Category: Philosophy
Arrived in my cyberpile
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
Due out September 3, 2014, self-recommending.
Very good sentences
…the feminist prescription doesn’t supply what men slipping down into the darkness of misogyny most immediately need: not lectures on how they need to respect women as sexual beings, but reasons, despite their lack of sexual experience, to first respect themselves as men.
And also:
…our society has lost sight of a basic human truth: A culture that too tightly binds sex and self-respect is likely, in the long run, to end up with less and less of both.
*Becoming Freud*
That is the new and excellent book by Adam Phillips, in the US available on Kindle only. Here is one bit:
…Freud was discovering that we obscure ourselves from ourselves in our life stories; that that is their function. So we will often find that the most dogmatic thing about Freud as a writer is his skepticism. He is always pointing out his ignorance, without ever needing to boast about it. He is always showing us what our knowing keeps coming up against; what our desire to know might be a desire for.
And later:
Psychoanalysis would one day be Freud’s proof that biography is the worst kind of fiction, that biography is what we suffer from; that we need to cure ourselves of the wish for biography, and our belief in it. We should not be substituting the truths of our desire with trumped-up life stories, stories that we publicize.
Recommended.
From the comments
Mesa wrote:
I would suspect that successful research institutions don’t feel obliged to redistribute their funding to less fortunate institutions. I think the point that is interesting here is that successful academic institutions are probably deemed to have earned their support, while successful business people are not, they having generally thought to have earned their success through luck or inheritance. From the endowment and research funding data it seems universities have both high income inequality and wealth inequality, to use terminology from the current debate.
A libertarian case for expanding Medicaid
Currently health care is very expensive in the United States, especially if you have to buy hospital care without formal insurance. Under ideal institutions, it would be much cheaper, maybe a third of the current price or lower yet (not for everything, though). For instance in Singapore health care expenditures are about four percent of gdp. A libertarian may think that laissez-faire or near laissez-faire is the way to go, while others might favor single payer with price controls, and so on. In any case, in the meantime we are stuck with expensive health care, and for reasons related to bad and coercive government policy.
Now, would a libertarian think that we should cut health care services in prisons, simply because tax dollars are in play? No, the prisoners — many of whom are morally innocent — have nowhere else to go for treatment. When it comes to health care, many potential Medicaid recipients are in essence prisoners, locked into a policy-deficient environment and so they cannot buy quality care at affordable prices. So if we favor health care expenditures for prisoners we might also favor Medicaid expansions.
That said, expanding the current version of Medicaid is unlikely to be a first-best solution, no matter what your broader political stance.
Addendum: Jacob Levy offers comment.
*The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World*
That is the new and truly excellent book by George Prochnik, think of it as a selective biography focused on themes of exile, perversion, Brazil, and suicide. Excerpt:
Martin Gumpert shared Zweig’s sense of depletion amid New York’s incessant activity, likening the exhaustion that befell almost every newcomer to a “magic spell.” When Bruno Walter first arrived in New York, the heat of his hotel room drove him out onto the street though it was still before dawn. On his initial promenade down Manhattan’s avenues, he imagined “wit a shudder of horror” that he was “walking at the bottom of immensely deep rocky canyons.” As the sun rose, his eyes caught sight of an enormous billboard on top of a building displaying the words “U.S. Tires.” In a daze he thought to himself, “Yes, it does — true enough — but why is this fact being advertised to me from the rooftops?”
And:
Even New York rain, Camus observed after his own first encounter with the city in the mid-1940s, was “a rain of exile. Abundant, viscous, and dense; it pours down tirelessly between the high cubes of cement into avenues plunged suddenly into the darkness of a well…I am out of my depth when I think of New York,” he acknowledged. Camus wrote of wrestling with “the excessive luxury and bad taste” of New York, but also with “the subway that reminds you of Sing Sing prison” and “ads filled with clouds of smiles proclaiming from every wall that life is not tragic.”
This is one of my favorite books of the year so far. (You will find here an interesting review.) And Zweig’s own The World of Yesterday is one of my favorite books period.
The other new French book on inequality
It is The Society of Equals, by , and it is a transatlantic look at how the notion of inequality has changed over the last three centuries. It strikes me as the sort of book Crooked Timber would have a symposium on. Here is one good bit:
Thus there is a global rejection of society as it presently exists together with acceptance of the mechanisms that produce that society. De facto inequalities are rejected, but the mechanisms that generate inequality in general are implicitly recognized. I propose to call this situation, in which people deplore in general what they consent to in particular, the Bossuet paradox. This paradox is the source of our contemporary schizophrenia. It is not simply the result of a guilty error but has an epistemological dimension. When we condemn global situations, we look at objective social facts, but we tend to relate particular situations to individual behaviors and choices. The paradox is also related to the fact that moral and social judgments are based on the most visible and extreme situation (such as the gap between rich and poor), into which individuals project themselves abstract, whereas their personal behavior is concretely determined by narrower forms of justification.
