Meteuphoric

People have always talked about the need for female role models, and until recently I didn’t understand how this was meant to help.

Why would I want a female math teacher to be my role model, when that bit of selection power might be used to get someone with more math skill? It seemed maybe insulting that people think I care so much about my femalehood that I prefer to copy someone else who shares it than someone who is chosen solely for being good at math. And if people use role models to decide how to behave, isn’t saying that female role models are important the same as saying either that women should behave differently from men, or that women are somehow unable to copy the behavior of men? Doesn’t it lead to more sexism if you suggest to people in this way that their gender is a defining feature and more important than e.g. math skill?

I now have a model of the potential need for female role models that makes sense to me, though I’m not especially confident in it. It may also be completely obvious to everyone other than me. Anyway, here it is.

Society has many stereotyped roles. The kind teacher. The cool businessman. The class clown. The twenty-something trying to figure out what they should do. The nerd.

My understanding of these is this. If you fit kind of near one of these roles, people will see you as being in it. In the same way that if you write a thing that is kind of like an ‘A’, people will read it as an ‘A’. If someone learns that you program a lot and enjoy playing board games, they think ‘ah, a nerd’ and then interpret more ambiguous characteristics to fit this role. For instance whether your clothing style is edgy or oblivious.

When people meet you, they observe your most striking characteristics, and try to figure out which kinds of person those characteristics mean that you are, from this set of known kinds of people. If your characteristics are striking but don’t seem to fit any known kinds of people, the observer will be confused and curious. Maybe you will get to have your own new role, or ‘weirdo’ is quite a large catchall.

People communicate who they are by either fitting known roles, or riffing on them: sort of fitting, but with unique flourishes that set them apart as individuals. Much like how fiction plays off ideas that exist in culture already, assuming the reader knows about the famous stories and common associations. Subtly varying on the themes or consciously subverting them, as commentary on what has come before, and to absorb the meanings from it so that much can be compactly implied. It is harder to write good fiction which sits in an uncharted vacuum, making use of alien characters, norms and ideas. Similarly it is easier to say who you are with clothes and policy preferences and so on, with a common language of kinds of people you might be gesturing at.

Most people don’t mean to fit in one simple stereotype, each person constructs a careful cocktail of them. They usually don’t mean to be a maximally stereotypical philosopher. However they might mean to be a modern freelance formal epistemologist with neuroscience roots and liberal values.

When people are deciding what to do, they often think of the roles available, and choose the one(s) that most appeal to them, and use that to guide their action. Sometimes this is obvious: few people choose a side in a policy debate without implicitly glancing at what a good liberal or conservative would do. But also, if they are choosing how to teach a class, they might have a few images of different kinds of teachers they could be, and select one they most want to try to emulate, rather than choosing their own behavior from scratch. For instance, they might choose the ‘stern but quietly caring’ teacher role. They can imagine what such a teacher would do, so then they do that.

This has the advantages of both being easier for the teacher, and more understandable to others. Parents and students know what to expect – they can readily recognize the stern but quietly caring teacher, and already know about her character.

So, there are all these stereotyped roles you can have. What does this have to do with gender? A lot of the roles are specific to certain kinds of people. You just can’t be the gentle giant if you are only five feet tall. You can’t be the village idiot if you are smart. And you can’t be the sort of person who twiddles their moustache if you can’t grow a moustache. In fact lots of roles come with a gender. The eccentric old professor who smokes a pipe in class can’t really be a woman, or if she is, then that is a notable characteristic, and she is the female eccentric old professor, which is different.

Growing up I socialized little, and the people I could most relate to were probably middle aged guys who wrote books. However our gender and age genuinely didn’t occur to me as relevant. I figured I could grow up to be Dr Who or Einstein or Dirk Gently.

Now I think I can’t really. And I can’t grow up to be Leo Szilard or an absent-minded professor, or an American gentleman who wanders foreign coffee shops and writes in his journal in the evening light, or even just the nerd. If I want to be a nerd, I have to be a girl nerd. Which is not the same character at all, in popularly imagined stereotype-world. If the Terminator had been a woman, would it be the same story? If Sherlock or James Bond were women, that would be an intentional and meaningful choice.

