mortality

What is the cost of all this?

PNRJ core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, politics , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 23 JDN 2461003

After the Democrats swept the recent election and now the Epstein files are being released—and absolutely do seem to have information that is damning about Trump—it really seems like Trump’s popularity has permanently collapsed. His approval rating stands at 42%, which is about 42% too high, but at least comfortably well below a majority.

It now begins to feel like we have hope, not only of removing him, but also of changing how American politics in general operates so that someone like him ever gets power again. (The latter, of course, is a much taller order.)

But at the risk of undermining this moment of hope, I’d like to take stock of some of the damage that Trump and his ilk have already done.

In particular, the cuts to US foreign aid are an absolute humanitarian disaster.

These didn’t get so much attention, because there has been so much else going on; and—unfortunately—foreign aid actually isn’t that popular among American voters, despite being a small proportion of the budget and by far the most cost-effective beneficial thing that our government does.

In fact, I think USAID would be cost-effective on a purely national security basis: it’s hard to motivate people to attack a country that saves the lives of their children. Indeed, I suppose this is the kernel of truth to the leftists who say that US foreign aid is just a “tool of empire” (or even “a front for the CIA”); yes, indeed, helping the needy does in fact advance American interests and promote US national security.

Over the last 25 years, USAID has saved over 90 million lives. That is more than a fourth of the population of the United States. And it has done this for the cost of less than 1% of the US federal budget.

But under Trump’s authority and Elon Musk’s direction, US foreign aid was cut massively over the last couple of years, and the consequences are horrific. Research on the subject suggests that as many as 700,000 children will die each year as long as these cuts persist.


Even if that number is overestimated by a factor of 2, that would still be millions of children over the next few years. And it could just as well be underestimated.

If we don’t fix this fast, millions of children will die. Thousands already have.

What’s more, fixing this isn’t just a matter of bringing the funding back. Obviously that’s necessary, but it won’t be sufficient. The sudden cuts have severely damaged international trust in US foreign aid, and many of the agencies that our aid was supporting will either collapse or need to seek funding elsewhere—quite likely from China. Relationships with governments and NGOs that were built over decade have been strained or even destroyed, and will need to be rebuilt.

This is what happens when you elect monsters to positions of power.

And even after we remove them, much of the damage will be difficult or even impossible to repair. Certainly we can never bring back the children who have already needlessly died because of this.

For my mother, on her 79th birthday

PNRJ core principles, current events, personal, politics , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 21 JDN 2460940

When this post goes live, it will be mother’s 79th birthday. I think birthdays are not a very happy time for her anymore.

I suppose nobody really likes getting older; children are excited to grow up, but once you hit about 25 or 26 (the age at which you can rent a car at the normal rate and the age at which you have to get your own health insurance, respectively) and it becomes “getting older” instead of “growing up”, the excitement rapidly wears off. Even by 30, I don’t think most people are very enthusiastic about their birthdays. Indeed, for some people, I think it might be downhill past 21—you wanted to become an adult, but you had no interest in aging beyond that point.

But I think it gets worse as you get older. As you get into your seventies and eighties, you begin to wonder which birthday will finally be your last; actually I think my mother has been wondering about this even earlier than that, because her brothers died in their fifties, her sister died in her sixties, and my father died at 63. At this point she has outlived a lot of people she loved. I think there is a survivor’s guilt that sets in: “Why do I get to keep going, when they didn’t?”

These are also very hard times in general; Trump and the people who enable him have done tremendous damage to our government, our society, and the world at large in a shockingly short amount of time. It feels like all the safeguards we were supposed to have suddenly collapsed and we gave free rein to a madman.

But while there are many loved ones we have lost, there are many we still have; and nor need our set of loved ones be fixed, only to dwindle with each new funeral. We can meet new people, and they can become part of our lives. New children can be born into our family, and they can make our family grow. It is my sincere hope that my mother still has grandchildren yet to meet; in my case they would probably need to be adopted, as the usual biological route is pretty much out of the question, and surrogacy seems beyond our budget for the foreseeable future. But we would still love them, and she could still love them, and it is worth sticking around in this world in order to be a part of their lives.

