Two kinds of Expectations, *one* of which is helpful for rational thinking
Expectation is often used to refer to two totally distinct things: entitlement and anticipation. My basic opinion is that entitlement is a rather counterproductive mental stance to have, while anticipations are really helpful for improving your model of the world.
Here are some quick examples to whet your appetite…
1. Consider a parent who says to their teenager: “I expect you to be home by midnight.” The parent may or may not anticipate the teen being home on time (even after this remark). Instead, they’re staking out a right to be annoyed if they aren’t back on time.
Contrast this with someone telling the person they’re meeting for lunch “I expect I’ll be there by 12:10” as a way to let them know that they’re running a little late, so that the recipient of the message knows not to worry that maybe they’re not in the correct meeting spot, or that the other person has forgotten.
2. A slightly more involved example: I have a particular kind of chocolate bar that I buy every week at the grocery store. Or at least I used to, until a few weeks ago when they stopped stocking it. They still stock the Dark version, but not the Extra Dark version I’ve been buying for 3 years. So the last few weeks I’ve been disappointed when I go to look. (Eventually I’ll conclude that it’s gone forever, but for now I remain hopeful.)
There’s a temptation to feel indignant at the absence of this chocolate bar. I had an expectation that it would be there, and it wasn’t! How dare they not stock it? I’m a loyal customer, who shops there every week, and who even tells others about their points card program! I deserve to have my favorite chocolate bar in stock!
…says this voice. This is the voice of entitlement.
The entitlement also wants to not just politely ask a shelf stocker if they have any out back, but to do things like walk up to the customer service desk and demand that they give me a discount on the Dark ones because they’ve been out of the Extra Dark ones for three weeks now. To make a fuss.
Entitlement is the feeling that you have a right to something. That you deserve it. That it’s owed to you.
(Relevant aside: the word “ought” used to be a synonym for “owed”, i.e. the past tense of “to owe”.)
A brief history of entitlement
That’s not what the term “entitlement” used to mean though. It used to refer to not the feeling but simply the fact: that you were owed something. Everyone deserved different things, according to their titles: kings and queens an enormous amount, lords and landowners a lesser though still large amount, and so on down the line. In some cases, people at the bottom of the hierarchy may have in fact been considering deserving of scarcity and suffering.
What changed?
Western culture shifted from exalting rule by one (monarchy) or few (oligarchy) or the rich (plutocracy) to being broadly more democratic, meritocratic, and then ultimately relatively egalitarian, in terms of ideals. What this means is that in modern times, it may be the case that being rich or white does in fact grant someone certain privileges, in the sense that they may in fact be less likely to get arrested, or more likely to get promoted…
…but broadly speaking, mainstream culture will no longer agree that they deserve these privileges. They are no longer entitled to them.
More broadly, nobody is really considered to be entitled to much of anything anymore—oh, except for a bunch of very basic, universal rights. The U.S. Bill of Rights lays out the rights the state grants Americans. The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights lays out the rights that U.N. countries grant everyone. In theory, anyway.
And since we no longer think that people deserve special privileges, anyone who acts like they do is called “entitled”. But now we’re talking about the feeling of entitlement, not actually having the right to some benefit.
Also, note that this isn’t just about class anymore: given the meritocratic context and a few other factors, people sometimes find themselves feeling like they deserve something because they worked hard for it. This isn’t a totally unreasonable way to feel, but the world doesn’t automagically reward people who work hard.
This principle is at play when older generations criticize millennials as being entitled, and then the millennials retort “well you said that if we just got a degree, then we’d have decent careers.” What the millennials are saying is that they had an expectation that they’d have prosperity, if they did a thing.
But are they actually feeling entitled to that thing? Are they relating to it in an entitled way? It’s hard to say, and probably depends on the individual. Let’s take an easier example.
Meet James Altucher
In his article How To Break All The Rules And Get Everything You Want, Altucher describes a multipart story in which he breaks some rules to get what he wants.
We arrived at the “Boy Meets Girl” fashion show and the woman with the clipboard said, “You are not on the list.”
WHAT!?
I had been telling my daughter Mollie all week we would go to this show.
Mollie was very excited.
“Don’t worry,” Nathan had told me earlier in the day, “you will be on the list.” I am extremely grateful he got us invited to the show.
Two more times in the article, James has that “WHAT!?” reaction.
This reaction seems to me to be practically the epitome of an entitlement response: outrage. Particularly when he’s like: WHAT!? You let us in even though we weren’t on the list, but we’re at the back!? Note that the feeling of entitlement is usually not so obvious, even internally.
But note also that it’s possible to act entitled, even if you don’t feel entitled. I posit that we might call this something like “entitled to ask” or “entitled to try”.
To illustrate this, let’s take a response to James’ article called When “Life Hacking” Is Really White Privilege, Jen Dziura writes:
I have often had encounters with men who take something that’s not theirs, and when they encounter no outright resistance — there’s no loud talking, no playground-style tussle — they assume everything is fine.
It is not fine.
