I had another dream, I had another life
The Pew Research Center released the results of a new survey demonstrating a growing partisan divide in the United States.
I am happy to see that a growing number of people are recognizing immigrants as a net positive to the country:
But what about politics at the personal level?
If partisans are living according to their preferences, then our communities may be highly polarized as well:
Aside from the human cost, what have wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria cost the American taxpayer? The following comes from the Department of Defense:
I recently came across a 2012 paper by philosopher Michael Huemer titled “In Praise of Passivity.” Given our current political climate, I found the paper to be rather wise:
When it comes to political issues, we usually should not fight for what we believe in. Fighting for something, as I understand the term, involves fighting against someone. If one’s goal faces no (human) opposition, then one might be described as working for a cause (for instance, working to reduce tuberculosis, working to feed the poor) but not fighting for it. Thus, one normally fights for a cause only when what one is promoting is controversial. And most of the time, those who promote controversial causes do not actually know whether what they are promoting is correct, however much they may think they know…[T]hey are fighting in order to have the experience of fighting for a noble cause, rather than truly seeking the ideals they believe themselves to be seeking.
Fighting for a cause has significant costs. Typically, one expends a great deal of time and energy, while simultaneously imposing costs on others, particularly those who oppose one’s own political position. This time and energy is very likely to be wasted, since neither side knows the answer to the issue over which they contend. In many cases, the effort is expended in bringing about a policy that turns out to be harmful or unjust. It would be better to spend one’s time and energy on aims that one knows to be good.
Thus, suppose you are deciding between donating time or money to Moveon.org (a left-wing political advocacy group) and donating time or money to the Against Malaria Foundation (a charity that fights malaria in the developing world). For those concerned about human welfare, the choice should be clear. Donations to Moveon.org may or may not affect public policy, and if they do, the effect may be either good or bad–that is a matter for debate. But donations to Against Malaria definitely save lives. No one disputes that.
There are exceptions to the rule that one should not fight for causes. Sometimes, people find it necessary to fight for a cause, despite that the cause is obviously and uncontroversially good–as in the case of fighting to end human rights violations in a dictatorial regime. In this case, one’s opponents are simply corrupt or evil. Occasionally, a person knows some cause to be correct, even though it is controversial among the general public. This may occur because the individual possesses expertise that the public lacks, and the public has chosen to ignore the expert consensus. But these are a minority of the cases. Most individuals fighting for causes do not in fact know what they are doing.
He concludes,
Popular wisdom often praises those who get involved in politics, who vote in democratic elections, fight for a cause they believe in, and try to make the world a better place. We tend to assume that such individuals are moved by high ideals and that, when they change the world, it is usually for the better.
The clear evidence of human ignorance and irrationality in the political arena poses a serious challenge to the popular wisdom. Lacking awareness of basic facts of their political systems, to say nothing of the more sophisticated knowledge that would be needed to reliably resolve controversial political issues, most citizens can do no more than guess when they enter the voting booth. Far from being a civic duty, the attempt to influence public policy through such arbitrary guesses is unjust and socially irresponsible. Nor have we any good reason to think political activists or political leaders to be any more reliable in arriving at correct positions on controversial issues; those who are most politically active are often the most ideologically biased, and may therefore be even less reliable than the average person at identifying political truths. In most cases, therefore, political activists and leaders act irresponsibly and unjustly when they attempt to impose their solutions to social problems on the rest of society.
…Political leaders, voters, and activists are well-advised to follow the dictum, often applied to medicine, to “first, do no harm.” A plausible rule of thumb, to guard us against doing harm as a result of overconfident ideological beliefs, is that one should not forcibly impose requirements or restrictions on others unless the value of those requirements or restrictions is essentially uncontroversial among the community of experts in conditions of free and open debate. Of course, even an expert consensus may be wrong, but this rule of thumb may be the best that such fallible beings as ourselves can devise.
So, the next time you get the itch to raise awareness about some controversial political issue, Huemer suggests…
Individualism is rising across the world, according to a forthcoming study in Psychological Science by a team of Canadian and American psychologists who evaluated 51 years of data on individualistic practices and values across 77 countries.
There is, however, one big exception to this salutary trend: China.
