Against Moral Relativism

2024-09-152024-09-14 PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm anthropology, human rights, moral realism, moral relativism, normative, objective, oppression, philosophy, relativism, religion, subjective, truth, United Nations

Moral relativism is surprisingly common, especially among undergraduate students. There are also some university professors who espouse it, typically but not always from sociology, gender studies or anthropology departments (examples include Marshall Sahlins, Stanley Fish, Susan Harding, Richard Rorty, Michael Fischer, and Alison Renteln). There is a fairly long tradition of moral relativism, from Edvard Westermarck in the 1930s to Melville Herskovits, to more recently Francis Snare and David Wong in the 1980s. University of California Press at Berkeley.} In 1947, the American Anthropological Association released a formal statement declaring that moral relativism was the official position of the anthropology community, though this has since been retracted.

All of this is very, very bad, because moral relativism is an incredibly naive moral philosophy and a dangerous one at that. Vitally important efforts to advance universal human rights are conceptually and sometimes even practically undermined by moral relativists. Indeed, look at that date again: 1947, two years after the end of World War II. The world’s civilized cultures had just finished the bloodiest conflict in history, including some ten million people murdered in cold blood for their religion and ethnicity, and the very survival of the human species hung in the balance with the advent of nuclear weapons—and the American Anthropological Association was insisting that morality is meaningless independent of cultural standards? Were they trying to offer an apologia for genocide?

What is relativism trying to say, anyway? Often the arguments get tied up in knots. Consider a particular example, infanticide. Moral relativists will sometimes argue, for example, that infanticide is wrong in the modern United States but permissible in ancient Inuit society. But is this itself an objectively true normative claim? If it is, then we are moral realists. Indeed, the dire circumstances of ancient Inuit society would surely justify certain life-and-death decisions we wouldn’t otherwise accept. (Compare “If we don’t strangle this baby, we may all starve to death” and “If we don’t strangle this baby, we will have to pay for diapers and baby food”.) Circumstances can change what is moral, and this includes the circumstances of our cultural and ecological surroundings. So there could well be an objective normative fact that infanticide is justified by the circumstances of ancient Inuit life. But if there are objective normative facts, this is moral realism. And if there are no objective normative facts, then all moral claims are basically meaningless. Someone could just as well claim that infanticide is good for modern Americans and bad for ancient Inuits, or that larceny is good for liberal-arts students but bad for engineering students.

If instead all we mean is that particular acts are perceived as wrong in some societies but not in others, this is a factual claim, and on certain issues the evidence bears it out. But without some additional normative claim about whose beliefs are right, it is morally meaningless. Indeed, the idea that whatever society believes is right is a particularly foolish form of moral realism, as it would justify any behavior—torture, genocide, slavery, rape—so long as society happens to practice it, and it would never justify any kind of change in any society, because the status quo is by definition right. Indeed, it’s not even clear that this is logically coherent, because different cultures disagree, and within each culture, individuals disagree. To say that an action is “right for some, wrong for others” doesn’t solve the problem—because either it is objectively normatively right or it isn’t. If it is, then it’s right, and it can’t be wrong; and if it isn’t—if nothing is objectively normatively right—then relativism itself collapses as no more sound than any other belief.

In fact, the most difficult part of defending common-sense moral realism is explaining why it isn’t universally accepted. Why are there so many relativists? Why do so many anthropologists and even some philosophers scoff at the most fundamental beliefs that virtually everyone in the world has?

I should point out that it is indeed relativists, and not realists, who scoff at the most fundamental beliefs of other people. Relativists are fond of taking a stance of indignant superiority in which moral realism is just another form of “ethnocentrism” or “imperialism”. The most common battleground of contention recently is the issue of female circumcision, which is considered completely normal or even good in some African societies but is viewed with disgust and horror by most Western people. Other common choices include abortion, clothing, especially Islamic burqa and hijab, male circumcision, and marriage; given the incredible diversity in human food, clothing, language, religion, behavior, and technology, there are surprisingly few moral issues on which different cultures disagree—but relativists like to milk them for all they’re worth!

But I dare you, anthropologists: Take a poll. Ask people which is more important to them, their belief that, say, female circumcision is immoral, or their belief that moral right and wrong are objective truths? Virtually anyone in any culture anywhere in the world would sooner admit they are wrong about some particular moral issue than they would assent to the claim that there is no such thing as a wrong moral belief. I for one would be more willing to abandon just about any belief I hold before I would abandon the belief that there are objective normative truths. I would sooner agree that the Earth is flat and 6,000 years old, that the sky is green, that I am a brain in a vat, that homosexuality is a crime, that women are inferior to men, or that the Holocaust was a good thing—than I would ever agree that there is no such thing as right or wrong. This is of course because once I agreed that there is no objective normative truth, I would be forced to abandon everything else as well—since without objective normativity there is no epistemic normativity, and hence no justice, no truth, no knowledge, no science. If there is nothing objective to say about how we ought to think and act, then we might as well say the Earth is flat and the sky is green.

