Go ahead and identify as a season

2024-06-022024-05-26 PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm civilization, conservative, gender, gender expression, identity, liberal, norms, rules, sex, social norms

Jun 2 JDN 2460464

A few weeks back, Fox News was running the story that “kids today are identifying as seasons instead of genders”. I suspected that by “kids today” they meant “one particular person on the Internet”, but in fact it was even worse than that; the one person on the Internet they had used as an example hadn’t actually said what Fox claimed they said.

What they actually said was far more nuanced: It was basically that their fluid gender expression varied based on what kind of clothes they wear, which, naturally, varies with the seasons. So they end up feeling more masculine at certain times of year when they like to wear masculine clothing. Honestly, this would be pretty boring stuff if conservatives hadn’t blown it out of proportion.

But after thinking about it for awhile, I decided that I don’t even care if kids want to identify as seasons.

It seems silly. I don’t understand why you’d want to do it. It would probably always feel weird to me. (And what pronouns do you even use for someone who identifies as “summer”?)

But ultimately, it seems completely, utterly harmless. So if there are in fact kids—or adults—out there who really feel that they want to identify their gender with a season, I’m here to tell you now:

Go right ahead and do that.

It’s really astonishing just what upsets conservatives in this world. Poverty? No big deal. Climate change? Probably a hoax or something. War? That’s just how it goes. But kids with weird genders!? The horror! The horror!

I think the reasoning here goes something like this:

Civilization is built upon social constructions.
Social constructions rely upon consensus behavior.
Consensus behavior relies upon shared norms.
Challenging any shared norms challenges all shared norms.
Challenging any norm will cause it to collapse.
Challenging gender norms is challenging a shared norm.
Therefore, challenging gender norms will cause civilization to collapse.

Premises 1 through 3 are true, though I suspect that phrases like “social construction” would actually not sit well with most conservatives. (Part of their whole shtick seems to be that if you simply admit that money, government, and national identity are socially constructed, that in itself will cause them to immediately and irretrievably collapse. Nevermind that I can tell you money is made up all day long, and you’ll still be able to spend it.)

Premise 6 is also true, indeed, nearly tautological.

And, indeed, the argument is valid; the conclusion would follow from the premises.

So of course we come to the two premises that aren’t valid.

Premise 4 is wrong because you can challenge some norms but not others. I have yet to see anyone seriously challenge the norm against murder, for example. Nor does it even seem especially popular to challenge the norm in favor of democratic voting. But those are the kind of norms that actually sustain our civilization—not gender!

And premise 5 is even worse: A norm that can’t withstand even the slightest challenge is a norm that’s too weak to rely upon in the first place. If our civilization is to be strong and robust, it must allow its norms to be challenged, and those norms must be able to sustain themselves against the challenge. And indeed, if someone were to challenge the norm against murder or the norm in favor of democratic voting, there are plenty of things I could say to reply to that challenge. These norms aren’t arbitrary. They are strong because we can defend them.

What about gender norms? How defensible are they?

Well, uh… not very, it turns out.

The existence of sexes is defensible. Humans are sexually dimorphic, and the vast majority of humans can be readily classified as either male or female. Yes, there are exceptions even to that, and those people count too. But it’s a pretty useful and accurate heuristic to divide our species into two sexes.

But gender norms are so much more than this. We don’t simply recognize that some people have penises and others have vaginas. We attach all sorts of social and behavioral requirements to people based on their bodies, many of which are utterly arbitrary and culturally dependent. (Not all, to be fair: The stereotype that men are stronger than women is itself a very useful and accurate heuristic.)

Worse, we don’t merely assign stereotypes to predict behavior—which might sometimes be useful. We assign norms to control behavior. We tell people who deviate from those norms that they are bad. We abuse them, discriminate against them, ostracize them from society. This is really weird.

And for what?

What benefit do gender norms have?

I can see how norms against murder and in favor of democracy sustain our civilization. I’m just not seeing how norms against using she/her pronouns when you have a penis provide similar support.

It’s true, most human societies throughout history have had strict gender norms, so maybe that’s some sort of evidence in their favor… but how about we at least try not having them for awhile? Or just relax them here and there, a little at a time, see how it goes? If indeed it seems to result in some sort of disaster, we’ll stop doing it. But I don’t see how it could—and so far, it hasn’t.

I think maybe the problem here is that conservatives don’t understand how to evaluate norms, or perhaps even that norms can be evaluated. To them, a rule is a rule, and you never challenge the rules, because if there were no rules, there would be chaos and destruction.

But challenging some rules—or even all rules—doesn’t mean having no rules! It means checking to make sure our rules are good rules, and if they aren’t, changing them so they are.

And since I see no particular reason why having two genders is an especially good rule, go ahead, make up some more if you want.

Go ahead and identify if a season, if you really want to.

Medical progress, at least, is real

2024-05-262024-05-19 PNRJ core principles, development economics, futurism, personal acupuncture, alternative medicine, artificial intelligence, chiropractic, climate change, growth, healthcare, history, homeopathy, infant mortality, medicine, migraine, naturopathy, progress, transcranial magnetic stimulation

May 26 JDN 2460457

The following vignettes are about me.

Well, one of them is about me as I actually am. The others are about the person I would have been, if someone very much like me, with the same medical conditions, had been born in a particular place and time. Someone in these times and places probably had actual experiences like this, though of course we’ll never know who they were.

976 BC, the hilled lands near the mouth of the river:

Since I was fourteen years old, I have woken up almost every day in pain. Often it is mild, but occasionally it is severe. It often seems to be worse when I encounter certain plants, or if I awaken too early, or if I exert myself too much, or if a storm is coming. No one knows why. The healers have tried every herb and tincture imaginable in their efforts to cure me, but nothing has worked. The priests believe it is a curse from the gods, but at least they appreciate my ability to sometimes predict storms. I am lucky to even remain alive, as I am of little use to the tribe. I will most likely remain this way the rest of my life.

24 AD, Rome:

Since I was fourteen years old, I have woken up almost every day in pain. Often it is mild, but occasionally it is severe. It often seems to be worse when I encounter certain plants, or if I awaken too early, or if I exert myself too much, or if a storm is coming. No one knows why. The healers have tried every herb and tincture imaginable in their efforts to cure me, but nothing has worked. The priests believe it is a curse from the gods, but at least they appreciate my ability to sometimes predict storms. I am lucky that my family was rich enough to teach me reading and mathematics, as I would be of little use for farm work, but can at least be somewhat productive as a scribe and a tutor. I will most likely remain this way the rest of my life.

1024 AD, England:

Since I was fourteen years old, I have woken up almost every day in pain. Often it is mild, but occasionally it is severe. It often seems to be worse when I encounter certain plants, or if I awaken too early, or if I exert myself too much, or if a storm is coming. No one knows why. The healers have tried every herb and tincture imaginable in their efforts to cure me, but nothing has worked. The priests believe it is a curse imposed upon me by some witchcraft, but at least they appreciate my ability to sometimes predict storms. I am lucky that my family was rich enough to teach me reading and mathematics, as I would be of little use for farm work, but can at least be somewhat productive as a scribe and a tutor. I will most likely remain this way the rest of my life.

2024 AD, Michigan:

Since I was fourteen years old, I have woken up almost every day in pain. Often it is mild, but occasionally it is severe. It often seems to be worse when I encounter certain pollens, fragrances, or chemicals, or if I awaken too early, or if I exert myself too much, or when the air pressure changes before a storm. Brain scans detected no gross abnormalities. I have been diagnosed with chronic migraine, but this is more a description of my symptoms than an explanation. I have tried over a dozen different preventative medications; most of them didn’t work at all, some of them worked but gave me intolerable side effects. (One didn’t work at all and put me in the hospital with a severe allergic reaction.) I’ve been more successful with acute medications, which at least work as advertised, but I have to ration them carefully to avoid rebound effects. And the most effective acute medication is a subcutaneous injection that makes me extremely nauseated unless I also take powerful anti-emetics along with it. I have had the most success with botulinum toxin injections, so I will be going back to that soon; but I am also looking into transcranial magnetic stimulation. Currently my condition is severe enough that I can’t return to full-time work, but I am hopeful that with future treatment I will be able to someday. For now, I can at least work as a writer and a tutor. Hopefully things get better soon.

3024 AD, Aegir 7, Ran System:

For a few months when I was fourteen years old, I woke up nearly every day in pain. Often it was mild, but occasionally it was severe. It often seemed to be worse when I encountered certain pollens, fragrances or chemicals, or if I awakened too early, or if I exerted myself too much, or when the air pressure changed before a storm. Brain scans detected no gross abnormalities, only subtle misfiring patterns. Genetic analysis confirmed I had chronic migraine type IVb, and treatment commenced immediately. Acute medications suppressed the pain while I underwent gene therapy and deep-effect transcranial magnetic stimulation. After three months of treatment, I was cured. That was an awful few months, but it’s twenty years behind me now. I can scarcely imagine how it might have impaired my life if it had gone on that whole time.