Sometimes, you take the best desk for yourself in the new office. Sometimes, you take credit for someone else’s work or ideas. Sometimes, you’re on a team, and someone from the client company assumes that you — the tallest, whitest member — are in charge, and you do not correct them. Sometimes, it’s just that someone baked cookies to congratulate their team on a job well-done, and you’re not on that team but you wanted a cookie, and no one seemed to mind.
I have been the cookie guy. Probably with literal cookies, although probably a different situation—not that I would know, since I was just paying attention to the cookies.
And if someone had refused me the cookies, I wouldn’t have been like “WHAT!?”. I would have said something polite and moved on. But if someone had suggested I was rude for asking, I might have been a bit indignant: “I was just asking…”
But in order to be “just asking”, I also had to be assuming that the person would feel comfortable saying no if my request didn’t make sense. Assuming that giving me a “no” isn’t a costly action. Which is often not a safe assumption, for a myriad of reasons that are outside the scope of this post. But the effect is that even without having a subjective feeling of entitlement to anything in particular, I can be relating to a situation in an entitled way.
But I’m a Nice Guy!
There’s a concept that’s been around for awhile, known as the Nice Guy phenomenon. The basic notion is of a person (canonically male, though not always) becoming frustrated when their attempts to transform a platonic friendship into a romantic and/or sexual relationship fall through, leading to rejection. Feminist circles have sometimes criticized these men as objectifying women, but as Dan Fincke points out, in many cases the men are trying to relate to them deeply.
Still, Dan writes:
They want to earn love with their moral virtues, with their genuine friendship, and with their woman-honoring priorities that put knowing women as people over trying to just bed them.
Uh oh. Trying to earn love is a recipe for the meritocratic flavour of entitlement. Dan again, a little further down:
So at this point we come to the actual entitlement issue. It’s not that they feel entitled to sex—it’s much deeper and less superficial than that and these men deserve the respect of having that acknowledged. What they really feel entitled to is love.
At any rate, there usually is a sense of entitlement here, and it makes for unpleasant interactions when the guy finally shares his feelings for his friend. He has his hopes all up and expects her to reciprocate. (Here we probably have both kinds of expectation going on—entitlement and anticipation.)
Miri at Brute Reason clarifies that the problem isn’t feeling sad when you’re rejected. That’s natural and can make lots of sense. Same with:
- Wishing the person would change their mind
- Thinking that you would’ve made a good partner for this person
- Thinking that you would’ve made a better partner for this person than whoever they’re interested in
- Feeling embarrassed that you were rejected
- Feeling like you don’t want to see them or talk to them anymore
Miri distinguishes these from the feeling “I deserve sex/romance from this person because I was their friend.” and goes on to name some actions which follow from this feeling of entitlement. These include:
- Pressuring the person to change their mind (which isn’t the same as saying “Well, let me know if you ever change your mind” and then stepping back)
- Guilt-tripping them for rejecting you (which isn’t the same as being honest about your feelings about the rejection)
- Becoming cruel to the person to get back at them (i.e. “Whatever, I never liked you anyway, you [gendered slur]”)
I think that what Miri has highlighted here is a really solid application of the two channels model: the idea that you can have multiple interpretations of something at the same time, that can be alike in valence (in this case, both negative/hurting) but different in structure and implication—and potentially leading to different actions.
The difference in action can be stark—”Whatever, I never liked you anyway” vs “I still think you’re cool, even if I feel pretty burned.”—or quite subtle… what, you might ask, is the difference between “guilt-tripping someone for rejecting you”, and “being honest about your feelings about the rejection”?
Without the two channels model, we might say that the former is when you’re entitled, and the latter is when you’re not. But the two channels model suggests that it’s more like, guilt-tripping is what happens when your entitlements own you, instead of you owning them.
So you feel entitled? Okay, accept that. Not in the sense of endorsing it, but in the sense of accepting reality as it is. The reality is that you feel entitled. One way to do this while staying outside of the frame is to say something like “so it seems that a bunch of what I’m feeling right now is entitlement”. Either to yourself, or if it makes sense, to share that with the person you’re talking with.
If the guy in this situation talks honestly about his feelings of rejection and loneliness, that could be experienced as guilt-tripping or as making the person take care of him:
I feel really rejected now. It’s so frustrating, like, I’m so unlovable. Forever alone, right here.
But maybe if he’s able to get outside of just being the feelings, and talk about the overarching structure of what’s going on:
“It seems I’m feeling both a sense of rejection, but also like I’ve been setting myself up to feel entitled to your love and affection… and I guess that doesn’t make sense. I’m feeling frustrated and lonely, and at the same time… wanting to not relate to you from there.”
If I try, I can imagine that that phrasing might sound over-the-top to some people, but it’s actually how me and many of my friends talk… and it allows us to navigate tense situations while remaining on the “same side”. We stay on the same side by putting the feelings in the center where they can be talked about, and being clear that the relating doesn’t need to be run by those feelings. I go into more detail about the value of this kind of language here.
