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Logos01 comments on [link] I Was Wrong, and So Are You - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
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."
In popular culture we really like to deride "semanticism". But sometimes it damn well counts.
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.
For that matter, where is a marginal dollar going to make a bigger hit to self worth?
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.
At that point you're accepting the framework and simply deliberating over the precise terms.
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)
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.
Libertarians did get it right, actually - 70% of them. And 4% of progressives got it wrong.
70% of libertarians vs 96% of progressives, yes.
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.
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.
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?
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?
... 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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.