Dominance Hides in Prestige Clothing

By Robin Hanson · October 8, 2018 5:00 pm · Comments (0)

21 months ago, I said: 

We like to give others the impression that we personally mainly want prestige in ourselves and our associates, and that we only grant others status via the prestige they have earned. But let me suggest that, compared to this ideal, we actually want more dominance in ourselves and our associates than we like to admit, and we submit more often to dominance. In the following, I’ll offer three lines of evidence for this claim. First consider that we like to copy the consumer purchases of people that we envy, but not of people we admire for being “warm” and socially responsible. … Second, consider the fact that when our bosses or presidents retire and leave office, their legitimate prestige should not have diminished much. … Yet others usually show far less interest in associating with such retirees. … For my third line of evidence, … for long term mates we more care about prestige features that are good for the group, but for short term mates, we care more about dominance features that are more directly useful to us personally. (more)

Today I’ll describe a fourth line of evidence: when ranking celebrities, we don’t correct much for the handicaps that people face. Let me explain.

Dominance is about power, while prestige is about ability. Now on average having more ability does tend to result in having more power. But there are many other influences on power besides individual ability. For example, there’s a person’s family’s wealth and influence, and the power they gained via associating with powerful institutions and friends.  

As I know the world of intellectuals better than other worlds, let give examples from there. Intellectuals who go to more prestigious schools and who get better jobs at more prestigious institutions have clear advantages in this world. And those whose parents were intellectuals, or who grew up in more intellectual cultures, had advantages. Having more financial support and access to better students to work with are also big helps. But when we consider which intellectuals to most praise and admire (e.g., who deserves a Nobel prize), we mainly look at the impact they’ve had, without correcting this much for these many advantages and obstacles. 

Oh sure, when it is we ourselves who are judged, we are happy to argue that our handicaps should be corrected for. After all, most of us don’t have as many advantages as do the most successful people. And we are sometimes willing to endorse correcting for handicaps with politically allied groups. So if we feel allied with the religious and politically conservative, we may note that they tend more obstacles in intellectual worlds today. And if we feel allied with women or ethnic minorities, we may also endorse taking into account the extra obstacles that they often face. 

But these corrections are often half-hearted, and they seem the exceptions that prove a rule: when we pick our intellectual heroes, we don’t correct much for all these handicaps and advantages. We mainly just want powerful dominant heroes. 

In acting, music, and management, being good looking is a big advantage. But while we tend to say that we disapprove of this advantage, we don’t correct for it much when evaluating such people. Oscar awards are mostly the pretty actors, for example. 

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Challenge Coins

By Robin Hanson · October 2, 2018 3:15 pm · Comments (1)

Imagine you are a king of old, afraid of being assassinated. Your king’s guard tells you that they’ve got you covered, but too many kings have been killed in your area over the last century for you to feel that safe. How can you learn of your actual vulnerability, and of how to cut it?

Yes, you might make prediction markets on if you will be killed, and make such markets conditional on various policy changes, to find out which policies cut your chance of being killed. But in this post I want to explore a different solution.

I suggest that you auction off challenge coins at some set rate, say one a month. Such coins can be resold privately to others, so that you don’t know who holds them. Each coin gives the holder the right to try a mock assassination. If a coin holder can get within X meters of you, with a clear sight of a vulnerable part of you, then they need only raise their coin into the air and shout “Challenge Coin”, and they will be given N gold coins in exchange for that challenge coin, and then set free. And if they are caught where they should not be then they can pay the challenge coin to instead be released from whatever would be the usual punishment for that intrusion. If authorities can find the challenge coin, such as on their person, this trade can be required.

Now for a few subtleties. Your usual staff and people you would ordinarily meet are not eligible to redeem challenge coins. Perhaps you’d also want to limit coin redeemers to people who’d be able to kill someone; perhaps if requested they must kill a cute animal with their bare hands. If a successful challenger can explain well enough how they managed to evade your defenses, then they might get 2N gold coins or more. Coin redeemers may be suspected of being tied to a real assassin, and so they must agree to opening themselves to being investigated in extra depth, and if still deemed suspicious enough they might be banned from ever using a challenge coin again. But they still get their gold coins this time. Some who issue challenge coins might try to hide transmitters in them, but holders could just wrap coins in aluminum foil and dip them in plastic to limit odor emissions. I estimate that challenge coins are legal, and not prohibited by asset or gambling regulations.

