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Heuristics for a good life

Posted on June 11, 2010 | 9 comments

I wondered what careers or the like help other people the most. Tyler reposted my question, adding:

Let’s assume pure marginalist act utilitarianism, namely that you choose a career and get moral credit only for the net change caused by your selection.  Furthermore, I’ll rule out “become a billionaire and give away all your money” or “cure cancer” by postulating that said person ends up at the 90th percentile of achievement in the specified field but no higher.

And answered:

What first comes to mind is “honest General Practitioner who has read Robin Hanson on medicine.”  If other countries are fair game, let’s send that GP to Africa.  No matter what the locale, you help some people live and good outcomes do not require remarkable expertise.  There is a shortage of GPs in many locales, so you make specialists more productive as well.  Public health and sanitation may save more lives than medicine, but the addition of a single public health worker may well have a smaller marginal impact, given the greater importance of upfront costs in that field.

I’m not convinced that the Hansonian educated GP would be much better than a materialism educated spiritual healer. Tyler’s commenters have a lot of suggestions for where big positives might be too – but all jobs have positives and many of them seem important, so how to compare? Unfortunately calculating the net costs and benefits of all the things one could do with oneself is notoriously impossible. So how about some heuristics for what types of jobs tend to be more socially beneficial?

Here some ideas, please extend and criticize:

  • Low displacement: if someone had to be hired, you only add the difference between your ability and the second best candidate (plus the second best candidate’s efforts to another job at random). The same goes for what you produce. Even if creating beautiful music doesn’t knock another musician out of business, people listen to your new song instead of older songs, which are not seemingly any worse.
  • Big gains to a marginal person being better: careers that fail the above can still rate highly if this is so. This is a hard route because if candidate quality matters more there will generally be stronger selection so you will be more average for who they let in. Your best bet here might be in something important to you which usually attracts people with poor abilities.
  • Goal discretion: one way a displacing person can make a relatively big difference is to have a better purpose than the person they displace in a position where that matters. This is more likely in jobs that aren’t meant to be altruistic. e.g. if you head an NGO for delivering fresh water to poor households, you only add to the cause to the extent that you are better at it than the alternative guy. If you are an academic with some choice in research topics and no imperative to be altruistic, you can add a person’s worth of effort to an important topic at the expense of an unimportant topic without having to be any better at researching. Similar for shop owners and heads of state.
  • Profits: if you are making huge profits, it’s probably good.
  • Positive externalities: same.
  • Ongoing effects: usually a kind of positive externality. Nice cake lasts minutes whereas nice ideas last a long time (though someone else would have thought of them eventually).
  • Negative externalities
  • Fueling status races or other zero sum games: arguably things people buy to look better than other people do not cause any overall benefit, so you shouldn’t read too much into the profitability of selling such things. Similar for weapons in at least some situations. Same for selling any other negative externalizing capabilities.
  • Speeding trends: culturesome things tend to cycle through new variants continually. Contributing a song, movie, or meme variant for a current trend certainly makes a lot of people like you (briefly). But it’s not clear what people value here: each new item while it is new, or being up to date with the current trends in general. If the former you are doing them a service by adding your bit of culture, if the latter you are just making it more expensive for them to keep up.
  • Effects on galaxy colonization chances and speed: this matters so much you can ignore all the other things.

What jobs do well on most of these things?

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Why not fake height?

Posted on May 9, 2010 | 37 comments

Barking up the wrong tree:

to match the dating success of a man one inch taller, a 5’9″ man would have to make $30,000 a year more…

So why don’t men wear high heels? Obviously the immediate reason is to avoid looking like women, since women wear them. But there are all sorts of things that both men and women do without men becoming sullied by girliness (for instance wearing high heels at other times in history). And why didn’t men get in first and claim high heels for manliness, if they should benefit from it so much? We would be puzzled if in another culture men were the only ones with push up bras, because push up bras were too manly for women to wear.

