Evil Gandhis and Poor Executive Function: How the World Looks if You Have Poor Impulse Control

Cross-posted to Cognition and Evolution.

Imagine that in some distant, cloudy mountain hideaway there is a city of evil Gandhis - or just unempathic but highly disciplined monks - who spend all their waking hours meditating. As a result of the self-control they've created in this manner, their executive function is superhuman - after all, extensive meditation builds not just cognitive discipline but EEG-measurable physical changes in the brain. Most dismiss this place as myth, but you come to believe it's real and that it still exists today. You follow the clues across blazing deserts and fetid swamps, and when finally you scale the last soaring frozen wall and scramble over the edge onto the floor of their lookout points, you have finally arrived in this storied, isolated monastery-city, a place of serene and severe carved granite with a glowing fire roaring in the center of the great terrace. You are greeted by intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic, studying you from their great central plaza with piercing eyes. You find that you are the first visitor from your country. Suddenly a horrific pain erupts from the back of your neck, and you turn to see one of the monks withdrawing a red hot brand that he has just poked you with.

Obviously you demand to know why you deserved that. As they are merely dispassionately interested in collecting knowledge, this one calmly explains that they would like to see if your skin burns in the same way theirs does. You turn to see several more of them calmly approaching you with various glowing metal rods; behind them, in the fire at the center of the plaza, someone is handing out even more. You tell them to stop, but they ignore you. Finally, you turn to the closest one approaching you, and punch him in the face. Your punch lays him flat out and as he falls his metal rod clangs to the ground.

"That's assault," one of the other monks says. "We're going to have to lock you up now."

"Assault?" you shout. "What was I supposed to do? You made me assault you!"

The monk rolls his eyes. Only then do you notice various burns, knife and whip scars all over his face and arms. "You're like a child. It's not our problem if your self-control is so poor that you can't stand being burned a few times."

To a person with a Cluster B personality disorder - including narcissistic PD or especially borderline - the world must seem to be filled with such evil cold-blooded monks. If I have BPD, then these people just can't see that when they withhold affection, that's so intolerable - it's just the same as a hot iron - that they're making me attack them to protect myself. (I have heard a severe narcissist in a psychiatric hospital, fighting while being restrained by staff after being refused special treatment, literally say "Look what you're making me do! You're making me do this!" The resemblance to what a five year-old might say is not coincidental.)

But this is more than just an interesting perspective - it's relevant to a critical assumption that we make in liberal democracies. Namely, that people have agency, and this agency allows them to be responsible for themselves, and to some degree others. While (so far as I know) pain-tolerating monks do not exist, people with severe borderline and narcissistic personality disorder - with poor executive function and low distress tolerance - do exist. And we do lock them up.

It turns out that "agency" has buried within it many components, which do vary quite a bit across the population, and which profoundly affect people's ability to run their own lives and live with others. The one case where we're comfortable saying that humans don't have agency is children - but even that is somewhat arbitrary and agranular (many of us can think of a sixteen year old more capable of running her own life than a twenty-eight year old.) The monks would lock you or me up because we're at the extreme bad end of their distribution, just like we lock up people in jails or long-term care facilities. But here's the thing - we wait for someone to commit an act, of the sort that they are guaranteed to commit at some point, if they're at the extreme end of the distribution. As society becomes more complex, more and more people will commit such acts, and we'll have to become more honest and clear about exactly how we deal with them.

War Requires Material Capacity and Lack of Institutional Constraint

In Never at War, Spencer Weart shows that in the modern era, democracies are extremely unlikely to fight other democracies, but that non-democracies fight democracies, and each other, much more often. You can try to think of counterexamples (Mexican-American War, maybe) but you'll be straining to do so.