Researchers focused on shifts in measures like the cross-cultural Individualism-Collectivism scale in the countries they evaluated. Individualism promotes a view of self-direction and autonomy, whereas collectivism fosters conformity and adherence to social obligations. Individualistic cultures prioritize independence and uniqueness whereas collectivist cultures emphasize family and fitting in.
To get at how cultures have moved along the individualism-collectivism spectrum the researchers used data focusing on changes in individualistic cultural practices and also World Values Survey responses that track shifts in cultural values.
The relevant cultural practices included changes in household size, percentage of people living alone, older adults living alone, and divorce rates. The researchers also analyzed how values changed with regard to the importance of friends versus family; teaching children independence or obedience; and preferences for self-expression such as arguing that free speech should be protected in their countries.
So what’s causing this shift? After looking at “socioeconomic development, disaster frequency, pathogen prevalence and climate affected trends in individualism,” the researchers found that “socioeconomic development had by far the strongest effect, accounting for between 35 and 58 percent of the change in individualism…The shift toward greater individualism is not confined just to developed countries. Overall, they find a 12 percent global shift on the axis toward increased individualism. The richer people become, the more likely they are to throw off the shackles of collectivism.”
So how come China hasn’t kept up? “As a possible explanation, researchers cite a 2014 study that identified profound cultural differences between southern and northern Chinese. Specifically, the folks in rice-growing southern China are more interdependent and holistic-thinking than those who live in the more individualistic wheat-growing north. Of course, it doesn’t help that the Communist government under President Xi Jinping is forcefully suppressing dissent.”
Yale economist William Nordhaus has done some of the best research on the economic effects of climate change. In a new working paper, Nordhaus and Andrew Moffat survey the literature (27 studies) and look at 36 different estimates regarding the global economic impact of climate change by 2100. They note that the IPCC stated in their 2007 report, “Global mean losses could be 1 to 5% of GDP for 4°C of warming” (pg. 2). Overall, “there are many studies of theoretical temperature increases in the 2 to 4 °C range, and that they cluster in the range of a loss of 0 to 4% of global output” (pg. 13). The authors’ own “preferred regression” provides an “estimated impact” of “1.63 % of income at 3 °C warming and 6.53% of income at a 6 °C warming. We make a judgmental adjustment of 25% to cover unquantified sectors…With this adjustment, the estimated impact is -2.04 (+ 2.21) % of income at 3 °C warming and -8.16 (+ 2.43) % of income at a 6 °C warming” (pg. 3).
This supports my previous posts about the economics of climate change. Once again, climate change will drastically reduce income over the next 100 years without intervention (and recent research suggests that we might have more time to intervene than previously thought). But people will still be be significantly better off compared to us today even if we fail to act. They just won’t be as well off as they could have been.[ref]Political philosophers Jason Brennan and Bas van der Vossen cover this in their upcoming book In Defense of Openness (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).[/ref]
According to a new study, this appears to be the case. As reported at the IFS blog,
What we know from experience—that divorce has an infectious effect—researchers Rose McDermott, James Fowler, and Nicholas Christakis confirm in their study, Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample. They write, “The results suggest that divorce can spread between friends. Clusters of divorces extend to two degrees of separation in the network.”
I would argue this might be especially true in insular groups like retirement communities, where a number of elements coalesce to create a perfect storm for social and personal dysfunction. One of these signs is the rise of divorce in the 50+ baby boomer American generation, what is sometimes called “gray divorce.” In a 2012 study published in The Journals of Gerontology, we learn first, that the United States has the highest rate of divorce in the world. And that Baby Boomers have shown high rates of marital instability beginning from young adulthood. As several studies indicate, Baby Boomers are carrying this marital instability into their latter years, giving rise to the gray divorce phenomenon. The study shows that the divorce rate for middle-aged (50-64) and older (65+) Americans has doubled since 1990.
…Looking for correlated variables, Cahn and Carbone dug into a 2016 study in an article for the Institute for Family Studies and found that financial insecurity and marital biographies (as Brown and Lin noted) were two major factors in Baby Boomer divorce. A notable third factor was the marital quality of the couple.
But if we consider the work of McDermott, Fowler, and Christakis, we cannot underestimate the social network effect on the Boomer generation. True, marital histories, economic stress, and marital quality can impact the health of a marriage, but social influence can act on a couple for good or for ill when they are in a weak position.
