Politics

Who’s Better At Science?

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No one. Stop it. No seriously, stop.

The story of this thought starts here. Dan Kahan over at the Cultural Cognition blog found in his studies that, counter to his expectations, “identifying with the Tea Party correlates positively (r = 0.05,p = 0.05) with scores on the science comprehension measure.” Aha, take that Democrats! Except Kahan very clearly states “the relationship is trivially small, and can’t possibly be contributing in any way to the ferocious conflicts over decision-relevant science that we are experiencing.” So what does the Tea Party do? Runs with it anyways like the Democrats have done before.

This is dumb and has to stop. Using statistics with zero understanding of both the particular study and statistics in general is going to show exactly one thing: your preexisting biases. But more importantly, this arguing back and forth about whose group is “better” at science or whose group “accepts” more science is often nothing more than an attempt to be “good” at science by osmosis. If my group is better at science, that must mean that I personally am better at science, right? Or if I accept more scientific conclusions, that must mean I am better at science? No, and no. For example:

…there is zero correlation between saying one “believes” in evolution & understanding the rudiments of modern evolutionary science.

Those who say they do “believe” are no more likely to be able to be able to give a high-school-exam passing account of natural selection, genetic variance, and random mutation — the basic elements of the modern synthesis — than than those who say they “don’t” believe.

In fact, neither is very likely to be able to, which means that those who “believe” in evolution are professing their assent to something they don’t understand.

That’s really nothing to be embarrassed about: if one wants to live a decent life — or just live, really –one has to accept much more as known by science than one can comprehend to any meaningful degree.

What is embarrassing, though, is for those who don’t understand something to claim that their “belief” in it demonstrates that they have a greater comprehension of science than someone who says he or she “doesn’t” believe it.

I agree with Kahan. Accepting at least some of the conclusions of science–and authorities in general–beyond our personal ability to verify is essentially prerequisite to functioning in this world. But let’s not pretend that means we understand science merely because we accept it. And let’s definitely not make science into another piece in the age old war of “who is the better, smarter, and more handsome group.” If you’re worried about the state of science, I can promise you that even a large number of yahoos believing silly things won’t destroy science, but politicizing science most certainly will.

Wealth’s Impact on Child Outcomes: Evidence from Sweden

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Drawing on a large sample from Sweden, a new working paper suggests that wealth may not have much impact on child outcomes. From the abstract:

In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs…In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children’s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, which include drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that correlations observed in affluent, developed countries between (i) wealth and health or (ii) parental income and children’s outcomes do not reflect a causal effect of wealth.

These findings should give us pause. Perhaps we as citizens and policy makers should be looking at other factors that truly impact the long-term well-being of children.

Yglesias: American Democracy is Doomed

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This could have gone differently.
This could have gone differently.

Matthew Yglesias says American democracy is doomed. I am tempted to follow the lead of the good folks at Jr. Ganymede and conclude the opposite but–also like those good folks–I think Yglesias has a point. It’s a long article and it’s worth your time, but here’s the TL;DR:

The idea that America’s constitutional system might be fundamentally flawed cuts deeply against the grain of our political culture. But the reality is that despite its durability, it has rarely functioned well by the standards of a modern democracy. The party system of the Gilded Age operated through systematic corruption. The less polarized era that followed was built on the systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans. The newer system of more ideological politics has solved those problems and seems in many ways more attractive. But over the past 25 years, it’s set America on a course of paralysis and crisis — government shutdowns, impeachment, debt ceiling crises, and constitutional hardball. Voters, understandably, are increasingly dissatisfied with the results and confidence in American institutions has been generally low and falling. But rather than leading to change, the dissatisfaction has tended to yield wild electoral swings that exacerbate the sense of permanent crisis.

Yglesias goes on to say that, despite all these handicaps, the American political system has been incredibly lucky. And that it’s luck is potentially about to run out.

Me? I’ve got one thing to add. As quaint as it may seem, I think that we spend a little too much time focusing on the formal infrastructure of government: on the bureaucracies and the laws, the offices and the branches. The most important ingredients, I think, are the social ones. This is why I have so little interest in politics these days. It’s not just the cynicism. It’s the belief that politics is just the surface, and that the problems–and the solutions–lay in the depths below.

And now, as the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them—therefore Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God. (Alma 31:5)

Progressivism, Rogue AI, and the Heat Death of Humanity

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Click the image to see Randall Munroe's explanation of why the robot revolution is unlikely to succeed.
Click the image to see Randall Munroe’s explanation of why the robot revolution is unlikely to succeed.

