Friday, February 10, 2012

Familial favoritism & Nationalism

Bryan Caplan wrote an interesting article about nationalism and familial favoritism.
"There is one obvious difference between nationalism and familial favoritism. Familial favoritism is a deep and ineradicable part of the human psyche, thanks to many millions of years of evolution. Nationalism - and expansive tribal identities more generally - pretends to be equally fundamental, but it's largely cheap talk. People happily give tons of free stuff to their children. But you need coercion to make people surrender more than a pittance to their "fellow citizens." To ask people to stop favoring their own children goes utterly against human nature. To ask people to stop favoring their countrymen is a modest, eminently do-able request."
Signalling, say letting leaders off might be a production of years of evolutionary psychology, but does it mean it is desirable? No ought from is. Bryan Caplan's statement (emphasis mine) is just stating the facts not answering the moral question. Going against leaders or talking too much truth might go against human nature but that's a poor justification when a lot of it can be wasteful signalling.

I would like to ask Caplan whether he would get rid of family favoritism, if he only could? Does he see it as pointless? In fact, we all are selfish, we generally at least care about (the utility of) ourselves a lot over others. Then we care a bit less about those that we care, and so on. The real issue is where to draw the line. It is going to be a line in the water. If turtles or sharks had only cared about others, they wouldn't have lived hundreds of millions of years. If we would have to compete with smart A.I., and in the end we would die due to extinction, is that efficient? Should be if humans are equal to these machines. Almost nobody thinks their children or very closed ones are equal to everyone else. Sure we can say that, but our actions talk otherwise. Human action may be corrupt but it is very real.

My take on nationalism is that is things are just not that simple. Generally nationalism leads to inefficiency, moral paradoxes and horrible conflicts. I find it kind of silly, hypocritical and dangerous. But then again a lot of other human action falls under that category. I'm not convinced it is completely wrong.

I think Robin Hanson put it up best here (Are Nations Tribes?). My answer would be that some are. There're some countries like Japan, Finland etc. with highly genetically and culturally similar population. Since I'm from Finland, I've got a lot of hands-on experience with nationalism, especially with conscription. I think it serves some good ends but it has a high cost. Generally it increases trust within society (or rather, diversity decreases it), decreases transaction costs and makes it possible to solve some coordination problems that might be very hard to solve under a different system. Nordic welfare states are unique to some extent, and have some benefits that are unreachable on other systems, but I think welfare state mostly work as a closed system. The question of benefits and cons of welfare states are too numerous to issue here but I think there's more at stake than it seems prima facie.

I'm not going to give into simple efficiency analysis that it is possible to tell which moral ends are easily  calculable, something of which I talked about here. Now I admit, especially on that issue I'm far from a specialist but I wanted to chime in my thoughts.

To elaborate a bit more, I think a lot of Finns like our country. Sure there're lots of problems like in any society, but I think in comparison to many other countries, they're small. This is just anecdotal evidence but I think many expatriates miss lots of things from Finland, and not just for cultural reasons. I have lived abroad so I at least have some experience to say this. What they probably don't miss is cold winters and high taxes. Generally I'd imagine a lot of other Swedes, Norwegians etc. fall under this category because our cultures are highly similar even though we speak different languages. To give another example, I like interacting the most with people from welfare states (Scandinavia, Canada). There's higher level of trust, and lots of shared values. It makes a lot less conflicts and disagreements. Generally I find just less "craziness" abroad both institutions and people. This all could be an observation error and I'd have to find better scientific evidence to say this more accurately.

To give even a better example. Think of the Amish people who are kind of a tribe. They have their rules, and they favor each other. They maintain a very closed, and individually limited system. Would Bryan advocate demolishing their social system? Someone might complain that its voluntary, yes nominally, but they do punish deserters with high social cost. And punishment, whether monetary or jail is just a cost. I think they should be left alone. I see knowledge more local that is maybe apparent, and I don't think this kind of issue is nearly as clear-cut as it seems. This is why I probably have  a lot of sympathy for Tyler Cowen's way to doing more holistic comparisons than atomic ones, and I'd love to hear his thoughts on this.


