Dear Friends,
For those of you who were able to come celebrate my birthday with me, thank you. And for those of you who couldn't make it, you were missed, but not loved the less for it.
On the topic of presents – while none will be turned away, I’m fortunate to mostly have enough things in my life. If you’d like to do something for me to celebrate my birthday, I’m going to ask you to take an action instead. I’m going to ask you to take an action to help others.
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At this year's CFAR Alumni Reunion, Leah Libresco hosted a series of short talks on Effective Altruism. She now has a post up on an issue Anna Salamon brought up, the disorienting nature of some EA ideas:
For some people, getting involved in effective altruism is morally disorienting — once you start translating the objects and purchases around you into bednets, should you really have any of them? Should you skip a gruel diet so you can keep your strength up, work as an I-banker, and “earn to give” — funneling your salary into good causes? Ruminating on these questions can lead to analysis paralysis — plus a hefty serving of guilt.
In the midst of our discussion, I came up with a speculative hypothesis about what might drive this kind of reaction to Effective Altruism. While people were sharing stories about their friends, some of their anxious behaviors and thoughts sounded akin to Catholic scrupulosity. One of the more exaggerated examples of scrupulosity is a Catholic who gets into the confessional, lists her sins, receives absolution, and then immediately gets back into line, worried that she did something wrong in her confession, and should now confess that error.
Both of these obviously bear some resemblance to anxiety/OCD, period, but I was interested in speculating a little about why. In Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, he lays out a kind of factor analysis of what drives people’s moral intuitions. In his research, some moral foundations (e.g. care/harm) are pretty common to everyone, but some (sanctity/degradation or “purity”) are more predictive in some groups than others.
My weak hypothesis is that effective altruism can feel more like a “purity” decision than other modes of thought people have used to date. You can be inoculated against moral culture shock by previous exposure to other purity-flavored kinds of reasoning (deontology, religion, etc), but, if not (and maybe if you’re also predisposed to anxiety), the sudden clarity about a bestmode of action, that is both very important, and very unlikely for you pull off everyday may trigger scrupulosity.
EAs sometimes seem to think of the merit of an action as a binary quality, where either it is obligatory because it has the "bestness" attribute and outweighs the opportunity cost, or it is forbidden because it doesn't. You're allowed to take care of yourself, and do the best known thing given imperfect information, but only if it's "best.” This framing is exhausting and paralyzing because you're never doing anything positively good, everything is either obligatory or forbidden.
It doesn't have to be that way; we can distinguish between intrapersonal and interpersonal opportunity cost.
I'm not a public utility, I'm a person. If I help others in an inefficient way, or with less of my resources than I could have employed, then I've helped others. If last year I gave to a very efficient charity, but this year I switched to a less efficient charity, then I helped others last year, and helped others again this year. Those are things to celebrate.
But if I pressure or convince someone else to divert their giving from a more efficient to a less efficient charity, or support a cause that itself diverts resources from more efficient causes, then I have actually harmed others on net.
Miri has a post up responding to someone snarking about how the female condom is redundant and a solution to a solved problem. She points out a bunch of problems that aren't solved by other forms of birth control. But this is a more general pattern: it can be socially beneficial to have multiple, competing, mostly-redundant ways of getting things done, even if one of them is the "best."
Sometimes things can seem to swing too far in the direction of redundancy, especially for those of us who have pretty normal needs. A cool thing can lead to lots of strictly worse knockoffs hoping to profit from the confusion, or get buzz from the novelty of it, or because the prize of making it to the top in a market big enough for only one product is big enough to justify spending a lot on a small chance. Sites like The Wirecutter and The Sweethome are doing good work helping reduce the complexity of some consumer decisions.
But one thing a lot of critics of "consumerism" or the proliferation of products often seem to miss is that not everyone is the marginal consumer. Some people have strong inframarginal preferences that just aren't being served by some products. Back when "everyone" knew that Japanese cars were "better" than American ones, I remember an old Orson Scott Card article pointing out that he just can't fit comfortably into anything but a (relatively large) American-brand seat:
we try to buy American cars, not just out of loyalty to American workers, but because Americans tend to have some idea of how big Americans are, and I'm a big guy, and I don't want a car that was originally designed for people who are six inches shorter and a hundred-thirty pounds lighter than me.
That doesn't show up on generalized measures of quality but it's an important attribute big people may care a lot about, and small people don't. I face a similar problem with shoes. My feet are wide, and some brands of shoe are narrow. If there were only one or two types of shoe in each category, that might serve 90% of people fairly well - but the cost of serving another 9% of people is fairly low, because 9% is a huge number of people. There are diminishing marginal returns to diversity, but there are still sometimes positive returns.
This is true for drugs too. You may be allergic or not respond to one kind, so a "copycat" drug could make the difference between being sick and getting better, and then of course everyone made fun of the ads for that "restless leg syndrome" drug saying "haha drumming up demand by pathologizing normal behavior, stupid evil advertisers" without thinking, maybe someone who ACTUALLY HAS restless leg might be the best judge of that. And if they don't realize it's a treatable problem that they should mention to their physician, the ad could do them a lot of good.
