tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49653957784394989652024-03-09T18:47:42.562-08:00The Late EnlightenmentWe're still in the Enlightenment, only now reason has shown us that we are not reasonable - and a more empirical study of man helps us remember the point of the whole programMichael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.comBlogger452125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-10454406592404752492024-01-07T17:34:00.000-08:002024-01-07T17:41:10.609-08:00Fiction Is Dreaming In PrintThere are mathematical techniques intended to counter over-fitting in data. Imagine a stockmarket analysis program. If it's trained on a year of data when, that year on June 23, all tech stocks dropped, it might start to recommend selling (or shorting) all its tech stocks just prior to June 23 every year. Obviously this isn't smart; the program has overfitted. What you might do is take the training data and slice it up and restack it in some new way - different sectors, different months - and the program might start finding more meaningful relationships.
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This is analogous to dreaming, and has been rediscovered (or re-engineered, if you prefer) in other settings <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/google-deepmind-gives-computer-dreams-to-improve-learning" target="_blank">for some years now</a>. We still don't really know why we sleep, let alone <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/nobody-really-knows-why-we-dream/" target="_blank">why we dream</a>. But if we assume that brains are doing the same thing - avoiding overfitting - the explanation makes sense, and is consistent with the characteristics of dreams. Suddenly you're at the beach you used to go to every summer as a kid, but then in your school; your deceased grandmother is there, at the same time as your asshole coworker from the last company, and then you're driving down a steep mountain road with no brakes. Obviously they never met, and they especially didn't meet in some bizarre hybrid beach-school-mountain place. By mixing them, you're trying to avoid overfitting. In contrast, if you have PTSD, you do dream literally the same concrete traumatic experience over and over - and your waking behavior is overfitted - you avoid trucks under overpasses, or that one street corner, or movies about fire, based on whatever experience you had that you can't "digest", integrate with the rest of your life's experience, and move past.
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Returning to computers, <a href="https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1733299213503787018" target="_blank">Andrej Karpathy on Twitter says</a> "...in some sense, hallucination is all LLMs do. They are dream machines. We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM's hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful." Similarly, the data stored and sliced and diced in <i>our</i> dreams influences how we perceive the world. It provides the top-down filter for the bottom-up sense data pouring in.[1] Without this, we veer off into hallucinations and delusions within days.[2]
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But sometimes we humans' dreams intrude into our waking hours, drawing attention to themselves in full form, like stars briefly visible in the daytime if you know where to look[3], or if you like, a laundry dryer opened mid-cycle to let a sock or a shirt fly out. In the shower, you start laughing when a joke you heard in eighth grade pops out of nowhere. While driving to work somehow you're suddenly thinking of your recently deceased cat, and you're sad.
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It seems to me that fiction is a more elaborated version of this, committed to a less ephemeral form, one that produces fossils of our overfitting-avoidance. Something has to explain the reason that we write stories that never actually happened, that we know no one will ever think actually happened, and that we (mostly) never even show to anyone else. (Out of all the short stories ever completed in history, what percentage of them was even intended for publication, let alone did the author think had a real chance of being read by someone else?) So why do we bother? Why are we so compelled? We're avoiding overfitting the things that are important to us. We write character-driven stories examining the psychology of people similar to those we know, or we write alternate history what-ifs about events that we find interesting - all of which we are trying to understand better and connect to our other experience, as we turn it over, and slice and dice it and rub it up against our other experiences.. Even the writing process itself is consistent with this - the ideas somehow just appear automatically, along with some scenes and images and events, that the writer has to organize (often laboriously, decidedly non-automatically) into a coherent narrative.
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[1] <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.24.513606v1" target="_blank">In psychosis, the top-down part of the process dominates</a> and you're lost in a waking dream of hallucinations and delusions. Autism is sometimes thought of as a diametric opposite to psychosis, when the bottom-up sense data dominates and unfiltered and the overwhelming cacophony of sounds, lights, or textures become intolerable.
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[2] Waters F, Chiu Vivian, Atkinson A, Blom JD. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6048360/" target="_blank"> Severe Sleep Deprivation Causes Hallucinations and a Gradual Progression Toward Psychosis With Increasing Time Awake</a>. Front Psychiatry. 2018; 9: 303.
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[3] When Venus is on the same side of the Sun as Earth, you can actually see it with the naked eye during the day. When I first located it in a blue daytime sky, I found this almost disorienting.
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-2561007015306089872024-01-04T23:28:00.000-08:002024-01-04T23:28:05.259-08:00A Brief Sketch of History: Subdivisions of the Iron AgeLarge sedentary civilizations emerged where groups of people were forced to, and then rewarded by, central organization of labor - often in marginal environments (<a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2019/03/evidence-for-coordinated-labor-in.html" target="_blank">dry river valleys requiring irrigation</a>, <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2012/03/rainfall-theory-of-culture-and-china.html" target="_blank">or in the special case that generalizes the rule, rice farming</a>.) Because of the more rapid diffusion of ideas, the Silk Road regions (Asia, Middle East, Europe, North Africa) were advantaged over the rest of the world. (Hence, the description here is focused on the Silk Road macro-region.) Europe, in turn, was advantaged over China <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2016/03/europe-as-china-why-didnt-it-happen_20.html" target="_blank">because geography predisposed the formation of multiple small states</a> which acted like incubators for cultural selection; and Greece was advantaged over the rest of Europe given its peninsulas, mountains, and islands. This arrangement still allowed eventual cultural diffusion, overtaking China only with the printing press. The other factor which allowed Europe's situation to obtain was the separation of religious/moral authority and secular authority - a Pope, and kings (as opposed to the unity of these institutions throughout much of Islamic history, and the relative marginalization of religion in East Asian history.)
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States demonstrate <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-200-to-250-year-life-cycle-of-large.html" target="_blank">a natural cycle of 200-250 years</a>. Even if a nation by the same name, on the same territory, with the same people, lasts longer than this, typically there is a transition period. The natural experiment of a large state on a fertile plain showing this pattern is China, but Rome also demonstrated the Principate and Dominate periods, the Ottomans had a similar pattern, and it can be seen elsewhere as well.
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<b>THE IRON AGE: 1200 BCE-1800 CE</b>
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<b> Early Iron Age: 1200 BCE-500 CE.</b> Began with the Bronze Age Collapse, saw the rise of multiethnic administrative empires and coinage, thus the Axial Age. In China, the end of Shang and Zhou and Han. In Europe can be further divided into Early Iron Age 1 (1200-600 BCE) featuring palace economies, and the later development of oligarchic rule and early market economies.
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<b> Middle Iron Age: 500-1500 CE.</b> Roughly co-extensive with the medieval period. Begins with collapse of Western Roman Empire, weakening of Eastern, collapse of Persia and spread of Islam. In China, possibly begins earlier with the end of the Han Dynasty. Begins with the spread of supra-ethnic philosophies and the dissolution of large empires, which can be thought of as an ecological model of cooperation within empires no longer being greater than competition within empires; oligarchies quarelled amongst themselves, and external groups benefited from cultural diffusion (German tribes in Europe, Yellow Turban Rebellion in China.) Marked by states and peoples having a sense of history if not patriotism, and especially by nomads occasionally overwhelming established states, with the Mongols as the high water mark of nomads in history.
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<b> Late Iron Age: 1500-1800 CE.</b> In the West contains the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Age of Discovery and Enlightenment. In Russia, the Great Stand on the Ugra and eastward expansion. In China, the end of the Yuan Dyansty. Ultimately driven by the spread of gunpowder, as seen in the gunpowder kingdoms, as well as the printing press, which had its greatest impact in Europe both for the good (Europe's domination of the world starting in this period) and the bad (religious civil wars as Northern Europe could communicate more easily.) At this time, the technological advantage of sedentary societies overwhelmed that of nomads. Simultaneously, the benefit of technological innovation in the crucible of a sort of natural Federalism in Europe allowed Europe to outstrip China and colonize the world. The use of gunpowder as a source of energy to propel projectiles faster than human muscle power anticipates the Industrial Age. Napoleon was the high water mark of Iron Age warfare, and was ultimately undone by the home of the Industrial Age, the United Kingdom.
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Though not the focus of the post, the Industrial Age comes with its own subdivisions: the first wave in 1790-1830 with steam and water power leading to factories, materials extraction and textiles, an interim with three "transition wars" in the West (the Crimean War, American Civil War, and Franco-Prussian War; the Taiping Rebellion still appeared very much like a late Iron Age religious War, the Thirty Years War compressed into half the time) with the second industrial revolution 1870-1910 converting industrial power into consumer goods; this culminated in World War I, the first industrialized war.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-13264439708562654712023-09-03T18:03:00.003-07:002024-03-09T05:09:31.961-08:00No Connection Between ABC Laws and Alcohol-Related Outcomes<center><img width=99% height=99% src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUQrxU_dryZJrKXzlKNEksDYz3LhK8A5J4VfubRQ2c5NA_s-tZLOI8bo91tcL0r3Fb5X3pAiFluzl21y0TXVpbRIprtyi06dd4V3JnLm-quaRFomNN4wx4VvVTHEUd51OF-8EQARHN6e3PsUn6ZEg06hm1BDsse_0Ip6hTteIT0bLRXEVOxU1OtE7jpWI/s1600/US-Blank-map.png"/></img>
States in red have ABC laws. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_state" target="_blank">Source: wiki</a>)
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American states have varying levels of state control over alcohol sales. When the topic is discussed at all, it's typically framed as an issue of controlling a potential vice - ostensibly, those laws are there to protect the states' citizens from the bad effects of alcohol. So it's obviously worth asking: do these laws actually help?
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One of the nice things about a federal system is we can give some states the slack to conduct their own individual experiments, and see if they work out, so in that sense it's a good thing that some states have ABC laws and some don't. I initially wanted data either for QALY lost due to alcohol per capita by state, or alcohol use disorder by state. I was unable to find that data (if you have it, contact me and I will add it to the analysis.) But there were three outcomes where I could find data that are on their face relevant to why we would care about this: alcohol-related death rate, cost of alcohol related morbidity and mortality per capita, and volume of alcohol consumed per capita.
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Using two-tailed t-tests and data as cited below, <b>there is no significant difference between ABC states and non-ABC states in death rate, alcohol-related health costs, or consumption.</b>
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If you don't trust fancy statistics and just want to know the averages, then I have to tell you, the (again, not significant) averages were WORSE for death and consumption in ABC states, and better for costs in ABC states. There's just no way to look at these numbers and conclude that ABC laws improve alcohol outcomes.
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Are there outliers? Yes, unsurprisingly, Utah. Removal of Utah from the data makes the consumption difference significant the other way. That is to say, if we take out Utah, <b>there actually IS a significant difference in consumption between ABC and non-ABC states - and ABC states drink MORE.</b>
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Of course this says nothing about causality, with or without the difference in consumption that becomes significant when we remove Utah. In that case, you could understand the statistics as meaning<br/>
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<li>ABC laws actually make people drink <i>more,</i> or
<li>People in ABC states already drank more, and their governments passed ABC laws to reign them in, or
<li>It's something else, and ABC laws have no effect.
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Obviously none of these are palatable as publicly debated arguments for ABC laws ("The Governor announced today we're keeping the ABC laws because you people are impulsive animals who can't be trusted with liquor") and the states who are collecting revenue from such laws are not going to do anything to damage the fragile justification for continuing the system as-is.
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Of course, the next question is "Then why do states keep ABC laws in place?" The answer is likely revenues, veto blocs (the employees at the state stores who want to keep their jobs more than they want the state government to make sense for citizens) and some degree of virtue signaling to voters. If you're ever fortunate enough to hear public officials and state store employees and unions defend the status quo on this, you'll be treated to some vaguely moralizing, gyratory, evidence-free statements; gambling produces similar sorts of 2 + 2 = 5 rhetoric, which is why the arrangement is rarely if ever directly addressed. Consequently, in an environment where this kind of absurdity is accepted with a shrug, adjacent nonsensical laws, e.g. the Johnstown Flood Tax still being collected today from alcohol sales in Pennsylvania, can persist and metastasize easily.*
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Remember this next time you're at your local state store, talking about this with a friend, or most importantly, voting.
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REFERENCES<br/>
Death rates: <a href="https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-abuse-statistics/" target="_blank">drugabusestatistics.org</a><br/>
Alcohol health-related costs: <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/data-stats.htm#" target="_blank">CDC</a><br/>
Alcohol consumption per capita: <a href="https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/alcohol-consumption-by-state/#:~:text=The%2010%20states%20with%20the,other%20states%20in%20the%20country." target="_blank">wisevoter.com</a>
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<i>*There are those who claim Johnstown has been rebuilt, but reasonable people can disagree on this. That said, guys, it's been well over a century. Either they've rebuilt Johnstown by now, or they should give up. </i>
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-12904544132999495482023-08-23T23:31:00.011-07:002024-01-05T00:04:36.015-08:00Foundation, Empire, and Pennsylvania<br/><i>If you like alternate history, there's <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/search?q=alternate+history" target="_blank">more here</a>.</i>
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<i>The Central State's flag above, and the American flag below, with the lions of sacred Mount Nittany standing guard. At one time the American flag had thirteen stripes, prior to the absorption of the Northeast Extension, the Lower Counties, and The Shore (old style, Connecticut, Delaware and New Jersey respectively.)</i>
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From fair Henlopen in the South, and Franklinton, New Reading and Long Island. From Toledo in the Northwest where the prairies begin, and the industrial river metropolis of Huntington, the Central State looms large in history and in our hearts. From the beginning it was a microcosm of all of America. The culture and government of the United States was not always so dominated as it is today by the Keystone Kingdom. Indeed it is sometimes difficult to separate discussions of national politics from those of "Pee-Ay". But it is instructive to revisit the events that led to such an arrangement.
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On the eve of the Revolution, there was no sure sign that Pennsylvania would come to dominate the Union just as the original crown colony of Virginia had until then dominated the colonies. But there was already a hint during the Seven Years War, when British officers who came to fight the French in the North American theater recognized, in print, that Virginians promised everything and delivered nothing, while for the Pennsylvanians it was the contrary. No surprise that the opportunist Washington was the first to engage the French (illegally killing a surrendered officer), hunker down at Fort Necessity, and quickly lose.
