Year: 2022

Charity shouldn’t end at home

pnrj core principles, current events, futurism, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It so happens that this week’s post will go live on Christmas Day. I always try to do some kind of holiday-themed post around this time of year, because not only Christmas, but a dozen other holidays from various religions all fall around this time of year. The winter solstice seems to be a very popular time for holidays, and has been since antiquity: The Romans were celebrating Saturnalia 2000 years ago. Most of our ‘Christmas’ traditions are actually derived from Yuletide.

These holidays certainly mean many different things to different people, but charity and generosity are themes that are very common across a lot of them. Gift-giving has been part of the season since at least Saturnalia and remains as vital as ever today. Most of those gifts are given to our friends and loved ones, but a substantial fraction of people also give to strangers in the form of charitable donations: November and December have the highest rates of donation to charity in the US and the UK, with about 35-40% of people donating during this season. (Of course this is complicated by the fact that December 31 is often the day with the most donations, probably from people trying to finish out their tax year with a larger deduction.)

My goal today is to make you one of those donors. There is a common saying, often attributed to the Bible but not actually present in it: “Charity begins at home”.

Perhaps this is so. There’s certainly something questionable about the Effective Altruism strategy of “earning to give” if it involves abusing and exploiting the people around you in order to make more money that you then donate to worthy causes. Certainly we should be kind and compassionate to those around us, and it makes sense for us to prioritize those close to us over strangers we have never met. But while charity may begin at home, it must not end at home.

There are so many global problems that could benefit from additional donations. While global poverty has been rapidly declining in the early 21st century, this is largely because of the efforts of donors and nonprofit organizations. Official Development Assitance has been roughly constant since the 1970s at 0.3% of GNI among First World countries—well below international targets set decades ago. Total development aid is around $160 billion per year, while private donations from the United States alone are over $480 billion. Moreover, 9% of the world’s population still lives in extreme poverty, and this rate has actually slightly increased the last few years due to COVID.

There are plenty of other worthy causes you could give to aside from poverty eradication, from issues that have been with us since the dawn of human civilization (the Humane Society International for domestic animal welfare, the World Wildlife Federation for wildlife conservation) to exotic fat-tail sci-fi risks that are only emerging in our own lifetimes (the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for AI safety, the International Federation of Biosafety Associations for biosecurity, the Union of Concerned Scientists for climate change and nuclear safety). You could fight poverty directly through organizations like UNICEF or GiveDirectly, fight neglected diseases through the Schistomoniasis Control Initiative or the Against Malaria Foundation, or entrust an organization like GiveWell to optimize your donations for you, sending them where they think they are needed most. You could give to political causes supporting civil liberties (the American Civil Liberties Union) or protecting the rights of people of color (the North American Association of Colored People) or LGBT people (the Human Rights Campaign).

I could spent a lot of time and effort trying to figure out the optimal way to divide up your donations and give them to causes such as this—and then convincing you that it’s really the right one. (And there is even a time and place for that, because seemingly-small differences can matter a lot in this.) But instead I think I’m just going to ask you to pick something. Give something to an international charity with a good track record.

I think we worry far too much about what is the best way to give—especially people in the Effective Altruism community, of which I’m sort of a marginal member—when the biggest thing the world really needs right now is just more people giving more. It’s true, there are lots of worthless or even counter-productive charities out there: Please, please do not give to the Salvation Army. (And think twice before donating to your own church; if you want to support your own community, okay, go ahead. But if you want to make the world better, there are much better places to put your money.)

But above all, give something. Or if you already give, give more. Most people don’t give at all, and most people who give don’t give enough.

In defense of civility

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, ethics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 18 JDN 2459932

Civility is in short supply these days. Perhaps it has always been in short supply; certainly much of the nostalgia for past halcyon days of civility is ill-founded. Wikipedia has an entire article on hundreds of recorded incidents of violence in legislative assemblies, in dozens of countries, dating all the way from to the Roman Senate in 44 BC to Bosnia in 2019. But the Internet seems to bring about its own special kind of incivility, one which exposes nearly everyone to some of the worst vitriol the entire world has to offer. I think it’s worth talking about why this is bad, and perhaps what we might do about it.

For some, the benefits of civility seem so self-evident that they don’t even bear mentioning. For others, the idea of defending civility may come across as tone-deaf or even offensive. I would like to speak to both of those camps today: If you think the benefits of civility are obvious, I assure you, they aren’t to everyone. And if you think that civility is just a tool of the oppressive status quo, I hope I can make you think again.

A lot of the argument against civility seems to be founded in the notion that these issues are important, lives are at stake, and so we shouldn’t waste time and effort being careful how we speak to each other. How dare you concern yourself with the formalities of argumentation when people are dying?

But this is totally wrongheaded. It is precisely because these issues are important that civility is vital. It is precisely because lives are at stake that we must make the right decisions. And shouting and name-calling (let alone actual fistfights or drawn daggers—which have happened!) are not conducive to good decision-making.

If you shout someone down when choosing what restaurant to have dinner at, you have been very rude and people may end up unhappy with their dining experience—but very little of real value has been lost. But if you shout someone down when making national legislation, you may cause the wrong policy to be enacted, and this could lead to the suffering or death of thousands of people.

Think about how court proceedings work. Why are they so rigid and formal, with rules upon rules upon rules? Because the alternative was capricious violence. In the absence of the formal structure of a court system, so-called ‘justice’ was handed out arbitrarily, by whoever was in power, or by mobs of vigilantes. All those seemingly-overcomplicated rules were made in order to resolve various conflicts of interest and hopefully lead toward more fair, consistent results in the justice system. (And don’t get me wrong; they still could stand to be greatly improved!)

Legislatures have complex rules of civility for the same reason: Because the outcome is so important, we need to make sure that the decision process is as reliable as possible. And as flawed as existing legislatures still are, and as silly as it may seem to insist upon addressing ‘the Honorable Representative from the Great State of Vermont’, it’s clearly a better system than simply letting them duke it out with their fists.

A related argument I would like to address is that of ‘tone policing‘. If someone objects, not to the content of what you are saying, but to the tone in which you have delivered it, are they arguing in bad faith?

Well, possibly. Certainly, arguments about tone can be used that way. In particular I remember that this was basically the only coherent objection anyone could come up with against the New Atheism movement: “Well, sure, obviously, God isn’t real and religion is ridiculous; but why do you have to be so mean about it!?”

But it’s also quite possible for tone to be itself a problem. If your tone is overly aggressive and you don’t give people a chance to even seriously consider your ideas before you accuse them of being immoral for not agreeing with you—which happens all the time—then your tone really is the problem.

So, how can we tell which is which? I think a good way to reply to what you think might be bad-faith tone policing is this: “What sort of tone do you think would be better?”