I also believe that this is not the end for American liberal democracy. This is a terrible time, no doubt. Much that we thought would never happen already has, and more still will. It must be so unsettling, so uncanny, for someone who grew up in the triumphant years after America helped defeat fascism in Europe, to grow older and then see homegrown American fascism rise ascendant here. Even those of us who knew history all too well still seem doomed to repeat it.

At this point it is clear that victory over corruption, racism, and authoritarianism will not be easy, will not be swift, may never be permanent—and is not even guaranteed. But it is still possible. There is still enough hope left that we can and must keep fighting for an America worth saving. I do not know when we will win; I do not even know for certain that we will, in fact, win. But I believe we will.

I believe that while it seems powerful—and does everything it can to both promote that image and abuse what power it does have—fascism is a fundamentally weak system, a fundamentally fragile system, which simply cannot sustain itself once a handful of critical leaders are dead, deposed, or discredited. Liberal democracy is kinder, gentler—and also slower, at times even clumsier—than authoritarianism, and so it may seem weak to those whose view of strength is that of the savanna ape or the playground bully; but this is an illusion. Liberal democracy is fundamentally strong, fundamentally resilient. There is power in kindness, inclusion, and cooperation that the greedy and cruel cannot see. Fascism in Germany arrived and disappeared within a generation; democracy in America has stood for nearly 250 years.

We don’t know how much more time we have, Mom; none of us do. I have heard it said that you should live your life as though you will live both a short life and a long one; but honestly, you should probably live your life as though you will live a randomly-decided amount of time that is statistically predicted by actuarial tables—because you will. Yes, the older you get, the less time you have left (almost tautologically); but especially in this age of rapid technological change, none of us really know whether we’ll die tomorrow or live another hundred years.

I think right now, you feel like there isn’t much left to look forward to. But I promise you there is. Maybe it’s hard to see right now; indeed, maybe you—or I, or anyone—won’t even ever get to see it. But a brighter future is possible, and it’s worth it to keep going, especially if there’s any way that we might be able to make that brighter future happen sooner.

Grief, a rationalist perspective

PNRJ core principles, ethics, personal , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 31 JDN 2460919

This post goes live on the 8th anniversary of my father’s death. Thus it seems an appropriate time to write about grief—indeed, it’s somewhat difficult for me to think about much else.

Far too often, the only perspectives on grief we hear are religious ones. Often, these take the form of consolation: “He’s in a better place now.” “You’ll see him again someday.”

Rationalism doesn’t offer such consolations. Technically one can be an atheist and still believe in an afterlife; but rationalism is stronger than mere atheism. It requires that we believe in scientific facts, and the permanent end of consciousness at death is a scientific fact. We know from direct experiments and observations in neuroscience that a destroyed brain cannot think, feel, see, hear, or remember—when your brain shuts down, whatever you are now will be gone.

It is the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science: There is no soul but the brain.

Moreover, I think, deep down, we all know that death is the end. Even religious people grieve. Their words may say that their loved one is in a better place, but their tears tell a different story.

Maybe it’s an evolutionary instinct, programmed deep into our minds like an ancestral memory, a voice that screams in our minds, insistent on being heard:

“Death is bad!”

If there is one crucial instinct a lifeform needs in order to survive, surely it is something like that one: The preference for life over death. In order to live in a hostile world, you have to want to live.

There are some people who don’t want to live, people who become suicidal. Sometimes even the person we are grieving was someone who chose to take their own life. Generally this is because they believe that their life from then on would be defined only by suffering. Usually, I would say they are wrong about that; but in some cases, maybe they are right, and choosing death is rational. Most of the time, life is worth living, even when we can’t see that.

But aside from such extreme circumstances, most of us feel most of the time that death is one of the worst things that could happen to us or our loved ones. And it makes sense that we feel that way. It is right to feel that way. It is rational to feel that way.

This is why grief hurts so much.

This is why you are not okay.

