Reality

Abstract: Inception is not a smart movie because as far as I can tell the director intended it to "blow people's minds" with a focus on the metaphysical themes. But that debate is old hat. Fortunately, with art you get out what you put in--in garbled form. For me, it is a movie about ideas and purpose. It's a morality play about not living in the past and about choosing what to make of your future.

Inception ends on an intentionally puzzling note. Is Cobb in the real world or not? If it's a dream (almost) anything can happen, so the hypothesis (effectively) can't be falsified. The one piece of evidence that could possibly lead us to reject the theory is the top falling down, but we don't know if it does. If he's not dreaming it is strange that the kids are close to the same age and wearing very similar clothes, that he wakes up without cords attached, that he somehow woke up at all, and that everyone nods at him but no one talks to him, etc. All of this seems left intentionally to draw into question the reality of what we see.

Nolan is drawing our attention to the reality, but he should be hoping that we're mindful enough to draw our attention away, to acknowledge we'll never know if it was real of not--we can't--and that we shouldn't care. We shouldn't care because we don't want to live a life that's "real," we want to experience a certain kind of life: one filled with love, compassion, family, sacrifice, and pleasure. That is the life Cobb finds (we believe) at the end of the movie and the life we should leave the theater intent on creating (not having).

The reality, no pun intended, is that the entire movie is an inception on us. It's a "dream" that helps us to discover the importance of living as opposed to obsessing over trivialities. Much of the movie doesn't make sense (why is Cobb being chased by corporations? where did it start? why do the rules change all the time? and why is the ending ambiguous aside from one hard-to-spot clue?) and we're meant to learn that doesn't matter. We learn movies don't have to be realistic to be thrilling. (They just need copious amounts of violence and explosives. Inception would be a bad movie without them.) We learn that your life might be a computer simulation or a dream, but that doesn't imply it can't be meaningful.

Things matter because we make them matter. The movie is a movie--it isn't real. But we argue about how it "really" ended because we choose to make that important, to make it "real." Inception isn't about metaphysics, it's about ethics. It should be about seeing the world is new ways. It's should be about the power of ideas (our mind) to shape our reality, about how our choices determine what is important and what feels real. We understand on a visceral level that the ending is a happy ending whether it's "real" or not.

Despite the comparisons to The Matrix, Inception is really a counterpoint. The Matrix, like Nozick's experience machine, is about how we live for more than just pleasure (or happiness), and about making the right choices to become the kind of person you want (are meant?) to be. In contrast, Inception shows how what is "real" isn't important. We don't want to be in the "real" world so we can see our "real" kids and have "real" accomplishments. We want to live in the "real" world because the people we care about are there. The real Mal is dead because her projection lacks her vitality, Cobb learns. Limbo (like the experience machine) becomes hell for Mal and Cobb because we need social connections--friends and family--to be happy. We don't need them because they are "real" but because that is how we want to experience life. That's why Cobb needs to be with his kids and why, though the camera draws us to the totem and our frontal lobe draws us to hackneyed metaphysics, we are really being guided toward the inception of a novel idea of why and how to live.

Local Eating

I liked this op-ed in the New York Times on "locovores."

Stephen Landsburg comments on his blog. (I highly recommend both the blog as two of his books: The Big Questions and The Armchair Economist.)

Landsburg's point is very valid and to often ignored. The Soivet Union collapsed because planners can't get enough information to decide who should get what, where and when. Prices, miraculously, do the work of the planner fantastically. They are signals that tell let everyone make individuals choices and when those choices get added up in the market, everyone gets what they want--with a few exceptions.

Exception one is that if people don't make smart choices then they aren't going to get what they want. That sounds stupid to say but its the basis for a ton of experiments in behavioral economics exploring why and when people make bad choices.

Exception two is when the prices don't reflect the real cost of something. For example, the price of gasoline doesn't reflect the cost (externality) of pollution to everyone who likes clean air.

