evil.

Addendum: I liked this bit too:

Perhaps mysterious forces are just more trustworthy than social
institutions? Or perhaps karma seems nice because its promotion is read
as ‘everyone will get what they deserve’, while markets seem nasty
because their promotion is read as ‘everyone deserves what they’ve
got’. Better ideas?

Today he writes:

Every day, I check a blog called Marginal Revolution, which is famous
for its erudite authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, and its
intelligent contributors [TC: that's you!]. Last week, one of those contributors asked a
question that is fantastical but thought-provoking: What would happen
if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth
that happened to be facing the sun?

His Burkean answer is here and I very much agree with it.  Excerpt:

Without posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high
ambitions. Politics becomes insignificant. Even words like justice lose
meaning because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the
here and now.

And:

If millions of immigrants were brought over, they would populate the
buildings but not perpetuate the culture. They wouldn’t be like current
immigrants because they wouldn’t be joining a common project, but
displacing it. There would be no sense of peoplehood, none of the
untaught affections of those who are part of an organic social unit
that shares the same destiny.

Here is the original inspiring MR post.

I agree with Will Wilkinson's point that real social inequality has (mostly) been falling for some time in the United States.  Today many an upper middle class person is plausibly happier than many a billionaire.  Yet most self-made billionaires work very hard to get to that position, which creates a possible tension between cardinal and "observed choice" or "ordinal" metrics of welfare.  Why work so hard for so little?  Presumably many of these billionaires really want to "be there," even if they are only marginally better off or in some cases worse off.

Here are a few possible implications, not all of which are (or can be) true:

1. Higher marginal tax rates aren't very unjust, because lower incomes don't make wealthy people much less worse off.

2. Higher marginal tax rates are very unjust, because they undo results that the wealthy have worked very hard for and cared very deeply about.

3. Work is fun for the (self-made) wealthy, so higher marginal tax rates won't much discourage their work effort.

4. Greater wealth is barely worth it for the wealthy, so higher marginal tax rates will very much discourage their work effort.

Will's paper convinces me that the distinction between ordinal and cardinal measures of human welfare is more important than ever. Conservatives often cite #2 and #4, or in other words they have an ordinal normative theory and a cardinal predictive theory.  Liberals are more likely to cite #1 and #3, giving them a cardinal normative theory and an ordinal predictive theory.  In neither case is there an outright contradiction, but arguably both groups end up holding an odd mix of positions.

It would be interesting to take each group aside and present them with the abstract questions of cardinal vs. ordinal understandings of well-being, yet without explaining to them the possible policy implications of their answers.

Who are the up-and-comings?  Drake Bennett has the answers.  He covers Luigi Zingales, W. Bradford Wilcox, Megan McArdle, and Reihan Salam.

A second experiment developed this idea and showed further that an
action is most morally condemnable when personal force and intention
co-occur. Students judged as most morally unacceptable a situation in
which Joe deliberately pushed a victim off a bridge so that he could
reach a switch to save five others. By contrast, if the victim was
knocked off the bridge accidentally so Joe could reach the switch, or
if Joe killed him by diverting a trolley with a switch, then the
students' moral judgements were not so harsh.

"Put simply,
something special happens when intention and personal force co-occur,"
the researchers said. This prompts many further questions, such as what
counts as personal force. "Must it be continuous (as in pushing), or
may it be ballistic (as in throwing)?" the researchers asked. "Is
pulling the same as pushing?"

Here is more.

Kyle Munkittrick writes to me and sets out what it would mean for transhumanism to arrive or succeed:

…Transhumanism is definitely more of a philosophy than
an objective, though it is a political philosophy like feminism or
libertarianism. There are specific goals, like extending life span,
creating true A.I., and animal uplift, and then broad ethical goals,
like ending suffering.

Those are the three landmarks I'd look for when trying to answer
that question…I'm a big fan of MR, so it prides me
to see transhumanism as a topic you've enough interest in to mention.

Advocates, is that a good account?

I'm not a Luddite (at all) but I've never been taken by transhumanism as a systematic philosophy.  I'm more worried that we will fail at "humanism," namely the simple requirement that we treat other people decently.  It's worth asking whether the promotion of transhumanism makes us more or less likely to meet basic canons of decency and consideration.  I would be more likely to favor a transhumanism that made us painfully aware of our personal vulnerability in a way that would expand our circle of benevolence.  I worry that transhumanism can be used to cloak that vulnerability, assert its contingency, and instill a false sense of personal control or denial.

Was Michael Jackson a transhumanist (cut to 3:54)?

What are the exact conditions for counting "transhumanism" as having been attained?  Would you rather have a worse trip with better memories, or a more fun trip with fewer memories?  Why do some Senators act so obnoxiously to their subordinates?  Why don't more people from Hollywood go into politics?  From here on in, what is the best case scenario for your life?  Does it increase the productivity of a man if he marries a very religious woman?  If so, through what mechanism?  If China starts first with explicit genetic engineering, does that make it more or less likely that the U.S. will follow suit?  What does the presence of affirmative action in U.S. universities signal to foreigners?  What effects does the strategy of "male neuroticism" have on a marriage?  Will you become a "granite slave"?

The "poorest" people are not those with low incomes but rather those with low human capital endowments.  That includes the elderly because, even if they are very talented, on average they will die sooner.  A typical 23-year-old lower-middle-class immigrant has a higher real endowment than does Warren Buffett.

Through Medicare, the U.S. government subsidizes the health care of the elderly.  Given the embedded incentives in the system, the subsidy is especially large for people in the last year of life or so, namely the very poorest.

Western European welfare states may be more efficient, because they do more to expand routine health care access for the relatively young and this may have a higher rate of return.  But those same systems are in critical regards less egalitarian.  Bravo to them.

Many people do not look at the contrast this way.  They wish to think they believe in egalitarianism, they wish to be skeptical of the United States, they wish to condemn the U.S. for its inequality, and they wish to raise the relative status of people who are not very successful under capitalism.  When you put all those wishes together, those people will be deeply allergic to my argument. 

A few of these people also confuse "high social status" with "well off."  Since old, high-bank-account white males have lots of social status and power, these onlookers cannot bring themselves to regard those males as holding very poor overall endowments.  They substitute in assessments of social status for assessments of absolute endowments (another sign of the claim that "politics is not about policy" but rather it is about whom we should admire and condemn).

I am amazed (but not surprised) by how frequently people think of egalitarianism in terms of social markers of status rather than actual forward-looking endowments.

It is common for more egalitarian policies to be less efficient.

From the comments: "Let us say you are a twenty three year old immigrant living in New York. Would you want to trade places with Warren Buffett?

My answer is this- you couldn't pay me enough to make the trade."