Pragmatism and Wicked Problems

On the Ezra Klein podcast, he and Jon Haidt got into an interesting discussion about activism. Klein believes that it is important to talk about topics that make people uncomfortable in order to bring about change.

Klein says: “Confrontation is unpopular, and often necessary, in part to get people to see things they don’t want to see.”

Haidt believes that this tends to push people away and civility is more important. He talks about "wicked problems."

"The conditions for solving a wicked problem are: you have to have people who see it from multiple perspectives," Haidt says.

It reminded me of the Conflict vs. Mistake Theories post, in which Scott Alexander describes mistake theorists who view society as a diseased patient and we're all doctors trying to diagnose it, inviting different perspectives to solve the problem.

It also reminded me of the two political campaign strategies: double down on your base and turn out non voters vs. broaden your appeal and swing moderate voters.

Scott Alexander explores this in Part I of The Toxoplasma of Rage. PETA doubles down, makes people uncomfortable and, as a result, gets their message out at the cost of everyone hating them. On the other hand, Vegan Outreach is much more civil but no one has heard of them.

When Michael Collins negotiated the independence of Ireland, he conceded the territory of Northern Ireland to remain a British colony. He received backlash from De Valera who thought he should have dug his heels in and taken an all- or- nothing approach. Was he right?

All of these dichotomies can also be described as thus: self righteousness vs. pragmatism. The thing about pragmatists (or centrists or mistake theorists) is that they are never completely convinced they are right; always open to the possibility of changing their mind. That's why they believe in inviting multiple perspectives.

Activists like Klein have no patience for civility; they are so convinced they are right and anyone who isn't with them is ignorant and needs to be forcefully educated (made woke), or is evil and needs to be viciously fought.

For a while I believed that my way of thinking (pragmatism/mistake theory) was better. But I've come to realize it's a contradiction. I'm essentially telling the activists "I'm right and you're wrong for thinking 'I'm right and you're wrong.'" In this case, I'm actually not inviting their perspective and being open to changing my mind.

In all likelihood, there are instances in which digging in one's heels and refusing to engage with one's enemy is probably the better strategy.

My problem with our education system

After picking my son up from school, I asked him about one of his friends. He told me that his friend had the flu and was home sick. Then he began asking me about the flu, what it is, how flu shots work, and so on.

I tried to explain viruses, inoculation, and antifragility in six-year-old language and stopped after some stumbling in what I was sure made no sense. After a moment of silence Tyler said, "Daddy, keep talking about that."

I think about this whenever I hear him complain about going to school or having to do homework. I think about whether or not he ever tells his teacher, "Keep talking about that." Like most children, he has a natural curiosity about certain subjects. I don't blame his teacher, he simply cannot explore these curious impulses because it's not part of the curriculum.

Here's what worries me: I'm 36 and I'm still not sure what the end goal of K-12 education is.

Is it to get a job? Then why don't we teach job skills?

Is it to be a good citizen? Then why don't we teach virtue?

Is it to get kids into college? This seems closest but it circles back to the original question: what is the point of college education? is it to teach virtue or job skills? And why wouldn't we teach those in K-12. Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour theory wasn't about 10,000 hours of classroom instruction, it was about 10,000 hours of empiricism.

Is it to teach resiliency? If so, then you could almost make the case that education is designed to make kids used to doing things they hate so they will be prepared for a job they abhor.

I think the current education system is designed to reward people who like learning for the sake of learning. It doesn't reward people who are inspired by learning for teleological means; someone who wants to build a rocket ship is motivated to learn the necessary science and mathematics even if they have no interest in learning about science and math for its own sake.

I understand that you need to know science if you want to discover cures to diseases. But my belief is that a kid who wants to learn how a flu shot works so he can get his friend healthy and playing cars with him again is not in a system that allows him to explore that. The systems tells him what he's allowed to learn about and when.

I know I'm not an educator and I'm probably oversimplifying things, but I believe that the goal of our education system should be to find what makes a kid say, "Keep talking about that" and to answer his questions instead of asking him yours. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

False Positives: when purple dots look blue

Here's a really interesting study about false positives. In short, participants were shown dots of various shades of blue and purple and asked to identify the blue dots. The less frequently they were shown blue dots, the more likely people were to misidentify purple dots as blue.

It reminds me of a quote about Amos Tversky and that he "merely studied in a systematic way things about behaviour that were already known to advertisers and used-car salesmen".

