When Fatalism Means Freedom

I responded to a friend's Facebook post about depression. I didn't do a good job of articulating a response so I'm going to try to do that here.

The Happiness Curve shows that happiness is highest in our early 20s, goes down each year, bottoms out around 45-50, and goes up each year after that.

I think about this whenever I am stressed. It is easy to blame my problems on something fundamentally flawed about myself (introversion, neuroticism), or on my unique situation (kids, finances). But the happiness research reminds me that I'm not unique; I'm just a person in his late 30s on the down slope of the curve.

In other words, this is supposed to happen.

Whatever problems seem to cause your depression—loneliness, work, money, etc.—don't just disappear once you turn 56. And yet, everyone seems to get happier at that age. Even people in their 80s and 90s, in the worst physical health of their lives, are happier than ever (a good counter argument is that this could be survivorship bias: the least happy people die by this age and are no longer counted in the data).

As a non-theist, I don't believe in fatalism as divine intervention. But I do believe that evolutionary factors and cultural forces shape my behavior beyond my sovereign control of it.

And yet, this makes me happy.

I find liberty in knowing that I don't have a whole lot of control over my well being and that it is going to get better. Maybe I like knowing that I won't have to do anything to be happier, other than wait to turn 56.

I remember reading Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus in which he concludes, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." I never understood that essay, but I think I do now. There is a certain freedom in resigning myself to the understanding that my life is just following a script and I know it has a happy ending.

Talking to the Elephant

When trying to persuade someone who doesn't think like you, Jonathan Haidt said it's important to "talk to the elephant." He uses the elephant/rider metaphor to explain our subconscious/intuitive mind as an elephant, and the rider as our rational consciousness. The elephant moves where it wants but rider can try to steer it, although not always successfully.

Haidt's point is that people don't think logically, so your argument should speak to their emotional/intuitive instincts.

I wrote a post about how liberals should look for a reason for conservatives to use a transgender person's preferred pronoun, because "standing up for the oppressed" doesn't speak to their elephant. I only recently realized that Scott Alexander already made a good argument for this.

He goes through a really long post that eventually leads to this conclusion:

1. It's probably not "true" that a biological male can be a woman, however;
2. Transgender persons are at very high risk of suicide;
3. Calling a transgender person their preferred pronoun can greatly reduce this risk, therefore;
4. The benefits of using a transgender person's pronoun outweigh the costs of saying something he doesn't believe to be true.

Facing this argument puts non-progressives in a tough situation; what reason could be so great that it justifies pushing someone toward suicide? Are you really going to double down on "facts don't care about your feelings"?

In this instance, Alexander makes an appeal to common humanity identity politics. Reducing suicide is something we can all agree is a good thing; it transcends tribal partisanship. It's an argument that has the best chance of working with conservatives and other non-progressives because it speaks to their emotions and avoids tribal signaling.

Obedience > Creativity

On the penultimate day of my son's summer camp, parents are invited to take part in "family night". Part of the evening involves each age group performing a song for the families in attendance.

I was following around my two year old daughter, who cannot sit still, as she explored the camp. As we walked away from the picnic area where the performances were going on, we found an octagonal shaped platform, about 10 feet across, surrounded by an octagonal shaped fence, about three feet high.

Suddenly, a group of kids who had finished their performance rushed over, hopped the octagonal fence, and began playing a game they had clearly been taught over the course of the week. Although the game was supposed to involve a ball, having no ball, they improvised and used one kid's shoe.

Meanwhile, another group of kids was giving their performance as the families continued to watch. As the group of kids playing the game became louder and more intense, a camp director eventually came over, made them stop, and told them to return to the picnic area.

I keep thinking about this story for several reasons. It reminds me of the research into "nurturing" versus "strict" parenting styles. Apparently, whichever one chooses is a very strong predictor of how they vote.

One of the questions the researchers would ask is if you think it's more important for a child to be creative or obedient. Creative respondents tended to be liberal voters and were given the "nurturing" label; obedient respondents tended to be conservative voters and were given the "strict parent" label.

In the story I told, almost any adult would agree with the camp director's decision to end the game and make the kids return to the picnic area (in case I wasn't clear, they were never given permission to play and were supposed to be seated the entire time). The pro arguments are that it is distracting to the families trying to listen to the other students' songs and unfair to the kids who had practiced their routine and sat through the earlier performances.

However, my guess is that, given the chance, almost all campers would have preferred to play than to give their performance. So who is the performance really for: the campers or their families?

In siding the camp director, we choose obedience over creativity. When asked, progressive parents will say they prefer a creative child to an obedient one. But in practice, I think they are more likely to do the latter and scold the group of campers, who had created their own game, for not sitting quietly at their picnic table.

