Overcoming Bias

Blaming The Unlucky

A recent working paper finds that we call the same decision immoral when it leads to a bad outcome, but moral when it leads to a good outcome: 

Two studies investigated the influence of outcome information on ethical judgment. Participants read a series of vignettes describing ethically-questionable behaviors. We manipulated whether those behaviors were followed by a negative or positive consequence. As hypothesized, participants judged behavior as less ethical when it was followed by a negative consequence. In addition, they judged the behavior as more blameworthy and to be punished more harshly. Participants’ ethical judgments mediated their judgments of both blame and punishment. The results of the second experiment showed again that participants rated behavior as less ethical when it led to undesirable consequences, even if they saw that behavior as acceptable before they knew its consequences. Implications for both research and practice are discussed.   ...

We show that outcomes of decisions lead people to see the decisions themselves in a different light, and that this effect does not depend on misremembering their prior state of mind. In other words, people will see it as entirely appropriate to allow a decision's outcome to determine their assessment of the decision's quality. ... The tendency demonstrated in our studies might lead people to blame others too harshly for making sensible decisions that have unlucky outcomes. ... Too often, we let ethically-questionable decisions slide for a long time until they result in negative outcomes, even in cases in which such outcomes are easily predictable. 

This makes morality look more like a social convention for who we can blame for what, rather than a direct guide to decision making. 

Schwitzgebel Thoughts

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel asks good questions: 

I'm interested in the moral behavior of ethics professors -- and why, in particular, it doesn't appear to be any better than that of non-ethicists of similar social background. One possibility is that philosophical moral reflection is behaviorally inert. In conversation, I've found that philosophers are often quick to endorse that idea.   Maybe I haven't done a very good job of articulating what I find unattractive in that view. Let me phrase my concern as a dilemma: Is philosophical reflection about ethics different in this respect from everyday moral deliberation about what to do?

If no, then the view being espoused is dark indeed: Moral deliberation, in general, is behaviorally inert. When we think morally about what we are obliged to do, the resulting judgments must either simply justify what we were going to do anyway, or if they don't match our prior inclinations they must be cast aside as we go ahead and act contrary to them.

He's found relevant data here:

The majority of respondents expressed the view that ethicists do not, on average, behave better than non-ethicists.  While ethicists tended to avoid saying either that ethicists in general (Version I) or individual arbitrarily selected ethicists (Version II) behave worse than non-ethicists, non-ethicists expressed that pessimistic view about as often as they expressed the view that ethicists behave better.

Morality Is Overrated

Hanging out with moral philosophers last week at Oxford reminded me of the old complaint that economists neglect morality.  Actually, I think the real problem is the reverse!  Let me explain.

Many people advise us on what to do.  Some discuss personal actions, while others suggest how groups could better coordinate.  And, crucially, some advise us on what we should do, while others advise us on how to get what we want. 

At the personal level, parents, teachers, preachers, and activists tend to tell us what is morally right, while friends, mentors, lawyers, doctors, therapists, and financial planners tend to tell us what will achieve our ends.  At the level of social policy, pundits and wonks give a mixture of rationales for their suggestions.  Moral philosophers, for example, tend to emphasize policies we should pick, while economists tend to emphasize policies to better get us what we want.   

All else equal, we may each prefer to do what is right, but when all else is not equal we often allow other considerations to weigh against morality.  After all, morality is only one of the many ends we pursue.  Yes we want to be moral, but we also want other things, and we each choose as if we often care about those other things more than morality.  (Some say moral beliefs directly cause us to be moral even if we don't want that, but I prefer to describe this as a revealed preference for moral ends, i.e., for "wanting" to be moral.) 

They're Only Tokens

Mr "howtolive" reports:

On Friday I had the opportunity to hear author Dan Ariely speak. Dan is an MIT professor on tour to promote his new book, Predictably Irrational. ... The example Dan gave was an experiment in which people had the ability to cheat and claim they deserved more money than they actually did. When the payoff was in cash, people only cheated a little, but when the payoff was in tokens which could be immediately redeemed for cash, people cheated a lot more.

Here is a nice book summary by Toby Segaran.  On his website Dan has a video which is like those ads comparing a hip Apple customer to a Windows dork, but this time comparing a hip behavioral economist to a nerdy standard economist.  Completely unfair as argument, but cute nonetheless. 

