bias meme for your amusement
A couple nights ago, in that half hour I usually have after lying down and before falling asleep, I dreamt up what I think might be a fun meme about your personal/ideological biases.
To continue the basic meme tradition, I'll tag smandal and j35u5chr15t, with whom I think I have broad ideological overlap; vadius, who grew in virtually the same intellectual incubator as me, but later sold his soul to the Dark Side; quirkyfemme, who is a crazy liberal and I'm interested to better understand how; proudtobprouty for a liberal arts flavor; and imaginedust because I fancy her. Complete this and tag like, four other people, or whatever.
We all have biases and they stop up our ears and cloud our thinking. We find comfort in our world view and for all I know (hey I'm no scientist ...) we probably release endorphins when we hear someone agree with us. As they say, the first step to recovery is to admit we have a problem. List N philosophical or ideological biases you have, briefly provide context, and discuss how they might cause you to err.
My biases are:
1) free market
The first of a few that could fall under an umbrella libertarian bias. I like the idea of an economic system in which interactions and transactions are voluntary. The way the market mechanism allocates resources and solves problems in that complex adaptive system kind of way is elegance itself.
But markets do fail, by failing to price externalities or flunking collective action problems or getting stuck along unfortunate path dependences or whatever. I'm going to be reluctant to admit instances of market failure and even after I see them, I won't necessarily agree that correcting the market failure is worth society's while. Because arrogantly yanking levers in a complex adaptive system can have unforeseen consequences, I'm going to be very skeptical of even reasonable-sounding market regulations. So I'll err on the side of too little regulation of the economy, even though I know certain kinds of regulation actually facilitate more efficient markets.
2) anti-government
A government is a firm with a monopoly on the use of violent force in a given region. More, this monopoly privilege is wholly illegitimate. Unfortunately anarchy seems to be usually unstable. And even the market-facilitating institution of private property that I like so much rests on a shaky axiom or two. So I've gotten over the allure of the legitimacy trap, but I still think that government is an ugly beast.
I'm going to err in assuming that government action on a problem is always going to be inefficient if not totally counter-productive. I'm also going to make the mistake of assuming, when shit goes down like a financial crisis, the government simply must have fucked up somewhere, and the disaster is its fault. This is a strong one with me; even writing about it in this meme I have a hard time seeing this as an actual bias. I talked a lot about the economy, but this bias goes for social and foreign policy issues as well.
3) march-of-history optimism
Our lives sucked 10,000 years ago. They were marginally better 1000 years ago. They were fantastically improved 100 years ago, but still fairly miserable compared to today. 10 years ago and you start to run into the normal ups-and-downs granularity of human history (sometimes we have recessions, or plagues, or an meteor hit your town). Everything seems to me like it's getting better all the time. This gives me an optimistic bias, which causes me to err in a host of ways.
One obvious thing is that I'm going to brush off as silly worrying notions of something really awful happening. I just assume that nuclear war or even global scale traditional military conflict aren't serious threats because, you know, surely we have as a species figured out how to avoid such no-brainer cock-ups. But we just had a world war a short seventy years ago. I assume globalization and the attendant liberation of the world's poor (is this another bias?) will happily continue apace. But protectionist rhetoric still wins elections ...
There are sneakier effects of my optimistic bias. I have a hard time believing racism and sexism and homophobia and all that other garbage still exist. I mistake the fact that this stuff is eventually dying out for it already being gone. I need help seeing examples of, say, sexism in the work place. Consciousness raising is good.
4) individualism => globalism
I have an exaggerated belief in the rugged individual, a remnant of my Randian past, I'm sure. I think individual responsibility is empowering, and dignifying. I basically think that individuals, especially in the West, can make of their lives what they choose. This will lead me astray when it comes to those in society who are just really fucked. I assume that if people are poor, they're probably lazy or something. Of course, in reality, life is more complicated than that.
A side note: my individualism leads directly to my globalism. I see individuals very clearly, and can't be bothered with groupings. I don't care about families or tribes or nations. We're all six point something billion of us individuals, and I think a sub-Saharan's life is equal in value to an American's life. I'm not sure if this causes me to err in any particular way, but it flies in the face of our evolutionary history. It also accounts for my gut instinct support for completely open borders and totally free trade. I guess this might cause me to err in legitimate border security issues. And the sequence of economic liberalization probably matters quite a lot for developing economies.
5) anti-spiritual
My atheism isn't a bias, but my complete disrespect for the spiritual impulse and, indeed, religious people, probably is a bias. My gut tells me to reject out of hand anything that smacks spiritual or new agey. I am perhaps too quick in my disdain for atheistic versions of Buddhism. Our brains are wired for spiritualism. I guess I scoff at that at my peril.
6) Cats
are way better than dogs. That's not so much a bias as it is a self-evident truth.
