Category: Philosophy
Do earthquakes make men more risk tolerant?
We investigate whether individuals’ risk preferences change after experiencing a natural disaster, specifically, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Exploiting the panels of nationally representative surveys on risk preferences, we find that men who experienced greater intensity of the earthquake became more risk tolerant a year after the Earthquake. Interestingly, the effects on men’s risk preferences are persistent even five years after the Earthquake at almost the same magnitude as those shortly after the Earthquake. Furthermore, these men gamble more, which is consistent with the direction of changes in risk preferences. We find no such pattern for women.
That is from a newly published paper by Chie Hanaoka, Hitoshi Shigeoka, and Yasutora Watanabe. What else will have this effect?
*Cognitive Gadgets*
The author is Cecilia Heyes, and the subtitle is The Cultural Evolution of Thinking, published by Harvard/Belknap. It is not always a transparent read, but this is an important book and likely the most thoughtful of the year in the social sciences.
From the book’s home page:
…adult humans have impressive pieces of cognitive equipment. In her framing, however, these cognitive gadgets are not instincts programmed in the genes but are constructed in the course of childhood through social interaction. Cognitive gadgets are products of cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution. At birth, the minds of human babies are only subtly different from the minds of newborn chimpanzees. We are friendlier, our attention is drawn to different things, and we have a capacity to learn and remember that outstrips the abilities of newborn chimpanzees. Yet when these subtle differences are exposed to culture-soaked human environments, they have enormous effects. They enable us to upload distinctively human ways of thinking from the social world around us.
The key substantive points from this are malleability and speed of evolution, and overall in her theory there is a much lower reliance on cognitive instincts and thus a fundamentally different account of social evolution: “In contrast, the cognitive gadgets theory applies cultural evolutionary theory to the mechanisms of thought — the mental processes that generate and control behavior.”
And “…social interaction in infancy and childhood produces new cognitive mechanisms; it changes the way we think.”
The chapter on imitation is the best appendage to Girard on memesis I know. One interesting point is that most people find it quite hard to imitate how they look to others when say they tell a joke or make love. To imitate successfully, you need to develop particular sensorimotor capacities. Otherwise, you can be thwarted by a kind of “correspondence” problem, not knowing how the objective and subjective experiences of imitation match up properly. This too we learn through cultural gadgets.
Mindreading is also a mental gadget, it must be learned, and it is surprisingly similar to print reading. In an odd twist on Julian Jaynes, Heyes suggests that humans five or six thousand years ago may not have had this capacity very strongly. And as with print reading, there is cross-cultural diversity in mindreading. There is no mindreading instinct and we all must learn it, autistics too.
What about language? Rather than Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, there are instead “domain-general processes of sequence learning.” This in turn leads to a complex and quite interesting take on how, while non-human animals do also have language, it is quite different from ours (p.187).
Most generally, if someone is trying to explain X, maybe both genetic/instinct and cultural evolution accounts of X are wrong — try a cultural gadget approach! And think of this book as perhaps the best attempt so far to explain the weirdness of humans, relative to other animals.
Note also that in this view, humanity is relatively vulnerable to cultural catastrophes, as we cannot simply bounce back using enduring instincts. Furthermore, social media may indeed matter a great deal, and in revisionist terms some parts of Marx are not as crazy as they may seem (my point this latter one, not hers).
I need more time (years?) to digest the contents of this book, and decide how much I agree. It is somehow neither hard nor easy reading, but most MR readers should be able to make their way through it. Highly recommended, it is likely to prove one of the most thought-provoking books of the year.
Buy it on Amazon here. Here is a Heyes lecture on related ideas, also click through to part II.
My Conversation with Martina Navratilova
Here is the podcast and transcript, Martina was in top form and dare I say quick on her feet? Here is part of the summary:
In their conversation, she and Tyler cover her illustrious tennis career, her experience defecting from Czechoslovakia and later becoming a dual citizen, the wage gap in tennis competition and commentary, gender stereotypes in sports, her work regimen and training schedule, technological progress in tennis, her need for speed, journaling and constant self-improvement, some of her most shocking realizations about American life, the best way to see East Africa, her struggle to get her children to put the dishes in the dishwasher, and more.
Here is one bit:
NAVRATILOVA: I just wanted to leave no stone unturned, really. The coach, obviously, was technique and tactics. The physical part was training, working very hard. I’ll give you my typical day in a minute. The eating was so that I could train hard and not get injured. So it all came together.
The typical day, then, when I really was humming was four hours of tennis, 10:00 to 2:00, two hours of drills and maybe two hours of sets. Then I would do some running drills on the court for 15, 20 minutes, sprints that if I did them now, I wouldn’t be able to walk the next day.