This same approach could be used by the TSA to show everyone how hard it is to slip unapproved items past TSA security. Just reveal your coin and your unapproved item right after you exit TSA security. You could also use this approach to convince an audience that your accounting books are clean; anyone with a coin can point to any particular item in your books, and demand an independent investigation of that item, paid for at the coin-issuer’s expense. If the item is found to not be as it should, the coin holder gets the announced prize; otherwise they just lose their coin.

In general, issuing challenge coins is a way to show an audience what rate of detection success (or security failure) results from what level of financial incentives. (The audience will need to see data on the rates of coin sales and successful vs. unsuccessful redemptions.) We presume that the larger the payoff to a successful challenge, the higher the fraction of coins that successfully result in a detection (or security failure).

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How Gossip Works

By Robin Hanson · September 26, 2018 8:00 am · Comments (1)

Trying to read up on how gossip really works, I found a nice ’79 article: Teasing, Gossip, and Local Names on Rapanui. Sadly, Google scholar says it only ever got three cites. That seems an underestimate of its value to me. The rest of this post is just lots of quotes: Continue reading "How Gossip Works" »

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Gossip Cabals

By Robin Hanson · September 25, 2018 3:45 pm · Comments (0)

Four actresses relayed their suspicion that, after rejecting [Harvey] Weinstein’s advances and complaining about him, he had them removed from projects or persuaded others to remove them. A number of Farrow’s sources said Weinstein had referred to his success in planting stories in the media about individuals who had crossed him. … He told them that complying with his demands would help their careers, repeatedly mentioning Paltrow (without the actress’s knowledge) as someone he claimed to have had sex with. … these activities were enabled by employees, associates, and agents who set up these meetings, and lawyers and publicists who suppressed complaints with payments and threats. (more)

Ashley Judd … refused, and says he got revenge by seeking to damage her career. Director Peter Jackson has come forward to say he removed her from a casting list “as a direct result” of what he now thinks was “false information” provided by Weinstein. … Like with Ashley Judd, Peter Jackson said Weinstein warned him off casting [Mira Sorvino]. … Heather Graham … alleges he implied she had to sleep with him to get a film role, telling her that his wife would have been fine with it. … He insisted on listening to [Louisette Geiss] pitch in his hot tub, then asked her to watch him masturbate, she says – and told her he could green-light her script if she did so. … Daryl Hannah … suffered physical repercussions as her flights were cancelled and she was left stranded after she turned him down on one occasion, she adds. … Rosanna Arquette … says she rejected Weinstein’s advances and that she believes her acting career suffered as a result. (more)

What power exactly did Harvey Weinstein possess, to let him harass and rape with impunity for decades? He was an actor’s agent, who negotiated deals between actors and studios, but many agents do that. If one agent makes unreasonable demands, why not switch to another? How hard can it be anyway to evaluate an actor and suggest which projects they might be well suited for?

Well, okay, maybe it takes years to acquire good judgement, and some agents have much better judgment than others. Even so, if many agents are capable of evaluating and matching actors, how can one agent gain so much power over an actor who could easily switch to other agents?

Okay, yes, also, an actor-agent relation might develop slowly over a long time, and as with quitting a on marriage or a family, someone might put up with modest abuse before calling it quits. But Weinstein seems to have had far more power than most partners who increase in value over time.

Some say that wannabe actors are far more irrational and desperate than are most people in most relations. So they’ll do almost anything for a tiny increase of a chance for acting success. Maybe, but I want to explore other explanations, before I’m willing to conclude that.

One scenario is that corrupt agents offer to overestimate an actor’s suitability if they accept agent demands. But if the agent reneged on their promise, how would an actor enforce it? This strategy could result in studios giving them a try, seeing they are subpar, and then realizing that they are getting lower quality advice from that agent, reducing demand for that agent. And if there’s a limit to how much they could plausibly exaggerate quality, an agent could only plausibly use this strategy on the few best actors, as the rest will be rejected in any case.

Another scenario is that corrupt agents threaten to underestimate an actor’s suitability if they reject agent demands. Here enforcement is more reliably handled by the agent. If most actors give in to the threat, then most threats need not be carried out, and so the quality of signals sent to studios will be much less degraded. If the threat is carried out, studios will likely reject, and so not see that they got a bad signal. Also, this threat can be given to all types of actors, good and bad. So underestimation threats seems more effective overall than overestimation promises.