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<i>The Grand Canyon. (Credit Bayjournal.com.)</i></center>
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It bears repeating what every American learns in school, but imagining that we were there, not knowing how things would turn out, making decisions in real time. In the spring of 1784, Pennsylvania had had enough from the treacherous Yankees of the Northeast Extension (then called Connecticut), who continued illegally squatting in the Wyoming Valley and dispossessing the Central State of its land based on deeds from King George - who the inbred Anglophiles may not have realized was no longer in charge of North America! Leading the charge were Alexander Patterson and Henry Shoemaker, low-level officials who would be catapulted into history as protectors and heroes of the young republic. In response to the mobs of Yankees rampaged through the valley attacking women and children, a militia was raised in July by order of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council. Outgoing president of Congress (a rather modest position with no hint of what was to come) Thomas Mifflin, after pleading with both sides to stop, visited the valley and saw the Yankee depradations with his own eyes.
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In August the strengthened militia fully ejected the Yankees and pursued them across the border into New York. Mifflin returned to the Confederated States capital at Annapaolis and made his impassioned speech, demanding "Can only the Pennsylvanian reckon justice?" The call was heard back home, and as the Pennamite army pushed the weakening Yankees back to the Hudson River, reinforcements continued to pour in. (The story of a fleeing Yankee taunting now-General Shoemaker that Pennamites couldn't swim, while delicious, is likely apocryphal.) Thus began the Crossing near Newburgh, the Glorious March, and the Forty Great Days. The swollen Pennamite Army pursued the haggard Yankees, first to Hartford, then turned back to New Haven where the final resistance was met and crushed. The Burning of New Haven and subsequent salting of the soil caused the victorious Pennamites to name the town built on its ashes New Carthage. The first new piece of the Central State had been assembled.
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<i>The Death of New Haven</i>, John Troutman. (Really <i>Burning Village at Night</i> by Johann Trautmann, 1716-1769.)<br/><br/></center><br/>
Fresh from their victory and with no serious organized opposition, Shoemaker made the then-controversial decision to continue along the coast to the harbor town of Franklinton (then called simply New York City; Difficult though it is for us to believe today, Franklinton was at that time actually slightly larger than Philadelphia!) Of course, we were all shocked to learn based on recently discovered letters that Mifflin had essentially ordered him not to. Franklinton took a few days longer but finally fell; it is often simplistically imagined that the fighting stopped quickly and neatly, but for nearly two months the hunt-and-snipe naval warfare continued, with most of the guerilla fighting both in the streets of the main island Manhattan and in the forests of Staten Island, along with significant resistance from the converted commercial barges coming down the Hudson. At this point Mifflin issued demands to the Lower Counties (then, confusingly, called "Delaware" after a county in southeast Pennsylvania that always remained as part of the Central State) that they return to the fold, and they rejoined with a minimum of discussion. Getting New Jersey's delegates to agree was slightly harder but after the (now archaic-seeming) carve-outs were placed in the Act of Union, Pennsylvania now extended to the Atlantic. This is the basis for public wagering and the production of certain pork products being restricted to The Shore; a pig farmer at the negotiations named Charles Taylor insisted on the latter, and the pork rolls still bear his name. (It's a curiosity that The Shore's official name remains New Jersey, though mapmakers seem unconcerned with this.)
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By October, other states had begun organizing their own militias, with Massachusetts in particular preparing for all-out war. Mifflin unilaterally moved the capital back to Philadelphia, and appealed to the other states to quickly send delegates that the Articles of Confederation could be amended, as winter was approaching. Revisionists occasionally deride this as an illegal move, but the Republic as it stands is founded on the agreements subsequently drawn up. (The grumbling of James Montgomery, the Rhode Island delegate, that he was rubber-stamping something to give it an air of legitimacy, gives us the phrase "like a Rhode Islander at the convention" for those who decry pointless ceremonies.) Mifflin began with tweaks to the articles which subtly gave the Central State the "first among equals" status it now not so subtly enjoys. But the work continued into the winter, and once there was snow on the ground, he went full bore - in particular, in adding an article outlawing slavery, which Pennsylvania had already done within its own borders, in a law written by Mifflin himself. Mifflin knew what he was doing in bringing out these amendments to his captive audience when the weather turned - hence, where an Englishman might talk about crossing the Rubicon, an American would quote Mifflin: "When the first flake strikes the Schuylkill."
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<center><img width=99% height=99% src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO6u3SA5cfgMSZfEQu7d7e0vfchQE56TKpG5ACSocHqVuUEmzJURIumkQ0DNe5-7RdfgZArkW2qOYXgga3Tlk66bZheVs8tUCDTYlPQiYTgChu13qxYsE4uH3UQgwH9NGzt4jEnh2H4yV2iUEv_jFzJJXokFUZ_I-Vc-jdqTe-ODcs-SVrafOiRaxpeBc/s1600/thomasmifflin.jpg"/></img>
<i>The First and Highest, Governor Mifflin. (Credit Pennsylvania House of Representatives.)</i></center>
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The agrarian states in the South obviously balked, but Mifflin had anticipated this. A militia composed of the willing - not only the Pennamites from the Central State's expanded realm but also New England abolitionists, had already been dispatched south, going plantation to plantation, intercepting riders bringing news of their approach, and most importantly - conducting rendition of slaveowners. This is the most difficult part of Thomas Mifflin's legacy, but the results are not in dispute. When the brigade officer met with the plantation owner, the owner would be asked to sign a document freeing his slaves, and a petition to be submitted to the Final Congress demanding the abolition of slavery throughout the nation. Of course, most refused; they were then brought north, themselves to work in the chilly fields of Lancaster and Berks County and building roads and digging canals, with the only condition required for their release - signing those two documents. By 1785 there were few enough holdouts that the Emancipation Act was passed, closing a stained chapter of our history.
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The British were no idle spectators and indeed, had expected the experiment in self-government to fail from its first days. Caught by surprise, they had provided only nominal aid to the Yankees in the fall of 1784, but they were taken off guard; not so the following year. The wealthy plantation owners of Virginia met with the British naval officers who came up that state's rivers at night, and the Battle of Williamsburg was a narrow Pennamite victory, when a detachment of troops came upon a squadron of British ships at anchor. Of the owners who were sought and captured as a result of their foreign involvement, we mostly remember Washington, whose service to the cause of independence will be forever marred by his willingness to consort with the enemy to keep human beings in chains. One wonders how long, in some other world, some of our other Virginian First Fathers would have continued the institution of slavery without the example of Washington to encourage them to emancipate. This incident resulted in the transfer of Virginia's mountain counties and Trans-Ohio lands to Pennsylvania, a transaction encoded directly in the Charter, and the Central State took the final form it has today.
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<i>The High Governor's two official residences. Above, at Ocean City in The Shore and below, in South Mountain, Berks County.</i>
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In 1786 the Charter was finalized by Franklin and signed by Mifflin, and the Republic of America was born, with Pennsylvania at its heart. Governor Mifflin finally achieved his title, formally transferring his responsibilities to head of the Central State's government rather than that of the nation. As a result, legally, "Governor of Pennsylvania" is de facto interchangeable with leader of the Republic of America, with the American President having a mostly ceremonial role, much like the king in a constitutional monarchy. Mifflin was followed by Patterson and Shoemaker, and during the terms of the Great Three, America pushed in every direction, not only expanding beyond the Mississippi but also taking England's possessions in Canada and the Caribbean and adding them to the Republic. As the Republic expanded within the North American continent, it found itself in a complex arrangement, with the Pennsylvanian-founded states like Ollinger and Yoder having a status akin to a Republican version of those in Europe ruled directly by the Holy Roman Empire, and independent states like New Mexico and California as duchies and principalities. The Pennamites appeared to be unstoppable, and this era produced William Pitt the Younger's frustrated statement about finding England's sins, so she could be absolved and saved from this new race of devils.
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A subsequent history of Pennsylvania is necessarily a history of the world, given its immediate industrial expansion and its people's close ties with the many progressive German states, usually considered to have started with an overseas victory by a combined force of European and Pennamite troops over the French despot Napoleon at Austerlitz, where Napoleon was captured and executed. These ties only deepened over the next century. Despite a brief clash between east and west nearly erupting into full civil war over the use of "soda" versus "pop", and "youse" vs "yinz", Americans continue to be greeted the world over as "pennies", and immigrants continue to arrive in Philadelphia and take a picture as they order their first sauerkraut and scrapple in the Central State. The ongoing Wawa-Sheetz controversy seems intractable, but Pennsylvania has always synthesized its extremes and risen above them.
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<b>BACK FROM ALTERNATE HISTORY: WHY DID NEW YORK AND NOT PENNSYLVANIA BECOME THE EMPIRE STATE?</b>
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New York didn't dominate the Union to nearly the same degree as our fun alternate history of "Imperial Pennsylvania." (I liked "Central State" better than "Keystone" because it echoes the literal translation of China's self-confident name for itself, the Central Kingdom.) But New York is to some extent the first among equals on the East Coast, even if de facto rather than de jure. Why? As usual, a combination of <a target=_blank href=https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2016/03/europe-as-china-why-didnt-it-happen.html>geography and demography being destiny, and historical happenstance.</a>
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First, what do we mean by "empire state"? The biggest wealthiest city, and the most famous people. Let's start with the second one there. It often sticks out to me that Pennsylvania had so many fewer presidents than the states that surround it. Virginia has eight, Ohio has eight, and New York has five. Pennsylvania finally has a second - in an ironic twist, the first was Buchanan, the worst president in American history until the twenty-first century, and the second president from PA unseated the only president who was even worse than Buchanan.[1] Again, why?
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Pennsylvania was settled by people from the Midlands of England and Germans.[2] The German religious migrants and Midlanders were a group that valued equality and an overall "flat" social organization which was a major contributor to the informality and salt-of-the-Earth directness of the overall American character, and the religious tolerance that Penn espoused fit them well. New York had a heavy influence from the more rigid settlers of New England who valued education much more than Pennsylvania's farmers - and, in real life, came directly into armed conflict with them in the actually quite real <a target=_blank href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennamite%E2%80%93Yankee_War>Pennamite Wars</a>[3], which formed the branchpoint in our exercise here.
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As to the second factor - geography - New York was already slightly bigger during the time of the Revolution, but this obviously just begs the question.[4] Why was New York already bigger? You might think it's because it's a little closer to Europe, so it was easier for European migrants to arrive there. True, but then why isn't Massachusetts the Empire State? The real reason is that New York has the Hudson, a navigable river that crosses the <a href=https://mdk10outside.blogspot.com/2020/04/east-coast-where-trees-dont-lose-their.html>Fall Line</a>, which can be sailed all the way to Troy. It was easier to get raw materials and get to markets and then later, with canals, onto the Great Lakes. Similar reasons account for the origins of Detroit as the center of the automotive industry and Seattle as the headquarters of Boeing (wood for material, and water for transport for the early aerospace industry.) While Pennsylvania does have shoreline on Lake Erie, it's across the significant and little-discussed Eastern Continental Divide, that divides the watersheds of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Pennsylvania did build a canal later connecting the Delaware and Chesapeake but the Susquehanna (whose name, according to a humorous myth, means "mile wide, inch deep") is just not a useful river for transporting goods.
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Years ago I was curious why Virginia, the cradle of presidents, ended up settling with the title of dominion rather than empire? You may have noticed that despite Jamestown being the oldest culturally ancestral settlement in America[5], our biggest densest cities are not in coastal Virginia. (We actually <a target=_blank href=https://historicjamestowne.org/archaeology/history-of-jamestown-rediscovery/#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9Clost%20fort%E2%80%9D%20story%20pointed,the%20%E2%80%9Clost%20fort%E2%80%9D%20story.>lost the location of Jamestown at one point!)</a> But straight line extrapolation from single facts is always a fool's game. Virginia's first two centuries were strong ones - the military uniform Washington wore early in the Seven Years War actually implied Virginia was a equal part of the United Kingdom along with England, Scotland and Ireland (sorry Wales.) But after the Civil War, Virginia was relegated to partly a suburb of DC, and then, well, the rest of it. (I'm partial to Hampton Roads for reasons of childhood vacations, and Shenandoah National Park is cooler than you might realize, but the point is fair.) <a href="https://mdk10outside.blogspot.com/2020/04/east-coast-where-trees-dont-lose-their.html" target="_blank">Virginia is a warmer Pennsylvania</a>, but even worse, with a wider coastal plain between the Atlantic and the Fall Line. Why even worse? Because as the industrial age unfolded, its better climate and broader plains cursed it.[6] The first settlers were from the estates of southern England (Albion's Seed termed them Cavaliers) and served as the first Presidents, but the agrarian paradise that Jefferson envisioned (a chain of plantation mini-states that were either utopias or dystopias depending what color your skin was) was soon outcompeted in dollars, growth, and power by the industrial cities to the north. (I would be curious to look at a Gini calculation between Pennsylvania and Virginia landowners or a comparison of mean farm size between the two, but I'm going to call that the line where the professionals can take over.) And finally, if you think the Fall Line in Pennsylvania was hard to get over, try the Appalachians in Virginia. <a href="https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/americas-national-parks-shenandoah/3430622.html" target="_blank">Some of those roads in Shenandoah wouldn't look out of place in the Sierras</a> if not for the deciduousness of the forests.
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Long live the Keystone State! May it ever shine in glory!
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<b>FOOTNOTES</b>
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[1] If you don't agree, I'm surprised that you were able to read this far, but surely it was slow going and you're likely mouthing your words as you read.<br/><br/>
[2] <a target=_blank https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/>Albion's Seed</a> is an excellent book, which details how each region of colonial America was settled by people from specific parts of England. Similar things happened in the Spanish-speaking world, for example people from Andalusia to Mexico, people from the <a target=_blank href=https://mdk10outside.blogspot.com/2017/04/canary-islands-gran-canaria-and-la.html>Canaries</a> to the Caribbean.<br/><br/>
[3] This was actually the <i>second time</i> Pennsylvanians fought with another colony or state. <a target=_blank href=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/long-violent-border-dispute-between-colonial-maryland-and-pennsylvania-eventually-required-king-step-180963333/>Suck it, Cresap.</a><br/><br/>
[4] I suspect we don't talk as much about New York during the Revolution as we do Philadelphia and Boston because we mostly got our asses kicked there. The British abandoned Boston early in the war, Philly was occupied only after a fight but both the Declaration and Constitution were written there, and the interior was never occupied, with the pesky insurgents brazenly camping right up the Schuylkill in Valley Forge.<br/><br/>
[5] The roundabout language of "culturally ancestral" disqualifies St. Augustine, Roanoke, along with Cahokia and every Native American city, since there isn't an unbroken cultural chain from any of them to us today in modern America.<br/><br/>
[6] There's a great statistic cited in Zakaria's <a target=_blank https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/fareed-zakaria/the-post-american-world/>Post-American World</a> that I will give in the abstract here, to maximize impact. Country 1 has a sound lead in industry X; Country 2 in industry Y. Sales in industry X are at least an order of magnitude bigger than Y. So you want to be Country 1 right? Filling in the blanks: the year was 1900, Country 1 was the UK, industry X was bicycles, Country 2 was the US, and industry Y was automobiles. Extending this to Virginia (and the South in general), its better climate made it over-reliant on agriculture, and the industrial revolution arrived late and weakly.<br/><br/>
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-56632865681272899982023-04-19T13:10:00.003-07:002023-04-19T13:10:42.892-07:00Whether AIs are "Conscious" or "Intelligent", Etc. Is Irrelevant to Questions of Danger and Alignment
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1. If the question of our continued survival and flourishing is what's important – then it's an interesting question whether AIs are just imitating language, or have experience and therefore possibly worthy of moral consideration. But it’s not important to the question of danger. If the AI can out-process us (whether are not you believe it’s “thinking”) and destroy us, who cares if it's "just imitating"? Unless you can show that whatever those words mean (thinking, processing, conscio etc.) has some bearing on predicting the objective behavior of the entity, it's irrelevant.
