It was the wisdom of crowds, it was the madness of crowds

I recently read Douglas Murray’s book The Madness of Crowds, and while the book has a lot of content worth reading, it’s the name itself that struck a particular chord with me.

The wisdom of crowds refers to the observation that under certain circumstances, the collective mind of a crowd can be very accurate, much more so than most, or maybe even all, individuals.  A popular example is that when you ask a large enough number of people to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, the average answer tends to be very close to the actual number.

How does this happen?  Because upon averaging, the truth (the signal) is preserved, while the errors (the noise) get cancelled out.  For example, suppose a jar holds a few thousand jellybeans.  Some with terrible guessing skills will wildly underestimate, giving answers in the hundreds, or maybe even tens.  But conversely, some with terrible guessing skills will wildly overestimate, giving answers in the tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands.

With enough people, the really bad overestimaters and underestimaters will roughly cancel each other out, the somewhat bad overestimaters and understimaters will roughly cancel each other out, and the decent/good estimaters will settle around the real answer.

It’s hard to overstate the beauty of this.  We have an emergent phenomenon where by letting everyone voice their answer and giving them all equal weight, we can get very close to the truth.  There’s no reason for anyone to argue that some people shouldn’t be allowed to guess because they’re too stupid or too educated or too impaired in whatever way – the cancelling out of the errors means we have a simple process that gives us accuracy while holding up equality.

But suppose now that the group has some social dynamic in which it’s considered a faux-pas to underestimate the number of jellybeans in the jar.  Maybe it’s considered sinful, or perhaps politically incorrect.  Those who guess a bit low are tut-tutted, while the ones who guess really low are shunned by their friends and family, and may even lose their jobs.  Conversely, those that guess really high might be socially rewarded in some way, perhaps even receiving a reward greater than what’s earned for guessing accurately.

In these cases, the crowd will not be wise; it will be mad.  The average of the crowd’s answer can no longer be expected to be close to the real answer: in fact, it is guaranteed to always be much too high.

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote of a real-life example of this in When None Dare Urge Restraint.  Speaking of the mood after 9/11, he recalled that everyone – politicians, pundits, and citizens alike – was socially expected to only say things in the direction of emphasizing the hurt and hating the enemy, while anyone attempting to put the event in context (ex. mentioning that 8x as many died in automobile accidents every year) would face the mob’s wrath.  Today, as that particular maddening has subsided and wisdom is allowed to take over again, many realize that the terrorists were able deal a lot of extra damage by getting an emotional nation involved in two long-lasting wars, costing the country trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives.

Of course, there are many more maddenings that are going on today.  I’ve written about some of them in this blog already.  I’m sure you can think of some yourself.  This is another reason free speech is so important – not just from a legal perspective, but from a social one.  Unpopular ideas need to be heard, because for all the noise they might contain, they will also likely contain some signal.

Every time the madness takes over, it is a sad thing – not just because it leads us so astray, but because a real opportunity for wisdom was lost.

The crime equation

A few weeks ago, some friends and I were talking about crime and punishment.  Not the book, as reading Dostoevsky is beyond most Millennial attention spans, but just about how society should handle crime.  Both my friends were of the “Criminals should be punished and harshly” persuasion, and these were some of the points they made: 

• Justice is inherently important and should be pursued, even if giving victims justice results in more crime 
• It’s important that victims get some sort of vengeance on the criminals who caused them harm 
• We should expect that we ourselves will be the victims of crime, and should vote accordingly  

Being a STEM nerd, it’s in my nature to try and break down everything into equations.  So, here was my counter equation:  

E = V(crime) * P(crime) + V(no crime) * P(no crime) 

In case just seeing that equation isn’t enough for readers to realize why my friends are wrong, let’s walk through what that means.

• E is the expected value, E, that each individual in society should expect due to crime.
• V(crime): the utility of being a crime victim.  Since being a victim is a bad experience, this is negative.  However, the justice system is meant to provide some recourse: through vengeance for instance.  So we can separate this out into –V(crime act) + V(justice).
• P(crime): the probability of becoming a crime victim.
• V(no crime): the utility of not being a crime victim.  This value is zero, since we don’t gain anything from not being a victim to a crime – that’s simply the default.
• P(no crime): this ends up not mattering, because V(no crime) is zero anyway.

So, this breaks down into:

E = P(crime) * [V(justice) – V(crime act)]

We can always expect V(crime act) to be higher than V(justice), so the expected value here is always going to be negative.  Society can’t control V(crime act), so we try to control V(justice) and maximize it.  This is the first of two main reasons people tend to want harsh punishments for criminals.

The second reason people want harsh punishments for criminals is that they expect a negative correlation between P(crime) and V(justice).  When criminals are punished harshly, they think, the victims feel better and crime will go down as criminals are deterred; if criminals are not punished harshly, victims will feel worse and crime will increase.  By this logic, the expected value for the innocent is always higher when criminals punished more.

But the assumption fails.  Take a look at the National Institute of Justice‘s “Five Things About Deterrence”.  Their number one point is that “The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.”  In fact, point number three (“Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished”) and point number four (“Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime”) are, more or less, rehashes of that same point.

“Okay,” someone might argue.  “Harsher punishments might not help much.  But they might help a little bit.  So, combining that with the solace it gives the victims or their families, it’s still all positive”.