I realize that it might not be possible to talk at this level in a given relationship. First of all, it requires the capacity to think thoughts like that when you’re in an emotional state (hint: practice when you’re calm!) Even more challengingly, it requires a certain kind of trust and shared assumptions in the relationship, which may not be available.
With those shared assumptions, much less verbose expressions can still have that same page feeling. Without them, even the most clear articulation can nonetheless be experienced as an attempt at manipulation.
Without a good segue, we now turn to the final section: expectations, entitlements, anticipations, and desire.
Anticipations and Desire
When I was maybe 15, a friend and had a principle we used for navigating relationships with our romantic interests. We would go into a situation with “no intentions and no expectations”. One framing of this is that it was to protect against disappointment, but I think it could also be understood as a defense against the whole entitlement debacle: if I had an “expectation” that me and my crush were going to kiss, but she didn’t want to, well… then what? I wouldn’t kiss her without her consent, but… was it okay to even expect that, if I didn’t know what she wanted?
And so we come back to the breakdown I introduced at the start: expectations as including both anticipations and entitlements. I seriously salute my 15-year-old self for managing to avoid the entitlement-related issues (well, at least in the situations when I remembered to use this principle).
The problem was, in turning off expectations, I had shut off not only entitlements but anticipations as well. And anticipations are important!
First of all, denotationally: from an epistemic perspective, you want to be able to predict what’s going to happen. Not just so that you could remember to bring condoms, but also to have a sense of being prepared psychologically for what sort of situation you might be navigating. Projecting what will happen in the future is important.
Then there’s the second, more connotational part of the term “anticipation”, which is the emotional quality: the pleasure of considering a longed-for event. The book Rekindling Desire contains quotations like:
Anticipation is the central ingredient in sexual desire.
[…] sex has a major cognitive component — the most important element for desire is positive anticipation.
What this means is that if you try to avoid having anticipations, you can end up with a reduced sense of desire. Hormones and curiosity being what they were, this wasn’t an issue for my teenage self on a physical level, but even now I notice a subtle effect that I think has the same roots…
I’ve sometimes found it hard to tap into my sense of what it is that I want in relationships or in physically intimate contexts. I know what feels good in the moment—pleasure gradients aren’t hard—but it’s been challenging to cultivate a sense of taste for the kinds of intimacy I want, and I think that a large part of that is the resistance I have for letting myself cultivate desire through anticipation.
An article published just a few days ago (but after I’d drafted this whole post) touches on how this may be a common phenomenon:
“I want more men to get to know their own bodies and desires. […]
“Feminist men often fall into the trap of thinking that the opposite of male sexual entitlement–the opposite of men using other people’s bodies to get themselves off without any concern for that person’s consent or desire–is to focus entirely on their partner’s pleasure and deny any preferences of their own. No. The opposite of male sexual entitlement is two (or more) people working together–playing together, rather–to create the experiences they want.”
So one conclusion I’m making as part of breaking down expectations into entitlements and anticipations is that I can start doing more anticipating of things, as long as I don’t let myself get trapped in having entitlements as well. As long as I don’t hinge my sense of self-worth on having my expectations fulfilled and on never experiencing rejection. As long as I can remember that having no preferences unsatisfied by way of having no preferences isn’t actually satisfying.
“The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension.”
— Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline
The Two Kinds of Expectations + Rationality
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how this affects interpersonal dynamics, but I want to briefly note that this distinction matters a lot for thinking quality as well:
Having entitlement-based relationships to people or systems is kind of like writing the bottom line before you know what the argument will be. It’s assuming you know what makes sense or know what will work, even though you don’t have all of the information, and then precommitting to be reluctant to change your mind.
Having anticipations, on the contrary, is fundamental to making your beliefs pay rent: in order for your beliefs to be entangled with the real world, they necessarily must suggest which events to anticipate—and importantly, which events to not anticipate.
There’s a question to, of how expectations show up when trying to coordinate a team (or vague network of people with a shared goal). I think a sports analogy is actually valuable here: if we’re on a soccer team, it’s critical that I can expect that if I pass you the ball in a certain way, you’ll be able to kick it directly at the goal. I need to know this so that I know when to do it, because it’s an effective technique when performed well. But if that expectation is about entitlement rather than anticipation, then that will cause me to be less focused on whether my pass made sense in this situation and more focused on whether I can blame you for missing the shot.
My money’s on the team with anticipation, not the one with entitlement.
This article crossposted from malcolmocean.com.
Market Failure: Sugar-free Tums
In theory, the free market and democracy both work because suppliers are incentivized to provide products and services that people want. Economists consider it a perverse situation when the market does not provide what people want, and look for explanations such as government regulation.
The funny thing is that sometimes the market doesn't work, and I look and look for the reason why, and all I can come up with is, People are stupid.
I've written before about the market's apparent failure to provide cup holders in cars. I saw another example this week in the latest Wired magazine, a piece on page 42 about a start-up called Thinx to make re-usable women's underwear that absorbs menstrual fluid--all of it, so women don't have to slip out of the middle of meetings to change tampons. The piece's angle was that venture capitalists rejected the idea because they were mostly men and so didn't "get it".