If the afterlife were real—or even plausible—then grief would not hurt so much. A loved one dying would be like a loved one traveling away to somewhere nice; bittersweet perhaps, maybe even sad—but not devastating the way that grief is. You don’t hold a funeral for someone who just booked a one-way trip to Hawaii, even if you know they aren’t ever coming back.

Religion tries to be consoling, but it typically fails. Because that voice in our heads is still there, repeating endlessly: “Death is bad!” “Death is bad!” “Death is bad!”

But what if religion does give people some comfort in such a difficult time? What if supposing something as nonsensical as Heaven numbs the pain for a little while?

In my view, you’d be better off using drugs. Drugs have side effects and can be addictive, but at least they don’t require you to fundamentally abandon your ontology. Mainstream religion isn’t simply false; it’s absurd. It’s one of the falsest things anyone has ever believed about anything. It’s obviously false. It’s ridiculous. It has never deserved any of the respect and reverence it so often receives.

And in a great many cases, religion is evil. Religion teaches people to be obedient to authoritarians, and to oppress those who are different. Some of the greatest atrocities in history were committed in the name of religion, and some of the worst oppression going on today is done in the name of religion.

Rationalists should give religion no quarter. It is better for someone to find solace in alcohol or cannabis than for them to find solace in religion.

And maybe, in the end, it’s better if they don’t find solace at all.

Grief is good. Grief is healthy. Grief is what we should feel when something as terrible as death happens. That voice screaming “Death is bad!” is right, and we should listen to it.

No, what we need is to not be paralyzed by grief, destroyed by grief. We need to withstand our grief, get through it. We must learn to be strong enough to bear what seems unbearable, not console ourselves with lies.

If you are a responsible adult, then when something terrible happens to you, you don’t pretend it isn’t real. You don’t conjure up a fantasy world in which everything is fine. You face your terrors. You learn to survive them. You make yourself strong enough to carry on. The death of a loved one is a terrible thing; you shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But it doesn’t have to destroy you. You can grow, and heal, and move on.

Moreover, grief has a noble purpose. From our grief we must find motivation to challenge death, to fight death wherever we find it. Those we have already lost are gone; it’s too late for them. But it’s not too late for the rest of us. We can keep fighting.

And through economic development and medical science, we do keep fighting.

In fact, little by little, we are winning the war on death.

Death has already lost its hold upon our children. For most of human history, nearly a third of children died before the age of 5. Now less than 1% do, in rich countries, and even in the poorest countries, it’s typically under 10%. With a little more development—development that is already happening in many places—we can soon bring everyone in the world to the high standard of the First World. We have basically won the war on infant and child mortality.

And death is losing its hold on the rest of us, too. Life expectancy at adulthood is also increasing, and more and more people are living into their nineties and even their hundreds.

It’s true, there still aren’t many people living to be 120 (and some researchers believe it will be a long time before this changes). But living to be 85 instead of 65 is already an extra 20 years of life—and these can be happy, healthy years too, not years of pain and suffering. They say that 60 is the new 50; physiologically, we are so much healthier than our ancestors that it’s as if we were ten years younger.

My sincere hope is that our grief for those we have lost and fear of losing those we still have will drive us forward to even greater progress in combating death. I believe that one day we will finally be able to slow, halt, perhaps even reverse aging itself, rendering us effectively immortal.

Religion promises us immortality, but it isn’t real.

Science offers us the possibility of immortality that’s real.

It won’t be easy to get there. It won’t happen any time soon. In all likelihood, we won’t live to see it ourselves. But one day, our descendants may achieve the grandest goal of all: Finally conquering death.

And even long before that glorious day, our lives are already being made longer and healthier by science. We are pushing death back, step by step, day by day. We are fighting, and we are winning.

Moreover, we as individuals are not powerless in this fight: you can fight death a little harder yourself, by becoming an organ donor, or by donating to organizations that fight global poverty or advance medical science. Let your grief drive you to help others, so that they don’t have to grieve as you do.

And if you need consolation from your grief, let it come from this truth: Death is rarer now today than it was yesterday, and will be rarer still tomorrow. We can’t bring back who we have lost, but we can keep ourselves from losing more so soon.

The Cognitive Science of Morality Part II: Molly Crockett

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JDN 2457140 EDT 20:16.