So yes, when I encounter other cultures with other values and ideas, I am forced to deal with the fact that they and I disagree about many things, important things that people really should agree upon. We disagree about God, about the afterlife, about the nature of the soul; we disagree about many specific ethical norms, like those regarding racial equality, feminism, sexuality and vegetarianism. We may disagree about economics, politics, social justice, even family values. But as long as we are all humans, we probably agree about a lot of other important things, like “murder is wrong”, “stealing is bad”, and “the sky is blue”. And one thing we definitely do not disagree about—the one cornerstone upon which all future communication can rest—is that these things matter, that they really do describe actual features of an actual world that are worth knowing. If it turns out that I am wrong about these things, \I would want to know! I’d much rather find out I’d been living the wrong way than continue to live the same pretending that it doesn’t matter. I don’t think I am alone in this; indeed, I suspect that the reason people get so angry when I tell them that religion is untrue is precisely because they realize how important it is. One thing religious people never say is “Well, God is imaginary to you, perhaps; but to me God is real. Truth is relative.” I’ve heard atheists defend other people’s beliefs in such terms—but no one ever defends their own beliefs that way. No Evangelical Baptist thinks that Christianity is an arbitrary social construction. No Muslim thinks that Islam is just one equally-valid perspective among many. It is you, relativists, who deny people’s fundamental beliefs.

Yet the fact that relativists accuse realists of being chauvinistic hints at the deeper motivations of moral relativism. In a word: Guilt. Moral relativism is an outgrowth of the baggage of moral guilt and self-loathing that Western societies have built up over the centuries. Don’t get me wrong: Western cultures have done terrible things, many terrible things, all too recently. We needn’t go so far back as the Crusades or the ethnocidal “colonization” of the Americas; we need only look to the carpet-bombing of Dresden in 1945 or the defoliation of Vietnam in the 1960s, or even the torture program as recently as 2009. There is much evil that even the greatest nations of the world have to answer for. For all our high ideals, even America, the nation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the culture of “liberty and justice for all”, has murdered thousands of innocent people—and by “murder” I mean murder, killing not merely by accident in the collateral damage of necessary war, but indeed in acts of intentional and selfish cruelty. Not all war is evil—but many wars are, and America has fought in some of them. No Communist radical could ever burn so much of the flag as the Pentagon itself has burned in acts of brutality.

Yet it is an absurd overreaction to suggest that there is nothing good about Western culture, nothing valuable about secularism, liberal democracy, market economics, or technological development. It is even more absurd to carry the suggestion further, to the idea that civilization was a mistake and we should all go back to our “natural” state as hunter-gatherers. Yet there are anthropologists working today who actually say such things. And then, as if we had not already traversed so far beyond the shores of rationality that we can no longer see the light of home, then relativists take it one step further and assert that any culture is as good as any other.

Think about what this would mean, if it were true. To say that all cultures are equal is to say that science, education, wealth, technology, medicine—all of these are worthless. It is to say that democracy is no better than tyranny, security is no better than civil war, secularism is no better than theocracy. It is to say that racism is as good as equality, sexism is as good as feminism, feudalism is as good as capitalism.

Many relativists seem worried that moral realism can be used by the powerful and privileged to oppress others—the cishet White males who rule the world (and let’s face it, cishet White males do, pretty much, rule the world!) can use the persuasive force of claiming objective moral truth in order to oppress women and minorities. Yet what is wrong with oppressing women and minorities, if there is no such thing as objective moral truth? Only under moral realism is oppression truly wrong.

How to detect discrimination, empirically

2024-08-252024-08-18 PNRJ core principles, ethics, inequality, mathematical models, public policy, tribal paradigm CEO, competence, discrimination, doctor, employment, gender, hiring, labor, race, startup, talent

Aug 25 JDN 2460548

For concreteness, I’ll use men and women as my example, though the same principles would apply for race, sexual orientation, and so on. Suppose we find that there are more men than women in a given profession; does this mean that women are being discriminated against?

Not necessarily. Maybe women are less interested in that kind of work, or innately less qualified. Is there a way we can determine empirically that it really is discrimination?

It turns out that there is. All we need is a reliable measure of performance in that profession. Then, we compare performance between men and women, and that comparison can tell us whether discrimination is happening or not. The key insight is that workers in a job are not a random sample; they are a selected sample. The results of that selection can tell us whether discrimination is happening.