I think there are basically three possible responses:

1. They can’t offer one, because there is actually no tone in which they would accept the substance of your argument. In that case, the tone policing really is in bad faith; they don’t want you to be nicer, they want you to shut up. This was clearly the case for New Atheism: As Daniel Dennett aptly remarked, “There’s simply no polite way to tell someone they have dedicated their lives to an illusion.” But sometimes, such things need to be said all the same.

2. They offer an alternative argument you could make, but it isn’t actually expressing your core message. Either they have misunderstood your core message, or they actually disagree with the substance of your argument and should be addressing it on those terms.

3. They offer an alternative way of expressing your core message in a milder, friendlier tone. This means that they are arguing in good faith and actually trying to help you be more persuasive!

I don’t know how common each of these three possibilities is; it could well be that the first one is the most frequent occurrence. That doesn’t change the fact that I have definitely been at the other end of the third one, where I absolutely agree with your core message and want your activism to succeed, but I can see that you’re acting like a jerk and nobody will want to listen to you.

Here, let me give some examples of the type of argument I’m talking about:

1. “Defund the police”: This slogan polls really badly. Probably because most people have genuine concerns about crime and want the police to protect them. Also, as more and more social services (like for mental health and homelessness) get co-opted into policing, this slogan makes it sound like you’re just going to abandon those people. But do we need serious, radical police reform? Absolutely. So how about “Reform the police”, “Put police money back into the community”, or even “Replace the police”?

2. “All Cops Are Bastards”: Speaking of police reform, did I mention we need it? A lot of it? Okay. Now, let me ask you: All cops? Every single one of them? There is not a single one out of the literally millions of police officers on this planet who is a good person? Not one who is fighting to take down police corruption from within? Not a single individual who is trying to fix the system while preserving public safety? Now, clearly, it’s worth pointing out, some cops are bastards—but hey, that even makes a better acronym: SCAB. In fact, it really is largely a few bad apples—the key point here is that you need to finish the aphorism: “A few bad apples spoil the whole barrel.” The number of police who are brutal and corrupt is relatively small, but as long as the other police continue to protect them, the system will be broken. Either you get those bad apples out pronto, or your whole barrel is bad. But demonizing the very people who are in the best position to implement those reforms—good police officers—is not helping.

3. “Be gay, do crime”: I know it’s tongue-in-cheek and ironic. I get that. It’s still a really dumb message. I am absolutely on board with LGBT rights. Even aside from being queer myself, I probably have more queer and trans friends than straight friends at this point. But why in the world would you want to associate us with petty crime? Why are you lumping us in with people who harm others at best out of desperation and at worst out of sheer greed? Even if you are literally an anarchist—which I absolutely am not—you’re really not selling anarchism well if the vision you present of it is a world of unfettered crime! There are dozens of better pro-LGBT slogans out there; pick one. Frankly even “do gay, be crime” is better, because it’s more clearly ironic. (Also, you can take it to mean something like this: Don’t just be gay, do gay—live your fullest gay life. And if you can be crime, that means that the system is fundamentally unjust: You can be criminalized just for who you are. And this is precisely what life is like for millions of LGBT people on this planet.)

A lot of people seem to think that if you aren’t immediately convinced by the most vitriolic, aggressive form of an argument, then you were never going to be convinced anyway and we should just write you off as a potential ally. This isn’t just obviously false; it’s incredibly dangerous.

The whole point of activism is that not everyone already agrees with you. You are trying to change minds. If it were really true that all reasonable, ethical people already agreed with your view, you wouldn’t need to be an activist. The whole point of making political arguments is that people can be reasonable and ethical and still be mistaken about things, and when we work hard to persuade them, we can eventually win them over. In fact, on some things we’ve actually done spectacularly well.

And what about the people who aren’t reasonable and ethical? They surely exist. But fortunately, they aren’t the majority. They don’t rule the whole world. If they did, we’d basically be screwed: If violence is really the only solution, then it’s basically a coin flip whether things get better or worse over time. But in fact, unreasonable people are outnumbered by reasonable people. Most of the things that are wrong with the world are mistakes, errors that can be fixed—not conflicts between irreconcilable factions. Our goal should be to fix those mistakes wherever we can, and that means being patient, compassionate educators—not angry, argumentative bullies.

Inequality-adjusted GDP and median income

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics, inequality , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 11 JDN 2459925

There are many problems with GDP as a measure of a nation’s prosperity. For one, GDP ignores natural resources and ecological degradation; so a tree is only counted in GDP once it is cut down. For another, it doesn’t value unpaid work, so caring for a child only increases GDP if you are a paid nanny rather than the child’s parents.

But one of the most obvious problems is the use of an average to evaluate overall prosperity, without considering the level of inequality.

Consider two countries. In Alphania, everyone has an income of about $50,000. In Betavia, 99% of people have an income of $1,000 and 1% have an income of $10 million. What is the per-capita GDP of each country? Alphania’s is $50,000 of course; but Betavia’s is $100,990. Does it really make sense to say that Betavia is a more prosperous country? Maybe it has more wealth overall, but its huge inequality means that it is really not at a high level of development. It honestly sounds like an awful place to live.

A much more sensible measure would be something like median income: How much does a typical person have? In Alphania this is still $50,000; but in Betavia it is only $1,000.

Yet even this leaves out most of the actual distribution; by definition a median is only determined by what is the 50th percentile. We could vary all other incomes a great deal without changing the median.

A better measure would be some sort of inequality-adjusted per-capita GDP, which rescales GDP based on the level of inequality in a country. But we would need a good way of making that adjustment.

I contend that the most sensible way would be to adopt some kind of model of marginal utility of income, and then figure out what income would correspond to the overall average level of utility.

In other words, average over the level of happiness that people in a country get from their income, and then figure out what level of income would correspond to that level of happiness. If we magically gave everyone the same amount of money, how much would they need to get in order for the average happiness in the country to remain the same?

This is clearly going to be less than the average level of income, because marginal utility of income is decreasing; a dollar is not worth as much in real terms to a rich person as it is to a poor person. So if we could somehow redistribute all income evenly while keeping the average the same, that would actually increase overall happiness (though, for many reasons, we can’t simply do that).

For example, suppose that utility of income is logarithmic: U = ln(I).

This means that the marginal utility of an additional dollar is inversely proportional to how many dollars you already have: U'(I) = 1/I.

It also means that a 1% gain or loss in your income feels about the same regardless of how much income you have: ln((1+r)Y) = ln(Y) + ln(1+r). This seems like a quite reasonable, maybe even a bit conservative, assumption; I suspect that losing 1% of your income actually hurts more when you are poor than when you are rich.

Then the inequality adjusted GDP Y is a value such that ln(Y) is equal to the overall average level of utility: E[U] = ln(Y), so Y = exp(E[U]).

