narcissism

The Butlerian Jihad is looking better all the time

PNRJ book reviews, cognitive science, computer science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, inequality, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 24 JDN 2460395

A review of The Age of Em by Robin Hanson

In the Dune series, the Butlerian Jihad was a holy war against artificial intelligence that resulted in a millenias-long taboo against all forms of intelligent machines. It was effectively a way to tell a story about the distant future without basically everything being about robots or cyborgs.

After reading Robin Hanson’s book, I’m starting to think that maybe we should actually do it.

Thus it is written: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

Hanson says he’s trying to reserve judgment and present objective predictions without evaluation, but it becomes very clear throughout that this is the future he wants, as well as—or perhaps even instead of—the world he expects.

In many ways, it feels like he has done his very best to imagine a world of true neoclassical rational agents in perfect competition, a sort of sandbox for the toys he’s always wanted to play with. Throughout he very much takes the approach of a neoclassical economist, making heroic assumptions and then following them to their logical conclusions, without ever seriously asking whether those assumptions actually make any sense.

To his credit, Hanson does not buy into the hype that AGI will be successful any day now. He predicts that we will achieve the ability to fully emulate human brains and thus create a sort of black-box AGI that behaves very much like a human within about 100 years. Given how the Blue Brain Project has progressed (much slower than its own hype machine told us it would—and let it be noted that I predicted this from the very beginning), I think this is a fairly plausible time estimate. He refers to a mind emulated in this way as an “em”; I have mixed feelings about the term, but I suppose we did need some word for that, and it certainly has conciseness on its side.

Hanson believes that a true understanding of artificial intelligence will only come later, and the sort of AGI that can be taken apart and reprogrammed for specific goals won’t exist for at least a century after that. Both of these sober, reasonable predictions are deeply refreshing in a field that’s been full of people saying “any day now” for the last fifty years.

But Hanson’s reasonableness just about ends there.

In The Age of Em, government is exactly as strong as Hanson needs it to be. Somehow it simultaneously ensures a low crime rate among a population that doubles every few months while also having no means of preventing that population growth. Somehow ensures that there is no labor collusion and corporations never break the law, but without imposing any regulations that might reduce efficiency in any way.

All of this begins to make more sense when you realize that Hanson’s true goal here is to imagine a world where neoclassical economics is actually true.

He realized it didn’t work on humans, so instead of giving up the theory, he gave up the humans.

Hanson predicts that ems will casually make short-term temporary copies of themselves called “spurs”, designed to perform a particular task and then get erased. I guess maybe he would, but I for one would not so cavalierly create another person and then make their existence dedicated to doing a single job before they die. The fact that I created this person, and they are very much like me, seem like reasons to care more about their well-being, not less! You’re asking me to enslave and murder my own child. (Honestly, the fact that Robin Hanson thinks ems will do this all the time says more about Robin Hanson than anything else.) Any remotely sane society of ems would ban the deletion of another em under any but the most extreme circumstances, and indeed treat it as tantamount to murder.

Hanson predicts that we will only copy the minds of a few hundred people. This is surely true at some point—the technology will take time to develop, and we’ll have to start somewhere. But I don’t see why we’d stop there, when we could continue to copy millions or billions of people; and his choices of who would be emulated, while not wildly implausible, are utterly terrifying.

He predicts that we’d emulate genius scientists and engineers; okay, fair enough, that seems right. I doubt that the benefits of doing so will be as high as many people imagine, because scientific progress actually depends a lot more on the combined efforts of millions of scientists than on rare sparks of brilliance by lone geniuses; but those people are definitely very smart, and having more of them around could be a good thing. I can also see people wanting to do this, and thus investing in making it happen.

He also predicts that we’d emulate billionaires. Now, as a prediction, I have to admit that this is actually fairly plausible; billionaires are precisely the sort of people who are rich enough to pay to be emulated and narcissistic enough to want to. But where Hanson really goes off the deep end here is that he sees this as a good thing. He seems to honestly believe that billionaires are so rich because they are so brilliant and productive. He thinks that a million copies of Elon Musks would produce a million hectobillionaires—when in reality it would produce a million squabbling narcissists, who at best had to split the same $200 billion wealth between them, and might very well end up with less because they squander it.

