Satisfaction over Happiness

Researchers have been studying happiness for a while. We don’t know what happiness is, so researchers tend to try to let the intuitions of the subjects define it for them. Ask them “how happy are you?” and they’ll implicitly define what they think happiness is by answering.

Sometimes I wonder what the difference between “happiness” and “satisfaction” is. Different researchers ask about either one, but I tend to think that they ought to be asking about satisfaction a lot more than happiness.

A clear example: I will often walk out of a sad movie less happy than when I walked in, but I’m glad I went if it was a good movie. I am more satisfied having walked out of a really well done tragedy, than a mediocre joke-a-minute romantic comedy, even if I derive more happy feelings from the latter.

This situation doesn’t happen very often, but it is only one example of a broader, more common and desirable life state. I spend a lot of time mellow and satisfied. It doesn’t make me want to dance or sing, but I prefer the savory of satisfaction to the sweetness of happiness. It is more full – completing, while happiness can be empty. Well-being is what matters.

Bart Erman on Jesus’ Existence

Near the very end of this debate (which is a good one. Go listen to it), Bart Erman an atheist New Testament Scholar was asked,

With the knowledge we have of the gospels how much can be deduced regarding how much we know about Jesus?

He answers,

It’s virtually certain that Jesus existed, that he was a Jew, that he lived in Palestine, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilot.

As I observe the mainstream secular historical take on Jesus, I find that the view that Jesus didn’t exist to be on the fringes of academic modern thought. Yet, the view that Jesus never existed has become an absurdly popular view among atheists.

The most important thing to take from this is that confirmation bias is a human trait, not a religious or Christian one. It is often those same people who claim dedication to reason, science, and openmindedness, who neglect to question evidence for whatever they would like to believe. It wouldn’t be so hypocritical if they weren’t so explicit about their high view of their own intellectual honesty.

Everyone is a critical thinker until they’re sacred beliefs are called into question.

 

Mid-Wife Notices Availability Heuristic

My and my wife’s Midwife asked us if we were going to breastfeed. We said yes. She mentioned that sometimes you hear stories about how hard or bad it was to breastfeed, but while these stories are common, they’re more atypical than you might think because stories about successful breastfeeding don’t make good stories and are therefore not heard about very often.

What she was indeed warning us about was an availability bias (also called a heuristic). We oftentimes subconsciously assess the probability of something by how easily an instance can be recalled from memory. I don’t think she knew the term for it, but she was smart enough to warn us against such a bias.

In my normal life I see many many people violating this bias, but very rarely do I witness someone recognizing it or warning against it.

David Friedman on Global Warming vs. Peak Oil

Here is David Friedman pointing out the incompatibility of Global Warming and Peak Oil.

As best I can tell, the two arguments tend to be supported by the same people. This makes sense from the point of view of someone who has a conclusion and wants arguments to support it, since both arguments support the same conclusion…

The more limited our supplies of fossil fuels are, the lower the climate effects of burning them all up. If we are going to run out of all of them by, say, 2050, then any global warming projection that depends on our continuing to burn them thereafter is impossible.

He brings up the point that these great atrocities awaiting us are always paired with the same policy recommendations that liberals and environmentalists have always wanted in the first place. In that sense global warming and the like are extremely convenient truths. Too convenient, in fact -- which is why they ought to be approached with extra skepticism.

Even with extra skepticism, global warming passes as a reality and to an extent man-made. I don’t think that those two things alone amount to a need for carbon regulations or alternative energy funding.

I tend to think that world ending events are too rare to be predictable. If it happens, nobody will have thought of it, and when it does everyone will make the mistake of thinking that it was predictable. For all the time that it doesn’t happen, people will keep trying to predict it and once in a while it will amount to great and unnecessary cost.

Where Jesus was Born

I was reading some early church writing today, and I came across this passage from Justin Martyr.

Now there is a village in the land of the Jews, thirty-five stadia from Jerusalem, in which Jesus Christ was born, as you can ascertain also from the registers of the taxing made under Cyrenius, your first procurator in Judæa.

I wondered if there were any other early writing citing Jesus’ birthplace, and I came across this passage from Against Marcion, another early church writing:

But there is historical proof that at this very time a census had been taken in Judaea by Sentius Saturninus, which might have satisfied their inquiry respecting the family and descent of Christ.