Information that is use both academically and practically.
A new working paper provides some interesting results about the interplay between immigration and minimum wage laws:
Our first empirical strategy exploits the non-linearity of the minimum wage across U.S. States to investigate the role played by the minimum wage in shaping the impact of immigration on the wages and employment of competing native workers. We find that on average, immigration has relatively small detrimental effects on the wages and employment outcomes of competing native workers. The main contribution of this study is not to provide yet another estimate of the wage and employment responses to immigration but, rather, to investigate the role of minimum wages in determining such responses. Indeed, we show that the labor market effects of immigration are heterogeneous across U.S. States characterized by different levels of minimum wage. In particular, we find that the impact of immigration on natives’ labor market outcomes is more negative in states where the effective minimum wage is relatively low. In contrast, sufficiently high minimum wages tend to protect native workers from any adverse wage or unemployment effects of immigration.
Our second empirical methodology uses a difference-in-differences approach. We use cross-state differences in the impact of federal minimum wage adjustments on state effective minimum wages. Over our period of interest, the successive rises in the federal minimum wage have fully affected the states where the effective minimum wage is equal to the federal one (the treatment group), with no impact in high minimum wage states (the control group). Thus, we can estimate the difference between the labor market impact of immigration before and after the federal policy changes between the treatment group and the control group. Our estimates indicate that the detrimental impact of immigration on natives’ wages and employment have been mitigated thanks to the federal minimum wage increases that occurred in three installements between 2007 and 2010.
Taken together, our results indicate that high minimum wages tend to protect employed native workers against competition from immigrants. This may come at the price, obviously, of rendering access to employment more difficult for outsiders such as the unemployed natives and new immigrants, a question we cannot investigate given the limits of our data (pg. 51-52).
Interesting, but not surprising. Case in point, consider my summary of Thomas Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers:
The book meticulously demonstrates that the progressive impulse toward inflating the administrative state was driven largely by self-promotion (i.e, the professionalization of economists), racist ideologies (i.e., the fear of race suicide), and an unwavering faith in science. Not only should the “undesirables” of the gene pool be sterilized, but they should be crowded out of the labor force as well. Those considered “unfit” for the labor market included blacks, immigrants, and women. In order to artificially raise the cost of employing the “unfit,” progressives sought to implement minimum wage (often argued to be a “tariff” on immigrant labor), maximum hours, and working standard legislation.
A “tariff” on immigrant labor indeed.
In the most recent issue of Nature Human Behaviour, neuroscientist Molly Crockett suggests that “digital media may exacerbate the expression of moral outrage by inflating its triggering stimuli, reducing some of its costs and amplifying many of its personal benefits.”
She explains,
A recent study conducted in the US and Canada suggests that encountering norm violations in person is relatively rare: less than 5% of reported daily experiences involved directly witnessing or experiencing immoral acts. But the internet exposes us to a vast array of misdeeds, from corrupt practices of bankers on Wall Street, to child trafficking in Asia, to genocide in Africa — the list goes on. In fact, data from a study of everyday moral experience show that people are more likely to learn about immoral acts online than in person or through traditional forms of media…Research on virality shows that people are more likely to share content that elicits moral emotions such as outrage. Because outrageous content generates more revenue through viral sharing, natural selection-like forces may favour ‘supernormal’ stimuli that trigger much stronger outrage responses than do transgressions we typically encounter in everyday life. Supporting this hypothesis, there is evidence that immoral acts encountered online incite stronger moral outrage than immoral acts encountered in person or via traditional forms of media…These observations suggest that digital media transforms moral outrage by changing both the nature and prevalence of the stimuli that trigger it. The architecture of the attention economy creates a steady flow of outrageous ‘clickbait’ that people can access anywhere and at any time.
