LESSWRONG
LW

[link] I Was Wrong, and So Are You — LessWrong

25 [link] I Was Wrong, and So Are You

by [anonymous]

9th Nov 2011

4 min read

25

A article in the Atlantic, linked to by someone on the unofficial LW IRC channel caught my eye. Nothing all that new for LessWrong readers, but still it is good to see any mention of such biases in mainstream media.

I Was Wrong, and So Are You

A libertarian economist retracts a swipe at the left—after discovering that our political leanings leave us more biased than we think.

...

You may have noticed that several of the statements we analyzed implicitly challenge positions held by the left, while none specifically challenges conservative or libertarian positions. A great deal of research shows that people are more likely to heed information that supports their prior positions, and discard or discount contrary information. Suppose that on some public issue, Anne favors position A, and Burt favors position B. Anne is more likely than Burt to agree with statements that support A, and to disagree with statements that support B, because doing so simplifies her case for favoring A. Otherwise, she would have to make a concession to the opposing side. Psychologists would count this tendency as a manifestation of “myside bias,” or “confirmation bias.”

Buturovic and I openly acknowledged that the set of eight statements was biased. But these were the statements we had available to us. And as we explained in the paper, some of them—including those on professional licensing, standard of living, monopoly, and trade—did not appear to fit neatly into a partisan debate. Yet even on those, respondents on the left fared worst. What’s more, in separate research, Buturovic found that the respondents themselves either had difficulty classifying some of the statements on an ideological scale, or simply believed those statements were not, prima facie, ideological. So while we thought the results were probably exaggerated because of the bias in the survey, we nonetheless felt that they were telling.

Buturovic and I largely refrained from replying to the criticism (much of which focused on myside bias) that followed publication of the article. Instead, we planned a second survey that would balance the first one by including questions that would challenge conservative and/or libertarian positions.

...

Buturovic began putting all 17 questions to a new group of respondents last December. I eagerly awaited the results, hoping that the conservatives and especially the libertarians (my side!) would exhibit less myside bias. Buturovic was more detached. She e-mailed me the results, and commented that conservatives and libertarians did not do well on the new questions. After a hard look, I realized that they had bombed on the questions that challenged their position. A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position.

Writing up these results was, for me, a gloomy task—I expected critics to gloat and point fingers. In May, we published another paper in Econ Journal Watch, saying in the title that the new results “Vitiate Prior Evidence of the Left Being Worse.” More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon, people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. Seventy-eight percent of libertarians believed gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns. Overall, on the nine new items, the respondents on the left did much better than the conservatives and libertarians. Some of the new questions challenge (or falsely reassure) conservative and not libertarian positions, and vice versa. Consistently, the more a statement challenged a group’s position, the worse the group did.

The reaction to the new paper was quieter than I expected. Jonathan Chait, who had knocked the first paper, wrote a forgiving notice on his New Republic blog: “Insult Retractions: A (Very) Occasional Feature.” Matthew Yglesias, writing at ThinkProgress, summed up the takeaway: “Basically, there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there.” Nothing illustrates that point better than my confidence in the claims of the first paper, especially as distilled in my Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Shouldn’t a college professor have known better?

I break here to comment that I don't see why we would expect this to be so given the reality of academia.

Perhaps. But adjusting for bias and groupthink is not so easy, as indicated by one of the major conclusions developed by Buturovic and sustained in our joint papers. Education had very little impact on responses, we found; survey respondents who’d gone to college did only slightly less badly than those who hadn’t. Among members of less-educated groups, brighter people tend to respond more frequently to online surveys, so it’s likely that our sample of non-college-educated respondents is more enlightened than the larger group they represent. Still, the fact that a college education showed almost no effect—at least for those inclined to take such a survey—strongly suggests that the classroom is no great corrective for myside bias. At least when it comes to public-policy issues, the corrective value of professional academic experience might be doubted as well.

Discourse affords some opportunity to challenge the judgments of others and to revise our own. Yet inevitably, somewhere in the process, we place what faith we have.

Personal Blog

25

[link] I Was Wrong, and So Are You

New Comment

96 comments, sorted by

top scoring

Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 10:37 AM

Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)Change truncation settings

[-]Incorrect14y210

More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon, people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. Seventy-eight percent of libertarians believed gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns.

I... I notice that I am confused. How could such a large percentage of people get these easy questions wrong? Are they interpreting it as a question of signalling without even reaching the point of evaluating it as an ontological statement?

[-]TheOtherDave14y220

(nods) I would expect so.

But also, even among people who do evaluate it, there are many who will answer strategically... that is, something like "Of course the answer is A. But I believe that if I say A, my answer will be used to defend conclusions I disapprove of, whereas if I say B, my answer will be used to defend conclusions I approve of. So I will say B."

Actually, I wonder now whether anyone has done studies of people's linguistic processing when reading sentences like this. It probably would not be too difficult to determine whether the sentence is being parsed differently in the first place or not, and if so to establish potentially interesting specifics about how the "default" parsing is being interfered with.

[-]komponisto14y110

Are they interpreting it as a question of signalling without even reaching the point of evaluating it as [a propositional] statement?

