Jun 19 JDN 2459780

There’s something odd about the debate in evolutionary theory about multilevel selection (sometimes called “group selection”). On one side are the mainstream theorists who insist that selection only happens at the individual level (or is the gene level?); and on the other are devout group-selectionists who insist that group selection is everywhere and the only possible explanation of altruism.

Both of these sides are wrong. Selection does happen at multiple levels, but it’s entirely possible for altruism to emerge without it.

The usual argument by the mainstream is that group selection would require the implausible assumption that group live and die on the same timescale as individuals. The usual argument by group-selectionists is that there’s no other explanation for why humans are so altruistic. But neither of these things are true.

There is plenty of discussion out there about why group selection isn’t necessary for altruism: Kin selection is probably the clearest example. So I’m going to focus on showing that group selection can work even when groups live and die much slower than individuals.

To do this, I would like to present you a model. It’s a very pared-down, simplified version, but it is nevertheless a valid evolutionary game theory model.

Consider a world where the only kind of interaction is Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas. For the uninitiated, an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is as follows.

Time goes on forever. At each point in time, some people are born, and some people die; people have a limited lifespan and some general idea of how long it is, but nobody can predict for sure when they will die. (So far, this isn’t even a model; all of this is literally true.)

In this world, people are randomly matched with others one on one, and they play a game together, where each person can choose either “Cooperate” or “Defect”. They choose in secret and reveal simultaneously. If both choose “Cooperate”, everyone gets 3 points. If both choose “Defect”, everyone gets 2 points. If one chooses “Cooperate” and the other chooses “Defect”, the “Cooperate” person gets only 1 point while the “Defect” person gets 4 points.

What are these points? Since this is evolution, let’s call them offspring. An average lifetime score of 4 points means 4 offspring per couple per generation—you get rapid population growth. 1 point means 1 offspring per couple per generation—your genes will gradually die out.

That makes the payoffs follow this table:

	C	D
C	3, 3	1, 4
D	4, 1	2, 2

There are two very notable properties of this game; together they seem paradoxical, which is probably why the game has such broad applicability and such enduring popularity.

1. Everyone, as a group, is always better off if more people choose “Cooperate”.
2. Each person, as an individual, regardless of what the others do, is always better off choosing “Defect”.

Thus, Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas are ideal for understanding altruism, as they directly model a conflict between individual self-interest and group welfare. (They didn’t do a good job of explaining it in A Beautiful Mind, but that one line in particular was correct: the Prisoner’s Dilemma is precisely what proves “Adam Smith was wrong.”)

Each person is matched with someone else at random for a few rounds, and then re-matched with someone else; and nobody knows how long they will be with any particular person. (For technical reasons, with these particular payoffs, the chance of going to another round needs to be at least 50%; but that’s not too important for what I have to say here.)

Now, suppose there are three tribes of people, who are related by family ties but also still occasionally intermingle with one another.

In the Hobbes tribe, people always play “Defect”.

In the Rousseau tribe, people always play “Cooperate”.

In the Axelrod tribe, people play “Cooperate” the first time they meet someone, then copy whatever the other person did in the previous round. (This is called “tit for tat“.)

How will these tribes evolve? In the long run, will all tribes survive, or will some prevail over others?

The Rousseau tribe seems quite nice; everyone always gets along! Unfortunately, the Rousseau tribe will inevitably and catastrophically collapse. As soon as a single Hobbes gets in, or a mutation arises to make someone behave like a Hobbes, that individual will become far more successful than everyone else, have vastly more offspring, and ultimately take over the entire population.

The Hobbes tribe seems pretty bad, but it’ll be stable. If a Rousseau should come visit, they’ll just be ruthlessly exploited and makes the Hobbes better off. If an Axelrod arrives, they’ll learn not to be exploited (after the first encounter), but they won’t do any better than the Hobbeses do.

What about the Axelrod tribe? They seem similar to the Rousseau tribe, because everyone is choosing “Cooperate” all the time—will they suffer the same fate? No, they won’t! They’ll do just fine, it turns out. Should a Rousseau come to visit, nobody will even notice; they’ll just keep on choosing “Cooperate” and everything will be fine. And what if a Hobbes comes? They’ll try to exploit the Axelrods, and succeed at first—but soon enough they will be punished for their sins, and in the long run they’ll be worse off (this is why the probability of continuing needs to be sufficiently high).

The net result, then, will be that the Rousseau tribe dies out and only the Hobbes and Axelrod tribes remain. But that’s not the end of the story.