A new paper by Blank, Dincecco and Zhukov show that prior to the modern era (i.e., 1200-1800) parliamentary states were actually MORE likely to go to war than absolutist states were. Their argument is that parliamentary states were successful in that they actually had more capacity to make war than the absolutist states, but they had not yet developed institutional constraints to prevent them from doing so, as presumably occurred in the modern era. (H/T slatestarcodex)

Examples of Antiquity's Influence on American Founders

Of many, here are two of recent interest:

1) Gibbon's pointing to the increasing power of the Praetorian Guard in the Roman Empire leading to its decline. You might say this is a particularly virulent case of the kinds of special interests internally distorting the priorities of an empire (or over-reactions to those interests), like eunuchs in Ming China or the shepherd lobby in colonial era Spain; particularly virulent, because when the lobby is the people who know how to kill people, their demands are more difficult to ignore, resulting in few natural deaths for emperors.

2) The recognition by both Gibbon and Machiavelli that there may have been a connection, fortuitous though it was, between non-violent succession during the non-inherited Five Good Emperors period, and the prosperity at that time in Rome; hence the installation of regular peaceful power transfers. Good institutions are indeed important.


Relating to #2 above, I would have liked to find some quantitative work with nice graphs on the damage to the Roman economy by civil unrest or governmental inefficiency during turnover/civil wars, but I couldn't find any; there's this article by Bruce Bartlett which is mostly about the damage done by the Roman deep state (deep for that time). Suffice it to say, the Julio-Claudian dynasty marked a period of stability after the civil war between Augustus and Antony, the Five Emperors were a period of peaceful succession, and the Crisis of the Third Century was the opposite. (Note how Bartlett is gunning for the deep state and he skips the Crisis entirely.) Economies grow when credit and capital are available, which requires the world to be predictable. (In other words: risk is okay as long as it can be evaluated.) The Pax Romana and Mongolica are good examples of this; civil wars are obviously bad, but expropriation/nationalization events by otherwise stable states can do just as much damage, because they concentrate the unpredictability in the safety of capital.

We Might Be Careful What We Infer From These Happiness Statistics

Here is a list of "top" countries ranked in order of what percent of interviewed people were satisfied according to the question, "In this country, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?"



Possibly more informative is how Americans' answers have fared over time on this poll in terms of percent satisfaction (not relative rank):



(Full article here.) Any poll where UAE and Uzbekistan tie for fifth, ahead of (for example) Canada and Scandinavian countries, suggests at the very least that this isn't measuring what is useful to us, or isn't measuring what we think it is.

Measuring Congress

A benefit of easy access to computation and publication tools is that public figures can be more easily made accountable to their performance, whatever their domain of endeavor, and then have their status affected appropriately.  Of course not just primates but many social animals track past behavior and reciprocation albeit sloppily, and we humans started doing this more rigorously by applying integers to one measure of exchangeable liquid utility in the Middle East fifty centuries or so ago (money).  But there were often ways to opacify performance and game the system.  I am optimistic that technology means this is changing for the better.  Impressively, after this U.S. election cycle, even Dick Morris had to explain himself on FOX. 

So why don't we measure and track legislators, in terms of the effectiveness of the laws they write?

It would be nice to hear people in bars talking about averages for legislators or entire Congresses instead of yards rushing. "Remember that 114th Congress? They had a term average of point eight nine. Those were the glory days. Not like these bums now, they haven't been above point seven oh any single week."

The first thing that's terrifying to contemplate about the legislative process is that the feedback loop (between writing good bills and re-election of the writer) is not just broken, it basically never existed.  Imagine if a company were run like this!  Think about it:  one or a few legislators (out of 435 in the House) write a bill, in committee, invariably with lobbyists "advising" them.  The bill goes to the floor for a vote, which in the U.S. at least will usually be along party lines regardless of the bill's content.  And voters do not reward or punish the legislators who wrote the bill - because voters ignore bills (whether they were good or bad) and decide who to vote for based on what tribal loyalty noises the politician makes during the election, and whether jobs were gained or lost during the last term, which usually has nothing to do with anything the legislator did.  Occasionally a bill will become known for its extreme unpopularity, and for this reason there's every reason to avoid association with laws passed, and few reasons to be associated with them in the minds of voters.  In very rare cases, a bill later becomes very popular, in which case at election time it was their idea all along, and we see five hundred thirty-some gruesome examples of the free rider problem. 