Not so.  The justice system only has a certain amount of resources.  It can expend those resources into giving criminals longer sentences, or it can expend them into catching more criminals and giving them shorter sentences.  It can’t do both.  The tradeoff has to be made, and the data clearly indicates we should do the latter.  (It also makes intuitive sense: your brain can’t comprehend the concept of 5 vs 10 years in prison as well as it can comprehend going to vs not going to prison.)

In other words, focusing our resources on harsher sentences mean less criminals caught, which in turn means more crime.  Let’s go back to the equation now:

E = P(crime) * [V(justice) – V(crime act)] 

Harsher sentences for criminals mean an increase in both P(crime) and V(justice).  But as we’ve already established, the value in the square brackets will always be negative, so the only real option to maximize our expected value is to lower P(crime).  We need to be smarter and better at catching criminals rather than focusing on punishing the ones we already catch.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Peace is acceptance, war is rejection

I.

I recently stumbled upon and re-read a portion of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.  First off, if you’ve never read this brilliant fanfic, you definitely should.  While it’s got the flaws of a work produced by an amateur writer, it’s a strange but impressive combination of sharp wit, dry humor, an edge-of-your-seat plot, and some of the best philosophical conversations I’ve ever read.

In this particular scene, Harry is trying to deal with having gone into Azkaban and seeing the horrors of the dementors, seeing how the prisoners there are basically tortured.  He doesn’t understand how society can tolerate the existence of such a place, a place where there are surely at least a few innocents suffering unbearably.  He forcefully asks Dumbledore how he can accept this monstrosity of a place.  Fawkes, Dumbledore’s phoenix, appears to side with Harry, sending out a piercing cry whenever Dumbledore talks.

“You went to Azkaban,” Harry whispered, “you took Fawkes with you, he saw – you saw – you were there, you saw – WHY DIDN’T YOU DO ANYTHING? WHY DIDN’T YOU LET THEM OUT? ”

…

“I can’t! ” cried Albus Dumbledore. “Harry, Fawkes, I can’t, there’s nothing I can do!”

Another piercing scream.

“WHY NOT? JUST GO IN AND TAKE THEM OUT!”

The old wizard wrenched his gaze from the phoenix, his eyes meeting Harry’s instead. “Harry, tell Fawkes for me! Tell him it’s not that simple! Phoenixes aren’t mere animals but they are animals, Harry, they can’t understand -”

“I don’t understand either,” Harry said, his voice trembling. “I don’t understand why you’re feeding people to Dementors! Azkaban isn’t a prison, it’s a torture chamber and you’re torturing those people to DEATH! ”

“Percival,” said the old wizard hoarsely, “Percival Dumbledore, my own father, Harry, my own father died in Azkaban! I know, I know it is a horror! But what would you have of me? To break Azkaban by force? Would you have me declare open rebellion against the Ministry?”

CAW!

There was a pause, and Harry’s trembling voice said, “Fawkes doesn’t know anything about governments, he just wants you – to take the prisoners out – of their cells – and he’ll help you fight, if anyone stands in your way – and – and so will I, Headmaster! I’ll go with you and destroy any Dementor that comes near! We’ll worry about the political fallout afterward, I bet that you and I together could get away with it -”

“Harry,” whispered the old wizard, “phoenixes do not understand how winning a battle can lose a war.” Tears were streaming down the old wizard’s cheeks, dripping into his silver beard. “The battle is all they know. They are good, but not wise. That is why they choose wizards to be their masters.”

“Can you bring out the Dementors to where I can get at them?” Harry’s voice was begging, now. “Bring them out in groups of fifteen – I think I could destroy that many at a time without hurting myself -”

The old wizard shook his head. “It was hard enough to pass off the loss of one – they might give me one more, but never two – they are considered national possessions, Harry, weapons in case of war -”

Fury blazed in Harry then, blazed up like fire, it might have come from where a phoenix now rested on his own shoulder, and it might have come from his own dark side, and the two angers mixed within him, the cold and the hot, and it was a strange voice that said from his throat, “Tell me something. What does a government have to do, what do the voters have to do with their democracy, what do the people of a country have to do, before I ought to decide that I’m not on their side any more?”

The old wizard’s eyes widened where he stared at the boy with a phoenix upon his shoulder. “Harry… are those your words, or the Defense Professor’s -”

“Because there has to be some point, doesn’t there? And if it’s not Azkaban, where is it, then?”

“Harry, listen, please, hear me! Wizards could not live together if they each declared rebellion against the whole, every time they differed! Always there will be something -”

“Azkaban is not just something! It’s evil! ”

“Yes, even evil! Even some evils, Harry, for wizards are not perfectly good! And yet it is better that we live in peace, than in chaos; and for you and I to break Azkaban by force would be the beginning of chaos, can you not see it?” The old wizard’s voice was pleading. “And it is possible to oppose the will of your fellows openly or in secret, without hating them, without declaring them evil and enemy! I do not think the people of this country deserve that of you, Harry! And even if some of them did – what of the children, what of the students in Hogwarts, what of the many good people mixed in with the bad?”

I’ve read the whole book twice before but it’s only on this latest read that the absolute brilliance of this scene dawned on me.

II.

It is said that liberalism comes from the heart, and conservativism comes from the head.  Harry and Fawkes cry out the liberal view here: there is great suffering and it needs to be stopped now.  The status quo is horrifyingly evil and it cannot be tolerated.

