Jonathan Haidt’s Perfect Example of Externalities

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt says that some problems really can be solved by regulation. His example perfectly exemplifies negative externalities:

As automobile ownership skyrocketed in the 1950s and 1960s, so did the tonnage of lead being blown out of American tailpipes and into the atmosphere – 200,000 tons of lead a year by 1973. Gasoline refiners had been adding lead since the 1930s to increase the efficiency of the refining process. Despite evidence that the rising tonnage of lead was making its way into the lungs, bloodstreams, and brains of Americans and was retarding the neural development of millions of children, the chemical industry had been able to block all efforts to ban lead additives from gasoline for decades. It was a classic case of corporate superorganisms using all methods of leverage to preserve their ability to pass a deadly externality on the public.

The Carter administration began a partial phase-out of leaded gasoline, but it was nearly reversed when Ronald Reagan crippled the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to draft new regulations or enforce old ones. A bipartisan group of congressmen stood up for children and against the chemical industry, and by the 1990s lead had been completely removed from gasoline. This simple public health intervention worked miracles: lead levels in children’s blood dropped in lockstep with declining levels of lead in gasoline and the decline has been credited with some of the rise in IQ that has been measured in recent decades.

But wait, it gets better:

Even more amazingly, several studies have demonstrated that the phase-out, which began in the late 1970s, may have been responsible for up to half of the extraordinary and otherwise unexplained drop in crime that occurred in the 1990s. Tens of millions of children, particularly poor children in big cities, had grown up with high levels of lead, which interfered with their neural development from the 1950s until the late 1970s. The boys in this group went on to cause the giant surge in criminality that terrified America – and drove it to the right – from the 1960s until the early 1990s. These young men were eventually replaced by a new generation of young men with unleaded brains (and therefore better impulse control), which seems to be part of the reason the crime rate plummeted.

This is a perfect example of a negative externality the economists call a market failure. It is also a perfect example of the kind of story leftists hear and accept without any kind of research. They hate oil and Reagan, love regulation and Carter, it caters to the care and fairness foundations (it’s for the children!) -- It fits their worldview so well that it must be true. I’m not so sure. There are just so many stories like this that I look into and turn out to be laughably bogus or largely disputed.

There are many claims to the story that may be true and may be false and may be uncertain to different degrees.

1. Gasoline lead really did get into the bodies of people and stayed there so it could effect them
2. The lead noticeably lowered IQs
3. The lead noticeably increased crime rates
4. Lead effected children in particular
5. Regulation is the primary driver of reduced lead rates in gasoline (as opposed to just new and better ways of doing things).

The reason I’m a bit more sympathetic to this story in particular though, is because Jonathan Haidt is generally very well researches what he says. As I look into it a bit, there is more evidence that lead genuinely got into people’s bodies and it effected IQ than that it effected crime rates. Also, Children are more at risk for lead poisoning because their smaller bodies are in a continuous state of growth and development.

I’m not going to say that it is for sure true, but I certainly lean that way. It truly is the best example I’ve ever seen of negative externalities. Libertarians and conservatives will no doubt look deeply for any piece of evidence that it is not true. They will also fail to confess that something like this is even possible in order to avoid giving up even the theoretical point for regulation. Meanwhile, liberals will fit this factual atrocity into their long list of bogus atrocities that environmental regulation needs to solve.

Social Scientists Ignore Asians

I made the comment on Facebook the other day that social scientists habitually ignore data on Asians when they study minorities. I probably shouldn’t have. I know I have friends who are concerned with whether words feel good and not concerned with whether they’re true.

I could have been clearer. Social scientists ignore data on Asians when it is convenient. The data is oftentimes available, but it doesn’t fit the story they’re telling so it is ignored.

Examples are easy to find. Just look for situations where social scientists would find it convenient to ignore Asians. Here is an article against the war on drugs, it is the first one that pops up on google. It actually caters to my political conclusions.

Today, black males have a 29% chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives, Latino males have a 16% chance, and white males have a 4% chance…

African-Americans comprise:
• 35% of those arrested for
drug possession;
• 55% of those convicted for
drug possession; and
• 74% of those imprisoned
for drug possession…

This skewed enforcement of drug laws has a devastating impact. One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are currently either on probation, parole, or in prison. One in five black men have been convicted of a felony. In 7 states, 80-90% of prisoners serving time for drug offenses are black…

The statistics on latino population are equally disturbing. Latinos comprise 12.5% of
the population5 and use and sell drugs less than whites, 6 yet they accounted for 46% of those charged with a federal drug offense in 1999…

It would be so easy for me to make friends with the leftists and fight the war on drugs together. I’m quite eager to find common ground, but not at the expense of serious intellectual discipline.