Here’s a simple model to show how this works.

Suppose there are five different skill levels in the job, from 1 to 5 where 5 is the most skilled. And suppose there are 5 women and 5 men in the population.

1. Baseline

The baseline case to consider is when innate talents are equal and there is no discrimination. In that case, we should expect men and women to be equally represented in the profession.

For the simplest case, let’s say that there is one person at each skill level:

Men	Women
1	1
2	2
3	3
4	4
5	5

Now suppose that everyone above a certain skill threshold gets hired. Since we’re assuming no discrimination, the threshold should be the same for men and women. Let’s say it’s 3; then these are the people who get hired:

Hired Men	Hired Women
3	3
4	4
5	5

The result is that not only are there the same number of men and women in the job, their skill levels are also the same. There are just as many highly-competent men as highly-competent women.

2. Innate Differences

Now, suppose there is some innate difference in talent between men and women for this job. For most jobs this seems suspicious, but consider pro sports: Men really are better at basketball, in general, than women, and this is pretty clearly genetic. So it’s not absurd to suppose that for at least some jobs, there might be some innate differences. What would that look like?

Again suppose a population of 5 men and 5 women, but now the women are a bit less qualified: There are two 1s and no 5s among the women.

Men	Women
1	1
2	1
3	2
4	3
5	4

Then, this is the group that will get hired:

Hired Men	Hired Women
3	3
4	4
5

The result will be fewer women who are on average less qualified. The most highly-qualified individuals at that job will be almost entirely men. (In this simple model, entirely men; but you can easily extend it so that there are a few top-qualified women.)

This is in fact what we see for a lot of pro sports; in a head-to-head match, even the best WNBA teams would generally lose against most NBA teams. That’s what it looks like when there are real innate differences.

But it’s hard to find clear examples outside of sports. The genuine, large differences in size and physical strength between the sexes just don’t seem to be associated with similar differences in mental capabilities or even personality. You can find some subtler effects, but nothing very large—and certainly nothing large enough to explain the huge gender gaps in various industries.

3. Discrimination

What does it look like when there is discrimination?

Now assume that men and women are equally qualified, but it’s harder for women to get hired, because of discrimination. The key insight here is that this amounts to women facing a higher threshold. Where men only need to have level 3 competence to get hired, women need level 4.

So if the population looks like this:

Men	Women
1	1
2	2
3	3
4	4
5	5

The hired employees will look like this:

Hired Men	Hired Women
3
4	4
5	5

Once again we’ll have fewer women in the profession, but they will be on average more qualified. The top-performing individuals will be as likely to be women as they are to be men, while the lowest-performing individuals will be almost entirely men.

This is the kind of pattern we observe when there is discrimination. Do we see it in real life?

Yes, we see it all the time.

Corporations with women CEOs are more profitable.

Women doctors have better patient outcomes.

Startups led by women are more likely to succeed.

This shows that there is some discrimination happening, somewhere in the process. Does it mean that individual firms are actively discriminating in their hiring process? No, it doesn’t. The discrimination could be happening somewhere else; maybe it happens during education, or once women get hired. Maybe it’s a product of sexism in society as a whole, that isn’t directly under the control of employers. But it must be in there somewhere. If women are both rarer and more competent, there must be some discrimination going on.

What if there is also innate difference? We can detect that too!

4. Both

Suppose now that men are on average more talented, but there is also discrimination against women. Then the population might look like this:

Men	Women
1	1
2	1
3	2
4	3
5	4

And the hired employees might look like this:

Hired Men	Hired Women
3
4
5	4

In such a scenario, you’ll see a large gender imbalance, but there may not be a clear difference in competence. The tiny fraction of women who get hired will perform about as well as the men, on average.

Of course, this assumes that the two effects are of equal strength. In reality, we might see a whole spectrum of possibilities, from very strong discrimination with no innate differences, all the way to very large innate differences with no discrimination. The outcomes will then be similarly along a spectrum: When discrimination is much larger than innate difference, women will be rare but more competent. When innate difference is much larger than discrimination, women will be rare and less competent. And when there is a mix of both, women will be rare but won’t show as much difference in competence.

Moreover, if you look closer at the distribution of performance, you can still detect the two effects independently. If the lowest-performing workers are almost all men, that’s evidence of discrimination against women; while if the highest-performing workers are almost all men, that’s evidence of innate difference. And if you look at the table above, that’s exactly what we see: Both the 3 and the 5 are men, indicating the presence of both effects.

What does affirmative action do?

