Category: Philosophy
Xenophon’s consultation of the Pythia
1. Statement of prayer-question – Xenophon begins by verbally addressing Apollo, asking “to which of the gods should I sacrifice and pray in order best and most successfully to perform the journey I have in mind and return home in safety?” Only once this plea is uttered does Apollo’s priesthood record the god’s reply.
2. Ritual hymn & payment – Like all individual consultants, he had to buy a pelanos (sacrificial cake) and burn it on the altar while reciting the short Delphic paean in Apollo’s honour; the spoken hymn and the offering together signalled respect and opened the way for prophecy.
3. Sacrificial plea – A goat was sprinkled with water; if it shuddered, Apollo was deemed willing to speak. The consultants (or an attendant priest) then voiced a brief prayer “Hear me, Lord Apollo…” over the animal before it was sacrificed. Only after this spoken plea did the Pythia mount the tripod and deliver the oracle.
That is an o3 answer in response to one of my queries, namely whether you had to make incantations to oracles before they would respond. You did! If you scroll down, you will see that original answer is amended somewhat and improved in accuracy. For instance “…drop the idea that each visitor had to intone a fixed hymn. At most, priests might intone a brief paean while the cake was burned…”
In any case, you could not do “one shot” with the oracle — you had to put a bit of effort into it. If you simply approached them and asked for a prophecy of the future (and did nothing else) you would get no meaningful response. In contemporary terminology, you needed a bit of prompting.
To return more explicitly to the current day, many people complain about the hallucinations of top LLMs, and indeed those hallucinations are still present. (o3 is much quicker than o1 pro, but probably has a higher hallucination rate.) If you ask them only once, you are more likely to get hallucinations. If you ask a follow-up, and request a correction of errors, the answer usually is better.
Almost everyone evaluates the LLMs and their hallucinations on a one-shot basis. But historically we evaluated oracles on a multi-shot basis. It would be easy for us to do that again with LLMS, and of course many users do. For the faster models the follow-up query really does not take so long.
Or just start off on the right foot. Marius recommends this prompt:
Ultra-deep thinking mode. Greater rigor, attention to detail, and multi-angle verification. Start by outlining the task and breaking down the problem into subtasks. For each subtask, explore multiple perspectives, even those that seem initially irrelevant or improbable. Purposefully attempt to disprove or challenge your own assumptions at every step. Triple-verify everything. Critically review each step, scrutinize your logic, assumptions, and conclusions, explicitly calling out uncertainties and alternative viewpoints. Independently verify your reasoning using alternative methodologies or tools, cross-checking every fact, inference, and conclusion against external data, calculation, or authoritative sources. Deliberately seek out and employ at least twice as many verification tools or methods as you typically would. Use mathematical validations, web searches, logic evaluation frameworks, and additional resources explicitly and liberally to cross-verify your claims. Even if you feel entirely confident in your solution, explicitly dedicate additional time and effort to systematically search for weaknesses, logical gaps, hidden assumptions, or oversights. Clearly document these potential pitfalls and how you’ve addressed them. Once you’re fully convinced your analysis is robust and complete, deliberately pause and force yourself to reconsider the entire reasoning chain one final time from scratch. Explicitly detail this last reflective step.
I haven’t tried it yet, but it doesn’t cost more than a simple “Control C.” Perhaps some of you can do better yet, depending of course on what your purpose is.
There is no reason why you cannot ask for better, and get it. Beware those who dump on hallucinations without trying to do better — they are the Negative Nellies of LLM land.
And oh — o3 pro is coming soon.
The Library Burned Slowly
A powerful but grim essay by John McGinnis, Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern. For decades, the federal government—driven by the left—expanded its control over universities. The right, most notably Ronald Reagan, tried to resist, shielding civil society from state overreach. They failed. Now, a new right has turned to the left’s playbook and is imposing its own vision of the good society. Chris Rufo mocks classical liberals like myself and their naive ideas of neutrality, fairness and open institutions. Principles are for losers. Seize power! Crush your enemies. Rufo does know how to crush his enemies. But what happens when the devil turns? Bludgeoning your enemies is fun while it lasts but you can’t bludgeon your way to a civilization. Hayek’s civil society dies in the rubble.