It seems that this group of researchers are studying the heuristic "If your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." Invoking the Lindy Effect, the phrase seems to have a long history, although not well documented, giving it survival value.

[Now comes the dangerous part where we take some data about the color of dots and extrapolate it to explain human behavior.]

If you see the world as a conflict between oppressors and victims, you will eventually see blue dots that are actually purple as our society grows more just and prosperous and these instances become less common.

"Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be one source of that pessimism."

Best of 2018

In no particular order, these are the best essays/blog posts I read in 2018.

Conflict Theory vs. Mistake Theory, by Scott Alexander.
The entire Slate Star Codex post is long but worthwhile. However, I'll use David Brooks to sum it up:

"Mistake theorists believe that the world is complicated and most of our troubles are caused by error and incompetence, not by malice or evil intent...Basically, we’re all physicians standing over a patient with a very complex condition and we’re trying to collectively figure out what to do. 

In the conflict theorist worldview, most public problems are caused not by errors or complexity, but by malice and oppression. The powerful few keep everyone else down. The solutions to injustice and suffering are simple and obvious: Defeat the powerful."

Complicating the Narrative by Amanda Ripley
A fantastic, long read that builds a roadmap for the future of journalism.

"Journalism has yet to undergo this awakening. We like to think of ourselves as objective seekers of truth. Which is why most of us have simply doubled down in recent years, continuing to do more of the same kind of journalism, despite mounting evidence that we are not having the impact we once had.... If we want to learn the truth, we have to find new ways to listen.

The lesson for journalists (or anyone) working amidst intractable conflict: complicate the narrative. First, complexity leads to a fuller, more accurate story. Secondly, it boosts the odds that your work will matter — particularly if it is about a polarizing issue. When people encounter complexity, they become more curious and less closed off to new information. They listen, in other words."

The Anthropology of Manhood by Sebastian Junger, National Review. I've written about this before and it still holds up well.

The Bulverizing of the American Mind, by Aaron Sibarium, The American Interest. I've mentioned this before as well and come back to it for two reasons. This quote: "Give people too much freedom, and soon they’ll come crawling back to their chains," which reminds me of the paradox of choice in moral terms. And that it introduced me to the term bulverizing, which exposes ad hominem, identity politics arguments for the logical fallacy they are (or am I only saying that because I'm a straight, white, cisgendered man?).

Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth, by Russ Roberts.
Speaking of complicating the narrative, this Medium post by Russ Roberts made me think that maybe income inequality isn't as bad as we think. Make sure you watch the videos too.

A Better Way to Look at Most Every Political Issue by Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic. Talk about nuance. His focus on "limits and equilibrium" reminds me of my post about viewing topics as trying to minimize false positives or false negatives.

"Most political stances can be understood in terms of an equilibrium. For instance, some people might believe that access to abortion in a conservative state is too restricted under the status quo, and favor relaxing the rules regulating abortion clinics. That is, they might favor shifting the equilibrium in a “pro-choice” direction.

But ask those same voters, "Should there be any limits on legal abortion?" and they might declare that the procedure should be banned in the last trimester of pregnancy unless the mother's health is threatened. Insofar as the abortion debate is framed around the equilibrium, they will align with the pro-choice movement; but insofar as it is framed around limits, they will align with the pro-life movement."

Libertarian Paternalism

I often read thought-provoking books that get deep into the "what is wrong with modern society" discussion. I enjoy them, but their next-step conclusions often leave me underwhelmed.

They amount to things like "people just need to understand that..." or "we need a public discussion about..." and other pie-in-the-sky proclamations that will never fucking happen. There just aren't enough people who are going to make serious enough changes in their lives to have an impact.

For example, I truly believe if everyone read The Righteous Mind, the world would be a better place. At the very least, we would fight less, understand more, and tone down our self-righteousness. But I'm grounded enough to know that most people are not going to read that book.

I keep coming back to one of Jonathan Haidt's essays, which he opens by talking about how the cosmic settings of the universe are tweaked just so, allowing for the possibility of life. He then relates how our founders searched for the same fine tuning to establish a Republic that would work.

Maybe Richard Thaler and Cass Sustein's concept of libertarian paternalism would do a better job of fine tuning the settings to improve society.

We all know that social media is bad for us, but we lack the self-restraint to do anything about it. What if a community decided to shut off internet access every Sunday, but allowed people to fill out an opt-out form if they didn't want to be included.