Effectively, affirmative action lowers the threshold for hiring women (or minorities) in order to equalize representation in the workplace. In the presence of discrimination raising that threshold, this is exactly what we need! It can take us from case 3 (discrimination) to case 1 (equality), or from case 4 (both discrimination and innate difference) to case 2 (innate difference only).

Of course, it’s possible for us to overshoot, using more affirmative action than we should have. If we achieve better representation of women, but the lowest performers at the job are women, then we have overshot, effectively now discriminating against men. Fortunately, there is very little evidence of this in practice. In general, even with affirmative action programs in place, we tend to find that the lowest performers are still men—so there is still discrimination against women that we’ve failed to compensate for.

What if we can’t measure competence?

Of course, it’s possible that we don’t have good measures of competence in a given industry. (One must wonder how firms decide who to hire, but frankly I’m prepared to believe they’re just really bad at it.) Then we can’t observe discrimination statistically in this way. What do we do then?

Well, there is at least one avenue left for us to detect discrimination: We can do direct experiments comparing resumes with male names versus female names. These sorts of experiments typically don’t find very much, though—at least for women. For different races, they absolutely do find strong results. They also find evidence of discrimination against people with disabilities, older people, and people who are physically unattractive. There’s also evidence of intersectional effects, where women of particular ethnic groups get discriminated against even when women in general don’t.

But this will only pick up discrimination if it occurs during the hiring process. The advantage of having a competence measure is that it can detect discrimination that occurs anywhere—even outside employer control. Of course, if we don’t know where the discrimination is happening, that makes it very hard to fix; so the two approaches are complementary.

And there is room for new methods too; right now we don’t have a good way to detect discrimination in promotion decisions, for example. Many of us suspect that it occurs, but unless you have a good measure of competence, you can’t really distinguish promotion discrimination from innate differences in talent. We don’t have a good method for testing that in a direct experiment, either, because unlike hiring, we can’t just use fake resumes with masculine or feminine names on them.

People need permission to disagree

2024-07-212024-07-13 PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm argument, bigotry, conversation, disagreement, far-right, low-information voter, morality, politics

Jul 21 JDN 2460513

Obviously, most of the blame for the rise of far-right parties in various countries has to go to the right-wing people who either joined up or failed to stop their allies from joining up. I would hope that goes without saying, but it probably doesn’t, so there, I said it; it’s mostly their fault.

But there is still some fault to go around, and I think we on the left need to do some soul-searching about this.

There is a very common mode of argumentation that is popular on the left, which I think is very dangerous:

“What? You don’t already agree with [policy idea]? You bigot!”

Often it’s not quite that blatant, but the implication is still there: If you don’t agree with this policy involving race, you’re a racist. If you don’t agree with this policy involving transgender rights, you’re a transphobe. If you don’t agree with this policy involving women’s rights, you are a sexist. And so on.

I understand why people think this way. But I also think it has pushed some people over to the right who might otherwise have been possible to persuade to our own side.

And here comes the comeback, I know:

“If being mistreated turns you into a Nazi, you were never a good ally to begin with.”

Well, first of all, not everyone who was pushed away from the left became a full-blown Nazi. Some of them just stopped listening to us, and started listening to whatever the right wing was saying instead.

Second, life is more complicated than that. Most people don’t really have well-defined political views, believe it or not. Most people sort of form their political views on the spot based on whoever else is around them and who they hear talking the loudest. Most swing voters are really low-information voters who really don’t follow politics and make up their minds based on frankly stupid reasons.

And with this in mind, the mere fact that we are pushing people away with our rhetoric means that we are shifting what those low-information voters hear—and thereby giving away elections to the right.

When people disagree about moral questions, isn’t someone morally wrong?

Yes, by construction. (At least one must be; possibly everyone is.)

But we don’t always know who is wrong—and generally speaking, everyone goes into a conversation assuming that they themselves are right. But our ultimate goal of moral conversation is to get more people to be right and fewer people to be wrong, yes? If we treat it as morally wrong to disagree in the first place,we are shutting down any hope of reaching that goal.

Not everyone knows everything about everything.

That may seem perfectly obvious to you, but when you leap from “disagree with [policy]” to “bigot”, you are basically assuming the opposite. You are assuming that whoever you are speaking with knows everything you know about all the relevant considerations of politics and social science, and the only possible reason they could come to a different conclusion is that they have a fundamentally different preference, namely, they are a bigot.

Maybe you are indeed such an enlightened individual that you never get any moral questions wrong. (Maybe.) But can you really expect everyone else to be like that? Isn’t it unfair to ask that of absolutely everyone?

This is why:

People need permission to disagree.

