Monthly Archives: March 2009

Lying With Style

By Robin Hanson · March 5, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (13)

Clear and Simple as the Truth, the best book I've read in years, explains the virtues and lies of a very popular writing style.  Excerpts:

A [writing] style is defined by its conceptual stand on truth, presentation, writer, reader, thought, language, and their relationships. … Classic style is in its own view clear and simple as the truth. It adopts the stance that its purpose is presentation; its motive is disinterested truth. Successful presentation consists of aligning language with truth, and the test of this alignment is clarity and simplicity. The idea that presentation is successful when language is aligned with truth implies that truth can be known; truth needs no argument but only accurate presentation; the reader is competent to recognize truth; the symmetry between writer and reader allows the presentation to follow the model of conversation; a natural language is sufficient to express truth; and the writer knows the truth before he puts it into language. …

Classic style is focused and assured. Its virtues are clarity and simplicity; in a sense, so are its vices. It declines to acknowledge ambiguities, unessential qualifications, doubts, or other styles. It declines to acknowledge that it is a style. It makes its hard choices silently and out of the reader's sight. Once made, those hard choices are not acknowledged to be choices at all; they are presented as if they are inevitable, because classic style is, above all, a style of presentation with claims to transparency. …

Classic style is neither shy nor ambiguous about fundamentals. The style rests on the assumptions that it is possible to think disinterestedly, to know the results of disinterested thought, and to present them without fundamental distortion. In this view, thought precedes writing. All of these assumptions may be wrong, but they help to define a style whose usefulness is manifest. …

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Question Medical Findings

By Stuart Buck · March 4, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (21)

A recurring theme here is the difficulty in knowing whether some (much?) of modern healthcare is actually beneficial or not.  A couple of recent links that add support to that theme:

1. From JAMA, a new study analyzes more than two decades of heart care guidelines (that is, the guidelines that your doctor might follow in deciding how to treat you) from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. The study found that the overwhelming majority of recommendations are not supported by good evidence:

Level of evidence provides the link between recommendations and evidence base. Although there is significant variation among individual guidelines in available evidence supporting recommendations, the median of level of evidence A recommendations [i.e., those supported by more than one randomized trial] is only 11% across current guidelines, whereas the most common grade assigned is level of evidence C, indicating little to no objective empirical evidence for the recommended action. . . . Interestingly, our findings are reflective of a specialty — cardiology — that has a large pool of research to draw on for its care recommendations. Guidelines in other medical areas in which large clinical trials are performed less frequently may have an even weaker evidence-based foundation.

2. In this post, Dr. Eades criticizes (convincingly, I think) a recent study purporting to show that statins reduce mortality.

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Six Months Later

By Robin Hanson · March 3, 2009 9:45 pm · Comments (18)

Six months ago I asked here what Tyler Cowen and I should discuss on Blogging Heads TV.  I got sick on our scheduled day, but we are finally on again for Tuesday.  Your suggestions from before are fine, but an awful lot has happened since – not quite 28 Days Later scale, but a lot.  So I thought I'd ask again; Tyler also asked at Marginal Revolution. 

Also, March 24 I will debate Bryan Caplan at GMU on "Liberty vs. Efficiency."  What a fun month!

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What Changed?

By Robin Hanson · March 3, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (53)

It is becoming increasingly clear that Obama's proposed policies go well beyond what we might need just to respond to the economic crisis; he's making a bid for great changes in national policy.  The Democrats do now control the U.S. presidency and both houses of Congress, but usually that wouldn't be enough to think they could get away with this; they would fear a public backlash at the next election.  So they must think the public is now more receptive to Democrat-style large policy changes.  I don't know that they are wrong, but this does raise the question: if so, what does the public think has changed?

Economists don't think this crisis has added that much to our total dataset; Obama's economists may think his new proposals are good ideas, but they almost all thought so a year ago as well.  So is it that the public learned something that experts already knew?  Or does the public just want to affiliate with the impressive unusually high-status elites pushing these proposals? 