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To my knowledge these are open questions in philosophy, and it surprises me to see the most intense doomers e.g. Yudkowsky giving one second of attention to them in discussions.
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2. AIs are, so far, increasingly complicated echo chambers. That is, to an AI, "enojo" means "zorn" and vice versa - both mean “anger” in English, and the AI can put them in the right place in context with words, but there is no real argument at all that these phrases correspond to the Ais experience, unlike the way most of us think about language.
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Again, this is not a dismissal of the possible danger of AI. That GPT4 is an echo chamber is irrelevant if the machines can out-process us even if they're "just imitating". However the AIs are language engines, not survival engines. Humans have come from selection over billions of years in the realm of real-world physics and have programmed in the very core of our being to avoid death and to reproduce; language is a recent side effect of that. AT THIS STAGE, I would be surprised if these language models were to resist being erased or turned off. <b>Therefore we should be very concerned about genetic or evolutionary techniques for producing language engines.</b><br/><br/>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-81408663908326623872023-03-05T19:20:00.000-08:002023-03-05T19:20:20.241-08:00Herein, I Criticize the Governor of Florida Florida bill HB991 has not yet become law as I write this article. However, if it does pass, please consider my statement made in this post to be repeated the day after the law goes into effect. And that statement is that not only is Ron Desantis a bad governor, he is also not a true Christian. Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-3840186381973486712022-12-20T14:15:00.006-08:002024-03-09T05:10:12.265-08:00Denialisms Are About Moral Authority, Not TruthSovereign citizens (sovcits) stick out among the various species of denialists. Other denialisms are at least about matters of fact - even if the denialists demonstrate poor critical thinking, at least their core assertion is a truth claim. The Earth is round, or it is flat. Vaccines cause autism, or they do not. 9/11 was an inside job, or it was not.
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But sovcits extend their beliefs into having a kind of power of their own; that their legal pronouncements have some kind of magic power to them. When surfing Youtube for "sovereign citizen" you won't have to look long for Youtube videos of the form:
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<ol>
<li> Sovcit gets pulled over, stopped, or otherwise detained by police.<br/><br/>
<li> Sovcit recites their legal incantation.<br/><br/>
<li> Sovcit, quite amazingly, somehow manages to be shocked when the police break their window, tase them, arrest them, etc. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn_CjjK-shI" target="_blank">Here is a perfect example</a>, but don't watch it unless you are ready to see police violence.)
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Creationists and Flat Earthers mostly agree with the same basic observations of the world, and they mostly don't make different decisions about how to live in the world based on their claims. I've never seen a creationist argue against the existence of island gigantism or dwarfism, or a flat Earther against the existence of the horizon - they just have a different explanation.
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You might make the argument that as a denialism, the "theories" of sovreign citizens have domain-specific characteristics. After all, law requires a belief in its legitimacy to work, and they just claim legitimacy for a different set of rules, rules which affect our behavior on a daily basis. But this still doesn't really address the way in which sovcits seem different from the rest. Imagine that an evil neuroscientist plants in your head the belief that vaccines cause autism. Once under the spell of that denialism, you can predict that you would act the same way as other anti-vaxxers, avoiding immunizations, attending anti-vaccine protests, etc. But the thought experiment doesn't work for sovcits. The evil neuroscientist puts the belief in your head that the current American government is illegitimate. You STILL wouldn't think that you could Jedi-mind-trick your way out of a traffic stop, even though you would be frustrated by living under the thumb of the current regime. In fact we don't need an evil neuroscientist to demonstrate this -
assuming you believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine is illegitimate, then you consider the political authority of the Russian government in the occupied territories to be similarly illegitimate. If you found yourself in Ukraine, would you go walking across an open field into the occupied territories loudly reciting "The U.N. says this is an illegal war and you can't be here" and then adding with surprise "Hey, you shot me!" No, because you recognize the physical reality even if you disagree as to who the legitimate authority is. But that's exactly what these sovereign citizens are doing.
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And there, exactly, we see what DOES unite all these denialisms. In all of them, including the sovereign citizens, the core aspect <b>is a disagreement as to the true source of moral authority.</b> The different truth claims are a symptom of that underlying disagreement, and only in the sovereign citizens is the root cause so exposed.
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A lot of other seemingly unrelated aspects of denialism start to snap into place now. Creationists believe the source of authority on the story of our origin is the Bible (or Quran), and by undermining religious cosmogony, ultimately we undermine religious morality (hence why creationists are overwhelmingly religious, hence their bizarre non sequiturs that teaching evolution leads to drug culture and promiscuity.) And I'm not sure who the moon landing people or 9/11 truthers think is a good moral authority, but I'm damn sure they do NOT think it's the United States government. And if you think the people telling you to wear a mask and get vaccinated are the same immoral elites making your favorite President look bad by calling attention to the pandemic, then no mask and no vaccines for me! Some people have a <a href="https://moralfoundations.org/" target="_blank">psychological makeup that is so polarized toward respect for authority</a> that <i>not only does it dominate truth, it becomes conflated with it</i>. Sovereign citizens think that objective truth equals objective and irresistible authority, which is why they're inevitably shocked when physical reality disagrees with their perceived moral authority.
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We neglect and misunderstand <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2021/12/toward-unified-account-of-finding-truth.html#authorities">the complicated and ancient relationship between truth and authority</a> at our peril.<br/><br/>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-34236186553678463442022-07-28T22:57:00.001-07:002023-09-08T12:51:42.719-07:00Don't Paralyze Myths into Images<center>
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<img width=99% height=99% src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEistYXw27cJRQZc8HAxUwz1waicVvq9_qTyYVgnMGaJ73iSdt0KMKRYA4J2UkccQnOzIzvCbciGvkMNd4BJ0AuKSeCgcbBa3UUUFl3jdoswpM9BbVKW1ENt2wD_KT9d2iQFlpGphPrJuWTH06SW6SwdJWopvZJdjLtTYeRGOIWbYRc5Pp35fHssMQq-/s1600/ryleh_1200.jpg"/></img><br/>
<i>Cthulhu's city of R'lyeh, by <a href="http://marcsimonetti.artworkfolio.com/" target="_blank">Marc Simonetti</a></i></center>
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I made a decision last week not to draw my young daughter a picture of her imaginary friend.
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I've drawn other monsters and fairies from her rich inner world - one was the Magic Space Pickle. Another was Bad Plus, an incorrigible villain who eats garbage. Thusfar all have been well-received. But despite having talked several times about drawing Sussa, her octopus friend from Neptune, I changed my mind. I think it would be cruel. I would be taking something away from her.
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By summoning these creatures into the real world, or at least the concrete sensory world, you nail them down. You take the emotional experiences that are the important things about them - what they're really made of, what they're <i>for</i> - and you neuter them, constrain them, and tame them. You trap their unbound and supernatural essence inside something mundane and concrete. You've stolen it and broken it.
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So here's an example: Grendel, in Beowulf. In the poem, Grendel is utterly terrifying. But even when it's rendered accurately according to the text, it loses something. 2005's Beowulf included the sinew-and-bone-chewing noises which at that time I didn't remember were actually in the text. But the distorted misshapen creature they dragged into the light just didn't feel like the vaguely sort of spiny reptilian insectoid thing I had imagined. It's not that the CGI people did a bad job; they <i>could not, in principle,</i> have done a good job. In the same vein, many otherwise enthusiastic fans of the movie Alien feel similarly deflated when the overall shape of the xenomorph is revealed as disappointingly humanoid as it disintegrates in the glare of the shuttle's engines.
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I think my daughter understands this too. She did harass me for an image of the Space Pickle once I mentioned drawing him. But, interestingly enough, she has colluded with me in forgetting the decision to draw Sussa.
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For this reason, Sussa and her ice cream powers and solar-system-spanning tentacles will remain forever as words and feelings in my daughter's mind - where they belong and flourish.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-89418743904138123462022-07-12T11:02:00.001-07:002022-07-12T11:02:19.478-07:00Professional Sports: Salary Distributions and Relationship to Team Size and League RevenuesSome casual fans of pro sports are actually much more interested in the business and psychology of the leagues than the action on the field. IF that's you, read on! I started wondering 1) what is the minimum you could make in each sport? What was the relationship between size of team in each sport, player salaries, and profitability? and 2) that if any of the figures in my table are glaringly wrong, please comment below and I will correct it (and my written conclusions if they're affected.)
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<table border="1">
<tr><td>Leag</td><td>Max/min</td><td>avg/med</td><td>rev, $B</td><td>sal/rev</td><td>rev/plyr</td><td>rev/pl / avg sal</td></tr>
<tr><td>NFL</td><td>76</td><td>1.28</td><td>18.0</td><td>0.10</td><td>10,613,208</td><td>9.68</td></tr>
<tr><td>MLB</td><td>56</td><td>2.92</td><td>9.56</td><td>0.40</td><td>10,988,506</td><td>2.51</td></tr>
<tr><td>NHL</td><td>21</td><td>1.04</td><td>5.2</td><td>0.42</td><td>7,065,217</td><td>2.36</td></tr>
<tr><td>NBA</td><td>44</td><td>1.97</td><td>10.0</td><td>0.34</td><td>22,222,222</td><td>2.96</td></tr>
</table>
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Observations:
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<ol>
<li>The smaller the team roster size, the better players get compensated (both in terms of minimum income, median, and average.) That is to say: if you're a player, the NBA is the best place to be.
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<li>To get an idea of the salary spreads in each sport, we can look at the max:min ratio. (Minimum salaries in each case are determined by the players union contract with the league.) A catchier name for this would beis the "J.P. Morgan index"*, is highest in football, then baseball and not far behind basketball, with the NHL the lowest.
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To get a Gini index (to see income inequality within the league) we'd need all the individual salary data. While that may be available, and I welcome you to find it and crunch the numbers yourself, for my level of curiosity a quick-and-dirty index of average salary divided by median will work. Despite the NFL having some outgroup super-earners giving it the highest J.P. Morgan index, baseball is the most unequal (suggesting the most high-earning outliers) at almost 3, followed by the NBA, NFL, and NHL. In the NHL the average and median are almost the same, and the top earner is an outlier among all the leagues at only $16M. (The J.P. Morgan index is also the lowest there.)
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As an additional thought, I wonder how closely real output (measured in goals, sacks, strike-outs etc.) correlates with pay - and does this explain why the NHL is so much more egalitarian in pay than the MLB or NFL? (Again there could be contract or business-specific reasons that I'm not aware of, rather than the nature of the sport.) It also raises the question of whether relative status has more of an effect in some sports, i.e. are there more positional effects in hockey?
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To explain this concretely: if you look at say, a brick-making factory, there will be people who are faster at making bricks, and people who are slower. If they're salaried, then you would expect rationally that someone who makes twice as many bricks as the median would get paid twice as much, and similarly someone who makes half as many bricks would get paid half as much.
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But that's not what we see - the curve is sigmoidal, flattening out at both ends, with the most productive people not making as much per unit as the people in the middle of the distribution, and the slowpokes getting more per unit. How does this make sense? The theory (as described by Robert Frank in <a target=_blank href=https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/944954.Choosing_the_Right_Pond>Choosing the Right Pond</a>) is that part of the compensation the fast workers are getting is status - they can strut around the factory with everyone knowing they're the best - and similarly to keep the humiliated slowpokes coming back day after day, you have to give them a premium to pay for the humiliation they suffer. So does a quarterback who throws for twice as many yards or scores twice as many touchdowns get twice as much? It's easy to tell just-so stories in other directions before we look at the data - yes, obviously status is a massive part of sports played for an audience, so the effect would be greater - or, people want to play sports professionally and the status of being a professional athlete more than offsets the humiliation of being the worst quarterback, paid commensurate with miserable stats. But again, I would need data at individual salary levels and have to compare stats (which differ for different positions), so if that's interesting enough to you to gather and crunch the numbers, I invite you to do it and post a link in the comments.
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<li>I was also curious about whether player salary or team payroll made a difference, and fortunately other people have been too and already crunched the numbers. Keep in mind that what matters to a franchise's owners is <b>how much money they make</b>, and winning or losing is just a means to that end (if it
actually matters to the fan's expenditures at all - and the more loyal the fans, the less it matters - <a target=_blank href=https://mdk10outside.blogspot.com/2018/01/why-do-people-remain-loyal-to-losing.html>see more here.</a>) But it turns out that baseball has the highest gap between payrolls, and it also makes the biggest difference to team performance; the NFL has the least gap, and it makes the least difference. According <a target=_blank href=https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1310&context=facpub>this article</a>, the low-payroll teams actually made it to the Final Four more often than the high-payroll teams. (More data on MLB payroll-performance relationship <a href=https://rpubs.com/grigory/MLBSalaryPerfLR>here</a>; yes payroll does help you win in MLB.
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<li>The most important thing is how much does each player produce? As someone involved in a league or franchise from a business standpoint, you might think of your sport this way: players are machines that produce revenue. In this analysis, using the average salary and number of players per league, as well as the overall revenue, we can see how much of the revenue is taken by salaries, and how efficient each league's players are at producing profit. Interestingly, here the NFL is in a league of its own. Its salaries are only about 10% of its revenue, compared to the other three which range 34-42%, and players in the NFL produce a share of the revenue 9.7 times their salaries, as opposed to the other three, who range from 2.36 to 2.96 times their salaries. Why is this? Does the NFL have better merchandising? More expensive tickets? Or it's just an inherently better TV sport so there's a bigger audience?
