Monthly Archives: January 2011

Why Not Censor?

By Robin Hanson · January 9, 2011 8:45 pm · Comments (24)

An important kind of regulation is paternalism regarding individual behavior – we often prohibit or require certain choices, and say this is because people can make mistakes. The story told is that expert regulators can carefully consider the mistakes we are likely to make, and adjust our sets of available choices with an eye to reducing those mistakes. Paternalistic regulations now limit, for example, the investments you can make, the food and drugs you can consume, the professionals you can employ, the cars you can drive, etc.

When considering any particular regulation, officials should consider hoped-for gains from fewer mistakes on the one hand, and then on the other hand subtract expected losses from frustrating preferences, reducing innovation, and enforcement costs. When considering whether to allow regulation in some area, voters should also consider the possibility of incompetent, corrupt, or partisan regulatiors.

While public and elite opinion supports many kinds of regulation, there also appears to be a widely-held consensus against one kind of regulation: censorship. While we accept some limits on what kids can hear, and a few limits on extreme adult expressions, the standard view is that ordinary adults should mostly be allowed to speak and hear whatevever they want.

Yet the same human flaws that lead us to mistakenly consume investments, drugs, cars, or professionals can lead us to mistakenly consume claims, arguments, and opinions. And expert regulators have an apparently similar potential to help people by identifying and removing poor choices from their available consumption options. Why are we so eager to regulate so much individual behavior, yet so reluctant to endorse censorship?

It can’t be because our beliefs and opinions don’t matter – they often matter greatly. Yes, censorship can interfere with the competition of ideas and the evolution of better ones, but regulation can interfere with innovation in most any area. Yes, we do like to interfere in the competition of ideas by favoring some ideas via school curricula, public service messages, and subsidized art. But we still usually stop short of actually censoring messages opposed to those we favor and subsidize.

Actually, we don’t stop short as much with for-profit corporations. For example, we won’t let alcohol makers advertize the fact that most research finds those who drink more are healthier. But we are more reluctant to limit what non-profits can say about the subject. This suggests to me that one big thing going on is an anti-dominance instinct against for-profit firms. We are in general reluctant to limit choices, whether of ideas or other things, but we are more willing to make an exception for products and services offered by for-profit firms, especially big ones.

One big noteworthy exception to this pattern is reporters; we are reluctant to limit what large for-profit news firms can say. News firms have somehow sold themselves as being smaller opponents of bigger maybe-illicitly-dominating governments. When most firms are regulated against their will, they are also smaller opponents of bigger maybe-illicitly-dominating governments. But in those cases we side with the bigger governments against the smaller firms. So why side with big news firms against a bigger government?

I suspect there are multiple equilibria here.  When governments limit criticism we accept their claim that firms must not be allowed to speak freely, but when news firms are allowed to tell us they shouldn’t be censored, we believe and support this position.

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Unequal Folks Save

By Robin Hanson · January 8, 2011 9:35 am · Comments (29)

Our forager ancestors developed a strong aversion to inequality, for good functional reasons. Norms against dominance were humanity’s first strong social norms. But our world is a very different place now, and other than our inherited dislike of inequality, it is not clear that inequality is on net good or bad. Since researchers are intuitively so averse to inequality, however, they are reluctant to publish on inequality’s advantages.  So it is worth paying attention when they do:

Using the Chinese Urban Household Survey data between 1997 and 2006, we find that income inequality has a negative (positive) effect on household consumption net of education expenditures (savings) even after we control for household income. We argue that people save to improve their social status when social status is associated with pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits. Rising income inequality can strengthen the incentives of status-seeking savings by increasing the benefit of improving status, and by enlarging the wealth level required for status upgrading. We also find that the negative effect of income inequality on consumption is stronger for poorer and younger people and that income inequality stimulates more education investment, which are consistent with the status-seeking hypothesis. (more)

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Bad News: Kant & Bets

By Robin Hanson · January 7, 2011 11:30 am · Comments (36)

The famous philosopher Kant saw bets as encouraging thoughtfulness and discouraging self-deception:

The usual touchstone of whether what someone asserts is mere persuasion or at least a subjective conviction, i.e., firm belief, is betting. Often someone pronounces his propositions with such confident and inflexible defiance that he seems to have entirely laid aside all concern for error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes he reveals that he is persuaded enough for one ducat but not for ten. For he would happily bet one, but at ten he suddenly becomes aware of what he had not previously noticed, namely that it is quite possible that he has erred. (Critique of Pure Reason, A824/B852; more; HT Tyler)

If we were to see life out there in the universe, at or below our level of development, that would be bad news regarding our future.  It would suggest that more of the great filter that stands between dead matter and expanding civilization lies ahead of our place on that path. Similarly, it is bad news to hear that Kant had a high opinion of the accuracy advantages of bets.  Let me explain.

