Month: September 2022

Mindful of mindfulness

PNRJ cognitive science, personal , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 25 JDN 2459848

I have always had trouble with mindfulness meditation.

On the one hand, I find it extremely difficult to do: if there is one thing my mind is good at, it’s wandering. (I think in addition to my autism spectrum disorder, I may also have a smidgen of ADHD. I meet some of the criteria at least.) And it feels a little too close to a lot of practices that are obviously mumbo-jumbo nonsense, like reiki, qigong, and reflexology.

On the other hand, mindfulness meditation has been empirically shown to have large beneficial effects in study after study after study. It helps with not only depression, but also chronic pain. It even seems to improve immune function. The empirical data is really quite clear at this point. The real question is how it does all this.

And I am, above all, an empiricist. I bow before the data. So, when my new therapist directed me to an app that’s supposed to train me to do mindfulness meditation, I resolved that I would in fact give it a try.

Honestly, as of writing this, I’ve been using it less than a week; it’s probably too soon to make a good evaluation. But I did have some prior experience with mindfulness, so this was more like getting back into it rather than starting from scratch. And, well, I think it might actually be working. I feel a bit better than I did when I started.

If it is working, it doesn’t seem to me that the mechanism is greater focus or mental control. I don’t think I’ve really had time to meaningfully improve those skills, and to be honest, I have a long way to go there. The pre-recorded voice samples keep telling me it’s okay if my mind wanders, but I doubt the app developers planned for how much my mind can wander. When they suggest I try to notice each wandering thought, I feel like saying, “Do you want the complete stack trace, or just the final output? Because if I wrote down each terminal branch alone, my list would say something like ‘fusion reactors, ice skating, Napoleon’.”

I think some of the benefit is simply parasympathetic activation, that is, being more relaxed. I am, and have always been, astonishingly bad at relaxing. It’s not that I lack positive emotions: I can enjoy, I can be excited. Nor am I incapable of low-arousal emotions: I can get bored, I can be lethargic. I can also experience emotions that are negative and high-arousal: I can be despondent or outraged. But I have great difficulty reaching emotional states which are simultaneously positive and low-arousal, i.e. states of calm and relaxation. (See here for more on the valence/arousal model of emotional states.) To some extent I think this is due to innate personality: I am high in both Conscientiousness and Neuroticism, which basically amounts to being “high-strung“. But mindfulness has taught me that it’s also trainable, to some extent; I can get better at relaxing, and I already have.

And even more than that, I think the most important effect has been reminding and encouraging me to practice self-compassion. I am an intensely compassionate person, toward other people; but toward myself, I am brutal, demanding, unforgiving, even cruel. My internal monologue says terrible things to me that I wouldnever say to anyone else. (Or at least, not to anyone else who wasn’t a mass murderer or something. I wouldn’t feel particularly bad about saying “You are a failure, you are broken, you are worthless, you are unworthy of love” to, say, Josef Stalin. And yes, these are in fact things my internal monologue has said to me.) Whenever I am unable to master a task I consider important, my automatic reaction is to denigrate myself for failing; I think the greatest benefit I am getting from practicing meditation is being encouraged to fight that impulse. That is, the most important value added by the meditation app has not been in telling me how to focus on my own breathing, but in reminding me to forgive myself when I do it poorly.

If this is right (as I said, it’s probably too soon to say), then we may at last be able to explain why meditation is simultaneously so weird and tied to obvious mumbo-jumbo on the one hand, and also so effective on the other. The actual function of meditation is to be a difficult cognitive task which doesn’t require outside support.

And then the benefit actually comes from doing this task, getting slowly better at it—feeling that sense of progress—and also from learning to forgive yourself when you do it badly. The task probably could have been anything: Find paths through mazes. Fill out Sudoku grids. Solve integrals. But these things are hard to do without outside resources: It’s basically impossible to draw a maze without solving it in the process. Generating a Sudoku grid with a unique solution is at least as hard as solving one (which is NP-complete). By the time you know a given function is even integrable over elementary functions, you’ve basically integrated it. But focusing on your breath? That you can do anywhere, anytime. And the difficulty of controlling all your wandering thoughts may be less a bug than a feature: It’s precisely because the task is so difficult that you will have reason to practice forgiving yourself for failure.

The arbitrariness of the task itself is how you can get a proliferation of different meditation techniques, and a wide variety of mythologies and superstitions surrounding them all, but still have them all be about equally effective in the end. Because it was never really about the task at all. It’s about getting better and failing gracefully.

