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Jackercrack comments on Open thread, Oct. 13 - Oct. 19, 2014 - Less Wrong
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I honestly couldn't say. In the borderline cases you would presumably need some kind of impartial observer with sufficient specialist knowledge. Luckily, I don't have to worry about borderline cases because the three cases we have here are fairly obvious. For an example of an obvious case of homo sapiens being led into things against his best interest consider smoking. It is extremely rare that smoking is in anyone's best interest given the high cost in both money and years of life such a habit entails.
I feel that's a major issue you'll have to face.
Sure. People have smoked a variety of dried plants (including but not limited to tobacco and marijuana) for a very long time. Much, much longer than advertising has been around. So, what's the "best interest" here, who decides what it is, and who "leads" people into something against their best interest?
Note, by the way, that if you honestly can't say who decides what's in a person's best interest (other than herself, of course) then the phrase "It is extremely rare that smoking is in anyone's best interest" doesn't mean anything.
Ideally I would measure best interest compared to the human utility function, but we do not have the luxury of a fully unpacked utility function. In the mean time I'll just go with (length of life x happiness) - (very large number x atrocities committed). As to who leads someone against their best interest, that would be advertisers as the agents of companies who wish to sell people things. Some advertisers also move people towards their best interest. The point is that the best interest of the buyer and the best interest of the seller are rather disconnected and intersect rather randomly. The best interests of the people being sold to are far less relevant to the people doing the selling than the amount of money a person can be persuaded to spend.
Edit: I feel like this would be a good place to put a chart of cigarette usage by % of population over the years. At current time, 42% of people smoking have tried to quit over the last year. I feel like this is fairly conclusive: these people are acting against their own self interest
Have you read any behavioural economics? These are rather central things to the theory and there are books out there that can explain this a lot better than me.
Also, we're getting sidetracked again. I thought the whole advertising thing was just a useful example to talk about the original disagreement about charity vs giving to political parties.
It doesn't look like you've read my post. Who leads this guy, for example? People like him have been doing this for hundreds of years at least.
Yes, I have. I understand how people can be influenced. I still don't understand how someone is going to decide what is in, for example, my best interest.
No-one decides what is in the best interest of a singular person except that person. This kind of stuff is only really applicable to large populations where you can shift the conditions to raise or lower usage by 10% by raising barriers against harmful activities and lowering them for beneficial activities. By raising barriers I mean for example increasing the cost of cigarettes through taxes while increasing knowledge by printing cancer statistics on packaging, an effective strategy that the UK has been using for a while now. Applying it to singular people involves far more direct intervention than most people are willing to deal with and tends to cause problems. I am essentially espousing soft paternalism.
That guy is smoking a tobacco cigar in India I assume? He is influenced by the people around him who don't know how much damage is done by smoking, by the ready and cheap availability of the thing he wants to smoke, by the physical addictiveness of the plant, by the status change associated with smoking (positive or negative) and by his own state of knowledge about the effects of his actions. People like him have been doing this for hundreds of years and it was a reasonable choice given the knowledge they had because no-one knew that it was dangerous and caused cancer. Now the knowledge exists, and it has become clear that it is a bad choice. It has negative utility.
I did read your post. I couldn't figure out where what you were getting at. I was honestly wondering if you were trying to use Socratic method on me or something. Your point was not clear to me, it still isn't. Could you clarify?
Empirically that's not true. There is a large number of laws and regulations, for example, which claim to exist in my best interest -- from the seat-belt laws to the FDA.
So are the, ahem, implementation difficulties are the only reason why you espouse soft paternalism and not hard? If applying "this kind of stuff" to individual people didn't cause problems, would you have issues with it?
My point, stated bluntly, is that no one is qualified to judge what is in a person's best interest except for that very person. And given that it fails on the individual level, it fails on the aggregate level as well.
A side theme here is that I highly value autonomy and am quite suspicious of paternalism.
Ah, right you're talking about the specific practical implementation of these things. My bad. I don't have a better model than the current one kicking about, that's for sure. The ideal of the current model in my country (the UK) is that the scientific community figures out what things are unambiguously helpful and unambiguously harmful and legislation is enacted to maximise and minimise those activities. More ambiguous things don't tend to get legislation enacted. That the actual implementation of the model falls short in a number of ways is obvious and unfortunate, but I don't know enough about the subject to propose a better solution. If you have one I would be interested to hear it.
For it not to cause problems people would have to be fine with an outside force making a large number of their decisions for them. It appears to be an inherent human trait to dislike excess meddling by any outside force so I'm not entirely sure that such a population exists. This may simply reflect a western view of looking at things though, my knowledge of the mindset of Chinese people for example is obviously insufficient.
I would still have one issue with it even if people didn't mind being meddled with. Hard paternalism implies bans on things, hard rules that are not allowed to be broken. There are almost always situations where the reasons behind a rule do not apply. With hard paternalism a person would be prohibited from doing something even when it made sense in that specific situation.
You've been blunt with me so I'll do you the same courtesy. People are bad at judging what actions maximise their own best interest. I believe that a majority of people are highly effected by the environment in which they make their decisions and can be induced to make different decisions, good or bad, through clever manipulation. Most people do not have the knowledge to deal with manipulation like this in an effective manner. It is an asymmetrical fight, because advertisers can apply whole departments of people and the latest knowledge of neuroscience to manipulating the inherent biases of the human brain while normal people devote very little or no time to countermeasures. As the knowledge and money base of advertising increases I would expect people to be more and more swayed.
