Slate Star Codex

With malice toward none, charity for all, confusion about most, secret crushes on a few, and miniature flags for others!

The Wisdom of the Ancients

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Scott Alexander

Were The Victorians Cleverer Than Us?, asks a new study by Woodley et al that has gotten name-dropped in places like The Daily Mail and The Huffington Post.

Meanwhile, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines continues to warn us that “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

On first glance, the paper looks solid. It investigates simple reaction time, a measure which is known to be correlated with g, the mysterious general intelligence which is supposedly measured (to some degree) by IQ tests. People have been experimenting with simple reaction time for over a century now, so the paper asked the relatively simple question of whether it has changed over that century. They found that it had: it had gone up, signifying a decrease in general intelligence. Their explanation was dysgenics.

People have known for a long time that high-IQ people have fewer children than low-IQ people, so it might make sense genetically to believe that each generation becomes a little dumber. This pattern has stubbornly refused to appear: instead, every generation has had significantly higher IQ than the one before, an observation called the Flynn Effect. This has been attributed to various things, including better nutrition, child-rearing, and education.

What the authors of this paper do – and it’s pretty clever – is say that the Flynn Effect is an environmental increase in IQ which has hidden a simultaneous genetic decline in IQ. They try to prove it by saying environmental and genetic factors affect IQ in different ways, and that genetic factors are more likely to affect certain features like reaction time – a pattern which is called a Jensen Effect and which is on relatively solid ground. Because they find reaction time is declining, probably people are becoming genetically stupider and the only reason we can keep having a civilization at all is because our environment is getting better – which is too bad, since our environment may have stopped doing that.

All the theory here sort of checks out, except for the part where they say IQ changed 15 points in a hundred years, which is just a little bit faster than any responsible person expects evolution to progress. People critique the idea that Ashkenazi Jews could have shifted fifteen points in nine hundred years on the grounds that it’s too fast. So let’s take a closer look at their data.

Only two of their sixteen studies come from the Victorian Era: Galton 1889 (n = 3410) and Thompson 1895 (n = 49).

Francis Galton, a brilliant Victorian scientist who was a half-cousin of Darwin, is the source of 98.5% of our Victorian reaction time data – not to mention the concept of reaction time itself, several statistical tools including correlation and standard deviation, the use of the survey in data collecting, the term “eugenics”, the entire science of meteorology, hearing tests, the first study on the power of prayer (he prayed over random fields to see if the crops there grew higher; they didn’t), fingerprinting, the scientific investigation of synaesthesia, and a horrible warning about how not to do facial hair.

Galton’s Data A Century Later, published in 1985, tells us a little about how he gained his ground-breaking reaction time statistics. He set up a laboratory in the Science Galleries of the South Kensington Museum. There he charged visitors to the museum three pence ($25 in modern currency after adjusting for inflation) to be measured by his instruments, a process he advertised as “for the use of those who desire to be accurately measured in many ways, either to obtain timely warning of remediable faults in development, or to learn their powers.” Over the course of nine years, he attracted about nine thousand curious individuals, three thousand of whose data managed to make it into the current meta-analysis.

His colleague in Victorian reaction-time measurement was Helen Thompson Woolley, an American psychologist who published a 1903 dissertation titled The Mental Traits of Sex: An Experimental Investigation of the Normal Mind in Men and Women (it was, apparently a simpler time). With an optimism bordering on the incredible, Wikipedia notes that “Before Woolley, research on sex differences was heavily influenced by conjecture and bias.”

Woolley writes of her sampling technique:

“In making a series of tests for comparative purposes, the first prerequisite is to obtain material that is really comparable. It has been shown that the simple sensory processes vary with age and with social condition. No one would question that this statement is true for the intellectual processes also. In order to make a trustworthy investigation of the variations due to sex alone, therefore, it is essential to secure as material for experimentation, individuals of both sexes who are near the sae age, who have the same social status, and who have been subjected to like training and social surroundings. Probably the nearest approach among adults to the ideal requirement is afforded by the undergraduate students of a coeducational university. For most of the the obtaining of an education has been the one serious business of life.

The individuals who furnished the basis for the present study were students of the University of Chicago. They were all juniors, seniors, or students in the first year of their graduate work. The subjects were obtained by requesting members of the classes in introductory psychology and ethics to serve.”

She found (a finding replicated by all later studies and now considered essentially proven) that women have slower reaction times than men (interestingly, this difference does not correlate with IQ) – but more relevant to the current meta-analysis, she found the same generally fast reaction times as Galton.

The modern studies, keeping with the zeitgeist of the modern age, are much less colorful. I only looked into the two largest: one Scottish, the other Australian. Here’s what the Scottish study says of its methodology:

The study was originally located in the Central Clydeside Conurbation (Figure 3), a socially heterogeneous and predominantly urban region, including Glasgow City, which is known to have generally poor health. Two-stage stratified sampling was used to select subjects. For the regional sample, local government districts were stratified by unemployment and socio-economic group data from the 1981 Census and 52 postcode sectors were systematically selected from these with a probability proportionate to their population size. The same postcode sectors were chosen for all three cohorts. The sampling frame used for individuals was Strathclyde Regional Council’s 1986 Voluntary Population Survey—an enhanced electoral register that provides details of the age and sex of all household members.3 Individuals were selected from the 52 postcode sectors within each age cohort with a systematic selection with a prescribed sampling interval from a random start.

I was getting bored by the time I made it to the Australian study, but I managed to keep my attention on it long enough to note the following sentence:

Persons selected at random from the Electoral Roll [of Canberra] were sent a letter informing them about the survey and saying that an interviewer would contact them soon to see if they wanted to participate.

Look around you. Just look around you. Have you worked out what we’re looking for yet?

That’s right. The answer is selection bias.

Back in the Victorian Age, science was done by aristocrats and gentlemen who drew their subjects from their own social groups. There were no poor people in either study, because getting poor people to participate in an experiment would require finding some poor people, who probably smelled terrible and lived in areas where there were no good restaurants.

In the Modern Age, everyone is excruciatingly Socially Aware, and studies go out of their way to look at Disadvantaged Disempowered Disprivileged Populations so their results can serve as Cutting Social Commentary.

Galton’s study population was visitors to a science museum in the posh part of London who were willing to pay him $25 to participate. Thompson’s population was University of Chicago philosophy students. The two modern studies are random selections double-checked to make sure they don’t undersample the poorest sections of the population.

So, uh, congratulations, authors of this paper! You have successfully proven that the average member of the population is dumber than wealthy science dilettantes and students at elite colleges! Go pat yourself on the back!

In case we need more rigor: according to The National Center for Education Statistics, about 2.3% of Americans went to college in 1900. In a perfect meritocracy maybe only the smartest people would go to college, but we’re not a perfect meritocracy. Would it sound about fair to say that the people in college at the time were a sample of the 20% or so of the smartest Americans?

Because the IQ of someone at the 80th percentile is 113 – that is, exactly enough to explain the 14 point IQ “drop” that Woodley et al found.

This is a little harder to do with Galton’s science museum visitors. The 1985 commentary on Galton’s data tells us:

As would be expected of a group of paying testees being measured in a museum, a sizable portion of Galton’s sample consisted of professionals, semiprofessionals, and students. However, as may be discerned in Tables 10 and 11, all socioeconomic strata were represented.