I hope for a future where betting markets are a commonly used mechanism to create official consensus beliefs, but I must explain the fact that they are not already often used this way.  What barriers have stood in their way? One barrier is widespread skepticism about bet accuracy. But hearing of Kant’s well-known position reduces my estimate of this barrier; many respected people have long respected bet accuracy. So I must therefore increase my estimate of the difficulty of other barriers.  Alas, since skepticism about accuracy seems one of the easiest barriers to overcome, via track records and lab experiments, I must increase my estimate of the overall difficulty of my goal.  I’ll keep trying though.

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True Em Grit

By Robin Hanson · January 6, 2011 2:00 pm · Comments (23)

The new movie True Grit is a well-done celebration of the central farmer value of self-control. Not that foragers didn’t use self-control, but farmers took it to a whole new level, to get folks to act in quite un-forager-like ways. George Will’s latest column echos that gritty farmer theme, with a standard conservative warning that wealth and modernity tempts us to excess:

Daniel Akst['s] … book “We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess” notes that the problems of freedom and affluence – of “managing desire in a landscape rich with temptation” – are desirable problems. But they are problems. …

American life resembles “a giant all-you-can-eat buffet” offering “calories, credit, sex, intoxicants” and other invitations to excess. … Life in general has become what alcohol is – disinhibiting. … Today capitalism has a bipolar disorder, demanding self-controlled workers yet uninhibited shoppers. … The inhibiting intimacy of the village has been supplanted by the city’s “disinhibiting anonymity.” … As traditional social structures have withered under disapproval, and personal choice and self-invention have been celebrated, “second careers, second homes, second spouses, and even second childhoods are commonplace.” …

Pondering America’s “aristocracy of self-control,” Akst notes that affluent people, for whom food is a relatively minor expense, are less likely than poor people to be obese. Surely this has something to do with habits of self-control that are conducive to social success generally.

Before you dismiss Will’s concerns as the no-longer-relevant paranoid fears of a sad stick-in-the-mud, consider that when I recently discussed future Malthusian ems, several commentors responded that em poverty wouldn’t be so bad because very vivid and luxurious video games and virtual reality would cost only a tiny fraction of their subsistence cost. Also, since ems wouldn’t eat food, get sick, or have biological bodies, they needn’t feel hunger or pain. But I think this image misses the revival of farmer-style grit in an em world:

Ems, or whole brain emulations, are my best guess for the next big transition on the order of the farming and industry transitions. Farmer-style stoicism, self-sacrifice, and self-control, detached as needed from farmer specifics like love of land or sexual monogamy, might well be more effective [than a forager-style] at creating acceptance of em-efficient lifestyles. Religious ems might, for example, better accept being deleted when new more efficient versions of themselves are introduced. “Onward Christian robots” might be the new sensibility. And em’s low incomes might help farmer-style fear-based norm-enforcement to gain traction.

Ems would need some resources, and their bodies and minds would collect defects and errors, even if none of these resources or defects are biological. So it would be functional for ems to redirect their hunger systems to track the collection of needed resources, and redirect their pain systems to monitor possible defects and errors. They might of course sometimes enjoy pleasant vivid daydreams when their minds need non-shut-down rest, but it would be more functional for ems to daydream about variations on their own lives, rather than about completely alien lifestyles. They might also, if possible, redirect their needs for sex and kids toward em style reproduction activities.  If so, ems should feel hunger, pain, desire, and deep frustration, because such things are useful to feel.

As with our ancestors, it might be functional for much of em leisure to be devoted to relatively functional social bonding and mutual signaling of abilities, shared loyalty, and values. Farmer leisure differs from rich forager leisure, for good functional reasons. Compared to us, ems might prefer leisure that more celebrates self-control, religion, honor, loyalty, submission, grit, and determination. They might on average be happy, but with a grittier farmer style happiness. Whether such lives seem worth living to you probably depends on how fiercely you side with foragers in the forager-farmer divide.

