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Vladimir_M comments on Open Thread: May 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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Morendil:
Astronauts are soldiers. Unlike doctors, soldiers have a huge incentive not to let their beliefs depart too far from reality because of status or any other considerations, for the simple reason that it may easily cause them personally, and not just someone else, to get killed or maimed. Thus, military culture is extremely practice-oriented. Due to their universal usefulness, checklist-driven procedures are a large part of it, and having to participate in them is not considered demeaning, even for super-high-status soldiers like fighter pilots. Eventually, strict rule-driven procedures associated with the military often even develop a cool factor of their own (consider launch or takeoff scenes from war action movies).
Of course, soldiers who lack such incentives will, like WW1 generals, quickly develop usual human delusions driven by status dynamics. But astronauts are clearly not in that category.
So your narrative is "checklists fail to take root because they are low-status, except where their being a serious matter for the people who use them (not just bystanders) causes them to be accepted, and in one such case they gain high status for extraneous reasons".
Why, then, isn't the rising cost of malpractice insurance enough to drive acceptance of checklists? What does it take to overcome an initial low-status perception? How do we even explain such perception in the first place?
As I understand it, drastic, rare, and somewhat random punishment does little to change behavior. Reliable small punishments change behavior.
That analysis would be inconsistent with my understanding of how checklists have been adopted in, say, civilian aviation: extensive analysis of the rare disaster leading to the creation of new procedures.
Again, my point was to prompt an alternative explanation to the hypothesis "checklists are not used by surgeons because the practice is intrinsically low-status". Why (other than the OB-inherited obsession of the LW readership with "status") does this hypothesis seem favored at the outset?
How would we go about weighing this hypothesis against alternatives? For instance, "checklists are not used because surgeons in movies never use them", or "checklists are not used because surgeons are not trained to understand the difference between a checklist and a shopping list", or "checklists are not used because surgeons are reluctant to change their practices until it becomes widely accepted that the change has a proven beneficial impact"?
Morendil:
One relevant difference is that the medical profession is at liberty to self-regulate more than probably any other, which is itself an artifact of their status. Observe how e.g. truckers are rigorously regulated because it's perceived as dangerous if they drive tired and sleep-deprived, but patients are routinely treated by medical residents working under the regime of 100+ hour weeks and 36-hour shifts.
Even the recent initiatives for regulatory limits on the residents' work hours are presented as a measure that the medical profession has gracefully decided to undertake in its wisdom and benevolence -- not by any means as an external government imposition to eradicate harmful misbehavior, which is the way politicians normally talk about regulation. (Just remember how they speak when regulation of e.g. oil or finance industries is in order.)
The reason I attach high plausibility to such explanations is simply that status is the primary preoccupation of humans as soon as their barest physical subsistence needs are met. Whenever you see humans doing something without an immediate instrumental purpose, there is a very high chance that it's a status-oriented behavior, or at least behavior aimed at satisfying some urge that originally evolved as instrumental to human status games.
The alternatives you mentioned are by no means incompatible with status-based explanations, and some of them are in fact reducible to it. For example, the behavior of doctors in TV shows is a reflection of the whole complex of popular beliefs and attitudes from which the medical profession draws its extraordinary status -- and which in turn shapes these beliefs and attitudes to some extent. So, as I wrote in one of my other comments, if doctor TV shows started showing cool-looking checklist rituals prior to the characters' heroic exploits, these rituals would probably develop a prestigious image, like countdown procedures in action movies, which would likely facilitate their adoption in practice.
At the very least this seems to be privileging an extraversion hypothesis. You can only gain status by interacting in some way with other people, yet it is not uncommon for people to shun company and instead devote time to solitary occupations with scant status benefits.
Under your justification for favoring status explanations, the only reason anyone ever reads a book is to brag about it. This seems wrong, prima facie, as well as simplistic.
Morendil:
Note that I also mentioned "satisfying some urge that originally evolved as instrumental to human status games" in my above statement. Today's world is full of super-stimuli that powerfully resonate with ancestral urges even though they don't actually lead towards the goals that these urges had originally evolved to promote, and are often even antithetical to these goals. Just like candy bars cheat the heuristic urges that evolved to identify nutritious and healthy food in the ancestral environment, it is reasonable to expect that solitary occupations with scant (or even negative) status benefits cheat the heuristic urges that originally evolved as useful in status games, or for furthering some other goal that they no longer achieve reliably in the modern environment.