So I disagree with Landsburg that prices are good signals in this case. The price of food doesn't capture the externalities from energy use because there is no carbon tax, so in a way it makes sense to try to "correct" the prices for energy use. That said, my guess is that Landsburg and I would agree locovores (and the op-ed author) don't approach that calculation properly because they don't even attempt to weight the costs of global warming against the happiness from consumption.

Descriptive and Normative

I will never understand why the difference between descriptive statements and normative statements is so hard for people to understand.

David Berri once wrote a post on The Wages of Wins blog about who was widely considered an "MVP-candidate" but wasn't actually playing well. He was obviously making the normative statement "if you're not playing well, you don't deserve the MVP award. These guys aren't playing well [... you infer the rest]." But commenters objected, writing that Dave shouldn't title "Who is not the MVP" if he wasn't making a descriptive point about who is not the actual MVP. Yet we know that is a disingenuous point because if you take the title "Who is not the MVP" literally when the MVP won't be award for 5 months, then you expect the post to include every name in the NBA.

Still, you might be willing to cut the commentator some slack since writers often try to pass off normative statements for facts. Nicholas Krisftof wrote the worst op-ed he's ever written a few days ago. It's an opinion column celebrating wider availability for an abortificant that is very safe to use. It's obvious he's pro-choice and celebrating this fact because of the way he places facts in the article and the language he uses: "Up to 70,000 women die from complications of abortions . . .  last year the World Health Organization expanded it's uses as an 'essential medicine.'" But it's painful to read because, while this is an opinion column, Kristof is trying to hide his opinion and manipulate the reader by telling the story of a pill (with selectively chosen facts) as if it were a news story.

One of the most painful areas where people mix up normative and positive statements is when they talk about the arts. A third of the time when people say "that was a great movie" they mean that lots of people like or that on average people like it (descriptive), another third of the time they mean "I like it" (normative) and another third it's hard to know what they mean but it's something along the lines of either "this movie is widely praised by the elite" (descriptive) or "I think this movie will be widely praised by the elite for its structural properties" (normative). When I tried to write all of that I started to understand, just a little, why people can be so confused about whether people are saying something about what is or what should be. Look at this story where the author makes a statement of fact "Inception is ranked #3 on IMDb" but presents it in a warped way "Inception is the third greatest movie of all time." It certainly is not the third greatest movie of all time by any reasonable metric, so does he really just mean he liked it a lot? Or does he think IMDb is a representative poll? (This would make a nice post on why people need to learn statistics in high school.)

The most painful area, though, where people confuse the normative/positive distinction, is ethics. People often use "legal" as a proxy for moral, as in "well it ain't illegal" which is meant to imply it's acceptable and you shouldn't complain. To this day, despite being reminded a hundred times, my dad still thinks that say "the Supreme Court ruled [insert ruling, say that abortion is legal]" is a good argument for why I should think killing an infant is acceptable. Philosophers often confuse what is "natural" with what is right. This comes up often in relation to utilitarianism, where philosophers argue that because utilitarianism places too much of a burden on people to do the right things all the time that it's the wrong moral philosophy. If ethics had a low point of complete intellectual abdication in the past 50 years, it might be that debate. Yet, somehow, a related debate is starting to drag things down even further. As scientists have understand more about people's moral intuitions and it's become clear that, like how all languages are related and share a similar structure, all the rules different societies develop to regulate behavior share similar structure. Someone this has evolved into "morality is a product of evolution" becoming a catch-phrase that is meant to be taken as a normative statement--whatever your brain tells you to do is acceptable because your brain evolved to know right from wrong. Or something. It doesn't make any sense to me, but I've heard people I'd consider pretty smart and reasonable try to make that point.

All of that was cringe-inducing to write.

Achievement

This was in the drafts folder for a long time. I didn't have time to turn the notes I jotted down into anything polished.

How do we decide what we're impressed by? And how much of it do we even get to decide?