In order for people to learn and grow in their understanding, they need permission to not know all the answers right away. In order for people to change their beliefs, they need permission to believe something that might turn out to be wrong later.

This is exactly the permission we are denying when we accuse anyone we disagree with of being a bigot. Instead of continuing the conversation in the hopes of persuading people to our point of view, we are shutting the conversation down with vitriol and name-calling.

Try to consider this from the opposite perspective.

You enter a conversation about an important political or moral issue. You hear their view expressed, and then you express your own. Immediately, they start accusing you of being morally defective, a racist, sexist, homophobic, and/or transphobic bigot. How likely are you to continue that conversation? How likely are you to go on listening to this person? How likely are you to change your mind about the original political issue?

In fact, might you even be less likely to change your mind than you would have been if you’d just heard their view expressed and then ended the conversation? I think so. I think just respectfully expressing an alternative view pushes people a little—not a lot, but a little—in favor of whatever view you have expressed. It tells them that someone else who is reasonable and intelligent believes X, so maybe X isn’t so unreasonable.

Conversely, when someone resorts to name-calling, what does that do to your evaluation of their views? They suddenly seem unreasonable. You begin to doubt everything they’re saying. You may even try to revise your view further away out of spite (though this is clearly not rational—reversed stupidity is not intelligence).

Think about that, before you resort to name-calling your opponents.

But now I know you’re thinking:

“But some people really are bigots!”

Yes, that’s true. And some of them may even be the sort of irredeemable bigot you’re imagining right now, someone for whom no amount of conversation could ever change their mind.

But I don’t think most people are like that. In fact, I don’t think most bigots are like that. I think even most people who hold bigoted views about whatever population could in fact be persuaded out of those views, under the right circumstances. And I think that the right circumstances involves a lot more patient, respectful conversation than it does angry name-calling. For we are all Judy Hopps.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it doesn’t matter how patiently we argue. But it’s still morally better to be respectful and kind, so I’m going to do it.

You have my permission to disagree.

Wrongful beneficence

2024-06-092024-06-02 PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy beneficence, Chris Meyers, exploitation, fair trade, free trade, iPhone, poverty, sweatshops, trade

Jun 9 JDN 2460471

One of the best papers I’ve ever read—one that in fact was formative in making me want to be an economist—is Wrongful Beneficence by Chris Meyers.

This paper opened my eyes to a whole new class of unethical behavior: Acts that unambiguously make everyone better off, but nevertheless are morally wrong. Hence, wrongful beneficence.

A lot of economists don’t even seem to believe in such things. They seem convinced that as long as no one is made worse off by a transaction, that transaction must be ethically defensible.

Chris Meyers convinced me that they are wrong.

The key insight here is that it’s still possible to exploit someone even if you make them better off. This happens when they are in a desperate situation and you take advantage of that to get an unfair payoff.

Here one of the cases Meyers offers to demonstrate this:

Suppose Carole is driving across the desert on a desolate road when her car breaks down. After two days and two nights without seeing a single car pass by, she runs out of water and feels rather certain that she will perish if not rescued soon. Now suppose that Jason happens to drive down this road and finds Carole. He sees that her situation is rather desperate and that she needs (or strongly desires) to get to the nearest town as soon as possible. So Jason offers her a ride but only on the condition that […] [she gives him] her entire net worth, the title to her house and car, all of her money in the bank, and half of her earnings for the next ten years.

Carole obviously is better off than she would be if Jason hadn’t shown up—she might even have died. She freely consented to this transaction—again, because if she didn’t, she might die. Yet it seems absurd to say that Jason has done nothing wrong by making such an exorbitant demand. If he had asked her to pay for gas, or even to compensate him for his time at a reasonable rate, we’d have no objection. But to ask for her life savings, all her assets, and half her earnings for ten years? Obviously unfair—and obviously unethical. Jason is making Carole (a little) better off while making himself (a lot) better off, so everyone is benefited; but what he’s doing is obviously wrong.

Once you recognize that such behavior can exist, you start to see it all over the place, particularly in markets, where corporations are quite content to gouge their customers with high prices and exploit their workers with low wages—but still, technically, we’re better off than we would be with no products and no jobs at all.

Indeed, the central message of Wrongful Beneficence is actually about sweatshop labor: It’s not that the workers are worse off than they would have been (in general, they aren’t); it’s that they are so desperate that corporations can get away with exploiting them with obviously unfair wages and working conditions.

Maybe it would be easier just to move manufacturing back to First World countries?

