Category Archives: books and book reviews

Messing with the web of social conventions

Posted on by

The late economist Hyman Minsky had an aphorism:

It’s easy to create money. The trick is getting it accepted

This aphorism can be adapted to other realms.

It’s easy to create a software standard (like the Internet protocols, or an operating system, or a programming language). The trick is getting it accepted.

It’s easy to create the software architecture for a social network. The trick is getting it accepted.

It’s easy to create a law. The trick is getting it accepted.

It’s easy to create a social norm. The trick is getting it accepted.

It’s easy to create a religion. The trick is getting it accepted.

It’s easy to create a credentialing system. The trick is getting it accepted.

What to call things that are like this? I like the term “consensual hallucination,” as William Gibson defined cyberspace in his sci-fi novel Neuromancer. But a more standard term would be “social convention.”

We live in a web of social conventions. Each social convention by itself is a sort of Chesterton Fence. You may wonder why it’s there, but take it away and you may not anticipate what will happen elsewhere in the web. You ignore potential interdependencies at your peril. De-fund the police (or delegitimize them) and crime goes up. Get rid of government schools and replace them with a voucher system, and perhaps you get only the intended consequences, but maybe you don’t.

Once social conventions have been adopted for awhile, they become very sticky. Is Microsoft Word the best possible word processing program? No, but try to replace it. Is Facebook the best way to design an online social network? No, but try to replace it. Is the U.S. patent system the best way to address intellectual property? No, but try to replace it. Is a Harvard MBA or a Yale law degree the best credentialing system for finding people for powerful positions? No, but try to replace them.

Freedom of speech is an interesting social convention. The First Amendment (another social convention) technically applies only to the U.S. Congress. But many of us seek to promote the social convention of free speech more broadly.

Private property is a social convention. The economist Hernando de Soto in The Mystery of Capital, pointed out that having clear legal title to land makes a tremendous difference in a society. Without it, people cannot rely on enjoying the benefits from building on that land. They cannot borrow against their real estate assets. They have only what he calls “dead capital.”

Our society treats property rights as essential. We follow John Locke in this regard. Or a natural law tradition that preceded him.

Karl Marx’s followers saw private property as an evil social convention. Just get rid of it! Well, we know what happened.

Philosopher Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority questions the usefulness of giving government the right to coerce and citizens the duty to obey. Could we not get rid of these social conventions? I reviewed his book skeptically. I wrote,

I suspect that the real reasons that people buy into political authority cannot be found in the work of political philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Rawls, or James Fishkin. The true reasons are implicit, and someone needs to undertake the task of teasing them out. Until we know what the real reasons are, we will not be able to refute them.

This is not to say that we should never tinker with social conventions. Progress depends on successful tinkering. But we should always be wary that an experiment in social (re-)engineering may not work.

Keep this in mind as you read Balaji Srininivasan’s How to Start a New Country. He strikes me as cavalier about the stickiness and interconnectedness of some of the social conventions that he thinks can be cast aside.

What is fragile?

Posted on by

Scott Alexander writes,

in an area with frequent catastrophes, where the catastrophes have externalities on people who didn’t choose them, you want to lower variance, so that nothing ever gets bad enough to produce the catastrophe.

In an area where people can choose whatever they want, and are smart enough to choose good things rather than bad ones, you want to raise variance, so that the best thing will be very good indeed, and then everybody can choose that and bask in its goodness.

Scott’s essays on “anti-fragile” point to a need to define fragility in a way other than “I’ll know it when Nassim Taleb sees it.” Are we talking about a person, a choice, a process, a system. . .?

It could be that the admonition “Be anti-fragile!” has no practical implications. That is because most disagreements can be framed as disagreements about what are the important sources of fragility.

Conservatives see individual human beings as fragile, but they see the accumulated habits of civilization as anti-fragile. But a progressive could argue that the accumulated habits of civilization make a society fragile. As the environment changes, people need to change in response.

Epistemology as a social process

Posted on by

I am in the middle of reading Michael Huemer’s Knowledge, Reality, and Value, which he bills as a textbook. I see it as a vehicle for Huemer to give his views on some major philosophical topics. Although I do not have a Ph.D in philosophy, I consider myself able to play in that league. I may be missing some jargon, but otherwise I think I can go toe to toe with any of them.

Why study philosophy? My answer is to keep your mind from being rotted by reading Twitter. That raises the question (and does not beg the question):

Why not simply avoid reading Twitter in order to keep your mind from rotting?

The answer is that although it helps to not read Twitter, unfortunately other people read Twitter, their minds are rotting, and they will rot your mind unless you study philosophy.

For me, the most fundamental epistemological truth is this:

Other people exist, and one has to reconcile one’s beliefs to theirs.