It seems remarkable that seemingly antisemitic protests by undergraduates, such as those at my own university of Northwestern, could threaten the biomedical research funding of its medical school. But the structure of civil rights laws as applied to universities has long allowed the federal government to cut off funding to the entire university based on the wrongful actions of particular units or departments.
Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach, bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.
…Clumsy governmental dictates on contentious matters such as transgender rights do not merely settle disputes; they inflame societal divisions by transforming moral disagreements into winner-takes-all political battles. Civil society, by contrast, thrives precisely because it embraces diversity and facilitates compromise, allowing pluralistic communities to coexist peacefully without being conscripted into ideological warfare. The left, fixated upon uniform outcomes, consistently undervalues the power of voluntary cooperation and cultural persuasion. Their shortsightedness has delivered into the hands of their opponents the very instruments of coercion they forged, vividly confirming an enduring truth: the power you grant government today will inevitably be wielded tomorrow by your adversaries.
Read the whole thing.
My excellent Conversation with Chris Dixon
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Chris Dixon believes we’re at a pivotal inflection point in the internet’s evolution. As a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of Read Write Own, Chris believes the current internet, dominated by large platforms like YouTube and Spotify, has strayed far from its decentralized roots. He argues that the next era—powered by blockchain technology—can restore autonomy to creators, lower barriers for innovation, and shift economic power back to the network’s edges.
Tyler and Chris discuss the economics of platform dominance, how blockchains merge protocol-based social benefits with corporate-style competitive advantages, the rise of stablecoins as a viable blockchain-based application, whether Bitcoin or AI-created currencies will dominate machine-to-machine payments, why Stack Overflow could be the first of many casualties in an AI-driven web, venture capital’s vulnerability to AI disruption, whether open-source AI could preserve national sovereignty, NFTs as digital property rights system for AIs, how Kant’s synthetic a priori, Kripke’s modal logic, and Heidegger’s Dasein sneak into Dixon’s term‑sheet thinking, and much more.
Most of the talk was about tech of course, but let’s cut right to the philosophy section:
COWEN: What’s your favorite book in philosophy?
DIXON: I’ve actually been getting back into philosophy lately. I did philosophy years ago in grad school. Favorite book, man. Are you into philosophy?
COWEN: Of course, yes. Plato’s Dialogues; Quine, Word and Object; Parfit, Reasons and Persons; Nozick. Those are what come to my mind right away.
DIXON: Yes. I did analytic philosophy. I actually was in a graduate school program and dropped out. I did analytic philosophy. Actually, Quine was one of my favorites — Word and Object and Two Dogmas of Empiricism, all those kinds of things. I like Donald Davidson. Nozick — I loved Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Reading that with Rawls is a great pairing. I used to love Wittgenstein, both early and later. I was into logic, so Frege and Russell. This was a grad school.
Now I’m trying to finally understand continental philosophy. I never understood it. I’ve actually spent the last three months in a philosophy phase. I’ve been watching a lot of videos. Highly recommend this. Do you know Bryan Magee?
COWEN: Sure, yes.
DIXON: Amazing. I watched all of his videos. This guy, Michael Sugrue, was a Princeton professor — great videos on continental philosophy. I’ve been reading — it sounds pretentious; I’m not saying I understand this or I’m an expert on it, but I’m struggling in reading it. I’m trying to read Being and Time right now — Heidegger. I really like Kripke. I follow Kripke. I liked his books a lot. Nelson Goodman was one of my favorites. Funny enough, I just bought it again — Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Kripke — Naming and Necessity is his legendary book on reference and language.
COWEN: I’ve never been persuaded by that one. It always felt like sleight of hand to me. He’s very, very smart. He might be the sharpest philosopher, but I like the book on Wittgenstein better.
DIXON: He basically invented modal logic. I don’t know if you know that story. He was in high school, something.
COWEN: He was 15 years old, I heard. Yes.
DIXON: [laughs] He’s like a true prodigy. Like a lot of philosophy, you have to take it in the context, like Naming and Necessity I think of as a response — gosh, I’m forgetting the whole history of it, but as I recall, it was a response to the descriptive theory of reference, like Russell. Anyways, I think you have to take these things in a pairing.
Actually, last night I was with a group of people. I got a lecture on philosophy, and it was great because he went through Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. I don’t want to go too much into that, but I’ve always struggled with Kant. Then he went into Hegel and explained that Hegel struggled with Kant in the same way that I did, and then improved on it. I’m not trying to go into details of this; it’s too much. The point is, for me, a lot of it has to be taken in as a dialogue between thinkers over multiple periods.