Some factors are probably:

1. how hard did someone try?

2. how unique is the skill vis a vis a reference point?

3. how much does our culture respect people who can do it?

I ranked them according to what our intuition probably says is most important. We respect effort first and foremost, and are most impressed by achievements people invest years of their lives in.

But is that true? Would you be more impressed by someone eating 100 sticks of butter in 15 minutes or someone composing the best music on the best selling classical CD this year? I don't think anyone can actually do the former. It far and away more difficult, but if someone did I doubt they'd do it to much fanfare. We just aren't impressed by unusual talents like that. How much is that a product of acculturation and how much is it a product of not understanding?

It could be the later. After all, I don't know anything about competitive eating. That sounds like a lot of butter, but maybe it's common to eat that much on the circuit. Maybe it wouldn't even be that hard if you trained for a year. But to compose a best selling CD? You could train for decades and never accomplish that, right? We're more impressed by things we understand because we can put the achievement in context--how hard did they have to work? (I'm putting aside the issue of natural talent here.)

But I think that factor isn't as important as we think. Here is a thought experiment I like to use. Whose accomplishments are more impressive, Michael Jordan's or Mozart's? I'm pretty sure most people will say Mozart as a snap answer. But most of those people don't know much about composing. They don't have any idea how much people actually like Mozart (do you? Classical music makes up < 2.5% of total album sales). Most people know a little more about Jordan, if only because he's still alive. He won 6 championships and he's far and away the best basketball player of all time. We know roughly how old basketball is (100 years) and how many people play (tens of millions) in the U.S. A lot more people play sports than compose classical music, and a lot more people are alive today then hundreds of years ago. If Mozart was one of the best composers in an era when few people composed and fewer people lived, doesn't that add up to an best guess that there are a lot more Mozarts out there than Jordans? If our judgements were driven primarily by praising what we understand we should be more impressed with Jordan. But we aren't.

So the question is whether everyone is impressed by Picaso's paintings and Shakespeare's plays because everyone likes them, or because everyone told them they're impressive for so long?

Note: This didn't fit in, but it's a nice dig on Cambridge elites. I've noticed the same people who tend to claim the most interest in diversity are the least accepting of these kinds of ideas. They have the strongest commitment to traditional views about what makes good art and what constitutes "success." Isn't it time they opened our eyes to the diversity of human achievement? Like eating 4.5 lbs of steak in 7 minutes.

Metaphysics

Like most "literal-minded" people, I'm not that interested in metaphysics. I think the questions are interesting: Do we have free will? What is real? Is there a God? They seem self-evidently important.

Yet there's something wrong with most metaphysical speculation. I can't say it as eloquently as Hume so I'll just dig up the famous quote to express my sentiments:

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

If philosophy departments are sophistry plants, then metaphysicists are the 20% in the 80/20 rule.

Still, Hume's statement contradicts itself. He wants us to avoid questions that can't be settled scientifically, yet his basis for the claim isn't scientific. There's something inescapable about questions of reality, purpose, and free will.

Free will is the easiest to settle. Everything in the universe seems pretty easy to explain in deterministic or at least probabilistic terms at a quantum level. There doesn't seem to be any scope for choice at the level of the tissues and organs, so it seems unlikely our brains can really make choices. Free will is a myth. But it's a myth that we should believe in. Stories are important to our lives, even if they are delusions. "Sometimes the truth isn't good enough. Sometimes people deserve more." We deserve free will.

The fact that I casually advocate deluding yourself suggests I don't care much about reality. That is mostly true. I don't think subjective idealism is refutable. I don't think you can prove anything is "real" or even care what word "real" means. But I do, of course, have implicit views. As far as I'm concerned what's real is what our intuition, the principle of parsimony, and scientific experiments combine to tell us is real. The ground we stand on is real, by intuition. Electrons are real, by experimental evidence. God is not real, by the principle of parsimony. There is no higher purpose in the universe, no set of criteria for deciding what is right and wrong or what we should do. There's just what's in our heads.