This sounds like a very difficult thing to calculate. But fortunately, the distribution of actual income seems to quite closely follow a log-normal distribution. This means that when we take the logarithm of income to get utility, we just get back a very nice, convenient normal distribution!

In fact, it turns out that for a log-normal distribution, the following holds: exp(E[ln(Y)]) = median(Y)

The income which corresponds to the average utility turns out to simply be the median income! We went looking for a better measure than median income, and ended up finding out that median income was the right measure all along.

This wouldn’t hold for most other distributions; and since real-world economies don’t perfectly follow a log-normal distribution, a more precise estimate would need to be adjusted accordingly. But the approximation is quite good for most countries we have good data on, so even for the ones we don’t, median income is likely a very good estimate.

The ranking of countries by median income isn’t radically different from the ranking by per-capita GDP; rich countries are still rich and poor countries are still poor. But it is different enough to matter.

Luxembourg is in 1st place on both lists. Scandinavian countries and the US are in the top 10 in both cases. So it’s fair to say that #ScandinaviaIsBetter for real, and the US really is so rich that our higher inequality doesn’t make our median income lower than the rest of the First World.

But some countries are quite different. Ireland looks quite good in per-capita GDP, but quite bad in median income. This is because a lot of the GDP in Ireland is actually profits by corporations that are only nominally headquartered in Ireland and don’t actually employ very many people there.

The comparison between the US, the UK, and Canada seems particularly instructive. If you look at per-capita GDP PPP, the US looks much richer at $75,000 compared to Canada’s $57,800 (a difference of 29% or 26 log points). But if you look at median personal income, they are nearly equal: $19,300 in the US and $18,600 in Canada (3.7% or 3.7 log points).

On the other hand, in per-capita GDP PPP, the UK looks close to Canada at $55,800 (3.6% or 3.6 lp); but in median income it is dramatically worse, at only $14,800 (26% or 23 lp). So Canada and the UK have similar overall levels of wealth, but life for a typical Canadian is much better than life for a typical Briton because of the higher inequality in Britain. And the US has more wealth than Canada, but it doesn’t meaningfully improve the lifestyle of a typical American relative to a typical Canadian.

The case against phys ed

pnrj education, ethics, personal , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 4 JDN 2459918

If I want to stop someone from engaging in an activity, what should I do? I could tell them it’s wrong, and if they believe me, that would work. But what if they don’t believe me? Or I could punish them for doing it, and as long as I can continue to do that reliably, that should deter them from doing it. But what happens after I remove the punishment?

If I really want to make someone not do something, the best way to accomplish that is to make them not want to do it. Make them dread doing it. Make them hate the very thought of it. And to accomplish that, a very efficient method would be to first force them to do it, but make that experience as miserable and humiliating is possible. Give them a wide variety of painful or outright traumatic experiences that are directly connected with the undesired activity, to carry with them for the rest of their life.

This is precisely what physical education does, with regard to exercise. Phys ed is basically optimized to make people hate exercise.

Oh, sure, some students enjoy phys ed. These are the students who are already athletic and fit, who already engage in regular exercise and enjoy doing so. They may enjoy phys ed, may even benefit a little from it—but they didn’t really need it in the first place.

The kids who need more physical activity are the kids who are obese, or have asthma, or suffer from various other disabilities that make exercising difficult and painful for them. And what does phys ed do to those kids? It makes them compete in front of their peers at various athletic tasks at which they will inevitably fail and be humiliated.

Even the kids who are otherwise healthy but just don’t get enough exercise will go into phys ed class at a disadvantage, and instead of being carefully trained to improve their skills and physical condition at their own level, they will be publicly shamed by their peers for their inferior performance.

I know this, because I was one of those kids. I have exercise-induced bronchoconstriction, a lung condition similar to asthma (actually there’s some debate as to whether it should be considered a form of asthma), in which intense aerobic exercise causes the airways of my lungs to become constricted and inflamed, making me unable to get enough air to continue.

It’s really quite remarkable I wasn’t diagnosed with this as a child; I actually once collapsed while running in gym class, and all they thought to do at the time was give me water and let me rest for the remainder of the class. Nobody thought to call the nurse. I was never put on a beta agonist or an inhaler. (In fact at one point I was put on a beta blocker for my migraines; I now understand why I felt so fatigued when taking it—it was literally the opposite of the drug my lungs needed.)

Actually it’s been a few years since I had an attack. This is of course partly due to me generally avoiding intense aerobic exercise; but even when I do get intense exercise, I rarely seem to get bronchoconstriction attacks. My working hypothesis is that the norepinephrine reuptake inhibition of my antidepressant acts like a beta agonist; both drugs mimic norepinephrine.

But as a child, I got such attacks quite frequently; and even when I didn’t, my overall athletic performance was always worse than most of the other kids. They knew it, I knew it, and while only a few actively tried to bully me for it, none of the others did anything to make me feel better. So gym class was always a humiliating and painful experience that I came to dread.

As a result, as soon as I got out of school and had my own autonomy in how to structure my own life, I basically avoided exercise whenever I could. Even knowing that it was good for me—really, exercise is ridiculously good for you; it honestly doesn’t even make sense to me how good it is for you—I could rarely get myself to actually go out and exercise. I certainly couldn’t do it with anyone else; sometimes, if I was very disciplined, I could manage to maintain an exercise routine by myself, as long as there was no one else there who could watch me, judge me, or compare themselves to me.

In fact, I’d probably have avoided exercise even more, had I not also had some more positive experiences with it outside of school. I trained in martial arts for a few years, getting almost to a black belt in tae kwon do; I quit precisely when it started becoming very competitive and thus began to feel humiliated again when I performed worse than others. Part of me wishes I had stuck with it long enough to actually get the black belt; but the rest of me knows that even if I’d managed it, I would have been miserable the whole time and it probably would have made me dread exercise even more.

The details of my story are of course individual to me; but the general pattern is disturbingly common. A kid does poorly in gym class, or even suffers painful attacks of whatever disabling condition they have, but nobody sees it as a medical problem; they just see the kid as weak and lazy. Or even if the adults are sympathetic, the other kids aren’t; they just see a peer who performed worse than them, and they have learned by various subtle (and not-so-subtle) cultural pressures that anyone who performs worse at a culturally-important task is worthy of being bullied and shunned.

Even outside the directly competitive environment of sports, the very structure of a phys ed class, where a large group of students are all expected to perform the same athletic tasks and can directly compare their performance against each other, invites this kind of competition. Kids can see, right in their faces, who is doing better and who is doing worse. And our culture is astonishingly bad at teaching children (or anyone else, for that matter) how to be sympathetic to others who perform worse. Worse performance is worse character. Being bad at running, jumping and climbing is just being bad.

