Hanlon’s Razor isn’t quite right

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 27 JDN 2461311

Hanlon’s Razor tells us:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

This is almost right. In fact, it is close enough to right to be useful at solving the problem it was meant to solve. However, I have a different maxim that I believe improves upon it:

Never attribute to coordinated conspiracy that which is adequately explained by uncoordinated malice and/or stupidity.

This is also related to another maxim I have read, Grey’s Law:

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

The problem that Hanlon’s Razor exists to solve, I believe, is the fact that many people are innately conspiracy-minded: Whenever something bad happens, they like to attribute it to the mysterious workings of some coordinated cabal of evildoers.

But this is in fact a very improbable explanation; our prior probability on it should be quite low. Not zero, as coordinated conspiracies do happen on occasion; but low, as they don’t happen very often—and the larger and longer the conspiracy required to explain the outcome, the lower we should the probability. (Three evil people coordinating for a few weeks happens all the time. Three thousand evil people coordinating for ten years is almost impossible.)

Yet malice is not actually all that improbable. About 1% of men are full-blown psychopaths and 10% have psychopathic tendencies, and about 8% of men are rapists. Since psychopaths seem to be overrepresented in positions of power, the prior probability that a given CEO or head of state is a psychopath is more like 5%. So when a corporation or a government does something horrific, yes, stupidity is very likely to be involved—but so is malice.

If we follow Hanlon’s Razor too closely, we begin to look for reasons why horrible things are not the true intentions of the people who do them, when sometimes the cruelty is the point. We come to imagine that our enemies are simply foolish and benighted, and if we simply told them the truth they would be enlightened.

This is in fact how I used to think. The last decade proved me wrong.

It seems deeply ironic; when I was a teenager, I thought the world’s conflicts were fundamentally complicated and required nuanced understanding of multiple perspectives in order to resolve. But everything that Donald Trump and the Republicans who have enabled him have done over the last ten years has shown me that this is simply not always true. My naivete of youth was in being too charitable.

Sometimes the other side is just evil. Sometimes they really are motivated by nothing but craven selfishness, misogyny, xenophobia, and racism. Sometimes our leaders really are willing to support a corrupt, incompetent, deceitful, malevolent, racist, misogynist, fascist, pedophile rapist. (Are they corrupt? Has he threatened them? Are they doing this because they still somehow think he’ll be good for the economy? Do they simply hate the same people he hates? Does it even matter anymore? Someone who supports a fascist because he was bribed or thinks it will be good for the economy is still supporting a fascist.)

While I cannot say all his millions of supporters are evil, their failure at this point seems to go beyond any ordinary stupidity. It requires either that they do not know how terrible he is—which would require such profound willfull ignorance or gullibility that it is almost unfathomable to me—or that they do not care—which would make them so totally callous or misguided that in fact I should probably simply call them evil after all. Fortunately they only comprise about 40% of Americans, roughly the proportion who think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old—and yes, the two beliefs are very strongly correlated. So maybe they really, truly are that ignorant and gullible. They have been convinced of absurdities and so will happily excuse atrocities. Perhaps there is still some way to reach them, but I do not know what it is, and I do not think we have time to find out.

Sometimes our enemies cannot be reasoned with, and must simply be defeated—hopefully at the ballot box, but if it comes to it, sometimes even on the battlefield. (To be clear: I am not suggesting a violent overthrow of Donald Trump. I want Democrats to win both houses of Congress and remove him from office. But if they try to remove him and he refuses to be removed, or if he refuses to cede power to whoever wins in 2028, then yes, it would then be time to solve this conflict with guns.)


Want to support this blog? Join my Patreon, and get early access to all draft posts before they go live! https://www.patreon.com/c/pnrjulius

Heaven and Hell, or how to hack a hedonic mind

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, heuristics and biases, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 13 JDN 2461297

I am writing this on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, perhaps the most vivid moment in recent history in which religious beliefs directly caused horrific violence. Yes, there were political motivations for the attacks as well; but the way that the conspirators spoke of Islam and the afterlife and the fact that they were willing—eager, even—to sacrifice their own lives in the service of their cause shows that religion was also a very important motivating factor.

I’m not going to spend this post re-litigating the American and international response to the attacks, except to say what I already said over a decade ago: we sacrificed vital civil liberties for more or less nothing. (I would also like to note how prescient this line reads today, written in 2015: “If we’re worried about millions of people dying, it is far more likely that there would be a repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic”)

Instead, I’d like to talk about how religion made 9/11 a rational behavior.

If you allow the premise that there is a Heaven in which we will receive eternal bliss if we do the right thing, and a Hell in which we will receive eternal suffering if we do the wrong thing, and then posit that the right thing God wants you to do is to crash an airplane into a skyscraper, it is rational for you to crash an airplane into a skyscraper.

If Heaven and Hell are at stake, any action can be made rational.

In order to avoid this conclusion, you either need to deny the rationality of religion itself, or you need to somehow ensure that whatever actions are prescribed by religion are good ones. But people don’t always agree on what actions are good—especially if they come from different religions—and if you already know which actions are good… what did you need religion for?

Is the idea perhaps that most people are too stupid to understand what is really good, and so instead we have to motivate them with lies? The people who are smart enough to understand ethics come up with the rules, and then they pass down these rules to the priests so that the priests can convince everyone else that following those rules leads to Heaven and breaking them leads to Hell? Is that why religious people seem so afraid of atheists undermining the authority of religion? You think most people can’t handle the truth? That if you stopped telling people that they are ruled by an almighty totalitarian who is willing and able to inflict eternal suffering on the disobedient, they wouldn’t understand why murder is wrong?

The better answer is to deny the rationality of religion itself.

This is the problem with Pascal’s Wager: If you are motivated by expected utility (which, most philosophers agree, is the rational way to behave), and you allow that there are outcomes which result in infinite utility, then only those outcomes matter, and you can be convinced to do literally anything in order to achieve those outcomes, as long as their probability of occurring is not exactly zero.

And if there are two different possible outcomes with infinite positive and negative utility attached (e.g. maybe Christianity is true, or maybe Islam is true)? Then your decision becomes undefined. Every possible action results in infinity minus infinity expected utility.

