Category Archives: 1

I have devoted a lot of time to standing in the security lines in various airports. Usually, I am trying to multitask with something else happening on my phone. A terrible impediment to this multitasking is that the airport line keeps moving. Every time the person in front of me walks forward three steps, I have to pick up my belongings and do the same. I’m in favor of the line moving over not moving, but it would be much better if I could wait until there was ten feet of space, and then bulk-process walking forward in one go. This arrangement would also seem to be better for everyone in the line behind me, who are in roughly the same situation. So why don’t I do it?

I at least imagine social pressure to continue walking forward. If I try waiting a bit longer than usual, I at least imagine that the people behind me are getting kind of restless and thinking I’m a bad line-member, and will soon do something analogous to honking their horns at a driver who isn’t driving at a green light, or simply walk around me. Because the thing I would be doing would look superficially a bit like stopping people from getting to the front of the line as soon as possible. So far, I haven’t actually tried it, probably because it sounds too uncomfortable. 

Perhaps I am imagining all of this. Why would the people behind me care? This change would seem to be neutral to good for all of them. Well, maybe not for the person right behind me. I can imagine the person right behind me caring is because IF it were bad for me to hold up the line, it would be her job to be restless about it at me. And whether or not she cares, she imagines that the people behind her might. Or, she expects me to expect that other people care, and so interprets me as making a social transgression that should rightly be noted, whether or not the consequences are good.

So roughly, I expect maybe everyone feels badly toward me for doing this, because they think the thing I’m doing is antisocial, even though it would immediately make everyone’s lives better. This might seem like an uninteresting window into my own ability to overthink standing in a line, but I think it is more interesting for two reasons. One is that even if I am weird in this way, it is a nice vivid example of a human having overwhelming hesitation to do a thing that seems both selfishly and socially beneficial for fear of secondary social punishment largely from people who would benefit. Which I expect should happen, game theoretically, so it is neat to see sometimes in the wild. 

The other reason is that I have never seen anybody else do this thing which seems both selfishly and socially beneficial, suggesting that something is stopping them (or I have judged the consequences wrongly). That others too perceive holding up the line as antisocial in spite of its consequences being good is my best guess about what. And if it is what is going on with other people, it would be a much better example of people getting stuck in an obviously bad for everyone equilibrium for fear of social retribution.

(Content warning: death)

People often use trigger and content warnings to tell readers about content that might be costly to read, before they are already reading it. I have seen warnings about a large variety of upsetting contents, but I have seen very few about death (I thought it was none, but after waiting a while I noticed a couple). And more generally, outside of the sphere where things like content warnings are common, people also seem totally ok talking about horrific deaths in a way that would seem totally inappropriate for topics that might be upsetting. I continue to find this strange. Isn’t death one of the canonical things that is awful? And it’s not some abstract or unemotional awfulness that might not traumatize people, like ‘costs’ or ‘taxes’. Usually in life, I think death is one of the most upsetting things that ever happens.

I for one find death upsetting, and would generally much prefer not to read about it [edit: or did at time of writing—I currently find almost nothing upsetting]. However it is clear that I’m at least somewhat unusual, and so not surprising that others’ preferences diverge from mine here. But still, isn’t death a usual thing to be bothered by in other ways? Isn’t there this whole academic area of terror management, about how bothered people are by death? According to Wikipedia, the theory is derived from Ernest Becker‘s 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death, “in which Becker argues most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death”. If it is at all plausible that most of human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death, aren’t there at least a minority of people who would get value out of not accidentally reading about some heartbreaking and horrific familial manslaughter over breakfast on a regular basis? This really seems like low hanging fruit, before you get to reworking your relation to religious symbolism or whatever to bolster your sense of permanence.

Yet I read about death all the time, all over the place. For instance on Facebook sometimes there are even pictures of dead people and nobody else seems to find this costly (ok, apparently many of my friends find actual photographs of recent corpses bad, but it seems more decayed human remains are ok with people). I’ve tried asking Facebook not to show me such content, and sometimes try to tell Facebook why, but Facebook is like ‘is this violent?’ ‘does it depict breasts?’ and gives me no option for ‘it depicts the actual bad thing that violence is bad in large part because of’. One time the first ten posts or so in my Facebook were about death, broadly construed. I’ve mostly fixed this now, with F.B Purity, which lets you filter out posts which contain specific words. But I’m still confused about why this doesn’t bother other people, even though other people are distressed by reading about a bunch of other things.

