Tag Archives: Disagreement

Who Talks Politics?

By Robin Hanson · January 26, 2012 9:10 am · Comments (8)

Using data from a nationally representative survey of registered voters conducted around the 2008 U.S. presidential election … [we find that] people discussed politics as frequently as (or more frequently than) other topics such as family, work, sports, and entertainment with frequent discussion partners. … The frequency with which a topic is discussed is strongly and positively associated with reported agreement on that topic among these same discussion partners, … because people avoid discussing politics when they anticipate disagreement. (more)

Political talk is quite different within vs. outside of families. Within families, politics talkers tend to be less conscientious, more emotionally stability, and more extraverted. Extraverted family members tend to talk politics more even when they disagree.

Outside of families, people tend to talk politics more when they see each other a few times week, as opposed to daily or weekly. The only other predictor of non-family talk is having an open personality type, and then only when political agreement is especially strong. Controlling for the above features, gender, race, age, education, and other personality factors (like agreeableness) did not predict who talked politics, neither in nor out of families.

So the main situation in which people somewhat talk through their political disagreements is extraverts within families, especially when extraverts are related (think Archie Bunker and meathead). At the other extreme, love fests of political agreement happen most when those with open personalities (who tend politically left) see each other outside of families a few times a week (think faculty lunches). Both of these extreme results fit my personal experience.

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Imagine Being Wrong

By Robin Hanson · January 17, 2012 10:00 am · Comments (30)

I felt myself wince recently when I wrote “I imagine that if I were a racist.” I realized that I’m not supposed be able to imagine being a racist. Even though a most folks in history have believed, often reasonably given their evidence, that races differ substantially on important qualities. And even though historians, sociologists, etc. regularly study and understand racists.

Apparently one is supposed to believe that racists are so obviously and extremely crazy that it is impossible for a reasonable person to see things from their point of view. Pretending to believe this signals to your associates confidence in your shared anti-racist position, and so is a signal of group loyalty.

But it seems a bad habit to get into, if you want to believe the truth. No doubt many positions are hard to understand, at least without some practice and preparation. Being rational in disagreements is hard exactly because it is so much easier to see one’s own reasoning than to imagine the reasoning of others. And we have only a limited ability to overcome this barrier. But to go out of your way to make it hard to see things from another’s view, that suggests one is more interested in showing loyalty than in discerning truth.

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Dear Young Eccentric

By Robin Hanson · January 5, 2012 1:50 pm · Comments (24)

We humans are conformist — we typically prefer folks who fall in the middle of distributions, and avoid those from the tails. Yes, we prefer the high tail of health, beauty, intelligence, etc. But for most other traits, we prefer the ordinary.

This situation can seem pretty discouraging to those who find that they are naturally weird. Weird folks are often tempted to give up on grand ambitions, thinking there is little chance the world will let them succeed. Turns out, however, it isn’t as bad as all that. Especially if your main weirdness is in the realm of ideas.

First, being unusual can be an advantage. Unusual tastes can often be satisfied for cheaper than common tastes. If everyone wants to go to the beach, but you just want to hike in the woods, it won’t cost you as much for a nearby hotel. Unusual abilities can also be in more demand than usual abilities. And weird folks can be especially creative, a trait valued in certain occupations like marketing or research.

Second, people who are weird about ideas tend to care more about ideas, and so over-estimate how much others care. You can actually get away with a lot of weirdness in abstract ideas, if you are ordinary enough in manners and style.

I’ve known some very successful people with quite weird ideas. But these folks mostly keep regular schedules of sleep and bathing. Their dress and hairstyles are modest, they show up on time for meetings, and they finish assignments by deadline. They are willing to pay dues and work on what others think are important for a while, and they have many odd ideas they’d pursue if given a chance, instead of just one overwhelming obsession. They are willing to keep changing fields, careers, and jobs until they find one that works for them.

Their conversational styles are also modest and polite. While they are quite willing to talk about their weird ideas, they do not push such topics on uninterested others. They do not insult people around them, nor directly challenge local powers that be. They don’t lash out randomly and scare people.

Of course being modest isn’t enough for great success. You’ll also need some extraordinary abilities. Like being extra smart, articulate, hard-working, insightful, etc. But having weird ideas isn’t nearly as much of a liability as it may seem.