Part of the problem is that school administrators seem to see physical education as a training and selection regimen for their sports programs. (In fact, some of them seem to see their entire school as existing to serve their sports programs.) Here is a UK government report bemoaning the fact that “only a minority of schools play competitive sport to a high level”, apparently not realizing that this is necessarily true because high-level sports performance is a relative concept. Only one team can win the championship each year. Only 10% of students will ever be in the top 10% of athletes. No matter what. Anything else is literally mathematically impossible. We do not live in Lake Wobegon; not all the children can be above average.

There are good phys ed programs out there. They have highly-trained instructors and they focus on matching tasks to a student’s own skill level, as well as actually educating them—teaching them about anatomy and physiology rather than just making them run laps. Actually the one phys ed class I took that I actually enjoyed was actually an anatomy and physiology class; we didn’t do any physical exercise in that class. But well-taught phys ed classes are clearly the exception, not the norm.

Of course, it could be that some students actually benefit from phys ed, perhaps even enough to offset the harms to people like me. (Though then the question should be asked whether phys ed should be compulsory for all students—if an intervention helps some and hurts others, maybe only give it to the ones it helps?) But I know very few people who actually described their experiences of phys ed class as positive ones. While many students describe their experiences of math class in similarly-negative terms (which is also a problem with how math classes are taught), I definitely do know people who actually enjoyed and did well in math class. Still, my sample is surely biased—it’s comprised of people similar to me, and I hated gym and loved math. So let’s look at the actual data.

Or rather, I’d like to, but there isn’t that much out there. The empirical literature on the effects of physical education is surprisingly limited.

A lot of analyses of physical education simply take as axiomatic that more phys ed means more exercise, and so they use the—overwhelming, unassailable—evidence that exercise is good to support an argument for more phys ed classes. But they never seem to stop and take a look at whether phys ed classes are actually making kids exercise more, particularly once those kids grow up and become adults.

In fact, the surprisingly weak correlations between higher physical activity and better mental health among adolescents (despite really strong correlations in adults) could be because exercise among adolescents is largely coerced via phys ed, and the misery of being coerced into physical humiliation counteracts any benefits that might have been obtained from increased exercise.

The best long-term longitudinal study I can find did show positive effects of phys ed on long-term health, though by a rather odd mechanism: Women exercised more as adults if they had phys ed in primary school, but men didn’t; they just smoked less. And this study was back in 1999, studying a cohort of adults who had phys ed quite a long time ago, when it was better funded.

The best experiment I can find actually testing whether phys ed programs work used a very carefully designed phys ed program with a lot of features that it would be really nice to have, but the vast majority of actual gym classes do not, including carefully structured activities with specific developmental goals, and, perhaps most importantly, children were taught to track and evaluate their own individual progress rather than evaluate themselves in comparison to others.

And even then, the effects are not all that large. The physical activity scores of the treatment group rose from 932 minutes per week to 1108 minutes per week for first-graders, and from 1212 to 1454 for second-graders. But the physical activity scores of the control group rose from 906 to 996 for first-graders, and 1105 to 1211 for second-graders. So of the 176 minutes per week gained by first-graders, 90 would have happened anyway. Likewise, of the 242 minutes per week gained by second-graders, 106 were not attributable to the treatment. Only about half of the gains were due to the intervention, and they amount to about a 10% increase in overall physical activity. It also seems a little odd to me that the control groups both started worse off than the experimental groups and both groups gained; it raises some doubts about the randomization.

The researchers also measured psychological effects, and these effects are even smaller and honestly a little weird. On a scale of “somatic anxiety” (basically, how bad do you feel about your body’s physical condition?), this well-designed phys ed program only reduced scores in the treatment group from 4.95 to 4.55 among first-graders, and from 4.50 to 4.10 among second-graders. Seeing as the scores for second-graders also fell in the control group from 4.63 to 4.45, only about half of the observed reduction—0.2 points on a 10-point scale—is really attributable to the treatment. And the really baffling part is that the measure of social anxiety actually fell more, which makes me wonder if they’re really measuring what they think they are.

Clearly, exercise is good. We should be trying to get people to exercise more. Actually, this is more important than almost anything else we could do for public health, with the possible exception of vaccinations. All of these campaigns trying to get kids to lose weight should be removed and replaced with programs to get them to exercise more, because losing weight doesn’t benefit health and exercising more does.

But I am not convinced that physical education as we know it actually makes people exercise more. In the short run, it forces kids to exercise, when there were surely ways to get kids to exercise that didn’t require such coercion; and in the long run, it gives them painful, even traumatic memories of exercise that make them not want to continue it once they get older. It’s too competitive, too one-size-fits-all. It doesn’t account for innate differences in athletic ability or match challenge levels to skill levels. It doesn’t help kids cope with having less ability, or even teach kids to be compassionate toward others with less ability than them.

And it makes kids miserable.

The Efficient Roulette Hypothesis

pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, financial advice, market failure, public policy , , , , , , ,

Nov 27 JDN 2459911

The efficient market hypothesis is often stated in several different ways, and these are often treated as equivalent. There are at least three very different definitions of it that people seem to use interchangeably:

  1. Market prices are optimal and efficient.
  2. Market prices aggregate and reflect all publicly-available relevant information.
  3. Market prices are difficult or impossible to predict.

The first reading, I will call the efficiency hypothesis, because, well, it is what we would expect a phrase like “efficient market hypothesis” to mean. The ordinary meaning of those words would imply that we are asserting that market prices are in some way optimal or near-optimal, that markets get prices “right” in some sense at least the vast majority of the time.

The second reading I’ll call the information hypothesis; it implies that market prices are an information aggregation mechanism which automatically incorporates all publicly-available information. This already seems quite different from efficiency, but it seems at least tangentially related, since information aggregation could be one useful function that markets serve.

The third reading I will call the unpredictability hypothesis; it says simply that market prices are very difficult to predict, and so you can’t reasonably expect to make money by anticipating market price changes far in advance of everyone else. But as I’ll get to in more detail shortly, that doesn’t have the slightest thing to do with efficiency.

The empirical data in favor of the unpredictability hypothesis is quite overwhelming. It’s exceedingly hard to beat the market, and for most people, most of the time, the smartest way to invest is just to buy a diversified portfolio and let it sit.

The empirical data in favor of the information hypothesis is mixed, but it’s at least plausible; most prices do seem to respond to public announcements of information in ways we would expect, and prediction markets can be surprisingly accurate at forecasting the future.

The empirical data in favor of the efficiency hypothesis, on the other hand, is basically nonexistent. On the one hand this is a difficult hypothesis to test directly, since it isn’t clear what sort of benchmark we should be comparing against—so it risks being not even wrong. But if you consider basically any plausible standard one could try to set for how an efficient market would run, our actual financial markets in no way resemble it. They are erratic, jumping up and down for stupid reasons or no reason at all. They are prone to bubbles, wildly overvaluing worthless assets. They have collapsed governments and ruined millions of lives without cause. They have resulted in the highest-paying people in the world doing jobs that accomplish basically nothing of genuine value. They are, in short, a paradigmatic example of what inefficiency looks like.