What is the moral of this story?

Medical progress is real.

Many people often doubt that society has made real progress. And in a lot of ways, maybe it hasn’t. Human nature is still the same, and so many of the problems we suffer have remained the same.

Economically, of course we have had tremendous growth in productivity and output, but it doesn’t really seem to have made us much happier. We have all this stuff, but we’re still struggling and miserable as a handful at the top become spectacularly, disgustingly rich.

Social progress seems to have gone better: Institutions have improved, more of the world is democratic than ever before, and women and minorities are better represented and better protected from oppression. Rates of violence have declined to some of their lowest levels in history. But even then, it’s pretty clear that we have a long, long way to go.

But medical progress is undeniable. We live longer, healthier lives than at any other point in history. Our infant and child mortality rates have plummeted. Even chronic conditions that seem intractable today (such as my chronic migraines) still show signs of progress; in a few generations they should be cured—in surely far less than the thousand years I’ve considered here.

Like most measures of progress, this change wasn’t slow and gradual over thousands of years; it happened remarkably suddenly. Humans went almost 200,000 years without any detectable progress in medicine, using basically the same herbs and tinctures (and a variety of localized and ever-changing superstitions) the entire time. Some of it worked (the herbs and tinctures, at least), but mostly it didn’t. Then, starting around the 18^th century, as the Enlightenment took hold and Industrial Revolution ramped up, everything began to change.

We began to test our medicine and see if it actually worked. (Yes, amazingly, somehow, nobody had actually ever thought to do that before—not in anything resembling a scientific way.) And when we learned that most of it didn’t, we began to develop new methods, and see if those worked; and when they didn’t either, we tried new things instead—until, finally, eventually, we actually found medicines that actually did something, medicines worthy of the name. Our understanding of anatomy and biology greatly improved as well, allowing us to make better predictions about the effects our medicines would have. And after a few hundred years of that—a few hundred, out of two hundred thousand years of our species—we actually reached the point where most medicine is effective and a variety of health conditions are simply curable or preventable, including diseases like malaria and polio that had once literally plagued us.

Scientific medicine brought humanity into a whole new era of existence.

I could have set the first vignette 10,000 years ago without changing it. But the final vignette I could probably have set only 200 years from now. I’m actually assuming remarkable stagnation by putting it in the 31^st century; but presumably technological advancement will slow at one point, perhaps after we’ve more or less run out of difficult challenges to resolve. (Then again, for all I know, maybe my 31^st century counterpart will be an emulated consciousness, and his chronic pain will be resolved in 17.482 seconds by a code update.)

Indeed, the really crazy thing about all this is that there are still millions of people who don’t believe in scientific medicine, who want to use “homeopathy” or “naturopathy” or “acupuncture” or “chiropractic” or whatever else—who basically want to go back to those same old herbs and tinctures that maybe sometimes kinda worked but probably not and nobody really knows. (I have a cousin who is a chiropractor. I try to be polite about it, but….) They point out the various ways that scientific medicine has failed—and believe me, I am painfully aware of those failures—but then where the obvious solution is to improve scientific medicine, they instead want to turn the whole ship around, and go back to what we had before, which was obviously a million times worse.

And don’t tell me it’s harmless: One, it’s a completewaste of resources that could instead have been used for actual scientific medicine. (9% of all out-of-pocket spending on healthcare in the US is on “alternative medicine”—which is to say, on pointless nonsense.) Two, when you have a chronic illness and people keep shoving nonsense treatments in your face, you start to feel blamed for your condition: “Why haven’t you tried [other incredibly stupid idea that obviously won’t work]? You’re so closed-minded! Maybe your illness isn’t really that bad, or you’d be more desperate!” If “alternative medicine” didn’t exist, maybe these people could help me cope with the challenges of living with a chronic illness, or even just sympathize with me, instead of constantly shoving stupid nonsense in my face.

Not everything about the future looks bright.

In particular, I am pessimistic about the near-term future of artificial intelligence, which I think will cause a lot more problems than it solves and does have a small—but not negligible—risk of causing a global catastrophe.

I’m also not very optimistic about climate change; I don’t think it will wipe out our civilization or anything so catastrophic, but I do think it’s going to kill millions of people and we’ve done too little, too late to prevent that. We’re now doing about what we should have been doing in the 1980s.

But I am optimistic about scientific medicine. Every day, new discoveries are made. Every day, new treatments are invented. Yes, there is a lot we haven’t figured out how to cure yet; but people are working on it.

And maybe they could do it faster if we stopped wasting time on stuff that obviously won’t work.

Are eliminativists zombies?

2024-05-192024-05-12 PNRJ cognitive science Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, body, brain, consciousness, dualism, eliminativism, eliminitavist, Hard Problem, idealism, mind, monism, zombie

May 19 JDN 2460450

There are lots of little variations, but basically all views on the philosophy of mind boil down to four possibilities:

Dualism: Mind and body are two separate types of thing
Monism: Mind and body are the same type of thing
Idealism: Only mind exists; body isn’t real
Eliminativism: Only body exists; mind isn’t real

Like most philosophers and cognitive scientists, I am a die-hard monist, specifically a physicalist: The mind and the body are the same type of thing. Indeed, they are parts of the same physical system.

I call it the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, which so many fail to understand at their own peril:

You are your brain.

You are not a product of your brain; you are not an illusion created by your brain; you are not connected to your brain. You are your brain. Your consciousness is generated by the activity of your brain.

Understanding how this works is beyond current human knowledge. I ask only that you understand that it works. Treat it as a brute fact of the universe if you must.

But precisely because understanding this mechanism is so difficult it has been aptly dubbed The Hard Problem, I am at least somewhat sympathetic to dualists, who say that the reason we can’t understand how the mind and brain are the same is that they aren’t, that there is some extra thing, the soul, which somehow makes consciousness and isn’t made of any material substance.

(If you want to get into the weeds a bit more, there are also “property dualists”, who try to bridge the gap between dualism and physicalism, but I think they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. So-called “predicate dualism” is really just physicalism; nobody says that tables or hurricanes are non-physical just because they are multiply-realizable.)

The problem, of course, is that dualism doesn’t actually explain anything. In fact, it adds a bunch of other mysteries that would then need to be explained, because there are clear, direct ways that consciousness interacts with physical matter. Affecting the body affects the mind, and vice-versa.

You don’t need anything as exotic as fMRI or brain injury studies to understand this. All you need to do is take a drug. In fact, all you need to do is get hungry and eat food. Eating food—obviously a physical process—makes you no longer hungry—a change in your conscious state. And the reason you ate food in the first place was because you were hungry—your mental state intervened on your bodily action.

The fact that mind and body are deeply connected is therefore an obvious fact, which should have been apparent to anyone throughout history. It doesn’t require any kind of deep scientific knowledge; all you have to do is pay close enough attention to your ordinary life.

But I can at least understand the temptation to be a dualist. Consciousness is weird and mysterious. It’s tempting to posit some whole new class of substance beyond anything we know in order to explain it.

Then there’s idealism, which theoretically, in principle, could be true—it’s just absurdly, vanishingly unlikely. Technically, all that I experience, qua experience, happens in my mind. So I can’t completely rule out the possibility that everything I think of as physical reality is actually just an illusion, and only my mind exists. It’s just that, well… the whole of my experience points pretty strongly to this not being the case. At the very least, it’s utterly impractical to live your life according to such a remote possibility.

That leaves eliminativism. And this, I confess, is the one I really don’t get.

Idealism, I can’t technically rule out; dualism, I understand the temptation; monism is in fact the truth. But eliminativism? I just can’t grok how anyone can actually believe it.

Then again, I think they sort of admit that.

The weirdest thing about eliminativism is that what they are actually saying is that things like beliefs and knowledge and feelings don’t actually exist.

If you ask an eliminativist if they believe eliminativism is true, they should answer “no”: because their assertion is precisely that nobody believes anything at all.

The more sophisticated eliminativists say that these “folk terms” are rough approximations to deeper concepts that cognitive science will someday understand. That’s not so ridiculous, but it still seems pretty bizarre to me to say that iron doesn’t exist because we now understand that an iron atom has precisely 26 protons. Perhaps indeed we will understand the mechanisms underlying beliefs better than we do now; but why would we need to stop calling them beliefs?