COWEN: Are you getting anything out of Heidegger? Because I sometimes say I’ve looked at every page of that book, but I’m not sure I’ve read it.
DIXON: It’s a good question. I have a friend who’s really into it, and we’ve been spending time together, and he’s trying to teach me. If you want, I’ll send you some videos that I think are really good.
COWEN: That’d be great.
DIXON: They’ve helped me a lot. I’ve always got it from an intellectual history point of view. If you want to follow the history of postmodernism, there’s Heidegger and then Derrida, and just what’s going on in the academy today with relativism and discourse and hermeneutics. I think it’s modern political implications that were really probably kicked off by Nietzsche and then Heidegger. I’ve always understood in that sense.
What I struggle with, and I understand him as a theory of psychology, I think of describing the experience of the Dasein and being-in-the-world. To me, it’s an interesting theory of psychology. You’re thrown into the world. This whole idea is very appealing to me. Just that whole story he tells — you’re thrown into the world, ready at hand versus present at hand. I think this idea of knowing how versus knowing that, different kinds of knowledge is a very interesting idea. Do you watch John Vervaeke?
COWEN: No.
You will find the (very interesting) tech segments all over the rest of the dialogue. And I am happy to refer you all to the new paperback edition of Chris’s new book Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet.
The 1982 IHS seminar I attended
It was a week long, in Hartford, CT, sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies. The four faculty were:
Robert Nozick
Israel Kirzner
John Gray
Ronald Max Hartwell
Those were the only faculty, for one week — pretty amazing! Libertarianism and classical liberalism quite simply had much higher intellectual status in those days. You could not assemble a comparable group of lecturers today.
I thank David Price for jogging my memory here.
My history with philosophy
At the same time I started reading economics, at age 13, I also was reading philosophy. I lived in Hillsdale, New Jersey, but River Vale had a better public library for those topics, so I would ride my bike there periodically and take out books (I also learned about Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis by bringing home scratched LPs).
Most of all, I was drawn to the Great Books series, most of all the philosophy in there. I figured I should read all of them. So of course I started with the Dialogues of Plato, which occupied my attention for a long time to come. Aristotle was boring to me, though at the time (and still) I felt he was more correct than Plato.
I also, from the beginning, never bought the argument that Socrates was the mouthpiece of Plato. In my early view (and still), Plato was the real genius, and he upgraded the second-rate Socrates to a smarter figure, mostly to make the dialogues better. The dialogic nature of Plato shows is true genius, because any single point of view you might find in there is quite untenable.
My favorite dialogues were the classic ones, such as Crito, Apology, Phaedo, and Symposium. Parmenides was a special obsession, though reader beware. It seemed fundamental and super-important. Timaeus intrigued me, as did Phaedrus, but I found them difficult. I appreciated The Republic only much later, most of all after reading the Allan Bloom introduction to the Chicago edition. My least favorite was Laws.
The other major event was buying a philosophy textbook by John Hospers (yes, if you are wondering that is the same John Hospers who wrote all that gay porn under a pseudonym). I think I bought this one in NYC rather than taking it out of the library. It explained the basic history of “early modern philosophy” running through Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, and that fascinated me. So I decided I should be reading all those people and I did. Berkeley and Hume were the most fun. I already could see, from my concomitant economics reading, that Kant could not think at the margin.
Other early philosophy readings, in high school, were Popper, Nietzsche, and Doseoyevsky, at the time considering Karamazov a kind of philosophy book. Some Sartre, and whatever else I could find in the library. Lots of libertarian philosophy, such as Lysander Spooner’s critique of social contract theories of the state. I also read a number of books on atheism, such as by Antony Flew and George Smith, and a good deal of C.S. Lewis, such as God in the Dock. Arthur Koestler on the ghost in the machine. William James on free will. Various 1960s and 1970s screeds, many of which were on the margins of philosophy. Robert Pirsig bored me, not rigorous enough, etc., but I imbibed many such “works of the time.” They nonetheless helped to define the topic for me, as did my readings in science fiction. If I was reading Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, and Theory and History by Mises, I also was thinking of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.