Yet, we still have economists who insist that “the efficient market hypothesis” is a proven fact, because the unpredictability hypothesis is clearly correct.

I do not think this is an accident. It’s not a mistake, or an awkwardly-chosen technical term that people are misinterpreting.

This is a motte and bailey doctrine.

Motte-and-bailey was a strategy in medieval warfare. Defending an entire region is very difficult, so instead what was often done was constructing a small, highly defensible fortification—the motte—while accepting that the land surrounding it—the bailey—would not be well-defended. Most of the time, the people stayed on the bailey, where the land was fertile and it was relatively pleasant to live. But should they be attacked, they could retreat to the motte and defend themselves until the danger was defeated.

A motte-and-bailey doctrine is an analogous strategy used in argumentation. You use the same words for two different versions of an idea: The motte is a narrow, defensible core of your idea that you can provide strong evidence for, but it isn’t very strong and may not even be interesting or controversial. The bailey is a broad, expansive version of your idea that is interesting and controversial and leads to lots of significant conclusions, but can’t be well-supported by evidence.

The bailey is the efficiency hypothesis: That market prices are optimal and we are fools to try to intervene or even regulate them because the almighty Invisible Hand is superior to us.

The motte is the unpredictability hypothesis: Market prices are very hard to predict, and most people who try to make money by beating the market fail.

By referring to both of these very different ideas as “the efficient market hypothesis”, economists can act as if they are defending the bailey, and prescribe policies that deregulate financial markets on the grounds that they are so optimal and efficient; but then when pressed for evidence to support their beliefs, they can pivot to the motte, and merely show that markets are unpredictable. As long as people don’t catch on and recognize that these are two very different meanings of “the efficient market hypothesis”, then they can use the evidence for unpredictability to support their goal of deregulation.

Yet when you look closely at this argument, it collapses. Unpredictability is not evidence of efficiency; if anything, it’s the opposite. Since the world doesn’t really change on a minute-by-minute basis, an efficient system should actually be relatively predictable in the short term. If prices reflected the real value of companies, they would change only very gradually, as the fortunes of the company change as a result of real-world events. An earthquake or a discovery of a new mine would change stock prices in relevant industries; but most of the time, they’d be basically flat. The occurrence of minute-by-minute or even second-by-second changes in prices basically proves that we are not tracking any genuine changes in value.

Roulette wheels are extremely unpredictable by design—by law, even—and yet no one would accuse them of being an efficient way of allocating resources. If you bet on roulette wheels and try to beat the house, you will almost surely fail, just as you would if you try to beat the stock market—and dare I say, for much the same reasons?

So if we’re going to insist that “efficiency” just means unpredictability, rather than actual, you know, efficiency, then we should all speak of the Efficient Roulette Hypothesis. Anything we can’t predict is now automatically “efficient” and should therefore be left unregulated.

Mind reading is not optional

pnrj cognitive science, heuristics and biases, personal , , , , , ,

Nov 20 JDN 2459904

I have great respect for cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and it has done a lot of good for me. (It is also astonishingly cost-effective; its QALY per dollar rate compares favorably to almost any other First World treatment, and loses only to treating high-impact Third World diseases like malaria and schistomoniasis.)

But there are certain aspects of it that have always been frustrating to me. Standard CBT techniques often present as ‘cognitive distortions‘ what are in fact clearly necessary heuristics without which it would be impossible to function.

Perhaps the worst of these is so-called ‘mind reading‘. The very phrasing of it makes it sound ridiculous: Are you suggesting that you have some kind of extrasensory perception? Are you claiming to be a telepath?

But in fact ‘mind reading’ is simply the use of internal cognitive models to forecast the thoughts, behaviors, and expectations of other human beings. And without it, it would be completely impossible to function in human society.

For instance, I have had therapists tell me that it is ‘mind reading’ for me to anticipate that people will have tacit expectations for my behavior that they will judge me for failing to meet, and I should simply wait for people to express their expectations rather than assuming them. I admit, life would be much easier if I could do that. But I know for a fact that I can’t. Indeed, I used to do that, as a child, and it got me in trouble all the time. People were continually upset at me for not doing things they had expected me to do but never bothered to actually mention. They thought these expectations were “obvious”; they were not, at least not to me.

It was often little things, and in hindsight some of these things seem silly: I didn’t know what a ‘made bed’ was supposed to look like, so I put it in a state that was functional for me, but that was not considered ‘making the bed’. (I have since learned that my way was actually better: It’s good to let sheets air out before re-using them.) I was asked to ‘clear the sink’, so I moved the dishes out of the sink and left them on the counter, not realizing that the implicit command was for me to wash those dishes, dry them, and put them away. I was asked to ‘bring the dinner plates to the table’, so I did that, and left them in a stack there, not realizing that I should be setting them out in front of each person’s chair and also bringing flatware. Of course I know better now. But how was I supposed to know then? It seems like I was expected to, though.

Most people just really don’t seem to realize how many subtle, tacit expectations are baked into every single task. I think neurodivergence is quite relevant here; I have a mild autism spectrum disorder, and so I think rather differently than most people. If you are neurotypical, then you probably can forecast other people’s expectations fairly well automatically, and so they may seem obvious to you. In fact, they may seem so obvious that you don’t even realize you’re doing it. Then when someone like me comes along and is consciously, actively trying to forecast other people’s expectations, and sometimes doing it poorly, you go and tell them to stop trying to forecast. But if they were to do that, they’d end up even worse off than they are. What you really need to be telling them is how to forecast better—but that would require insight into your own forecasting methods which you aren’t even consciously aware of.

Seriously, stop and think for a moment all of the things other people expect you to do every day that are rarely if ever explicitly stated. How you are supposed to dress, how you are supposed to speak, how close you are supposed to stand to other people, how long you are supposed to hold eye contact—all of these are standards you will be expected to meet, whether or not any of them have ever been explicitly explained to you. You may do this automatically; or you may learn to do it consciously after being criticized for failing to do it. But one way or another, you must forecast what other people will expect you to do.

To my knowledge, no one has ever explicitly told me not to wear a Starfleet uniform to work. I am not aware of any part of the university dress code that explicitly forbids such attire. But I’m fairly sure it would not be a good idea. To my knowledge, no one has ever explicitly told me not to burst out into song in the middle of a meeting. But I’m still pretty sure I shouldn’t do that. To my knowledge, no one has ever explicitly told me what the ‘right of way’ rules are for walking down a crowded sidewalk, who should be expected to move out of the way of whom. But people still get mad if you mess up and bump into them.