But it actually makes perfect sense that people would try to motivate you this way.

Given that you are a hedonic mind, that is, one which is motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and I want to give you some belief that will make you do whatever I want, how can I have the best possible chance to convince you to do whatever I want you to do?

The answer, of course, is to convince you that doing what I want will result in infinite positive utility—eternal bliss—while doing whatever I don’t want will result in infinite negative utility—eternal suffering. I should tell you that doing what I want sends you to Heaven and not doing what I want sends you to Hell.

If I can convince you of that, I can make you do whatever I want. Once you hold that belief, obeying my every command is the only rational action for you to take, for whatever harms it may cause, they could never be as bad as eternal suffering, and whatever benefits you must forgo to do them, they could never be as good as eternal bliss.

Heaven and Hell are an optimal hack for a hedonic mind.

They are like the sudo command in Linux: Promising Heaven and threatening Hell grants full root access and allows you to make any possible command with absolute authority. In Linux operating systems, you need to already have administrative privileges to use sudo; in religion, I suppose what you need is the spiritual authority of a religious leader (or enough charisma and skill at deception to found your own cult).

Or to make it a little more concrete: They are like a gun held to your head, a gun that is so powerful it can make you suffer for all eternity.

And hey, maybe you’ll get lucky, and what whoever is in control of your beliefs (your priest? your holy book? your church community as a whole?) will actually motivate you to do good things! Maybe it won’t be so bad to be a mindlessly obedient automaton as long as you are programmed for good!

But what if you don’t get lucky? What if the person holding an infinite gun to your head orders you to do something bad? You’ll do that instead. The moment you accepted the belief that certain actions result in infinite happiness or infinite suffering, you gave up all your rational autonomy. As long as that belief remains in your head, the only rational thing to do will always be whatever sends you to Heaven and keeps you from going to Hell.

This is what Voltaire was talking about when he said:
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

The answer, of course, is to never accept that belief.

There are various tricks you could use to do that: One would be to temporally discount the future so that bliss millennia from now means almost nothing to you. Another would be to assign some sort of arbitrary cap on how high or low the utility from a given outcome can be.

Alternatively, you could insist upon assigning a probability of zero to any belief that would result in infinite utility—just categorically say that you will never believe such a claim. This could actually be accomplished with a nice, smooth prior that is a normal distribution over outcomes, for while any particular positive utility has a positive probability, there is no probability of an infinite outcome. And the larger the utility that is promised, the lower the probability you’ll accept it—as I previously suggested as a reply to Pascal’s Wager (and Pascal’s Mugging).

In practice, I think people sort of do this.

I think that, deep in their minds, most people have some sort of “reasonableness checker” heuristic that tries to ensure that nobody is able to convince them to behave in horrible ways by making them adopt crazy beliefs. I believe that the reason most people do not commit atrocities is that they cannot really be convinced to believe absurdities—not completely. They can believe in believing them, but they can’t really believe them.

But then, there are the people who don’t have that heuristic, or for whom it has malfunctioned in some way, and those people actually believe the crazy beliefs they were told to believe. And those people can be motivated to commit atrocities—and so several of them did, 25 years ago.


Want to support this blog? Join my Patreon, and get early access to all draft posts before they go live! https://www.patreon.com/c/pnrjulius

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a weird relationship with gender.

PNRJ personal , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I have always appreciated how weird gender is as a concept, and always felt like being considered a boy (and later, a man) wasn’t so much wrong as arbitrary, like okay, sure, I have certain anatomical features, and maybe there are some good reasons to keep track of that sort of thing (e.g. for medical or sexual purposes), but it sure seems odd what a big deal everyone seems to make about it.

It seemed about as weird to me that our culture puts all this baggage on having penises versus vaginas as it would to do the same thing with brown versus green eyes, or straight versus curly hair. In fact, I once wrote a dystopian YA novella about a society where people are categorized by their eye color and one deviant green-eyed person wants to act like a brown-eyed person and date other green-eyed people. (Yes, I realize this is a bit cliché; in my defense, I was 12, so more the expected age to read rather than write YA fiction.) Yes, people can be categorized that way, and maybe you care sometimes; but why all the time? Why is it built into your pronoun declension? (Yes, the story had separate pronouns for brown and green-eyed people; if I recall correctly, they were bro/bris/bron and gre/gris/gren pronouns, and were kind of painful to read—but maybe that was part of the point?)

Even as a young child, I didn’t even like gendering my parents; I consistently referred to them as “guys” rather than “Mom and Dad” because it felt weird to me that I was supposed to gender them all the time. (In hindsight, this was going a little far.)

I also independently discovered “ey/em” Spivak pronouns in my undergraduate years, writing a blog post about them on Xanga before ever having heard that they already existed. I started using them for myself for awhile, but didn’t get enough traction from other people and ultimately sort of gave up and defaulted back to masculine. (I also have some other naive views expressed on that blog which I would no longer stand by, but that is what it means to learn and change in a world where your thoughts can be published forever.)

Of course, my perspective on this was certainly shaped by being bisexual/pansexual (I don’t care which word you use, I just want the arguments to stop), such that even when it came to sex and romance, gender wasn’t nearly as important to me as it was to almost everyone else. The word “sapiosexual” has always sounded arrogant and pretentious to me (maybe because lots of people find intelligence attractive—and if that hadn’t been true for millions of years, we probably wouldn’t be the species that we are), but it has in fact always been genuinely the case that I am more attracted to an intelligent person of whatever gender than to an unintelligent person of whatever gender.

I also have a shockingly large number of friends who are trans or nonbinary; I think they constitute about 30% of my friends, a further 10% are cis queer, and that leaves only 60% cishet. (10% queer is pretty close to the population baseline—but 30% trans/enby is about ten times the population level!)

Long story short, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised that I now want to adopt a nonbinary gender identity.