This weekend has been very busy for me, so this post is going to be shorter than most—which is probably a good thing anyway, since my posts tend to run a bit long.

In an earlier post I discussed the Weinberg Cognitive Science Conference and my favorite speaker in the lineup, Joshua Greene. After a brief interlude from Capybara Day, it’s now time to talk about my second-favorite speaker, Molly Crockett. (Is it just me, or does the name “Molly” somehow seem incongruous with a person of such prestige?)

Molly Crockett is a neuroeconomist, though you’d never hear her say that. She doesn’t think of herself as an economist at all, but purely as a neuroscientist. I suspect this is because when she hears the word “economist” she thinks of only mainstream neoclassical economists, and she doesn’t want to be associated with such things.

Still, what she studies is clearly neuroeconomics—I in fact first learned of her work by reading the textbook Neuroeconomics, though I really got interested in her work after watching her TED Talk. It’s one of the better TED talks (they put out so many of them now that the quality is mixed at best); she talks about news reporting on neuroscience, how it is invariably ridiculous and sensationalist. This is particularly frustrating because of how amazing and important neuroscience actually is.

I could almost forgive the sensationalism if they were talking about something that’s actually fantastically boring, like, say, tax codes, or financial regulations. Of course, even then there is the Oliver Effect: You can hide a lot of evil by putting it in something boring. But Dodd-Frank is 2300 pages long; I read an earlier draft that was only (“only”) 600 pages, and it literally contained a three-page section explaining how to define the word “bank”. (Assuming direct proportionality, I would infer that there is now a twelve-page section defining the word “bank”. Hopefully not?) It doesn’t get a whole lot more snoozeworthy than that. So if you must be a bit sensationalist in order to get people to see why eliminating margin requirements and the swaps pushout rule are terrible, terrible ideas, so be it.

But neuroscience is not boring, and so sensationalism only means that news outlets are making up exciting things that aren’t true instead of saying the actually true things that are incredibly exciting.

Here, let me express without sensationalism what Molly Crockett does for a living: Molly Crockett experimentally determines how psychoactive drugs modulate moral judgments. The effects she observes are small, but they are real; and since these experiments are done using small doses for a short period of time, if these effects scale up they could be profound. This is the basic research component—when it comes to technological fruition it will be literally A Clockwork Orange. But it may be A Clockwork Orange in the best possible way: It could be, at last, a medical cure for psychopathy, a pill to make us not just happier or healthier, but better. We are not there yet by any means, but this is clearly the first step: Molly Crockett is to A Clockwork Orange roughly as Michael Faraday is to the Internet.

In one of the experiments she talked about at the conference, Crockett found that serotonin reuptake inhibitors enhance harm aversion. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors are very commonly used drugs—you are likely familiar with one called Prozac. So basically what this study means is that Prozac makes people more averse to causing pain in themselves or others. It doesn’t necessarily make them more altruistic, let alone more ethical; but it does make them more averse to causing pain. (To see the difference, imagine a 19th-century field surgeon dealing with a wounded soldier; there is no anesthetic, but an amputation must be made. Sometimes being ethical requires causing pain.)

The experiment is actually what Crockett calls “the honest Milgram Experiment“; under Milgram, the experimenters told their subjects they would be causing shocks, but no actual shocks were administered. Under Crockett, the shocks are absolutely 100% real (though they are restricted to a much lower voltage of course). People are given competing offers that contain an amount of money and a number of shocks to be delivered, either to you or to the other subject. They decide how much it’s worth to them to bear the shocks—or to make someone else bear them. It’s a classic willingness-to-pay paradigm, applied to the Milgram Experiment.

What Crockett found did not surprise me, nor do I expect it will surprise you if you imagine yourself in the same place; but it would totally knock the socks off of any neoclassical economist. People are much more willing to bear shocks for money than they are to give shocks for money. They are what Crockett terms hyper-altruistic; I would say that they are exhibiting an apparent solidarity coefficient greater than 1. They seem to be valuing others more than they value themselves.