Peter Gray writes frequently about the need for unstructured, unsupervised play. But as a society, we continue to move further away from that ideal, even the parents who might think of themselves as "nurturing."

Want Libertarianism? Vote Democrat (or Republican)

In The Joy of Federalism, Frank Foer writes about how states have passed legislation in areas the federal government has made no progress.

"New York's attorney general Eliot Spitzer, declaring himself a "fervent federalist," is using state regulations to prosecute corporate abuses that George W. Bush's Department of Justice won't touch. While the federal minimum wage hasn't budged since the middle of the Clinton era, 13 (mostly blue) states and the District of Columbia have hiked their local wage floors in the intervening years. After Bush severely restricted federal stem cell research, California's voters passed an initiative pouring $3 billion into laboratories for that very purpose, and initiatives are under way in at least a dozen other states."

Bill Bishop believes that congressional gridlock is what creates the conditions for this type of federalism to flourish.

On a message board, I saw a libertarian-leaning poster write about how he doesn't vote for a party, he votes for gridlock. He doesn't trust either of the major parties, so he favors a situation in which neither one has power.

It seems that the outgrowth of this strategy is that it pushes power downward to the local level (it feels unjust that us taxpayers are paying the legislative body all this money to not pass legislation).

All of this makes me wonder: is voting for libertarian candidates the most effective strategy for libertarian voters? Or is it voting for the most extreme, uncompromising candidates in the minority party, thus ensuring gridlock?

Defending Ideological Diversity

Katie Knibbs at The Ringer wrote a scathing critique of "ideological diversity" that everyone should read. Go ahead and read it. I'll wait.

She makes some good points and some bad ones, which I will respond to.

"Zuckerberg’s statement startled me, partly because he was more adept at defending Thiel than he was at addressing Facebook’s failure to hire black employees. (Facebook is about 2 percent black. Its board is 100 percent white.)"

People love to point out the racial diversity of an institution they don't like. I don't know if Knibbs is suggesting a lack of equality or a lack of equity. Is she suggesting Zuckerberg is racist because he's not hiring enough blacks or is he racist because he's not manipulating his hiring process and discriminating against other races in favor of blacks?

How many qualified African-Americans are there to work at one of the most successful companies? According to this, 13.7% of Harvard's student body is African-American. Assuming the alumni demographics are similar, there should be quite a few African-American elites out there for Zuck to choose from. So Knibbs might have a point.

Nutpicking

"The push for “ideological diversity” (SCARE QUOTES!) as a curative confuses the benefit of dialectical learning with the notion that all ideas are worth debating. History is littered with horrible ideas that aren’t worth poking holes into during a question-and-answer session. “The earth is flat,” for instance. “Castrating homosexuals is an acceptable punishment for homosexuality.” “Slavery is good.” “Women’s suffrage is incompatible with democracy.”'

"In contemporary arguments for “ideological diversity,” the ask is more moderate: It’s not that campuses need to purge Marxists as much as they need to let a few more Ayn Rand aficionados and ethno-nationalists onto the tenure track."

One of the things Knibbs does is take the worst representation of her outgroup and use it as an example of what "ideological diversity" might look like. (She also conflates "diverse" ideas with those lacking merit.) She might counter by saying that this is what will happen if we open the floodgates to different thinking, these bad ideas will get through.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author becomes transfixed with trying to define "quality." He says it's something that's both objective and subjective at the same time.

For example, I hate country music. But even I can distinguish between high quality country music like you'd hear on the radio and low quality country music performed by some hack who can't stay in key. My point is, I don't think it's as hard as people think to distinguish high and low quality ideas from our outgroup.

For example, Heterodox Academy doesn't call for all loons to come give college lectures. It calls for credentialed professors from different ideologies to be welcomed into the academy so that their biases will cancel each other out.

Even the fringiest of the left wouldn't expect Zuck to hire homeless people of color to write code for him if it meant more racial diversity. Merit still matters.

The Perception Gap study shows that more than 3/4 of Republicans agree that racism is still a problem (Democrats predicted the number to be about 1/2, hence the name "Perception Gap"). Our outgroup isn't dominated by the crazies; we just think they are.

The other thing that helps is to picture ideologies as the emotions that drive them rather than their worst representation. That's why I like Arnold Kling's Three Languages of Politics, it helps me see conservatives as people who fear the decline of civilization rather than people who want a military state to keep minorities down.

Bad faith

"But the “ideological diversity” debate, again, isn’t really about allowing every horrid viewpoint equal standing. It is about creating a schism in which extreme conservatives appear a trampled class."