Tiedemies kirjoittaa hyvin tabuista ja eufemismeista. Arkikielessä arvostamme paljon rehellisyyttä, mutta tämä ei ole totta. Arvostamme rehellisyyttä tietyissä asioissa. Toimintamme paljastaa todelliset preferenssimme, mikä johtuu siitä, että ei ole kannattavaa puhua totuutta useimmiten. Esimerkiksi voimme sanoa, että urheilu on kivaa ja kannattavaa kiertoilmaisuna sille, että henkilö on vaikkapa ylipainoinen ja pitäisi kuntoilla. Tässä tapauksessa kyse on enemmänkin lojaliteeteista, mutta usein kyse on vain siitä, että totuuden puhuuden signaloi henkilökohtaisesti epäedullisia asioita. Tiedemiehen esimerkki kertoo siitä, miten tiettyjen termien käyttäminen signaloisi pinnallisuutta, ilkeämielisyyttä jne. Tämä johtuu osittain siitä, että näiden käytösten alkuperäiinen tarkoitus tuskin on se mitä väitetään. Talk isn't about info, politics isn't about policy.

Olen ollut osana erilaisissa yhteisöissä, joista toiset ovat olleet enemmän akateemisen diskurssin omaavia, ja jotkut hyvin juveneeleja. Tälläiset ominaispiirteet ovat lähinnä tulosta sattumasta, henkilöistä ja kontekstista. Juveneelilla yhteisöillä tarkoitan sellaisia, missä kiroilu on hyvin yleistä, adrenaliinia on veressä emmekä kaihda ns. vittuilla päin naamaa. Jotkut voisivat pitää tälläistä vulgaaria käytöstä paheksuttavana, huonona ja maailmasta kitkettävänä. Ehkäpä näin, mutta näillä yhteisöillä on funktio: totuutta kehdataan puhua. Se, että totuus on ruma ja ilkeä on vain maailman ominaisuus. Vulgaariin käytökseen kuuluu pitkälti oman statuksen rummuttaminen, mitkä tarkoittaa, että mielipiteet ovat vahvoja, ylivarmoja ja pinnallisia. Kuitenkin tälläisessä kontekstissa voidaan sanoa asioita, mistä muualla vain kuiskutellaan.

Emme usein omalla käytöksellämme emme voi päästä tälläisesta tilanteesta pois tai muuttaa sitä. Tätä kutsutaan  Nash-tasapainoksi. Toisaalta en näe, että on välttämättä mitään optimaalista keskustelukulttuuria, vaan jokaisella keskustelukulttuurilla on omat hyvät ja huonot puolensa. Elämä olisi kai melko vastenmielistä, jos puhuisimme totuutta jokaisessa kontekstissa. Diplomatialla on funktio.

Tärkeämpää on rakentaa instituutiot niin, että informaatio aggregoidaan kun tehdään päätöksiä, joilla on paljon merkitystä. Yrityksissä, valtion laitoksissa, järjestöissä jne. on ihmisiä, jotka tietävät mikä on vikana, mutta ei ole heidän oman edun kannalta järkevää puhua tai ilmaista mielipidettään.  Toisin sanoen on anoynyymi tapa ilmaista totuus ketään loukaamatta ja signaloimatta epäedullisia asioita.  Ennustemarkkinat ovat yksi esimerkki näistä. Kun teemme päätöksiä väärällä tiedolla ja valheilla teemme tehokkuustappioita, mitkä voivat vaatia jopa ruumiita.

Ylempi D-12:n debyyttilevyllä Devil's Night esiintynyt kappalee antaa hyvän käsittyksen mistä on kyse (lyriikat).

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Dealism redux

Robin Hanson wrote an interesting post about physics vs economics. First of all, one has to know that he favors dealism, kind of preference utilitarianism. Basically economists should listen to all sides and provide with the option that gives the people what they want. If we give economics the social status of physicists, this has basically the implication, that economics should be our new overlords.

