Sam Harris and Ezra Klein Podcast

Neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris has the notorious Charles Murray on his podcast to talk about race differences, "Forbidden Knowledge."

Races can be thought of as analogous to families. Some people have said that a race is essentially just a very large family that is partly inbread. But you can see family resemblance in the races. I mean it's not an accident that you can generally predict where someone's ancestors came from just by his face. I mean there are phenotypic differences between people that have genetic underpinnings. And it's not merely just skin deep. I mean there are genetic diseases that various racial groups have/ are more prone to... This is just straight biology. Because different racial groups differ genetically to any degree, and because most of what we care about in ourselves, intelligence included, have some genetic underpinnings... it would be very very surprising if everything we cared about was tuned to the exact same population average in every racial group. I mean there's just virtually no way that's going to be true. So based purely on biological consideration, we should expect that for any variable there will be differences in its average level across racial groups that differ genetically to some degree.

Ezra Klein at Vox publishes piece very critical of Murray and Harris, "Charles Murray is once again Peddling Junk Science about Race and IQ. Sam Harris is the latest to fall for it."

The conviction that groups of people differ along important behavioral dimensions because of racial differences in their genetic endowment is an idea with a horrific recent history. Murray and Harris pepper their remarks with anodyne commitments to treating people as individuals, even people who happen to come from genetically benighted groups.

Sam Harris and Ezra Klein exchange e-mails and consider doing a podcast on the topic. But Sam Harris is too upset that Ezra fails to acknowledge that Vox published a hit-piece on him.

You published an article (and tweets) that directly attacked my intellectual integrity. At a minimum, you claimed that I was taken in by Murray, because I didn’t know enough of the relevant science. Consequently, we peddled “junk science” or “pseudoscience” on my podcast.

You published an article (and tweets) that directly attacked my moral integrity. Murray is “dangerous,” and my treating him as a free speech case is “disastrous.” We are “racialists” (this is scarcely a euphemism for “racist”). There is no way to read that article (or your tweets) without concluding that Murray and I are unconscionably reckless (if not actually bad) people.

 This was nearly a year ago, and nobody knew even about the e-mails!

Fast forward to the present, and the New York Times publishes article by geneticist David Reich. How Genetics is Changing our Understanding of Race.

“it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races.’”

So Sam Harris posts to Ezra on Twitter.

I hope @ezraklein is on the case. Scientismic, neo-racialist thought crime never sleeps... https://t.co/U7AJkU3dKt

— Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) 25 March 2018

Ezra Klein responds with another Vox article. This is not “forbidden knowledge.” It is America’s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality.

In this country, given our history, discussions about race and IQ need more care and context than they get. As a starting point, rather than being framed around the bravery of the (white) participants for having a conversation that has done so much damage, they should grapple seriously with the costs of America’s most ancient justification for bigotry, and take seriously why so many are so skeptical that this time, finally, the racial pessimists are right when they have been so horribly wrong before. 

And Sam, I’m still up for that podcast.

 In response, Sam Harris posted the previously mentioned e-mails from the year before.

The list of prominent people on the Left who are willing to behave unethically in order to silence others continues to grow. If nothing else, readers of this exchange will understand how much harm these people are doing to honest conversation, both in public and in private.

 Sam Harris then posted that posting the e-mails backfired. And then after that he put up a Twitter poll,

I'll put it to you, Twitter:

Should @ezraklein and I do a podcast together?

— Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) 30 March 2018

With 76% saying yes, Sam Harris is now willing to do the podcast. To boot he throws in a link to an article by Andrew Sullivan. Denying Genetics Isn't Shutting Down Racism, It's Fueling It.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the podcast.

Other links relating to the situation:

Psychologist Richard Haier, No Voice at Vox, Sense and Nonsense about discussing IQ and race.

whatever the factors are that influence individual differences in IQ, the same factors would influence average group differences. Since there is overwhelming evidence that genes influence the former, it would not be unreasonable to hypothesize that genes at least partially influence group differences.

Steven Pinker has also linked to the How Genetics is Changing our Understanding of Race article.

Researching Race

These are facts, not opinions and science must be governed by data. There is no place for the “moralistic fallacy” that reality must conform to our social, political, or ethical desires.

Warning: this research will be challenging for some people.

Is the White House a Circus?

Some of the anonymous quotes you hear about the atmosphere in the White House are probably exaggerated, likewise many of the stories I hear. I honestly think that a lot of Republicans say this stuff off the record or on background for selfish reasons. They want it known that they weren’t part of the problem. They’re planning for the future and want to maintain some viability or something.

But you could exclude all the anonymous quotes and thinly sourced stories, and a reasonable person would still have to conclude that this White House is operating as if the dispensing nurse at the asylum accidentally grabbed the amphetamines instead of the Xanax. As the vet said when I brought my cat in for an appointment and pulled a tuxedo-wearing, rainbow-colored iguana with a monocle out of the carrier, “This is not normal.”

