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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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    Why is bad teaching attached to uni certification?

    Posted on April 30, 2010 | 18 comments

    When most things are certified, like coffee or wood or insanity, the stuff is produced by one party, then someone else judges it. University is meant to be a certification of something or another, so a nagging question for all those who can think of a zillion better ways to learn things than by moving their morning sleep to a lecture theater  is ‘why can’t university work like those other things?’

    If the learning bit were done with a different party from the certification bit, everyone could buy their preferred manner of education, rather than being constrained by the need for it to be attached to the most prestigious certification they could get hold of. This would drastically increase efficiency for those people who learn better by reading, talking, or listening to pausable, speedupable, recordings of good lecturers elsewhere than they do by listening to someone gradually mumble tangents at them for hour-long stints, or listening to the medical autobiographies of their fellow tutorial-goers.

    This is an old and seemingly good idea, assuming university is for learning stuff, so probably I should assume something else.

    Many other things university could be for face the same argument – if you are meant to learn to be a ‘capable and cultivated human being’ or just show you can put your head down and do work, these could be achieved in various ways and tested later.

    One explanation for binding the ‘learning’ to the certification is that the drudgery is part of the test. The point is to demonstrate something like the ability to  be bored and pointlessly inconvenienced for years on end, without giving up and doing something interesting instead, purely on the vague understanding that it’s what you’re meant to do. That might be a good employee characteristic.

    That good though? Surely there is far more employment related usefulness you could equip a person with in several years than just checking they have basic stamina and normal deference to social norms. Presumably just having them work cheaply for that long would tell you the same and produce more. And aren’t there plenty of jobs where the opposite characteristics, such as initiative and responding fast to suboptimal situations, are useful? Why would everyone want signals of placid obedience?

    Bryan Caplan argued that university must be long because it is to show conformity and conscientiousness, and anyone can pretend at that for a short while. But why isn’t university more like the army then? People figure out that they don’t have the conformity and conscientiousness for that much faster than they do university from what I hear. University is often successfully done concurrently with spending a year or five drunk, so it’s a pretty weak test for work ethic related behaviours.

    Another possible explanation is that the system made more sense at some earlier time, and is slow to change because people want to go to prestigious places and not do unusual things. While there’s no obvious reason the current setup allows more prestige, it’s been around a long time, so its institutions are way ahead prestige-wise.

    What do you think?

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    Who observes being you, and do they cheat in SIA?

    Posted on April 29, 2010 | 5 comments

    Warning: this post is somewhat technical – looking at this summary should help.

    1,000,000 people are in a giant urn. Each person is labeled with a number (number 1 through number 1,000,000).
    A coin will be flipped. If heads, Large World wins and 999,999 people will be randomly selected from the urn. If tails, Small World wins and 1 person will be drawn from the urn.
    After the coin flip, and after the sample is selected, we are told that person #X was selected (where X is an integer between 1 and 1,000,000).
    Prior probability of Large World: P(heads)=0.5
    Posterior probability of Large World: P(heads|person #X selected)=P(heads)=0.5
    Regardless of whether the coin landed heads or tails, we knew we would be told about some person being selected. So, the fact that we were told that someone was selected tells us nothing about which world we are in.

    Jason Roy argues that the self indication assumption (SIA) is equivalent to such reasoning, and thus wrong. For the self indication assumption to be legitimate it would have to be analogous to a selection procedure where you can only ever hear about person number 693465 for instance – if they don’t come up you hear nothing.

    In both cases you can only hear about one person in some sense, the question is whether which person you could hear about was chosen before the experiment, or afterwards from those which came up. The self indication assumption looks at first like a case of the latter; nothing that can be called you existed before the experiment to have dibs on a particular physical arrangement if it came up, and you certainly didn’t start thinking about the self indication assumption until you were well chosen. These things are not really important though.

    Which selection procedure is analogous to using SIA seems to depend on what real life thing corresponds to ‘you’ in the thought experiment when ‘you’ are told about people being pulled out of the urn. If ‘you’ are a unique entity with exactly your physical characteristics, then if you didn’t exist, you wouldn’t have heard of someone else – someone else would have heard of someone else. Here SIA stands; my number was chosen before the experiment as far as I’m concerned, even if I wasn’t there to choose it.

    On the other hand ‘you’ can be thought of as an abstract observer who has the same identity regardless of characteristics. Then if a person with different characteristics existed instead of the person with your current ones, it’s just you observing a different first-person experience. Then it looks like you are taking a sample from those who exist, as in the second case, so it seems SIA fails.

    This isn’t a question of which of those things exists. They are both coherent enough concepts that could refer to real things. Should they both be participating in their own style of selection procedure then, and reasoning accordingly? Your physical self discovering with utmost shock that it exists while the abstract observer looks on non-plussedly? No – they are the same person with the same knowledge now, so they should really come to the same conclusion.

    Look more closely at the lot of the abstract observer. Which abstract observers get to exist if there are different numbers of people? If they can only be one person at once, then in a smaller world some observers who would have been around in the bigger world must miss out. Which means finding that you have the person with any number X should still make you update in favor of the big world, exactly as much as the entity defined by those physical characteristics should; abstract observers weren’t guaranteed to have existed exist either.

    What if the abstract observer experiencing the selection procedure is defined to encompass all observerhood? There is just one observer, who always exists, and either observes lots of creatures or few, but in a disjointed manner such that it never knows if it observes more than the present one at a given time. If it finds itself observing anyone now it isn’t surprised to exist, nor to see the particular arbitrary collection of characteristics it sees – it was bound to see one or another. Now can we write off SIA?

    Here the creature is in a different situation to any of Roy’s original ones. It is going to be told about all the people who come up, not just one. It is also in the strange situation of forgetting all but one of them at a time. How should it reason in this new scenario? In ball urn terms, this is like pulling all of the balls out of whatever urn comes up, one by one, but destroying your memories after each one. Since the particular characteristics don’t tell you anything here, this is basically a version of the sleeping beauty problem. Debate has continued on that for a decade, so I shan’t try to answer Roy by solving it now. SIA gives the popular ‘thirder’ position though, so looking at the selection procedure in this perspective does not undermine SIA further.

    Whether you think of the selection procedure experienced by an exact set of physical characteristics, an abstract observer, or all observerhood as one, using SIA does not amount to being surprised after the fact by the unlikelihood of whatever number comes up.

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