Chapter Summaries of The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
I'm writing chapter summaries of The Moral Animal by Robert Wright here. So far, two out of four parts are online. I recommend the book, as do Eliezer Yudkowsky and Patri Friedman.
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them. - Laurence J. Peter
I'm writing chapter summaries of The Moral Animal by Robert Wright here. So far, two out of four parts are online. I recommend the book, as do Eliezer Yudkowsky and Patri Friedman.
Two biases that lead to "stickiness" of political beliefs are motivated skepticism and motivated credulity. When I encounter an argument opposing some strongly-held belief of mine, I am prone to examine the argument extremely skeptically, never giving the benefit of the doubt. If I find the slightest flaw - a minor factual mistake, a questionable statistic, an improbable leap of logic - I am tempted to dismiss the whole as clearly the work of a dishonest or incompetent mind. This doesn't feel wrong. It feels like being logical, and upholding the highest standards of debate. It feels righteous. This is motivated skepticism, also called disconfirmation bias.
Rule of thumb: Be skeptical of things you learned before you could read. E.g. religion. -- Ben CasnochaBen is right: lacking the ability to read will severely hamper your ability to form sound beliefs. Lacking an understanding of cognitive biases - such as motivated skepticism - is also a risk factor for dubious beliefs. I remember dismissing the arguments of those I thought fools based on a few tangential errors, back before I'd heard the term "motivated skepticism". That was my mistake. So I'd go further, and propose this rule of thumb: be skeptical of beliefs you formed and defended before you understood motivated skepticism.
AB: I read Malthus three times. Malthus understood the problems of limits, and he understood these things. And his timetable--he couldn't have anticipated the mechanization of agriculture, which has greatly increased agricultural production worldwide...And I think with these limits showing up in terms of peak oil, peak natural gas--I think with these limits showing up people will have to reassess their proud claim that "we've proven Malthus wrong." Malthus, I think, will turn out to be... "well, yeah, he understood the problem, he was right." And when some learned scholar tells me "we've proven Malthus wrong," that scholar is telling me about himself; he's not telling me about Malthus."The discussion then moved, as it should, to the economist Julian Simon, who would have disagreed with that. Here is how I wish the conversation had gone:
A: Julian Simon would say that agricultural innovations weren't accidental or coincidental, because whenever food became scarce, food prices increased, which increased the reward to those who found ways to increase food production. I guess we should address that.My fantasy pundits sound so reasonable. The actual conversation was an exercise in motivated skepticism. Instead of addressing the criticism Julian Simon would have made to them, they found an irrelevant quote to attack:
B: Well, Norman Borlaug is considered the father of the Green Revolution, developing high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. It's said that he saved millions of lives. So what motivated him?
A: According to this interview, he says he was motivated by seeing so much human misery. He was a teenager during the Depression.
B: So Simon was wrong! Borlaug wasn't motivated by money!
A: Well, maybe. Simon said that food shortages would lead to innovation through the mechanism of increased prices, and therefore growth could continue. In this particular case the mechanism seems to have been altruism rather than personal gain, but the process still worked. A resource shortage led to innovation and ensured continued growth. Ideally we would examine more examples of the motivations of people who improved agricultural yields.
B: Ok...so what does this mean for peak oil and peak natural gas, which were talking about earlier?
A: Simon would probably say that we can expect innovation to solve resource shortages for those problems too.
AH: And I think we should point out that Julian Simon infamously said that we had enough technology in our minds and in our libraries to allow population to continue growing for the next 7 [million] years.This could be my motivated credulity talking, but I think that when you find an assertion, and you add an assumption (a 1% growth rate) to that assertion and then attempt a reductio ad absurdum, then you've only disproved your assumption, not the assertion. To be fair, Julian's assertion of seven million years of growth on Earth seems a silly prediction in several ways. But regardless of that line's worth, it was irrelevant to their argument.
AB: That's an interesting story...my correspondent asked me, "What would the world population be if it just grew at the present rate of 1% per year"--which sounds terribly small as a growth rate--"if it grew at 1% per year for 7 million years?" Well...[it's] a number that you get by writing 1 followed by 30,000 zeroes...1 followed by 85 is the number of atoms estimated in the known universe, and Julian's population size would be 1 followed by 30,000 zeroes.
AH: So, no amount of technology is ever going to make it possible for those people to fit on earth.
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AB: There aren't enough atoms to make that many people. But Julian was worshiped by the people in Washington who wanted to hear is message. And these people were often politicians who had no scientific judgment. But Simon had a Ph.D. And he was reasonably bright in the sense that he was bright enough to know what it was that important clients wanted to hear. And so he composed things they wanted to hear. And so they were very much enamored of him.
Are you good at maths? Are you good at drawing?
In the past, people sometimes tried to improve the economy by destroying wealth:
President Roosevelt came into office proposing a New Deal for Americans, but his advisers believed, mistakenly, that excessive competition had led to overproduction, causing the depression. The centerpieces of the New Deal were the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and the National Recovery Administration (NRA), both of which were aimed at reducing production and raising wages and prices. Reduced production, of course, is what happens in depressions, and it never made sense to try to get the country out of depression by reducing production further. In its zeal, the administration apparently did not consider the elementary impossibility of raising all real wage rates and all real prices.
The AAA immediately set out to slaughter six million baby pigs and reduce breeding sows to reduce pork production and raise prices. Since cotton plantings were thought to be excessive, cotton farmers were paid to plow under one-quarter of the forty million acres of cotton to reduce marketed production to boost prices.
The second plan is more politely known as "fleet modernization." It combines economic as well as environmental goals in one package.