Reconciling my beliefs to yours does not mean that I always agree with you. Consider the Asch conformity experiment. In a psychology experiment, you are brought into a room with three other people, who you are led to believe are also subjects, but who in fact are confederates of the experimenter. On a screen at the end of the room, a projector shows two lines, A and B. Line A is longer than line B, but when you are asked to say which line is longer, the other three “subjects” all say that line B is longer. What do you say?

When the experiment is done with many subjects, a sizable proportion of them choose to agree that line B is longer. This is known as “Asch conformity.”

Most of the time, you and I agree. I see an octopus, and you see an octopus, and reconciling my beliefs with yours is easy. When we disagree, as in the Asch conformity experiment, I have to decide whether it is your view of the screen or mine that is correct. If I think that your view is incorrect, I may infer other that you are looking from a different angle or that you have been instructed to lie.

If we take it as given that other people exist and that we have to reconcile our views to theirs, then this reinforces the case for what Huemer calls “direct realism,” while not sliding into “naive realism,” a term that I learned from Jeffrey Friedman. Direct realism says that in order for you to see an octopus, an octopus must really exist. Naive realism says that everything you believe to be true is true.

My epistemological view is that when I see an octopus there really is an octopus unless other people persuade me that there is no octopus. Usually, when I see an octopus, other people see the octopus. But if other people say there is no octopus, then I become like the subject in an Asch conformity experiment. I have to wonder whether they are lying, whether their perception is messed up, or whether it is my perception that is messed up.

A lot of epistemology uses your own mind as a starting point. Think of Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” My preferred epistemology uses other minds as a starting point. I put Descartes into reverse. “There are people in the world, and I am similar to them. They think, therefore I think.”

A skeptic could ask, “How do you know that there are other people in the world?” or “How do you know what other people are thinking?” My reply is that I am darned sure there are other people in the world, and I have pretty accurate perceptions of a lot of their thoughts.* To be skeptical about that is at best ridiculous and at worst impossible.

*As thoughts get more complex, misunderstandings can and do arise.

Who gets to restrict speech?

Posted on by

Anthony Doyle writes,

In the end, we have to consider which is more harmful to society: a minority who would seek to incite violence against their fellow citizens, or a state that has been empowered to set the limits of permissible thought and speech. On balance, I suspect that those of us who know a thing or two about history will settle on the latter.

From an essay excerpted from his new book. This seems to qualify as steel-manning, in that he does make the effort to build the case for the other point of view.

In contrast with Doyle’s steel-manning, Glenn Greenwald writes,

journalists have bizarrely transformed from their traditional role as leading free expression defenders into the the most vocal censorship advocates, using their platforms to demand that tech monopolies ban and silence others.

That same motive of self-preservation is driving them to equate any criticisms of their work with “harassment,” “abuse” and “violence” — so that it is not just culturally stigmatized but a banning offense, perhaps even literally criminal, to critique their journalism on the ground that any criticism of them places them “in danger.” Under this rubric they want to construct, they can malign anyone they want, ruin people’s reputations, and unite to generate hatred against their chosen targets, but nobody can even criticize them.

In The Three Languages of Politics, I make a case for treating everyone else as reasonable. If you want to diagnose anyone’s beliefs as irrational or self-serving, do that only to yourself. I admit that I have not always lived up to this ideal.

Another term for steel-manning is “cognitive empathy,” meaning trying to understand what the other person is thinking. Let me try to show cognitive empathy for the journalists Greenwald disapproves of (and make no mistake, I disapprove of them, too). I see them as believing that society will work better if people trust the information that they get from mainstream journalists. Those who undermine that trust threaten society by creating an environment in which falsehoods masquerade as news and in which journalists who try to do their job feel threatened and intimidated. Society needs to fight back against these spoilers of the realm of public knowledge.

Although I can empathize with this point of view, I do not find it compelling. As Greenwald points out, it can be hard to tell the difference these days between writers with and without journalistic credentials. Often, it is the ordinary people breaking stories and providing reliable analysis. Meanwhile, there are credentialed journalists playing the role of spoilers–spreading falsehoods and intimidating those who try to speak the truth.

Postjournalism

Posted on by

Andrey Mir’s Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers would have made my list of best books of 2020 except that I only recently read it. I recommend the entire book, even though Mir’s writing is repetitive. A few quick thoughts.

When I was growing up, you needed to read the sports section to see all the box scores, you needed the financial pages to look up specific stocks, and you turned to the comics section for entertainment.

Mir points out that advertising is what really supported the newspapers. In fact, although he does not say this, it was classified advertising that really paid the bills.

In a sense, the news and opinion that came bundled with your sports, financial news and comics was included courtesy of the advertisers. Mir points out that the advertisers were better off without angry, negative, divisive news and editorial content. Journalists were free to uphold standards for objectivity, because advertisers did not mind.

Then advertising went away. And you could get your sports and financial information from specialty web sites, and newspaper comics were no longer a compelling form of entertainment. So newspapers lost their readers, and their advertisers.