There are lots of roles that men can’t have too. It is hard for a man to be a nanny or nurse or ballet dancer, without being a ‘MALE ballet dancer’ or whatever. I don’t think that men actually have more roles. I also doubt that men’s versions of more feminine roles are more flattering than women’s versions of more masculine roles. However I wonder if men have a better selection of appealing roles on the whole. It is better to be the absentminded professor than the old school maam, or the spinster cat lady. It is better to be the class clown than the conscientious girl. It is better to be the nerd than the nerd girl. It is better to be the scientist than the woman in science. While it’s also better to be the nanny than the male nanny, there is arguably less demand for being some kind of nanny than some kind of scientist.

So, it’s not that I might not know how to do math well unless I see a woman do it, it is that if there aren’t women doing math around, there might not seem to be a female math-doing role at all, and as a young person finding my place in the world I might be hesitant to explore uninhabited territory in kinds-of-people-space. I think the hope is that if there are enough females doing math, there won’t even be some kind of ‘female mathematician’ role, there will just be a ‘mathematician’ role, and it won’t be attached to gender, like ‘environmentalist’ or ‘conservative’ are not. The reason you might want female role models is not to flesh out a female-specific role, but to illustrate clearly that the usual role can be filled by males or females, since many roles are not.

So the female role model is not to show the female that she can do math. It is to show other people that she can fill a mathematical role, and to show her that other people know this.

I used to sometimes pay other people to cut up my meat into small pieces (not as weird as it sounds—our house has a tiny internal token economy). Somehow chewing meat was surprisingly hard for me, and so (unrelatedly?) was cutting it with a knife. I think I attributed these failings to some kind of generalized lack of virtue with respect to dealing with food.

Then one day a few months ago, my boyfriend said something like ‘I don’t understand—why can’t you cut meat? It’s not like there are lots of ways to do it wrong—you just put the knife here, and then go like this’ and I was like ‘Oh!’ and then I could cut the meat. (See picture, and pretend chocolate is meat and plastic knife is metal knife.)

How to cut meat

How not to cut meat

Encouraged, we went on to investigate why I couldn’t chew the meat, and learned that I was attempting to chew it with a different set of teeth to the ones he was using. Apparently you are meant to break up meat with your canine teeth. I tried this, and it worked much better than what I was doing (kind of crushing it together with my back teeth).

Relatedly, the two of us often floss our teeth together, and I always take longer than he does. Similarly, I think we both put this down to some vague moral failure on my part. One day we investigated more carefully, and learned that I have twenty five percent more teeth than he does, which explained the time difference pretty well. (After some confusion we figured out that I have the normal number, and he had all of his wisdom teeth removed, plus another four long ago).

I recounted some of these stories to a different friend, and he asked me if I knew how to drink cold water. I said probably not—in fact I have never understood how people drink iced water, which hurts my teeth. He showed me how to purse my lips to avoid the coldest water touching my teeth.

All this was surprising to me. I had assumed that most variation in people’s abilities to do random things was due to small nebulous differences in many characteristics. Maybe Sam can’t throw a ball as well as Lara because his posture is different in a thousand subtle ways, and he tends to move his body less quickly, and his hands are not the same shapes and he has different attitudes and beliefs and habits, about throwing balls and about learning things in general. The aforementioned series of events suggests that more often than I thought, Sam can’t throw a ball as well as Lara because he has his foot too far forward, and if he moves it backwards he’ll be almost as good. Or at least, that this is true of me.

This doesn’t appear to make sense, because of course people do vary in heaps of small and nebulous ways, and lots of those ways should affect how good they are at random tasks. But perhaps if a person is bad enough at something for it to be noticeable, this is usually overwhelmingly caused by one very well defined problem? This is my best guess for now, but I am interested in others.