Think of it this way. When some folks go out of their way to show off their defiance and rebellion, others go out of their way to publicly squash such rebellion, to assert their dominance. But if you are not overtly rebellious, you can get away with a lot of abstract idea rebellion — few folks will even notice such deviations, and fewer still will care. So, ask yourself, do you want to look like a rebel, or do you want to be a rebel?

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Work Hour Skepticism

By Robin Hanson · December 23, 2011 11:20 pm · Comments (15)

In the comments John Maxwell links again to a presentation claiming that folks who work more than about 40 hours a week don’t actually produce more:

Working more than 40 hours a week leads to decreased productivity. … >60 hour work week gives a small productivity book. The boost last 3 to 4 weeks and then turns negative. … Ford … [ran] dozens of experiments. As a result … he and his fellow industrialists lobbied Congress to pass 40 hour a week labor laws. Not because he was nice. He wanted to make the most money possible. … Performance for knowledge workers declines after 35 hours, not 40. … Past this they start becoming tired and making dumb decisions. (more)

The claim that Ford needed regulation to get his workers to work only 40 hours is clearly wrong. But the other claims are intriguing, and appeal to my contrarian tastes. These claims were also historically important:

During the first decades of the twentieth century, … a new cadre of social scientists began to offer evidence that long hours produced health-threatening, productivity-reducing fatigue. This line of reasoning, advanced in the court brief of Louis Brandeis and Josephine Goldmark, was crucial in the Supreme Court’s decision to support state regulation of women’s hours in Muller vs. Oregon. Goldmark’s book, Fatigue and Efficiency (1912) was a landmark. In addition, data relating to hours and output among British and American war workers during World War I helped convince some that long hours could be counterproductive. (more)

Now, the most productive people I know, including self-employed folks and those with a huge personal stake in their own productivity, tend to work tons of hours. Either these claims are just wrong about such folks, or they are right on average but don’t apply to the most productive folks, or these folks and their associaties consistently make a huge mistake (as did most of the working world before 1920). Which is it?

The presentation above cites this, which cites this, which cites books from 1894, 1908, 1909, 1913, 1926, and says:

I have found many studies, conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military, that support the basic notion that, for most people, eight hours a day, five days per week, is the best sustainable long-term balance point between output and exhaustion. Throughout the 30s, 40s, and 50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds; and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours. But, somehow, Silicon Valley didn’t get the memo. .. Five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century.

This article quotes a 1980 article “Scheduled Overtime Effect on Construction Projects” as saying:

Where a work schedule of 60 or more hours per week is continued longer than about two months, the cumulative effect of decreased productivity will cause a delay in the completion date beyond that which could have been realized with the same crew size on a 40-hour week.

I couldn’t find that source, but I found a 2001 review article:

Based on the foregoing overview of available studies it is evident that only a few are based on original data. Moreover, less than reliable data have been published and republished over and over giving a false appearance of originality. Finally, data are available for a limited number of trades only. Figure 16 compares the reported efficiency from various studies for the 50-hour, 60-hour and 70-hour work weeks with the majority based on 10-hour workdays and an overtime schedule of four consecutive weeks. (more)

That figure 16 estimates a max total productivity over four weeks at 60 hours per week. But the study it cites that looked longest, found that by sixteen weeks median per hour productivity had fallen by 30%, 50% and 62% for 50, 60, and 84 hour work weeks. (Though for that source “The origin of the data and the work environment are unknown.”) So yes, the basic claims above do weakly check out, at least for the construction industry. But basic questions still remain: How solid is the data here, does this apply to all industries, and does it apply to our most productive workers?

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Allen & Greaves On Ems

By Robin Hanson · October 13, 2011 4:50 pm · Comments (29)

Paul Allen and Mark Greaves say the “singularity” is over a century away:

This prior need to understand the basic science of cognition is where the “singularity is near” arguments fail to persuade us. …. A fine-grained understanding of the neural structure of the brain … has not shown itself to be the kind of area in which we can make exponentially accelerating progress. … By the end of the century, we believe, we will still be wondering if the singularity is near.

But what about the whole brain emulation argument that we can simulate a brain without understanding it? They say:

For example, if we wanted to build software to simulate a bird’s ability to fly in various conditions, simply having a complete diagram of bird anatomy isn’t sufficient. To fully simulate the flight of an actual bird, we also need to know how everything functions together. In neuroscience, there is a parallel situation. Hundreds of attempts have been made (using many different organisms) to chain together simulations of different neurons along with their chemical environment. The uniform result of these attempts is that in order to create an adequate simulation of the real ongoing neural activity of an organism, you also need a vast amount of knowledge about the functional role that these neurons play, how their connection patterns evolve, how they are structured into groups to turn raw stimuli into information, and how neural information processing ultimately affects an organism’s behavior. Without this information, it has proven impossible to construct effective computer-based simulation models.