This is why delusions are ok. What's "really real" is whatever we can construct in our minds. We can give ourselves goals and set rules for telling right from wrong. We can give these goals and rules meaning. And we should--for our own health and happiness (the two "goods" I give meaning to start with).

Thus my metaphysic says, in short, we are probably just clumps of matter that somehow, through some strange loop, became self-aware. We don't have any objective purpose, but we shouldn't care. We should invest some purpose--then ignore the ladder of reasoning we used to arrive at that purpose and pursue it as a given most of the time. That's how we'll be happiest.

I don't have use for thought experiments like the experience machine or questions about whether we live in a computer simulation, or even whether we have free will. We shouldn't care.

"Of course it is [just] happening inside your head . . . but why on Earth should that mean that it is not real?"

Other interesting ideas in metaphysics I didn't get to mention:

1. In I am a Strange Loop Douglas Hofstadter makes an analogy for the interaction of neurons in our brain and our thoughts. I recommend reading the book because I can't explain it here but his basic point is that we can just as well say that our thoughts and feelings "cause" the neurons to fire in certain patterns as saying that those patterns "cause" us to feel the way we do. It's a semantic point about the meaning of "cause" but it's interesting.

2. In The Big Questions, Steve Landsburg notes that math is a universal. We're compelled by logic to agree with provable propositions. Perhaps, then, he proposes a sort of Platonism where math is the reality. It sounds better in the book.

3. The latter two films in The Matrix trilogy have an interesting "worldview." In the world of The Matrix there is an anomaly in the universe that is otherwise governed by (I guess) mathematical laws. This anomaly represents something like incompleteness or the halting program, and is represented in human form by Neo. Neo is the only person in the movies who can make choices, though he only ever makes one choice, because all the other "choices" are caused by this or that rationale. Neo gets caught in a fight with Smith that is analogous to the halting program, and he chooses to halt. Smith asks why, but there is no rationale, he does it simply "because [he] choose[s] to."

What and Where to Read

I'll bookend another David Brooks quote with two Keynes quotes:

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones

But Brooks believes we should try to entrap ourselves with the old ideas:

. . . different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on . . .

But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.

The thing is, you can read books with terrible, unimportant ideas just like you can read terrible writing on the Internet (like this). Brooks isn't arguing for books so much as arguing for the cannon. But I don't read fiction because there are hardly any good ideas in fiction--you tend to get out only what you put in. That eliminates most of the cannon. The rest, which is mostly philosophy and religion, you can learn more efficiently through secondary sources. Reading Kant in translation or Berkeley directly is a horrible way to learn about the categorical imperative or subjective idealism. If you want to be smart don't read a lot of "great books," just siphon a ton of great ideas out of good textbooks and literature reviews. Then think hard about why most of those ideas are bad (e.g. this).

That said, Brooks might have a point when you consider libertarians. They tend to learn everything they know from a few Internet sources and don't know much economic theory. Indeed,

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Martha Nussbaum on Buqua's

Nussbaum's argument against banning them.

She's a philosopher, so she should be prone to making long-winded, logically inconsistent arguments that misrepresent counterarguments and rely on a number of empirical claims that are swept under the rug. But here (despite being a little drawn out), she manages to make a clear point about theory, then applies the criteria and address counter-points sequentially. She even addresses and empirical point (about the correlation between Islam and violence). This goes to show I don't hate all philosophy writing, just most of it.

On a side note, which one doesn't fit:

Sex magazines, nude photos, tight jeans — all of these products, arguably, treat women as objects

Zizek

Zizek is a likeable guy and, as this profile from Der Spielgel illustrates, a characiture of everything wrong with philosophers.