I've noticed something about my motivation structure. This might be contingent on my level of stimulation, not universal. But, positive reinforcement doesn't function well for me as a reward. Negative reinforcement is awesome. I don't like it when some system does "nice" things that attract my attention for doing the thing, except on fairly short focused timespans. I love it if I can make something annoying go away by doing the thing.
I've tried habit-building apps like Epic Win and Fitocracy (HabitRPG seems to be the new popular one), which give you points each time you log progress, let you "level up" after a certain number of points, and sometimes have cute sounds or animations to make it feel more like a reward. But I hate logging things, and the apps make me hate it even more because they cost time and attention. Fitocracy made me hate taking the stairs for a while. Trying to reward myself for doing to-dos, checking email, and so on, has the same problem - so far, I've ended up more annoyed by the attentional cost of any reward system than pleased by the reward.
By contrast, I find Inbox 0 to be intrinsically motivating. I took a few hours to slog through my email. It was easy to stay motivated once I got into the mindset of, "Email, you shall trouble me no longer. I will end you. AVADA KEDAVRA!" Now it's easy to get motivated to bring my inbox back to zero. I’m a little worried that many of my high-motivation moments feel like casting the Killing Curse on tedious things, but the worry relies on fictional evidence. Continue reading
"You can't kill me," growled Bruce. He had been stupid enough to allow himself to be captured - and he would have to resort to desperate measures to avert permanent failure.
"I'm not going to kill you," said his nemesis, pointing to the terrified, unwilling participant standing next to Bruce on the bridge. "But he might."
Bruce could hear the trolley coming closer. If he didn't do something soon, one of two things would happen. Either the five people on the tracks would die, or Bruce would be pushed off the bridge to stop the trolley with his body. Neither was acceptable. If he died, he would protect these innocents - maybe - but others would doubtless die in future experiments. If he did not stop the trolley, then five people who had not signed consent forms or waivers of liability would be killed, in an unauthorized experiment. Continue reading
Dr. John Kinyago had first noticed the problem when one of his research assistants had spilled her coffee on a test subject. After recovering from the unpleasant surprise, the subject had looked at her with clear suspicion. “I'm sorry, it was an accident!”, the research assistant said, truly but unconvincingly.
He worked the makeup remover over his face, wiping away the mask he carefully composed each morning to bring his vitiligo-altered skin back to some semblance of normality. He had tried more permanent treatments, but the result had unsettling effects. Michael Jackson could make money off his strange appearance; Jack Kinyago had to look impeccably conventional, conforming to expectations, unimpeachably serious. Except now.
In my post complaining about the way people talk about Guess, Ask, and Tell Cultures, I summarized them this way:
The gist of the difference is that in “ask culture” it’s normal to ask for things you want even if you don’t expect to get them, it’s normal to refuse requests, and it’s not expected to anticipate others’ needs if they don’t ask for things, whereas in guess culture, you’re expected to offer things without being asked, you don’t ask for things unless you really need them or strongly expect the other person will want to give them, and it’s rude to refuse requests. (Tell culture is a variant on ask culture where instead of just making a request, you express the strength and exact nature of your preference, so other people can respond to your needs cooperatively, balancing your interest against theirs, and suggesting better alternatives for you to get what you want.)
But the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that the problem isn't that one or all of these is bad - it's that these distinctions are insufficiently dimensional. Here are a few more precise axes along which communication differs:
Anyone who's taken a sufficiently high-level statistics course, or tried to teach themselves statistics, knows that there are a bunch of different kinds of statistical procedures, and a bunch of different "statistics" and "tests" they have to do to figure out whether the results are "significant." For example, I've seen the F Test introduced, explained mathematically, derived a few times - but I never quite figured out what it was actually doing. Not during my mathematical statistics course, not during my regression or econometrics courses, not at work, not in my own reading. Then last night a friend asked what it was and I explained it in about 30 seconds, then realized that I'd figured it out. I figured it would be nice if someone explained this on the internet, and I'm someone, so here goes:
The way people have been praising ask culture and tell culture makes me imagine a boot asking a human face whether it would like to be stamped on - forever. Whether it wants to or not, eventually the boot's going to give in. But why do I feel so uncomfortable with the idea of ask/tell culture? It seems so sensible; why do I want to run away and hide whenever I hear someone explain how good it is?
Warning: mild spoilers above the fold, big spoilers below. There is no way to describe this book without spoilers.
The protagonist is a detective solving a mysterious murder. A body has turned up in the fictional Eastern European city of Beszel. The problem: the body has been dumped across an international border; the victim lived in, and was almost certainly murdered in, the neighboring fictional Middle Eastern city of Ul Qoma.
These aren't like East and West Berlin, or Jewish and Arab Jerusalem, sharing a single contiguous unambiguous border. The cities occupy the same physical grid of streets with borders and "shared" areas crisscrossing the literal topographical ("grosstopic") area. Only some unfathomed and possibly unfathomable force prevents the citizens of each city from perceiving and interacting with each other. It's not just that it wasn't legal to dump a body across the border - it shouldn't have been possible at all.
I cannot tell you what makes The City & the City, by China Mieville, so good without spoiling the whole thing, but I will tell you that it does not betray the trust of a reader who expects mysteries to be about something. This is not Lost. There really is a secret to the Cities, it makes sense, and it is big enough to justify the story. To the right kind of reader, this is recommendation enough - if so, go and read it.
The big spoilers are below the fold.