It probably also helps that meditation is relaxing. Solving integrals might not actually work as well as focusing on your breath, even if you had a textbook handy full of integrals to solve. Breathing deeply is calming; integration by parts isn’t. But lots of things are calming, and some things may be calming to one person but not to another.

It is possible that there is yet some other benefit to be had directly via mindfulness itself. If there is, it will surely have more to do with anterior cingulate activation than realignment of qi. But such a particular benefit isn’t necessary to explain the effectiveness of meditation, and indeed would be hard-pressed to explain why so many different kinds of meditation all seem to work about as well.

Because it was never about what you’re doing—it was always about how.

Europe is paying the price for relying on Russian natural gas

PNRJ current events, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 18 JDN 2459841

For far too long, Europe has relied upon importing cheap natural gas from Russia to supply a large proportion of its energy needs. Now that the war in Ukraine has led to mutual sanctions, they are paying the price—literally, as the price of natural gas has absolutely ballooned. Dutch natural gas futures have soared from about €15 per megawatt-hour in 2020 to over €200 today.

Natural gas prices are rising worldwide, but not nearly as much: Henry Hub natural gas prices (a standard metric for natural gas prices in the US) have risen from under $2 per million BTU in 2020 to nearly $9 today. This substantial divide in prices can only be sustained because transporting natural gas is expensive and requires substantial infrastructure. (1 megawatt-hour is about 3.4 million BTU, and the euro is trading at parity with the dollar (!), so effectively US prices rose from €7 per MWh to €31 per MWh—as opposed to €200.)

As a result, a lot of people in Europe are suddenly finding their utility bills unaffordable. (I’m fortunate that my flat is relatively well-insulated and my income is reasonably high, so I’m not among them; the higher prices will be annoying, but not beyond my means.) What should we do about this?

There are some economists who would say we should do nothing at all: Laissez-faire. Markets are efficient, right? So just let people freeze! Fortunately, Europe is not governed by such people nearly as much as the US is.

But while most economists would agree that we should do something, it’s much harder to get them to agree on exactly what.

Rising prices of natural gas are sort of a good thing, from an environmental perspective; they’ll provide an incentive to reduce carbon emissions. So it’s tempting to say that we should just let the prices rise and then compensate by raising taxes and paying transfers to poor families. But that probably isn’t politically viable; all three parts—letting prices rise, raising taxes, and increasing transfers—are all going to make enemies, and we really must have all three for such a plan to work.

The current approach seems to be based on price controls: Don’t let the prices rise so much. The UK has such a policy in place: Natural gas prices for consumers are capped by regulations. The cap has been increased in response to the crisis (itself an unpopular, but clearly necessary, move), but even so 31 gas companies have already gone under across the UK since the start of 2021. It really seems to be the case that for many gas companies, especially the smaller ones with less economy of scale, it’s simply not possible to continue providing natural gas to homes with input prices so high and output prices capped so low.

Or, we could let prices rise that high for producers, but subsidize consumers so that they don’t feel it; several European countries are already doing this. That at least won’t result in gas companies failing, but it will cost a lot of government funds. Greece in particular is spending over 3% of their GDP on it! (For comparison, the US military budget is about 4% of GDP.) I think this might actually be the best option, though all that spending will mean more government debt or higher taxes.

European governments have also been building up strategic reserves of natural gas, which may help us get through the winter—but it also makes the current price increases even worse.

We could also ration energy use, as we’ve often done during wartime. (Is this wartime? Kind of? Not really? It certainly is starting to feel like Cold War II.) Indeed, the President of the European Commission basically said that this should happen. That, at least, would reap some of the environmental benefits of reduced natural gas consumption. Rationing also feels fair to most people in a way that simply letting market prices rise does not; there is a sense of shared sacrifice. What worries me, however, is that the rations won’t be well-designed enough to account for energy usage that isn’t in a family’s immediate control. If you’re renting a flat that is poorly insulated, you can’t immediately fix that. You can try to pressure the landlord into buying better insulation, but in the meantime you’re the one paying the energy bills—or getting cold when the natural gas ration isn’t enough.

Actually I strongly suspect that most household usage of natural gas is of this kind; people don’t generally heat their homes more than necessary just because gas is cheap. Maybe they can set the thermostat a degree or two lower when gas is expensive, or maybe they use the gas oven less often and the microwave more; but the vast majority of their gas consumption is a function of the climate they live in and the insulation of their home, not their day-to-day choices. So if we’re trying to incentivize more efficient energy usage, that’s a question of long-term investment in construction and retrofitting, not something that sudden price spikes will really help with.

In the long run, what we really need to do is wean ourselves off of natural gas. Currently natural gas provides 33% of energy and nearly 40% of heating in Europe. (US figures are comparable.) Switching to electric heat pumps and powering them with solar and wind power isn’t something we can do overnight—but it is something we surely must do.

