Tag Archives: Status

Innovation Is Random

By Robin Hanson · May 12, 2012 8:30 am · Comments (10)

A dramatic, and sad, example of how random innovation can be:

A blowtorch flame is barrelling onto its surface to no effect. The egg should have cracked apart within seconds under the blistering heat. Yet after a few minutes, McCann picks it up and holds it in his hand. “It only just feels warm,” he says. He cracks it open and out dribbles a runny yolk. “It hasn’t even begun to start cooking.” That was March 1990, and this remarkable demonstration on the British TV show Tomorrow’s World was about to transform [Maurice] Ward’s fortunes.

The egg itself was nothing special. Its extraordinary resistance to the blowtorch’s heat came from a thin layer of white material that Ward had daubed on its shell. An amateur inventor, … Ward had concocted the stuff with no scientific training and named it Starlite. … Subsequent tests in British and US government labs confirmed that it was the real thing. …

Over the next two decades, Ward made a handful of samples of his material, but always refused to reveal the recipe. Then, in May 2011, he died. … A former hairdresser, in the 1980s [Ward] reportedly ran a small plastics company in northern England. He was also an English eccentric with a white beard, a bow tie and a divergent mind. He told journalists he made some batches of Starlite on his kitchen table in a food processor. ..

Greenbury believes that Ward was never interested in the money. His thinks Ward wasn’t able to relinquish the role of expert. By passing on the responsibility for Starlite to trained scientists, Greenbury suggests, Ward would have lost this coveted status. (more)

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Stories Are Like Religion

By Robin Hanson · May 8, 2012 10:00 pm · Comments (114)

Small children (age 4-6) who were exposed to a large number of children’s books and films had a significantly stronger ability to read the mental and emotional states of other people. … The more absorbed subjects were in the story, the more empathy they felt, and the more empathy they felt, the more likely the subjects were to help when the experimenter “accidentally” dropped a handful of pens… Reading narrative fiction … fosters empathic growth and prosocial behavior. …

Fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place. (more)

People who mainly watched drama and comedy on TV — as opposed to heavy viewers of news programs and documentaries — had substantially stronger “just-world” beliefs. … Fiction, by constantly exposing us to the theme of poetic justice, may be partly responsible for the sense that the world is, on the whole, a just place. (more)

Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life’s risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o’clock news. That’s because these people are less likely to see sensationalized or one-sided sources of information, and thus see reality more clearly. (more)

Imagine that all you know about someone is that they have zero interest in stories. Not movies, not novels, not nothing. They prefer instead to stay focused on the real world. The only “stories” they want are accurate histories of representative people. What do you think of this person?

You might want to hire this person. But would you trust them to be loyal? Would you date them? Marry them? Most people feel a little wary of such story-less people, just as they are wary of atheists. People fear that atheists will violate social norms because they do not fear punishment from gods and spirits. Similarly, people fear that story-less people have not internalized social norms well – they may be too aware of how easy it would be to get away with violations, and feel too little shame from trying.

Thus in equilibrium, people are encouraged to consume stories, and to deludedly believe in a more just world, in order to be liked more by others. This is similar to how people have long been encouraged to be religious, so that they could similarly be liked more by others.

A few days ago I asked why not become religious, if it will give you a better life, even if the evidence for religious beliefs is weak? Commenters eagerly declared their love of truth. Today I’ll ask: if you give up the benefits of religion, because you love far truth, why not also give up stories, to gain even more far truth? Alas, I expect that few who claim to give up religion because they love truth will also give up stories for the same reason. Why?

One obvious explanation: many of you live in subcultures where being religious is low status, but loving stories is high status. Maybe you care a lot less about far truth than you do about status.

