Power Buys You Distance From The Crime

Introduction

Taxes are typically meant to be proportional to money (or negative externalities, but that's not what I'm focusing on). But one thing money buys you is flexibility, which can be used to avoid taxes. Because of this, taxes aimed at the wealthy tend to end up hitting the well-off-or-rich-but-not-truly-wealthy harder, and tax cuts aimed at the poor end up helping the middle class. Examples (feel free to stop reading these when you get the idea, this is just the analogy section of the essay):

  • Computer programmers typically have the option to work remotely in a low-tax state; teachers need to be where the classroom is. 
  • Estate taxes tend to hit families with single large assets (like a business) harder than those with diverse investments (who can simply sell assets to pay for taxes), who are hit harder than those with enough wealth to create trust funds.
  • Executives can choose to receive stock (which is taxed more favorably) instead of cash to the exact percentage they desire. Well paid employees are offered stock, but the amount will not be tailored to their needs. Lower level employees either are not offered this, or are not in a position to take advantage of it.
  • The legal distinction between a business (whose expenses are tax deductible) and a hobby (deductions not allowed) is based on whether the activity nets you income (there are complications and you can sometimes prove a money loser is a business, but this is a good rule of thumb). Small business owners (e.g. lawyers) can fold their occasionally-revenue-generating hobby (e.g. photography) into their real business, enabling tax deductions for their hobby.
  • IRAs, 401ks, HSAs, and FSAs all lock your money up for a time or purpose, in exchange for lower or delayed taxes. You can only take advantage of them if you’re sure you won’t need the money for another purpose sooner.
  • More examples here.

Note that most of these are perfectly legal and the rest are borderline. But we're still not getting the result we want, of taxes being proportional to income.

When we assess moral blame for a situation, we typically want it to be roughly in proportion to much power a person has to change said situation. But just like money can be used to evade taxes, power can be used to avoid blame. This results in a distorted blame-distribution apparatus which assigns the least blame to the person most able to change the situation. Allow me a few examples to demonstrate this.

Examples 1 + 2: Corporate Malfeasance

Amazon.com provides a valuable service by letting any idiot sell a book, with minimal overhead. One of the costs of this complete lack of verification is that people will sell things that wouldn't pass verification, such as counterfeits, at great cost to publishers and authors. Amazon could never sell counterfeits directly: they're a large company that's easy to sue. But by setting themselves up as a platform on which other people sell, they enable themselves to profit from counterfeits.

Or take slavery. No company goes “I’m going to go out and enslave people today” (especially not publicly), but not paying people is sometimes cheaper than paying them, so financial pressure will push towards slavery. Public pressure pushes in the opposite direction, so companies try not to visibly use slave labor. But they can’t control what their subcontractors do, and especially not what their subcontractors’ subcontractors’ subcontractors do, and sometimes this results in workers being unpaid and physically blocked from leaving.

Who’s at fault for the subcontractor(^3)’s slave labor? One obvious answer is “the person locking them in during the fire” or “the parent who gives their kid piecework”, and certainly it couldn’t happen without them. But if we say “Nike’s lack of knowledge makes them not responsible”, we give them an incentive to subcontract without asking follow up questions. The executive is probably benefiting more from the system of slave labor than the factory owner is from his little domain, and has more power to change what is happening. If the small factory owner pays fair wages, he gets outcompeted by a factory that does use slave labor. If the Nike CEO decides to insource their manufacturing to ensure fair working conditions, something actually changes.

...Unless consumers switch to a cheaper, slavery-driven shoe brand.

Which is actually really hard to not do. You could choose more expensive shoes, but the profit margin is still bigger if you shrink expenses, so that doesn’t help (which is why Fairtrade was a failure from the workers’ perspective). You can’t investigate the manufacturing conditions of everything you buy-- it’s just too time consuming. But if you punish obvious enslavement and conduct no follow up studies, what you get is obscured enslavement, not decent working conditions.

Moral Mazes describes the general phenomenon on page 21:

Moreover, pushing down details relieves superiors of the burden of too much knowledge, particularly guilty knowledge. A superior will say to a subordinate, for instance: “Give me your best thinking on the problem with [X].” When the subordinate makes his report, he is often told: “I think you can do better than that,” until the subordinate has worked out all the details of the boss’s predetermined solution, without the boss being specifically aware of “all the eggs that have to be broken.” It is also not at all uncommon for very bald and extremely general edicts to emerge from on high. For example, “Sell the plant in [St. Louis]; let me know when you’ve struck a deal,” or “We need to get higher prices for [fabric X]; see what you can work out,” or “Tom, I want you to go down there and meet with those guys and make a deal and I don’t want you to come back until you’ve got one.” This pushing down of details has important consequences.
First, because they are unfamiliar with—indeed deliberately distance themselves from—entangling details, corporate higher echelons tend to expect successful results without messy complications. This is central to top executives’ well-known aversion to bad news and to the resulting tendency to kill the messenger who bears the news.
Second, the pushing down of details creates great pressure on middle managers not only to transmit good news but, precisely because they know the details, to act to protect their corporations, their bosses, and themselves in the process. They become the “point men” of a given strategy and the potential “fall guys” when things go wrong. From an organizational standpoint, overly conscientious managers are particularly useful at the middle levels of the structure. Upwardly mobile men and women, especially those from working-class origins who find themselves in higher status milieux, seem to have the requisite level of anxiety, and perhaps tightly controlled anger and hostility, that fuels an obsession with detail. Of course, such conscientiousness is not necessarily, and is certainly not systematically, rewarded; the real organizational premiums are placed on other, more flexible, behavior.

These examples differ in an important way from tax structuring: structuring requires seeking out advice and acting on it to achieve the goal. It’s highly agentic. The Wells Fargo and apparel-outsourcing cases required no such agency on the part of executives. They vaguely wished for something (more revenue, fewer expenses), and somehow it happened. An employee who tried to direct the executives’ attention to the fact that they were indirectly employing slaves would probably be fired before they ever reached the executives. Executives are not only outsourcing their dirty work, they’re outsourcing knowledge of their dirty work. 

[Details of personal anecdotes changed both intentionally and by the vagaries of human memory]

Example/Exception 2.5: Corporate Malfeasance Gone Wrong

The Wells Fargo account fraud scandal: in order to meet quotas, entry level Wells Fargo employees created millions of unauthorized accounts (typically extra services for existing customers). I originally included this as an example of "executives incentivizing entry level employees to commit fraud on their behalf", but it turns out Wells Fargo made almost no money off the fraud- $2m over five years, which hardly seems worth the employees' time, much less the $185m fine. I've left this in as an example of how the incentives-not-orders system doesn't always work in powerful people's favor.

