Philosophy and reasoning links
Examining the concept of ‘fair’ via experimental economics.
Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1972 essay defending the 1968 Papal Encyclical Humanitae Vitae.
Making a good point about the problems of appealing to legal definitions to defend particular conceptions of marriage.
About horoscopes and how ambiguous statements encourage assent.
C.S.Lewis on the desire to be “on in the in”:
And of course everyone knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But one of this trio will be enough to deal with today. The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone.
C.S.Lewis against the humanitarian theory of justice:
The Humanitarian theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice.
… but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
… For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured.
About the purpose of morality:
But the fact that our moral norms were not consciously designed does not prevent us from considering their function.
Simplifying greatly, it seems to me that morality helps to provide security to members of the community, create stability, ameliorate harmful conditions, foster trust, and facilitate cooperation in achieving shared or complementary goals. In short, it enables us to live together and, while doing so, improve the conditions under which we live. …
Moral norms achieve their ends in part by their ability to be inculcated in almost all humans.
About dream logic, the internet and artificial intelligence:
But when a person is dreaming, hallucinating - when he is inside a mind-made fantasy landscape - the thinker and his thought-stream are not separate. They are blended together. The thinker inhabits his thoughts. No computer will be able to think like a man unless it, too, can inhabit its thoughts; can disappear into its own mind. …
When your focus is high, you control you thoughts. …
Losing control of your thought stream equals losing reality.
… there are formidable technical problems. For example: there can be no cognitive spectrum without emotion. Emotion becomes an increasingly important bridge between thoughts as focus drops and re-experiencing replaces recall.
Five emotions you may not know you had:
Status can take two forms, says anthropologist Joe Henrich, also at UBC. The first is based on dominance and commonly seen in non-human primates, whereby bigger and stronger individuals are revered because they could overwhelm or kill others. The human equivalents include the playground bully and officious boss. The second kind of status is prestige. In this case, respect and power is gained through knowledge or skill. "This fits in with the two kinds of pride," says Tracy. "One is associated with aggression and overconfidence, while the other motivates achievement, hard work and altruistic behaviour."
Alan Wolfe on Terry Eagleton on evil:
Yet Eagleton is not satisfied with Greene’s novel. Pinkie, he writes, “cannot understand everyday human reality, but the tawdry common existence presented by the narrative is not worth understanding in any case.” So much for the working class. When it comes to sympathy for the down-and-out, Eagleton sounds more like Herbert Spencer than Karl Marx.
… Eagleton’s book makes no sense. But it is not evil. It just makes no sense between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. I begin to realise the truth of the old proverb that he who sups with that formidable host needs a long spoon. …
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. … that “Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.
… Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.
… But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.
Something given authority because it gives oneself status can be very powerful.
About the paranoid style in global politics:
There is plenty of evidence, however, to suggest that anger, frustration and distrust - the necessary conditions for paranoia - are spreading into the body politic of advanced industrialised democracies in new and profound ways. …
To be clear, it’s not that the internet creates paranoid or conspiratorial views. The worldwide web simply allows like-minded extremists separated by geography to form their own online cocoon. …
None of these revelations fundamentally undercut the hypotheses of anthropogenic climate change. They do puncture the myth of scientists as strictly impartial and rational technocrats. …
In other words, a man who proposed intensive state-run surveillance now has the ear of the most powerful man in the free world. I’m sure that won’t make anyone more paranoid.
About moral fashions and what you can’t say:
In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. …
In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one. …
But any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a good candidate for something we're mistaken about. …
And that suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see what's inside their heads. …
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. …
I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them. …
I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. …
This technique won't find us all the things we can't say. I can think of some that aren't the result of any recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted deep in the past. …
Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.
How facts backfire:
In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. …
This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers - alongside an unprecedented amount of good information - endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right. …
one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen - and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. …
A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. …
And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts - inference, intuition, and so forth - to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done.
About the liberalism of discovery versus the liberalism of respect:
In my thinking about the contrasts between Rawlsian and Hayekian liberalism, I’ve begun to think about the former as the “liberalism of respect” and the latter as the “liberalism of discovery.” The liberalism of discovery recognizes the pervasiveness of our ignorance and the necessity of liberty for the emergence of useful knowledge. I would argue that the ideal of a social order embodying respect for persons as free and equal-the ideal of the liberalism of respect-comes to seem appealing only after a society has attained a certain level of economic development and general education, and these are largely consequences of a prior history of the relatively free play of the mechanisms of discovery celebrated by liberals like Hayek and Jim. But liberals of respect have tended to overlook the conditions under which people come to find the their favored ideal worth aspiring to, and so have tended to fail to acknowledge in their theories of justice the role of the institutions of discovery in creating and maintaining a society of mutual respect and fair reciprocity.