Dumbledore attempts to make the conservative argument.  I don’t think he makes it very well, but the conservative argument is always much harder to make, as it requires more abstractness and more levels of indirection.  He argues that this is the prison the political system and its elected governments have built.  To go against it, even when it seems deserved, is to declare war, not just on those in power but on the everyday voters in the democracy.  This is an untenable response to dealing with a disagreement with society.  If everyone did that, we could never have peace – and as bad as things can be during peace, war is far worse.

I’ll admit that the previous times I read the scene, I mostly sided with Harry.  While the rest of the world seemed to desire, or at least accept, Azkaban, he saw it for what it really was and wanted it destroyed.  But upon reflection, I think Dumbledore is the one who sees the big picture here.  Azkaban might be hellish, but destroying it would produce (or at least greatly risk producing) a larger and even worse hell.

Let’s ignore the fact that many in Azkaban are terrible people who should not be let out at any cost.  Let’s suppose that Harry and Dumbledore could just go in and destroy the dementors, at which point the Ministry just hires more Aurors and the prisoners are still locked up.  This way, the populace is still safe from criminals, but no one is unnecessarily tortured.  Does this mean everything is fine and good?

No, because this is a criminal act that would result in a public backlash and the Ministry going after Harry and Dumbledore.  Even government officials sympathetic to their view would have to seek them out to bring them to justice.  How would that play out?  Harry and Dumbledore would have basically three choices: disappear and go into exile, surrender themselves to the Ministry and peacefully negotiate terms, or fight back.

While all-out war would be the most disastrous option here, much is lost even in the first two options.  Dumbledore is the highly respected Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, who holds great sway and influence over the politics of Magical Britain; Harry is the genius Boy Who Lived, who will one day have greater or equal influence.  By bringing down Azkaban, they would lose all of that.  Even if they’re not removed from power entirely, their influence will be severely diminished.  As Dumbledore puts it, by winning a battle, they would lose the war.

The populace and system that built Azkaban would still be in place.  Azkaban is just one of the many horrific decisions the system created.  Harry never even evaluated all the products of the system to determine that Azkaban was the worst – it was simply the one he happened to encounter.  There are other issues where Dumbledore and Harry’s wisdom and kindness could help, if they work within the system.  It isn’t even clear that anything would be truly gained from destroying Azkaban: it could well just lead to an even worse Azkaban 2.0.

 

III.

Harry asks a powerful question in response to this: “What does a government have to do, what do the voters have to do with their democracy, what do the people of a country have to do, before I ought to decide that I’m not on their side any more?  Because there has to be some point, doesn’t there? And if it’s not Azkaban, where is it, then?”

I said two things in the previous section that seem somewhat contradictory: 1) The system is horrific and creates many terrible things; and 2) Harry and Dumbledore should work within the system to make it better.  If the system is so horrific, why even work within it?  Why not just bring it all down and replace it with something better?

To answer this, we need to make sure we are seeing the whole elephant, rather than its parts.  A system can produce both great and terrible things.  Democratic systems are, by in large, peaceful.  There is an agreement that the elected officials rule, even if many don’t like the rule.  It means there is an established system of deciding who is in power, and those in power voluntarily stepping down when their term is up.

What’s the cost of war?  Well, where do we even start with that?  There’s all the deaths, injuries, tortures, and trauma – those are bad enough, but they aren’t even the whole story.  War takes a toll on everyone, not just those actively fighting.  Innocent people get hurt.  The friends and families of those affected deal with loss.  Everyone lives in fear as the strong prey on the weak.  With societal breakdown, progress is disrupted, as resources get diverted from increasing human flourishing to ensuring basic survival.  And at the end of all this, what do we have?

Harry seems to think he can rule in a way that would be much better for all the citizens.  Perhaps he can – he is a boy genius after all.  Yet, at this point, he seems to be reacting emotionally without yet grasping what he would need to deal with: paternalistically ruling over Magical Britain, making decisions for the populace on what is and isn’t good for them, and attempting to do what’s right while dealing with their understandable resentment and hatred towards their authoritarian ruler.

So what does the government and the people have to do before Harry decides he’s not on their side?  The answer is: something so bad that it’s worth sacrificing the peace for war and authoritarian rule.  That is the point at which working within the system is no longer tenable.

 

IV.

Now that we have an answer to this fictional testcase, what lessons can we take and apply to real life?

There is an excerpt from Nathan Robinson’s The Difference Between Liberalism And Leftism that I often think about:

The leftist sees capitalism as a horror, and believes that so long as money and profit rule the earth, human beings will be made miserable and will destroy themselves. The liberal does not actually believe this. Rather, the liberal believes that while there are problems with capitalism, it can be salvaged if given a few tweaks here and there.

Socialists like Nathan believe that the current system is unsalvageable.  It’s an idea that’s all over the place, from Reddit (see r/LateStageCapitalism) to punk rock videos (see Rise Against’ Rise Against’ Re-Education (Through Labor)) to popular TV shows (see the “Kingdom of Bullshit” scene from Mr. Robot).

Is it justified?  Emotionally, yes – they’re as compelling as Harry’s call to destroy Azkaban and overthrow democracy, no questions asked.  But they’re meant to be appealing to the heart rather than the mind.  To see and talk only about the negatives, horrifying as they are, and to be blind or indifferent to the positives, is to not see the world clearly.