To my knowledge, we don’t have the public record for Rome at the time, but we have arguments citing the public record which says that Jesus’ birthplace was Bethlehem. It would be bizarre to make such a point if the record was either not available or did not mention Jesus’ birth details.

What does this mean? One implication is that Jesus in fact existed. Not that that fact is in serious dispute among even atheist New Testament scholars.

One more serious implication is on popular disputes about where Jesus was born. There have been claims that the gospel writers corrupted the story to make their guy come out of Bethlehem, so as to fulfill old testament prophesy.

IGM Economists on Kidney Sales

The latest panel of IGM Economists on Kidney Sales:

General agreement, but I’m a little surprised that it wasn’t as universal as it could be -- A lot of uncertainty. The normal economic analysis seems to be poor people and sick people trading to make the poor less poor and the sick less sick. Of course there are exceptions, a few horror stories to make the news, but the broad and life changing gains pretty clearly outweigh the costs.

As always the comments are interesting.

One common cause of skepticism is of a moral nature.

Would improve allocative efficiency but means- and health-conditioned vouchers would presumably have to be used to address ethical concerns.

A market with or without subsidies for low income patients?

That would mean valuing people's lives by their incomes. We already do that but moving further in that direction seems wrong.

If you wanted to say that it should be paired with subsidies for low income, then that’s reasonable, whether or not it is right. What I have trouble understanding is why it must be paired with low income subsidies in order for it to be right. Why should the rich sick have to stay sick? When people say it “seems wrong” to get in between a willing informed buyer and a willing informed seller, nobody cares. “Seems wrong” arguments keep poor people poor and sick people sick needlessly. Not thinking an issue through to assess outcomes for people who seriously need help also seems wrong.

Consider this, there is a magic fountain where rich people can throw their money and new kidneys will magically appear. Should you ban the use of this fountain?

Also consider, we find out that a poor person is born with a large sum of money inside the kidney that he will almost definitely never ever use for the rest of his life. He wants to have surgery to remove this kidney and receive the money. Should we ban the poor person from having surgery to remove his own kidney? Before you answer, consider this, we already allow poor people to donate their kidneys for absolutely free! Only this way, the poor person actually gets something in return!

The only Consistent thing about Liberals and Conservatives is how they Frame Issues

As an unbiased observer, it is easy to notice the arbitrariness of popular political positions. What being against gay marriage has to do with being pro-life I will never know. Smart people keep a few exceptions in their back pocket so they don’t look like mindless followers. Still, it seems in a rational world whether one believes that we should have amnesty on illegal Mexicans should have absolutely no predictive power over whether the same one believes that we should have stricter gun laws. In real life, knowing one belief gives you a lot of predictive power over others.

One response is that popular political differences are about different basic values. We can see the reflection of these values in how each political actor talks about their policies. To borrow Jonathan Haidt’s categories, liberals believe more so in “fairness” and “care”, while conservatives believe more so in “authority”, “sanctity”, and “loyalty”.

Another response is that liberals are for more social freedom and less economic freedom and conservatives are the other way around.

There is no doubt each political actor emphasizes their own set of principles. I question whether these are principles at all or if they’re really just moral framing. Are these “principles” defined? Are they applied according to a method in order to reach conclusions? Or are they inserted as ex-post justifications?

I also question how much wiggle room there is in determining whether an issue is social or economic. Isn’t what one person calls the right to own a gun another’s right to buy a gun? To buy an abortion and to have an abortion? The right to immigrate and the right to sell your labor to a foreign employer?

For an activity, try switching the moral frames with their applications to discover how easy or difficult it is to pretend you’re about principle no matter what. I’ll go first:

The liberal argument against abortion:

“as citizens of this planet we have to care about the life of every living creature – every animal, every human, and yes every fetus. We find that conservative policies habitually oppress the weak for the sake of the strong. Their heartless policies extends to the poor, the sick, and now to children who haven’t even breathed in a gasp of fresh air yet. If civilization is to succeed we have to move past this social Darwinism, and tolerate the lives of the unborn even when it is inconvenient.”

Want to be a conservative who favors the freedom of abortion?