I'd guess they "got it". It isn't a complicated idea. The thing is, there are already 3 giant companies battling for that market. The first thing a VC would say when you tell him you're going to make something better than a tampon is, "Why haven't Playtex, Kotex, or Tampax already done that?"
So, Thinx did a kickstarter and has now sold hundreds of thousands of thousands of absorbent underwear for about $30 each.
The failure in this case is not that VCs are sexist, but that Playtex, etc., never developed this product, although there evidently is a demand for it, and there is no evident reason it couldn't have been produced 20 years ago. The belief that the market doesn't fail then almost led to a further failure, the failure to develop the product at the present time, because the belief that the market doesn't fail implied the product could not be profitable.
I just now came across an even clearer case of market failure: Sugar-free Tums.
Making Less Wrong Great Again




Please post other Making Less Wrong Great Again memes in the comments
Suppose HBD is True
Suppose, for the purposes of argument, HBD (Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations (I will be avoiding using the word "race" here insomuch as possible) of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population) is true, and that all its proponents are correct in accusing the politicization of science for burying this information.
I seek to ask the more interesting question: Would it matter?
1. Societal Ramifications of HBD: Eugenics
So, we now have some kind of nice, tidy explanation for different characters among different groups of people. Okay. We have a theory. It has explanatory power. What can we do with it?
Unless you're willing to commit to eugenics of some kind (be it restricting reproduction or genetic alteration), not much of anything. And even given you're willing to commit to eugenics, HBD doesn't add anything HBD doesn't actually change any of the arguments for eugenics - below-average people exist in every population group, and insofar as we regard below-average people a problem, the genetic population they happen to belong to doesn't matter. If the point is to raise the average, the population group doesn't matter. If the point is to reduce the number of socially dependent individuals, the population group doesn't matter.
Worse, insofar as we use HBD as a determinant in eugenics, our eugenics are less effective. HBD says your population group has a relationship with intelligence; but if we're interested in intelligence, we have no reason to look at your population group, because we can measure intelligence more directly. There's no reason to use the proxy of population group if we're interested in intelligence, and indeed, every reason not to; it's significantly less accurate and politically and historically problematic.
Yet still worse for our eugenics advocate, insomuch as population groups do have significant genetic diversity, using population groups instead of direct measurements of intelligence is far more likely to cause disease transmission risks. (Genetic diversity is very important for population-level disease resistance. Just look at bananas.)
2. Social Ramifications of HBD: Social Assistance
Let's suppose we're not interested in eugenics. Let's suppose we're interested in maximizing our societal outcomes.
Well, again, HBD doesn't offer us anything new. We can already test intelligence, and insofar as HBD is accurate, intelligence tests are more accurate. So if we aim to streamline society, we don't need HBD to do so. HBD might offer an argument against affirmative action, in that we have different base expectations for different populations, but affirmative action already takes different base expectations into account (if you live in a city of 50% black people and 50% white people, but 10% of local lawyers are black, your local law firm isn't required to have 50% black lawyers, but 10%). We might desire to adjust the way we engage in affirmative action, insofar as affirmative action might not lead to the best results, but if you're interested in the best results, you can argue on the basis of best results without needing HBD.
I have yet to encounter someone who argues HBD who also argues we should do something with regard to HELPING PEOPLE on the basis of this, but that might actually be a more significant argument: If there are populations of people who are going to fall behind, that might be a good argument to provide additional resources to these populations of people, particularly if there are geographic correspondences - that is, if HBD is true, and if population groups are geographically segregated, individuals in these population groups will suffer disproportionately relative to their merits, because they don't have the local geographic social capital that equal-advantage people of other population groups would have. (An average person in a poor region will do worse than an average person in a rich region.) So HBD provides an argument for desegregation.
Curiously, HBD advocates have a tendency to argue that segregation would lead to the best outcome. I'd welcome arguments that concentrating an -absence- of social capital is a good idea.
3. Scientific Ramifications of HBD
Well, if HBD were true, it would mean science is politicized. This might be news to somebody, I guess.
4. Political Ramifications of HBD
We live in a meritocracy. It's actually not an ideal thing, contrary to the views of some people, because it results in a systematic merit segregation that has completely deprived the lower classes of intellectual resources; talk to older people sometime, who remember, when they worked in the coal mines (or whatever), the one guy who you could trust to be able to answer your questions and provide advice. Our meritocracy has advanced to the point where we are systematically stripping everybody of value from the lower classes and redistributing them to the middle and upper classes.
HBD might be meaningful here. Insofar as people take HBD to its absurd extremes, it might actually result in an -improvement- for some lower-class groups, because if we stop taking all the intelligent people out of poor areas, there will still be intelligent people in those poor areas. But racism as a force of utilitarian good isn't something I care to explore in any great detail, mostly because if I'm wrong it would be a very bad thing, and also because none of its advocates actually suggest anything like this, more interesting in promoting segregation than desegregation.
It doesn't change much else, either. With HBD we continually run into the same problem - as a theory, it's the product of measuring individual differences, and as a theory, it doesn't add anything to our information that we don't already have with the individual differences.