There is certainly a point at which things can be so bad, so awful, that it’s beyond saving and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.  But that’s the point at which the costs of war and the high chance of authoritarianism are now the lesser evil.  There will always be injustices in the world so awful that our hearts will want to tear everything down, but it is our reason that must prevail, lest we make things even worse.

The beauty of simplistic ideals

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple years trying to see things from other people’s sides.  Being very liberal historically, it’s been quite eye-opening reading essays and arguments from right-wing types and seeing just how differently they’ve been perceiving the world.  This has given me some sympathy to some of their points of view and made me more aware of when the left acts hypocritically.

The problem is that I don’t seem to be able to do much with this awareness.  There are others who have a somewhat centrist take on the world as I do, and we can discuss this centrism and talk about how “enlightened” we all are, and be a tribe like everyone else.  But the ideal would be that as someone who lives in Blue Tribe territory, I am able to point out flaws in and better the Blue Tribe, while similar folks who live in Red Tribe territory can do the same for the Red Tribe.

Of course, no one likes being criticized and no one likes having their flaws pointed out.  This makes pursuing this ideal a somewhat painful ordeal for both myself and the poor sucker who’s stuck in a conversation with me.  There’s an entire corpus of defense mechanisms available to anyone who wants to avoid changing their mind, and it’s not like I’m always right either.  So we’re relegated to dancing the dance of conversations as we each try to get the other at least a little bit closer to our own view.

One crux I repeatedly run into in these conversations is that people repeatedly feel that I am making false equivalences.  For instance, I might say something like “The left believes minorities should celebrate their identities and band together based on it, but fiercely opposes whites doing the same.  It would be better to just oppose all race-based identities.”

This tends to irritate my interlocutors, who ask me how I can possibly equate the two.  They’ll bring up the history of America, the current president, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, ICE, hate crimes, and a million other different things.  As far as they’re concerned, I’m decoupling the general concept of identity without giving any credence to the context.  They see this as a huge faux-pas; I see this as the way forward.

Imagine you are a European Catholic in the early 18^th century.  Those damn Protestants are hounding and killing your people while refusing to acknowledge the divine legitimacy of the Pope.  You’ve been helping hound and kill them too in return, and this has been happening for centuries.  At some point, someone proposes a new concept called Freedom of Religion.  You and your fellow Catholics don’t kill any Protestants, and they don’t kill any of you; in fact, no one’s allowed to even rally up and attack others based on their religion.  You can’t even discriminate against them at stores or at the workplace.  If anyone breaks these rules, there will be a collective effort made to punish the rule-breaker, regardless of their religion.

To you, this is blasphemy.  The same rules are being applied to your true religion as they are to false religions.  What kind of madness is that?  And yet, religious folks have largely followed this principle for centuries and this has helped yield peace for everyone.

This is what decontextualizing means.  It means you sacrifice context that you think is of the utmost importance for the sake of peace.  Is it pleasant?  No.  But if you expect others to do it, you should too.

Now let’s take the popular strawman: are we really expected to apply the same rules of engagement and fairness and compromise between the people who say “Let’s kill all the Jews” and the people who say “Let’s not kill any of the Jews”?

Honestly, I don’t know.  But what I do know is that’s not the situation we are in right now.  There’s more than 0 Nazis, which is already too many, but they’re still a negligible percentage with an ideology that’s basically guaranteed not to take hold in America.

There probably is a point at which it’s better to stop decontextualizing and abandon making equivalences.  But I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that today.

Watching British politics

About a year ago, I came across this post through Reddit: Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won.  At the time, Dominic Cummings was a little-known man behind the curtain who headed the Brexit Vote Leave campaign.  Since then, his character has been played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the movie Brexit: The Uncivil War, and he is now one of two top advisers to UK PM Boris Johnson.

Cummings is a controversial figure.  One Guardian piece has called him “master of the dark arts”, while another makes him out to be either a brilliant eccentric or an evil genius.  Former PM David Cameron called him a career psychopath.

The post I read was Cummings’ explanation of his role in the Brexit campaign and how his team managed to do what they did.  It was long, but it was a hell of a read.  I wasn’t the only one who thought so, given that writer James Graham felt there should be a movie about it.

Cummings doesn’t have a focused style of writing.  He goes all over the place, ranging from interesting philosophical paradigms to random attacks on people I had never heard of.  But I was enthralled – I had never come across anyone in politics who thought like this.

An admission, an excuse and an apology: I don’t follow, and therefore don’t understand, UK politics.  I’ve never heard a really good, or even satisfactory, argument for why Britain should leave the EU.  My respect for Cummings is despite the fact that he is in favor of something that seems dangerous and insane, not because of it.  I respect him because he thinks about politics correctly in a way that no one else in the field does.

Cummings has a great number of posts on his blog, all of which are long and rambling, but most of which are very, very interesting.  For now, I’ll just focus on the one article that introduced me to him, that piqued my attention.  Here are some excerpts:

We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful. On one hand the work of Kahneman et al on ‘irrationality’ has given an exaggerated impression. The fact that we did not evolve to think as natural Bayesians does not make us as ‘irrational’ as some argue. We evolved to avoid disasters where the probability of disaster X happening was unknowable but the outcome was fatal. Rationality is more than ‘Bayesian updating’. On the other hand our stories do often obscure the branching histories of reality and they remain the primary way in which history is told. The mathematical models that illuminate complex reality in the physical sciences do not help us much with history yet. Only recently has reliable data science begun to play an important role in politics.