 Read this smart and very funny article by Jonah Goldberg. With a fair dose of wit and without a hint of leftist bent, he portrays just how brash the Trump White House seems to be.

He also hosts a podcast called The Remnant.

Evidence that Rape is about Oppression

Why do men rape? is another well written article in Quillette. In it, the author evaluates the evidence for the claim that, “Rape is not about sexual orientation or sexual desire. It is an act of power and control in which the victim is brutalized and humiliated."

If rape is about sex, doesn't that in some sense justify rape?

“If there is still any lingering misconception that rape is a crime of sexual passion, it’s important to drive a stake through the heart of that idea as quickly as possible…”3 Another writer calls the old model of rape “the ideological fantasies of those who justify sexual coercion,” and claims that admitting that rape is rooted in human desires “actually amounts to an incitement to rape.”

Are most rapes planned and therefore not caused by sexual passion but by strategic dominance?

According to the sociologist Garbrilee Dietrisch, “Surveys show that a vast majority of rapes are planned. This goes to disprove the theory that the rapist is usually ‘provoked’ by the flimsy clothing worn by the victim, and is overcome by an overpowering physical urge. In fact, the rapist is asserting his power and urge to dominate.”

 Are there other cultures that don't rape, and therefore rape was invented by men to dominate women?

feminist sociologist Michael Kimmel claims “[w]e have evidence of the absence of rape” in “several cultures... Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously argued in Coming of Age in Samoa that rape was virtually absent in the Samoan Islands”

 and,

anthropologist Peggy Sanday states that in some societies, “the sexual act is not concerned with sexual gratification but with deploying the penis as a concrete symbol masculine social power.”9 To support her claim that rape is a cultural phenomenon, she provided her own study of the world’s anthropological literature.

 Is it true that other animals don't rape, and therefore rape was invented by men to dominate women?

In Against Our Will, Brownmiller makes her own naïve foray into the worlds of anthropology and zoology, and attempts to uncouple sexual desire and rape by theorizing that it is a human social phenomenon not found elsewhere in nature: “No zoologist, as far as I am aware, has ever observed animals to rape in their natural habitat, the wild.”

Is the fact that more vulnerable women are raped more often evidence that rape is about oppression, not sex?

rape correlates highly with poverty, homelessness, and gender inequality. War is a major catalyst for rape. All of these variables make women more vulnerable to male desires...

 Okay, so...

If these quotations sound like fair depictions of what intellectually strong, "rape is about oppression," people say, then good. That means the author didn't build a straw man when he criticized these arguments in the article.

David Reich on Genetics and Race

Warning; highly contentious issue here. How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’

Hat tip to goes to Steven Pinker for posting a link to it on Twitter.

I think we need people like Steven Pinker pointing this kind of thing out. We need people who cannot reasonably be considered "on the right," because right wingers get obliterated with the worst of insult from the left no matter how thoughtful, careful, or well studied they are when approaching this issue.

But it needs to be said, because while anti-science rightism is scoffed at, anti-science leftism is tolerated. And though the fundamentalist creationism is miles away from being taught in mainstream biology, Leftist anti-science already shackles progress in schools.

Anyway, to the article:

The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. 

I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

It's worth noting that race can be defined as a genetic cluster one inherited from having ancestors from a particular geographic region. So it's hardly a new discovery that genes correlate between races. Race and genetic differences are tautological. I mean, where you think the most evident racial feature, melanin, comes from?

These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years.

70,000 years is a long time. Could anyone plausibly believe that after all that time people wouldn't become different?

We might ask, if not to promote racism, if not to deny rights to certain races, if not to create racial prejudices and injustices, then to what end is all this being said?

Did this research rely on terms like “African-American” and “European-American” that are socially constructed, and did it label segments of the genome as being probably “West African” or “European” in origin? Yes. Did this research identify real risk factors for disease that differ in frequency across those populations, leading to discoveries with the potential to improve health and save lives? Yes.

 Color of your skin, your bodily dimensions, and your susceptibility to disease are one thing, but...

Finding genetic influences on a propensity for disease is one thing, they argue, but looking for such influences on behavior and cognition is another. 

But whether we like it or not, that line has already been crossed. A recent study led by the economist Daniel Benjamin compiled information on the number of years of education from more than 400,000 people, almost all of whom were of European ancestry. After controlling for differences in socioeconomic background, he and his colleagues identified 74 genetic variations that are over-represented in genes known to be important in neurological development, each of which is incontrovertibly more common in Europeans with more years of education than in Europeans with fewer years of education.

The most interesting paragraph in the whole article is this:

If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong. For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.