Under a bill introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D.-Calif., owners of older cars would get vouchers worth thousands of dollars toward the purchase of newer, more fuel-efficient vehicle. For the customer to get that cash, the car dealer would have to certify that the trade-in was getting scrapped and not resold. The car's vehicle identification number (VIN) would be tracked to make sure it never shows up on a vehicle registration again.
[In discussions of the stimulus bill,] dairy and beef cattle producers butted heads over talk that the government might buy up dairy cattle for slaughter to drive up depressed milk prices.
Governments tend to promote/subsidize home ownership. Why? Rourke O'Brien and David Newville write in the Washington Post (January 11, 2009):
Studies have shown that families who own their own homes are more likely to be involved in their communities, to report higher satisfaction with their lives, and to vote. Homeownership also has positive impacts on children, such as increased high school graduation rates, fewer behavioral problems and better job outcomes after school, and these effects have been found to be strongest among low-income homeowners.Citation needed, but ok...
What's more, homeownership has been and will continue to be the single biggest source of wealth for low- and moderate-income families. Even if housing prices don't rise much, the forced saving that comes from paying down a mortgage can help families build equity that can then be leveraged to finance a child's education, provide financial security in retirement or pass wealth on to the next generation."Even if housing prices don't rise much"? What if they fall by 40%?
How do you distinguish good experts from bad experts? It would be an extraordinarily useful skill - a meta-skill that gives you access to so many others.
You need to prove that you can "beat the house"; that your own judgment is likely to be less fallible than the nutritional scientists' for some reason. Top nutritional scientists should know everything you do about the problems with certain kinds of studies and take that into account. So all of the pitfalls that apply to nutritional scientists equally apply to you, unless you have some specific reason to think they don't. And then the experts have the extra advantage of much greater familiarity with the subject matter.
Narrative One: entrepreneurs are motivated by financial incentives. Reduced regulation and reduced taxes can increase entrepreneurship.
According to the National Venture Capital Association, in all of 2008 there have been just six companies that have gone public. Compare that with 269 IPOs in 1999, 272 in 1996, and 365 in 1986.
I know a CEO of an Internet company that planned on doing an IPO in 2008. Of course the economy tanked so it's not happening.
He told me that SOX required the company to have auditing/traceability and controls for everything. This meant they quit using any software as a service applications, they shut down IM, they have to keep track of everything on every machine, banned a whole list of applications that would interfere with SOX (iTunes, file sharing, and music app), etc.
They had to hire lawyers, more accountants, consulting firms. He told me they were looking at > 10m to comply. And that doesn't count lost productivity of having to act like a draconian big ass company where they had to have design docs for everything they do, detailed project plans, get rid of the tools they use (as listed above), etc.
In other words to go IPO now you give up agility, spend more money, and become less productive.
I worked for a company a couple of years ago that was planning to public in a year or two. The CEO told us that complying with SOX would cost $3 million for the IPO and over $1 million per year after that. That's a huge burden for a company with revenues of $35 million at the time. I have read that it is now $5 million for an IPO and that no company with revenues under $100 million can afford to be public.
Entrepreneurs who create something out of nothing don’t care what tax rates are. Bill Gates didn’t monitor the marginal tax rate when he dropped out of Harvard and started MicroSoft (btw, it was a ton higher than it is today). Michael Dell didn’t wonder what the capital gains tax was when he started PC’s Limited, and then grew it into Dell Computer. I doubt that any great business or invention started with a discussion or even a consideration of what the current or projected income or capital gains tax was or would be.
The impact of tax rates on productivity and development is something economists masterbate about, enterpreneurs don’t waste their time thinking about it. We have business to do.
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Entrepreneurs live for the juice of making their dreams come true. Of having a vision and fighting to see it come true. The joy of mission accomplished and the scoreboard of the financial rewards.
The cure to our economic problems is the Entrepreneurial Spirit of All Americans. Instead of bitching at each other, could one Presidential candidate please show even the least bit of leadership and character and stand up for and encourage the entrepreneurs in this country ?
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What we need is our candidates to stop yelling at each other and starting looking at the American people and encouraging the best of who we are. That is who I want to get behind. That is what I would like to see for our country. That is what will energize and motivate people to create companies and invent products that will turn the economy.
Universal access to health care would not only increase individual liberty and alleviate wasteful spending, but would also increase entrepreneurial activity – another value central to conservative thinking. Many entrepreneurs are discouraged from embarking on their new business venture by fears about the high cost of providing employers with health insurance. Small business employers are then forced to make tough decisions about whether to absorb the high costs, pass them on to employees, or not offer benefits at all. A universal health care system would eliminate these concerns and encourage hesitant entrepreneurs to test their innovations and ideas.
America acts as if all is well when in fact we’re one of the only developed countries with a rate of self-employment even lower than France’s. While surveys show that Americans are nearly twice as entrepreneurial as Europeans, we’re only half as likely to actually become self-employed.
What is holding Americans back? In two words: health care.
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In other developed countries, where self-employment rates tend to be higher, taking the leap to working for yourself doesn’t affect your health care coverage or your family’s. In publicly funded health care systems, entrepreneurs pay less into the system during the few lean years that often accompany starting a business. Once you get off the ground, you pay more. That benefits the country’s health and its economy.
Some commentators have suggested that the absence of portable health insurance impedes people from leaving their jobs to start new firms. We investigate this belief by comparing wage-earners who become self-employed during a given period of time with their counterparts who do not. By examining the impact of variables relating to the health insurance and health status of these workers and their families, we can infer whether the lack of health insurance portability affects the probability that they become self-employed. The evidence does not support the conjecture that the current health insurance system affects the propensity to become self-employed. Hence, whatever its other merits, there is no reason to believe that the introduction of universal health insurance would significantly enhance entrepreneurial activity.