I think ultimately what is going to happen is all of the above: Different countries will adopt different policy mixes, all of them will involve difficult compromises, none of them will be particularly well-designed, and we’ll all sort of muddle through as best we can.

The War on Terror has been a total failure.

PNRJ current events, ethics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Sep 11 JDN 2459834

Since today happens to be September 11, I thought I’d spend this week’s post reflecting on the last 21 years (!) of the War on Terror.

At this point, I can safely say that the War on Terror has been a complete, total, utter failure. It has cost over $8 trillion and nearly a million lives, and not only didn’t reduce terrorism, it actually appears to have substantially increased it.

Take a look at this graph from Our World in Data:

Up until the the 1980s, terrorism worldwide was a slow smoldering, killing rarely more than a few hundred people each year. Obviously it’s terrible if you or one of your loved ones happen to be among those few hundred, but in terms of its overall chance of killing you or your children, terrorism used to be less dangerous than kiddie pools.

Then terrorism began to rise, until it was killing several thousand people a year. I was surprised to learn that most of these were not in the Middle East, but in fact spread all over the world, with the highest concentrations actually being in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Notably, almost none of these deaths were in First World countries, and as a result most First World governments largely ignored them. Terrorism was something that happened “over there”, to other people.

Then of course came 2001, and 9/11/2001, in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in a single day. And suddenly the First World took notice, and decided to respond with overwhelming force.

We have been at war basically ever since. All this war has accomplished… approximately nothing.

The deadliest year of terrorism in the 21st century was not 2001; it was 2014, after the US had invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, and in fact withdrawn from Iraq (but not yet Afghanistan). This was largely the result of the rise of Daesh (which is what you should call them by the way), which seems to be the most fanatical and violent Islamist terrorist organization the world has seen in decades if not centuries.

Even First World terrorism is no better today than it was in the 1990s—though also no worse. It’s back to a slow smolder, and once again First World societies can feel that terrorism is something that happens to someone else. But terrorism in the Middle East is the worst it has been in decades.

Would Daesh not have appeared if the US had never invaded Afghanistan and Iraq? It’s difficult to say. Maybe their rise was inevitable. Or maybe having a strong, relatively secular government in the region under Saddam Hussein would have prevented them from becoming so powerful. We can at least say this: Since the US withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban retook control, the Taliban and Daesh have been fighting each other quite heavily. Presumably that would have been happening all along if the US had not intervened to suppress the Taliban.

Don’t get me wrong: The Taliban were, and are, a terrible regime, and Saddam Hussein was a terrible dictator. But Daesh is clearly worse than either, and sometimes in geopolitics you have to accept the lesser evil.

If we’d actually had a way to take over Afghanistan and Iraq and rebuild them as secular liberal democracies as the US government intended, that would have been a good thing, and might even have been worth all that blood and treasure. But that project utterly failed, and we should have expected it to fail, as never in history has anyone successfully imposed liberal democracy by outside force like that.

When democracy spreads, it usually does so slowly, through the cultural influence of trade and media. Sometimes it springs up in violent revolution—as we hoped it would in the Arab Spring but were sadly disappointed. But there are really no clear examples of a democratic country invading an undemocratic country and rapidly turning it democratic.

British colonialism was spread by the sword (and especially the machine gun), and did sometimes ultimately lead to democratic outcomes, as in the US, Australia, and Canada, and more recently in India, South Africa, and Botswana. But that process was never fast, never smooth, and rarely without bloodshed—and only succeeded when the local population was willing to fight for it. Britain didn’t simply take over countries and convert them to liberal democracies in a generation. No one has ever done that, and trying to was always wishful thinking.

I don’t know, maybe in the very long run, we’ll look back on all this as the first, bloody step toward something better for the Middle East. Maybe the generation of women who got a taste of freedom and education in Afghanistan under US occupation will decide to rise up and refuse to relinquish those rights under the new Taliban. Daesh will surely die sooner or later; fanaticism can rarely sustain organizations in the long term.

But it’s been 20 years now, and things look no better than they did at the start. Maybe it’s time to cut our losses?

The injustice of talent

PNRJ core principles, ethics, inequality, mathematical models, personal , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 4 JDN 2459827

Consider the following two principles of distributive justice.

A: People deserve to be rewarded in proportion to what they accomplish.

B: People deserve to be rewarded in proportion to the effort they put in.

Both principles sound pretty reasonable, don’t they? They both seem like sensible notions of fairness, and I think most people would broadly agree with both them.