That is more or less the human default. And of course you won't get them to admit it if you ask them "are you just signaling?", because that very question and its answer have signaling value themselves.

This isn't a deliberate deception; I'm convinced that most people's brains process language first and foremost as signaling-transactions and not as propositional content.

8Swimmy14y

I am far from confused. This is the entire theme of the series "politics is the mind-killer." Arguments are soldiers, and giving aid to enemy soldiers gives aid to the enemy position. I don't think people of any political persuasion are immune to this.

7SilasBarta14y

The first question is highly suspect in its value in testing one's economics knowledge, considering that all basic economics texts (left, right, center, libertarian, or whatnot) teach that preferences are ordinal (ranked rather than real-valued) and interpersonally incomparable. So people who took economics would have been explicitly told to answer oppositely from what Klein considered correct! This point was raised in the MR discussion and other places. (Bob Murphy wrote an introductory text that uses Klein's exact sentence as an example of an economic error in reasoning.) I agree that there's a sense in which a dollar means more to a poor person than a rich, but that sense is not an economic one, but one of morality or cognitive science.

4Vladimir_Nesov14y

Consider the following thought experiment. Depending on a coin toss, you'll become either rich or poor. Your decision is between granting $1 to the hypothetical version of yourself that's poor, or to one that's rich. Which do you choose? It seems like a perfectly clear-cut decision problem, with an equally clear-cut correct answer. There is also an obvious Counterfactual Mugging variant, where we won't need to stipulate actual expected change in your rich/poor status and can consider granting money to your present (vs. different counterfactual) self, rather than different future self. (This is meant as a focusing statement, not an objection to your comment.)

3SilasBarta14y

That's just a rephrasing of the general intuition about the decision-theoretic optimality of giving a marginal unit of money to poor vs. rich people. It doesn't change the fact that people are taught in economics that preferences are ordinal, making the claim in the survey economic nonsense and therefore uninformative about the answerer's reasoning skills or economic knowledge. A large number of causes could explain either answer: perhaps the respondent was parroting their economic "teacher's password" when they said no, rather than answering the decision-theoretic analog.

0Matt_Simpson14y

I would have phrased it differently - I would have said that the standard economics is just wrong here, but it doesn't matter for observable implications of preferences, so they can get away with it. I'm not sure if this means I disagree with you or not - it may just be semantics. edit: I should have said observable behavioral implications of preferences. There are, in fact, neurologically observable implications of cardinal preferences, but the fact that preferences are cardinal doesn't have an impact on the behavior of an agent. Well, at least if we assume that agent is rational. Now that I think about it, there's the potentially a nonrational agent that's a counterexample to this statement.

0SilasBarta14y

I think we agree. I refer to Murphy et al's position as "hyper-anti-IUCism" (IUC = interpersonal utility comparison). If you restrict the topic to a specific domain, you have to throw out IUCs, but in the general case they are a meaningful, helpful concept. See my remarks in the second link. (Btw, why do I get URL bloat when I copy a URL shortcut from this site?)

7malthrin14y

The meta-pattern for reasoning errors is question substitution. A question with an available answer is substituted for the actual query and the answer is translated using intensity matching if the units don't match. In this case, the subjects were primed to recall the cheers of their football team by the context of a political survey. The question they substituted was, "Does this statement resemble any of the professed beliefs of my political affiliation?" Their answers were never considered empirically. Most questions never are.

2buybuydandavis14y

Yeah. It's hard for literal types like myself to come to grips with the idea, but yes, there are many different ways to respond to a question besides answering with the literal truth. You could answer for approval of others. Self approval. For signalling. For group inclusion. To fight the great fight against evil. To fight the great fight against bad ideas. If you really pay attention, I think you'll often find that people are largely indifferent to identifying or professing literal truth. That's a God that just doesn't speak to them.

2paulfchristiano14y

I should disclaim that I would certainly agree to the statement "A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person," but I still find your level of incredulity a little surprising and probably disingenuous. It should be completely clear that the disagreement here is not about questions of fact but about what the question means. (Edit: Actually, that shouldn't be completely clear at all. However, it should be clear that all reasoned disagreement is of this form. The process for most respondents is quite likely to go "Hear the statement -> Interpret statement as 'redistribution good' -> disagree" without regards for propositional content. If you want to get ridiculous results from interpreting people's statements literally, you could probably find statements much harder to justify than this one.) What does "means more" denote here? In many contexts it is standard to evaluate strength of preference on a scale of dollars; according to this view everyone values a dollar equally. And there is pragmatic justification for this habit: if I want to determine who should receive a good, dollars are probably the best measure of strength of preference. If I gave the good to someone for whom it "meant more" but who was willing to pay less, I could implement a Pareto improvement by giving the good to the person who was willing to pay more and then performing an appropriate monetary transfer. If we take this view, a dollar doesn't mean more to a poor person: everything else just means less. Maybe you think this is unreasonable (it is certainly odd), but if you allow any fixed yardstick (I'm guessing that most respondents who disagreed with the statement would have used bundles of particular comforts and discomforts as their yardstick) for measuring strength of preference, then you get similar artifacts--for example, people who care less about stress or physical pain, people who are willing to work harder, etc. Interpersonal comparisons are inherently problematic

4Incorrect14y

I believe it is generally a useful heuristic that if someone asks you a question and it seems to be true by definition, you are misinterpreting their question. For example, if I ask you "Why are humans mortal?", and your usual definition of "human" includes mortality then you should probably not use your usual definition in interpreting the question.