Tables 10 and 11 turn out to be a gold mine – I worried the records of exactly who took the tests would be lost, but as you might expect of someone who basically invented statistics single-handedly and then beat Darwin in a debate about evolution as an encore, Galton was very good at keeping careful data.

This site tells me that about 3% of Victorians were “professionals” of one sort or another. But about 16% of Galton’s non-student visitors identified as that group. These students themselves (Galton calls them “students and scholars”, I don’t know what the distinction is) made up 44% of the sample – because the data was limited to those 16+, I believe these were mostly college students – aka once again the top few percent of society. Unskilled laborers, who made up 75% of Victorian society, made up less than four percent of Galton’s sample!

So this discredits this meta-analysis way beyond any need for further discrediting, but since I can’t help beating a dead horse…

Let’s talk about race. We know that studies find white people usually have faster reaction times than black people – in fact, a lot of the voluminous and labyrinthine research on race and IQ hinges on this fact. We thankfully do not have to enter the minefield of trying to figure out the causes of this discrepancy (biological vs. environmental vs. social) – we can just take it as a brute fact.

What percent of Galton’s 1889 science museum visitors do you think were non-white? What percent of Thompson’s 1895 University of Chicago students? Approximately zero? Sad to say, non-white people were as likely to be exhibits in the science museums of the day as visitors, and according to no less a figure than W.E.B. DuBois in 1900 there were only 2600 living black Americans who had graduated college.

I looked them up some stats on the sample areas for the modern studies – 6% of Glasgow is non-white, and about 12% of Canberra. So aside from selection bias affecting intelligence which affects reaction time, we have selection bias affecting race which affects reaction time.

May I just say how annoyed I am that I have to remind reactionary eugenicist IQ researchers, of all people, to pay attention to race? YOU HAD ONE JOB!

Finally, there’s significant IQ differences within populations of the same race and country simply due to migration effects. An analysis of IQs across Great Britain finds that the highest scores are in London (102) and the lowest in Scotland (97). Almost all this meta-analysis’ Victorian data came from London (Galton’s museum in Kensington) and the largest source of modern data (making up about half of the whole, and being unusually high in reaction time) came from Scotland (and Glasgow isn’t even the nice part of Scotland). The 5 point London – Scotland difference explains over a third of the “difference between Victorians and moderns” found in this study.

So in conclusion, this study ignores race, ignores regional variations, but most importantly IGNORES THAT ALL ITS VICTORIAN STUDIES WERE SAMPLING FROM THE SMARTEST 20% OR SO OF THE POPULATION AND THEY GOT EXACTLY THE NUMBERS YOU WOULD EXPECT IF YOU DID THAT.

There is some really excellent IQ research out there that everyone should be reading, but this is not it. Please please please don’t cite this study as evidence for dysgenics or the decline of civilization.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

Apart From Better Sanitation And Medicine And Education And Irrigation And Public Health And Roads And Public Order, What Has Modernity Done For Us?

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Scott Alexander

. . .

Brought peace.

As you may have noticed, instead of another GIGANTIC WALL OF TEXT I am trying to write my rebuttal to Reactionary philosophy in the form of several smaller posts that I can then link together in a sequence index. This particular post addresses Reactionary claims that modern society causes international instability, leading to increased war (or increased “total war”) and the resulting mayhem.

This claim I received mostly from blog posts I can’t find right now and from discussions with Michael Anissimov. It goes that when states are fully sovereign, self-interested, and run by noble classes – as they were long ago – their wars are rare, as short as possible, and mostly fought in a civilized way.

But when states are subject to a larger international order (like the UN or “international law”), interested in ideological concerns, and governed by a host of factions competing for democratic power – as they are today – wars are more common, bungled into increased length and fatality, and turn into “total war” where anything goes and civilians are considered valid targets.

Michael specifically mentioned the Congress of Vienna as an example of the old order, pointing out that a bunch of aristocrats met up, divided Europe among them, and there was peace for decades afterwards. He compared this to the inelegance of modern “police actions” and “foreign interventions”, pointing out how World Wars I and II, at the beginning of the modern era, were unmatched in their deadliness and brutality.

Luckily, these questions about war and the stability of different models of international relations can be investigated empirically. Are wars worse today, or were we worse during the old aristocratic era? By what standards?

Let’s ask the media! War Is Going Out Of Style, says the New York Times. War And Violence On The Decline In Modern Times, trumpets NPR. Josh Goldstein says we are “winning the war on war”, Steven Pinker proclaims the victory of the better angels of our nature, and John Mueller even more triumphantly posits that War Has Almost Ceased To Exist

The statistics bear them out. The BBC notes:

The Human Security Report found a decline in every form of political violence except terrorism since 1992. “A lot of the data we have in this report is extraordinary,” its director, former UN official Andrew Mack, said.

It found the number of armed conflicts had fallen by more than 40% in the past 13 years, while the number of very deadly wars had fallen by 80%.

The study says many common beliefs about contemporary conflict are “myths” – such as that 90% of those killed in current wars are civilians, or that women are disproportionately victimised. The report credits intervention by the United Nations, plus the end of colonialism and the Cold War, as the main reasons for the decline in conflict.

The trend is older than just this decade. According to Goldstein:

In fact, the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years, based on data compiled by researchers Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II. If you factor in the growing global population, which has nearly quadrupled in the last century, the decrease is even sharper. Far from being an age of killer anarchy, the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.

And Steven Pinker shows the following graph:

So there’s more than enough data to show the world has been getting more peaceful over the past seventy years. The most plausible Reactionary response would be that this is too small a time horizon: that the horrors of progressivism should be viewed over a timescale of centuries.

First of all, this shouldn’t be true. A staple of Reactionary thought is that the world has become notably more progressive since World War II, and a hyper-willingness to attribute anything that’s declined since that period to the progressive world-view. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Second, it is very suspicious to say that the part of the data you don’t have good statistics for, and only that part of the data, proves your point.

But in order to address this objection more fully, I tried to get fuzzy ballpark area data on the deadliness of wars in past centuries. My methodology was to comb Wikipedia’s list of wars by death toll, take all the ones with casualties of one million or greater, and organize them by era. The eras I used were 21st Century So Far, 1950-2000, 1900-1950, 1850-1900, 1800 -1850, 1700-1800, 1600-1700, 1500-1600, 1000-1500, 1-1000, and 500 BC – 1. Where casualties were given as a range, I took the center of that range, except in the Taiping Rebellion where I believe the top of Wikipedia’s range is crazy high and so I took nearer the bottom; where conflicts spanned more than one era, I placed them in the one containing the majority of the conflict.

I added up total war casualties for each era, then scaled them by population using 2005 as the standard – that is, deaths were multiplied so that the new number was the same percent of the 2005 population as the original was of its own era’s population. Then I divided by the length of the era to give average deaths per century during that era.

The 1900 – 1950 era indeed came on top, with 626 million projected deaths per century per 2005 population. Second place was 1600 – 1700, with 442 million. Other violent periods of note were 1850 – 1900 (326M), 1000 – 1500 (230M), and 1800-1850 (106M). There was no obvious trend related to time.

However one trend worthy of note is that the 21st Century So Far and the period 1950-2000 were by far the two most peaceful eras of any in the study (both at about 28M).