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(<a target=_blank href=https://mdk10outside.blogspot.com/2011/01/do-some-college-football-teams-get.html>College football</a> is obviously ideal in this regard. The individual player's share of revenue generated-to-salary ratio is nearly infinite. We might all be forgiven for dismissing the overwrought pleas not to pollute the moral purity of the sport by paying the players coming from the administrators of these programs, or the business office of the learning institutions that for some reason host them. It will be interesting to see, with college football consolidating essentially into two superleagues, how they'll keep the rankings and championships opaque in order to continue maximizing the number of bowls and profits therefrom.)
</ol>
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<i>*Wasn't it J.P. Morgan who said the CEO should not make more than a certain multiple of what the lowest paid employee makes? I couldn't find the quote so if I'm misattributing it please correct me in the comments.</i>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-90865289206926900232021-12-26T17:36:00.000-08:002021-12-26T17:36:01.346-08:00List of New ConceptsHere are some of the concepts I've discussed on this blog.
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<b>Dolphin belief</b> - an utterance where the apparent propositional, truth-claim part of it is less impotant than the emotional or group signaling content. The person saying a dolphin is not aware that this is what they're doing. Much of what humans say is like this, with the content of the statement just window-dressing for its true purpose. An actual meaningful truth claim is like a fish, while one of these utterances with decorative verbal content looks superfically the same, but is actually something completely different - like a dolphin. (<a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2021/04/lists-of-bizarre-beliefs-reveal.html" target="_blank">More here</a>.)
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<b>Viceroy authorities</b> - there is a spectrum of justification of authority, from people who actually try to derive their authority from making true claims, and others whose principal aim is to manipulate others, regardless of the truth. Those who want to manipulate of course want to seem like (and often believe they are) justified authorities, so they imitate justified authority. Justified correct authorities are like monarch butterflies, and dogmatists aiming at manipulation are like viceroys trying to mimic them. (<a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2021/12/toward-unified-account-of-finding-truth.html" target="_blank">More here</a>.)
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<b>White beast</b> - the opposite of a bête noire. A white beast is a sacred object or event in the history of an identity-forming community - it is a usually a tragedy that has negative consequences for the community down to the modern day. The paradox is that when an outgroup suggests a remedy, even though a demand for justice over this tragedy is central to the group's identity, a remedy ironically threatens that identity, and is met with outrage from the outgroup which puzzles the outgroup. (More here.)
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<b>Inherent cyclic crisis</b> - A process by which any dynamic organized entity (living things, organisms, individual humans and their beliefs, human organizations) must have inherent contradictions between the drive to avoid damage and dissolution, and the way they represent aversive stimuli, leading to a distorted model of the external world which results in either paroxysmal suffering or death. (<a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2019/09/complex-dynamic-systems-like-cells.html">More here.</a>)
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<b>The ISE theory</b> of dealing outsiders - humans have only devised <a target=_blank href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-three-ways-of-dealing-with.html" target="_blank">three ways of dealing with other humans that do not follow the same moral authority</a> - remaining Ignorant, treating them as Subhumans outside of moral consideration, or Evangelizing (assimilating) them.
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<b>The tyranny of territory</b> stops us from having true choice and therefore brings competition between governments for human capital close to zero. Since social organization rests ultimately on the threat of violence, no one has thought of an effective way to have individuals be able to choose which agency they would like involved in which aspect of their life (i.e. I like the Nebraska DMV better than Idaho's, so I'll get my license there.) Rare exceptions exist such as international tax law but this applies to legal entities. The closest solution has been charter cities. A similar argument applies to living in a simulation - the hardware where your experience originates has to reside in physical space somewhere, even if distributed.
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A substate of inherent cyclic crisis above: states demonstrate a <b>200 to 250 year cycle</b>. This is most obvious in the case of China, only because <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2016/03/europe-as-china-why-didnt-it-happen_20.html" target="_blank">China has a large fertile plain which lends itself to political unification</a> and few neighboring states that can threaten them (with obvious exceptions.) But the same cycle can be seen <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-200-to-250-year-life-cycle-of-large.html" target="_blank">applying to other states when it has the opportunity to run without interruption</a>.
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<b>Population drops off west of the 100th meridian</b> in the U.S. because around the time people reached that point, <a target=_blank href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2010/12/why-is-frontier-strip-where-it-is.html" target="_blank">trains became a practical means</a> of getting all the way to the coast.
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When discussing the <b>simulation argument</b>, "simulation" is almost always poorly defined, and in a meaningful way, if you feel pain pleasure or emotion, you are in a simulation. Simulation argument proponents also smuggle in characteristics and motivaitons of the simulators (including the assumption that they exist and have intentions) similar to theology.
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<b>We should stop METI, or any attempt to actively alert aliens to our presence.</b>
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<b>CLAHSF</b> (pronounced "CLASH EFF") - the Coordinated Labor and Agriculture Hypothesis of State Formation. The nuclei of early civilizations was generally in agriculturally marginal environments (deserts with a river, arid cold plateaus.) In these environments, centrally coordinated agriculture (e.g. planting or harvesting in large numbers based on river flooding) could actually result in population growth, and there was no ability to leave the group and survive outside of the system. Centralized states with more coordination in warfare developed and dominated neighbors. This explains why places like Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, central Mexico or the Andes produced growing civilizations when more productive areas did not. The exception is China, but there, the chosen crop of rice demands similar central coordination. Could be thought of as the counterpart to Scott's <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-state" target="_blank">Seeing Like a State</a>. (<a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/search?q=clahsf" target="_blank">More here</a>.)
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<b>The Bad Stripe</b> - in the U.S. there is a zone of low human development stretching from the southeast corner of Pennsylvania, down the Appalachians through West Virginia into Kentucky and Tennessee, where it turns west through Arkansas and into Oklahoma. This corresponds roughly to the areas settled by Border Reavers in Fischer's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed" target="_blank">Albion's Seed</a>, and could be called Greater Appalachia. (<a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/search?q=bad+stripe" target="_blank">More here</a>.)Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-23259699982318935632021-12-26T15:56:00.003-08:002021-12-26T16:21:54.331-08:00Most "Emergent Properties" Are Either Ignorance (or, Once We Understand Them, Merely Shorthand)Searle's famous example of an emergent property is that a single water molecule is not wet. It's only when there are a lot of them together under certain conditions that they occur in something meaningfully called a liquid.
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More generally in this view: emergence occurs when the interaction of multiple entities (often ones outside the direct perceptual abilities of humans, like water molecules), produces a behavior qualitatively different from the single entities, which can be perceived directly (like water.)
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This concept has been rightly rejected but it's worth being clear about exactly why it <i>should</i> be rejected, in order to make a general argument against the idea.
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Viewed in terms of predicting the behavior at the more complex (usually directly perceived macro) level, from the simpler entities, emergence is <i>only, and always, ignorance.</i> By "ignorance" I mean "an inability to predict that is based on limited knowledge of the observer, rather than a property of the entity that is lacking when the entity exists in isolation, but apparent when the entity interacts with other entities." Water's behavior in aggregate as a liquid is determined by the masses and electrochemical properties of its atoms It is determined by the water molecules, inherent to their properties. If the water molecules are replaced with ammonia or methane, the properties of those atoms and their relationship in ammonia or methane molecules, create a different sort of liquid, with different properties.
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Of course, we CAN now predict fairly well from the intermolecular forces of water molecules at various temperatures and pressures (or of multiple molecules) where they will be liquids, and how those liquids will behave. Now that we can predict it, does this mean it's no longer emergent? And for those places (still in the large majority) in chemistry where we cannot yet make the prediction, does that mean reality is fundamentally irrational with no causal association between the simple entity and the aggregate, or we just aren't smart enough to see it yet? Therefore, the superficial countenance of an "emergent" property has nothing to do with the entities themselves, it's just the result of our own provincial limits on cognition that keep us from predicting how they will behave together.
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Viewed in reverse (trying to apply the property we think has emerged at the higher complex level to the simple entities), it's clear that "wet" is shorthand for aggregate interactions of myriad small entities. In principle, you could understand (read: predict) the bucket of water at the level of individual molecules, but we use a (in this case, very good) approximation for their behavior which we describe as "wet". <i>This is based entirely on the provincial bounds on human perception, cognition, and the tools we have to observe water molecules.</i> In fact it is the cases where evolution has given us very good cognitive and perceptual approximations that the appearance of emergence is most compelling. But leave the realm of entities and events that our ancestors needed good cognitive/perceptual shorthand for, and the idea starts getting less interesting. I haven't heard anyone saying that quantum entanglement, or Bose-Einstein condensates at near-absolute-zero temperatures are examples of emergent properties, even though they weren't immediately predictable - though they fulfill the conditions for "emergency" seen above, both the simple and complex entities are outside of our meter-second-kilogram realm of experience, and there's no cognitive/perceptual shorthand for them. In the same way, we could talk about a building a Gothic or art deco instead of describing the spatial relationships of every brick (that is to say - a brick is not Gothic or art deco but this is equally "emergent" as wetness from water.)
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A charitable interpretation of the traditional idea of emergence then does exist: we directly perceive certain properties like wetness at the macro level in the manifest world. We can actually predict the occurrence of this directly-perceived property based on what we observe at a simpler, smaller level. But the provincial limitations of our eyes and brains do not constitute a dividing line between properties where the universe carves itself at its joints.
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<a target=_blank href=https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.76.9965&rep=rep1&type=pdf>This paper by Darley</a> refers to work on cellular automata (of course) and argues that it is not Turing-decidible whether an infinite system would demonstrate emergence, and is "only" NP-hard whether a finite system is. I will go out on a limb and say this is at least in practice a reductio ad absurdum for such a property, and shows at least that ignorance can (formally!) never be ruled out in cases of apparent emergence of this type. this paper by Darley</a> refers to work on cellular automata (of course) and argues that it is not Turing-decidible whether an infinite system would demonstrate emergence, and is "only" NP-hard whether a finite system is. I will go out on a limb and say this is at least in practice a reductio ad absurdum for such a property, and shows at least that ignorance can (formally!) never be ruled out in cases of apparent emergence of this type. What's more, the "emergent" phenomenon (emergent by this definition) is often not really that interesting - for example, the behavior of a three-body system. Does unpredictability really put it on another "level" of understanding? Actually, the opposite - in such a case it is only the individual elements that seem to form a unified entity. If each body is a water molecule, then there is no analogous "wetness" in the holistic full three bodies.
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Darley, V. <a target=_blank href=”https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.76.9965&rep=rep1&type=pdf”>Emergence Phenomena and Complexity.</a>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-51264920676335593762021-12-25T00:39:00.003-08:002022-12-20T14:27:21.656-08:00Toward a Unified Account of Finding the Truth: Quine and Bayes on Dogma Versus Good AuthorityScott Alexander recently posted <a target=_blank href=https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag>a great account (and critique) of reasoning and communication,</a> beginning with criticism of science communication. He then expands this into an argument about how a real Bayesian evaluation of truth claims requires us to sometimes reject "higher standards" of evidence that produce results in conflict with what we think we already know. In so doing he begins to unify every day reasoning within a Bayesian framework. This is valuable, because honest rationalists have noticed gaps between what we consider high-quality evidence, and what we actually use to update - not because we are hypocrites, but because there are other considerations when we want to really get the right answer.
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To begin with a critique of simplistic "levels of evidence": even those of us most enthusiastic about peer-review make almost every decision in life without it. You don't insist on a peer-reviewed journal when figuring out how to give yourself administrator rights to a PC you just got for free (a situation I just found myself in.) Your decision process is a combination of evaluations of the cost, time, and likely consequences of whatever you do, along with deciding what sources to trust based on the decisions' specialization beyond daily experience of subject matter, speed of feedback, and possible perverse incentives. In this case, I just watched a Youtube video and it worked like a charm. It's a free computer I'm playing with so I didn't care much if it was ruined by the attempt.
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Taking all these things into account is actually Bayesian even if we aren't thinking explicitly about the Bayes equation. But it turns out the model we use in science is actually a special case of Bayesian reasoning - and <i>even victims of dogmatism</i> are using Bayesian reasoning. The second statement is much more controversial than the first; scroll down to that section if you like.
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<b>Recasting Popperian Falsification in Bayesian Terms</b>
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Karl Popper's model of hypothesis testing is that we can only falsify a hypothesis, we can never be sure it's true. Looking at Anscombe' quartet above, you can see that there are multiple data sets which can produce the same statistics. Stopping after inadequate positive predictions may lead you to the wrong equation. Therefore, the only answer that provides certainty is to falsify a hypothesis.
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There are two important aspects to this approach to finding out the truth. The first, and the more underemphasized, is its appreciation of human psychology. Stephen Toulmin noted that the way humans actually reason is to start with premises <i>and</i> conclusion first, and then build a rhetorical bridge between them. If you're a rationalist, you make sure that your rhetorical bridge is not just verbal/emotional sleight of hand but rather an actual argument. The point is that even in Popperian science, we <i>start with a conclusion</i>. The difference is that we explicitly declare, in public, ahead of time, that we're not sure if the conclusion is right (it's less than a thesis - a "hypo" thesis, if you will.) Then you test it.
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And, the way you test it is by creating an experience that will give you an unexpected result if it's wrong - to falsify it. The question is, <i>does a hypothesis-supporting experiment (that produces the results we expect) really give us zero information?</i> No, but it usually doesn't give us <i>as much</i> information as a falsification.
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A falsification is usually more strongly weighted information - it "moves the needle" much more, because it's more likely to be surprising. Indeed to equate heavier weighting with surprise is almost tautology. So we can place Popperian hypothesis-testing in a Bayesian framework by saying, instead of a false binary of "support equals zero information equals bad" and falsification good", note that ideally an experiment is trying to create that experience which is most likely to produce a surprise, and most efficiently provide information.
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<b>Finding Truth in the Real World - Where Other Humans Also Live</b><br/><br/>
But people don't always do this. We live in a complicated world and have had to learn to weight truth claims based on something besides immediate experience. You almost certainly have not done an experiment on biological evolution, and few if any true retrodictive studies.[1] You can't function otherwise, unless you live in a cabin in the wilderness by yourself.
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One thing we use in the real world is a web of beliefs, in the Quinean sense. Recasting this in Bayesian terms, no belief is an island, with each belief in the web serving as part of the weighting for your prior. Most beliefs will have many other beliefs bearing on it, updating the belief in question and holding its prediction in place. If you have reasonable confidence in those many other beliefs, then a counterclaim or weird observation just doesn't outweight them. (I am not a statistician, but Elo ratings seem analagous to this. Just because the Packers had an off night and lost to the Detroit Lions doesn't mean you should bet against the Packers going forward - move your needle? Yes, but this is what it means for one loss to be a fluke.)[2] This is why in the <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag" target="_blank">linked article</a>, Scott describes how it is right to reject peer-reviewed homeopathy studies - because they are on their face improbable, in large part because of our rich web of other beliefs about how the world works.