[laughter]
NAVRATILOVA: You know, 15- to 30-second sprinting drills. Then we would eat lunch. Then I would go either play basketball full-court, two on two for an hour and a half or little man-big man. It’s two on one. I don’t know, those people that play basketball. You just run. You just run.
COWEN: Which one were you?
NAVRATILOVA: It switches. Whoever has the ball is the little man. No, whoever has the ball, it’s one against two. Then you play little man, the person plays defense, and then the big man plays center. It’s not two on one, it’s one against one and then one. Then whoever gets the ball goes the other way. It’s run, run, run.
Then I would lift weights and have dinner either before lifting weights or after. So it was a full day of training.
COWEN: What about 9:00 A.M. to 10:00 A.M.?
And this:
COWEN:Billie Jean King once suggested that you use writing in a journal every day to help you accomplish your goals. How does that work for you? What is it you do? Why do you think it works?
NAVRATILOVA: It worked because it really centers you. It narrows it down, whatever long-term goal you have. It becomes more real and more current because it narrows it down in that, “What do you need to do today?” and “Did you accomplish that goal?” You have a big goal. You break it into smaller goals, into smaller goals, until you get into, “OK, what do I do today to get to that goal?”
…Try to be honest with yourself. Be honest but also be nice to yourself. You see that with most champions. They’re perfectionists. You beat yourself up too much. I preach and I try to strive for excellence rather than perfection.
If you strive for excellence, perfection may happen. [laughs] It’s good enough to be excellent. That’s good enough. You don’t need to be perfect because perfection just happens by accident.
I asked her this:
COWEN: What was it like to go skiing with Donald Trump?
My favorite part was this:
NAVRATILOVA: Tyler, you need to drink more water. You’re not hydrating at all.
Remember, above all else, sports is cognitive! These are some of the smartest humans of our time, even if it is not always the kind of intelligence you respect most.
Are the Amish unhappy?
We were able to recruit 52 Amish participants for our study of which 56 % were male and for which the average age was 44. Interestingly, the average levels of life satisfaction as measured by the SWLS (Diener et al., 1985) was 4.4; just above the neutral point. Above neutral scores are consistent with the idea that “most people are mildly happy” (Diener & Diener, 1996), and that mild happiness is evolutionarily advantageous (Fredrickson, 2001). Comparatively, the Amish satisfaction in our study can be interpreted as meaning that the Amish fall lower than members of many other groups. In a study of more than 13 thousand college students from 31 nations, for example, only students from Kenya (whose average life satisfaction was 4.0) scored lower than the Amish (Diener & Diener, 1995).
Anecdotally, the Amish society in which we conducted our study was fraught with contrasts. On the one hand, the Amish had a pronounced pro-social attitude. One man I interviewed, for example, had donated tens of thousands of US Dollars toward the medical treatment of his neighbor’s son, with no thought of repayment. Similarly, the Amish often helped one another in quilting, construction, and food preparation. On the other hand, these neighborly behaviors were confined to in-group members. There was a conspicuous degree of prejudice toward out-group members, especially ethnic or religious minorities. One bishop, for example, asked me whether I thought the space shuttle Challenger exploded because there was a Jewish person (Judith Resnick) aboard.
Another set of contrasts could be found in the relationship between the Amish and the larger “English” society in which they live. While on the one hand there is a strong cultural push to remain separate from industrialized society. The Amish I spoke with were highly invested in publicly conforming to group norms related to abstaining from the use of industrial technologies and from remaining aloof from broader society. Privately, however, the Amish revealed themselves to be as curious and as human as people from any other society. One participant, for example, admitted that he used his workplace telephone—an allowable technology—to phone a newspaper number that hosts recordings of the world’s news. Another informant revealed that she had secretly flown on an airplane. These examples reflect the on-going tension of a society that must—individually and collectively—continually re-negotiate its relation to the larger society in which it exists. Where subjective well-being is concerned, the tension between retaining traditions and adapting to new circumstances is an interesting issue for research.
…global and specific domain satisfaction should, theoretically, be in agreement. For example, if a person is satisfied with her romantic life, her friendships, and her family relationships—all specific domains—she should, logically, report about the same amount of satisfaction with her overall social life (the global domain). Diener and colleagues found that this correspondence occurred in some cultures, such as Japan. In other cultures, however, they discovered an inflationary effect. People in Colombia and the United States, for instance, are likely to inflate their global reports of satisfaction over that reported for specific satisfaction.
That is by Robert Biswas-Diener, there is much of interest in this paper on happiness in small societies. Via Rolf Degen. By the way, this article about Norway is worth a ponder too.
