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There is considerable disagreement over which things are roughly good or bad for the world. Encouraging same-sex marriage, speeding the cogs of ‘progress’, compelling would-be immigrants to live in third world shanty towns, and building self-replicating nanobots are considered by different parties to be either substantially positive or substantially negative. Such questions are sometimes loudly and fiercely debated.

There also seems to be much disagreement over how good different good interventions are. Is promoting sustainable agriculture a crucial last-ditch countermeasure in the face of impending societal destruction, or harmless feel-goodery? This type of disagreement seems very widespread, given the huge variety of endeavors people support with their money and time. However such disagreements are much quieter; for the most part people politely get on with their own causes. You are much more likely to be handed a brochure explaining the virtues of buying beads from women in the developing world than one earnestly arguing that this isn’t particularly valuable.

This seems like some evidence of a tragedy of the commons that one might expect prima facie. Even if you can hand out don’t-expend-effort-on-veganism brochures more cost-effectively than the vegans can hand out theirs, you can’t capture the efforts of the would-be vegans for your own preferred cause. The efforts you divert will probably be spread across many other causes.

Ultimately then, the public discussion of causes should become full of hooks to harvest goodwill and efforts, with few working to rescue people from bad causes and replenish the stock. The main demand for counterarguments should come from the people who wish to avoid joining causes themselves. But they don’t need strong cases, just some excuse to say as they decline to join. And indeed, the retorts used for such purposes seem rarely strong enough to change a person’s mind.

One big exception to this tragedy of the commons situation would be causes where people are quite divided – where leaving the pro-X side means joining the anti-X side, and where the anti-X supporters would be happy enough to diminish the X side anyway. These causes tend to be of the first sort I mentioned: where the disagreement is over whether X is excellent or hellish, rather than good or better. For these issues there are no tragedies of the commons, and we should expect to see elaborate cases made for both sides. As of course we do.

Another situation where you wouldn’t see this behavior much is one where most of the causes are considered similarly good by most people, but there are still a few much worse ones. Then a person who understands this state of affairs can redirect most of the efforts they divert from the bad causes toward causes that seem best to them. So if the tragedy of the commons account is right, it seems we are not in that situation. People either think a relatively narrow range of causes are quite good, or that so many causes are quite good there aren’t bad ones around to divert people from.

I don’t know that this is most of the explanation, though it seems it must happen to some degree. People may also prefer not to speak against anything that seems ‘good’ – and measure good against some consistent zero point, not against the opportunity cost. It could also be that the easiest way to compare things is for different parties to make a pro- case for each, then to compare those. Though it seems in practice that would leave out many negative details about each cause. Any other theories? Any reasons to believe or disbelieve this one? Note that the heroes of this story would include the selfless people who go out on the internet night after night, with little to gain by it, tirelessly assaulting any position that shows weakness.

Users of languages improve them by adding new words. Often languages would also be improved by taking away words – not so much such that nobody ever uses the word, but just so it is not necessary to convey a certain meaning. For instance since it is very rare for a claim to be meant with one hundred percent certainty, it would be more efficient if a speaker had to add ‘certainly’ in that case, rather than adding ‘probably’ or ‘I think’ for every other case where they are only claiming a best guess.

Robin Hanson explains the retention of such extra words by people being stuck in a signaling game: if you don’t add the extra words in the normal cases, then people mistake you for those who really are making extreme claims, since everyone else adds the extra words when they are making the ordinary claim.

That seems correct. But why would this begin? How did everyone ever come to use the long, complicated sentences for saying ordinary things and the succinct ones for claims that almost nobody ever wants to make? Perhaps we just especially notice the half of times when the signals are assigned the inconvenient way around?

