Monthly Archives: October 2009

Denying Dominance

By Robin Hanson · October 10, 2009 12:30 pm · Comments (34)

Participants expecting to have a conversation with an obese student were much quicker to indicate that words like “powerful”, “strong” and “dominant” matched their self-concept than were participants expecting to have a conversation with a normal-weight student. …  Moreover, participants expecting to chat to an overweight student reported feeling more socially powerful as revealed by their agreement with statements like “I could make the interaction more enjoyable for my partner” and “I expect that my partner will like me more than I like him”. Finally, participants waiting to talk to an overweight partner also tended to rate their partner more negatively, and were more likely to say that obesity is due to lack of willpower.

More here.  Humans clearly attend closely to status, an important part of status is dominance, and a key way we show dominance is to tell others what to do.  Whoever gets to tell someone else what to do is dominating, and affirming their own status.  But we are also clearly built to not notice most of our status moves, and so we attribute them to other motives.  And as long as we are making up motives, we might as well make up the most admired of motives, altruism.

So we tend to think we tell others what to do in order to help them, and not to dominate them.  In particular we tend to think we tell fat folks what to do, and control their behavior, because this will help those fat folks.  For example, many support taxing soda or fast food in order to help fat folks.

Yet it is completely crazy to imagine that fat folks have not yet heard that fat might be unhealthy or unattractive.  Believe me, they’ve heard!  If they are choosing to be fat, they are doing so reasonably informed of the consequences.  Our constant anti-fat “public health” messages are not at all kind – such messages just serve to put fat folks down, and lift the rest of us up.  If anyone is so clueless as to need constant reminders, it is those who can’t see their own over-bearing domination, such as putting down fat folks to lift themselves up.

Hat tip to Stefano Bertolo and Tyler Cowen.

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Fear of Near Death Thoughts

By Robin Hanson · October 9, 2009 12:05 am · Comments (23)

Sadly Hal Finney, who wrote many great posts here at OB, has ALS:

ALS … is only mostly fatal. When breathing begins to fail, ALS patients must make a choice. They have the option to either go onto invasive mechanical respiration, which involves a tracheotomy and breathing machine, or they can die in comfort. I was very surprised to learn that over 90% of ALS patients choose to die. And even among those who choose life, for the great majority this is an emergency decision made in the hospital during a medical respiratory crisis. …

Probably fewer than 1% of ALS patients arrange to go onto ventilation when they are still in relatively good health, even though this provides the best odds for a successful transition.  With mechanical respiration, survival with ALS can be indefinitely extended. And the great majority of people living on respirators say that their quality of life is good. …

There are a number of practical and financial obstacles to successfully surviving on a ventilator, foremost among them the great load on caregivers. No doubt this contributes to the high rates of choosing death. But it seems that much of the objection is philosophical. People are not happy about being kept alive by machines. … I hope that when the time comes, I will choose life. …. Stephen Hawking, the world’s longest surviving ALS patient at over 40 years since diagnosis, is said to be able to type at ten words per minute by twitching a cheek muscle.

Medicine and health are strange and distorted in large part because of the misnamed “fear of death.”  If we really feared death, we would think hard and critically about how to avoid death, and we would succeed a lot more.  Instead, however, we fear thinking about our own death, especially in near mode.  Near mode favors practical analytical reasoning, while far mode favors symbolic creative reasoning.  When we are forced to think about our death we run screaming into far mode, placing us at a further psychological distance, but hindering our ability to think practically.

My best idea for reforming medicine is for us to each put our medical decisions in the hands of someone with expert knowledge and a clear financial incentive to make good health vs. cost tradeoffs.  Unfortunately, this suggestion to put med choices in an expert hard-headed near-mode mind doesn’t hit the right symbolic chords in our far-mode avoiding-death-thoughts minds.

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Beware Book Learning

By Robin Hanson · October 7, 2009 11:15 pm · Comments (32)

My youngest son Andy is a junior at arguably the best public high school in the US: Thomas Jefferson in Fairfax County Virginia.   At back to school night tonight I asked his AP Computer Science teacher if/how they encouraged a modular programming style.  He said this wasn’t necessary since they used objects in JAVA, and modularity comes automatically from objects.

My jaw would have dropped had I been less polite. This is so amazingly wrong that I’m not even sure what a good analogy is – I’d better understand a physics teacher working on perpetual motion machines.  My nine years as a computer researcher taught me that modularity is by far our single most powerful programming tool.  Sure objects might help, but only a bit; one must attend to modularity everywhere.

Yes it makes sense for this teacher to ignore modularity if the AP exam ignores it.  And perhaps it even makes sense for the exam to ignore it since modularity tests might take lots longer than other tests.  But for someone with five years experience teaching computing at the nation’s best public high school to not even know that modularity goes way beyond objects – that seems a sad example of off-the-rails book learning.

My wife thought my complaint ridiculous, and didn’t think I should voice it within earshot of other parents.  He was a teacher after all, and I’m just a parent.  (I worry – could I be that book-learning wrong about anything I teach, relative to what practitioners know?)

This example supports the claim that it is mostly the students not the teachers who makes good schools good, and that even in computer science signaling takes precedence over learning.

Fortunately Andy’s other computing teacher seems to know what he is doing.  Andy claims he is well aware of the importance of modularity, and there is some evidence of that in the games he has written (see Rhodium Games and its YouTube soundtracks.)

I fear too many kids see the key to success as scoring on tests and classes and doing politically-correct extra-curricular activities, instead of taking on substantial projects where they learn a bit more about how things really work.  I’m somewhat (but only somewhat) glad I went to a college that was too easy for me, and that the girls showed me little interest, making me invent and pursue my own projects.

