Category: Philosophy
*The Kural*
Or Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural, translated with a preface by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma, just published by Beacon Press. This poem, a staple (the staple?) of Tamil literature, is believed to have been composed between the third and fifth centuries AD. The poem covers issues of wisdom, ethics, virtue, wealth, and love. I cannot compare this version to the Tamil original, but it reads nicely and is attractively placed on the page.
Excerpt:
Is she a siren a rare peacock a woman in jewels —
My heart quakes
As if on attack with an army of sirens — the look
She gives when I look
I did not know death but now I do —
Fierce feminine eyes
They don’t fit this young woman — these eyes
That kill those looking
Is it death an eye a deer — her gaze
Contains all three
There should be some extra indentation after each two lines. And does anyone has a link to the whole thing recited in Tamil, I cannot readily find this on YouTube.
Ask the beast
“why does tyler cowen mean when he says something is “Straussian”?”
That is perhaps the question I have received the most often over the last five years, subbing in “what” for “why.” And, via Jeremy Davis, here is the answer he received:
Tyler Cowen is an economist and author who is known for his use of the term “Straussian” to describe certain ideas or perspectives. The term “Straussian” is a reference to the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who was active in the mid-20th century. Strauss is known for his belief that there is a fundamental tension between reason and tradition, and that the best way to understand political ideas is to look at the underlying assumptions and hidden meanings that are present in the text.
When Cowen says something is “Straussian,” he typically means that it is characterized by a focus on underlying principles and hidden meanings, rather than surface-level appearances. He might also be referring to the ideas of Leo Strauss, who is known for his emphasis on the study of classical texts and his belief that political philosophy should be grounded in an understanding of the great works of the past.
In general, when Cowen uses the term “Straussian” he is using it as an adjective to describe a perspective or approach that is characterized by an emphasis on careful reading, attention to detail, and an appreciation for the complexity of ideas. It is often used by Cowen to point out that some perspectives are not as straightforward as they seem, and that there is always more to be discovered if we look beneath the surface.
Now you can stop asking!
My St. Andrews talk on Effective Altruism
About 25 minutes of talk, the rest is Q&A — recommended!
My excellent Conversation with Katherine Rundell
One of my favorite CWTs, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
She joined Tyler to discuss how she became obsessed with John Donne, the power of memorizing poetry, the political implications of suicide in the 17th century, the new evidence of Donne’s faith, the contagious intensity of thought in 17th century British life, the effect of the plague on national consciousness, the brutality of boys’ schooling, the thrills and dangers of rooftop walking, why children should be more mischievous, why she’d like to lower the voting age to 16, her favorite UK bookshop, the wonderful weirdness of Diana Wynne Jones, why she has at least one joke about Belgium in every book, what T.S. Eliot missed about John Donne, what it’s like to eat tarantula, the Kafka book she gives to toddlers, why The Book of Common Prayer is underrated, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, you have two books, Rooftoppers and Skysteppers, about rooftop walking. Some might call them children’s books. I’m not sure that’s exactly the right description, but what is the greatest danger with rooftop walking?
RUNDELL: Oh, it’s falling off.
COWEN: What leads you to fall off? If you’re rooftop walking, if you were to fall off, what would be the proximate cause of that event?
RUNDELL: Philippe Petit, who is, of course, one of the great roof walkers of the world and the man who strung the wire between the Twin Towers in 1977, talks about vertigo as a beast that has to be tamed piece by piece, that can never be overcome all at once.
Vertigo, he says, is not the fear that you will fall. It is the fear that you will jump. That, of course, is the thing that, when you are roof walking, you are taming. You are trying to unmoor your sense of danger and of not being able to trust yourself not to jump from your sense of beauty and the vision of a city that you get up high.
I roof-walk for very practical reasons: to see views that would otherwise be not really available to me in an increasingly privatized City of London.
And:
COWEN: For you, what is most interesting in Donne’s sermons?
