Tag Archives: Hypocrisy

Motivated Legal Bias

By Robin Hanson · March 7, 2010 5:00 pm · Comments (21)

The probability of being sentenced to death is much greater if a defendant kills a white or Hispanic victim who is married with a clean criminal record and a college degree, as opposed to a black or Asian victim who is single with a prior criminal record and no college degree. …

“Irrelevant social facts also shape the ultimate state sanction” Phillips says. “In the capital of capital punishment, death is more apt to be sought and imposed on behalf of high status victims. Some victims matter more than others.”

Phillips research is based on 504 death penalty cases that occurred in Harris County, Texas between 1992 and 1999.  Drawing on the same data, Phillips’s previous research demonstrated that black defendants were more likely to be sentenced to death than white defendants in Houston. The racial disparities revealed in the prior paper become even more acute after accounting for victim social status – black defendants were more apt to be sentenced to death despite being less apt to kill high status victims.

More here (HT naz). I expect such patterns to be found in most legal jurisdictions, not just Harris County Texas.  You will find it hard to find any lawyer, judge, or law professor who will go on the record saying these are officially accepted as legitimate considerations in legal sentencing.  Most will say the law “tries” to ignore such considerations.  And yet such patterns have long existed, have long been widely known to exist.

These are motivated biases, not just random accidents of a system trying to be fair but failing to because of limited human mental capacity.  These errors are far more likely to persist than the opposite error.  If the opposite errors were suddenly to become common, enormous concern would be expressed, great resources would be spent, and we’d be willing to consider large institutional changes to eliminate them.

The place such errors enter is of course via “judgment.”  We recoil in horror at the thought of a simple legal system where judges or juries could make any decision they wanted in each case they considered.  But we also recoil at the thought of a legal system with explicit rules which had to be followed exactly in each case.  We instead prefer a legal system with lots of specific rules, where in the end “reasonable” people are allowed to exercise “judgment” about how to “interpret” the rules.   It sure looks like what we want is the appearance of constraining ourselves to follow rules, combined with the practice of arbitrary choice.

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Torture Kids Instead

By Robin Hanson · January 8, 2010 3:00 pm · Comments (35)

Juvenile detention is not intended to be punitive. Rather, juveniles held in secure custody usually receive care consistent with the doctrine of parens patriae, i.e., the state as parent.

That is wikipedia.  The US state is a horrible parent; 12% of its “detained” kids are sexually abused each year, versus 4% of adult prisoners.  0.3% of US non-prisoners report rape each year, versus a world median of ~0.05%.

12 percent of incarcerated juveniles … had been raped or sexually abused in the past year by fellow inmates or prison staff. … At 13 detention facilities, nearly one out of three juveniles said they had been victims of some type of sexual abuse. … Other federal studies … suggest that 60,500 adults are victims of rape or sexual misconduct in prisons each year. … the study reflecting that juveniles may be abused at three times the [4%] rate of adults.

More here and here:

  • 91% of youth in these facilities were male; 9% were female. …
  • 10.8% of males and 4.7% of females reported sexual activity with facility staff.
  • 9.1% of females and 2.0% of males reported unwanted sexual activity with other youth.

The US leads the world in its fraction in jail or prison; it has 0.7% vs a world median of ~0.1%.

US folk often express pride that their nation tortures and executes criminals less than other “medieval” nations.  But, honestly, torture and execution look pretty good to me when compared with our actual prisons; I might rather be branded with an iron, or hang in a stockade for a few days, than suffer at large chance of rape.  Branding or stockades seem less cruel than rape in pretty much any book.

Compared to prison, punishments like torture, exile, and execution are not only much cheaper (the US spends $68B/yr on prisons), but they can also be monitored more easily, letting citizens better see just how much punishment is actually being imposed.  And alas, I suspect that is the real problem.  With prison, citizens can more easily pretend that they have the prisons they wished for, rather than the prisons they actually have.

Added 6:30p: This also seems a sad example of empire bias.  We assume prison rape is the sort of thing a large organization should be able to control, so we presume modest “reform” is sufficient.  It’s not.