Roger Berkowitz has a very good review here, excerpt:
As does Piketty, Rosanvallon employs philosophy and history to characterize the return of inequality in the late 20th and now 21st centuries. And Rosanvallon, again like Piketty, worries about the return of inequality. But Rosanvallon, unlike Piketty, argues that we need to understand how inequality and equality now are different than they used to be. As a result, Rosanvallon is much more sanguine about economic inequality and optimistic about the possibilities for meaningful equality in the future.
And:
…inequality absent misery may not be the real problem of political justice. The reason so much inequality is greeted with resentment but acceptance, is that our current imagination of justice concerns visibility and singularity more than it does equality of income.
Recommended.
Against against commodification (markets in everything)
Jason Brennan reports:
Commodification is a hot topic in recent philosophy. There’s a limitless market for books about the limits of markets. The question: Are there some things which you permissibly may possess, use, and give away, but which are wrong to buy and sell? Most authors who write about this say yes. Peter Jaworski and I say no. There are no inherent limits to markets. Everything you may give away you may sell, and everything you may take for free you may buy. We defend that thesis in our book Markets without Limits, which will be published by Routledge Press, most likely in late 2015 or early 2016. As of now, we have a completed first draft.
We plan to commodify the book itself. We will sell acknowledgements in the preface of the book.
There is more information here. I thank Michael Wiebe for a relevant pointer.
Chinese wheat eaters vs. rice eaters (speculative)
Angela Meng reports:
Researchers have found that people from rice-growing southern China are more interdependent and holistic thinkers, while those from the wheat-growing north are more independent and analytical.
The researchers call it “rice theory”, and they believe the psychological differences of southern and northern Chinese stem from their ancestors’ subsistence techniques – rice farming needs co-operation and planning; wheat farming requires less co-operation between neighbours.
…The last experiment assessed the nepotism, or group loyalty, of the participants. Students were given hypothetical scenarios and asked how they would treat friends and strangers in reaction to helpful or harmful actions. A defining characteristic of holistic culture is that people draw sharp contrasts between friend and stranger.
“The data suggests that legacies of farming are continuing to affect people,” Thomas Talhelm, of the University of Virginia and lead author of the research, said. “It has resulted in two distinct cultural psychologies that mirror the differences between East Asia and the West.”
Talhelm and his team concluded that the co-operative nature of rice-growing has cultivated a culture of interdependence, while wheat-growing has cultivated independence.
“I think the rice theory provides some insight to why the rice-growing regions of East Asia are less individualistic than the Western world or northern China, even with their wealth and modernisation,” Talhelm said.
Here is Talhelm’s home page. Research summaries are here (interesting). Links to his research are here, and the wheat paper is here.
For the pointer I thank the excellent Mark Thorson.
*A Nation in Pain*
The author is Judy Foreman and the subtitle of this excellent book is Healing our Biggest Health Problem. Here is one excerpt:
In those not-so-old days when Jeffrey was born, as a preemie, many doctors mistakenly believed that babies’ nervous systems were too immature to process pain and that, therefore, babies didn’t feel pain at all. Or, doctors rationalized, if babies did somehow feel pain, it was no big deal because they probably wouldn’t remember it. Besides, since nobody knew for sure how dangerous anesthesia drugs might be in tiny babies, doctors figured that if surgery was necessary to save a child’s life, they’d better operate anyway — and comfort themselves with the hope that the child wouldn’t feel pain. As one scientific paper from those days intoned, “Pediatric patients seldom need medication for relief of pain. They tolerate discomfort well,”
That’s preposterous, obviously. But doctors had to have these self-protective beliefs for their own emotional survival, says Neil Schechter, a pediatric pain physician at Children’s Hospital in Boston. “Doctors were not sure how to do anesthesia in babies. In response, they had to believe that the babies couldn’t feel pain. They were too scared of the anesthetics.”
Here is part of the Amazon summary:
Out of 238 million American adults, 100 million live in chronic pain. And yet the press has paid more attention to the abuses of pain medications than the astoundingly widespread condition they are intended to treat. Ethically, the failure to manage pain better is tantamount to torture. When chronic pain is inadequately treated, it undermines the body and mind. Indeed, the risk of suicide for people in chronic pain is twice that of other people. Far more than just a symptom, writes author Judy Foreman, chronic pain can be a disease in its own right — the biggest health problem facing America today.
This book will make my best of the year list.
*Think Like a Freak*
The authors are Levitt and Dubner and the subtitle is The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain.
This is a beautifully written book, as good as the original Freakonomics.
My favorite parts were the discussion of the Japanese hot dog eater Kobayashi and his training/learning regime, why van Halen had the “no brown M&Ms” clause in its contract, and why Nigeriam spam scammers tell you they are from Nigeria.
You also can get the real story (or at least part of the real story) of how the authors helped the British authorities identify terrorist money laundering.