5. The Big Problem: Individuality
Which is the crucial fault with HBD, iterated multiple times here, in multiple ways: It literally doesn't matter if HBD is true. All the information it -might- provide us with, we can get with much more accuracy using the same tests we might use to arrive at HBD. Anything we might want to do with the idea, we can do -better- without it.
HBD might predict we get fewer IQ-115, IQ-130, and IQ-145 people from particular population groups, but it doesn't actually rule them out. Insofar as this kind of information is useful, it's -more- useful to have more accurate information. HBD doesn't say "Black people are stupid", instead it says "The average IQ of black people is slightly lower than the average IQ of white people". But since "black people" isn't a thing that exists, but rather an abstract concept referring to a group of "black persons", and HBD doesn't make any predictions at the individual level we couldn't more accurately obtain through listening to a person speak for five seconds, it doesn't actually make any useful predictions. It adds literally nothing to our model of the world.
It's not the most important idea of the century. It's not important at all.
If you think it's true - okay. What does it -add- to your understanding of the world? What useful predictions does it make? How does it permit you to improve society? I've heard people insist it's this majorly important idea that the scientific and political establishment is suppressing. I'd like to introduce you to the aether, another idea that had explanatory power but made no useful predictions, and which was abandoned - not because anybody thought it was wrong, but because it didn't even rise to the level of wrong, because it was useless.
And that's what HBD is. A useless idea.
And even worse, it's a useless idea that's hopelessly politicized.
Dissolving Deep Questions: A Decline in Contemporary Controversy
I'm practicing dissolving questions. For some of these questions, there's no dispute as to the nature of the facts, and people are just arguing about what frame to hang life's picture in, what words to use to describe it. For others, there are real factual disputes hiding behind these semantic squabbles, and this technique lets us get past disputing definitions and graduate to mapmaking.
Most of these questions are *actually argued* in prominent venues, and my intention is to give a response that if presented in such a venue, would leave the combatants with nothing to say, or if not, with a concrete and tractable problem. Potential for progress.
Please comment any other controversies this technique would benefit.
The key in every case is to look at reality as it is, and then dispute *that* if there's disagreement, letting fade into obscurity the relatively trivial question of what words to use to describe the piece of reality in question (at least until that greater problem is given its due).
The tree in the forest question seems to me a good place to demonstrate the principle at first since it's not politicized. Perhaps in real venues, it would be useful to give an uncontroversial example of the technique before applying it to the controversy at hand.
1. If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a "sound?"
Some say sound is a series of vibrations, others that it is an auditory experience. Regardless of which word you use, the reality of the situation is that the tree will fall over, make vibrations, and there will not be any auditory experiences. That is the entirety of the situation, there is no disagreement. Now, you can argue about whether or not we should describe this with the word “sound” or “noise,” or “fershizzleplumf,” but let’s all be aware that we’re arguing about which word to use to describe reality; we’re not arguing about what reality is truly like.
2. Is Islam a "religion of peace?"
This simply depends on what you mean by religion of peace, an ambiguous term, to be sure. The fact of the matter is that Islam’s teachings include some which can be interpreted to encourage peace, and other interpreted to encourage violence. Some adherents of the religion are violent, or support violence, and some do not. These are the facts, beyond dispute. If you want precise numbers, you can look into polling data, or per capita incidents of violence, or other pieces of information, but at the end of the day, you’re going to have this total picture of what Islam is like as a religion. At that point, it doesn’t matter what you call it; you know what it is. Then call it "a religion of peace" or not, but be aware that you’re not adding any information. And if people want to argue about what word to call this picture, this piece of reality, I humbly submit, that arguments about such trivial semantics are better reserved for after we’ve dedicated our brainpower to solving real problems.
3. Is there a "wall of separation between Church and State" in the US?
The United States laws allow for many kinds of religion practice. Other laws forbid doing certain things with religion, like requiring that the president believe certain dogmas. On the spectrum of total integration of church and state to total segregation, America lies somewhere in the middle, and we could find out exactly where if we prepared careful measures and looked hard enough. But at the end of the day, whatever we find, whatever we know, will be the totality of reality. We can argue about whether that degree of segregation should be called “a wall of separation between Church and State,” but we’re not actually arguing about what the reality is. Such semantic discussions are rather less interesting and useful than what we should expect of concerned citizens, or elected officials.
4. Is America a "Christian nation?"
America is what it is. It has a certain historic and modern relationship with Christianity. That relationship could have been—could be stronger than it has been—than it is, for example, had every citizen been a fervent Christian. At the end of the day, these are the bare facts, which no one disputes. The totality of these facts you may call what you wish: a Christian nation—or not. But what you call it is of little import. Such arguments would be not about what reality consists of, but about what technical term people should use to describe it: the kind of dry, pedantic discussion not worthy to divert our attention from more pressing matters.