So the most progressive periods in history are also the most peaceful. And the Reactionaries’ pet period, the 1600s when the Stuarts ruled England and the Hapsburgs were still mighty, was the deadliest age of history outside a World War. I tested what would happen if I limited the domain to Europe, and the results are much the same (with the exception of 1850 – 1900 becoming much more peaceful).

This study is actually biased against me and in favor of the Reactionaries in two ways. First, I eliminated all wars with death counts less than a million, because otherwise it would have taken forever. But that disproportionately eliminates pre-modern wars, since they were fought among lower-population nations – a conflict today need only kill 1/7000th of the population to make my list, but one in 0 BC would have had to kill a full 1/100 or be dropped entirely.

Second, technology! Two days worth of airplanes dropping bombs on Dresden in the 1940s killed more people than several long and bloody medieval crusades. More modern death counts should probably be discounted to take into account the fact that we are just way better at killing each other when we want to, even though we want to much less often. Yes, the era of World Wars saw slightly greater deaths per population than the era of absolute monarchy in Europe. But the Allies were killing people with nuclear bombs, and the Hapsburgs were killing people with bayonets. The 17th century in particular, and the past in general, just really really sucked.

Some Reactionaries, intuiting this pattern, have tried to dismiss it by saying that, while progressive eras have few wars, their wars are much worse – the sort of “total war” that characterized World Wars I and II, and so rose to new levels of killing and barbarity.

But this article lists the worst conflicts of all time by percent of population killed. And you have to go to number six on the list just to get to World War II! World War I isn’t even on the list! The Mongols did not kill 11% of the population of Earth in twenty-one years by not being aware you could harm civilians; the various mercenaries of the Thirty Years’ War were no more innocent.

One last fact noticed in the process of going through Wikipedia’s wars list: in any particular era, it is always the least progressive countries that are having the wars. Even the miniscule death count in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is limited almost entirely to authoritarian African countries and Islamic theocracies. In neither World War was the major conflict two democracies (by any reasonable definition) fighting one another, and at least in the latter totalitarian side deserves a disproportionate amount of blame. The bloodiest conflicts of the past few thousand years, even adjusting for population, have been in China, which is basically Reactionary Utopia with an authoritarian Emperor, a Mandate of Heaven, and strict racial homogeneity. There is a lot of debate over whether two democracies have ever gone to war (answer: it depends how true of a Scotsman you are) but this very fact should cue you in that war and democracy are not positively correlated (and most likely not even neutrally correlated).

So to sum up: as the world has become more progressive over the past seventy years, conflicts and deaths from conflict have dropped precipitously. Virtually every past era was much more violent than our own, and the biases of this study probably mean they were more violent even than our numbers indicated. Every single one of the five deadliest conflicts in human history occurred before the Enlightenment, and in any given era the more progressive countries both start and participate in fewer wars than the less progressive countries.

Very likely this is due partly or mostly to economic factors – the point that no two countries with McDonalds’ ever go to war is a good one. But this does not negate the fact that our current political and social system is the one that economic factors decided to set up in order to achieve their economic goals.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 79 Comments

Can You Condition Yourself?

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Scott Alexander

A friend recently told me about a self-help tactic that has become popular in the circles I move in: the idea of applying behaviorism to yourself (sometimes called “training your inner pigeon”). The idea is you give yourself rewards when you do things you want to do more of, and your brain works its magic and reinforces the activity.

When I first heard about this, my thought was “No way that is ever going to work”. I have always been under the impression that conditioning is kind of like tickling. You can’t tickle yourself. You’d be expecting it.

Let’s start by distinguishing a couple of possibilities:

1) This process doesn’t work at all

2) This process works by making you want the reward. Suppose you promise yourself a candy bar each time you do homework. You are hungry and want the candy bar, but you would feel bad if you ate it without doing homework. Therefore, you grudgingly do homework to get at the candy bar.

3) This process works by changing your urges and desires. After eating a candy bar each time you do homework, your brain associates homework with a nice, delicious-feeling, and you enjoy doing homework more from now on.

Let’s start with 3, the most encouraging possibility. This gains a little support from the Little Albert experiment. Here, a baby who had no particular fear of rats was exposed several times to rats plus loud, terrifying noises. Eventually the baby came to fear rats, even without the noise, presumably because the fear of the noise had generalized onto the rat through association. It’s easy to see how this could mean something like the happiness of candy-bar-eating generalizing to homework. Nevertheless, I believe this argument proves too much.

Every evening, I sit down at the table, get a plate and some silverware, and eat dinner. It’s usually something I really like, and it usually includes dessert, which I like even more. If eating good food isn’t rewarding, I don’t know what is, and sure enough I rarely skip dinnertime.

However, if for some reason I don’t have dinner – maybe I’ve promised my friends I’ll go out with a late dinner for them and so I can’t stuff myself first – I do not feel the slightest urge to sit down at the dinner table with a plate and sort of move my silverware around in the air making little eating motions, and when I tried it (empiricism!) I did not find it at all pleasant.

Take a second to think about how weird that is (the result, not me trying the experiment). Sitting at the table and moving my silverware, in conditions exactly like these, has been quickly associated with reward every single time I’ve done it in the past, for decades, ever since I learned to feed myself. But I don’t feel even a little bit of urge to do this. None at all. You may generate additional examples at your leisure, but the point is that just being consistently associated with a positive reinforcer in a low time-delay way does not make a neutral activity (let alone an actively unpleasant activity) become desirable.

What happened with Little Albert, then? First of all, he was classical conditioning and not operant conditioning. Second of all, Albert had no understanding or control over what was going on. Each time he heard the noise, he was very surprised – he was receiving a new fact from the Universe. But it wasn’t information he understood; he had no idea what the connection between the rat and the noise was and whether it would recur. He just knew that there was some mysterious rat -> noise connection.

Compare this to me eating dinner. The connection between sitting down and eating dinner is not at all a new fact fed me by the Universe; it’s something I plan myself. And it is not mysterious whether any given sitting and silverware-waving will reward me; I know it will reward me if and only if I am planning to eat dinner. Therefore the brain does not think of silverware-waving as an activity that might, who knows, lead to reward in the future.

(one might object that my inner pigeon – or lizard brain, to mix animal metaphors – doesn’t share my complex explicit knowledge of the reward structure of dinner-eating. But the little I know of the brain’s reinforcement mechanism suggests that reinforcement learning is based on surprise – technically the difference between predicted and observed values of some complicated Bayesian equation encoded in dopaminergic neurons or something – and that this system is actually quite good at predicting expected reward from an action, within certain limits)

So (3), the hypothesis that the reward will cause me to start enjoying homework, seems wrong. What about (2) – “I don’t like homework much, but at least I get some candy out of it”?

Here there’s a ceiling on how much the candy can reinforce your homework-doing behavior, and that ceiling is how much you like candy.

Suppose you have a big box of candy in the fridge. If you haven’t eaten it all already, that suggests your desire for candy isn’t even enough to reinforce the action of going to the fridge, getting a candy bar, and eating it, let alone the much more complicated task of doing homework. Yes, maybe there are good reasons why you don’t eat the candy – for example, you’re afraid of getting fat. But these issues don’t go away when you use the candy as a reward for homework completion. However little you want the candy bar you were barely even willing to take out of the fridge, that’s how much it’s motivating your homework.

