Overcoming Bias

Singularity Summit 2008

FYI all:  The Singularity Summit 2008 is coming up, 9am-5pm October 25th, 2008 in San Jose, CA.  This is run by my host organization, the Singularity Institute.  Speakers this year include Vernor Vinge, Marvin Minsky, the CTO of Intel, and the chair of the X Prize Foundation.

Before anyone posts any angry comments: yes, the registration costs actual money this year.  The Singularity Institute has run free events before, and will run free events in the future.  But while past Singularity Summits have been media successes, they haven't been fundraising successes up to this point.  So Tyler Emerson et. al. are trying it a little differently.  TANSTAAFL.

Lots of speakers talking for short periods this year.  I'm intrigued by that format.  We'll see how it goes.

Future Altruism, Not

In the laboratory dictator game, you give subjects a pile of money and ask them if they want to give some of it to anonymous other subjects.  In the lab people do give away some money, a lot more than if you had handed money to someone on the street.  People give less if the experiment is double-blind, if there is social distance between the giver and recipient, and according to a new study, if payments are received more than a week after the decision:

We experimentally study the effect of time on altruism. By postponing payments in a standard Dictator game, subjects allocate a future payment between themselves and others. Since both the payoffs of the Dictator and the Receiver are delayed until the same time, standard intertemporal utility maximization would predict that waiting time should not affect the Dictator's choice. In this respect, we observe that Dictators' decisions are not affected, as long as the time interval between the decision and payment is not large [2-6 days, median gift 15%]. On the other hand, for large time gaps [10-22 days, median gift 0%], subjects become more self-interested.

I fear this is more bad news about our altruism toward the very distant future. 

World Welfare State

At at the city, state, or national levels we sometimes "help the poor" via initiatives to "develop" this or that region, but what we mostly have is "welfare" benefits that go directly to individuals.  After all, development funds have a poor track record, and are often diverted by corrupt officials, while direct benefits are the prototype of charity to help those less fortunate than ourselves.  At the international level, however, we mostly have "development aid", even though its track record is just as bad there.  Why don't we give more benefits directly to the world's poor? 

We do not need a strong world government to have a world welfare state - we just need those who want to help the poor to form to a common fund with a common system for distributing benefits.  Some minimal requirements, such as a world ID card, would be made on nations who wanted to let their citizens to get world welfare.  And a special level of international disgust could be reserved for nations that refused to let locals to get world welfare.  Yes this wouldn't be easy, but why does no one even try? 

With a world welfare system donors would have to more directly face their choice between welfare at home and abroad.  Why don't we first ensure everyone in the world at least gets a dollar a day, before we make sure locals don't suffer with only basic cable channels? 

Nephew Versus Nepal Charity

If you had a poor but promising nephew, you might promise to pay his way through college.  You would place some limits on his activities - you probably wouldn't pay for a semester off to train for Halo championships.  And you might insist he maintain a minimum GPA.  But you probably wouldn't interfere much in his choice of college or major.  And when you give to your children in your will, you rarely place restrictions on how they can spend what you give them. 

But when we help poor people in far away lands (like Nepal), we almost never just give people money with few strings attached.  We instead fund projects, run mostly by outsiders, to do things for them.  We build them dams, roads, hospitals, bed nets, laptops, irrigation ditches, and so on.  For poor people in our own nation, we act somewhere in between these two extremes.

When we give, why do we interfere so much more with distant poor, and interfere so little with those close to us? 

The Greatest Gift, The Best Exercise

In this generous season, consider the greatest gift we regularly and personally give (even if we do not intend it as such): sex.  Back in 2005, Tyler Cowen pondered Michael Vassar's pregnant observation: "there is an inexplicable shortage of sex."  This remains, I think, one of the most neglected questions in social science.  We should devote far more effort to diagnosing and fixing this problem.  To inspire more precious gift-giving, let us review the health benefits of sex [as of 2003]:

Saving yourself" before the big game, the big business deal, the big hoedown or the big bakeoff ... there's no evidence it sharpens your competitive edge. The best that modern science can say for sexual abstinence is that it's harmless when practiced in moderation.

In one of the most credible studies ... tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. ... Its findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards. ... In a 2001 follow-on ... by having sex three or more times a week, men reduced their risk of heart attack or stroke by half.