This is one of those blog posts that, once you’ve read it, makes you wonder how there was ever a possible universe in which you didn’t know the concepts that you just learned: The Heat Death of Humanity: Progressivism as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The first major new concept has a humble name: paperclipper. According to the Less Wrong Wiki[ref]I have no idea[/ref], the paperclipper is “the canonical thought experiment showing how an artificial general intelligence, even one designed competently and without malice, could ultimately destroy humanity.” Imagine, as the original 2003 paper did, an AI given the task of maximizing the number of paperclips it has in its collection. Seems harmless enough at first glance. However:

If it has been constructed with a roughly human level of general intelligence, the AGI [artificial general intelligence] might collect paperclips, earn money to buy paperclips, or begin to manufacture paperclips. Most importantly, however, it would undergo an intelligence explosion: It would work to improve its own intelligence, where “intelligence” is understood in the sense of optimization power, the ability to maximize a reward/utility function—in this case, the number of paperclips. The AGI would improve its intelligence, not because it values more intelligence in its own right, but because more intelligence would help it achieve its goal of accumulating paperclips. Having increased its intelligence, it would produce more paperclips, and also use its enhanced abilities to further self-improve. Continuing this process, it would undergo an intelligence explosion and reach far-above-human levels. It would innovate better and better techniques to maximize the number of paperclips. At some point, it might convert most of the matter in the solar system into paperclips.

Or, in the words of Eliezer Yudkowsky, “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” In this case: paperclips.

Keep that example in mind for a moment, and think about recent critiques of the social justice movement: Chait’s, Ronson’s, or (what the heck), mine. The common thread is that there is no limiting principle to halt the downward spiral of ever increasing levels of outrage over ever smaller indignities. This doesn’t mean that the individual progressive causes are wrong. The problem is that–just as with the paperclipper–a benign (or even good!) goal has been mistaken for the only goal. Justice is the paperclip.

Well, obviously justice is a lot more intrinsically valuable than a paperclip (or any number of paperclips), but the fact remains that it isn’t the only goal. And justice at the expense of truth, or at the expense of mercy and forgiveness, or at the expense of any number of other possible virtues can become just as dangerous as the paperclipper.

There’s more to the story, however. The primary source of energy for the social justice movement is outrage, and the outrage is derived from examples of injustice. The more injustice the movement sees, the more energy it has available. To use a biological metaphor: here you have a bunch of leaf-eating herbivores and along comes an herbivore that can eat entire trees (bark, branches, and even trunks). The new organism is going to out-compete and eventually replace all others. But, in our case, the same feature that makes social justice ideology so perfectly adapted to our memetic ecosystem is also fueling a kind of second law of thermodynamics for social systems.

It seems that perhaps progressivism is the embodiment in human systems of the second law of thermodynamics, which can be roughly stated as “the tendency of natural processes to lead towards spatial homogeneity of matter and energy, and especially of temperature.”

The individual differences that social justice seeks to ameliorate may be, case-by-case, well worth the effort of amelioration. Or even eradication. But without a limiting principle, the risk is that all differences will be eradicated. And that’s bad because”

…If you even care about life existing – let alone the infinite diversity possible therein – then (contra Caplan), boundaries (such as national borders) are an absolute necessity. No differences, no energy flow, no (thermodynamic) work, no life. As in the stars, so on the earth: romance flows from polarity; trade from comparative advantage; thermodynamic work from heat differences;evolution from variation; economic competition from competing alternatives. All progress is driven by differences; so to erase differences is (counter-eponymously) to end progress.

A lot of this is argument-from-metaphor, of course, which is always perilous. But I certainly think there is some validity to this approach.

Hobbits, Kings, and Legitimate Government

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The Scouring of the Shire
The Scouring of the Shire

I came across an interesting post not long ago on the topic of legitimate government using hobbits as the primary example. I found the post intriguing and especially these two ideas:

Where to the old Christian view, rights followed from duties in the same man, to our post-Christian view the arbitrary rights of one man translate to duties for unaccounted others. (My right to a free lunch translates to your duty to pay for it, &c.) In this sense, all modern political thinking is in its nature totalitarian.

The connection between rights and responsibility is a deep and important one, so I have to confess my first impression was simply, “I like it when people say things that I agree with,” but the kicker at the end about totalitarianism is, at least theoretically, genuinely interesting. When we move from a view of government as primarily guarantor of negative to provider of positive rights, it’s all downhill from there.[ref]Negative and positive rights. (Wikipedia)[/ref] Then came something a little different:

Similarly, a mediaeval king has the task of defending custom. It isn’t his “right” to change anything, but instead his duty to pass on the kingdom to his successor, unmolested. He is the symbol of unity, of social solidarity, of moral order, of motherhood and apple pie and everything that is “above politics.” When he exceeds his authority, he must be deposed. That is precisely why so much mediaeval political thinking was devoted to explicating the duty of rebellion. It can never be taken lightly, never be required except in the gravest circumstances. It is never a right; it can only be a duty. It is a duty not to overturn, but instead to restore a legitimate order, pleasing to God, that has itself been overturned.