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Illusory Power Transference

By Robin Hanson · May 7, 2012 1:00 pm · Comments (5)

“Illusory Power Transference” is the academic name for feeling powerful due to a superficial connection to a powerful person, such as having once been in the same room:

Suppose that one day, an employee at a large multinational corporation attends an event in which the company’s rarely seen chief executive officer (CEO) makes an appearance. As the CEO works the room, the employee greets him with a handshake, followed by a brief conversation in which they exchange pleasantries. The CEO thanks him for being ‘‘part of the team’’ and then excuses himself to deliver his keynote address. When the event is over, the employee walks back to his office and resumes his job as an investment manager. How would this brief association with the company’s most powerful figure affect the employee’s mindset and behavior when he resumes his work? …

We propose that … associating with the powerful CEO suggests that he, too, must be powerful. Moreover, this minimal connection with the CEO would actually lead him to act as if he personally possessed more power when making important decisions on the job and interacting with others. ….

We use two experiments to … demonstrate that men who have a tenuous association with a powerful other (versus a powerless or equal-power other) felt more powerful and were more optimistic, confident, and risk seeking, even though they could not leverage the associate’s power. (more; HT Tyler Cowen)

I have suggested that lot of otherwise puzzling behavior can be explained by strong evolved desires to affiliate with high status (i.e., impressive or powerful) people. Apparently even very weak affiliations can make big differences. This can help explain our preferring live art and sport events, and our uncritical relations to academics, real estate agents, investment advisors, doctors, lawyers, etc.

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Death of a Salesman

By Robin Hanson · May 6, 2012 9:55 pm · Comments (48)

A recent NYT article intrigued me:

Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” … is the most devastating portrait of punctured middle-class dreams in our national literature. … [It] has consolidated its prestige as an exposure of middle-class delusions. … Mr. Miller later wrote …. that he had hoped the play would expose “this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.” … Mr. Miller remembered worrying in 1949 that “there was too much identification with Willy, too much weeping, and that the play’s ironies were being dimmed out by all this empathy.” … Miller’s outrage at a capitalist system he wanted to humanize has become our cynical adaptation to a capitalist system we pride ourselves on knowing how to manipulate. (more)

I didn’t remember the play offering a critique of capitalism, but looking around I see this view is common:

Critics have maintained that much of the enduring universal appeal of Death of a Salesman lies in its central theme of the failure of the American Dream. Willy’s commitment to false social values—consumerism, ambition, social stature—keeps him from acknowledging the value of human experience—the comforts of personal relationships, family and friends, and love. … Some commentators perceive the play as an indictment of American capitalism and a rejection of materialist values. … Willy’s … penchant for blaming others has been passed onto his sons and, as a result, all three men exhibit a poor work ethic and lack of integrity. Willy’s inability to discern between reality and fantasy is another recurring motif. (more)

So I just re-read the play. And it does contain critiques of status, ambition for status, and self-delusion to gain status. It is indeed sad to see a success-driven man unwilling to admit his failure, or to accept charity from friends, choose instead to kill himself. But I see no further critiques of materialism or capitalism in the play.

On materialism, Willy Loman and his similar son Happy mainly want to be liked and respected. Sometimes they care about money, but mainly to keep score, and get respect. When they want luxury goods, such as stockings or fancy drinks, it is mainly to get women to sleep with them. In contrast, Willy’s other son Biff wants “to be outdoors, with [my] shirt off.” Perhaps those other women are materialistic, but not these men.

On capitalism, the play might hold critiques of failing to save for hard times, or of success based on who you know, good looks, and likability. But these are not intrinsic to, or even obviously correlated with, capitalism. For example, North Korea today is nothing like capitalism, yet it has strong status differences, people who struggle for status, in part to gain sex, and success based in part on good looks and who you know. A story about an old self-deluded status-seeking North Korean failure would make just as much sense as Willy Loman’s story.

This seems to me a common situation – things said to be critiques of capitalism are often just critiques of humanity. Humans vie selfishly and self-deludedly for status. Some succeed, while others fail. The struggle, and the failures, aren’t pretty. Yes capitalism inherits this ugliness, but then so does any other system with humans.

It is interesting to note that, compared to most occupations, the world of Miller the playwright was especially like the salesmen Miller described:

For a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. … He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. … A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

Like salesmen, playwrights succeed when others like them. Even though most fail, most self-deludedly think they will be the exceptions, and can be crushed when they eventually learn otherwise. But few playwrights lament this, or blame it on capitalism. Why?