RUNDELL: The thing I find most interesting would be the radical honesty that he has — that you will find in so few other sermons of the time — about the difficulty of finding God. He is a man who writes often with certainty about the idea of reaching the infinite, the divine. But he also writes this famous passage where he says, “I summon God and my angels, and when God and the angels are there, I neglect them for . . .” I forget what it is. “The sound of a carriage, a straw under my knee, a thought, a chimera, and nothing and everything.”
That sense that, even though he had a brain that could control incredibly rigorous poetry, he did not have a brain that would control itself in prayer. He offered that to his congregation as a vulnerability and a piece of honesty that so few sermoners of the time — who thought of themselves more as a regulatory ideal that should never admit vulnerability — would offer.
Definitely recommended. And Katherine’s recent book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne was perhaps my favorite book of last year.
What should I ask Noam Dworman?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. Noam is the owner of Comedy Cellar, considered by many to be the world’s best comedy club, located in Greenwich Village, NYC. There is a branch in Las Vegas too. The Cellar also has its own TV show.
Here is Norm’s LinkedIn page. Noam also makes music in a band, usually playing guitar.
So what should I ask him?
How happy are Americans (and Danes) anyway?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Two economists, David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Alex Bryson of University College London, have come up with a new and more intuitive way to measure well-being. The results are striking. If you consider US states as comparable to countries, 16 of the top 20 political units in the world for well-being are in the US — including the top seven.
Many happiness surveys ask individuals how satisfied they are with their lives. That is one way of phrasing the happiness question, but it has its biases. It tends to favor nations where people have a strong sense of self-satisfaction — or, if you want to put a more negative gloss on it, where the people are somewhat smug. Those are some of the studies in which Finland and Denmark come in first.
The genius of this most recent study is that it considers both positive and negative affect, and gives countries (and US states) separate ratings for the two. In other words, it recognizes there is more than one dimension to well-being. It lists four variables as part of negative affect: pain, sadness, anger and worry. Positive affect consists of four measures: life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling and being well-rested. So life satisfaction is only one part of the measure.
One interesting result is that nations that avoid negative affect are not necessarily the same as those which enjoy the highest positive affect. Some countries — including the US — have a lot of extremes. Americans tend to go to the limit on both the upside and the downside.
Bhutan is an extreme contrast along these same lines. Measured only by positive affect, the Bhutanese are No. 9 in the world, an impressive showing. But for negative affect they rank No. 149 — in other words, they experience a great deal of negative emotion, perhaps due to the extreme hardships in their lives. Considering both positive and negative affect, they come in at No. 99, not a bad showing for such a poor country (better, in fact, than the UK’s 111.)
Denmark’s positive affect puts it only at No. 71, befitting the popular image of a country where not everyone is jumping for joy. Arkansas has a better positive affect, coming in at No. 67. But Denmark rates higher overall (38, to Arkansas’s 72) because Arkansas shows higher negative affect (87, to Denmark’s 66).
Measuring both positive and negative affect, the 10 happiest political units in the world are, in order: Hawaii, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Taiwan, Alaska and Wisconsin. Of the top 50 places, 36 are US states (I include the District of Columbia, No. 16). China is No. 30.
Here is the original study. The Danes are #111 for smiling!
Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
We examine the causes and consequences of an important cultural and psychological trait: the extent to which one views the world in zero-sum terms – i.e., that benefits to one person or group tend to come at the cost of others. We implement a survey among approximately 15,000 individuals living in the United States that measures zero-sum thinking, political and policy views, and a rich set of characteristics about their ancestry. We find that a more zero-sum view is strongly correlated with several policy views about the importance of government, the value of redistributive policies, the impact of immigration, and one’s political orientation. We find that zero-sum thinking can be explained by experiences of an individual’s ancestors (parents and grandparents), including the amount of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, the degree of economic hardship they suffered, whether they immigrated to the United States or were exposed to more immigrants, and whether they had experiences with enslavement. These findings underscore the importance of psychological traits, and how they are transmitted inter-generationally, in explaining current political divides in the United States.
