Category: Philosophy

Noah Smith presents Ryan Oprea

by  Tyler Cowen in

But a new paper by Ryan Oprea challenges the idea that we even need something like Prospect Theory at all. Oprea hypothesizes that a lot of the seemingly “irrational” experimental behaviors are really just due to the excessive complexity of the task they’re being asked to do. He does an experiment where he takes away all the risk in the decision — there are no probabilities and no losses involved. One option just gives you more money than the other. And yet experimental subjects still make mistakes that look a lot like the “irrational” choices they make in Kahneman-type experiments. Eric Crampton has a good blog post summarizing the details of Oprea’s experiment.

So it’s possible that a lot of what looks like “irrationality” is just human beings being unable to deal with complex calculations. That doesn’t kill the idea of behavioral economics — it just means we need different theories about why people don’t act like homo economicus.

Here is the link to Noah.

Assisted dying in the UK

by  Tyler Cowen in

I would say that overall I am more suspicious of “assisted dying” policies than are many of my libertarian friends.  I am fine with legalizing suicide, but I get nervous when a state — especially a less than fully competent, fiscally strapped state — enters the picture with so much influence over the proceedings.  In the longer term, no matter how the legislation is initially written, what will be the incentives of that state?  What will be the incentives of family members and legal guardians?

That said, I do recognize that as medical technology and life-saving techniques advance, something has to give.  We can’t just keep tens of millions of people hooked up to life support for decades.

I do not have any “top down” way of resolving all of the difficult moral and practical issues here.  I will simply note that the returns to federalism have risen.  Different American states can try out different policies, as indeed they do, and we can see what is happening and judge accordingly.

I believe this point remains underrated.  As technology advances, and the world changes more rapidly, the returns to federalism rise.  We are coming off a long period when the returns to federalism were relatively low.

I am more optimistic about England than many people, but this is one of my worries.  Devolution doesn’t quite do the same, but rather means that for anything England does, two other polities are likely to choose something even worse.

My Conversation with Russ Roberts on Vasily Grossman’s *Life and Fate*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Russ and I agreed to read the book in its entirety and then discuss it.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Russ and Tyler cover Grossman’s life and the historical context of Life and Fate, its themes of war, totalitarianism, freedom, and fate, the novel’s polyphonic structure and large cast of characters, the parallels between fascism and communism, the idea of “senseless kindness” as a counter to systemic evil, the symbolic importance of motherhood, the psychology of confession and loyalty under totalitarian systems, Grossman’s literary influences including Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dante, and Stendhal, individual resilience and moral compromises, the survival of the novel despite Soviet censorship, artificial intelligence and the dehumanization of systems, the portrayal of scientific discovery and its moral dilemmas, the ethical and emotional tensions in the novel, the anti-fanatical tone and universal humanism of the book, Grossman’s personal life and connections to its themes, and the novel’s enduring relevance and complexity.

Here is one bit from me:

COWEN: Amongst Soviet authors, he is the GOAT, one could say, to refer to our earlier episode. But this, to me, is one of the very few truly universal novels. The title itself, Life and Fate — it is about life and fate, but the novel is about so much more. It’s about war. It’s about slavery. It’s about love, motherhood, fatherhood, childbirth, rape, friendship, science, politics. How many novels, if any, can you think of that have all of those worlds in them in an interesting and insightful manner? Very few.

The one that comes closest to it is, in fact, his model. That’s Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a three-word title with an and in the middle and two important concepts. They’re both about war. They’re both about the invasions of Russia or the USSR. There’s a central family in both stories. The notion of what is fate or destiny is highly important to Tolstoy, as it is to Grossman, though they have different points of view.

Napoleon plays a significant role in War and Peace. In Life and Fate, Hitler and Stalin make actual appearances in the novel, which I find shocking when I read it, like, here they are on the page, and it’s actually somewhat plausible. So, he’s modeling this, I think, after War and Peace. He actually pulls it off, which is a miracle. I think it is a novel comparable in quality and scope and import to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which is sometimes called the greatest novel ever. So that is a pretty amazing achievement.