Thanks to Larks for pointing this out.

Example 3: Foreign Medical Care

My cousin Angela broke her leg while traveling in Thailand, and was delighted by the level of care she received at the Thai hospital-- not just medically, but socially. Nurses brought her flowers and were just generally nicer than their American counterparts. Her interpretation was that Thailand was a place motivated by love and kindness, not money, and Americans should aspire to this level of regard for their fellow human being. My interpretation was that she had enough money to buy the goodwill of everyone in the room without noticing, so what she should have learned is that being rich is awesome, and that being an American who travels internationally is enough to qualify you as rich.

This is mostly a success story for the free market: Angela got good medical care and the nurses got money (I’m assuming). Any crime in this story were committed off-screen. But Angela was certainly benefiting from the nurses’ restrained choices in life. And had she had actual power to affect healthcare in US, trying to fix it based on what she learned in Thailand would have done a lot of damage.

Example 4: My Dating an Artist Experience

My starving-artist ex-boyfriend, Connor, stayed with me for two months after a little bad luck and a lot of bad decisions cost him his job and then apartment (this was back when I had a two bedroom apartment to myself-- I miss Seattle). During this time we had one big fight. My view on the fight now is that I was locally in the right but globally the disagreement was indicative of irreconcilable differences that should have led us to break up. That was delayed by months when he capitulated.

One possibility is that he genuinely thought he could change and that I was worth the attempt. Another is that he saw the incompatibility, or knew things that should have led him to see it, but lied or blocked out the knowledge so that he could keep living with me. This would be a shitty, manipulative thing for him to do. On the other hand, what did I expect? If the punishment for breaking up with me was, best case scenario, moving into a homeless shelter, of course he felt pressure to appease me. 

It wasn’t my fault he felt that pressure, any more than it was Angela’s fault her nurses were born with fewer options than her. Time in my spare bedroom was a gift to him I had no obligation to keep giving. But if I’d really valued a coercion free decision, I would have committed to housing him independent of our relationship. Although if that becomes common knowledge, it just means people can’t make an uncoerced decision to date me at all. And if helping Connor at all meant a commitment to do so forever, he would get a lot less help.

This case is more like the Wells Fargo case than Amazon or Nike. I was getting only the appearance of what I wanted (a genuine relationship with a compatible person), not the real thing. Nonetheless, the universe was contorting itself to give me the appearance of what I wanted.

Summary

What all of these stories have in common is that (relatively) powerful people’s desires were met by people less powerful than them, without them having to take responsibility for the action or sometimes even the desire. Society conspired to give them what they wanted (or in the case of Connor and Wells Fargo, a facsimile of what they wanted) without them having to articulate the want, even to themselves. That’s what power means: ability to make the game come out like you want. Disempowered people are forced to consciously notice things (e.g., this budget is unreachable) and make plans (e.g., slavery) where a powerful person wouldn’t. And it’s unfair to judge them for doing so while ignoring the morality of the powerful who never consider the system that brings them such nice things. 

Take home message:

  1. The most agentic person in a situation is not necessarily most morally culpable. One of the things power buys you is distance from the crime.
  2. Power obscures information flow. If you are not proactively looking to see how your wants and needs are being met, you are probably benefiting from something immoral or being tricked.

This piece was inspired by a conversation with and benefited from comments by Ben Hoffman. I'd also like to thank several commenters on Facebook for comments on an earlier draft and Justis Mills for copyediting.

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Just thinking loudly about the boundaries of this effect...

Suppose I have a garden, and a robot that can pick apples. I instruct the robot to bring me the "nearest big apple" (where "big" is exactly defined as having a diameter at least X). Coincidentally, all apples in my garden are small, so the robot picks the nearest apple at neighbor's garden and brings it to me, without saying anything.

When the neighbor notices it, he will be angry at me, but I can defend myself that I made an innocent mistake; I didn't mean to steal apples. This may be a good excuse for the first time; but if the thing keeps happening, the excuse no longer works; it was based on me not knowing.

Also, the robot will not even try to be inconspicuous; it will climb straight over the fence, in the middle of a day, even when the neighbor is there and looking at it. If I try to avoid this, by giving instructions like "bring me the nearest apple, but make sure no one notices you", I lose the plausible deniability. (I am assuming here that if my neighbor decides to sue me, the judge will see the robot's programming.)

Now why specifically does the situation change when inste... (read more)

Some context: In the past I had a job as a quality assurance inspector. I realized very soon after I started doing the job that a machine could easily do my job with less errors and for less then I was being paid so I wondered "Why do they pay for a human to do this job?" My conclusion was that if a machine makes a mistake as it is bound to do eventually they can't really fire it or yell at it well as a human can be. A human can be blamed.

So I agree with you. In the future I can see robots doing all the jobs expect being the scape goats.

9Viliam
Self-driving cars have a similar problem. Even if the car would cause 100 times fewer accidents than a human driver, the problem is that when an accident happens, we need a human to blame. How will we determine who goes to jail? Elon Musk? The poor programmer who wrote the piece of software that will be identified as having caused the bug? Or maybe someone like you, who "should have checked that the car is 100% safe", even if everyone knows it is impossible. Most likely, it will be someone at the bottom of the corporate structure. For now, as far as I know, the solution is that there must be a human driver in a self-driving car. In case of accident, that human will be blamed for not avoiding it by taking over the control. But I suppose that moving the blame from the customer to some low-wage employee of the producer would be better for sales, so the legislation will likely change this way some day. We just need to find the proper scapegoat.
4MikkW
It seems to me that the correct answer to your question is "no-one should go to jail"
1FireStormOOO
Or more completely: In the absence of malice or extreme negligence there's nothing criminal to punish at all and money damages should suffice.  Given a 100x lower occurrence of accidents this should be insurable for ~1% the cost.  The default answer is drivers remain financially responsible for damages (but insurance gets cheaper) and driver can't be criminally negligent short of modifying/damaging the car in an obviously bad way (e.g. failing to fix a safety critical sensor in a reasonable amount of time that would have prevented the crash.  Alternately, bypassing one or more safety features that could have prevented the crash).  Car companies would be smart to lobby to keep it that way as letting every car accident become a product liability thing would be much more expensive. 
9Benquo
This is an excellent analytical account of the underlying dynamics. It also VERY strongly resembles the series of blame-deflections described in Part II Chapter VII of Atlas Shrugged (the train-in-the-tunnel part), where this sort of information suppression ultimately backfires on the nominal beneficiary.

ETA 1/12: This review is critical and at times harsh, not because I want to harshly criticize the post or the author, but because I did not consider harshness of criticism when writing. I still think the post is positive-net-value, and might even vote it up in the review. I especially want to emphasize that I do not think it is in any way useful to blame or punish the author for the things I complain about below; this is intended as a "pointing out a problematic habit which a lot of people have and society often encourages" criticism, not a "bad thing must be punished" criticism.