What about the Asian population? They’re a major minority. It seems like it would matter. Especially if you’re going to say something like,

These statistics are not the product of chance, but of purpose and can be found throughout the country.

Asians are unusual because their outcomes differ radically from Latinos and Blacks. They generally fare much better than whites, in fact. Is that a product of chance? Or do white people maliciously discriminate against other whites in favor of Asians? We can’t just write a big article filled with evidence for gender differences in outcomes and assert that its because of discrimination.

Okay, lets try again. I googled, “employer discrimination minorities”. This is an obvious place to ignore data on Asians. This is the first article that popped up. It limits discussion to blacks and women. Asians would be an obvious counter-point to mention, but they’re ignored completely.

One could do a study of social scientists studying minorities and discover that many of them exclude Asians from their data sets. Are they discriminating against Asians? Of course not, they just have a lot of beliefs about minorities that the Asian demographics don’t support. So why even mention them?

Someone Documents their Mistakes

Here is a person who documents his (her?) changes of mind.

I’m skipping the religion section. He’s an atheist and gives reasons you typically hear from atheists.

The American Revolution:

The Revolution was a bloodbath with ~100,000 casualties or fatalities followed by 62,000 Loyalist refugees fleeing the country for fear of retaliation and their expropriation… Independence was granted to similar English colonies at the smaller price of “waiting a while”: Canada was essentially autonomous by 1867 less than a century later) and Australia was first settled in 1788 with autonomous colonies not long behind and the current Commonwealth formed by 1901. (Nor did Canada or Australia suffer worse at England’s hands during the waiting period than,say, America in that time suffered at its own hands.

He cites a few of Bryan Caplan’s arguments for the long term costs of the Revolution. Fighting the war removed the last real check on aggression toward the Native Americans, and without it we would have expected slavery to end earlier and more peacefully. The first claim I’m not sure of, the second is more clearly true.

Communism:

He, like many others, had sympathy for communism. It just seems so right, doesn’t it? For many communism is synonymous with altruism. But…

the practical results with economies & human lives spoke for themselves: the ideas were tried in so many countries by so many groups in so many different circumstances over so many decades that if there were anything to them, at least one country would have succeeded. In comparison, even with the broadest sample including hellholes like the Belgian Congo, capitalism can still point to success stories like Japan.

But I’m sure the real communism is waiting to be tried.

Skipping the occult.

Fiction:

What has changed in what I read - I now read principally nonfiction (philosophy, economics, random sciences, etc.), where I used to read almost exclusively fiction… I, in fact, aspired to be a novelist. I thought fiction was a noble task, the highest production of humanity, and writers some of the best people around, producing immortal works of truth. Slowly this changed. I realized fiction changed nothing, and when it did change things, it was as oft as not for the worse.Fiction promoted simplification, focus on sympathetic examples, and I recognized how much of my own infatuation with the Occult (among other errors) could be traced to fiction. What a strange belief, that you could find truths in lies.

I had the same transformation from fiction to non-fiction. I ready non-fiction pretty exclusively. Even my writing style has changed. I used to analyze the elegance of each sentence as I wrote. I was not careful to test them for truth. Some have managed to combine the two (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), but I find that task difficult.

Nicotine:

I had naturally assumed, in line with the usual American cultural messages, that there was nothing good about tobacco and that smoking is deeply shameful, proving that you are a selfish lazy short-sighted person who is happy to commit slow suicide (taking others with him via second-hand smoke) and cost society a fortune in medical care. Then some mentions of nicotine as useful came up and I began researching it. I’m still not a fan of smoking, and I regard any tobacco with deep trepidation, but the research literature seems pretty clear: nicotine enhances mental performance in multiple domains and may have some minor health benefits to boot. Nicotine sans tobacco seems like a clear win. (It amuses me that of the changes listed here, this is probably the one people will find most revolting and bizarre.)

He seems careful and honest enough that I can trust him on his claims about the benefits of nicotine.

Skipping centralized black markets.

He continues with beliefs he has come to less certainty about.

