Category: Philosophy

*Dante: The Story of His Life*

by  Tyler Cowen in

…Dante’s fame as a necromancer is also in a certain sense documented.

Such notoriety shouldn’t be surprising. For one thing, he had a reputation as an expert in astrology, and we know that this discipline could easily spill over into magical and necromantic practices.  And then, above all, he was famous after the publication of Inferno for having descended live into the realms of the afterlife and for having encountered devils there, the souls of the damned, and having spoken to them.  It must have been a rumor widely spread and also disturbing.  It seems, according to Boccaccio, that the women who used to pass him in the street would say to each other: Look, “he who goes into Hell, and returns whenever he likes, and brings back news of those who are down there…”

That is from the new Dante biography by Marco Santagata, Belknap Press at Harvard, definitely recommended, it will make my best non-fiction of the year list for sure.

What is statistically the most improbable thing that has happened to you?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is a question posed by Robert H. Frank in his forthcoming book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.  The main point of this book is to illuminate the major role which luck plays in our lives and then to flesh out the social and policy implications of that fact.

My view is more Straussian than Bob’s: I think we have to believe in a concept of meritocracy whether it is justified or not.  (Do note that Bob covers a version of this point in one of his chapters, where he argues that reminding people of their good fortune makes them more generous; I still think society requires strong feelings of desert, and generosity often follows from a kind of false magnanimity about one’s good fortune.)  But as always with Bob, this is a deep and stimulating book, well written too.  You also learn a great deal about Bob’s highly interesting life, such as how he survived his heart attack, pulled out Cornell tenure at the last moment, and decided to track down his birth parents.

Here is the book’s home page.  Here is chapter one, which starts with the heart attack story.

Anyway, the comment section is open: what is statistically the most improbably thing that has happened to you?

How both sides can believe they are losing

by  Tyler Cowen in

If you read narratives of recent history from the perspective of the left and the right, each side believes it is losing. One could dismiss this as marketing strategy. If our side is winning, then why is it urgent to read my book or donate to my organization?

But I think it is possible for the each side to sincerely believe it is losing.

The left presumes that government can solve problems. We have problems. Therefore, we must be losing!

The right presumes that the government causes problems. We have problems. Therefore, we must be losing!

That is from Arnold Kling.

Hayek and Freud, *The Viennese Students of Civilization*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Erwin Dekker’s The Viennese Students of Civilization: The Meaning and Context of Austrian Economics Reconsidered is an original and interesting look at the foundations of the Austrian School of Economics, properly situating it in the context of its time.  Here is one bit:

In the “Civilization and its Discontents” — as Rosten attempts to point out to Hayek — Freud argues that civilization means constraining ourselves. Freud argues that morality works through a sense of guilt, and that restraint and hence civilization is created and upheld by this sense of guilt.  As civilization progresses, this sense of guilt has to be intensified or heightened.  This is in line with Hayek’s ideas, as we will see later, but Hayek refuses to acknowledge this.

Dekker also discusses the relevance of Nietzsche, Hermann Broch, and Peter Drucker for the Austrian school, and goes beyond the usual hagiography.

Sentences to ponder

by  Tyler Cowen in

However, we find that economic conservatives are as or more scientifically literate and optimistic about science than economic leftists. Our results highlight the importance of separating different sub-dimensions of political orientation when studying the relationships between political beliefs, scientific literacy and optimism about science.

That is from Carl, Cofnis, and Woodley, via Ben Southwood.

What is the point of replication?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

No experiment can ever be replicated so each attempted replication must assume that the things which differ don’t matter. The more and the more important the things that we can plausibly assume don’t matter, the stronger is the original study. Chemistry students have done the same experiments for hundreds of years and that’s useful because we can plausibly assume that who and when the experiment is conducted doesn’t matter. The recent brouhaha between Nosek et al. and Gilbert et al. illustrates a weaker case.

In their critique of Nosek et al., Gilbert et al. say that some of their replications failed because things were different.

An original study that asked Israelis to imagine the consequences of military service was replicated by asking Americans to imagine the consequences of a honeymoon

Now that sounds like two very different studies but Nosek provides important context. The original study in question wasn’t about military service or honeymoons it was about the conditions that promote reconciliation between victims and injurers after an injustice has been committed. The original study asked Israelis what they would do and how they would feel about a specific injustice. Namely you and a co-worker have been working on a project for a long-time but just before submission you are called away for reserve duty [male]/maternity leave [female]. Your co-worker takes credit for all the work and gets promoted while you later get demoted. The study then went on to ask questions about the conditions necessary for reconciliation. The reserve duty/maternity leave bit was just the story element needed to explain the situation not the focus of the study.

