Monthly Archives: November 2010

Real Creativity

By Robin Hanson · November 13, 2010 2:00 pm · Comments (12)

Munira Mirza’s ’08 review of Creativity: Unconventional Wisdom from 20 Accomplished Minds:

The editors’ corporate conceptualisation of ‘creativity’ makes this collection about as exciting as a the spring show from Marks and Spencers. … What is creativity? … the respondents give a rather similar (and by the end of the book, dull) answer – it’s thinking out of the box, it’s breaking the rules, it’s challenging convention. …

In fact, creative people don’t think of themselves as ‘creatives’ with a particular mentality to boot (unless, of course, they run a creative consultancy, in which case it’s necessary for promotional purposes). They think of themselves as novelists, engineers, software designers, journalists, artists, and so on. … They make things and are preoccupied with the things they make, unbothered with developing a ‘creative’ mentality. … It is their engagement with their chosen activity that drives them, rather than some kind of personal predisposition or character type. …

We live in a society obsessed with cultivating the creative mind: on this view, the mental attitude is all that matters, regardless of what end product it actually makes. This shift has taken place most profoundly in arts education. … And now, we have a deluge of state sponsored initiatives to encourage creativity in people (creative industries, Creative Partnerships, creative quarters, etc) but a dearth of the skills that allow people to create. …

There are many examples in the book when creativity is shown to be a team effort, rather than the spark of an individual genius …. Creativity is also something that requires hard work and intellectual energy, rather than spontaneity. … Karl Marx pointed out that when people engage in creative labour they are required to pay close attention both to the concrete practice of creating, and the conceptualisation of the end product. (more; HT Rachel Armstrong)

Yup.  I’ll admit it; Murina’s more (academic-style) articulate than I on the subject.

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Bah Sophistication

By Robin Hanson · November 12, 2010 12:00 pm · Comments (60)

On the radio recently some guy said he didn’t want his new kid to have electronic toys, so he looked up his old favorite, Legos, on the web. He was horrified to see websites for obsessive adult male hobbyists, who devoted decades and huge sums to develop lego masterpieces. He worried his kid might grow up like that.

Me, I worry my kids will grow up to be the opposite: sophisticated. While such folks can be very smart and capable, they are uninteresting. I blame their having too many hobbies. Their conversations swirl around the same standard topics: food, music, movies, novels, travel, sports, clothes, houses, politics, etc., all of which they each feel the need to be ready to quip. Sophisticated folks are horrified to seem to not care or know the standard amount about any standard hobby. The sort of folks one wants to know, e.g., to invite to a dinner party, simply must be ready to converse lightly and intelligently (if not insightfully) on the latest fashions in all such areas. The problem is that maintaining a basic proficiency in all these topics, in addition to keeping up a job and family, etc., takes a up pretty much all their time and energy.

Interesting folks, in contrast, get so far into a particular topic that they become at risk of violating conversation etiquette, by talking too enthusiastically for too long on topics of minor interest to sophisticates. Yes, interesting folk are at risk of being distracted from dress or hygiene, or from carefully climbing their local status ladder. But they are also at risk of making a unique contribution to the world. They are also the sort of person from which you might actually hear something new, something you couldn’t hear from a million different sophisticates.

Of course our vast world of huge organizations has many roles for sophisticates as conformist middle managers and professionals, as they can better size each other up and talk in a common vocabulary. There are also roles for interesting folks, but more off to the edges, where their awkward obsessions least disrupt the smooth flow of sophisticate banter. But interesting folk are still the people I most want to talk to, to know, and to be.

Added: Adam Ozimek riffs.

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Expand Bounty Hunting

By Robin Hanson · November 11, 2010 1:00 pm · Comments (44)

Why do most people want their teachers, doctors, detectives, soldiers, park rangers, etc. to be state employees, or heavily regulated “professionals,” instead of vigorously competing business-folk? Yes, many specific market failure rationales are offered, but it seems to me that humans also feel a psychological need to keep their sacred social institutions looking similar to the families, bands, and fiefdoms of their distant ancestors. We want something like key people swearing an oath of loyalty to us and our dearest norms; otherwise it just doesn’t feel right.

