Category Archives: 1

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.

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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Intuitions are a major source of evidence in philosophy. Intuitions are also a significant source of evidence about the person having the intuitions. In most situations where onlookers are likely to read something into a person’s behavior, people adjust their behavior to look better. If philosophical intuitions are swayed in this way, this could be quite a source of bias.

One first step to judging whether signaling motives change intuitions is to determine whether people read personal characteristics into philosophical intuitions. It seems to me that they do, at least for many intuitions. If you claim to find libertarian arguments intuitive, I think people will expect you to have other libertarian personality traits, even if on consideration you aren’t a libertarian. If consciousness doesn’t seem intuitively mysterious to you, one can’t help wonder if you have a particularly un-noticable internal life. If it seems intuitively correct to push the fat man in front of the train, you will seem like a cold, calculating sort of person. If it seems intuitively fine to kill children in societies with pro-children-killing norms, but you choose to condemn it for other reasons, you will have all kinds of problems maintaining relationships with people who learn this.

So I think people treat philosophical intuitions as evidence about personality traits. Is there evidence of people responding by changing their intuitions?

People are enthusiastic to show off their better looking intuitions. They identify with some intuitions and take pleasure in holding them. For instance, in my philosophy of science class the other morning, a classmate proudly dismissed some point, declaring,’my intuitions are very rigorous’. If his intuitions are different from most, and average intuitions actually indicate truth, then his are especially likely to be inaccurate. Yet he seems particularly keen to talk about them, and chooses positions based much more strongly on they than others’ intuitions.

I see similar urges in myself sometimes. For instance consistent answers to the Allais paradox are usually so intuitive to me that I forget which way one is supposed to err. This seems good to me. So when folks seek to change normative rationality to fit their more popular intuitions, I’m quick to snort at such a project. Really, they and I have the same evidence from intuitions, assuming we believe one anothers’ introspective reports. My guess is that we don’t feel like coming to agreement because they want to cheer for something like ‘human reason is complex and nuanced and can’t be captured by simplistic axioms’ and I want to cheer for something like ‘maximize expected utility in the face of all temptations’ (I don’t mean to endorse such behavior). People identify with their intuitions, so it appears they want their intuitions to be seen and associated with their identity. It is rare to hear a person claim to have an intuition that they are embarrassed by.

So it seems to me that intuitions are seen as a source of evidence about people, and that people respond at least by making their better looking intuitions more salient. Do they go further and change their stated intuitions? Introspection is an indistinct business. If there is room anywhere to unconsciously shade your beliefs one way or another, it’s in intuitions. So it’s hard to imagine there not being manipulation going on, unless you think people never change their beliefs in response to incentives other than accuracy.

Perhaps this isn’t so bad. If I say X seems intuitively correct, but only because I guess others will think seeing X as intuitively correct is morally right, then I am doing something like guessing what others find intuitively correct. Which might be a bit of a noisy way to read intuitions, but at least isn’t obviously biased. That is, if each person is biased in the direction of what others think, this shouldn’t obviously bias the consensus. But there is a difference between changing your answer toward what others would think is true, and changing your answer to what will cause others to think you are clever, impressive, virile, or moral. The latter will probably lead to bias.

I’ll elaborate on an example, for concreteness. People ask if it’s ok to push a fat man in front of a trolley to stop it from killing some others. What would you think of me if I said that it at least feels intuitively right to push the fat man? Probably you lower your estimation of my kindness a bit, and maybe suspect that I’m some kind of sociopath. So if I do feel that way, I’m less likely to tell you than if I feel the opposite way. So our reported intuitions on this case are presumably biased in the direction of not pushing the fat man. So what we should really do is likely further in the direction of pushing the fat man than we think.

Cross posted from Overcoming Bias. Comments there.

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When negotiating over the price of a nice chair at a garage sale, it can be useful to demonstrate there is only twenty dollars in your wallet. When determining whether your friend will make you a separate meal or you will eat something less preferable, it can be useful to have a longterm commitment to vegetarianism. In all sorts of situations where a valuable trade is to be made, but the distribution of the net benefits between the traders is yet to be determined, it can be good to have your hands tied.

