Open thread, 21-27 April 2014

Metus

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Thread started before the end of the last thread to ecourage Monday as first day.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Thread started before the end of the last thread to ecourage Monday as first day.

I get confused when people use language that talks about things like "fairness", or whether people are "deserving" of one thing or another. What does that even mean? And who or what is to say? Is it some kind of carryover from religious memetic influence? An intuition that a cosmic judge decides what people are "supposed" to get? A confused concept people invoke to try to get what they want? My inclination is to just eliminate the whole concept from my vocabulary. Is there a sensible interpretation that makes these words meaningful to atheist/agnostic consequentialists, one that eludes me right now?

The sense of fairness evolved to make our mental accounting of debts (that we owe and are owed) more salient by virtue of being a strong emotion, similar to how a strong emotion of lust makes the reproductive instinct so tangible. This comes in handy because humans are highly social and intelligent and engage in positive-sum economic transactions, so long as both sides play fair... according to your adapted sense of what's fair. If you don't have a sharp sense of fairness other people might walk all over you, which is not evolutionarily adaptive. See &quo... (read more)

1iconreforged12y

So, as I've heard Mike Munger explain it, fairness is evolution's solution to the equilibrium outcome selection problem. "Solution to the what?" you ask. This would be easy to explain if you're familiar with the Edgeworth box. In a simplified economy consisting of two people and two goods, where the two people have some combination of different tastes and different initial baskets of things. Suppose that you have 20 oranges and 5 apples, and that I have 3 oranges and 30 apples, and that we each prefer more even numbers of fruits than either extreme. We can trade apples and oranges to make each of us strictly better off, but there's a whole continuum of possible trades that make us better off. And with your highly advanced social brain, you can tell that some of these trades are shit deals, like when I offer you 1 apple for 12 of your oranges. Even though we'd both mutually benefit, you'd be inclined to immediately counteroffer with something a closer to the middle of the continuum of mutually beneficial exchanges, or a point that benefits you more as a reprimand for my being a jerk. Dealing fairly with each other skips costly repeated bargaining, and standing up to jerks who deviate from approximate fairness preserves the norm. This is the sort of intuition that we're trying to test for in the Ultimatum game.

8IlyaShpitser12y

I am with Stanislaw Lem -- it's hard to communicate in general, not just about fairness. I find so many communication scenarios in life resemble first contact situations..