This could be a problem:
By increasing the frequency and extremity of triggering stimuli, one possible long-term consequence of digital media is ‘outrage fatigue’: constant exposure to outrageous news could diminish the overall intensity of outrage experiences, or cause people to experience outrage more selectively to reduce emotional and attentional demands. On the other hand, studies have shown that venting anger begets more anger. If digital media makes it easier to express outrage, this could intensify subsequent experiences of outrage. Future research is necessary to resolve these possibilities…[Online], people can express outrage online with just a few keystrokes, from the comfort of their bedrooms, either directly to the wrongdoer or to a broader audience. With even less effort, people can repost or react to others’ angry comments. Since the tools for easily and quickly expressing outrage online are literally at our fingertips, a person’s threshold for expressing outrage is probably lower online than offline…And just as a habitual snacker eats without feeling hungry, a habitual online shamer might express outrage without actually feeling outraged. Thus, when outrage expression moves online it becomes more readily available, requires less effort, and is reinforced on a schedule that maximizes the likelihood of future outrage expression in ways that might divorce the feeling of outrage from its behavioural expression.
So why the outrage?
[E]xpressing moral outrage benefits individuals by signalling their moral quality to others. That is, outrage expression provides reputational rewards. People are not necessarily conscious of these rewards when they express outrage. But the fact that people are more likely to punish when others are watching indicates that a concern for reputation at least implicitly whets our appetite for moral outrage. Of course, online social networks massively amplify the reputational benefits of outrage expression. While offline punishment signals your virtue only to whoever might be watching, doing so online instantly advertises your character to your entire social network and beyond. A single tweet with an initial audience of just a few hundred can quickly reach millions through viral sharing — and outrage fuels virality.
And while this outrage may “benefit society by holding bad actors accountable and sending a message to others that such behaviour is socially unacceptable,” for the most part
moral disapproval ricochets within echo chambers but only occasionally escapes. Second, by lowering the threshold for outrage expression, digital media may degrade the ability of outrage to distinguish the truly heinous from the merely disagreeable. Third, expressing outrage online may result in less meaningful involvement in social causes, for example through volunteering or donations. People are less likely to spend money on punishing unfairness when they are given the opportunity to express their outrage via written messages instead. Finally, there is a serious risk that moral outrage in the digital age will deepen social divides. A recent study suggests a desire to punish others makes them seem less human. Thus, if digital media exacerbates moral outrage, in doing so it may increase social polarization by further dehumanizing the targets of outrage.
She concludes,
The framework proposed here offers a set of testable hypotheses about the impact of digital media on the expression of moral outrage and its social consequences…Preliminary data support the framework’s predictions, showing that outrage-inducing content appears to be more prevalent and potent online than offline. Future studies should investigate the extent to which digital media platforms intensify moral emotions, promote habit formation, suppress productive social discourse, and change the nature of moral outrage itself. There are vast troves of data that are directly pertinent to these questions, but not all of it is publicly available. These data can and should be used to understand how new technologies might transform ancient social emotions from a force for collective good into a tool for collective self-destruction.
Lay off the outrage porn.
I’ve been on a bit of a metaphysics kick. In the last year, I’ve read:
These readings have made me more interested in ways of knowing and–as the publishers should indicate–our institutions of knowledge. What do those within these institutions (and thus those typically generating new knowledge) think and believe?
According to sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund’s study, 47% of elite scientists in U.S. have a religious tradition, while 34% of American scientists profess atheism, 30% profess agnosticism, and 36% profess at least some form of belief in a “higher power” (God or otherwise). Furthermore, she explains, “Nearly 60 percent of scientists I interviewed displayed a spirituality that scholars might call “thin.””[ref]Ecklund, 2010, pg. 53.[/ref]
Philosopher Helen De Cruz summarizes the sociological data on spirituality within academia:
Atheism and agnosticism are widespread among academics, especially among those working in elite institutions. A survey among National Academy of Sciences members (all senior academics, overwhelmingly from elite faculties) found that the majority disbelieved in God’s existence (72.2%), with 20.8% being agnostic, and only 7% theists (Larson and Witham 1998). Ecklund and Scheitle (2007) analyzed responses from scientists (working in the social and natural sciences) from 21 elite universities in the US. About 31.2% of their participants self-identified as atheists and a further 31 % as agnostics. The remaining number believed in a higher power (7%), sometimes believed in God (5.4%), believed in God with some doubts (15.5%), or believed in God without any doubts (9.7%). In contrast to the general population, the older scientists in this sample did not show higher religiosity—in fact, they were more likely to say that they did not believe in God. On the other hand, Gross and Simmons (2009) examined a more heterogeneous sample of scientists from American colleges, including community colleges, elite doctoral-granting institutions, non-elite four-year state schools, and small liberal arts colleges. They found that the majority of university professors (full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty) had some theistic beliefs, believing either in God (34.9%), in God with some doubts (16.6%), in God some of the time (4.3%), or in a higher power (19.2%). Belief in God was influenced both by type of institution (lower theistic belief in more prestigious schools) and by discipline (lower theistic belief in the physical and biological sciences compared to the social sciences and humanities).