Look back at that payoff table. Both tribes are stable, but each round the Hobbeses are getting 2 each round, while the Axelrods are getting 3. Remember that these are offspring per couple per generation. This means that the Hobbes tribe will have a roughly constant population, while the Axelrods will have an increasing population.

If the two tribes then come into conflict, perhaps competing over resources, the larger population will most likely prevail. This means that, in the long run, the Axelrod tribe will come to dominate. In the end, all the world will be ruled by Axelrods.

And indeed, most human beings behave like Axelrods: We’re nice to most people most of the time, but we’re no chumps. Betray our trust, and you will be punished severely. (It seems we also have a small incursion of Hobbeses: We call them psychopaths. Perhaps there are a few Rousseaus among us as well, whom the Hobbeses exploit.)

What is this? It’s multilevel selection. It’s group selection, if you like that term. There’s clearly no better way to describe it.

Moreover, we can’t simply stop at the reciprocal altruism as most mainstream theorists do; yes, Axelrods exhibit reciprocal altruism. But that’s not the only equilibrium! Why is reciprocal altruism so common? Why in the real world are there fifty Axelrods for every Hobbes? Multilevel selection.

And at no point did I assume either (1) that individual selection wasn’t operating, or (2) that the timescales of groups and individuals were the same. Indeed, I’m explicitly assuming the opposite: Individual selection continues to work at every generation, and groups only live or die over many generations.

The key insight that makes this possible is that the game is iterated—it happens over many rounds, and nobody knows exactly how many. This results in multiple Nash equilibria for individual selection, and then group selection can occur over equilibria.

This is by no means restricted to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In fact, any nontrivial game will result in multiple equilibria when it is iterated, and group selection should always favor the groups that choose a relatively cooperative, efficient outcome. As long as such a strategy emerges by mutation, and gets some chance to get a foothold, it will be successful in the long run.

Indeed, since these conditions don’t seem all that difficult to meet, we would expect that group selection should actually occur quite frequently, and should be a major explanation for a lot of important forms of altruism.

And in fact this seems to be the case. Humans look awfully group-selected. (Like I said, we behave very much like Axelrods.) Many other social species, such as apes, dolphins, and wolves, do as well. There is altruism in nature that doesn’t look group-selected, for instance among eusocial insects; but much of the really impressive altruism seems more like equilibrium selection at the group level than it does like direct selection at the individual level.

Even multicellular life can be considered group selection: A bunch of cells “agree” to set aside some of their own interest in self-replication in favor of supporting a common, unified whole. (And should any mutated cells try to defect and multiply out of control, what happens? We call that cancer.) This can only work when there are multiple equilibria to select from at the individual level—but there nearly always are.

Dec 12 JDN 2459561

I’ve been seeing this meme go around lately, and I felt a need to respond:

Economics: “Humans only value things monetarily.”

Sociology: “Uh, I don’t…”

Economics: “Humans are always rational and value is calculated by complex internal calculus.”

Sociology: “Uhhh, Psy, can you help?”

Psychology: “That’s not how humans…”

Economics: “ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!”

Physics: drops teacup

I have plenty of criticisms to make of neoclassical economics—but this is clearly unfair.

Economists aren’t that crazy.

Above all, economists don’t actually believe in exponential growth forever. I literally have never met one who does. The mainstream, uncontroversial (I daresay milquetoast)neoclassical growth model, the Solow-Swan model, predicts a long-run decline in the rate of economic growth. Indeed, I would not be surprised to find that long-run per-capita GDP growth is asymptotic, meaning that there is some standard of living that we can never expect the world to exceed. It’s simply a question of what that limit is, and it is most likely a good deal better than how we live even in First World countries.

It’s nothing more than a strawman of neoclassical economics to assert otherwise. Yes, economists do believe that current growth can and should continue for some time yet—though even among them it is controversial how long it will continue. But they absolutely do not believe that we can expect 3% annual growth in per-capita GDP for the next 1000 years. And indeed, it is precisely their mathematical sophistication that makes this so: They would be the first to recognize that this implies a 6.8 trillion-fold increase in standard of living, which is obviously ludicrous. A much more plausible figure for that timescale is something like 0.2%, which would be only a 7-fold increase over that same interval. And if you really want to extrapolate to millions of years, the only plausible long-run economic growth rate over that period is basically 0%. Yet billions of lives hinge upon whether it is actually 0.0001%, 0.0002%, or 0.0003%—if indeed human beings don’t go extinct long before then.