And on some non-book issues:

COWEN: I think I should have said it’s a bimodal distribution, that you go one way or another. Look at it this way: In the simplest Bayesian model, your views should be a random walk, that the recent evolution of your views shouldn’t predict where you’ll end up tomorrow. But that’s not the case, really, with anyone that I’ve ever met. There’s some kind of trend in your views. You’re either getting more fanatical, getting more moderate, getting more religious, more or less something.

And that, to me, is one of the most interesting facts about human belief, is how hard it is to find belief as a random walk. So, what’s wrong with all of us? If you’re getting more moderate all the time, that’s wrong too. That’s a funny kind of, you could say, almost fanaticism, where you ought to say, “Well, I see the trend so I’m just going to leap to where I ought to be.” Then the next day, maybe 50 percent chance I’ll take a step back toward being more dogmatic or less moderate. But again, that’s not what we see from the moderates either.

ROBERTS: I wonder how much of it is the fact that it’s really convenient to have a system, gives you something to shove into the box. You’ve got this black box that you take the world’s events and you’ve decided how they should be processed. Then something new comes along, and you know how to deal with that because you’ve got this box; you’ve got all these great examples from the past.

At some point for me, I just started thinking that maybe the box doesn’t work all the time. I think a lot of people love the box. It’s a great source of comfort, whether it’s religion or ideology or other things. Maybe there’s just something peculiar about me. When you’re younger, certainty is deeply comforting because the world’s a bit too complicated to deal with. It still is, but I’m just less certain.

COWEN: There’s also a more charitable interpretation of what you’re describing. Think of yourself as working through problems, which is fine. Working through problems takes some time. You can’t every day pick up a new problem. The problems you’re working through as you — I wouldn’t say solve them, but as you somewhat make progress on them — that’s going to give you some persistence in the deltas of how your beliefs change.

I’m not sure — the pure Bayesian model might just be wrong. It’s so far from actual human practice. Maybe we shouldn’t just damn humans for not meeting it, but realize there are structures to how you work through things, and they are going to imply certain trends that go on for periods of time.

Recommended, obviously.

Parents should believe in upward mobility

by  Tyler Cowen in

There is a new paper on this topic, with multiple authors by led by Rebecca Ryan.  Here is the abstract:

Research in economics and psychology shows that individuals are sensitive to cues about economic conditions in ways that affect attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. We provide causal evidence that parents’ beliefs about economic mobility prospects shape parental investments of time and money in children. To do so we conduct an on-line information experiment with ~ 1,000 socioeconomically diverse parents of children ages 5-15. The information treatment aimed to manipulate parents’ beliefs in the possibility for future upward (downward) economic mobility in US society. The experimental results yield three conclusions. First, parents are highly sensitive to signals about future economic mobility prospects. Second, parents who are induced to believe in the likely possibility of future upward mobility increase their beliefs about the return on their own investments of time and money. Using a novel measure of time investment we developed, these parents also increase their time investments in the service of boosting children’s skill. Finally, they report being more willing to pay for resources that would boost their child’s skill development. Third, these patterns are true for economically advantaged and disadvantaged families alike. We discuss the implication of these results in terms of reports showing that Americans are losing faith in “The American Dream.”

No, researchers should not lie, but perhaps this gives some additional perspective on who exactly is harming the world.  There can be a cost to publishing neurotic, untrue ideas.

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

The new Roger Penrose biography

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Patchen Barss, and the title is The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius.  I liked this book very much, and feel there should be more works like this.  It was made with the full cooperation of Penrose himself, though he had no veto over the final work.  Here is one bit:

Many relativists had a powerful feel for formal math: errors in calculations leapt out at them the way off-key notes rankle a musician’s ear.  Not Roger.  Equations required too much mental labour and restricted his creativity.  His “magic” came from the shape of things.  He preferred to run his fingers along the curves and twists of space and time and find in those graceful lines the story of how every particle, force, and phenomenon acquired its properties.

