Tag Archives: Law

Real Policing

By Robin Hanson · August 8, 2011 2:15 pm · Comments (13)

A columnist wary of police discretion in enforcing a teen curfew:

The County Council is considering an ill-conceived curfew for kids under 18 after a flash-mob gang fight … At the jam-packed hearing, Montgomery officers assured curfew skeptics and opponents that they weren’t out to lock up the kids coming home late from jobs or Harry Potter premieres. … So, how exactly do they plan on telling the good kids from the bad ones? I’m pretty sure most kids will forget their government-issued, GOOD KID ID badge every time they go out. A government-imposed curfew opens the door to harassment and profiling when what we need is policing of criminals and parenting of kids. (more)

A police officer responds:

Today’s Montgomery County police are part of one of the first generations of Americans to have grown up “color blind,” or for that matter, blind to all bias. ….

We are able to tell the bad kids based on their behavior. It’s the kids who come to hang out but never spend a dime at area businesses. The ones dropping the “F-bomb” so loud that you cringe when you’re walking by with your family. The ones who comment on the appearance of your daughters, walking behind them and taunting with comments so crude it would make a sailor blush. The ones who end up staying late, wanting to fistfight kids from other neighborhoods because of some street name or boundary line that is important only in their minds. The ones who follow you as you walk out of Silver Spring into the adjoining neighborhoods, snatching your iPhone and running to the Metro to get home. (more)

This exchange nicely illustrates the conflict between the ideals we want law to embody, of police just enforcing a clearly specified “law,” and the real messy peace-keeping tasks police actually perform. This police officer clearly expects to use lots of discretion in deciding who to harass. While it is not officially illegal to shop without buying, or to use swear words, or to care about neighborhood lines, he’d use those as indicators about whom to harass. He’d probably on average mostly harass kids that locals dislike, though he’d also probably act on personal biases and preferences. And I’ll bet that among police, the only unusual thing about his attitude is that he published it. Police must give lip-service to being “unbiased,” and local citizens will pretend along with them, if that’s what it takes to keep the peace.

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Blackmail Is Gossip+

By Robin Hanson · August 8, 2011 8:20 am · Comments (13)

Sticks and stones may my bones, but words will never hurt me. Old saying, that few believe.

A perverse man stirs up dissension, and a gossip separates close friends. (Proverbs 16:28)

They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, … (Romans 1:29,30)

Law, first and foremost, keeps the peace. Sometimes people have big complaints about others, complaints so big that they are tempted to do something big about them. In such cases it can be very nice to have a law step in and declare who is right. If many accept the law’s resolution, peace may be preserved.

Gossip is dangerous. This has long been known, as the bible quotes above indicate. People can be greatly harmed by others talking about them, so sometimes gossip leads to very big complaints. Through most of the history of formal law, dangerous gossip was dealt with simply: law banned saying bad things about others. Of course this rule wasn’t always or even usually enforced – it was expensive to make a legal complaint. And there were various conditions and exceptions. But the basic idea was simple: keep people from hurting each other.

Our modern Western world thinks differently. We idealize conversation, and letting people say what they think. So we no longer have law punish people for saying bad things about each other, especially true things. We instead tell folks to tough it, that true mean words don’t excuse violent retaliation. Sometimes we see people hurt others greatly, out of malice, and we refuse to stop them. We sacrifice such victims on the altar of our respect for conversation.

Of course there are good things to say about gossip. By freely sharing info, we might aggregate it, and all learn the sum of what we all know. For example, we might learn to identify people who are mean or uncooperative, helping us to avoid them, and giving them stronger incentives to cooperate. While such social pressure to please aren’t always good, they seem good on average.

Blackmail is basically a threat of gossip; “if you don’t pay, I’ll gossip.” So almost all the things people don’t like about blackmail are things they don’t like about gossip. Someone could, out of selfish motives, say something that hurts someone else. If you don’t like this scenario, it is mainly something you don’t like about a freedom to gossip.