However, if an actor could easily switch to dozens of other agents, even this underestimation threat seems weak. I doubt such a threat would have moved me much when I was working with a book agent. But what if someone like Weinstein could credibly threaten, “If I give the word, you’ll never get another job in this town/industry again?”

This threat might be credible if the major acting powers formed a cabal where they agreed to believe their negative evaluations of others. Then Weinstein could tell other powers, like director Peter Jackson, that you are difficult, and none of them would audition you. If Jackson defied Weinstein and auditioned you anyway, then Weinstein could tell the other powers that Jackson is difficult. So an equilibrium could be formed where all the powers take each others’ strong negative evaluations of others at face value, for fear that otherwise they will become a target. And they could collectively benefit from this equilibrium, as they can each now make stronger credible threats to outsiders.

This sort of equilibrium seems to me very common part of human behavior. For example, academic elites in an area tend to all treat each other’s claims with respect, and endorse any of their dismissals of outsiders. In a social media mob pile on, where a big mob all says person X is bad, someone who speaks up saying X isn’t so bad should reasonably fear the mob would turn on them. And the set of top bosses in a firm typically shares an inclination to jointly reject any lower level person who challenges any one of those bosses. (“We can criticize each other privately, but we are unified in rejecting public criticism by outsiders.”)

In this sort of equilibrium, elites will in public usually say “We are the best people in this area, as proved by the fact that we all say we are best. If we all say someone else is bad, you can take that to the bank.” Sometimes they will say “George used to be good, but we all now agree that George has turned bad.” And in private each elite can say to wannabes, “Unless you do everything I demand, I’ll tell the other elites you are bad, and you’ll be out of this area for good.”

We economists tend to worry about firms colluding on prices, to keep them high, or colluding on entry, where I won’t enter your area if you don’t enter mine. But I suspect that gossip collusion like this is a far bigger problem. It happens not just in business, but in politics, arts, religion, sports, academia, journalism, law, etc.

While it would be hard, I could imagine attempts to more strong regulate and discourage this sort of behavior. But the striking thing is, we hardly even try.

Added 26Sep: Oops, seems Weinstein was a producer, not an agent. But producers serve a related role of evaluating and matching actors. A big part of the demand for him as a producer would be his ability to do those well.

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The Master and His Emissary

By Robin Hanson · September 23, 2018 1:25 pm · Comments (1)

I had many reasons to want to read Iain McGilchrist’s 2009 book The Master and His Emissary.

  1. Its an ambitious big-picture book, by a smart knowledgeable polymath. I love that sort of book.
  2. I’ve been meaning to learn more about brain structure, and this book talks a lot about that.
  3. I’ve been wanting to read more literary-based critics of economics, and of sci/tech more generally.
  4. I’m interested in critiques of civilization suggesting that people were better off in less modern worlds.

This video gives an easy to watch book summary:

McGilchrist has many strong opinions on what is good and bad in the world, and on where civilization has gone wrong in history. What he mainly does in his book is to organize these opinions around a core distinction: the left vs right split in our brains. In sum: while we need both left and right brain style thinking, civilization today has gone way too far in emphasizing left styles, and that’s the main thing that’s wrong with the world today.

McGilchrist maps this core left-right brain distinction onto many dozens of other distinctions, and in each case he says we need more of the right version and less of the left. He doesn’t really argue much for why right versions are better (on the margin); he mostly sees that as obvious. So what his book mainly does is help people who agree with his values organize their thinking around a single key idea: right brains are better than left.

Here is McGilchrist’s key concept of what distinguishes left from right brain reasoning: Continue reading "The Master and His Emissary" »

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My Poll, Explained

By Robin Hanson · September 23, 2018 11:10 am · Comments (0)

So many have continued to ask me the same questions about my recent twitter poll, that I thought I’d try to put all my answers in one place. This topic isn’t that fundamentally interesting, so most you you may want to skip this post.

Recently, Christine Blasey Ford publicly accused US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of a sexual assault. This accusation will have important political consequences, however it is resolved. Congress and the US public are now put in the position of having to evaluate the believability of this accusation, and thus must consider which clues might indicate if the accusation is correct or incorrect.