Honestly, I feel like I’ve sort of wanted to do this for a very long time (as in I think it first occurred to me in kindergarten), but never quite felt like it was worth the effort—like, yes, I would obviously prefer this, but gender seems so important to everyone else, and I’m largely apathetic toward it, so insisting that I need a specific gender (or lack thereof) just felt like making a fuss with very little justification. Even now, I am hesitant to put this out there, not because I’m afraid it will have some negative consequence for me, but because it feels like I’m just being difficult. I feel like I’m putting unnecessary work on everyone else asking them to use Spivak pronouns or singular “they” (the latter of which is older than singular “you”, by the way) instead of the “he” they default to. Maybe I have some thin sliver of anxiety that this will somehow affect my future employment prospects? But let’s be honest: I was already going to be limited to LGBT-friendly employers. (It’s possible that an employer could be okay with gay or bi and not okay with trans or enby, but that seems like kind of a weird edge case, and surely not very common.)

I started this with a kind of soft launch; first I grew my hair out, but that was plausibly deniable; lots of men do that these days. Then, I started introducing myself to new people as “Pat” rather than “Patrick”, as I happen to be fortunate enough to have the sort of first name that has readily-available variants which are of each gender or gender-neutral. (Other good examples: Alex/Alexander/Alexandra, Sam/Samuel/Samantha, Charlie/Charles/Charlene; borderline cases: Eddy/Edward/Edwina, Bobby/Robert/Roberta, Andy/Andrew/Andra, Jo/Joseph/Josephine, or Danny/Daniel/Daniella. But most names can’t do this.)

I’ve also always liked going by “PJ”, which I do with my closest friends (and this is also a surprisingly big part of why I didn’t want to change my last name when I got married). For most trans and enby people, choosing a new name is a major decision; for me it was sort of an obvious default that I could slip into with people barely even noticing.

On the other hand, I don’t really see “Patrick” as a deadname, as that has very harsh connotations that I don’t feel apply to me. I still recognize it as my given name; I still answer to it; I still use it as a byline on my writing.

Up until recently, I would have said I don’t experience gender dysphoria related to appearing or being perceived as masculine, but upon reflection I think I do experience it specifically regarding my facial and body hair. I have always hated needing to shave, and I don’t like wearing shorts because it shows my hairy legs. I think I didn’t really pay attention to this before because I chalked it up to the sort of body-image issues nearly everyone has, and also because I had far more severe sources of dysphoria in my life—especially rejection-sensitive dysphoria. Lately I’ve been going through laser hair removal on my face; it’s not exactly cheap, but it’s affordable, and hopefully after a few rounds of it I will never have to deal with the unpleasantness of stubble or the sensory misery of shaving my face ever again. And every time I get a laser treatment, the actual session is painful, but I feel more confident and upbeat afterward, having taken another concrete step toward a more authentic gender presentation. (My legs, I’m probably just gonna shave, or maybe wax; covering that big an area with laser treatment is expensive.)

I also recently started on estradiol. It has done absolute wonders for my depression in a way that’s honestly hard for me to explain. I feel more energetic, more creative, more resilient. And unlike antidepressants that took weeks to do this (if they did it at all—several I tried did not), estradiol did it in a couple of days. It honestly felt like the difference between a treatment that maybe allows your body to do something that will eventually maybe help—and a treatment that just fixes what needed to be fixed.

That’s the upside. The downside is that it has also clearly made my migraines much worse—my frequency of severe migraines is double what it was before the treatment, and my mean pain score has risen from 3.9 to 5.3. (Please understand: My 6 may be your 10. I know what a real 10 feels like—a spinal tap headache—and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.)

But, honestly, I can’t be too surprised, because I had read research about what estradiol treatment does for people with migraines. Trans women on estradiol get migraines about as often as cis women, and trans men on testosterone get migraines less often than cis women but still more often than cis men. (So estradiol makes them worse, and testosterone makes them better, but more the former than the latter.)

I had been holding out hope for maybe experiencing a different result: There is some evidence that a very low, steady dose of estradiol administered via patch (such as what I’m on right now) can actually be good for migraines, but it’s mainly been tested in menopausal or perimenopausal women. (I find it vaguely disturbing that if I were a cisgender woman, I would in fact probably be perimenopausal at this point. I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be that old yet. Shouldn’t I be further along in my career by now?)

Of course, it may be too soon to say what estradiol really does to me; I’ve only been on it a little over a week now. My doctor thinks that my migraines may settle down in a month or two—but that feels like a very long time right now.

I’m considerably more worried about migraines than I am about growing breasts, which honestly I’m mostly indifferent toward (plus, I figure I could always bind them or even have them removed later if I decided to). I am quite certain I do not want to get on testosterone blockers, both because of their effect on migraines and their effect on sexual function. I am interested in some of the feminizing effects of estrogen; I would like to look more androgynous, with wider hips, a softer face, and softer hands. But at this point, honestly the biggest reason I want to stay on estradiol is that it has turned out to be an extraordinarily potent antidepressant.

Now, if I could just get rid of these damn migraines….

Want to support this blog? Join my Patreon, and get early access to all draft posts before they go live! https://www.patreon.com/c/pnrjulius

My own contribution to/dismissal of the God debate

PNRJ core principles, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , ,

Aug 30 JDN 2461283

News of my death has been greatly exaggerated. I don’t know if I’m ready to go back to weekly blogging, but I will at least try to write here occasionally again.

I value Scott Alexander’s contribution to/dismissal of the God debate (he insists it’s a dismissal, but it seems awfully long and carefully-argued for that), and I would like to add my own contribution/dismissal.

I used to be a fairly major voice for atheist apologetics in my community; I was the founder and, for four years, president of a chapter of the Secular Student Alliance at the University of Michigan, and I participated in several public debates.

One was at the University of Michigan with Frank Turek, and I think I’ll call it a draw; he was a very skilled debater and I was a bit underprepared for his full-on assault, but I still think I won on the substance. (His gotcha question was: “What is the ultimate foundation of morality?” as if this is something you can just answer with a single sound byte. I wrote an entire book about that. Large sections of it are published on this blog.)

I also did one at Rochester College which I thoroughly dominated (if I do say so myself). Along with the Christian head of the panel, there was a neopagan, and some sort of fuzzy-headed woo-type person whose views weren’t entirely clear, and there was a very clear hierarchy in which I won, the Christian fared decently well, and the other two failed catastrophically in defending any of their significant points.