What should I ask Balaji Srinivasan?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, no associated public event. Here is his home page, here is his bio:
Balaji S. Srinivasan is the CEO of Earn.com and a Board Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to taking the CEO role at Earn.com, Dr. Srinivasan was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Before joining a16z, he was the cofounder and CTO of Founders Fund-backed Counsyl, where he won the Wall Street Journal Innovation Award for Medicine and was named to the MIT TR35.
Dr. Srinivasan holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. He also teaches the occasional class at Stanford, including an online MOOC in 2013 which reached 250,000+ students worldwide.
His latest Medium essay was on ICOs and tokens. I thank you all in advance for your wise counsel.
Greeting cards aren’t about greeting
Greeting cards and cliché more generally bear witness to the fact that the most banal and the most meaningful regularly coincide, and that something always remains beyond the reach of words. Cliché is a place where life and language resist one another.
By recognising the radical imperfection of language, cliché can help ameliorate the damage it does. The continual return of these stock phrases reminds us that, though language can say ‘I love you’ or ‘Our deepest sympathies’ – which ties the love and grief we feel with all those who have ever, and will ever, love and grieve – it can never completely capture this grief or this love. After which, the universality of our love, our grief, begins to feel less like an act of violent conceptuality and more like an act of community, transposing us into a commune with all the living and the dead.
Greeting cards serve as a reminder that it is often with the clichéd and the ordinary that the fabric of language starts to unravel, and the pulse of life – that which will always remain beyond words – begins to bubble up from beneath.
Here is more, by Daniel Fraser. Do you prefer that take, or a single tweet on the topic by Robin Hanson?
Very good sentences about sex
Here is one of them:
But there is a risk too that repoliticising desire will encourage a discourse of sexual entitlement.
Here is another:
By contrast, gay men – even the beautiful, white, rich, able-bodied ones – know that who we have sex with, and how, is a political question.
Here are many more, by Amia Srinivasan, definitely recommended to those of you who are interested, and do note that sex is not like a sandwich. The piece closes with:
In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.
Via S.M. Here is more about the still massively underrated author.
*The Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard*
That is the new book by Cynthia L. Haven, which I was very enthusiastic about. I find about half of it to be a revelation, and the other half to be perfectly fine, though material I largely had seen before (but still useful to most readers). Here are a few of the things I learned:
1. As a child, “…his favorite game was a solitary one: with toy soldiers, he reenacted France’s major battles, taking all the roles himself.”
2. In 1944, at the age of 21, he saw many French collaborators killed or put on trial, and from that time started to develop some of his major ideas.
3. When he migrated to America, he associated the country with grandness and Avignon with petiteness. He was at that time “adamantly atheistic.”
4. He wrote his dissertation on “American Opinions on France, 1940-1943,” which at 418 pp. contained some early versions of his later ideas.
5. He was turned down for tenure at Indiana University, claiming he spent several years “devoted essentially to female students and cars.”
6. He insisted that he witnessed a lynching (likely in North Carolina) in the early 1950s, although after reading Haven’s discussion I suspect this was a fabrication.
7. He was significantly influenced by the Dante circle at Johns Hopkins where he ended up teaching, including by Charles Singleton.
8. Like myself, Haven considers Theater of Envy to be his most underrated book.
9. His work day typically started at 3:30 a.m.
10. Peter Thiel, as an undergraduate, actually took a class from Girard.
Definitely recommended to anyone with an interest in Girard. Here is my recent summary post on Girard.
People expect happiness improvements that don’t quite arrive
Among the young, expectations for future well-being run far ahead of reported well-being today. The gap diminishes with age, and in the rich countries, the lines cross around age 65 after which the future is expected to be worse than the present. Except for this, people appear to be perpetually optimistic about their futures even though this optimism is perpetually frustrated by actual outcomes.
…This (unjustified) optimism seems to happen everywhere in the world…
That is from a new paper by Angus Deaton.
What should I ask Agnes Callard?
I will be having a Conversation with her soon. She is a philosopher at the University of Chicago, and her new book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming is coming out in early April. Here are some of her papers. Here is her recent NYT Op-Ed. So what should I ask her?
The contributions of Rene Girard
Carl L asks: Address the scapegoating theory of René Girard in general, and its possible application to economics. Peter Thiel has repeatedly cited Girard as an important influence and has even said his theory was partly the reason he invested in Facebook.