Added 9Jan: Stunning stat:

95 percent of the youth making such [sex abuse] allegations said they were victimized by female staff.

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Smart Sincere Syndrome

By Robin Hanson · December 30, 2009 9:10 am · Comments (34)

Humans are built to be hypocritical, i.e., to give lip service and soft thought to high ideals, while mostly acting to achieve low practical personal ends.  We manage this disconnect both by being stupid, and so not noticing our hypocrisy, and by being insincere, and so caring less when we notice.

Now human characteristics vary quite a bit, and so some folks are both unusually smart and unusually conscientious about their ideals.  More than most people, these folks notice their hypocrisy, and try to avoid it.  And since far ideals tend toward incoherence and impracticality, this has led smart sincere folks to invent a wide range of “ideologies” to substitute for their jumbled intuitions, with matching actions that range far from the norm.

The chance to show sincerity and smarts via our ideals makes it more important that one’s far ideals fit with a coherent and well-thought out ideology, than to be accurate relative to some external standard.  So humans are relatively unconcerned to discover they have wildly divergent ideologies; they accept that they disagree.  While a middle average opinion might be more accurate on average, it would less sparkle with the shine of clear clever sincere thought.  In addition, divergence lets folks show loyalty to particular groups.

This smart sincere syndrome less afflicted our distant ancestors because fuzzy far feelings rarely lead to clear inescapable conclusions.  While far mode is good for creative thinking, it usually leaves plausible excuses for rejecting conclusions that one does not like.  But the more recent invention of near-mode-based math/logical style analysis, applicable to far abstract problems, has made it easier for humans to notice and avoid inconsistencies.  So today, the smart sincere syndrome especially afflicts many folks with high math ability.

Now a modest dose of smart sincerity, limited by time, topic or temperament, is a good sign, as it indicates the positive qualities of intelligence and conscientiousness, qualities most any organization can put to good use.  So everyone wants to seem ideological to some degree.  And even a large dose of smart sincerity, if bundled with complements such as beauty, stamina, or charisma, can bring success as a “movement” or spiritual leader.  But without such complements, an overdose of smart sincerity tends toward evolutionary failure, typically achieving less success relative to ability.

Today, a common solution to this dilemma is libertarian axiomatics, a simple coherent ideology supporting most, but hardly all, ordinary practical actions.  Another common solution is to embrace a particular successful person, profession, or institution as the key to achieving global ideals; full loyalty and support of such a thing may, if reciprocated, help one achieve standard measures of success.

However, pity the simply smart sincere, who try make sense of their inherited incoherent impractical far ideals, via more coherent if idiosyncratic ideologies, that encourage unusual, and usually unadaptive, behavior.  Stories told of their dramatic bids for ideal consistency may be their main legacy from this our dream-time era.

Added 17Jan: Rob Wiblin says terrorists fit this pattern.

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Naked Promiscuity

By Robin Hanson · December 17, 2009 11:10 pm · Comments (17)

Most wives are offended to see their husbands make a direct pass at another woman in front of them.  They mind less if he seems unconsciously attracted to a woman, but does not consciously act on that attraction.  A wife might mind her husband buying a sports car if his conscious intention was to attract other women for short term sex, but mind less if his main conscious reason was to race.  These things depend on how conscious and deliberate are his efforts to attract other women.  Now consider this:  It seems men are eager to visibly help heroically and financially, and to spend on visible status symbols, mainly to seek promiscuous short-term sex!  Data:

Men in the mating condition … said they would spend more money on the conspicuous luxuries. … Women in the mating condition … said they would spend more time on conspicuous pro-social volunteering. … Mating-primed women … said they would spend more on generosity-signalling conspicuous spending; mating-primed men did the same. Also, mating-primed men … said they would do more heroic helping, but not more non-heroic helping. … Moreover, men who were most interested in promiscuous, short-term sexual liaisons showed the largest increase after the mating priming in both generosity-signalling conspicuous spending and in heroic benevolence. …