You will probably agree that super-stimulation of status-seeking urges explains at least some non-beneficial solitary activities with high plausibility, for example when people neglect their real-life responsibilities by getting caught up in the thrill of virtual leadership and accomplishment provided by video-games. Of course, this by no means applies to all such activities; it is likely that the enjoyment found in some of them is rooted in urges that evolved for different reasons.
To address your above example, unless we assume some supernatural component of the human mind, I see no possible explanation of human book-reading except as a super-stimulus for some ancestral urges (whether status-related or not), unless of course it's done not for enjoyment, but purely to acquire information necessary for other goals. While it's far from being a complete explanation of human book-reading, it seems plausible to me that people sometimes enjoy books in part because it enhances their status signaling abilities in matters of erudition and taste. Also, it seems to me that stories super-stimulate the human urges for gossip, which are likely a device with an original status-related purpose, and all sorts of complex information may super-stimulate curiosity, whose evolution has likely been only partly status-based. These are of course just rough outlines of the complete truth, which we don't yet know.
On the other hand, to get back to the original topic, when it comes to issues where actual power and prestige in human societies is at stake, in any case I've ever given much thought, the prominent role of widespread status-related beliefs and behaviors seems to me strikingly obvious and without any rival explanations that would be even remotely as plausible. The ability to account for such explanations by evolutionary theories additionally enhances their plausibility, as well as the fact that many deep and accurate insights into human nature by classical writers and philosophers can be faithfully retold in the more explicit modern language of status dynamics.
There's nothing "super" about a book: no corresponding "normal" stimulus that elicits a natural response, such that a book is an exaggerated version of it.
Book-reading is explained straightforwardly enough as satisfying curiosity, a trait we share with many species (think cats).
If reading a book sometimes trumps the quest for status, then the latter cannot be THE primary preoccupation of people beyond bare physical subsistence. You will at least need to retreat to "an important" preoccupation.
Now, if you were to explore this topic without jumping to conclusions, perhaps you'd recognize this one example as the start of a list, and would in an unbiased manner draw up a somewhat realistic list of the activities typical humans engage in, and sort them into "activities having a high status component" and "activities not primarily status-related". Then we might form a better picture of "how important".
Morendil:
I disagree, for the reasons I've already discussed at length. You don't seem to have read my above comment carefully, or perhaps my exposition was poor.
I did mention curiosity as one part of the motivation for reading books. Moreover, the curiosity explanation itself contradicts your above claim: a book, or a story told any other way, presents far more material (albeit fictional) for curiosity-satisfaction than is available from real-life events, and this material is intentionally and skillfully crafted to have great appeal in this regard, so it clearly does provide a super-stimulus for this particular urge.
Besides, as I also mentioned in my above post, there is also the human urge for gossip, which is pretty obviously related to status games, and is clearly super-stimulated by (at least some) books and other story-telling media. Finally, there is also the motivation of status seeking via demonstrating taste and erudition. All these, and possibly many other factors would probably feature in a complete theory of this particular human behavior.
Again, you don't seem to understand my point about the difference between: (1) human behaviors that actually enhance status, or promote goals that lead towards its enhancement, and (2) behaviors driven by urges that had originally evolved for status-seeking purposes in the ancestral environment, but which misfire in the modern environment -- just like e.g. the human taste for sugar was a good nutritional heuristic in a sugar-poor environment, but leads us to bad nutritional choices in the present environment full of cheap sugar-rich super-stimuli.
But as I explained above, you don't seem to have understood my remarks about this example correctly. (I allow for the possibility that my writing was too bad to be understandable, of course.) I've explained the issue again now, and my conclusion is still that your example is incorrect. If you believe that my reasoning in this case is invalid, or if you have other examples that you believe refute my main thesis, I'd love to hear your arguments, but please make sure to address the substance of what I've written.
I read mostly non-fiction books, mostly to satisfy my curiosity. A recent example was "Freakonomics". That appears to defuse your argument...
I dispute that a book is a "superstimulus" in the same sense in which that term has predictive power when applied to herring gull parents, to the sexual arousal response in humans, or to the appeal of fast-food flavors. I am unwilling, more generally, to interpret the term "super-stimulus" broadly enough to encompass any case where a given behaviour is explained by an urge vaguely related to another urge that existed in the ancestral environment.
If books in general were superstimuli for some existing urge, then any book would elicit the hijacked response to that urge (and we would be able to make a book irresistible by exaggerating the relevant cues). Instead, I find myself discriminating quite sharply between "interesting" books and "boring" books. (For instance I can't stand the sight of most "trade" books that are supposed to appeal to programmers, like "Functional Programming in a Nutshell".)
