Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky @ Cato Unbound

XiXiDu

A response essay written by Eliezer Yudkowsky posted at Cato Unbound for the issue Brain, Belief, and Politics:

Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky suggests that the partial mutability of human traits is an auxiliary reason at best for Michael Shermer’s libertarianism. Take that fact away, and Shermer’s politics probably wouldn’t go with it. Yudkowsky says that his own small-l libertarian tendencies come from the long history of government incompetence, indifference, and outright malevolence. These, and not brain science, are the best reasons for libertarians to believe what they do.

Moreover, we make a logical error when we infer shares of causality from shares of observed variance; the relationship between nature and nurture is cooperative, not zero-sum. One thing, however, is clear: Human genetic variance is tiny, as indeed it must be for human beings all to constitute a single species. Environmental manipulation can only achieve so much in part because of this universal human inheritance.

The lead essay has been written by Michael Shermer:

Liberty and Science by Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer discusses scientific findings about belief formation. Beliefs, including political beliefs, are usually the result of automatic or intuitive moral judgments, not rational calculations. One cluster of those intuitions presumes that human nature is malleable; these usually produce a liberal politics. Another group of intuitions presumes that human nature is static; these tend to produce conservatism. But Shermer argues that humans really fall somewhere in between — malleable, within some important limits. He argues that this set of findings should produce a libertarian politics.

A response essay written by Eliezer Yudkowsky posted at Cato Unbound for the issue Brain, Belief, and Politics:

Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky suggests that the partial mutability of human traits is an auxiliary reason at best for Michael Shermer’s libertarianism. Take that fact away, and Shermer’s politics probably wouldn’t go with it. Yudkowsky says that his own small-l libertarian tendencies come from the long history of government incompetence, indifference, and outright malevolence. These, and not brain science, are the best reasons for libertarians to believe what they do.

Moreover, we make a logical error when we infer shares of causality from shares of observed variance; the relationship between nature and nurture is cooperative, not zero-sum. One thing, however, is clear: Human genetic variance is tiny, as indeed it must be for human beings all to constitute a single species. Environmental manipulation can only achieve so much in part because of this universal human inheritance.

The lead essay has been written by Michael Shermer:

Liberty and Science by Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer discusses scientific findings about belief formation. Beliefs, including political beliefs, are usually the result of automatic or intuitive moral judgments, not rational calculations. One cluster of those intuitions presumes that human nature is malleable; these usually produce a liberal politics. Another group of intuitions presumes that human nature is static; these tend to produce conservatism. But Shermer argues that humans really fall somewhere in between — malleable, within some important limits. He argues that this set of findings should produce a libertarian politics.

From the beginning of Eliezer's piece

I think my libertarianism rests chiefly on the empirical proposition—a factual belief which is either false or true, depending on how the universe actually works—that 90% of the time you have a bright idea like “offer government mortgage guarantees so that more people can own houses,” someone will somehow manage to screw it up, or there’ll be side effects you didn’t think about, and most of the time you’ll end up doing more harm than good, and the next time won’t be much different from the last time.

I think there's an interesting congitive phenomenon going on here. If you tell the average Joe that you propose to deregulate some industry or activity, they easily call to mind the potential negative consequences - "they'll just pollute as much as they want now" or "only the biggest companies will buy up the fishing quotas" etc. What the average Joe doesn't think about are the potential negative effects of regulation - unintended consequences and regulatory capture for example. Regulatory capture is a sort of funny case because though the concept was invented by a Marxist (if memory serves), only economists and libertarians seem to think about it. When the average Joe does recognize these shortcomings, they virtually always get to designing a "better" law, agency, and/or policy. For evidence, I offer r/politics, though there's an admittedly liberal slant there (relative to the population).

I'm not sure what is causing this bias or even how to categorize it, but it seems related to how most people respond to the broken window fallacy. Some effects are "seen" and others "unseen", or rather more easily seen and less easily seen (which correspond to something like direct effects and indirect effects), and the average person is much better at anticipating "seen" effects. Something like this is going on in the political case - at least in terms of unintended consequences, but that's not all of it. Regulatory capture occurs, in part, because people in the government are no more or less corrupt than people outside of the government. Most people are quick to suspect private companies of being corrupt, but never a new regulatory agency to reign in that private company. The solution to a government failure is always government. Rarely does the average Joe even ask the question "is the government even good at doing this sort of thing?" At least at the surface level, this looks nothing like "seen" and "unseen." I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, but I suspect figuring it out will help explain political preferences.

Regulatory capture is a sort of funny case because though the concept was invented by a Marxist (if memory serves), only economists and libertarians seem to think about it.

There's nothing really funny here: regulatory capture is a theory of how the social democratic mixed economy etc is prone to certain sorts of institutional failure in accomplishing its goals, so of course the various sorts of people who don't believe in that will find it appealing. Likewise, you'll see both Marxists and libertarians readily endorse the idea that the purpose of most we... (read more)

27Scott Alexander15y

At the obvious risk of making this too political (in my defense, everyone else started it), I'm not sure "no one except us ever realizes how bad regulation is" is the real problem here. In my metacontrarianism post I talked about how when someone discovers a counterintuitive idea that only smart people can understand, they can become very excited and use it as a membership test for the Secret Society Of Smart People, to the point where they enter a Happy Death Spiral and blow it out of all proportion. (for example, it's easy to think of ways modern Western civilization is better than primitive tribal civilization - more wealth, less prejudice, fewer tapeworms. There are also a few counterintuitive hard-to-understand ways primitive tribal civilizations are better than us - closer family bonds, more attuned to the natural world. And so many intellectuals focus on these to the exclusion of everything else and talk about how Western society is hopelessly corrupt and evil. Where they should be saying "Western civ is great, but not quite as great as the average person might think," we instead get "Western civ is awful." This passes unchallenged because the good things about Western civ like absence of tapeworms have become background noise to which everyone has adjusted. One interesting marker for this kind of behavior is that people still feel contrarian when they say it even though everyone who hears it agrees with them.) I feel that some aspects of opposition to regulation might be this kind of behavior. There's a large background of successful regulation (like banning lead and fluorinating water and not dumping trash on the streets and so on) that no one ever notices (unless they've just come back from a country that doesn't have it!) There's also some highly available examples of regulation that goes wrong. People feel like these must be hard to catch and so can start a death spiral around how intelligent they are to notice. So my explanation for why so many peop

9Raemon15y

I haven't actually heard the term "regulatory capture" before, but the concept of big businesses owning regulators is a pretty universal rallying cry of the left.

44

Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky @ Cato Unbound

44

44

44

Is That Your True Rejection? by Eliezer Yudkowsky @ Cato Unbound

44

44