Yes, in addition to harmful gossip, blackmail can also involve money, and a threat. But money-inspired threats happen anytime parties haggle over a price, and few folks get worked up over that. If people are free to buy or not buy, and to sell or not sell, why not let them make threats about the price they’ll accept? Similarly, if people are free to gossip or not gossip as they prefer, why not let them haggle over the price of their gossip?

Yes, some prices are seen by many as unfair or immoral. Many don’t think the price of water or gas should rise in a crisis, and think the cash price of sex, babies, and organs should always be zero. But the arguments folks give for those cases don’t apply well to gossip — why exactly should the cash price of gossip always be zero?

Now a world that allows blackmail about gossip, i.e., haggling over the price of gossip, isn’t exactly the same as a world with only gossip. Legal blackmail should increase the incentives to discover embarrassing info, and thus the expected penalties from embarrassing actions. But these are mostly just stronger versions of the effects of gossip without blackmail, and they are effects we think we mostly like about gossip.

If we don’t want to discourage certain embarrassing actions, then why allow gossip about them? We could extend our privacy laws, and declare some topics off limits to casual conversation. But for topics where we do want conversation, because it is on average good to discourage people from doing embarrassing things, why not also allow blackmail?

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Blackmail History

By Robin Hanson · August 7, 2011 10:20 am · Comments (3)

The most common way academics study regulation is to seek models under which such regulation could be efficient (or moral), and to seek empirical data on details of current local regulatory practice to distinguish such models. But this standard approach tends to neglect both models where people personally gain by supporting inefficient (or immoral) regulation, and the patterns of such regulations across diverse cultures, times, and topics. Some other day I’ll elaborate on this general point. Today I’ll apply my own advice to blackmail, and consider the history of blackmail law.

Some say that we ban blackmail today in order to encourage more gossip. Others say blackmail law is driven mainly by elites wanting to protect themselves. Relevant to both of these theories is the fact that both blackmail and negative gossip were illegal in ancient Rome. (Details below.) But only regarding elites. Unless you had a special privilege, it was illegal to say something embarrassing about an elite. It wasn’t until the last few centuries that law has allowed gossip that says bad true things about elites, and then to compensate we greatly increased blackmail penalties. So at least regarding the pre-modern era, the elite protection theory gets a boost, while the gossip support theory looks weak. This data also helps one understand how the ancients could affirm such high moral standards – few were allowed to point out elite hypocrisy.

Foragers relied heavily on gossip – “leaders” and “legal guilt and punishment” were determined almost entirely by informal uncontrolled gossip. Farmer elites tried to crush gossip as a social force competing with their edicts, though gossip stayed stronger among elites. In the modern world we have returned more to forager values, and so we more empower and rely on gossip, though usually within limits. We allow juries to decide legal trials, though we limit outside gossip influence on jurors. Via democracy, public opinion now picks top leaders, and mass media is recently getting comfortable saying bad things about leaders’ personal lives. Via a celebrity and media culture, gossip chooses many other elites. And we also allow freer speech, including saying embarrassing things about elites.

Forager values seem less enamored of money, since a money-based relation is often framed as a kind of domination, and for foragers domination is illicit. So while the modern world more embraces decentralized conversation, we seem to often be wary of letting base money and commerce influence conversation, which we idealize. For example, there is today widespread wariness of paid advertising, open campaign finance, and of for profit firms controlling schools and media, and publishing research. While this wariness doesn’t usually lead to prohibitions of money interacting with gossip, it makes people more willing to accept such prohibitions.

Blackmail can be framed as a base thing, money, polluting both our idealized conversation, and our idealized private lives. Distaste for pollution of high things by low, together with strong elite distate for blackmail, which mostly targets them, seems enough to explain why blackmail remains illegal.

Some quotes on blackmail law history: Continue reading "Blackmail History" »

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Charity Blackmail?