When this post first came out, I said something felt off about it. The same thing still feels off about it, but I no longer endorse my original explanation of what-felt-off. So here's another attempt.

First, what this post does well. There's a core model which says something like "people with the power to structure incentives tend get the appearance of what they ask for, which often means bad behavior is hidden". It's a useful and insightful model, and the post presents it with lots of examples, producing a well-written and engaging explanation. The things which the post does well more than outweigh the prob... (read more)

... on reflection, I do not want to endorse this as an all-the-time heuristic, but I do want to endorse it whenever good epistemic discussion is an objective. Asking "who should we blame?" is always engaging in a status fight. Status fights are generally mindkillers, and should be kept strictly separate from modelling and epistemics.

Now, this does not mean that we shouldn't model status fights. Rather, it means that we should strive to avoid engaging in status fights when modelling them. Concretely: rather than ask "who should we blame?", ask "what incentives do we create by blaming <actor>?". This puts the question in an analytical frame, rather than a "we're having a status fight right now" frame.

This was a pretty important couple of points. I'm not sure I agree with them as worded, but point towards something that I think is close to a pareto improvement, at least for LessWrong and maybe for the whole world.

I do not want to endorse this as an all-the-time heuristic, but I do want to endorse it whenever good epistemic discussion is an objective

The key problem is... sometimes you actually just do need to have status fights, and you still want to have as-good-epistemics-as-po... (read more)

The key problem is... sometimes you actually just do need to have status fights, and you still want to have as-good-epistemics-as-possible given that you're in a status fight. So a binary distinction of "trying to have good epistemics" vs "not" isn't the right frame.

Part of my model here is that moral/status judgements (like "we should blame X for Y") like to sneak into epistemic models and masquerade as weight-bearing components of predictions. The "virtue theory of metabolism", which Yudkowsky jokes about a few times in the sequences, is an excellent example of this sort of thing, though I think it happens much more often and usually much more subtly than that.

My answer to that problem on a personal level is to rip out the weeds wherever I notice them, and build a dome around the garden to keep the spores out. In other words: keep morality/status fights strictly out of epistemics in my own head. In principle, there is zero reason why status-laden value judgements should ever be directly involved in predictive matters. (Even when we're trying to model our own value judgements, the analysis/engagement distinction still applies.)

Epistemics will still be involved in status fights, bu... (read more)

8Elizabeth
John and I had a fantastic offline discussion and I'm currently revising this in light of that. We're also working on a postmortem on the whole thing that I expect to be very informative. I keep mission creeping on my edits and response and it's going to take a while so I'm writing the bare minimum comment to register that this is happening.
5Slider
That explanation what is suspicious about the post drives two intuitions on me how that gets at something and how it is too black and white. The danger is having a logic of "We had a bad harvest this year. We need to burn more witches so that our harvests are better". Having a guilty party makes it easy to stop being curious about the mechanics and fuels a very flawed theory of remedy. But then if there is a car accident and somebody tries to find whos insurance company should be paying the repair bills going in that situation and saying "You are committing a grievious error if you try to find a blame party" seems wrong. There it still seems there are more and less productive ways about it. A court probably would not think who we should bill but rather who is on the hook for the bill. Likewise a airplane crash investigation is very interested in the causes and is likely to be basis for future preventative action. The kind of question of "a plane crashed and we have no clue why" screams to have a high quality, correct answer. It also seems typical that in such investigations multiple contribuitng hypotheses are examined closely. In serial show The Boys one of the characters spins a plane crash for politcal grief over airspace control. That fictional situation seems like an example of how to do it wrong where it is pretty clear how to do it right. I guess itmight just be that "How this happened?" is a way more justifiable question rather than "Whos life we should make diffcult based on this?"
3Elizabeth
I've been thinking a lot about this comment, and wanted to think more, but it seems useful to have something up as voting starts, so.... I think there's A Thing JW both agree is harmful (around assigning people moral responsibility when they're responding to incentives), and that I was trying to fight against. One thing I took from this comment is there's a good chance I had only a partial victory against Harmful Thing, and tried to pull down the master's house with the master's tools. I'd be very interested in exploring that further. (I also think it's possible JW is doing the same thing... it's a hard trap to escape) I don't think giving up the question "Who should we blame?" entirely is a good idea. Possibly the benefits of the norm would outweigh the costs for LessWrong in particular, but I don't believe such a norm would be a pareto improvement. 
This case is more complicated than the corporate cases because the powerful person (me) was getting merely the appearance of what she wanted (a genuine relationship with a compatible person), not the real thing. And because the exploited party was either me or Connor, not a third party like bank customers. No one thinks the Wells Fargo CEO was a victim the way I arguably was.

I think you have misunderstood the Wells Fargo case. These fake accounts generally didn't bring in any material revenue; they were just about internal 'number of new accounts targets'. It was directly a case of bank employees being incentivised to defraud management and investors, which they then did. If ordinary Wells employees had not behaved fraudulently, all the targets would have been missed, informing management/investors about their mis-calibration, and more appropriate targets would have been set. In this case power didn't buy distance from the crime, but only in the sense that it meant you couldn't tell you were being cheated.

For more on this I recommend the prolific Matt Levine:

There's a standard story in most bank scandals, in which small groups of highly paid tr
... (read more)

Hmm. I'm not sure I fully understand the Wells Fargo case but I interpreted it as a concern between four parties:

1. The people who got fake accounts signed up for them.

2. The employees doing the fake signups

3. A middle management tier, which set quotas

4. A higher level management tier that (presumaby?) wanted middle management to actually be making money.

So, the people being defrauded are not the customers, but the higher management tier, basically. (But, also, this entire thing might just be a weird game that middle management tiers play with each other for complex, mostly orthogonal reasons. Elizabeth references the book Moral Mazes, which Zvi provides an abridged version of here, which I suspect is important background here, although not 100% sure where Elizabeth was coming from)

[note: I hadn't necessarily interpreted the original Well's Fargo story with the subtext I outline here, but when you point out the correct subtext it doesn't feel like it shifts much how the example relates to the overall point]

4Elizabeth
Fixed, thank you for pointing this out.

Something about this piece felt off to me, like I couldn't see anything specifically wrong with it but still had a strong instinctive prior that lots of things were wrong.

After thinking about it for a bit, I think my main heuristic is: this whole piece sounds like it's built on a conflict-theory worldview. The whole question of the essay is basically "who should we be angry at"? Based on that, I'd expect that many or most of the individual examples are probably inaccurately understood or poorly analyzed. Lark's comment about the Wells Fargo case confirms that instinct for one of the examples.

