I'm frequently a victim of "your needs are uncommon, therefore no one else has to accommodate them" type reasoning. A compromise is necessary: I can't demand that the people around me not eat any mint candy (much less that everyone stop using mint toothpaste lest I encounter them an hour later) just because the smell is intolerable to me. Slightly more common needs (that people not invade my personal space) or needs that are supported by societal distaste (that people not smoke cigarettes in my school buildings) get accommodated. In my case, I know these things are at least partly hardwired - oversensitivity to sensory stimuli is par for the course with Asperger's - but I haven't noticed anyone get more sympathetic to this sort of thing when I so inform them unless they've been my friend for a long time (I think non-friends assume I'm making it up to get my way). Even with my friends, I suspect it's because my long-term friends assume anything I don't like must be a consequence of my wiring. I've stopped bothering to explain that my dislike of ginger doesn't mean anything except that I don't like ginger.
There's a danger, in accommodating preferences because they are ...
If people's political opinions come partly from unchangeable anatomy
It's a big step to go from finding physical correlates of mental phenomena -- especially hypothetical ones -- to ascribing the mental phenomena to "unchangeable anatomy".
I've created Typical mind fallacy article stub on the wiki, linking to the original article and to this one. LessWrong'ers, use it as an excuse to start contributing to the wiki.
"Other than that, it's just a general message of pessimism. If people's political opinions come partly from unchangeable anatomy, it makes the program of overcoming bias in politics a lot harder, and the possibility of coming up with arguments good enough to change someone else's opinion even more remote."
Only if you, like 99.999% of people, are approaching political change in the wrong way. Those few of us who are trying to change politics assuming political views are basically constant, however, have already taken this into account. A major p...
Be warned some large speculation follows
There is a fairly strong liberal/conservative split between urban and rural areas. Now let us say that the human brain is slightly polymorphic and alters its structure dependent upon the population density it finds itself in.
In an urban environment the brain needs to worry somewhat about non-human threats, disease and fire. Raiding from bandits is less of a problem. Some form of taking of money (be it a protection racket or legitimate government) is very likely and in this situation it is unlikely to be able to be r...
when you're out in the country, everyone can pretty much "do their own thing" without much conflict
For people living on their own in the wilderness with no neighbours for miles, perhaps. But both small town America and rural England are known for everyone knowing everyone else's business and their oppressive atmospheres for those who do not fit in, and even for those who do. For many people from those backgrounds, moving to the big city is a liberating experience.
Considering how vast are differences in political views, how tiny are differences in underlying biology, I'm extremely skeptical to any biological explanations.
Political distance between American left 2009 and American right 2009 is far smaller than political distance between average American 2009 and average American 1809, or than political distance between average North Korean 2009 and average Somalian 2009.
If those tiny American differences corresponded to big differences in biology, then people from different countries and times would have to be pretty much a different species. That's obviously not true, so I find such explanations extremely unlikely.
Your observation does not rule out a model in which cultural context predicts mean political behavior/views (within that culture) and individual biological differences predict individual variations in political behavior/views around the cultural mean.
A common reason economists say noise regulation is not needed is that noise doesn't travel very far, most noise sources don't move, and so one can easily find the offending parties. So as long as it is clear who has the relevant property right (to make noise or to stop noise) they can plausibly make a deal to achieve the efficient outcome, at least if the problem is big enough.
Silas has already come up with a good response, but...let's say this was implemented. And let's take the standard economic oversimplification of assuming mostly self-interested people.
And let's say I live in an apartment with six other people, one of whom is noisy. Five people are considerate and respectful of their neighbors, one is an inconsiderate asshole. I pay the asshole $100/month to do what everyone else does because they're a decent person. End result: being an inconsiderate asshole earns you $100/month. If you value fairness, this is already a bad outcome.
Now the other five people are upset, so they start making noise in the hope that I pay them $100. All this noise makes everyone unhappy, since everyone has at least some noise intolerance, and I don't have $500/month I can give away. I try to renegotiate the contract with the asshole, and he refuses. The other people can't back down, because they know this would ensure that they would never be respected as a bargaining partner again because even if I didn't pay them the money they would eventually stop making noise. The apartment becomes intolerably loud. This is an extremely bad outcome.
It becomes tempting to suggest th...
Why do I see a prohibition on murder as a kind of property right (in one's body) while you see it as a government regulation?
Property rights are government regulation. There are no such inherent rights.
The rights vs. regulation distinction is another example of gratuitous moral realist language that we should probably avoid.
So all the important issues like economic freedom and labor policy and maximizing utility and suchwhat get subordinated to whether you're secreting more neurotransmitters in response to money loss or images of sad coal miners.
If people's political opinions come partly from unchangeable anatomy, it makes the program of overcoming bias in politics a lot harder, and the possibility of coming up with arguments good enough to change someone else's opinion even more remote.
But a good first step would be to follow Greene's advice and change our moral language ...