Another possibility is that this only applies to me—that I am somehow uniquely lacking at basic, easily teachable skills. Which might make sense, since I went to school less than the recommended amount as a child. But I doubt they had a class on meat-eating. Coincidence seems like a plausible explanation too—maybe things like this are rare, and I just came across several in quick succession. I guess I credit coincidence for three of four stories here involving teeth. I don’t have any good guesses that account for that. Possibly stories about teeth remind people of other stories about teeth.

How often do you think being bad at a task is due to some easily explained problem? That might be fixed in minutes? Have you found yourself severely lacking at common human skills? Did you ever get better at them? Were the solutions simple? Do you know how to effectively chew meat? How did you learn that?

I. A problem

I have heard pessimism lately about whether democracy can produce good decisions frequently enough to stop everything rapidly going to Hell. Primary concerns are that voters are ignorant and that voters are evil. Supposing voters are evil, arguably any good system of government should bring about Hell. However the ignorance seems like a real issue.

A popular response to all complaints about democracy is, ‘Well, what else are we going to do? Do you want dictatorship?’

I think this ignores the potential for mild variations on democracy. ‘Democracy’ is not very specific. Wikipedia lists a bunch of variations. I’d like to suggest a different one.

The basic problem I want to solve is that the people voting for policies (directly or indirectly) are ignorant about the likely consequences of policies.

But first I’d like to point out that this is a problem for everyone, not a conflict between an ignorant team and an informed team. That ignorant people vote for destructive policies is at least as bad for the ignorant people as it is for everyone else. That is, if people truly vote for bad policies due to ignorance, they would presumably prefer the outcomes that they voted against. 

II. A (hand-wavy) solution

My proposal is for people to vote on what they want to happen, and then for someone else to put in the hard work of figuring out which policies correspond to which outcomes. That is, to vote on values.

Robin Hanson suggested this in Shall we Vote on Values, but Bet on Beliefs? (2013), as a component of Futarchy—a system where people elect representatives to stipulate their values, and use prediction markets to judge which policies will satisfy those values. Robin is mostly excited about the prediction markets aspect, but I think the idea of separating out values from policies is important on its own. Prediction markets are but one thing a population might use to figure out what to do, once they knew what their group as a whole wanted. Arguably a pretty good thing, but still. Any kind of voting on values then doing something else about beliefs seems like it would have a number of benefits unrelated to prediction markets.

We can think of selecting policy as something like:

Everyone has their own values and empirical beliefs. Everyone has to share policies. Values and empirical beliefs together determine the best policies. We basically want everyone’s values to be represented in the policies. It is not important that everyone’s empirical beliefs are all represented though—if we had a good way of just using the most accurate beliefs to bring about everyone’s values, the people with the least accurate beliefs would still be better off.

Usually the combining of values and empirical beliefs into policy recommendations happens within each person’s head. Then we aggregate policies, via voting on them directly or voting for representatives who agree with us on policy. Instead, we could aggregate values alone, and combine the aggregated values with empirical data gleaned some other way.

III. Good things

I claim this would achieve the good things about democracy—e.g. accounting for everyone’s interests, fairness, avoiding extreme evils, reducing reasons for conflict—at least not much worse than the current system, while mostly mitigating the problem that most people are ignorant or misinformed about most things.

I think there are also a lot of other benefits. Here are benefits of voting on values that I can think of:

• More accurate sources of empirical belief. There are lots of better ways to get accurate empirical views than taking a national vote. The problem is often summarized as ‘people are stupid’ and ‘people are uneducated’, but even smart, educated people are probably very ignorant about the policies they vote on a lot of the time, relative to experts. It would just be an infeasibly huge amount of work to have informed views about the myriad policy questions a person has some tiny amount of political influence over.
• Much less effort. Instead of every person in the country figuring out which policies lead to which outcomes (a very tricky problem), it only has to be done once. 
• More efficient use of information. If everyone’s beliefs constitute noisy evidence about the true state of the world, and each person uses only their own beliefs to choose their favorite policy, most information that could be used for each choice about policy preference is not being used. If beliefs are aggregated in some way and and then applied to aggregated values, this uses all of the information.
• More fairness to those with few resources. The status quo means that uneducated people are less likely to get the outcomes they want, because they are more likely to vote for policies that don’t support those outcomes, due to misunderstanding. This proposal should avoid that bias.
• Less destruction from voting to express values. Arguably, most of the consequences of a person’s political positions are on friends’ and acquaintances’ perceptions of the person. So we might expect political choices to be partly optimized for signaling values and qualities, rather than for optimal policy consequences. If people voted on values rather than policies, this would superficially seem to make advertising your values and qualities more straightforward, and less destructive, because expressing your values is just what you are supposed to be doing. 

