Category: Philosophy
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.
Robin Hanson on the real multiplier
Yes doing things now can have good side effects, but unless something changes in the side-effect processes, doing things later should have exactly the same sort of side effects. And because of positive interest rates, you can do more later, and thus induce more of those good side effects. (Also, almost everyone can trade time for money, and so convert money or time now into more money or time later.)
For example, if you can earn 7% interest you can convert $1 now into $2 a decade from now. Yes, that $1 now might lend respectability now, induce others to copy your act soon, and induce learning by the charity and its observers. But that $2 in a decade should be able to induce twice as much of all those benefits, just delayed by a decade.
In math terms, good side effects are multipliers, which multiply the gains from your good act. But multipliers are just not good reasons to prefer $1 over $2, if both of them will get the same multiplier. If the multiplier is M, you’d just be preferring $1M to $2M.
…I think one should in general be rather suspicious of investing or donating to groups on the basis that they, or you, or now, is special. Better to just do what would be good even if you aren’t special. Because usually, you aren’t.
There is more here.
*A Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead*, by Charles Murray
I enjoyed this book, and I recommend that you get it for your kid. Here is one bit of many:
Good help is hard to find. Really hard to find. Sure, there are lots of people with the right degrees and résumés, but the kind of employee we yearn for sticks out almost immediately.
You can buy the book here.
What kind of doctor should I become?
Hi Professor Cowen,
I am a loyal MR reader and I wondered if you could comment on the following situation:
I am a 3rd year medical student, and for the purposes of this question, let’s assume I have equal interest and ability in the various medical specialties. In order to create the greatest good for the greatest number of people through my work in medicine (i.e., the highest return to society), what specialty should I pursue? I should add that, although I intend to practice in the U.S., I am open to devoting as much of my free time/vacation as possible to pro bono medical activities, and further, that I wish to do the interventions myself (instead, for example, or just making lots of money and then donating the proceeds to some other charitable activity). In attempting to answer this question, I’ve been looking at DALYs and QALYs associated with various medical interventions (e.g., cataract surgery). Am I going about answering this question the right way? Any thoughts?
An interesting corollary would be asking what job, in any field, has the highest return to society. Is there any literature on this?
The fundamental institutional failure to overcome is that many lives “out there” are pretty happy, and very much worth living, but those individuals do not have enough money to afford reasonable doctors. If you are seeking to maximize social welfare, look to step into some of these gaps.
But which gap in particular?
The second binding constraint, in my view, is that most people won’t in fact go through with their plan to do a lot of social good. That means you too. So you wish to seek out a form of do-gooding which is incentive-compatible over the long run, or in other words which is fun for you or rewarding in some other way. This second consideration is likely to prove decisive.
For instance you might decide the fight against dengue (just an example to make a point, not an actual net assessment) is the way to go, based on a narrow cost-benefit analysis. But it is hard as a field worker to really, fully protect yourself against dengue. And getting dengue can be very bad indeed. As you age, the pressures not to go into the field will mount. You might do more good by pledging your efforts to fight a malady which you can help fix without so much direct risk or exposure to yourself, let’s say infant mortality.
You will note a difference here between pledges of individual effort and pledges of money. A money pledger, thinking in game-theoretic Nash terms, will realize that effort pledgers will resist the fight against dengue. That is all the more reason why throwing money at the fight against dengue may bring high returns, namely that at the margin not enough is being done from the side of volunteer and quasi-volunteer labor. (In general this distinction creates a problem with talking up one kind of cause over another, namely that labor and money face differing incentives and should hear different messages of encouragement.)
You will note also that in a second best optimum, field workers will appear to be “consuming too many perks.” At the same time, donated funds should be trying to push field workers out of their comfort zones, at least on the margin.
I would add two final points. First, if you have a reasonable chance of being a research superstar, that may be the path to follow.
Second, if you are not already attached, spent time cultivating social circles (aid work, World Bank, vegetarians, etc.) where you are likely to meet a partner or spouse who will support a similar vision to help the world.
Addendum: David Henderson adds comment.
What should you talk about?