This is a problem, because they are mutually contradictory. We cannot possibly follow them both.

For, as much as our society would like to pretend otherwise—and I think this contradiction is precisely why our society would like to pretend otherwise—what you accomplish is not simply a function of the effort you put in.

Don’t get me wrong; it is partly a function of the effort you put in. Hard work does contribute to success. But it is neither sufficient, nor strictly necessary.

Rather, success is a function of three factors: Effort, Environment, and Talent.

Effort is the work you yourself put in, and basically everyone agrees you deserve to be rewarded for that.

Environment includes all the outside factors that affect you—including both natural and social environment. Inheritance, illness, and just plain luck are all in here, and there is general, if not universal, agreement that society should make at least some efforts to minimize inequality created by such causes.

And then, there is talent. Talent includes whatever capacities you innately have. It could be strictly genetic, or it could be acquired in childhood or even in the womb. But by the time you are an adult and responsible for your own life, these factors are largely fixed and immutable. This includes things like intelligence, disability, even height. The trillion-dollar question is: How much should we reward talent?

For talent clearly does matter. I will never swim like Michael Phelps, run like Usain Bolt, or shoot hoops like Steph Curry. It doesn’t matter how much effort I put in, how many hours I spend training—I will never reach their level of capability. Never. It’s impossible. I could certainly improve from my current condition; perhaps it would even be good for me to do so. But there are certain hard fundamental constraints imposed by biology that give them more potential in these skills than I will ever have.

Conversely, there are likely things I can do that they will never be able to do, though this is less obvious. Could Michael Phelps never be as good a programmer or as skilled a mathematician as I am? He certainly isn’t now. Maybe, with enough time, enough training, he could be; I honestly don’t know. But I can tell you this: I’m sure it would be harder for him than it was for me. He couldn’t breeze through college-level courses in differential equations and quantum mechanics the way I did. There is something I have that he doesn’t, and I’m pretty sure I was born with it. Call it spatial working memory, or mathematical intuition, or just plain IQ. Whatever it is, math comes easy to me in not so different a way from how swimming comes easy to Michael Phelps. I have talent for math; he has talent for swimming.

Moreover, these are not small differences. It’s not like we all come with basically the same capabilities with a little bit of variation that can be easily washed out by effort. We’d like to believe that—we have all sorts of cultural tropes that try to inculcate that belief in us—but it’s obviously not true. The vast majority of quantum physicists are people born with high IQ. The vast majority of pro athletes are people born with physical prowess. The vast majority of movie stars are people born with pretty faces. For many types of jobs, the determining factor seems to be talent.

This isn’t too surprising, actually—even if effort matters a lot, we would still expect talent to show up as the determining factor much of the time.

Let’s go back to that contest function model I used to analyze the job market awhile back (the one that suggests we spend way too much time and money in the hiring process). This time let’s focus on the perspective of the employees themselves.

Each employee has a level of talent, h. Employee X has talent hx and exerts effort x, producing output of a quality that is the product of these: hx x. Similarly, employee Z has talent hz and exerts effort z, producing output hz z.

Then, there’s a certain amount of luck that factors in. The most successful output isn’t necessarily the best, or maybe what should have been the best wasn’t because some random circumstance prevailed. But we’ll say that the probability an individual succeeds is proportional to the quality of their output.

So the probability that employee X succeeds is: hx x / ( hx x + hz z)

I’ll skip the algebra this time (if you’re interested you can look back at that previous post), but to make a long story short, in Nash equilibrium the two employees will exert exactly the same amount of effort.

Then, which one succeeds will be entirely determined by talent; because x = z, the probability that X succeeds is hx / ( hx + hz).

It’s not that effort doesn’t matter—it absolutely does matter, and in fact in this model, with zero effort you get zero output (which isn’t necessarily the case in real life). It’s that in equilibrium, everyone is exerting the same amount of effort; so what determines who wins is innate talent. And I gotta say, that sounds an awful lot like how professional sports works. It’s less clear whether it applies to quantum physicists.

But maybe we don’t really exert the same amount of effort! This is true. Indeed, it seems like actually effort is easier for people with higher talent—that the same hour spent running on a track is easier for Usain Bolt than for me, and the same hour studying calculus is easier for me than it would be for Usain Bolt. So in the end our equilibrium effort isn’t the same—but rather than compensating, this effect only serves to exaggerate the difference in innate talent between us.

It’s simple enough to generalize the model to allow for such a thing. For instance, I could say that the cost of producing a unit of effort is inversely proportional to your talent; then instead of hx / ( hx + hz ), in equilibrium the probability of X succeeding would become hx2 / ( hx2 + hz2). The equilibrium effort would also be different, with x > z if hx > hz.