Several of these seem pretty big.

IV. Tricky things

There are also several obvious difficulties. A first difficulty is converting values into policies without the interference of the values of those people involved in doing the conversion. To put it less abstractly, if my nation decides that it values jobs a certain amount, and I am in charge of figuring out how to best create some jobs, and I don’t like people having jobs in forestry, you have to somehow stop me from just lying about whether forestry is a good place for creating jobs. 

While this seems hard to prevent entirely, there is already a lot of indirection between what people vote on and what happens in our current system. And probably this already biases outcomes far in favor of what intermediaries want. So the bar for improvement is not very high. I expect we could make a system of voting on values that was better than the current system in this regard. 

Another difficulty is that there isn’t a clearly good format for values to take while they are being voted on. Do you tick a box next to ‘people should be richer’? Probably not. Your vote would need to indicate how much some values are worth relative to others, and there are just a lot of things to value, and they don’t come in convenient units. Robin’s paper proposes a solution involving representatives, which at least demonstrates that this can be solved. I expect there are other ways to do it.

A related difficulty is deciding what kinds of things can be values. If you are going to aggregate everyone’s values, they will probably need to be in some common and easy to vote on format, which will probably restrict expressiveness. Again the bar for improving on the current system is not high however—choosing between two representatives whose level of agreement with your policy preferences is mostly explained by your being of the same species as them also probably reduces expressiveness.

There are probably also heaps of other problems that I haven’t thought of now. I’m mostly suggesting that this is worth thinking about, rather than presenting a detailed proposal that doesn’t have terrible problems.

V. Alternatives (that are worse)

Sometimes people suggest that citizens just not be allowed to vote unless they meet certain intellectual standards, such as basic knowledge of the part of the world they are voting about. This would have the dreadful downside that the people who know less about the broader world—perhaps because they don’t have the resources to invest in reading about such things—have their interests completely ignored. Yet people find such proposals perennially appealing. I think voting on values is the natural resolution to this conflict between wanting to represent the interests of people who are not deeply educated about all policy-relevant aspects of the world, without absorbing their empirical misunderstandings.

I previously suggested an explanation for very abstract research sometimes not being well respected: very abstract thought often looks superficially similar to very basic confusion, which looks amusingly silly. For instance, thinking about paraconsistent logic looks a lot like being confused about whether yes means no.

This theory suggests that abstract thought would mostly be less respected in areas that people have common sense views, because common sense is where it looks especially silly to be confused about basic assumptions.

I think this describes the abstract topics that Robin Hanson is interested in—and originally asked about—pretty well: the future, the human mind, the economy, practically relevant philosophy, and human behavior.

Maybe it’s just true of all areas? I don’t think so— biology and chemistry probably don’t have so many common sense views I think. Though physics and engineering probably have some, due to people having intuitive physics models.

So I think this is some evidence for the earlier theory, but I still don’t believe it that much.

You know what is cheap? Talk. 

You know what is expensive? Action. 

You know what is cost-effective? Hypocrisy.

At least if non-word actions are not much more effective than words, which seems right. Differences to the world you can make without communicating seem limited. And for communication, words seem better. Maybe actions speak louder than words, when they speak. But words do most of the talking, because actions are private and not very intelligible. They are like a really loud mumble to oneself. Words are so much easier to hear that when you know about someone else’s actions, it’s virtually always just because you heard some words about them.

Does Effective Altruism fundamentally push toward hypocrisy?