Hanson has a long section on trying to predict the personalities of ems. Frankly this could just have been dropped entirely; it adds almost nothing to the book, and the book is much too long. But the really striking thing to me about that section is what isn’t there. He goes through a long list of studies that found weak correlations between various personality traits like extroversion or openness and wealth—mostly comparing something like the 20th percentile to the 80th percentile—and then draws sweeping conclusions about what ems will be like, under the assumption that ems are all drawn from people in the 99.99999th percentile. (Yes, upper-middle-class people are, on average, more intelligent and more conscientious than lower-middle-class people. But do we even have any particular reason to think that the personalities of people who make $150,000 are relevant to understanding the behavior of people who make $15 billion?) But he completely glosses over the very strong correlations that specifically apply to people in that very top super-rich class: They’re almost all narcissists and/or psychopaths.

Hanson predicts a world where each em is copied many, many times—millions, billions, even trillions of times, and also in which the very richest ems are capable of buying parallel processing time that lets them accelerate their own thought processes to a million times faster than a normal human. (Is that even possible? Does consciousness work like that? Who knows!?) The world that Hanson is predicting is thus one where all the normal people get outnumbered and overpowered by psychopaths.

Basically this is the most abjectly dystopian cyberpunk hellscape imaginable. And he talks about it the whole time as if it were good.

It’s like he played the game Action Potential and thought, “This sounds great! I’d love to live there!” I mean, why wouldn’t you want to owe a life-debt on your own body and have to work 120-hour weeks for a trillion-dollar corporation just to make the payments on it?

Basically, Hanson doesn’t understand how wealth is actually acquired. He is educated as an economist, yet his understanding of capitalism basically amounts to believing in magic. He thinks that competitive markets just somehow perfectly automatically allocate wealth to whoever is most productive, and thus concludes that whoever is wealthy now must just be that productive.

I can see no other way to explain his wildly implausible predictions that the em economy will double every month or two. A huge swath of the book depends upon this assumption, but he waits until halfway through the book to even try to defend it, and then does an astonishingly bad job of doing so. (Honestly, even if you buy his own arguments—which I don’t—they seem to predict that population would grow with Moore’s Law—doubling every couple of years, not every couple of months.)

Whereas Keynes predicted based on sound economic principles that economic growth would more or less proceed apace and got his answer spot-on, Hanson predicts that for mysterious, unexplained reasons economic growth will suddenly increase by two orders of magnitude—and I’m pretty sure he’s going to be wildly wrong.

Hanson also predicts that ems will be on average poorer than we are, based on some sort of perfect-competition argument that doesn’t actually seem to mesh at all with his predictions of spectacularly rapid economic and technological growth. I think the best way to make sense of this is to assume that it means the trend toward insecure affluence will continue: Ems will have an objectively high standard of living in terms of what they own, what games they play, where they travel, and what they eat and drink (in simulation), but they will constantly be struggling to keep up with the rent on their homes—or even their own bodies. This is a world where (the very finest simulation of) Dom Perignon is $7 a bottle and wages are $980 an hour—but monthly rent is $284,000.

Early in the book Hanson argues that this life of poverty and scarcity will lead to more conservative values, on the grounds that people who are poorer now seem to be more conservative, and this has something to do with farmers versus foragers. Hanson’s explanation of all this is baffling; I will quote it at length, just so it’s clear I’m not misrepresenting it:

The other main (and independent) axis of value variation ranges between poor and rich societies. Poor societies place more value on conformity, security, and traditional values such as marriage, heterosexuality, religion, patriotism, hard work, and trust in authority. In contrast, rich societies place more value on individualism, self-direction, tolerance, pleasure, nature, leisure, and trust. When the values of individuals within a society vary on the same axis, we call this a left/liberal (rich) versus right/conservative (poor) axis.