1paulfchristiano14y

It is also a useful heuristic, if you are trying to understand how someone else answered a question, that you shouldn't reason "But that isn't a useful way to answer the question!" and then become confused rather than annoyed. As I said, I would readily agree to the statement, but disagreement seems defensible if only vacuously and it seems wrong to interpret it as "stupidity" (though it would certainly reveal that someone is looking for reasons they are allowed to disagree).

-1[anonymous]14y

So a homeless man with no income prefers a McDonald's cheeseburger less than a person with a comfortable income and a moderately-successful standard of living, who prefers it less than a very wealthy person making $5 million USD annually? It costs a dollar no matter who's buying it...

3paulfchristiano14y

But not everyone values it for a dollar? People who don't buy burgers value them for less than a dollar, and people who buy them value them for more, so people who eat at McDonald's value it more than millionaires. I gave the standard economic justification for using dollars to quantitatively estimate desire. There is a moral question here: should I take money from rich people to give it to poor people? Reasonable people I know tend to say yes, at least in the world as it is today, and I agree. But this is a moral question, not a factual question, as far as I can tell.

0[anonymous]14y

My own answer is "Yes, with caveats, and acknowledging the real-world context we live in makes a difference to this question." In a purely abstract sense I find it, well, problematic at best, but I also take note of the fact that most functional, somewhat wealthy (in their own ecological and economic context if not by present-day Western standards) societies existing prior to capitalism had gentle, largely-voluntary methods that had normative rather than authoritative sway over people. Potlatch, for example -- throwing a fantastic party and giving away your stuff is socially upvoted, but it's not actually compulsory, and the population sizes and living patterns ensure you're going to to benefit from someone else's potlatch later, so it's in your own interests if you're wealthy to trade permanent access to specific material items for reputation, secure in the knowledge that you will get back items you need to make your living and accrue wealth later. We don't have anything quite like that in Western culture; our own tax system seems to be more a mutation of the feudal "tribute-paying" behavior set, which is quite different (everyone pays a portion of their production into a central pool, leaders decide what to do with it, only now we have some democratic legislative access built into that). Redistributive mechanisms seem to stabilize a society, and enable the generation of collective forms of wealth (case in point: the national highway system here in the US); I don't think everyone having the exact same outcome is a realistic, achievable or even desireable goal, but I do think that everyone being genuinely able to choose freely is -- the difference between myself and most free-market advocates there being I do not think our current state of affairs looks much like that, or that it's even achievable from our current standpoint until there's no significant cluster of people unable to vote with their dollar about life necessities (just as you cannot make an uncoerced

0Nick_Tarleton14y

Why do you believe this conflicts with the majority consensus here?

0lessdazed14y

I don't know what this means, because I can think of several interpretations of it. I do know that characterizing your position as being not "purely" the result of one factor, in "conflict with the majority consensus here" is almost certain to be denotationally incorrect. People are reasonable and you do not distinguish yourself by thinking a result stems from more than one cause. You might say that you mean to say that they ascribe more importance to these factors than you do, and that meaning was clear. My point, other than not knowing exactly what "Malthusian" means here, is that you are phrasing your position in a way that makes your opponents wrong almost by definition - it's a dark art thing to do, even if it can be inferred that you mean to say you only disagree about how much more important they think a factor than you do. This is a spectrum of conditions. I think you put this very well because the idea of a free market is almost independent from questions of distribution. A society could, for example, heavily tax, incomes, property, and sales and provide no or few services other than a large stipend to each individual. So it is a matter of demographics alone, "most" people's beliefs, rather than being essential.

0[anonymous]14y

Put simply: I do not buy the idea that poverty in the society I live in is caused by scarcity as a limiting factor on available resources for them (there's plenty of nutritious, nourishing food around, and enough land currently tapped agribusiness that in a purely abstract sense we already produce enough food for everyone currently alive on Earth to hypothetically be eating 3500 calories a day; there's tons of land and even unoccupied homes), or that the numbers of people caught by it reflect primarily those who aren't capable of making and doing something bigger and more value-creating for themselves and others around them.

3lessdazed14y

Who disagrees with "in a purely abstract sense we already produce enough food for everyone currently alive on Earth to hypothetically be eating 3500 calories a day; there's tons of land and even unoccupied homes"? You mean slightly different circumstances would see most people primarily in poverty be not caught in it, and people not caught in it caught in it? I think LW has some unusual beliefs about the relative unimportance of character traits in decision making.

0[anonymous]14y

Or they might not have the money to spare. Not all economic decisions are constrained by preference -- there is a real point in life, occupied by a great many people even in the US, where the desire for a McDonald's Cheeseburger is basically irrelevant to the fact that right now, you cannot afford it. If you're in that position, you could also probably really use it right now (since you have to be pretty broke to not be able to throw a dollar for a cheeseburger whenever you want); it might be the only food you get all day. I daresay someone who cannot reliably purchase a McDonald's cheeseburger whenever they want to probably values it more, for its implication to their livelihood, than someone who has the money and eats lunch there every day.