Immediately after the accusation, many said that the timing of the accusation seemed to them suspicious, occurring exactly when it would most benefit Democrats seeking to derail any nomination until after the election, when they may control the Senate. And it occurred to me that a Bayesian analysis might illuminate this issue. If T = the actual timing, A = accurate accusation, W = wrong accusation, then how much this timing consideration pushes us toward final beliefs is given by the likelihood ratio p(T|W)/p(T|A). A ratio above one pushes against believing the accusation, while a ratio below one pushes for it.

The term P(T|A) seemed to me the most interesting term, and it occurred to me to ask what people thought about it via a Twitter poll. (If there was continued interest, I could ask another question about the other term.) Twitter polls are much cheaper and easier for me to do than other polls. I’ve done dozens of them so far, and rarely has anyone objected. Such polls only allow four options, and you don’t have many characters to explain your question. So I used those characters mainly to make clear a few key aspects of the accusation’s timing:

Many claimed that my wording was misleading because it didn’t include other relevant info that might support the accusation. Like who else the accuser is said to have told when, and what pressures she is said to have faced when to go public. They didn’t complain about my not including info that might lean the other way, such as low detail on the claimed event and a lack of supporting witnesses. But a short tweet just can’t include much relevant info; I barely had enough characters to explain key accusation timing facts.

It is certainly possible that my respondents suffered from cognitive biases, such as assuming too direct a path between accuser feelings and a final accusation. To answer my poll question well, they should have considered many possible complex paths by which an accuser says something to others, who then tell others people, some of which then chose when to bring pressure back on that accuser to make a public accusation. But that’s just the nature of any poll; respondents may well not think carefully enough before answering.

For the purposes of a Twitter poll, I needed to divide the range from 0% to 100% into four bins.
I had high uncertainty about where poll answers would lie, and for the purpose of Bayes rule it is factors that matter most. So I choose three ranges of roughly a factor of 4 to 5, and a leftover bin encompassing an infinite factor. If anything, my choice was biased against answers in the infinite factor bin.

I really didn’t know which way poll answers would go. If most answers were high fractions, that would tend to support the accusation, while if most answers were low fractions, that would tend to question the accusation. Many accused me of posting the poll in order to deny the accusation, but for that to work I would have needed a good guess on the poll answers. Which I didn’t have.

My personal estimate would be somewhere in the top two ranges, and that plausibly biased me to pick bins toward such estimates.  As two-thirds of my poll answers were in the lowest bin I offered, that suggests that I should have offered an even wider range of factors. Some claimed that I biased the results by not putting more bins above 20%. But that fraction is still below the usual four-bin target fraction of 25% per bin.

It is certainly plausible that my pool of poll respondents are not representative of the larger US or world population. And many called it is irresponsible and unscientific to run an unrepresentative poll, especially if one doesn’t carefully show which wordings matter how via A/B testing. But few complain about the thousands of other Twitter polls run every day, or of my dozens of others. And the obvious easy way to show that my pool or wordings matter is to show different answers with another poll where those vary. Yet almost no one even tried that.

Also, people don’t complain about others asking questions in simple public conversations, even though those can be seen as N=1 examples of unrepresentative polls without A/B testing on wordings. It is hard to see how asking thousands of people the same question via a Twitter poll is less informative than just asking one person that same question.

Many people said it is just rude to ask a poll question that insinuates that rape accusations might be wrong, especially when we’ve just seen someone going through all the pain of making one. They say that doing so is pro-rape and discourages the reporting of real rapes, and that this must have been my goal in making this poll. But consider an analogy with discussing gun control just after a shooting. Some say this is rude then to discuss anything but sympathy for victims, but others say this is exactly a good time to discuss gun control. I say that when we must evaluate a specific rape accusation is exactly a good time to think about what clues might indicate in what direction on whether this is an accurate or wrong accusation.

Others say that it is reasonable to conclude that I’m against their side if I didn’t explicitly signal within my poll text  that I’m on their side. That’s just the sort of signaling game equilibrium we are in. And so they are justified in denouncing me for being on the wrong side. But it seems a quite burdensome standard to hold on polls, which already have too few characters to allow an adequate explanation of a question, and it seems obvious that the vast majority of Twitter polls today are not in fact being held to this standard.