Even when norms are stated explicitly, it is often as a kind of last resort, and the mere fact that you needed to have a norm stated is often taken as a mark against your character. I have been explicitly told in various contexts not to talk to myself or engage in stimming leg movements; but the way I was told has generally suggested that I would have been judged better if I hadn’t had to be told, if I had simply known the way that other people seem to know. (Or is it that they never felt any particular desire to stim?)

In fact, I think a major part of developing social skills and becoming more functional, to the point where a lot of people actually now seem a bit surprised to learn I have an autism spectrum disorder, has been improving my ability to forecast other people’s expectations for my behavior. There are dozens if not hundreds of norms that people expect you to follow at any given moment; most people seem to intuit them so easily that they don’t even realize they are there. But they are there all the same, and this is painfully evident to those of us who aren’t always able to immediately intuit them all.

Now, the fact remains that my current mental models are surely imperfect. I am often wrong about what other people expect of me. I’m even prepared to believe that some of my anxiety comes from believing that people have expectations more demanding than what they actually have. But I can’t simply abandon the idea of forecasting other people’s expectations. Don’t tell me to stop doing it; tell me how to do it better.

Moreover, there is a clear asymmetry here: If you think people want more from you than they actually do, you’ll be anxious, but people will like you and be impressed by you. If you think people want less from you than they actually do, people will be upset at you and look down on you. So, in the presence of uncertainty, there’s a lot of pressure to assume that the expectations are high. It would be best to get it right, of course; but when you aren’t sure you can get it right, you’re often better off erring on the side of caution—which is to say, the side of anxiety.

In short, mind reading isn’t optional. If you think it is, that’s only because you do it automatically.

Is the cure for inflation worse than the disease?

pnrj current events, macroeconomics, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 13 JDN 2459897

A lot of people seem really upset about inflation. I’ve previously discussed why this is a bit weird; inflation really just isn’t that bad. In fact, I am increasingly concerned that the usual methods for fixing inflation are considerably worse than inflation itself.

To be clear, I’m not talking about hyperinflation—if you are getting triple-digit inflation or more, you are clearly printing too much money and you need to stop. And there are places in the world where this happens.

But what about just regular, ordinary inflation, even when it’s fairly high? Prices rising at 8% or 9% or even 11% per year? What catastrophe befalls our society when this happens?

Okay, sure, if we could snap our fingers and make prices all stable without cost, that would be worth doing. But we can’t. All of our mechanisms for reducing inflation come with costs—and often very high costs.

The chief mechanism by which inflation is currently controlled is open-market operations by central banks such as the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank. These central banks try to reduce inflation by selling bonds, which lowers the price of bonds and reduces capital available to banks, and thereby increases interest rates. This also effectively removes money from the economy, as banks are using that money to buy bonds instead of lending it out. (It is chiefly in this odd indirect sense that the central bank manages the “money supply”.)

But how does this actually reduce inflation? It’s remarkably indirect. It’s actually the higher interest rates which prevent people from buying houses and prevent companies from hiring workers which result in reduced economic growth—or even economic recession—which then is supposed to bring down prices. There’s actually a lot we still don’t know about how this works or how long it should be expected to take. What we do know is that the pain hits quickly and the benefits arise only months or even years later.

As Krugman has rightfully pointed out, the worst pain of the 1970s was not the double-digit inflation; it was the recessions that Paul Volcker’s economic policy triggered in response to that inflation. The inflation wasn’t exactly a good thing; but for most people, the cure was much worse than the disease.

Most laypeople seem to think that prices somehow go up without wages going up, but that simply isn’t how it works. Prices and wages rise at close to the same rate in most countries most of the time. In fact, inflation is often driven chiefly by rising wages rather than the other way around. There are often lags between when the inflation hits and when people see their wages rise; but these lags can actually be in either direction—inflation first or wages first—and for moderate amounts of inflation they are clearly less harmful than the high rates of unemployment that we would get if we fought inflation more aggressively with monetary policy.

Economists are also notoriously vague about exactly how they expect the central bank to reduce inflation. They use complex jargon or broad euphemisms. But when they do actually come out and say they want to reduce wages, it tends to outrage people. Well, that’s one of three main ways that interest rates actually reduce inflation: They reduce wages, they cause unemployment, or they stop people from buying houses. That’s pretty much all that central banks can do.

There may be other ways to reduce inflation, like windfall profits taxes, antitrust action, or even price controls. The first two are basically no-brainers; we should always be taxing windfall profits (if they really are due to a windfall outside a corporation’s control, there’s no incentive to distort), and we should absolutely be increasing antitrust action (why did we reduce it in the first place?). Price controls are riskier—they really do create shortages—but then again, is that really worse than lower wages or unemployment? Because the usual strategy involves lower wages and unemployment.

It’s a little ironic: The people who are usually all about laissez-faire are the ones who panic about inflation and want the government to take drastic action; meanwhile, I’m usually in favor of government intervention, but when it comes to moderate inflation, I think maybe we should just let it be.

Now is the time for CTCR

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , ,

Nov 6 JDN 2459890

We live in a terrifying time. As Ukraine gains ground in its war with Russia, thanks in part to the deployment of high-tech weapons from NATO, Vladimir Putin has begun to make thinly-veiled threats of deploying his nuclear arsenal in response. No one can be sure how serious he is about this. Most analysts believe that he was referring to the possible use of small-scale tactical nuclear weapons, not a full-scale apocalyptic assault. Many think he’s just bluffing and wouldn’t resort to any nukes at all. Putin has bluffed in the past, and could be doing so again. Honestly, “this is not a bluff” is exactly the sort of thing you say when you’re bluffing—people who aren’t bluffing have better ways of showing it. (It’s like whenever Trump would say “Trust me”, and you’d know immediately that this was an especially good time not to. Of course, any time is a good time not to trust Trump.)

(By the way, financial news is a really weird thing: I actually found this article discussing how a nuclear strike would be disastrous for the economy. Dude, if there’s a nuclear strike, we’ve got much bigger things to worry about than the economy. It reminds me of this XKCD.)

But if Russia did launch nuclear weapons, and NATO responded with its own, it could trigger a nuclear war that would kill millions in a matter of hours. So we need to be prepared, and think very carefully about the best way to respond.

The current debate seems to be over whether to use economic sanctions, conventional military retaliation, or our own nuclear weapons. Well, we already have economic sanctions, and they aren’t making Russia back down. (Though they probably are hurting its war effort, so I’m all for keeping them in place.) And if we were to use our own nuclear weapons, that would only further undermine the global taboo against nuclear weapons and could quite possibly trigger that catastrophic nuclear war. Right now, NATO seems to be going for a bluff of our own: We’ll threaten an overwhelming nuclear response, but then we obviously won’t actually carry it out because that would be murder-suicide on a global scale.

