Category: Philosophy

The Google-Trolley Problem

by  Alex Tabarrok in

As you probably recall, the trolley problem concerns a moral dilemma. You observe an out-of-control trolley hurtling towards five people who will surely die if hit by the trolley. You can throw a switch and divert the trolley down a side track saving the five but with certainty killing an innocent bystander. There is no opportunity to warn or otherwise avoid the disaster. Do you throw the switch?

A second version is where you stand on a bridge with a fat man. The only way to stop the trolling killing five is to push the fat man in front of the trolley. Do you do so? Some people say no to both and many say yes to switching but no to pushing, referring to errors of omission and commission. You can read about the moral psychology here.

I want to ask a different question. Suppose that you are a programmer at Google and you are tasked with writing code for the Google-trolley. What code do you write? Should the trolley divert itself to the side track? Should the trolley run itself into a fat man to save five? If the Google-trolley does run itself into the fat man to save five should Sergey Brin be charged? Do your intuitions about the trolley problem change when we switch from the near view to the far (programming) view?

I think these questions are very important: Notice that the trolley problem is a thought experiment but the Google-trolley problem is a decision that now must be made.

What is the correct Bayesian inference from this British message?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I found a little card in my bathroom, perched above the toilet and near the shower:

This bath has a non slip surface in part.  If you would like a rubber bath mat in addition please contact housekeeping.

And so what does that mean?  Here are some options:

1. The part without the non slip surface is really, really slippery.  Watch out!

2. We are boasting about having a non slip surface “in part,” yet without appearing to be boasting too explicitly.

3. We are not sure which is your best course of action (there is human heterogeneity), but we want to get you thinking about the non slip surface and also the slip surface.  We are sure you will put the information to good use and also we are showing our respect for your decision-making and autonomy.

4. We have attempted to word this message as emotionally neutrally as possible.  We are therefore signaling that we are a quality hotel, without intending to offer any particular advice about the non slip surface or for that matter the slip surface.  We also did not fall into the trap of hyphenating “non slip” (though we did elsewhere in the bathroom hyphenate “co-operation”), nor did we place a comma after “addition” as you barbarians might have done.

I am not intelligent enough to discern which of these might be true.

*Economic Fables*, the new Ariel Rubinstein book

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is summarized here:

I had the good fortune to grow up in a wonderful area of Jerusalem, surrounded by a diverse range of people: Rabbi Meizel, the communist Sala Marcel, my widowed Aunt Hannah, and the intellectual Yaacovson. As far as I’m concerned, the opinion of such people is just as authoritative for making social and economic decisions as the opinion of an expert using a model.

Part memoir, part crash-course in economic theory, this deeply engaging book by one of the world’s foremost economists looks at economic ideas through a personal lens. Together with an introduction to some of the central concepts in modern economic thought, Ariel Rubinstein offers some powerful and entertaining reflections on his childhood, family and career. In doing so, he challenges many of the central tenets of game theory, and sheds light on the role economics can play in society at large.

Economic Fables is as thought-provoking for seasoned economists as it is enlightening for newcomers to the field.

The book can be read freely here.  Rubinstein’s home page is here.

Should B. emigrate from England?

by  Tyler Cowen in

A request from a loyal blog reader. I attended a talk in Oxford by Martin Wolf from the FT a few months ago, in which he gave a very pessimistic assessment of prospects for the British and European economies. A member of the audience asked what his advice for a young graduate entering the job market would be, and his response was ’emigrate’.

So two requests, really:

(1) Do you agree?
(2) If so, where should I go?

To put things in context, I am a 21-year-old male, a final year student at Oxford University reading for a BA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (concentrating on the latter two subjects). I have work experience in the financial sector, moderate language ability (high school level French and German, but a fast learner), and I am willing to consider a wide range of locations. I am an EU citizen, so obviously have freedom of movement within the EU. I am open to staying somewhere for a relatively long period, but at the moment I am more inclined to think of it as a below-ten-year stay. Assume, perhaps, the prospect of permanent residence is not excluded. Feel free to edit the request as appropriate for the blog.

I say:

1. The key data point is the polarization of labor market returns, including in the United Kingdom and much of Western Europe.  Given that your background and reading habits signal smarts and hard work, you probably will do fine staying at home.

2. Switching languages will set you back by years, even if you are a quick study.  Stick to the Anglo world, or to an English-speaking job at least.

3. It is not already obvious to B. that he should move to the United States.  That’s fine, so perhaps he quite likes England already and indeed who wouldn’t?  That lack of obsession with America also means he does not have a diehard commitment to maximizing pecuniary returns and that is yet further evidence he should stay in England.