This seems confused. No doubt a detailed enough emulation of bird body motions would in fact fly. It is true that a century ago our ability to create detailed bird body simulations was far less than our ability to infer abstract principles of flight. So we abstracted, and built planes, not bird emulations. But this hardly implies that brains must be understood abstractly before they can be emulated.

Yes you need to understand a system well in order to know what details you can safely leave out and still achieve the same overall functions. But if you can afford to leave in all the details, you don’t have to understand what is safe to leave out. We apply this principle every time we play a song or movie. Since we know that a song or movie recording contains enough detail to reproduce a full sound or visual experience, we don’t have to understand a song or movie in order to be able to replay it for someone, and achieve most of the relevant artistic experience.

Projecting trends like Moore’s law suggests that our ability to simulate low level brain processes should increase by fantastic factors within a century. These factors seem plenty sufficient to model entire brains at low levels of detail. So if we have not understood brains well enough by then to know what details we can safely leave out, we should be able to reproduce their behavior via brute-force simulation of lots of raw detail.

Added 10p: As I explained in January:

We should expect brain emulation to be feasible because brains function to process signals, and the decoupling of signal dimensions from other system dimensions is central to achieving the function of a signal processor.

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On Futurism

By Robin Hanson · September 29, 2011 9:00 am · Comments (15)

When the media reports on the future, reporters pretty much only ever quote these sort of futurists, who have hijacked the future to support their side of certain current disputes. Truth be told, folks who analyze the future but don’t frame their predictions or advice in terms of standard ideological categories are largely ignored, because few folks actually care much about the future except as a place to tell morality tales about who today is naughty vs. nice. (more)

That was me almost two years ago. Here are three more observations on futurists:

1) Most folks I know who self-describe as future-oriented seem obsessed with the latest tech press releases. They constantly circulate links on new tech gadget demos and analyses. Which might make sense if “the future” meant the next ten years. But if “the future” means the next century, this makes far less sense. Long term future oriented folk should focus on basic theory and long term trends, and pay little attention to daily tech fluctuations. Press-release-focused futurists seem more interested in affiliating with the idea that “tech is our future” than in actually understanding the future.

2) Few ever gain fame in futurism on the basis of what they say about the future. Almost everyone “known” for thoughts on the future first gained status and notoriety in some other area, and then started being heard on the future. Folks who talk about the future but don’t have another status base are almost completely ignored. It seems that while positioning ourselves regarding the future, we like to affiliate with high status folks, but don’t see such future positions as conferring status.

3) It is often said that futurists forecast big things to happen in twenty years because their careers will be done then, and they’ll suffer few consequences from mistaken forecasts. But human lifetimes are actually long enough to fit not one but three cycles of tested twenty year forecasts. People could make forecasts at age 20 that are checked at age 40, make another set of forecasts at 40 that are checked at age 60, and then make a third set of forecasts at age 60 that are checked at age 80. We could then pay special attention to the forecasts of eighty year olds who have had a good track record over three cycles of twenty year forecasts.

Yet I’d bet that even if some folks went to the all trouble to collect such a track record, we’d mostly ignore them, unless they had some other strong status base. If they disagreed with the current fashion on the future they’d be mostly dismissed as lucky old codgers who just didn’t “get” the new new thing.

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Info Cuts Confidence

By Robin Hanson · September 17, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (6)

An interesting tendency:

By the time Project Blue Book folded in 1969, it had evaluated 12,618 reports of sightings. … Special Report Number 14 [is] a vast statistical analysis of 3,201 UFO cases, with hundreds of graphs, tables, charts, and maps. … According to the report, about 22 percent of sightings were declared “unknown.” That means their origin couldn’t be determined even after all the evidence was in—these were objects that didn’t look like airplanes or balloons or any other discernible vessel. They maneuvered in strange ways, hovering or changing speed and direction suddenly. Sometimes witnesses, many of them Air Force pilots, described seeing actual saucer- or cigar-shaped objects. Unknowns tended to be cases with better information: 35 percent of “excellent” sightings—those with more reliable witnesses and, sometimes, corresponding physical evidence—defied explanation; only 19 percent of poor ones did. And the longer a sighting lasted, Friedman says, the more likely it was to remain unexplained: 36 percent of unknowns were seen for more than five minutes. (more)

Since things with fewer details are seen more in far mode, and since in far mode we are more confident in our theories, we should expect people to be more confident in their classifications of things that have fewer details, and so have a smaller fraction of things left as hard to explain. I’d like to see this tested elsewhere, such as planes seen near or far, or crimes known in little or much detail.