The book covers Penrose’s personal life as well:

Judith encouraged him to sort out his relationship with Joan independently of his feelings for her.  He wasn’t sure that made sense.  In a deterministic universe, could he really take ownership of his unhappy marriage?  The idea felt strange to him.

Returning to physics:

Roger’s curiosity about consciousness came from many places — the extreme mental feats of his father and brothers, the speed of decision making in racquet sports, the human ability to transcend Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and his own capacity to discover new mathematical insights.

Then again, one might return to matters of his personal life:

…he [Penrose] offhandedly observed how many scientists — not just him — seem to have “troubled marriages.”  He implied that a solitary life might be an inevitable consequence, a necessary price, for his kind of success.  True, Wolfgang and Ted [friends] had long, happy marriages.  Then again, neither of them had won a Nobel Prize.

His tone was one of justification rather than regret.  He didn’t see how it could be any other way.

Recommended.  Here is a good NYT review.

Austrian economics and AI scaling

by  Tyler Cowen in

As many of you know, I grew up reading (on knowledge) Hayek, Michael Polanyi, Ludwig Lachmann, Mario Rizzo, and others in that tradition.  For these Austrian and Austrian-related thinkers, knowledge is about how different parts of a system fit together, rather than being a homegeneous metric easily expressed on a linear scale.  There is no legible way to assess the smarts of any single unit in the system, taken on its own. Furthermore, there are many “walls,” meaning knowledge is bumpy and lumpy under the best of circumstances.  It thus makes little sense to assert that an entity is “3x smarter” than before.  In my early 20s I received a second “dose” of related ideas through complexity theory and non-linear dynamics, some of those frameworks having Hayekian roots.

When people came along and made various predictions about AI following “scaling laws,” I was never extremely impressed.  I did not feel I had the technical background to contradict them, I just was never sure they were measuring the social import of that knowledge in a meaningful way.

That is one (not the only) reason I have never been much persuaded by either the AI doomsters nor the AI utopians.  Both seemed to me misguided rationalists, operating with a fundamentally pre-Hayekian understanding of knowledge.  Furthermore, Ludwig Lachmann frequently told me that capital was a structure based on relationships of complementarity, mirroring the Hayekian knowledge insight in capital theory.

I find Matt Clifford’s observation “There is no AI-shaped hole in most organizations” to be a very useful starting point for analysis.

I am also much influenced by the history of artistic and scientific revolutions.  Consider the Florentine artistic Renaissance, or say the blossoming of Germanic classical music in the 18th century.  There were thick markets of rivalrous creators, sophisticated audiences, new technologies to work with, a diversity of funding sources, and strong beliefs that something very important was at stake, among other preconditions.  Do we find similar preconditions active in AI worlds today?  I would argue yes, but of course that could be contested.  In any case, it is another and very different way of trying to understand the likely future pace of AI progress.  “Does this feel like the environment that produced the Beatles and Bob Dylan?”  “The Scot tinkerers of the Industrial Revolution?”  “The German Romantics?”

Now in the last two days we have seen various media accounts (Bloomberg), some citing AI experts, claiming that scaling has slowed down or is no longer working.  Put aside whether these claims are correct.  I remain bullish on AI progress, because the AI world is showing so many signs of significant ferment.  Ask yourself for instance — is it attracting the best minds and most ambitious people?  Just as the postulation of AI scaling never so much excited me, neither does talk of its possible diminution much discourage me.

It is still a question of whether and at what pace we can find or create “AI-shaped holes” in organizations, or with individuals.  And that is up to us.

AfD vs. Bauhaus

by  Tyler Cowen in

By their aesthetics shall ye know them:

It shaped modern industrial design and continues to inspire architects and product designers the world over, but to some on Germany’s far right, Bauhaus is nothing to celebrate.