Such psychological needs seem to me our biggest barriers to making an efficient flexible legal system capable of rapid and effective adaptation to the huge sudden economic changes I foresee. We insist, for example, that those who investigate and prosecute criminal law must be state employees operating under a single unified command, as in an ancient fiefdom. And even though for-profit bounty hunters have been consistently cheaper and more effective at making accused folks show up for trial, most nations ban such hunters, and legal elites in the few remaining nations very much want to do the same (Quotes below.)

Yet it seems to me that we’d probably be better off if generalized bounty hunters replaced government detectives and prosecutors on most sorts of crime! Here’s how it could work. For each type of crime, we’d set a bounty amount to be paid to anyone who successfully convinced a court that a particular in-custody person had committed that sort of crime. (What to do with the guilty party is then a separate issue.) We’d have to decide what investigative powers to grant bounty hunters, what regulations to impose on them, and what plea-bargains to allow. We’d also have to set rules on when to detain suspects, and how to prevent double jeopardy. (Options below.) We might want especially solid anti-trust regulations, to prevent bounty hunters from conspiring to create a police state.

But if such regulations worked, we’d gain the advantages of economic competition – not only better efficiency, specialization, and adaptation to change, but also more uniform legal treatment and reduced corruption. Instead of having the level of crime enforcement vary by neighborhood or ethnicity, as it does now, or having police and prosecutors go easy on their friends and extra hard on those they dislike, profit-driven bounty hunter firms would be just as eager to prosecute similar crimes regardless where they happened or by who. And each bounty hunter firm would be eager to profit by exposing the crimes of its competitors. This stands in stark contrast to the way we now tolerate corruption by having crime labs and corruption investigators report to the same police chief who would be embarrassed by exposed corruption.

The main downsides of this approach are close to its upsides: we’d actually uniformly enforce the laws on our books. Politically connected people and districts could less use “suction” to tilt the scales of justice their way, and we’d have to admit when we aren’t serious about enforcing laws with very low bounties. We’d also have to admit when we can’t solve cases, and can’t find something to pin on undesirables.

Now for those promised quotes. From the NYT in ’08: Continue reading "Expand Bounty Hunting" »

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Flexible Law Wins

By Robin Hanson · November 10, 2010 4:00 pm · Comments (24)

The transitions to farming and to industry were associated with huge sudden increases in growth rates. Growth had remained pretty steady before each transition, and then boom, within a quarter of a previous doubling time, doubling times fell by over a factor of 150. Going by the number of doublings in these previous modes, we are already overdue for another transition. So I suspect that within a century or so we will see another such “singularity.” And since the current doubling time is about fifteen years, we should roughly expect that within a space of about five years the world economy will transition to doubling every few weeks or less.

Previous transitions were uneven in the sense that some places gained advantages by being first with the new mode. While such transition-induced inequality seems to have fallen over time, large inequalities will probably also occur with a new future mode, as some places more quickly adapt and welcome it. So which places will gain most from the next transition?

One obvious possibility is that places where the new relevant tech originates will gain an advantage. But while important, this matters less than tech folks assume. More important is which places have key inputs required for the new mode, and a big demand for the outputs of the new mode. These input and demand factors should heavily favor the world’s then most well-balanced and prosperous economies.

However, a fourth factor may matter most: legal and regulatory flexibility. If it is to radically remake the economy within a space of five years, this new mode will quickly run afoul of a wide range of existing laws and regulations. Places that require many years of discourse between diverse stakeholders to begin even incremental legal and regulatory changes are just not going to be where this new mode first grows big. Much more promising are places where new industries and ventures can just do things, or lobby a small set of key decision makers to quickly get big changes, and commit to keeping such changes. Random empty declarations of policy changes that could easily be soon reversed, or not enforced, won’t do either.