Once we acknowledge that talent is genuinely important, we face an ethical problem. Do we want to reward people for their accomplishment (A), or for their effort (B)? There are good cases to be made for each.

Rewarding for accomplishment, which we might call meritocracy,will tend to, well, maximize accomplishment. We’ll get the best basketball players playing basketball, the best surgeons doing surgery. Moreover, accomplishment is often quite easy to measure, even when effort isn’t.

Rewarding for effort, which we might call egalitarianism, will give people the most control over their lives, and might well feel the most fair. Those who succeed will be precisely those who work hard, even if they do things they are objectively bad at. Even people who are born with very little talent will still be able to make a living by working hard. And it will ensure that people do work hard, which meritocracy can actually fail at: If you are extremely talented, you don’t really need to work hard because you just automatically succeed.

Capitalism, as an economic system, is very good at rewarding accomplishment. I think part of what makes socialism appealing to so many people is that it tries to reward effort instead. (Is it very good at that? Not so clear.)

The more extreme differences are actually in terms of disability. There’s a certain baseline level of activities that most people are capable of, which we think of as “normal”: most people can talk; most people can run, if not necessarily very fast; most people can throw a ball, if not pitch a proper curveball. But some people can’t throw. Some people can’t run. Some people can’t even talk. It’s not that they are bad at it; it’s that they are literally not capable of it. No amount of effort could have made Stephen Hawking into a baseball player—not even a bad one.

It’s these cases when I think egalitarianism becomes most appealing: It just seems deeply unfair that people with severe disabilities should have to suffer in poverty. Even if they really can’t do much productive work on their own, it just seems wrong not to help them, at least enough that they can get by. But capitalism by itself absolutely would not do that—if you aren’t making a profit for the company, they’re not going to keep you employed. So we need some kind of social safety net to help such people. And it turns out that such people are quite numerous, and our current system is really not adequate to help them.

But meritocracy has its pull as well. Especially when the job is really important—like surgery, not so much basketball—we really want the highest quality work. It’s not so important whether the neurosurgeon who removes your tumor worked really hard at it or found it a breeze; what we care about is getting that tumor out.

Where does this leave us?

I think we have no choice but to compromise, on both principles. We will reward both effort and accomplishment, to greater or lesser degree—perhaps varying based on circumstances. We will never be able to entirely reward accomplishment or entirely reward effort.

This is more or less what we already do in practice, so why worry about it? Well, because we don’t like to admit that it’s what we do in practice, and a lot of problems seem to stem from that.

We have people acting like billionaires are such brilliant, hard-working people just because they’re rich—because our society rewards effort, right? So they couldn’t be so successful if they didn’t work so hard, right? Right?

Conversely, we have people who denigrate the poor as lazy and stupid just because they are poor. Because it couldn’t possibly be that their circumstances were worse than yours? Or hey, even if they are genuinely less talented than you—do less talented people deserve to be homeless and starving?

We tell kids from a young age, “You can be whatever you want to be”, and “Work hard and you’ll succeed”; and these things simply aren’t true. There are limitations on what you can achieve through effort—limitations imposed by your environment, and limitations imposed by your innate talents.

I’m not saying we should crush children’s dreams; I’m saying we should help them to build more realistic dreams, dreams that can actually be achieved in the real world. And then, when they grow up, they either will actually succeed, or when they don’t, at least they won’t hate themselves for failing to live up to what you told them they’d be able to do.

If you were wondering why Millennials are so depressed, that’s clearly a big part of it: We were told we could be and do whatever we wanted if we worked hard enough, and then that didn’t happen; and we had so internalized what we were told that we thought it had to be our fault that we failed. We didn’t try hard enough. We weren’t good enough. I have spent years feeling this way—on some level I do still feel this way—and it was not because adults tried to crush my dreams when I was a child, but on the contrary because they didn’t do anything to temper them. They never told me that life is hard, and people fail, and that I would probably fail at my most ambitious goals—and it wouldn’t be my fault, and it would still turn out okay.

That’s really it, I think: They never told me that it’s okay not to be wildly successful. They never told me that I’d still be good enough even if I never had any great world-class accomplishments. Instead, they kept feeding me the lie that I would have great world-class accomplishments; and then, when I didn’t, I felt like a failure and I hated myself. I think my own experience may be particularly extreme in this regard, but I know a lot of other people in my generation who had similar experiences, especially those who were also considered “gifted” as children. And we are all now suffering from depression, anxiety, and Impostor Syndrome.

All because nobody wanted to admit that talent, effort, and success are not the same thing.