In today’s Wall Street Journal, Matthew Hutson, author of The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane, reviews our new book The Elephant in the Brain. He starts and ends with obligatory but irrelevant references to Trump. Quotes from the rest:
Sorry for not responding here earlier; the blog software hid your comment & I’ve finally got it out. Thanks again for engaging with our book, and yes it is clear that you enjoyed it. :)
I agree that the US is an outliner in some ways, and it is interesting to think about how to explain those facts. Let me suggest that exceptional US spending on medicine and the military are due in part to the US telling itself key myths that it deservers credit for pioneering modern medicine, and for saving the world from fascism and communism. We feel that by spending more on these things, we support our claims of the great value of such things, and constantly remind the world of the gratitude we feel they owe us. We feel we are the best, but must keep spending more to stay the best.
Yes it is possible come up with many explanations for any particular empirical fact. But there’s a great risk of being overly ad hoc that way. The discipline that we try to hold ourselves to in our book is to explain many patterns at once with a small number of assumptions. Of course that approach could mislead by chance, or we could have failed to do it well.
Robin, thank you for bringing your post to my attention and inviting me to add comments here. You make several reasonable points.
there’s an intellectual contribution to make by arguing together for a large set of related claims. This is what I suggest is original about our book.
Indeed! That’s why I wrote “I can’t say that the book covers new ground, but it is a smart synthesis and offers several original metaphors.” (I probably should have added “much” before ”new ground.") FWIW, I would describe my own book as a smart synthesis that doesn’t cover much new ground.
We do not offer our thesis as an explanation for all possible variations in these activities!
That’s true, but my (relatively uninformed) perception is that excess medical care in other developed countries is a fraction of what it is in the US. If that’s the case, then by far the biggest factor in US medical bloat is something US-specific. And if status-signaling doesn’t have anything to say about that overwhelming factor, then it’s left begging for scraps of factors to explain. My analysis may be incorrect, but in any case I suspect other readers might have the same unanswered questions, and so I called it a hole in your case. You may have reasoning or evidence to plug the hole in a jiffy, but it was missing from the book. (Formally, it’s not a hole in the case that status affects some medicine, just in the case that it has a sizable effect on medicine, which I perhaps incorrectly assumed was the case you were making. I left it to myself to define “sizable.”)
Perhaps it wasn’t the ideal example of a hole, but I also had unaddressed counter-argumets for all of the predictions at the end of the chapter. For example, in the first ("Keeping Up with the Joneses”), it’s possible that people spend more on health care after moving to a richer neighborhood because they spend more on everything. Or if they spend more specifically on health care, maybe there are descriptive norms about how much it’s reasonable to spend on health care not for status but for health. You might hear from neighbors that a certain specialist or procedure is quite effective and worth the cost, then see the service as a practical expenditure.
Actually it is a reference to common idea of “The Elephant in the Room”
Ah, I assumed it was a double entendre because you cite Haidt’s book in the discussion of mind modularity. (In a draft of the review I included both entendres, but an editor remove the “elephant in the room” reference, perhaps because he felt that entendre needed no explanation.) I thought I recalled your mentioning Haidt's metaphor explicitly, but I can’t find the passage, so apparently I was confabulating!
Anyway, I enjoyed your book, and I hope that came across.
Caplan and I have long predicted low interest in MOOCs. Does that count? I predicted that the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment would show weak health effects, does that count?
> We do not offer our thesis as an explanation for all possible variations in these activities! We say that our favored motive is under-acknowledged, but we don’t claim that it is the only motive, nor that motive variations are the only way to explain behavioral variation. The world is far too big and complex for one simple story to explain it all.
Right, I'd been wanting to know your response to that criticism. This makes sense - you are advocating a theory with significant-but-not-unanimous explanatory power in many domains. I admit your theory has an elegance and coherence to it, and your blog posts often seem to make sense of things in my life I'd been confused by.
If I may ask an ignorant question, do you have any easy links to / examples of times where your theory has made novel predictions in advance of the data being available? I appreciate this may be difficult as you rarely get to run studies yourself. An alternatively satisfying thing would be a set of studies you'd like to run that would be very surprising yet you'd strongly predict would come out in your theory's favour.