Foragers tend to have values more like those of rich/liberal people today, while subsistence farmers tend to have values more like those of poor/conservative people today. As industry has made us richer, we have on average moved from conservative/farmer values to liberal/forager values. This value movement can make sense if cultural evolution used the social pressures farmers faced, such as conformity and religion, to induce humans, who evolved to find forager behaviors natural, to instead act like farmers. As we become rich, we don’t as strongly fear the threats behind these social pressures. This connection may result in part from disease; rich people are healthier, and healthier societies fear less.

The alternate theory that we have instead learned that rich forager values are more true predicts that values should have followed a random walk over time, and be mostly common across space. It also predicts the variance of value changes tracking the rate at which relevant information appears. But in fact industrial-era value changes have tracked the wealth of each society in much more steady and consistent fashion. And on this theory, why did foragers ever acquire farmer values?

[…]

In the scenario described in this book, many strange-to-forager behaviors are required, and median per-person (i.e. per-em) incomes return to near-subsistence levels. This suggests that the em era may reverse the recent forager-like trend toward more liberality; ems may have more farmer-like values.

The Age of Em, p. 26-27

There’s a lot to unpack here, but maybe it’s better to burn the whole suitcase.

First of all, it’s not entirely clear that this is really a single axis of variation, that foragers and farmers differ from each other in the same way as liberals and conservatives. There’s some truth to that at least—both foragers and liberals tend to be more generous, both farmers and conservatives tend to enforce stricter gender norms. But there are also clear ways that liberal values radically deviate from forager values: Forager societies are extremely xenophobic, and typically very hostile to innovation, inequality, or any attempts at self-aggrandizement (a phenomenon called “fierce egalitarianism“). San Francisco epitomizes rich, liberal values, but it would be utterly alien and probably regarded as evil by anyone from the Yanomamo.

Second, there is absolutely no reason to predict any kind of random walk. That’s just nonsense. Would you predict that scientific knowledge is a random walk, with each new era’s knowledge just a random deviation from the last’s? Maybe next century we’ll return to geocentrism, or phrenology will be back in vogue? On the theory that liberal values (or at least some liberal values) are objectively correct, we would expect them to advance as knowledge does—improving over time, and improving faster in places that have better institutions for research, education, and free expression. And indeed, this is precisely the pattern we have observed. (Those places are also richer, but that isn’t terribly surprising either!)

Third, while poorer regions are indeed more conservative, poorer people within a region actually tend to be more liberal. Nigeria is poorer and more conservative than Norway, and Mississippi is poorer and more conservative than Massachusetts. But higher-income households in the United States are more likely to vote Republican. I think this is particularly true of people living under insecure affluence: We see the abundance of wealth around us, and don’t understand why we can’t learn to share it better. We’re tired of fighting over scraps while the billionaires claim more and more. Millennials and Zoomers absolutely epitomize insecure affluence, and we also absolutely epitomize liberalism. So, if indeed ems live a life of insecure affluence, we should expect them to be like Zoomers: “Trans liberation now!” and “Eat the rich!” (Or should I say, “Delete the rich!”)

And really, doesn’t that make more sense? Isn’t that the trend our society has been on, for at least the last century? We’ve been moving toward more and more acceptance of women and minorities, more and more deviation from norms, more and more concern for individual rights and autonomy, more and more resistance to authority and inequality.

The funny thing is, that world sounds a lot better than the one Hanson is predicting.

A world of left-wing ems would probably run things a lot better than Hanson imagines: Instead of copying the same hundred psychopaths over and over until we fill the planet, have no room for anything else, and all struggle to make enough money just to stay alive, we could moderate our population to a more sustainable level, preserve diversity and individuality, and work toward living in greater harmony with each other and the natural world. We could take this economic and technological abundance and share it and enjoy it, instead of killing ourselves and each other to make more of it for no apparent reason.

The one good argument Hanson makes here is expressed in a single sentence: “And on this theory, why did foragers ever acquire farmer values?” That actually is a good question; why did we give up on leisure and egalitarianism when we transitioned from foraging to agriculture?

I think scarcity probably is relevant here: As food became scarcer, maybe because of climate change, people were forced into an agricultural lifestyle just to have enough to eat. Early agricultural societies were also typically authoritarian and violent. Under those conditions, people couldn’t be so generous and open-minded; they were surrounded by threats and on the verge of starvation.