Added 11a: Many commenters think direct modification of em brains would quickly lead to “happy slave” ems. Seems likely we’d try such modification, and they’d probably add some degree of cooperativeness, but my guess this will be a minor contribution.  The ability to select just a few of the billions of humans to make em copies will allow big changes between ems and humans, but I expect most of that to be used to select very high ability em minds, and that relatively little will need be spent on a willingness to submit to low incomes and high work regimentation. The farming revolution has already selected humans for plasticity in that direction, and it wouldn’t have been possible if humans didn’t already have a lot of such plasticity.

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How To Doubt

By Robin Hanson · January 5, 2011 6:00 pm · Comments (15)

Doubting conventional wisdom seems pretty central to my style and central issues. So I took some time to ponder the general issue of doubt. Here’s what I came up with.

The relation between confident and doubtful states of belief is like that between the three corners of a triangle and the points within the area of the triangle. Even though there are far more area points than corner points, area points are more similar to each other, in a distance sense. In the same way, there are far more states of doubt than confidence, yet states of doubt are more similar to each other, in that they lead to similar decisions.

What can you do about serious skepticism, i.e., the possibility that you might be quite mistaken on a great many of your beliefs? For this, you might want to consider which of your beliefs are the most reliable, in order to try to lean more on those beliefs when fixing the rest of your beliefs. But note that this suggests there is no general answer to what to do about doubt – the answer must depend on what you think are actually your most reliable beliefs.

When seeking your most reliable beliefs, to help fix other beliefs, you might be tempted to just consider simple beliefs like “George is my friend” or “carrots are orange.” But you may do better to rely on your less often stated beliefs that it is quite unlikely for a great many of your “independently” generated beliefs to all be mistaken.

That is, our most potent beliefs for dealing with doubt are often our beliefs about the correlations between errors in other beliefs. This is because having low error correlations can imply that related averages and aggregates are very reliable. For example, if there is little correlation in the errors your eyes make under different conditions in judging brightness, then you need only see the same light source under many conditions to get a reliable estimate of its brightness.

Since beliefs about low error correlations can support such strong beliefs on aggregates, in practice doubt about one’s beliefs often focuses on doubts about the correlations in one’s belief errors. If we guess that a certain set of errors have low correlation, but worry that they might really have a high correlation, it is doubts about such hidden correlations that threaten to infect many other beliefs.

So then what do we actually worry about, when we worry that our belief errors might be correlated? It seems to me that we mainly worry about two sources of correlated error:

  • Hidden psychological tendencies: We worry that our mind are built in such a way as to give related errors on what appear to be unrelated topics. Our minds might, for example, be biased toward high estimates of our ability, for many kinds of unrelated abilities.
  • Hidden social coordination: We worry that our social groups coordinate so as to give related errors from what appear to be unrelated social sources. Sources that share a common ideology might, for example, make similar errors on diverse topics.

Most academic consideration of radical skepticism happens in philosophy. But the above analysis suggests that if you were serious about actually doubting, instead of just discussing doubt, you’d want to study psychology and social sciences, especially hidden psychological biases and social coordination. Getting a grip on these subjects might position you well to actually consider the possibility that you might in fact be quite mistaken about a great deal.

Of course once you do understand psych and socsci, there is no guarantee that such understanding enables you to, on your own, powerfully address your doubts.  If fact, you may end up agreeing with me that our best approach is for would-be doubters to coordinate to support new institutions that better reward correction of error, especially correlated error.  I refer of course to prediction markets.

In sum: States of doubt are diverse, yet lead to similar decisions, relative to states of confidence. To productively doubt, you’ll want to identify beliefs in which you have greater confidence. When your belief errors have low correlation, you can have quite high confidence in certain aggregate beliefs. So doubts about belief error correlations are central to real skepticism. Since most doubts about correlations seem to arise from concerns about hidden mental tendencies and social coordination, a serious doubter will give those topics the most attention. And an ambitious doubter might join me in supporting something like prediction markets.