Normally I’d say that this makes no sense at all—why would you value some random stranger more than yourself? Equally perhaps, and obviously only a psychopath would value them not at all; but more? And there’s no way you can actually live this way in your daily life; you’d give away all your possessions and perhaps even starve yourself to death. (I guess maybe Jesus lived that way.) But Crockett came up with a model that explains it pretty well: We are morally risk-averse. If we knew we were dealing with someone very strong who had no trouble dealing with shocks, we’d be willing to shock them a fairly large amount. But we might actually be dealing with someone very vulnerable who would suffer greatly; and we don’t want to take that chance.

I think there’s some truth to that. But her model leaves something else out that I think is quite important: We are also averse to unfairness. We don’t like the idea of raising one person while lowering another. (Obviously not so averse as to never do it—we do it all the time—but without a compelling reason we consider it morally unjustified.) So if the two subjects are in roughly the same condition (being two undergrads at Oxford, they probably are), then helping one while hurting the other is likely to create inequality where none previously existed. But if you hurt yourself in order to help yourself, no such inequality is created; all you do is raise yourself up, provided that you do believe that the money is good enough to be worth the shocks. It’s actually quite Rawslian; lifting one person up while not affecting the other is exactly the sort of inequality you’re allowed to create according to the Difference Principle.

There’s also the fact that the subjects can’t communicate; I think if I could make a deal to share the money afterward, I’d feel better about shocking someone more in order to get us both more money. So perhaps with communication people would actually be willing to shock others more. (And the sensation headline would of course be: “Talking makes people hurt each other.”)

But all of these ideas are things that could be tested in future experiments! And maybe I’ll do those experiments someday, or Crockett, or one of her students. And with clever experimental paradigms we might find out all sorts of things about how the human mind works, how moral intuitions are structured, and ultimately how chemical interventions can actually change human moral behavior. The potential for both good and evil is so huge, it’s both wondrous and terrifying—but can you deny that it is exciting?

And that’s not even getting into the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, which undermines all concepts of afterlife and theistic religion. I already talked about it before—as the sort of thing that I sort of wish I could say when I introduce myself as a cognitive scientist—but I think it bears repeating.

As Patricia Churchland said on the Colbert Report: Colbert asked, “Are you saying I have no soul?” and she answered, “Yes.” I actually prefer Daniel Dennett’s formulation: “Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.”

We don’t have a magical, supernatural soul (whatever that means); we don’t have an immortal soul that will rise into Heaven or be reincarnated in someone else. But we do have something worth preserving: We have minds that are capable of consciousness. We love and hate, exalt and suffer, remember and imagine, understand and wonder. And yes, we are born and we die. Once the unique electrochemical pattern that defines your consciousness is sufficiently degraded, you are gone. Nothing remains of what you were—except perhaps the memories of others, or things you have created. But even this legacy is unlikely to last forever. One day it is likely that all of us—and everything we know, and everything we have built, from the Great Pyramids to Hamlet to Beethoven’s Ninth to Principia Mathematica to the US Interstate Highway System—will be gone. I don’t have any consolation to offer you on that point; I can’t promise you that anything will survive a thousand years, much less a million. There is a chance—even a chance that at some point in the distant future, whatever humanity has become will find a way to reverse the entropic decay of the universe itself—but nothing remotely like a guarantee. In all probability you, and I, and all of this will be gone someday, and that is absolutely terrifying.

But it is also undeniably true. The fundamental link between the mind and the brain is one of the basic facts of cognitive science; indeed I like to call it The Basic Fact of Cognitive Science. We know specifically which kinds of brain damage will make you unable to form memories, comprehend language, speak language (a totally different area), see, hear, smell, feel anger, integrate emotions with logic… do I need to go on? Everything that you are is done by your brain—because you are your brain.

Now why can’t the science journalists write about that? Instead we get “The Simple Trick That Can Boost Your Confidence Immediately” and “When it Comes to Picking Art, Men & Women Just Don’t See Eye to Eye.” HuffPo is particularly awful of course; the New York Times is better, but still hardly as good as one might like. They keep trying to find ways to make it exciting—but so rarely seem to grasp how exciting it already is.