Given all these relevant factors, it remains quite unclear which places will be the most congenial to the next big growth mode. Perhaps change will favor places where policy is decided at a more local level, as local policy is easier to change.  (This favors, for example, municipalizing medicine.)

But if you believe a big change is coming, and hope for your place to gain first-mover advantages from it, this flexibility question seems key. It is where feasible policy changes have the biggest chance of actually making a consistent difference.

By the way, the contract-law core of our legal system is actually remarkable general, general enough to allow a great range of law within the same framework, and large perhaps even sudden peaceful voluntary transitions within that framework. Most actual legal systems do not allow such a wide general use of contract, however, and it is not clear whether any will anytime soon.

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Light Rights Tangles

By Robin Hanson · November 9, 2010 5:00 pm · Comments (23)

We are a long way from running out of room, rocks, and sunlight on Earth, but eventually, probably well within a thousand years, our descendants will colonize our Solar System in earnest. When they do, they will have to answer some key property rights questions:

  • How do things go from unowned to owned? An auction? First to touch/use in some way?
  • What orbital rights-of-way can be owned? Only Sun-centered spheres? Any initially used orbit and any changes that don’t intersect other used orbits?
  • Who can block what sunlight? Let anyone block anything? Can’t block used light without permission?

On this last question, I can see light rights easily evolving as did water rights on Earth, where those using some water for a while gained a right to keep on using it. However, on reflection this seems like a mistake for sunlight. Imagine one gained a right to sunlight in a certain orbit after one had used it that way for a while. Once there came to be lots of complex orbits of things using sunlight, it would become very hard to contract with all those light owners to put together the rights to build something large orbiting closer to the sun. Such a new close thing would naturally block many far away things.

Yet the long term efficient use of sunlight would probably involve fewer big collectors orbiting close to the Sun. Thus a natural initial way to allocate light rights would lead naturally to an inefficient long-term allocation of those rights. So it might be better to start the light rights system off differently. I suggest having the property rights be that anyone can block anyone’s light as long as doing so is accidental and doesn’t seem especially targeted at blocking their light. This system would eventually allow a smoother transition to the more efficient arrangement of having fewer big close light collectors.

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Hypergamy Hypothesis

By Robin Hanson · November 8, 2010 8:30 pm · Comments (15)

My last post said teen males want more sex than teen females. Older men also often complain of women withholding sex, while women complain of men demanding too much sex. From a typical top ten complaints list:

[Women About Men:] 3. They are not affectionate enough.  4. They tend to bypass sexual foreplay.

[Men About Women:] 1. Women complain, criticize and nag too much. …  4. They tend to withhold sex as a punishment or blackmail.

This is often explained in part via women just caring less about sex than men. Men often see the entire dating/mating process a sport where they pay costs, jump hurdles, pass tests, etc. in the hopes of gaining sex. In that view, women seem more interested in the costs men pay and the hurdles they jump than in the sex itself. But consider:

‎A multi-year study look[ed] at the relationship satisfaction of men and women from five countries who’ve been married more than 20 years. In men … a number of factors could predict relationship satisfaction, including health, sexual functioning and intimacies like kissing and cuddling. In women, only sexual functioning — level of desire, frequency of arousal and orgasm — seemed to predict satisfaction.

This suggests that older women care more about sex than men. Perhaps this result is just wrong, but if not the hypergamy hypothesis offers a resolution: unhappy men could be satisfied by more sex from their partner, but unhappy women mainly want sex from other better men. So while it makes sense for men to ask their partner for more sex, there’s little point in women requesting access to other men.  So women instead complain about everything else.