Then I started thinking about the "conflict theory = predictably wrong" heuristic. We say "politics is the mindkiller", but I don't think that's quite right - people have plenty of intelligent discussions about policy, even when those discussions inherently involve politics. "Tribalism is the mindkiller" is another obvious formulation, but I'd also propose "conflict theory is the mindkiller". Models like "arguments are soldiers" or "our enemies are evil" are the core of Yudkowsky's orig... (read more)

I changed my mind about conflict/mistake theory recently, after thinking about Scott's comments on Zvi's post. I previously thought that people were either conflict theorists or mistake theorists. But I now do not use it to label people, but instead to label individual theories.

To point to a very public example, I don't think Sam Harris is a conflict theorist or a mistake theorist, but instead uses different theories to explain different disagreements. I think Sam Harris views any disagreements with people like Stephen Pinker or Daniel Dennett as primarily them making reasoning mistakes, or otherwise failing to notice strong arguments against their position. And I think that Sam Harris views his disagreements with people like <quickly googles Sam Harris controversies> Glenn Greenwald and Ezra Klein as primarily them attacking him for pushing different goals to their tribes.

I previously felt some not-insubstantial pull to pick sides in the conflict vs mistake theorist tribes, but I don't actually think this is a helpful way of talking, not least because I think that sometimes I will build a mistake theory for why a project failed, and sometimes I will buil... (read more)

I think the whole "mistake theory vs conflict theory" thing needs to be examined and explained in greater detail, because there is a lot of potential to get confused about things (at least for me). For example:

Both "mistake statements" and "conflict statements" can be held sincerely, or can be lies strategically used against an enemy. For example, I may genuinely believe that X is racist, and then I would desire to make people aware of a danger X poses. The fact that I do not waste time explaining and examining specific details of X's beliefs is simply because time is a scarce resource, and warning people against a dangerous person is a priority. Or, I may knowingly falsely accuse X of being racist, because I assume that gives me higher probability of winning the tribal fight, compared to a honest debate about our opinions. (Note: The fact that I assume my opponent would win a debate doesn't necessarily imply that I believe he it right. Maybe his opinions are simply more viral; more compatible with existing biases and prejudices of listeners.) Same goes for the mistake theory: I can sincerely explain how most people are not evil and yet Moloc... (read more)

I might be missing the forest for the trees, but all of those still feel like they end up making some kinds of predictions based on the model, even if they're not trivial to test. Something like:

If Alice were informed by some neutral party that she took Bob's apple, Charlie would predict that she would not show meaningful remorse or try to make up for the damage done beyond trivial gestures like an off-hand "sorry" as well as claiming that some other minor extraction of resources is likely to follow, while Diana would predict that Alice would treat her overreach more seriously when informed of it. Something similar can be done on the meta-level.

None of these are slamdunks, and there are a bunch of reasons why the predictions might turn out exactly as laid out by Charlie or Diana, but that just feels like how Bayesian cookies crumble, and I would definitely expect evidence to accumulate over time in one direction or the other.

Strong opinion weakly held: it feels like an iterated version of this prediction-making and tracking over time is how our native bad actor detection algorithms function. It seems to me that shining more light on this mechanism would be good.

4johnswentworth
After reading this and the comments you linked, I think people mean several different things by conflict/mistake theory. I mostly think of conflict theory as a worldview characterized by (a) assuming that bad things mostly happen because of bad people, and (b) assuming that the solution is mostly to punish them and/or move power away from them. I think of mistake theory as a worldview characterized by assuming that people do not intend to be evil (although they can still have bad incentives). I see mechanism design as the prototypical mistake theory approach: if people are misaligned, then restructure the system to align their incentives. It's a technical problem, and getting angry at people is usually unhelpful. In the comment thread you linked, Scott characterizes conflict theory as "the main driver of disagreement is self-interest rather than honest mistakes". That view matches up more with the example you give: the mistake theorist assumes that people have "good" intent, and if you just explain that their actions are harmful, then they'll stop. Under this interpretation, mechanism design is conflict-theory-flavored; it's thinking of people as self-interested and then trying to align them anyway. (I think part of the confusion is that some people are coming in with the assumption that acting in self-interest is automatically bad, and others are coming in with more of an economic/game theory mindset. Like, from an economic viewpoint, there's no reason why "the main driver of disagreement is self-interest" would lead to arguing that public choice theory is racist, which was one of Scott's original examples.) So I guess one good question to think about is: how do we categorize mechanism design? Is it conflict, is it mistake, is it something else? Different answers correspond to different interpretations of what "conflict" and "mistake" theory mean. I'm pretty sure my interpretation is a much better fit to the examples and explanations in Scott's original post on

Like, from an economic viewpoint, there’s no reason why “the main driver of disagreement is self-interest” would lead to arguing that public choice theory is racist, which was one of Scott’s original examples.

I don't share this intuition. The Baffler article argues:

IN DECEMBER 1992, AN OBSCURE ACADEMIC JOURNAL published an article by economists Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, titled “The Public Choice Theory of John C. Calhoun.” Tabarrok and Cowen, who teach in the notoriously libertarian economics department at George Mason University, argued that the fire-breathing South Carolinian defender of slaveholders’ rights had anticipated “public choice theory,” the sine qua non of modern libertarian political thought.

...

Astutely picking up on the implications of Buchanan’s doctrine, Tabarrok and Cowen enumerated the affinities public choice shared with Calhoun’s fiercely anti-democratic political thought. Calhoun, like Buchanan a century and a half later, had theorized that majority rule tended to repress a select few. Both Buchanan and Calhoun put forward ideas meant to protect an aggrieved if privileged minority. And just as Calhoun argued that laws should only be approved by

... (read more)
1johnswentworth
Let's imagine for a minute that we didn't know any of the background, and just think about what we might have predicted ahead of time. Frame 1: conflict theory is characterized by the idea that problems mostly come from people following their own self-interest. Not knowing anything else, what do we expect conflict theorists to think about public choice theory - a theory whose central premise is modeling public servants as following their own self-interests/incentives? Like, the third sentence of the wikipedia article is "it is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents (voters, politicians, bureaucrats) and their interactions". If conflict theory is about problems stemming from people following their self-interest, public choice theory ought to be right up the conflict theorist's alley. This whole "meta-level conflict" thing sounds like a rather contrived post-hoc explanation; a-priori there doesn't seem to be much reason for all this meta stuff. And conflict theorists in practice seem to be awfully selective about when to go meta, in a way that we wouldn't predict just based on "problems mostly stem from people following their self-interest". On the other hand... Frame 2: conflict theory is characterized by the idea that bad things mostly happen because of bad people, and the solution is to punish them. In this frame, what would we expect conflict theorists to think of public choice theory? Well, we'd expect them to dismiss it as obviously wrong - it doesn't denounce any bad people - and therefore also probably an attempt by bad people to steer things the way they want. If conflict theory is characterized by "bad things happen because of bad people", then an article about how racism secretly underlies public choice theory is exactly the sort of thing we'd predict.