That is from a new paper by Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva. The paper has many interesting particular results, here is one:
Respondents living in Utah exhibit the least zero-sum thinking, on average, and respondents living in Montana, Oklahoma and Mississippi exhibit the most. Importantly, there is no significant geographic clustering and the geographic distribution of zero-sum beliefs is not obviously correlated with that of political leanings.
And this:
If a respondent was born outside the U.S., then they tend to have a less zero-sum view of the world.
African-Americans have more zero-sum thinking than average, and also this:
Zero-sum thinking is also associated with more liberal [TC: the wrong word, right here the misuse is especially glaring!] economic policies and a political alignment with the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party.
Recommended.
The narrowing gap between human and animal intelligence
Resulting from recent AI advances, how should our perceptions change? From the comments:
Why does it narrow the gap between human and animal intelligence?
Intelligence seems simpler than we thought, just a matter of scaling things up, so human intelligence is more likely a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind/step change. Plus this suggests there’s a wider range of possible intelligences out there, so in the grand scheme, human and animal intelligence will look very similar/closely related (it looked less that way when they were the only games in town. Then they were as far apart as was known to be possible).
Broader implications of ChatGPT
No, it is not converging upon human-like intelligence or for that matter AGI. Still, the broader lesson is you can build a very practical kind of intelligence with fairly simple statistical models and lots of training data. And there is more to come from this direction very soon.
This reality increases the probability that the aliens around the universe are intelligent rather than stupid. They don’t need a “special box” in their heads (?) to become cognitively sophisticated, rather experience can bring them a long way.
That in turn heightens the Fermi paradox. Where are they?
Which in turn, for any particular views about The Great Filter (presumably there is some chance it lies ahead of us), should make us more pessimistic about the future survival of humankind.
It modestly increases the chances that UFOs are drone probes from space aliens.
It also narrows the likely gap between human and animal intelligence.
What else?
I thank a friend for a useful conversation related to these points.
ChatGPT
Here.
Told you so. And more to come soon.
Listening speaks to our intuition while reading promotes analytic thought
That is the title of the paper at least, here is the abstract:
It is widely assumed that thinking is independent of language modality because an argument is either logically valid or invalid regardless of whether we read or hear it. This is taken for granted in areas such as psychology, medicine, and the law. Contrary to this assumption, we demonstrate that thinking from spoken information leads to more intuitive performance compared with thinking from written information. Consequently, we propose that people think more intuitively in the spoken modality and more analytically in the written modality. This effect was robust in five experiments (N = 1,243), across a wide range of thinking tasks, from simple trivia questions to complex syllogisms, and it generalized across two different languages, English and Chinese. We show that this effect is consistent with neuroscientific findings and propose that modality dependence could result from how language modalities emerge in development and are used over time. This finding sheds new light on the way language influences thought and has important implications for research that relies on linguistic materials and for domains where thinking and reasoning are central such as law, medicine, and business.
That is by Geipel, J., & Keysar, B. Or do I need to shout?
And what does this mean for Socrates?
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
*What Makes Us Human?*
The authors are Iain S. Thomas and Jasmine Wang, here is one excerpt:
What is the proper response to suffering?
If this life is all there is, then the proper response to suffering is to embrace it
and be transformed by it.
If there is more than this life, then the proper response to suffering
is to take the next step in your journey.
It’s not simply for punishment. Pain is an opportunity for spiritual growth.
We suffer from the growth that comes from suffering.
The subtitle of the book is An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions.
How to process the FTX news — a test
Here is one MR comment that illustrates my point:
How noble—stealing people’s life savings to increase African birth rates, navel-gaze about AI risk, make cows happier, and all the other nonsense.
Mostly a bunch of lost, hideous people with terrible moral intuitions proclaiming themselves the most holy tribe in existence.
Not a single worthwhile cause in there.
From MR commentator Ineffective Grifterism.
I would say if the FTX debacle first leads you to increase your condemnation of EA, utilitarianism, philosophy, crypto, and so on that is a kind of red flag for your thought processes. They probably could stand some improvement, even if your particular conclusion might be correct. As I’ve argued lately, it is easier to carry and amplify damning sympathies when you can channel your negative emotions through the symbolism of a particular individual. Especially when others are doing the same — do not forget Girard!