Zizek is the kind of guy who "is so full of thoughts that are just waiting to bubble out of him" that he doesn't even need notes to speak to an cosmopolitan audience of 1,000. In science, that might scare you: you come to hear about carefully constructed experiments and tight reasonsing. You expect parimonious explanations you could explain to your grandma. Simplicity is a virtue.

But not in philosophy. At this conference, complexity is a virtue: "the point is not to provide easy or concrete answers." This is a conference of ideas.

Ideas about how "the ontological essense of the Germans, French, and Americans [is based] on their toilet habits and the resulting relationship with their fecal matter." Filled with wry, cutting insights such that "the best, most impressive films about the Holocaust are comedies." Like Schindler's List.

The first, and only, time I read Zizek I found him pontificating about the need for an "aesthetic appreciate of trash." I don't remember why we needed it (something to do with ending global warming), but I'm pretty sure "stupid is as stupid does." And Zizek is stupid.

I felt like that point was shocking enough to deserve bolding. I'm not a dramatic person. I wouldn't bold it--I didn't want to--but it practically bolded itself.

The thing is, the fact that Zizek is a moron will come as a shock to many. Yet anyone who writes 50 books has got to be full of shit. When Zizek started talking about ontologies and shit he stumbled on the Holy Grail of philosophy. He transmuted his high probability of being a moron into a certainty. For a fleeting second I thought he really was brilliant.

He, of course, knows this. He admits he doesn't have deep ideas, or even big ideas most of the time. He just has a big personality, big enough to write an entertaining human interest piece at least.

Part III in the on-going series "Why I hate Philosophers." Part I and Part II, retroactively designated.

The Epistemic Problem

I just read a good paper by Tyler Cowen on "the epistemic problem" for consequentialism. The problem is that it's hard to predict the consequences of actions, esp. over a long time horizon, and we are meant to infer that this implies consequences can't be a good basis for deciding how to act.

If that sounds like a stupid argument, it is.

Unfortunately, philosophers have constructed sophisticated examples to help pull the wool over their own eyes. Take this example, discussed in Cowen's paper. You are a general deciding where to invade France to ensure victory over the Nazi's. You can land at the Pas-de-Calais or in Normandy and have no good reason to prefer one over the other. You do know, however, that if you land in Normandy you will break a dog's leg during the landing. (Ignore how implausible it is that you could know something about the dog but nothing about the beaches.)

A utilitarian would land in the Pas-de-Calais so as not to harm the dog. But that is stupid, we're supposed to say. It's patently so stupid the utilitarian must be bonkers and we shouldn't be utilitarian's or we risk being thrown in Arkham. And you don't want to be thrown in the asylum, do you? I didn't think so.

But here's the catch that got swept under the rug. If we didn't know about the dog we wouldn't have a way for deciding on Calais or Normandy. We'd just pick one of the beaches randomly, probably by flipping a coin. Is getting in touch with our inner Two-Face a better way to decide? I guess some Very Serious Philosophers think so.

Books which have influenced me most

Tyler Cowen started a trend in March of bloggers listing a "gut list" of the 10 books which influenced them the most. His list is here.

I'm a bit late to the party but my list is below. I have 11 entries because sometimes you just need 1 more, so you take it to 11. Most of the books are on there for one memorable or novel idea, not necessarily original to the author, just the first place I learned about it. They aren't the 10 "best" books I've ever read, but I'd recommend most of them.

Hyperspace - This book introduced me to how interesting math and theoretical physics can be. I started reading it late one night and couldn't put it down, something I can't say for a lot of books.

 

The End of Poverty - this was the first book I read on development economics. I read close to everything Jeffrey Sachs publishes these days. This book introduced me to the importance of trade and growth in development (in a vague way) and is one of the main reasons I'm studying economics today.

 

The Tipping Point - this was one of the first books I read in a day. It made me think a lot about applications to politics. I don't think about it so much anymore. I've read tons of Gladwell essays and his three other books since, many of which also had some good ideas. (Outliers almost made this list.)