 Read the whole thing. He parallels race differences with gender differences, something much more socially acceptable to believe, and states the upshot which is to, "accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.

He also talks about the vacuum being left by not acknowledging race differences, and how people are filling the silence with their own preposterous conclusions.

And he reemphasizes a head first heart second attitude when moving forward. We can't let feelings prejudice science. And we should treat all people as individuals and to empower all people.

The bottom line:

Arguing that no substantial differences among human populations are possible will only invite the racist misuse of genetics that we wish to avoid.

About Me is Up

After 5+ years I finally wrote an About Me Section.

It's split into my three worlds; work, family, and ideas. Then it talks about my personality differences.

I tried to be funny

The Angry Liberal Meme

“That’s a stupid fucking question,” answered a Socialist Alliance activist when I asked sincerely where they were getting what sounded like inflated poverty statistics. “If you don’t believe in gay marriage or gun control, unfriend me,” demand multiple Facebook statuses from those I know. “That’s gross and racist!” spluttered a red-faced Ben Affleck when the atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris criticized Islamic doctrines on Bill Maher’s Real Time.

This except was taken from The Psychology of Progressive Hostility.

So what explains this kind of behavior that inspired the raging liberal meme?

In his remarkable book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt recalls a telling experiment. He and his colleagues Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham sought to discover how well conservative and what Haidt terms ‘liberal’ (ie: progressive) students understood one another by having them answer moral questions as they thought their political opponents would answer them. “The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse...

People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.

I'm a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt. Since I first heard him on this brilliant Econtalk, I watched every video on the internet with his name on it. I think open minded liberals should listen to him very carefully with a sober mind.

I've also accumulated a lot of respect for the publication, Quillette, since I first heard about them in this interview.

In regard to the article cited above, let me stick up for liberals a bit. It is very true that the SJW Warriors and other far left people are extraordinarily volatile, but lets not compare them to conservative moderates. The fair comparison is to the hardcore right wingers, who are anything but civil. Consider this 1,000,000+ subscriber youtube channel who regularly calls people "libtards".

It's a shame the left and right mirror each other in a lot of ways. I'm especially disappointed at the way leftists lately have received a reputation for shutting down free speech. I think this is especially harmful when Trump leverages this politically correct madness for his advantage.

If people are destined to play tribes, I think there are healthier ways of doing it. Like perhaps the center left and center right could unite against the radicals on either side. Make tolerance, open mindedness, and civility a part of their group identity. That's the way to do it.

Sci Hub

Um, Scott Alexander just linked to this site, which removes all barriers to research papers.

"To Remove All Barriers from Science"

I didn't know there was enough demand for something like this to exist. My dorky self is more excited about this than pirating the last episode of The Walking Dead or Radiohead album.

SlateStar covers the ethics of this sort of piracy. In his post he declares a new rule:

Thus Dark Rule Utilitarianism: “If I did this, everyone would do it. If everyone did it, our institutions would collapse. But I hate our institutions. Therefore... 

The Ever Contagious Fake News

To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.

In reaction to this paper, many are saying false news spreads faster than true news (here, here, and here for example). But not Tyler Cowen, who critiques this interpretation of the study.

Overall the results of this paper remind me of another problem/data issue. At least in the old days, children’s movies used to earn more than films for adults, as stressed by Michael Medved. That doesn’t mean you have a quick money-making formula by simply making more movies for kids. It could be a few major kid’s movies, driven perhaps by peer effects, suck up most of the oxygen in the room and dominate the market. And then, within the universe of cascade-driven movies, kid’s movies will look really strong and indeed be really strong. That also doesn’t have to mean the kid’s movies have more cultural influence overall, even if they look dominant in the cascade-driven category. In this analogy, the kid’s movies are like the fake news.

Fake news has the advantage of being specifically designed to spread. True news has to overcome the extra hurtle of having to be true. And despite the internet, it seems like nobody fact checks anything.

Christians on Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson might be on the political right, and he might even be a Christian. But comparing him to Billy Graham is a complete mismatch. I don't want to take anything away from the now deceased Billy Graham, but he was first and foremost a fundamentalist while Peterson is an intellectual.

What's the difference? Lets just say Peterson is unlikely to ask people to invite Jesus into their heart at the end of one of his lectures.

It is interesting to see Christians take a relatively positive perspective on this evolutionary psychologist.

In Sydney, Peterson encouraged everyone to voluntarily acknowledge our flaws, transgressions, vulnerabilities, and suffering in life – what he described as “practical and metaphysical advice”. He stated that Christ was the ultimate example of that practice because he was innocent, yet voluntarily suffered extreme torture and death – “a bedrock idea”.

My guess is that while Jordan has made great enemies with the far left and far right, he's pretty good at getting along with moderates. I've seen him in very civil conversations with Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Russel Brand, Sam Harris, and Russ Roberts. What do they all have in common? Not political leanings that's for sure. They all have a basic openness to ideas.