The near singularity:

there are many troubling long-term metrics. I was deeply troubled to read Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment pointing out a long-term decline in discoveries per capita (despite ever increasing scientists and artists per capita!), even after he corrected for everything he could think of. I didn’t see any obvious mistakes. Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation twisted the knife further, and then I read Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. I have kept notes since and see little reason to expect a general exponential upwards over all fields, including the ones minimally connected to computing. (Peter Thiel’s “The End of the Future” makes a distinction between “the progress in computers and the failure in energy”;

Neo-luddism:

He basically agrees with Tyler Cowen that labor inputs are going to decrease in value while wealth as a whole grows, making inequality a serious concern.

The specification seems fairly clear: the Neo-Luddite claim, in its simplest form predicts that ever fewer people will be able to find employment in undistorted free markets. We can see other aspects as either tangents (will people be able to consume due to a Basic Income or via capital ownership?) or subsets (the Author thesis of polarization would naturally lead to an overall increase in unemployment). The due date is not clear, but we can see the Neo-Luddite thesis as closely linked to artificial intelligences, and 2050 would be as good a due date as any inasmuch as I expect to be alive then & AI will have matured substantially

I.Q. and Race:

I never doubted that IQ was in part hereditary (Stephen Jay Gould aside, this is too obvious - what, everything from drug responses to skin and eye color would be heritable except the most important things which would have a huge effect on reproductive fitness?), but all the experts seemed to say that diluted over entire populations, any tendency would be non-existent. Well,OK, I could believe that; visible traits consistent over entire populations like skin color might differ systematically because of sexual selection or something, but why not leave IQ following the exact same bell curve in each population?

Mu:

If, like most people, you’ve only read a few papers or books on it, your opinion (whatever that is) is worthless and you probably don’t even realize how worthless your opinion is…

So why be interested in the topics at all? If you cannot convince anyone, if you cannot learn the field to a reasonable depth,and you cannot even communicate well what convinced you, why bother? In the spirit of keeping one’s identity small, I say: it’s not clear at all. So you should know in advance whether you want to take the red pill and see how far down the rabbit hole you go before you finally give up, or you take the blue pill and be an onlooker as you settle for a high-level overview of the more interesting papers and issues and accept that you will only have that and a general indefensible assessment of the state of play.

My own belief is that as interesting as it is, you should take the blue pill and not adopt any strong position but perhaps (if it doesn’t take too much time) point out any particularly naive or egregious holes in argument, by people who are simply wrong or don’t realize how little they know or how slanted a view they have received from the material they’ve read.

He does not believe knowledge is an end in and of itself. He wants to belittle the value of time and brain power spent on abstract topics, especially for non-experts who can’t change a mind or further the discussion. My problem with this is that he doesn’t replace it with a better use of time – perhaps family and friends, but those things too are not lasting. It’s all just consumption.

I think there are many, though, who don’t find intellectualism rewarding – people who are out to confirm their biases and convince others. This kind of mindset can easily lead down the rabbit holes he is talking about. I’ve been there. But if you find satisfaction in progressing through the nuances of ideas, never stop.

Value of Information:

Final genetic studies of I.Q. are coming, so just wait it out because trying to figure it out is expensive and not very beneficial.

Here is the article again.

 

 

Owen Anderson on Attributing good to evil, and God to Creation

Some dialogue from Owen Anderson:

Earnest: so your explanation about knowing and showing begins with the assumption that nothing informative is certain.

Bill:  yes I take that to be obvious.

Earnest: that nothing is certain includes nothing is certain about God and about good and evil?

Bill: obviously.

Earnest: would you say that there is a clear distinction between God and what is created, and a clear distinction between good and evil?

Bill: I think so.

Earnest: so isn't what you are calling suppressing really just instances of persons attributing the attributes of God to the creation, or the attributes of good to evil?

Bill: perhaps.

Earnest: then isn't the issue whether we have correctly identified these distinctions, and not whether we have immediate deliverances about them?  After all, everyone has immediate deliverances that require further examination. 

Guns Cause Violence but we should still not Restrict them

An article entitled, The Murder Rate is Collapsing in Chicago After “Conceal Carry” is Legalized

I can accept the data point in the article, but it's too easy to find correlation in so many cities and so many different laws.

My view in a nutshell: more guns is probably more gun violence. I'm sure more guns prevent certain crimes by discouraging criminals who don't want to get shot, but I'm very skeptical that the net effect is positive. The best point of this is the United States' high violent and gun crime crime rate, which is hard to ignore.