[MPs’] lack of motivation is connected to another important psychology – the willingness to fail conventionally. Most people in politics are, whether they know it or not, much more comfortable with failing conventionally than risking the social stigma of behaving unconventionally. They did not mind losing so much as being embarrassed, as standing out from the crowd. (The same phenomenon explains why the vast majority of active fund management destroys wealth and nobody learns from this fact repeated every year.)

High prestige pundits and editors yield great power over the stories told (and have far more power over politicians like Cameron, unfortunately, than they realise) but the field is not based on real expertise. Fields dominated by real expertise are distinguished by two features: 1) there is enough informational structure in the environment such that reliable predictions are possible despite complexity and 2) there is effective feedback so learning is possible.

Shows should require precise quantitative predictions about well-formed questions as Superforecasters do. Newspapers should do the same when interviewing people. The next step is using this process to push people towards admitting conditional errors like ‘if I am proved wrong about X by date Y then I will admit I was wrong to claim Z’. If political shows pushed their guests to do this and kept track of the predictions it could have a big positive effect. (Next time they come on you can flash up their record on a screen so the public can see how often they are right.) It is vital to change incentives so people are encouraged to admit errors and learn instead of fooling themselves constantly. For those who refuse it would be easy to develop a protocol that categorises their vague comments and puts numbers on them. This will push them to ‘correct the record’.

There’s loads more.  I encourage everyone to read the whole thing.  But all of these read like excerpts from an academic who has no influence over politics, but are instead from someone who has the ear of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.  That’s super exciting!

On the other hand, Cummings was just weird in this interview and displayed none of the brilliance I expected from reading his blog.  The fact that he wants to restructure the UK’s civil service entirely is also far more eyebrow-raising given that a respected international index rated it best in the world.  All this confuses me and I haven’t yet worked this out.

On another note, I watched a video of the British parliament for the first time and holy fucking shit!!  I mean I was very amused and very entertained, but this is how decisions to run the country are made?!?

Reacting to the HONY crowd (1 of ∞)

I love Humans of New York.  I think it’s one of the best things to exist on the internet.  They’re human stories told in a picture and a small blurb.  Sometimes the stories are heartwarming, sometimes they’re horrific, and sometimes they’re light-hearted.  They’re often very powerful.  What I really love about them is how they bring people together, giving us glimpses into many different peoples’ lives, as well as different kinds of people’s lives.

But I criticize everything I love, so I’m going to end the compliments there.

Recently, I came across this post.  The story is tragic.  It’s about a Venezuelan refugee in Spain who is working hard to send money to his family back home and is trying to get them passports so he can bring them over.  Unfortunately, the government stopped giving out passports, so he bribed a government official with $600.  The official promised to help but nothing happens.

“We were just trying to survive. Sometimes I’d wait in line six hours just to buy a piece of bread. Our son is only eleven, and we didn’t want him to realize that we didn’t have any food– so my wife and I didn’t eat. I lost forty-five pounds. But I still stayed in Venezuela as long as possible. I didn’t want to break up our family. Then one morning I was walking my son to school, and we saw a dead man in the street. He’d been shot. A crowd had gathered. And that’s when I decided to leave. I explained to my son that I’d be home soon. Then I crossed the border into Colombia and took a flight to Spain. I’ve been here for a year now. I live in a flat with four other refugees. I’m making enough as a bike messenger to send home $100 every two weeks. It’s enough to buy them food and medicine and anything else they need. My son always asks when I’ll be home, and I just keep saying ‘soon.’ And even though I’m lonely, I’m much calmer now. Because at least I know they’re eating. The plan has always been to bring them here, but the problem is passports. The government has stopped giving passports. We applied five months ago but nothing happened. So three weeks ago I gave $600 to a man in government. He promised to help. I’ve been checking the application status every day, but still nothing. I don’t know what’s happening. I thought it would be done by now.”

Hearing about this, Brandon used the money from his HONY Patreon to reimburse him.  The move is met with universal praise.

Meanwhile, I found this very eyebrow raising.

When HONY readers hear about someone needing help, they want to help.  This is a good thing.  They’ve saved, improved, and changed lives.

I don’t have a problem with Brandon paying back the Venezuelan refugee here.  It’s his money and he used it to help someone he wanted to help and who needed to help.  Good on him.

But he’s not the person I would have helped.  He’s not the only refugee out there.

I don’t blame the man for trying to bribe a government official.  I probably would have done the same thing in his shoes.  But it’s not enough to empathize with this man.  You have to empathize with the other refugees too.  There are other refugees who never tried to bribe anyone: maybe they were even poorer, maybe they didn’t have the same connections, or maybe they were too timid.  Their stories aren’t told in HONY but they still exist.  This man tried to get a leg up on them and their families to help his own.  Again, I don’t blame him for that – but reimbursing him for that wouldn’t be my priority.

If I was Brandon, I’d have taken a step back to calculate how many refugees I wanted to help and over how many weeks.  Maybe I’d want to cover the monthly send-home expenses of 3 refugees: that’d also come out to the same amount of money.  This both distributes some of the good and makes it clear that the money is for the food and medicine, rather than a reimbursement for an attempted bribe.