 

Stumbling on Happiness - I read 100 pages of this book in high school, then fell asleep at like 7 PM on Friday and never got around to finishing it. Three years later I checked it out from the library and didn't finish it. Then I bought it just a few months ago and read it cover to cover. It's about why we're so bad at predicting what will make us happy. I forget that a lot, but it struck me as a very novel thesis, well argued. I wish I just kept it in mind more often.

 

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - this is the best novel ever written. There are a lot of great but trite messages throughout the series. The thing that struck me and stuck with me was in this quote: "Of course it is happening in your head . . . but why on Earth should that mean that it is not real?" I'm an ethical subjectivist. I think we make up our own significance and this (probably unintentionally) captures that.

 

Brave New World - this book is about truth and happiness. It plays with your intuition to try to convince you happiness isn't everything and I learned a ton thinking about why the book is wrong (happiness > truth) but feels wrong.

 

"Politics and the English Language" - this is the best essay ever written, period. Re-read it often. It's easy to try to sound smart by string big words together. It's hard to think up good ideas and then find words to express them. Jargon isn't always bad, and I think he goes too far attacking some common phrases.

 

A Midsummer Night's Dream - this is the most thoughtful Shakespeare play and the most fun. Literature deal with a few topics well. Love is one and this reflects more of what I think about it (fickle, dramatic, and inescapable) than Romeo and Juliet ("love conquers all", tragic).

 

Commanding Heights - this is a book but I never finished it. It's on the list because the PBS special based on the book was influential. It introduced me to Jeff Sachs and also changed me from being sympathetic to socialist ideas to thinking history proved them wrong. I didn't understand the calculation problem until later but the seed was probably planted here

 

How We Decide -  I didn't even finish this book but I made me understand and believe that the brain works unconsciously to solve most of our problems and that emotions can be guideposts based on that subconscious work. It helped shatter my worldview that said you make your best decisions by always thinking thing through. Now I believe you should trust your gut, at least on some issues (see "A Midsummer Night's Dream").

 

Godel, Escher, Bach - this book is one of the longest books I've ever read. It has hundreds of interesting ideas but the most interesting is the concept of a "strange loop," that what makes conscious things conscious is that they are aware they exist. You can draw an analogy between that fact and how Godel's theorem exploits arithmetic to speak about arithmetic, leading to all sorts of paradoxes. I still don't understand the whole deal that well, but it got me interesting in cognitive science and to the author's hypothesis that all thinking is a process of making analogies. The speech where he explained that might as well share this spot.

Update: I'm adding another pair of books on the same theme because they should have been on here and I forgot to write them down.

Band of Brothers and A Bridge Too Far. These are great books about courage. While Band of Brothers is a triumphant story, A Bridge too Far is tragic. They complement each other.

Smart movie?

and as District 9 proved, a smart, inventive thriller can catch the Academy’s attention in a ten-picture race.

What the hell is a smart movie? I never understood.

Is it the kind of movie smart movie like? (Or the kind of movie people like to look smart?) Any movie that takes itself seriously?

I think it's supposed to be a movie with a point that's smart.

But what was the point of District 9? To treat aliens with respect? Or was it smart because it thoughtlessly alluded to apartheid?

Honestly, I'm scared of people who get their opinions from movies. If you're using The Hurt Locker as one of your primary sources (in either sense) in a debate about Iraq, how likely is it you have anything insightful to say?

I'm not saying movies can't make you think. The Dark Knight reiterates some not-quite-trite points ("sometimes the truth isn't good enough") and The Matrix trilogy is first-rate meta-physics (with horseshit ethics).

Maybe this analogy can help. I wonder why people cared that Megan Fox was in Transformers. If you want some stimulation you can find it on the Internet. Why waste 2 hours and $8.50? Mutatis mutandis with "smart" movies and intellectual stimulation.