5. Are Catholics/Mormons/Jehovah's Witnesses/etc "Christian?"
Every person on earth, identify as whatever religion they might or mightn’t, holds certain beliefs, and doesn’t hold others. Many of them hold similar beliefs to others, such as self-identified Mormons, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventist’s, etc. To understand these people as they are, you might carefully examine, among other things, their beliefs. At that point of understanding, you might wish to call them by some label or another, such as Christian, or you might not. But at that point, you’re not saying anything new about these people. The full nature of their beliefs is already examined. What you call them is of little import, and, according to every religion creed I know, has nothing to do with how God will think of them, or treat them, in this life, or in the next.
6. "Should" women take preventative measures against sexual assault?
Sometimes people say “should” and mean it is a moral duty to do something, such as when we say, “You should help others when you can.” Other times people say “should” when they mean it would be convenient or beneficial to do something, such as when we say, “You should exercise.”
Should women take preventative measures against sexual assault? It depends on which should you mean. They don’t have a moral duty to do so, they hold no guilt or responsibility for assaults committed against them. At the same time, they might find it convenient or beneficial to take such measures, if they are effective. Certainly I would hope my loved ones would, as I myself would. These are both bare facts; they are true. Neither contradicts the other. If you wish to say “should” or “shouldn’t” at this point, remember that it is only a question of words; the reality of the situation has already been described and does not change by your naming it. Anyone who spends excessive time deciding what word to use to describe the previously mentioned reality might be encouraged to dedicate their extra time to something more helpful, for themselves, or for their fellow human beings.
*note: framing an issue may affect how people think about it and be a worthwhile battle sometimes*
7. Is atheism a "religion?"
Atheism is the lack of belief in theism, or sometimes, the belief that theist ideas are false. This is the nature of it. Understanding that, you may wish to call it a religion or not, but it is a comparatively trivial matter. How much does it matter what you call something, compared to actually understanding what that thing is?
8. What is the "meaning of life?"
This one is harder to prepare in advance like this, because it's a non-binary question; there could be many possible meanings to the question. But the same strategy applies: Ask the questioner to pose the question in non-ambiguous terms. This is a classic "deep/hard" question more because *the questioner doesn't know what they're asking* than because of any ignorance on the part of the questioned.
So, I'd ask: "What do you mean by the meaning of life?"
If you mean whatever brings the most happiness, then I don't know what will produce the maximum possible happiness, but there are some good studies on what other qualities correlate with happy people that may be of use to you.
If you mean was life created for the sake of some goal, in the same way that we create things for the sake of some goal/purpose, then I think the answer is no. But even if you don't believe me, if you want to ask some religion or another, this has still ceased to be a deep or difficult question. It's positively mundane once dissolved, just take whatever religious answer you're willing to trust, or see if life looks created by a mind with a purpose.
If you have other possible interpretations of the question, I'd also like to hear those.
LessWrong 2.0
Alternate titles: What Comes Next?, LessWrong is Dead, Long Live LessWrong!
You've seen the articles and comments about the decline of LessWrong. Why pay attention to this one? Because this time, I've talked to Nate at MIRI and Matt at Trike Apps about development for LW, and they're willing to make changes and fund them. (I've even found a developer willing to work on the LW codebase.) I've also talked to many of the prominent posters who've left about the decline of LW, and pointed out that the coordination problem could be deliberately solved if everyone decided to come back at once. Everyone that responded expressed displeasure that LW had faded and interest in a coordinated return, and often had some material that they thought they could prepare and have ready.
But before we leap into action, let's review the problem.
[Link]Rationalization is Superior to Rationality
Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics
This is a 2012 paper by Andrew Gelman and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi on what they view as a misuse of Bayesian statistics in scientific reasoning. I found this interesting because their definition of hypothetico-deductivism closely matches up with Eliezer Yudkowsky's definition of rationalization, and their definition of inductive inference closely matches up with his definition of rationality. The definitions:
Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Rationality - Starting from evidence, and then crunching probability flows, in order to output a probable conclusion.
Rationalization - Starting from a conclusion, and then crunching probability flows, in order to output evidence apparently favoring that conclusion.
Andrew Gelman and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi:
Inductive Inference - An accretion of evidence is summarized by a posterior distribution, and scientific process is associated with the rise and fall in the posterior probabilities of various models.
Hypothetico-Deductivism - Scientists devise hypotheses, deduce implications for observations from them, and test those implications. Scientific hypotheses can be rejected (i.e., falsified), but never really established or accepted in the same way.
Now, what's interesting about the paper is that in contrast to Eliezer Yudkowsky's view they argue that rationalization (hypothetico-deductivism) is the correct analytic method, and rationality as Eliezer Yudkowsky defined it is wrong. They make the following argument:
Social-scientific data analysis is especially salient for our purposes because there is general agreement that, in this domain, all models in use are wrong – not merely falsifiable, but actually false. With enough data – and often only a fairly moderate amount – any analyst could reject any model now in use to any desired level of confidence. Model fitting is nonetheless a valuable activity, and indeed the crux of data analysis. To understand why this is so, we need to examine how models are built, fitted, used and checked, and the effects of misspecification on models.
They also argue Popper made multiple errors, but that his fundamental view is closer to correct than Kuhn's, and that correct science is about attempting to falsify hypotheses. They simply disagree with how Popper went about doing it.