It is better to simply file the data point away and add it to your mental regressions, but not right now to get too emotional or condemnatory about it.
If you would like, here are a few better questions for occupying your time:
1. Which 19th century novel does this story most resemble?
2. If you had to flee the Bahamas, and sought out a locale with no extradition treaty, which one would you choose? (Indonesia, for me, not Dubai.)
3. What kind of love story exactly is that of Sam and Caroline? I mean this query seriously and I am not looking for a hostile or sarcastic answer.
4. Which parts of the SBF worldview remain correct and will end up undervalued?
5. What does the scenario look like where this is good for crypto as a whole?
6. How should remaining EA philanthropists rethink their giving and also their PR?
7. How will this affect economic development in the Bahamas?
You can work yourself on completing this list. My claim is that, over time, you will end up much smarter if you focus on questions like these rather than “reliving” collective condemnations like those of Ineffective Grifterism. Nominative determinism occasionally does hold!
A simple point about existential risk
Hardly anyone associated with Future Fund saw the existential risk to…Future Fund, even though they were as close to it as one could possibly be.
I am thus skeptical about their ability to predict existential risk more generally, and for systems that are far more complex and also far more distant. And, it turns out, many of the real sources of existential risk boil down to hubris and human frailty and imperfections (the humanities remain underrated). When it comes to existential risk, I generally prefer to invest in talent and good institutions, rather than trying to fine-tune predictions about existential risk itself.
If EA is going to do some lesson-taking, I would not want this point to be neglected.
Is the EA movement dead?
No.
To be clear, I am not “an EA person,” though I do have sympathies with considerable parts of the movement. Most of all it has struck me, as I have remarked in the past, just how much young talent the movement has attracted. Money enabled the attracting of that talent, but I never had the sense that the money was the reason why the talent was showing up at EA events. So a less well-funded EA movement still will be potent, at least assuming it gets over the immediate trauma. That trauma may even help to drive away some of the less serious poseurs who thought EA was the easiest path to polyamory, or whatever..
Intellectual movements can be quite influential on small sums of money. What exactly was the budget for the Apostles? Or take libertarianism, which arguably saw peak influence in the last 1970s and early 1980s, when it was much less well funded than in later times.
How much money did the Benthamites have? Nonetheless they influenced policy a great deal.
As a side note, Open Philanthropy spent over $400 million in 2021. I know zero about their plans, but I don’t see any reason to think they will be unimportant in the future. That is plenty of funding right there.
A mere month ago, I witnessed the game of young people sitting around, speculating how many future billionaires will be attracted to EA. Probably that number has fallen, for reasons related to the current bad publicity, but I don’t see why it has to have fallen to zero. The next set of billionaires might simply choose a different set of labels.
I do anticipate a boring short-run trend, where most of the EA people scurry to signal their personal association with virtue ethics. Fine, I understand the reasons for doing that, but at the same time grandma, in her attachment to common sense morality, is not telling you to fly to Africa to save the starving children (though you should finish everything on your plate). Nor would she sign off on Singer (1972). While I disagree with the sharper forms of EA, I also find them more useful and interesting than the namby-pamby versions.
Tyrone knocks at the door: “Tyler, you are failing to state the truth about SBF! He did maximize social welfare! And sacrificed himself to that end. What indeed is Christ without Judas? Judas sacrificed his reputation. So did SBF. Now the jump-started EA ideas will live on for eternity. And those who hold crypto through Caribbean exchanges are about the most deserving losers you can think of. Those assets did not represent social value anyway. And isn’t discouraging crypto investment exactly what we should be doing? (SBF is good for the environment!) And you need a celebrity example of wrongdoing for that lesson to stick, not just a few random price drops for bitcoin. He is surely a true angel…” At which point I had to ask Tyrone to leave the penthouse and shut his dirty mouth…he is not a valid boy!