But some eliminativists—particularly behaviorists—seem to think that the these “folk terms” are just stupid, unscientific notions that will be one day discarded the same way that phlogiston and elan vital were discarded. And that I absolutely cannot fathom.

Consciousness isn’t an explanation; it is what we were trying to explain.

You can’t just discardthe phenomenonyou were trying to make sense of! This isn’t giving up on phlogiston; it’s giving up on fire. This isn’t abandoning the notion of elan vital; it’s abandoning the distinction between life and death.

But the more I think about this, the more I wonder:

Maybe eliminativists are right—about themselves?

Maybe the reason they think the rest of us don’t have feelings and beliefs is that they actually don’t. They don’t understand all this talk about the inner light of consciousness, because they just don’t have it.

In other words:

Are eliminativists zombies?

No, not the shambling, “Brains! Brains!” kind of zombie; the philosophical concept of a zombie (sometimes written “p-zombie” to clarify). A zombie is a being that looks human, acts human, is externally indistinguishable from a human, yet has no internal experience. They walk and talk, but they don’t actually think. A zombie acts like us, but lacks the inner light of consciousness.

Of course, what I’d really be saying here is that they are almost indistinguishable, but you can sometimes tell them apart by their babbling about the non-existence of consciousness.

But really, almost indistinguishable makes more sense anyway; if they were literally impossible to tell apart under any conceivable test, it’s difficult to even make sense of what we mean when we say they are different. (I am certainly not the first to point this out, and indeed it’s often used as an argument against the existence of zombies.)

Do I actually think that eliminativists are zombies?

No. I don’t.

But the weird thing is that they seem to, and so I feel some compulsion to let them self-identify that way. It feels wrong to attribute beliefs to someone that they say they don’t actually hold, and eliminativists have said that they don’t hold any beliefs whatsoever.

Yet, somehow, I don’t think they’ll appreciate being called zombies, either.

How Effective Altruism hurt me

2024-05-122024-05-05 PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics, inequality, personal, public policy altruism, drowning child, effective altruism, ethics, justice, Peter Singer, poverty, QALY, utilitarianism

May 12 JDN 2460443

I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way. I still strongly believe in the core principles of Effective Altruism. Indeed, it’s shockingly hard to deny them, because basically they come out to this:

Doing more good is better than doing less good.

Then again, most people want to do good. Basically everyone agrees that more good is better than less good. So what’s the big deal about Effective Altruism?

Well, in practice, most people put shockingly little effort into trying to ensure that they are doing the most good they can. A lot of people just try to be nice people, without ever concerning themselves with the bigger picture. Many of these people don’t give to charity at all.

Then, even among people who do give to charity, typically give to charities more or less at random—or worse, in proportion to how much mail those charities send them begging for donations. (Surely you can see how that is a perverse incentive?) They donate to religious organizations, which sometimes do good things, but fundamentally are founded upon ignorance, patriarchy, and lies.

Effective Altruism is a movement intended to fix this, to get people to see the bigger picture and focus their efforts on where they will do the most good. Vet charities not just for their honesty, but also their efficiency and cost-effectiveness:

Just how many mQALY can you buy with that $1?

That part I still believe in. There is a lot of value in assessing which charities are the most effective, and trying to get more people to donate to those high-impact charities.

But there is another side to Effective Altruism, which I now realize has severely damaged my mental health.

That is the sense of obligation to give as much as you possibly can.

Peter Singer is the most extreme example of this. He seems to have mellowed—a little—in more recent years, but in some of his most famous books he uses the following thought experiment:

To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.

I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do.

Basically everyone agrees with this particular decision: Even if you are wearing a very expensive suit that will be ruined, even if you’ll miss something really important like a job interview or even a wedding—most people agree that if you ever come across a drowning child, you should save them.

(Oddly enough, when contemplating this scenario, nobody ever seems to consider the advice that most lifeguards give, which is to throw a life preserver and then go find someone qualified to save the child—because saving someone who is drowning is a lot harder and a lot riskier than most people realize. (“Reach or throw, don’t go.”) But that’s a bit beside the point.)

But Singer argues that we are basically in this position all the time. For somewhere between $500 and $3000, you—yes, you—could donate to a high-impact charity, and thereby save a child’s life.

Does it matter that many other people are better positioned to donate than you are? Does it matter that the child is thousands of miles away and you’ll never see them? Does it matter that there are actually millions of children, and you could never save them all by yourself? Does it matter that you’ll only save a child in expectation, rather than saving some specific child with certainty?

Singer says that none of this matters. For a long time, I believed him.

Now, I don’t.

For, if you actually walked by a drowning child that you could save, only at the cost of missing a wedding and ruining your tuxedo, you clearly should do that. (If it would risk your life, maybe not—and as I alluded to earlier, that’s more likely than you might imagine.) If you wouldn’t, there’s something wrong with you. You’re a bad person.

But most people don’t donate everything they could to high-impact charities. Even Peter Singer himself doesn’t. So if donating is the same as saving the drowning child, it follows that we are all bad people.

(Note: In general, if an ethical theory results in the conclusion that the whole of humanity is evil, there is probably something wrong with that ethical theory.)

Singer has tried to get out of this by saying we shouldn’t “sacrifice things of comparable importance”, and then somehow cash out what “comparable importance” means in such a way that it doesn’t require you to live on the street and eat scraps from trash cans. (Even though the people you’d be donating to largely do live that way.)

I’m not sure that really works, but okay, let’s say it does. Even so, it’s pretty clear that anything you spend money on purely for enjoyment would have to go. You would never eat out at restaurants, unless you could show that the time saved allowed you to get more work done and therefore donate more. You would never go to movies or buy video games, unless you could show that it was absolutely necessary for your own mental functioning. Your life would be work, work, work, then donate, donate, donate, and then do the absolute bare minimum to recover from working and donating so you can work and donate some more.

You would enslave yourself.

And all the while, you’d believe that you were never doing enough, you were never good enough, you are always a terrible person because you try to cling to any personal joy in your own life rather than giving, giving, giving all you have.

I now realize that Effective Altruism, as a movement, had been basically telling me to do that. And I’d been listening.

I now realize that Effective Altruism has given me this voice in my head, which I hear whenever I want to apply for a job or submit work for publication:

If you try, you will probably fail. And if you fail, a child will die.

The “if you try, you will probably fail” is just an objective fact. It’s inescapable. Any given job application or writing submission will probably fail.

Yes, maybe there’s some sort of bundling we could do to reframe that, as I discussed in an earlier post. But basically, this is correct, and I need to accept it.

Now, what about the second part? “If you fail, a child will die.” To most of you, that probably sounds crazy. And it is crazy. It’s way more pressure than any ordinary person should have in their daily life. This kind of pressure should be reserved for neurosurgeons and bomb squads.

But this is essentially what Effective Altruism taught me to believe. It taught me that every few thousand dollars I don’t donate is a child I am allowing to die. And since I can’t donate what I don’t have, it follows that every few thousand dollars I fail to get is another dead child.

And since Effective Altruism is so laser-focused on results above all else, it taught me that it really doesn’t matter whether I apply for the job and don’t get it, or never apply at all; the outcome is the same, and that outcome is that children suffer and die because I had no money to save them.

I think part of the problem here is that Effective Altruism is utilitarian through and through, and utilitarianism has very little place for good enough. There is better and there is worse; but there is no threshold at which you can say that your moral obligations are discharged and you are free to live your life as you wish. There is always more good that you could do, and therefore always more that you should do.

Do we really want to live in a world where to be a good person is to owe your whole life to others?

I do not believe in absolute selfishness. I believe that we owe something to other people. But I no longer believe that we owe everything. Sacrificing my own well-being at the altar of altruism has been incredibly destructive to my mental health, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

By all means, give to high-impact charities. But give a moderate amount—at most, tithe—and then go live your life. You don’t owe the world more than that.

Of men and bears

2024-05-052024-04-27 PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, personal, politics, tribal paradigm bear, crime, danger, fear, feminism, homicide, homicie, murder, psychopath, psychopathy, rape, risk, sexism, violence

May 5 JDN 2460436

[CW: rape, violence, crime, homicide]

I think it started on TikTok, but I’m too old for TikTok, so I first saw it on Facebook and Twitter.

Men and women were asked:
“Would you rather be alone in the woods with a man, or a bear?”

Answers seem to have been pretty mixed. Some women still thought a man was a safer choice, but a significant number chose the bear.

Then when the question was changed to a woman, almost everyone chose the woman over the bear.

What can we learn from this?

I think the biggest thing it tells us is that a lot of women are afraid of men. If you are seriously considering the wild animal over the other human being, you’re clearly afraid.

A lot of the discourse on this seems to be assuming that they are right to be afraid, but I’m not so sure.