7paulfchristiano14y

You don't seem to be using the word "preference" in the same way I am (or economists do). If I have only $2, and so can't afford a $1 cheeseburger, then we say that I prefer $1 to a cheeseburger. You have a choice--either keep your $1, or get a cheeseburger--and you choose to keep your dollar. This seems perfectly clear. In the extreme case, when everything you own and your labor is literally worth less than a cheeseburger, then this doesn't exactly work: it may be that you would rather get a cheeseburger than a $1, so that you will buy a cheeseburger at literally the first opportunity. Very few people are this poor, and those who are don't generally buy hamburgers as soon as they get $1. There are much better ways to spend a dollar: cheeseburgers aren't worth $1 to the rational poor. Now whether we interpret this as meaning that the poor care less about a cheeseburger, or as saying that they care more about $1, seems to me to be a question of semantics which no one cares about.

2wedrifid14y

I'm confused too. Now I'm wondering if that figure seems so unrealistic because I don't expect blatantly obvious stupidity to come from libertarians. Would I find it just as surprising if a different political group believed an equally stupid thing in such numbers? Perhaps not. I'm still skeptical.

[-]CuSithBell14y200

I'm confused too. Now I'm wondering if that figure seems so unrealistic because I don't expect blatantly obvious stupidity to come from libertarians.

Now I'm confused. I expect any significant political party (or similarly wide grouping of people) to produce blatantly obvious stupidity.

But you've been around here a while, you know all this stuff. So what am I missing? Why would you expect libertarianism to be an exception? (If there is a LW-appropriate answer.)

6[anonymous]14y

Lots of LWers are libertarians, far more than in the general population. Also a significant subset of Libertarians like to think of themselves as being driven by reason (which I think is a situation somewhat similar to the one with polyamory btw). Obviously this dosen't imply that Libertarians will on average be significantly or even measurably more rational or less blatantly stupid, but hey our brains are wired to be stupid in that way! :)

0CuSithBell14y

True enough. Ah, c'est le cerveau.

5arundelo14y

Much respect to the people who answered "don't know". (As a science nerd from childhood, it pained me to admit this, but knowing the layout of the solar system has no direct benefit for most people.)

0CuSithBell14y

I suppose so. And it's a little harder to generate using Sovereign Reason while in the middle of a quiz.

4grouchymusicologist14y

A couple of ideas: (1) The centrality of markets to libertarian thinking. Anyone who knows enough economics to even bother identifying as a libertarian should be fairly unlikely to get questions like this wrong -- questions that don't go at all beyond an Econ 101 grasp of supply-and-demand and marginal utility. (2) The lack of an explicitly libertarian option as a major party in US politics. Because of that, not many people really default to self-identifying as libertarian. Thus, libertarians are self-selected for relatively high levels of political and economic knowledge. (I've done my best to phrase these as neutral statements and not arguments on the merits of any political position -- thus as "LW-appropriate answers"!)

[-]Desrtopa14y180

Anyone who knows enough economics to even bother identifying as a libertarian

I don't find that self identification as a libertarian demands any degree of economic fluency, any more than social conservatism demands familiarity with the contents of the Bible.

8Swimmy14y

I think you're missing a large component of libertarians: People who want to be outsiders or contrarians. If you watch the documentary The Most Hated Family in America about the Westboro clan, you'll find that one of the converts proudly declares that he foolishly used to believe libertarianism, until he found the teachings of Fred Phelps. He's now in one of the most outside groups in American culture. I think this is a big draw for some people, and it attracts them to cults, conspiracy theories, and unpopular political/philisophical theories. I don't know what percentage of libertarians they make up, but I'm sure they exist. 30% wouldn't surprise me.

0CuSithBell14y

I think these are good ideas. But still, it's "the third largest and fastest growing political party in the United States" (according to 'Kipedia)! As such, I'd be surprised if libertarians in general could apply econ-101-level reasoning across the board, even in support of "enemy soldiers".

3wedrifid14y

More that I didn't have a primed cache for "idiotic things people might say in support of libertarianism" that would be on the order of stupidity of "we aren't causing shitloads of global warming" or "there are WMDs (at the appropriate time)". Just a primed cache for "somewhat naive and oversimplistic things people might say in support of libertarinism". The more mainstream stupidities I am already desensitized to. (Note that this train of thought is all along the lines of a "What is the nature of my confusion?" inquiry.)

2CuSithBell14y

Well, true enough. The first things in that category that come to mind for me are "the free market solves everything always without downsides" and "the government is going to kill me unless I stockpile canned goods and ordnance," but they're much less prominent views than the others. Though, it's a rapidly growing party. Give them time, I'm sure they'll come up with something idiotic to champion.

0Mercy14y

Curious, one of the top entries in my primed cache of "idiotic things people might say in support of libertarianism" is "we aren't causing shitloads of global warming". It's the one of the most popular topics among libertarian columnists, beating out smoking, PC at the BBC, Europe and Laurie Penny. True, American Libertarians generally seem to be more contrarian than the sort we get in the UK, but I seem to remember both Bryan Caplan and Will Wilkinson making similar observations about the other side of the pond.