If you can’t have your hands tied, the next best thing is to have a salient place to split the benefits. The garage sale owner did this when he put a price tag on the chair. If you want to pay something other than the price on the tag, you have to come up with some kind of reason, such as a credible commitment to not paying over $20. Many buyers will just pay the asking price.

This means manipulating salient ways to split benefits could be pretty profitable. This means people should probably be doing it on purpose. I’m curious to know if and how they do.

Often the default is to keep the way the benefits naturally fall without money (or anything else ‘extra’) changing hands. For instance suppose you come to lunch at my place and we both enjoy this to some extent. The default here is to keep the happiness we got from this, rather than say me paying you $10 on top.

So in such cases manipulating the division of benefits should mostly be done by steering toward more personally favorable variations on the basic plan. e.g. my suggesting you come to my place before you suggest that I come to yours. A straightforward way to get gains here is to just race to be the first to suggest a favorable option, but this is hard because it looks domineering to try to manipulate things in your favor in such a way. Unless you have some particular advantage at suggesting things fast and smoothly, such a race seems costly in expectation.

If in general trying to manipulate a group’s choice seems like a status-move or dominance-move, subtle ways to do this are valuable. Instead of a race to suggest options, you can have a prior race to make the options that you might want to suggest seem more suggestible. For instance if you’d prefer others come to your place than you go to others’ places, you can put a pool at your place, so suggestions to go to your place seem like altruism. If you know a lot of details about another person, you can use one of them to justify assuming that a particular outcome will be better for them. e.g. ‘We all know how much John likes steak, so we could hardly not go to Sozzy’s steak sauna!’. None of this works unless it’s ambiguous which way your own preferences go.

On the other hand if your preferences are very unambiguous, you can also do well. This is because others know your preferences without your having to execute a dominance move to inform them. If their preferences are less clear, it’s hard for them to compete with yours without contesting your status themselves. So arranging for others to know your preferences some other way could be strategic. e.g. If you and I are choosing which dessert to split, and it is common knowledge that I consider chocolate cake to be the high point of human experience, it is unlikely that we will get the carrot cake, even if you prefer it quite strongly.

So, strategy: if it’s clear that you have a pretty strong preference, make it quite obvious but not explicit. If you have a less clear preference, make it look like you have no preference, then position to get the thing you want based on apparently irrelevant considerations.

Even if the default is to transfer no cash, there can be a range of options that are clearly incrementally better for you and worse for me, with no salient division. e.g. If I invite you over for lunch, there are a range of foods I could offer you, some better for you, some cheaper for me. This seems quite similar to determining how much money to pay, given that someone will pay something.

In the lunch case I get to decide how good what I offer you is, and you have to take it or leave it. You can retaliate by thinking better or worse of me. You can’t very explicitly tell me how much you will think better or worse of me though, and you probably have little control over it. Your interpretation of my level of generosity toward you (and thus your feelings) and my expectations of your feelings are both heavily influenced by relevant social norms. So it’s not clear that either of us has much influence over which point is chosen. You could try to seem unforgiving or I could try to seem unusually ascetic, but these have many other effects, so are extreme ways to procure better lunching deals. I suspect this equilibrium is unusually hard to influence personally because there’s basically no explicit communication.

There are then cases where money or peanut butter sandwiches or something does change hands naturally, so ‘no transfer’ is not a natural option. Sometimes there is another default, such as the cost of procuring whatever is being traded. By default businesses put prices on items rather than consumers doing it, which appears to be an issue of convenience. If it’s clear how much surplus is being split, a natural way is to split it evenly. For instance if you and I make $20 busking in the street, it would be strange for you to take more than $10, even if you are a better singer. This fairness norm is again hard to manipulate personally, except by making it more or less salient. But it’s a nice example of a large scale human project to alter default surplus division.

When there are different norms among different groups, you can potentially reap more of it by changing groups. e.g. if you are a poor woman, you might do better in circles where men are expected to pay for many things.

These are just a random bunch of considerations that spring to mind. Do you notice people trying to manipulate default surplus divisions? How?