During that time, I learned a lot about what is and isn’t happening in these God debates.

I now think public in-person debates are pretty much useless. It’s a performance. It’s theatre. The most-prepared person usually wins, and I’m pretty sure at Rochester they thought the Christian would be that, but it was actually me; I not only knew the Ontological Argument and Pascal’s Wager, I actually had prepared answers for them.

I think that written debate, via blogging or published articles, is still valuable. This is a much better format for clarifying thoughts and solidifying arguments, and it gives both the writer and the reader a chance to actually think about things rather than having to respond in the moment. But even this is limited, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.

Scott Alexander makes the very solid point that theism seems to be privileging a very specific hypothesis that the world is fine-tuned by some sort of inscrutable powerful being, which is the sort of hypothesis that could be used to explain literally anything, and thus ultimately explains nothing.

But I’ve got an even bigger point I’d like to make:

This whole debate is a motte and bailey.

For the uninitiated, a motte and bailey was a defensive strategy in Medieval times: You had a fortress called the motte which was small but highly defensible, and a wider open area called the bailey which was expansive and rich in resources but too large to readily defend. Your people would live on the bailey and reap its fruits most of the time, but when attacked, they would retreat to the motte to fend off attackers until the danger had passed.

In argumentation, a motte and bailey is when you have one view that you actually believe and care about and live your life according to, but can’t rationally defend easily (or perhaps at all)—the bailey—and another that you can rationally defend, but don’t actually care about—the motte.

In religion, the motte is what is called deism: The proposition that there could maybe exist some sort of powerful entity that created the universe, which might or might not have consciousness as we would understand it and might or might not have some sort of plan or intentions behind the way it designed and created the universe, and that it is reasonable to consider such a being with a sense of profound awe and mystery.

The bailey is, well, actual religion: The claim that the creator of the universe wrote this specific book which told your ancestors to commit genocide and tells you to mutilate children’s penises and kill gay people and drink wine every seven days while pretending/convincing yourself that it’s actually the blood of said creator of the universe who is also somehow human and died (but not really!) and sacrificed himself (for a weekend) for our sins, including ones committed by people who lived thousands of years ago (who probably never even existed), sins so bad that they apparently make it totally okay for kids to die of cancer (even though the entire concept of sacrificing one person to atone for the sins of another is morally incoherent). This creator of the universe loves us and wants to make us live happily forever—but if we’re bad, he’ll instead make us suffer forever, because that’s what love means! (This is not abusive at all.) And we should definitely ask this creator to do stuff for us, and he totally will, as long as we are pious enough—and if he doesn’t, well, we must not have been pious enough. Also, you should believe with all your heart in this one very specific interpretation of this specific book, even though there are thousands of other interpretations and dozens of other books that other people believe just as firmly with just as little evidence.

(Because I mostly write for an American audience, I’m picking on Christianity in particular here, but rest assured: I can do the same thing for Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and plenty of other religions. They are all absurd, and most of them are evil.)

Deism is a rationally defensible proposition.

I disagree with it, but it is the sort of abstract, theoretical disagreement that has very few practical consequences, upon which reasonable people can in fact simply agree to disagree.

Religion is a blight upon human civilization.

It is a memeplex that defends itself by systematically undermining the human capacity for rational thought and critical analysis, frequently aligns itself with the most evil authoritarianism, and has held back scientific and moral progress since its emergence.

If you want to defend religion, it is simply not good enough to provide reasonable arguments for why maybe we might believe in an “ultimate mind” or a creator of the universe. You must defend hating gay people and mutilating children and supporting authoritarians and venerating a book that commands genocide. You must defend intercessory prayer and believing in Heaven and Hell.

If you wish to defend religion, you must defend what religious people actually do and believe, not what maybe some theoretical religious people could do and believe if they were vastly more kind and rational.

And if you are unprepared to do that, I have a very simple request:

Stop defending religion.

Nobody cares about your abstract, rarefied clockmaker God who designed Planck’s constant perfectly but is pitilessly indifferent to the suffering of children who die of cancer or drown in tsunamis. (I strongly suspect that you do not even actually care.)

People care about a personal God, a religious God, one that justifies them going to church on Sundays and praying to be healed and discriminating against gay people. They care about a God who will take them to Heaven if they are good but send them to Hell if they are bad. They care about the Bible, and they want it to be thought of as the best book ever even though it is in fact scientifically absurd and morally horrific—a good candidate for worst book ever, in fact, as even Mein Kampf does not include the line “save alive nothing that breathes”.

If you are truly motivated by reason and truth, you should hate those beliefs as passionately as I do, and want to resist them at every turn—and yet instead I see you making excuses for them, pretending that they are somehow compatible with modern science and modern ethics even though they plainly are not.

People are suffering and dying because of religion. Stop telling people it’s okay to believe in religion.

Somehow, the sanewashing continues

PNRJ core principles, current events, politics , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 26 JDN 2461248

Since the very beginning, journalists have been sanewashing Trump and his cronies: Whenever he or one of them says something absolutely absurd, they always try to find some more sensible way of rephrasing it as a vaguely-similar concept that might actually be a potentially reasonable government policy.

To use one of many examples I could have pulled from, when Donald Trump gave an incoherent rant about immigrants invading our country to barbecue our cats and dogs, many news outlets reported it as things like “Trump escalates rhetoric on immigrants.” Is that what he did? Is it?

I even understand the impulse: In most circumstances, trying to be charitable and steelman your opponents’ ideas is healthy, productive, and good.

But sometimes, when someone just says something completely crazy, you need to quote them verbatim. You need people to know that what they said was, in fact, completely crazy. As journalists, you do the world a disservice otherwise.

Indeed, I think this was one of the reasons Trump was able to be so successful; low-information voters often only heard the sanewashed version of his ideas, and so he sounded like a fairly typical Republican: tough on crime, tough on immigration, serious about boosting the economy.

And while some news outlets are—slowly, all too slowly—getting better about this, spending more time quoting Trump directly and showing videos of him actually speaking and how demented he appears when doing so, there are still some mainstream outlets that are trying to sanewash him and his cronies.

I give you, Exhibit A: The Economist.