Some theories:

1. There is just so much death around that avoiding it is totally infeasible, so nobody thinks anybody else might be trying to.
2. Avoiding learning about bad things in the world is looked down upon, because it suggests that you are not tough, and prioritize your own freedom from discomfort over being able to be an informed citizen. So it is only in particular cultures that content warnings are popular, and those cultures come with specific idiosyncratic concerns, which happen to not include death.
3. People put content warnings on things (or speak about them carefully in other ways) when they think other people might be upset with them, which only happens when they post unusually bad things, and death is a usual thing to write about.
4. Death is distressing, but people basically always experience a countervailing fascination that makes reading about it worthwhile.
5. People are upset to the point they benefit from warnings or the like by things that remind them of their own terrible experiences, and almost all deaths don’t remind any particular person of a death that personally bothered them. To be useful, such warnings would have to be things like ‘death by kidney disease’.
6. Maybe death causes some different kind of distress from other topics (e.g. something other than ‘being triggered’), which perhaps people don’t mind as much.

Related: Katla on death as entertainment.

Here is one way the world could be. By far the best opportunities for making the world better can be supported by philanthropic money. They last for years. They can be invested in a vast number of times. They can be justified using widely available information and widely verifiable judgments.

Here is another way the world could be. By far the best opportunities are one-off actions that must be done by small numbers of people in the right fleeting time and place. The information that would be needed to justify them is half a lifetime’s worth of observations, many of which would be impolite to publish. The judgments needed must be honed by the same.

These worlds illustrate opposite ends of a spectrum. The spectrum is something like, ‘how much doing good in the world is amenable to being a big, slow, public, official, respectable venture, versus a small, agile, private, informal, arespectable one’.

In either world you can do either. And maybe in the second world, you can’t actually get into those good spots, so the relevant intervention is something like trying to. (If the best intervention becomes something like slowly improving institutions so that better people end up in those places, then you are back in the first world). 

An interesting question is what factor of effectiveness you lose by pursuing strategies appropriate to world 1 versus those appropriate to world 2, in the real world. That is, how much better or worse is it to pursue the usual Effective Altruism strategies (GiveWell, AMF, Giving What We Can) relative to looking at the world relatively independently, trying to get into a good position, and making altruistic decisions.

I don’t have a good idea of where our world is in this spectrum. I am curious about whether people can offer evidence.

A reverse lottery pays out a little bit each time you pay but sometimes lead to horrific disaster. For instance, going without a seatbelt. You enjoy a momentary convenience every time you drive, but occasionally you die. Relatedly, wearing your seatbelt can be seen as a lottery: you pay a tiny inconvenience each time for an occasional huge win.

Like all lotteries, whether it is good to play depends on the payoffs, and one might reasonably decide to play some lotteries and reverse lotteries and not others. However, as Scott points out, it can be tempting to play reverse lotteries too much. I think this happens in particular from learning what is good by experience. If you play a reverse lottery once, probably you get a reward, and want to do it again. So you do, and get another reward, and it starts to seem like a pretty good idea. You get a lot of visceral feedback about the good aspect, and none about the bad. At least for a while. This seems like a real problem, and a neat way of thinking about it.

So presumably normal lotteries should be the opposite. You play them a few times, and it is a bit bad each time. So you quickly give up and never see the glorious reward. This doesn’t seem true of the literal lotteries in which people gamble for fun. At least plenty of people are not put off for a very long time, in spite of never winning. But maybe those are a weird instance of the abstract lottery class—for instance, because the prospect of winning a lot of money is made very salient. You might imagine that the negative lotteries would be very off putting in the analogous case: if every time you don’t wear your seatbelt, you hear about another person dying from that very choice, you wouldn’t be so tempted by the no-seatbelt reverse lottery.

I’m still confused about how individuals feel about lotteries, because I’m failing at thinking of clear examples where I know how people behave and they don’t have a really salient message about how the thing might go well. Possibly this is just because nobody does things that go badly almost all the time. Which is as good a segue as any into the thing I actually wanted to think about.

How do groups feel about lotteries and reverse lotteries?

Groups often learn whether a thing is good by one person trying it, and telling their friends, who then try it if the message was favorable, and so on. On this model, we might expect groups to do the worst kind of failing to think about the low chance outcomes.

For instance, suppose that a bakery sells reverse lottery cakes. They taste nice, but occasionally they make you sick for a day. Alice tries them, and likes them, and tells her friends. They like them. Soon lots of people are loving the reverse lottery cakes, and saying nice things about them. Eventually Zoe gets a badly upset stomach.

This might go ok for group epistemology—maybe Zoe tells her friends, and they radically lower their opinions of the cakes upon hearing how much Zoe hates them (probably too much, since Zoe is one of their few friends), and not only cease eating them themselves, but also warn their other friends, and maybe eventually everyone becomes accurately aware of the costs (I haven’t checked under what circumstances if any you end up at a good equilibrium).