I personally don't have much respect for DIY physics, chemistry, climate science etc. but I think economists should have bigger confidence interval. I acknowledge I may be highly biased and wrong, but let me elaborate on my reasoning.

Firstly, a lot of knowledge is probably local. Take for example Amish society. Should average economist made their new leader and decide how to run their society? I certainly doubt that. Maybe they make some horrible coordination problems that either harm themselves or outsiders, and we have to intervene but surely the reasons would have to be strong. Now, Amish society, like many institutions, can be horribly broken, and we can surely say that objectively, but I think especially when dealing with efficiency analysis, it is easy to abstract away local knowledge and heuristics.

Another example here. Basically it was hockey's political issue of visors. They certainly know less economics than average economist, and economics could say many things about such an issue but could it provide them with the most optimal answer? Would economists, as outsiders, have better judgement than those currently doing that decision? I think it shows a good example of intervened values and beliefs. Surely economists could improve on margin somewhere where they wouldn't have to make the ultimate value decisions but what about when someone has to?

Second problem is more of epistemological. I think a lot of knowledge is tacit. Take for example music. Since formalism or music notation was developed it became much more easier to understand logic of music, but even today, a lot of knowledge how to produce music is tacit. Sure I do believe this knowledge is at least in some form in our brains stored in neural networks which can be expressed in language of mathematics but even it were it might be just a huge mess of details.

Thirdly, I think our disagreements, while fundamentally logical are not that obvious and easy to solve even with the best intentions. Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson disagreed on cryonics here. Why? Tyler said the disagreement was more on a meta-level. I've had many this kind of disagreements myself in good faith, and just by talking, it seemed hard if not impossible to solve it even we both had great knowledge about the subject. Having some kind of verification mechanism seemed the best idea around this. In sports for example, if a player has an idea, he can test it and get instant feedback. No need for a lengthy biased debate. This is I think because a lot of knowledge is tacit, and words only capture part of information.

I must say, I've seen smart people apply to this pyramid model of knowledge. It makes a lot of sense in hard sciences like mathematics. Younger pupils know basic arithmetic, academic students might know differential equations, professors know number theory and so on. Then when it comes things like social sciences, aesthetics or generally solving coordination problems, a great deal of knowledge is actually local and tacit, someone who is very accustomed to reductionist thinking has a hard time appreciating this. It is not that I don't believe in reductionism,  because I do, but all abstractions leak.

I'll want to emphasize that I do not believe in supernatural explanations. Fundamentally I'm a reductionist but in practical sense I think there're many heuristics and models that are not recorded anywhere on scientific papers. Maybe they will be in the future. Another problem is complexity problem. It is one thing to say why a frog has green skin and another thing to say what it should have because of the massive computational requirements to verify answer. There're certainly is global knowledge. We can say some leaders are corrupt, some people have very sub-optimal incentives, but I just find fixing things much harder.

To illustrate, if an expert came to tell us how to live a good life or run a family. Should we take his advice? I don't have an easy answer even if he faced very good incentives and claimed to be totally neutral; at least we should listen to him.

One way to approach this question of economics is just to ask what kind of diversity would we have in terms of countries if we took strong economic advice everywhere where possible, or would we end up with more of the same? It is not that I want diversity per se, but can we say that what we would end up would desirable as a whole? It could be we just run into Arrow's theorem somewhere and have to make judgement calls on what kind society we want.

We're likely loaded with bias as our experts tell we are, and our low-hanging fruit is acknowledge this and allocate resources to solve this. Prediction markets are one of the smartest ideas because they show a lot of promise to remove loads of bias and generally aggregate beliefs. Making us accountable for our beliefs is probably the best way to improve our society that that runs over few values. Ignoring this for some silly signalling benefits seems very sad.

Now I want to emphasize that this is just some skepticism of economics being a final word in many matters. Overall I think economics can improve on margin in many things, and economists deserve higher status. People should listen to more to them than themselves or anyone else in social science (on margin). We waste awful lots of resources for apparently useless reasons, and economists could improve a lot on that. It could make a massive difference over longer time, because like Einstein said, there's nothing as powerful as compound interest.