Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Weighting Provokers

I recently had a conversation with a friend who was telling me about his frustration with information around the Covid vaccines. He told me about a journalist who had been banned from Twitter (was recently reinstated) for "telling the truth." Namely, reporting that nothing in the original Pfizer trials showed any impact on transmission. 

We've been lied to, he told me.

I asked where he heard this, even though I already knew the answer. And that answer was the Joe Rogan Podcast.

I spent several seconds Googling this claim and sent him a link from Reuters that provided some clarifcation. (Yes, to obtain emergency authorization from the FDA you do not need to prove transmission reduction, only that it's safe and reduces fatalities and hospitalizations. Also, later studies showed the vaccine did reduce transmission in Covid Classic, something the Rogan journalist did not report on.)

Yet despite all this, I still kinda like Joe Rogan. 

The whole conversation reaffirmed for me why I trust my views more than my friend's. By listening to Joe Rogan's podcast, my friend hears voices outside the mainstream that others may be missing. But by not listening to mainstream media, or even fact-checking the claims he hears, he's missing a lot of details that provide more clarity and is unable to build a good consensus of opinion.

I listen to the mainstream and the rogues, but I need to be more aware how I divvy up my attention. I am reminded of the blog post about explainers, illuminators, and provokers. Joe Rogan is a provoker. David Leonhardt or Derek Thompson are explainers. Noah Smith and Matt Iglesias are illuminators. And I think they are all important.

Bet on it

Let's say at the beginning of the 2021 NBA season, I wanted to bet on how many games I thought the Boston Celtics would win. If I listened to the mainstream consensus. I would have guessed that they would win about half their games, or 41.

But what if I had listened to a rogue prognosticator, who was convinced that the new head coach's defensive scheme and tough-love approach was going to shock people and that this team was going to win  65 games? 

Well, he would've been wrong, but he would have updated my priors more in his direction and probably moved my prediction from the consensus of 41 wins to something like 51, which is exactly how many games they won on their way to the NBA Finals that year.

But if I only listened to the provokers, I'd just hear extreme predictions like 65 wins or 12 wins, nothing tempered by the consensus that would actually get me closer to the true total of 51.

So I build my model similar to Nassim Taleb's barbell approach to investing: 80% in safe bonds and 20% in high-risk, high-reward stocks. The NYT reporters are the bonds, the Joe Rogan Podcast guests are the stocks. 

I used to think that intellectual diversity was more important but I think this framing is better. (Or maybe you meld the two and ensure there is intellectual diversity among your explainers and your provokers.) I also think there is a distinction, that some may say doesn't exist, between rogues and conflict entrepreneurs—the latter being people who lie or distort to create a narrative that affirms the priors of their audience and always frames the outgroup as the enemy. Whereas rogues take their contrarian position because it's what they really believe, no matter how unpopular it makes them.

I think my model is pretty good, and I will continue to update it as necessary, but I also understand that most people aren't building out a model when they choose where they get their news from. This is something that social media could take a more active approach with, building users' algorithms to reflect this model in their feed rather than it being an intellectual bubble. 

Posted by at No comments:

Monday, November 7, 2022

Updating my Priors: Short Takes 11.2022

Regarding my action vs. theory post: I thought this Inside Higher Ed article was a good melding of the two: teach activists to be builders. 

It also reminded me of this story from the Chronicle for Higher Ed. Student activists at Sarah Lawrence College interrupted speech with a list of demands. The writer, who was one of the speakers, recalls a conversation after the event with the president who reflected on how difficult it was to engage with these students. She had tried to get them involved in the budget process and be a part of the solution. 

Their response: "it isn’t our job. You figure it out." They didn't want to be builders.

Tanner Greer was right. Today’s activism isn’t “How can we solve this problem?” It’s “How can we get management to take our side?”

This paper finds that “greater access to firearms in the Black community reduced the rate of lynching in the Jim Crow South.” So maybe greater access to guns isn’t always a bad thing. Consider my priors updated.

I've always liked the argument that bad science shouldn't be fixed with censorship, it should be fixed with better science. But I never had a good example of what that would look like. 

Now I do. Jonathan Rauch fucking nails it.

In the early 20th century, the American Psychiatric Association's official stance on homosexuality was that it was a mental illness. Finally, in 1956 one psychologist tested whether psychiatrists could distinguish homosexuals from heterosexuals based on personality tests. They could not. By 1973 the APA reversed its stance.