About the limitations of present social science and our ignorance of the human condition:
Of course, Aristotle, like other proto-scientific thinkers, relied extensively on empirical observation. The essential distinction between such observation and an experiment is control. …
By about a quarter-century ago, however, it had become obvious to sophisticated experimentalists that the idea that we could settle a given policy debate with a sufficiently robust experiment was naive. The reason had to do with generalization, which is the Achilles’ heel of any experiment, whether randomized or not. …
A physicist generally answers that question by assuming that predictive rules like the law of gravity apply everywhere, even in regions of the universe that have not been subject to experiments, and that gravity will not suddenly stop operating one second from now. No matter how many experiments we run, we can never escape the need for such assumptions. …
In 1992, Sherman surveyed the replications and concluded that in stable communities with high rates of employment, arrest shamed the perpetrators, who then became less likely to reoffend; in less stable communities with low rates of employment, arrest tended to anger the perpetrators, who would therefore be likely to become more violent. The problem with this kind of conclusion, though, is that because it is not itself the outcome of an experiment, it is subject to the same uncertainty that Aristotle’s observations were. How do we know if it is right? …
What businesses have figured out is that they can deal with the problem of causal density by scaling up the testing process. Run enough tests, and you can find predictive rules that are sufficiently nuanced to be of practical use in the very complex environment of real-world human decision making. …
Second, within this universe of programs that are far more likely to fail than succeed, programs that try to change people are even more likely to fail than those that try to change incentives. A litany of program ideas designed to push welfare recipients into the workforce failed when tested in those randomized experiments of the welfare-reform era; only adding mandatory work requirements succeeded in moving people from welfare to work in a humane fashion. … the only program concept that tentatively demonstrated reductions in crime rates in replicated RFTs was nuisance abatement, which changes the environment in which criminals operate.
… there is no magic. Those rare programs that do work usually lead to improvements that are quite modest, compared with the size of the problems they are meant to address or the dreams of advocates.
Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1972 essay defending the 1968 Papal Encyclical Humanitae Vitae.
Making a good point about the problems of appealing to legal definitions to defend particular conceptions of marriage.
About horoscopes and how ambiguous statements encourage assent.
C.S.Lewis on the desire to be “on in the in”:
And of course everyone knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But one of this trio will be enough to deal with today. The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone.
C.S.Lewis against the humanitarian theory of justice:
The Humanitarian theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice.
… but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
… For if crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call ‘disease’ can be treated as a crime; and compulsorily cured.
About the purpose of morality:
But the fact that our moral norms were not consciously designed does not prevent us from considering their function.
Simplifying greatly, it seems to me that morality helps to provide security to members of the community, create stability, ameliorate harmful conditions, foster trust, and facilitate cooperation in achieving shared or complementary goals. In short, it enables us to live together and, while doing so, improve the conditions under which we live. …
Moral norms achieve their ends in part by their ability to be inculcated in almost all humans.
About dream logic, the internet and artificial intelligence:
But when a person is dreaming, hallucinating - when he is inside a mind-made fantasy landscape - the thinker and his thought-stream are not separate. They are blended together. The thinker inhabits his thoughts. No computer will be able to think like a man unless it, too, can inhabit its thoughts; can disappear into its own mind. …
When your focus is high, you control you thoughts. …
Losing control of your thought stream equals losing reality.
… there are formidable technical problems. For example: there can be no cognitive spectrum without emotion. Emotion becomes an increasingly important bridge between thoughts as focus drops and re-experiencing replaces recall.
Five emotions you may not know you had:
Status can take two forms, says anthropologist Joe Henrich, also at UBC. The first is based on dominance and commonly seen in non-human primates, whereby bigger and stronger individuals are revered because they could overwhelm or kill others. The human equivalents include the playground bully and officious boss. The second kind of status is prestige. In this case, respect and power is gained through knowledge or skill. "This fits in with the two kinds of pride," says Tracy. "One is associated with aggression and overconfidence, while the other motivates achievement, hard work and altruistic behaviour."
Alan Wolfe on Terry Eagleton on evil:
Yet Eagleton is not satisfied with Greene’s novel. Pinkie, he writes, “cannot understand everyday human reality, but the tawdry common existence presented by the narrative is not worth understanding in any case.” So much for the working class. When it comes to sympathy for the down-and-out, Eagleton sounds more like Herbert Spencer than Karl Marx.