Okay, those were the biases that came to mind. Did I miss any?
To continue the basic meme tradition, I'll tag smandal and j35u5chr15t, with whom I think I have broad ideological overlap; vadius, who grew in virtually the same intellectual incubator as me, but later sold his soul to the Dark Side; quirkyfemme, who is a crazy liberal and I'm interested to better understand how; proudtobprouty for a liberal arts flavor; and imaginedust because I fancy her. Complete this and tag like, four other people, or whatever.
We all have biases and they stop up our ears and cloud our thinking. We find comfort in our world view and for all I know (hey I'm no scientist ...) we probably release endorphins when we hear someone agree with us. As they say, the first step to recovery is to admit we have a problem. List N philosophical or ideological biases you have, briefly provide context, and discuss how they might cause you to err.
My biases are:
1) free market
The first of a few that could fall under an umbrella libertarian bias. I like the idea of an economic system in which interactions and transactions are voluntary. The way the market mechanism allocates resources and solves problems in that complex adaptive system kind of way is elegance itself.
But markets do fail, by failing to price externalities or flunking collective action problems or getting stuck along unfortunate path dependences or whatever. I'm going to be reluctant to admit instances of market failure and even after I see them, I won't necessarily agree that correcting the market failure is worth society's while. Because arrogantly yanking levers in a complex adaptive system can have unforeseen consequences, I'm going to be very skeptical of even reasonable-sounding market regulations. So I'll err on the side of too little regulation of the economy, even though I know certain kinds of regulation actually facilitate more efficient markets.
2) anti-government
A government is a firm with a monopoly on the use of violent force in a given region. More, this monopoly privilege is wholly illegitimate. Unfortunately anarchy seems to be usually unstable. And even the market-facilitating institution of private property that I like so much rests on a shaky axiom or two. So I've gotten over the allure of the legitimacy trap, but I still think that government is an ugly beast.
I'm going to err in assuming that government action on a problem is always going to be inefficient if not totally counter-productive. I'm also going to make the mistake of assuming, when shit goes down like a financial crisis, the government simply must have fucked up somewhere, and the disaster is its fault. This is a strong one with me; even writing about it in this meme I have a hard time seeing this as an actual bias. I talked a lot about the economy, but this bias goes for social and foreign policy issues as well.
3) march-of-history optimism
Our lives sucked 10,000 years ago. They were marginally better 1000 years ago. They were fantastically improved 100 years ago, but still fairly miserable compared to today. 10 years ago and you start to run into the normal ups-and-downs granularity of human history (sometimes we have recessions, or plagues, or an meteor hit your town). Everything seems to me like it's getting better all the time. This gives me an optimistic bias, which causes me to err in a host of ways.
One obvious thing is that I'm going to brush off as silly worrying notions of something really awful happening. I just assume that nuclear war or even global scale traditional military conflict aren't serious threats because, you know, surely we have as a species figured out how to avoid such no-brainer cock-ups. But we just had a world war a short seventy years ago. I assume globalization and the attendant liberation of the world's poor (is this another bias?) will happily continue apace. But protectionist rhetoric still wins elections ...
There are sneakier effects of my optimistic bias. I have a hard time believing racism and sexism and homophobia and all that other garbage still exist. I mistake the fact that this stuff is eventually dying out for it already being gone. I need help seeing examples of, say, sexism in the work place. Consciousness raising is good.
4) individualism => globalism
I have an exaggerated belief in the rugged individual, a remnant of my Randian past, I'm sure. I think individual responsibility is empowering, and dignifying. I basically think that individuals, especially in the West, can make of their lives what they choose. This will lead me astray when it comes to those in society who are just really fucked. I assume that if people are poor, they're probably lazy or something. Of course, in reality, life is more complicated than that.
A side note: my individualism leads directly to my globalism. I see individuals very clearly, and can't be bothered with groupings. I don't care about families or tribes or nations. We're all six point something billion of us individuals, and I think a sub-Saharan's life is equal in value to an American's life. I'm not sure if this causes me to err in any particular way, but it flies in the face of our evolutionary history. It also accounts for my gut instinct support for completely open borders and totally free trade. I guess this might cause me to err in legitimate border security issues. And the sequence of economic liberalization probably matters quite a lot for developing economies.
5) anti-spiritual
My atheism isn't a bias, but my complete disrespect for the spiritual impulse and, indeed, religious people, probably is a bias. My gut tells me to reject out of hand anything that smacks spiritual or new agey. I am perhaps too quick in my disdain for atheistic versions of Buddhism. Our brains are wired for spiritualism. I guess I scoff at that at my peril.
6) Cats
are way better than dogs. That's not so much a bias as it is a self-evident truth.
Okay, those were the biases that came to mind. Did I miss any?