For a brief while I considered becoming a philosopher, though I decided that the economist path was better and far more practical, and also more useful to the world.
I kept on reading philosophy through my undergraduate years. The biggest earthquake was reading Quine. All of a sudden I was seeing a very different approach to what social science propositions and economic models were supposed to mean. (I never had been satisfied with Friedman, Samuelson, or the Austrians on ecoomic methodology.) For a long time I thought I would write a 100-page essay “Hayek and Quine,” but I never did. Nonetheless some radical new doors were opened for me, most of all a certain kind of freedom in intellectual interpretation. I also was influenced a good deal by reading Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men/Starmaker novels, feeding into my speculative bent.
I didn’t do much with philosophy classes, though in graduate school at Harvard I sat in on Hilary Putnam’s philosophy of language class (with my friend Kroszner). That was one of the very best classes I ever had, maybe the best. At Harvard I also got to know Nozick a bit, and of course he was extraordinarily impressive. At that time I also studied Goethe and German romanticism closely, and never felt major allergies toward the Continental approaches.
One day at Harvard, in 1984, I walked into Harvard Book Store and saw a copy of Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which had just come out. I hadn’t known of Parfit before, but immediately decided I had to buy and read the book. I was hooked, and spent years working on those problems, including for part of my dissertation, which was hardly advisable from a job market point of view. Like Quine, that too changed my life and worldview. “Quine and Parfit” would be an interesting essay too.
When I took my first job at UC Irvine, I hung out with some of the philosophers there, including the excellent Alan Nelson and also Gregory Kavka, with whom I co-authored a bit. Greg and I became very good friends, and his early death was a great tragedy. I also enjoyed my periodic chats with David Gordon, a non-academic philosopher who lives in Los Angeles and the best-read philosopher I have met.
In the late 1980s I met Derek Parfit, and ended up becoming Derek’s only co-author, on the social discount rate. The full story there is told in Dave Edmonds’s excellent biography of Parfit, so I won’t repeat it here. These posts are for secrets! I will add that Derek struck me as the most philosophical person I ever have met, the most truly committed to philosophy as a method and a way of life. That to me is still more important than any particular thing he wrote. Your writings and your person are closely related, but they also are two separate things. Not enough philosophers today give sufficient thought to who they are.
After the collaboration with Parfit, he wrote me a letter and basically offered to bring me into his group at Oxford (under what terms was not clear). That felt like a dead end to me, plus a big cut in lifetime income, and so I did not pursue the opportunity.
I ended up with four articles in the philosophical equivalent of the “top five” journals in economics. I also was pleased and honored when Peter Singer invited me to present my paper “Policing Nature” to his philosophy group at Princeton. I think of my books The Age of the Infovore and Stubborn Attachments as more philosophy than anything else, though synthetic of course.
I have continued to read philosophy over the years. Next on my list is the new translation of Maimonides, which on first glance seems like a big improvement. However I read much less philosophy in refereed journals than I used to. Frankly, I think most of it is not very philosophical and also not very interesting. It is not about real problems, but rather tries to carve out a small piece that is both marginally noticeable by an academic referee and also defensible, again to an academic referee. That strikes me as a bad way to do philosophy. It worked pretty well say in the 1960s, but these days those margins are just too small.
Most professional philosphers seem to me more like bureaucrats than philosophers. They simply do not embody philosophic ideals, either in their writings or in their persons. Most of all I am inclined to reread philosophic classics, read something “Continental,” or read philosophic works that to most people would not count as philosophy at all. An excellent tweet on AI can be extraordinarily philosophical in the best sense of the term, and like most of the greatest philosophy from the past it is not restricted by the canons of refereed journals. Maxims have a long and noble history in philosophy.
My notion of who is a philosopher has broadened extensively over the years. I think of Patrick Collison, Camille Paglia, and the best Ross Douthat columns (among many other examples, let’s toss in the best Matt Y. sentences as well, and the best Peter Thiel observations), not to mention some art and architecture and music critics, as some of the best and most important philosophy of our time. The best philosophy of Agnes Callard (NYT) does not look like formal philosophy at all. I know it is hard for many of you to make this mental shift, but revisit how Kierkegaaard and Schopenhauer wrote and you might find it possible. And of course the very greatest philosophers of our time are the people who are building and learning how to use the quality LLMs.