By Robin Hanson · August 6, 2011 5:35 pm · Comments (38)

Monday Tuesday I’ll be taped again for a segment of the John Stossel Show, to air [added: on some coming yet to be determined] Thursday at 10p. This time I’ll be defending blackmail, a subject I’ve discussed here, here, here. In preparation, I’ve just reviewed twenty academic papers on the subject.

Blackmail starts with a situation where A knows something embarrassing about B.  Assume A obtained this info legally, and has the legal freedom to tell or not tell this info to others, based on many noble or ignoble motivations, including rivalry and revenge. A is guilty of illegal blackmail if he requests compensation from B in exchange for A not telling others. Such a deal is legal, however, if B suggests it. (So A should say, “I happen to know this about you. And on a completely unrelated subject, I sure could use a new car.”) For example, recently someone was sent to prison for trying to blackmail David Letterman on his extramarital affairs.

In those twenty papers, roughly a quarter of the authors think blackmail should be legal. Others offered a wide range of arguments for illegality:

  1. Your right to keep quiet is weaker than your right to speak.
  2. It is stupid to pay a blackmailer; stupidity should be illegal.
  3. A blackmailer’s motives, in wanting money, are immoral.
  4. Saying embarrassing things about someone hurts them.
  5. It is especially wrong to gain money by hurting someone.
  6. The blackmailer uses third parties, without their permission, to extract gains.
  7. Blackmail discourages embarrassing activities, but some things just can’t be changed.
  8. Blackmailers may commit crimes to get the info, as may victims to get money.
  9. Rules forbidding or requiring the telling of certain info might be good, but are less “practical” than blackmail laws.
  10. If blackmail is impossible, people will instead gossip, and gossip will result in more folks knowing, and discourage embarrassing activities more.
  11. Government law can optimally discourage an activity via optimal punishment and rates of detection and error. Blackmail is an out of control private law, and will get these things wrong by detecting and punishing too often.

The issue of blackmailer motives could be addressed by only legalizing “charity blackmail”, where the compensation obtained is donated to a charity. (Credit to Rong Rong for the idea.) As probably few would support allowing only charity blackmail, it seems blackmailer motives aren’t the main issue.

Note that gossip is also an out-of-control private law which can discourage activities too much – why allow gossip but disallow blackmail? Note also that those who most dislike the idea of either blackmail or gossip discouraging their embarrassing activities seem to prefer that blackmail be illegal – they don’t believe that gossip alone discourages such activities more. Nor do I.

Posner ’93 offers an elite bias explanation:

It is extremely easy for a legislator, judge, or other public official to visualize himself or herself as a blackmail victim: any public official is a prime target for blackmail, and public officials are influential in the formation of law.

Smilansky ’95 agreees:

Part of the explanation for the perplexing attitude of common-sense morality on this issue is probably cynical, e.g. that the thought of being blackmailed in the ordinary ways is frightening to the rich and powerful in society, who may be less concerned with e.g. the threats of employers or politicians. Hence, that ordinary blackmail be taken so seriously is just what one would expect.

Boyle ’92 says we don’t like money intruding on “private” realms:

“Blackmail seems like the intrusion of market logic into the realm that should be most “private.” … To commodify is itself to violate the private realm. To commodify a violation of privacy, then, is doubly reprehensible. …. Blackmail is illegal because we have a vision of “privateness” that is constructed in part around the control of information as opposed to, say, wealth, healthcare, or housing. … We make a pre theoretical judgment that an activity is “private,” and only then do we “deduce” that it must be kept from the ruthless, instrumental logic of the market.

I made a similar suggestion last October.