Violet video games reduce violence:

So not only is the “video games cause school shootings” argument wrong, it actually does the opposite.

We know that millennials and Gen Z aren't able to afford homes because we haven't been building enough supply. But when we do build new homes, they aren't even they types that youngish people can afford Why?

I’ve noticed that new construction is always big houses, never any new starter homes. Now I know why.


Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, October 23, 2022

The Physical Pain of Grief

 

Sebastian Junger's essay "The Anthropology of Manhood" still resonates with me, particularly this part:

"a woman on a backhoe can move just as much earth as a man on a backhoe ... As these gender-specific jobs disappear, it becomes harder for men to know whether they have anything essential to offer society.

Both the triumph and the tragedy of modern society is that we have eliminated almost every hardship and danger from daily life. For the most part that is a great blessing, but it comes at a cost. The very efficiency of mass society makes people feel unnecessary, and therein lies a profound threat to our dignity."

Recently we had to put to sleep one of our family's dogs. He was about 13 years old, which means that he had been a part of our family longer than any of our children.

We decided on a home burial. Part of the decision was because we didn't like the idea of shoving his dead body into a giant oven to be incinerated with other dead animals. But the other reason was that it was really important for me to dig his hole in our backyard. And the fact that it was going to be a difficult and physically-demanding chore was part of the appeal, a notion I couldn't explain until I thought of the Junger essay.

It wasn't until some time after my son was born that I began to face the existential questions: What does it mean to be a man? A father?

After reading Junger's essay I've been reframing those questions as: What does it take to feel necessary?

I was the only member of our family who was physically capable of digging a four-foot deep hole with my spaded shovel. I was the only one physically capable of carrying my dog's body from the back of my car and lowering him into his final resting spot. Anyone could've handed him off to the vet tech, who could slide him into the incinerator and push a button. But for this task, I was necessary.

But it wasn't just about being needed by my family, it was about honoring my dog. And I wanted to feel the pain from digging his grave. I wanted my back to be sore the next day. I wanted those red blisters that formed on my calloused hands. I wanted to give our dog a respectful ceremony but I wanted to feel like it took something from me, a sacrifice in some way.

A decorated Christmas tree in your living room that was bought from the parking lot of a Home Depot looks the same as one you cut down with a hand saw from a tree farm out in the country. But something about the labor involved in procuring the latter tree makes it feel more valuable.

I now realize that that is how I chose to grieve; not through tears but through physical pain in a way that felt meaningful and necessary to the situation. 

That dog gave me over a decade's worth of joy. Even after his death he gave me another gift: he made me feel necessary.

Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

EA Should Embrace Communitarianism


I.

I'm jumping on the "actually, effective altruism is bad" bandwagon. Even though I think it is mostly good. 

I identify as a communitarian, even when it comes to philanthropy. This puts me at odds with EA individuals but I think it actually fits with their philosophy.

In his book Moral Tribes, Joshua Greene talks a lot about utilitarianism, which he believes (and I agree) is the most misunderstood philosophy in the world. The greatest good for the greatest number, what could be wrong with that? The common argument against it is that, according to utilitarianism (which is at the heart of EA), if killing my mother and harvesting her organs will save seven lives then I must do it. If you find this scenario repulsive and reject it, then you must reject utilitarianism.

But wait, Greene says, if we all agree that this fictional society is worse, then that means we reject it on utilitarian grounds. In other words, we agree killing our mother to save the lives of seven strangers would not be for the greatest good. 

The problem with this interpretation of utilitarianism is that it only takes into account that which can be quantified. 

Yes, we can count that the loss of my mother's life resulted in the saving of seven other lives. But we cannot account for the grieving that my family and I experience. We cannot quantify the absolute horror everyone will be living in, knowing their life could be taken away by some utilitarians to provide for the greater good. It is this unquantifiable aspect of life that I am interested in.

II.

In Tribe, Sebastian Junger describes an asymmetry between the returning of hostages among early settlers and Native Americans. When the Native Americans released a colonist hostage, the colonists would sometimes refuse to return to their communities or even sneak out and go back to live with the Native Americans.  What's interesting isn't how often it happened, but that it happened at all. Because the reverse never occurred; released Native American hostages always rejoined their tribe.

By every quantifiable metric, living in civilization (as the colonists did) is better than living a hunter/gatherer life (as the Natives did); life expectancy, health care, literacy levels, rates of poverty, etc. 