Nosek et al. tried to replicate the study in the United States where being called up for reserve duty is less common than in Israel and where being demoted for taking maternity leave could raise legal issues so they substituted ‘had to leave for honeymoon’. Everything else was the same. One of the original authors approved the new design.

Nosek et al. were not able to replicate the original findings. Is this because they didn’t replicate the study or because the study failed to replicate? Gilbert et al. say Nosek et al. failed to replicate the study.

In my view, Gilbert et al. are caught on the horns of a dilemma. If the studies don’t replicate they aren’t interesting and if the studies replicate but only under extremely precise conditions they also aren’t interesting. We are interested in general features of the human condition not in descriptions of the choices that 75 female and 19 male Israeli students made at a particular point in time. Moreover, if changes in wording matter then surely so does the fact that the original study was on Israeli’s in 2008 and the replication used Americans in 2013 (a lot has changed over these years!) and so must also a hundred other differences. But if so, what’s the point?

Hat tip: Andrew Gelman who has more to say.

Does personality cause politics?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In the first stage of our analysis, we demonstrated that there are several substantively significant relationships between the personality traits and political ideology dimensions. Most notably, P [a complex variable, but derived from “Psychoticism”] is substantially correlated with conservative military and social attitudes, while Social Desirability is related to liberal social attitudes, and Neuroticism is related to liberal economic attitudes [emphasis added by TC]. Our findings at the phenotypic level are highly consistent with similar explorations in an Australian population (Verhulst, Hatemi, and Martin 2010).

The results are generated from twins data.  I found this discussion very interesting, as it shows the standard personality-to-politics chain is only part of a richer story:

These findings directly challenge the causal pathway assumed in the extant literature (e.g., Gerber et al. 2010; Mondak et al. 2010). Rather than personality traits causing people to develop liberal or conservative political attitudes, the current results suggest two alternative relationships. First, the combined Cholesky and DoC analyses suggest that a common set of genes mutually influences personality traits and political attitudes, implying the relationship between personality and politics is a function of an innate common genetic factor rather than a sequential personality to politics model (see the right panel of Figure 1). The results from the DoC analysis also suggest an alternative causal model. That is, the latent set of genes shared between political attitudes and personality traits directly influences attitudes and indirectly influences personality traits. In other words, the genetic component of political attitudes partially mediates the genetic influence on personality traits. This finding is completely opposite from the basic assumption in the most recent literature (e.g., Gerber et al. 2010; Mondak et al. 2010). Thus, it appears the genetic component of political attitudes measured relatively later in an individual’s life contributes to the development of an individual’s personality along the way. In this view, attitudes are more than what is expressed in adulthood, but part of one’s disposition which guides behavior and selection into environments, which later are recognized and measured as attitudes in adulthood. Regardless of whether the final analysis supports a latent genetic source of covariance or a mutual causal structure, both perspectives require a major revision to the prevailing assumptions about political attitudes and personality traits.

That is from Verhulst, Eaves, and Hatemi.

Do conservatives prefer to use nouns?

by  Tyler Cowen in

The researchers, led by Dr Aleksandra Cichocka of the School of Psychology, also established that conservatives generally, to a greater degree than liberals, tend to refer to things by their names, rather than describing them in terms of their features. An example would be saying someone ‘is an optimist’, rather than ‘is optimistic’.

This use of nouns, rather than adjectives, is seen to preserve stability, familiarity and tradition – all of which appear to be valued more highly by conservatives than liberals.

Because nouns ‘elicit clearer and more definite perceptions of reality than other parts of speech’, they satisfy the desire for ‘structure and certainty’ that is common among social conservatives, the research authors found.

The research was based on studies carried out in three countries – Poland, Lebanon, and the USA. The US study compared presidential speeches delivered by representatives of the two main political parties. The sample included 45 speeches delivered by Republicans, considered to be more conservative, and 56 speeches delivered by then Democrats, considered to be more liberal.

The (gated) paper is here, and for the pointer I thank Charles Klingman.