I think it's a genuinely difficult problem to draw the boundary between a conflict and a mistake theory, in no small part due to the difficulties in drawing the boundary between lies and unconscious biases (which I rambled a bit about here). You can also see the discussion on No, it's not The Incentives - it's you as a disagreement over where this boundary should be.

That said, one thing I'll point out is that explaining Calhoun and Buchanan's use of public choice theory as entirely a rationalisation for their political goals, is a conflict theory. It's saying that them bringing public choice theory into the conversation was not a good faith attempt to convey how they see the world, but obfuscation in favour of their political side winning. And more broadly saying that public choice theory is racist is a theory that says the reason it is brought up in general is not due to people having differing understandings of economics, but due to people having different political goals and trying to win.

I find for myself that thinking 'conflict theorists' is a single coherent group is confusing me, and that I should instead replace the symbol with the su... (read more)

I get what you're saying about theories vs theorists. I agree that there are plenty of people who hold conflict theories about some things but not others, and that there are multiple reasons for holding a conflict theory.

None of this changes the original point: explaining a problem by someone being evil is still a mind-killer. Treating one's own arguments as soldiers is still a mind-killer. Holding a conflict theory about any particular situation is still a mind-killer, at least to the extent that we're talking about conflict theory in the form of "bad thing happens because of this bad person" as opposed to "this person's incentives are misaligned". We can explain other peoples' positions by saying they're using a conflict theory, and that has some predictive power, but we should still expect those people to usually be mind-killed by default - even if their arguments happen to be correct.

As you say, explaining Calhoun and Buchanan's use of public choice theory as entirely a rationalisation for their political goals, is a conflict theory. Saying that people bring up public choice theory not due to differing economic understanding but due to different political goals, is a conflict theory. And I expect people using either those explanations to be mind-killed by default, even if the particular interpretation were correct.

Even after all this discussion of theories vs theorists, "conflict theory = predictably wrong" still seems like a solid heuristic.

Sorry for the delay, a lot has happened in the last week.

Let me point to where I disagree with you.

Holding a conflict theory about any particular situation is still a mind-killer, at least to the extent that we're talking about conflict theory in the form of "bad thing happens because of this bad person" as opposed to "this person's incentives are misaligned".

My sense is you are underestimating the cost of not being able to use conflict theories. Here are some examples, where I feel like prohibiting me from even considering that a bad thing happened because a person was bad will severely limit my ability to think and talk freely about what is actually happening.

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Conflict theories tends to explode and eat up communal resources in communities and on the internet generally, and are a limited (though necessary) resource that I want to use with great caution.

But are theories that tend to explode and eat up communal resources therefore less likely to be true? If not, then avoiding them for the sake of preserving communal resources is a systematic distortion on the community's beliefs.

The distortion is probably fine for most human communities: keeping the peace with your co-religionists is more important than doing systematically correct reasoning, because religions aren't trying to succeed by means of doing systematically correct reasoning. But if there is to be such a thing as a rationality community specifically, maybe communal resources that can be destroyed by the truth, should be.

(You said this elsewhere in the thread: "the goal is to have one's beliefs correspond to reality—to use a conflict theory when that's true, a mistake theory when that's true".)

But are theories that tend to explode and eat up communal resources therefore less likely to be true? If not, then avoiding them for the sake of preserving communal resources is a systematic distortion on the community's beliefs.

Expected infrequent discussion of a theory shouldn't lower estimates of its probability. (Does the intuition that such theories should be seen as less likely follow from most natural theories predicting discussion of themselves? Erroneous theorizing also predicts that, for example "If this statement is correct, it will be the only topic of all future discussions.")

In general, it shouldn't be possible to expect well-known systematic distortions for any reason, because they should've been recalibrated away immediately. What not discussing a theory should cause is lack of precision (or progress), not systematic distortion.

Consider a situation where:

  • People are discussing phenomenon X.
  • In fact, a conflict theory is a good explanation for phenomenon X.
  • However, people only state mistake theories for X, because conflict theories are taboo.

Is your prediction that the participants in the conversation, readers, etc, are not misled by this? Would you predict that, if you gave them a survey afterwards asking for how they would explain X, they in fact give a conflict theory rather than a mistake theory, since they corrected for the distortion due to the conflict theory taboo?

2Vladimir_Nesov
Would you correct your response so? (Should you?) If the target audience tends to act similarly, so would they. Aside from that, "How do you explain X?" is really ambiguous and anchors on well-understood rather than apt framing. "Does mistake theory explain this case well?" is better, because you may well use a bad theory to think about something while knowing it's a bad theory for explaining it. If it's the best you can do, at least this way you have gears to work with. Not having a counterfactually readily available good theory because it's taboo and wasn't developed is of course terrible, but it's not a reason to embrace the bad theory as correct.

Would you correct your response so?

Perhaps (75% chance?), in part because I've spent >100 hours talking about, reading about, and thinking about good conflict theories. I would have been very likely misled 3 years ago. I was only able to get to this point because enough people around me were willing to break conflict theory taboos.

It is not the case that everybody knows. To get from a state where not everybody knows to a state where everybody knows, it must be possible to talk openly about such things. (I expect the average person on this website to make the correction with <50% probability, even with the alternative framing "Does mistake theory explain this case well?")

It actually does have to be a lot of discussion. Over-attachment to mistake theory (even when a moderate amount of contrary evidence is presented) is a systematic bias I've observed, and it can be explained by factors such as: conformity, social desirability bias (incl. fear), conflict-aversion, desire for a coherent theory that you can talk about with others, getting theories directly from others' statements, being bad at lying (and at detecting lying), etc. (This is similar to the question (and may

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2Matt Goldenberg
This seems a bit off as Jessica clearly knows about conflict theory. The whole thing about making a particular type of theory taboo is that it can't become common knowledge.
2Vladimir_Nesov
That's relevant to the example, but not to the argument. Consider a hypothetical Jessica less interested in conflict theory or a topic other than conflict theory. Also, common knowledge doesn't seem to play a role here, and "doesn't know about" is a level of taboo that contradicts the assumption I posited about the argument from selection effect being "well-known".

In general, it shouldn't be possible to expect well-known systematic distortions for any reason, because they should've been recalibrated away immediately.