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In Favor Of Flogging

By Robin Hanson · June 16, 2011 12:40 pm · Comments (37)

Suggest adding the whipping post to America’s system of criminal justice and most people recoil in horror. But offer a choice between five years in prison or 10 lashes and almost everybody picks the lash. What does that say about prison? … Never in the history of the world has a country locked up so many of its people. … Not even the most progressive reformer has a plan to reduce the prison population by 85 percent.  I do: Bring back the lash. Give convicts the choice of flogging in lieu of incarceration. …

Corporal punishment, said one early advocate of prisons, was a relic of “barbarous” British imperialism ill-suited to “a new country, simple manners, and a popular form of government.” … State by state, starting with Pennsylvania in 1790, … corporal punishment was struck from the criminal code. The idea was that penitentiaries would heal the criminally ill just as hospitals cured the physically sick. It didn’t work. … Of course some people are simply too dangerous to release — pedophiles, terrorists and the truly psychopathic, for instance. But they’re relatively few in number. … Incarceration destroys families and jobs, exactly what people need to have in order to stay away from crime. (more)

Yup. The US spends vast sums to affirm its myths of greatness, such on arms to affirm our saving the world from nazis, communists, etc. and on med to affirm our gift of modern med to the world. You might hope we’d give up eventually as myths become obviously wrong, but this prison myth, that we are kind because we won’t flog, has lasted for two centuries in the face of consistently contrary evidence, and gives no signs of abating.  Could our military and med myths last that long?

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Punish Sleep-Rape

By Robin Hanson · June 3, 2011 10:10 pm · Comments (57)

Sexsomnia is simply a variant of sleepwalking, which affects 1 to 2% of adults. … The woman awoke to discover that her underwear had been removed and a glassy-eyed Luedecke was trying to rape her. She pushed him off, ran to the washroom, and returned to find him standing there bewildered. Luedeke, who had an established history of sleepwalking behaviors, was acquitted after [a] psychiatrist … testified … [that he] was in a dissociative state when the incident occurred and therefore he was not consciously aware of his actions. (more)

Should we punish ordinary rape severely yet entirely forgive sleep-rape? More generally, should we punish harms chosen by an unconscious mind much less severely than harms chosen by a conscious mind? I can see two arguments, but both fail I think.

The first argument says we should punish “intentional” harms more. Assume that law tries to encourage people to adopt efficient levels of care. Then note that purposely planning and carefully directing actions to create harm seems quite clearly far below an efficient level of care to prevent harm. Finally, conclude that it makes sense to punish planned harms more severely than harms which might more plausibly be accidental.

To conclude from this that unconscious acts should be forgiven, however, one must presume that unconscious mind harms are unplanned or are accidental side effects of other plans. Yet almost all conscious plans are first made unconsciously. So why should we presume unconscious acts are never planned?

The second argument divides a human mind into conscious and unconscious parts, and then complains that it is unfair to punish the conscious part for acts of the unconscious part, over which it might have had no control. Consider, however, an analogy with a married couple. When we punish a married person who has committed a crime, their spouse is usually punished as well. Fine and jail that take away resources from a criminal also take away resources from their spouse.

We are mostly ok with punishing spouses along with criminals. People choose their marriage partners, and have many opportunities to monitor and encourage good behavior from spouses. So punishing spouses gives them incentives to monitor and encourage well. But conscious minds also have opportunities to monitor and encourage associated unconscious minds. In fact, there are probably more such opportunities with a single person’s head than within a married couple. This suggests that we should thus punish conscious minds for associated unconscious actions at least as much as we effectively punish criminal spouses.

I wonder how our eagerness to excuse unconscious rule violations is related to our more general homo hypocritus eagerness to reserve possible excuses for our and allies’ future rule violations.

Added 11:30a: Like drunks, sleepwalkers seem somewhat incapacitated, so perhaps they should be excused from crimes to a similar degree as drunks. More data:

A sleepwalking adult usually has eyes wide open, although they may have a glassy or dazed appearance.  While they may move around somewhat clumsily, their arms are not outstretched. … Sleepwalking adults have been known to rearrange furniture, talk on the phone, email, eat, clean house, play a musical instrument, and many other routine tasks.  Sometimes they will perform rather bizarre actions, like urinating in a trashcan or removing all the knick-knacks from living room shelves and lining them up around the bathroom sink. … sleep walking adults have been known to get in the car and drive, sometimes for long distances.  Oftentimes these road trips have resulted in serious auto accidents.  There are many stories on record of sleepwalkers falling from second story windows or roofs, seriously injuring themselves, or even dying from the fall. … In some rare instances, somnabulists have walked out into the middle of a busy street, or stepped in front of an oncoming train … [or] committed murder and other serious crimes. (more)