The conclusion of this line of thinking, of course, is the effective altruism movement.  I’ve given up on expecting most people to go that far with combining their hearts and their heads.  But at a minimum, we should help in ways that don’t incentivize bribery.

Liking the candidate

When I was in high school, Bush was president, and mocking his terribleness and stupidity was a popular pastime.  Bush wasn’t as overtly terrible as Trump, and the political arena wasn’t quite as disastrous then as it is now, so all in all it was more fun than horror.  One thing I remember all of us shaking our heads at was how people elected Bush because “He’s the kind of guy I’d like to have a beer with.”  It was the pinnacle of American stupidity, we thought, to elect someone based on how well you think you’d get along with them instead of how well they’d govern.

Now a decade’s gone by, and I’m finding my own self in a similar place with Elizabeth Warren.

I have some biases toward liking Warren.  I first heard about her when I was in college, when I was often browsing Reddit, where she was often mentioned positively.  She was the tough lady taking on the big banks who had caused the 2008 recession and left the taxpayers to foot the bill, the one senator who would take on Wall Street instead of falling to their lobbying.  Wikipedia says she “focused on consumer protection, economic opportunity, and the social safety net while in the Senate”, which are all things I care about.  What’s more, she’s an academic, a professor and a policy wonk – exactly the kind of person I want running the country.

And yet every time I hear a policy proposal from her, I become horrified and almost start questioning if I even want a Democrat winning in 2020.

It started about a year ago when Warren was reported to be closely looking at job guarantees.  I’ve heard Andrew Yang talk about how the one thing government has proven itself effective at is mailing checks to people – hence his support (and tentatively mine) of UBI.  Until I heard of job guarantees, I had never imagined anyone would propose the government take on a role so incredibly complex to get right and so assuredly guaranteed to go wrong.  And yet here were multiple prominent Democrats getting behind the idea, including my first-choice contender!

But a quick Google search shows that this idea hasn’t had much traction since early to mid-2018, so let’s just assume it’s been dropped.

The next time I heard about Warren was when she released her DNA results to proudly declare her very small amount of Native American ancestry.  This I thought was silly and revealed a lack of politicking skill on her part, but I didn’t think too much about it.

Then she started talking about reparations and I cringed.  As someone who wants to live in a society where the color of my skin isn’t relevant, it’s hard for me to get behind any policy proposal that targets race so explicitly.

And then she proposed student loan debt forgiveness plans and I was truly horrified.  It’s not that I don’t sympathize with those laden with student debt, I really do.  But college shouldn’t be that expensive in the first place, and this is an expensive band-aid to avoid dealing with the real issue.  Even worse, it makes it so that those who were spend-thrifty and neglected their debt end up in a better position than those who worked hard and lived more frugally to help pay off their debt.  In a country like America, where financial mismanagement is rampant and credit card debt is through the roof, I don’t see how we can afford to disincentivize responsible spending habits and tell the people the government will just bail them out of tough spots.

Anyway, the point is that despite all of this, I can’t bring myself to dislike Warren or oppose her presidency.  I like her.  I don’t know if beer’s her alcohol of choice but I’d have a drink with her.

Maybe I don’t actually believe she’ll implement the worst of her ideas.  I think she’s smart and I don’t expect smart people to do dumb things.  This is, of course, incredibly bad logic.

What it really is, I think, is that it’s hard for my intuitive brain to both like Warren and oppose her presidency.  That takes a level of nuance and System 1s don’t do nuance very well.

All of this is moot anyway, since I can’t actually vote.  But I am looking forward to the debates later this month, and I’ll be cheering for Warren to say smart, policy-driven things.  Given her recent track record, I expect I will be disappointed.  Oh well – let’s see how things unfold.

_{[Update 8/4/2019: Two months later, I no longer feel this way about Warren specifically.  But I do feel this way about Yang, whose UBI policy apparently makes no sense.]} 

The parable of the tortured clone

Imagine an evil magician appears in front of you and says that he is going to duplicate you, i.e. turning you into two clones exactly identical to yourself.  One second it’ll be just you there and the next second there’ll be two of you standing right next to each other.  The magician will then randomly choose one of you to hold for ransom and torture.  The other will be free to go, but can free the tortured version if they pay up some large (but still achievable) sum of money, say $250,000.

If you knew this was about to happen to you, what would you resolve?  Well, both versions of you are you: let’s say it’s U becoming U₁ and U₂.  The difference between U and U₁, or between U and U₂, is the same as the difference between yourself at any given point in time, and yourself a second before.  The fact that there’s also a duplicate is irrelevant.  (If you disagree with this, suppose some quantum mechanics breakthrough says with certainty that at every instant in time, a clone of you is created elsewhere and then killed – would this practically change the way you view yourself?)

Given that you know that some version of you will be tortured until the ransom is paid, you’d want the other to do whatever they can to get that money as quickly as possible.  If that means working at multiple jobs all the time, day after day, do it; if that means sacrificing their social and romantic lives, do it; if that means living extremely frugally to the point of misery, do it.  It’s a bargain you’d strike with yourself to try and maximize happiness for “yourself”, given the awful situation you’ve been placed in.