8CuSithBell14y

Well, 31% of progressives said that a company with the largest market share in a particular area is a monopoly, and as noted above, 40+% of conservatives think that a dollar does not mean more to a poor person than it does to a rich person.

0wedrifid14y

Wow. Just wow.

6TheOtherDave14y

I have to admit, I've stopped even being amazed by this sort of thing. My working theory is that about 40% of questions on surveys get answered without actually bothering to read the question.

3CuSithBell14y

Unfortunately, there's a correlation between political leanings and chance of getting this sort of thing wrong - conservatives were more likely to get the former question right, and progressives more likely to get the latter one right.

4TheOtherDave14y

(nods) You're right, of course. I shouldn't even have made the comment, I'm just in a depressed and cynical morass at the moment.

0CuSithBell14y

Sorry about that. Perhaps stay away from politics for a bit, and remember that this data on the averages tells you very little about the few super-important outliers. (And that people who aren't paying attention are more likely to answer based on their political party's position, probably.)

1TheOtherDave14y

Oh, the depressed cynicism is coming from an entirely different channel (I just came out of a staff meeting at my office); it's not a result of this exchange, just simultaneous with it. I'll get over it. Though I do in fact stay away from politics in the sense you mean it here, for precisely the reason you have in mind...it does not do wonders for my mood. Although the exercise of defending the reasonableness of my political opponents and looking for holes in the positions of my political allies is one I find valuable, albeit generally best done in the privacy of my own mind. In any case, thanks for your concern.

-1CuSithBell14y

Yeah... yeah. It's all a little disheartening.

4[anonymous]14y

I don't think people were compensated for correct answers. For the people taking the survey, selecting one answer had no more utility than another (except maybe if fucking with a survey can be considered fun). Therefore, I don't think that you call it stupidity for anyone to select one answer rather than another. It just didn't matter.

2Kaj_Sotala14y

On the other hand, if you compensate people for the right answer, they start using the criteria of "what do I think the survey-maker thinks is the correct answer", which may not be the same as "what do I think is the correct answer".

1Desrtopa14y

Or contributing to a trend that suggests "people ascribing to my ideology are less likely to believe stupid things."

1wedrifid14y

The stupid thing is the answer, not the person giving it. Heck, it's politics. Giving an answer because it happens to be correct rather than sending the optimal signalling would be the stupid thing.

0thomblake14y

It doesn't even seem strange to me. The obvious thing for most people to do is to respond with the "correct" signal. But amongst those who actually do think about the question, there's still a matter of interpretation: I might answer "no", depending on what I thought they meant by "means". If I was thinking of it as a symbol and was considering what its semantic value was, I would probably think it was the same for both rich and poor people - they both correctly understand what is meant by "dollar" and value that thing differently. I might think this was true, depending on what you mean by "fail" and "reduce". Since it's trivially true that a gun control law should reduce people's access to guns by some extent, the question when interpreted charitably would seem to be asking whether gun control laws are effective at their goals of significantly reducing criminals' access to guns. I might also wonder what "reduce access" means; it could mean "for each person, it is harder to get a gun", or it could mean, "some people who could formerly get guns now cannot". The latter seems strictly false, since industrious people can find some way around any law.

2Prismattic14y

My general take on "A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person" is that, unless the respondents were chosen only from the subset of people with a basic grounding in economics" the researchers likely felt that they could not use the statement "The marginal value of an additional dollar is greater to a poor person than in it is to a rich person" because they could not assume that respondents would understand the concept of marginal value. Possibly just mind projection on my part, but that is what I assume this statement was supposed to "translate" to. Of course, the fact that we have do discuss the meaning of the statement is already evidence that the researcher assumed to much when creating the question. Anecdotally, I have on numerous occasions encountered arguments against redistributive taxation based solely on deadweight loss (ignoring the declining marginal value of the dollar), so the mistake in question certainly exists. It's difficult to say how much more it exists among conservatives and libertarians than among liberals, however, because conservatives/libertarians and liberals are likely to have divergent opinions about redistributive taxation anyway for tribal and other reasons. I interpret the gun control proposition using a supply-and-demand model. Legal prohibition increases costs for producers (and to some extent for consumers) -- the costs associated with evading enforcement. These costs function like a tax, shifting the supply curve. Since this results in less total guns being sold, I take the proposition to be false.

-1Logos0114y

I identify as politically libertarian. I also find that the question "Does a dollar mean more to a poor person than it does to a rich person?" somewhat loaded semantically. Depending on which of a wide array of various interpretations of the statement I could answer -- legitimately -- either way. And yet it is taken as a "given", which progressives "got right" and libertarians "didn't". I wonder what would happen to that rate of answers if the question was rephrased as follows: "A poor person will suffer more for the lack of one dollar than a rich person will suffer for the lack of one dollar.", and as follows: "A poor person is more likely to base his self-worth on how many dollars he owns than a rich person is likely to baes his self-worth on how many dollars he owns." Both of these rephrasings are potential "effectively synonymous" statements to the original question, but I hope that their answers are quite obviously inverted from each other.