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Privilege Marks Status

By Robin Hanson · February 8, 2011 8:30 pm · Comments (40)

Crime is bad. So prosecuting criminals is good. Prosecution requires evidence, mainly testimony. So we force witnesses to testify in court, without compensation. Testifying in court might be quite inconvenient for a witness, might subject him or her to retaliation, and might damage her relationships. Yet still we require it. Except:

A privilege is … rules excluding evidence that would be adverse to a fundamental principle or relationship if it were disclosed. The most common form is … attorney-client privilege. … The rationale is that clients ought to be able to communicate freely with their lawyers, in order to facilitate the proper functioning of the legal system. Other common forms include privilege against self-incrimination, without prejudice privilege (protecting communications made in the course of negotiations to settle a legal dispute), public interest privilege (formerly Crown privilege, protecting documents for which secrecy is necessary for the proper functioning of government), marital privilege, medical professional privilege, and clergy-penitent privilege. (more)

Reporters’ privilege … is the … right many jurisdictions by statutory law or judicial decision have given to journalists in protecting their confidential sources from discovery. (more)

The right to remain silent is … the right of … the defendant to refuse to comment or provide an answer when questioned. … Adverse comments or inferences cannot be made by the judge or jury regarding the refusal by a defendant to answer questions before or during a … legal proceeding. (more)

OK, if we want plea bargaining, we must privilege what is said in negotiations – who would negotiate otherwise? And I could understand an “important secret” privilege, for when the social costs of revealing a secret outweigh a crime’s harm. But it is hard to believe social harm is that large in typical privilege applications, or much larger than for unprivileged relations. (And no harm calculations are given for us to examine.)

For example, students would surely feel more comfortable talking to teachers who could never testify against them. But that hardly seems reason to prevent teachers from testifying against students. Friends and lovers prevented from testifying against each another should also feel closer. In fact, most any relation could gain by eliminating the threat of future legal testimony. But surely this isn’t reason to stop such testimony.

Eliminating privileges should increase the cost of being a criminal, and discourage more crime.  So why don’t we do that?  If legal privilege isn’t about crime or social harm from secrets exposed, what is it about?

Many people are horrified to learn of how ancient societies formally divided folks into classes, and limited what classes could wear. But we aren’t so different. I suspect most legal priviledge serves the same function as the common requirement for folks to dress “respectfully” in court – it raises the status of some relative to others. To mark our respect for married folk, lawyers, doctors, priests, reporters, and citizens in general, we give them special privileges, even if that costs us more crime.

Added 11Feb:  There is also a research privilege!

Certificates of Confidentiality are issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). … They allow the investigator and others who have access to research records to refuse to disclose identifying information on research participants in any civil, criminal, administrative, legislative, or other proceeding, whether at the federal, state, or local level. (more; HT Alex T.)

Really? We make it harder to catch criminals because otherwise researchers might find it harder to recruit criminals into their studies?

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Non-Evil Firms

By Robin Hanson · January 29, 2011 8:15 am · Comments (26)

Are corporations intrinsically evil because they must by law only maximize profits? I don’t think so, but if you do, you might prefer to do business with a benefit corporation whose goals you respect. By law, a benefit firm must first try to achieve its declared goals:

Fifteen benefit corporations have been created in the three months since new [Maryland] legislation, signed into law in April, took effect. … At its core, benefit corporations blend the altruism of nonprofits with the business sensibilities of for-profit companies. These hybrid entities pay taxes and can have shareholders, without the risk of being sued for not maximizing profits. Companies can consider the needs of customers, workers, the community or environment and be well within their legal right.