It’s not that the fear is unfounded: Most women will suffer some sort of harassment, and a sizeable fraction will suffer some sort of physical or sexual assault, at the hands of some men at some point in their lives.

But there is a cost to fear, and I don’t think we’re taking it properly into account here. I’m worried that encouraging women to fear men will only serve to damage relationships between men and women, the vast majority of which are healthy and positive. I’m worried that this fear is really the sort of overreaction to trauma that ends up causing its own kind of harm.

If you think that’s wrong, consider this:

A sizeable fraction of men will be physically assaulted by other men.

Should men fear each other?

Should all men fear all other men?

What does it do to a society when its whole population fears half of its population? Does that sound healthy? Does whatever small increment in security that might provide seem worth it?

Keep in mind that women being afraid of men doesn’t seem to be protecting them from harm right now. So even if there is genuine harm to be feared, the harm of that fear is actually a lot more obvious than the benefit of it. Our entire society becomes fearful and distrustful, and we aren’t actually any safer.

I’m worried that this is like our fear of terrorism, which made us sacrifice our civil liberties without ever clearly making us safer. What are women giving up due to their fear of men? Is it actually protecting them?

If you have any ideas for how we might actually make women safer, let’s hear them. But please, stop saying idiotic things like “Don’t be a rapist.” 95% of men already aren’t, and the 5% who are, are not going to listen to anything you—or I—say to them. (Bystander intervention programs can work. But just telling men to not be rapists does not.)

I’m all for teaching about consent, but it really isn’t that hard to do—and most rapists seem to understand it just fine, they just don’t care. They’ll happily answer on a survey that they “had sex with someone without their consent”. By all means, undermine rape myths; just don’t expect it to dramatically reduce the rate of rape.

I absolutely want to make people safer. But telling people to be afraid of people like me doesn’t actually seem to accomplish that.

And yes, it hurts when people are afraid of you.

This is not a small harm. This is not a minor trifle. Once we are old enough to be seen as “men” rather than “boys” (which seems to happen faster if you’re Black than if you’re White), men know that other people—men and women, but especially women—will fear us. We go through our whole lives having to be careful what we say, how we move, when we touch someone else, because we are shaped like rapists.

When my mother encounters a child, she immediately walks up to the child and starts talking to them, pointing, laughing, giggling. I can’t do that. If I tried to do the exact same thing, I would be seen as a predator. In fact, without children of my own, it’s safer for me to just not interact with children at all, unless they are close friends or family. This is a whole class of joyful, fulfilling experience that I just don’t get to have because people who look like me commit acts of violence.

Normally we’re all about breaking down prejudice, not treating people differently based on how they look—except when it comes to gender, apparently. It’s okay to fear men but not women.

Who is responsible for this?

Well, obviously the ones most responsible are actual rapists.

But they aren’t very likely to listen to me. If I know any rapists, I don’t know that they are rapists. If I did know, I would want them imprisoned. (Which is likely why they wouldn’t tell me if they were.)

Moreover, my odds of actually knowing a rapist are probably lower than you think, because I don’t like to spend time with men who are selfish, cruel, aggressive, misogynist, or hyper-masculine. The fact that 5% of men in general are rapists doesn’t mean that 5% of any non-random sample of men are rapists. I can only think of a few men I have ever known personally who I would even seriously suspect, and I’ve cut ties with all of them.

The fact that psychopaths are not slavering beasts, obviously different from the rest of us, does not mean that there is no way to tell who is a psychopath. It just means that you need to know what you’re actually looking for. When I once saw a glimmer of joy in someone’s eyes as he described the suffering of animals in an experiment, I knew in that moment he was a psychopath. (There are legitimate reasons to harm animals in scientific experiments—but a good person does not enjoy it.) He did not check most of the boxes of the “Slavering Beast theory”: He had many friends; he wasn’t consistently violent; he was a very good liar; he was quite accomplished in life; he was handsome and charismatic. But go through an actual psychopathy checklist, and you realize that every one of these features makes psychopathy more likely, not less.

I’m not even saying it’s easy to detect psychopaths. It’s not. Even experts need to look very closely and carefully, because psychopaths are often very good at hiding. But there are differences. And it really is true that the selfish, cruel, aggressive, misogynist, hyper-masculine men are more likely to be rapists than the generous, kind, gentle, feminist, androgynous men. It’s not a guarantee—there are lots of misogynists who aren’t rapists, and there are men who present as feminists in public but are rapists in private. But it is a tendency nevertheless. You don’t need to treat every man as equally dangerous, and I don’t think it’s healthy to do so.

Indeed, if I had the choice to be alone in the woods with either a gay male feminist or a woman I knew was cruel to animals, I’d definitely choose the man. These differences matter.

And maybe, just maybe, if we could tamp down this fear a little bit, men and women could have healthier interactions with one another and build stronger relationships. Even if the fear is justified, it could still be doing more harm than good.

So are you safer with a man, or a bear?

Let’s go back to the original thought experiment, and consider the actual odds of being attacked. Yes, the number of people actually attacked by bears is far smaller than the number of people actually attacked by men. (It’s also smaller than the number of people attacked by women, by the way.)

This is obviously because we are constantly surrounded by people, and rarely interact with bears.

In other words, that fact alone basically tells us nothing. It could still be true even if bears are far more dangerous than men, because people interact with bears far less often.

The real question is “How likely is an attack, given that you’re alone in the woods with one?”

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any useful statistics on this. There area lot of vague statements like “Bears don’t usually attack humans” or “Bears only attack when startled or protecting their young”; okay. But how often is “usually”? How often are bears startled? What proportion of bears you might encounter are protecting their young?

So this is really a stab in the dark; but do you think it’s perhaps fair to say that maybe 10% of bear-human close encounters result in an attack?

That doesn’t seem like an unreasonably high number, at least. 90% not attacking sounds like “usually”. Being startled or protecting their young don’t seem like events much rarer than 10%. This estimate could certainly be wrong (and I’m sure it’s not precise), but it seems like the right order of magnitude.

So I’m going to take that as my estimate:

If you are alone in the woods with a bear, you have about a 10% chance of being attacked.

Now, what is the probability that a randomly-selected man would attack you, if you were alone in the woods with him?

This one can be much better estimated. It is roughly equal to the proportion of men who are psychopaths.

Now, figures on this vary too, partly because psychopathy comes in degrees. But at the low end we have about 1.2% of men and 0.3% of women who are really full-blown psychopaths, and at the high end we have about 10% of men and 2% of women who exhibit significant psychopathic traits.

I’d like to note two things about these figures:

It still seems like the man is probably safer than the bear.
Men are only about four or five times as likely to be psychopaths as women.

Admittedly, my bear estimate is very imprecise; so if, say, only 5% of bear encounters result in attacks and 10% of men would attack if you were alone in the woods, men could be more dangerous. But I think it’s unlikely. I’m pretty sure bears are more dangerous.

But the really interesting thing is that people who seemed ambivalent about man versus bear, or even were quite happy to choose the bear, seem quite consistent in choosing women over bears. And I’m not sure the gender difference is really large enough to justify that.

If 1.2% to 10% of men are enough for us to fear all men, why aren’t 0.3% to 2% of women enough for us to fear all women? Is there a threshold at 1% or 5% that flips us from “safe” to “dangerous”?

But aren’t men responsible for most violence, especially sexual violence?

Yes, but probably not by as much as you think.

The vast majority of rapesare committed by men, and most of those are against women. But the figures may not be as lopsided as you imagine; in a given year, about 0.3% of women are raped by a man, and about 0.1% of men are raped by a woman. Over their lifetimes, about 25% of women will be sexually assaulted, and about 5% of men will be. Rapes of men by women have gone even more under-reported than rapes in general, in part because it was only recently that being forced to penetrate someone was counted as a sexual assault—even though it very obviously is.

So men are about 5 times as likely to commit rape as women. That’s a big difference, but I bet it’s a lot smaller than what many of you believed. There are statistics going around that claim that as many as 99% of rapes are committed by men; those statistics are ignoring the “forced to penetrate” assaults, and thus basically defining rape of men by women out of existence.

Indeed, 5 to 1 is quite close to the ratio in psychopathy.

I think that’s no coincidence: In fact, I think it’s largely the case that the psychopaths and the rapists are the same people.

What about homicide?

While men are indeed much more likely to be perpetrators of homicide, they are also much more likely to be victims.

Of about 23,000 homicide offenders in 2022, 15,100 were known to be men, 2,100 were known to be women, and 5,800 were unknown (because we never caught them). Assuming that women are no more or less likely to be caught than men, we can ignore the unknown, and presume that the same gender ratio holds across all homicides: 12% are committed by women.