Wow, psychology is right up there now

Different Fines Different Incomes

Why should the rich and poor pay the same in fines?

Flat fines also fail to meet basic goals of punishment, like retribution and deterrence. Punishment is partly an expression of a society’s desire to inflict pain on those who break the law. But giving wealthy offenders a mere slap on the wrist makes a mockery of that objective. And while punishment is supposed to prevent undesirable conduct from happening in the first place, flat fines deter the wealthy less than everyone else. Some evidence shows the rich are more likely to break the law while driving.

An example solution:

Finland and Argentina, for example, have tailored fines to income for almost 100 years. The most common model, the “day fine,” scales sanctions to a person’s daily wage. A small offense like littering might cost a fraction of a day’s pay. A serious crime might swallow a month’s paycheck. Everyone pays the same proportion of their income.

I guess you could say that the rich and poor pay the same for the same groceries and clothes, why not fines? But market prices emerge from supply and demand (controlled by nobody), and serve the function of transmitting proper incentives and information. Legal fines are designed explicitly by lawmakers as deterrents. They're not serving that function by charging the rich and poor the same.

Does the Death Penalty Work?

Bryan Caplan passes the ideological turing test and argues against his own side here:

I'm not advocating the death penalty for drug offenses. In fact, I consider drug prohibition to be a heinous crime against humanity. But in the absence of overwhelming contrary evidence, we should still believe that the death penalty heavily deters drug use.

A tell that someone is ideologically biased is their willingness to swallow every piece of evidence that supports their view. Bryan Caplan is not that kind of thinker.

I have a similar view on minimum wage. While I think minimum wage probably has more benefits than costs, I comfortably admit one of those costs is almost certainly disemployment effects for the very people the policy is constructed to help!

Another on Gun Control: adding some extra gun control likely has net benefits. But I'm likely to get frustrated with leftists who bulldoze over millions of gun owners to somewhat reduce the already miniscule number of people who die from mass shootings.

Gender rights. I don't think anyone should be forced into gender stereotypes. But the psychological literature on natural gender differences is overwhelming.

Bryan Caplan calls drug prohibition a heinous crime against humanity, but we should be honest and not pretend like that means it doesn't work.

Psychology and Intelligence

"I think the more something is genetic the more likely it is we can change it for the good."

"16% of the population has an IQ of 85 or lower"

"If you think of all the different mental abilities, and you devise a test for each one of them. And you gave this test to a lot of  people across a range of ability, what you'll find is the scores on all those tests are positively correlated with each other, suggesting that all tests of mental ability have something in common: the g factor or general ability to reason."

It seems weird to me that people wholly embrace the idea of influencing IQ through environmental factors, but there's a taboo against influencing it directly. If you found out your child is going to have an IQ of 85, and you could change it with a pill, wouldn't you?

Play and IQ gains

Jordan Peterson sometimes talks about how play in rats stimulates prefrontal cortex growth. He thinks this is an important aspect of child development too. Kids need physical play at an early age or else they'll become anti-social and likely criminals.

I connect that up with birth order effects. If you're familiar with birth order, you might know that most personality effects are on very shaky ground. It doesn't seem like birth order predicts much of anything. Except research has consistently found gains in IQ for younger siblings.

Now I wonder, is that because of the extra play younger children get from having older siblings to play with?

Just speculation.

Economics of Steel and Aluminum Tariffs

I'm not saying you shouldn't disagree with all the experts, I'm just saying that if you do you should at least be able to explain what they believe and why.

I'm not a Conservative but...

An excerpt from an article in the fantastic Heterodox Academy:

Imagine that you are an 18-year-old student. Perhaps you were raised in a liberal household; or perhaps, in a conservative one. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you have arrived at a top American university. Like the other freshmen in your class: you’re intelligent, insecure and largely ignorant. 

As classes begin, you start to absorb the signals; the mantras; the soundbites and principles of relativism and progressivism. In categorical and absolute terms, you learn of the stupidity and malice of the ‘other side’. 

In this climate, would you, young and looking to make friends as you are, dare to voice a different view? Would you, on your own time, question such assumptions? Maybe you would. But the likelihood is that you would not. Or at least, you would rather not. Because it would make your student life difficult. 

These are not hypotheticals, but real people. An Oxford undergraduate, who identifies as liberal and a feminist, tells me she is a ‘secret heretic’; fearful to voice her doubts on gender fluidity and intersectionality. While a liberal professor at New York University tells me she’s exhausted trying to qualify every lesson with progressive frames.
And if this is how many liberals feel, can you imagine what it’s like to be a conservative?

I'm not a conservative, but I feel the need to preface every challenge to overt liberalism with, "I'm not a conservative but..."

