Category: Philosophy
Should we care if the human race goes extinct?
Stephen Hawking fears that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Elon Musk and Bill Gates offer similar warnings. Many researchers in artificial intelligence are less concerned primarily because they think that the technology is not advancing as quickly as doom scenarios imagine, as Ramez Naam discussed. I have a different objection.
Why should we be worried about the end of the human race? Oh sure, there are some Terminator like scenarios in which many future-people die in horrible ways and I’d feel good if we avoided those scenarios. The more likely scenario, however, is a glide path to extinction in which most people adopt a variety of bionic and germ-line modifications that over-time evolve them into post-human cyborgs. A few holdouts to the old ways would remain but birth rates would be low and the non-adapted would be regarded as quaint, as we regard the Amish today. Eventually the last humans would go extinct and 46andMe customers would kid each other over how much of their DNA was of the primitive kind while holo-commercials advertised products “so easy a homo sapiens could do it”. I see nothing objectionable in this scenario.
Aside from greater plausibility, a glide path means that dealing with the Terminator scenario is easier. In the Terminator scenario, humans must continually be on guard. In the glide path scenario we only have to avoid the Terminator until we become them and then the problem is resolved with little fuss. No human race but no mass murder either.
More generally, what’s so great about the human race? I agree, there are lots of great things to point to such as the works of Shakespeare, Mozart, and Grothendieck. We should revere the greatness of the works, however, not the substrate on which the works were created. If what is great about humanity is the great things that we have done then the future may hold greater things yet. If we work to pass on our best values and aspirations to our technological progeny then we can be proud of future generations even if they differ from us in some ways. I delight to think of the marvels that future generations may produce. But I see no reason to hope that such marvels will be produced by beings indistinguishable from myself, indeed that would seem rather disappointing.
Optimal policy toward mental illness
I was asked about this recently, so I thought I would put down some basic thoughts. Note that mental illness is a major underlying issue behind both crime and unemployment. Federal, state, and local policies toward the mentally ill are highly complex, but here are a few points:
1. As is often the case in health care policy, my inclination is to fund research and development, in this case through the NIH and NSF, before worrying about improving coverage in extant programs. The long-term dynamic gains have the potential to outweigh the one-time static gains.
2. Medicaid offers a highly imperfect coverage of mental illness. Fine-tuning the coverage may well be a good idea, but perhaps first Medicaid needs to be put on a sounder footing. If you are a liberal this may mean federalizing Medicaid, and if you are a conservative this may mean block grants to the states for Medicaid experimentation. If we are simply asking which policy is better for the mentally ill, federalization is likely the answer, although that does not settle the broader debate as to which alternative would be better overall.
3. We could retool Obamacare mandates, and other health insurance default settings, to have more coverage for mental illness and less coverage for other health conditions. Both practical and “individual responsibility” arguments might point in that direction.
4. The deinstitutionalization of the 1980s has come in for a lot of criticism, but I remain a fan of that policy. I’m well aware of its connection to homelessness, and also how many mentally ill people have ended up in jail. Still, that change ended a kind of slavery for many, and if you oppose slavery you should oppose the previous policies, even if the transition brought some very large practical problems. Of course some of these people were lobotomized or otherwise treated coercively in addition to their involuntary confinement. In 1955 the institutionalized population peaked at about 500,000 and many of those were not voluntary admissions; a 2003 measure put that same population at only 50,000. I recommend this Samuel R. Bagenstos piece on the topic.
5. Further deregulation could boost telemedicine and also telepsychiatry; this would lower cost and is especially important for rural areas.
6. When the family of a mentally ill adult should be notified, given individual privacy rights, is worth further discussion. I don’t have a simple answer, here is some background.
7. The future debate will be all about wearables, including those that monitor the excited or violent states of mentally ill people. I am skeptical about this development, mostly for slippery slope reasons, but this will become a major policy issue, for criminals and high risk individuals too.
8. Crime rates have been falling since the 1980s. That suggests some very large gains are coming through peer effects. There is plenty of evidence that mentally ill people, to some extent, slot into their culture’s conception of what mental illness should consist of (mentally ill Malaysians for instance are more likely to “run amok,” because that is a salient concept there.) It seems that our culture is communicating an increasingly peaceful notion of what mental illness should consist of. This development should be studied further, as perhaps those gains can be extended or accelerated in some way.
Overall this is one of the most important topics which is most understudied by economists.
Econ Journal Watch, and the status of classical liberalism
The new issue of Econ Journal Watch is online at http://econjwatch.org.