I guess if Hanson is right that the em world is also one of poverty and insecurity, we might go back to those sort of values, borne of desperation. But I don’t see any reason to think we’d give up all of our liberal values. I would predict that ems will still be feminist, for instance; in fact, Hanson himself admits that since VR avatars would let us change gender presentation at will, gender would almost certainly become more fluid in a world of ems. Far from valuing heterosexuality more highly (as conservatives do, a “farmer value” according to Hanson), I suspect that ems will have no further use for that construct, because reproduction will be done by manufacturing, not sex, and it’ll be so easy to swap your body into a different one that hardly anyone will even keep the same gender their whole life. They’ll think it’s quaint that we used to identify so strongly with our own animal sexual dimorphism.

But maybe it is true that the scarcity induced by a hyper-competitive em world would make people more selfish, less generous, less trusting, more obsessed with work. Then let’s not do that! We don’t have to build that world! This isn’t a foregone conclusion!

There are many other paths yet available to us.

Indeed, perhaps the simplest would be to just ban artificial intelligence, at least until we can get a better handle on what we’re doing—and perhaps until we can institute the kind of radical economic changes necessary to wrest control of the world away from the handful of psychopaths currently trying their best to run it into the ground.

I admit, it would kind of suck to not get any of the benefits of AI, like self-driving cars, safer airplanes, faster medical research, more efficient industry, and better video games. It would especially suck if we did go full-on Butlerian Jihad and ban anything more complicated than a pocket calculator. (Our lifestyle might have to go back to what it was in—gasp! The 1950s!)

But I don’t think it would suck nearly as much as the world Robin Hanson thinks is in store for us if we continue on our current path.

So I certainly hope he’s wrong about all this.

Fortunately, I think he probably is.

I finally have a published paper.

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Jun 12 JDN 2459773

Here it is, my first peer-reviewed publication: “Imperfect Tactic Collusion and Asymmetric Price Transmission”, in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

Due to the convention in economics that authors are displayed alphabetically, I am listed third of four, and will be typically collapsed into “Bulutay et. al.”. I don’t actually think it should be “Julius et. al.”; I think Dave Hales did the most important work, and I wanted it to be “Hales et. al.”; but anything non-alphabetical is unusual in economics, and it would have taken a strong justification to convince the others to go along with it. This is a very stupid norm (and I attribute approximately 20% of Daron Acemoglu’s superstar status to it), but like any norm, it is difficult to dislodge.

I thought I would feel different when this day finally came. I thought I would feel joy, or at least satisfaction. I had been hoping that satisfaction would finally spur me forward in resubmitting my single-author paper, “Experimental Public Goods Games with Progressive Taxation”, so I could finally get a publication that actually does have “Julius (2022)” (or, at this rate, 2023, 2024…?). But that motivating satisfaction never came.

I did feel some vague sense of relief: Thank goodness, this ordeal is finally over and I can move on. But that doesn’t have the same motivating force; it doesn’t make me want to go back to the other papers I can now hardly bear to look at.

This reaction (or lack thereof?) could be attributed to circumstances: I have been through a lot lately. I was already overwhelmed by finishing my dissertation and going on the job market, and then there was the pandemic, and I had to postpone my wedding, and then when I finally got a job we had to suddenly move abroad, and then it was awful finding a place to live, and then we actually got married (which was lovely, but still stressful), and it took months to get my medications sorted with the NHS, and then I had a sudden resurgence of migraines which kept me from doing most of my work for weeks, and then I actually caught COVID and had to deal with that for a few weeks too. So it really isn’t too surprising that I’d be exhausted and depressed after all that.

Then again, it could be something deeper. I didn’t feel this way about my wedding. That genuinely gave me the joy and satisfaction that I had been expecting; I think it really was the best day of my life so far. So it isn’t as if I’m incapable of these feelings under my current state.