Deregulating GMOs

This from the Genetic Literacy Project

New gene-editing tools are even more precise than the older methods. They can be used to make predictable changes in a selected gene and leave behind no extraneous genetic material. Such changes are just like the natural variants that underlie the domestication of agricultural plants and animals. And they’re the same as genetic changes introduced by the mutagenic methods used to produce most of today’s high-yielding grain varieties and such favorites as Rio Red grapefruit. 

This means that many of the organisms produced using today’s high-precision gene editing will be indistinguishable at the molecular level from those produced by nature and by previous generations of breeders. This presents a conundrum for our current regulatory approach.

Fortunately, the solution is in plain sight: Confine regulatory scrutiny to the novel properties of improved organisms. That is, regulate the product, not the process, as the U.S. National Academies of Science and Engineering have long recommended.

Also valuable was the link to a Decade of GMO Research.

Does the Truth win out in the End?

Here is an excerpt that struck me from How to Win Friends and Influence People,

You may be right, dead right, as you speed along in your argument; but as far as changing another's mind is concerned, you will probably be just as futile as if you were wrong.

 I can't find it now, but I believe it was Scott Alexander who said that being right is the only extra tool the good guys have is being right. Both sides of every issue can us rhetorical tricks to persuade without good arguments. But only the truth has that extra power inherent in being right.

So if you're trying to decide which is healthier between two drinks, both spokespeople for those drinks have access to the same propagandandistic tricks to make you think their drink is healthier. But one of them is healthier. That doesn't mean you'll be right every time, but on average over all those drinks for all those consumers over many many years, the propaganda cancels out and only the side with the truth on their side has that extra edge that comes from being right.

This isn't what Dale Carnegie says in the first quote. He says that the truth doesn't matter a pinch in influencing people. So who's right?

I think I might be on the side of Carnegie's pessimism, but not because the truth doesn't matter at all. I think facts and sound argument is persuasive, for some more than others, but on average at least a little bit. But what isn't considered by either one of them is the truth's ability to distract from more effective rhetorical techniques. Going into an argument saying, "I'm just going to tell the truth," is probably bad advice but I think a lot of people do it. I've done it.

We're not arguing in a time vacuum. I had an English teacher who told us to use 50% logos, 40% pathos, and 10% ethos in our persuasive essays. But what if drop the logos completely? It's not like we have less, it only makes room for pathos and ethos to fill the void. Because the time we use on sound argument crowds out the time we use on more effective persuasion.

In other words the opportunity cost of telling the truth is rhetorical trickery. And that might be more important than the extra sliver of persuasion the truth gives you.

Sacralizing Reading

And I'm sure reading makes us smarter, and healthier, and live longer, and less depressed, and more happy, and better speakers, and better thinkers, and better feelers, and less politically polarized, and better socialized, and more attractive, and lights up all the right parts of the brain, and if everybody read more we'd have world peace.

Or not.

Maybe reading is just a really really important way of communicating. Maybe reading makes you a better reader, and perhaps a better writer, and that's it. Maybe mass literacy is one of the greatest human achievements of all time...

But do we have to make it a religion?

Am I Autistic? You're not the only one who's asked

Am I autistic?An intellectual autobiography

I became preoccupied with holistic explanations based on minimal assumptions. I recall spending hours thinking furiously in my bedroom— overlooking cherry blossoms in the front garden: I was convinced that there should be a singular explanation for the shape of things, just starting from the premise that something existed. My best conceptualization of this was some abstract point in an abstract space that, in later life, transpired to be a point attractor in a phase-space. This style of thinking made it easy to understand dynamical systems theory in terms of attracting sets—and the distinction between different forms of attracting manifolds.

Head First Heart Second

If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm.

-Eliezer Yudkowsky

Suppose a time travelling angel came to you and offered an altruistic choice:
A) Prevent every mass shooting in the last 10 years
B) Reduce the car accident fatality rate by 10% last year

If your heart leads you to impulsively choose A, then congratulations, you're normal. But your heart will be responsible for the net death of about 2,000 people. Why do our hearts mislead us like this? Because Stalin was right when he said, "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." 

We can't picture 30,000 people dying in car accidents, but we can picture the scene of a school shooting, with all its horror and all its tragedy. As the numbers go up they get more abstract. It becomes harder to empathize with the victims. But that doesn't mean they're not real. And when your heart steamrolls over them to get to more vivid, tragic stories; I'm sorry but that's not altruism.

The true cost of something does not equal how bad you feel when you imagine it.

So the rule is, head first heart second. Your head needs to interpret the world before your heart helps navigate through it. Your heart may change its opinion after you've done the head work. I mean, once you know that choice A would cause 2,000 extra deaths, doesn't your heart change its mind?