What’s this, a red-blooded conservative American talking seriously about the duties and obligations of kings, as though monarchy wasn’t intrinsically and categorically inferior to democracy? Well, maybe democracy is a little overhyped at times, but there’s something more. As we’ve covered at DR fairly recently, meritocracies can be hereditary. In fact, the more egalitarian a meritocracy society becomes, the more it will tend to generate an entrenched aristocracy. The reason for this is that there are basically two components for human IQ (and other traits related to success in a meritocracy): genes and environment. A truly egalitarian society would give all kids the same (or at least very similar) environments. Thus, the remaining variation would be primarily genetic. Add in a little assortative mating (smart people marrying smart people) and presto: you’re perfect egalitarian meritocracy has an entrenched aristocracy.

This an oversimplification that makes a valid point: maybe some of the lessons of past political philosophies, institutions, and traditions might be more relevant to our modern society than we would like to admit. Instead of denying the undercurrent of hereditary privilege, we may want to acknowledge it and borrow from our past to find creative new approaches to mitigate its dark side.

 

Occupational Licensing: Enriching the (Relatively) Few

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A new study from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University explores the growth of optician licensing in the U.S. Though licensing is often advocated for in the name of “public safety,” this study finds that strict licensing laws reduce competition and enrich opticians with no measurable benefits for consumers (such as vision insurance or optician malpractice insurance premiums). A new NBER study found similar results, concluding that those with occupational licenses in the labor market “earn higher pay, are more likely to be employed, and have a higher probability of retirement and pension plan offers.” Writing in The New York Times, the University of Minnesota’s Morris Kleiner explains,

In the 1970s, about 10 percent of individuals who worked had to have licenses, but by 2008, almost 30 percent of the work force needed them. With this explosion of licensing laws has come a national patchwork of stealth regulation that has, among other things, restricted labor markets, innovation and worker mobility…Occupational licensure has a large and growing impact on labor markets and consumers, but has yet to draw significant public attention or scrutiny. The left and right seem to be in agreement that policy makers need to revisit the process for creating licensure regulations and consider amending or rolling back existing laws in favor of lesser forms of regulations such as certification. Ultimately, we all would benefit from wiser, not more, occupational licensing.

Worth thinking about.

Bourgeois Terrorism

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The late scholar John Bowyer Bell described terrorists as “real gunmen in imaginary gardens.” By emphasizing the ideological world-view of terrorists- their perceived reality– Bell was going against popular wisdom. It is easy to form the impression that terrorists are driven to desperate measures by harsh, hopeless economic realities. In other words, an environment of poverty and no jobs leaves angry young men with no choice but to lash out violently against the government. This is more or less what Malcolm X meant by a “sociological explosion.”

Is terrorism, though, really about poverty and jobs? A new piece by Peter Bergen argues that it is not. If anything, terrorism is largely a middle-class phenomenon. A terrorist is likelier to be an educated professional such as a surgeon, engineer, or computer programmer than an unemployed laborer. Some, like Osama Bin Laden, are fabulously wealthy. “These are not the dispossessed. They are the empowered.”

If the empowered are the ones resorting to terrorism, it is hard to argue that it is due to economic oppression. These, after all, are people with degrees that epitomize western ideals of applied science and progress, not some sort of unwashed masses. Basically, creating jobs and business opportunities is important, but unlikely to stop radicalized programmers from becoming terrorists. Effectively responding to terrorism requires responding to terrorist ideologies with perceived grievances, and there is no getting round that.

Bergen’s piece draws from top-notch studies providing interesting information on the socioeconomic backgrounds of terrorists, so check it out.

Some Thoughts on Art in Education

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958 - Art in Education

I saw this political cartoon making the rounds on Facebook a week or two ago. I didn’t think much of it until I finished reading The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad on Saturday. I picked it up on a whim at Audible because the description made it sound like an espionage book, and I’ve been meaning to read some of those. Well, it really wasn’t an espionage book in any conventional sense. But what it was a mind-blowing work of literature in which Conrad floored me again and again with his effortless supply of novel and forcefully evocative metaphors and his profligate characterization. It was stunning.