A simple rule of thumb is that if no one is writing you, and telling you that you changed their lives, you probably are not a philosopher. You cannot expect such feedback in mathematical logic, or early in your career, but still it is not a bad place to start for judging this issue.
Looking back, I now see myself as having chosen the path of philosophy more than economics. I view myself as a philosopher who knows a lot of economics and who writes about economics (among other things). I am comfortable with that redefinition of self, and it makes my career and my time allocation easier to understand.
And now to go try that new Maimonides edition…
The Ross Douthat manifesto?
Not exactly my views, but well worth reading as a whole. Here is one excerpt:
…much of this extinction will seem voluntary. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.
In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.
Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward.
And this:
And while this description may sound like pessimism, it’s intended as an exhortation, a call to recognize what’s happening and resist it, to fight for a future where human things and human beings survive and flourish. It’s an appeal for intentionality against drift, for purpose against passivity — and ultimately for life itself against extinction.
Do read the whole thing (NYT).
Parallels between our current time and 17th century England
That is the topic of my recent essay for The Free Press. Excerpt:
Ideologically, the English 17th century was weird above all else.
Millenarianism blossomed, and the occult and witchcraft became stronger obsessions. This was an age of religious and economic upheaval; King James I even wrote a book partly about witches called Daemonologie. The greater spread of pamphlets and books meant that witch accusations circulated more widely and more rapidly, and so the 1604 Witchcraft Act applied harsher punishments to supposed witches.
People were more likely to fear imminent transformation, and new groups sprouted up with names such as “Fifth Monarchy Men,” devoted to the idea that a new reign of Christ would usher in the end of the world. Protestantism splintered, giving rise to Puritanism and numerous sects, many of them extreme.
Meanwhile, Roger Williams brought ideas of free speech and freedom of conscience to America, founding what later became the state of Rhode Island. The development of economics as a science with an understanding of markets (credit Nicholas Barbon and Dudley North) dates from that time, as do the first libertarians, namely the Levellers, a liberty-oriented group from the time of the English Civil War.
All of these developments were supported by the falling price of printing, giving rise to an extensive use of pamphlets and broadsheets to communicate and debate ideas, often in London coffeehouses. Johannes Gutenberg had built the printing press for Europe much earlier, in the middle of the 15th century—but 17th-century England was the time and place when a commercial middle class could start to afford buying printed works.
I explore the parallels with today at the link, recommended.
Why not inquire together more?
Robin Hanson, citing Agnes Callard, asks that question. He writes:
They said (my summary) that we have many standard roles, tools, and scripts to guide practical inquiry, that we have little need to inquire into deep topics, and that social talk is often of short duration, has norms of impracticality and frequent topic changes, is more to bond via relaxing affirming comfort while inquiry is harder work, and it raises fears of seeming uncertain, wrong, in conflict, dominating, or overly serious.
However, we do often socialize via exerting sustained and substantial effort in cooking, sport, hiking, games, travel, and activism. And we often enjoy arguing with each other, even on divisive topics like sex, politics, or religion. We sometimes even sustain such arguments over long engagements, such as on social media. I think that comparison to these cases preserves the puzzle: why not also inquire together?
I find that “inquiring together” works best when you are traveling together, and confronted with new questions. They can be as mundane as “do you think the two people at that restaurant table are on a first date or not?” From the point of view of the observers, the inquiry is de novo. And the joint inquiry will be fun, and may make some progress. You both have more or less the same starting point. There isn’t really a better way to proceed, short of asking them.
For most established social science and philosophy questions, however, there is so much preexisting analysis and literature that the “chains of thought” are very long. The frontier point is not well maintained by a dyadic conversation, because doing so is computationally complex and further the two individuals likely have at least marginally separate agendas. So the pair end up talking around in circles, rather than progressively. It would be better if one person wrote a short memo or brief and the other offered comments. In fact we usethat method frequently, and fairly often it succeeds in keeping the dialogue at the epistemic frontier.
I find that when two people converse, they often make more progress by joking, and one person (or both) taking some inspiration or insight from the joke. As the joke evolves through time, and is repeated in different guises, each person — somewhat separately — refines their intuitions on the question related to the joke. The process is joint, and each person may be presenting new ideas to the other, but the crucial progress-making work still occurs individually.