That leaves conventional military retaliation. What sort of retaliation? Several years ago I came up with a very specific method of conventional retaliation I call credible targeted conventional response (CTCR, which you can pronounce “cut-core”). I believe that now would be an excellent time to carry it out.

The basic principle of CTCR is really quite simple: Don’t try to threaten entire nations. A nation is an abstract entity. Threaten people. Decisions are made by people. The response to Vladimir Putin launching nuclear weapons shouldn’t be to kill millions of innocent people in Russia that probably mean even less to Putin than they do to us. It should be to kill Vladimir Putin.

How exactly to carry this out is a matter for military strategists to decide. There are a variety of weapons at our disposal, ranging from the prosaic (covert agents) to the exotic (precision strikes from high-altitude stealth drones). Indeed, I think we should leave it purposefully vague, so that Putin can’t try to defend himself against some particular mode of attack. The whole gamut of conventional military responses should be considered on the table, from a single missile strike to a full-scale invasion.

But the basic goal is quite simple: Launching a nuclear weapon is one of the worst possible war crimes, and it must be met with an absolute commitment to bring the perpetrator to justice. We should be willing to accept some collateral damage, even a lot of collateral damage; carpet-bombing a city shouldn’t be considered out of the question. (If that sounds extreme, consider that we’ve done it before for much weaker reasons.) The only thing that we should absolutely refuse to do is deploy nuclear weapons ourselves.

The great advantage of this strategy—even aside from being obviously more humane than nuclear retaliation—is that it is more credible. It sounds more like something we’d actually be willing to do. And in fact we likely could even get help from insiders in Russia, because there are surely many people in the Russian government who aren’t so loyal to Putin that they’d want him to get away with mass murder. It might not just be an assassination; it might end up turning into a coup. (Also something we’ve done for far weaker reasons.)


This is how we preserve the taboo on nuclear weapons: We refuse to use them, but otherwise stop at nothing to kill anyone who does use them.

I therefore call upon the world to make this threat:

Launch a nuclear weapon, Vladimir Putin, and we will kill you. Not your armies, not your generals—you. It could be a Tomahawk missile at the Kremlin. It could be a car bomb in your limousine, or a Stinger missile at Aircraft One. It could be a sniper at one of your speeches. Or perhaps we’ll poison your drink with polonium, like you do to your enemies. You won’t know when or where. You will live the rest of your short and miserable life in terror. There will be nowhere for you to hide. We will stop at nothing. We will deploy every available resource around the world, and it will be our top priority. And you will die.

That’s how you threaten a psychopath. And it’s what we must do in order to keep the world safe from nuclear war.

The United Kingdom in transition

pnrj current events, macroeconomics, personal, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 30 JDN 2459883

When I first decided to move to Edinburgh, I certainly did not expect it to be such a historic time. The pandemic was already in full swing, but I thought that would be all. But this year I was living in the UK when its leadership changed in two historic ways:

First, there was the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and the coronation of King Charles III.

Second, there was the resignation of Boris Johnson, the appointment of Elizabeth Truss, and then, so rapidly I feel like I have whiplash, the resignation of Elizabeth Truss.

In other words, I have seen the end of the longest-reigning monarch and the rise and fall of the shortest-reigning prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom. The three hundred-year history of the United Kingdom.

The prior probability of such a 300-year-historic event happening during my own 3-year term in the UK is approximately 1%. Yet, here we are. A new king, one of a handful of genuine First World monarchs to be coronated in the 21st century. The others are the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Monaco, Andorra, and Luxembourg; none of these have even a third the population of the UK, and if we include every Commonwealth Realm (believe it or not, “realm” is in fact still the official term), Charles III is now king of a supranational union with a population of over 150 million people—half the size of the United States. (Yes, he’s your king too, Canada!) Note that Charles III is not king of the entire Commonwealth of Nations, which includes now-independent nations such as India, Pakistan, and South Africa; that successor to the British Empire contains 54 nations and has a population of over 2 billion.

I still can’t quite wrap my mind around this idea of having a king. It feels even more ancient and anachronistic than the 400-year-old university I work at. Of course I knew that we had a queen before, and that she was old and would presumably die at some point and probably be replaced; but that wasn’t really salient information to me until she actually did die and then there was a ten-mile-long queue to see her body and now next spring they will be swearing in this new guy as the monarch of the fourteen realms. It now feels like I’m living in one of those gritty satirical fractured fairy tales. Maybe it’s an urban fantasy setting; it feels a lot like Shrek, to be honest.

Yet other than feeling surreal, none of this has affected my life all that much. I haven’t even really felt the effects of inflation: Groceries and restaurant meals seem a bit more expensive than they were when we arrived, but it’s well within what our budget can absorb; we don’t have a car here, so we don’t care about petrol prices; and we haven’t even been paying more than usual in natural gas because of the subsidy programs. Actually it’s probably been good for our household finances that the pound is so weak and the dollar is so strong. I have been much more directly affected by the university union strikes: being temporary contract junior faculty (read: expendable), I am ineligible to strike and hence had to cross a picket line at one point.

Perhaps this is what history has always felt like for most people: The kings and queens come and go, but life doesn’t really change. But I honestly felt more directly affected by Trump living in the US than I did by Truss living in the UK.

This may be in part because Elizabeth Truss was a very unusual politician; she combined crazy far-right economic policy with generally fairly progressive liberal social policy. A right-wing libertarian, one might say. (As Krugman notes, such people are astonishingly rare in the electorate.) Her socially-liberal stance meant that she wasn’t trying to implement horrific hateful policies against racial minorities or LGBT people the way that Trump was, and for once her horrible economic policies were recognized immediately as such and quickly rescinded. Unlike Trump, Truss did not get the chance to appoint any supreme court justices who could go on to repeal abortion rights.

Then again, Truss couldn’t have appointed any judges if she’d wanted to. The UK Supreme Court is really complicated, and I honestly don’t understand how it works; but from what I do understand, the Prime Minister appoints the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chancellor forms a commission to appoint the President of the Supreme Court, and the President of the Supreme Court forms a commission to appoint new Supreme Court judges. But I think the monarch is considered the ultimate authority and can veto any appointment along the way. (Or something. Sometimes I get the impression that no one truly understands the UK system, and they just sort of go with doing things as they’ve always been done.) This convoluted arrangement seems to grant the court considerably more political independence than its American counterpart; also, unlike the US Supreme Court, the UK Supreme Court is not allowed to explicitly overturn primary legislation. (Fun fact: The Lord Chancellor is also the Keeper of the Great Seal of the Realm, because Great Britain hasn’t quite figured out that the 13th century ended yet.)

It’s sad and ironic that it was precisely by not being bigoted and racist that Truss ensured she would not have sufficient public support for her absurd economic policies. There’s a large segment of the population of both the US and UK—aptly, if ill-advisedly, referred to by Clinton as “deplorables”—who will accept any terrible policy as long as it hurts the right people. But Truss failed to appeal to that crucial demographic, and so could find no one to support her. Hence, her approval rating fell to a dismal 10%, and she was outlasted by a head of lettuce.