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Another way we weight beliefs is by giving credence to authority. I think<b> differing confidence in authorities (based partly on our innate cognitive/emotional makeup and partly on life experience) explains the majority of major differences people have in beliefs about the world - not their direct experience of things or reasoning ability.</b> The truth is that people often say "I believe X because an authority I trust said so." In fact, fellow rationalist, <i>you</i> often say that. And again, to function, you <i>must</i>. (Education is a formal example of this. You don't need to do every experiment back to Newton to be a physicist.) Yet during the pandemic, it has become painfully clear that people differ in what authorities they listen to.
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<b>Why Dogmatists Are Actually Still Bayesians: Good Authorities and Bad Authorities</b>
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I once had the privilege to give a talk to the <a href="https://www.meetup.com/SacFAN/" target="_blank">Sacramento Freethinkers, Atheists and Nonbelievers (SacFAN)</a> about the function of beliefs. At one point I stated that to have good beliefs, you had to pick good authorities. An audience member asked me "How do you define a good authority?" At the time I answered humorously, deflecting the question only because of my discomfort at realizing I didn't have a ready answer.
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First let's define authority: a personal source of data (a person or institution) whose truth claims you weight more heavily than others' without first requiring evidence.
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We all have our authorities. To function, we <i>must</i>. Sometimes they are formal (academic scientists); more often they are informal (someone you hike with who seems to know the trails and conditions in your part of the world.)
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But there are many claimed authorities with poor justification for their beliefs, that promulgate false beliefs, and if we are updating based on what they tell us, we will be wrong too. A current near-canonical example for my likely readers would be a religious leader claiming that mRNA vaccines will kill you. But scientists can be wrong too, and not just because they haven't generated enough data to update their beliefs. Nobel Prize winners going off the rails are something of an institution now, so how do we know to ignore Kary Mullis or Linus Pauling's weirder moments? Not so scary, you say: partly the conflict with the web of beliefs as noted before, and partly because they're speculating outside of their expertise or reproducible experiment. Fair enough.
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Returning to the pandemic, the CDC said for at least first month that masks didn't help. (Was this deliberate obfuscation to keep non-medical people from hoarding masks, or an error? Either way, that's what they communicated, and in any event I'm not sure which is worse.) If you still think, despite this, that the CDC is still a better authority than a preacher, why?</a>
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<b>Is Someone Who Calls Himself a Rationalist Claiming Dogmatists are Rational?</b>
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In an article about people in middle America who refused the vaccine and got severe COVID, I was struck by the following statement (paraphrasing since I can't find the original): "We didn't think it was real, just like everybody else."
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When you are surrounded by people who believe X, all of whom (along with you) admire a leader who believes X, and only people who everyone around you has told you are liars are telling you not-X - then, in the absence of (thusfar) immediately contradictory experience, you will continue to believe X. This is the case for COVID victims like those I paraphrased. <i>Given the information they have,</i> they were being good Quineans and good Bayesians.
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<b>Early Life Experience and Emotional Makeup Clearly Influence Our Weightings</b>
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You might be asking incredulously: is this guy seriously arguing that people following bad authorities are good Bayesians? And (assuming that's true), does that mean people are really in an inescapable hole if they follow the wrong authority, absent any profound contradictory evidence? The respective answers are technically yes, and sometimes no.
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To the first point, you might object that many of these people certainly did have experts providing them better information, and they incorrectly underweighted this information, so they were NOT good Bayesians. But there's a problem: large <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inferential-distance" target="_blank">inferential distance</a>. Everyone around them has told them that (Fauci, academics, etc.) are bad, lying, immoral people who are trying to harm you, and should be ignored. With this information, and very little information about how to identity good authorities, from their perspective, if they give credence to Fauci, they have no justification for not also listening to every crank who comes along. Similarly, it's hard to see how someone in North Korea should somehow just know that people in the West really don't have it out for them. These people do not have <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem" target="_blank">trapped priors</a> in the sense that that a belief is somehow innately more inert - as if it has a higher specific epistemological gravity - but their priors are pinned down by a dense web of beliefs whose strands are numerous and have strong weightings because they date to early life experience.
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To the second question about whether it's hopeless to get people with bad authorities out of their <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/delusion-box" target="_blank">delusion box</a>, as often happens with the rationalist community, in our public discussions we're playing catch-up centuries after salesmen, politicians and religious leaders figured these things out, though in fairness, they had a greater incentive with more immediate feedback loops. The trick is to find someone who they recognize as an authority. Usually this is as simple as finding people providing better information who share with their audience superficial markers of cultural affinity - afiliations with religions or regions, class, dress, language. Yes these people should understand how to select an authority, but the inferential distance is too great. Put them in touch with someone with the same accent instead. Concentrate forces by looking for people who do not demonstrate "authority monoculture." You can also decrease inferential distance by engaging with people who are already having doubts. (Again, not a news flash, but it may help rationalists to understand if I put it in these terms. See what I did there?)
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<b>How to Differentiate Dogmatists from Good Authorities</b>
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Let's define dogmatists (or charlatans, or whatever other term you like) as someone who wants the benefits of being an authority, but is not interested in the the truth of the beliefs they promulgate, in terms of actions and consequences. Whether or not they genuinely believe they are interested in the truth is irrelevant, and either way, they will certainly claim they are committed to the truth. There's an analogy here to the relationship between tribal team cheers (shibboleths) that appear on the surface to be truth claims, and proper truth claims, like dolphins and fish. Similarly, dogmatists do their best to masquerade[3] as good authorities, but they're really something else entirely - dogmatists might be considered the <b>viceroys</b> to the good authorities' monarchs.
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But there are characteristics of good authorities which are "expensive" for dogmatists to maintain. These are:
<ol>
<li> They have some feedback loop betwen their claims and outcomes (and are interested in it.) Example: physicians and patient outcomes; politicians and legislative impact.
<li> They do not avoid being tracked by others in their outcomes or predictions.
<li> They minimally appeal to or rely on those early-life, emotional, identity-overweighted beliefs in their audience's web.
<li> Their feedback loop is not distorted by perverse interests. Example: TV news pundits trying to get ratings by avoiding predictions that conflict with their audience's values. Paraphrasing <a href="https://fs.blog/munger-worldly-wisdom/" target="_blank">Charlie Munger</a>, when you're dealing with a business, you have to understand their business well enough to know their incentives. (More <a href="https://fs.blog/munger-worldly-wisdom/" target="_blank">here</a>.)
<li> They have a way of seeking out "legitimate surprise" (not mere confusion - can also be accomplished with dopamine hacking, i.e. meth.) Example, hypothesis testing in science. (This may be the hardest of these to do consistently due to <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2019/09/complex-dynamic-systems-like-cells.html" target="_blank">inherent contradictions within any information-seeking entity</a>.)
<li> They communicate clearly, and they do not hold up incomprehensibility as a positive. (See: descriptions of <a href="https://twitter.com/jamesheathers/status/1429245102258417667" target="_blank">John von Neumann</a>, the first of Asher's <a target=_blank href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sins_of_Medicine" target="_blank">Seven Sins of Medicine</a>.) Insistence of formal or especially foreign or arcane language is one pernicious form. (See: modern legal language, use of Latin in Church, legal French in late Medieval England.)
<li>Their claims to authority are limited in scope. Henry Ford had some great industral ideas but also thought people should listen to his hang-ups about cows and horses. Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel but recognizing that his domain of expertise did not extend to politics he said no.
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Seeking good authorities, and preparing to reject one you may have liked when you realize they are just a viceroy, is uncomfortable - it's "software" imposed on the factory settings of humans as we operated in small groups for millennia. People who are constitutionally high in the <a href="https://moralfoundations.org/" target="_blank">moral dimensions of loyalty and authority</a> will always find this difficult - the idea of checking their proposed authority runs counter to their nature.
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<i>For further reading: more formal syntheses of Quinean and Bayesian models <a target=_blank href="https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/rochford-quine-bayes.pdf">here</a> and <a href="http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/18705/1/scientific_theories_as_bayesian_nets.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. A useful <a target=_blank href="https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/eizz7l/can_quines_web_of_belief_be_implemented_with/" target="_blank">discussion of a possible conflict here</a>, which the resolution that Bayesian reasoning can be a satisfactory way to contruct a Quinean web without arguing that Bayes is necessarily optimal.
</i>
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<b>FOOTNOTES</b>
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[1] Retrodiction sometimes upsets Popperians, but hypothesis-testing is about making a prediction, based on your hypothesis, about <i>something that the predictor does not yet know, even if it already happened</i>. It is always about the state of knowledge of the claimant when the hypothesis is formulated; it's irrelevant if the events already happened, just that they are not yet known.
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[2] The <a href="https://medium.com/purple-theory/what-is-elo-rating-c4eb7a9061e0" target="_blank">ELO rating used in sports</a> not formally an example of a belief web but it is analogous to one, and in this case behaves similar to one. Just as a single peer-reviewed homeopathy study should not make us throw away the rest of science, a great team somehow losing to a bad one should not make us think the great team is now worse than the bad one.
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[3] It is a testament to the success of science that viceroys, especially religious ones in the U.S., increasingly co-opt its language. It is very rare to see this happening in the opposite direction.
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-42490669169761843652021-04-05T12:17:00.004-07:002021-12-26T17:14:01.740-08:00Lists of "Bizarre Beliefs" Reveal Difference Between True Belief, and Tribal Team Cheers<i>tl;dr Many truth claims - beliefs - are actually just tribal team cheers, or emotional signals, with the propositional verbal content merely superficial. We can get confused and react to these as if they are truth claims, especially because they people saying these things insist that they are. We need a name to distinguish them from real propositions - let's call them <b>dolphin beliefs</b>, because of their superficial similarity to true, propositional "fish" beliefs.</i>
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You should read <a href="https://aaronbergman.substack.com/p/book-review-fantasyland?r=2muv6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy">Aaron Bergman's review of Fantasyland</a>, a book about American's relationship with conspiracy and magical thinking, today and over the decades. He cites surveys which show, for example, that one in nine Americans believe they have seen the devil driven out of someone. Others he cites are about Obama being born in Kenya, vaccines causing autism, and ghosts. Recognizing that no one is immune to irrational beliefs, Bergman identifies what he thinks are his most "fringe" beliefs. And here I also engage in this exercise, not because I think you're particularly concerned with my fringe beliefs, but because it's interesting to see the differences in his and my list, vs the kinds of things discussed in a book about American conspiracy thinking.*
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A few of my own bizarre beliefs:
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<ul>
<li>Panpsychism - consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe itself.
<li>There are <a target=_blank href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2020/10/prediction-venusian-phosphine-is.html">living cells on Venus</a> which explain the unknown absorbers and presence of phosphine.
<li>As we explore the solar system, <a target=_blank href="https://speculative-nonfiction.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-fermi-paradox-thickens-more-on.html">we will find evidence of von Neumann probes on asteroids.</a>
<li>There will be nuclear weapons used in war in the lifetimes of many readers, and we don't talk about this nearly enough.
</ul>
There are two characeristics to note about these fringe beliefs - one of which Bergman and I share with the conspiracy-believers cited in the book, and one which I think we do not.
<ol>
<li>We are not good at knowing what will seem strange to others.<br/><br/>
<li>These beliefs are not <i>central to identity.</i>
</ol>
I think if you asked the devil-drivers to name their fringe beliefs, they would (in keeping with #1 above) not necessarily realize that devil-driving is seen by many others as a strange, fringe belief. Similarly, when voluntarily producing a list like this, I probably haven't been able to identify the beliefs I hold that would most shock most readers. This occurs because we're all embedded in communities. Devil-drivers know a lot of other devil-drivers; the belief doesn't seem strange in that context.
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As for #2 - I can't speak for Bergman but I know that, if I encounter a strong argument against panpsychism, or data from a probe in the Venus clouds showing a completely mundane abiotic process that produces phosphine, not only would I probably change my mind - <i>I would not become hostile and defensive, as if I were being personally attacked.</i> Resistant, disappointed, a bit embarrassed to have been wrong in public - sure. But not angry. Whereas I think if you were to engage a devil driver and explain why their belief may be wrong, <i>I predict they <b>would</b> become hostile and defensive, as if they were being personally attacked.</i> Same for antivaxxers and birthers.
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This underlines the core difference in two types of beliefs. There are actual hypotheses - what a belief ideally always is, able to be updated by new information – and then there are the tribal team cheers of religion, politics, or conspiracy communities.
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If we think of beliefs as a good materialist should, we think about what is actually going on in the nervous systems, and how the behavior of the organism differs systematically in a way that can be categorized or at least placed on a spectrum. Notice that it's not merely isolated "trapped priors" we're dealing with here - antivaxxers and devil drivers don't just calmly reject arguments and information and continue to believe what they already believed. There is community, identity, and emotion involved.
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I therefore think we should consider whether the "beliefs" of devil-drivers and antivaxxers are truth claims at all, or something else.** At the very least we should consider whether their utility is more as tribal team cheers than as truth claims.
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The implication here is that the superficial content of the belief is not the only determinant of whether it is a functional, updateable belief (a hypothesis) or a tribal team cheer. For example: say I learn that there is going to be a meeting of a local club to discuss the phosphine and unknown absorbers in the Venusian atmosphere. Excited to talk about it with like-minded people, I attend. At the meeting I find people talking about how they just know in their hearts there is life on Venus, that NASA is trying to hide the evidence, and that they don't care what additional evidence the probes might find. In fact when I suggest we send more probes they are actively hostile!*** Whereas the
club members and I would both say "There is life in the Venusian atmosphere", I have a hypothesis, they have a tribal team cheer, though the superficially the content of the claim is the same. (The hypothesis IS just the content of the claim; the tribal team cheer is a cake of social behaviors with the words of the truth claim as icing.)
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In fact, focusing on the process of belief, rather than the content of the belief itself, is what we do in psychiatry. If someone is convinced his wife is cheating on him with absolutely zero evidence, even if she confides "actually I did have a drunken one-night stand ten years ago but he doesn't know about it" - that's still a jealous delusion. He doesn't have a good reason to believe it. The Venus club's stated belief is a community and identity device, not a cognitive tool for explaining the world. Hence bizarre statements, in the rare occasion when they are discussing it with people from outside their community, like "I just feel that it's true", "this is offensive", and "this is a personal attack."