Maybe you say “I will allow myself exactly one candy bar a day, but only if I finish my homework”. Even if you can stick to this rule, here the candy bar becomes an extrinsic reward motivating the homework. We all know what happens with extrinsic rewards – overjustification effect! You gradually start interpreting the task at hand as an annoying impediment to getting the reward, lose your intrinsic motivation, and as soon as the reward is removed, you’re even less willing to do the task than before.

So both (2) and (3) are pretty unlikely. That leaves us with (1) – don’t even bother.

Luckily, my friend helpfully clarified that this wasn’t what her class taught at all (I think maybe they originally tried this, but considerations like the ones I mentioned convinced them to change?). Their new policy is that you should reinforce yourself with a “victory gesture” – for example, pumping your fist and shouting “YEAH!” and visualizing an image corresponding to your success and trying to feel really good about yourself.

So for example, as soon as you sit down to start your homework, you make the victory gesture and imagine yourself graduating summa cum laude from school, and then you feel really good and have reinforced the behavior of sitting down to do your homework. And maybe you do it again when you finish, because peak end rule.

She claims a few benefits of this method. First, it’s very fast, so you can reinforce things right as they happen instead of with time delay which gives your brain enough time to lose the connection. Second, it’s intrinsic, so it’s not going to sap your natural motivation the same way the candy bar might.

I understand the claim that rewards delivered very immediately after a stimulus can work better for conditioning – I was referred to a couple of papers proving this, though I don’t remember them. But I notice I am confused. When we have good examples of real conditioning, immediate reward isn’t especially important. For example, people often use the language of behaviorism to talk about addiction, say alcoholism. But the chemical rewards of getting drunk don’t manifest until a little while after you’ve had your first beer – certainly not within a split second – and certainly alcoholism can reinforce even longer term behaviors, like leaving home and going to the bar. Pornography is another good example of effective behaviorism, but going to a porn site gives only delayed rewards – first you have to find a video you like, then you have to wait for it to buffer, then you have to sit through the boring part where the nice lady and the plumber are discussing the best ways to fix her faulty pipes, and so on. It seems that when we have a real effect that definitely works, immediacy is not required (indeed, if it were humans would have a lot of trouble learning anything but the most basic reflexes).

But okay. Ignore that. It would really really really really bad mind design to allow your own consciously generate-able emotions to feed back into the reinforcement mechanism.

Start with one obvious point. I said the candy bar couldn’t be much of a reinforcer if you otherwise left it in the jar without eating it. The same seems broadly true of a victory gesture. I don’t feel the slightest urge to perform a victory gesture, and having tried it empirically I don’t feel the slightest urge to repeat it. This bodes poorly for its ability to be a strong reinforcer.

And over several billion years of evolution, the brain has every incentive to get rid of that behavior if indeed it was ever possible. Imagine a world in which our own thoughts and feelings can be strongly reinforcing. You’re a caveman, encountering a saber-toothed tiger. You have two choices. You can either feel fear, which is an unpleasant emotion. Or you can feel happiness, which is a pleasant emotion. First you try feeling fear, but that’s unpleasant! You don’t like fear! The feeling of fear is negatively reinforced and your brain learns to stop feeling it. Then you try happiness! You like happiness! The decision to feel happiness is positively reinforced. Yes, you decide, saber-toothed tigers are wonderful things and you are overjoyed there is one in front of you getting into a pouncing position and licking its lips and…well, this caveman isn’t going to live very long.

From the little I know about the reward system, it seems to operate on a basis of predicting pleasure level, then upregulating actions that result in world-states that seem more pleasurable than predicted and downregulating actions that result in world-states that seem less pleasurable than predicted. I don’t think you can prevent the “I’m going to do my victory gesture!” part of you and the “I’m going to predict my pleasure at time t+1″ part of you from talking to each other, I don’t think internal pleasure is as reinforcing as external world-state results, and I don’t think the pleasure of making a victory gesture is strong enough to do much anyway.

…there were a lot of “I thinks” in that paragraph. Do we have any evidence here?

The literature on this is hiding under the obscure term “self-consequation”, and unfortunately it is all from Scientific Prehistory, ie the 1970s and 1980s before journal articles were uploaded to the Internet. I am able to find this full study, which does pretty much exactly the experiment listed at the beginning of this post – feed people candy in return for studying – and finds that it helps only if other people are there keeping them honest. But I am also able to find this abstract, which appears to be from a study showing the opposite – some kind of benefit – but is totally unavailable on the Internet. Both studies seem to refer to a long literature supporting their result and (sigh) neither seems aware of the other’s existence. However, I am more skeptical of the second, both because I can’t see it and because I worry that experimental protocols aren’t real self-reinforcement. That is, if an experimenter gives you their bag of candy and tells you to reinforce yourself by eating some when you do something good, that’s still different from using your own bag of candy and coming up with the idea on your own, even if the experimenter is out of the room when you’re working.

I will still try the technique, because it seems low cost and potentially high value. Really high value, actually. So high value that I would have expected the first person to get it right to take over the world. This is turning into another argument against it, isn’t it?

But yeah, as I was saying, I still intend to try the technique, even though it won’t be a very well-controlled experiment. And I’m glad I heard the idea for reminding me how little I know about behaviorism.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 40 Comments

Against Bravery Debates

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Scott Alexander

One of the things I was most criticized for on my old blog – and upon reflection, criticized for fairly – was my propensity to engage in bravery debates.

There’s a tradition on Reddit that when somebody repeats some cliche in a tone that makes it sound like she believes she is bringing some brilliant and heretical insight – like “I know I’m going to get downvoted for this, but believe we should have less government waste!” – people respond “SO BRAVE” in the comments. That’s what I mean by bravery debates. Discussions over who is bravely holding a nonconformist position in the face of persecution, and who is a coward defending the popular status quo and trying to silence dissenters.

These are frickin’ toxic. I don’t have a great explanation for why. It could be a status thing – saying that you’re the original thinker who has cast off the Matrix of omnipresent conformity and your opponent is a sheeple (sherson?) too fearful to realize your insight. Or it could be that, as the saying goes, “everyone is fighting a hard battle”, and telling someone else they’ve got it easy compared to you is just about the most demeaning thing you can do, especially when you’re wrong.

But the possible explanations aren’t the point. The point is that, empirically, starting a bravery debate is the quickest way to make sure that a conversation becomes horrible and infuriating. I’m generalizing from my own experience here, but one of the least pleasant philosophical experiences is thinking you’re bravely defending an unpopular but correct position, facing the constant persecution and prejudice from your more numerous and extremely smug opponents day in and day out without being worn-down … only to have one of your opponents offhandedly refer to how brave they are for resisting the monolithic machine that you and the rest of the unfairly-biased-toward-you culture have set up against them. You just want to scream NO YOU’RE WRONG SEFSEFILASDJO:IALJAOI:JA:O>ILFJASL:KFJ

A lot of common political terms pretty much encode bravery debates. “Political correctness”, “mainstream media”, “liberal media”, “corporate media”, “rape culture“, “Big Government” or “Big Business” or “Big Anything”, “patriarchy”, “the climate establishment”, or “the anything-anything complex”. By not-at-all-a-coincidence, these also happen to be some of the terms most likely to be inflammatory and get people angry. Has there ever been an argument that continued being civil or productive after “political correctness” was mentioned?