"When Zuckerberg used the phrase “ideological diversity” on a college campus, he was crouching behind the notion that the real problem is groupthink, not that Facebook did a bad job of hiring people of color to operate his company." 

"I don’t know if Zuckerberg boasted of Facebook’s “ideological diversity” in keeping Thiel on its board to offer a deliberate olive branch to the right wing, or if he has genuinely conflated the value of having people with different perspectives working together with an idea that all perspectives are equally valid and deserving of a platform,"

I hate bad faith arguments. They reduce people to flat, cartoonish characters. In fact, this is a good example of why we need more ideological diversity. The more we stay in our bubbles, the more we assume the worst about our outgroup. The more we communicate with those who do not think like us, the more we see nuance.

In the second quote above, Knibbs does raise an interesting point though. Do I think Zuck touts ideological diversity just so he can use that as an excuse for keeping his board 100% white? No (remember, his own wife is Asian). But is it possible to have ideological and racial diversity? I don't know but I fear that one comes at the cost of the other.

But, in good faith, I'm going to assume that which ever type of diversity you favor is because you think it's best and not because you want to live in a totalitarian state or because you promote the superiority of a certain race.

Simple stories

"Hemmer notes that conservatives eventually adopted the pro-diversity language of the left as an undermining tactic,"

The phrase “ideological diversity” is a Trojan horse designed to help bring disparaged thought onto campuses, to the media, and into vogue. It is code for granting fringe right-wing thought more credence in communities that typically reject it, and nothing more."

These quotes remind me of Tyler Cowen's TED Talk about simple stories. In short: beware of them. Especially if you see words like "pure and simple" or "and nothing more", usually the writer is arguing in bad faith.

A good counter I like to give is to ask the person if it's possible to distinguish good faith from bad faith. Such as, "If conservatives truly believed that the best form of education came from heterodox thinking, how would you be able to distinguish them from conservatives who are only using that language to give a platform to white supremacy and nazis?"

Most people don't have a way of distinguishing, which makes their assumptions rather hollow.

The Power to declare racism

"When students come out against ideas like this, they aren’t succumbing to dumb mob-think. They are taking a reasonable stand against legitimizing hurtful, wrongheaded nonsense."

"Pundits are getting distracted by the dubious tactical approaches of a small minority of protestors instead of focusing on why they’re so upset in the first place — because discredited, offensive, and abhorrent (often right-wing) fringe viewpoints are now getting treated like they’re merely “ideologically diverse” instead of poisonous."

Now we get into the muddy area of what is considered "nonsense", "fringe" and "discredited." Who is given the power to decide that? I would also argue that "hurtful" and "offensive" ideas are not precursors for wrong. Sometimes they are, but sometimes they are the result of not being exposed to different viewpoints.

The path to truth doesn't always feel good.

I guess what upsets me most about columns like this are that they take a topic that obviously is foreign to them, like ideological diversity, and spend the column writing about how the people who push it are evil instead of, I dunno, doing actual reporting. How about figuring out what this idea is and what drives people to feel that way? How about talking to some people outside your inner circle instead of lifting an email from your old boss without asking him?

The worst part is that she writes about the students who attacked Allison Stranger and wonders why pundits didn't focus on why they're upset, without a hint of irony as to why she is not focusing on why someone of a different ideology might think the way they do. (Unless she truly believes it's as simple as blatant racism. If so, try harder, Katie.)

I would be happier if the conclusion were something like: "I can understand the merits of viewpoint diversity, but I still believe that racial and gender diversity is more important and if I have to choose one I am going with the latter."

I really don't want to do this, but ...

"Murray coauthored 1994’s The Bell Curve, a discredited tract that argues for the innate intellectual superiority of white people over black people."

Defending Charles Murray is not a hill I'm willing to die on, I disagree with him on many things and he is certainly to the right of me politically. But I can at least steelman his haters.

I find it inaccurate to say his work has been "discredited." It's been criticized and he has responded to the criticism.

Two chapters of the book talk about race. The rest of the book argues that intelligence is the best predictor of things like earnings, job performance, unwed pregnancy, and crime.

The fact that his thesis is controversial does not make it discredited. You could say lacking in consensus.

As far as I know, the research is solid. The question becomes how much can be extrapolated from the work? "Is IQ the best predictor of success?" is a good question to ask. And, even if true, should we withhold this information if it emboldens white supremacists? (Personally, my favorite take on IQ comes from Eric Weinstein.)

The value I do find in his work is that it pushes back against blank slatism; an idea that I feel has been discredited. However, blank slatism has enough support from credentialed academics that I find value in seeing it debated. Bad ideas don't go away by being pushed underground (that makes them more extreme), they go away by being proven wrong.