These latter findings indicate that academics are more religiously diverse than has been popularly assumed and that the majority are not opposed to religion. Even so, in the US the percentage of atheists and agnostics in academia is higher than in the general population, a discrepancy that requires an explanation. One reason might be a bias against theists in academia. For example, when sociologists were surveyed whether they would hire someone if they knew the candidate was an evangelical Christian, 39.1% said they would be less likely to hire that candidate—there were similar results with other religious groups, such as Mormons or Muslims (Yancey 2012). Another reason might be that theists internalize prevalent negative societal stereotypes, which leads them to underperform in scientific tasks and lose interest in pursuing a scientific career. Kimberly Rios et al. (2015) found that non-religious participants believe that theists, especially Christians, are less competent in and less trustful of science. When this stereotype was made salient, Christian participants performed worse in logical reasoning tasks (which were misleadingly presented as “scientific reasoning tests”) than when the stereotype was not mentioned.
It is unclear whether religious and scientific thinking are cognitively incompatible. Some studies suggest that religion draws more upon an intuitive style of thinking, distinct from the analytic reasoning style that characterizes science (Gervais and Norenzayan 2012). On the other hand, the acceptance of theological and scientific views both rely on a trust in testimony, and cognitive scientists have found similarities between the way children and adults understand testimony to invisible entities in religious and scientific domains (Harris et al. 2006). Moreover, theologians such as the Church Fathers and Scholastics were deeply analytic in their writings, indicating that the association between intuitive and religious thinking might be a recent western bias. More research is needed to examine whether religious and scientific thinking styles are inherently in tension.
How about philosophers? A 2014 study came up with the following numbers (from pgs. 14-16 of the ungated version). I’ve highlighted a few that stand out to me:
1. A priori knowledge: yes 71.1%; no 18.4%; other 10.5%.
2. Abstract objects: Platonism 39.3%; nominalism 37.7%; other 23.0%.
3. Aesthetic value: objective 41.0%; subjective 34.5%; other 24.5%.
4. Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes 64.9%; no 27.1%; other 8.1%.
5. Epistemic justification: externalism 42.7%; internalism 26.4%; other 30.8%.
6. External world: non-skeptical realism 81.6%; skepticism 4.8%; idealism 4.3%; other
9.2%.
7. Free will: compatibilism 59.1%; libertarianism 13.7%; no free will 12.2%; other
14.9%.
8. God: atheism 72.8%; theism 14.6%; other 12.6%.
9. Knowledge claims: contextualism 40.1%; invariantism 31.1%; relativism 2.9%;
other 25.9%.
10. Knowledge: empiricism 35.0%; rationalism 27.8%; other 37.2%.
11. Laws of nature: non-Humean 57.1%; Humean 24.7%; other 18.2%.
12. Logic: classical 51.6%; non-classical 15.4%; other 33.1%.
13. Mental content: externalism 51.1%; internalism 20.0%; other 28.9%.
14. Meta-ethics: moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism 27.7%; other 15.9%.
15. Metaphilosophy: naturalism 49.8%; non-naturalism 25.9%; other 24.3%.
16. Mind: physicalism 56.5%; non-physicalism 27.1%; other 16.4%.
17. Moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0%; other 17.3%.
18. Moral motivation: internalism 34.9%; externalism 29.8%; other 35.3%.
19. Newcomb’s problem: two boxes 31.4%; one box 21.3%; other 47.4%.
20. Normative ethics: deontology 25.9%; consequentialism 23.6%; virtue ethics 18.2%;
other 32.3%.
21. Perceptual experience: representationalism 31.5%; qualia theory 12.2%; disjunctivism
11.0%; sense-datum theory 3.1%; other 42.2%.