The persistence of bravery debates is actually kind of weird. Shouldn’t it be really really easy to figure out who’s being oppressed by whom? The Spanish Inquisition had many faults, but whining about being unfairly persecuted by heretics was, as far as I know, not one of them. Can two opposing positions really be absolutely certain they are under siege?

This question immediately reminded me of my recent observation about Christians and Muslims in the media. Whenever the media says something negative about Christians, comments and blogs and forums immediately fill up with claims that the media loves picking on Christians and that no one would ever publish a similar story about Muslims for fear of being “offensive” (eg 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). And whenever the media says something negative about Muslims, comments and blogs and forums immediately fill up with claims that the media is Islamophobic and attacks Muslims any chance it gets and they would never dare pick on a large powerful group like Christians in such a way (eg 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

So for example, Aziz Mubaraki writes:

There are numerous cases to judge whether there is bias against Muslims in the media, but in recent times look no further than the press coverage regarding the terrorist attack that took place in Norway not very long ago. Impartial population waited impatiently to read this act being explicitly described as a “terrorist attack” or an “act of terrorism” by the mainstream media. But never once the “Christian” label was used despite the fact that Mr. Breivik was a self-described devout Christian. Therefore the important question is: Why is it when the person responsible for the terrorist act happens to be Muslim all of a sudden the religion becomes the focus instead?

Yet israpundit.com writes:

Big media has no qualms about boldly and repeatedly labeling the Norweigan shooter as a “Christian”, even describing him as a Christian Zionist, despite no evidence that he was any kind of devout Christian whatsoever. Yet till this day the same vile liberal media will not refer to the Fort Hood jihadist as muslim or emphasize the Islamic motivation behind the shooting. Neither do government reports on the jihad attack.

So can we agree that this phenomenon of two opposing groups being equally sure they are bravely pointing out the world’s bias in favor of the other is, in fact, a thing?

Because once we acknowledge it, it’s not really hard to explain.

Psychologists have known about the hostile media effect for thirty years, ever since a 1982 study where they got pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students to watch a documentary and found that:

On a number of objective measures, both sides found that these identical news clips were slanted in favor of the other side. Pro-Israeli students reported seeing more anti-Israel references and fewer favorable references to Israel in the news report and pro-Palestinian students reported seeing more anti-Palestinian references, and so on. Both sides said a neutral observer would have a more negative view of their side from viewing the clips, and that the media would have excused the other side where it blamed their side.

Note that this was not at all subtle. The pro-Palestinians claimed that favorable references to Israel outnumbered unfavorable references almost 2:1, but the pro-Israelis complained that unfavorable references outnumbered favorable references at a greater than 3:1 ratio (p < .001). Transforming a different measure mentioned earlier in the paper to a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is completely pro-Palestine and 10 is completely pro-Israel, the average pro-Israeli rated it a 3.2, and the average pro-Palestinian rated it a 7.4. These numbers were even higher in people who claimed to know a lot about the conflict.

So even when exposed to genuinely neutral information, people tend to believe the deck is stacked against them. But people aren't exposed to genuinely neutral information. In a country of 300 million people, every single day there is going to be an example of something hideously biased against every single group, and proponents of those groups have formed effective machines to publicize the most outrageous examples in order to “confirm” their claims of bravery. I had an interesting discussion on Rebecca Hamilton’s blog about the Stomp Jesus incident. You probably never heard of this, but in the conservative Christian community it was a huge deal; Google gives 20,500 results for the phrase “stomp Jesus” in quotation marks, including up-to-date coverage from a bunch of big conservative blogs, news outlets, and forums. I guarantee that the readers of those blogs and forums are constantly fed salient examples of conservatives being oppressed and persecuted. And I don’t mean “can’t put up ten commandments in school”, I mean armed gay rights activist breaks into Family Research Council headquarters and starts shooting people for opposing homosexuality. Imagine you hear a story in this genre almost every time you open your RSS feed.

(And now consider all the stories you hear every day about violence and harassment against your people in your RSS feed.)

And if there aren’t enough shooters, someone is saying something despicable on Twitter pretty much every minute. The genre of “we know the world is against us because of five cherry-picked quotes from Twitter” is alive, well, and shaping people’s perceptions. Here’s an atheist blog trawling Twitter for horrible comments blaming atheists for terrorism, and here’s an article on the tweets Brad Pitt’s mother got for writing an editorial supporting Romney (including such gems as “Brad Pitt’s mom wrote an anti-gay pro-Romney editorial. Kill the b—-.”)

Then we get into more subtle forms of selection bias. Looking at the articles above, I am totally willing to believe newspapers are more likely to blaspheme Jesus than Mohammed, and also that newspapers are more likely to call a Muslim criminal a “terrorist” than they would a Christian criminal. Depending on your side, you can focus on one or the other of those statements and use it to prove the broader statement that “the media is biased against Christians/Muslims in favor of Muslims/Christians”. Or you can focus on one part of society in particular being against you – for leftists, the corporations; for rightists, the universities – and if you exaggerate their power and use them as a proxy for society then you can say society is against you. Or as a last resort you can focus on only one side of the divide between social and structural power.

So it’s far from a mystery how bravery debates can be so common or persistent. Or why everyone is so sure they’re on the brave side. But the interesting thing is that they actually work.

I call your attention to two studies by Joseph Vandello et al. In the first, experimenters once again took the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but ran the experiment in the other direction. Here they presented maps that showed Palestine as the underdog (by displaying a map emphasizing a tiny Palestine surrounded by much larger Israel) or Israel as the underdog (by displaying a map emphasizing tiny Israel surrounded by a much larger Arab world including Palestine). In the “Palestinians as underdogs” condition, 55% of subjects said they supported Palestine. In the “Israelis as underdogs” condition, 75% said they supported Israel. And in the second, experimenters found subjects rated people who had been unfairly disadvantaged during a job interview as more attractive and more desirable romantic partners than people who had not been.

Baaaaasically if you get yourself perceived as the brave long-suffering underdog, people will support your cause and, as an added bonus, want to have sex with you.

And I dislike this, because bravery debates tend to be so fun and addictive that they drown out everything more substantive. Sometimes they can be acceptable stand-ins for actually having an opinion at all. I constantly get far-right blogs linking to my summary of Reactionary thought, and I hope I’m not being too unfair when I detect an occasional element of “Oh, so that’s what our positions are!”. There seem to be a whole lot of Reactionaries out there who are much less certain of what they believe than that they are very brave and nonconformist for believing it.

As I said before, I accept the criticism that I was too quick to start bravery debates at my old blog and am trying to cut down on them. I would also recommend that other people cut down on them. I think they probably fall into the large category of things that make people who already agree with you fist-pump and shout “Yeah! We are awesome rebels!” while alienating everyone who doesn’t hold your position.

But what if you are being really brave by holding a dangerous and unpopular position? Shouldn’t you get credit for that?

I guess. I propose that if you write something and, for even just a second, you think of not publishing it, because of the risk to your reputation, or your livelihood, or your family, or even your life – then go ahead and call yourself brave, and I will try to reassure you and tell you everything is going to be all right.