If it were up to me, I would determine which ideas are worthy of attention by merit and popularity. If there is a really good idea that no one is talking about, we should shed light on it. If there is a really bad idea that has become ascendant, we should show why it is wrong.

I also take umbrage with the last part of Knibbs' quote. If anything, Murray's work shows the "innate intellectual superiority" of Asians over everyone else.

Taking the low road

So let's engage in some bad faith reasoning. It sounds like fun.

There is a scene in Louie (yes, I'm going there) in which Louis C.K. and Parker Posey are on a date. She convinces him to come to the top of a roof and proceeds to stand on the roof's edge and look down. Louie, out of breath and starting to worry that she might be a little crazy, refuses.

What are you afraid of? she asks. She then infers that a part of Louie is afraid that he wants to jump, and that is why he doesn't want to stand on the edge of the building and look down. Posey declares, "I want to live. That's why I'm not afraid to look down."

Part of me wonders that the reason those in ideological bubbles refuse to listen to other ideas isn't because it legitimizes discredited ideas or will be hurtful to minorities. It's because a small part of them is scared it will change their mind.

Here is my plea: You might think a person is bad because the SLPC declared them a racist. But if you engage with them, you're probably not going be convinced that they are right and run off to join their tribe. However, you might come to believe that they are not actually racist.

So don't be scared. Come to the edge. If you are confident in your beliefs and identity, I guarantee you won't jump off. But you might see the world from a new angle and gain a new appreciation.

Diploma as Ableism

Scott Alexander had a wonderful thought experiment: what if we made it illegal for employers to ask if job candidates had a college degree? What if it was treated like we treat a disability, something employers cannot use to discriminate against potential employees.

First, it would also have to be illegal for candidates to reveal their education. Otherwise employers would just look at resumes and if it didn't list a college, they'd assume they never went.

Second, this would probably cost employers money, as screening would become more rigorous. I don't know that applications for a bank president would be flooded with low skilled, high school dropouts (people will still likely apply for jobs they have a chance at getting) but there will probably be enough to increase the workload for HR.

(They could take a cue from the college admission process and require an application fee. This would at least make people question if it's worth it to apply for the bank manager position.)

The outcome of this screening process is what fascinates me. How will they ask the candidates to show their worth? Does this put more pressure on internships and job experience?

Do employers develop aptitude tests and level the playing field for non graduates? Do they become country clubs and require referrals from current employees, making it more elitist than the current system?

This idea also puts pressure on colleges. Now building human capital becomes more important than ever. Students will expect more out of colleges. "How are you going to make me attractive to employers?"

In class, the emphasis will shift from grades to learning. In fact, grades would be pretty useless.

Graduation rates would plummet. If, by junior year, you feel you have what it takes to get a good job, what is to keep you from staying two more semesters?

I'm not sure if this would be better or worse, but it is a small tweak that would have enormous implications.

Means and Ends

"Equity" has become the term du jour for the academic left. It has usurped equality, a term I imagine most Americans find admirable.

I think the important distinction is that one focuses on ends, the other on means. Equality means everyone is treated the same, regardless of outcome. Equity means we should treat people differently in order to achieve the same outcome.

If you buy into the equity narrative, you can see how claims like "racism and white supremacy are baked into American culture" make sense. White people succeed at higher rates than blacks, so it's "racist" even if no one is making judgements based on race (this claim conveniently ignores the success of Asian Americans).

So when they talk about "structural racism" or ignore the textbook definition of racism, you can understand what they are talking about. To them, this type of racism has nothing to do with treatment and everything to do with outcomes.

If you buy into the equality narrative, you don't understand how someone can be racist unless they treat people differently based on race.

In employment law, these terms exist as disparate treatment and disparate impact. The latter is something a company can get sued for even if they haven't consciously made any attempt to treat people differently based on race, gender, age, or disability.

When we use "treatment" in this context, we're really talking about discrimination. Is discrimination never okay or is it justified in certain situations? Whichever way you lean will determine which philosophy you employ.

If you prefer equity, you employ a utilitarian strategy to create the greatest good.

If you prefer equality, you view discrimination as a sacred categorical imperative in which the ends never justify the means.

If, in the name of equity, discrimination is normalized to create equal outcomes, are we then creating a world in which discrimination qua social good has the potential to be used by evil agents for nefarious purposes?

My fear is that this hypothetical world grants too much power to define something as nebulous as "social good." I'd feel better if the limitations of this power were agreed upon and the definition of the social good that justifies discrimination comes from heterodox thinking.