More Moral Wiggle Room

A new lab experiment confirms results reported a year ago:  people prefer to not know how their actions effect others, when such knowledge would induce them to sacrifice to benefit others. 

In the baseline version, each subject chose between five pairs of numbers (x,y), where x is how much money he gets and y is how much money some other subject gets.  In each pair (x,y,) each number was drawn randomly from the set {1,1,4,4,7}.  Here 40 of 63 subjects appeared to put heavy weight on benefits to the other person in making their choices.

In the other treatment, each subject was shown only the x value for each of his five pairs, but could at no cost choose to see the y values.  Of the 40 subjects who in the baseline version heavily weighted benefits to others, only 10 of them chose to see the y values.  The others just picked the best option for them. 

"If only people knew how bad things are here in Z-land, they'd do something."  Yes, and maybe that is why they do not know. 

Something to Protect

Followup to:  Tsuyoku Naritai, Circular Altruism

In the gestalt of (ahem) Japanese fiction, one finds this oft-repeated motif:  Power comes from having something to protect.

I'm not just talking about superheroes that power up when a friend is threatened, the way it works in Western fiction.  In the Japanese version it runs deeper than that.

In the X saga it's explicitly stated that each of the good guys draw their power from having someone - one person - who they want to protect.  Who?  That question is part of X's plot - the "most precious person" isn't always who we think.  But if that person is killed, or hurt in the wrong way, the protector loses their power - not so much from magical backlash, as from simple despair.  This isn't something that happens once per week per good guy, the way it would work in a Western comic.  It's equivalent to being Killed Off For Real - taken off the game board.

The way it works in Western superhero comics is that the good guy gets bitten by a radioactive spider; and then he needs something to do with his powers, to keep him busy, so he decides to fight crime.  And then Western superheroes are always whining about how much time their superhero duties take up, and how they'd rather be ordinary mortals so they could go fishing or something.

Similarly, in Western real life, unhappy people are told that they need a "purpose in life", so they should pick out an altruistic cause that goes well with their personality, like picking out nice living-room drapes, and this will brighten up their days by adding some color, like nice living-room drapes.  You should be careful not to pick something too expensive, though.

In Western comics, the magic comes first, then the purpose:  Acquire amazing powers, decide to protect the innocent.  In Japanese fiction, often, it works the other way around.

Of course I'm not saying all this to generalize from fictional evidence. But I want to convey a concept whose deceptively close Western analogue is not what I mean.

I have touched before on the idea that a rationalist must have something they value more than "rationality":  The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.  But do not mistake me, and think I am advocating that rationalists should pick out a nice altruistic cause, by way of having something to do, because rationality isn't all that important by itself.  No.  I am asking:  Where do rationalists come from?  How do we acquire our powers? 

The "Intuitions" Behind "Utilitarianism"

Followup to:  Circular Altruism.  Response to:  Knowing your argumentative limitations, OR "one [rationalist's] modus ponens is another's modus tollens."

(Still no Internet access.  Hopefully they manage to repair the DSL today.)

I haven't said much about metaethics - the nature of morality - because that has a forward dependency on a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy that I haven't gotten to yet.  I used to be very confused about metaethics.  After my confusion finally cleared up, I did a postmortem on my previous thoughts.  I found that my object-level moral reasoning had been valuable and my meta-level moral reasoning had been worse than useless.  And this appears to be a general syndrome - people do much better when discussing whether torture is good or bad than when they discuss the meaning of "good" and "bad".  Thus, I deem it prudent to keep moral discussions on the object level wherever I possibly can.

Occasionally people object to any discussion of morality on the grounds that morality doesn't exist, and in lieu of jumping over the forward dependency to explain that "exist" is not the right term to use here, I generally say, "But what do you do anyway?" and take the discussion back down to the object level.

Paul Gowder, though, has pointed out that both the idea of choosing a googolplex dust specks in a googolplex eyes over 50 years of torture for one person, and the idea of "utilitarianism", depend on "intuition".  He says I've argued that the two are not compatible, but charges me with failing to argue for the utilitarian intuitions that I appeal to.

Knowing your argumentative limitations, OR "one [rationalist's] modus ponens is another's modus tollens."