There are many ways this might not happen though. For instance, if Zoe is less of an enthusiastic proponent of not eating reverse-lottery cakes than her friends are of eating them. Or if people just count up how many people around them like a thing—e.g. “of all my friends, only one doesn’t like reverse-lottery cakes, so probably I will like them”. Or if people disproportionately trust a large number of agreeing friends more than an outlier. These seem more plausible to me than the opposite alternatives, where Zoe becomes a disproportionately fierce critic of the reverse lottery bakery, or where other people hear that there is someone out there—a friend of a friend of a friend—who really didn’t like the reverse lottery cakes and update too much on this.

There are some important ways these opposite things happen though. For instance, large negatives are more newsworthy than small positives, so for things where the downsides are worthy of a story, I’d expect there to be some correction, though I’m not sure whether it should over or undershoot in general. For instance, people are famously over-concerned about sharks. If they just got their information from swimming and hearing about swimming trips from their friends, I might expect them to be under-concerned. However shark attacks make for fairly compelling reading.

So the kinds of situations that I expect crowds to over-invest in reverse lotteries are those where the costs aren’t really huge or fascinating. Or where it is hard to trace the effect to the (partial) cause. An example off the top of my head is going to theme parks. Most people I know like going to theme parks, as far as I can tell. Two people I know strongly dislike it, because they were injured at theme parks in the past. Without looking at the statistics, it is tempting (for me at least, intuitively) to say, ‘Well, basically everyone thinks it’s good. Maybe those two people were doing something weird. It’s probably fine’.

I was thinking about this because I was writing about a principle of being a good person that I feel emotionally compelled by. I wondered about the causal history of my liking it. I figured I should know about that, so that I could have a more consequentialist view on whether it was actually good. And I realized that maybe I got excited about it after a handful of times where it seemed very useful for making good decisions or being in a good mental state. But I can see how it might go wrong one time in a thousand, and when it does, how it might perhaps sometimes causes some sort of humanitarian crisis or something. If I go around praising this principle based on my own feelings after buying a handful of reverse lottery tickets, then other people might buy more of them, even if it was never a good idea in expectation, and even if I could have predicted that. So I figured I should rethink my principle (I haven’t yet), and not go around praising things that I admire just because I feel like it.

Suppose that you are listening to music, and you reach a song that makes you sad. How do you respond? Here are two ideas:

A) Be sad. Perhaps think about bittersweet memories. Stare into space. Get completely sidetracked and cry a bit. Downgrade your assessment of how good your life is overall. Until some happy music comes on, at least.

B) Decide if you want to be sad, and adjust the playlist accordingly. Maybe you determine that your goals would be better served by listening to patriotic music on this occasion. So you change it. Even though the sad music is now making you feel like listening to sad music.

It seems to me that these correspond to two natural classes of things people are doing when they ‘respond’ to stuff.

The first kind of response is a relatively automatic reaction to a stimulus. Feeling sad when you hear sad music. Finding a clever retort if someone is rude to you.

The second kind of response is a continued pursuit of your goals, adjusted for any information contained in the stimulus. Turning off sad music if it doesn’t seem helpful. Walking away from a rude person if talking to them is not creating a lot of value, while perhaps considering whether their criticism is relevant to you.

I’m going to call these reflexive responses and agentic responses.

More examples of stimuli and reflexive and agentic responses to them:

• Being cold: curl up under your meager blanket and shiver vigorously // get out of bed, cross the very cold room, turn on the heater.
• Hearing a joke: Laugh proportional to the humor of the joke, adjusted for offensiveness and attractiveness of the joke teller // laugh if you think it would be good to raise the status of the person telling you the joke, or to make them happy, or to make the situation less awkward, etc.
• Seeing misinformation on a blog: write a comment correcting the error // add ‘online misinformation’ to your mental list of problems in the world, and then if you decide that it is the most important one at some point, seriously scheme about what to do there.
• Someone starts a conversation with you: say the natural next thing at every juncture // decide if there is something you want to achieve by talking to the person, and then steer the conversation appropriately (perhaps toward winding up)
• Physically suffering: curl up in a ball, close your eyes and whimper // search for painkillers, make a doctor’s appointment then leave your house and go to it
• Emotionally suffering: avoid thinking about the topic, cry, go over the source of distress in your head, tell other people that you are suffering // try to figure out why you are suffering, and then stop it, even if that involves some amount of thinking about unpleasant things and having uncomfortable conversations.
• Being employed: do the things you are meant to do at jobs, perhaps hinted at by the instructions // choose the bits of the job that are relevant to your goals and emphasize those to the extent that makes sense within the bounds of not jeopardizing your job or failing at your promises.
• Being called on to give a speech: say the things that are meant to go in speeches // say the things you want the audience to hear
• Your partner being rude to you in front of your friends: disrespect them aggressively right back // infer that your partner may not respect you enough or doesn’t understand social norms or made an error, and make a mental note to figure out which and address the problem later. Decide whether it is valuable to save face in front of present company, and aggressively disrespect them right back, or be nice, or whatever, as appropriate.