Indeed, Scott Siskind notes a similar pattern with the Amish: "Relatively few Amish 'defect' to regular modern society." While they do beat other Americans in health outcomes, they lack the comforts of modern society. So there must be something about these lifestyles that causes people to prefer them to the "quantifiably better" lifestyle of modern civilization.

I call that "something" community.

III.

My case does not purely rest on anecdotes. We actually have some data. When you have strong social connections in your community, it makes you happier.

The effect of money on happiness has a low ceiling; after a certain point, making more money will not make you happier. But the social connections that come from being a part of a community will improve your life, which explains why a lonely life of material comfort can be less appealing than a materially-poor life with rich social connections.

One of the places people develop social connections through community is church. Indeed, this paper shows that:

"People living in an area with a higher density of co-religionists have higher incomes, they are less likely to be high school dropouts, and more likely to have a college degree. Living in such an area also reduces the odds of receiving welfare, decreases the odds of being divorced, and increases the odds of being married."

Not only that, social connections are a key, possibly the key, driver of social mobility. Raj Chetty's research shows that when poor children have friendships that cut across class lines, it increases their earning potential. There is significant variance in the number of cross-class friendships by community. In other words, the community you live in plays an outsized role in your life outcomes. So creating stronger communities will lift more people out of poverty and, probably, increase their happiness.

So while I understand that donating mosquito nets to people in Somalia will save more lives than any other donation I could make, I also believe that we don't fully grasp how much strengthening communities can improve our lives because it's harder to quantify. (I also believe that philanthropy that feels good for the donor will lead to more philanthropy, regardless of how EA-approved the charity is.)

IV.

A final thought regarding the Chetty research. The study showed that the effects of cross-class relationships are true regardless of race, the benefits of poor kids befriending rich kids aren't only extended to white kids. And the communities with large Black populations tend to be the most disconnected, with both black and white citizens having fewer high-income friends to help them rise out of poverty.

From this basis I propose my solution to reducing the racial wage gap: increasing the number of interracial friendships, specifically cross-class ones. And to take this a step further and do the binary Kendi good guy/bad guy thing: Any policy that reduces or sustains the number of black-white friendships is racist. Any policy that increases the number of black-white friendships is antiracist. 

That means DEI trainings that only cause white people to feel guilty, to walk on egg shells, or to look down upon poor white people, rather than strengthening interracial friendships, are racist. Yes, racist.

So let's tear down the walls that prevent us from having friendships outside our racial, social, and economic groups. And if you find a good charity doing this type of work, support them! If an effective altruist criticizes you, you just tell them that they are racist for not working to increase the number of interracial friendships.

Posted by at No comments:

Friday, August 26, 2022

Updating my Priors: Short Takes 8.2022

Oh, how I love when a big study comes along, gets published in the NYT with beautiful interactive graphics, and totally confirms all of my communitarian priors. The title says it all, "Vast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich and Poor." This is my Maxwell's demon problem. I'll have more thoughts in a future post, but if there is an argument for MLK's Beloved Community, this is it.

Regarding my post about abortion being a losing issue for Republicans: their favorable/unfavorable rating has barely budged. However, their Senate odds in the mid terms has swung in their favor. It could be a lot of factors, but I think the Dobbs ruling definitely works against them. (Popularism ftw!) 

Regarding my comment about pessimistic people appearing smart. 

So not only does that bit of advice hold up in a study, the study also shows why we should ignore that advice: pessimistic people are less competent. Of course, I don't think the answer here is to ignore pessimistic people. I still think averaging the responses of experts—optimistic, pessimistic, and otherwise—is the best solution.

I just thought this was cool for some super 90s nostalgia.

In reading an essay, I came across the term “idea inoculation.” It reminded me of my post about the diffusion of rhetoric. This kind of explains my worry about activists controlling a message for The Persuadables and how they can actively do harm to a good cause.

In the essay—called Bioinfohazards by Megan Crawford, Finan Adamson, and Jeffrey Ladish—the writers contrast idea inoculation with the Streisand effect.

“In the case of the Streisand Effect, attempts to remove information are what catapult it into public consciousness. In the case of idea inoculation, attempts to publicize an idea ensure that the concept is ignored or dismissed out of hand, with no further consideration given to it."

A good example is the impact of pollution causing frogs to forgo intersex copulation in favor of intrasex copulation (ie it made the frogs gay), a phenomenon that took a while to catch on because it was being espoused by Alex Jones, he of little credibility. 

