Monthly Archives: August 2009

Value for money kills?

Posted on August 24, 2009 | 15 comments
Indonesian SODIS users (picture: SODIS Eawag)

Indonesian SODIS users (picture: SODIS Eawag)

SODIS is a cheap method of disinfecting water by putting it in the sun. Like many things, it works better in physics than society, where its effects were not significant, according to a study in PLoS medicine recently. The technical barrier is that people don’t do it much. About thirty two percent of participants in the study used the system on a given day. If you’re familiar with how little things work in reality, this is still surprising. Cheaply disinfecting water seems like it would be a hit with poor people whose children get diarrhea all the time and regularly die. Rural Bolivia, where the study was done, is a good candidate. The children studied usually get diarrhoea four times a year, which causes about fifteen percent of deaths of children under five. For the poorest quintile in Bolivia the under five death rate is about one in ten of those born alive.

The leader of the study, Daniel Mausezahl, suspects a big reason for this is that lining up water bottles on your roof shows your neighbors that you aren’t rich enough to have more expensive methods of disinfecting water. It’s hard to see from a distance the difference between chlorination and coliform-infested jerry cans, so drinking excrement can make you look better than drinking cheap clean water.

Fascinating as signaling explanations are, this seems incredible. Having live descendents is even more evolutionarily handy than impressing associates. What other explanations could there be? Perhaps adults are skeptical about effectiveness? There is apparently good evidence it works though, and there were intensive promotional campaigns during the study. What’s more, lack of evidence doesn’t usually stop humans investing in just about anything that isn’t obviously lethal in the absence of effective means to control their wellbeing. And parents are known for obsessive interest in their children’s safety. What’s going on?

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Is your subconscious communist?

Posted on August 22, 2009 | 8 comments
People can be hard to tell apart, even to themselves (picture: Giustino)

People can be hard to tell apart, even to themselves (picture: Giustino)

Humans make mental models of other humans automatically, and appear to get somewhat confused about who is who at times.  This happens with knowledge, actions, attention and feelings:

Just having another person visible hinders your ability to say what you can see from where you stand, though considering a non-human perspective does not:

[The] participants were also significantly slower in verifying their own perspective when the avatar’s perspective was incongruent. In Experiment 2, we found that the avatar’s perspective intrusion effect persisted even when participants had to repeatedly verify their own perspective within the same block. In Experiment 3, we replaced the avatar by a bicolor stick …[and then] the congruency of the local space did not influence participants’ response time when they verified the number of circles presented in the global space.

Believing you see a person moving can impede you in moving differently, similar to rubbing your tummy while patting your head, but if you believe the same visual stimulus is not caused by a person, there is no interference:

[A] dot display followed either a biologically plausible or implausible velocity profile. Interference effects due to dot observation were present for both biological and nonbiological velocity profiles when the participants were informed that they were observing prerecorded human movement and were absent when the dot motion was described as computer generated…

Doing  a task where the cues to act may be incongruent with the actions (a red pointer signals that you should press the left button, whether the pointer points left or right, and a green pointer signals right), the incongruent signals take longer to respond to than the congruent ones. This stops when you only have to look after one of the buttons. But if someone else picks up the other button, it becomes harder once again to do incongruent actions:

The identical task was performed alone and alongside another participant. There was a spatial compatibility effect in the group setting only. It was similar to the effect obtained when one person took care of both responses. This result suggests that one’s own actions and others’ actions are represented in a functionally equivalent way.

You can learn to subconsciously fear a stimulus by seeing the stimulus and feeling pain, but not by being told about it. However seeing the stimulus and watching someone react to pain, works like feeling it yourself:

In the Pavlovian group, the CS1 was paired with a mild shock, whereas the observational-learning group learned through observing the emotional expression of a confederate receiving shocks paired with the CS1. The instructed-learning group was told that the CS1 predicted a shock…As in previous studies, participants also displayed a significant learning response to masked [too fast to be consciously perceived] stimuli following Pavlovian conditioning. However, whereas the observational-learning group also showed this effect, the instructed-learning group did not.