Of about 22,000 homicides in the US last year, 17,700 victims were men. 3,900 victims were women. So men are 4.5 times as likely to be murdered than women in the US. Similar ratios hold in most First World countries (though total numbers are lower).

Overall, this means that men are about 7 times as likely to commit murder, but about 4.5 times as likely to suffer it.

So if we measure by rate of full-blown psychopathy, men are about 4 times as dangerous as women. If we measure by rate of moderate psychopathy, men are about 5 times as dangerous. If we measure by rate of rape, men are about 5 times as dangerous. And if we measure by rate of homicide, men are about 7 times as dangerous—but mainly to each other.

Put all this together, and I think it’s fair to summarize these results as:

Men are about five times as dangerous as women.

That’s not a small difference. But it’s also not an astronomical one. If you are right to be afraid of all men because they could rape or murder you, why are you not also right to be afraid of all women, who are one-fifth as likely to do the same?

Should we all fear everyone?

Surely you can see that isn’t a healthy way for a society to operate. Yes, there are real dangers in this world; but being constantly afraid of everyone will make you isolated, lonely, paranoid and probably depressed—and it may not even protect you.

It seems like a lot of men responding to the “man or bear” meme were honestly shocked that women are so afraid. If so, they have learned something important. Maybe that’s the value in the meme.

But the fear can be real, even justified, and still be hurting more than it’s helping. I don’t see any evidence that it’s actually making anyone any safer.

We need a better answer than fear.

Everyone includes your mother and Los Angeles

2024-04-282024-05-19 PNRJ cognitive science, computer science, core principles, current events, ethics, futurism, heuristics and biases, politics, public policy artificial general intelligence, artificial intelligence, Eliezer Yudkowsky, existential risk, Google, paperclipper, Scientific American

Apr 28 JDN 2460430

What are the chances that artificial intelligence will destroy human civilization?

A bunch of experts were surveyed on that question and similar questions, and half of respondents gave a probability of 5% or more; some gave probabilities as high as 99%.

This is incredibly bizarre.

Most AI experts are people who work in AI. They are actively participating in developing this technology. And yet more than half of them think that the technology they are working on right now has a more than 5% chance of destroying human civilization!?

It feels to me like they honestly don’t understand what they’re saying. They can’t really grasp at an intuitive level just what a 5% or 10% chance of global annihilation means—let alone a 99% chance.

If something has a 5% chance of killing everyone, we should consider that at least as bad as something that is guaranteed to kill 5% of people.

Probably worse, in fact, because you can recover from losing 5% of the population (we have, several times throughout history). But you cannot recover from losing everyone. So really, it’s like losing 5% of all future people who will ever live—which could be a very large number indeed.

But let’s be a little conservative here, and just count people who already, currently exist, and use 5% of that number.

5% of 8 billion people is 400 million people.

So anyone who is working on AI and also says that AI has a 5% chance of causing human extinction is basically saying: “In expectation, I’m supporting 20 Holocausts.”

If you really think the odds are that high, why aren’t you demanding that any work on AI be tried as a crime against humanity? Why aren’t you out there throwing Molotov cocktails at data centers?

(To be fair, Eliezer Yudkowsky is actually calling for a global ban on AI that would be enforced by military action. That’s the kind of thing you should be doing if indeed you believe the odds are that high. But most AI doomsayers don’t call for such drastic measures, and many of them even continue working in AI as if nothing is wrong.)

I think this must be scope neglect—or something even worse.

If you thought a drug had a 99% chance of killing your mother, you would never let her take the drug, and you would probably sue the company for making it.

If you thought a technology had a 99% chance of destroying Los Angeles, you would never even consider working on that technology, and you would want that technology immediately and permanently banned.

So I would like to remind anyone who says they believe the danger is this great and yet continues working in the industry:

Everyone includes your mother and Los Angeles.

If AI destroys human civilization, that means AI destroys Los Angeles. However shocked and horrified you would be if a nuclear weapon were detonated in the middle of Hollywood, you should be at least that shocked and horrified by anyone working on advancing AI, if indeed you truly believe that there is at least a 5% chance of AI destroying human civilization.

But people just don’t seem to think this way. Their minds seem to take on a totally different attitude toward “everyone” than they would take toward any particular person or even any particular city. The notion of total human annihilation is just so remote, so abstract, they can’t even be afraid of it the way they are afraid of losing their loved ones.

This despite the fact that everyone includes all your loved ones.

If a drug had a 5% chance of killing your mother, you might let her take it—but only if that drug was the best way to treat some very serious disease. Chemotherapy can be about that risky—but you don’t go on chemo unless you have cancer.

If a technology had a 5% chance of destroying Los Angeles, I’m honestly having trouble thinking of scenarios in which we would be willing to take that risk. But the closest I can come to it is the Manhattan Project. If you’re currently fighting a global war against fascist imperialists, and they are also working on making an atomic bomb, then being the first to make an atomic bomb may in fact be the best option, even if you know that it carries a serious risk of utter catastrophe.

In any case, I think one thing is clear: You don’t take that kind of serious risk unless there is some very large benefit. You don’t take chemotherapy on a whim. You don’t invent atomic bombs just out of curiosity.

Where’s the huge benefit of AI that would justify taking such a huge risk?

Some forms of automation are clearly beneficial, but so far AI per se seems to have largely made our society worse. ChatGPT lies to us. Robocalls inundate us. Deepfakes endanger journalism. What’s the upside here? It makes a ton of money for tech companies, I guess?

Now, fortunately, I think 5% is too high an estimate.

(Scientific American agrees.)

My own estimate is that, over the next two centuries, there is about a 1% chance that AI destroys human civilization, and only a 0.1% chance that it results in human extinction.

This is still really high.

People seem to have trouble with that too.

“Oh, there’s a 99.9% chance we won’t all die; everything is fine, then?” No. There are plenty of other scenarios that would also be very bad, and a total extinction scenario is so terrible that even a 0.1% chance is not something we can simply ignore.

0.1% of people is still 8 million people.

I find myself in a very odd position: On the one hand, I think the probabilities that doomsayers are giving are far too high. On the other hand, I think the actions that are being taken—even by those same doomsayers—are far too small.

Most of them don’t seem to consider a 5% chance to be worthy of drastic action, while I consider a 0.1% chance to be well worthy of it. I would support a complete ban on all AI research immediately, just from that 0.1%.

The only research we should be doing that is in any way related to AI should involve how to make AI safer—absolutely no one should be trying to make it more powerful or apply it to make money. (Yet in reality, almost the opposite is the case.)

Because 8 million people is still a lot of people.

Is it fair to treat a 0.1% chance of killing everyone as equivalent to killing 0.1% of people?

Well, first of all, we have to consider the uncertainty. The difference between a 0.05% chance and a 0.015% chance is millions of people, but there’s probably no way we can actually measure it that precisely.

But it seems to me that something expected to kill between 4 million and 12 million people would still generally be considered very bad.

More importantly, there’s also a chance that AI will save people, or have similarly large benefits. We need to factor that in as well. Something that will kill 4-12 million people but also save 15-30 million people is probably still worth doing (but we should also be trying to find ways to minimize the harm and maximize the benefit).

The biggest problem is that we are deeply uncertain about both the upsides and the downsides. There are a vast number of possible outcomes from inventing AI. Many of those outcomes are relatively mundane; some are moderately good, others are moderately bad. But the moral question seems to be dominated by the big outcomes: With some small but non-negligible probability, AI could lead to either a utopian future or an utter disaster.

The way we are leaping directly into applying AI without even being anywhere close to understanding AI seems to me especially likely to lean toward disaster. No other technology has ever become so immediately widespread while also being so poorly understood.

So far, I’ve yet to see any convincing arguments that the benefits of AI are anywhere near large enough to justify this kind of existential risk. In the near term, AI really only promises economic disruption that will largely be harmful. Maybe one day AI could lead us into a glorious utopia of automated luxury communism, but we really have no way of knowing that will happen—and it seems pretty clear that Google is not going to do that.

Artificial intelligence technology is moving too fast. Even if it doesn’t become powerful enough to threaten our survival for another 50 years (which I suspect it won’t), if we continue on our current path of “make money now, ask questions never”, it’s still not clear that we would actually understand it well enough to protect ourselves by then—and in the meantime it is already causing us significant harm for little apparent benefit.

Why are we even doing this? Why does halting AI research feel like stopping a freight train?

I dare say it’s because we have handed over so much power to corporations.

The paperclippers are already here.