Even with the danger of looking like a girl in proper high heels, isn’t there a temptation to get men’s shoes with a tiny bit higher heel than usual? Maybe just $10,00 worth of income’s heel? Presumably there is some heel increase that wouldn’t stand out as effeminate. And when that’s commonplace, wouldn’t it be tempting to add a tiny bit more? If height is such an advantage to men, and the danger of girliness shouldn’t stop a gradual increase, what’s the barrier?

Note: I removed the possibility of trackbacks to this post because it was receiving more filter evading spam than I could be bothered looking at.

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Moving marginal mothers

Posted on May 8, 2010 | 5 comments

Julian Savulescu suggests extending the idea of paying drug addicts not to have children to everyone.  At first the purpose is to avoid the eugenics feel of discouraging only one set of people from procreating, but then he reasons:

“The benefit of a policy of offering inducements to sterilisation is that it would select those who do not value, do not understand, do not want the role of parent. And it is precisely these people who are likely to be the worst parents.

Being a parent is, at best, a difficult job. Why not excuse those with the least motivation and determination? There are plenty of others willing to take their place. And the earth can only sustain a finite number of people.”

It’s of course true that if you penalize an activity, those to whom it is most expensive already will be the ones to quit. However:

  1. The existing costs of parenting already induce those who dislike parenting most not to parent. Adding another cost to parenting would just move the line where it becomes worthwhile to parent, not implement such selection. Justifying this requires an argument that the level of value at which people find parenting worthwhile is too low, not just a desire to encourage better parents to do a greater proportion of parenting in general.
  2. “Excuse those with the least motivation and determination”? We aren’t exactly pushing them to do it. Why presume they don’t excuse themselves at the appropriate point? This goes with the above point; the line where parenting seems worthwhile could be in the wrong place if parents were pushed for some reason to have too many children, but why think they misjudge?
  3. Why would there be plenty of others willing to take their places? Presumably those wanting to bear children will do so already or at least would not start at a 1:1 ratio on the news that others are not. Few factors influencing conception depend on the ambient birthrate.
  4. If others really were willing to ‘take their place’, the exit of poor parents from parenting  wouldn’t be relevant to the total population and whether the planet can sustain it.
  5. Presumably the issue is how big a finite number of people the earth’s resources can support, and more importantly why and to what extent parents should be expected to misjudge.
  6. Smaller populations are not automatically better if you value human life at all. That parents are unlikely to account for the entire value of their potential child’s life is a strong reason to think that parents don’t have enough children. If that is the overwhelming externality, the line should be lower, and we would be better off paying people to have children.

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    Experiences are friends

    Posted on May 5, 2010 | 6 comments

    Products tend to be less satisfying than experiences. This is old news. Psyblog elaborates on six reasons from a set of (hard to access) recent experiments, which add up to this:

    We compare products more than experiences, and since products are doomed to not be the best we could ever have got, we are sad. When we don’t compare, we are happy.

    This requires one of two things:

    1. that when we can’t compare something, we assume it is better than average
    2. that we find knowing how something compares displeasing in itself unless the thing is the best.

    Either of these seem like puzzling behaviour. Why would we do one of them?

    The first one reminds me of the way people usually like the children they have more than the hypothetical children of any other combinations of genes they could have had. Similarly but to a lesser extent, people are uncomfortable comparing their friends and partners with others they might have had instead, and in the absence of comparison most people think those they love are pretty good. You rarely hear ‘there are likely about half a billion wives I would like more than you out there, but you are the one I’m arbitrarily in love with’.

    This all makes evolutionary sense; blind loyalty is better than ongoing evaluation from an ally, at least towards you. So you evaluate people accurately for a bit, then commit to the good ones. Notice that here the motivation for not comparing appears to come from the benefits of committing to people without regret, rather than the difficulty of figuring out what a nice bottom is worth next to a good career.

    I wonder if our not comparing experiences, and rating them well regardless is related. Experiences we buy are often parts of our relationships with other people, while objects usually aren’t. So to compare your experiences and evaluate them as accurately as you can comes dangerously close to comparing bits of your relationships and evaluating them accuracely.