Only the mating-primed men showed a higher interest in the socially dominant pro-social behaviours, and this effect was carried mostly by highly promiscuous men. … High-promiscuity men were more willing to borrow fashionable clothes from a friend to impress a potential mate rather than a new boss, whereas low-promiscuity men would rather impress the boss. Women showed no difference. …

High-promiscuity men who looked at photos of eight attractive women … said they would spend more money on items such as designer sunglasses or an elaborate car stereo rather than inconspicuous products such as low-cost jeans or a toaster, … [but] this is only the case when the potential mating situation is a short-term hook-up rather than a long-term relationship.  There was no shift for mating-primed low-promiscuity men or for women in either study. … Women rated a man driving a Porsche Boxster as more attractive for a short-term sexual relationship than a man driving a Honda Civic.  But the Porsche did not make the man more attractive as a possible marriage partner. Men rating women were uninfluenced by the type of car she drove.

So what would happen if we all became conscious of the above behaviors being strong clues that men are in fact actively trying for promiscuous short term sex?  Would such behaviors reduce, would long term relations become less exclusive, or what?  Maybe we just couldn’t admit that these are strong clues?

If these clues aren’t strong enough, imagine facial expression reading software could reliably tell when men are actively trying to attract short term sex partners.  How would we deal with such naked promiscuity?

Hat tip to Holden Karnofsky.

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Status Honesty

By Robin Hanson · December 15, 2009 9:35 am · Comments (58)

Scott Young ponders how honest to be about status:

People tend to ignore the status benefits of wealth. Most obviously because seeking status is a low-status behavior. Anyone seen grubbing for fame or new toys to impress their friends becomes less impressive.  As a result, I believe many people delude themselves that they want material possessions for intrinsic reasons. This is an unconscious effort to seek material wealth for purely status-related motives, and at the same time, not appear interested in grubbing for status. …

Some people would argue that the solution is to wipe yourself free of the need to obtain status. …  Another solution is to accept that people want status, and to pursue it zealously. … Of course, you could lie about these motives when asked, but still pursue them secretly. … One other solution seems to be the one most people pursue: search for status doggedly, but carefully delude yourself that every action you take for status, is actually pursued for other, nobler reasons. … None of these choices seem very appealing …

Perhaps the resolution to the conflict lies in accepting our need for status like all our other needs, hunger, sex or affection. … We should balance our strategy of life so that our pursuit of status mostly coincides with our other, nobler needs.  An artist might accept that recognition drives him. But he can also choose strategies that balance this drive with his need for creative expression, mastery or public impact.

No, no.  Scott, you are thinking you are built with separate desires for status and creative expression (etc.), which you must consciously trade against one another.  But we rarely need to consciously try to achieve status; usually the details of our desire for creative expression (etc.) are already designed to achieve status. Continue Reading "Status Honesty" »

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Married Sex

By Robin Hanson · December 6, 2009 4:40 pm · Comments (145)

“Oh, my God! You’re actually getting married in a few hours! I mean, everything’s gonna be all different. Carla, you never have to have sex again except for when you actually want to.”  Elliot from Scrubs.

Husbands often complain about too little sex:

One in five couples, he says, have a sexless marriage (having sex 10 or fewer times per year) and that if they want to get out of this painful rut, they’ll have to work together. … “The man says ‘Why don’t we have more sex?’ And the woman says ‘Why don’t we have more intimacy?’ ” he explains. … Most often, he says, the problem is much more mundane: “The sexual charge no longer is there.”

Well the charge must be there for him, or he wouldn’t ask.  So the charge isn’t there for her; what does she want?   The authors of Why Women Have Sex:

Women’s sexual attraction tends to be far more nuanced. It’s affected by … how a man smells … sense of humor and confidence, social status … other women’s judgments of how attractive he is … in addition to the visual cues. … Some women reported having sex to give someone else an S.T.D. or to extract revenge on someone who had wronged them. … Young women today … had sex just for the pleasure of it, … they wanted to be sexually experienced and add “another notch on their belt”; they had sex because they were competitive with other women—they wanted to win; and they were curious—they had sex just to see what it was like with men of different ages, ethnicities, careers, and penis sizes. …

I’m personally betting on the “Mr. Right Hypothesis,” which suggests that women use sexual orgasm, in part, as a mate selection device. Men who are attentive to the woman, sexually unselfish, take the time to learn what turns her on, etc., tend to make good partners and possibly good dads. … Some women came to the conclusion, after being with one partner for several years, that they were just not very sexual creatures. Then when they switched to a different partner, all of a sudden they started to blossom sexually. … Women are all different in their sexual needs. Don’t assume that what worked in the last relationship will be as effective in the next.