Rather, I fear that I am becoming more permanently disillusioned with academia. Now that I see how the sausage is made, I am no longer so sure I want to be one of the people making it. Publishing that paper didn’t feel like I had accomplished something, or even made some significant contribution to human knowledge. In fact, the actual work of publication was mostly done by my co-authors, because I was too overwhelmed by the job market at the time. But what I did have to do—and what I’ve tried to do with my own paper—felt like a miserable, exhausting ordeal.

More and more, I’m becoming convinced that a single experiment tells us very little, and we are being asked to present each one as if it were a major achievement when it’s more like a single brick in a wall.

But whatever new knowledge our experiments may have gleaned, that part was done years ago. We could have simply posted the draft as a working paper on the web and moved on, and the world would know just as much and our lives would have been a lot easier.

Oh, but then it would not have the imprimatur of peer review! And for our careers, that means absolutely everything. (Literally, when they’re deciding tenure, nothing else seems to matter.) But for human knowledge, does it really mean much? The more referee reports I’ve read, the more arbitrary they feel to me. This isn’t an objective assessment of scientific merit; it’s the half-baked opinion of a single randomly chosen researcher who may know next to nothing about the topic—or worse, have a vested interest in defending a contrary paradigm.

Yes, of course, what gets through peer review is of considerably higher quality than any randomly-selected content on the Internet. (The latter can be horrifically bad.) But is this not also true of what gets submitted for peer review? In fact, aren’t many blogs written by esteemed economists (say, Krugman? Romer? Nate Silver?) of considerably higher quality as well, despite having virtually none of the gatekeepers? I think Krugman’s blog is nominally edited by the New York Times, and Silver has a whole staff at FiveThirtyEight (they’re hiring, in fact!), but I’m fairly certain Romer just posts whatever he wants like I do. Of course, they had to establish their reputations (Krugman and Romer each won a Nobel). But still, it seems like maybe peer-review isn’t doing the most important work here.

Even blogs by far less famous economists (e.g. Miles Kimball, Brad DeLong) are also very good, and probably contribute more to advancing the knowledge of the average person than any given peer-reviewed paper, simply because they are more readable and more widely read. What we call “research” means going from zero people knowing a thing to maybe a dozen people knowing it; “publishing” means going from a dozen to at most a thousand; to go from a thousand to a billion, we call that “education”.

They all matter, of course; but I think we tend to overvalue research relative to education. A world where a few people know something is really not much better than a world where nobody does, while a world where almost everyone knows something can be radically superior. And the more I see just how far behind the cutting edge of research most economists are—let alone most average people—the more apparent it becomes to me that we are investing far too much in expanding that cutting edge (and far, far too much in gatekeeping who gets to do that!) and not nearly enough in disseminating that knowledge to humanity.

I think maybe that’s why finally publishing a paper felt so anticlimactic for me. I know that hardly anyone will ever actually read the damn thing. Just getting to this point took far more effort than it should have; dozens if not hundreds of hours of work, months of stress and frustration, all to satisfy whatever arbitrary criteria the particular reviewers happened to use so that we could all clear this stupid hurdle and finally get that line on our CVs. (And we wonder why academics are so depressed?) Far from being inspired to do the whole process again, I feel as if I have finally emerged from the torture chamber and may at last get some chance for my wounds to heal.

Even publishing fiction was not this miserable. Don’t get me wrong; it was miserable, especially for me, as I hate and fear rejection to the very core of my being in a way most people do not seem to understand. But there at least the subjectivity and arbitrariness of the process is almost universally acknowledged. Agents and editors don’t speak of your work being “flawed” or “wrong”; they don’t even say it’s “unimportant” or “uninteresting”. They say it’s “not a good fit” or “not what we’re looking for right now”. (Journal editors sometimes make noises like that too, but there’s always a subtext of “If this were better science, we’d have taken it.”) Unlike peer reviewers, they don’t come back with suggestions for “improvements” that are often pointless or utterly infeasible.

And unlike peer reviewers, fiction publishers acknowledge their own subjectivity and that of the market they serve. Nobody really thinks that Fifty Shades of Grey was good in any deep sense; but it was popular and successful, and that’s all the publisher really cares about. As a result, failing to be the next Fifty Shades of Grey ends up stinging a lot less than failing to be the next article in American Economic Review. Indeed, I’ve never had any illusions that my work would be popular among mainstream economists. But I once labored under the belief that it would be more important that it is true; and I guess I now consider that an illusion.