I suspect this is because playwrights see even failed playwrights as high status, and successful salesmen as low status. A hidden message of the play is “Poor Willy can’t see that even if he sold a lot, he’d still be a failure in our eyes.” Which is part of why it bothered Arthur Miller that his audiences empathized so much with Willy. Audiences thought Willy could have high status.

Some key quotes from the play: Continue reading "Death of a Salesman" »

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Fair Date Reporting Act

By Robin Hanson · April 23, 2012 2:20 pm · Comments (18)

A week ago I heard an NPR radio interview with an FTC representative on web and phone privacy. She said the FTC protects your privacy by making sure firms who collect info on our activities can only use it to sell us stuff, but not to decide on hiring, renting, lending, or insuring. I thought: why is this where we draw our line of “privacy”?

Looking up a recent FTC report (quotes below), I see it goes back to the 1972 Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which required firms that rate you or collect info on you for hiring, renting, lending, or insuring to show you everything your rating is based on, and let you challenge any part of it. And given how completely infeasible it would be to show you all internet info collected about you, or let you challenge any of it, this law basically says that hiring, renting, lending, and insuring decisions must not benefit from the vast increase in info that web/phone tech now creates.

Adverse selection, where the people you least want are mostly like to apply, can plague hiring, renting, lending, and insuring. This is a big problem, and many regulations are said to be designed to deal with it. Yet the FCRA clearly makes this hidden info problem worse, by greatly limiting the info on which such decisions can be based.

To see how far this can go wrong, imagine a Fair Date Reporting Act, requiring all dating decisions to be made on the basis of documented information that potential dates can inspect and challenge. You couldn’t reject someone for a date unless you could clearly document that they are unsuitable. You’d end up relying heavily on some very crude indicators, like weight, education, income, and hair color, and enjoy your dates a lot less. And then they’d probably pass laws prohibiting some indicators as unfair, such as weight.

So why are we more willing to mess up decisions about hiring, renting, lending, or insuring, relative to dating? Because we see those deciders as dominating, because they choose to accept or reject us, and we see big firms as evil. Why don’t we similarly restrict the info firms can use to try to sell us stuff? Because we see ourselves as doing more of the choosing there, making us the dominant party.

Added 11p: Imagine that you were required by law to score all job offers on objective verifiable criteria, such as salary and location, and had to take the job that scored highest. How close would that be to slavery?

Those promised FTC report quotes: Continue reading "Fair Date Reporting Act" »

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Are The Trendy Shallow?

By Robin Hanson · April 18, 2012 2:45 pm · Comments (28)

A lot of the press on Tyler’s new book has focused on his suggestion to avoid restaurants with pretty women:

Beware the Beautiful, Laughing Women

When I’m out looking for food, and I come across a restaurant where the patrons are laughing and smiling and appear very sociable, I become wary. … Many restaurants, especially in downtown urban areas, fill seats—and charge high prices—by creating social scenes for drinking, dating, and carousing. They’re not using the food to draw in their customers. The food in most of these places is “not bad,” because the restaurant needs to maintain a trendy image. … I also start to worry if many women in a restaurant are beautiful in a trendy or stylish way. The point is not that beautiful women have bad taste in food. Instead, the problem is that they will attract a lot of men to the restaurant, whether or not the place serves excellent food. And that allows the restaurant to cut back on the quality of the food. … When you enter a restaurant, you don’t want to see expressions of disgust on the diners’ faces, but you do want to see a certain seriousness of purpose. … This review on Zagat.com says it all:

One of my favorite places in DC—awesome lounge, great decor, and food is delicious.

At least they got the order straight and put the food last. (more)

Matt thought he disagreed, but Tyler clarified. It seems to me that people focus on this issue because it is a veiled insult. Chuck Rudd says it more directly:

Initially, I rebelled against Cowen’s implication that men have unrefined palates or that they just don’t care about food quality. I don’t want to make some sort of gender issue out of it, but his argument implies that these trend-seeking women’s palates are unrefined as well. (more)

Notice that the claim is that places with more pretty women cut back on food quality, but not on decor, location, or service quality. So it isn’t that places just generically slack off when they are more popular. It must instead be that pretty trendy people, compared to other people, can less distinguish or less care about food quality, relative to other types of quality. And since food quality seems harder to observe that decor, service, etc. quality, the implication is that pretty trendy people are more shallow, i.e., less discerning about or interested in harder to observe qualities.