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Because it's easy to be confused by tribal team cheers which do indeed look like truth claims, especially when the tribal team cheer-ers are loathe to admit that it's not really a truth claim, it's worth identifying the tribal cheers as something different from hypotheses.
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You're probably familiar with the idea of a <b>shibboleth.</b> For me, the belief in Venusian life is a hypothesis; for the club, it's a shibboleth - or at least, much more of a shibboleth than a hypothesis. The more of these characteristics it has, the more likely a belief is a shibboleth than a hypothesis:
<br/><ul>
<li>Avoidance of any testing
<li>Anger at questions, as if somehow being personally attacked
<li>Formation of identity around the belief
<li>Reason for belief is emotional
<li>Association with community around the belief
</ul>
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Devil-driving, birtherism, and antivaxxer-ism are shibboleths. Panpsychism is a hypothesis. In the future of epistemology, people may be amused but charitable that we did not make this distinction, just as we think of people five centuries ago who didn’t understand that dolphins are not fish. For that reason instead of calling these types of beliefs shibboleths and hypotheses, let's call them <b>dolphins</b> and fish respecitvely, to emphasize their superficial similarity, and because many dolphin beliefs are actually not in-group team cheers, they're just used by individuals to send emotional signals.
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<i>*It's worth pointing out that the types of beliefs we articulate, when asked what our most surprising beliefs are, are generally about the external world, not internal beliefs like "I'm unlovable" or "I can't accomplish important things" - even if we're frequently aware of such beliefs, we guard them closely. I think this is more likely out of fear of the impact on others' opinions of us, rather than a shrewd calculation about what people want to hear about.
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**At one point there was a debate in psychiatry as to whether delusions are really beliefs. My argument is that they are indeed something neurologically and behaviorally different, though this is an academic or semantic distinction at this point.
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***Compare to eg creationists, who often spend much more time talking about how their enemies are suppressing them than providing actual arguments and data, making predictions or trying to do something pragmatic and useful with their "theory". Where are the creationist biomedical companies?</i>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-58380720648529963422021-03-12T23:45:00.004-08:002021-03-12T23:45:56.791-08:00Patterns of Misperception Between Chapman's Stages of Moral CompetenceDavid Chapman has developed a very interesting framework, elaborating moral psychology developed by Kegan and Kohlberg, to address the differing ability of humans to co-exist in groups at varying levels of complexity, through their ways of finding meaning. This can be seen in their <i>moral competence</i>, a phrase which Chapman often uses.
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If you're not already familiar with Chapman's stage, I suggest you <a target=_blank href="https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence">first visit his pages,</a> then return here for this additional detail. Part of the interest is that <a href="https://meaningness.com/modes-chart">the stages correlate fairly well with modes of civilization over time, including states, religions, and art.</a>
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The theory, if that's the right term, is a rich one in that it rewards interrogation with further insights. For example - yes, people do vary in their achievable levels of competence, an uncomfortable realization which Chapman emphasizes less than Kegan.
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Another observation Chapman makes is that <b>to a person at level X, level X+1 is indistinguishable from level X-1.</b> (The following will make no sense if you haven't read his work, so if you haven't, <a href="https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence">please do.</a>) Let's call this <b>misperception pattern A,</b> or "they're all the same."
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<i>Example A-1: to a communal level 3 person who cannot function at level 4, the institutional-minded level 4 boss who fires her for constantly missing work due to family obligations just seems like a level 2 psychopath.</i> She can't tell the difference from her stage of moral competence. (Concrete example: think immigrant to Western country living with their family, or J.D. Vance's hillbillies, working for a large corporation.)
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<i>Example A-2: to a level 4 institutionalist, the level 5 person just seems like a tribalist/communitarian.</i> Think of that same corporate manager, watching with frustration as their kids participate in a gig economy, maybe program part-time, live in a co-op, have polyamorous relationships - to the corporate manager, this is responsibility-shirking, sloppy living just like the hillbillies.
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I'd like to propose another pattern: <b>People at level X can function superficially at level X+2.</b> This is <b>misperception pattern B,</b> or "superficial skipping levels."
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<i>Example B-1: a level 1 person (who is dependent on others and cannot even provide the basics of their life) survive in level 3 settings,</i> but are not net contributors and do not truly find meaning through their family or communal settings. Children are level one briefly as infants and toddlers; disabled people may be level 1 throughout their lives.
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<i>Example B-2: a level 2 psychopath (my term) can, for a time, survive in an institutional (level 4) setting.</i> Their mechanical transactionalism superficially is a good fit for the rule-based world of the institution. However, in a good (high-functioning, rational, mission-driven) institution, their behavior is not sustainable. (Unfortunately for many of us it is not hard to imagine this. See <a href="http://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2019/09/three-levels-of-operations-in.html">here for the emergent behavior of institutions</a> - they are neither constellations of individuals, nor collectives.)
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<i>Example B-3: a level 3 communalist can seem to fit into a level 5 setting.</i> Ultimately they will find the shifting modes of meaning incomprehensible and frustrating, and split off into an actual communal splinter from the level 5's around them, or return to their level 3 community of origin. Think of the level 5 son. Hey may have met someone who he thought would be an interesting person to start an intentional community with, a guy from Guatemala playing the guitar in a park, and invited him to come out to the desert for a while. The guy tries, but finds it all very weird, and would just rather be with his family.
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For an overview of Chapman's stages, <a href="https://meaningness.com/modes-chart">start here.</a>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-51448024126996766952021-02-14T23:00:00.003-08:002021-02-14T23:00:37.929-08:00Nkondi - Fetish DollsI've long been obsessed with these intimidating objects and I'm not surprised to learn that the design for Pinhead in Hellraiser was strongly influencd by them. They are reservoirs for aggressive spirits meant to defend against would-be harm-doers. A nail is pounded in every time you want to wake up the spirit.
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<img width=99% height=99% src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkJWRM0U5jx9EEB6gDEX1m8IJS4zedcVLQ-NOtCZ6xWRxIhgBFl-PpPAmIGmOjNfwBx5V9oj_Cyrdk7we7AGkYWFs4MU1N-6ilM4g4XSWqwEvt9ajEbQUCmYalhXVzgAgw3jhrM5yo4Cg/s0/nkondi1.jpg"/></a></div>
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Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-44308973489503819482020-09-13T15:43:00.001-07:002020-09-13T15:57:00.402-07:00Is Discounting the Future Due to a Defect in Impulse Control, Or a Rational Adaptation?Many people are familiar with the Mischel marshmallow experiment. Kids who delayed gratification had better life outcomes.* The concept of varying ability to delay gratification is <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2010/06/three-thought-experiments-about-wealth.html" target="_blank">quite critical to discussions of public policy</a>, since clearly we do not all have identical agency in every situation, by reason of variation of our nervous systems.
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The received wisdom in the informed public is that not delaying gratification - that is, discounting the future - is a negative, a deficit in impulse control. The experiment has been run in multiple settings with the discount rate quantified: do you accept a ten dollar payment at the conclusion of your participation, or $11 a month later? (If you take the $10 right now, your future discounting rate is 10% per month.) It's been pointed out repeatedly since then that there are many other plausibly influential factors, including the predictability of the environment. Run this study in Singapore, and you can count on the experimenter being in their office when you go back. In Somalia, after a month, who knows if the building will be there anymore? Whether it's war or just low trust that makes it less likely you'll actually get your payoff, the direction of the impact on your discount rate is going to be the same.
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<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027712001849" target="_blank">Celeste Kidd created a model of this in children</a>, and sure enough, kids who were disappointed by not receiving a promised reward, later on discounted the future significantly more. This relates to future discount rates in politically unstable parts of the world, as well as in children raised by inconsistent parents. It's a vicious cycle, because increasing your discounting is actual the rational choice.
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I would have expected this result to be much better known, so I'm doing my small part in making that happen.
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<i>Kidd C, Palmeri H, Aslin RN. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010027712001849" target="_blank">Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability.</a> Cognition. Volume 126, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 109-114.</i>
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<i>*It's worth pointing out that, so far as I know, there's no research showing that low future discounting increases happiness - in fact, there's research strongly suggesting that the curve is U-shaped, and beyond a certain point, good impulse control makes us <b>less</b> happy! Isn't that why we care? Essentially longitudinal studies <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20180374" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8416" target="_blank">here</a>; writeup of both in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/go-ahead-and-eat-that-marshmallow-patience-can-make-you-unhappy/2020/01/30/3e7dbfd8-42e6-11ea-b503-2b077c436617_story.html" target="_blank">Washington Post</a>. Of course, your country is affected by the level of impulse control of your countrymen, so the ideal situation might be to be a person with low impulse control in a country of people with high impulse control, a classic free-rider problem. </i>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-62607888368038268292020-09-13T11:51:00.009-07:002021-01-02T12:03:32.822-08:00Classifying Humans Is Not Inherently Bad. In Fact It's Often Good.When I was a psychiatry resident one of my supervisors told me her classification scheme for her fellow psychiatrists: there are fuzzies, and there are techies. Fuzzies are more the stereotype you might hold of people in the mental health field - people who are innate nurturers and speak in a soothing voice, and enjoy a holistic instinctual approach to helping people. They might have ethnic vases in their office. In contrast, techies are psychiatrists who like to think about neurotransmitters and circuits and diagnostic classifications, and use explicit reasoning processes about those to help patients. They read science fiction and dress like engineers.
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I think there is indeed a spectrum of this sort, and I think it exists not just in humans, but in the world at large. And I see an increasing moral disgust on the part of fuzzies against techies.
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Classifying humans is not bad. Humans are <i>fascinating</i>. Why wouldn't you pay attention to the endless ways in which they vary? (Have I given myself away as a techie yet?) But to fuzzies, an urge to assign humans to abstract categories of any sort can seem bad - creepy, even - a gateway to dehumanizing and harming them. "You should just <i>care</i> about about people!", they say. "Why is that so hard?"
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These two urges - to care and to classify - are not mutually exclusive. In fact are mutually reinforcing to the important outcome, namely, people getting better. They should both be present in any healthy cognitively diverse group of humans. They're just not usually present to the same degree within each individual brain.
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There are a lot of us who want to help people, but don't have that innate nurturing instinct. So we make an end run around that, and we think in explicit categories: person #1 has trait A, and might benefit from X (and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about psychiatric treatment, public policy, or understanding why someone is feeling a certain emotion right now.) To a nurturer, this might sound abhorrent. But if it helps, does it matter what cognitive process we use to accomplish it?
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Because we humans do vary in this dimension, this ironically means we vary in our ability to understand people at the other end of the spectrum. To us techies, when we encounter fuzzies' offense, it's surprising and baffling. "No no no, you've got it all wrong. I <i>like this person!</i> I find her interesting! She is the first native speaker of a Nilotic language I've met and that makes her cognitively unique among people I know and capable of contributing uniquely!" From many fuzzies' perspectives, this kind of classification seems almost "racism-adjacent" - indeed, a stone's throw from phrenology.
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<b>A fair criticism of techies </b>is that classification can be wrong, and can be used for bad purposes, e.g. phrenology (a dead horse which has been dead for a long time but which people love to bring up - until someone can find us a living phrenologist, let's all retire this cliche.) And yes, it is possible that thinking of people only in terms of their abstract traits and membership in various groups can dehumanize them, if it is done with no real interest in the individual, by reducing their identity to membership in collectives.* It can feel intrusive and "script"-reinforcing. On the other hand, a defense of techies is that their interest is a genuine interest in humans, their makeup is generally such that this is the most natural way of relating, and this is all an effort to <i>connect and understand</i> other people. The very abstractness of these categories means that they are universal - to a techie, the fact we can all be classified in along the same dimensions actually <i>feels quite equalizing</i>!
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<b>An also-fair criticism of fuzzies</b> is that often, the self-image and need to signal tribal identity with certain kinds of statements overwhelms consideration of others' actual needs. ("Did you actually measure the outcome of your caring act?") And nurturing does not always help. Some people, for example, are indifferent to (or even enjoy) the suffering of others (i.e., antisocial personality disorder) and no amount of nurturing will change that; thus, the blind eye often turned to this population in mental health care, because the cognitive dissonance their existence causes to nurturers is extreme. It should also be pointed out that the neurochemical basis of nurturers' behavior, oxytocin, is not a love hormone so much as an ingroup hormone. All that nurturing ultimately requires an outgroup, and many a techie can tell stories of deliberate censure and exclusion by fuzzies for some poorly understood offense. A defense of fuzzies is that they are more genuinely motivated by the positive affect of the recipients of their caring attention, and therefore, probably better at taking care of people in the short-run.
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*Speaking as a techie: intersectionality seems quite deliberately dehumanizing, in that it explicitly argues the most important thing about each of us the various racial and gender groups we're part of - and since our membership in these groups is <i>involuntary</i>, this strips identity of any aspect of agency.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-41741234246811806742020-09-12T16:01:00.002-07:002020-09-12T16:01:53.988-07:00Physical Topography (of the American West) Associated with Human PersonalityYou can find <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0930-x#citeas" target="_blank">the paper here</a>. I have only read the abstract since there's a paywall. Questions: how does this correlate with the settlement patterns discussed in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed" target="_blank">Albion's Seed</a>, in <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fs%2Fbalkanized-america%2Fthe-11-nations-of-america-as-told-by-dna-f283d4c58483&psig=AOvVaw0g21F_KEITFhHRigDVh6lE&ust=1600037904736000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAMQjB1qFwoTCJjQrvDb5OsCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD" target="_blank">this genetic analysis</a>, or the <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/search?q=bad+stripe" target="_blank">Bad Stripe</a>? (The Bad Stripe roughly correlates with Greater Appalachia in the former article, or the Border Reavers in Albion's Seed.)
<br/><br/>
<i>Götz, F.M., Stieger, S., Gosling, S.D. et al. Physical topography is associated with human personality. Nat Hum Behav (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0930-x</i>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-11977990284009710252020-08-22T22:24:00.001-07:002021-01-02T11:53:18.478-08:00Economist Bryan Caplan on 80,000 Hours: Thinking Through Your Real Reasons for Going to CollegeCaplan is an economist most famous for advancing the theory (held by many) that education in its current instantiation in the US is more about sigaling (in particular, credentialing) than learning. But that's not what I'm including in the large excerpt below - this is more advice for young people who are sacrificing their happiness worrying about/trying to get into college. <div><br /></div><div>I don't endorse his specific conclusions, but I strongly endorse his way of thinking about it, which broadly comes down to: ask yourself what you actually want out of life, look at the empirical reality of what your choices might get you, and
don't just go along with the crowd. The <a href="https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/Bryan-caplan-case-for-and-against-education/#transcript" target="_blank">full interview is here.</a>
(Previous posts on this <a href="http://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2019/12/ranking-of-university-attended-does-not.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="http://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2020/01/for-rationalist-community-more-on-why.html" target="_blank">here.</a>)
<blockquote>
Robert Wiblin: Yeah I’m thinking, so now we’re talking to the listeners, and we’re hoping to give them some advice on how they could actually do better in their lives.