Surviving in an ad-supported world

2024-04-212024-04-14 PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, public policy ads, advertising, capitalism, charity, Internet, marketing, sales, scam, shopping

Apr 21 JDN 2460423

Advertising is as old as money—perhaps even older. Scams have likewise been a part of human society since time immemorial.

But I think it’s fair to say that recently, since the dawn of the Internet at least, both advertising and scams have been proliferating, far beyond what they used to be.

We live in an ad-supported world.

News sites are full of ads. Search engines are full of ads. Even shopping sites are full of ads now; we literally came here planning to buy something, but that wasn’t good enough for you; you want us to also buy something else. Most of the ads are for legitimate products; but some are for scams. (And then there’s multi-level marketing, which is somewhere in between: technically not a scam.)

We’re so accustomed to getting spam emails, phone calls, and texts full of ads and scams that we just accept it as a part of our lives. But these are not something people had to live with even 50 years ago. This is a new, fresh Hell we have wrought for ourselves as a civilization.

AI promises to make this problem even worse. AI still isn’t very good at doing anything particularly useful; you can’t actually trust it to drive a truck or diagnose an X-ray. (There are people working on this sort of thing, but they haven’t yet succeeded.) But it’s already pretty good at making spam texts and phone calls. It’s already pretty good at catfishing people. AI isn’t smart enough to really help us, but it is smart enough to hurt us, especially those of us who are most vulnerable.

I think that this causes a great deal more damage to our society than is commonly understood.

It’s not just that ads are annoying (though they are), or that they undermine our attention span (though they do), or that they exploit the vulnerable (though they do).

I believe that an ad-supported world is a world where trust goes to die.

When the vast majority of your interactions with other people involve those people trying to get your money, some of them by outright fraud—but none of them really honestly—you have no choice but to ratchet down your sense of trust. It begins to feel as this financial transactions are the only form of interaction there is in the world.

But in fact most people can be trusted, and should be trusted—you are missing out on a great deal of what makes life worth living if you do not know how to trust.

The question is whom you trust. You should trust people you know, people you interact with personally and directly. Even strangers are more trustworthy than any corporation will ever be. And never are corporations more dishonest than when they are sending out ads.

The more the world fills with ads, the less room it has for trust.

Is there any way to stem this tide? Or are we simply doomed to live in the cyberpunk dystopia our forebears warned about, where everything is for sale and all available real estate is used for advertising?

Ads and scams only exist because they are profitable; so our goal should be to make them no longer profitable.

Here is one very simple piece of financial advice that will help protect you. Indeed, I believe it can protect so well, that if everyone followed it consistently, we would stem the tide.

Only give money to people you have sought out yourself.

Only buy things you already knew you wanted.

Yes, of course you must buy things. We live in a capitalist society. You can’t survive without buying things. But this is how buying things should work:

You check your fridge and see you are out of milk. So you put “milk” on your grocery list, you go to the grocery store, you find some milk that looks good, and you buy it.

Or, your car is getting old and expensive to maintain, and you decide you need a new one. You run the numbers on your income and expenses, and come up with a budget for a new car. You go to the dealership, they help you pick out a car that fits your needs and your budget, and you buy it.

Your tennis shoes are getting frayed, and it’s time to replace them. You go online and search for “tennis shoes”, looking up sizes and styles until you find a pair that suits you. You order that pair.

You should be the one to decide that you need a thing, and then you should go out looking for it.

It’s okay to get help searching, or even listen to some sales pitches, as long as the whole thing was your idea from the start.

But if someone calls you, texts you, or emails you, asking for your money for something?

Don’t give them a cent.

Just don’t. Don’t do it. Even if it sounds like a good product. Even if it is a good product. If the product they are selling sounds so great that you decide you actually want to buy it, go look for it on your own. Shop around. If you can, go out of your way to buy it from a competing company.

Your attention is valuable. Don’t reward them for stealing it.

This applies to donations, too. Donation asks aren’t as awful as ads, let alone scams, but they are pretty obnoxious, and they only send those things out because people respond to them. If we all stopped responding, they’d stop sending.

Yes, you absolutely should give money to charity. But you should seek out the charities to donate to. You should use trusted sources (like GiveWell and Charity Navigator) to vet them for their reliability, transparency, and cost-effectiveness.

If you just receive junk mail asking you for donations, feel free to take out any little gifts they gave you (it’s often return address labels, for some reason), and then recycle the rest.

Don’t give to the ones who ask for it. Give to the ones who will use it the best.

Reward the charities that do good, not the charities that advertise well.

This is the rule to follow:

If someone contacts you—if they initiate the contact—refuse to give them any money. Ever.

Does this rule seem too strict? It is quite strict, in fact. It requires you to pass up many seemingly-appealing opportunities, and the more ads there are, the more opportunities you’ll need to pass up.

There may even be a few exceptions; no great harm befalls us if we buy Girl Scout cookies or donate to the ASPCA because the former knocked on our doors and the latter showed us TV ads. (Then again, you could just donate to feminist and animal rights charities without any ads or sales pitches.)

But in general, we live in a society that is absolutely inundated with people accosting us and trying to take our money, and they’re only ever going to stop trying to get our money if we stop giving it to them. They will not stop it out of the goodness of their hearts—no, not even the charities, who at least do have some goodness in their hearts. (And certainly not the scammers, who have none.)

They will only stop if it stops working.

So we need to make it stop working. We need to draw this line.

Trust the people around you, who have earned it. Do not trust anyone who seeks you out asking for money.

Telemarketing calls? Hang up. Spam emails? Delete. Junk mail? Recycle. TV ads? Mute and ignore.

And then, perhaps, future generations won’t have to live in an ad-supported world.

How is the economy doing this well?

2024-04-142024-04-07 PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, current events, macroeconomics, politics Biden, Bidenomics, COVID, CPI, depression, FRED, Galileo, Great Depression, Great Recession, history, inflation, Phillips curve, recession, statistics, unemployment

Apr 14 JDN 2460416

We are living in a very weird time, economically. The COVID pandemic created huge disruptions throughout our economy, from retail shops closing to shortages in shipping containers. The result was a severe recession with the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.

Now, a few years later, we have fully recovered.

Here’s a graph from FRED showing our unemployment and inflation rates since 1990 [technical note: I’m using the urban CPI; there are a few other inflation measures you could use instead, but they look much the same]:

Inflation fluctuates pretty quickly, while unemployment moves much slower.

There are a lot of things we can learn from this graph:

Before COVID, we had pretty low inflation; from 1990 to 2019, inflation averaged about 2.4%, just over the Fed’s 2% target.
Before COVID, we had moderate to high unemployment; it rarely went below 5% and and for several years after the 2008 crash it was over 7%—which is why we called it the Great Recession.
The only times we actually had negative inflation—deflation—were during recessions, and coincided with high unemployment; so, no, we really don’t want prices to come down.
During COVID, we had a massive spike in unemployment up to almost 15%, but then it came back down much more rapidly than it had in the Great Recession.
After COVID, there was a surge in inflation, peaking at almost 10%.
That inflation surge was short-lived; by the end of 2022 inflation was back down to 4%.
Unemployment now stands at 3.8% while inflation is at 2.7%.

What I really want to emphasize right now is point 7, so let me repeat it:

Unemployment now stands at 3.8% while inflation is at 2.7%.

Yes, technically, 2.7% is above our inflation target. But honestly, I’m not sure it should be. I don’t see any particular reason to think that 2% is optimal, and based on what we’ve learned from the Great Recession, I actually think 3% or even 4% would be perfectly reasonable inflation targets. No, we don’t want to be going into double-digits (and we certainly don’t want true hyperinflation); but 4% inflation really isn’t a disaster, and we should stop treating it like it is.

2.7% inflation is actually pretty close to the 2.4% inflation we’d been averaging from 1990 to 2019. So I think it’s fair to say that inflation is back to normal.

But the really wild thing is that unemployment isn’t back to normal: It’s much better than that.

To get some more perspective on this, let’s extend our graph backward all the way to 1950:

Inflation has been much higher than it is now. In the late 1970s, it was consistently as high as it got during the post-COVID surge. But it has never been substantially lower than it is now; a little above the 2% target really seems to be what stable, normal inflation looks like in the United States.

On the other hand, unemployment is almost never this low. It was for a few years in the early 1950s and the late 1960s; but otherwise, it has always been higher—and sometimes much higher. It did not dip below 5% for the entire period from 1971 to 1994.

They hammer into us in our intro macroeconomics courses the Phillips Curve, which supposedly says that unemployment is inversely related to inflation, so that it’s impossible to have both low inflation and low unemployment.

But we’re looking at it, right now. It’s here, right in front of us. What wasn’t supposed to be possible has now been achieved. E pur si muove.