Sounds plausible, though, since I don’t get many offers to hang out with pretty trendy people, I don’t have first hand evidence one way or the other. I’m open to chances to collect evidence though. You know, in case any of you pretty trendy people have a slot open …

Note that Tyler probably got more attention for a veiled insult than if he had insulted directly. Homo hypocritus delights in indirectly jockeying for status and support.

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Unpainted For Far

By Robin Hanson · March 18, 2012 12:45 pm · Comments (17)

We usually think of very old buildings and statues as plainly colored, with just the color of the stone, but in fact they were usually painted colorfully, as the Greek pictures below show. Mayan temples and gothic churches were also wildly colored. But if so, why don’t we see the remaining buildings, statues, etc. painted like that today, so people can see what they looked like? They are often painted, but with plain stone color paint!

You might say it is because we can’t be sure exactly what colors were where. But we often renovate the buildings themselves extensively, and add in missing statutes, even when we aren’t sure exactly what the original buildings or statues looked like.

Also consider that cities like Paris and Washington DC designed their buildings and building codes to look like ancient buildings, except without the paint. Same for many universities like U. Chicago. You might explain this as due to people believing incorrectly that the ancients didn’t have paint. But paint isn’t remotely a recent invention, why would anyone think it was?

Here’s another explanation: thinking of the distant past evokes our far mental mode, in which we tend to think of objects having fewer relevant surfaces and less texture detail. Unpainted buildings and statues appear to have fewer surfaces and less texture – they look more far. We subconsciously think that unpainted things make more sense as something associated with the distant past.

Since power evokes a far mode, your architecture can evoke a far mode that suggests power if it has fewer relevant surfaces and a simpler texture. So people have seen the unpainted ancient style as more distinguished, and places like Paris and Washington DC required such a style as a way to assert their power.

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Doctors Dominate

By Robin Hanson · March 17, 2012 1:25 pm · Comments (22)

We humans pretend to resist domination, but actually tend to submit, and are often consciously unaware of the contradiction. I recently posted on our relating this way to police. We also relate this way to doctors. For example, people are basically scared to post negative web reviews of doctors. No, they don’t consciously feel scared. They’ll talk about how busy they are or they don’t feel qualified to judge. Yet their usual arrogance lets them rate lots of other things they know little about. And they are scared for good reason: doctors do got out of their way to retaliate against negative reviews. Details:

The Web Is Awash in Reviews, but Not for Doctors. Here’s Why.

… It is puzzling that there is no such authoritative collection of reviews for physicians, the highest-stakes choice of service provider that most people make. Sure, various Web sites like HealthGrades and RateMDs have taken their shots, and Yelp and Angie’s List have made a go of it, too. But the listings are often sparse, with few contributors and little of substance. … Not enough people take the time to review their doctors. …

RateMDs now has reviews of more than 1,370,000 doctors in the United States and Canada. But getting in the faces of the previously untouchable professional class has inevitably led to legal threats. He says he gets about one each week over negative reviews and receives subpoenas every month or two for information that can help identify reviewers, who believe they are posting anonymously. …

Several years ago, a physician reputation management service called Medical Justice developed a sort of liability vaccine. Doctors would ask patients to sign an agreement promising not to post about the doctor online; in exchange, patients would get additional privacy protections…. Medical Justice has now turned 180 degrees and embraced the review sites. It helpfully supplies its client doctors with iPads that they can give to patients as they are leaving. Patients write a review, and Medical Justice makes sure that the comments are posted on a review site. Sound coercive? … p

Patients may be steering clear for a far more ordinary reason: if they live in a small town or are only one or two degrees of social separation from physicians or their family members, they may not want to create any awkwardness. … An Angie’s List customer who read my column about the service last week raised a related concern. She said she would never talk negatively about her doctors on the site because there were only two decent hospital systems where she lived and she didn’t want to end up blackballed by doctors at either. …