Here’s the thing: I read Joseph Conrad in high school, both Heart of Darkness and “The Secret Sharer.” I remember them as somewhat impressive and a bit dark, but the truth is that nothing much that I was required to read at the time really meant very much to me. How could they have? How much depth, really, does your average 14 year old have? Even the thought of 18 year olds sitting in a college classroom conducting “literary analysis” just reminds of the story of that poor old woman who tried to restore the famous painting of Jesus. The results aren’t pretty.

958 - Retouching Gone Wrong

Call me a cynic, but my view is that your high school English teacher is probably not going to be able to expand your mind to the point where you fully appreciate Joseph Conrad because artistic appreciation is largely something that comes with age and experience. The older I get, the more powerful art is to me. Any attempt to try and cram that sense of wonder and power into a required curriculum strikes me as not only premature, but kind of perverse. Could there be a more apt application of the phrase “pearls before swine?” At 15, Kurt Vonnegut was bizarre, remote, and alien. At 33, I had to stop on several pages just to allow the power of his writing to sort of wash over me before I could keep going.

I’m not arguing against teaching the arts at all, but I do have two thoughts. First, I think we should be more worried about teaching economics, statistics, and basic computer literacy. Those are the skills we need to have an informed electorate and–yes–for people to be able to go out and get a job. They–in addition to basic math and basic literacy–ought to take priority in school because they are needed earlier in life and because, if we’re going to be honest, the ability to appreciate new art at 30 (or 40 or 50) is a lot more likely than the ability to take up calculus or physics. Art stays with you for life. Why rush it?

Second, I’d like to see a whole lot less emphasis on trying to teach kids how to analyze or critique art. In other words: teach the canon. When you invite students to spend their time on analysis you’re turning the whole thing into a farce. If the works are really monuments of intellectual and artistic greatness, than it’s stupid to think that a classroom of random kids will have anything particularly insightful to bring to the table. If the works are really amenable to analysis by a pack of high-schoolers who maybe read 1/2 and skimmed the rest, then obviously there is not really that much to them.

Instead, I’d like to see a whole lot more time on providing the history (and especially the intellectual history) that contextualizes those works. I think lots of folks are worried that the canon might be incorrect, but the reality is that teaching the canon is not primarily an exercise in indoctrination. What is important is not that the kids accept the framework, but that they recognize it and are therefore free to accept, amend, or reject it as informed readers. Ping-ponging around from Socratic dialogues to Herman Hesse to Kurt Vonnegut (just a sample of the high school reading I remember) and treating each one individually and critically is a recipe for disaster.

I’m not confident that this is an approach that would work across-the-board. I don’t think any approach does that. But I do think that the overall emphasis is sound. School should be primarily about learning the stuff that (1) you wouldn’t learn on your own and that (2) must be learned quickly and early on. Focus on skills that are relevant and that can’t be easily picked up alone. An appreciation for art is absolutely essential, but there isn’t as much need to rush the issue in that case.

 

Second Thoughts On Social Media Shaming

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966 - Tweet Shaming

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran a really good story called How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life. It’s not really just about Justine Sacco, though. It’s about a litany of folks who made a stupid joke on Twitter or posted a stupid photo on Instagram and were then subject to massive social media shaming and had their lives ruined. Now here’s the thing: most of the jokes or images that drew people’s ire were pretty inexcusable as far as things go. But the repercussions seem disproportionate and–most worryingly–the shaming has taken on an kind of barbaric, carnival cruelty aspect. If there’s one thing to take away from this, it’s that social media is shockingly anti-social.

Economists on the Welfare State and the Regulatory State Symposium

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The latest issue of Econ Journal Watch has papers from the Mercatus-sponsored symposium “Economists on the Welfare State and the Regulatory State: Why Don’t Any Argue in Favor of One and Against the Other?” The issue features articles from economists like Robert Higgs, Arnold Kling, and Scott Sumner. However, the two that seem the most interesting to me are the articles by Swedish economist Andreas Bergh and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. I’ve referenced Bergh’s work elsewhere due to his dispelling of several of myths regarding the Swedish welfare state (from both the Right and Left). His symposium contribution argues that a Hayekian welfare state can exist in theory by combining “low regulation with social insurance schemes that are not terribly vulnerable to the knowledge problem.”[ref]This might go well with philosopher Erik Angner’s view on Hayek and redistribution.[/ref]

In Haidt’s paper (with co-author Anthony Randazzo), the two surveyed economists and “found a relationship between views on empirical economic propositions and moral judgments.” Furthermore, in footnote #3, it says that Haidt is working on a book on capitalism and moral psychology. I imagine it will look something like his Zurich.Minds presentation.

Definitely worth checking out.