2jimrandomh14y

Huh? I don't see these statements as equivalent at all. If I try to map the second sentence onto the first, I get "Dollars mean more to a poor person than they do to a rich person". Use of the singular word dollar, to my dialect, rules out the "fraction of self-worth" interpretation.

2dlthomas14y

For that matter, where is a marginal dollar going to make a bigger hit to self worth?

-6Logos0114y

1Raemon14y

I think a person with 10,000,000 dollars' sense of self worth will barely fluctuate with the addition or subtraction of a dollar, whereas a person with 1,000 dollars may actually care.

-3Logos0114y

At that point you're accepting the framework and simply deliberating over the precise terms.

0Raemon14y

I agree that the question should have been worded better, and yes, it's loaded semantically. But I think it's factually true that for purposes of purchasing happiness, status, lack-of-suffering, preference-satisfaction or most other metrics I can think of that matter to individual people, people are likely to value a dollar more highly if they have fewer of them. (Yes, I realize that's still operating within a framework, but as soon as you're talking about "what something means to someone" as supposed to "what something is capable of purchasing" you're inherently defining the issue in terms of "what people care about" rather than "what things can purchase," and yes, I think that means the question has a factual answer)

-2Logos0114y

And you just switched back from context #2 to context #1. This is, frankly, frustrating my hope of a dialogue here. Do you recognize, at least, that you have done this? (Changed contexts / rephrasings)? You can't discuss "what does this say of my value as a person" in terms of "how useful is this?" Value ethics are not utility ethics.

1beriukay14y

Yeah, when I read that bit, I heard a small Bill Clinton in my head, echoing the line "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

8Logos0114y

In popular culture we really like to deride "semanticism". But sometimes it damn well counts.

0lessdazed14y

Libertarians did get it right, actually - 70% of them. And 4% of progressives got it wrong.

0Logos0114y

70% of libertarians vs 96% of progressives, yes.

0JoshuaZ14y

This is not at all equivalent. A rich person might for example still base much of his self-worth on how much money he has but each dollar will be a smaller amount of self-worth. That's at least in the most obvious way of reading this statement to me. I don't think your suggested wordings are any better. Possibly something like "All else being equal, a poor person will gain more utility from a dollar than a rich person would"? Even that has problems but that seems slightly better.

1Logos0114y

Actually, that's semantically equivalent to rephrasing #1, and as such semantically contradictory to rephrasing #2. I figured someone might raise this objection. :) Let's define the "rich" person as owning 10,000,000 dollars, and the poor person as owning 1,000. If the rich person places a high proportion on his self-worth on how much money he owns (say, 80% of his self-worth) then 10,000,000+1 yields an increase of self-evaluation by 0.00000008. If, however, the poor person places .001% of his self-worth on how much money he owns, then 1,000+1 yields an increase of 0.00000001. So the rich person's "self-worth score" in this scenario is increased by a factor of 8 as compared to the poor person's. Now, is it likely that poor people, lacking money, will place any but the weakest of weightings onto how they judge themselves as people based on the amount of money they currently possess? Is the opposite likely? That, then, becomes the nature of the question.

0mwengler14y

You fail to understand what rich and poor mean. While a rich person may be using dollars to keep score, a poor person is using them to stay alive. Do you really think that someone with a million dollars could care about each one of them as much as someone who has only one dollar cares about his one dollar? That the million dollar owner could be more devastated by the loss of two of his million dollars than the one-dollar owner will be by the prospect of not eating if he loses his one dollar?

-1JoshuaZ14y

I don't follow how your paragraph starting with "Let's" says anything along the lines of your paragraph starting with "Now". Can you expand?

0Logos0114y

... the "Now" isn't actually 'saying anything'. There's no assertions in the "Now" paragraph. It was the introduction of a new query to the dialogue: "How do the poor associate money with their estimates of self-worth?" In other words; after my "Let's" gave a hypothetical scenario with specific numbers in order to demonstrate that, "Yes, statement #2 could be true", my "Now" raised the question of: "But is it actually true?"

0JoshuaZ14y

Ok. In that case, the answer simply seems to be "yes, they will do so." At least from personal experience, people in a very low income bracket are extremely happy to move up to a slightly higher income bracket, and the barely employed look down on the unemployed homeless while the homeless with jobs consider themselves better than the homeless without jobs. I don't however know of any real data backing this up.

0Logos0114y

Would you be willing to agree with the notion that a non-trivial percentage of people might come to the conclusion that it either could go either way or that poor people "find ways to believe they are good people without money"? This gets us back to the original topic -- the 30% of libertarians who answered as 4% of progressives did and this automatically meaning that the progressives got the question "more right" than the libs. This despite any apparent effort to figure out which version of the question (and again, I only gave TWO variants) said person was answering.

4JoshuaZ14y

At this point you are taking a strained interpretation of the sentence that is far from the natural interpretation, and then positing that people would take that strained interpretation and then might think a thought based on that interpretation that still requires a off belief based on how most poor people seem to think. This seems to be more of an attempt to make a specific tribe not as wrong as they were rather than just acknowledge that many members of the tribe are wrong. I strongly suspect and would be willing to bet money that if one phrased the question in terms of utility or close to your other wording the numbers would look nearly identical.