That's only relative to other countries, which isn't really important if we want to make a judgment on the net effect of guns. In reality, guns just don't hurt many people. If you're worried about getting shot in an armed robbery, or your child's school being shot up, or your neighbour's child discovering his dad's gun and shooting himself with it; you need to look at mortality statistics readjust your risk assessments. Guns are a billion dollar industry, lots of people pay that money because they like guns for one reason or another, and the vast majority of guns sold never hurt anybody. I don't think there's a lot to gain from gun restrictions.

But it'll always sound better to say that we'll pay any price to reduce the already negligible risk of school shootings. The reality is that if we care about other people we shouldn't assess the costs of something as "how bad I feel when I think about it", we should actually understand the values of others and get a more serious idea of the costs and benefits.

XKCD on Free Speech

I think xkcd gets this one right.

I once had someone tell me how ironic it was that tea party people were using their free speech to protest that they don’t have free speech. This person seemed to think that freedom of speech is the freedom to say something at all. Anything less than taping your mouth shut is not a violation of free speech – because that was really something they were worried about. After all, the tea party people were able to say something and therefore they have freedom of speech, how very ironic.

It seems to me that free speech has to mean all free speech or some free speech. If it means some free speech, then which speech? How do we determine? The mechanism by which we decide would be the same mechanism we would if we didn’t have a constitutional protection of free speech at all. It amounts to freedom of speech protecting only the speech they’ve decided not to regulate, which is no protection at all.

It is like if I promised that I will protect you whenever you are not in harm.

Jonathan Haidt on America’s Rising Partisanship

Here is Jonathan Haidt establishing that America has become more partisan:

But in the last twelve years Americans have begun to move further apart. There’s been a decline in the number of people calling themselves centrists or moderates (from 40 percent in 2000 down to 36 percent in 2011), a rise in the number of conservatives (from 38 percent to 41 percent), and a rise in the number of liberals (from 19 percent to 21 percent).

He cites Gallup for this fact: go to Gallup.com and search “U.S. Political Ideology.”

He also cites CivilPolitics.org

Candidates began to spend more time and money on “oppo” (opposition research), in which staff members or paid consultants dig up dirt on opponents (sometimes illegally) and then shovel it to the media.

He also cites America’s downgraded credit rating as a failure to work across party lines.

I have heard it said that the predictability of congressional votes based on party affiliation has grown significantly. It is much more common for every Republican to vote the same way or every Democrat to vote the same way. It is rarer to see a handful of politicians vote against their party. I can’t remember if it was Haidt who said this, but it would be further evidence that partisanship has grown.

Though I tend to think he’s right, the justification Jonathan Haidt gives in the book, taken alone, wouldn’t convince me that partisanship in fact has grown. He relies on the commonsense plea that of course partisanship has grown. But that’s not as obvious as some people claim.

Reason.com has a good video of how we romanticize the civility of past partisan debates, and how ridiculous our commonsense notions are.

Chris Date’s Comment on the Nephilim and Fallen Angels

Here is a Great line posted by Chris Date on a Rethinking Hell’s Facebook page:

Daniel and I had a rousing (read me being a stubborn jerk) discussion this morning about Gen 6's sons of God. I am of the wacko opinion that they are not fallen angels magically incarnated complete with 23 human chromosome gamete-producing testes capable of fertilizing human ova.

Jonathan Haidt on Being a Compulsive Liar

Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind:

On February 3, 2007, shortly before lunch, I discovered that I was a chronic liar. I was at home, writing a review article on moral psychology, when my wife, Jayne, walked by my desk. In passing she asked me not to leave dirty dishes on the counter where she prepared our baby’s food. Her request was polite but its tone added a postscript: “As I have asked you a hundred times before.”

My mouth started moving before hers had stopped. Words came out. Those words linked themselves up to say something about a baby having woken up at the same time that our elderly dog barked to ask for a walk and I’m sorry but I just put my breakfast dishes down wherever I could. In my family, caring for a hungry baby and an incontinent dog is a surefire excuse, so I was acquitted…

So there I was at my desk, writing about how people automatically fabricate justifications of their gut feelings, when I suddenly realized that I had just done the same thing with my wife. I disliked being criticized, and I had felt a flash of negativity by the time Jayne had gotten to her third word (“can you not…”). Even before I knew why she was criticizing me, I knew I disagreed with her (because intuitions come first). The instant I knew the content of the criticism (“… leave dirty dishes on the…”), my inner lawyer went to work searching fro an excuse (strategic reasoning second). It’s true that I had eaten breakfast, given Max his first bottle, and let Andy out for his first walk, but these events had all happened at separate times. Only when my wife criticized me did I merge them into a composite image of a harried father with too few hands, and I created this fabrication by the time she had completed her one sentence criticism (“… counter where I make the baby food?). I then lied so quickly and convincingly that my wife and I both believed me

Jonathan Haidt on Must vs. Can

Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind:

When my son, Max, was three years old, I discovered that he’s allergic to must. When I would tell him that he must get dressed so that we can go to school (and he loved to go to school), he’d scowl and whine. The word must is a little verbal handcuff that triggered in him the desire to squirm free.