… Eagleton’s book makes no sense. But it is not evil. It just makes no sense between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. I begin to realise the truth of the old proverb that he who sups with that formidable host needs a long spoon. …
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. … that “Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.
… Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.
… But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.
Something given authority because it gives oneself status can be very powerful.
About the paranoid style in global politics:
There is plenty of evidence, however, to suggest that anger, frustration and distrust - the necessary conditions for paranoia - are spreading into the body politic of advanced industrialised democracies in new and profound ways. …
To be clear, it’s not that the internet creates paranoid or conspiratorial views. The worldwide web simply allows like-minded extremists separated by geography to form their own online cocoon. …
None of these revelations fundamentally undercut the hypotheses of anthropogenic climate change. They do puncture the myth of scientists as strictly impartial and rational technocrats. …
In other words, a man who proposed intensive state-run surveillance now has the ear of the most powerful man in the free world. I’m sure that won’t make anyone more paranoid.
About moral fashions and what you can’t say:
In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. …
In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one. …
But any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a good candidate for something we're mistaken about. …
And that suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see what's inside their heads. …
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. …
I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them. …
I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. …
This technique won't find us all the things we can't say. I can think of some that aren't the result of any recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted deep in the past. …
Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.
How facts backfire:
In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. …
This effect is only heightened by the information glut, which offers - alongside an unprecedented amount of good information - endless rumors, misinformation, and questionable variations on the truth. In other words, it’s never been easier for people to be wrong, and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right. …
one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen - and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. …
A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong. …
And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting. Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts - inference, intuition, and so forth - to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done.
About the liberalism of discovery versus the liberalism of respect:
In my thinking about the contrasts between Rawlsian and Hayekian liberalism, I’ve begun to think about the former as the “liberalism of respect” and the latter as the “liberalism of discovery.” The liberalism of discovery recognizes the pervasiveness of our ignorance and the necessity of liberty for the emergence of useful knowledge. I would argue that the ideal of a social order embodying respect for persons as free and equal-the ideal of the liberalism of respect-comes to seem appealing only after a society has attained a certain level of economic development and general education, and these are largely consequences of a prior history of the relatively free play of the mechanisms of discovery celebrated by liberals like Hayek and Jim. But liberals of respect have tended to overlook the conditions under which people come to find the their favored ideal worth aspiring to, and so have tended to fail to acknowledge in their theories of justice the role of the institutions of discovery in creating and maintaining a society of mutual respect and fair reciprocity.
About the limitations of present social science and our ignorance of the human condition:
Of course, Aristotle, like other proto-scientific thinkers, relied extensively on empirical observation. The essential distinction between such observation and an experiment is control. …
By about a quarter-century ago, however, it had become obvious to sophisticated experimentalists that the idea that we could settle a given policy debate with a sufficiently robust experiment was naive. The reason had to do with generalization, which is the Achilles’ heel of any experiment, whether randomized or not. …
A physicist generally answers that question by assuming that predictive rules like the law of gravity apply everywhere, even in regions of the universe that have not been subject to experiments, and that gravity will not suddenly stop operating one second from now. No matter how many experiments we run, we can never escape the need for such assumptions. …
In 1992, Sherman surveyed the replications and concluded that in stable communities with high rates of employment, arrest shamed the perpetrators, who then became less likely to reoffend; in less stable communities with low rates of employment, arrest tended to anger the perpetrators, who would therefore be likely to become more violent. The problem with this kind of conclusion, though, is that because it is not itself the outcome of an experiment, it is subject to the same uncertainty that Aristotle’s observations were. How do we know if it is right? …
What businesses have figured out is that they can deal with the problem of causal density by scaling up the testing process. Run enough tests, and you can find predictive rules that are sufficiently nuanced to be of practical use in the very complex environment of real-world human decision making. …
Second, within this universe of programs that are far more likely to fail than succeed, programs that try to change people are even more likely to fail than those that try to change incentives. A litany of program ideas designed to push welfare recipients into the workforce failed when tested in those randomized experiments of the welfare-reform era; only adding mandatory work requirements succeeded in moving people from welfare to work in a humane fashion. … the only program concept that tentatively demonstrated reductions in crime rates in replicated RFTs was nuisance abatement, which changes the environment in which criminals operate.
… there is no magic. Those rare programs that do work usually lead to improvements that are quite modest, compared with the size of the problems they are meant to address or the dreams of advocates.