Right-wingers are fond of making outlandish claims that making products at First World wages would be utterly infeasible; here’s one claiming that an iPhone would need to cost $30,000 if it were made in the US. In fact, the truth is that it would only need to cost about $40 more—because hardly any of its cost is actually going to labor. Most of its price is pure monopoly profit for Apple; most of the rest is components and raw materials. (Of course, if those also had to come from the US, the price would go up more; but even so, we’re talking something like double its original price, not thirty times. Workers in the US are indeed paid a lot more than workers in China; they are also more productive.)

It’s true that actually moving manufacturing from other countries back to the US would be a substantial undertaking, requiring retooling factories, retraining engineers, and so on; but it’s not like we’ve never done that sort of thing before. I’m sure it could not be done overnight; but of course it could be done. We do this sort of thing all the time.

Ironically, this sort of right-wing nonsense actually seems to feed the far left as well, supporting their conviction that all this prosperity around us is nothing more than an illusion, that all our wealth only exists because we steal it from others. But this could scarcely be further from the truth; our wealth comes from technology, not theft. If we offered a fairer bargain to poorer countries, we’d be a bit less rich, but they would be much less poor—the overall wealth in the world would in fact probably increase.

A better argument for not moving manufacturing back to the First World is that many Third World economies would collapse if they stopped manufacturing things for other countries, and that would be disastrous for millions of people.

And free trade really does increase efficiency and prosperity for all.

So, yes; let’s keep on manufacturing goods wherever it is cheapest to do so. But when we decide what’s cheapest, let’s evaluate that based on genuinely fair wages and working conditions, not the absolute cheapest that corporations think they can get away with.

Sometimes they may even decide that it’s not really cheaper to manufacture in poorer countries, because they need advanced technology and highly-skilled workers that are easier to come by in First World countries. In that case, bringing production back here is the right thing to do.

Of course, this raises the question:

What would be fair wages and working conditions?

That’s not so easy to answer. Since workers in Third World countries are less educated than workers in First World countries, and have access to less capital and worse technology, we should in fact expect them to be less productive and therefore get paid less. That may be unfair in some cosmic sense, but it’s not anyone’s fault, and it’s not any particular corporation’s responsibility to fix it.

But when there are products for which less than 1% of the sales price of the product goes to the workers who actually made the product, something is wrong. When the profit margin is often wildly larger than the total amount spent on labor, something is wrong.

It may be that we will never have precise thresholds we can set to decide what definitely is or is not exploitative; but that doesn’t mean we can’t ever recognize it when we see it. There are various institutional mechanisms we could use to enforce better wages and working conditions without ever making such a sharp threshold.

One of the simplest, in fact, is Fair Trade.

Fair Trade is by no means a flawless system; in fact there’s a lot of research debating how effective it is at achieving its goals. But it does seem to be accomplishing something. And it’s a system that we already have in place, operating successfully in many countries; it simply needs to be scaled up (and hopefully improved along the way).

One of the clearest pieces of evidence that it’s helping, in fact, is that farmers are willing to participate in it. That shows that it is beneficent.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s genuinely fair! This could just be another kind of wrongful beneficence. Perhaps Fair Trade is really just less exploitative than all the available alternatives.

If so, then we need something even better still, some new system that will reliably pass on the increased cost for customers all the way down to increased wages for workers.

Fair Trade shows us something else, too: A lot of customers clearly are willing to pay a bit more in order to see workers treated better. Even if they weren’t, maybe they should be forced to. But the fact is, they are! Even those who are most adamantly opposed to Fair Trade can’t deny that people really are willing to pay more to help other people. (Yet another example of obvious altruism that neoclassical economists somehow manage to ignore.) They simply deny that it’s actually helping, which is an empirical matter.

But if this isn’t helping enough, fine; let’s find something else that does.

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.

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.

Love is more than chemicals

2024-02-182024-02-12 PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, tribal paradigm Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, brain, consciousness, dopamine, dualism, eliminative materialism, epiphenomenalism, love, materialism, mind, oxytocin, rationalist, rationality, religion, reverence, Rick & Morty, sincerity

Feb 18 JDN 2460360

One of the biggest problems with the rationalist community is an inability to express sincerity and reverence.

I get it: Religion is the world’s greatest source of sincerity and reverence, and religion is the most widespread and culturally important source of irrationality. So we declare ourselves enemies of religion, and also end up being enemies of sincerity and reverence.

But in doing so, we lose something very important. We cut ourselves off from some of the greatest sources of meaning and joy in human life.

In fact, we may even be undermining our own goals: If we don’t offer people secular, rationalist forms of reverence, they may find they need to turn back to religion in order to fill that niche.

One of the most pernicious forms of this anti-sincerity, anti-reverence attitude (I can’t just say ‘insincere’ or ‘irreverent’, as those have different meanings) is surely this one:

Love is just a chemical reaction.