Sorry for not responding here earlier; the blog software hid your comment & I’ve finally got it out. Thanks again for engaging with our book, and yes it is clear that you enjoyed it. :)
I agree that the US is an outliner in some ways, and it is interesting to think about how to explain those facts. Let me suggest that exceptional US spending on medicine and the military are due in part to the US telling itself key myths that it deservers credit for pioneering modern medicine, and for saving the world from fascism and communism. We feel that by spending more on these things, we support our claims of the great value of such things, and constantly remind the world of the gratitude we feel they owe us. We feel we are the best, but must keep spending more to stay the best.
Yes it is possible come up with many explanations for any particular empirical fact. But there’s a great risk of being overly ad hoc that way. The discipline that we try to hold ourselves to in our book is to explain many patterns at once with a small number of assumptions. Of course that approach could mislead by chance, or we could have failed to do it well.
Robin, thank you for bringing your post to my attention and inviting me to add comments here. You make several reasonable points.
there’s an intellectual contribution to make by arguing together for a large set of related claims. This is what I suggest is original about our book.
Indeed! That’s why I wrote “I can’t say that the book covers new ground, but it is a smart synthesis and offers several original metaphors.” (I probably should have added “much” before ”new ground.") FWIW, I would describe my own book as a smart synthesis that doesn’t cover much new ground.
We do not offer our thesis as an explanation for all possible variations in these activities!
That’s true, but my (relatively uninformed) perception is that excess medical care in other developed countries is a fraction of what it is in the US. If that’s the case, then by far the biggest factor in US medical bloat is something US-specific. And if status-signaling doesn’t have anything to say about that overwhelming factor, then it’s left begging for scraps of factors to explain. My analysis may be incorrect, but in any case I suspect other readers might have the same unanswered questions, and so I called it a hole in your case. You may have reasoning or evidence to plug the hole in a jiffy, but it was missing from the book. (Formally, it’s not a hole in the case that status affects some medicine, just in the case that it has a sizable effect on medicine, which I perhaps incorrectly assumed was the case you were making. I left it to myself to define “sizable.”)
Perhaps it wasn’t the ideal example of a hole, but I also had unaddressed counter-argumets for all of the predictions at the end of the chapter. For example, in the first ("Keeping Up with the Joneses”), it’s possible that people spend more on health care after moving to a richer neighborhood because they spend more on everything. Or if they spend more specifically on health care, maybe there are descriptive norms about how much it’s reasonable to spend on health care not for status but for health. You might hear from neighbors that a certain specialist or procedure is quite effective and worth the cost, then see the service as a practical expenditure.
Actually it is a reference to common idea of “The Elephant in the Room”
Ah, I assumed it was a double entendre because you cite Haidt’s book in the discussion of mind modularity. (In a draft of the review I included both entendres, but an editor remove the “elephant in the room” reference, perhaps because he felt that entendre needed no explanation.) I thought I recalled your mentioning Haidt's metaphor explicitly, but I can’t find the passage, so apparently I was confabulating!
Anyway, I enjoyed your book, and I hope that came across.
Matt
For what it's worth, I also thought the title was a (confusing) reference to the mentioned Haidt metaphor.
No worries, I'll look around myself.
The effort to search for such things seems to me misspent.
I like those both a lot - do you have a link to such predictions very early?
Caplan and I have long predicted low interest in MOOCs. Does that count? I predicted that the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment would show weak health effects, does that count?
> We do not offer our thesis as an explanation for all possible variations in these activities! We say that our favored motive is under-acknowledged, but we don’t claim that it is the only motive, nor that motive variations are the only way to explain behavioral variation. The world is far too big and complex for one simple story to explain it all.
Right, I'd been wanting to know your response to that criticism. This makes sense - you are advocating a theory with significant-but-not-unanimous explanatory power in many domains. I admit your theory has an elegance and coherence to it, and your blog posts often seem to make sense of things in my life I'd been confused by.
If I may ask an ignorant question, do you have any easy links to / examples of times where your theory has made novel predictions in advance of the data being available? I appreciate this may be difficult as you rarely get to run studies yourself. An alternatively satisfying thing would be a set of studies you'd like to run that would be very surprising yet you'd strongly predict would come out in your theory's favour.