Sex, if nothing else, is exercise. A vigorous bout burns some 200 calories--about the same as running 15 minutes on a treadmill or playing a spirited game of squash. ... Sex also boosts production of testosterone, which leads to stronger bones and muscles. ...

A 2002 study of 293 women ... reported that sexually active participants whose male partners did not use condoms were less subject to depression than those whose partners did. One theory of causality: Prostoglandin, a hormone found only in semen, may be absorbed in the female genital tract. ...

"Can't Say No" Spending

The remarkable observation that medical spending has zero net marginal effect is shocking, but not completely unprecedented.

According to Spiegel in "Too Much of a Good Thing: Choking on Aid Money in Africa", the Washington Center for Global Development calculated that it would require $3,521 of marginal development aid invested, per person, in order to increase per capita yearly income by $3.65 (one penny per day).

The Kenyan economist James Shikwati is even more pessimistic in "For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid!":  The net effect of Western aid to Africa is actively destructive (even when it isn't stolen to prop up corrupt regimes), a chaotic flux of money and goods that destroys local industry.

What does aid to Africa have in common with healthcare spending? Besides, of course, that it's heartbreaking to just say no -

Food Vs. Sex Charity

Scott Aaronson asks a great question: 

Consider two men, A and B. Man A steals food because he’s starving to death, while Man B commits a rape because no woman will agree to have sex with him.  From a Darwinian perspective, the two cases seem exactly analogous. In both we have a man on the brink of genetic oblivion, who commandeers something that isn’t his in order to give his genes a chance of survival. And yet the two men strike just about everyone — including me — as inhabiting completely different moral universes. The first man earns only our pity. We ask: what was wrong with the society this poor fellow inhabited, such that he had no choice but to steal? The second man earns our withering contempt.

One problem with the question is that in our society giving enough sex to satisfy is expensive, while giving enough food to satisfy is cheap.  So it might help to imagine a society where the person who lost the food was also in some, though less, danger of starving.   

But even then food and sex seem to be treated differently.  When we give food aid we don't just give rice and beans to keep folks from starving; we give them enough to have a moderately tasty diet.   We do nothing remotely similar for sex.

To me the obvious answer is that our concern about inequality is not very general - compared to inequality in access to food, humans are just not that concerned about sexual inequality, especially for men.  Presumably for our ancestors, the gene pool of a tribe could benefit from equalizing food in ways that it could not benefit by equalizing sex. 

Added: Riffing off this post, Scott rewords his question:  Why do we, as a society, provide food stamps for the hungry but not sex stamps for the celibate?

T.S. Eliot Quote

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm-- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.   T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party, (1974), p. 111   

Well put.  Found here. 

Take Our Survey

Grad student Jason Briggeman and I would love for you to take our overcoming-bias related survey, and perhaps win a $100 Visa gift card.  I wish I could say more about it here, but we don't want to bias your answers.  After we get enough answers and analyze them, we'll tell you what we found.  Please don't read the comments until you've taken the survey. 

Fair Landowner Coffee

Many people feel proud of buying "fair trade" coffee, because it is supposed to help the poor people who grow the coffee.   But it turns out that the benefits go to landowners, not laborers: 

In Costa Rica, less than 2% of the coffee produced is certified and sold as Fair Trade. In Guatemala, farmers report the meager benefits promised by Fair Trade, if they materialize, are not worth the costs which must be borne. ... Certification, for the producer cooperative, costs between US$2,000 and US$4,000. ...  A coffee farm is not eligible for Fair Trade certification if it employs even one person as a permanent full-time employee.  Most family farms, while not enormous, can be tended during the 7-8 months of the growing season quite easily by an average size family. However, during the harvest (November to March) large numbers of seasonal employees are needed . ...  immigrants flood into Costa Rica from Nicaragua, Colombia, and to a lesser extent, Panama. These individuals are too poor to own land, but supply the much needed labor for the harvest period. While Fair Trade notes that any seasonal labor should be paid at least the country's minimum wage, no records are required of the individual landowner-farmers. The wages paid are never verified as part of the certification or annual inspection processes.

Now admittedly these landowners are a lot poor than the average American who drinks Fair Trade coffee.  But it is still curious that coffee landowners elicit more of our sympathy than coffee field workers.   Human altruism is a complex beast.