More:

In 1997 a CNN poll found that 80 percent of Americans think the government is hiding information about UFOs, and 64 percent believe that extraterrestrials have contacted humans. In a 2007 Associated Press poll, 14 percent said they’d seen a UFO. … At the end of his lectures, [Friedman] often asks the audience how many of them have seen a flying saucer. … Usually ten percent of the audience have their hands raised. … “But then I ask, ‘How many of you reported what you saw?’” Nearly every hand drops.

Thats a whole lot of skeptics of the usual official UFO story. (I’m not a skeptic.)

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Counter Indoctrination

By Robin Hanson · September 1, 2011 10:35 pm · Comments (32)

A case study and new micro-level data in Uganda, where the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) forcibly recruited thousands of youth and plied them with threats and violence in order to make them stay. The evidence suggests that child [soldier] recruits were less able than adult ones, so superior ability is not a driving force of child soldiering in this case. Rather, the Uganda data and interviews suggest that children were retained because they were more easily indoctrinated and misinformed than adults, and had more difficulty escaping—with ease of indoctrination being especially influential. … Initial data from a random sample of [African rebel] groups display two relationships consistent with our model. First, where we observe child recruitment we also tend to observe forcible recruitment (one of the most easily measured forms of coercion). Second, forced child recruitment is most common when punishment is cheap. … Child recruitment is inversely associated with military protection of refugee and displacement camps. (more)

The US military also relies heavily on near age 18 soldiers, even though age 28 soldiers are probably more skilled at most tasks. The US also probably prefers younger soldiers because they are more easily indoctrinated, misinformed, and intimidated. Which reminds us that interest groups often fight over who gets to train kids, as the winners get to choose their favored indoctrination. Which reminds us that the winner of such a fight indoctrinated you when young.

Once you are an adult who realizes that your younger self was unreasonably gullible, you should try to undo that bias, at least if you want to have accurate beliefs. If you can imagine how other powers would have instead tried to indoctrinate you, had they controlled your indoctrination, you might try to believe something in-between these various indoctrination extremes. Of course you should also add in whatever can be inferred from the fact that one particular power was in fact strong enough to win the contest to indoctrinate you. Though it is not clear why this would mean their indoctrination was more true.

So what biases we expect from young school indoctrination? Perhaps excess respect for:

  1. Teachers and their allies
  2. Life value of formal education
  3. Being quiet and doing what you are told
  4. Governments like those that run schools
  5. The region or nation where you lived
  6. Having regular workday, like at school
  7. What else?

Added 8a: The military is an especially capital intense industry, which makes it especially important to have skilled labor to complement all that expensive capital. All else equal, this would induce this industry to outcompete other industries for more skilled workers, such as 28 year olds. So there must be some other factor that pushes them to hire 18 year olds. It can’t be pure physical strength and stamina, as few military jobs today require that.

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Religion As Standard

By Robin Hanson · August 31, 2011 6:10 pm · Comments (36)

Systems often get locked into standards. For example, computer systems get locked into programming language and operating system standards. When people notice that existing standards have unsatisfactory features, they often try to create and promote alternate standards. Such attempts usually fail, however, due to the large costs of coordinating to switch to new standards, including the loss of complementary investments into old standards. In order to induce a switch, expected gains from a new better standard have be large enough to compensate for switching costs, and users need to coordinate their actions in order to switch.

Hopes for a libertarian revolution seem similar. Yes, there may be gains from transferring traditional government services (like schools, roads, fire protection) to private substitutes. But we have many complementary investments in an existing government-provision system that has many self-reinforcing elements. If most people see the potential gains from switching to be few and weak compared to the substantial cost of switching, it just won’t happen. So big change probably won’t happen until some new context where many folks expect private substitutes to work much better.