Thoughts on Ethics

Ethics is one of my favorite topics. If philosophy departments weren't so full of quacks, the grading wasn't so subjective, and the requirement's didn't include so much tripe, I'd probably be a philosophy major. (More thoughts on philosophy in one of my two Amazon.com book reviews.)

Warning: This is the customary warning that someone has probably made these points before.

Consequentialists think that the right thing to do is the action with the best consequences. Utilitarians are the most common type of consequentialists because they specify an intuitive criteria for "best:" whatever generates the most happiness is best. Of course, what exactly that means is a subject of much debate.

One "refutation" of utilitarianism is this reductio ad adsurdem argument. Consider a scenario where a million people will be happier by blaming and punishing a scapegoat for their problems. A slight increase in happiness multiplied a million times over could easily cancel out a ton of misery for one scapegoat. So the right thing to do is punish the scapegoat. But we know that isn't right. You can't punish someone for crimes they didn't commit.

But who says the utility function should just be the sum of happiness in the universal minus the pain in the universe. The point is that the distribution of happiness could matter. The utility function could take the happiness of each individual into account separately. One idea for how to do that would be to think of all possible words and rank them according to which one you'd want to live in if you didn't know who you'd be. This utility function captures the value of original position and veil of ignorance from John Rawls without the weaker parts of his theory of justice. This gives the utility function a much more natural, and less grand, interpretation too.

If we apply this utility function to the scapegoat case we find it gives the "right" prediction. If the risk of being that scapegoat is large enough no one would choose to live in that world. On the other hand, if everyone gains a lot and the risk of being the scapegoat is small, then the theory says punish the scapegoat. That makes sense. We don't want to lower the speed limit even though we know it would save a few lives because we all want the little bit of extra happiness from a shorter commute. Those who die in accidents are de facto scapegoats.

The interesting thing about this theory is that is changes the utility function from being concerned with the nature of "the good," i.e. with the meaning of a good life is. It punts on those questions and simply assumes that whatever we prefer is a good life. There's a large literature on this "good life" question, the debate largely revolving around the issue of whether a good life is one with satisfied preferences, happiness, or "virtue" (whatever that is).

An interesting property of this utility function, though, is that everyone might end up with different rankings of preferences. I might be risk averse and hate worlds with lots of inequality while you might be risk-neutral and just prefer the happiness world. How should we decide what the "actual" best world is? We'd have to know that to know what the true "best action" is. (Ignore the fact that it's already impossible to do this thought experiment and rank all possible worlds on our own, much less for everyone!)

One idea is that you could just take everyone's ranking of all possible words (suppose there is a finite number) and use them as some kind of vote. Whichever world wins the vote is the best world and the corresponding action is the best action. The problem with this is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem applies which means, under some basic criteria, there is no fair system for deciding which world is the best.

The lesson I take from this is that ethics is really a game where we make the rules and it's important not to over think the significance of these rules. When you try to make them consistent and sensible things start to fall apart, even on a purely theoretical level. When the utility function represents something objective (e.g. happiness, brain states, activity in pleasure sensing areas of the brain) then you're left asking why should ethics be concerned with that quantity? Is the purpose of the universe really to maximize the activity in pleasure sensing areas of the brain? But if you go with a less meta-physically grand strategy based on preferences, things fall apart. I ignored two even more basic problems with preferences. First, they may not even be transitive (e.g. A > B, B > C, yet C > A). Second, people are bad predictors of what they like. The lotteries will likely be heavily influenced by cognitive biases, like focusing too much on small changes of a miserable life.

Theoretical ethics is a mess, yet the alternative of having ad hoc rules for living seems equally unsatisfying.

Update: Related thoughts from Bryan Caplan.

Sandel on Justice

Sandel's TED talk on improving policy debate. His big idea is that we spend too much of the time asking the wrong questions because we ignore the fundamentals. We should ask "what is the purpose of universities?" before we ask who they should admit (affirmative action). I think it's a good talk.