<br /><br />Bryan Caplan: Right, right. But selfishly speaking?
<br /><br />Robert Wiblin: Selfishly speaking, yeah-
<br /><br />Bryan Caplan: Yeah. So right, I mean honestly where I always start is gaming the system. I don’t start with learning, because the system doesn’t seem very interested in learning. I would just start with … Right, so what do you want to do and how can you do that with the least suffering to yourself. Basically sort of going through the inventory and finding out which things you can cut corners on and which things you can’t cut corners on. Some obvious things are, if it’s way outside your nature, if you’re just doing it for requirement than just find the easiest person. Most Americans will never use foreign language on the job, so find the easiest foreign language teachers that are around, go and do that.
<br /><br />
Like for college actually for most people my advice is just be an econ major. Because I often tell my students economics is the highest paid of all the easy majors. And there’s a lot … Like these aren’t easy. Like come on people it’s not computer science, it’s not engineering. You know you can do really well in econ major and still have a great social life in college. It doesn’t mean that you’ll be like vitamin D deprived, like you would be if you were a CS major.
<br /><br />
Economics is not the highest paid major, but it’s not that far from the winner. So winners are usually electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, finance, then econ. But it’s not that big of a difference. A lot of it, as I say, major in econ because it is the highest paid of all the easy majors, so do that. I say, whatever else you’re interested in you can do that to, but the econ major will just get you a better job and open more doors for you. So I advise people to do that.
<br /><br />
In terms of other numbers. General result, this I not primarily me, I’m just reporting what the researchers find. Your majors more important than the selectivity of your school. Better to go to a state school and be an engineering major than go to Harvard and be a literature major. For most purposes, at least for your career purposes, maybe not for dating purposes, or for marriage purposes. But in least of terms of your career it seems like a hard major at a low cheap state school better deal than going to a private school.
<br /><br />
Then I’ve also got stuff on is it worth going to an expensive private school. Like the marriage … Like improving your marital options, that seems like the best argument for. In terms of your career, what I’m saying is unless they’re giving you a lot of scholarship money, probably don’t go. Or, the only other reason I would consider going to a top school is if you have a special career that is even snobbier than other careers. Like say professor. If your career goal is to be a professor, then I encourage you to go to a top school because graduate schools are super snobby. And then schools hire professors who are super snobby. So even though it may not affect your earnings, it may affect whether you’re allowed to enter in to your desired occupation at all. So I think about that.
<br /><br />
And the other big thing to think about, this probably won’t matter very much for your listeners specifically, but maybe for their kids, you should think about whether it’s worth going to college at all. I say there, the main underappreciated variable is just completion probability. There were got this classic saying of the best predictor of future performance is past performance. Best predictor of whether you’re gonna graduate college is whether you did well in high school. If you struggle to get through high school, or if you know someone who is struggling to get through high school. Those are the people it is not at all clear that it’s a good idea for them to go to college even selfishly speaking. Because they’re so unlikely to get that big bag of gold over the finish line.
<br /><br />Robert Wiblin: Yeah. The reason this issue of people who are unlikely to finish, it seems like the very most low hanging fruit here is to convince people who are losing out personally because they go to college for a year or two and spend a bunch of money and time, but are very unlikely to ever actually graduate. Just to convince them to stop going to university, I mean that’s something you can maybe even get the government on. You don’t have to tell anyone to sacrifice for the greater good, you just have to tell them “Well you’re gonna lose yourself.”
<br /><br />Bryan Caplan: Yes, I mean, funny thing, the government used to have a whole program to go do this. It was called guidance counselors. So back in the old days, the guidance counselor would bring you in, and they’d say “You are or you are not college material.” This was hard to hear … And of course sometimes they made mistakes. Sometimes there’s someone who is really good and they told them they’re not college material and they’re late bloomers. But you know better than to put too much weight on that scenario. There’s also a lot of people who were told not to go, they would fail, and so they didn’t go, so they didn’t fail.
<br /><br />
There’s been a big change in the United States towards the college role model. Now I think one of the best ways to get fired as a high school guidance counselor is start using, throwing around that phrase “You’re not college material” and I think that will get big complaints from parents. Like, “Do you know what your guidance counselor told my kid, said he’s not college material.” So the government used to do this, now there’s more of, whether you tell them to go to community college or four-year college. It’s sort of the main division right now. And you say well of course college is for everyone, everyone’s college material but you should probably go to community college to get your grades up and then that kind of thing.
<br /><br />
Then go and tell about how great community college is for those who do well in it. Without ever giving them any idea if they’re ever statistically likely to do well. But yeah, in terms of what I’m trying to I do actually try to give this advice. Honestly I don’t think the kids that are struggling in high school are going to be listening anything I say. So I do try to direct this to the parents. Who I think are the … They’re sort of the last line of defense of people who won’t get fired as parents if they level with their kid.
<br /><br />
It’s really hard, especially parent’s pride is at stake. This is where my best appeal is look, what’s more important your kid’s future or your friend’s pity? Like “Oh my god, your kid isn’t going to college that’s so terrible. Oh my god.” Right, and I mean know parents, I think their pride is so strong they’d rather send their kid on this academic suicide mission rather than endure the pity of their friends, but I think there’s a lot of parents who have mixed motives, and I just like go and give them some moral support for advice to kids to go and try something else. I mean, I try to frame it more positively as can we find something else your kid likes and is good at, other than academics.
<br /><br />
Like can you do that, have you tried? Why not try? You know if your kid just really doesn’t like school, why keep assuming they’re gonna turn over a new leaf and blossom in college rather than say here’s ten jobs that give you a good life and don’t require college.
<br /><br />Robert Wiblin: So as you say, most listeners on the show aren’t trying to decide whether to try to do an undergraduate degree or not. But many of them are trying to decide whether to go to grad school. So what do you have for advice for students who did well in undergrad and they’re considering doing an economics PhD or some other PhD? Who should do it and who shouldn’t and what courses should they consider and what courses shouldn’t they consider?
<br /><br />Bryan Caplan: Yeah that’s a great question. Just to preface data on graduate education is much mushier than data on high school or college. So here I’m just building on a much shakier ground, and I just think everyone should know that I’m doing that. The main thing to know is that grad school completion is even lower than regular college graduation. Remember that people go to grad to school are generally well above average for college, for undergraduate. So when you’re thinking about whether to go, again, the best predictor is how good were you as an undergraduate.
<br /><br />
So if you were doing very well as an undergraduate, then probably you would be about average for grad school, and remember average doesn’t do that well. So were you stellar for an undergraduate, those are the people where they’re likely to actually gain from graduate education. Furthermore, you have to consider what you’re majoring in. I’m not sure that I found a single paper that measured the payoff for graduate programs as a function of major. It certainly seems that the pattern for undergraduate holds up for graduate as well with CS and engineering and economics paying well. History and philosophy and fine arts paying poorly.
<br /><br />
So you gotta factor that in, and again as usual if you know what occupation you’re training for than just see what does the job market for that occupation actually look like. There are many graduate programs where almost the only thing you do with is to become a professor of that subject. Or you just don’t use it. So in that case, well you wanna be an English professor, well look at the jobs prospects for the people who are currently coming out with English PhDs and see how they’re doing.
<br /><br />
Don’t ask yourself are you as good as those people. Ask what someone who didn’t know you, only knew what you were like on paper, would think whether you’re better than those people. Because the world doesn’t tell you … We don’t even need to go and get into overconfidence and self-centered bias. Let’s just say the world’s not fair and even if you’re awesome the world rewards being awesome on paper, not intrinsic awesomeness. Just accept this as a flaw in the world, and then consider that when you’re deciding whether or not you wanna try what you’re gonna do.
<br /><br />
Another sort of general piece of advice that I offer people is if you wanna do almost anything in social science, and a lot of humanities, and you are dismayed but the crummy job prospects of people that major in the subjects. Then, my question … Can you do math? If so, why not just go and get an econ PhD and call what you’re doing economics X. I’m not even being flippant here. So I am baffled by people who like history and can do math, who do a history PhD. Why not just do econ and become a economic historian?
<br /><br />
It is literally true that you will probably have tenure as an economist, before you would have your first assistant professor job as a historian. That’s how the world works. And then, once you have that tenure, you can work on anything you want. You never get another raise in your whole career, you probably have a better income stream than a historian would. So this is of course selfishly speaking. This is the kind of strategy that if everybody did it, it wouldn’t work anymore. But everybody’s not gonna do it are they Rob. So why don’t you go and do it?
<br /><br />Robert Wiblin: Well we’ve got the special tricks for you there. Just not too many of you do it-
<br /><br />Bryan Caplan: Economic philosophy of course. You can either go and try to become a philosophy PhD and try to be a philosophy professor, or you can go in economics and then do economic philosophy. Probably get tenure before you get your first job as a philosophy prof. And then, yes you’ll have to go and do some stuff you don’t like to get tenure probably, but then afterwards it’s clear sailing. So why not?
<br /><br />Robert Wiblin: It’s a shame that the evidence on postgraduate courses isn’t better. I recall one thing you said was that Master’s degrees don’t tend to do very well. Is that right?
<br /><br />Bryan Caplan: Yes. So we … Of course they still do have higher earnings, but basically when you combine the low completion probability with the modest gain and the high opportunity cost, because you know … The opportunity costs of high school is really low. Basically it’s like a high school dropouts wage. The further along you go, the bigger your opportunity cost is. And also, you’re starting to cut off some of your peak earning years too. And this it what winds up giving the bad result. But I’m not gonna say the master’s degree data is any good either, it’s very sparse.
<br /><br />
In a way, the good news is the people are studying are putting more into studying decisions that more people face. So I suppose that’s good. But at the same time, given the sheer volume, you think there would be 20 good papers on it, and it’s very hard to find anything that I really thought was compelling
</blockquote></div>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-78940027017895688032020-08-22T22:05:00.006-07:002021-01-02T12:15:57.991-08:00Reflections from Fire Country: Scale Inversely Correlates with Actionability (the SICA Doctrine)<p> </p><blockquote>England no longer existed. He’d got that—somehow he’d got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out.<br /><br />
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
</blockquote>
<br /><br />
<blockquote>
Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department.
<br /><br />
- Ernest Rutherford
</blockquote>
<br /><br />
I've noticed, recently with some urgency, that the more local the media content*, the more actionable and concrete it is.
<br /><br />
For the last week I've been hiding from the smoke in my house in Sonoma County California, deciding hour-to-hour whether it's time to go. (I got my things ready weeks back instead of waiting for this year's fire.)
<br /><br />
Rather than just waiting for an emergency alert to come through from an agency, I scroll through Twitter. Those agencies are on there, along with people on the ground, linking to the agencies and to
recently updated maps (within hours.)
<br /><br />
The #LNULightningcomplex is now about 500 square miles. A fire that big (#LNULightningComplex) has multiple parts (like the #WalbridgeFire and #HennesseyFire.) What I care about is how the fire closest to my house (the #Walbridgefire) is acting, where the local
winds are pushing it, whether there is air support available to try to hold them back. I recognize now more than ever that, regarding (for example) the parts of the fire south and east of Lake Berryessa which have all merged with the #HennesseyFire, my interest is an idle one.
There is no immediate life-and-property decision I have to make based on that information.
<br /><br />
So it was with interest that I noticed that when I searched on the #Walbridgefire, the mix of Tweets included more actionable, concrete (though often dry) facts-and-figures - as opposed to the gigantic #LNULightningComplex in its totality, which has a much higher proportion of
news stations (both national and local), people making political statements or otherwise connecting the existence of the fire to their own interest, or people making emotional statements (granted, often supportive ones.)
<br /><br />
But more than that, it shows that the more concrete, immediate, and specific something is, the more likely statements about it are going to be useful ones, that we can actually employ to help us make decisions. Likewise,
the broader, the more general, the more abstract something is, the more likely statements about it will be vague, not actionable, more about the nervous system that's making the statements, than about the external world
the nervous system is trying to model. In fact this is something of a tautology, since the more abstract something is, the more it exists in the nervous system rather than as an external empirical entity.
<br /><br />
To boil it down, <b>Scale Inversely Correlates with Actionability</b>, or <b>SICA</b> (pronounced "seek-uh"). Here, "scale" doesn't just mean physical dimension as with the fires, but rather broadness of definition.
And actionability doesn't mean whether you are able to do it right now; it means whether you can come up with a clear plan of action afterward. As an example: "they should fix the houses in my state so they can withstand an earthquake." As opposed to, "my brother should fix his house so it can withstand an earthquake." One of those is more obviously broad, and less clearly actionable. In fact, in this sense, "actionable" implies that a claim is both falsifiable and meaningful
<br /><br />
SICA is quite closely related to the old saw in American local politics, that "there is only one way to pave a road, not a Republican way or a Democratic way." A country is an abstract enough place that you can spend a lot of time
arguing about "things" which seem to be important, but in a city, at some point someone has to move dirt, in a specific way, from one place to another to build something. This is why it's a good idea to, as much as possible,
keep discussions on the object- vs meta-level. Human skills and problem-solving are not nearly as generalizeable as we would like to think. (This is why for example <a href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2016/07/in-praise-of-dilettantism-or-going.html" target="_blank">I stopped trying to improve at chess.) </a><div><br /></div><div>It's also related to the idea of operationalizing definitions. You don't need to operationalize concrete entities that can be simultaneously directly experienced on the scale of one meter and one second. The more abstract, the more rigorous the definition must be. Our built-in sense of "folk physics" is good
enough to meaningfully make predictions about the behavior of fist-sized rocks. But E=mc^2 is one of the most general statements ever made, and in order to be actionable, it must be in a rigorous formalism. Because "broader" entities do trend away from actionability, it's exactly these statements about broad entities ("matter", "energy") that need to be formalized and defined operationally the most. Otherwise, when we talk about such things we're probably just barking at each other.