There was supposed to be this terrible trade-off between inflation and unemployment, leaving our government with the stark dilemma of either letting prices surge or letting millions remain out of work. I had always been on the “inflation” side: I thought that rising prices were far less of a problem than poeple out of work.

But we just learned that the entire premise was wrong.

You can have both. You don’t have to choose.

Right here, right now, we have both. All we need to do is keep doing whatever we’re doing.

One response might be: what if we can’t? What if this is unsustainable? (Then again, conservatives never seemed terribly concerned about sustainability before….)

It’s worth considering. One thing that doesn’t look so great now is the federal deficit. It got extremely high during COVID, and it’s still pretty high now. But as a proportion of GDP, it isn’t anywhere near as high as it was during WW2, and we certainly made it through that all right:

So, yeah, we should probably see if we can bring the budget back to balanced—probably by raising taxes. But this isn’t an urgent problem. We have time to sort it out. 15% unemployment was an urgent problem—and we fixed it.

In fact in some ways the economy is even doing better now than it looks. Unemployment for Black people has never been this low, since we’ve been keeping track of it:

Black people had basically learned to live with 8% or 9% unemployment as if it were normal; but now, for the first time ever—ever—their unemployment rate is down to only 5%.

This isn’t because people are dropping out of the labor force. Broad unemployment, which includes people marginally attached to the labor force, people employed part-time not by choice, and people who gave up looking for work, is also at historic lows, despite surging to almost 23% during COVID:

In fact, overall employment among people 25-54 years old (considered “prime age”—old enough to not be students, young enough to not be retired) is nearly the highest it has ever been, and radically higher than it was before the 1980s (because women entered the workforce):

So this is not an illusion: More Americans really are working now. And employment has become more inclusive of women and minorities.

I really don’t understand why President Biden isn’t more popular. Biden inherited the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, and turned it around into an economic situation so good that most economists thought it was impossible. A 39% approval rating does not seem consistent with that kind of staggering economic improvement.

And yes, there are a lot of other factors involved aside from the President; but for once I think he really does deserve a lot of the credit here. Programs he enacted to respond to COVID brought us back to work quicker than many thought possible. Then, the Inflation Reduction Act made historic progress at fighting climate change—and also, lo and behold, reduced inflation.

He’s not a particularly charismatic figure. He is getting pretty old for this job (or any job, really). But Biden’s economic policy has been amazing, and deserves more credit for that.

What does “can” mean, anyway?

2024-04-072024-04-03 PNRJ cognitive science, personal, science and academia capability, cerebrospinal fluid, D&D, disability, language, linguistics, meaning, neuroscience, P=NP, philosophy, Riemann Hypothesis, serotonin

Apr 7 JDN 2460409

I don’t remember where, but I believe I once heard a “philosopher” defined as someone who asks the sort of question everyone knows the answer to, and doesn’t know the answer.

By that definition, I’m feeling very much a philosopher today.

“can” is one of the most common words in the English language; the Oxford English Corpus lists it as the 53rd most common word. Similar words are found in essentially every language, and nearly always rank among their most common.

Yet when I try to precisely define what we mean by this word, it’s surprisingly hard.

Why, you might even say I can’t.

The very concept of “capability” is surprisingly slippery—just what is someone capable of?

My goal in this post is basically to make you as confused about the concept as I am.

I think that experiencing disabilities that include executive dysfunction has made me especially aware of just how complicated the concept of ability really is. This also relates back to my previous post questioning the idea of “doing your best”.

Here are some things that “can” might mean, or even sometimes seems to mean:

1. The laws of physics do not explicitly prevent it.

This seems far too broad. By this definition, you “can” do almost anything—as long as you don’t make free energy, reduce entropy, or exceed the speed of light.

2. The task is something that other human beings have performed in the past.

This is surely a lot better; it doesn’t say that I “can” fly to Mars or turn into a tree. But by this definition, I “can” sprint as fast as Usain Bolt and swim as long as Michael Phelps—which certainly doesn’t seem right. Indeed, not only would I say I can’t do that; I’d say I couldn’t do that, no matter how hard I tried.

3. The task is something that human beings in similar physical condition to my own have performed in the past.

Okay, we’re getting warmer. But just what do we mean, “similar condition”? No one else in the world is in exactly the same condition I am.

And even if those other people are in the same physical condition, their mental condition could be radically different. Maybe they’re smarter than I am, or more creative—or maybe they just speak Swahili. It doesn’t seem right to say that I can speak Swahili. Maybe I could speak Swahili, if I spent a lot of time and effort learning it. But at present, I can’t.

4. The task is something that human beings in similar physical and mental condition to my own have performed in the past.

Better still. This seems to solve the most obvious problems. It says that I can write blog posts (check), and I can’t speak Swahili (also check).

But it’s still not specific enough. For, even if we can clearly define what constitutes “people like me” (can we?), there are many different circumstances in which people like me have been in, and what they did has varied quite a bit, depending on those circumstances.

People in extreme emergencies have performed astonishingly feats of strength, such as lifting cars. Maybe I could do something like that, should the circumstance arise? But it certainly doesn’t seem right to say that I can lift cars.

5. The task is something that human beings in similar physical and mental condition to my own have performed in the past, in circumstances similar to my own.

That solves the above problems (provided we can sufficiently define “similar” for both people and circumstances). But it actually raises a different problem: If the circumstances were so similar, shouldn’t their behavior and mine be the same?

By that metric, it seems like the only way to know if I can do something is to actually do it. If I haven’t actually done it—in that mental state, in those circumstances—then I can’t really say I could have done it. At that point, “can” becomes a really funny way of saying “do”.

So it seems we may have narrowed down a little too much here.

And what about the idea that I could speak Swahili, if I studied hard? That seems to be something broader; maybe it’s this:

6. The task is something that human beings who are in physical or mental condition that is attainable from my own condition have performed in the past.

But now we have to ask, what do we mean by “attainable”? We come right back to asking about capability again: What kind of effort can I make in order to learn Swahili, train as a pilot, or learn to SCUBA dive?

Maybe I could lift a car, if I had to do it to save my life or the life of a loved one. But without the adrenaline rush of such emergency, I might be completely unable to do it, and even with that adrenaline rush, I’m sure the task would injure me severely. Thus, I don’t think it’s fair to say I can lift cars.

So how much can I lift? I have found that I can, as part of a normal workout, bench-press about 80 pounds. But I don’t think is the limit of what I can lift; it’s more like what I can lift safely and comfortably for multiple sets of multiple reps without causing myself undue pain. For a single rep, I could probably do considerably more—though how much more is quite hard to say. 100 pounds? 120? (There are online calculators that supposedly will convert your multi-rep weight to a single-rep max, but for some reason, they don’t seem to be able to account for multiple sets for some reason. If I do 4 sets of 10 reps, is that 10 reps, or 40 reps? This is the difference between my one-rep max being 106 and it being 186. The former seems closer to the truth, but is probably still too low.)

If I absolutely had to—say, something that heavy has fallen on me and lifting it is the only way to escape—could I bench-press my own weight of about 215 pounds? I think so. But I’m sure it would hurt like hell, and I’d probably be sore for days afterward.

Now, consider tasks that require figuring something out, something I don’t currently know but could conceivably learn or figure out. It doesn’t seem right to say that I can solve the P/NP problem or the Riemann Hypothesis. But it does seem right to say that I can at least work on those problems—I know enough about them that I can at least get started, if perhaps not make much real progress. Whereas most people, while they could theoretically read enough books about mathematics to one day know enough that they could do this, are not currently in a state where they could even begin to do that.

Here’s another question for you to ponder:

Can I write a bestselling novel?

Maybe that’s no fair. Making it a bestseller depends on all sorts of features of the market that aren’t entirely under my control. So let’s make it easier:

Can I write a novel?

I have written novels. So at first glance it seems obvious that I can write a novel.

But there are many days, especially lately, on which I procrastinate my writing and struggle to get any writing done. On such a day, can I write a novel? If someone held a gun to my head and demanded that I write the novel, could I get it done?

I honestly don’t know.

Maybe there’s some amount of pressure that would in fact compel me, even on the days of my very worst depression, to write the novel. Or maybe if you put that gun to my head, I’d just die. I don’t know.

But I do know one thing for sure: It would hurt.

Writing a novel on my worst days would require enormous effort and psychological pain—and honestly, I think it wouldn’t feel all that different from trying to lift 200 pounds.

Now we are coming to the real heart of the matter:

How much cost am I expected to pay, for it to still count as within my ability?

There are many things that I can do easily, that don’t really require much effort. But this varies too.

On most days, brushing my teeth is something I just can do—I remember to do it, I choose to do it, it happens; I don’t feel like I have exerted a great deal of effort or paid any substantial cost.