“I don’t understand what is so hard for liberals to grasp the right of every person to spend their hard-earned money how they choose. I believe it is individual’s right to contract with who they damn well please. If I want to buy an abortion, and a doctor wants to sell me an abortion, there is no reason for big government to step between buyer and seller and tell us it is wrong to do so. Besides, we have a crisis of children being raised without 2 parent households, it’s destroying our civilization, it’s destroying our families, and liberals are exasperating the problem by forcing teens into single parenthood.”

Here is a bit more strained liberal argument for free market health care:

“My body, my right to do what I want with it. Health is my choice, and I’ll be as healthy or unhealthy as I want to be without conservatives unloading money on already rich doctors to make my body into one of their temples.”

Conservative argument for socialized health care:

“In order to continue being the strongest nation on earth, we need the health care of the strongest nation on earth. We need fathers who have the strength to protect their families. We need businesspeople who live long and stay sharp so they can provide the standard of living we enjoy. And we need every one of our young patriots who risk their lives for their country to grow up with health care, sick soldiers on the battlefield is downright dangerous to everyone if you think about it. And lets face it, when we don’t have health care we are degradation image of God by frailty and illness.”

These might sound awkward, but I suspect that if they were more common it would seem natural for conservatives to want government health-care and liberals to want the life of a fetus protected. Also consider that I’m not the best moral framer, and I haven’t felt the emotional thrust of a political moral argument in a very long time. Hence I have a handicap in reproducing it. Especially against professional moral framers we hear on television, and from whom everyday political people derive their rhetoric.

Moral frames are powerful. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an issue subjected to a normal cost-benefit analysis only to be told that that missed the whole point – that this is about principle – followed by descriptions of what they like using good words, and descriptions of what they don’t like using bad words. This kind of moral philosophy is incoherent because anyone can describe anything with moral frames.

Libertarians are much more likely to deduce their policies from defined principles (like that of non-aggression). So they do have a an internally consistent web of policies all connected with each other, thus avoiding the arbitrariness of other political positions. Of course, so do Marxists, so that alone doesn’t make them right.

Bryan Caplan Blaming Republicans and the Poor

Bryan Caplan undermining the poor’s presumptive status as victims again:

When I blame people for their problems, Democrats and liberals are prone to object at a fundamental level.  One fundamental objection rests on determinism: Since everyone is determined to act precisely as he does, it is always false to say, ‘There were reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid his problem…’

Strangely, though, every Democrat and liberal I know routinely blames one category of people for their vicious choices: Republicans.  Watch their Facebook feeds.  You'll see story after story about how Republicans - leaders and followers - shirk their basic moral duties.

I’m a low-skilled worker, and my observation is that Bryan Caplan is right on. Me and my fellow low skilled workers are less intelligent, less conscientious, and less conformist than the typical American, and these traits are heavy influences on how much money we make. The reason we don’t pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and work ourselves into middle-class workers is because most of us just don’t feel like making those choices.

And then we blame “the system” for the costs.

The President does not Effect Gas Prices

One of my least favorite questions asked in election debates is, “what are you going to do about gas prices?”

The correct answer is, “nothing”, and I think the candidate probably knows that he can’t do anything about gas prices. Gasoline is a globally traded commodity, no particular country, and therefore no particular country’s policy is going to have a serious impact on gas prices. Not within the realm of political feasibility. Nuking the middle east would effect gas prices, so would banning imports, but in real life these things don’t happen.

Here we have Canadian and American gas prices moving in lockstep with each other. Of course Canadian prices are higher because the typical Canadian has less purchasing power, but the peaks and troughs are almost identical.

So if American or Canadian policy has a serious effect on gas prices, how can we understand this chart? As soon as the Canadian government does something that makes gas prices go up, the American government happens to do the exact same thing? As soon as the American government does something that makes gas prices go down, the Canadian government does the exact same thing? That’s quite a coincidence.

For more evidence, try the IGM Economic Experts.

Atheist Defends Reason against Fideism

Here is a good article from an Atheist Blog. The writer rejects faith in acceptance of reason, but I’d prefer if people would learn the word “Fideism” in order to more accurately specify who they’re arguing with.