The word can is much nicer: “Can you get dressed, so that we can go to school?”…

The social psychologist Tom Gilovich studies the cognitive mechanisms of strange beliefs. His simple formulation is that when we want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “can I believe it?” Then we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, we can stop thinking. We now have permission to believe. We have a justification, in case anyone asks.

In contrast, when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves, “must I believe it?” Then we search for contrary evidence, and if we find a single reason to doubt the claim, we can dismiss it. You only need one key to unlock the handcuffs of must.

Signatures from Experts don’t mean anything

One of the worst ways of establishing an expert consensus, or more often a non-consensus of experts, is with signatures. Many find a long list of names persuasive for establishing that there is at least conflict within the field. 300 signatures from biologists stating that they don’t believe in evolution, or economists stating that they don’t believe in free trade, or climatologists stating that they don’t believe in global warming, is not good evidence that there is conflict in the field. Why? Because there are millions or sometimes hundreds of thousands of experts, and those who put their name on it are not a representative sample of the whole field. The denominator is too high (and of course not mentioned) for some large list of names to mean anything.

How many names one gets on a piece of paper ends up being a strong indicator of how much work one is willing to do, and a very weak indicator of what the experts believe.

Oftentimes what qualifies as an “expert” is broadened in order to get more names anyway.

GMO Consensus Industry Funded

Sometimes you hear that industry funding is behind the consensus on GMOs – here’s a great article on that.

Monsanto is a medium sized company ($57.43B). Is it really possible that they’ve manipulated tens of thousands of scientists performing thousands of studies for three decades with no whistleblowers? Could Monsanto’s power have resulted in a scientific consensus that has been bent completely to their will? In comparison, fossil fuel behemoths Exxon Mobil ($394.83B), Chevron ($215.45B) and BP ($150.07B) (total: $760.35B) have been completely stymied in their efforts to buy a scientific consensus on climate change. Let’s put aside the fact that this line of thinking just doesn’t make sense. Instead, let’s take a look at the evidence and unravel some of the pretzeled logic often employed to dismiss the weight of that evidence in support of the scientific consensus on GMOs.

The majority of studies are industry funded, but…

Looking at the scientific literature about GMO safety, we find little difference between the results of independent and industry funded studies.

What was the evidence for industry funding corrupting the results in the first place? Just saying so.

Bart Ehrman: All the Scholars agree Jesus Existed

…there are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher or teacher, who was crucified in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea. Even though this is the view of nearly every trained scholar on the planet, it is not the view of a group of writers who are unusually labeled, and often label themselves, Mythicists.

This is Bart Ehrman’s book, Did Jesus Exist? The whole book is good. He refutes the claims I often hear from non-expert atheists – that Jesus was just a retelling of older pagan stories, that there are no reliable sources which cite Jesus’ existence, that there is no record of Jesus’ trial under Pontius Pilate, as if we should expect there to be. And some of the silly wordplay they use -- Jesus was the “son” of God meant he was the “sun” of God – Jesus was an astrological symbol for the sun, as if the language used at the time were the same, and even if it were that that would amount to anything like evidence. Another one is the true meaning of “Gospel” is “God’s Spell”. Yeah, okay.

Beyond the ridiculous Zeitgeist sort of stuff, Ehrman uses most of the book to build a strong case from the ground up for Jesus’ existence.

Here is a debate Bart Ehrman has with James White defending the position that the bible misquotes Jesus.

Why did God Forsake Jesus?

In The Gospel of Matthew and Mark, Jesus cries out, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” or, “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The quote is powerful, but a bit awkward for the reader who might be trying to determine the meaning of Jesus’ words. In Jesus Interrupted, Bart Ehrman says that the picture Mark paints of Jesus is one of abandonment. He states about Jesus’ death in Luke in contrast to Mark,

This is not a Jesus who feels forsaken by God and wonders why he is going through this pain of desertion and death. It is a Jesus who feels God’s presence with him and is comforted by the fact that God is on his side. He is fully cognizant of what is happening to him and why, and he commits himself to the loving care of his heavenly father, confident of what is to happen next.
Jesus Interrupted, pg.68

To Bart Ehrman, Jesus’ cry, “why have you forsaken me”, in Mark is an expression of abandonment, very different from Luke where Jesus is in control. Does Mark describe a Jesus who “wonders why”" he is going through this pain of desertion and death?”