“Pete Hegseth’s testosterone-screening plan is unusual, not crazy”, they write.

Is that so? Is it?

They point out that soldiers are at elevated risk of hypogonadism, likely due to the extremely high physical and psychological stress of warfare. This much is absolutely true. But is it even relevant? Is that what Hegseth’s testosterone plan is actually about?

Clearly not. WIRED has their heads on straight: “Pete Hegseth’s Plan for ‘High T’ Troops Is a Junk-Science Fever Dream”.

Pete Hegseth did not consult a group of military endocrinologists or read the latest scientific research on stress-related hypogonadism when devising his latest policy. Nor, indeed, would he have come up with this policy had he done so: Military doctors already know how to screen for endocrine disorders, it is not difficult or expensive to do so, and they generally do so whenever a soldier exhibits symptoms that are consistent with such a disorder. Most soldiers obviously don’t need such screenings, and those that do, would need to be tested at multiple different times of day to track their hormone cycle (male hormone cycles are higher in both frequency and amplitude than female hormone cycles, so it’s honestly pretty weird that we think of women as “hormonal”), not simply get a one-time test every six months to see if the number is high enough. And even if a soldier does suffer from hypogonadism, any good endocrinologist will tell you that you don’t just jump straight to testosterone replacement therapy before trying anything else.

Thus, mass testing everyone in the military for testosterone and immediately offering hormone replacement therapy is neither necessary nor sufficient for actually treating the genuine physiological risks of warfare.

What it is necessary and sufficient for is something much, much stupider.

Testosterone is manly. Manly is good. Warriors must be more manly. More manly warriors win wars.

That, my friends, is the level of reasoning that went on inside Pete Hegseth’s pathetic, immature brain.

This is not a carefully considered medical policy developed under consultation with experts. This is a man physically has the body of an adult but never mentally matured beyond the age of 13 and still thinks that the ideal soldier looks like a GI Joe doll. (Excuse me, “action figure”.) He’s probably insecure about his own testosterone level (as that does tend to drop as you get older), likely is on (unnecessary) testosterone replacement therapy himself, and thinks that everyone should do this, because it’s just obvious to him that more testosterone equals more manly equals better.

Imagine a Neanderthal who had been given some vague inkling as to what testosterone is, enough to know that men have lots of it and women don’t. That is the kind of person we are dealing with here.

So, I say to you, The Economist, and every other news outlet:

STOP IT. STOP IT NOW.

You should have stopped 10 years ago, but better late than never. Stop it now.

When they do and say crazy things for crazy reasons, say that. Tell people. That is your job. Yes, we all wish that low-information voters were more responsible about gathering knowledge before voting (and thus stopped being low-information voters). But they aren’t going to do that any time soon, and it’s even understandable that they don’t (life is busy!). So please, make it easy for them: When the guy on one side of the aisle is a raving maniac, tell them that. Don’t expect them to figure it out for themselves.

(Really, I just wish that ignorant people would stop voting. If you can’t cast an informed vote, don’t cast a vote at all! You aren’t helping!)

I’m pretty sure the Singularity won’t happen, but it’s still better odds than winning the lottery

PNRJ financial advice, futurism, inequality , , , , , ,

Jun 28 JDN 2461220

What do you suppose are the chances that, within the next 10 years, AGI is invented and ushers in a new era of abundance in which hardly anyone has to work and we all live in prosperity?

A lot of people seem to think that this is actually pretty likely, for some reason. They seem to have bought into some ridiculous hype by AI corporations. Yes, computing power grows exponentially; but just having enough computing power isn’t enough to actually create artificial general intelligence. You have to actually understand cognition, and we absolutely do not, not even a little bit. Basically at this point we’re just hoping we can throw enough computing power at the problem that we don’t need to understand anything. (And, to be fair, that has worked much better for LLMs than I would have expected.)

But okay, it’s not impossible. I am certainly not going to call it my retirement strategy, but I will allow that there is some chance that this could happen. Let’s go with… 0.1%. I am 99.9% sure it will not happen.

This got me thinking about other extremely remote possibilities, like winning the lottery jackpot. How do those two events compare? Would it be more or less crazy to bank my retirement on the Singularity than to bank my retirement on winning the lottery?

Amazingly, it would in fact be less crazy. By quite a lot.

That’s how bad your odds of winning the lottery are.

The odds of winning either the Mega Millions or the Powerball jackpots (don’t ask me why we have two) are about 1 in 300 million. This works out so that if literally everyone in America played, someone would probably win each time; and it also works out so that with the large number of people who do play, somebody wins every month or two.

But as far as your individual odds of winning, it means that, for all practical intents and purposes, you will not win.

I have long tried to get this into people’s heads, but I think the Singularity comparison helps a great deal. I have said that I think there is a 0.1% chance the Singularity will happen in the next 10 years. That is pretty much not going to happen, right? I’m just being generous and saying it’s possible. A probability of 0.1% is still pretty much negligible.

And yet, to have a 0.1% chance of winning the lottery, you would need to play 300,000 times.

At $2 per ticket, this would cost you $600,000. To do it within 10 years, you would need to spend $60,000 per year on nothing but lottery tickets.

And that’s to get a chance that we just agreed is basically still negligible.

If you spend a “reasonable” amount on lottery tickets, say buying two tickets each week, you only spend $200 a year on it, which for most people is not really a big deal. But your odds of winning within 10 years in this scenario are now 1 in 300,000—that’s 300 times smaller than the odds of not needing to win because the Singularity has happened by then.

Don’t play the lottery. Save that $200 and put it in stocks. $200 a year won’t make you rich, but neither will the lottery—and at least you’ll have something to show for it later.

Welcome to Cyberpunk.

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, current events, futurism, inequality, personal , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 21 JDN 2461213

I’m calling it now: We officially live in the dystopian cyberpunk future. We’re not headed that way; it’s not on the horizon. It is here, now. The United States is a cyberpunk dystopia, exactly as we were warned it would become. Maybe there is still hope for the rest of the world.

After all, it’s 2026, and the narcissistic owner of a corporation that is involved in space travel, social media, and artificial intelligence just became a literal trillionaire.(Not to mention that this man was given unprecedented, clearly unconstitutional, control over our government’s finances and used it to sentence millions of children to death.)