Now imagine the moment after the magician’s split you: you and your clone are staring at each other, knowing what is about to come.  The two of you would still want to make the same bargain, but now the situation isn’t very different from if the other were a total stranger.  It’d be a measure you’d take to have some hope of avoiding lifelong torture, but the lucky untortured one doesn’t have a personal stake anymore: they are free to say “Screw it” and just live their lives and try to forget that the torture is even happening.  It is, after all, happening to someone else, not them.

This reveals an inconsistency in how we would behave with our past vs our future selves.  The free self (U_f) knows that it’s not going to be tortured and can treat it as happening to someone else.  The original self (U) can’t do this, as it will be enduring the torture soon as U_t.  But as soon as the split’s happened, U_f loses this concern for U_t that it had just a moment ago.  (I’m not saying much that is new here: Wait But Why already did a post on something very similar.)

To repair this inconsistency, U_f and U_t would need to treat the other the same as they would themselves.  This is impossible to do practically because we are not wired to act like that, but it does seem the theoretical right thing to do.

But then, observe: we are saying we should care about this other person because it could have been us; how is that different from life in general?  You care about this tortured clone because it’s a replica of you.  But what if it wasn’t exactly?  What if they were just like you but their eye color was different?  Should this change anything?  How about if they were just like you but their eye color was different and their ears were larger?  What if they were just like you but their eye color was different, their ears were larger and they were slightly more extroverted?  Add more degrees and increase the levels of differences, and soon you have a whole another person.

Why shouldn’t you care about others as much as you do yourself?  You didn’t choose to be born to your circumstances and they didn’t choose to be born into theirs.  It was the luck of the draw and plenty of people drew a very short end of the stick.  They are out there struggling today.  Are you going to help them?

Ask not what the economy can do for you

I.

When I was a kid, I asked why the government didn’t just print enough money to make everyone rich.  I got some answer about how that would reduce the worth of money itself, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  So I spent some time thinking about it and realized the answer depended on understanding what the economy itself was.

As a society, we all need a whole bunch of things.  We need people to make food, people to build housing, people to treat us when we are sick, people to keep us safe, people to teach us things, people to produce entertainment, people to manage this whole system, and so on.

Capitalism then was a somewhat fair and useful system to get us all of this.  Anyone is free to take on any of these roles, and do it as well or as poorly as they want.  But the better job you do, the more you will be rewarded, as more people will come to you for your goods or services.  Similarly, if a lot of people can do what you do, you will be rewarded less than if only a few people can do what you do.  And then we have the concept of money to greatly simplify all these interpersonal transactions.

This made me realize roughly what my role in life needed to be.  I was in school at this time so I was in a training phase.  Society was basically giving me “a free 18 years”: until I was 18, no one expected me to contribute anything.  I was getting good food, clean water, shelter, security, and loads of entertainment without having to lift a finger.  All the adults were taking 40 or so hours of their time every week to provide me with all of this.

So my role when I became an adult was to figure out how I wanted to contribute back.  My choice wasn’t fixed: I could always change it.  But I had to contribute somehow.  And if I felt lazy and decided not to, society would say okay and give me enough to keep me alive but not enough to give me a great standard of living (i.e. welfare) – after all, I needed to be motivated somehow.

The answer to why the government doesn’t just print more money then became obvious: it just wasn’t an act that allowed people to produce more value to each other.

II.

All of this is fairly straightforward.  And yet few seem to ever think along these lines.

When we’re in school, the things we’re told most often are “Do what you love” and “Follow your passions”.  I don’t want to admonish this advice per se – if you’re trying to decide how to contribute, finding something enjoyable is best both for yourself and for those who benefit from your profession.

But just because you love doing something doesn’t mean it’s useful to anyone.  You could love painting, but there could be more than enough painters already, most of them better than you will ever be.  Here, at least, the market self-corrects – unable to compete, you’ll find something else to do.  But you could also love something like day trading, where you just buy and sell stocks within the same trading day, making a profit for yourself by timing small rises and dips in the market.  Here, you’re not providing value to anyone’s lives, and yet you can make a fine living for yourself.

Finding a career that can make you the most money is the other popular sentiment.  In an ideal economic system where salary correlates perfectly with positive impact to society, this would be fine.  But this is obviously not the case and no one pretends it is.  Lobbyists, lawyers, tax accountants, executives – it’s obviously wrong to say that all of these highly paid people don’t have positive impact, yet most wouldn’t argue that a lot of these highly paid people have large negative impacts on society and the world.

No one ever told me in school to look for where I could contribute to the world the most.  In fact, when I Google “Why should I get a job?”, I see page after page listing reason after reason, none of which acknowledge “Well, maybe you should be finding your place to give back to the society that is giving you so much.”

On one hand I get it – most people don’t have the luxury of choosing these things, they just take whatever jobs they can get to survive, and they shouldn’t feel the slightest bit bad about it.  But the fact that we don’t talk about this as the actual purpose of jobs is worrisome and leads to a whole lot of confusion.

 

III.

One popular talking point in politics is job creation.  It’s one of the few things regarded as a good thing on both sides of the aisle because in capitalism a strong economy is one where everyone is working and buying.

This really is a failure of capitalism though to model the ideal situation.  In an ideal economic system, jobs exist purely for the sake of solving problems and as we solve more of our problems, jobs will disappear and everyone can work less while simultaneously increasing our standard of living.  Clearly we haven’t figured out how to do that so we’re stuck with capitalism and now “more problems to solve” is uncontested as a positive.