Another interesting issue to me is that if you look at the main post Against Rationalization, Adirian and Vladimir_Nesov both suggested that both forms of analysis are acceptable, but TheAncientGeek was the only one who argued rationalization over rationality, and his comment received multiple downvotes. This also appears to me to have been a major concept central to many parts of the sequences. Andrew Gelman and Eliezer Yudkowsky had a bloggingheads.tv conversation together, b̶̶̶u̶̶̶t̶̶̶ ̶̶̶I̶̶̶'̶̶̶m̶̶̶ ̶̶̶n̶̶̶o̶̶̶t̶̶̶ ̶̶̶s̶̶̶u̶̶̶r̶̶̶e̶̶̶ ̶̶̶i̶̶̶f̶̶̶ ̶̶̶t̶̶̶h̶̶̶i̶̶̶s̶̶̶ ̶̶̶p̶̶̶a̶̶̶r̶̶̶t̶̶̶i̶̶̶c̶̶̶u̶̶̶l̶̶̶a̶̶̶r̶̶̶ ̶̶̶t̶̶̶o̶̶̶p̶̶̶i̶̶̶c̶̶̶ ̶̶̶e̶̶̶v̶̶̶e̶̶̶r̶̶̶ ̶̶̶c̶̶̶a̶̶̶m̶̶̶e̶̶̶ ̶̶̶u̶̶̶p̶̶̶.̶̶̶
Thoughts?
Edit - Andrew Gelman and Eliezer Yudkowsky discuss this issue at the end of the bloggingheads video. Click on "The difference between Eliezer and Nassim" for their take. I also fixed a link.
Is Greed Stupid?
I just finished reading a fantastic Wait But Why post: How Tesla Will Change The World. One of the things that was noted is that the people in the Auto and Oil industries are trying to delay the introduction of Electric Vehicles (EVs) so they could make more money.
The post also explains how important it is that we become less reliant on oil.
- Because we're going to run out relatively soon.
- Because it's causing global warming.
- Make some more money, which gives them and their families a marginally more comfortable life.
- Not get a sense of purpose out of your career.
- Probably feel some sort of guilt about what you do.
- Avoid the short-term discomfort of changing jobs/careers.
- Because of diminishing marginal utility, I doubt that the extra money is making them much happier. I'm sure they're pretty well off to begin with. It could be the case that they're so used to their lifestyle that they really do need the extra money to be happy, but I doubt it.
- Autonomy, mastery and purpose are three of the most important things to get out of your career. There seems to be a huge opportunity cost to not working somewhere that provides you with a sense of purpose.
- To continue that thought, I'm sure they feel some sort of guilt for what they're doing. Or maybe not. But if they are, that seems like a relatively large cost.
- I understand that there's probably a decent amount of social pressure on them to conform. I'm sure that they surround themselves with people who are pro-oil and anti-electric. I'm sure that their companies put pressure on them to perform. I'm sure that they have families and all of that and starting something new might be difficult. But these don't seem to be large enough costs to make their choices worthwhile. A big reason why I get this impression is because they are so short term.
Praising the Constitution
I am sure the majority of the discussion surrounding the Unites States recent Supreme Court ruling will be on the topic of same-sex marriage and marriage equality. And while there is a lot of good discussion to be had, I thought I would take the opportunity to bring up another topic that seems often to be glossed over, but is yet very important to the discussion. That is the idea in the USA of praising the United States Constitution and holding it to an often unquestioning level of devotion.
Before I really get going I would like to take a quick moment to say I do support the US Constitution and think it is important to have a very strong document that provides rights for the people and guidelines for government. The entire structure of the government is defined by the Constitution, and some form of constitution or charter is necessary for the establishment of any type of governing body. Also, in the arguments I use as examples I am not in any way saying which side I am on. I am simply using them as examples, and no attempt should be made to infer my political stances from how I treat the arguments themselves.
But now the other way. I often hear in political discussions people, particularly Libertarians, trying to tie their position back to being based on the Constitution. The buck stops there. The Constitution says it, therefore it must be right. End of discussion. To me this often sounds eerily similar to arguing the semantics of a religious text to support your position.
A great example is in the debate over gun control laws. Without espousing one side or the other, I can fairly safely and definitively say the US Constitution does support citizens' rights to own guns. For many a Libertarian, the discussion ends there. This is not something only Libertarians are guilty of. The other side of the debate often resorts to arguing context and semantics in an attempt to make the Constitution support their side. This clearly is just a case of people trying to win the argument rather than discuss and discover the best solution.
Similarly in the topic of marriage equality, a lot of the discussion has been focused on whether or not the US supreme court ruling was, in fact, constitutional. Extending that further, the topic goes on to "does the Constitution give the federal government the right to demand that the fifty states all allow same-sex marriage?" To me, this is not the true question that needs answering. Or at least, the answer to that question does not determine a certain action or inaction on the part of the federal government. (E.g., if it was decided that it was unconstitutional, that STILL DOESN'T NECESSARILY mean that the federal government shouldn't do it. I know, shocking.)