This complexity allows women to be honestly confused about what they want, but it can also hide motivated differences between what women say or think they want, and what really drives their choices.  For example, reduced sex might come from wives respecting husbands less than before, from seeing overly willing wives as lower in status, or from withholding sex to gain bargaining power on other issues.

The most emailed NYT article today is Elizabeth Weil’s account of trying to improve her marriage: Continue Reading "Married Sex" »

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It’s News On Academia, Not Climate

By Robin Hanson · November 22, 2009 1:00 pm · Comments (94)

Electronic files that were stolen from a prominent climate research center and made public last week provide a rare glimpse into the behind-the-scenes battle to shape the public perception of global warming.  …

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones writes. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”  In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree.. … “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.” …

Horner … [said] the e-mails have “the makings of a very big” scandal. “Imagine this sort of news coming in the field of AIDS research,” he added. … some likening the disclosure to the release of the Pentagon Papers during Vietnam.

More here.  Joel Achenbach comments:

This is not a scandal so much as a window on real scientists working on a politicized issue. … “Gravity isn’t a useful theory because Newton was a nice person.” I agree. But isn’t it also true that Newtons antipathy towards Hooke and his use of his position in control of the Royal Society, ensured that the concept of an achromatic lens for a telescope … had to wait until after [Newton's] death.

Yup, this behavior has long been typical when academics form competing groups, whether the public hears about such groups or not.  If you knew how academia worked, this news would not surprise you nor change your opinions on global warming.  I’ve never done this stuff, and I’d like to think I wouldn’t, but that is cheap talk since I haven’t had the opportunity.  This works as a “scandal” only because of academia’s overly idealistic public image.

It is a shame that academia works this way, and an academia where this stuff didn’t happen would probably be more accurate.  But even our flawed academic consensus is usually more accurate than its contrarians, and it is hard to find reliable cheap indicators saying when contrarians are more likely to be right.

If you don’t like this state of affairs join me in trying to develop a more reliable consensus mechanism on such topics: prediction markets. It just takes time or money.  Prefer instead to act shocked, just shocked, when the other side is shown to do this stuff, while reserving your side’s ability to do the same?  Then I have little respect for you.

Added 23Nov:  Tyler basically agrees.  Bryan too, mostly.  Nate Silver riffs.

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Vegan Compromise

By Robin Hanson · November 13, 2009 2:40 pm · Comments (56)

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious. …

How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.” …

“Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about ‘eating animals,’ they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism,” he says. “It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.”

More here.  She’s right: we will not tolerate folks watching animals tortured for entertainment, as in movies or cock-fights, but we will tolerate animals being tortured for food, for meds, or perhaps lipstick.  We care far more about our pets than our food, even if they are very similar creatures.  And we know deep down that the usual sorts of principles most folks endorse do not support this behavior.  We are hypocrites.

Those with strong self-images as principled intellectuals have two outs:

  1. Become vegetarians, to make our acts match our words.
  2. Change our principles, to make our words match our acts.

Rather than warring to the death for one side or the other to win such a conflict, I prefer to seek compromises between our near and far selves.  Let us seek principles that can account for most of our acts, then try to change the other acts to conform with such easier principles.  My tentative resolutions:

  • We don’t care much about most animals, even smart ones.
  • It is a bad sign about someone that they would be enjoy watching animals being tortured.  We prohibit such watching to make our society look “civilized” to other societies.
  • We are kind to our pets to show others we are loyal to those loyal to us.  Fido has always been there for us, so we will be there for him – up to a point at least.
  • We are willing to spend only modest sums to make food animal lives a bit more enjoyable.  We should spend such sums, but not go overboard.