In this issue:
Evolution, moral sentiments, and the welfare state: Many now maintain that multilevel selection created a sympathetic species with yearnings for social solidarity. Several evolutionary authors on the political left suggest that collectivist politics is an appropriate way to meet that yearning. Harrison Searles agrees on evolution and human nature, but faults them for neglecting Hayek’s charge of atavism: The modern polity and the ancestral band are worlds apart, rendering collectivist politics inappropriate and misguided. David Sloan Wilson, Robert Kadar, and Steve Roth respond, suggesting that new evolutionary paradigms promise to transcend old ideological categories.
Evidence of no problem, or a problem of no evidence? In 2009, Laura Langbein and Mark Yost published an empirical study of the relationship between same-sex marriage and social outcomes. Here Douglas Allen and Joseph Price replicate their investigation, insisting that conceptual problems and a lack of empirical power undermine any claim of evidence on outcomes. Langbein and Yost reply.
The progress of replication in economics: Maren Duvendack, Richard W. Palmer-Jones, and W. Robert Reed investigate all Web of Science-indexed economics journals with regard to matters concerning replication of research, including provision of the data and code necessary to make articles replicable and editorial openness to publishing replication studies. They explain the value of replication as well as the challenges, describe its history in economics, and report the results of their investigation, which included corresponding with journal editors.
A Beginner’s Guide to Esoteric Reading: Arthur Melzer describes techniques and devices used in esoteric writing.
Symposium:
Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country (Part I): Authors from around the world tell us about their country’s culture of political economy, in particular the vitality of liberalism in the original political sense, historically and currently, with special attention to profession economics as practiced in academia, think tanks, and intellectual networks.Chris Berg:
Classical Liberalism in Australian EconomicsFernando Hernández Fradejas:
Liberal Economics in SpainMateusz Machaj:
Liberal Economics in PolandPatrick Mardini:
The Endangered Classical Liberal Tradition in Lebanon: A General Description and Survey ResultsMiroslav Prokopijević and Slaviša Tasić:
Classical Liberal Economics in the Ex-Yugoslav NationsJosef Šíma and Tomáš Nikodým:
Classical Liberalism in the Czech RepublicEJW Audio: W. Robert Reed on Replication in Economics
From the comments, on the political implications of behavioral economics
The classical MU [differential marginal utility of money] argument has, in my view, been moderated by the findings of behavioral economics, namely loss-aversion. Taking from the higher-incomes to give it to the lower incomes may be negative utility as the higher incomes are valuing their loss at an exaggerated rate (it’s a loss), while the lower income recipients under value it.
Many on the Left are too quick to grab on to the findings of behavioral economics as a critique of neoclassical economics, but while they often do point away from simplistic free-market views, they do not necessarily point towards left-wing solutions. They are just as likely to point to non-market conservative views.
For example, isn’t it another consequence of the asymmetry of the utility function with respect to the status quo (loss aversion) that social mobility destroys utility? I mean, if the tide is lifting all boats, then you can argue that it’s still better for everyone (the libertarian view), but if your utility function is heavily rank-based (a standard left-wing view) and you accept loss-aversion from the behavioral literature, then social mobility is suspect from an utility point-of-view.
This sounds shockingly old-school conservative when we discuss our own societies (“why should the children of the poor compete with my kids for a place in a good university? they have lower expectations, after all, State U is a step up for them. My kids, on the other hand, would be crushed if they had to go to their safety school”), but is quite acceptable when discussing international inequalities (“it doesn’t morally matter that people in Mexico have much less material wealth, their society has lower expectations”).
That is from Luis Pedro Coelho.
The differential marginal utility of money
1. You cannot build and sustain a polity on the idea of redistributing wealth to take advantage of differences in the marginal utility of money across varying wealth classes.
2. The ideas you can sustain a polity around often contradict the notion of socially arbitraging MU differences to try to boost total utility.
3. The MU argument, in isolation, is therefore rarely compelling. Furthermore its “naive” invocation is often a sign of underlying weakness in the policy case someone is trying to make. The proposed policy may simply be too at odds with otherwise useful social values.
4. This is related to why parties from “the traditional Left” so often lose elections, including in a relatively statist Europe.
5. That all said, sometimes we should in fact take advantage of MU differences in marginal increments of wealth and use them to drive policy.
6. Figuring out how to deal with this tension — ignoring MU differences, or pursuing them — is a central task of political philosophy.
7. The selective invocation of the differential MU argument — or the case against it — will make it difficult to improve your arguments over time; arguably it is a sign of intellectual superficiality.