I notice people getting caught up with this head or heart dichotomy. I think that's why they get mad at me when I suggest things like basic numeracy when evaluating the cost of school shootings. They think I'm recommending the head over and above the heart. But when did I say that? I said use your head first, then use your heart. Again; your head is good for drawing the map, your heart is good at using the map to navigate the terrain.

There is no angel offering us any choices, so what does it matter? Well, as any fool knows there are tradeoffs to everything. When we radically misunderstand the magnitudes of the costs and benefits because we're so absorbed in heart-style thinking, we're likely to do more harm than good.

In the gun debate, we've framed the entire issue around mass shootings, but lightning causes more deaths. We can't have a serious discussion about gun control until everyone accepts that basic numeracy applies even to the most tragic of the tragic.

Which Religions Fear Death?

 Which religions have the greatest fear of death? One study:

Compared with other groups, monastic Tibetans gave particularly strong denials of the continuity of self, across several measures. We predicted that the denial of self would be associated with a lower fear of death and greater generosity toward others. To our surprise, we found the opposite. Monastic Tibetan Buddhists showed significantly greater fear of death than any other group. The monastics were also less generous than any other group about the prospect of giving up a slightly longer life in order to extend the life of another.

Does learning another Language help you Think?

A meta-analysis of 152 studies shows no cognitive benefits of bilingualism:

our analyses revealed a very small bilingual advantage for inhibition, shifting, and working memory, but not for monitoring or attention. No evidence for a bilingual advantage remained after correcting for bias. For verbal fluency, our analyses indicated a small bilingual disadvantage, possibly reflecting less exposure for each individual language when using two languages in a balanced manner. Moreover, moderator analyses did not support theoretical presuppositions concerning the bilingual advantage. We conclude that the available evidence does not provide systematic support for the widely held notion that bilingualism is associated with benefits in cognitive control functions in adults. 

Gun Control Memes

After noticing a trend in Facebook memes where people "prove" their gun control position by pointing out one place, I thought I'd find more:

If you're anti-gun control, you're likely to accept this data point on it's face. No skepticism required!

If you're pro-gun control, you're likely to dig deeper. Research. Fact check. And if you can't scrape up a reason why it's false, then it doesn't matter anyway. Probably just the exception and not the rule.

And in places like Chicago, clearly it's violent despite gun control, not because of gun control. Without gun control Chicago would be even worse. Gun control works, but nobody said it works miracles. Right?

Washington DC, Detroit, and Chicago are all in the same category. They're places where the violence got so bad that we had to pass gun control. It's not like Gun control what made it bad in the first place. Right?

Now we're going to do a different slew of gun memes from the other side.

If you're pro-gun control, then of course this meme is persuasive. No need to check to see if it's true. Learn from Sweden!

But if you're anti-gun control, you're likely to check this fact out. Isn't Japan the one with the high suicide rate? I'll be they're not counting gun suicides and that's why they get such a low number for Japan. Right?

Looks like we have some homework to do. Gotta debunk this liberal logic. And why would they even think about bringing Germany into this? Right?

Apparently Australia is a spokescountry for both sides

I want to be generous, so lets just say numbers are hard for some people. But here's what I notice, numbers are really easy when they tell a story we like, and then numbers get complicated when they tell a story we don't like. That's because people are only compelled to investigate stories when they contradict our preferred conclusion.

This is how psychologists say we fool ourselves. Nobody chooses to believe something they know is false. They simply exercise more or less intellectual discipline based on what answers they want to find. 

If it's something they like they do very little digging and give it a high benefit of the doubt. 

If it's something they don't like they dig into the data and give it a high burden of proof.

So how should we think about all these data points being thrusted in our face on Facebook?

There's one possible answer that applies to all arguments about regulation, including gun regulation. It is that we're in a sub-optimal middle ground.

There's no reason why gun control and gun violence are either correlated or inversely correlated at every level. The curve could look something like this.

Dude, I made it in a kid's graphmaker website. Cut me a break.

Low gun control countries like Israel and Switzerland are on the left of the graph. High gun control countries like Sweden and Japan are on the right side of the graph. Australia is that little green dot on the right because who knows what's up with them. And the United States is in the wishywashy middle ground, where there's too much gun control for a criminal to fear citizens, but still so little gun control that a criminal to easily obtain a weapon.

I don't think that's how things really are, but it's a totally possible position that nearly nobody takes. Gee, why I would nobody take this perfectly competent position? Did it sleep with their mom?

I also think that when we talk about more or less of any kind of regulation, we're missing the point. It seems clear enough that we want more good regulation, and less bad regulation. Not all regulation is the same, so wanting more or less bypasses thoughtful discussion about kinds of regulation.