But I have two big problems with philosophers and both apply to Sandel. When Sandel asks the audicence about the Supreme Court case they end up in a situation where A says letting a disabled golfer use golf cart would not give him an unfair advantage. B says that it would. A's only response is, to paraphrase, "I believe it wouldn't as an article of faith." In situations like this our thoughts should jump to "why don't we do an experiment and find out?" The facts are almost always absolutely essential to a debate, even after it has been framed properly.

The second problem is that Sandel says "musical performance isn't just [about] mak[ing] . . . us happy, but to honor and recognize . . . excellence." For decades this kind of virtue ethic has been in vogue. I understand appeal--consequentialism brings too many unsavory paradoxes. But isn't it obvious, when you really stop and think, that act utilitarianism is the only sensible ethical system?

This debate has an analog in economics. Sometimes people don't behave like the homo economicus would. We take that as evidence that some economic models are bad. Fair enough. But it's also evidence that a lot of people make stupid choices. Utilitarianism doesn't predict people's intuitions AND it shows people have bad intuitions.

Essays

I have 5,000 entires to sort through from my RSS feeds, and about 120 articles I opened but never read. I guess I should start posting about those some time soon. Also, I need to weight on this story. I think the Dartmouth data story is more complicated than the reaction on the liberal blogosphere suggests, but, at the same time, its obvious the story's authors are tools.

In the mean time I've been doing some research on the validity of this model and it brought me back to the best article I've read in the past 6 months, An Animal's Place.

Journalists don't make good points to often, but I think Michael Pollan has a worthwhile thesis. Or maybe he just looks good because his competition on this topic is academic philosophers.

My other favorite Times Magazine stories are Leonhardt's The Big Fix and Krugman's How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? for content and The Aria of Chris Matthews for entertainment value.

While I'm at it I'll link to my two favorite essays: Inside the Machine: Toward a New Development Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Politics and the English Language by George Orwell.

Is it rational to vote?

Does it make sense to vote?

The short answer is "probably, since you'll feel better about having done your civic duty." But when people ask this question I think what they mean is "the cost of voting is about 10 minutes of your time, the benefit is a tiny probability multiplied by something huge--is that tiny multiplied by huge a big or small?

Gelman et al. estimate the probability your vote would have mattered in the 2008 election. The probability varies by state so they plot by state in this graph:

These probabilities are tiny. (And I think they are vast overestimates.) But look at the historic average growth rates for different income groups when Democrats are in office vs Republicans. The fact that Democrats have higher growth rates for all groups probably has little to do with policy. Democrats just happened to get voted into office at the right times of the business cycle. The fact that the growth is relatively even (and somewhat convergent) is possibly also an artifact of the Democrats being in office when there was a lot of growth in college and high school education, while the Republicans have presided during a period of more rapid technological change (or some such narrative).

But it's definitely possible that Democratic and Republican policies have something to do with the fact that income growth lags for the poorest under Republicans and is greatest for the poorest under Democrats. Suppose that we adjust the growth rates so the means are the same; then, by eye-balling, it looks like growth would be around 1% greater per year for the poorest income deciles. Using the numbers in this graph that means about $144 billion in value over 4 years for the bottom two income quintiles.

Suppose your time is worth $20 an hour. It takes ~10 minutes to vote. The value from voting is $144 billion worth of aid to the poor and working class. What would the probability need to be (at least) for the expected benefit of voting to exceed its cost? If you weight income to yourself and to others equally then it's just 1 in 43 billion.

Which means it rational (in the sense of expected value), for Democrats at least, to vote in almost every state in the union. That's definitely not a result most philosophers intuit (and is probably an artifact of greater overestimated probabilities).

But what if these numbers are right? Shouldn't the possibility be widely noted in the literature? And shouldn't estimates of the probability of your vote mattering note that there is a big difference between a 1 in 10²⁰ chance, which implies voting is irrational, and a 1 in 10⁹ or 1 in 10¹² chance, which may imply voting is rational?