Jonathan Haidt seeks a hire

by  Tyler Cowen in

From an email, via Dan Klein:

We are seeking a talented and experienced researcher with some tech skills to help run two projects that use social science research to improve major American institutions. Your main job would be research director for HeterodoxAcademy.org, a collaboration of social scientists trying to increase viewpoint diversity in the academy. You would also be part of the team at EthicalSystems.org, a research collaboration that uses behavioral science to “make ethics easy” for businesses.

The ideal candidate will be a recent Ph.D. or ABD in the social sciences with both technological sophistication and excellent writing skills.

To Apply: Send a CV, writing sample, and cover letter explaining why you would be a good fit for the job to Jeremy Willinger, Communications Director, at  [email protected].

“Are Choosers Losers?”– the value of control and the propensity to underdelegate

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is one of the more understudied behavioral biases, so I was pleased to see this new paper by Bobadilla-Suarez, Sunstein,and Sharot:

Human beings are often faced with a pervasive problem: whether to make their own decisions or to delegate decision tasks to someone else. Here, we test whether people are inclined to forgo monetary rewards in order to retain agency when faced with choices that could lead to losses and gains. In a simple choice task, we show that even though participants have all the information needed to maximize rewards and minimize losses, they choose to pay in order to control their own payoff. This tendency cannot be explained by participants’ overconfidence in their own ability, as their perceived ability was elicited and accounted for. Rather, the results reflect an intrinsic value for choice, which emerges in the domain of both gains and losses. Moreover, our data indicates that participants are aware that they are making suboptimal choices in the normative sense, but do so anyway, presumably for psychological gains.

I believe this is one reason why individuals can be so tribal, because otherwise they fear losing control to outsiders.

Why Do We Kiss?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Smithsonian: [K]issing helps heterosexuals select a mate. Women in particular value kissing early on. Saliva is full of hormones Gustav-Klimt_The-Kiss_ArtExand other compounds that may provide a way of chemically assessing mate suitability—that’s the biological brain stepping in.

…While kissing, couples exchange 9 milliliters of water, 0.7 milligrams of protein, 0.18 mg of organic compounds, 0.71 mg of fats, and 0.45 mg of sodium chloride, along with 10 million to 1 billion bacteria, according to one accounting.

Women are also more likely to say that a first kiss could be the decider for selecting a mate. Can the biological drive overcome the perception that your chosen one is a bad kisser? Wlodarski says it’s hard to separate the two, but that “I would hazard a guess that if someone thinks someone is a bad kisser it’s because their smell wasn’t right,” he says. Women have to be more selective because they face greater consequences when they make a poor mating decision—like having to carry a baby for nine months, says Wlodarski.

…Not every culture is down with the full-on mouth kissing enlivened by a wandering tongue. That seems to be a modern, and Western, convention, perhaps from the last 2,000 years, says Wlodarski. A study published in 2015 found that less than half of the cultures surveyed engage in romantic, sexual kissing.

There’s evidence—at least from written history—that in the past, kissing was primarily mutual face or nose rubbing, or even sniffing in close proximity. In Hindu Vedic Sanskrit texts, kissing was described as inhaling each other’s soul.

Antonin Scalia on economic rights

by  Tyler Cowen in

From 1985 (pdf):

But still, that seemed to me a peculiar way to put it — contrasting economic affairs with human affairs as though economics is a science developed for the benefit of dogs or trees; something that has nothing to do with human beings, with their welfare aspirations, or freedoms.  That, of course, is a pernicious notion, though it represents a turn of mind that characterizes much American political thought.  It leads to the conclusion that economic rights and liberties and qualitatively distinct from, and fundamentally inferior to, other noble human values called civil rights, about which we should be more generous….On closer analysis, however, it seems to me that the difference between economic freedoms and what are generally called civil rights turns out to be a difference of degree rather than of kind.

He worries, however, that conservatives want a non-activist Court, but then want the Court to do what they want on economic issues.  Ultimately Scalia worried that if the Court gave too much credence to economic rights, it would end up with economic rights which are not sensible, and thus he wished to abide by a literally more conservative approach.  He closed his beautiful essay with this:

…the task of creating what I might call a constitutional ethos of economic liberty is no easy one.  But it is the first task.

I disagreed with him on many issues, but his presence on the Court was an important stepping stone for law and economics, and for philosophy as well I might add.

Addendum: “…justices die far more often when a member of the opposite party holds the White House.”