Why do people knit? I'd say that the urges involved are mostly competence and caring, rather than status. Why do I learn how to solder, and take apart consumer electronics? Curiosity, not status.
The common theme is that caring, competence and curiosity did plausibly exist in the ancestral environment, so it isn't necessary to invoke status when there is a clearer link to other drives. I'm OK with having status (properly understood) take its rightful place in a pantheon of inherited drives, but it drives me nuts to see it trotted out to explain everything.
I just want to throw in a note that I don't think human motivation is adequately explained by status alone -- I would expand the list to SASS: Status, Affiliation, Safety, and Stimulation. (Where, as some folks here have pointed out, "Safety" might be more accurately described as stability, certainty, or control, rather than being purely about physical safety.)
Book-reading, in particular, is more likely to meet Safety/Stimulation needs than Status or Affiliation ones.... though you could maybe get those latter two from a book club or an academic setting.
pjeby:
I agree, but most complex and multi-faceted human behaviors are likely to be compelled by a mixture of these motives. My impression is that status features more often and more prominently that most people imagine, and its often masqueraded and rationalized by pretenses of other motivations.
My hypothesis is that super-stimulation of the same urges that cause people to enjoy gossip is responsible for a significant part (though by no means all) of human enjoyment of books and other ways of presenting stories. This would be a good example of super-stimulating an urge whose original evolution was to a large degree driven by status games, in a way that however has no direct relation to the present-day status games.
People just as routinely masquerade and rationalize the other three, actually.
However, that's because their operation is fairly opaque to consciousness. We have built-in machinery for processing social signals relating to Status and Affiliation, and during our "impressionable" years, we learn to value the things that are associated with them, and come to treat them as terminal values in themselves.
IOW, SASS is how we learn to have non-SASS terminal values. So, when a person claims to be acting out of a non-SASS value, they're not really lying. It's just that they're not usually aware of (i.e. have forgotten about) the triggers that shaped the acquisition of that value in the first place.
Plenty of other animals manage to be curious, needing actual stories. Also, some of us like to read things that aren't gossip or stories.
Presumably one could test your hypothesis by finding out whether individuals lose interest in reading when they gain status; my personal experience suggests this is not the case, and that instead books compete with other forms of stimulation.
So, ISTM that even if curiosity (and certain templates for what to be curious about) were shaped by status competition, this doesn't mean there is an operational connection between books and one's self-perception of status.
To a certain extent, we could say that everything is about status, in the same way that every organ is a reproductive organ. But saying that everything is X, is the same as saying as nothing is X - it reduces your predictive power, rather than increasing it.
So that list doesn't include curiosity. Are you denying that curiosity is a significant drive? Or (say) competence?
Curiosity falls under the "stimulation" heading, as does skill acquisition for its own sake (e.g. video games).
To be fair, the SASS list is more a convenient set of categories, than it is an attempt to be a comprehensive and rigorously-proven classification system. However, it's definitely "less wrong" than assuming everything is about status... yet not so unwieldy as the systems that claim 16 or more basic human drives.
The evolution of a desire for competence is an excellent question. Impulses such as curiosity and systemizing could be related to developing competence.
Systemizing could indeed be useful for your survival, and the survival of those around you, via tool-making, weapon-making, hunting/cooking techniques, etc... So systemizing could be a status-related adaptation.
Yet if your systemizing skills create a breakthrough (e.g. you design a useful tool), then your tribe may well accord you status, enhancing your survival and reproduction.
A desire for competence could also be useful for mating, because competence displays "good genes." This is true of skills that don't provide such obvious survival benefits, such as singing and dancing.
A desire for competence, and adaptations that facilitate its development (curiosity, systemizing), could well be useful for any combination of survival, reproduction, and status.
In the spirit of Morendil's question: what other professions should be shunning useful but low-status tools (particularly checklists) for the same reason as doctors, according to the status model? I don't know enough about (a) lawyers, (b) politicians, (c) businesspeople, (d) salespeople, or (e) other high status professions to judge either what your model would predict or what they do.
It's worth noting that engineering is (moderately-)high-status but involves risk of personal cost in case of error, making the fact that it shows widespread adherence to restrictive professional standards explicable under the status theory.
Now that's an interesting question! Off the top of my head, some occupations where I'd expect that status considerations interfere with the adoption of effective procedures would be:
Judges -- ultra-high status, near-zero discipline for incompetence.