When people do wish to “talk through a question with me,” I find I am personally most useful offering reading references (I do have a lot of those), rather than ideas or analysis per se. The reading reference is a short computational strand, and it does not require joint, coordinated maneuvering at the end of very long computational strands.
Sometimes Alex and I make progress working through problems together, most of all if it concerns one of our concrete projects. But keep in mind a) we have been working together pretty closely for 35 years, b) often we are working together on the same concrete problem and with common incentives, c) we are pretty close to immune when it comes to offending each other, and d) our conversations themselves do not necessarily go all that well. So I view this data as both exceptional (in a very good way), and also broadly supportive of my thesis here.
For related reasons, I am most optimistic about “inquiring together more” in the context of concrete business decisions. Perhaps John and Patrick Collison are pretty good at this?
Or so it seems to me. Maybe I should go ask someone else.
Five insights from farm animal economics
By Martin Gould, here is one excerpt:
Halting plans for a large, polluting factory farm feels like a clear win — no ammonia-laden air burning residents’ lungs, no waste runoff contaminating local drinking water, and seemingly fewer animals suffering in industrial confinement. But that last assumption deserves scrutiny. What protects one community might actually condemn more animals to worse conditions elsewhere.
Consider the UK: Local groups celebrate blocking new chicken farms. But because UK chicken demand keeps growing — it rose 24% from 2012-2022 — the result of fewer new UK chicken farms is just that the UK imports more chicken: it almost doubled its chicken imports over the same time period. While most chicken imported into the UK comes from the EU, where conditions for chickens are similar, a growing share comes from Brazil and Thailand, where regulations are nonexistent. Blocking local farms may slightly reduce demand via higher prices, but it also risks sentencing animals to worse conditions abroad.
The same problem haunts government welfare reforms — stronger standards in one country can just shift production to places with worse standards. But advocates are getting smarter about this. They’re pushing for laws that tackle both production and imports at once. US states like California have done this — when it banned battery cages, it also banned selling eggs from hens caged anywhere. The EU is considering the same approach. It’s a crucial shift: without these import restrictions, both farm bans and welfare reforms risk exporting animal suffering to places with even worse conditions. And advocates have prioritized corporate policies, which avoid this problem, as companies pledge to stop selling products associated with the worst animal suffering (like caged eggs), regardless of where they are produced.
My 1979 trip to Oxford and London
In my recent post on my Freiburg year abroad, I mentioned that my first time leaving the country was a trip to England. Somehow I was accepted into a multi-week economics course at Oxford. Of course it was not the real Oxford, just some program for foreigners held on Oxford campus.
I didn’t much care for Oxford, and I suppose I still do not. It struck the 17-year-old Tyler as rather backward and ancien regime. Everything seemed so old and static, and also slightly rundown. I walked around plenty, I did go punting, and I also got drunk for the first time in my life (out of three times total?). I enjoyed only the first three of those experiences.
My fondest memories are walking across town, through a residential neighborhood, to a very good fish and chips place. I sat on the curb and ate out of the newspaper wrapper. That was pretty divine, keeping in mind I come from Kearny, NJ, where fish and chips was a major Scots-Irish “thing” until recently (the town is now Latino and Lusaphone).
I realized quickly that I knew a lot of economics — almost everything presented in the lectures bored me.
What did influence me was hearing and meeting Madsen Pirie, who of course is still around. Here was an actual logical positivist! That shocked me. At age seventeen, logical positivists were to me boogeymen who had been refuted by Karl Popper and Brand Blanshard. But all of a sudden, there was one right in front of me, bowtie and all. The biggest thing I learned from Madsen is that behind each view is a human being who has counterarguments. That may sound deeply stupid, but so many of our most important learnings take that form, namely emotionally internalizing something that ought to be obvious, and thus developing better habits of thought. Anyway, Madsen’s lectures at least were fun, even if the content was familiar to me. I recall also David O’Mahoney, of University College Cork, giving a good talk on competition and cooperation.
One weekend a few of us decided to take the train up to Edinburgh, egads what a debacle that was. Somehow we ended up sleeping in a boxcar with a bunch of soldiers around us (how did that happen!? I have no idea). It was freezing cold the whole time, even though this was August. And the train kept on stopping, maybe the trip took eight or nine hours and had neigh a smooth moment.