Added 24Sep: I thought the poll interesting enough to ask, relative to its costs to me, but I didn’t intend to give it much weight. It was all the negative comments that made it a bigger deal.

Note that, at least in my Twitter world, we see a big difference in attitudes between vocal folks who tweet and those who merely answer polls. That later “silent majority” is more skeptical of the accusation.

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Allow Covert Eye-Rolls

By Robin Hanson · September 19, 2018 2:25 pm · Comments (2)

Authorities, such as parents, teachers, bosses, and police, tend to have both dominance and prestige. Their dominance is usually clear: they can hit you, fire you, or send you to your room. Their prestige tends to be less clear, as that is an informal social consensus on their relevant ability and legitimacy. They have to earn prestige in the eyes of subordinates, and subordinates talk with each other to form a consensus on that. I’ve suggested that we often choose bosses primarily for their prestige indicators, as that allows subordinates to more easily submit to dominance without shame.

There’s a classic scene in fiction where an authority goes too far to squash defiance. (E.g., see video above.) Yes, authorities must respond to overt defiance that interferes with key functions, like a child refusing to come home or a student refusing to stop disrupting class. But usually authorities prefer to suggest actions, rather than to give direct orders. And often subordinates try to use covert signals to tell each other they are less than fully impressed by authority. They might roll their eyes, smirk, slouch, let their attention wander, etc. And sometimes authorities take visible offense at such signs, punishing offenders severely. In extreme cases they may demand not only that everyone seem to be enthusiastically positive in public, they may also plant spies and monitor private talk to punish anyone who says anything remotely negative in private.

This is the scenario of extreme totalitarian dominance, a picture that groups often try to paint about opponents. It is the rationale in the ancient world for why we have good kings but they have evil tyrants, and why we’d be doing them a favor to replace their leaders with ours. More recently, it is the story that the west told on Nazism and Communism. It is even the typical depiction today of historical slavery; it isn’t enough to describe slaves as poor, over-worked, and with few freedoms, they are also shown as also having mean tyrannical owners.

The key problem for authorities is that repressing dissent has the direct effect of discouraging rebellion, but the indirect effect of looking bad. It looks weak to try to stop subordinates from talking frankly about the prestige they think you deserve. Doing this suggests that you don’t think they will estimate your prestige highly. Much better to present the image that most everyone accepts your authority due to your high prestige, and it is only a few malcontent troublemakers who defy you. So most authorities allow subordinate eye-rolls, smirks, negative gossip, etc. as long as they are not too overtly a direct commonly-visible challenge to their authority. They visibly repress overt defiance by one low prestige person or small group, but are wary of simply crushing large respected groups, or hindering their covert gossip. Trying that makes you seem insecure and weak.

In the world of cultural elites today, like arts, journalism, civil service, law, and academia, there’s a dominant culture, and it punishes deviations from its core tenets. But its supporters should be worried about going too far toward totalitarian dominance. They should want to project the image that they don’t need to repress dissent much, as their culture is so obviously prestigious. If the good people are pretty unified in their respect for it, it should be sufficient to punish those who most openly and directly defy it. They shouldn’t seem to feel much threatened by others rolling their eyes.

It is in this context that I think we should worry about the recent obsession with gaslighting and dog-whistles. I’ve posted some controversial tweets recently, and in response others have then publicly attributed to me extreme and culturally-defiant views. (Such as I’m sexist, pro-rape, anti-reporting-of-rape, and seem likely to rape.) When I’ve pointed out that I’ve said no such things and often said the opposite, they often respond with dog-whistle concerns.

That is, they say that there are all these people out there who pretend to submit to culturally dominant views, but who actually harbor sympathy with opposing views. They hide in the shadows communicating with each other covertly, using anonymous internet accounts and secret hand signals. It is so important to crush these rebels that we can’t afford to give anyone the benefit of the doubt to only criticize them for the views they actually say. We must aggressively punish people for even seeming to some people like they might be the sort to secret harbor rebel sympathies. And once everyone knows that we are in a strong repression regime, there’s no excuse for not lying low in abject submission, avoiding any possible hint of forbidden views. If you even touch such topics, you only have yourself to blame for what happens to you.