    For instance, if I see there was a cheaper airfare than one I took, to entertain the thought that it would have been better to travel a week later is to admit I would give up all the moments you and I spent together on that trip for some other set of experiences and fifty dollars, which feels uncomfortably like calculating and judging our time together as average and replacable.

    If this explanation were true there would be less need for the other explanation for not comparing experiences, which is that comparing experiences is naturally more difficult than comparing products. This seems untrue anyway; the added information about products often actually makes it harder to compare, though if you used all your information you would get a better comparison.

    For instance, accurately comparing phone plans often requires a large spreadsheet and unrealistic amounts of patience, and you end up ignoring factors like the details of the applications different phones allow. On the other hand with experiences you usually know an easy to calculate price for each, a lot of detail about the one you had, and few of the details of the one you didn’t have. So you can pretty much ignore the details, unless you have some reason to think the experience you had was above or below expectations (if being at the restaurant at that time caused your colleague to get shot, probably the other restaurant would have been better), and go by price.

    This explanation predicts that if objects are closely associated with people we would treat them like we do experiences. Gifts are an obvious example, and we are unusually reluctant to compare or trade them, and tend to be especially fond of them.

    Another example of objects linked to people is toys that children think of as people. I don’t have more than anecdotal evidence on this, but when I was young I hated plenty of toys that I didn’t own, until I was given one and immediately loved it, out of politeness.

    This explanation also predicts that experiences we don’t share we might compare more readily, but I have no evidenec on that.

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    Connotations are indelible

    Posted on May 4, 2010 | 9 comments

    Once a connection exists between two concepts, there is no easy way to remove it. For instance if it was publicly decided tomorrow that ‘f***’ should no longer carry connotations of anything other than sweet lovemaking, it would be virtually impossible to remove the other meanings even if everyone wanted to. The connotation will always be a Schelling point for what the word might imply. Whenever the banned connotation made the most sense, people would understand it as that. Listeners know that the speaker knows they will be reminded of the connotation, and since the speaker used the word anyway, they intentionally sent the message.

    This is part of why polite terms are constantly changed for concepts which are followed by unwanted negative connotations, such as terms for physically and mentally disabled people and ethnic and racial minorities. As Steven Pinker probably pointed out, the negative connotations people attach to the subject matter get attached to the word, so the word becomes derogatory and we have to get another one for when offense isn’t meant. So these words cycle much faster than other words.

    You can’t even refuse to use or accept a connotation yourself. Some people insist that gender stereotypes don’t apply, are offensive, and should never be used. But if someone says to them ‘David was being a bit of a girl’, they can’t help but receive the message. They might refuse to respond, but they have no defenses to receiving. They would like to remove the association of wimpiness from the public understanding of femalehood, but they can’t even opt out themselves.

    This is similar to the game mentioned in The Strategy of Conflict where two people are to privately pick a letter from several which have different payoffs to both of them without communicating. If a single suggestion is accidentally uttered, they must pick the letter spoken even if neither of them prefer it to others. It’s the only way to coordinate. If one of them managed to speak another letter, that would weaken the original Schelling point, but not destroy it. Similarly, if you make it clear that femininity suggests strength to you, you can confuse the communication somewhat by making it difficult for either the speaker or listener to guess which of the prominent possible meanings is being communicated, but you can’t destroy the existing meaning. At best the interpretation will depend on the situation, just like in the game it will depend on other cues both parties can use interpret one of the letters as more obvious.

    Besides this, the more you point out things shouldn’t be associated, the more you associate them in the public mind. And that’s before taking into account that your bothering to draw attention to the issue advertises to your audience that in the common understanding the concepts are associated, so they should understand them as so in normal discussion. For instance if I argued to you that ‘capitalistic’ shouldn’t be associated with ‘immoral’, you might be persuaded, but you would also get the impression that everyone else thinks they are related. Since the latter matters and the former doesn’t, the net effect on you would be to make you understand ‘immoral’ more strongly the next time you heard someone say ‘capitalistic’.

    So I would expect campaigns to attach new associations to things (such as tiny penises to speeding) are likely to be more effective than campaigns to remove associations from things (such as inferiority from femininity). Any evidence on this?

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