Robin Hanson reports:
If your main reason for talking is to socialize, you’ll want to talk about whatever everyone else is talking about. Like say the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. But if instead your purpose is to gain and spread useful insight, so that we can all understand more about things that matter, you’ll want to look for relatively neglected topics. You’ll seek topics that are important and yet little discussed, where more discussion seems likely to result in progress, and where you and your fellow discussants have a comparative advantage of expertise.
You can use this clue to help infer the conversation motives of the people you talk with, and of yourself. I expect you’ll find that almost everyone mainly cares more about talking to socialize, relative to gaining insight.
I would be curious to hear what other people think of this…
The multiverse is looking more likely
Or so I am told:
…those gravitational wave results point to a particularly prolific and potent kind of “inflation” of the early universe, an exponential expansion of the dimensions of space to many times the size of our own cosmos in the first fraction of a second of the Big Bang, some 13.82 billion years ago.
“In most models, if you have inflation, then you have a multiverse,” said Stanford physicist Andrei Linde. Linde, one of cosmological inflation’s inventors, spoke on Monday at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics event where the BICEP2 astrophysics team unveiled the gravitational wave results.
Essentially, in the models favored by the BICEP2 team’s observations, the process that inflates a universe looks just too potent to happen only once; rather, once a Big Bang starts, the process would happen repeatedly and in multiple ways.
There is more here. How should this change my behavior? Should I feel more or less regret? Take more or fewer risks?
For the pointer I thank Ami Evelyn.
Modeling Vladimir Putin
Here are some options:
1. Putin is a crazy hothead who is not even procedurally rational. Merkel received that impression from one of her phone calls with him.
2. Putin is rational, in the Mises-Robbins sense of instrumental means-ends rationality, namely that he has some reason for what he does. He simply wills evil ends, namely the extension of Russian state power and his own power as well.
3. Putin is fully rational in the procedural sense, namely that he calculates very well and pursues his evil ends effectively. In #2 he is Austrian but in #3 he is neoclassical and Lucasian too. He knows the true structure of the underlying model of global geopolitics.
4. Putin lives in a world where power is so much the calculus — instrumentally, emotionally and otherwise — that traditional means-ends relationships are not easy to define. Power very often is the exercise of means for their own sake and means and ends thus meld and merge. Our rational choice constructs may mislead us and cause us to see pointless irrationality when in fact power is being consumed as both means and end. It is hard for we peons to grasp the emotional resonance that power has for Putin and for some of his Russian cronies. They grew up in the KGB, watched their world collapse, tyrannized to rise to top power, while we sit on pillows and watch ESPN.
Here is a former CIA chief arguing Putin has a zero-sum mentality, though I would not make that my primary framing. Here is Alexander J. Motyl considering whether Putin is rational (Foreign Affairs, possibly gated for you). Here is an interesting and useful discussion of differing White House views of Putin. This account of a several-hour dinner with Putin says he is prideful, resentful of domination, and hardly ever laughs. Here is Eric Posner on Putin’s legal astuteness.
My views are a mix of #2 and #4. He is rational, far from perfect in his decision-making, and has a calculus which we find hard to emotionally internalize. His resentments make him powerful, and give him precommitment technologies, but also blind him to the true Lucasian model of global geopolitics, which suggests among other things that a Eurasian empire for Russia is still a pathetic idea.
Putin is also paranoid, and rationally so. We have surrounded him with NATO. China gets stronger every year. Many other Russians seek to kill him, overthrow him, or put him in prison.
Assumptions about Putin’s rationality will shape prediction. Under #1 you should worry about major wars. With my mix of #2 and #4, I do not expect a massive conflagration, but neither do I think he will stop. I expect he keep the West distracted and seek to turn resource-rich neighbors into vassal states, for the purpose of constructing a power-intensive, emotionally resonant new Russian/Soviet empire, to counter the growing weight of China and to (partially) reverse the fall of the Soviet Union. Even if he does not grok the true model of the global world order, he does know that Europe is weak and the United States has few good cards it is willing to play.
Developing…
Addendum: Whatever your theory of Russians in general may be, watch this one-minute video of a Russian baby conducting and give it a rethink.