What about the other two claims? Well, neoclassical economists do have a habit of assuming greater rationality than human beings actually exhibit, and of trying to value everything in monetary terms. And economists are nothing if not arrogant in their relationship to other fields of social science. So here, at least, there is a kernel of truth.

Yet that makes this at best hyperbole for comedic effect—and at worst highly misleading as to what actual economists believe. You can find a few fringe economists who might seriously assent to the claim “humans are always rational”, and you can easily find plenty of amoral corporate shills who are paid to say such things on TV. (Krugman refers to them as “professionally conservative economists”.)

Moreover, I think the behavioral economics paradigm still hasn’t penetrated fully enough—most economists will give lip service to the idea of irrational behavior without being willing to seriously face up to how frequent it is or what this implies for policy. But no serious mainstream economist actually believes that all human beings are always rational.

And while there is surely a tendency to over-emphasize monetary costs and try to put everything in monetary terms, I don’t think I’ve ever met an economist who genuinely believes that all humans value everything monetarily. At most they might think that everyone should value everything monetarily—and even then the only ones who say things like this are weird fringe figures like that guy who hates Christmas.

Am I reading too much into a joke? Maybe. But given how poorly most people understand economics, this kind of joke can do real damage. It’s already a big problem that (aforementioned) corporate shills can present themselves as economic experts, but if popular culture is accustomed to dismissing the claims of actual economic experts, that makes matters much worse. And rather than the playful ribbing that neoclassical economists well deserve (like Jon Stewart gave them: “People are screwy.” “You’re just now figuring this out?”), this meme mocks economists aggressively enough that it seems to be trying to actively undermine their credibility.

If COVID taught us anything, it should be that expertise matters. Trusting experts more than we did would have saved thousands of lives—and trusting them less would have doomed even more.

So maybe a joke that will make people trust economic experts less isn’t so harmless after all?

Jul 26 JDN 2459057

Imagine for a moment what this would feel like:

Your girlfriend, who works as an EMT, just got home and went to bed after a long shift. Suddenly you hear banging on your door. “Who is it?” you shout; no answer. “Who is it?” you ask again; still no answer. The banging continues.

You know there is a lot of crime in your neighborhood, so you bought a handgun to protect your family. Since it seems like someone is about to invade your home, now seems like the obvious time to use it. You get the gun, load it, and aim it at the doorway. You hesitate; are you really prepared to pull that trigger? You know that you could kill someone on the other side. But you need to protect your family. So you fire a few shots at the doorway, hoping it will be enough to scare them away.

The response is a hail of bullets from several different directions, several of which hit your girlfriend and kill her while she is asleep.

Then, the door breaks down and several police officers barge in, having never announced themselves as police officers. They arrest you. You learn later that they were serving a so-called “no knock warrant”, which was intended for someone who wasn’t even there. They were never supposed to be in your home in the first place. Your girlfriend is now dead. And then, to top it all off, they have the audacity to charge you with attempted murder of a police officer because you tried to defend your home.

Now imagine what this would feel like as well:

In the evening you joined a protest. It was a peaceful protest, and there were hardly even any police officers around. There was no rioting, no vandalism, no tear gas or rubber bullets; just people holding signs and chanting. It’s now about 2:00 AM, and the protest is ending for the night, so you begin walking home.

Suddenly a van pulls up next to you. It’s completely unmarked; it just looks like a rental car that anybody could have rented. The door slides open and men in tactical body armor leap out of it, pointing rifles at you. They demand that you get in the van with them, and since you think they’re likely to shoot you if you don’t, you comply.

They handcuff you, cover your eyes with your hat, and drive you somewhere. They unload you into a building, then frisk you, photograph you, and rummage through your belongings. Then, they put you into a cell. They have not identified themselves. They have not explained why they abducted you.

Only after they have put you into a cell do they identify themselves as federal agents and start reading you your Miranda rights. They still won’t tell you why you were arrested. They ask you to waive your right to counsel; when you refuse, they leave you there for an hour and a half and then release you. Only as you walk outside do you realize that you had been taken to a federal courthouse.