The Constitution was written by a bunch of men over two hundred years ago. Fallible, albeit brilliant, men. It isn't perfect. (It's damn good, else the country wouldn't have survived this long.) But it is still just a heuristic for finding the best course of action in what resembles a reasonable amount of time (insert your favorite 'inefficiency of bureaucracy' joke here). But heuristics can be wrong. So perhaps we should more often consider the question of whether or not what the Constitution says is actually the right thing. Certainly, departures from the heuristic of the Constitution should be taken with extreme caution and consideration. But we cannot discard the idea and simply argue based on the Constitution.
At the heart of the marriage equality and the supreme court ruling debate are the ideas of freedom, equality, and states' rights. All three of those are heuristics I use that usually point to what I think are best. I usually support states' rights, and consider departure from that as negative expected utility. However, there are many times when that consideration is completely blown away by other considerations.
The best example I can think of off the top of my head is slavery. Before the Emancipation Proclamation some states ruled slavery illegal, some legal. The question that tore our nation apart was whether or not the federal government had the right to impose abolition of slavery on all the states. I usually side with states' rights. But slavery is such an abominable practice that in that case I would have considered the constitutional rights of the federal government a non-issue when weighed against the continuation of slavery in the US for a single more day. If the Constitution had specifically supported the legality of slavery, then that would have shown it was time to burn it and try again.
Any federal proclamation infringes on states' rights, something I usually side with. And as more and more states were legalizing same-sex marriage it seemed that the states were deciding by themselves to promote marriage equality. The supreme court decision certainly speeds things up, but is it worth the infringement of state rights? To me that is the important question. Not whether or not it is Constitutional, but whether or not it is right. I am not answering that question here, just attempting to point out that the discussion of constitutionality may be the wrong question. And certainly an argument could be made for why states' rights should not be used as a heuristic at all.
Moral Anti-Epistemology
This post is a half-baked idea that I'm posting here in order to get feedback and further brainstorming. There seem to be some interesting parallels between epistemology and ethics.
Part 1: Moral Anti-Epistemology
"Anti-Epistemology" refers to bad rules of reasoning that exist not because they are useful/truth-tracking, but because they are good at preserving people's cherished beliefs about the world. But cherished beliefs don't just concern factual questions, they also very much concern moral issues. Therefore, we should expect there to be a lot of moral anti-epistemology.
Tradition as a moral argument, tu quoque, opposition to the use of thought experiments, the noncentral fallacy, slogans like "morality is from humans for humans" – all these are instances of the same general phenomenon. This is trivial and doesn't add much to the already well-known fact that humans often rationalize, but it does add the memetic perspective: Moral rationalizations sometimes concern more than a singular instance, they can affect the entire way people reason about morality. And like with religion or pseudoscience in epistemology about factual claims, there could be entire memeplexes centered around moral anti-epistemology.
A complication is that metaethics is complicated; it is unclear what exactly moral reasoning is, and whether everyone is trying to do the same thing when they engage in what they think of as moral reasoning. Labelling something "moral anti-epistemology" would suggest that there is a correct way to think about morality. Is there? As long as we always make sure to clarify what it is that we're trying to accomplish, it would seem possible to differentiate between valid and invalid arguments in regard to the specified goal. And this is where moral anti-epistemology might cause troubles.
Are there reasons to assume that certain popular ethical beliefs are a result of moral anti-epistemology? Deontology comes to mind (mostly because it's my usual suspect when it comes to odd reasoning in ethics), but what is it about deontology that relies on "faulty moral reasoning", if indeed there is something about it that does? How much of it relies on the noncentral fallacy, for instance? Is Yvain's personal opinion that "much of deontology is just an attempt to formalize and justify this fallacy" correct? The perspective of moral anti-epistemology would suggest that it is the other way around: Deontology might be the by-product of people applying the noncentral fallacy, which is done because it helps protect cherished beliefs. Which beliefs would that be? Perhaps the strongly felt intuition that "Some things are JUST WRONG?", which doesn't handle fuzzy concepts/boundaries well and therefore has to be combined with a dogmatic approach. It sounds somewhat plausible, but also really speculative.
Part 2: Memetics
A lot of people are skeptical towards these memetical just-so stories. They argue that the points made are either too trivial, or too speculative. I have the intuition that a memetic perspective often helps clarify things, and my thoughts about applying the concept of anti-epistemology to ethics seemed like an insight, but I have a hard time coming up with how my expectations about the world have changed because of it. What, if anything, is the value of the idea I just presented? Can I now form a prediction to test whether deontologists want to primarily formalize and justify the noncentral fallacy, or whether they instead want to justify something else by making use of the noncentral fallacy?
Anti-epistemology is a more general model of what is going on in the world than rationalizations are, so it should all reduce to rationalizations in the end. So it shouldn't be worrying that I don't magically find more stuff. Perhaps my expectations were too high and I should be content with having found a way to categorize moral rationalizations, the knowledge of which will make me slightly quicker at spotting or predicting them.
Thoughts?
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