Hm. Is "well-known" good enough here, or do you actually need common knowledge? (I expect you to be better than me at working out the math here.) If it's literally the case that everybody knows that we're not talking about conflict theories, then I agree that everyone can just take that into account and not be confused. But the function of taboos, silencing tactics, &c. among humans would seem to be maintaining a state where everyone doesn't know.

0Vladimir_Nesov
There is no need for coordination or dependence on what others think. If you expect yourself to be miscalibrated, you just fix that. If most people act this way and accept the argument that convinced you, then you expect them to have done the same.

My current sense is that I should think of posing conflict theories as a highly constrained, limited communal resource, and that while spending it will often cause conflict and people to be mind-killed, a rule that says one can never use that resource will mean that when that resource is truly necessary, it won’t be available.

"Talking about conflict is a limited resource" seems very, very off to me.

There are two relevant resources in a community. One is actual trustworthiness: how often do people inform each other (rather than deceive each other), help each other (rather than cheat each other), etc. The other is correct beliefs about trustworthiness: are people well-calibrated and accurate about how trustworthy others (both in particular and in general) are. These are both resources. It's strictly better to have more of each of them.

If Bob deceives me,

I desire to believe that Bob deceives me;

If Bob does not deceive me,

I desire to believe that Bob does not deceive me;

Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

Talking about conflict in ways that are wrong is damaging a resource (it's causing people to have incorrect beliefs). Using clickbaity conflict-y titles w

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I’m hearing you say “Politics is not the mind-killer, talking inaccurately and carelessly about politics is the mind-killer! If we all just say true things and don’t try to grab attention with misleading headlines then we’ll definitely just have a great and net positive conversation and nobody will feel needlessly threatened or attacked”. I feel like you are aware of how toxic things like bravery debates are, and I expect you agree they’d be toxic even if everyone tried very hard to only say true things. I’m confused.

I’m saying it always bears a cost, and a high one, but not a cost that cannot be overcome. I think that the cost is different in different communities, and this depends on the incentives, norms and culture in those communities, and you can build spaces where a lot of good discussion can happen with low cost.

You’re right that Hanson feels to me pretty different than my other examples, in that I don’t feel like marginal overcoming bias blogposts are paying a cost. I suspect this might have to do with the fact that Hanson has sent a lot of very costly signals that he is not fighting a side but is just trying to be an interested scientist. But I’m not sure why I feel differently in this case.

I'm going to try explaining my view and how it differs from the "politics is the mind killer" slogan.

  • People who are good at talking about conflict, like Robin Hanson, can do it in a way that improves the ability for people to further talk rationally about conflict. Such discussions are not only not costly, they're the opposite of costly.
  • Some people (most people?) are bad at talking about conflict. They're likely to contribute disinformation to these discussions. The discussions may or may not be worth having, but, it's not surprising if high-disinformation conversations end up quite costly.
  • My view: people who are actually trying can talk rationally enough about conflict for it to be generally positive. The issue is not a question of ability so much as a question of intent-alignment. (Though, getting intent aligned could be thought of as a kind of skill). (So, I do think political discussions generally go well when people try hard to only say true things!)
  • Why would I believe this? The harms from talking about conflict aren't due to people making simple mistakes, the kind that are easily corrected by giving them more information (which could be uncovered in the course of
... (read more)

Thank you, this comment helped me understand your position quite a bit. You're right, discussing conflict theories are not inherently costly, it's that they're often costly because powerful optimization pressures are punishing discussion of them.

I strongly agree with you here:

I am advocating a conflict theory, rather than a mistake theory, for why discussions of conflict can be bad. I think, if you consider conflict vs mistake theories, you will find that a conflict theory makes better predictions for what sorts of errors people make in the course of discussing conflict, than a mistake theory does.

This is also a large part of my model of why discussions of conflict often go bad - power struggles are being enacted out through (and systematically distorting the use of) language and reasoning.

(I am quite tempted to add that even in a room with mostly scribes, given the incentive on actors to pretend to be scribes, can make it very hard for a scribe to figure out whether someone is a scribe or an actor, and this information asymmetry can lead to scribes distrusting all attempts to discuss conflict theories and reading such discussions as political coordination.

Yet I not... (read more)

4Hazard
This is a very helpful comment, thank you!
2Kenny
By-the-way, this is a fantastic comment and would make a great post pretty much by itself (with maybe a little context about that to which it's replying).
1Kenny
... seems to be exactly why it's so difficult to discuss a conflict theory with someone already convinced that it's true – any discussion is necessarily an attack in that conflict as it in effect presupposes that it might be false. But that also makes me think that maybe the best rhetorical counter to someone enacting a conflict is to explicitly claim that one's unconvinced of the truth of the corresponding conflict theory or to explicitly claim that one's decoupling the current discussion from a (or any) conflict theory.
4johnswentworth
I generally endorse this line of reasoning.
2Ben Pace
Nice :-)
7clone of saturn
This seems like dramatically over-complicating the idea. I would expect a prototypical conflict theorist to reason like this: 1. Political debates have winners and losers—if a consensus is reached on a political question, one group of people will be materially better off and another group will be worse off. 2. Public choice theory makes black people worse off. (I don't know if the article is right about this, but I'll assume it's true for the sake of argument.) 3. Therefore, one ought to promote public choice theory if one wants to hurt black people, and disparage public choice theory if one wants to help black people.
0johnswentworth
This explanation loses predictive power compared to the explanation I gave above. In particular, if we think of conflict theory as "bad things happen because of bad people", then it makes sense why conflict theorists would think public choice theory makes black people worse off, rather than better off. In your explanation, we need that as an additional assumption.
1Kenny
I don't think it's useful to talk about 'conflict theory', i.e. as a general theory of disagreement. It's more useful in a form like 'Marxism is a conflict theory'. And then a 'conflict theorist' is someone who, in some context, believes a conflict theory, but not that disagreements generally are due to conflict (let alone in all contexts). So, from the perspective of a 'working class versus capital class' conflict theory, public choice theory is obviously a weapon used by the capital class against the working class. But other possible conflict theories might be neutral about public choice theory. Maybe what makes 'conflict theory' seem like a single thing is the prevalence of Marxism-like political philosophies.
0OphilaDros
This example looks like yet another instance of conflict theory imputing bad motives where they don't exist and generally leading you wrong. A large part of this example relies on "Buchanan having racist political agenda and using public choice theory as a vehicle for achieving this agenda" being a true proposition. I can not assign a high degree of credibility to this proposition though, considering Buchanan is the same guy who wrote this: "Given the state monopoly as it exists, I surely support the introduction of vouchers. And I do support the state financing of vouchers from general tax revenues. However, although I know the evils of state monopoly, I would also want, somehow, to avoid the evils of race-class-cultural segregation that an unregulated voucher scheme might introduce. In principle, there is, after all, much in the ”melting pot“ notion of America. And there is also some merit in the notion that the education of all children should be a commonly shared experience in terms of basic curriculum, etc. We should not want a voucher scheme to reintroduce the elite that qualified for membership only because they have taken Latin and Greek classics. Ideally, and in principle, it should be possible to secure the beneficial effects of competition, in providing education, via voucher support, and at the same time to secure the potential benefits of commonly shared experiences, including exposure to other races, classes and cultures. In practise, we may not be able to accomplish the latter at all. But my main point is, I guess, to warn against dismissing the comprehensive school arguments out of hand too readily. " Source: http://www.independent.org/issues/article.asp?id=9115
8Benquo
1. Talk is cheap, especially when claiming not to hold opinions widely considered blameworthy. 2. Buchanan's academic career (and therefore ability to get our attention) can easily depend on racists' appetite for convenient arguments regardless of his personal preferences.