(I thought it seemed particularly apt to focus on this one during the week of Valentine’s Day.)

On the most casual of searches I could find at least half a dozen pop-sci articles and a YouTube video propounding this notion (though I could also find a few articles trying to debunk the notion as well).

People who say this sort of thing seem to think that they are being wise and worldly while the rest of us are just being childish and naive. They think we are seeing something that isn’t there. In fact, they are being jaded and cynical. They are failing to see something that is there.

(Perhaps the most extreme form of this was from Rick & Morty; and while Rick as a character is clearly intended to be jaded and cynical, far too many people also see him as a role model.)

Part of the problem may also be a failure to truly internalize the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science:

You are your brain.

No, your consciousness is not an illusion. It’s not an “epiphenomenon” (whatever that is—I’ve never encountered one in real life). Your mind is not fake or imaginary. Your mind actually exists—and it is a product of your brain. Both brain and mind exist, and are in fact the same.

It’s so hard for people to understand this that some become dualists, denying the unity of the brain and the mind. That, at least, I can sympathize with, even though we have compelling evidence that it is wrong. But there’s another tack people sometimes take, eliminative materialism, where they try to deny that the mind exists at all. And that I truly do not understand. How can you think that nobody can think? Yet intelligent, respected philosophers have claimed to believe such things.

Love is one of the most important parts of our lives.

This may be more true of humans than of literally any other entity in the known universe.

The only serious competition comes from other mammals: They are really the only other beings we know of that are capable of love. And even they don’t seem to be as good at it as we are; they can love only those closest to them, while we can love entire nations and even abstract concepts.

And once you go beyond that, even to reptiles—let alone fish, or amphibians, or insects, or molluscs—it’s not clear that other animals are really capable of love at all. They seem to be capable of some forms of thought and feeling: They get hungry, or angry, or horny. But do they really love?

And even the barest emotional capacities of an insect are still categorically beyond what most of the universe is capable of feeling, which is to say: Nothing. The vast, vast majority of the universe feels neither love nor hate, neither joy nor pain.

Yet humans can love, and do love, and it is a large part of what gives our lives meaning.

I don’t just mean romantic love here, though I do think it’s worth noting that people who dismiss the reality of romantic love somehow seem reluctant to do the same for the love parents have for their children—even though it’s made of pretty much the same brain chemicals. Perhaps there is a limit to their cynicism.

Yes, love is made of chemicals—because everything is made of chemicals. We live in a material, chemical universe. Saying that love is made of chemicals is an almost completely vacuous statement; it’s basically tantamount to saying that love exists.

In other contexts, you already understand this.

“That’s not a bridge, it’s just a bunch of iron atoms!” rightfully strikes you as an absurd statement to make. Yes, the bridge is made of steel, and steel is mostly iron, and everything is made of atoms… but clearly there’s a difference between a random pile of iron and a bridge.

“That’s not a computer, it’s just a bunch of silicon atoms!” similarly registers as nonsense: Yes, it is indeed mostly made of silicon, but beach sand and quartz crystals are not computers.

It is in this same sense that joy is made of dopamine and love is made of chemical reactions. Yes, those are in fact the constituent parts—but things are more than just their parts.

I think that on some level, even most rationalists recognize that love is more than some arbitrary chemical reaction. I think “love is just chemicals” is mainly something people turn to for a couple of reasons: Sometimes, they are so insistent on rejecting everything that even resembles religious belief that they end up rejecting all meaning and value in human life. Other times, they have been so heartbroken, that they try to convince themselves love isn’t real—to dull the pain. (But of course if it weren’t, there would be no pain to dull.)

But love is no more (or less) a chemical reaction than any other human experience: The very belief “love is just a chemical reaction” is, itself, made of chemical reactions.

Everything we do is made of chemical reactions, because we are made of chemical reactions.

Part of the problem here—and with the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science in general—is that we really have no idea how this works. For most of what we deal with in daily life, and even an impressive swath of the overall cosmos, we have a fairly good understanding of how things work. We know how cars drive, how wind blows, why rain falls; we even know how cats purr and why birds sing. But when it comes to understanding how the physical matter of the brain generates the subjective experiences of thought, feeling, and belief—of which love is made—we lack even the most basic understanding. The correlation between the two is far too strong to deny; but as far as causal mechanisms, we know absolutely nothing. (Indeed, worse than that: We can scarcely imagine a causal mechanism that would make any sense. We not only don’t know the answer; we don’t know what an answer would look like.)

So, no, I can’t tell you how we get from oxytocin and dopamine to love. I don’t know how that makes any sense. No one does. But we do know it’s true.