I think the most valuable words in the article are:

I stated that the principles of logic are “certain.” This touches on a particularly important part of the faith vs. reason debate. Often, the advocate of faith will say, “But you can’t prove the truth of logic, so you must have “faith” in it—just as I have faith in God.” This critique of reason brings to mind the story of the child who keeps asking “why?” to every answer offered by the parent. Of course, this infinite regress of cause and effect cannot go on forever. To understand when to stop asking “why?” is to begin to understand the nature of concepts. Concepts do not exist in a vacuum. With one class of exceptions, concepts derive their meaning from some immediately ancestral set of concepts and can retain their meaning only within that context. You hit “bedrock” when you reach the so-called axiomatic concepts, which are irreducible, primary facts of reality—our “percepts.” These percepts form the foundation upon which we build our concepts. How do you know when you’ve finally hit these primary facts of reality in the long string of why’s? You know—and this is critically important—when there is no way to deny them, or even to question them, without presupposing that they are, in fact, true. To deny them or to even question whether they are true is to literally utter a contradiction.

I think Presuppositional apologists would say that Faith in God is bedrock, because God is omniscient and therefore a perfect authority. Without perfect authority, you have to keep asking why and end up with the answer, “just because”.

A simple application of what he’s saying:

Suppose I say, “Logic is an arbitrary human invention and could be wrong.” Well, if it is wrong, then the Law of Contradiction (a thing cannot be itself and its negation at the same time and in the same respect) and the related Law of Identity (a thing is itself) are wrong; but then that means the very words that make up my original claim, such as, “Logic is arbitrary” could mean “Logic is not arbitrary” or it could mean both at the same time and in the same respect. In fact, it could mean “I like chunky peanut butter.”  If all that sounds crazy and unintelligible, that’s because it is, as are all utterances when the truth of logical principles cannot be assumed.

My own way of explaining this is as follows: Reason is unquestionable because Reason makes questioning possible. Reason cannot be doubted without calling it into question. Reason is certain if it cannot be doubted.

At the end he adds to his defense of reason, a criticism of faith (Fideism),

A member of Christian sect X believes that all other sects are damned, and she says that she knows this through faith. The person she is talking to is a member of sect Y that believes only sect Y is the one true faith, and that all others are damned, including members of sect X—and, of course, she knows this through faith.   Clearly they both cannot be right. The member of sect Y asks the member of sect X how she knows that she is not really just hearing the deceitful voice of Satan leading her down a false path. To that our sect X member confidently replies, “I know that through faith as well.” Not surprisingly, these are the same answers given by the member of sect Y to exactly the same questions regarding her confidence in the truth of her favorite sect.  There is no independently validated method to resolve this. If reason is not the standard, then there literally is no standard, and people who abandon it have simply written themselves a blank check to believe whatever they choose. Cloaking this irrationalism with comfortable terms like “faith” does not make it any less irrational. As John A. T. Robinson once put it: “The only alternatives to thinking with reason are thinking unreasonably and not thinking.”

For the record, I do not believe that the implication of placing Reason as highest authority is atheism.

Economic Experts on Innovation and Growth

Here we have the most recent survey results on IGM’s Economic Experts Panel.

The economists answer with a great deal of uncertainty, which strikes me as accurate. The future is unpredictable, and wildly so 100 years into the future. It is always interesting to assess the economists comments after the survey.

The right answer is "uncertain". But "disagree" emphasizes that the view that we are running out of ideas, which has little basis.

Contrary Tyler Cowen, this expert answers with a certainty of 10 that economic growth will sustain as usual. The low hanging fruits of ideas theory is an important idea concerning large scale future economic trends. This economist doesn’t buy it.

I also observe that the idea that we’re running out of resources wasn’t a cited concern for future growth rates. Here’s to Julian Simon!

I am certain that anyone sensible should be uncertain. If one can predict innovation well, one should not be an economist but an inventor.

This strikes me as the most reasonable view.

I think this survey exhibits economists difference with the public in regard to the future’s predictability and Optimistic / pessimistic outlook. My suspicion is that the same question asked to the general public would have received a lot more confidently pessimistic answers. Economists are much more conservative about predictions of the far out future, and a lot more optimistic about the future.

Can Jonathan Haidt predict your Politics?

Here is a test by Jonathan Haidt used to predict your political beliefs. It’s only 12 questions.

For me it is worrisome that whether you like cats or dogs is predictive of your political ideology. It somewhat indicates that political ideologies by and large aren’t about what’s the best policy or who’s the best leader, it’s about expression. The counter-argument is that with all the possible arbitrary likes and dislikes of people, we should expect a minority of them to be predictive.

I got like 65% liberal. There is no libertarian result.