But there are days when even brushing my teeth is hard. Generally I do make it happen, so evidently I can do it—but it is no longer free and effortless the way it usually is.

There are other things which require effort, but are generally feasible, such as working out. Working out isn’t easy (essentially by design), but if I put in the effort, I can make it happen.

But again, some days are much harder than others.

Then there are things which require so much effort they feel impossible, even if they theoretically aren’t.

Right now, that’s where I’m at with trying to submit my work to journals or publishers. Each individual action is certainly something I should be physically able to take. I know the process of what to do—I’m not trying to solve the Riemann Hypothesis here. I have even done it before.

But right now, today, I don’t feel like I can do it. There may be some sense in which I “can”, but it doesn’t feel relevant.

And I felt the same way yesterday, and the day before, and pretty much every day for at least the past year.

I’m not even sure if there is an amount of pressure that could compel me to do it—e.g. if I had a gun to my head. Maybe there is. But I honestly don’t know for sure—and if it did work, once again, it would definitely hurt.

Others in the disability community have a way of describing this experience, which probably sounds strange if you haven’t heard it before:

“Do you have enough spoons?”

(For D&D fans, I’ve also heard others substitute “spell slots”.)

The idea is this: Suppose you are endowed with a certain number of spoons, which you can consume as a resource in order to achieve various tasks. The only way to replenish your spoons is rest.

Some tasks are cheap, requiring only 1 or 2 spoons. Others may be very costly, requiring 10, or 20, or perhaps even 50 or 100 spoons.

But the number of spoons you start with each morning may not always be the same. If you start with 200, then a task that requires 2 will seem trivial. But if you only started with 5, even those 2 will feel like a lot.

As you deplete your available spoons, you will find you need to ration which tasks you are able to complete; thus, on days when you wake up with fewer spoons, things that you would ordinarily do may end up not getting done.

I think submitting to a research journal is a 100-spoon task, and I simply haven’t woken up with more than 50 spoons in any given day within the last six months.

I don’t usually hear it formulated this way, but for me, I think the cost varies too.

I think that on a good day, brushing my teeth is a 0-spoon task (a “cantrip”, if you will); I could do it as many times as necessary without expending any detectable effort. But on a very bad day, it will cost me a couple of spoons just to do that. I’ll still get it done, but I’ll feel drained by it. I couldn’t keep doing it indefinitely. It will prevent me from being able to do something else, later in the day.

Writing is something that seems to vary a great deal in its spoon cost. On a really good day when I’m feeling especially inspired, I might get 5000 words written and feel like I’ve only spent 20 spoons; while on a really bad day, that same 20 spoons won’t even get me a single paragraph.

It may occur to you to ask:

What is the actual resource being depleted here?

Just what are the spoons, anyway?

That, I really can’t say.

I don’t think it’s as simple as brain glucose, though there were a few studies that seemed to support such a view. If it were, drinking something sugary ought to fix it, and generally that doesn’t work (and if you do that too often, it’s bad for your health). Even weirder is that, for some people, just tasting sugar seems to help with self-control. My own guess is that if your particular problem is hypoglycemia, drinking sugar works, and otherwise, not so much.

There could be literally some sort of neurotransmitter reserves that get depleted, or receptors that get overloaded; but I suspect it’s not even that simple either. These are the models we use because they’re the best we have—but the brain is in reality far more complicated than any of our models.

I’ve heard people say “I ran out of serotonin today”, but I’m fairly sure they didn’t actually get their cerebrospinal fluid tested first. (And since most of your serotonin is actually in your gut, if they really ran out they should be having severe gastrointestinal symptoms.) (I had my cerebrospinal fluid tested once; most agonizing pain of my life. To say that I don’t recommend the experience is such an understatement, it’s rather like saying Hell sounds like a bad vacation spot. Indeed, if I believed in Hell, I would have to imagine it feels like getting a spinal tap every day for eternity.)

So for now, the best I can say is, I really don’t know what spoons are. And I still don’t entirely know what “can” means. But at least maybe now you’re as confused as I am.

Bundling the stakes to recalibrate ourselves

2024-03-312024-03-24 PNRJ cognitive science, heuristics and biases, personal anxiety, categorical prospect theory, delayed return, depression, expected utility, immediate return, job market, probability, prospect theory, risk, utility

Mar 31 JDN 2460402

In a previous post I reflected on how our minds evolved for an environment of immediate return: An immediate threat with high chance of success and life-or-death stakes. But the world we live in is one of delayed return: delayed consequences with low chance of success and minimal stakes.

We evolved for a world where you need to either jump that ravine right now or you’ll die; but we live in a world where you’ll submit a hundred job applications before finally getting a good offer.

Thus, our anxiety system is miscalibrated for our modern world, and this miscalibration causes us to have deep, chronic anxiety which is pathological, instead of brief, intense anxiety that would protect us from harm.

I had an idea for how we might try to jury-rig this system and recalibrate ourselves:

Bundle the stakes.

Consider job applications.

The obvious way to think about it is to consider each application, and decide whether it’s worth the effort.

Any particular job application in today’s market probably costs you 30 minutes, but you won’t hear back for 2 weeks, and you have maybe a 2% chance of success. But if you fail, all you lost was that 30 minutes. This is the exact opposite of what our brains evolved to handle.

So now suppose if you think of it in terms of sending 100 job applications.

That will cost you 30 times 100 minutes = 50 hours. You still won’t hear back for weeks, but you’ve spent weeks, so that won’t feel as strange. And your chances of success after 100 applications are something like 1-(0.98)^100 = 87%.

Even losing 50 hours over a few weeks is not the disaster that falling down a ravine is. But it still feels a lot more reasonable to be anxious about that than to be anxious about losing 30 minutes.

More importantly, we have radically changed the chances of success.

Each individual application will almost certainly fail, but all 100 together will probably succeed.

If we were optimally rational, these two methods would lead to the same outcomes, by a rather deep mathematical law, the linearity of expectation:
E[nX] = n E[X]

Thus, the expected utility of doing something n times is precisely n times the expected utility of doing it once (all other things equal); and so, it doesn’t matter which way you look at it.

But of course we aren’t perfectly rational. We don’t actually respond to the expected utility. It’s still not entirely clear how we do assess probability in our minds (prospect theory seems to be onto something, but it’s computationally harder than rational probability, which means it makes absolutely no sense to evolve it).

If instead we are trying to match up our decisions with a much simpler heuristic that evolved for things like jumping over ravines, our representation of probability may be very simple indeed, something like “definitely”, “probably”, “maybe”, “probably not”, “definitely not”. (This is essentially my categorical prospect theory, which, like the stochastic overload model, is a half-baked theory that I haven’t published and at this point probably never will.)

2% chance of success is solidly “probably not” (or maybe something even stronger, like “almost definitely not”). Then, outcomes that are in that category are presumably weighted pretty low, because they generally don’t happen. Unless they are really good or really bad, it’s probably safest to ignore them—and in this case, they are neither.

But 87% chance of success is a clear “probably”; and outcomes in that category deserve our attention, even if their stakes aren’t especially high. And in fact, by bundling them, we have even made the stakes a bit higher—likely making the outcome a bit more salient.

The goal is to change “this will never work” to “this is going to work”.

For an individual application, there’s really no way to do that (without self-delusion); maybe you can make the odds a little better than 2%, but you surely can’t make them so high they deserve to go all the way up to “probably”. (At best you might manage a “maybe”, if you’ve got the right contacts or something.)

But for the whole set of 100 applications, this is in fact the correct assessment. It will probably work. And if 100 doesn’t, 150 might; if 150 doesn’t, 200 might. At no point do you need to delude yourself into over-estimating the odds, because the actual odds are in your favor.

This isn’t perfect, though.

There’s a glaring problem with this technique that I still can’t resolve: It feels overwhelming.

Doing one job application is really not that big a deal. It accomplishes very little, but also costs very little.

Doing 100 job applications is an enormous undertaking that will take up most of your time for multiple weeks.

So if you are feeling demotivated, asking you to bundle the stakes is asking you to take on a huge, overwhelming task that surely feels utterly beyond you.

Also, when it comes to this particular example, I even managed to do 100 job applications and still get a pretty bad outcome: My only offer was Edinburgh, and I ended up being miserable there. I have reason to believe that these were exceptional circumstances (due to COVID), but it has still been hard to shake the feeling of helplessness I learned from that ordeal.

Maybe there’s some additional reframing that can help here. If so, I haven’t found it yet.

But maybe stakes bundling can help you, or someone out there, even if it can’t help me.

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Human Economics

Cognitive development economics: Understanding the mind in order to feed the world

Year: 2024