It is truly amazing any law ever gets passed.

(On the complexity of modern government in general and how this breaks the feedback loop, see Steven Teles on "kludgeocracy":  "[it is] hard for Americans to attribute responsibility when things go wrong, thus leading blame to be spread over government in general, rather than affixed precisely, where such blame could do some good. The consequence of complexity, then, is diffuse cynicism, which is the opposite of the habit needed for good democratic citizenship...The complexity that makes so much of American public policy vexing and wasteful for ordinary citizens and governments, however, is also what makes it so easy for organized interests to profit off the state's largesse." Additional emphasis by Salam here.)

This is a problem in medicine, where it's hard to think of a way to put one number on a physician that measures their performance.  Consequently, we use the burdernsome approach of looking individually at every condition they see and procedure they do, and compare them to national averages.  In legislation the problem is worse, because laws are (in theory) solutions to problems that are not just unique but only recently appeared, which is why they now require laws.

A related question to problem #2 is that legislator effectiveness should not be measured just by number of laws produced.  The number of laws sponsored or co-sponsored is in large point dependent on the legislators' committee seats and seniority; and beyond that, just because someone is producing lots of laws,  doesn't mean those are good laws.  In fact part of the measure of legislator effectiveness could be how many laws (and regulations!) they retire, or subsume within new laws.  (A constitution and legal system written in a consistent programming language, requiring the full set of laws to be compiled every time the session ended, would be one way to decrease redundancy and legislative sclerosis.)  It may be appropriate that in a more complex time, we have more laws than we did a hundred years ago, but resignation to this type of legal sediment accumulation is unlikely to produce an optimal government.

One solution to the difficulty of how to measure individual laws would be not allowing a bill unless legislators made a concrete prediction about its effect - and then tracking whether they were right.  The legislators' effectiveness would be some combination of their accuracy, and their effect on a concrete metric - money, jobs, happiness in their district, etc.  No one cares that you were 10 for 10 on declarations that the sun would keep rising in the east, but if you miss a few while increasing quality of life years in your district, maybe you're a keeper.  This of course is a version of futarchy, applied to legislators.  It might actually be easier to install it in a legislature first, before it's installed among the general electorate, since many people are likely to recoil at the suggestion that voting be counted differently for different people for any reason.  But sticking it to Congress, well now you have something!

The Key to Happiness (and Less Violence): Multiple Status Hierarchies

Stephen Pinker has been making the rounds talking about the decline of violence, and in his Edge talk he gets a great question from Jaron Lanier. It's a well-studied phenomenon that being part of more social circles means lower stress, which accords well with the Robert Frank observation that status is a zero-sum game. That is to say, if you play status games (which if you're human, you do) then the best way to avoid stress is to play multiple ones at a time, because people will always try to climb, which in zero-sum games necessarily means they're trying to take status away from you. So if you lose, at least you only lose points in one of the several games you're playing. In contrast, if your whole social world is your job, or your family, or your sports team, etc., then there's a lot more pressure on your status within that team, and if something happens to expel you from grace within that circle you're screwed - and you know it, which is why you're more stressed. Segueing back to Pinker's talk, such unipolar social stress can translate to violence:

JARON LANIER: I'd like to hypothesize one civilizing force, which is the perception of multiple overlapping hierarchies of status. I've observed this to be helpful in work dealing with rehabilitating gang members in Oakland. When there are multiple overlapping hierarchies of status there is more of a chance of people not fighting their superior within the status chain. And the more severe the imposition of the single hierarchy in people's lives, the more likely they are to engage in conflict with one another. Part of America's success is the confusion factor of understanding how to assess somebody's status.