Moreover, fiction writers understand that rejection hurts; I’ve been shocked how few academics actually seem to. Nearly every writing conference I’ve ever been to has at least one seminar on dealing with rejection, often several; at academic conferences, I’ve literally never seen one. There seems to be a completely different mindset among academics—at least, the successful, tenured ones—about the process of peer review, what it means, even how it feels. When I try to talk with my mentors about the pain of getting rejected, they just… don’t get it. They offer me guidance on how to deal with anger at rejection, when that is not at all what I feel—what I feel is utter, hopeless, crushing despair.

There is a type of person who reacts to rejection with anger: Narcissists. (Look no further than the textbook example, Donald Trump.) I am coming to fear that I’m just not narcissistic enough to be a successful academic. I’m not even utterly lacking in narcissism: I am almost exactly average for a Millennial on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. I score fairly high on Authority and Superiority (I consider myself a good leader and a highly competent individual) but very low on Exploitativeness and Self-Sufficiency (I don’t like hurting people and I know no man is an island). Then again, maybe I’m just narcissistic in the wrong way: I score quite low on “grandiose narcissism”, but relatively high on “vulnerable narcissism”. I hate to promote myself, but I find rejection devastating. This combination seems to be exactly what doesn’t work in academia. But it seems to be par for the course among writers and poets. Perhaps I have the mind of a scientist, but I have the soul of a poet. (Send me through the wormhole! Please? Please!?)

How to be a good writer

PNRJ personal , , , , , ,

Oct 25 JDN 2459148

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
~ Thomas Mann

“You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

~ Red Smith

Why is it so difficult to write well? Why is it that those of us who write the most often find it the most agonizing?

My guess is that many other art forms are similar, but writing is what I know best.

I have come to realize that there are four major factors which determine the quality of someone’s writing, and the pain and challenge of writing comes from the fact that they are not very compatible with one another.

The first is talent. To a certain degree, one can be born a better or worse writer, or become so through forces not of one’s own making. This one costs nothing to get if you already have it, but if you don’t have it, you can’t really acquire it. If you do lack talent, that doesn’t mean you can’t write; but it does limit how successful you are likely to be at writing. (Then again, some very poorly-written books have made some very large sums of money!) It’s also very difficult to know whether you really have talent; people tell me I do, so I suppose I believe them.

The second is practice. You must write and keep on writing. You must write many things in many contexts, and continue to write despite various pressures and obstacles trying to stop you from writing. Reading is also part of this process, as we learn new ways to use words by seeing how others have used them. In fact, you should read more words than you write.

The third is devotion. If you are to truly write well, you must pour your heart and soul into what you write. I can tell fairly quickly whether someone is serious about writing or not by seeing how they react to the metaphor I like to use: “I carve off shards of my soul and assemble them into robots that I release into the world; and when the robots fail, I wonder whether I have assembled them incorrectly, or if there is something fundamentally wrong with my soul itself.” Most people react with confusion. Serious writers nod along in agreement.

The fourth is criticism. You must seek out criticism from a variety of sources, you must accept that criticism, and you must apply it in improving your work in the future. You must avoid becoming defensive, but you must also recognize that disagreement will always exist. You will never satisfy everyone with what you write. The challenge is to satisfy as much of your target audience as possible.

And therein lies the paradox: For when you have devoted your heart and soul into a work, receiving criticism on it can make you want to shut down, wanting to avoid that pain. And thus, you stop practicing, and you stop improving.

What can be done about this?

I am told that it helps to “get a thick skin”, but seeing as I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to do that and failed completely, this may not be the most useful advice. Indeed, even if it can be done it may not be worth it: The most thick-skinned people I know of are generally quite incompetent at whatever they do, because they ignore criticism. There are two ways to be a narcissist: One is to be so sensitive to criticism that you refuse to hear it; the other is to be so immune to criticism that it has no effect on you. (The former is “covert narcissism”, the latter is “overt narcissism”.)