If you think “Not publish this? But then how would everyone know how brave I’m being? I’m going to plaster my name all over this thing so everyone knows exactly where to send the bravery-related kudos!” … then stick to the damn object-level issues.

Posted in Uncategorized | 78 Comments

Newtonian Ethics

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Scott Alexander

We often refer to morality as being a force; for example, some charity is “a force for good” or some argument “has great moral force”. But which force is it?

Consider the possibility that it is gravity. In statements like “Sentencing guidelines should take into account the gravity of the offense”, the words “gravity” and “immorality” are used interchangeably. Gravitational language informs our moral discourse in other ways too: immoral people are described as “fallen”, sin is a “weight” upon the soul, and we worry about society undergoing moral “collapse”. So the argument from common usage (is best argument! is never wrong!) makes a strong case for an unexpected identity between morality and gravity similar to that between (for example) electricity and magnetism.

We can confirm this to the case by investigating inverse square laws. If morality is indeed an unusual form of gravitation, it will vary with the square of the distance between two objects.

Imagine a village of a hundred people somewhere in the Congo. Ninety-nine of these people are malnourished, half-dead of poverty and starvation, oozing from a hundred infected sores easily attributable to the lack of soap and clean water. One of those people is well-off, living in a lovely two-story house with three cars, two laptops, and a wide-screen plasma TV. He refuses to give any money whatsoever to his ninety-nine neighbors, claiming that they’re not his problem. At a distance of a ten meters – the distance of his house to the nearest of their hovels – this is monstrous and abominable.

Now imagine that same hundredth person living in New York City, some ten thousand kilometers away. It is no longer monstrous and abominable that he does not help the ninety-nine villagers left in the Congo. Indeed, it is entirely normal; any New Yorker who spared too much thought for the Congo would be thought a bit strange, a bit with-their-head-in-the-clouds, maybe told to stop worrying about nameless Congolese and to start caring more about their friends and family.

This is, of course, completely rational. New York City, at ten thousand kilometers, is one million times further away from the suffering villagers as the original well-off man’s ten meters. Since moral force decreases with the square of the distance, the moral force of the Congolese on the New Yorker is diminished by a factor of one million squared – that is, one trillion.

At that distance, all one billion Africans matter only 1/1000th as much as would a person at zero distance. There is, in fact, a person at zero distance from the average New Yorker – that New Yorker herself. So we find that our theory predicts that our obligations to the Congo are only one tenth of one percent as important as our obligations to ourselves.

We can confirm this experimentally. This article from 2005 lists private US overseas charitable contributions at $10.7 billion a year. The 2000 US Census gave a population of 281,421,906, meaning that the average American gave $38.02 in overseas charity. This is 0.107% of the average 2005 per capita income of $35,242, compared to a predicted .0100; that is, a margin of error of only about twenty four cents.

(This is why I love physics. You’d never get results that match up to predictions that precisely in the so-called “social sciences”.)

This methodology can be used to answer a seemingly very different problem that many of us face every day: just how far away from a beggar do you need to walk before you don’t have to feel bad about not giving her money?

Suppose the marginal value of an extra dollar to a beggar is ten times its value to a well-off person such as yourself. We start with the money in your pocket, about a meter away from your brain. If you pass right by the beggar then the money may be a meter away from the beggar as well. Distance to both people is equal, so here the moral force exerted by the beggar is ten times stronger than your own moral force: you are clearly obligated to give her the money.

As you double your distance from the beggar to two meters, the moral force of her need decreases by a factor of four; however, she still has a 2.5x greater claim to the money than you do. Even three meters is not sufficient; her claim will be 1.1x as strong as your own.

However, four meters ought to do it. At this distance, the importance of the beggar’s poverty has decreased by a factor of sixteen, while your own moral force has stayed constant. It’s now 1.6x better for you to keep the money for yourself – a comfortable margin of safety.

There has been some discussion on whether it is acceptable to just hang to the far outside of the sidewalk in order to avoid a beggar, or whether this is unethical and it necessary to cross to the entire opposite side of the street. We now have the tools necessary to solve this problem. If you are on a commercial throughway, downtown residential, or other sidewalk listed on this table as having a minimum width of 4m or greater, it is borderline acceptable (ignoring air resistance) simply to move to the other side of the walkway. However, on the smaller neighborhood residential sidewalks, industrial sidewalks and alleyways – not to mention anywhere the beggar is in the middle of the walkway – it is unfortunately necessary to cross all the way to the other side of the street.

Once again, the results of even a back-of-the-envelope calculation like this one mesh admirably with most people’s native intuitions. Just as even a young child who throws a ball will have a “gut feeling” about how long it will stay up in the air, so even people unaware that morality is a variant of gravitation can correctly apply these same “gut feelings” to moral dilemmas.

In summary, morality is a form of gravitation, albeit an unusual one. Calculations performed based on inverse square law assumptions correctly predict most people’s moral actions. Indeed, the majority of human moral behavior make no sense except under these assumptions, and without them our everyday moral reasoning would be ridiculous indeed.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 45 Comments

Links For May

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Scott Alexander

One of the points I bring up in my Non-Libertarian FAQ is how difficult a problem it is to get trustworthy ratings of the trustworthiness of businesses from “self-regulation” type groups. People sometimes bring up the Better Business Bureau as a counterexample, but there are consistent rumors that it basically uses its rating system to extort businesses for money. This is starting to seem much more plausible after a disgruntled group of business owners got them to give an A- rating to terrorist group Hamas just by paying them the necessary fees.

A Week’s Worth Of Groceries In Different Countries

There aren’t many occasions in which it’s acceptable to ask people in your town to dress up as Nazis, start shooting at citizens, and arrest the mayor and haul him off to a concentration camp. There are probably even fewer where it’s acceptable to paint local planes to look like Nazi bombers and fly them overhead, or declare a public ceremony renaming your main street Hitlerstrasse. But Winnipeg, Canada managed to make several million dollars off of it.

Yet another basic income guarantee experiment shows extremely positive results, this one in India.

Speaking of India, this series of pictures brings back the memories of my time traveling the Third World: Be Carefull: The Road Have A Problem

The Bronze Medal For Face-Palm-Ish Science Reporting goes to the Daily Mail for their article headlined “Women Are Born To Binge: Female Brains Are Biologically Programmed To Overeat”. Guess what species of animal the actual study was performed on? (hint: SQUEAK SQUEAK)

The Silver Medal goes to…also the Daily Mail, actually…for this article headlined “Children Brought Up By Two Parents Are More Intelligent – Because They Develop More Brain Cells – Boys Get Better Memories And Learning Ability – Girls Get Better Motor Co-ordination And Social Skills”. Once again, it would be worth mentioning that every single test subject in the experiment had a tail and an inordinate fondness for cheese.

The Gold Medal goes to…about 90% of the things I have seen about Jason Richwine, especially this article making the horrible “if something is a social construct, that’s kind of like saying it doesn’t exist and has no characteristics” argument. I kind of want to drag the author to Maine in the middle of winter in a bathing suit, on the grounds that going to California in the middle of winter in a bathing suit would be fine, and US states are just social constructs so they can’t possibly differ in temperature (AAAAAH STOP PROVING TOO MUCH!). Honorable exceptions to a few decent and thought-provoking people on all sides, including Erik Mesoy speaking for the rightists, Will Wilkinson speaking for the leftists, and Andrew Sullivan speaking for that dog and cat in the adorable Thanksgiving outfits.