STEVEN PINKER: That's a profound observation. There are studies showing that violence is more common when people are confined to one pecking order, and all of their social worth depends on where they are in that hierarchy, whereas if they belong to multiple overlapping groups, they can always seek affirmations of worth elsewhere. For example, if I do something stupid when I'm driving, and someone gives me the finger and calls me an asshole, it's not the end of the world: I think to myself, I’m a tenured professor at Harvard. On the other hand, if status among men in the street was my only source of worth in life, I might have road rage and pull out a gun.

Every time we read about a workplace shooting, it's difficult to imagine that these men (almost invariably) are well-connected socially outside their office or plant, in sports or family or civic service groups. Pinker's full discussion here; he also points out the decline in autocracies, which also bodes well for decreased violence.

Rand Paul at the Congressional Correspondents Dinner

You gotta love the guy, he actually made a Star Trek reference. Given that he was in D.C., I'm not sure how many people in the room got it.



He's doing a valuable service. We're in a bad spot right now. Democrats are a-okay with being Team America: World Police when it's their guy doing the bombing - and among many, Rachel Maddow's fawning that Obama's "attitude" is what makes the difference is particularly disgusting. I don't think the people dying in what is now our conflict, on either side, particularly care about Obama's attitude. And we hear precious little real opposition from the GOP, who don't dare criticize a war on humanitarian grounds for fear of looking soft.

Of course, one suspicion is that by starting a new war and simultaneously saying he'll encourage new oil drilling inside the U.S. (that's right Democrats, drill baby drill!) Obama is co-opting the GOP's few remaining sane moral and economic points and forcing them further to the fringe. Think how this war will play to the heartland during the 2012 debates when the GOP primary winner tries to call him soft on defense, or says the Democrats are weak on energy. Appointing Jon Huntsman ambassador to China was another move designed to assimiliate possible GOP moderation, and it's still not clear why Huntsman isn't more widely considered a literal Manchurian candidate in the GOP primary field, to torpedo a certain fellow moderate Mormon, and let the evangelicals have their way with the GOP in spring 2012.

The bottom line: the crazier the tea party and social conservatives get, the happier the Obama administration is, and the more rotten (or completely ignored) our discourse and legislative process become. This problem of democracy is not a uniquely American problem. Sarkozy's hair-trigger enthusiasm to bomb someone seems to have been influenced by similar electoral calculations. You're serious about human rights, gentlemen? What about North Korea and Congo and Somalia? I guess human rights must have something to do with oil that we just aren't understanding.

Political strategizing is fine but not when a side effect is using my tax dollars to end human lives.

Spot the Difference, or Political Multiple Choice

Time for some political multiple choice. Pick A or B:

"...[former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin/FBI Director Robert Mueller] said s/he's 'all for' profiling [Muslims/conservatives] if it saves 'innocent American lives.'

"Speaking about the [Fort Hood shooting/Tucson shooting], s/he said there were 'massive warning flags that were missed all over the place' because of a 'fear of being politically incorrect.'"

Which do you think it was? If these are not equivalent, why not?

"Chavez Squeezes Scientific Freedom"

To the rallying cries of "Let's be more like West Virginia!" and "Let's be more like North Korea!", we might add "Let's be more like Venezuela!" The headline above is from Nature. (Scientists have noticed Chavez doing other questionable things before.) While Eric Cantor is not yet in Chavez territory, it's worth it (and fair) to ask him directly if he would like to be.

Electoral District Reform: Give Seats Directly to the Special Interests

A post at opensecret.org described the outcome of the 2012 Congressional elective"Transportation unions lost three seats...And the mining industry gained two new seats." Many states and Congressional districts are transparently dominated by one or a very few industries. So why don't we cut to the chase? Why don't we have legislators that represent labor unions and mineral extraction interests right on their name tags, instead of pretending to represent New Jersey or Wyoming?