As the East German city of Dessau prepares to celebrate next year’s centenary of the famed design school’s move there, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has urged local legislators not to glorify Bauhaus’ cosmopolitan style ethos, saying it negated regional traditions.

The AfD’s proposal, debated and roundly rejected by the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt earlier this week, sparked a predictable outcry: Bauhaus was part of the interwar flourishing of German avant-garde culture that was stamped out by the Nazis when they came to power in 1933.

There are many losers, so it is a debatable question today which political movement has the best aesthetics…

Scott Alexander on the Progress Studies conference

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one excerpt:

Over-regulation was the enemy at many presentations, but this wasn’t a libertarian conference. Everyone agreed that safety, quality, the environment, etc, were important and should be regulated for. They just thought existing regulations were colossally stupid, so much so that they made everything worse including safety, the environment, etc. With enough political will, it would be easy to draft regulations that improved innovation, price, safety, the environment, and everything else.

For example, consider supersonic flight. Supersonic aircraft create “sonic booms”, minor explosions that rattle windows and disturb people underneath their path. Annoyed with these booms, Congress banned supersonic flight over land in 1973. Now we’ve invented better aircraft whose booms are barely noticeable, or not noticeable at all. But because Congress banned supersonic flight – rather than sonic booms themselves – we’re stuck with normal boring 6-hour coast-to-coast flights. If aircraft progress had continued at the same rate it was going before the supersonic ban, we’d be up to 2,500 mph now (coast-to-coast in ~2 hours). Can Congress change the regulation so it bans booms and not speed? Yes, but Congress is busy, and doing it through the FAA and other agencies would take 10-15 years of environmental impact reports.

Or consider solar power. The average large solar project is delayed 5-10 years by bureaucracy. Part of the problem is NEPA, the infamous environmental protection law saying that anyone can sue any project for any reason if they object on environmental grounds. If a fossil fuel company worries about a competition from solar, they can sue upcoming solar plants on the grounds that some ants might get crushed beneath the solar panels; even in the best-case where the solar company fights and wins, they’ve suffered years of delay and lost millions of dollars. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies have it easier; they’ve had good lobbyists for decades, and accrued a nice collection of formal and informal NEPA exemptions.

Even if a solar project survives court challenges, it has to get connected to the grid. This poses its own layer of bureaucracy and potential pitfalls.

Do read the whole thing.  And congratulations to Jason Crawford and Heike Larson for pulling off this event.

Risers and Fallers, mostly Fallers

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a fun post by Arnold Kling on which thinkers have kept name recognition and also influence.  Excerpt:

Sociology (Erving Goffman, Talcott Parsons, Robert Nisbet, Charles Murray, Matt Granovetter, Robert Trivers, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould)

Is there not a good case to be made that we are living in Erving Goffman’s world? I think he coined the term “impression management,” and certainly with the advent of social media that is now a big part of our lives. But he is a Faller. Probably if you would read him now, you would dismiss him as offering Blinding Glimpses of the Obvious. Parsons and Nisbet are also Fallers.

Murray is still polarizing, but much lesser known than he was in the 20th century. So he is a Faller, but too much of one.

Granovetter is a Riser, no? Social networks are a big deal now, and he is known for his work on those.

I put the sociobiology controversialists in the sociology category, since the public doesn’t care about insects or peacocks. I would say that Gould’s crusade against evolutionary biology failed, so he seems to be somewhat of a Faller. Dawkins and Trivers seem like Risers, but Wilson was much more well known, and controversial, in his prime.

Keynes, Tolkien, and Rand are among the risers (sometimes relatively speaking), so what does that tell us about the current world?