A benefit corporation, for instance, could choose to buy from local vendors at a higher cost to reduce its carbon footprint, much as the Big Bad Woof does. The company, as a part of the incorporation, is required to file an annual report on contributions to the goals set forth in the charter and submit to an audit by an independent third party. … There are no tax breaks or procurement incentives for benefit corporations in Maryland, but the classification offers a competitive advantage … A 2010 Cone study … [found] 61 percent of consumers surveyed had purchased a product because of the company’s long-term commitment to a cause or issue. …

Shortly after Maryland passed the benefit corporation legislation last year, Vermont got in on the act. Several other states, including New York and California, are considering similar bills. New York is one of 31 states with a “corporate constituency statute,” which allows for the consideration of non-financial interests but lacks the full protection of the new law. (more)

As Mr. Burns would say, “Excellent.”

So if benefit firms became more common, would people still habitually think them evil?  Would it matter much?

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Define By Consequences

By Robin Hanson · January 19, 2011 11:00 am · Comments (19)

If corporations must be treated as “persons” for the purpose of campaign contributions – as the Supreme Court mandated last year in the infamous Citizens United decision – why shouldn’t they also enjoy “personal privacy”? The case threatens to weaken an important tool used to hold government and corporations accountable. … The court should not repeat that mistake by again allowing corporations to masquerade as people. (more)

People often argue about “definitions” as if the main issue was conceptual essences, or “cutting nature at its joints.” But in fact the vast majority definition disputes are really about social convention (including law). For example, I was interviewed recently on our changing “definition of death.” I said we’d long had a perfectly sensible and timeless concept: death is when life is no longer possible. What people want instead is an easy to apply criteria, so they can know when it is socially acceptable to “give up” on someone, or to declare someone a “murderer.” The timeless concept doesn’t serve this role well, so they seek something else. (Which then limits cryonics.)

Similarly, we’ve long had a decent concept of “father,” the man from whom half of a kid’s DNA comes. But some say that since it is good for each kid to have the support of a man, we should declare a cuckolded husband to be the “father” of his wife’s kid. Debates about the definitions of “naked” or “porn” are similarly about social convenience.

The issue of calling firms “people” is also really about social consequences of doing so, even though many talk as if there was a “natural kind” out there to discover, if only we did enough conceptual analysis. I’ve argued that since the function of “free speech” is best served by “free hearing“, it shouldn’t matter who wants to talk. Unless we are willing to censor, we should let citizens hear any sources they desire.

Similarly, we should ask about the social functions served by privacy protections. Yes weaker privacy protections make it easier to hold firms accountable, but that applies to individual humans as well. And if stronger privacy protects folks more against abuse by governments or others, that benefit should apply to firms as well. Yes people may just have a direct preference for privacy, but such preferences may be weak, and perhaps people working at a firm feel similarly about the privacy of their firm.

For most definition disputes, pretending to resolve it via conceptual analysis just isn’t very honest. It is more honest to argue about the desirability of various consequences of alternate social conventions.

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Beware Commitment

By Robin Hanson · December 29, 2010 8:00 pm · Comments (26)

We choose “shoulds” over “wants” more often in far mode:

[Of] various programs, some were public policies (e.g., gas price) and some were personal plans (e.g., exercising). These programs presented a conflict between serving the ‘‘should” self and the ‘‘want” self. Participants were first asked to evaluate how much they thought they should support the program and how much they wanted to support the program. Then, they were asked to indicate how strongly they would oppose or support the program. Half of the participants were told that the program would be implemented in the distant future (e.g., in two years) and the other half were told the program would be implemented in the near future (as soon as possible). The results indicate that support for these ‘‘should” programs was greater among participants in the distant future implementation condition than among participants in the near future implementation condition. Further examination of the ‘‘gas price” policy revealed that the construal level of the policy mediated the relationship between the implementation time and the support for the policy. Participants were more likely to choose what they should do in the distant future as opposed to the near future. … [This] has an important implication: … policy-makers could increase support for ‘‘should” policies by emphasizing that the policies would go into effect in the distant future. (more)

All animals need different ways to reason about things up close vs. far away.  And because humans are especially social, our forager ancestors evolved especially divergent near and far minds. Far minds could emphasize presenting an idealized image to others, while near minds could focus on managing our less visible actions. Homo hypocritus could see himself from afar, and sincerely tell himself and others that when it mattered he would do the honorable thing. Even if in fact he’d probably act less honorably.