Staying in business required a different revenue model, which turned out to be donation via subscription. To motivate what Mir calls donscriptions, newspapers had to take strong stands. The survivors–WaPo and NYT–succeeded at this. Their readers look to these publications to validate their world view. Objectivity becomes a luxury that the papers can no longer afford–too much objectivity and readers will cancel their donscriptions.

Mir predicts a big drop in news site activity with Mr. Trump out of the White House. Already that looks like a good call.

Marriage and inequality

Posted on by

Gregory Clark writes,

a recent study from the UK Biobank, which has a collection of genotypes of individuals together with measures of their social characteristics, supports the idea that there is strong genetic assortment in mating. Robinson et al. (2017) look at the phenotype and genotype correlations for a variety of traits – height, BMI, blood pressure, years of education – using data from the biobank. For most traits they find as expected that the genotype correlation between the parties is less than the phenotype correlation. But there is one notable exception. For years of education, the phenotype correlation across spouses is 0.41 (0.011 SE). However, the correlation across the same couples for the genetic predictor of educational attainment is significantly higher at 0.654 (0.014 SE) (Robinson et al., 2017, 4). Thus couples in marriage in recent years in England were sorting on the genotype as opposed to the phenotype when it comes to educational status.

The paper is entitled “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls.” Pointer from Tyler Cowen. The conclusion points to a very strong Null Hypothesis view of all forms of social intervention.

n aspirations that by appropriate social design, rates of social mobility can be substantially increased will prove futile. We have to be resigned to living in a world where social outcomes are substantially determined at birth.

Clark has been finding evidence for heritability and for the broader Null Hypothesis for some time. See my essay on The Son Also Rises.

He is one of the few people doing this sort of research. Here is why. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

CRISPR and intellectual property

Posted on by

In the context of a book review of Kevin Davies’ Editing Humanity, I write,

As I see it, the proper treatment of intellectual property should have three characteristics. First, it should encourage knowledge to be shared as soon as possible. Second, it should reward those who take risks and exert effort. Third, it should reward actual profitable uses of ideas, not just sketches of possibilities. These goals are in tension with one another.

Rationalist epistemology

Posted on by

Tom Chivers writes,

According to Paul [Crowley], the thing that distinguishes a cause from a cult is when it becomes taboo to criticise the cult.

From The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy, p. 191

This leads to the following train of thought.

1. Good thinkers engage with ideas that question their beliefs. Bad thinkers instead engage in emotional blackmail against those who would question their beliefs.

2. Of course (1) is an instance of emotional blackmail. The terms “good” and “bad” are emotionally loaded. This is reminiscent of Quine’s point that the claim that “propositions that cannot be tested against logic or observation are dogma” is itself a dogma. I am willing to say that “there is one example of emotional blackmail that is acceptable, and that is the insinuation that it is bad to otherwise use emotional blackmail.”

3. I am not against emotions. You should pay attention to your emotions and choose an appropriate response. Many years ago, I was playing a game in an Othello tournament and noticed myself feeling frustrated that the game was not quickly resolving itself in my favor. Your natural reaction is to become impatient. But instead you need to do the opposite. I noticed my emotions, stopped, thought a long time, and made a course-correcting move.

4. More deeply, I do not believe that we can rationally calculate our daily lives. This point is expressed very well by Moshe Koppel in his book Judaism Straight Up. You can find out more about the book here or here, although I don’t think either article gets quite to the heart of what Koppel is saying.

The way I put it is this: We engage in behaviors and hold beliefs without understanding why we behave the way we behave or why we believe what we believe. This is not a failure of rationality. It is the human condition.

5. If I were asked to reduce the criteria for a fantasy intellectual to just one, it would be something like “the ability to constructively deal with criticism of one’s beliefs.” Part of doing that is anticipating what a critic might say.

6. Unfortunately, colleges nowadays seem to teach the opposite. Countering criticism with rational arguments seems to be “out,” and emotional blackmail seems to be “in.”

Number One Pick going for W, M

Posted on by

Scott Alexander writes about Freddy DeBoer’s The Cult of Smart.

If the season had started, and if DeBoer were on someone’s team, Alexander would get a Win. In response to DeBoer’s case for the Null Hypothesis that successful school reform is not scalable, Alexander writes

These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he’s willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that’s failed every time it’s tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that’s succeeded at least once?

Later in the essay, Alexander creates a candidate to score a Meme.

School is child prison. It’s forcing kids to spend their childhood – a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder – sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they’ll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the “Burrito Test” – if a place won’t let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it’s an institution. Doesn’t matter if the name is “Center For Flourishing” or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs – if it doesn’t pass the Burrito Test, it’s an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED “THE BATHROOM PASS” IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN’T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

Incidentally, I have decided to simplify Meme scoring. A player scores a Meme point if a Meme is used (by someone other than the player) three or more times during the season. So if “child prison” gets used by three other writers to mean school, Scott’s owner gets a Meme point.