Category Archives: 1

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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When I was at college, many of my associates had part time jobs, or worked during school breaks. They were often unpleasant, uninspiring, and poorly paid jobs, such as food preparation. Some were better, such as bureaucracy. But they were generally much worse than any of us would expect to be after graduating. I think this is normal.

It was occasionally suggested that I too should become employed. This seemed false to me, for the following reasons. There are other activities I want to spend a lot of time on in my life, such as thinking about things. I expect the nth hour of thinking about things to be similarly valuable regardless of when it happens. I think for a hundred extra hours this year, or a hundred extra hours in five years, I still expect to have about the same amount of understanding at the end, and for hours in ten years to be about as valuable either way.

Depending on what one is thinking about, moving hours of thinking earlier might make them more valuable. Understanding things early on probably adds value to other activities, and youth is purportedly helpful for thinking. Also a better understanding early on probably makes later observations (which automatically happen with passing time) more useful.

This goes for many things. Learning an instrument, reading about a topic, writing. Some things are even more valuable early on in life, such as making friends, gaining respect and figuring out efficient lifestyle logistics.

Across many periods of time, work is roughly like this. It is the total amount of work you do that matters. But between before and after graduating, this is not so!

If activity A is a lot more valuable in the future, and activity B is about as valuable now or in the future, all things equal I should trade them and do B now.

Yes, work before graduating might get you a better wage after graduating, but so will the same amount of work after graduating, and it will be paid more at the time. Yes, you will be a year behind say, but you will have done something else for a year that you no longer need to do in the future.

On the other hand, working seems a great option if you have pressing needs for money now, or a strong aversion to indebtedness. My guess is that the latter played a large part in others’ choices. In Australia, most youth whose families aren’t wealthy can get enough money to live on from the government, and anyone can defer paying tuition indefinitely.

It seems that college students generally treat their time as low value. Not only do they work for low wages, but they go to efforts to get free food, and are happy to spend an hour of three people’s time to acquire discarded furniture they wouldn’t spend a hundred dollars on. This seems to mean they don’t think these activities they could do at any time in their life are valuable. If you are willing to trade an hour you could be reading for $10 worth of value, you don’t value reading much. When these people are paid a lot more, will they give up activities like reading all together? If not, it seems they must think reading is also more valuable in the future than now, and the relative values are jumping roughly in line with the value of working at these times. Or do they just make an error? Or am I just making some error?

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Suppose you tell a close friend a secret. You consider them trustworthy, and don’t fear for its release. Suppose they request to tell the secret to a friend of theirs who you don’t know. They claim this person is also highly trustworthy. I think most people would feel significantly less secure agreeing to that.

In general, people trust their friends. Their friends trust their own friends, and so on. But I think people trust friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends less than proportionally. e.g. if you act like there’s a one percent chance of your friend failing you, you don’t act like there’s 1-(.99*.99) chance of your friend’s friend failing you.

One possible explanation is that we generally expect the people we trust to have much worse judgement about who to trust than about the average thing. But why would this be so? Perhaps everyone does just have worse judgement about who to trust than they do about other things. But to account for what we observe, people would on average have to think themselves better in this regard than others. Which might not be surprising, except that they have to think themselves more better than others in this domain than in other domains. Otherwise they would just trust others less in general. Why would this be?

Another possibility I have heard suggested is that we trust our friends more than is warranted by their true probability of defecting, for non-epistemic purposes. In which case, which purposes?

Trusting a person involves choosing to make your own payoffs depend on their actions in a circumstance where it would not be worth doing so if you thought they would defect with high probability. If you think they are likely to defect, you only rely on them when there are particularly large gains from them cooperating combined with small losses from them defecting. As they become more likely to cooperate, trusting them in more cases becomes worthwhile. So trusting for non-epistemic purposes involves relying on a person in a case where their probability of defecting should make it not worthwhile, for some other gain.

What other gains might you get? Such trust might signal something, but consistently relying too much on people doesn’t seem to make one look good in any way obvious to me. It might signal to that person that you trust them, but that just brings us back to the question of how trusting people excessively might benefit you.

Maybe merely relying on a person in such a case could increase their probability of taking the cooperative action? This wouldn’t explain the intransitivity on its own, since we would need a model where trusting a friend’s friend doesn’t cause the friend’s friend to become more trustworthy.

So here the theory is that you trust friends substantially more than friends of friends because friends have the right incentives to cooperate, whereas friends of friends don’t. But if your friends are really cooperative, why would they give you unreliable advice – to trust their own friends?

One answer is that your friends believe trustworthiness is a property of individuals, not relationships. Since their friends are trustworthy for them, they recommend them to you. But this leaves you with the question of why your friends are wrong about this, yet you know it. Particularly since generalizing this model, everyone’s friends are wrong, and everyone knows it.