For a more real example, at the time of writing most of this, I was in much pain, and was lying in bed thinking something like ‘Pain! Why pain? Why me? Ow. Pain! Pain pain pain’. Then I thought that perhaps all the thinking about pain was worse than the actual pain, and that even though noticing that I’m in pain every two seconds comes pretty naturally to me when I’m in pain, there are probably actions that better achieve my goals, if I can do them. So I decided to write a blog post instead, which to my surprised actually worked, at least for a bit. [Added upon coming back to this draft: my ability to focus on things other than being in pain didn’t last terribly long if I recall, but it was good for a bit.]

I claim that it is helpful to distinguish reflexive and agentic responses.

It seems that a key pattern in how humans interact with the world is that they notice events, and then feel the need to respond to them. Even to a person who is otherwise pretty consequentialist, it somehow seems very natural to say a thing right now for no apparent reason, except that some random person said a different thing in your vicinity, and the words you are saying are a semantically and socially natural response to the words that they said. You put your actual projects on hold, because you have to respond.

Furthermore I think when we respond, we usually do it in the reflexive style. Which is natural: there is arguably a lot of responding to be done, and we can’t think about all of it. But it is nice to remember sometimes that there is also the option of responding agentically. Responding agentically takes mental and perhaps other effort, but that aside will tend to be better (by definition).

I’ll say more about these classes of behavior as I see them, partly in the hope that this helps with drawing them so that other people know what I’m talking about.

You might think of reflexive responses as sort of based on feelings and agentic responses as sort of based on explicit thought. I think that isn’t right—in particular, there are a lot of reflexive responses that also mostly involve explicit thought. It’s just that the explicit thought isn’t about how to achieve your goals. For instance, if a person argues with you, you might have a reflexive response of constructing a counterargument and then sending it to the person. Or if you are watching the news and there is a surprising event, you might have a reflexive response of thinking about its implications, and remarking upon them verbally to your companion.

Some reflexive responses were designed by an agentic response previously. For instance, if you noticed before that you should just never listen to a particular song because it will ruin your day, then if it comes on you might skip past it near automatically.

It is often hard to not do a reflexive response. For instance, if you are angry, it can be hard (and arguably destructive) not to express it, perhaps without careful regard for the social consequences. This seems like a fine reason to react reflexively often. I still think that observing the existence of a decent alternative reaction often makes the reflexive response less naturally appealing.

Agentic responses very often involve not doing anything. Because it’s not that common that an event in your vicinity substantially alters what is the best thing for you to do next. More common than by chance, because things in your vicinity are much more relevant to you than other things. But still not that common.

I’m rolling a lot of different kinds of behavior into reflexive responses. Intuitive completion of patterns you are part of, fulfillment of roles, expression of the feelings that the stimulus makes you feel, following immediate incentive gradients, doing what feels right, fulfilling instincts.

Reflexive responses are often good because they are cheap and predictable. It is cheaper to finish a pattern or to fulfill the role than to rethink your whole plan in light of new evidence. And if people usually respond to X with Y, this perhaps makes them easier to interact with. Arguably, you can just live a whole life of one reflexive response after another, and then you don’t have to have goals at all, which potentially represents a real saving (at the cost of everything you might have wanted, if you had wanted anything).

Reflexive responses are associated with getting stuck in local optima. For instance, shivering in bed, which is less cold than getting out of bed, but more cold than turning on the heater and waiting five minutes. My guess is that they are also more associated with pathological large scale social interaction traps, such as the toxoplasma of rage. (While one might reasonably decide that reacting with outrage to something on the internet is the best way at hand of forwarding one’s goals, this has got to be a lot rarer than reacting out of anger is).

I get some value out of having these concepts. My friend has argued that they are part of a fundamentally wrong worldview, and I think he’s partly right (a discussion for another time), but I still think they are a good enough approximation of an important thing, and his better worldview doesn’t seem to naturally support a similar distinction.

Related: systems and stories, deontology and utilitarianism, reflex agents and goal based agents, thinking outside the box vs. thinking inside the box.