I haven’t been writing blog posts as often for the last few weeks, mainly because the future feels so bleak that I can no longer tell the difference between the reality of this cyberpunk dystopia and my own crushing depression. I don’t want to add any more bleakness to the world than it already has, and I don’t even know if anything I write (or anything I do) even really matters anymore. The Fourth of July this year doesn’t feel like a birthday; it feels like a funeral.

But I couldn’t let this one go, so here we are: This man now owns 1 TRILLION DOLLARS in assets.

I want you to understand just how insane an amount of money that is. I want you to understand that no just society could ever remotely allow something like this to happen as long as there is a single child unfed or unhoused. I want you to understand that the time to reverse course on our society’s inequality was five orders of magnitude ago.

How much is 1 trillion dollars?

If you made a comfortable salary of $110,000 per year (more than most American families make), and you saved it all, spending nothing (or, equivalently, spent only the interest on your savings), it would take you nine million years to save up $1 trillion. Humans have not existed for that long. Even australopithecines hadn’t evolved yet. Nine million years ago, our ancestors were chimpanzees.

If you made $1 per second—that’s $86,500, more than most individual Americans make in a year, every single day—and likewise only spent the interest, you’d take 31,000 years to save up $1 trillion—longer than human civilization has existed. You could have started saving when the Great Pyramid was a twinkle in its architect’s eye, and you’d only have saved up 15% of the total.

If he wanted to, Elon Musk could personally end world hunger. And don’t tell me he couldn’t really do that because his wealth is tied up in stocks: UNICEF happily accepts donations in stock.

(As I understand it, SEC rules prevent Musk from selling or giving away his shares for a year after the IPO, so he couldn’t technically give away a trillion dollars today. But he could do it a year from now—and how likely do you think it is that he will?)

Did he earn this wealth?

HE COULDN’T POSSIBLY HAVE.

That is my point. No human being, no matter how great their contribution to the world, could ever possibly have earned this much wealth—and Elon Musk isn’t even on my top-100 list of greatest contributions by human beings; mostly they’d be scientists and humanitarians, but even quite a few science fiction authors and comedians should be ranked well above Elon Musk. In fact, his net contribution to humanity is pretty clearly negative. He is not the worst human to have ever lived (there’s a lot of competition for that spot, unfortunately; Stalin, maybe? Or some ancient mass murderer most people haven’t heard of?), but he is on that list, actually—or did you forget about those millions of children he sentenced to death?

He does not work a million times harder than you. He is not a million times smarter than you. He has not contributed to the world a million times more than you have. But I’m willing to bet he has a million times as much wealth as you do—because if he doesn’t, you’d have to be a millionaire, and I doubt most of my readers are millionaires.

This is the world we live in now. The dystopia is here.


Welcome to Cyberpunk.

The most dangerous idea you’ve probably never heard of

PNRJ current events, ethics, futurism, public policy , , , , , , , ,

May 31 JDN 2461192

They call themselves effective accelerationists, co-opting the acronym EA from Effective Altruism despite being about as diametrically opposed as it is possible to be.

They rally behind the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which I admit makes a lot of good points and has a very seductive quality to it; but when you get to the end and reach the conclusions they draw from many reasonable-sounding premises, the result is absolute horror.

What do they want?

Totally unrestricted artificial intelligence produced as fast as possible.

Let’s be clear about this: They not only want to develop artificial intelligence (many people want that). They not only want to replace humanity with artificial intelligence (serious philosophers have suggested that this might be a long-term evolution for our civilization). They want to do it right now, without restrictions.

Their reasoning seems to go something like this:

  1. Artificial intelligence has tremendous potential.
  2. Improved computing has already been a tremendous boon to humanity, Applications of artificial intelligence to many fields such as scientific research and biotechnology could continue to be so.
  3. Free-market capitalism is the most efficient economic system yet devised.

Therefore,

  1. We should allow (or even incentivize) corporations to make artificial intelligence as powerful as possible as quickly as possible.

If we were to apply their same reasoning to other technologies, it would be obvious what’s wrong here. Consider the following argument:

  1. Nuclear energy is tremendously powerful and very environmentally-friendly.
  2. Cleaner, more powerful energy has been a boon to humanity, and would continue to be so if improved further.
  3. Free-market capitalism is the most efficient economic system yet devised.

Therefore,

  1. We should grant unrestricted access to nuclear material to anyone who is rich enough to afford it.

From three entirely reasonable premises (that honestly should be uncontroversial, even though they aren’t), we have made some kind of leap of logic to derive a conclusion that is utterly insane, and could literally result in the destruction of our entire civilization.

(And, if you’re not horrified enough yet, this isn’t even hypothetical after all: The US government is seriously considering giving weapons-grade plutonium to tech startups, apparently based on this exact reasoning.)

I agree that artificial intelligence has tremendous potential. That is why it must be kept on a tight leash.

In the near term, it is already poised to severely disrupt our economy and education system. But sufficiently-powerful AI genuinely could result in harms that could kill billions of people or even destroy human civilization. (I don’t think this will happen; but if the effective accelerationists have their way, that outcome becomes a lot more likely.)

Part of their argument seems to be that delaying new medical treatments and solutions to global problems will cost lives. This is true. But it’s far fewer lives than we would be putting at risk by pulling out all the stops and letting corporations do whatever they feel like doing.

I, too, want to see a glorious future where humanity transcends our current limits through biotechnology or cybernetics or truly-sentient artificial general intelligence. But the benefits of doing that a few years—or even decades, or even centuries—sooner are simply not worth the risk of destroying our entire civilization.

When dealing with a technology this powerful and a change this radical, the most important thing is to do it correctly—not to do it quickly. We need to make sure that the artificial intelligence we create is wise and benevolent so that its great power benefits humanity—and with this much at stake, it’s worth taking a long time to get it right if we have to.

A world run by copies of Lieutenant Commander Data would be a paradise. A world run by copies of Grok would be a hellscape. It’s worth spending some time to make sure we get the former and not the latter.