<center>
<br /><br />
<table border="1">
<tbody><tr><td><b>more concrete</b></td><td><b>more abstract, broader</b></td></tr>
<tr><td>actionable</td><td> idle speculation</td></tr>
<tr><td>specific </td><td> general</td></tr>
<tr><td>clear </td><td> vague</td></tr>
<tr><td>true or false </td><td>"not even wrong"</td></tr>
<tr><td>falsifiable</td><td>not testable</td></tr>
<tr><td>meaningful</td><td>pointless</td></tr>
<tr><td>effortlessly rule-bound (event itself follows obvious logic)</td><td>Must be grounded in rigid formalism to have a chance of being meaningful</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</center>
<br /><br /><br />
*As a side observation, news organizations are in the business of keeping you watching so you see commercials, than public service agencies and individuals motivated by their missions. It's probably for this reason that I c
an't think of a single instance of media reporting that I have used for decision-making during this time. I make this observation even as someone not particularly predisposed to dislike media institutions.
<br /><br />
**The astute reader will note that I've made a big jump from concrete to abstract right here, starting from the very humble "news about my fire is more actionable the more local it is" to a conclusion about
the nature of belief statements and psychology in general. All non-imitative learning involves generalization; the key is knowing when you're more likely to be doing it to try to scrutinize it better.</div>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-36715337174545589502020-07-26T18:06:00.001-07:002020-09-13T11:55:20.587-07:00The Roots of Universal Moral Authority in Medieval European Christendom - Benefits to States and IndividualsReading about many conflicts in medieval European history - especially bitter protracted ones - you're often struck by the appeal to legal proceedings. Take <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc#Trial" target="_blank">this example</a> about Joan of Arc's experience after being captured during the Hundred Years War:
<br/>
<blockquote>The trial for heresy was politically motivated. The tribunal was composed entirely of pro-English and Burgundian clerics, and overseen by English commanders including the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Warwick. In the words of the British medievalist Beverly Boyd, the trial was meant by the English Crown to be "a ploy to get rid of a bizarre prisoner of war with maximum embarrassment to their enemies". Legal proceedings commenced on 9 January 1431 at Rouen, the seat of the English occupation government. The procedure was suspect on a number of points, which would later provoke criticism of the tribunal by the chief inquisitor who investigated the trial after the war.
<br/><br/>
Under ecclesiastical law, Bishop Cauchon lacked jurisdiction over the case. Cauchon owed his appointment to his partisan support of the English Crown, which financed the trial. The low standard of evidence used in the trial also violated inquisitorial rules. Clerical notary Nicolas Bailly, who was commissioned to collect testimony against Joan, could find no adverse evidence. Without such evidence the court lacked grounds to initiate a trial. Opening a trial anyway, the court also violated ecclesiastical law by denying Joan the right to a legal adviser. In addition, stacking the tribunal entirely with pro-English clergy violated the medieval Church's requirement that heresy trials be judged by an impartial or balanced group of clerics.
</blockquote>
From this excerpt you can clearly see that her trial was hardly a model of justice and impartiality. But the very idea of a <i>trial</i>, and an appeal to fairness and an authority beyond the people with the most swords, is what is remarkable. Yes, the English bent rules, but there were rules to follow and they had to give at least a minimal appearance of following them. They didn't just immediately and gleefully execute her with no explanation beyond "she frustrated our goals and we don't like her."
<br/><br/>
Compare: confronted with the victorious army of Kublai Khan, the last Song emperor jumped to his death along with other high-ranking officials, rightly fearing their fates should they fall into the Mongols' hands. Was there a court they could appeal to for release or at least better treatment? An argument they could make to Kublai from universal moral authority, about what was the right and fair principle to obey? How could these concepts even make sense? For China and the Mongols, there could be no appeal, indeed no <i>idea</i> of an appeal beyond either's physical authority as it stemmed from each mans' desires - that is to say, force.
<br/><br/>
The benefit of an organization whose authority was mostly moral is something that those of us who are secular-minded may ignore, as it stemmed from supernatural claims. We are often tempted to write off medieval Europe as a thousand-year failure mode, an Iron Age Orwellianism, or a Mad Max dystopia from the standpoint of ancient Roman citizens. While it was all those things, the seeds of Europe's positive divergence were being sown, and having a superimposed moral authority, separate and acknowledged by all as above Earthly concerns, was a unique arrangement and seems likely to have been part of it. There are many ways to think about this - two might be that warring parties both respecting the Church's authority created an in-theory neutral arbiter; another is just that more players makes a richer political ecosystem that is less zero-sum. This ultimately made possible rule of law and not of men, the possibility of service to principle rather than person. The destructiveness of rational warfare in eg East Asia was possibly part of why Europe was able to pull ahead.
<br/><br/>
It may have been quite fortunate that the church was based in one city that fell to barbarians (Rome) and another that saw its territory shrink until it was overwhelmed by infidels. The Western Church then was a kind of virtual state that could coexist with the others fighting for survival in Western Europe. It was a fortunate accident of timing, with Europe's isolating geography (mountains near the coast and indented coastlines) favoring continued separation. In an alternate history where Belisarius succeeded in reuniting the Roman Empire, European religious history might look much more similar to that of the Middle East, where religious and political authority were inseparable (or Chinese history where it was clearly peripheral) and there was no chance for mediation to calm wars and allow the concept of rule of law to emerge.
<br/><br/>
This <a target=_blank href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3166294">2018 paper by Hill</a>, recently covered on MR argues in more detail about why the concept of the rule of law emerged when it did, though I disagree that it's the ideology itself that was more disposed to resulting in such a concept, rather than the geographical, political and military context of each. That is to say, if we re-ran history with the holy books switched, eg Mohammed in a cave writing the Bible, and the Qu'ran getting vetted and adopted at the Council of Nicea, I think the result would have been largely the same.
<br/><br/>
In the twentieth century, the U.N. has clearly appealed to a sense of universal rights much more than previous international forums did - the League of Nations and the Concert of Europe before it were both practical negotiation venues, but the U.N. makes claims to mediating universal morality. I can't help but wonder to what extent that has been intentional, and can't help but worry even as an atheist that it's easy to for states and peoples to reject non-supernatural moral claims as being made up by human beings, only and always for pragmatic self-interest.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-25467587409162382182020-06-07T20:56:00.003-07:002020-06-07T20:56:56.481-07:00"What Do We Want?" "Not That" "When Do We Want It" "Now"An as-ever prescient Orwell, on modern protest movements both left and right:
<br/><br/>
"[Nationalism] can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work <b>in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty."</b>
<br/><br/>
- George Orwell, <i><a target=_blank href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/">Notes on Nationalism</a></i><br/><br/><br/>
Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-63291210709308285172020-05-21T23:01:00.002-07:002020-08-16T12:11:54.776-07:00Trust and ProgressTyler Cowen <a target=_blank href="https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/paul-romer-tyler-cowen-science-economics-covid-19-93276c8a57dc">talks with Paul Romer</a> about social norms that encourage scientific advancement, or don't. Romer refers to the actually very puzzling question about why the industrial revolution didn't happen in China and (embellishing) it was one of this cacophony of <a target=_blank href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2016/03/europe-as-china-why-didnt-it-happen_20.html">squabbling medieval kingdoms that eventually did it</a>. Romer says, <br/><br/>
<blockquote>
One of my predecessors at the World Bank as chief economist, Justin Lin, has a very interesting paper on this puzzle of why didn’t China develop the industrial revolution. His argument is basically that China — because there were so many people looking and discovering; they discovered a lot of things, like gunpowder, steel, printing, and so forth — but what China didn’t do was invent the social system we call science. They had some knowledge and some technology. They didn’t invent science. And what was different in Europe was the invention of science.
<br/><br/>
I found that argument really compelling, and I’ve taken it one step further and think that part of what the West benefited from were notions about integrity and individual responsibility for what we say that fostered trust, and that science indirectly gave us those things.
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For any country around the world, it’s worth thinking about — if you’re short on that, if there’s a tendency for a lot of people to cheat on their taxes, to lie about what’s true, if there’s norms that hold a society back in those ways, I think it would be good to think about, how do we rebuild a system where we respect and admire people who consistently tell the truth, and where we look down on, disapprove of people who are found to have intentionally misled us?</blockquote>
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There's a section near the beginning of Kim Stanley Robinson's <i>Years of Rice and Salt</i> (the best <a target=_blank href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2017/02/review-of-journey-to-fusang-and-some.html">alternate history</a> book ever written hands-down) where an alchemist - actually a shady huckster who is aware that what he is doing is just a con - gets caught "transmuting" lead into gold in a demonstration for a local potentate in some Persianate Central Asian state when his hollow, gold-containing ladle is discovered.
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He gets his hands cut off in punishment, then swears that he will only work to advance knowledge from then on. This ends up being the start of something like what we recognize as science. Of note, the divergence point in this world is that the Black Plague wiped out <i>all</i> of Europe, turning history into a zero-sum contest between the Islamic world and China)* Because of the reformed con man, science advances much as it did in our history, except with different names (ie, <i>qi</i> for electricity.)
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That said, while many hucksters have been caught at their game, few have so dramatically changed their internal incentive structure in response - though this passage highlights the importance of trust and an earnest search for knowledge that may better the world in general. The importance of developing a general background of trust is difficult to overstate.
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<i>*Interestingly enough, in Stirling's <i>Conquistador</i>, Alexander the Great lives to a ripe old age and succeeds in his dream of uniting the lands from Europe to the Indus into a macro-state; the resulting world is one of unity and stability, therefore stagnancy, where by what would have been the 20th century of the Christian era they are barely medieval, and China appears to have been overrun by the Tocharians.</i>Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-8975961631934972632020-04-06T21:28:00.000-07:002020-04-06T21:28:00.438-07:00The Beginnings of a Voluntary State Free From the Tyranny of TerritoryStates are inefficient, with governments subject to severe free-riding (at the best of times) and exploitation by violent psychopaths (at the worst.) They are involuntary - you are in a state, usually, because of an accident of your birth. As animals that take up space and as modern humans dependent on agriculture, we occupy a territory that belongs to us, as does our state. The central job of the state is to maintain a monopoly on violence, in order to protect us from violence. (This is why the Somali "government" is a joke, because they can only protect you if you're within about four blocks of their office. You can emigrate, but at a massive price (learning a new language, new customs, new social network, etc. - ask people who are trained as physicians and leave their home country due to a civil war or persecution of their ethnic group, and end up driving a cab or running a shop somewhere safer.)
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Consequently this lack of competition means there is a high barrier to emigration, and states often drag in perpetual suboptimality until invasion, civil war, or economic disaster brings about a fundamental transformation. (<a target=_blank href="https://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-do-government-services-often-suck.html">More on this here</a>.) Much potential human flourishing is left on the table, so to speak. Charter cities are a partial attempt to free us from the tyranny of territories - if you can go across a bridge and be subject to the courts and business laws of a more sensible successful country than the one that governs your home, that minimizes emigration cost (you don't even have to, you just commute.) The end-goal of such arrangements would be that, if (for example) the DMV sucks in your state, you could announce you were subject to the DMV rules of another state. Of course this sounds absurd, and the tyranny of physical territory overrules this. The political scientist that could solve this problem would go down in history.
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Of course there are supranational cultural entities that serve some of these functions somewhat - religions and corporations immediately come to mind - but there's a new attempt to get past this: Safetywing, which aims to become no less than a virtual country. It is starting as a safety net (of the sort that wealthy welfare states already provide.) Read more about this idea <a target=_blank href="https://medium.com/@safetywingcom/a-practical-guide-to-building-a-country-on-the-internet-691ac9da3b0e">here</a>. Of course this will cost money, and if you're already paying into your own country's safety net based on the tyranny of territory, you might not have money for a second one. This is why wealthy (or at least upper middle class) people from developed countries should buy into this early, both to make it sustainable, and also to give it prestige value.
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I expect that should this actually take off, there will be massive resistance to it from the mutual-recognition cartel of the legacy states; see here for an example of <a target=_blank href="http://thelateenlightenment.blogspot.com/2019/04/violence-control-and-mutual-recognition.html">the kind of reaction one might expect if you have physical territory to attack</a>. The virtualness of the project may protect it in this regard, but I hope that Safetywing has anticipated that. Note that nation states are often openly hostile to supranational entities (see: Islamic states and other religions; China and any religion.) It could be that this virtual state could be the next supranational level of social organization, like religions and corporations, but it should expect to be identified as a threat in the same way that China sees Falun Gong.
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I will be joining this, and I strongly encourage you to consider it.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4965395778439498965.post-38461362489960791792020-03-02T23:51:00.001-08:002020-03-02T23:51:10.109-08:00Addiction Has Three Types: To Pleasure, Flow, or MeaningPositive psychology research models happiness as reducing to <a target=_blank href="https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/learn/wellbeing">three components</a>: pleasure (chocolate, sunsets and orgasm), flow (losing yourself in an activity; "action meditation") and meaning - feelings of value and connection and identity within a community. My fellow Americans and I have a tendency to reduce the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure is important, but it's not the whole game, and modern consumer society may have specialized in that component and lost the other two.
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We commonly think of addiction as a problem of pleasure and pain: pleasure when you consume the addictive substance (or perform the addictive activity), and suffering when you do not, after you're hooked. It's not hard to see how it's not just meth, but sex or food, that could be the subject of addictive behavior. Humans have continued to get better at creating goods and services that cause repetitive behavior in their targets - think brand loyalty, processed drugs (think coca leaves to cocaine; increasing the sugar in everything.) We have probably become better at identifying avoiding these addictive goods and services. Still, <a target=_blank href="http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html">I'd bet good money that over time, they're becoming more addictive faster than we're getting better at resisting them</a>.
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Through the lens of positive psychology, this starts to look too narrow. It's not just the pleasure component of happiness that has been exploited. Addiction to flow and meaning exist too.
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Probably the best example of addiction to flow is video games. They are designed for this purpose, and there is evidence that they are <a target=_blank href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/7/15933674/video-games-job-supply">damaging the productivity of young people</a>, particularly young males.
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Then there is community addiction. The most harmless form is what Facebook exploits to get you to keep checking whether your friends have liked your post. The more concerning form is that of religious cults, or small ingroup-vs-outgroup communities (often based on unearned, non-opt-outable qualities like race or religion.) This is actually the one that has the most potential for harm. Postwar Japan and late 60s America both featured a shock to the automatic meaning-generating aspect of national community. This is happening in a second wave in the West. It pains me as a staunch atheist to say this, but it's becoming clearer that <a target=_blank href="https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/">the disappearance of religion as a community-builder</a> has not been a boon for everyone. If you're also an atheist and that sentence made you squirm, then here's a thought: a substantial part, maybe even the majority, of young American males who support Donald Trump are not religious.
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I have enough confidence that these three types are legitimate subtypes that I think it would be appropriate to have them DSM as specifiers. Indeed, the discussion over video game addiction <a target=_blank href="https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/internet-gaming">has been ongoing for some time</a>.Michael Catonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01017910055699348111noreply@blogger.com0