Strong atheist critiques of religion also seem similar. Religious people often say things that sound crazy, at least when interpreted as claims intended to say things similar to, and evaluated by the usual critical standards of, most other intellectual realms. Atheists want to apply relatively uniform standards of interpretation and evaluation across wide ranges of intellectual claims. Such uniform standards should allow intellectuals to draw more reliable inferences combining insights from many diverse topic areas.

Religion, however, is a complex system integrating emotions, behaviors, relationships, and things that sound and are treated somewhat like intellectual claims. We have made many expensive complementary investments into this religious system, investments that would be expensive to translate to a substitute system. Religious folks understand that treating their religious claims as crazy would detract from the many complex functions that these claims serve within the complex religious experience. So they would rather apply different intellectual standards to these claims. They’d rather say “Don’t take this so literally, don’t be so reductionist; this kind of talk is just different.”

Of course defenders of religion also don’t want to say that they are just making comforting noises that have no intellectual meaning; a sense that their words are somewhat like intellectual claims is part of what lets those noises be comforting. And they don’t want to clarify in much detail just what exactly they are saying, in the usual intellectual terms. They’d rather say “Haven’t you got other topics to go investigate? Why come to our area and mess with things you don’t understand? How can you be so sure of your intellectual standards and your preferred interpretations of our words, so as to put at risk all this useful religious practice?”

It seems to me that religion will handily win this contest for a long time to come. The social support that can be mustered by a few intellectuals hoping for more uniform standards of interpretation and evaluation across diverse topics seems quite weak compared to strong interests others have in the usual complex religious processes. Even if many broad-thinking intellectuals decide to pick a noisy fight over this, most of society will just shrug their shoulders and ignore it. Surely this fact is known to most atheists, so this can’t really be about inducing a social change to a new less objectionable religion substitute. So it is probably mostly about other things, such as status contests within the smaller world of intellectuals.

FYI, some relevant quotes from the atheism critic James Wood: Continue reading "Religion As Standard" »

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What Is Reasoning For?

By Robin Hanson · August 18, 2011 6:00 pm · Comments (31)

People and institutions usually prefer to explain their behaviors in self-serving and self-flattering ways. For example, we usually explain human abilities to create and evaluate chains of reasoning in terms of truth – by reasoning we can better see what is true (including truths about what we want to do).

I’m a little late to the response party, but back in April Mercier and Sperber published their theory that reasoning is designed more to help people persuade others, than to infer truth:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. … Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. … A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. … Reasoning is not only for convincing but also for evaluating arguments, and that as such it has an epistemic function. (more; ungated)

Many of their critics, however, noted that reasoning could serve even more functions. Mercier and Sperber responded that such other functions were of only minor importance:

Several commentators, while agreeing that argumentation may be an important function of reasoning, suggest that it may serve other functions, as well. … Our claim is that argumentation is the main function of reasoning. …

Dessalles and Frankish suggest that argumentation could have evolved as a means to display one’s intellectual skills. Indeed, argumentation can be put to such a use. However, … reasoning is more like a crow’s than a peacock’s tail: It may be a bit drab, but it serves its main function well. Its occasional use, for instance, in academic milieus, to display one’s intellectual skills is unlikely to contribute to fitness to the point of having become a biological function, let alone the main function of reasoning. …

Pietraszewski … draws attention to a … class of cases … [where] who is arguing should be just as important as what they are saying when considering the ‘goodness’ of an argument” … The main relevance of a communicative act may be … in the very fact that it took place at all; it may have to do with … signaling agreement and disagreement. This can be done in particular by using arguments not so much to convince but to polarize. …

Frankish points out that reasoning can be used to strengthen our resolve by buttressing our decisions with supporting arguments.

Notice that, relative to the usual story of reasoning’s function, Mercier and Sperber offer a less flattering than usual explanation for argument speakers, but not for argument listeners. That is, Mercier and Sperber accept the self-flattering story of those who hear arguments, that they mainly just want to figure out what is true about the content of the topics argued.

So what might listeners of arguments be up to instead? As the critics above suggest, listeners could be trying to gauge speaker impressiveness, or the social support the speaker can muster in his or her conflicts. Also, listeners could be trying to figure out what they will say in response, in argumentation contests with many possible criteria for who wins. And argument listeners might try to gauge what positions will become accepted by a wider community, to help them decide what positions to personally support.

Once you give it a bit of thought, you can see many possible and even plausible explanations for human reasoning abilities, beyond the simple self-flattering story that we are trying to figure out what is true about the topic of our reasoning.

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