From my idiosyncratic point of view, here are a few of Girard’s major contributions, noting that I am putting them into “stupid simple” language, rather than trying to communicate his nuances:
1. His understanding of Christianity as fundamentally and radically different from earlier religions, as it exalts the individual victim rather than the conqueror. Here is one point from a summarizer: “Christianity is the revelation (the unveiling) of what the myths want to veil; it is the deconstruction of the mono-myth, not a reiteration of it—which is exactly why so many within academe want to domesticate and de-fang it.”
2. Seeing violence as a chronic problem of human societies, rather than as the result of a bug in rational choice or the collapse into a bad game-theoretic solution.
3. Understanding the import of “mimetic desire,” namely the desire to copy others, and also why this is not always an entirely peaceful process, due to scarcity. The tech world, by the way, at least pretends to have found a solution to this in its extreme scalability of product; we’ll see how that pans out.
4. A theory of mediated and triangulated desire, not yet absorbed by behavioral economics, and partly summarized here: “Whereas external mediation does not lead to rivalries, internal mediation does lead to rivalries. But, metaphysical desire leads a person not just to rivalry with her mediator; actually, it leads to total obsession with and resentment of the mediator. For, the mediator becomes the main obstacle in the satisfaction of the person’s metaphysical desire. Inasmuch as the person desires to be his mediator, such desire will never be satisfied. For nobody can be someone else. Eventually, the person developing a metaphysical desire comes to appreciate that the main obstacle to be the mediator is the mediator himself.”
5. First and foremost approaching societies from an anthropological point of view, prior to the economic method.
6. Understanding various social situations in terms of the need of finding a scapegoat to sacrifice, if not violently with some kind of resolution and catharsis. These days one of those victims would be the big tech companies, as it is remarkable how many weakly-argued critiques of them make the paper every day. You’ll understand these writings through the eyes of Girard, not economic theory. Girard is also one of the best lenses for understanding the writings of bad and manipulative pundits.
7. Girard is of great use for understanding literature. Try any Shakespearean play with “doubles,” Merchant of Venice, Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge (an all-time favorite), or Coetzee’s Disgrace, all Girardian to the core and very much illuminated by familiarity with his key ideas. These are perhaps his most underrated contributions. Shakespeare, by the way, is Girard’s most important precursor, also throw in the New Testament, Hobbes, Tocqueville, and maybe Montaigne.
What should you read by him?: Violence and the Sacred, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Theatre of Envy.
Where is Girard weakest: His theory of language, his overemphasis on the destructive nature of mimesis, excess claims to have discovered universal mechanisms, just making lots of stuff up, and not knowing enough economics or empirical anthropology.
How important is he?: If you had to pick twenty thinkers from the latter half of the 20th century, he is definitely one of them. By the way, Foucault and Baudrillard might be the other French writers on that list.
My Conversation with Robin Hanson
I am honored to have been able to do this, here is the podcast and transcript. The topics we covered included…the ideas of Robin, most of all: “With Robin, we go meta. Robin, if politics is not about policy, medicine is not about health, laughter is not about jokes, and food is not about nutrition, what are podcasts not about?”
Here is one exchange:
COWEN: Let’s say I’m an introvert, which by definition is someone who’s not so much out there. Why is that signaling? Isn’t that the opposite of signaling? If you’re enough of an introvert, it doesn’t even seem like countersignaling. There’s no one noticing you’re not there.
HANSON: I’ve sometimes been tempted to classify people as egg people and onion people. Onion people have layer after layer after layer. You peel it back, and there’s still more layers. You don’t really know what’s underneath. Whereas egg people, there’s a shell, and you get through it, and you see what’s on the inside.
In some sense, I think of introverts as going for the egg people strategy. They’re trying to show you, “This is who I am. There’s not much more hidden, and you get past my shell, and you can know me and trust me. And there’s a sense in which we can form a stronger bond because I’m not hiding that much more.”
And:
COWEN: Here’s another response to the notion that everything’s about signaling. You could say, “Well, that’s what people actually enjoy.” If signaling is 90 percent of whatever, surely it’s evolved into being parts of our utility functions. It makes us happy to signal. So signaling isn’t just wasteful resources.
What we really want to do is set up a world that caters to the elephant in our brain, so to speak. We just want all policies to pander to signaling as much as possible. Maybe make signals cheaper, but just signals everywhere now and forever. What says you?
HANSON: I think our audience needs a better summary of this thesis that I’m going to defend here. The Elephant in the Brain main thesis is that in many areas of life, perhaps even most, there’s a thing we say that we’re trying to do, like going to school to learn or going to the doctor to get well, and then what we’re really trying to do is often more typically something else that’s more selfish, and a lot of it is showing off.
If that’s true, then we are built to do that. That’s the thing we want to do, and in some sense it’s a great world when we get to do it.