One possibility is that everyone learns these things from experience, and they categorize the events in obvious ways that are different for different people. Your friend Eric sees a series of instances of his friend James being reliable and so he feels confident that James will be reliable. You see a series of instances of different friends of friends not being especially reliable and see James most easily as one of that set. It is not that your friends are more wrong than you, but that everyone is more wrong when recommending their friends to others than when deciding whether to trust such recommendations, as a result of sample bias. Eric’s sample of James mostly contains instances of James interacting with Eric, so he does overstate James’ trustworthiness. Your sample is closer to the true distribution of James’ behavior. However you don’t have an explicit model of why your estimate differs from Eric’s, which would allow you to believe in general that friends overestimate the trustworthiness of their friends to others, and thus correct your own such biases.

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Bryan Caplan says intelligence research is very unpopular because it looks so bad to call half of people stupider than average, let alone stupid outright. Calling people stupid is rude.

But if this is the main thing going on, many other kinds of research should be similarly hated. It’s rude to call people lazy, ugly bastards whose mothers wouldn’t love them. Yet there is little hostility regarding research into conscientiousness, physical attractiveness, parental marriage status, or personal relationships. At least as far as I can tell. Is there? Or what else is going on with intelligence?

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Over at philosophical disquisitions, John Danaher is discussing Aaron Smuts’ response to Bernard Williams’ argument that immortality would be tedious. Smuts’ thesis, in Danaher’s words, is a familiar one:

Immortality would lead to a general motivational collapse because it would sap all our decisions of significance.

This is interestingly at odds with my observations, which suggests that people are much more motivated to do things that seem unimportant, and have to constantly press themselves to do important things once in a while. Most people have arbitrary energy for reading unimportant online articles, playing computer games, and talking aimlessly. Important articles, serious decisions, and momentous conversations get put off.

Unsurprisingly then, people also seem to take more joy from apparently long-run insignificant events. Actually I thought this was the whole point of such events. For instance people seem to quite like cuddling and lazing in the sun and eating and bathing and watching movies. If one had any capacity to get bored of these things, I predict it would happen within the first century. While significant events also bring joy, they seem to involve a lot more drudgery in preceding build up.

So it seems to me that living forever could only take the pressure off and make people more motivated and happy. Except inasmuch as the argument is faulty in other ways, e.g. impending death is not the only time constraint on activities.

Have I missed something?

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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In mixed groups, women don’t talk as much as men. This is perhaps related to women being perceived as “bitches” if they do, i.e. pushy, domineering creatures whom one would best loath and avoid. Lindy West at Jezebel comments:

…it just goes back to that hoary old double standard—when men speak up to be heard they are confident and assertive; when women do it we’re shrill and bitchy. It’s a cliche, but it’s true. And it leaves us in this chicken/egg situation—we have to somehow change our behavior (i.e. stop conceding and start talking) while simultaneously changing the perception of us (i.e. asserting that assertiveness does not equal bitchiness). But how do you assert that your assertiveness isn’t bitchiness to a culture that perceives assertiveness as bitchiness? And how do you start talking to change the perception of how you talk when that perception is actively keeping you from talking? Answer: UGH, I HAVE NO IDEA…

One problem with asserting that your assertiveness doesn’t indicate bitchiness is that it probably does. If all women know that assertiveness will be perceived as bitchiness then those who are going to be perceived as bitches anyway (due to their actual bitchiness) and those who don’t mind being seen as bitches (and therefore are more likely to be bitches), will be the ones with the lowest costs to speaking up. So mostly the bitches speak, and the stereotype is self-fulfilling.

This model makes it clearer how to proceed. If you want to credibly communicate to the world that women who speak up are not bitches, first you need for the women who speak up to not be bitches. This can happen through any combination of bitches quietening down and non-bitches speaking up. Both are costly for the people involved, so they will need altruism or encouragement from the rest of the anti-stereotype conspiracy. Counterintuitively, not all women should be encouraged to speak more. The removal of such a stereotype should also be somewhat self-fulfilling – as it is reduced, the costs of speaking up decline, and non-bitchy women do it more often.

Interestingly and sadly, this is exactly opposite to the strategy that Lindy finds self-evident:

…But I guess I will start with this pledge I just made up: I, Lindy West, a shrill bitch, do hereby pledge to talk really really loud in meetings if I have something to say, even if dudes are talking louder and they don’t like me. I refuse to be a turtle—unless it is some really loud species of brave turtle with big ideas. I will not hold back just because I’m afraid of being called a loudmouth bitch (or a “trenchmouth loud ass,” which I was called the other day and as far as I can tell is some sort of pirate insult). Also, I will use the fuck out of the internet, because they can’t drown you out on the internet. The end. Amen or whatever.