1Logos0114y

You know, the funny thing is that I don't see it as 'strained' at all. And I don't think it's even that un-exceptional a belief -- though it is a "callow" one. I can rephrase it again and see if it seems more "familiar" to you. * The poor stay that way because they don't care about money. * The rich only get that way because they're greedy. * It's perfectly easy to be happy without money. And why, pray tell, would you believe that most people don't think they have valid notions about how other people think? How often, for example, have you heard libertarians talk about (or get denigraded for adhering to) the notion of "picking yourself up off your bootstraps"? The Google Search term poor people don't care about money yielded 227,000,000 hits. ... and there's the bias. :-) (One way or the other, someone here is biased and not thinking clearly.) Now, I've given a great deal -- at this point -- of evidence to affirm my position. If you really wanted to, I'd be more than happy to go through a list of events in the last few weeks where I have openly and directly disagreed with people who are "in-tribe" to me. So you're willing to bet money that context #1 would be nearly identical to the original phrasing, eh? How about context #2? Moreover: how about if we were to ask how many people thought context #2 (absent context #1) was at least one way to read the original statement? (I once again want to point out that context #2, by tying the concept of "value" to "this makes me a better person", isn't suited to questions of utilitarian evaluation. They can't be. It's a virtue-based statement, and it is a modal failure to require utilitarian framing for value-based norms.)

6Alejandro114y

The Google Search term "poor people don't care about money", however, yields only 7 results for the exact phrase. Many of the highest-ranked results from the search withoute quote marks are indeed from conservative/libertarian sites, but not all of them (e.g., some prominent results are "Minnesota Republicans To Outlaw Poor People Having Money" and "Rush Limbaugh Says Poor Don't Deserve Healthcare") And the vast majority of the millions of results are from completely unrelated sites, as usually happens when you search for a phrase made of common words without using quote marks.

2JoshuaZ14y

You've made some good points here, especially in regard to the fact that empirically a lot of people do seem to think that the poor don't care about money, and could have been answering the question in that context. I have to update my estimate that the change would not be that large if phrased explicitly in a way that emphasized utility of a dollar. My previous estimate was around 70% that the numbers for both would stay within +/- 10 percent or so (so the liberal/progressive "incorrect" response would be some level below 14% and the conservative/libertarian "incorrect" response would be around 21-41%). Given your arguments I still suspect this is true but need to reduce my confidence by quite a bit, to around 55% or so. So I'd still be willing to put even money on this. But I probably need to think about this more and update further.

[-]CuSithBell14y180

I Was Wrong, and So Are You

I think I'd feel a little more encouraged if the title was "I Am Wrong, and So Are You".

[-][anonymous]14y120

It seems to me that the main problem with that article is that the survey questions were badly designed. The writer claims that the questions “tested people’s real-world understanding of basic economic principles” – but in fact they merely tested people’s willingness to interpret vague or misleading questions (with nothing at stake...hardly “real-world”) as the experimenter intended.

Given that ambiguity it is hardly surprising that respondents chose to interpret the questions in a way that flatters their personal ideology. This does not demonstrate that the respondents are irrational in any way; if anyone is irrational it is the person who thinks that these surveys prove such a thing.

A few of the questions are listed with the "obviously false" answer in brackets:

a dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person (disagree)

This doesn’t specify whether it is referring to an average rich/poor man, or as a general condition for all rich/poor men. If the former then it is obviously true, but if the latter then it is false. A highly motivated entrepreneur of a penny-pinching disposition might care more about a dollar than an ascetic monk, for example.

when

... (read more)

4Raemon14y

I think most of your assessments are accurate.

1Mercy14y

More than that, a socialist would almost certainly argue that they are being exploited by the landowner, by the recipient of any fee they have to pay (for instance, for intellectual property) their own government if they pay taxes, and so on. The socialist definition of exploitation is extremely broad but roughly isomorphic to rent. It's also to my knowledge the only remotely rigorous definition of exploitation that would make sense in that context. So the question is pretty much explicitly asking "are you a socialist" and taking yes as being wrong about economics. Since the author's of the study disagree with socialists about economics that seems entirely fair, though obviously as an argument that socialists don't understand economics it's circular. Still it would be clearer if they said "demonstrably being exploited", but I think they are assuming that people who think exploited is vague default to no.

2[anonymous]14y

Thanks for the elaboration, which I endorse. In the context of the study, the problem is that the wrongness of certain answers in the survey is supposed to be attributable only to political bias. I am not a socialist but I think it's fair to say that the socialist view of economics, as far as economic facts are concerned, is not merely a bias. It may be wrong, but it should be credited at least as a mistaken school of thought rather than having all of its conclusions attributed to "myside bias". Although as I pointed out there are other problems with the survey, in this case the investigators should have limited themselves to questions that after correction, practically any intelligent person would agree upon - i.e. as close as possible to tautology whilst retaining the possibility for political bias to affect the results. I can't think of a good way to reword that particular survey question, so I'd probably scrap it. On the other hand: Ceteris paribus an average poor person, in comparison to an average rich person, is likely to be more motivated to perform some task (of which he is presumed capable) by the promise of a given monetary reward. Drug prohibition doesn't increase the difficulty or inconvenience experienced by an average individual in obtaining hard drugs whatsoever Answer Agree/Disagree/Unsure I would expect "myside bias" to be less evident if the survey questions were like this (i.e. not very open to interpretation).