Others idolize their doctors … Insurance giant WellPoint, … has found that only roughly 20 percent of customers will switch to a generic drug or use a less expensive imaging center, even if there is no health risk. Why? Because their doctor told them so. It is exactly this sort of unquestioning mind-set that may cause such low participation (or disproportionately positive reviews) at many review sites. …

WellPoint tracks doctors’ communication skills, availability, office environment and trust, but it doesn’t yet provide information about medical outcomes. .. It pays many physicians more when they achieve better results. But it’s not ready to share all of its outcome data. .. “The unintended consequences would be if certain surgical specialists would not take on the most challenging, needy and difficult patients.” … the big health care law requires Medicare to share all sorts of such data about doctors starting Jan. 1, 2013, assuming legal challenges don’t get in the way. The A.M.A. has raised many concerns about “risk adjustments.” (more; HT Tyler)

Risk adjustment is an issue for most products, since most have variations in who uses them. Yet we let people rate other products and collect track records on experiences with them. But for docs, we allow risk adjustment as an excuse to avoid accountability. This is an old issue is health econ — the story has always been that of course giving consumers info is a good idea, but we’d have to wait to give patients info until we “solve” the risk adjustment problem, which never happens, and never will. Mark my words, we will long delay publication of doc track records.

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Manzi On Trials, Consulting

By Robin Hanson · March 12, 2012 1:00 pm · Comments (27)

Arnold Kling on Jim Manzi’s new book Uncontrolled:

Manzi is a fan of randomized controlled experiments in business and public policy (in the latter, examples include the Rand health care study and the Wisconsin income-maintenance studies). I believe that decision-makers will resist this approach, for the same reason that they resist Robin Hanson’s suggestion to use prediction markets. That is, decisions are not necessarily about achieving results. They are often about establishing the status of the decision-maker. For a decision-maker to conduct experiments or to employ prediction markets is to admit ignorance and doubt, which lowers the decision-maker’s status.

Manzi responds:

I agree that this is true, and is a big deal. In the book, I expend a fair amount of effort describing the procedures and methods that have been used to ameliorate this problem (though never eliminate it) in therapeutic medicine, many large businesses, and certain narrow areas of government policy development. I think at a more strategic level, however, this problem is best addressed by decentralizing authority and accountability. Staff businesspeople, academics, and so on have much larger incentives to use “analysis as rhetoric” in the manner that Kling refers to than do people who are responsible for achieving outcomes in a marketplace. If I am paid (or live or die) based on my programs working or not, I am much more likely to care about what really works rather than getting tangled up in what analysis will get me noticed and promoted.

The book isn’t out yet. Kling got an advanced copy, but I did not. I look forward to seeing Manzi’s detailed discussion, but the above response seems to miss the point – authority and accountability won’t be decentralized if that lowers the status of central folks. Just because they should decentralize doesn’t mean they will.

Similarly, a few weeks ago Manzi responded to my post on the puzzles of why firms pay so much for often trite consulting advice, and why such advisors hire so many fresh grads of top schools. I suggested that firms are more buying prestige to bully locals into cooperation than they are buying info per se, and that recent top school grads offer the most prestige per wage dollar. Manzi disagreed: Continue reading "Manzi On Trials, Consulting" »

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Today’s Insults

By Robin Hanson · March 9, 2012 3:00 pm · Comments (28)

I recently asked a table full of New York city residents what they most noticed was different about people who lived elsewhere in the US. One person immediately said others are “fatter.” No one else disagreed, or offered any other descriptor.

I don’t know how representative is this opinion, but in general I’m interested in the kinds of insults that people find to be more more socially acceptable. This person might have also thought that outsiders seemed dumber, less well dressed, lazier, or less politically informed, but might have been shy about saying so.

The “fat” descriptor seems a more acceptable insult. Perhaps because fat can be seen pretty objectively, and tends to be blamed more on a person’s intentions, rather than on inherited ability or disposition.

Is there any data on the most common insults people use today? I’d be more interested in data on socially visible insults, rather than anonymous insults, such as might be found in blog comments.

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