Edinburgh was cold too, and I was not prepared for that. Somehow I ended up walking around in a bathrobe, if only not to freeze. I recall seeing monuments to Hume and Smith, being satisfied, and wanting to turn around and go back. Just as I do not recall how I ended up in the boxcar with the soldiers, I also do not recall how I was wearing a robe in Scotland.
The last week of the trip I spent in London. As I have narrated in the opening chapter of my GOAT book, my main activity was to walk across town to the British Library and read old pamphlets in the history of economic thought. That was wonderful.
I quite enjoyed 1979 London, which I much preferred to Oxford. For one thing, it had great music shops, including for sheet music. Most of all, I soaked up the “rude boy” atmosphere of the city and its slight tinge of danger. I was an avid Clash fan, and this was before they sold out with their London Calling album. The whole Clash worldview was laid out in front of me, and I kept on thinking of “Safe European Home” and other early classics. Piccadilly was a great place to hang out to imbibe that mood, which in retrospect seems remarkable.
I walked, walked, and walked more. Hardly any of the city seemed well-off, and it was very definitely an English city, unlike today.
I was staying in a hostel, and three or so nights before I was due to fly home, someone broke into the collective room and stole a lot of money. I didn’t have much left, and didn’t think I could get a money transfer quickly. So for a few days I bought and lived off Wonder bread, and scavenged abandoned fruit from dumpster bins. I also found a chess tournament (how??), and played some speed chess with people who in turn bought me a meal.
That all seemed like an appropriate way to end the trip.
At the time, and given my interests, England seemed unambiguously inferior to The American Way Of Life. The grit of London appealed to me, but I had my own version of that back home in NYC and New Jersey.
And so I flew home, and made no immediate plans to travel abroad again.
It was not until I started listening to Beethoven, and reading German romantic poetry, that that was to change.
What Did We Learn From Torturing Babies?
As late as the 1980s it was widely believed that babies do not feel pain. You might think that this was an absurd thing to believe given that babies cry and exhibit all the features of pain and pain avoidance. Yet, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the straightforward sensory evidence was dismissed as “pre-scientific” by the medical and scientific establishment. Babies were thought to be lower-evolved beings whose brains were not yet developed enough to feel pain, at least not in the way that older children and adults feel pain. Crying and pain avoidance were dismissed as simply reflexive. Indeed, babies were thought to be more like animals than reasoning beings and Descartes had told us that an animal’s cries were of no more import than the grinding of gears in a mechanical automata. There was very little evidence for this theory beyond some gesturing’s towards myelin sheathing. But anyone who doubted the theory was told that there was “no evidence” that babies feel pain (the conflation of no evidence with evidence of no effect).
Most disturbingly, the theory that babies don’t feel pain wasn’t just an error of science or philosophy—it shaped medical practice. It was routine for babies undergoing medical procedures to be medically paralyzed but not anesthetized. In one now infamous 1985 case an open heart operation was performed on a baby without any anesthesia (n.b. the link is hard reading). Parents were shocked when they discovered that this was standard practice. Publicity from the case and a key review paper in 1987 led the American Academy of Pediatrics to declare it unethical to operate on newborns without anesthesia.
In short, we tortured babies under the theory that they were not conscious of pain. What can we learn from this? One lesson is humility about consciousness. Consciousness and the capacity to suffer can exist in forms once assumed to be insensate. When assessing the consciousness of a newborn, an animal, or an intelligent machine, we should weigh observable and circumstantial evidence and not just abstract theory. If we must err, let us err on the side of compassion.
Claims that X cannot feel or think because Y should be met with skepticism—especially when X is screaming and telling you different. Theory may convince you that animals or AIs are not conscious but do you want to torture more babies? Be humble.
We should be especially humble when the beings in question are very different from ourselves. If we can be wrong about animals, if we can be wrong about other people, if we can be wrong about our own babies then we can be very wrong about AIs. The burden of proof should not fall on the suffering being to prove its pain; rather, the onus is on us to justify why we would ever withhold compassion.
Hat tip: Jim Ward for discussion.
What should I ask Chris Dixon?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. Chris is a managing partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, and has recently published Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet. Here is Chris on Wikipedia. Here is Chris on Twitter. Chris has some writings on his home page.
So what should I ask him?