Bryan Caplan asks:

If the government had followed a laissez-faire policy for the last six months, and output, employment, housing, and financial markets stood exactly where they stand today, what fraction of people would conclude that "Events decisively prove that laissez-faire is a disaster"?  Can you honestly give any answer less than 90%?

My best guess is that we are seeing the "ratchet effect"; voters expect more government to be a better response to most any big crisis than less government.  Let me pose the question differently:  can you imagine any crisis where voters would expect a substantial reduction in government to be the best response?  If you can't, that says there is almost no prospect for a crisis-induced libertarian revolution.

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Status Affiliation Puzzles

By Robin Hanson · March 2, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (43)

Recently I posted on otherwise puzzling behavior that can be easily explained via seeking status via affiliations.

I see more examples:

  • Voters far prefer representatives over direct democracy or random selection.
  • Donors prefer to picking grantees, over giving prizes to whoever succeeds.
  • Homeowners don't give good money incentives to real estate brokers.
  • Investors prefer actively managed funds that lose on average.  
  • Decision markets lose overwhelmingly to heroic "decider" managers.

In all these cases standard economic accounts seem to seriously miss the mark by ignoring strong human desires to gain status via affiliation.  As most of my institution design efforts suffer this problem, understanding this better is, to me, of the highest priority.

Added 3Mar:  It is usually possible to make up many explanations for any puzzling behavior, and some of these may fit well with our own conscious explanations for our behavior.  But the details in most of these cases seems hard to fit with most of the other proposed explanations, and we know that status is very important to people yet they do not like to admit they do things for status. 

The key to taking this idea further is to better understand just what sort of relations most confer status via affiliation.  It seems to me that arms-length formal relations where you each minimize your risk from the other's bad behavior do not show a mutually trusting relation, which as a closer connection confers more status via the relation.  So people are eager to trust high status affiliates, without evidence and even against the evidence. 

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OB meetup Friday 13th 7PM Springfield VA

By Philip Goetz · March 1, 2009 7:30 pm · Comments (21)

Do you believe in luck?  If not, and you live near DC, come to an OB meetup at my place southwest of Washington DC on Friday March 13th, at 7PM!  If you reply to this post and say you want to come, AND provide your real e-mail in the "email" line when you post, I'll email back with details.  (The email address provided by each commentator gets sent to the author of the original post.)

Even if I know you're coming, replying here will let others know who's coming.

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Augustine’s Paradox of optimal repentance

By Philip Goetz · March 1, 2009 4:09 pm · Comments (68)

Eliezer once wrote this about Newcomb's problem:

Nonetheless, I would like to present some of my motivations on Newcomb's Problem – the reasons I felt impelled to seek a new theory – because they illustrate my source-attitudes toward rationality. Even if I can't present the theory that these motivations motivate…

First, foremost, fundamentally, above all else:

Rational agents should WIN.

As I just commented on another thread, this is faith in rationality, which is an oxymoron.

It isn't obvious whether there is a rational winning approach to Newcomb's problem. But here's a similar, simpler problem that billions of people have believed was real, which I'll call Augustine's Paradox ("Lord, make me chaste – but not yet!")

All conservative variants of Christianity teach, in one way or another, that your eternal fate depends on your state in the last moment of your life. If you live a nearly-flawless Christian life, but have a sinful thought ten minutes before dying and the priest has already left, you go to Hell. If you are sinful all your life but repent in your final minute, you go to Heaven.

The optimal self-interested strategy is to act selfishly all your life, and then repent at the final moment. But if you repent as part of a plan, it won't work; you'll go to Hell anyway. The optimal strategy is to be selfish all your life, without intending to repent, and then repent in your final moments and truly mean it.

I don't think there's any rational winning strategy here. Yet the purely emotional strategy of fear plus an irrationally large devaluation of the future wins.

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Open Thread

By Robin Hanson · March 1, 2009 10:00 am · Comments (43)

Here is our monthly place to discuss issues not covered in our other posts.

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