Or each Sunday, designate several streets closed to traffic. Pedestrian only. Let kids play in the street without fear and encourage them to get outside, play, interact, and develop their social skills--something our schools no longer allow them to do.

For problems like rampage shootings, defraying social trust, addiction, depression, and suicide, maybe tackling them head on is the wrong approach. It might be better to attack the conditions that cause them: isolation, technology/social media, and hyper individualism. These causal problems are better addressed by looking at changes to their environment than trying to educate individuals and expecting them to change themselves.

I've lost some interest in Better Angels because I don't think it's sustainable. You get a few reds and blues in a room, they talk it out, and and feel more comfortable around those they met in the workshop. I don't see that reverberating throughout the community.

But if you invest in social infrastructure that gets parents talking to each other in social spaces, gets kids making friends in unstructured, unsupervised play, rally everyone together around a virual bowling league at the library or a Friday night football game, you might not need to worry about convincing people that reds and blues are actually normal people just like you. You'll already be identifying them first as friends and neighbors than by political ideology.

And the more reason you give people to leave their home, the less lonely and at-risk for depression, suicide, and anti-social behavior they will become.

American mythology

I'm reading Sapiens and learned something fascinating. Several similar species lived alongside homo sapiens at the same time. One of our distinguishing characteristics was the ability to tell fiction.

Most tribes, of all sapiens, couldn't grow by much more than 150 people without destabilizing. At that point it took a belief in the same story to get a large group of people to work together. That is how we got spirit animals, Greek Gods, contemporary religion, and patriotism.

One of the problems with America is that there are two competing fictions about our identity.

One says that we created a system based on freedom, pluralism, checks and balances, and a refuge to people seeking a better life and economic opportunity. This produced the longest lasting government in world history and the most powerful country ever.

The other fiction says that colonizers came here and wiped out native americans while stealing their land. They imported African slaves and made mint off their backs. All progress is from from slavery and thievery. We are the products of mass murderers who used their power to oppress women and minorities and continue to do so today.

The problem is that, hyperbole aside, both stories are true. But if we don't find a fiction we agree on, this isn't going to last.

We're always at war

I've been troubled by the recent rampage shootings. I've also been re-reading Sebastian Junger's Tribe. It reminded me of an unusual fact. Look at U.S. rampage shootings in the last three decades:

Notice anything unusual? Is it odd that, since 1986, the only year with no shootings was 2002, the year after our country was attacked? And there was only 1 per year in the years that followed, before it spiked again as the war became unpopular.

Here is another unusual fact: Israel has only had one mass shooting in recent years. The country is constantly at war. Does that give their lives more purpose?

For hundreds of thousands of years, tribes had to be prepared for war at any moment. But as Stephen Pinker illustrates in Enlightenment, we are living in, quite possibly, the safest time in human history. And yet, we cannot escape our longing for war.

As Scott Alexander notes, our levels of violence are about more than easy access to guns.

"The United States’ homicide rate of 3.8 is clearly higher than that of eg France (1.0), Germany (0.8), Australia (1.1), or Canada (1.4). However, as per the FBI, only 11,208 of our 16,121 murders were committed with firearms, eg 69%. By my calculations, that means our nonfirearm murder rate is 1.2. In other words, our non-firearm homicide rate alone is higher than France, Germany, and Australia’s total homicide rate."

I'm coming to the sobering conclusion that war is a part of the human DNA. And my fear is that, if we are not at war with an outside enemy, we will turn on ourselves.

And it isn't just the mentally disturbed, Islamic terrorists, or neo nazis. The most successful political campaigns are the ones that convince people that the other party is trying to destroy American democracy. So we create an enemy where none exists.

We are convinced that immigrants are coming here to take our jobs, rape our women, and sell drugs to our children. Or that republicans are going to increase inequality, establish a police state, only look out for the rich, and take away our healthcare, our unions, our rights. That democrats are going to turn us into a classless Marxist society where all hardworking Americans will be taxed to feed the lazy.

And we need your vote so we can fight them because we cannot let them win. 

The War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Things We Don't Like.

We need to create a system that satisfies our need for war. Repression until the point of rampages doesn't appear to be working.

Maybe it's like Nassim Taleb's idea of antifragility. Maybe men seek volatility in order to strengthen our evolutionary role as protectors. Too much peace weakens us, so something in our DNA convinces us that there is an enemy afoot.