An Economic Approach to Homer’s Odyssey: Part III
Published by Liberty Fund, by me, here is the third and final installment. Excerpt:
“Below is a brief and simplified catalog of the major polities described in The Odyssey:
- • Pylos and Sparta: Visited by Telemachus, superficially seem normal but they seem sadder on reflection and Sparta relies on intoxication to support public order.
- • Ogygia, or Calypso: An unbearable paradise, there is no utopia.
- • Phaeacia: Relatively well-run, inward-looking, passive-aggressive, “control freak” syndrome.
- • The Lotus Eaters: Another unbearable “utopia.”
- • The Cyclopes: Anarchistic, brutish, and the community is ineffective and unable to defend itself.
- • Aeolus: A closed society, based on incest, hostile to outsiders, a more extreme and dysfunctional version of Phaeacia.
- • Laestrygonia: Giants, they throw boulders and murder, and in some ways resemble the Cyclopes. Tendencies toward anarchy are widespread, and not confined to the Cyclopes.
- • Aeaea (Circe): There is the bed of tyrannical but beautiful Circe, or life as a well-fed pig. Again, utopias are impossible and immortality would bore us.
- • Cimmeria: Dark, bleak, and unloved by God. Possibly the default setting.
- • The Underworld: Everyone is sad (and dead), yet they talk like actual humans and also tell the truth. Lesson: the living cannot escape artifice and deception.
- • Ithaca: Usually wrapped up in war and revenge-taking, chaotic and lacking in trust and lacking in clarity about sovereignty. This is another one of the default options.
- • Syria: Initially prosperous but wrecked by the arrival of avaricious merchants. Unstable.
- • Crete: A diverse society of perfect trust, within a narrative of Odysseus-in-disguise, but it has no chance of existing.”
My overall goal has been to pull out the implicit “public choice” strands in Homer’s Odyssey. It is very much a poem about politics, and the book is among other things a study in comparative politics.
Do read the whole essay, and here are parts one and two.
The Economist 1843 magazine does a profile of me
I believe you can get through the gate by registering. A very good and accurate piece, first-rate photos as well, including of Spinoza too, here is the link. Here is one excerpt:
I asked Cowen – it is the kind of question you come to ask him – what were the criteria for a perfect Central American square. He began plucking details from the scene around us. Music, trees, a church, a fountain, children playing. “Good balloons,” he noted, looking approvingly at a balloon seller. I genuinely couldn’t tell whether he was extemporising from the available details, or indexing what he saw against a pre-existing model of what the ideal square should look like.
And:
When he told me he had never been depressed, I asked him to clarify what he meant. He had never been clinically depressed? Depressed for a month? For a week? An afternoon? I looked up from my notebook. An enormous smile, one I’d not seen before, had spread across the whole of Cowen’s face.
“Like, for a whole afternoon?” he asked, hugely grinning.
Here is the closing bit, taken from when the reporter (John Phipps) and I were together in Roatan:
As we came back to shore, Cowen smiled at the unremarkable, deserted village. “I’m long Jonesville,” he said warmly. (He often speaks about places and people as though they were stocks you could go long or short on.) I asked him if he would think about investing in property here. He shrugged as if to say “why bother?”
The cab had begun to grind its way up towards the brow of a hill with audible, Sisyphean difficulty. I mumbled something about whether we were going to have to get out. “We’ll make it,” Cowen said firmly. He was talking about how he liked to play basketball at a court near his house. He didn’t mind playing with other people, but most days he was the only person there. He’d been doing this for two decades now; it was an efficient form of exercise; the weather was mostly good. I asked him what he’d learned playing basketball alone for decades. “That you can do something for a long time and still not be very good at it,” he said. The car began to roll downhill.
Self-recommending, and with some significant cameos, most of all Alex T. and also Spinoza.
Matt Yglesias on morality
I do broadly align with utilitarian/consequentialist ideas, and I particularly like the formulation Richard Y Chappell calls Beneficentrism, which is simply the claim that one very important thing in life is to try to help others, including those who are very different or distant from ourselves.
I think that in that formulation, you address in one fell swoop 95 percent of what trips people up about utilitarianism. You can take special care of your friends and family. You can care more about citizens of your country than you care about people on the other side of the world. But you should care some about the general welfare. This is in fact pretty important and you should be doing something about it. How much? Probably more than you are doing. Probably more than I am doing.
Here is the full (gated) post, mostly about other matters.