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Teen Sex Deals

By Robin Hanson · November 8, 2010 2:00 pm · Comments (2)

A new paper on who gets what in teen ties confirms prior results:

Data include an in-school survey of almost 90,000 seventh to twelfth grade students at a randomly sampled set of 80 communities across the United States. …

Women are having sex more than they would like and men are having sex less than they would like. … Conditional on being in a relationship, the fraction of 12th grade women who are having sex is much higher than the fraction who would like to be having sex. This is in contrast to 9th grade women whose preferences for sex are similar to what actually occurs. For men, it is the 12th grade men whose preferences align with what actually happens in their relationships while 9th grade men in relationships are having substantially less sex than they would like. … Increases in the outside options [of other women to date] for male partners increasing the chances of sex occurring [in a relationship.] …

Sex is valued above and beyond the relationship itself. … Males have stronger preferences for sex than females. For males, but not for females, grade of the partner influences the utility of sex with men preferring to have sex with older partners. Those who have had sex in the past also have a much stronger preference for sex in the present. … Women prefer to be matched with older men and … this preference is stronger than the preference by men to have sex with older women rather than younger women. In contrast, men only prefer older women when the relationship is accompanied by sex.

Individuals also prefer to be matched with those in the same grade and the same race. … Both sides of the market are sacrificing their preferred relationship terms to increase their chances of matching.

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Why Are Rich Stingy?

By Robin Hanson · November 8, 2010 1:00 am · Comments (14)

A month ago I suggested that left vs. right political attitudes roughly correspond to forager vs. farmer attitudes:

We acted like farmers when farming required that, but when richer we feel we can afford to revert to more natural-feeling forager ways. The main exceptions, like school and workplace domination and ranking, are required to generate industry-level wealth.

Today I should acknowledge some apparently conflicting data:

Data are from 31 nations and 66,777 individual respondents … In poor countries, but not in rich, most believe that family needs legitimate higher pay. Within countries—particularly English-speaking ones—low SES groups endorse family needs, but high SES groups reject them. (more)

Across 4 studies, lower class individuals proved to be more generous (Study 1), charitable (Study 2), trusting (Study 3), and helpful (Study 4) compared with their upper class counterparts. Mediator and moderator data showed that lower class individuals acted in a more prosocial fashion because of a greater commitment to egalitarian values and feelings of compassion. (more)

Two kinds of processes should interact here, and may work at cross-purposes. While on the one hand humans may be programmed to develop different attitudes when rich, on the other hand some attitudes may be more effective than others at creating wealth. While my forager-farmer hypothesis suggests that humans naturally return to more-forager-like egalitarian attitudes when rich, observed correlations between wealth and egalitarian attitudes should also be influenced whether egalitarian attitudes assist or hinder the accumulation of wealth.

So the above data showing that rich people and nations tend to be less egalitarian could still be consistent with my forager-farmer hypothesis if forager-style egalitarian attitudes tend on average to hinder the creation and accumulation of wealth, relative to farmer-style attitudes. And if this tendency is stronger than the other wealth causing attitudes tendency I postulate. For example, perhaps egalitarian envy discourages entrepreneurial risk, or prevents more efficient ventures from displacing less efficient ones.

Added 10a: Another response is to just consider this to be part of the “main exceptions” clause of my claim – a way in which we do not move to forager ways when rich, because it is central to what makes us rich.

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Where Inequality Matters

By Robin Hanson · November 7, 2010 10:00 am · Comments (9)

People do care about their income relative to others, especially coworkers:

A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. … The vast majority of new users access[ed] data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. … Workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. (more)

If, as seems likely, coworker envy is much stronger than envy of distant strangers, then it is good to let each firm choose its internal level of inequality.  They internalize most of the envy externality, and so have good incentives to trade that against other relevant considerations in choosing employee incomes.

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Result Blind Review

By Robin Hanson · November 6, 2010 12:00 pm · Comments (12)

Three and a half years ago I proposed results-blind journal review:

Consider conclusion-blind review.  Authors would write, post, and submit at least two versions of each paper, with opposite conclusions.  Only after a paper was accepted would they say which conclusion was real.

On reflection, I’d modify that proposal. I’d add an extra round of peer review. In the first found, all conclusions about signs, amounts, and significance would be blanked out. After a paper had passed the first round, the reviewers would see the full paper. While reviewers might then allow the conclusions to influence their evaluation, they could not as easily hide such bias. Reviewers who rejected on the second round after accepting on the first round would feel pressure to explain what about the actual results, over and above the method, suggested that the paper was poor.

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