One thing that does seem to help is learning to develop some measure of detachment frrom your work, so that you can take criticism of your work as applying to that work and not to yourself. Usually the robots really are just misassembled, and there’s nothing wrong with your soul.

But this can be dangerous as well: If you detach yourself too much from your work, you lose your devotion to it, and it becomes mechanically polished but emotionally hollow. If you optimize over and over to what other people want, it eventually stops being the work that had meaning for you.

Perhaps what ultimately separates good writers from everyone else is not what they can do, but what they feel they must do: Serious writers feel a kind of compulsion to write, an addiction to transferring thoughts into words. Often they don’t even particularly enjoy it; they don’t “want” to write in the ordinary sense of the word. They simply must write, feeling as though they die or go mad if they ever were forced to stop. It is this compulsion that gets them to persevere in the face of failure and rejection—and the self-doubt that rejection drives.

And if you don’t feel that compulsion? Honestly, maybe you’re better off than those of us who do.

Is America uniquely… mean?

PNRJ core principles, ethics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457454

I read this article yesterday which I found both very resonant and very disturbing: At least among First World countries, the United States really does seem uniquely, for lack of a better word, mean.

The formal psychological terminology is social dominance orientation; the political science term is authoritarianism. In economics, we notice the difference due to its effect on income inequality. But all of these concepts are capturing part of a deeper underlying reality that in the age of Trump I am finding increasingly hard to deny. The best predictor of support for Trump is authoritarianism.

Of course I’ve already talked about our enormous military budget; but then Tennessee had to make their official state rifle a 50-caliber weapon capable of destroying light tanks. There is something especially dominant, aggressive, and violent about American culture.

We are certainly not unique in the world as a whole—actually I think the amount of social dominance orientation, authoritarianism, and inequality in the US is fairly similar to the world average. We are unique in our gun ownership, but our military spending proportional to GDP is not particularly high by world standards—we’re just an extremely rich country. But in all these respects we are a unique outlier among First World countries; in many ways we resemble a rich authoritarian petrostate like Qatar rather than a European social democracy like France or the UK. (At least we’re not Saudi Arabia?)

More than other First World cultures, Americans believe in hierarchy; they believe that someone should be on top and other people should be on the bottom. More than that, they believe that people “like us” should be on top and people “not like us” should be on the bottom, however that is defined—often in terms of race or religion, but not necessarily.

Indeed, one of the things I find most baffling about this is that it is often more important to people that others be held down than that they themselves be lifted up. This is the only way I can make sense of the fact that people who have watched their wages be drained into the pockets of billionaires for a generation can think that the most important things to do right now are block out illegal immigrants and deport Muslims.

It seems to be that people become convinced that their own status, whatever it may be, is deserved: If they are rich, it is obviously because they are so brilliant and hard-working (something Trump clearly believes about himself, being a textbook example of Narcissistic Personality Disorder); if they are poor, it is obviously because they are so incompetent and lazy. Thus, being lifted up doesn’t make sense; why would you give me things I don’t deserve?

But then when they see people who are different from them, they know automatically that those people must be by definition inferior, as all who are Not of Our Tribe are by definition inferior. And therefore, any of them who are rich gained their position through corruption or injustice, and all of them who are poor deserve their fate for being so inferior. Thus, it is most vital to ensure that these Not of Our Tribe are held down from reaching high positions they so obviously do not deserve.

I’m fairly sure that most of this happens at a very deep unconscious level; it calls upon ancient evolutionary instincts to love our own tribe, to serve the alpha male, to fear and hate those of other tribes. These instincts may well have served us 200,000 years ago (then again, they may just have been the best our brains could manage at the time); but they are becoming a dangerous liability today.

As E.O. Wilson put it: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”

Yet this cannot be a complete explanation, for there is variation in these attitudes. A purely instinctual theory should say that all human cultures have this to an essentially equal degree; but I started this post by pointing out that the United States appears to have a particularly large amount relative to Europe.