The essay's writers continue:

"Presenting a bad version of a good idea can cause people to dismiss it prematurely and not take it seriously, even when it’s presented in better form. 

Trying to change norms can backfire. If the first people presenting a measure to reduce the publication of risky research are too low prestige to be taken seriously, no effect might actually be the best-case scenario. An idea that is associated with disreputable people or hard-to-swallow arguments may itself start being treated as disreputable and face much higher skepticism and hostility than if better, proven arguments had been presented.”

This is tough because activists are the most action-oriented people, the first to promote a cause. So how do you get in front of the low-credibility ones to improve the messaging before they do more harm than good, when you're still bogged down in getting the theory right? I guess the answer is for popularists to become more activist-y.

For instance, red state Kansas defeated the anti-abortion ballot initiative by imbuing freedom into their message, with phrases like “strict government mandates” and “Say no to more government control.” It reminded me of a David Shor story about how the campaign ads that Democratic staffers liked best polled worse with the public. 

There is an interesting read about "respectability politics." Rosa Parks was hand picked to spark the bus boycott because "she’s morally clean, she’s reliable, nobody had nothing on her, she had the courage of her convictions." With MLK noting  “nobody can doubt the height of her character.”

Sadly, the person who delivers the message is more important than the actual message.

I found this fascinating:

School is literally killing our youth and yet I never hear any policy suggestions that will result in less school. 

Posted by at No comments:

Monday, August 15, 2022

Always Double Down on Meaning

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

I was having a conversation about student loan forgiveness recently. The argument against it went like this: I made sacrifices so that my children could go to school and graduate debt-free. Why should all these other people who didn’t do it the right way, like I did, have their loans forgiven?

The Old Bayesian Fox would have countered in a nerdy, rationalist manner. So what you’re describing is what economists call “opportunity cost.” Instead of buying coffee on the way to work each morning, you put that extra cash in your child’s 529 savings account. And you’re suggesting that the people who graduated school with debt are the results of parents who chose the coffee instead of savings. The flaw in your reasoning is that it assumes discretionary spending. Millions of families live paycheck to paycheck and don’t have any money left over after paying their bills. So it’s not a choice of coffee vs. savings, it’s a choice of savings vs. dinner or fixing the car’s breaks or asthma medication or some other form of mandatory spending that you can't skimp on.

But I’m going to do my Amanda Ripley thing and try to get at the heart of the underlying cause that I believe leads to this reaction. Because I believe that the Old Bayesian Fox response I just gave would be just as effective as telling the person they are just racist or selfish or something about white supremacy. In other words, my response only addresses the surface-level rationalization rather than trying to understand the motivation behind the rationalization.

Because I think this is really an issue of meaning.

What's in the Box?

At the beginning of Dune, Paul Atreides is asked to put his hand in a box that will cause excruciating pain. The whole point was to prove his humanity, because humans are the only creatures that will endure pain. If any other creature does something that causes pain, they will cease doing that activity. But humans will endure pain if they believe it is meaningful.

Getting back to the student loan forgiveness argument, if someone made a sacrifice, which involves enduring some semblance of pain, they must have done so because they felt it was meaningful. Forgiving student loan sounds to them like saying “Hey, remember those sacrifices you made? Turns out they were totally meaningless! You could’ve just had coffee every morning and literally nothing would be different because the government will just bail you out.”

Now, this doesn’t mean that they are right. I just think it means we should be mindful when conversing with them. Because I think liberals will be going through something similar soon when the science reveals that cloth masks didn’t actually keep our kids safe in school and school closures were probably a net harm. We spent so much time defending the public health community’s advice to make these sacrifices because we thought it was meaningful. So people are going to be unlikely to be receptive to data that suggests it was all pointless.

We all double down in the face of evidence that proves us wrong. We all commit the sunken cost fallacy. We are human and we crave meaning. So just be a little kinder to one another, that is all.


Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, August 13, 2022

The pre/trans fallacy of eating eggs

Ken Wilber coined the term pre/trans fallacy. Think of it this way: at the “pre” level, you are ignorant and believe Theory A. Then you gather some facts and become convinced Theory A is wrong and now you believe Theory B. Then you move into the “trans” level in which you gather even more facts, realize your original facts were faulty, and become convinced of Theory A once again.

The "fallacy" part occurs when you confuse the "trans" level of wisdom for the "pre" level of ignorance because they lead to the same conclusion (ie believing Theory A).