I have minimal aversion to monetary loss², but wasting time makes me angry.
2) Actually, it's more complicated than this, because I agonize over spending money when shopping.
Exactly the same happens to me!
Yesterday, I overcame this by deciding which amount of money to spend before entering the store, and once inside I would only be deciding how to spend that amount (as though I had been given a gift card, though this analogy didn't occur to me yesterday).
You do realize that Obama college volunteer plan included a $30/hour refundable tax credit? It was basically paying young people very good tax free salaries to do volunteer work. Keynesian economics at its best!
We could compare how much more sensitive to noise you are than Bill by comparing how you each rate the distraction/impairment from various levels of noise.
I promise there is a decibel level that Bill thinks is damaging, and in need of regulation.
It shouldn't be surprising that psychological differences inform our political intuitions. Hollywood doesn't make people liberal. Artistic / creative people are more likely to be liberal, and they're more likely to move to Hollywood.
We can define a psychological dimension as authoritarian vs non-authoritarian. Non-authoritarian psychology makes people more experimental and creative. They color outside the lines. They are more interested in art, theater, acting or music. They are more likely to experiment with alternative religions and spiritual pract...
I have a strong pain signal from lost money and from lost time. To the extent that I can introspect on the workings of my insula, I think that this is one impulse for me, rather than two as Yvain describes - one for time and one for money.
If I am correct that my brain processes the loss of time using the same moral hardware as the loss of money, what could explain why some people have one impulse covering both cases, while other people have a separate one for each?
The idea that regulation is "for the good" of someone somewhere is a rationalization. It is primarily about power and revenue.
So it seems possible to me that I have an oversensitivity to noise and Bill has an undersensitivity to it.
That seems to imply that the typical case is the "correct" one, and that somehow your (or Bill's) case is invalid because it's non-typical.
If noise means that you can't sleep, study or concentrate, and you can't really help this, then this is a valid factor that should be taken into account.
[edit] though after reading further down i can see that you appreciate that.
I like this post, because I really think that you are trying to understand other people instead of merely dismissing them.
What implications does this analysis have for those of us who have changed deeply held political beliefs (more than once)? Is it really a change in brain structure or chemistry? Have I been rewired to get upset about different things than I used to?
If you're going to talk about government regulation please understand that it is the epitome of the is-ought problem and you need a seriously rigorous chain of reasoning before I can take it seriously. I have yet to see a regulatory proposal that provides this.
Yesterday, in the The Terrible, Horrible, No Good Truth About Morality, Roko mentioned some good evidence that we develop an opinion first based on intuitions, and only later look for rational justifications. For example, people would claim incest was wrong because of worries like genetic defects or later harm, but continue to insist that incest was wrong even after all those worries had been taken away.
Roko's examples take advantage of universal human feelings like the incest taboo. But if people started out with opposite intuitions, then this same mechanism would produce opinions that people hold very strongly and are happy to support with as many reasons and facts as you please, but which are highly resistant to real debate or to contradicting evidence.
Sound familiar?
But to explain politics with this mechanism, we'd need an explanation for why people's intuitions differed to begin with. We've already discussed some such explanations - self-serving biases, influence from family and community, et cetera - but today I want to talk about another possibility.
A few weeks back, I was discussing harms with Bill Swift on Overcoming Bias. In particular, I was arguing that one situation in which there was an open-and-shut case for government restriction of private activity on private property was nuisance noise. I argued that if you were making noise on your property, and I could hear it on my property, that I was being harmed by your actions and that there was clearly just as much a case for government intervention here as if you were firing flaming arrows at me from your property. I fully expected Bill to agree that this was obviously true but to have some reason why he didn't think it applied to our particular disagreement.
Instead, to my absolute astonishment, Bill said that noise wasn't really a problem. He said he lived on a noisy property and had just stopped whining and gotten on with his life. I didn't really know how to react to this1, and ended up assuming either that he'd never lived in a really noisy place like I have, or that he was such a blighted ideologue that he was willing to completely contradict common sense in order to preserve his silly argument.
In other words, I was assuming the person I was debating was either astonishingly stupid or willfully evil. And when my thoughts tend in that direction, it usually means I'm missing something.
Luckily in this case I'd already written a long essay explaining my mistake in detail. In Generalizing From One Example, I warned people against assuming everyone's mind is built the same way their own mind is. One particular example I gave was:
I can't deal with noise. If someone's being loud, I can't sleep, I can't study, I can't concentrate, I can't do anything except bang my head against the wall and hope they stop. I once had a noisy housemate. Whenever I asked her to keep it down, she told me I was being oversensitive and should just mellow out.
So it seems possible to me that I have an oversensitivity to noise and Bill has an undersensitivity to it. When someone around me is being noisy, my intuitions tell me this is extremely bad and needs to be stopped by any means necessary. And maybe Bill's intuitions tell him that this is a minor non-problem. I won't say that this is actually behind our disagreement on the issue - my guess is that Bill and I would disagree about government regulation of pollution from a factory as well - but I think it contributes and it makes our debate much less productive than it would have been otherwise.