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Self Assured Destruction

By Robin Hanson · October 7, 2009 12:05 am · Comments (18)

If you thought mutually assured destruction was strange, wrap your mind around this:

An actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, [was] always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. … Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one. The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched. …

The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they’ve never heard of it. … So why didn’t the Soviets tell the world, or at least the White House, about it? … In fact, the Soviet military didn’t even inform its own civilian arms negotiators. … The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves. … By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. … No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge.

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Disasters Are Worth Preventing

By Robin Hanson · October 4, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (11)

In August I reported that economic disasters seem thin-tailed, and so are not existential risks.  Even so, it seems we should still devote more attention to them:

What is the likelihood that the U.S. will experience a devastating catastrophic event over the next few decades — something that would substantially reduce the capital stock, GDP and wealth?  …  How much should society be willing to pay to reduce the probability or likely impact of such an event?  We address these questions using a general equilibrium model that describes production, capital accumulation, and household preferences, and includes as an integral part the possible arrival of catastrophic shocks. …

We model catastrophes as Poisson events with some mean arrival rate, and an impact characterized by a one-parameter [thin-tailed] power probability distribution. … We calibrate our model so that it fits the basic data for the consumption-investment ratio, the risk-free interest rate, the equity premium, Tobin’s q , and the average real growth rate.  We thereby calculate the implied characteristics of catastrophes, and also determine how those characteristics vary over a range of values for the preference parameters. …

We found the annual probability of a catastrophe to between 0 and about .04. A reasonable estimate would be in the middle of our range, i.e., around .02. This is close to Barro’s (2006) estimate from historical data, but was obtained in a very different way. Our estimates of the impact distribution and expected loss should a catastrophe occur are tighter, but depend on the index of risk aversion (which we take to be between 2 and 4). However, the expected losses are large; about 26 to 32 percent …  We calculated … the permanent tax on consumption that society would accept to reduce the annual probability of a catastrophe by some percentage. Using the mid-range estimate of .02 for the annual probability, a permanent consumption tax of about 9 percent would be justified if it could cut this probability in half. Even if the probability is lower than .02, our results suggest that governments should devote greater resources to reducing the risk and potential impact of a global catastrophe.

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In Praise Of Blackmail

By Robin Hanson · October 2, 2009 5:10 pm · Comments (65)

Society – civilized society at least – is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. The Picture of Dorian Grey

On Wednesday I puzzled over areas of life where:

People seem to insist quite firmly that they do not want to hear lies, where the consequences of believing lies are substantial, where the costs to reliably determine if a lie happened could be low, and yet where lies are legal.

Today the Post reminded us that the puzzle is much bigger.  Not only don’t we use public law to punish many big lies, we actively prevent private parties from punishing them:

David Letterman … announced that he’d had sex with female “Late Show” staffers and that someone had tried to extort $2 million from him to keep quiet about the relationships. … The man who attempted to extort the money was … arrested Thursday on charges of attempted grand larceny in the first degree. … [He] had threatened to go public with the details if the late-night host did not pay …

Instead, Letterman said that he took the matter to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and that he was told by authorities to issue the person a phony check. That ruse reportedly led to the arrest … Letterman said on camera. “Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Perhaps it would.”  He added, however: “I feel like I need to protect these people. I need to certainly protect my family.”  Letterman and longtime girlfriend Regina Lasko married in March.

Yes, good thing the public-spirited Letterman risked himself to save us all from such horrid criminals, those who would seek financial gain by exposing celebrity sex lies.  Good thing we also have whistle blower laws giving large financial rewards to heroic citizens who expose drug companies who tell docs truths about drugs.  So many good things to be thankful for.  Sigh.

I would favor overturning anti-blackmail laws.  If we did this, these would be the main consequences:  Rich celebrities would lose money, do fewer illicit things, lie about them less, and trust their associates less.  They’d be more often exposed for lying about doing illicit things.  People would try a little less hard to become such rich celebrities.  The associates of rich celebrities would be a little richer, and people would try a little harder to become such folks.  Fans would not be able to idolize their celebrities quite as much, and would be less often offered roles as illicit activity partners.   Which of these consequences do we fear so much that we forbid blackmail?

Added 11:30a: These concerns expressed so far all apply to whistleblowers as well: privacy, info could be false, threatened folks could resort to murder, non-rich people may be effected, we don’t trust our rules to be reasonable, no wealth is created by the financial transfer, and most parties have done something that looks illicit.   So why promote whistleblowers but ban blackmail?

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True Violence

By Robin Hanson · October 2, 2009 12:00 am · Comments (61)

I’ll never trust movie violence again. From the first chapter of Collin’s book Violence:

One reason that real violence looks so ugly is because we have been exposed to so much mythical violence. … Contemporary film style … may give many people the sense that entertainment violence is, if anything, too realistic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. … [They] miss the most important dynamics of violence: that it starts from confrontational tension and fear, that most of the time it is bluster, and that the circumstances that allow this tension to be over­ come lead to violence that is more ugly than entertaining. …

A particularly silly myth is that fights are contagious. This is a staple of old film comedies and melodramas. One person punches another in a crowded bar … and in the next frames everyone is hitting everyone around them. This fighting of all against all, I am quite certain, has never occurred as a serious matter in real life. … Continue reading "True Violence" »

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Open Thread

By Robin Hanson · October 1, 2009 10:00 am · Comments (42)

This is our monthly place to discuss related topics that haven’t appeared in recent posts.

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