Words I never thought I would hear myself saying: “The new Great Gatsby video game isn’t as good as the last Great Gatsby video game”

Exciting medical news: antibiotics cure back pain in almost half of patients. This is really interesting for several reasons. First because it continues the trend of finding that conditions that superficially didn’t look like they involved infections actually do (for example ulcers) and infections are very treatable. Second because back pain is one of the biggest causes of morbidity in the First World, and if half those people could go back to work and engage in normal activities again it would be a huge deal. The guy in the article who says they deserve a Nobel Prize isn’t joking.

New item for the Biodeterminist’s Guide To Parenting: Flame retardants

This isn’t technically a news article, but I was pretty shocked to learn that only about 55%-60% of people who start a bachelor’s degree program at a four year college finish within 6 years. What are our colleges DOING?

The government just Streisand Effect-ed a gun. Wonderful. I have to say, although there is a part of me that likes Sticking It To The Man, that if people end up making quiet self-regulation of 3D printers impossible, this is less likely to result in the government shrugging and saying “Okay, I guess everyone can do whatever they want unmolested” and more likely to result in them just banning 3D printers or figuring out some way to limit it to a couple of big collusive companies that don’t do anything interesting.

William McGonagall is generally considered to be the worst English-language poet ever.

Of Mice and Markets. You’ve probably all seen this experiment, where people are willing to pay to keep lab animals alive but suddenly ignore that preference when dealing via a market. But this is YET ANOTHER REMINDER that no, markets don’t just naturally reflect our true preferences and promote perfectly rational behavior. Also another reminder that psychology researchers are really mean.

And now for something completely different: scientists who are going out of their way to avoid killing animals. There is now vegetarian meat, grown in a vat without harming animals. Now they just have to iron out that “$300,000 for one burger” issue.

I didn’t realize how parochial the element-naming process was until I read Wikipedia’s History of Astatine (SHUT UP I MANAGE MY TIME JUST FINE). The first team to claim to have synthesized it was a group in Alabama who named it “alabamium”. When their claim was disproven the next attempt came from chemists in Dhaka who proposed the name “dakin”. When their claim was also rejected, attention turned to a Swiss guy who named it “helvetium” and then an English-Swiss team with “anglo-helvetium”. Finally it was actually discovered by a team in Berkeley who gave it its current name of “astatine”, probably because Berkeley is so awesome already that naming an element after it too would just be rubbing it in everyone else’s face (this was actually before berkelium)

Ozy links me to this very good and balanced article on Monsanto in India. I wasn’t previously aware of the extent of the dishonesty of the attempt to link Indian farmers’ suicides to GM crops.

Sometimes NASA fills me with pride in humanity. Other times, not so much.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 35 Comments

Overheard In The Box, Part II

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Scott Alexander

Mike: I think the last time I had this discussion, I decided to ground morality with waffles.

Alicorn: What?

Mike: I was in an IHOP with my friend from college, and we were talking about meta-ethics, and we couldn’t reach agreement, and then as we were leaving we saw a big sign saying “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT GOOD IS UNTIL YOU’VE TRIED OUR WAFFLES”. So we thought, yeah, okay, that explains that.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Index: Posts on Raikoth

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Scott Alexander

The following are my posts on this blog about my constructed society of Raikoth:

1. Laws, Language, Society
2. Corruption, Priesthood
3. Cities, Land
4. Symbolic Beads
5. Economics, Relationships
6. History, Religion

Related: Five Thousand Years In An Alternate Universe

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 1 Comment

Raikoth: History, Religion

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Scott Alexander

Imagine the following world.

It’s Imperial Rome. Nero has just gotten pissed at Seneca, but instead of killing him, he orders him into exile. The other Stoics are getting kind of wary at this whole “insane dictator ruling a decadent and corrupt empire” thing, so they all agree to head off with him and start a colony dedicated to virtue and righteousness, far away in the new continent that has recently been discovered across the sea. They are somewhat better philosophers than they are navigators, and crash into Greenland – where they are, in accordance with the tradition, Mistaken For Gods By The Native Populace. Seneca starts arranging the local paleo-Eskimos into his conception of the Ideal State, but gets distracted by his discovery of Eskimo shamanism, which is ten million times more fascinating than any philosophy the Romans had to offer. He wanders off into the tundra to go on a spirit quest, and his new Greenlandic society collapses into civil war. This is ended only by the fortuitious return of Seneca, who has ascended a holy volcano, talked to God, and become a prophet.

Several thousand years later, Greenland hosts an thriving society of high-tech Latin-speaking Eskimos following a religion descended in equal parts from Greco-Roman philosophy, shamanism, and vision quest volcano prophecies.

This is about the quickest way to explain the history of Raikoth without going through a lot of boring pre-history and geography and hard-to-pronounce names.

Exhibit on early Raikothin history from the 2011 Micronational World Expo. Click to expand

Religion

So what, exactly, is this religion?

Raikothin religion, sumurhe in its own language, recognizes two aspects of God, called Truth and Beauty. The existing world is a poorly ordered mishmash of these two aspects, whereas God is the two aspects artfully and perfectly combined.

Truth includes everything that actually objectively exists, in the exact way that it actually exists. This aspect is mathematical, precise, and completely devoid of subjectivity. It is symbolically associated with winter, stars, the colors blue and silver, and all the hard sciences as well as math.

Beauty includes feelings, dreams, hopes, personality, meaning. This aspect is numinous, charged with emotion, and fantastic. It is symbolically associated with summer, roses, the colors green and gold, and all the arts, especially poetry and especially especially music.

The world is a gradual and halting attempt to integrate Truth and Beauty, and humans are the interface points at which the integration takes place. Humans join Truth to Beauty by bringing beautiful things into existence or interpreting existing things in such a way as to make them beautiful.

The pattern of integration of Truth and Beauty is self-similar at every level. That is, each individual object is its own attempt to integrate the two aspects; completion of this task perfects the objects (it’s maybe a little teleological). Completion of the integration at the highest level perfects the world, causing it to become a manifestation of God.

Truth is symbolized as a star, Beauty as a spiral; the national flag, the Star and Spiral, combines both

This philosophy cashes out into a formalization of two different ways of looking at things, the Elith-mirta and Ainai-mirta (Perspective of Truth and Perspective of Beauty). The sumurhe religion itself is a perfect example. In the Elith-mirta, it is a useful metaphor for the fact that some things are easier to understand using mathematics and other things are easy to understand using native anthropomorphic intuitions, as well as a recognition that religion promotes psychic health and strengthens community ties. In the Ainai-mirta, Truth and Beauty are literal anthropomorphic deities (the god Elith and the goddess Ainai) who are worshipped through prayer and sacrifice and invoked for strength in times of need.

It is considered somewhere between bad form and heresy to mix up these perspectives or try to apply one to the other. To claim that what one wishes were true actually is true is a heresy, an attempt to subordinate the god Elith to the goddess Ainai. But to claim that what is true is beautiful or acceptable or just when it isn’t is equally heretical and also an insult to a goddess. Relativism, the idea that there is no Truth and everything should be viewed through Ainai-mirta, is an especially despicable heresy.