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Lift Up Your Eyes

By Robin Hanson · January 4, 2011 3:15 pm · Comments (36)

People keep asking me why I’m not horrified by a future of trillions of ems living at near subsistence wages. I’ve explained that “poor folks do smile“, that poor lives usually have plenty of joy and satisfaction, even if less than in rich lives. Most lives in poor societies are well worth living. But for many, such abstract words ring hollow – what they may need is to really see such lives for themselves.  I haven’t seen it yet, but the new movie Lift Up seems promising for this purpose:

The old man wanted them to find joy, even in the sadness that accompanies death. … An 82-minute documentary called “Lift Up,” had its debut at the Haitian Embassy in Washington last month. Jean and Muse hope that, in its depiction of Haitians rejoicing despite the devastation dealt to their nation and their lives, the film evokes the spirit of their grandfather’s request. …

The brothers hope the film will introduce U.S. viewers to another side of Haiti, one that goes beyond the poverty, violence and suffering so often depicted in mass media. Growing up in Port-au-Prince, they saw the dark side of humanity but also reveled in warm households filled with extended family, days spent playing outside with packs of friends and a rich tradition of passing stories from one generation to the next. …

Over five days, the filmmakers captured scene after scene of children playing and people smiling as they remembered lost loved ones. “I didn’t see any of the negative things I had always heard about,” Knowlton said. “I only saw people coming together.” (more)

Added 8p: The world’s five happiest nations are: Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, El Savador, Puerto Rico. Far more people the world over, even in poor nations, call themselves ’Very happy’ or ‘Quite happy’ than ‘Not very happy’ or ‘Not at all happy’.

2. Mexico
3. Venezuela
4. El Salvador
5. Puerto R
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Roberts On Robots

By Robin Hanson · January 3, 2011 4:30 pm · Comments (48)

Russ Roberts and I talked for over 90 minutes on the possibility of a future robot-induced “singularity”, i.e., a sudden drastic social change, including a much faster growth rate. As this was his longest podcast in over two years, Russ seems to have been quite engaged by the subject.

Russ said “This may all sound crazy but Robin makes it actually sound plausible.” His two main points of skepticism were:

  1. I say our brains are big piles of brain cells that send signals to each other. We’ve know what parts the brain is made of, and they are the same familiar parts that everything else around us is made of. We know well how these parts interact locally, though figuring out what this implies on large scales is usually beyond our calculation abilities. So a good enough model of the parts and how they are connected must reproduce the same overall input-output behavior. Russ says “there is a reductionist element to this which says–and this is controversial–all there is to our brain is its physicality. Nothing else there. That’s not universally accepted, correct? … Being a religious person I’m capable of imagining something that is not observable.”
  2. I say prices usually fall when a very elastic supply curve rapidly gets cheaper. Russ would probably agree for something like computer memory, but is reluctant to agree for wages – he doesn’t think cheap plentiful immigrants lower wages. I say that if trillions of immigrants willing to work for a dollar an hour were waiting just offshore, letting in as many as wanted in would lower wages to that level. So I say cheap robots getting cheaper fast should rapidly lower wages for tasks they do. Russ objects “You can’t just say your wage will be driven down, because if there are complementary types of labor they’ll increase the wage rate of some people. … There’s all these complicated secondary effects.” I say all things considered, the likely effect is falling wages.

The first point reminds me of my disagreements with Tyler:

The three items on which Tyler most clearly identifies a disagreement [with me] are all in hard science and technology … Tyler doesn’t know that much about hard science and technology. … And yet Tyler feels confident enough in his perception of expert consensus on such topics to base his disagreements with me on them, even though I’ve spend years in such area.

The second point seems easier to settle, as it is just an application of standard econ theory.  Any other economists care to weigh in?

Added 5Jan: Karl Smith, Nick Rowe , Steven Hsu weigh in.

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Beware Fruits, Veggies?

By Robin Hanson · January 2, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (24)

Time in ’09:

Christopher Ruhm … examined statewide mortality fluctuations in the U.S. between 1972 and 1991 and found that a 1% rise in a state’s unemployment rate led to a 0.6% decrease in total mortality. … In a review of such studies … Stephen Bezruchka … suggests the results could be explained by declines in smoking, excessive alcohol consumption and overeating during recessions as people look for ways to save money.

NBER today:

A higher risk of unemployment is associated with reduced consumption of fruits and vegetables and increased consumption of “unhealthy” foods such as snacks and fast food. … Among individuals predicted to be at highest risk of being unemployed, a one percentage point increase in the resident state’s unemployment rate is associated with … a 2-4% reduction in the frequency of fruits and vegetables consumption, and an 8% reduction in the consumption of salad.

Either we can cross “eat healthier” off the list of possible ways unemployment helps health, or maybe fruits and veggies aren’t as healthy, and fast food as unhealthy, as we suppose.

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Open Thread

By Robin Hanson · January 1, 2011 6:00 am · Comments (30)

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

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