I hope you can see the problem. Worlds of strong repression are not secure stable worlds. Since everyone knows that authorities are making it hard for others to share opinions on authority prestige, they presume low levels of prestige. So if there’s ever an opening for a rebellion, they expect to see that rebellion. If the boot ever lets up just a bit in stomping the face, it may never get a second change.

Let us instead revert back to the traditional intellectual standard: respond most to what people say, and don’t stretch too hard to infer what you think they mean in scattered hints of what they’ve said and done. Let them roll their eyes and feel each other out for how much they respect the dominant authorities, be that people or culture. As they say:

If you love something set it free. If it comes back it’s yours. If not, it was never meant to be.

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Great Filter, 20 Years On

By Robin Hanson · September 15, 2018 7:45 pm · Comments (0)

Twenty years ago today, I introduced the phrase “The Great Filter” in an essay on my personal website. Today Google says 300,000 web pages use this phrase, and 4.3% of those mention my name. This essay has 45 academic citations, and my related math paper has 17 cites.

These citations are a bit over 1% of my total citations, but this phrase accounts for 5% of my press coverage. This press is mostly dumb luck. I happened to coin a phrase on a topic of growing and wide interest, yet others more prestigious than I didn’t (as they often do) bother to replace it with another phrase that would trace back to them.

I have mixed feelings about writing the paper. Back then I was defying the usual academic rule to focus narrowly. I was right that it is possible to contribute to many more different areas than most academics do. But what I didn’t fully realize is that to academic economists non-econ publications don’t exist, and that publication is only the first step to academic influence. If you aren’t around in an area to keep publishing, giving talks, going to meetings, doing referee reports, etc., academics tend to correctly decide that you are politically powerless and thus you and your work can safely be ignored.

So I’m mostly ignored by the academics who’ve continued in this area – don’t get grants, students, or invitations to give talks, to comment on paper drafts, or to referee papers, grants, books, etc. The only time I’ve ever been invited to talk on the subject was a TEDx talk a few years ago. (And I’ve given over 350 talks in my career.) But the worst scenario of being ignored is that it is as if your paper never existed, and so you shouldn’t have bothered writing it. Thankfully I have avoided that outcome, as some of my insights have been taken to heart, both academically and socially. People now accept that finding independent alien life simpler than us would be bad news, that the very hard filter steps should be roughly equally spaced in our history, and that the great filter gives a reason to worry about humanity’s future prospects.

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News Accuracy Bonds

By Robin Hanson · September 9, 2018 12:30 pm · Comments (0)

Fake news is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. This false information is mainly distributed by social media, but is periodically circulated through mainstream media. Fake news is written and published with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically, often using sensationalist, dishonest, or outright fabricated headlines to increase readership, online sharing, and Internet click revenue. (more)

One problem with news is that sometimes readers who want truth instead read (or watch) and believe news that is provably false. That is, a news article may contain claims that others are capable of proving wrong to a sufficiently expert and attentive neutral judge, and some readers may be fooled against their wishes into believing such news.

Yes, news can have other problems. For example, there can be readers who don’t care much about truth, and who promote false news and its apparent implications. Or readers who do care about truth may be persuaded by writing whose mistakes are too abstract or subtle to prove wrong now to a judge. I’ve suggested prediction markets as a partial solution to this; such markets could promote accurate consensus estimates on many topics which are subtle today, but which will eventually become sufficiently clear.

In this post, however, I want to describe what seems to me the simple obvious solution to the more basic problem of truth-seekers believing provably-false news: bonds. Those who publish or credential an article could offer bonds payable to anyone who shows their article to be false. The larger the bond, the higher their declared confidence in their article. With standard icons for standard categories of such bonds, readers could easily note the confidence associated with each news article, and choose their reading and skepticism accordingly.

That’s the basic idea; the rest of this post will try to work out the details.

While articles backed by larger bonds should be more accurate on average, the correlation would not be exact. Statistical models built on the dataset of bonded articles, some of which eventually pay bonds, could give useful rough estimates of accuracy. To get more precise estimates of the chance that an article will be shown to be in error, one could create prediction markets on the chance that an individual article will pay a bond, with initial prices set at statistical model estimates.