The level at which Beauty and Truth join together isn’t some superficial philosophical muddle, it’s the entire human project of art and science and trying to be happy and virtuous. Sumurhe is an attempt to give people a religious and mythological structure within which to view and appreciate that project.

It’s also an attempt to justify the institutions of the Raikothin state. The Angel of Evidence is an attempt to gain a direct connection to Truth, the Angel of Preference is an attempt to gain a direct connection to Beauty, and the Angel of Salience and the Archangel are attempts to integrate the information gained by both into a teleological improvement of the world. Thus also the three great religious institutions of Raikoth: the Priests of Truth, experts at understanding the external world; the Priests of Beauty, experts at understanding the human psyche; and the Priests of Joy, experts at figuring out how to make the two correspond.

Below this rarefied philosophical level sits a rich mythology, some of which dates back all the way to the Paleo-Eskimo substrate of the Raikothin population. This includes a Creation story, various archetypal characters and legendary heroes, and morality tales about the great leaders of the past. Believing any of these to be “true” in the sense of Elith-mirta would be a heresy, but they are believed to be Ainai-mirta, true-with-respect-to-Beauty, and repeated and taught in that sense. Even superstitions are tolerated and encouraged in this sense in order to make life more interesting: various standing stones that supposedly bring good luck, stories of places you can go to dream of those you have lost, stories about how when someone dies their good deeds incubate in the ground before flying out as butterflies to alight on those they loved during life, and the continued belief in the holy volcano as protector of the state (which it fulfills Elith-mirta as the source of cheap geothermal power).

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 9 Comments

Raikoth: Economics, Relationships

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Scott Alexander

Someone in one of the comments asked whether I am actually pushing Raikoth as a perfect society, and the answer is sorta. My con-culturing philosophy is trying to optimize for goodness while erring on the side of weirdness. This stands in contrast to a reasonable philosophy of the real world, where one might optimize for goodness while erring on the side of safety.

The reason I mention this may become clear further down in this post.

I promise no more than one or two more posts about this before I get back to regularly scheduled programming.

Economics

The economic system of Raikoth takes the form of a basic income guarantee and very little else.

There’s not much government intervention in health care – but people are strongly advised to spend some of their income guarantee on health insurance.

There’s no minimum wage, labor unions, or workplace safety laws – but people are encouraged to remain unemployed and live off their income guarantee if they’re not entirely satisfied with the job options available to them.

There’s not even a budget, per se. There’s a basket of taxes and the ability to slightly raise or slightly lower all taxes in the basket in order to fund individual programs. For example, a policy proposal would not take the form “Let’s build a new bridge, it would only cost $100 million and I’m sure there’s room in the budget for that”, but rather “Raise all taxes 0.5% to get $100 million, then use that to buy a new bridge”. Spending proposals not linked to revenue proposals would be considered incomplete; thus decision-making takes the form of real cost-benefit calculations instead of just saying yes to all pleasant-sounding spending and no to all unpleasant-sounding taxes.

It’s not that there’s no deficit – a small one is maintained for Keynesian reasons – but there’s complete control over its size and it’s never going to increase unexpectedly or against everyone’s wishes.

The taxes in the basket are primarily land taxes, very high estate taxes, and a tax on large corporations proportional to their size. This latter is meant to approximately balance economies of scale and give small mom-and-pop stores and start-ups ability to compete on an equal footing. It is recognized that this makes things a bit less efficient, but the Angels have decided it is still a net good for hard-to-measure reasons.

The government also taxes externalities – carbon taxes, pollution taxes, noise pollution taxes – as well as some less obvious cases. One of the weirder ones is destroying-the-social-fabric taxes. In these latter, Priests of Truth predict whether some piece of media will cause increases in crime or racism or whatever, calculate the costs of these effects, and then levy them as a tax on the producer. You can still get violent videogames that demean women or whatever, but they’re going to cost much more than the other videogames and that money is going to go to law enforcement, educational campaigns, and generally cleaning up after them.

Income taxes supposedly don’t exist, but symbolic beads place wealthy people under extreme social pressure to donate, and given the government’s (widely believed) pretension of being a perfect utilitarian system, most of these donations take the form of “bonus taxes”, providing an extreme boost to the national coffers and subsidizing most of the basic income guarantee program.

Relationships

One of my goals in con-culturing was to subvert dystopian tropes in unexpected ways, and one of my least favorite dystopian tropes is Bureaucrats Or Computers Decide Who You Are Allowed To Marry.

So fine. Let’s give these people their frickin’ Bureaucrats And Computers Deciding Who They Are Allowed To Marry.

Temion Mirun is a festival held on May 1st (approximate, based on solilunar calendar), a sort of combination celebration of springtime / Valentine’s Day / group marriage day. Each year in the runup to May 1st, everyone who has undergone the coming of age ritual but is not currently married writes down the names of the people they’re attracted to and want to date, in order of how much they like them. Then they send their lists to – say it with me – a centralized database.

Each year, on April 30th, the computer with the database runs a special variant of the Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm on everyone’s ranked lists. On May 1st if it is sunny, or the first sunny day after if not, everyone gets together with their chosen partners and are handfasted in a group ceremony – where handfasting means that they are considered a couple until the next May 1st.

Springtime in Raikoth

Handfasted couples are polyamorous by default, and people still ask each other out on dates in the traditional manner. Sometimes dates people get one year become their handfasts the next; other times people end up with partners they have only admired from afar and didn’t have the slightest idea returned their affection.

It is considered somewhat uncouth, but certainly allowed, to break up with your partner before the next May, unless there’s something really horrible going on like domestic violence (which is always provable – good old Third Eyes). On the other hand, it is not considered unusual or a sign of dislike to change partners the next year, even if the relationship was mostly happy. It’s not considered uncommon for A to handfast B one year, rank C higher the next year and handfast zir while maintaining a secondary relationship with B, and then decide B is better after all and go back to zir the year after.

Most people start considering marriage around the third year of being handfasted to the same person. Marriages are a bit like the handfasting relationship except that they are in theory permanent. There are a variety of different marriage contracts available, but most people go for neither no-fault divorce nor for full-on covenant marriage. The most common contract says that the marriage cannot be annulled except by the High Priest of Tala, and that the petitioner must go to Tala without using any form of motorized transportation. That is, they must walk through a few hundred miles of freezing tundra and then up the slopes of a towering ice volcano until they reach the holy city, where the High Priest will free them from their oath. The idea is to have a committment mechanism: it’s not impossible to end a marriage, but it’s not something you do without a lot of thought and an absolute certainty that it’s the only remaining option.

Marriage contracts may also include other stipulations. Although handfastings are polyamorous by default, marriages may or may not be; a couple that chooses not to be polyamorous may include this in their marriage vows, at which point people who cheat become liable for civil penalties relating to contract violation. Although some couples will happily marry with nothing but standard marriage vows, others will include a whole host of rules that then become inviolable unless both sides agree to edit the contract together.

Some people never take these stronger marriage contracts, preferring to move from handfasting to handfasting for their whole life; this is quite acceptable. But those who do usually do because they want children. Not only are most people who ask for the removal of contraception married, but the Priests of Truth use statistics about differential outcomes in married and unmarried couples when deciding whom to offer opportunities for subsidized child-raising.

Posted in Uncategorized | 41 Comments