A good summary of all this, Implicit and Explicit Processes in Social Cognition, interprets that we are subconsciously nice:

Many studies show that implicit processes facilitate
the sharing of knowledge, feelings, and actions, and hence, perhaps surprisingly, serve altruism rather
than selfishness. On the other hand, higher-level conscious processes are as likely to be selfish as prosocial.

…implicit processes facilitate the sharing of knowledge, feelings, and actions, and hence, perhaps surprisingly, serve altruism rather than selfishness. On the other hand, higher-level conscious processes are as likely to be selfish as prosocial.

It’s true that these unconscious behaviours can help us cooperate, but it seems they are no more ‘altruistic’ than the two-faced conscious processes the authors cite as evidence for conscious selfishness. Our subconsciouses are like the rest of us; adeptly ‘altruistic’ when it benefits them, such as when watched. For an example of how well designed we are in this regard consider the automatic empathic expression of pain we make upon seeing someone hurt. When we aren’t being watched, feeling other people’s pain goes out the window:

…A 2-part experiment with 50 university students tested the hypothesis that motor mimicry is instead an interpersonal event, a nonverbal communication intended to be seen by the other….The victim of an apparently painful injury was either increasingly or decreasingly available for eye contact with the observer. Microanalysis showed that the pattern and timing of the observer’s motor mimicry were significantly affected by the visual availability of the victim.

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Mistakes with nonexistent people

Posted on August 13, 2009 | 16 comments

Who is better off if you live and I die? Is one morally obliged to go around impregnating women? Is the repugnant conclusion repugnant? Is secret genocide OK? Does it matter if humanity goes extinct? Why shouldn’t we kill people? Is pity for the dead warranted?

All these discussions come down to the same question often: whether to care about the interests of people who don’t exist but could.

I shan’t directly argue either way; care about whatever you like. I want to show that most of the arguments against caring about the non-existent which repeatedly come up in casual discussion rely on two errors.

Here are common arguments (paraphrased from real discussions):

  1. There are infinitely many potential people, so caring about them is utterly impractical.
  2. The utility that a non-existent person experiences is undefined, not zero. You are calculating some amount of utility and attributing it to zero people. This means utility per person is x/0 = undefined.
  3. Causing a person to not exist is a victimless crime. Stop pretending these people are real just because you imagine them!
  4. If someone doesn’t exist, they don’t have preferences, so you can’t fulfil them. This includes not caring if they exist or not. The dead do not suffer, only their friends and relatives do that.
  5. Life alone isn’t worth anything – what matters is what happens in it, so creating a new life is a neutral act.
  6. You can’t be dead. It’s not something you can be. So you can’t say whether life is better.
  7. Potential happiness is immeasurable; the person could have been happy, they could have been sad. Their life doesn’t exist, so it doesn’t have characteristics.
  8. How can you calculate loss of future life? Maybe they’d live another hundred years, if you’re going to imagine they don’t die now.

All of these arguments spring from two misunderstandings:

Thinking of value as being a property of particular circumstances rather than of the comparison between choices of circumstances.

People who won't exist under any of our choices are of no importance (picture: Michelangelo)

People who won't exist under any of our choices are of no importance (picture: Michelangelo)

We need never be concerned with the infinite people who don’t exist. All those who won’t exist under any choice we might make are irrelevant.  The question is whether those who do exist under one choice we can make and don’t exist under another would be better off existing.

2, 3 and 4 make this mistake too. The utility we are talking about accrues in the possible worlds where the person does exist, and has preferences. Saying someone is worse off not existing is saying that in the worlds where they do exist they have more utility. It is not saying that where they don’t exist they experience suffering, or that they can want to exist when they do not.

Assuming there is nothing to be known about something that isn’t the case.

If someone doesn’t exist, you don’t just not know about their preferences. They actually don’t have any. So how can you say anything about them? If a person died now, how can you say anything about how long they would have lived? How good it could have been? It’s all imaginary. This line of thought underlies arguments 4-8.