Followup to: Who Told You Moral Questions Would be Easy?.  Response to: Circular Altruism

At the most basic level (which is all we need for present purposes), an argument is nothing but a chain of dependence between two or more propositions.  We say something about the truth value of the set of propositions {P1...Pn}, and we assert that there's something about {P1...Pn} such that if we're right about the truth values of that set, we ought to believe something about the truth value of the set {Q1...Qn}. 

If we have that understanding of what it means to make an argument, then we can see that an argument doesn't necessarily have any connection to the universe outside itself.  The utterance "1. all bleems are quathes, 2. the youiine is a bleem, 3. therefore, the youiine is a quathe" is a perfectly logically valid utterance, but it doesn't refer to anything in the world -- it doesn't require us to change any beliefs.  The meaning of any argument is conditional on our extra-argument beliefs about the world.

One important use of this principle is reflected in the oft-quoted line "one man's modus ponens in another man's modus tollens."  Modus ponens is a classical form of argument: 1. A-->B.  2.  A. 3.  .: B.  Modus tollens is this: 1.  A-->B.  2. ¬B.  3. .: ¬A.  Both are perfectly valid forms of argument!  (For those who aren't familiar with the standard notation, the horizontal line is meant to indicate negation.)  Unless you have some particular reason outside the argument to believe either A or B, you don't know whether the claim A-->B means that B is true, or that A isn't true! 

Why am I elucidating all this basic logic, which almost everyone reading this blog doubtless knows?  It's a rhetorical tactic: I'm trying to make it salient, to bring it to the top of the cognitive stack, so that my next claim is more compelling.

And that claim is as follows:

Eliezer's posts about the specks and the torture [1] [2], and the googleplex of people being tortured for a nanosecond, and so on, and so forth, tell you nothing about the truth of your intuitions.

Argument behind the fold...

Acceptable Casualties

Follow Up to Bias Against Torture and Kind Right-Handers

Imagine that one month after the 9/11 attacks the U.S. conducted a massive bombing campaign against terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.  Further assume that (1) the U.S. knew Bin Laden was well hidden and so the attacks would have no significant chance of killing him, (2) the U.S. military had estimated that about 5,000 innocents would die because of the bombings and indeed around 5,000 innocents did die, and (3) the bombings were conducted mainly to deter future terrorist attacks against the U.S.  Such a bombing campaign would have been widely supported in the U.S.  Most Americans would assign the moral blame for the civilian deaths to Bin Laden.

But now imagine that instead of conducting a bombing campaign President Bush ordered the assassination of Bin Laden’s closest relatives.  Assume that 500 people were killed including all of Bin Laden’s parents, grandparents, children, uncles, aunts, and first cousins who were alive on 9/11.  President Bush, lets assume, announced that although those killed were innocents their deaths were necessary to deter future terrorist attacks against the U.S.  My guess is that for ordering such assassinations Bush would have been impeached, removed from office and sentenced to either death or life in prison. 

The relative expected responses to the bombing campaign and assassinations seem inconsistent because fewer innocents would die with the assassinations and the assassinations might well have a greater deterrence effect on future terrorists.  We would be less bothered by the bombings, I suspect, because we could claim that we didn’t want the innocents to die.  But if we estimate that X number of innocents will die because of a military strike, why should it morally matter whether we actually wanted these X people to perish?

Circular Altruism

Followup to:  Torture vs. Dust Specks, Zut Allais, Rationality Quotes 4

Suppose that a disease, or a monster, or a war, or something, is killing people.  And suppose you only have enough resources to implement one of the following two options:

1. Save 400 lives, with certainty.
2. Save 500 lives, with 90% probability; save no lives, 10% probability.

Most people choose option 1.  Which, I think, is foolish; because if you multiply 500 lives by 90% probability, you get an expected value of 450 lives, which exceeds the 400-life value of option 1.  (Lives saved don't diminish in marginal utility, so this is an appropriate calculation.)

"What!" you cry, incensed.  "How can you gamble with human lives? How can you think about numbers when so much is at stake?  What if that 10% probability strikes, and everyone dies?  So much for your damned logic!  You're following your rationality off a cliff!"

Ah, but here's the interesting thing.  If you present the options this way:

1. 100 people die, with certainty.
2. 90% chance no one dies; 10% chance 500 people die.

Then a majority choose option 2.  Even though it's the same gamble.  You see, just as a certainty of saving 400 lives seems to feel so much more comfortable than an unsure gain, so too, a certain loss feels worse than an uncertain one.