Gossip phrased with concern provides advantages in female intrasexual competition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Although many women report being victimized by gossip, fewer report spreading negative gossip. Female gossipers might be unaware they are gossiping if they disclose such statements out of concern for targets. Four studies (N = 1709) investigated whether women believe their gossip is motivated by concern and whether expressing concern for targets insulates female gossipers against social costs, while simultaneously impairing targets’ reputations. Study 1 examined sex differences in gossip motivations. Compared to men, women endorsed stronger concern than harm motivations, especially when gossiping about other women, suggesting these motivations characterize female intrasexual gossip. In Study 2, female gossipers who phrased their negative gossip with concern (versus maliciously or neutrally) were evaluated as more trustworthy and desirable as social and romantic partners. Study 3 replicated the favorable evaluations of concerned female gossipers. Female participants especially disliked malicious female gossipers, suggesting professions of concern might help to avoid women’s scorn. Male participants reported lower romantic interest in female gossip targets when they learned concern (versus malicious or no) gossip, suggesting concerned gossip can harm female targets’ romantic prospects. Study 4 revealed these patterns extend to face-to-face interactions. A female gossiper was preferred as a social partner when she phrased her gossip with concern versus maliciously. Moreover, concerned gossip harmed perceptions of the female target as effectively as malicious gossip. Altogether, findings suggest that negative gossip delivered with concern effectively harms female targets’ reputations, while also protecting gossipers’ reputations, indicating a viable strategy in female intrasexual competition.

That is from a recent paper by Reynolds, Vaner, and Baumeister.  Via a loyal MR reader.

A funny feature of the AI doomster argument

by  Tyler Cowen in

If you ask them whether they are short the market, many will say there is no way to short the apocalypse.  But of course you can benefit from pending signs of deterioration in advance.  At the very least, you can short some markets, or go long volatility, and then send those profits to Somalia to mitigate suffering for a few years before the whole world ends.

Still, in a recent informal debate at the wonderful Roots of Progress conference in Berkeley, many of the doomsters insisted to me that “the end” will come as a complete surprise, given the (supposed) deceptive abilities of AGI.

But note what they are saying.  If markets will not fall at least partially in advance, they are saying the passage of time, and the events along the way, will not persuade anyone.  They are saying that further contemplation of their arguments will not persuade any marginal investors, whether directly or indirectly.  They are predicting that their own ideas will not spread any further.

I take those as signs of a pretty weak argument.  “It will never get more persuasive than it is right now!”  “There’s only so much evidence for my argument, and never any more!”  Of course, by now most intelligent North Americans with an interest in these issues have heard these arguments and they are most decidedly not persuaded.

There is also a funny epistemic angle here.  If the next say twenty years of evidence and argumentation are not going to persuade anyone else at the margin, why should you be holding this view right now?  What is it that you know, that is so resistant to spread and persuasion over the course of the next twenty years?

I would say that to ask such questions is to answer them.

Gustav de Molinari, the first libertarian?

by  Tyler Cowen in

He was a nineteenth century Belgian economist, wonderful to read, and still neglected as a thinker.  Here is one excerpt from a short open access book by Benoit Malbranque, now on line:

Gustave de Molinari himself was perhaps as much a traveler, a journalist and an historian, as he was a political philosopher. In fact, apart from a handful of professional travelers, very few people knew so much about the world as he did. Over the years, he made lengthy stays in Switzerland (1857), Russia (1860, 1882), Canada (1876, 1880, 1885), Ireland (1880), and the United States (1876, 1880, 1885). His journeys also made him discover England, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Turkey, as well as the Caribbean islands, Panama, Columbia, and Venezuela. Travels were obviously, at that time, more perilous and adventurous than they are now. By sea, they were both uncomfortable and terribly long: crossing the Atlantic Ocean took de Molinari 12 days in 1876, 10 days in 1880, and 11 days in 1885.

Part of his forward-looking libertarianism was a strong belief in international agreements, in the interests of peace and mutual cooperation.  He also blamed the poor quality and high expense of American food, as he perceived it, on American protectionism.

Here is a more general page of relevant material on French liberalism.  All via Daniel Klein.