This meme is based on the same idea:


You think we are in a recession because it feels like it. Then you learn that some institution called the NBER has to make that call and they use lots of data points, so it's not a recession yet. Then you realize the NBER doesn't know what it's talking about or is being politicized to make the administration look good or whatever, and so, yes, we are in a recession. You were right all along.

Here is a better example using eggs instead of a recession. An ignorant person, drawn above to the left of the distribution with eyes growing at the sides of his head, eats eggs because he doesn’t know they are high in cholesterol. A “smart” person, drawn here with the glasses and angry expression at the height of the bell curve, avoids eggs because he knows they are high in cholesterol. A wise person, on the right as the hooded sage, eats eggs because he knows they have the “good” cholesterol and are actually healthy for you.


So both the sage and the moron, on opposite ends of what I gather must be a chart measuring IQ, have the same response. The fallacy comes when the person in the middle can only see their response and not their reasoning, and assumes they are both morons for eating eggs.


So why is this framing important?


Wisdom in the Time of Mistrust


My theory is that one of the problems with The Age of Mistrust is that, due to increasing levels of education and easy access to unfiltered information, many people have moved from ignorant to “smart”, but they are falling for the pre/trans fallacy and assuming the “wise” people who are eating eggs are ignorant rubes who don’t know about cholesterol. 


And so they see people in positions of power, who might actually be the wise sage, taking the same position as the moron. They then assume they must be smarter than the people in charge and end up talking themselves into voting for Donald Trump.


This might be a big leap in extrapolation, but I sometimes wonder if people like myself make something like the  pre/trans fallacy as it relates to the hierarchy of society’s needs.


Needful Things


So Maslow's hierarchy of needs went like this: a person first needs shelter. Once that need is met, they need food and water. Once that need is met they need love and companionship. Once that need is met they need meaning.


Now picture a successful person. He has a high paying job, lives in a nice house, has a nice family, a happy marriage, and his life is full of meaning. One day he says to his wife, “It’s supposed to be a nice clear night tonight. I think we should camp out under the stars in our backyard.” His wife, looking stunned, replies “Are you kidding me? We cannot abandon the shelter of our home! That is the first need in Maslow's hierarchy. If we give that up, our whole lives will crumble.”


His wife is committing the pre/trans fallacy here. They are doing so well they can actually sleep without shelter if they want to. And sometimes I wonder if free speech warriors are doing the same.


The Free Speech Problem


Securing free speech is a basic need that prevents authoritarianism. Authoritarians try to control speech so they can take power. But some people try to censor speech because they are trying to improve society; they are the people who know eggs are high in cholesterol AND that it's still okay to eat.


It's like Aaron Sibarium's distinction that mass communication now is weirder than it has ever been because there are fewer veto points on the path from author to audience. So free speech was important because the people who controlled those veto points (governments, editors, publishers, hell even paper boys) could control information for their own agendas. But with social media, podcasts, and Substack, the information is more direct and unfiltered. So our new problem isn't powerful people keeping out information, its bad information reaching too many people.


And free speech doesn't solve this problem. In fact, it makes it worse. So when it comes to free speech critics, how to I separate the wheat from the chaff, the moron from the sage? How do I tell who is trying to control power for their own agenda and how is trying to stop the harm of misinformation?


Reconsidering CRT


I do not support critical race theory. And not the apologist's definition that "it's just teaching about the history of racism." That I'm fine with and is obviously important. I'm talking about the actual Derrick Bell definition that calls for the disruption of the whole Enlightenment project and liberalism as we know it. (I guess it makes more sense to say that I do not support the proposed solutions that follow from the ideas of founding CRT thinkers.) And I know that other countries that have undermined democracy and liberalism usually end up in disaster, Singapore being the one possible exception.


But what if CRT is transcendent rather than regressive, more sage than moron? I don't have a good heuristic for making that distinction so it's possible that my opposition* is wrong. (How possible? Okay fine, I'll say a 5% chance I'm wrong.)


So the idea I’m trying to stay open to is this: can we transcend society in a way that curbs free speech but still improves the public good? I don’t know but I’m trying to stay more open to ensuring I am not committing the pre/trans fallacy.


(*My opposition is in the most liberal sense. I strongly stand agains the New Right's attempts to stop the teaching of CRT in higher education. I also strongly stand against mandating illiberal, anti-enlightenment ideas be taught to public school children. Elective learning is fine. Forced learning or preventing elective learning is always bad.)
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)