Addendum: Here is an excerpt from the book.
Make three claims when trying to persuade
Suzanne B. Shu and Kurt A. Carlson have a paper (pdf) on this claim:
How many positive claims should be used to produce the most positive impression of a product or service? This article posits that in settings where consumers know that the message source has a persuasion motive, the optimal number of positive claims is three. More claims are better until the fourth claim, at which time consumers’ persuasion knowledge causes them to see all the claims with skepticism. The studies in this paper establish and explore this pattern, which is referred to as the charm of three. An initial experiment finds that impressions peak at three claims for sources with persuasion motives but not for sources without a persuasion motive. Experiment 2 finds that this occurs for attitudes and impressions, and that increases in skepticism after three claims explain the effect. Two final experiments examine the process by investigating how cognitive load and sequential claims impact the effect.
Here is a NYT summary of those results.
Does speaking a foreign language make us more utilitarian?
Albert Costa et.al. say yes:
Should you sacrifice one man to save five? Whatever your answer, it should not depend on whether you were asked the question in your native language or a foreign tongue so long as you understood the problem. And yet here we report evidence that people using a foreign language make substantially more utilitarian decisions when faced with such moral dilemmas. We argue that this stems from the reduced emotional response elicited by the foreign language, consequently reducing the impact of intuitive emotional concerns. In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on a daily basis.
The Plos paper is here, hat tip from Vic Sarjoo. And here is another Robin Hanson post on “near vs. far.”
Nick Beckstead’s conversation with Tyler Cowen
Nick is a philosopher at Oxford and he has worked with Larry Temkin and Nick Bostrom. He typed up his version of our conversation (pdf), it starts with this:
Purpose of the conversation: I contacted Tyler to learn about his perspectives on existential risk and other long-run issues for humanity, the long-run consequences of economic growth, and the effective altruism movement.
Here are a few excerpts:
Tyler is optimistic about growth in the coming decades, but he doesn’t think we’ll become uploads or survive for a million years. Some considerations in favor of his views were:
1. The Fermi paradox is some evidence that humans will not colonize the stars.
2. Almost all species go extinct.
3. Natural disasters—even a supervolcano—could destroy humanity.
4. Normally, it’s easier to destroy than to build. And, in the future, it will probably become increasingly possible for smaller groups to cause severe global damage (along the lines suggested by Martin Rees).The most optimistic view that Tyler would entertain—though he doubts it—is that humans would survive at subsistence level for a very long time; that’s what we’ve had for most of human history.
And:
People doing philosophical work to try to reduce existential risk are largely wasting their time. Tyler doesn’t think it’s a serious effort, though it may be good publicity for something that will pay off later. A serious effort looks more like the parts of the US government that trained people to infiltrate the post-collapse Soviet Union and then locate and neutralize nuclear weapons. There was also a serious effort by the people who set up hotlines between leaders to be used to quickly communicate about nuclear attacks (e.g., to help quickly convince a leader in country A that a fishy object on their radar isn’t an incoming nuclear attack).This has been fixed in other countries (e.g. US and China), but it hasn’t been fixed in other cases (e.g. Israel and Iran). There is more that we could do in this area. In contrast, the philosophical side of this seems like ineffective posturing.
Tyler wouldn’t necessarily recommend that these people switch to other areas of focus because people[‘s] motivation and personal interests are major constraints on getting anywhere. For Tyler, his own interest in these issues is a form of consumption, though one he values highly.
And:
Tyler thinks about the future and philosophical issues from a historicist perspective. When considering the future of humanity, this makes him focus on war, conquest, plagues, and the environment, rather than future technology.
He acquired this perspective by reading a lot of history and spending a lot of time around people in poor countries, including in rural areas. Spending time with people in poor countries shaped Tyler’s views a lot. It made him see rational choice ethics as more contingent. People in rural areas care most about things like fights with local villages over watermelon patches. And that’s how we are, but we’re living in a fog about it.
And:
The truths of literature and what you might call “the Straussian truths of the great books”—what you get from Homer or Plato—are at least as important rational choice ethics. But the people who do rational choice ethics don’t think that. If the two perspectives aren’t integrated, it leads to absurdities—problems like fanaticism, the Repugnant Conclusion, and so on. Right now though, rational choice ethics is the best we have—the problems of, e.g., Kantian ethics seem much, much worse.
If rational choice ethics were integrated with the “Straussian truths of the great books,” would it lead to different decisions? Maybe not—maybe it would lead to the same decisions with a different attitude. We might come to see rational choice ethics as an imperfect construct, a flawed bubble of meaning that we created for ourselves, and shouldn’t expect to keep working in unusual circumstances.
I’m on a plane for much of today, so you are getting Nick’s version of me, for a while at least. You will find Nick’s other conversations here.
Rules for students and teachers, popularized by John Cage
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
RULE TEN: We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything. It might come in handy later.
The source is here, via the excellent Ted Gioia.