Let me give an example of one place I think a mind difference *is* behind a political opinion. In Money, The Unit of Caring, Eliezer complained that people were too willing to donate time to charity, and too unwilling to donate money to charity. He gave the example of his own experience, where he felt terrible every time he gave away money, but didn't mind a time committment nearly as much. I fired back a response that this was completely foreign to me, because I am happy to give money to charity and often do it before I've even fully thought about what I'm doing, but will groan and make excuses whenever I'm asked to give away time. I also mentioned that this was a general tendency of mine: I have minimal aversion to monetary loss2, but wasting time makes me angry.
A few months ago, Barack Obama proposed a plan (which he later decided against) to make every high school and college student volunteer a certain amount of time to charity. Although I usually like Obama, I wrote an absolutely scathing essay about how unbearably bad a policy this was. It was a good essay, it convinced a number of people, and I still agree with most of the points in it. But...
...it was completely out of character for me. I'm the sort of person who heckles libertarians with "Stop whining and just pay your damn taxes!" Although I acknowledge that many government policies are inefficient, I tend to just note "Hmmm, that government policy is suboptimal, it would be an interesting mental puzzle to figure out how to fix it" rather than actually getting angry about it. This Obama proposal was kind of unique in the amount of antipathy it got from me.
So here's my theory. My brain is organized in such a way that I get minimal negative feelings at the idea of money being taken away from me. We can even localize this anatomically - studies show that the insula is the part responsible for sending a pain signal whenever the loss of money is considered. So let's say I have a less-than-normally-active insula in this case. And I get a stronger than normal pain signal from wasted time. This explains why I prefer to donate money than time to my favorite charity.
And it could also explain why I'm not a libertarian. One consequence of libertarianism is that you have every right to feel angry when you're taxed. But I don't feel angry, so the part of my brain that comes up with rational justifications for my feelings doesn't need to come up with a rational justification for why taxation is wrong. I do feel angry about being made to do extra work, so my brain adopted libertarian-type arguments in response to the community service proposal. I predict that if I lived in one of those feudal countries with a work levy rather than a tax, I'd be a libertarian, at least until the local knight heard my opinions and cut off my head.
And I don't mean to pick on libertarians. I know different people have completely different emotional responses to the idea of other people suffering. For example, I can't watch documentaries on (say) the awful lives on mine workers, because they make me too upset. Other people watch them, think they're great documentaries, and then spend the next hour talking about how upset it made them. And other people watch them and then ask what's for dinner. You think that affects people's opinions on socialism much?
Imagine a proposal to institute a tax that would raise money for some effort to help mine workers in some way. Upon hearing of it, different people would have an emotional burst of pain of a certain size at the thought of hearing of a tax, and an emotional burst of pain of a different size at the thought of considering the mine workers. Neither of these bursts of pain would be proportional to the actual size of the problem as measured in some sort of ideal utilon currency (note especially scope insensitivity). But the brain very often makes decisions by comparing those two bursts of pain (see How We Decide or just the insula article above) and then comes up with reasons for the decision. So all the important issues like economic freedom and labor policy and maximizing utility and suchwhat get subordinated to whether you're secreting more neurotransmitters in response to money loss or images of sad coal miners.
If this theory were true, we would expect to find neurological differences in people of different political opinions. Ta da! A long list of neurological findings that differ in liberals and conservatives. Linking the startle reflex and the disgust reaction to the policies favored by these groups is left as a (very easy) exercise for the reader3.
This may require some moderation of our political opinions on issues where we think we're far from the neurological norm. For example, I am no longer so confident that noise is such a big problem for everyone that we would all be better off if there were strict regulations on it. But I hope Bill will consider that some people may be so sensitive to noise that not everyone can just shrug it off, and so there may be a case for at least some regulation of it. Likewise, even though I don't mind taxes too much, if my goal is a society where most people are happy I need to consider that a higher tax rate will decrease other people's happiness much more quickly than it decreases mine.
Other than that, it's just a general message of pessimism. If people's political opinions come partly from unchangeable anatomy, it makes the program of overcoming bias in politics a lot harder, and the possibility of coming up with arguments good enough to change someone else's opinion even more remote.
Footnotes
1) I am suitably ashamed of my appeal to pathos; my only defense is that it is entirely true, that I have only just finished moving, and that this post is hopefully a more appropriate response.
2) Actually, it's more complicated than this, because I agonize over spending money when shopping. I seem to use different thought processes for normal budgeting, and I expect there are many processes going on more complex than just high versus low aversion to money loss.
3) Possibly too easy. It's easy to go from that data to an explanation of why conservatives worry more about terrorism, but then why don't they also worry more about global warming?