And just like everything else, love is more than the chemicals it’s made of.

Administering medicine to the dead

2024-01-282024-01-25 PNRJ core principles, ethics, personal, tribal paradigm atheism, belief, Jonathan Swift, rationalism, rationality, reason, religion, theism, Thomas Paine, truth

Jan 28 JDN 2460339

Here are a couple of pithy quotes that go around rationalist circles from time to time:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, […] is like administering medicine to the dead[…].”

― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”

― Jonathan Swift

You usually hear that abridged version, but Thomas Paine’s full quotation is actually rather interesting:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

It is indeed quite ineffective to convert an atheist by scripture (though that doesn’t seem to stop them from trying). Yet this quotation seems to claim that the opposite should be equally ineffective: It should be impossible to convert a theist by reason.

Well, then, how else are we supposed to do it!?

Indeed, how did we become atheists in the first place!?

You were born an atheist? No, you were born having absolutely no opinion about God whatsoever. (You were born not realizing that objects don’t fade from existence when you stop seeing them! In a sense, we were all born believing ourselves to be God.)

Maybe you were raised by atheists, and religion never tempted you at all. Lucky you. I guess you didn’t have to be reasoned into atheism.

Well, most of us weren’t. Most of us were raised into religion, and told that it held all the most important truths of morality and the universe, and that believing anything else was horrible and evil and would result in us being punished eternally.

And yet, somehow, somewhere along the way, we realized that wasn’t true. And we were able to realize that because people made rational arguments.

Maybe we heard those arguments in person. Maybe we read them online. Maybe we read them in books that were written by people who died long before we were born. But somehow, somewhere people actually presented the evidence for atheism, and convinced us.

That is, they reasoned us out of something that we were not reasoned into.

I know it can happen. I have seen it happen. It has happened to me.

And it was one of the most important events in my entire life. More than almost anything else, it made me who I am today.

I’m scared that if you keep saying it’s impossible, people will stop trying to do it—and then it will stop happening to people like me.

So please, please stop telling people it’s impossible!

Quotes like these encourage you to simply write off entire swaths of humanity—most of humanity, in fact—judging them as worthless, insane, impossible to reach. When you should be reaching out and trying to convince people of the truth, quotes like these instead tell you to give up and consider anyone who doesn’t already agree with you as your enemy.

Indeed, it seems to me that the only logical conclusion of quotes like these is violence. If it’s impossible to reason with people who oppose us, then what choice do we have, but to fight them?

Violence is a weapon anyone can use.

Reason is the one weapon in the universe that works better when you’re right.

Reason is the sword that only the righteous can wield. Reason is the shield that only protects the truth. Reason is the only way we can ever be sure that the right people win—instead of just whoever happens to be strongest.

Yes, it’s true: reason isn’t always effective, and probably isn’t as effective as it should be. Convincing people to change their minds through rational argument is difficult and frustrating and often painful for both you and them—but it absolutely does happen, and our civilization would have long ago collapsed if it didn’t.

Even people who claim to have renounced all reason really haven’t: they still know 2+2=4 and they still look both ways when they cross the street. Whatever they’ve renounced, it isn’t reason; and maybe, with enough effort, we can help them see that—by reason, of course.

In fact, maybe even literally administering medicine to the dead isn’t such a terrible idea.

There are degrees of death, after all: Someone whose heart has stopped is in a different state than someone whose cerebral activity has ceased, and both of them clearly stand a better chance of being resuscitated than someone who has been vaporized by an explosion.

As our technology improves, more and more states that were previously considered irretrievably dead will instead be considered severe states of illness or injury from which it is possible to recover. We can now restart many stopped hearts; we are working on restarting stopped brains. (Of course we’ll probably never be able to restore someone who got vaporized—unless we figure out how to make backup copies of people?)

Most of the people who now live in the world’s hundreds of thousands of ICU beds would have been considered dead even just 100 years ago. But many of them will recover, because we didn’t give up on them.

So don’t give up on people with crazy beliefs either.

They may seem like they are too far gone, like nothing in the world could ever bring them back to the light of reason. But you don’t actually know that for sure, and the only way to find out is to try.

Of course, you won’t convince everyone of everything immediately. No matter how good your evidence is, that’s just not how this works. But you probably will convince someone of something eventually, and that is still well worthwhile.

You may not even see the effects yourself—people are often loathe to admit when they’ve been persuaded. But others will see them. And you will see the effects of other people’s persuasion.

And in the end, reason is really all we have. It’s the only way to know that what we’re trying to make people believe is the truth.

Don’t give up on reason.

And don’t give up on other people, whatever they might believe.

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