So, there must be something in the cultures or institutions of different nations that makes them either enhance or suppress this instinctual tribalism. There must be something that Europe is doing right, the US is doing wrong, and Saudi Arabia is doing very, very wrong.
Well, the obvious one that sticks out at me is religion. It seems fairly obvious to me that Sweden is less religious than the US, which is less religious than Saudi Arabia.

Data does back me up on this. Religiosity isn’t easy to measure, but we have methods of doing so. If we ask people in various countries if religion is very important in their lives, the percentage of people who say yes gives us an indication of how religious that country is.

In Saudi Arabia, 93% say yes. In the United States, 65% say yes. In Sweden, only 17% say yes.

Religiosity tends to be highest in the poorest countries, but the US is an outlier, far too rich for our religion (or too religious for our wealth).

Religiosity also tends to be highest in countries with high inequality—this time, the US fits right in.

The link between religion and inequality is quite clear. It’s harder to say which way the causation runs. Perhaps high inequality makes people cling more to religion as a comfort, and getting rid of religion would only mean taking that comfort away. Or, perhaps religion actually makes people believe more in social dominance, and thus is part of what keeps that high inequality in place. It could also be a feedback loop, in which higher inequality leads to higher religiosity which leads to higher inequality.

That said, I think we actually have some evidence that causality runs from religion to inequality, rather than the other way around. The secularization of France took place around the same time as the French Revolution that overthrew the existing economic system and replaced it with one that had substantially less inequality. Iran’s government became substantially more based on religion in the latter half of the 20th century, and their inequality soared thereafter.

Above all, Donald Trump dominates the evangelical vote, which makes absolutely no sense if religion is a comfort against inequality—but perfect sense if religion solidifies the tendency of people to think in terms of hierarchy and authoritarianism.

This also makes sense in terms of the content of religion, especially Abrahamaic religion; read the Bible and the Qur’an, and you will see that their primary goal seems to be to convince you that some people, namely people who believe in this book, are just better than other people, and we should be in charge because God says so. (And you wouldn’t try to argue with God, would you?) They really make no particular effort to convince you that God actually exists; they spend all their argumentative effort on what God wants you to do and who God wants you to put in charge—and for some strange reason it always seems to be the same guys who are writing down “God’s words” in the book! What a coincidence!

If religion is indeed the problem, or a large part of the problem, what can we do about it? That’s the most difficult part. We’ve been making absolutely conclusive rational arguments against religion since literally 300 years before Jesus was even born (there has never been a time in human history in which it was rational for an educated person to believe in Christianity or Islam, for the religions did not come into existence until well after the arguments to refute them were well-known!), and the empirical evidence against theism has only gotten stronger ever since; so that clearly isn’t enough.

I think what we really need to do at this point is confront the moral monopoly that religion has asserted for itself. The “Moral Majority” was neither, but its name still sort of makes sense to us because we so strongly associate being moral with being religious. We use terms like “Christian” and “generous” almost interchangeably. And whenever you get into a debate about religion, shortly after you have thoroughly demolished any shred of empirical credibility religion still had left, you can basically guarantee that the response will be: “But without God, how can you know right from wrong?”

What is perhaps most baffling about this concept of morality so commonplace in our culture is that not only is the command of a higher authority that rewards and punishes you not the highest level of moral development—it is literally the lowest. Of the six stages of moral thinking Kohlberg documented in children, the reward and punishment orientation exemplified by the Bible and the Qur’an is the very first. I think many of these people really truly haven’t gotten past level 1, which is why when you start trying to explain how you base your moral judgments on universal principles of justice and consequences (level 6) they don’t seem to have any idea what you’re talking about.

Perhaps this is a task for our education system (philosophy classes in middle school?), perhaps we need something more drastic than that, or perhaps it is enough that we keep speaking about it in public. But somehow we need to break up the monopoly that religion has on moral concepts, so that people no longer feel ashamed to say that something is morally wrong without being able to cite a particular passage from a particular book from the Iron Age. Perhaps once we can finally make people realize that morality does not depend on religion, we can finally free them from the grip of religion—and therefore from the grip of authoritarianism and social dominance.

If this is right, then the reason America is so mean is that we are so Christian—and people need to realize that this is not a paradoxical statement.