There's another way of thinking about all these gun control memes; gun control matters, but it's not the only thing that matters. So Sweden's gun crime rate has more to do with Sweden being Sweden than Swedish gun control laws. Or Chicago's gun crime rates has more to do with Chicago being Chicago than Chicago's gun control laws. It's not like we could plop down Sweden's gun control laws on top of Chicago, and all of the sudden Chicago will see Swedish gun violence rates.

Culture matters. Saying that the United States has a culture of violence sounds vague, but I think it's true. You can start to see it when you look at the US's high non-gun violence rate. So to some extent it's not about gun control, but whether you're the kind of culture that supports gun control.

If it's not in a Meme it's like it didn't happen

Some of these memes compare violence rates before and after gun control. For a skeptical mind, there's on obvious problem with this. Violence rates are going up and down no matter what. In the last 10 years the United State's homicide rate dropped dramatically while gun control has stayed roughly stayed the same. So with lots of possible countries or states to choose from, one can easily find some where gun control was followed by whatever you want it to be followed by.

I see these pics on Facebook and I wonder, do they know the other side is posting the exact same evidence to support the other side? And if you find your evidence so appealing, why is their parallel evidence so unconvincing?

I don't think left or right. I don't think pro or anti gun control. I think partisanship or openmindedness. There are people in this world who are actually trying to reason through the evidence, to build a solid argument, to respond to criticism, and to intellectually empathize with their opponents. And there are people who really don't care. They're trying to usurp the moral high ground so they can win the debate. They can't see past their "us vs. them" mentality to realize that some of this stuff really effects people. It's that tribal attitude that causes many times more damage than the sins of the "other side".

Does Conditionalism lower the priority of Evangelism?

Over the years, I've come to a view called Conditionalism. It basically says that the consistent view of the biblical authors was that the fate of the unsaved is not eternal conscious torment, but complete annihilation. I might write my own post for why I think this is probably right, but for now Rethinking Hell does a damn good job outlining the reasons.

But some of my fellow conditionalists don't want to accept all the implications of our view. Specifically: A) that annihilation is preferable to eternal conscious torment, and B) that it reduces the importance of evangelism.

It's easy to see why evangelicals especially would not like these implications. Evangelism has been a deep priority of evangelicalism for a long time. And anything that waters down that priority, even a little bit, is resisted.

Still, I think they should admit that A and B are actually implications of their view. And just because it makes the fate of the wicked doesn't look as bad and evangelism doesn't look as good, that doesn't mean death isn't horrible and evangelism isn't wonderful.

So why should we believe that Annihilation is preferable to eternal conscious torment? Well it seems to me like everybody has a suffering threshold beyond which they'd prefer death. Maybe it's higher in some people than others, but at least for most of us that point exists. If you can't think of one, use your imagination. What's the most awful thing you can imagine? Would you rather die than experience it?

Still need help? Consider this picture, wouldn't you be begging for death?

Sorry for this, but point made?

It seems like for the people who believe that hell is eternal conscious torment, it's the worst of the worst eternal conscious torment.

The thing about the eternal conscious torment view of hell is that it's about has bad as anyone can imagine it to be. It's kind of the worst thing by definition.

What about B? Does that mean the need to evangelize is disincentivized?

If you think that when the price goes down, you should buy, then it has to, but only on the margin. The cost of hell is a little bit lower under conditionalism, so of course people should invest less in saving people from it. That doesn't make it any less than top priority, but still, there are so many hours in the day and evangelism surely isn't the only priority. To say otherwise is nothing less than a mathematical mistake. Invest more in higher valued goals. If the goal falls in value, invest less.

The logical consequences of conditionalism hasn't deterred me from accepting the reasons behind it. When something is true, you take the step wherever it leads. It's a basic condition of integrity. Conditionalism leads to less evangelism, so what?

The Importance of Mass Shootings

Suppose an angel came to you and offered an altruistic choice. A) You could end all mass shootings in America for 10 years, or B) reduce car accident fatalities by 10% for 1 year. What decision does your heart make? What choice does your head make?

Your heart might say to go with A. I think it was Stalin who said, "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic." Society is absorbed in the tragedy of every school shooting, most people don't even know the car accident fatality rate has been falling for years. They don't spend their limited attention on such statistics, but a moving story? We'll debate the implications on Facebook for weeks.

Use your head and you'll realize that by picking A, you've killed over 2,000 people. NOW use your heart to decide whether that's a good and moral choice.

The fallacy is in thinking that you have to choose between your head and your heart. Simply use your head and then use your heart. Don't ask your heart head questions and don't ask your head heart questions.

So what does our hypothetical story about the angel have to do with real life? When you assess mass shootings in proper proportion is seems dubious to base on it federal policy that effects 300 million people. The blip that is mass shootings cannot be what guides our policy decisions. Moreover, attention is a finite resource. We do ourselves no favors by hyper focusing on something that is quantitatively negligible.