He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.
Mark 8:31

saying, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. And they will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three days he will rise.”
Mark 10:33-34

Contra Bart Ehrman, the Jesus of Mark knows exactly what is going to happen and why it must happen. In chapter 8, he rebukes Peter for rejecting the idea that he had to die, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man,” he says.

So Jesus knows he is going to die, and that he must die, so why does he feel like God is abandoning him once he gets up there? There is a simple answer, he doesn’t. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” is a quote from Psalm 22, which is a hopeful Psalm. It begins in despair, when it seems like one has been abandoned, but in the end God is there and good is achieved.

The story Mark gives is not one where Jesus is abandoned, lost, powerless, or confused. It is one where Jesus knows what he is doing, why it must happen, and before death cites the beginning of Psalm 22 to call to mind that even in the worst of times, when it seems like you’re abandoned, you are not.

Consensus on GMOs

Is there a scientific consensus that GMOs (genetically modified foods) are safe? GMO Pundit offers a whole lot of evidence that says yes.

GMO Pundit also cites a nice little meta-study which show that, “the scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazards directly connected with the use of GE crops.”

We have reviewed the scientific literature on GE crop safety during the last 10 years, built a classified and manageable list of scientific papers, and analyzed the distribution and composition of the published literature. We selected original research papers, reviews, relevant opinions and reports addressing all the major issues that emerged in the debate on GE crops, trying to catch the scientific consensus that has matured since GE plants became widely cultivated worldwide. The scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazards directly connected with the use of GE crops; however, the debate is still intense. An improvement in the efficacy of scientific communication could have a significant impact on the future of agricultural GE.

A whole lot more is available from GMO Pundit.

Jonathan Haidt on Coherence and Reason

Here is long a quote from Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis,

“The word “coherence” literally means holding or sticking together, but it is usually used to refer to a system, an idea, or a worldview whose parts fit together in a consistent and efficient way. Coherent things work well: A coherent worldview can explain almost anything, while an incoherent worldview is hobbled by internal contradictions. …

Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts. You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. … Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment, and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life.

People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural. There has long been a division of academic labor: Biologists studied the brain as a physical object, psychologists studied the mind, and sociologists and anthropologists studied the socially constructed environments within which minds develop and function. But a division of labor is productive only when the tasks are coherent—when all lines of work eventually combine to make something greater than the sum of its parts. For much of the twentieth century that didn’t happen — each field ignored the others and focused on its own questions. But nowadays cross-disciplinary work is flourishing, spreading out from the middle level (psychology) along bridges (or perhaps ladders) down to the physical level (for example, the field of cognitive neuroscience) and up to the sociocultural level (for example, cultural psychology). The sciences are linking up, generating cross-level coherence, and, like magic, big new ideas are beginning to emerge.

Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.”

Here he is in The Righteous Mind,

“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”

 Jonathan Haidt often will turn a Psychology of knowledge claim into an Epistemological claim. He makes the claim that reason is a slave of to the passions – a common claim among psychologists studying confirmation bias. But without argument, he turns that into reason ought to be a slave to the passions. This is what he means by the latter quote.

It relates to the first quote in that there is no coherence if reason is not given supremacy. particularly at the psychological level. What happens without reason is a kind of happiness that is not lasting. It cannot last, because what was thought to be a coherent worldview turns out to be meaningless and contradictory upon analysis. One way to try to solve this problem is by going on without analyzing your beliefs, but this too ends up at incoherence because of our nature as rational beings.

Without the supremacy of reason, all worldviews are incoherent and happiness cannot last. If we don’t have coherence at a psychological level, we cannot have coherence at a physical level – our actions will contradict our thoughts. Our contradictory thoughts will imply two different actions both of which cannot be acted upon without actualizing a contradiction, which we cannot do. If we don’t have coherence at either of these two levels, we cannot have coherence at the third level -- the sociological level. There will be wars and fighting because out thoughts and actions contradict that of others. What was formerly seen as progress will regress back once the realization of contradictions with out fellow man occur.