I mostly think of conflict theory as a worldview characterized by (a) assuming that bad things mostly happen because of bad people, and (b) assuming that the solution is mostly to punish them and/or move power away from them. I think of mistake theory as a worldview characterized by assuming that people do not intend to be evil (although they can still have bad incentives).

Why not integrate both perspectives: people make genuine mistakes due to cognitive limitations, and they also genuinely have different values that are in conflict with each other, and the right way to frame these problems is "bargaining by bounded rationalists" where "bargaining" can include negotiation, politics, and war. (I made a 2012 post suggesting this frame, but maybe should have given it a catchy name...)

Personally, my view is that mechanism design is more-or-less-always the right way to think about these kinds of problems. Sometimes that will lead to the conclusion that someone is making an honest mistake, sometimes it will lead to the conclusion that punishment is an efficient strategy, and often it will lead to other conclusions.

(I wrote the above before seeing this part.) I guess "mechanism des

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3Gurkenglas
You mean, we mistake theorists are not in perpetual conflict with conflict theorists, they are just making a mistake? O_o

If your concern is that this is evidence that the OP is wrong (since it has conflict-theoretic components, which are mindkillers), it seems important to establish that there are important false object-level claims, not just things that make such mistakes likely. If you can't do that, maybe change your mind about how much conflict theory introduces mistakes?

If you're just arguing that laying out such models are likely to have bad consequences for readers, this is an important risk to track, but it's also changing the subject from the question of whether the OP's models do a good job explaining the data.

9johnswentworth
This is a really good point and a great distinction to make. As an example, suppose I hear a claim that some terrorist group likes to eat babies. Such a claim may very well be true. On the other hand, it's the sort of claim which I would expect to hear even in cases where it isn't true. In general, I expect claims of the form "<enemy> is/wants/does <evil thing>", regardless of whether those claims have any basis. Now, clearly looking into the claim is an all-around solid solution, but it's also an expensive solution - it takes time and effort. So, a reasonable question to ask is: should the burden of proof be on writer or critic? One could imagine a community norm where that sort of statement needs to come with a citation, or a community norm where it's the commenters' job to prove it wrong. I don't think either of those standards are a good idea, because both of them require the expensive work to be done. There's a correct Bayesian update whether or not the work of finding a citation is done, and community norms should work reasonably well whether or not the work is done. A norm which makes more sense to me: there's nothing wrong with writers occasionally dropping conflict-theory-esque claims. But readers should be suspicious of such claims a-priori, and just as it's reasonable for authors to make the claim without citation, it's reasonable for readers to question the claim on a-priori grounds. It makes sense to say "I haven't specifically looked into whether <enemy> wants <evil thing>, but that sounds suspicious a-priori."

This feels very similar to the debate on the MTG color system a while ago, which went (as half-remembered some time so much later I don't remember how long it's been, and it's since been deleted):

A: [proposal of personality sorting system.]

B: [statement/argument that personality sorting systems are typically useless-to-harmful]

A: but this doesn't respond to my particular personality system.


I'm sympathetic to B (equivalent to jonhswentworth) here. If members of category X are generally useless-to-harmful, it's unfair and anti-truth to disallow incorporating that knowledge into your evaluations of an X. On the other hand, A could have provided rich evidence of why their particular system was good, and B could have made the exact same statement, and it would still be true. If there are ever exceptions to the rule of "category X is useless-to-harmful", you need to have a system for identifying them

[I'm going to keep talking about this in the MTG case because I think a specific case is easier to read that "category X", and it's less loaded for me than talking about my own piece, if the correspondences aren't obvious let me... (read more)

I probably won't get to that soon, but I'll put it on the list.

I also want to say that I'm sorry for kicking off this giant tangential thread on your post. I know this sort of thing can be a disincentive to write in the future, so I want to explicitly say that you're a good writer, this was a piece worth reading, and I would like to read more of your posts in the future.

6Benquo
Who, specifically, is the enemy here, and what, specifically, is the evil thing they want? It seems to me as though you’re describing motives as evil which I’d consider pretty relatable, so as far as I can tell, you’re calling me an enemy with evil motives. Are people like me (and Elizabeth’s cousin, and Elizabeth herself, both of whom are featured in examples) a special exception whom it’s nonsuspect to call evil, or is there some other reason why this is less suspect than the OP?
4johnswentworth
By "enemy" I meant the hypothetical terrorist in the "some terrorist group likes to eat babies" example. I'm very confused about what you're perceiving here, so I think some very severe miscommunication has occurred. Did you accidentally respond to a different comment than you thought?

How is that relevant to the OP?

7habryka
I do think that I tend to update downwards on the likelihood of a piece being true if it seems to have obvious alternative generators for how it was constructed that are unlikely to be very truth tracking. Obvious examples here are advertisements and political campaign speeches. I do think in that sense I think it's reasonable to distrust pieces of writing that seem like they are part of some broader conflict, and as such are unlikely to be generated in anything close to an unbiased way. A lot of conflict-theory-heavy pieces tend to be part of some conflict, since accusing your enemies of being evil is memetic warfare 101. I am not sure (yet) what the norms for discussion around these kinds of updates should be though, but did want to bring up that there exist some valid bayesian inferences here.

The whole question of the essay is basically “who should we be angry at”?

While the post has a few sentences about moral blame, the main thesis is that power allows people to avoid committing direct crime while having less-powerful people commit those crimes instead (and hiding this from the powerful people). This is a denotative statement that can be evaluated independent of "who should we be angry at".

Such denotative statements are very useful when considering different mechanisms for resolving principal-agent problems. Mechanism design is, to a large extent, a conflict theory, because it assumes conflicts of interest between different agents, and is determining what consequences should happen to different agents, e.g. in some cases "who we should be angry at" if that's the best available implementation.