Why “bullshit jobs” exist

PNRJ inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, mathematical models, public policy , , , , , ,

May 24 JDN 2461185

Content warning: Algebra

In 2018, David Graeber published a book called Bullshit Jobs, positing that the transition of our economy from industrial manufacturing to ‘post-industrial’ services was in fact largely a transition from meaningful jobs that do actual work to meaningless jobs that employ people without contributing to society.

He made the point vividly in this article for Strike magazine:

For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

I think his claim is a little overstated, but the basic pattern does seem valid: Less and less labor is spent actually making things (or even really doing things) and more and more is spent on selling things and advertising things and suing over things.

While the pattern seems genuine, it’s a little hard to verify empirically, as the usual BLS categories include both useful and useless work in the same categories: “Sales and office occupations” includes far too many things to be useful.

But I think Graeber’s explanations of where the pattern comes from are pretty much totally wrong. He attributes it to “office feudalism” where bosses want to act like lords and “make-work” from government policy trying to create jobs without regard for whether those jobs are useful. I’m not saying these things never happen, but it’s not enough to explain a massive economic transition.

Rather, with a little bit of economic theory, I think it’s not hard to see that these “bullshit jobs” are actually rent-seeking; they don’t produce anything for society, but they are genuinely profitable for the companies that hire them—and thus it’s perfectly rational for a profit-maximizing corporation to behave in this way.

Here’s a simple model to demonstrate the idea.

Suppose there are two corporations, Zero Inc. and One Corp, which both produce cars.

Each factory worker produces r cars. (Presumably they really produce some fraction 1/n of n r cars, but it works out the same.) The labor productivity of factory workers is thus r.

Each factory worker receives a wage wf, which is outside the control of these two corporations (it’s set by a larger labor market).

This means that the marginal cost of producing a car is wf/r. As productivity increases, producing cars becomes cheaper.

The two corporations are in Cournot competition, so they face a total demand for cars that looks like this:

p = a – b (q0 + q1)

where q0 is how many cars Zero produces and q1 is how many cars One produces, and a and b are parameters. This is exogenous; it’s determined by broader market conditions, not by anything the corporations can control.

I’ll spare you the algebra, but this has a well-known equilibrium solution; the two corporations produce the same amount and charge the same price:

q0 = q1 = (a – wf/r)/(3b)
p = (a + 2wf/r)/3

Their profits are also the same, naturally:

F0 = F1 = (p – wf/r)q0 = (a – wf/r)2/(9b)

The number of workers employed making cars is:

L = q/r = 2(a – wf/r)/(3br)

Because the numerator increases with r but so does the denominator, it isn’t obvious whether this is increasing or decreasing in r; more productivity may result in either more or fewer factory workers employed.

By taking the derivative, this can be shown:

dL/dr > 0 iff a > 2w/r

This means that at relatively low levels of productivity, more productivity will increase employment of factory workers; but at high levels of productivity, it will decrease it.

Since profits are proportional to (a – wf/r)2, the higher profits are, the more likely it is that additional productivity will reduce employment of factory workers.

But what if factory workers aren’t the only workers each corporation can employ?

Suppose now that there is another kind of worker they can employ, salesmen.

Zero employs s0 salesmen, while One employs s1. Salesmen are paid a wage ws.

Salesmen don’t actually make anything. They produce no real output. Instead, they allow each firm to take a larger share of the market.

To model this, I’ll use a contest function (I used a similar model in some posts in 2020), where the actual quantity each corporation produces and sells is proportional to the relative number of salesmen employed at each corporation:

q0 = (s0)/(s0 + s1) q

I’ll assume that the total amount of cars produced and sold is the same as before. (Dropping this assumption makes the model much more complicated and hard to solve, without significantly changing the overall conclusions.)

Each corporation’s profits now depend on both how many cars they produce and how many salesmen they hire:

F0 = p q0 – wf/r q0 – ws s0

Again I will spare you the algebra, but it comes out like this:

s0 = s1 = (a – wf/r)2 / (18 b ws)

Unlike employment of factory workers, which may increase or decrease as productivity increases, employment of salesmen always increases.

Thus, as productivity gets higher and higher, we should expect employment of factory workers (“real jobs”) decreasing as employment of salesmen (“bullshit jobs”) increases—even though corporations are being completely rational and maximizing their profits.

Let’s put some numbers on this to make the example more concrete.

Suppose at the start that wf = 1, ws = 2, a = 10, b = 1, and r = 1. (Consider production in cars per day, wages as annual salaries, and money in units of $10,000.)

Then each corporation produces 3 cars per day:

q0 = q1 = (10 – 1/1)/(3*1) = 3

The price of a car is $40,000:

p = (10 + 2*1/1)/3 = 4

The number of factory workers employed is 6:

L = q/r = (3+3)/1

The number of salesmen employed is 4.5 (maybe one is employed half-time):

s = s0 + s1 = (10 – 1/1)2 / (9*1*2) = 81/18 = 4.5

So the majority of workers are factory workers.

But now suppose that productivity greatly increases, to r=10, with everything else the same:

The number of cars produced at each corporation per day increases to 3.3:

q0 = q1 = (10 – 1/10)/(3*1) = 3.3

The price of a car falls to $34,000:

p = (10 + 2*1/10)/3 = 3.4

The number of factory workers employed falls dramatically; there isn’t even one full-time job available, only part-time jobs:

L = (3.3+3.3)/10 = 0.66

But the number of salesmen increases to 5.445 (one additional full-time worker):

s = (10 – 1/10)2 / (9*1*2) = 5.445

Thus, while factory workers used to be 6/(6+4.5) = 57% of the workforce, now they are only 0.66/(0.66+5.445) = 10.8% of the workforce. And this happened because they got more productive!

This is of course a very simple model, but the basic pattern fits:

The share of employment that’s in manufacturing has greatly declined since 2000:

Yet manufacturing output hasn’t really changed:

The reason is that labor productivity has continued to rise:

In my model I assumed that factory worker wages haven’t changed, and, well, they really haven’t, despite large increases in productivity. In real terms, a factory worker today makes about 70% more than one in 1950, despite producing nearly six times as much output.