These stories did not happen in Zimbabwe or Congo or Nicaragua. They did not happen in Russia or China or Venezuela. They happened right here in the United States of America. The first one is the story of Kenneth Walker in Louisville, whose girlfriend Breonna Taylor was murdered by police who didn’t announce that they were police and were never supposed to be in his home. It wasn’t a completely random error; the intended target was someone Breonna Taylor knew. So yes, it was possible that the intended target—who did have a legitimate warrant out for his arrest—might have been present. But how does that justify not even announcing themselves as police?

The second is the story of Mark Pettibone in Portland, who was abducted by anonymous paramilitary forces in an unmarked van. The Department of Homeland Security (an Orwellian name for an agency if ever there were) released a report on the incidents of “violent anarchists” that justified their use of such extreme measures: Most of them are graffiti or vandalism. There are a few genuinely violent incidents in there: Some throwing rocks, some pointing laser pointers at police officers’ eyes, and at least one alleged pipe bomb; but in the whole report there is only one incident listed in which any police officers were injured.

This is authoritarianism. It is not like authoritarianism; it is not moving toward authoritarianism. It is authoritarianism. Secret police in unmarked vehicles abducting people off the street is simply something that should not be allowed to happen in a liberal democracy. Right now it is rare, and for this we should be grateful; but it should not be rare, it should be non-existent. And we should continue fighting until it is. This is not a utopian dream, like imagining that we could make rape or murder non-existent. This is a policy choice. No other First World country does this. (Indeed, are we even a First World country anymore? We were supposed to be the paragon of the First World, but I’m not so sure we even belong in the category anymore.) What we have made rare they have managed to avoid entirely.

While arrest warrants are a necessary part of law enforcement, “no-knock” warrants are inherently authoritarian. Police should be required to identify themselves: Not simply that they are law enforcement, but what agency they work for, their own names and badge numbers, and the reason they are conducting the arrest. A “no-knock” warrant would already be unjust even applied in the best of circumstances (capturing an organized crime boss, perhaps); but typically they are used for drug raids (is criminalizing drugs is even right in the first place?), and in this case the person they wanted wasn’t even there.

Pettibone was at least promptly released. Walker will grieve the loss of his girlfriend for the rest of his life. Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove, the officers who shot Breonna Taylor, have still not been charged.

I wish that I could blame Trump for all of this and promise that it will go away when he loses the election in November (as statistical forecasts strongly predict he will). But while Trump and those who enable him have clearly accelerated and exacerbated this problem, the roots run much deeper.

For many people, particularly Black people, the United States is a de facto police state, and more or less always has been. (In fact, in most ways it’s probably better than it used to be—which isn’t to say that it is remotely acceptable right now, but to point out just how horrific it once was.) Harassment and abuse by police are commonplace, and death at the hands of police is a constant fear. Many of us are blissfully unaware of this, because we live in places where it doesn’t happen. This violence is highly concentrated: Major US cities vary in their races of police homicide by nearly a full order of magnitude.

The power of our government is unmatched. We have the third-largest standing army (after China and India, each of which has four times our population), the fourth-largest police force (in addition to China and India, add Russia to the list—though their population is less than half ours), and the largest incarcerated population in the world. Our military spending is higher than the next ten countries combined. Our intelligence services are not simply the largest in the world; the CIA alone accounts for nearly two-thirds of all worldwide intelligence spending. And while by the CIA is by far the largest, the US has over a dozen other intelligence agencies. When this power is abused—as it all too often is—the whole world feels the pain. We cannot afford to tolerate such abuses. We must stamp them out while we still can.

Getting Trump out won’t fix this. We must get him out, for a hundred thousand reasons, but that will not be nearly enough. Like hairline fractures in a steel beam that become wide gashes when the bridge is loaded, there are deep, structural flaws in our society and our system of government that are now becoming visible under the strain of crisis. I for one believe that these flaws can still be mended. But the longer we wait, the closer we come to a total collapse.

Mar 17 JDN 2458560

It’s a bit of a pet peeve, but much like I insist people use “net wealth” instead of “net worth” (people are not worth more because they have more money!), I find it aggravating that the standard term for copyright infringement for personal use is “piracy”.

The word “piracy” is meant to describe some very severe crimes: Pirates on the high seas board ships to rape, enslave, and murder people. There are still actual pirates today, and they are murderous psychopaths. We glamorize pirates in much the same was as we glamorize organized crime; but the reality of actual piracy is horrific, monstrous violence. This is nothing like the “piracy” of copying songs and video games without permission.

If you need a word for copying songs and video games without permission, how about “unauthorized copying”? That’s what it is. You haven’t stolen anything. You’re not a pirate. You’ve copied something without authorization.