[-]HonoreDB14y90

I think and hope you could drastically reduce this effect by giving people an ADBOC box to check. It would promote the idea to the test-taker's attention, and it would be extra appealing since it's clearly the most sophisticated option and shows you're a nuanced thinker.

Unfortunately, real life discourse generally doesn't have a prominently displayed ADBOC checkbox. People have confidently informed me that gun control laws fail to reduce people's access to guns.

[-]lessdazed14y60

I don't remember where I saw it, but after the Gulf of Mexico spill last year there was a poll about offshore drilling asking if the spill had changed opinions on offshore drilling in general. People were asked if the incident made them less likely to support further drilling, more likely to support further drilling, or neither. A significant percentage selected the second, presumably responding as if the question asked if they favored offshore drilling in general.

It's logically possible the spill could have made someone more supportive of drilling. This w... (read more)

6see14y

Why do you presume that? Certainly, it's not particularly probable that most people would rationally update in favor of drilling, but it's perfectly possible that significant numbers of people acting irrationally would respond to attacks on drilling by becoming more strongly in favor of drilling than before the attacks. Increasing fanaticism when under siege is not an unprecedented reaction in human psychology.

4lessdazed14y

In studies I've seen showing this effect, people deny it in themselves. It is an embarrassing thing if true, I think that's obvious. I expect people to misunderstand or mis-think the question rather than answer honestly after accurate introspection. I think it was an accident.

2see14y

"I didn't care about X until it came under attack" is not considered a damaging admission in most political discussions I've seen. While the usual meaning of that declaration is that the person has merely rallied around his political tribe's position, the person involved doesn't characterize it that way. What he knows is he didn't have a strong opinion, and now he does, and he assumes that he has good reason for it. He'll acknowledge that it's new while resenting any implication that the new opinion is irrationally-acquired. If you try to break down the why, he might notice that he's being irrational, but then you can flip a coin as to whether he'll be embarrassed and update rationally or be embarrassed and double-down. The blowout was an accident, yes. Things like people calling for a moratorium on drilling afterward were not, they were, in political parlance, "attacks". People of the tribe that pre-accident included drilling-is-bad among their beliefs used the accident as ammunition to attack their enemies, and people of the enemy tribe, many of whom had not actually thought about drilling in the Gulf before, rallied to defend when bombarded.

1lessdazed14y

A trick coin. Oops, I get it now.

Moderation Log

Curated and popular this week

96Comments

Comment Permalink

[anonymous]14y00

There is a moral question here: should I take money from rich people to give it to poor people? Reasonable people I know tend to say yes, at least in the world as it is today, and I agree.

My own answer is "Yes, with caveats, and acknowledging the real-world context we live in makes a difference to this question."

In a purely abstract sense I find it, well, problematic at best, but I also take note of the fact that most functional, somewhat wealthy (in their own ecological and economic context if not by present-day Western standards) societies existing prior to capitalism had gentle, largely-voluntary methods that had normative rather than authoritative sway over people. Potlatch, for example -- throwing a fantastic party and giving away your stuff is socially upvoted, but it's not actually compulsory, and the population sizes and living patterns ensure you're going to to benefit from someone else's potlatch later, so it's in your own interests if you're wealthy to trade permanent access to specific material items for reputation, secure in the knowledge that you will get back items you need to make your living and accrue wealth later.

We don't have anything quite like that in Western culture; our own tax system seems to be more a mutation of the feudal "tribute-paying" behavior set, which is quite different (everyone pays a portion of their production into a central pool, leaders decide what to do with it, only now we have some democratic legislative access built into that). Redistributive mechanisms seem to stabilize a society, and enable the generation of collective forms of wealth (case in point: the national highway system here in the US); I don't think everyone having the exact same outcome is a realistic, achievable or even desireable goal, but I do think that everyone being genuinely able to choose freely is -- the difference between myself and most free-market advocates there being I do not think our current state of affairs looks much like that, or that it's even achievable from our current standpoint until there's no significant cluster of people unable to vote with their dollar about life necessities (just as you cannot make an uncoerced choice at the barrel of a gun, neither can you do so when you're starving or facing death from a treatable disease).

I also don't think the vast inequalities in say, the US result from purely Malthusian factors (much less conditions like global food unavailability), beliefs I'm willing to defend here if asked for sources but which at any rate seem to conflict with the majority consensus here.

Nick_Tarleton14y00

I also don't think the vast inequalities in say, the US result from purely Malthusian factors (much less conditions like global food unavailability), beliefs I'm willing to defend here if asked for sources but which at any rate seem to conflict with the majority consensus here.

Why do you believe this conflicts with the majority consensus here?

0lessdazed14y

See in context