Another plausible theory is that the usual cases are complicated, whereas simple cases are unusual and extreme. Adding qualifications allows you to say something much more specific and nuanced. And we usually want to refer to specific, nuanced state of affairs. However for uncontroversial issues nobody seems to have much trouble interpreting simple statements as the obvious more complex ones. If you say ‘roofs in England have steeper slopes than roofs in Australia’ most people would interpret this as indicating some sort of general tendency for steeper roofs in England. If you want to say the extreme thing, you have to say something like ‘literally every roof in England is steeper than every roof in Australia – no, I mean it literally. I know, it sounds insane! Look, I’ll send you these seven review articles summarizing the research.’ Whereas if a person says ‘women are less interested in engineering than men’, listeners seem to often interpret this in such a way as to make raising counterexamples a reasonable response.

So it seems closely connected with controversy. It appears that people making uncontroversial claims are much more scared of being misunderstood and thought controversial than people making controversial claims are the opposite. Or at least they are willing to pay more to avoid being misunderstood. So the controversial people can snap up the short, efficient signals without worrying about confusion, leaving the uncontroversial people to run away to awkward, qualified corners of signal space.

But it’s not obvious why uncontroversial people should be more afraid. The probability of misunderstanding seems to be much lower for them, because there are so few controversial people. A random apparently extreme claim is much more likely to be an error of speech than a random apparently moderate claim is. So to make the risk from potential misunderstandings higher for people making moderate claims, the cost of being misunderstood needs to be a lot higher for them. Why would this be?

Honesty

One answer is that more controversial claims are just more costly to make – everyone would prefer to make non-controversial claims, but some people are forced to make controversial claims by honesty. If they are misunderstood, all the better for them. This seems to have an element of truth, but doesn’t account for the apparent glee many people exhibit while making controversial claims.

Taking back

Another thing you might wonder about such models is why anybody should be much worried, given the possibility of clarification. Nobody fears being too misunderstood about roofs, in part because if the audience appears to be taking the statement the wrong way, it is cheap to clarify. Most conversation seems to involve plenty of this. Yet it seems to me at least that if you say something apparently controversial you are much less allowed to take it back than if you say something non-controversial. The audience is suspicious. Perhaps your slip of the tongue is  taken as telling, regardless of your conscious corrections. Whereas saying something uncontroversial first is not taken as much of a sign about you. If you correct your non-controversial statement to a controversial one, listeners are generally willing to allow that you are controversial.

Selection

Another possibility is that people are basically selected into making extreme claims or not according to whether they are terrified of other people criticizing them. Naturally the uncontroversial people are more scared of being misunderstood as controversial because this is what being uncontroversial is about.

Signaling

When talking about controversial topics, your words are taken as a sign of what side you are on. Perhaps to show that you are on the side considered more virtuous, you need to pay higher costs. People who believe controversial things might prefer to look like those who don’t, but their lack of passion for the cause means they can’t be bothered adding all the qualifiers, or feel more uncomfortable doing so. The people who truly believe the ‘virtuous’ claims can be bothered, and do so to set themselves apart.

This would also explain why listeners wouldn’t allow you to take back controversial sounding claims – if you could say things cheaply and only elaborate when you were caught, it would be much cheaper, so may not signal your devotion correctly.

It doesn’t however explain why you would have to do this particular costly act, instead of some other. But that is rarely explained I think.

Status

I discussed this with Robin, and he suggested a status explanation: making controversial claims is generally a bid for status. If roofs were controversial, then by claiming that roofs in Britain are steeper than roofs in Australia, you are taking the initiative to ally your group with ideas that the current powers consider enemy. So you are making a bid to increase your own importance in the group, as well as trying to change the status of other groups and ideas. People respond strongly to bids of status. If you want to do something that looks a bit like a bid for status without being beaten down into your place by all around, you have to do some sort of accepted submission dance at the same time to make it not like a bid for status. This seems intuitively somewhat plausible, but leaves even more questions unanswered: why does this behavior convince people around you that you are not bidding for status? Why doesn’t clarifying later work? Why are you so aggressively interpreted as bidding for status anyway, instead of making the nearest probable, non-controversial claim? 