I will give some specific examples and predictions to bring this back to earth. If healthy food was cheaper and as easy to prepare as unhealthy food, a country would have a healthier populace of a lower weight and live longer. If soft drinks high in fructose and other simple sugars were advertised less, diabetes rates would drop. Some examples of things known to work: When cigarettes were made expensive and the health effects well known such that people who decided to smoke were regarded as silly, cigarette use decreased so did lung cancer (after an appropriate time lag). If pension payments are made automatic as part of a pay cheque and employees simply have to check a box to opt out, employee pensions savings increase.
The idea of soft paternalism is to discourage bad decisions while still allowing them to be made. It is to make the right thing to do, the easy thing to do. The barriers against bad decisions are intentionally low such that anyone with a good reason can circumvent them. This allows policy makers to improve people's lives en mass without actually curtailing any specific person's autonomy very much. This has the useful side effect that if a bad decision is made by the government people can route around it with comparative ease.
By the way, that pattern of highly valuing autonomy and intense suspicion of government intrusion is something I find extremely common in US Americans, but is comparatively rare in my country the UK. I would be interested to talk to you about possible causes if you're up for it. My immediate thought is that the US government has given people more reasons to distrust it but I would much rather know your thinking, seeing as you live there.
A few general points.
We don't live in an idealized environment where our society is ruled by benevolent philosopher-kings or run by bodhisattva mandarins. The government consists of elected politicians and unelected bureaucracy of civil servants -- all of them human, always prone to mistakes, not always having the best intentions, corruptible by power, having their own incentives, etc. etc. The question of the appropriateness of soft paternalism has to be evaluated in the context of real political systems where the chances of the paternalistic tools being misused or abused are high.
Yes, people are bad at judging what's in their best interests, but there's no one who is better. There are lots and lots of examples, historical and more recent, of situations where some authority decides it knows what's better for the people -- and then it turns out that isn't the case at all. So the next authority (or even the same one) says sorry, carts out the corpses, cleans up the mess a bit, and then says "ah, but now we certainly now what is best for you!". Rinse and repeat...
In the same vein you posit that regular people are defenceless against advertisers, but they are defenceless in the same way against government propagandists as well. In fact, paternalism legitimises the idea that people are sheep in need of a leader, they cannot be trusted to arrange their own affairs. Infantilising the populace is a very seductive political technique.
You can probably google up discussions of this topic, it's not an uncommon one. Off the top of my head I can come up with:
From the American perspective, the situation over the pond looks like an unmitigated disaster. Between the ever-present cameras, the ASBOs, the terrorist-sympathisers legislation, etc. things are looking bloody awful over there...
To be quite honest I'd trust my government to do soft paternalism but not yours.
Do you know what's fascinating? We have an almost identical view of your country from over here, what with the rampant abuse of power among policemen, the massive online data mining, the gun crime, the bizarre and aggressive politics where shouting louder seems to be considered legitimate. And the tv news, it's just astounding. I've watched Fox and it is just bizarre, with people actually shouting at guests, belittling respected experts who were asked onto the show, cutting their mike when they start to disagree. Anyone who tried that here would be out of a job in short order. CNN may be better but they are still hilarious in a number of ways. That filibustering doesn't get a politician voted out instantly was originally shocking to me.
I could go on for a long long time. Suffice to say, the UK is actually doing pretty good. We have a few problems but they aren't the ones you've head about in the news. The ever present cameras have not been abused and are generally only used when a crime happens to have been committed in front of them (assault, burglary ect). The ASBOs are no worse than the worse rednecks or people from the ghettos. Also, terrorist-sympathiser legislation? I don't remember that.
Does it, now? Ignoring the minor matters like recent riots or how you managed to drop considerably below Ireland in GDP per capita, didn't you recently almost lose a large chunk of the country? And while the scurrying at Downing the week before the referendum when the poll results came out gets full marks for amusement value, it does seem that a bit less than half of all Scots have a problem with trusting Whitehall to do what's best for them.
Evidently in the UK it's a crime to write bad poetry about martyrdom.
Tell that to the girls from Rotherham. Or does that not count as "in the news" since your news media refused to report on it while is was happening? Not to mention the people attempting to blow the whistle on this back in 2001, were promptly prosecuted for hate speech.
Do you see the problem with this juxtaposition?
It goes back too far for that. I would suggest it goes back to distrust of the British colonial government. A country formed by rebelling against the government is going to end up distrusting government more.
I was thinking more about events during the lifetimes of people actually alive today. Being taught about the struggle against the British from a young age would count.
However, I've just realised that this entire line of reasoning is extremely speculative and my probability of being right is small. Probably best to scrap the line of discussion.
How about, being immersed in a culture where the standard story is of a noble rebel fighting against an oppressive government?
"Intentionally low" barriers have this way of expanding when the people who put the barriers in place either find they don't work to keep people away, or stand to benefit from making the barrier stronger.
Also, you're still forcing your decision on people who are poor enough that they can't afford to get across the barrier easily. (Whether that happens, of course, depends on the exact barrier used.)
You're right and yes, I am. That's the downside really. Policy debates should not appear one sided and all that. The upsides appear to outweigh the downsides from where I'm sitting. I just haven't come across a better system yet and I don't plan on waiting generations for AI to find an answer for these questions.
I measure a slightly reduced autonomy in areas of obvious harm to be a lesser downside than increased death rates.