My complaint isn’t really that most people don’t acknowledge this. I accept that people may be just fine leaving the elephant in their brain and not paying attention to it and continuing to pretend one thing while they’re doing another. That may be what makes them happy and that may be OK.
My stronger claim would be that policy analysts and social scientists who claim that they understand the social world well enough to make recommendations for changes—they should understand the elephant in the brain. They should have a better idea of hidden motives because they could think about which institutions that we might choose differently to have better outcomes.
And of course I asked:
COWEN: What offends you deep down? You see it out there. What offends you?
And why exactly does it work to invite your date up to “see my etchings”? And where is “The Great Filter”? And how much will we identify with our “Em” copies of ourselves? There is also quantum computing, Robin on movies, and the limits of Effective Altruism. On top of all that, the first audience question comes from Bryan Caplan.
You should all buy and read Robin’s new book, with Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life.
Reverse nudge theory — when the many nudge the few
Nudge Theory, popularised by Thaler & Sunstein, proposes that our decisions can be biased by relatively small changes in choice architecture. While we might be well intentioned, our human fallibility and modern environments sometimes require ‘choice architects’ to nudge us back on the path toward individual and collective wellbeing. Whether used for good or bad, Nudge Theory is most often applied downhill – the few (state or commercial players) nudge the many (citizens or consumers).
I would like to propose that Reverse Nudge Theory might be a good term for nudging uphill. For governments and corporations are also made up of individuals – and these individuals are equally prone to political, economic, and career forces which may get in the way of them making decisions that would be in our best interests.
Such reverse nudging is not a new endeavour of course. The formation of labour unions, the democratic process, and ‘voting with your wallet‘ are all good examples of this. So while well-intentioned choice architects nudge us, perhaps we need to be equally creative in nudging them back for their (and our) own good.
Who are the most underrated and overrated libertarian thinkers?
A while back, freethinker had a request: “name the most overrated and underrated libertarian thinkers”
Here are the most underrated:
1. Robert Nozick. Super-duper smart, always open and probing, and incredibly well-read. Somehow other libertarians seem to undervalue that he independently became one of the world’s greatest philosophers, perhaps because they have not done the same.
2. Herbert Spencer: In his day, he often was considered perhaps the greatest thinker of his time or even his century. That wasn’t quite right, but he did build a comprehensive system for the social sciences, understood the primacy of sociology and anthropology, outlined some of the better arguments for liberty, developed an early version of complexity theory, and the “Social Darwinist” caricature of him was exactly that. He even influenced literary theory and rhetoric. On the more practical side, read Social Statics.
3. Gustav de Molinari. He tried to think about governance more seriously than the other late 19th century, early 20th century Belgian libertarians. He understood the primacy of war, focused on futurism, and flirted with both anarchist and multi-lateralist constraints on state power. He hasn’t received much attention since Murray Rothbard promoted his ideas, though see these works by David Hart.
4. Whichever critic of slavery was libertarian enough to count as libertarian for your purposes. Bartolomé de las Casas? Lysander Spooner? William Lloyd Garrison? Take your pick.
Ayn Rand and Ludwig Mises belong in a separate category, because they both have overzealous disciples who so overrate them. That in turn makes them somewhat underrated almost everywhere else. Rand’s cocktail party analysis of the sociology of capitalism-hatred remains one of the great contributions to political thought, plus she reaffirmed the necessary high status of the business producer. Mises’s Liberalism and also Socialism were two of the best books of the first part of the 20th century. So I am happy to call them both underrated, subject to the above not entirely insignificant caveat.
The most overrated libertarian qua libertarian might be Milton Friedman. He is not overrated as an economist, if anything he is still considerably underrated. But as a libertarian? For a guy that smart, I’m not sure he added much to the corpus of libertarian ideas, and I recall one closing segment to a Free to Choose episode where he couldn’t out-argue Peter Jay on some basic issues of political philosophy. And have the Friedmanite ideas of school vouchers and social security privatization really held up as so central? Friedman and Rothbard really didn’t like each other, and each was right about what the other couldn’t do.
*Skin in the Game*, the new Nassim Taleb book
By some mysterious mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor…
And:
…the deep message of this book is the danger of universalism taken two or three steps too far — conflating the micro and the macro.
This is Taleb’s deepest and most Straussian book, quickly you will notice that the Levant and the ancient world haunt the pages. It may mystify some of his more casual fans, but I am happy to recommend it — it is the manly book Taleb wanted to write and it is full of ideas. After all, he had skin in the game.
His closing advice is this:
- Never engage in virtue signaling;
- Never engage in rent-seeking;
- You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.
You can pre-order it here.