Of course the same article should have a higher chance of paying a bond when its bond amount is larger. So even better estimates of article accuracy would come from prediction markets on the chance of paying a bond, conditional on a large bond amount being randomly set for that article (for example) a week after it is published. Such conditional estimates could be informative even if only one article in a thousand is chosen for such a very large bond. However, since there are now legal barriers to introducing prediction markets, and none to introducing simple bonds, I return to focusing on simple bonds.

Independent judging organizations would be needed to evaluate claims of error. A limited set of such judging organizations might be certified to qualify an article for any given news bond icon. Someone who claimed that a bonded article was in error would have to submit their evidence, and be paid the bond only after a valid judging organization endorsed their claim.

Bond amounts should be held in escrow or guaranteed in some other way. News firms could limit their risk by buying insurance, or by limiting how many bonds they’d pay on all their articles in a given time period. Say no more than two bonds paid on each day’s news. Another option is to have the bond amount offered be a function of the (posted) number of readers of an article.

As a news article isn’t all true or false, one could distinguish degrees of error. A simple approach could go sentence by sentence. For example, a bond might pay according to some function of the number of sentences (or maybe sentence clauses) in an article shown to be false. Alternatively, sentence level errors might be combined to produce categories of overall article error, with bonds paying different amounts to those who prove each different category. One might excuse editorial sentences that do not intend to make verifiable newsy claims, and distinguish background claims from claims central to the original news of the article. One could also distinguish degrees of error, and pay proportional to that degree. For example, a quote that is completely made up might be rated as completely false, while a quote that is modified in a way that leaves the meaning mostly the same might count as a small fractional error.

To the extent that it is possible to verify partisan slants across large sets of articles, for example in how people or organizations are labeled, publishers might also offer bonds payable to those than can show that a publisher has taken a consistent partisan slant.

A subtle problem is: who pays the cost to judge a claim? On the one hand, judges can’t just offer to evaluate all claims presented to them for free. But on the other hand, we don’t want to let big judging fees stop people from claiming errors when errors exist. To make a reasonable tradeoff, I suggest a system wherein claim submissions include a fee to pay for judging, a fee that is refunded double if that claim is verified.

That is, each bond specifies a maximum amount it will pay to judge that bond, and which judging organizations it will accept.  Each judging organization specifies a max cost to judge claims of various types. A bond is void if no acceptable judge’s max is below that bond’s max. Each submission asking to be paid a bond then submits this max judging fee. If the judges don’t spend all of their max judging fee evaluating this case, the remainder is refunded to the submission. It is the amount of the fee that the judges actually spend that will be refunded double if the claim is supported. A public dataset of past bonds and their actual judging fees could help everyone to estimate future fees.

Those are the main subtleties that I’ve considered. While there are ways to set up such a system better or worse, the basic idea seems robust: news publishers who post bonds payable if their news is shown to be wrong thereby credential their news as more accurate. This can allow readers to more easily avoid believing provably-false news.

A system like that I’ve just proposed has long been feasible; why hasn’t it been adopted already? One possible theory is that publishers don’t offer bonds because that would remind readers of typical high error rates:

The largest accuracy study of U.S. papers was published in 2007 and found one of the highest error rates on record — just over 59% of articles contained some type of error, according to sources. Charnley’s first study [70 years ago] found a rate of roughly 50%. (more)

If bonds paid mostly for small errors, then bond amounts per error would have to be very small, and calling reader attention to a bond system would mostly remind them of high error rates, and discourage them from consuming news.

However, it seems to me that it should be possible to aggregate individual article errors into measures of overall article error, and to focus bond payouts on the most mistaken “fake news” type articles. That is, news error bonds should mostly pay out on articles that are wrong overall, or at least quite misleading regarding their core claims. Yes, a bit more judgment might be required to set up a system that can do this. But it seems to me that doing so is well within our capabilities.

A second possible theory to explain the lack of such a system today is the usual idea that innovation is hard and takes time. Maybe no one ever tried this with sufficient effort, persistence, or coordination across news firms. So maybe it will finally take some folks who try this hard, long, and wide enough to make it work. Maybe, and I’m willing to work with innovation attempts based on this second theory.

But we should also keep a third theory in mind: that most news consumers just don’t care much for accuracy. As we discuss in our book The Elephant in the Brain, the main function of news in our lives may be to offer “topics in fashion” that we each can all riff on in our local conversations, to show off our mental backpacks of tools and resources. For that purpose, it doesn’t much matter how accurate is such news. In fact, it might be easier to show off with more fake news in the mix, as we can then show off by commenting on which news is fake. In this case, news bonds would be another example of an innovation designed to give us more of what we say we want, which is not adopted because we at some level know that we have hidden motives and actually want something else.