22. Personal identity: psychological view 33.6%; biological view 16.9%; further-fact
view 12.2%; other 37.3%.
23. Politics: egalitarianism 34.8%; communitarianism 14.3%; libertarianism 9.9%;
other 41.0%.
24. Proper names: Millian 34.5%; Fregean 28.7%; other 36.8%.
25. Science: scientific realism 75.1%; scientific anti-realism 11.6%; other 13.3%.
26. Teletransporter: survival 36.2%; death 31.1%; other 32.7%.
27. Time: B-theory 26.3%; A-theory 15.5%; other 58.2%.
28. Trolley problem: switch 68.2%; don’t switch 7.6%; other 24.2%.
29. Truth: correspondence 50.8%; deflationary 24.8%; epistemic 6.9%; other 17.5%.
30. Zombies: conceivable but not metaphysically possible 35.6%; metaphysically possible
23.3%; inconceivable 16.0%; other 25.1%
What’s interesting is that while nearly 73% of philosophers are atheist, only about half are naturalists or physicalists when it comes to the mind. Furthermore, nearly 40% would consider themselves Platonists, indicating the possibility of a Platonic atheism. Yet, when you consider philosophers of religion, the numbers reverse:[ref]This, of course, may be due to selection bias. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that the experts in religion tend to be theists and non-naturalists.[/ref]
| Answer | Correlation coefficient | |||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| God:theism | 0.351 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 917 p-value: < 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Free will:libertarianism | 0.262 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 899 p-value: < 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| not Free will:compatibilism | 0.207 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 899 p-value: < 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Mind:non-physicalism | 0.193 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 918 p-value: < 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Metaphilosophy:non-naturalism | 0.19 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 855 p-value: < 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Time:A-theory | 0.145 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 583 p-value: < 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Meta-ethics:moral realism | 0.142 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 896 p-value: < 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Personal identity:further-fact view | 0.14 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 813 p-value: < 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Laws of nature:non-Humean | 0.114 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 864 p-value: < 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Moral judgment:cognitivism | 0.112 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 875 p-value: < 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Mental content:internalism | 0.108 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 857 p-value: 0.001
|
||||||||||||||||||
| not Politics:egalitarianism | 0.107 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 751 p-value: 0.003
|
||||||||||||||||||
| not Personal identity:psychological view | 0.106 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 813 p-value: 0.002
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Perceptual experience:sense-datum theory | 0.101 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 716 p-value: 0.006
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Aesthetic value:objective | 0.099 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 895 p-value: 0.003
|
||||||||||||||||||
| A priori knowledge:yes | 0.093 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 918 p-value: 0.004
|
||||||||||||||||||
| not Normative ethics:consequentialism | 0.092 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 800 p-value: 0.009
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Knowledge:rationalism | 0.091 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 919 p-value: 0.005
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Perceptual experience:qualia theory | 0.087 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 716 p-value: 0.019
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Truth:correspondence | 0.085 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 863 p-value: 0.012
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Newcomb’s problem:one box | 0.084 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 663 p-value: 0.03
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Zombies:metaphysically possible | 0.083 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 825 p-value: 0.017
|
||||||||||||||||||
| not Truth:deflationary | 0.073 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 863 p-value: 0.032
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Teletransporter:death | 0.066 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 818 p-value: 0.059
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Normative ethics:virtue ethics | 0.062 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 800 p-value: 0.079
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Politics:libertarianism | 0.05 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 751 p-value: 0.171
|
||||||||||||||||||
| Analytic-synthetic distinction:yes | 0.05 | |||||||||||||||||
Response pairs: 920 p-value: 0.129
|
||||||||||||||||||
All of this is utterly fascinating, particularly for me as I try to work my way through a coherent Mormon metaphysics.
The Heritage Foundation recently released their 2017 Index of Culture and Opportunity, which “evaluates a range of factors needed to sustain freedom and opportunity in America. Through charts that track social and economic changes and expert commentary that explains the trends, the Index reports on important indicators in American society and analyzes what they mean for our future. The Index tracks social and economic factors related to culture, poverty and dependence, and general opportunity in America. It monitors trends for 31 indicators, based on regularly updated national data and organized into three categories:
This is the first I’ve heard of it. Check it out.