Minority Report for Kiwi youths?
In 2012 economists at the University of Auckland published research establishing clear correlations between family circumstances and incidents of child abuse or neglect. “No one realized we were sitting on such rich data in terms of its predictive power,” says Rhema Vaithianathan, who led the research. “We can find children who are at considerably elevated risk, and we can find them at birth.”
And:
Using data from welfare, education, employment, and housing agencies and the courts, the government identified the most expensive welfare beneficiaries—kids who have at least one close adult relative who’s previously been reported to child safety authorities, been to prison, and spent substantial time on welfare. “There are million-dollar kids in those families,” English says. “By the time they are 10, their likelihood of incarceration is 70 percent. You’ve got to do something about that.”
Moving closer to home:
Jennie Feria, who oversees risk assessment for L.A.’s Department of Children and Family Services, says one idea is to rate families, giving them a number that could be used to identify who’s most at risk in the way lenders rely on credit scores to determine creditworthiness. “The way we may use it, it’s going to be like it’s a FICO score,” Feria says. The information, she says, could be used both to prioritize cases and to figure out who needs extra services. “It’s at the very early stages, because we don’t know how we’re going to use it yet exactly.”
It will be interesting to see how that one develops. The article is by Josh Eidelson.
Why is libertarianism such a target?
Bryan Caplan considers this question in a very useful blog post. He serves up these hypotheses, though I think without committing to any particular one of them:
1. Despite their rarity and absence on the front lines of politics, self-conscious libertarians still strongly shape mainstream conservative politicians’ economic policies.
2. Self-conscious libertarians, though rare, have still managed to sharply shift public opinion in a libertarian direction.
3. Self-conscious libertarians, though politically impotent, are a symbol of what’s wrong with American politics.
And then there are the stories the critics won’t embrace, but perhaps they’re true nonetheless…
4. Libertarians, unlike mainstream conservatives, openly defend many unpopular views. Intellectuals who want to loudly champion popular views have to engage libertarians because there’s hardly anyone else to argue with.
5. Libertarian arguments, though mistaken, are consistently clever enough to get under the critics’ skin. The purpose of the criticism is not shielding the world from bad ideas but giving the critics some intellectual catharsis.
6. Libertarian arguments are good enough to weigh on the critics’ intellectual consciences. They attack libertarians to convince themselves that we’re wrong. And they keep attacking us because they keep failing to fully convince themselves.
But I see more options. Consider a simple model where bureaucracies maximize output, and try to produce correct output. In my view, the more mainstream thinkers criticize libertarians so much because a) it helps them generate output, and b) they think they have the better arguments. There is a clear target, easily explained (not always correctly explained, however), and very often the target can be taken on with a minimum of detailed empirical investigation. Furthermore the arguments against the libertarian often position the critic in a favorable ideological space, especially for left-wingers: “look, there are people who believe this, better come ally with me!”
If we are talking about “The Left,” the libertarian is about the most welcome intellectual opponent there is. The real scourge, correctly or not, is the common sense morality of the center. That’s right, the people who favor and distrust big government at the same time, the people who think the poor deserve welfare support but only so much, the people who distrust intellectual elites and cosmopolitanism, the people who side with police more than they ought to, and yes the people who think Medicare is more based on just deserts than is Medicaid.
That set of views does not describe me well, but the funny thing is — unlike with both far left and libertarian ideas — we do in fact know you can build a workable polity from them. The libertarians are so much more of a tempting opponent.
Tony Atkinson and François Bourguignon on inequality
His new book Inequality: What Can Be Done?, is out mid-May but already available in some bookstores. Here is an interview with Atkinson. I thought this book did not take sufficient care with some very basic distinctions, such as the difference between a problem of poverty and a problem of inequality. Nor does it put enough emphasis on wealth creation, or explain why Korean-Americans have done pretty well over the last thirty years, among other possible examples.
The book is dedicated to the NHS workers of Britain. That’s fine, many of them are very good, but Atkinson doesn’t mention a few key points, namely that a) the British system ranks relatively poorly by European standards, b) the British system probably has too much governmental ownership and provision, and c) bureaucracies usually underpay their best workers and thus do not generate enough initial income inequality.
François Bourguignon has a very good and readable new book on the international dimension of inequality, The Globalization of Inequality.
Martin Wolf has an FT review of both books.
For the pointer to the Atkinson interview I thank Enrico Schaar.