This can still be a harmful thing to do, and there are some cases where I think we rightfully make it illegal. But just from hearing the phrase “unauthorized copying” you can feel the difference: It already sounds like something that isn’t usually so bad and maybe shouldn’t always be against the law.

Indeed, it’s difficult to see exactly where the harm from most unauthorized copying is supposed to be. Even on the RIAA’s inflated estimates assuming that everyone who makes unauthorized copies would have otherwise purchased at retail price (which is clearly not true), total loss to the US music industry from unauthorized copying is less than $3 billion per year, while the total revenue of the music industry in the US is over $22 billion. So we’re talking about a roughly 12% reduction in revenue—and remember that this is an overestimate, because most of the people who make unauthorized copies would not have purchased the music at full price if they didn’t make the copies.

And most of those losses are to the very richest music producers, who are astonishingly rich indeed. The top 9 richest music producers in the US all have net wealth exceeding $100 million. It’s hard for me to see a 12% reduction in revenue for these nine-figure millionaires as a major loss to our society.

It might be a major loss to our society if weaker intellectual property enforcement had a chilling effect on the production of new content. And there is some reason to think that this could happen: Artists make their living selling content, and if that content can be copied for free it will be harder for them to make a living.

But it’s already really hard for most artists to make a living, and they make art anyway. There is no shortage of creative content in the world; indeed, there is an embarrassment of riches that makes it hard for new artists to break in and sometimes even hard for consumers to find the best content. If the goal is actually to support artists, there are obviously much better methods than granting Disney and Viacom totalitarian control over everything we read, hear, and see.

For instance, there are alternative modes of income support for artists that don’t require intellectual property enforcement, such as Patreon and Kickstarter. I make money on this very blog (not a lot mind you, but some extra spending cash) using Patreon without enforcing intellectual property. I’m not sure I could enforce intellectual property on my blog even if I tried.

A universal basic income is another option: Artists mostly create art because they want to, and only need to sell it because, like all humans, they have certain needs for food and shelter that must be met. With a sufficiently generous basic income, I think many artists would choose to share their work for free and live off the basic income, because it was never about making money but about creating art and spreading joy.

Or we could continue to enforce copyright, but in a much more limited manner: Say you get 30 years after publication, and whether or not your work has earned out by then, it goes to public domain and people can do whatever they want with it. Copy it, modify it, turn it into derivative works—yes, even make fanfiction and rule 34 porn, because that’s a form of artistic creation too.

I couldn’t find good data on this, but my suspicion is that most artistic works don’t turn a profit at all, and those that turn a profit generally do so within the first few years. Even if they paid out at a constant nominal rate, at any reasonable interest rate only about the first 30 years would really matter: At 7%, the net present value of $10,000 a year for 30 years is $124,000, while the net present value of $10,000 a year forever is only $143,000. This is because funds received in early years could be invested for that whole time (or used for something urgent and valuable), while funds received later can’t. There’s an old joke that may help you to remember that: “For $50, I’ll give you a million dollars! Such a deal! Oh, by the way, it’s $1 per year for the next million years.”

Extending copyright for decades simply doesn’t make sense if the goal is to support artists. (It makes perfect sense if the goal is to make Disney lobbyists happy.) Continuing to pay royalties for something you made 70 years ago may make you happy, but it wasn’t the incentive to produce that thing in the first place. I have trouble imagining an artist who would be willing to create a work if they received 70 years of royalties, but not if they only received 30 years of royalties.

In fact, economists studying copyright have estimated that the optimal duration of copyright to maximize creative innovation is even shorter than that: Only 15 years. There are a number of reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is that copyright can actually hinder some creativity, by making it harder to build off of the previous work of others. It’s one thing if all you have to do is re-name some characters in a novel and make a few other cosmetic changes (like Fifty Shades of Grey did; it was originally Twilight fanfiction); but that wouldn’t be so simple for a music remix or a video game mod. Depending on how the corporation that owns the original IP reacts, even a mod that looks and plays completely different could land you in court, because it was built on the same engine. There’s a great deal of ambiguity about just what constitutes a copyright violation in game modding.

And if we’re also thinking about patents as well as copyrights, intellectual property protection is the main cause of the high cost of brand-name drugs: People die because of that patent enforcement.

But there are complicated questions here about the proper way to balance the incentives. I think it would help to make the language clearer and less loaded: Don’t say “piracy”. Say “unauthorized copying”.