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Sexism Inflation

By Robin Hanson · September 8, 2018 4:20 pm · Comments (1)

What counts as “sexism” seems to be slowly inflating. You may recall that in 2005, Larry Summers lost his job as Harvard president for suggesting that genetically-caused ability differences contribute to women doing less well than men in science. In 2017, James Damore lost his job as a Google engineer for suggesting that Google has fewer female engineers in part because women tend to have different preferences, being more artistic, social, neurotic, and tending to prefer people to things.

Now a recent article describes the sad story of a math paper on why males are more variable on many traits in many species. Its key idea is that variances is rewarded when less than half of candidates are selected, while variance is punished when more than half are selected. This paper was accepted for publication by a math journal, and then it was unaccepted. Then this happened again at another math journal. No one claimed there was anything technically wrong with the paper, but they did claim that it was “damaging to the aspirations of impressionable young [math] women”, that “right-wing media may pick this up”, that it “support[s] a very controversial, and potentially sexist, set of ideas”.

So first it was sexist to suggest human women have lower science ability, then sexist to suggest women have differing tech-job preferences, and now it is sexist to say that in general across species and traits males tend to have more variance because they are selected less often.

My job seems safe and I haven’t had any publications unaccepted. But I can report on a different kind of inflation regarding what counts as (something close to) sexism: it seems now not okay to presume that male-female differences that were common in the past may continue on into the future, unless you explicitly say that such differences are due to evil discrimination and claim that the future will be full of evil discriminators.

My evidence? In my book Age of Em, I guess that past male-female differences may continue on into the future. This includes differences in what each sex desires in the other sex, and differences in employer demand for each sex in differing circumstances.

On differing desires, Sarah O’Connor said in a Financial Times review back in 2016:

One also has to believe that current economic and social theories will hold in this strange new world; that the “unknown unknowns” are not so great as to make any predictions impossible. Certainly, some of the forecasts seem old-fashioned, like the notion that male ems will prefer females with “signs of nurturing inclinations and fertility, such as youthful good looks” while females will prefer males with “signs of wealth and status”. Even so, the journey is thought-provoking. (more)

On differing labor demand, Philip Ball said in Aeon just this last week:

He also betrays a rather curious attitude to the arrow of historical causation when he notes in The Age of Em that male ems might be in higher demand than female ems, because of ‘the tendency of top performers in most fields today to be men’. (more)

Here is the entire relevant section from my book on labor demand by sex:

The em economy may have an unequal demand for the work of males and females. Although it is hard to predict which gender will be more in demand in the em world, one gender might end up supplying proportionally more workers than the other. On the one hand, the tendency of top performers in most fields today to be men suggests there might be more demand for male ems. However, while today’s best workers are often motivated by the attention and status that being the best can bring, in the em world there are millions of copies of the best workers, who need to find other motivations for their work. On the other hand, today women are becoming better edu- cated and are in increasing demand in modern workplaces. There are some indications that women have historically worked harder and more persistently in hard-times low-status situations, which seem similar in some ways to the em world. (p.338-9)

So I consider both possibilities, higher male and female labor demand, and for each possibility I note a sex-difference pattern from the past suggesting that possibility. Why does that suggest a “curious attitude to the arrow of historical causation”? Emailing the author, I was told that “a blank statement of male predominance today could easily be misinterpreted as an acceptance of something natural and inevitable in it” and “To say that [men] have been the ‘top performers’ implies that they achieve better on a level playing field.” And also “such differences … [might] arise because of a choice to perpetuate the inequalities we have seen historically. And one certainly can’t dismiss that possibility. But you do not say that.”

So it seems that today, to avoid (something close to) the label “sexist” (or “old-fashioned” on sex differences), it is not enough that you avoid explaining past observed sex differences in behavior in general in terms of sex differences in any selected parameters, including abilities or preferences, and including their means or variances. One must also presume that such differences will not continue into the future, unless one explicitly claims they will be caused by continued unfair discrimination. Regarding sex differences, predicting the future by guessing that it may be similar to the past is presumed sexist.

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