My review of *The Rambler*, by Samuel Johnson
Eric Posner’s (with Adrian and Blakey Vermeule) new and excellent venture The New Rambler asked me to write a book review for them. The impish side of me thought “what book better to review than the old Rambler?”, namely by Samuel Johnson? Here is the opening of my piece:
A blogger by the ostensible name of “Samuel Johnson” has compiled his previous posts into a book, edited by a supposed W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss. But the true work here is “Johnson’s,” and the sequential editing, as such, seems to have been done by WordPress. The editorial illusion, of course, is a trick dating from the eighteenth century, as for instance Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope presented the work of an imaginary Martinus Scriblerus in the 1740s. These Johnson posts claim to date from the early 1750s, a typical blogger’s conceit and misdirection, but the content is too modern and innovative to sustain that illusion for long.
Cutting through the postmodern trappings, Johnson’s blog reflects his ongoing interest in behavioral economics. He is continually skirting the frontier of the latest research insights, although like many bloggers he is lax in providing the proper citations. He writes off the top of his head, though without care for what came before from Thomas Schelling, Jean Tirole, or Cass Sunstein, among other titans of the field. Reading these short pieces is thus a fascinating but often frustrating experience. And as is true for most of the work in behavioral economics, there are insights but a fully fleshed out model, applied consistently to all human choices, is nowhere to be found.
Here is the full review, recommended!
What professions are oversaturated?
Chad writes me:
What jobs (particularly ones we think of as being inherently beneficial to society) might America have too many of? Political journalism comes to mind this particular month, since we apparently have enough to carefully monitor the Chipotle orders of presidential candidates 19 months before the election. Writers might be another, particularly in a world of self-publishing.
One can imagine lots of reasons for a greater-than-optimal number of people in a particular profession, from government subsidies to cultural biases, but I’m curious if you have a gut feeling about any professions in particular.
A good question, in my view the answer is not so simple. Writers and artists are indeed a possible nomination, but some of the demand for these professions is likely for consumption, which makes the overinvestment difficult to judge. And what about lawyers? Relative to the number of laws and regulations (too many in my view, but take them as given), it is not obvious to me that we have too many lawyers. Someone has to tell companies when it is safe to proceed, or not.
How about too many people selling medical devices and other high margin items? Too many people making alcohol? Too many people raising and selling animal meat? Those would be my picks.
The finance sector is another obvious culprit, but as a fraction of wealth I do not think it is larger than in the past. Admittedly people in the finance sector may be engaging in the wrong activities, but I am not sure the case for fewer employees per se is so obvious. Still, it is another candidate, if only because it (often) involves people selling high-margin items.
Claims about embryos
A pressing question, said Rudolf Jaenisch, an M.I.T. biology professor, is why anyone would want to edit the genes of human embryos in order to prevent disease. Even in the most severe cases, involving diseases like Huntington’s in which a single copy of a mutated gene inherited from either parent is enough to cause the disease with 100 percent certainty, editing poses ethical problems. Because of the way genes are distributed in embryos, when one parent has the gene, only half of the parent’s embryos will inherit it. With gene editing, the cutting and pasting has to start immediately, in a fertilized egg, before it is possible to know if an embryo has the Huntington’s gene. That means half the embryos that were edited would have been normal — their DNA would have been forever altered for no reason. “It is unacceptable to mutate normal embryos,” Dr. Jaenisch said. “For me, that means there is no application.”
If I were grading an undergraduate philosophy class, I am not sure Dr. Jaenisch would exceed a C minus with that answer (the source article is here). Besides I have never known a normal embryo. Then there is the all too obvious question as to why it should be acceptable to abort embryos, but not to modify or mutate them. Oops.
The better arguments are surely the slippery slope worries that embryo tinkering will change the nature and future of humanity in dangerous ways, perhaps producing too much conformity, too much zero-sum competition (“buy the Harvard splice”), too much discrimination against various “types,” too much induced family loyalty, legal discouragement of rebellious genes, excess advantages for elites, too many decisions which too explicitly lower the social status of some groups of people, and perhaps ultimately too much drift from the world we know (and love?).
Those are my worries. Whether or not they are valid, they would seem to merit at least a C+. But many commentators wish to ensure these issues are not actually argued. Will this prove the new face of anti-scientific, anti-philosophical thinking? Check out the closing quotation from Professor Daley at Harvard, and his use of the word “deranged.”
A lot of parents will strongly desire some future version of this product, and I believe a number of countries are going to be willing to proceed with such innovations, if and when they become possible. They’ll also be willing to live with the costs of the failures in the meantime. So I don’t think the strategy of shutting down debate is going to fare so well in this case.