Is Death the Ultimate Example of Loss Aversion

Psychology teaches that human beings have a weird mental quirk called loss aversion. We hurt more from loss than we feel good about gain. Give a man a fish and he'll be mildly happy. Take a fish away and he'll be very sad.

It makes me wonder if our fear of death is the ultimate example of loss aversion.

I first heard this idea from Penn Jillette, in connection with the atheist's view of the afterlife. He said, where were you in 1800? Nowhere. Was it scary? So why are you afraid of where you'll be in 2200? You'll be in the same place.

I like Penn Jillette's argument, but it deviates wildly from how we treat murder and suicide. Suicide is awful and murder is horrible. I have yet to hear from the defense in a homicide trial, "Look judge, I just took the victim back to where she was the day before she was born."

So it seems like life is extraordinarily valued only once you have it. It is cheap to give, and expensive to take away. If a misfired nerf gun accidentally sterilizes a man, we don't usually charge the shooter with two counts of manslaughter. Though on average that man would likely have had 2 children. But once those two children are born we value their lives tremendously, and if you end them you're in serious trouble.

So the question is, is this just a severe case of loss aversion? And if it is, what should we do about it?

Were Schools Safer in the 90s?

The latest in Everything is Awesome Nobody is Happy: Schools are safer than they were in the 90s.

A few random thoughts:

If you measure not incidents per year, but victims per year, the darker colors would have much more impact. I'm not sure how it would change the peaks and troughs of the graph, but it makes me curious.

I don't think trends in something with so few numbers are helpful for assessing much of anything.

I was ready to say that the trend of lower incidents correlated with the last 30 year's tendency toward more gun control. This would be some evidence that gun control works (some evidence /= knockdown argument). But when I look at whether we actually have stricter gun control, I'm a little bit surprised that we may not (here first, then here and here). So I have to reverse the argument and admit that this is at least some evidence that gun control does not work.

Tryers Vs. Slackers

From Nate Soars, Half-assing it with everything you've got,

Both the slackers and the tryers are pursuing lost purposes. The slackers scoff at the tryers, who treat an artificial quality line like it's their actual preferences and waste effort over-achieving. The tryers scoff at the slackers, who are taking classes but refusing to learn. And both sides are right! Because both sides are wasting motion... 

My teachers used to say that I could do great things if only I applied myself. I used to tell them that if they wanted me to apply more effort, they would need to invent higher letter grades.

Social Security Privileges the Living over the Dead

Life Expectancy in the U.S. is 79 years, but we all understand that life expectancy is not a life guarantee. If you do die before your life expectancy, you may also die before the full retirement age of 67, just like 17.4% of the population that dies before 65. Sooooo... there's roughly 17.4% chance that all those dollars you've seen taken out of your paycheck for "social security," you will never see again.

People tell me that Social Security is a program people pay into when they're young, and get paid from when they're old. It's more accurate to say they get paid from if they're old.

Much of the logic underlying arguments for social security is based in compassion for the vulnerable. I think of this guy from the Simpsons:

This guy never hurt anybody, he DESERVES Social Security

He's frail, kind, and unlike Mr. Burns doesn't seem particularly wealthy. He seems like just the kind of guy you'd want to help. But once you realize that the wealth and age are highly correlated, Social Security starts to look regressive. It takes from the poor young and gives to the rich old.

But poverty isn't the only metric one becomes a vulnerable member of society. People who die young will pay into social security and never receive a benefit. That seems just wrong to me. Throw in that the people who are more likely to die younger are poorer anyway, and we have another regressive aspect.

Just because we've had something a long time doesn't mean it's good. Humans are very susceptible to status quo bias, and will rationalize unendingly in defense of programs they can't imagine life without. I think that's why we don't give Social Security a good hard look and ask whether America's #1 expenditure is as valuable as we think.

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Extra notes

1. Some people retire before 67, so a few more people than stated will receive social security before they die

2. I used % of population that will die before 65 for the availability of the statistic, so a few less people than stated will receive social security before they die.

3. Much of the wealth of the elderly is held in their homes. They should put their house up for sale, making housing cheaper for new homeowners, and live off the wealth.

4. It seems like society already have a built-in retirement program, it's called a mortgage. You get a home to raise kids in when you're young, you get retirement money and a 1 bedroom apartment when you're old.

5. So you're saying that after spending 25 years paying off their homes, they should just turn around and sell it? Yes.

5. But what about the elderly in need? I didn't say we should ignore them, we could replace social security with something actually progressive.

6. I also didn't even say we should get rid of social security. I'm just saying that because it's the holy grail of public opinion, we're unable to see that in terms of helping the vulnerable it's not as useful as we assume.

7. Social Security is paid out to your spouse if you die, if you have a spouse and if she lives that long. It's probably more fair than paying nobody, but it's less fair than paying the person who's life was taken from them.