Responses

What to do about this? One intuitive possibility is to replace words instead of just removing some. For instance we could introduce the usage:

Qualifiedly: with all due qualifications, and some more

Then instead of saying ‘he sometimes seems a bit silly, to me, but I might just be biased, and I don’t really know him that well, and I’m sure we all have different preferences anyway, and that might be relevant..’ you could just say ‘he seems qualifiedly a bit silly’.

I’m not sure if this would work in any of the above models though. It probably won’t work if the point is to pay a cost, or do a special dance. In the signaling case there is probably no way out, unless non-controversial people can find a cheaper way to set themselves apart, that is still expensive enough to keep out the controversial people.

If the important thing is just to say something that can’t be interpreted badly the first time, something like this has a better chance of working.

Turning it around, how you expect such a change of words to go says something about which theory of inefficient qualifications is correct.

I’m back! And to celebrate being back, I shall discuss celebrating. I actually have not much idea why people celebrate things the way they do, but the practice has many interesting features.

Stylized facts about celebrating stuff:

1. It generally happens at the beginnings and ends of differentiated periods of time (e.g. a year, time living in a particular area, time on a particular project, a lifetime), and on annual anniversaries of those.
2. It usually requires most of one’s time, for between a couple of hours and a day.
3. If it is repeated, it tends to be ritualistic and traditional, containing roughly the same activities every time, but different ones for different celebrations.
4. The activities tend to be enjoyable, social, ones. They tend not to have other obvious purposes, besides eating.
5. Celebrating seems to generally express the importance of a subject. Celebrating a thing indicates approval for it.
6. Celebrations tend to involve more symbolism than your usual activity.
7. Many celebrations are shared by large numbers of people. Of all the social activities people engage in, most of the largest scale coordinated ones seem to be celebrations.
8. Celebrating seems normatively expected to be social. Celebrating a thing alone is often considered a sad sign.
9. Celebrations are more often associated with a religion than the average activity is, though many are not.
10. Celebrated entities are often humans, or significant human events. But there are also celebrations of beer and dance and so on. I’m unsure what unifying feature these things have. Perhaps just they are popular enough in some group to get general approval for expressing support for them. But it seems something like idealization or identity comes in – many mundane things are popular yet largely uncelebrated. e.g. double glazed windows.
11. Not celebrating stuff that others are celebrating is seen as somewhat antisocial, serious, and passionless. Yet not a terrible sin.

Why would you have an activity like this? One where periodically large numbers of people – often many perfect strangers – stop what they are doing and enjoy themselves socially in repetitive and symbolic ways that are understood to express approval regarding a particular thing?

The large scale coordination in expressing approval for a thing seems potentially useful for strengthening social norms around that thing. That everyone affirms the value of X every year in public lets you know that X has widespread support, and also makes this support salient. This probably makes dedication to X seem more important. But exactly what force would bring about things that are useful for strengthening social support for random things? And how true could this be of e.g. birthdays? It doesn’t seem obvious that people have birthday parties to encourage everyone to publicly reaffirm their support of the birthday haver.

If this kind of thing is the purpose though, it would make sense that celebrations are generally enjoyable. If you want a group of people to publicly affirm their support for a thing, an easy way to increase the number of people who will do it is to buy them off with cake. If the cake comes with a story about eating cake for ineffable reasons of great spiritual importance, all the better. And so you eventually end up with elaborate celebrations where many participants aren’t quite sure what the point was, and everyone slightly suspects that the others are there for the cake. Then at some point it becomes common knowledge that everyone is there for the cake, at which point the whole thing becomes embarrassing to continue and you go home.

Note that this need not be intentional – just those celebrations that are enjoyable tend to grow. Also note that the norms being supported need not be exactly the things celebrated. Celebrating features of a certain culture – e.g. beer – might strengthen embracement of that culture in general.