Producing the same amount of stuff now requires fewer people—so fewer people are employed in making stuff. They then end up employed somewhere else; and one of the more profitable ways to employ them these days is in rent-seeking activities like sales and advertising.

What should we do about this?

I already said what I wanted to do years ago: Tax advertising.

The stochastic superstar economy

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, current events, futurism, inequality , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 17 JDN 246178

Why do I make less money than, say, Mr. Beast (who now has a game show, apparently)?

The proximal answer to this question is obvious: He has a lot more people viewing his content, so he can sell ads that make him enormous amounts of money.

But that still leaves a deeper, more ultimate question unanswered:

Why are so many people interested in that?

Mr. Beast’s first truly viral YouTube videos was literally just him counting, one by one, from 1 to 100,000. He edited the footage to speed it up slightly so that the 40-hour ordeal would fit within a 24-hour video.

This is something that literally anyone could do that literally no one benefits from.

I also can’t imagine it was particularly entertaining to watch! Like, maybe he made it a little more entertaining than you might at first imagine (I don’t know; I have no desire to watch the actual video), but I still can’t imagine it would rate among even the top 100 most interesting things to do with 24 hours—or even the top 100 most interesting things that I could do right now from the comfort of my own home.

Right now you might be thinking I’m bitter about this, but if I am bitter, it is at our economic system as a whole; I harbor no ill will toward Mr. Beast in particular, who is actually something of a philanthropist. What I really am is utterly confused.

I don’t understand why anyone—let alone millions of people—would choose to watch that video. (Though it’s a bit easier to understand if you recognize that most viewers surely did not watch the entire thing.) I don’t understand how a man can make a highly successful career doing stupid stunts on video.

And I’m also quite certain that if I, right now, tried to do some similarly stupid stunt and post it on YouTube, it would get maybe a few dozen hits and nothing more would come of it.

Maybe Mr. Beast has something I don’t: A charm, a charisma, a salesmanship. Maybe he is spectacularly persistent in a way that I really can’t be (one certainly must be that to count to 100,000!). He likely is utterly unfazed by rejection, while I am severely oversensitive to it. So I’m not making the claim that there is nothing about Mr. Beast’s individual characteristics or talents that contributed to his success.

But I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the most important reason for Mr. Beast’s success is in fact no reason at all; his video is just the one that happened to go viral at that particular moment, and he managed to leverage that publicity into making yet more viral videos until he could become a multi-millionaire for doing stupid stunts in front of a webcam.

He is what I propose we call a stochastic superstar.

His success is not driven by talent, or intellect, or expertise; it is driven by luck. A million others have tried to imitate his exact methods and failed, not because they were any worse at it—but because he did it first.

This phenomenon is not entirely new; it certainly can be traced back at least as far as any form of mass media; radio and TV stars were often famous for no other reason that they were famous.

But I think it’s pretty clear that the Internet, and social media in particular, have made it much easier to become a stochastic superstar. Arcane, mysterious algorithms promote some content over other content in ways that hardly anyone—or perhaps literally no one, if LLMs are now involved—fully understands, and thousands of people doing basically the same thing get zero compensation for it, while one becomes rich and famous for no apparent reason.

This is not a healthy way to run an economy.

Yes, it certainly results in creating a lot of content, some of which is genuinely valuable. (Mr. Beast would not be high on my list of that either.) The Internet is an unfathomably grand and diverse place, and if you know where to look you can learn about almost anything in the world; or, you know, you can be fed complete misinformation and come away with fundamental misconceptions. Or you can just watch cat videos, which I’ll admit add some joy to the world, but probably not nearly enough to justify the amount of effort and time spent creating and viewing them.

It’s bad enough that glorifying superstars glorifies risk; but at least superstar athletes are objectively in peak physical condition and are the best players at the games they play. (I still don’t really get why people invest so much in these games, but whatever.) But it isn’t even clear that viral YouTubers are producing the best video content; they are just somehow producing the most successful video content in a way that seems basically orthogonal to actual quality or value for society.

I think this should lead us to a very important question:

Are there other systems we could use to compensate people for content?

What if ad revenue was divided evenly between all contributors to a platform, rather than just those with the highest view rates? Or what if there was some benefit to getting higher views, but there was some sort of mechanism to reduce the income inequality generated this way, like paying higher rates for views when you have fewer total views (e.g. $0.01 per view for the first 1000, $0.009 for the next 10,000, $0.008 for the next 100,000, etc.)? (Are there perverse incentives here, too? Surely. But are they worse than what we have right now?)

What if we didn’t run ads at all, but instead people paid microtransactions to subscribe to content? Patreon already sort of does this (and my Patreon is also an utter failure), but I think the transactions still aren’t micro enough. I want people to pay $0.05 to read an article—because that’s all the ad revenue they would give by reading that article anyway. Nobody should have to pay $5 to read what advertisers only pay $0.05 for. I want you to be able to see the title of a blog post and a brief snippet, and think, “Sure, I’ll pay a nickel to read that.” I don’t want you to have to decide whether you’re willing to commit to subscribing for an entire month for $5.

I would like to believe, at least, that people would be more willing to pay $0.05 to read good journalism and serious intellectual content, rather than a random guy counting to 100,000 for no reason. But even if that’s not true, at least we wouldn’t be so constantly inundated by ads!

Or what if social media platforms were maintained as public infrastructure, not yielding profits to any corporation, and instead of running ads, their hosting costs (which really are not all that high; I pay for my own hosting on this blog, for instance) were covered by tax revenue? Or what if you simply paid a subscription to use the social media site, and it was no longer used to harvest your data and target ads to you?

With an alternative system like one of the above, stochastic superstars would still be able to get famous randomly, and there are benefits (and drawbacks) that come directly from being famous; but maybe at least there would be fewer multi-millionaire YouTuber superstars and more ordinary people who are better able to make ends meet by contributing content.

But who am I kidding? This system works great for the billionaires who run it (who makes the real money off YouTube? Not Mr. Beast—Sundar Pichai.), and our government has shown very little interest in doing anything that would reduce their wealth and power. So, we can expect this, and everything else, to continue to get worse in exactly the way that cyberpunk fiction explicitly warned us it would, and our government continuing to do absolutely nothing about it!

This is fine.