One reason this was possible was that foragers had pretty weak commitment mechanisms. Yes, they could promise future actions, but they rarely coordinated to track others’ promises and violations, or to organize consistent responses.  So forager far minds could usually wax idealistic without much concern for expensive consequences.

In contrast, farmer norms and social institutions could better enforce commitments. But instead of generically enforcing all contacts, to give far minds more control over farmer lives, farmers were careful to only enforce a limited range of commitments. Cultural selection evolved a set of approved standard commitments that better supported a farmer way of life.

Even today, our legal systems forbid many sorts of contracts, and we generally distrust handling social relations via explicit flexible contracts, rather than via more intuitive social interactions and standard traditional commitments. We are even reluctant to use contracts to give ourselves incentives to lose weight, etc.

The usual near-far question is: what decisions do we make when in near vs. far mode? But there is also a key meta decision: which mode do we prefer to be in when making particular decisions?

Speechifiers through the ages, including policy makers today, usually talk as if they want decisions to be made in far mode. We should try to live up to our ideals, they preach, at least regarding far-away decisions. But our reluctance to use contracts to enable more far mode control over our actions suggests that while we tend to talk as if we want more far mode control, we usually act to achieve more near mode control. (Ordinary positive interest rates, where we trade more tomorrow for less today, also suggest we prefer to move resources from far into near.)

We thus seem to be roughly meta-consistent on our near and far minds. Not only are we designed to talk a good idealistic talk from afar while taking selfish practical actions up close, we also seem to be designed to direct our less visible actions into contexts where our near minds rule, and direct grand idealistic talk to contexts where our far minds do the talking.  We talk an idealistic talk, but walk a practical walk, and try to avoid walking our talk or talking our walk.

So yes, encouraging folks to commit more to decisions ahead of time should result in actions being driven more by our more idealistic far minds. In your far mind, you might think you’d like this consequence. But when you take concrete actions, your near mind will be in more control, making you more wary of this grand idealistic plan to get more grand idealism. Our hypocritical minds are a delicate balance, a intricate compromise between conflicting near and far tendencies. Beware upsetting that balance, via crude attempts to get one side to win big over the other.

Longtime readers may recall that my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky focuses on a scenario where a single future machine intelligence suddenly becomes super powerful and takes over the world. Considering this scenario near inevitable, he seeks ways to first endow such a machine with an immutable summary of our best ideals, so it will forevermore make what we consider good decisions. This seems to me an extreme example of hoping for a strong way to commit to gain a far-mind-ideal world.  And I am wary.

Added 8a: Michael Vassar objects to my saying Eliezer Yudkowsky wants to “endow such a machine with an immutable summary of our best ideals”, since Yudkowsky is well aware of the danger of using “Ten Commandments or Three Laws.” Actually, one could argue that Yudkowsky has an air-tight argument that his proposal won’t overemphasize far over near mode, because his CEV proposal is by definition to not make any mistakes:

Coherent extrapolated volition is our choices and the actions we would collectively take if “we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, and had grown up closer together.”

Now I hear a far mode mood in the second “wished we were” clause, but the first clause taken alone suggests a “no mistakes” definition. However, it seems to me one must add lots of quite consequential qualifying detail to a “no mistakes” vision statement to get an actual implementation. It is only in a quite far mode that one could even imagine there wouldn’t be lots of such detail.  And it is such detail that I fear would be infused with excessively far mode attitudes.

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