Teaching, at all levels -- unrealistically high status (assuming you subscribe to the cynical theories about education being mostly a wasteful signaling effort), fairly weak control for competence, lacking even clear benchmarks of success.
Research in dubious areas -- similarly, high status coupled with weak incentives for producing sound work instead of junk science.
For example, there are research areas where statistical methods are used to reach "scientific" conclusions by researchers with august academic titles who are however completely stumped by the finer points of statistical inference. In some such areas, hiring a math B.A. to perform a list of routine checks for gross errors in statistics and logic would probably prevent the publication of more junk science than their entire peer review system. Yet I think status considerations would probably conspire against such a solution in many instances.
I disagree somewhat that judges face near-zero discipline for incompetence. Except for judges on the highest court in a jurisdiction, most judges frequently face the prospect that the opinions they author may be reversed. It is true that frequent reversals will almost never lead to the sanction of the judge losing his or her job (due to lifetime appointments or ineffectiveness of elections at removing incumbent judges except for the most serious and publicized faults). But the resulting hit to status for frequent reversals can be quite serious; and because judges are so high status, as you note, they tend to be very concerned with maintaining that status. The handful of judges I've known personally have been quite concerned with their reversal rate and they particularly don't want to be reversed in a way that is embarrassing to them because it suggests laziness, incompetence, poor reasoning, cutting corners, or the like. (On the other hand, reversal for disagreements that can be characterized as “political” is probably not seen as quite so status-lowering.) At any rate, the law does provide checklist-like procedures or guidelines in many instances, and most judges do follow them, at least in part because failure to do so could lead to reversal.
Expanding on your example of judges- this fits in with general problems for people in the legal professions. For example, there have now been for many years pretty decent understanding about problems with the standard line-up system for criminal suspects. There are also easy fixes for those problems. Yet very few places have implemented them. Similarly, there have been serious problems with police and judges acting against people who try to videotape their interactions with police. Discussing this in too much detail may however run into the standard mind-killing subject.
Morendil:
My understanding is that the present (U.S.) system of malpractice lawsuits and insurance doesn't leave much incentive for extraordinary caution by individual doctors. Once you've paid your malpractice insurance, which you have to do in any case, you're OK as long as your screwups aren't particularly extreme by the usual standards. Moreover, members of the profession hold their ranks together very tightly, and will give up on you only in cases of extremely reckless misbehavior. They know that unlike their public image, they are in fact mere humans, and any one of them might find himself in the same trouble due to some stupid screwup tomorrow. And to establish a malpractice claim, you need not only be smart enough to figure out that they've done something bad to you, but also get expert testimony from distinguished members of the profession to agree with you.
I am not very knowledgeable about this topic, though, so please take this as my impression based on anecdotal data and incomplete exposure to the relevant literature. It would be interesting if someone more knowledgeable is available to comment.
I'd say that in a sense, it's a collective action problem. The pre-flight checks done by fighter pilots (and even to some extent by ordinary pilots) are perceived as cool-looking rituals, and not a status-lowering activity at all, because these procedures have come to be associated with the jobs of high-status individuals. Similarly, if there was a cool-looking checklist procedure done by those doctors on TV shows, presented as something that is only a necessary overture for acts of brilliance and heroism, and automatically associated with doctors in the popular mind, it would come to be perceived as a cool high-status thing. But as it is, in the present state of affairs, it comes off as a status-lowering imposition on people whose jobs are supposed to be one hundred percent about brilliance and heroism.
Also, there is the problem of the doctor-nurse status disparity. Pilots, despite having much higher status, don't look down on their mechanics much; after all, they have to literally trust them with their lives. (And it's similar for other military examples too.) Not so for doctors; it is probably a humiliating experience for them to be effectively supervised and rebuked for errors by nurses. (Again, I'm not an insider in the profession, so this is just my best guess based on the available information.)
The above cited article answers that question almost directly: the idea that typical doctors are doing such a lousy job that they would benefit from a simple checklist to avoid forgetting trivial routine things contradicts the very source of their high status, namely the public perception of them as individuals of extraordinary character and intellectual abilities, completely unlike us ordinary folks who screw things up all the time by stupidly forgetting some simple detail. The author, as I noted earlier, feels the need to disclaim such implications to avoid sounding too radical and offensive. Medicine has been a subject of magical thinking in every human culture, and ours is no exception.
The people who decide malpractice suits are likely to be more sympathetic to pleas of having used one's judgment and experience but making a mistake, over having used a rigid set of rules from which one did not deviate even as the patient took a turn for the worse.