4. If you want to travel and live abroad, try to start with an English multinational and then signal a willingness to move far afield.  Or consider the foreign service.  Or work for a year or two and then do a Jodi Ettenberg for as long as you can.  All of those options sound better to me than moving to Stuttgart and trying to master the intricacies of “dass ich nicht habe lachen mussen,” (or is it “dass ich habe nicht lachen mussen”?, or do they mean different things?) while petitioning the Knigge Society for a knowledge of manners.

5. “A man who is tired of London is tired of life.”

Spoons and the social discount rate

by  Tyler Cowen in

Its hard to imagine spoons will exist in their current form in 30 years. What does this tell us about the social discount rate?

That is from the ModeledBehavior hive mind.

Let’s assume an intertemporal equilibrium.  The rate of return on buying consumer durables ought to equal (risk-adjusted) the rate of return on capital.  Spoon improvement means a lower rate of return on holding spoons, which means a lower return on durables, which in turn means a lower rate of return on capital investment.  For a given set of interest rates, that implies a higher rate of social discount.

That said, I find it easy to imagine spoons will exist in their current form in 30 years.  What if I were wrong?  I would be overestimating the MU of money in future periods and thus saving too much.  I ought to buy more non-spoon items, renting my current spoons, knowing that spoon improvements will glide me into a cushy retirement.

*Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher*

by  Tyler Cowen in

I very much enjoyed the new biography of Eric Hoffer, here is one excerpt:

Reminding us of Immanuel Kant, Hoffer went on solitary walks, did not marry, had a stomach that often gave him trouble, and (after he moved to San Francisco) rarely traveled.  (Kant, it seems, never did.)  Remarkably, we know more about Kant’s early life than we do about Hoffer’s.  A professor of geography, Kant early on was more interested in science than in philosophy; Hoffer was the same.  After moving to skid row in Los Angeles, he said, he taught himself chemistry and botany.

…Hoffer’s hundreds of three-by-five-inch index cards carried quotations from Aristotle, Bagehot, Clemenceau, Disraeli, Gandhi, Hobbes, Kant, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Pascal, Spinoza, and a hundred others, compiled over many years.  Was there any precedent for this in the life of the nation?  An apparently unschooled laborer who became a longshoreman and made an attempt to compile the wisdom of the ages on his own?  he was filling them out by the 1940s and he continued adding to them until near the end of his life.  the later dates are conspicuous because his handwriting becomes ever more shaky.

The author is Tom Bethell, you can buy the book here.

*Peter Singer and Christian Ethics*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Charles C. Camosy and the subtitle is Beyond Polarization, you can buy it here.

Most philosophies draw heavily from religion, as Ross Douthat suggested recently.  Peter Singer is no exception, as Camosy ably demonstrates.  There should be more books like this.

My new question for visitors to the lunch table is: “What is it you really believe in?”

Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Teachers

by  Alex Tabarrok in
  1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
  2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
  3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
  4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavour to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
  5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
  6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
  7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
  8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
  9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
  10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

Hat tip: Brainpickings.

Thiel’s Law

by  Tyler Cowen in

Thiel’s law: A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.

That is from the new section of Peter’s lecture notes, recommended of course.  To pose a simple question, how many other people are there in the world you would rather listen to?  Does that not mean Peter is one of the seminal public intellectuals of our time, albeit working through some non-traditional media of communications?

Hat tip goes to The Browser, which by the way is better than The Tatler ever was.

*The Occupy Handbook*

by  Tyler Cowen in

I have an essay in that book co-authored with Veronique de Rugy.  Other contributors include Paul Krugman, Robin Wells, Michael Lewis, David Graeber, Peter Diamond, Emmanuel Saez, Ariel Dorfman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jeff Sachs, and Nouriel Roubini, among others.

Our essay is an…outlier…in the volume.  Here is one bit:

Wall Street has contributed to some very real problems, but the core issues for poor Americans are often health care, education, and the cost of renting an apartment of buying a house.  The best way to improve living standards and increase options for future success is to move toward greater competition and accountability in each of those areas, areas that usually have little to do with the financial sector per se.

Our goal is to propose an alternative vision for what OWS should focus on.  You can buy the book here.

Transcript of my interview with Peter Singer

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is here, now written out, courtesy of the excellent Jeff Kaufman.  The original visual and audio of the interview is here.  Here is one bit:

Cowen: …If we could imagine an alternative world, where people were, say, only 30% as committed to their personal projects as are the people we know, say the world is more like, in some ways, an ant colony, people are committed to the greater good of the species. Would that be a positive change in human nature or a negative change?

Singer: Of course, if you have the image of an ant colony everyone’s going to say “that’s horrible, that’s negative”, but I think that’s a pejorative image for what you’re really asking …

Cowen: No, no, I don’t mean a colony in a negative sense. People would cooperate more, ants aren’t very bright, we would do an ant colony much better than the ants do. …

It is one of my favorite outputs of me.