This would also explain the mystery of why there are as many celebrations as there are, and not more. Given that people seem to like the ones they have, and don’t seem to suffer much waning interest for extra excuses to party, it’s not immediately clear why we don’t just have some more celebrations. The explanation would be that the bottleneck is widespread belief in the virtue of celebrating a particular thing, which is hard to manufacture, rather than enthusiasm for a day off.

As for the repetitiveness, symbolism, and tradition, these things seem to be roughly how humans always behave when they feel particularly superstitious. Which they seem to do when things seem important, and they don’t understand them. At least that’s my tentative guess.

More theories?

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Maybe this is old advice, or so obvious that everyone figures it out. But handy tip for if you are strange, and you want others to not think you are strange: hang out with foreigners.

To foreigners, everyone from your culture is strange. It could easily take them years to realize that some of your peculiarities are actually your peculiarities, not quaint oddities of your backward culture.

They don’t need to be actually foreign in the national sense for this, but they do need to be at least fairly unfamiliar with your culture. People from a distant generation or social set should also work.

I have tried out this advice a bit when house-sharing. Usually I find sharing houses somewhat uncomfortable. One reason is that I have fairly obsessive-compulsive kitchen-use tendencies. When I first moved to Pittsburgh I lived with two of my Chinese colleagues. Amongst the mutually alien methods of cooking, and alien foods, and alien eating arrangements, and alien hygiene protocols in general, who bats an eyelid if you happen to wash things a couple of times more than the usual American? This made things more comfortable, modulo the fact that some foreign cooking habits don’t mix well with OCD.

Of course, the foreigners you hang out with are unusually likely to be following the same strategy. If you rudely want to avoid hanging out with strange foreigners while gaining the benefits of hiding your own strangeness, you should hang out with more foreigners. That way you can compare foreigners against one another and distinguish individual strangeness from cultural strangeness. Relatedly, you should avoid hanging out with more locals at the same time.

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

***

Suppose nobody has ever told you that they like you. Suppose you are relatively uncertain about how often people like other people, and also about how often they will disclose it when they do. Suppose you are confident that these facts about your ignorance and social inexperience do not bear on whether other people like you. So as it stands you are fairly uncertain about your popularity. Suppose also that you have a deep and insatiable need for people to like you, and your pleasure is roughly linear in the number of people who like you.

Suppose one day a person tells you that they like you. If you are given to expressing emotions or making inferences, one thing you might wonder is whether this should be cause for happiness.

This is not as obvious as it first seems. A person telling you that they like you is more probable if:

1. This specific person likes you.
2. People like you in general
3. People are given to expressing their liking for other people

The first two are promising. The third makes the fact that nobody else has ever said they like you a bit more damning. Just how much more damning depends on your probability distribution over different possible states of affairs. For an extreme example, suppose you had even odds on two extreme cases – people always saying they like people who they like, and people never doing so – and that many people have had a chance by now to tell you if they like you. Then you should be extremely sad if anyone tells you that they like you. The apparent update in favor of people liking you in general will be completely overwhelmed by the reverse update from flatly ruling out the possibility that all those people you have already met like you.

In general, seeing an instance of X can make X less likely, by indicating that X tends to be visible:

• Hearing your neighbors have loud sex might lower your estimate of how often they have sex.
• Finding a maggot in your dinner might reassure you that maggots in dinners are relatively visible (this is just a hypothetical example – in fact they are not, especially if your dinner is rice)

Conversely, failing to see X can make X more likely, by increasing the probability that it is invisible:

• If you have never observed a person lying, it might be more likely that they are an excellent and prolific liar than it would be if you had seen them lie awkwardly once. Though not once all the excellent liars realize this and stumble sheepishly over a white lie once in a while.
• Failing to observe phone calls  from friends for too long will often cause you to suspect they have in fact been calling you, and there is rather something wrong with your phone.