Does the internet make you overconfident? (this post may offend some bloggers)
Dan Klein (from Abigail D.) directs my attention to an interesting paper by Fisher, Goddu, and Keil (pdf):
As the Internet has become a nearly ubiquitous resource for acquiring knowledge about the world, questions have arisen about its potential effects on cognition. Here we show that searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information. Evidence from 9 experiments shows that searching for information online leads to an increase in self-assessed knowledge as people mistakenly think they have more knowledge “in the head,” even seeing their own brains as more active as depicted by functional MRI (fMRI) images.
Having done some further search on this topic, using Google, I can assure you that I now have a much better grasp on whether this hypothesis is true or not…
Why I like trigger warnings
At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions,” or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.
Read his whole discussion, but he more or less disapproves. I’ve long wanted to disagree with Chait “from the left,” and it seems this is my chance, I had better grab it while I can.
While teaching Law and Literature this year, I attached very gentle, low key “trigger warnings” to a number of items on the syllabus, namely those dealing with extreme violence, rape, and some other very unpleasant situations. I am glad I did this. I told students that if they preferred to do a substitute assignment, I could arrange that. Is that so unreasonable? There were no takers, but I don’t see it did anyone harm or limited free speech in the classroom (or outside of it) to make this offer. If anything, it may have eased speech a slight amount by noting it is OK to feel uncomfortable with some topics, or at least serving up that possibility into the realm of common knowledge. That struck me as better and wiser than simply pretending we were studying the successful operation of the Coase theorem the whole time.
I don’t doubt that trigger warnings may be misused in some situations by some professors, but overall they seem to me like another small step to a better world. I do agree we need to liberate trigger warnings from the strictures of the PC movement, no argument there.
Addendum: I am pleased to see that GMU was moved into the highest category for university free speech, according to FIRE.
What does Robin Hanson think is the most likely “Great Filter”?
Here is a long and excellent post, whereby Robin outs himself as a strange kind of environmentalist. Do need the whole thing, but here is one summary excerpt:
So, bottom line, the future great filter scenario that most concerns me is one where our solar-system-bound descendants have killed most of nature, can’t yet colonize other stars, are general predators and prey of each other, and have fallen into a short-term-predatory-focus equilibrium where predators can easily see and travel to most all prey. Yes there are about a hundred billion comets way out there circling the sun, but even that seems a small enough number for predators to careful map and track all of them.
“At first they came for the rabbits…and then they came for me.” I find that intriguing, but I have a more marginalist approach, and perhaps one which encompasses Robin’s hypothesis as a special case. The death of human (and other) civilizations may be a bit like the death of the human body through old age, namely a whole bunch of things go wrong at once. If there were a single key problem, it would be easier to find a patch and prolong things for just a bit more. But if we have reason to believe that, eventually, many things will go wrong at once…such a concatenation of problems is more likely to defeat us. So my nomination for The Great Filter, in a nutshell, is “everything going wrong at once.” The simplest underlying model here is that a) problems accumulate, b) resources can be directed to help solve problems, and c) sometimes problems accumulate more rapidly than they can be solved.
This is also why, in many cases, there is no simple “fact of the matter” answer as to why various mighty empires fell in the past. Here is my earlier review of Apocalypto, a remarkable and still underrated movie.
Is Capitalism Making Us Stupid?
Joseph Heath’s Enlightenment 2.0 is one of the best books I have read in years. I offer an extensive review at the New Rambler. Here’s the opening:
Joseph Heath is a Canadian philosopher who is unusually conversant with economics and also unusually capable of writing sparkling prose for a popular audience. His earlier book Economics Without Illusions was split into 6 right-wing fallacies and 6 left-wing fallacies, and he did a commendable job on both sides. Heath has his own left-liberal point of view: the subtitle of Economics Without Illusions was Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism and in the original Canadian version, the book was subtitled Economics For People Who Hate Capitalism. However, I like capitalism and I still enjoyed it! Enlightenment 2.0 is Heath’s foray into political philosophy. Drawing on psychology, economics and political science, Enlightenment 2.0 is a brilliant defense of reason, an important call for a more rational politics, and a great read.
Heath is worried that the foundations of liberal society are being eroded by the cultural denigration of reason combined with ruthlessly competitive economic and political forces that exploit the biases and hooks of our unreasoning mind.
Although I admire Enlightenment 2.0, I answer the question of the post differently than does Heath and my review contains plenty of critical commentary. Ayn Rand, Idiocracy, mind viruses and other interesting characters make an appearance. Read the whole thing.