More interesting quotes from that article: Continue Reading "Vegan Compromise" »

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How Wrong Can We Be?

By Robin Hanson · August 7, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (33)

Most models published in economic journals have a reasonable if loose match with human behavior.  If most published economic models says that in X-type situations people tend to do more Y, then more often than not, people in fact more often do Y when X.  This is evidence that economic theoryists actually know something about human behavior.

However, when you ask people in situation X why they do Y, the reasons they give usually have only a weak connection to the reasons in related economic models.  Yes people who have been taught economics can find it easy to explain their actions in economic model terms, but this is not how most folks usually think.  Thus the practice of academic economics implicitly accepts that people often, perhaps even usually, do things for reasons other than the reasons they give.

Consider also that something similar holds in sales and marketing.  The rationale a marketer gives for why an ad or other product strategy works usually differs quite a bit from the reasons people give for why they like an ad or a product.  Similarly, the reasons dating and other relation consultants give for why their suggested strategies help people like or respect you are often quite at odds with the reasons people give for why they like or respect others.

In addition, I just posted on how seeing the hidden status games in most conversations makes one a better actor, and on how psychotherapy is all about exposing our hidden-to-ourselves agendas.   Standard social science accounts of religion say religion is quite functional for people, but for reasons rather different from the reasons religious people give.  Similarly, my “showing that you care” explanation of medicine suggests medical behavior is functional, but for quite different reasons than people usually give.

This all seems to add up to a consistent expert consensus that humans quite often, perhaps even usually, just don’t know why they do what they do.  And this is extremely disturbing, as it calls into question our own opinions about why we do what we do.  Worse, if each of these areas (econ modeling, marketing, acting, psychotherapy) experts call into question only a limited range of our opinions, while implicitly assuming most of our other opinions are correct, perhaps these experts seriously underestimate just how misinformed we all are.

I’d like to take this skepticism seriously, and in fact seem to be somewhat obsessed by this project.   I’m not sure exactly how, but I’ll plow ahead anyway.

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You Are A Character

By Robin Hanson · July 15, 2009 1:45 am · Comments (23)

Far more entertaining than it deserves to be, unless you’re a 10-year-old boy, in which case it’s only the greatest movie ever made. Village Voice on Dragonball Evolution.

Dragonball Evolution is not a great film.  It can be fun if you mentally “squint” and ignore the obvious implausibilities, cliches and blatant manipulations to get you to side with the good characters against the bad, and to be caught up in their concerns.   Ten-year-olds may not know enough to recognize these manipulations, in which case they may love the movie.

“Good” movies are nearly as manipulative; they just do a better job of hiding it.  Those who make movies simply must manipulate us if they are to entertain us; we are quite clearly bored by most of the reality around us, and usually even by detailed truthful tellings of the most dramatic real events around.  But since we do not enjoy a story when we are too clearly aware of its manipulations, movies must be crafted so as to not force us to notice them.  We usually cooperate to “suspend judgment”, so that manipulations can be visible on the periphery of our awareness.

Let me suggest that humans are much like story characters.   Since others like us better if the story of our lives seems to fit with standard human ideals, we try to appear to so fit.   But since it is expensive to actually fit these ideals in great detail, we instead manipulate our cheap surface words and acts to give a loose appearance of a fit.  The expensive details of our lives, however, instead better fit the non-ideal necessities of who we really are.   None of this works if our hypocrisy is too obvious, but thankfully we tend to cooperate to squint and avoid seeing each others’ non-ideal realities.

You are a character in the story of your life.  Evolution has formed you so that you, mostly unconsciously, craft the character you project to be likable and interesting.  The crafting of this image is done via manipulations that are just good enough to not force most folks to notice them.   Perceptive folk may notice them more, but usually also know they will not be rewarded for calling our mutual charade.

Even so, I choose to try to see through our deceptions, to the less ideal, dramatic, and sympathetic people we really are.  And I hope to live to tell about it.

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