But I do wish more people (and not just anti-capitalists) would acknowledge this.

When job opportunities disappear in some sector, people fight ferociously to get them back.  But another way to think this is there isn’t much to contribute in this sector anymore, and people should be trying to find one that can actually make use of their skills and talents.

People pride themselves in their ability to work hard, again giving less consideration to what that work actually produces.  The phrase “Earning your keep” has more to do with working hard and working well than about actually contributing positively.  Being exhausted is somewhat considered a status symbol.  I don’t know any criminals personally but a lot of criminals in crime shows and movies praise the virtues of hard work, despite the fact that their hard work brings down the fabric of society instead of elevating it.

People also take great pride in the money they make without caring about the damage they do to the world – whether it’s profiting off ruining the economy, the environment, or other people’s lives.  Part of the reason is simple greed for materialism: the luxury life is nice after all.  But the other part is that our society prizes wealth with considerably less consideration for what means were used to acquire that wealth.

“I’m just doing my job” is often considered a valid excuse for bad behavior.  Same with “I do what I can to put food on the table.”

 

IV.

The first popular piece of reading I’ve seen really talk about this is Cracked’s 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You A Better Person, which is one of their most popular articles ever and many seem to view it as speaking some mind-blowing truths.

Then there’s 80,000 Hours which goes in the complete opposite direction of all other career advice I’ve encountered and focusses on optimizing your career almost purely for positive impact onto the world.  I have complete admiration for people that have this as their focus, but I think it’s so diametrically opposed to the current mode of thinking that most people would just roll their eyes at it.

But we should reshape our cultural attitude towards work.  It’s not just about making a living for yourself, it’s about doing your part to help everyone else thrive.

The Japanese have a concept called Ikigai, which means “A reason for being”.  It says there’s four things to aim for in a job: enjoying it, being good at it, being able to get paid for it, and giving the world what it needs.

Now we can see what traditional North American career advice lacks.  “Follow your passions” makes it seem like what you love is all that matters.  “Earning your keep” makes it seem like what you can be paid for is all that matters.  “You’re good at X, why not do X?” makes it seem like what you’re good at is what matters.  All these are starting points but the fourth circle there of “What the world needs” is just as important, and is just as good a starting point.

And it’s not just about doing it for the world for morality’s sake.  Doing something useful and knowing you are making a positive impact feels different.  Living selfishly to satisfy yourself feels hollow; trying to make the world even a little better feels meaningful.

I want to re-iterate that for a good portion of the population, the options they need are simply not there.  No one who’s trying to make ends meet should read this post and feel the least bit bad about it – you can’t help the world if you’re struggling to survive, and there’s no shame in struggling to survive if that’s the situation you’re in today.

But if you’re lucky enough to be a person who has options, consider that your job isn’t just a way to give yourself and your family a nice standard of living.  Consider what kinds of jobs would make you feel more complete and help others out.  Consider not just asking what the economy can do for you but what you can do for the economy.

Another free speech advocate bites the dust

I found out this morning that a Canadian professor named Rick Mehta was fired.  The available details on this flimsy due to confidentiality issues, but from the little the articles say, his firing is an extremely troubling sign of the times we live in.

The universities are supposed to be the quintessential institution that not just tolerates dissent but welcomes it so that ideas are constantly scrutinized.  It’s supposed to take taking a lead role in showing society that by engaging with unpopular ideas, we can squash them when they’re wrong and change our thinking when we’re wrong.  While humans and politics are susceptible to fanatical ideologies and dogmatism, the universities are meant to be apolitical and dedicated to seeking truth.  And they are failing us.

I don’t want to say there’s nothing a professor could have said that would warrant his firing.  Perhaps if he had threatened other faculty or students in some way, or if he called for violence, his firing would be justified.  But the things Rick Mehta said don’t seem remotely beyond the pale, at least based on what the articles said.  They simply seem to have gone against the orthodoxy that’s present among campuses.

• “Multiculturalism is a scam” – it’s impossible to criticize this statement without hearing the whole context. When an Indian professor (someone who has skin in the game in supporting multicultural attitudes) says this, it’s worth hearing what he meant.
• “Denying the wage gap” – I assume this means he denies that any wage gap is largely due to discrimination, not that there is no wage gap on average between men and women make in society. This is in line with what Freakonomics says, and the infamous Jordan Peterson – Cathy Newman interview seems support this as well.
• “Dismissing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a vehicle for “endless apologies and compensation”” – I know nothing about this commission, but criticizing a commission seems like exactly the kind of thing an academic should be free to do.

The news article also cites his retweet of a post that said it is “statistically impossible for all Native children to have had a negative experience with residential schools.”  They cite this without mentioning that the next line of the post was “To deny this fact would be just as bad as denying the majority that did have negative experiences.”  This is either extremely sloppy or extremely dishonest on the part of the Globe and Mail: the news is supposed to inform by providing context, not remove context for the sake of pushing a point of view.

What’s even more frustrating is that if his ideas really are stupid and dangerous and problematic, it should be easy to argue against them with facts instead of with firings.

The firing of Rick Mehta shouldn’t only worry you if you think he might be even partially right on any of those counts.  It should worry you if you think if you think the orthodoxies of the university are wrong about anything.  It means they’ve lost their self-correction mechanism.  And then society suffers.