At the time of writing, the new prime minister has not yet been announced, but the smart money is on Rishi Sunak. (I mean that quite literally; he’s leading in prediction markets.) He’s also socially liberal but fiscally conservative, but unlike Truss he seems to have at least some vague understanding of how economics works. Sunak is also popular in a way Truss never was (though that popularity has been declining recently). So I think we can expect to get new policies which are in the same general direction as what Truss wanted—lower taxes on the rich, more privatization, less spent on social services—but at least Sunak is likely to do so in a way that makes the math(s?) actually add up.

All of this is unfortunate, but largely par for the course for the last few decades. It compares quite favorably to the situation in the US, where somehow a large chunk of Americans either don’t believe that an insurrection attempt occurred, are fine with it, or blame the other side, and as the guardrails of democracy continue breaking, somehow gasoline prices appear to be one of the most important issues in the midterm election.

You know what? Living through history sucks. I don’t want to live in “interesting times” anymore.

Updating your moral software

pnrj core principles, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 23 JDN 2459876

I’ve noticed an odd tendency among politically active people, particular social media slacktivists (a term I do not use pejoratively: slacktivism is highly cost-effective). They adopt new ideas very rapidly, trying to stay on the cutting edge of moral and political discourse—and then they denigrate and disparage anyone who fails to do the same as an irredeemable monster.

This can take many forms, such as “if you don’t buy into my specific take on Critical Race Theory, you are a racist”, “if you have any uncertainty about the widespread use of puberty blockers you are a transphobic bigot”, “if you give any credence to the medical consensus on risks of obesity you are fatphobic“, “if you think disabilities should be cured you’re an ableist”, and “if you don’t support legalizing abortion in all circumstances you are a misogynist”.

My intention here is not to evaluate any particular moral belief, though I’ll say the following: I am skeptical of Critical Race Theory, especially the 1619 project which seems to be to include substantial distortions of history. I am cautiously supportive of puberty blockers, because the medical data on their risks are ambiguous—while the sociological data on how much happier trans kids are when accepted are totally unambiguous. I am well aware of the medical data saying that the risks of obesity are overblown (but also not negligible, particular for those who are very obese). Speaking as someone with a disability that causes me frequent, agonizing pain, yes, I want disabilities to be cured, thank you very much; accommodations are nice in the meantime, but the best long-term solution is to not need accommodations. (I’ll admit to some grey areas regarding certain neurodivergences such as autism and ADHD, and I would never want to force cures on people who don’t want them; but paralysis, deafness, blindness, diabetes, depression, and migraine are all absolutely worth finding cures for—the QALY at stake here are massive—and it’s silly to say otherwise.) I think abortion should generally be legal and readily available in the first trimester (which is when most abortions happen anyway), but much more strictly regulated thereafter—but denying it to children and rape victims is a human rights violation.

What I really want to talk about today is not the details of the moral belief, but the attitude toward those who don’t share it. There are genuine racists, transphobes, fatphobes, ableists, and misogynists in the world. There are also structural institutions that can lead to discrimination despite most of the people involved having no particular intention to discriminate. It’s worthwhile to talk about these things, and to try to find ways to fix them. But does calling anyone who disagrees with you a monster accomplish that goal?

This seems particularly bad precisely when your own beliefs are so cutting-edge. If you have a really basic, well-established sort of progressive belief like “hiring based on race should be illegal”, “women should be allowed to work outside the home” or “sodomy should be legal”, then people who disagree with you pretty much are bigots. But when you’re talking about new, controversial ideas, there is bound to be some lag; people who adopted the last generation’s—or even the last year’s—progressive beliefs may not yet be ready to accept the new beliefs, and that doesn’t make them bigots.

Consider this: Were you born believing in your current moral and political beliefs?

I contend that you were not. You may have been born intelligent, open-minded, and empathetic. You may have been born into a progressive, politically-savvy family. But the fact remains that any particular belief you hold about race, or gender, or ethics was something you had to learn. And if you learned it, that means that at some point you didn’t already know it. How would you have felt back then, if, instead of calmly explaining it to you, people called you names for not believing in it?

Now, perhaps it is true that as soon as you heard your current ideas, you immediately adopted them. But that may not be the case—it may have taken you some time to learn or change your mind—and even if it was, it’s still not fair to denigrate anyone who takes a bit longer to come around. There are many reasons why someone might not be willing to change their beliefs immediately, and most of them are not indicative of bigotry or deep moral failings.

It may be helpful to think about this in terms of updating your moral software. You were born with a very minimal moral operating system (emotions such as love and guilt, the capacity for empathy), and over time you have gradually installed more and more sophisticated software on top of that OS. If someone literally wasn’t born with the right OS—we call these people psychopaths—then, yes, you have every right to hate, fear, and denigrate them. But most of the people we’re talking about do have that underlying operating system, they just haven’t updated all their software to the same version as yours. It’s both unfair and counterproductive to treat them as irredeemably defective simply because they haven’t updated to the newest version yet. They have the hardware, they have the operating system; maybe their download is just a little slower than yours.

In fact, if you are very fast to adopt new, trendy moral beliefs, you may in fact be adopting them too quickly—they haven’t been properly vetted by human experience just yet. You can think of this as like a beta version: The newest update has some great new features, but it’s also buggy and unstable. It may need to be fixed before it is really ready for widespread release. If that’s the case, then people aren’t even wrong not to adopt them yet! It isn’t necessarily bad that you have adopted the new beliefs; we need beta testers. But you should be aware of your status as a beta tester and be prepared both to revise your own beliefs if needed, and also to cut other people slack if they disagree with you.

I understand that it can be immensely frustrating to be thoroughly convinced that something is true and important and yet see so many people disagreeing with it. (I am an atheist activist after all, so I absolutely know what that feels like.) I understand that it can be immensely painful to watch innocent people suffer because they have to live in a world where other people have harmful beliefs. But you aren’t changing anyone’s mind or saving anyone from harm by calling people names. Patience, tact, and persuasion will win the long game, and the long game is really all we have.

And if it makes you feel any better, the long game may not be as long as it seems. The arc of history may have tighter curvature than we imagine. We certainly managed a complete flip of the First World consensus on gay marriage in just a single generation. We may be able to achieve similarly fast social changes in other areas too. But we haven’t accomplished the progress we have so far by being uncharitable or aggressive toward those who disagree.

I am emphatically not saying you should stop arguing for your beliefs. We need you to argue for your beliefs. We need you to argue forcefully and passionately. But when doing so, try not to attack the people who don’t yet agree with you—for they are precisely the people we need to listen to you.