7johnswentworth
I would say that mechanism design is how mistake theorists respond to situations where conflict theory is relevant - i.e., where there really is a "bad guy". Mechanism design is not about "what consequences should happen to different agents", it's about designing a system to achieve a goal using unaligned agents - "consequences" are just one tool in the tool box, and mechanism design (and mistake theory) is perfectly happy to use other tools as well. There's certainly a denotative idea in the OP which could potentially be useful. On the other hand, saying "the post has a few sentences about moral blame" seems like a serious understatement of the extent to which the OP is about who to be angry at. The OP didn't talk about any other possible implementations, which is part of why it smells like conflict theory. Framing it through principal-agent problems would at least have immediately suggested others.
4Benquo
"Conflict theory" is specifically about the meaning of speech acts. This not the general question of conflicting interests. The question of conflict vs mistake theory is fundamentally, what are we doing when we talk? Are we fighting over the exact location of a contested border, or trying to refine our compression of information to better empower us to reason about things we care about?

Quoting Scott's post:

Mistake theorists treat politics as science, engineering, or medicine. The State is diseased. We’re all doctors, standing around arguing over the best diagnosis and cure. Some of us have good ideas, others have bad ideas that wouldn’t help, or that would cause too many side effects.

Conflict theorists treat politics as war. Different blocs with different interests are forever fighting to determine whether the State exists to enrich the Elites or to help the People.

Part of what seems strange about drawing the line at denotative vs. enactive speech is that there are conflict theorists who can speak coherently/articulately in a denotative fashion (about conflict), e.g.:

It seems both coherent and consistent with conflict theory to believe "some speech is denotative and some speech is enacting conflict."

(I do see a sense in which mechanism design is a mistake theory, in that it assumes that deliberation over the mechanism is possible and desirable; however, once the mechanism is in place, it assumes agents never make mistakes, and differences in action are due to differences in values)

4Benquo
I don't quite draw the line at denotative vs enactive speech - command languages which are not themselves contested would fit into neither "conflict theory" nor "mistake theory." "War is the continuation of politics by other means" is a very different statement than its converse, that politics is a kind of war. Clausewitz is talking about states with specific, coherent policy goals, achieving those goals through military force, in a context where there's comparatively little pretext of a shared discourse. This is very different from the kind of situation described in Rao where a war is being fought in the domain of ostensibly "civilian" signal processing.
5Raemon
I'm not sure I endorse this comment as written, but just wanted to note that I appreciate trying to tease out why the article felt subtly off to you. Something about framing it through mistake theory stills feels off to me, too, though. I see where you're coming from with the naive-conflict-theory feeling off. But something important about the article seemed to be grappling with (or at least, I was grappling with as I read the article, and especially through the lens of your comment) was something like: "We have a bunch of naive intuitions about who to blame. Those naive intuitions get weird in sufficiently complex systems, and it's not obvious what to do. One thing you might do is discard the blame concept. But, this feels a bit unsatisfying because many people are still playing the blame game, and directing the blame at someone, and it's rarely the privileged people who were able to purchase distance from the blameworthy things. And maybe the solution here is to get everyone out of conflict theory, but it's not obvious to me that this is a tractable or even optimal-given-buy-in approach, because people in fact do fight over things." [edit: and jessicata's note that incentive alignment is conflict theory feels relevant]

This post makes a fairly straightforward point that has been vary helpful for thinking about power. Having several grounding concrete examples really helped as well. The quote from moral mazes that gave examples of the sorts of wiping-hands-of-knowledge things executives actually say really helped make this more real to me.

Explains a particular social phenomenon that I hadn't previously been aware of.

Thanks for this insightful piece.

It seems to me that there's a third key message, or possibly a reframing of#1, which is that people without power should be considered less morally culpable for their actions -eg the Wells Fargo employees should be judged less harshly.

The concept of "human error" is often invoked to explain system breakdown as resulting from individual deficiencies (eg, early public discussion of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes had an underlying theme of "Ethiopian and Indonesian pilots are just not as skilled as American pilots") - but a human

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6Dagon
I strongly disagree with this. People without power often have less impact from their actions, and actions that do less harm should be judged less harshly. But this is a judgement of the degree of wrongness of the action, not the blame-ability of the person. Also, moral culpability is not zero-sum. There's plenty of blame for everyone making harmful decisions, and "just following orders" is not a valid defense. Giving bad orders is clearly more harmful than following, but in fact more followers adds to the total and to the individual blame, rather than distributing it.
5Elizabeth
I go back and forth on this, and I think the answer might depend on exactly what question you're asking. If what you want to know is "how do we get Wells Fargo to stop defrauding customers?", the answer is obviously to focus on executives, not entry level employees. But if the question is "Do I want to go into business with Dave, who defrauded customers as part of his role as a teller at Wells Fargo? Or Jill, who sliced and diced her data to get her paper count up"? That answer is going to depend a lot on particulars and context.

Stumbled across a laww concepts that splits "power" in this context into finer distinctions.

There is a concept of "qualified immunity". If a police officer makes an act in the course of official duties lawsuits regarding that should be addressed to the police department not to the individual police officer. Power there does not buy distance to the crime but on the contrary great power leads to great accountability even responcibility for things that do not have rules governing them but maybe should. There it can be clear that a police o... (read more)

Thanks for writing this, but I don't believe there's broad agreement on either of your main examples.

I don't know anyone who claims taxes should be only proportional to wealth or income. There are those who say it should be super-linear with income or wealth (tax the rich even more than their proportion of income), and those who say not to tax based on wealth or income, but on consumption (my preference) or the hyper-pragmatic "tax everyone, we need the money". And of course many more nuanced variations.

I likewise don't th... (read more)

4Elizabeth
I'm having trouble responding because I don't understand your cruxes. Are you arguing that in practice people blame the nearest person rather than the most powerful, or that this is theoretically or optimal, or some third thing? Because I agree that that's what happens, my argument is that it is wrong. If you disagree, can you share your cruxes for why I am wrong/something else is correct?
1Dagon
Mostly that this is what happens, and it wasn't clear whether you were describing the same thing, or your preferred configuration.
2Elizabeth
I am confused why you are bringing this up. I see how the fact that there are multiple kinds of taxes and they are sometimes marginally increasing changes my points about taxes or power.
5Dagon
I don't find either of your main examples (taxes or blame apportionment) particularly compelling, and gave some reasons for that. And this makes me less likely to accept your thesis that power allows an incorrect perception of moral distance, or that it (necessarily) obscures information flow. There probably is a relationship in there - power as a measure of potential impact on almost any topic means that power can do these things. It's not clear that it automatically or always does, nor that power is the problem as opposed to bad intentions of the powerful.