But in no case are we discussing characteristics of something that doesn’t exist. We are discussing which characteristics are likely in the case where it does exist. This is very different.

If I haven’t made you a cake, the cake doesn’t have characteristics. To ask whether it is chocolate flavoured is silly. You can still guess that conditional on my making it it is more likely chocolate flavoured than fish flavoured. Whether I’ve made it already is irrelevant. Similarly you can guess that if a child were born it would be more likely to find life positive (as most people seem to) and to like music and food and sex and other things it’s likely to be able to get, and not to have an enourmous unsatisfiable desire for six to be prime. You can guess that conditional on someone’s life continuing, it would probably continue until old age. These are the sorts of things we uncontroversially guess all the time about our own futures, which are of course also conditional on choices we make, so I can’t see why they would become a problem when other potential people are involved.

Are there any good arguments that don’t rely on these errors for wanting to ignore those who don’t currently exist in consequentialist calculations?

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Are abortion views sexist?

Posted on August 12, 2009 | 23 comments
Indian girls are born on 500,000 fewer occasions per year than Indian boys (2006).(Photo: Steve Evans)

Indian girls are born on 500,000 fewer occasions per year than Indian boys (2006).(Photo: Steve Evans)

Abortion isn’t too bad according to half of Americans, and most of liberals and the irreligious and that bunch. The fetus never really got as far as being a child, and virtually nobody thinks failing to have children is as bad as murder.

Selective abortion of female fetuses, on the other hand, is horrific according to both ends of the ideological spectrum. And the reasons given are almost always to do with it being  bad for the females who aren’t born. It’s “discrimination“, a “gross violation of women’s rights“, “an extreme manifestation of violence against women” . As my pro-choice friend (among others) complains, ‘There are all these females who should exist and are missing!’

So confirmed females have a right to exist if they are conceived, and have suffered a grave loss if they cease to be, but fetuses who might be male may as well not exist? This is either hypocritical or extremely sexist. Why are the same people adamant about both views often?

They both appear to be applications of general pro-female sympathy. When supporting the pro-choice side, the concern is for a woman’s rights over her own body. When condemning gender-specific abortion, the concern is for the females who won’t be born. Siding with the females becomes complicated when females are conspicuous as aborters one day and abortees the next. So it looks like this isn’t hypocrisy via accidental oversight, but policy choice biased by sympathies to a specific gender. If ‘whether an aborted fetus has been done a terrible wrong’ were the important point, we should expect to see more consistency on that.

When I asked about this previously my friend suggested that the motivations were importantly different in the two cases. Aborting someone because they are female is wrong. Aborting someone because you don’t want to look after them is compassionate. This doesn’t apply here, even if it were true. Gender specific abortions are common for economic and other pragmatic reasons too, not because people hate females especially. Moreover one could argue consistently that gender specific abortions are bad because they harm to others who do exist, such as the males who will go lonely. This is rarely the claimed source of outrage however.

The most feasible explanation for this inconsistency then is sexism in favor of females being a big motivating force. You probably don’t approve of sexism in picking job applicants or political candidates. Do you approve of it in picking policies which determine countless lives or deaths?

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Markets marketed better

Posted on August 3, 2009 | 12 comments

What do you call a system where costs and benefits return to those who cause them? Working markets or karma, depending on whether the accounting uses money or magic.

In popular culture karma generally has good connotations, and markets generally have bad. Reasons for unease about markets should mostly apply just as well to karma, but nobody complains for instance that inherent tendencies to be nice are an unfair basis for wellbeing distribution. Nor that people who have had a lot of good fortune recently might have cheated the system somehow. Nor that the divine internalizing of externalities encourages selfishness. Nor that people who are good out of desperation for fair fortune are being exploited. So why the difference?

Perhaps mysterious forces are just more trustworthy than social institutions? Or perhaps karma seems nice because its promotion is read as ‘everyone will get what they deserve’, while markets seem nasty because their promotion is read as ‘everyone deserves what they’ve got’. Better ideas?

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