Critical Critical Review Review

[paulhope]

Ok, I've put this off for a while--I wonder why? The Critical Review (henceforth CR) seminar was full of smart people and was pretty much non-stop thought about important things. I expected that it would all spill over into a giant post immediately when I came back. But I guess instead I faced some burnout, or maybe just made the appropriate

Comments

[polishcyclist]

To simplify things, I’ve just noted areas of sharp disagreement; you can assume I more or less agree unless otherwise noted

[polishcyclist]

re: your comments in response to his "rebuild political theory with pro-market foundations" arguments

Humanity (1)

[paulhope]

re: your comments in response to his "rebuild political theory with pro-market foundations" arguments
Firstly, I'd like to get an idea of your conception of human nature. Personally, although I accept people aren't perfectly rational or selfish (myriad of motivations), I think that they are generally rational and broadly self-interested (for example, I'd say that lack of information is a bigger cause of not-rational actions than irrational intentions...stymied by ignorance rather than irrational by design). My conception of human nature...hmmm

Humanity (2)

[paulhope]

Meanwhile, we are smart. Well, smarter than lions and tigers and bears. But not that smart. Some things we do about as good as anyone can figure out (causal reasoning, for example, is a task people perform on about as well as the best normative models). Other things we evolved short cuts for. We simply didn't have the computing power or the proper hardware on which we could take an integral over "pleasure"--"pleasure" doesn't mean anything, anyway. So we develop the peak-end rule. It's faster. Similarly, rather than considering all available hypothesis about the world and check for empirical confirmation, we pick one and stick to it until long after it would be discredited by any sort of normatively-operating induction robot

Markets

[paulhope]

Secondly, in defense of the market, I'm going to argue that a) the market does a better job than you give it credit for - that an imperfect market can still be the best option. See all points above about skepticism about gov. actions.

I don't think I've made any actual claims about how good the market does versus government interactions. I'm arguing that the market is imperfect, which you/Friedman/AE/CR-dogma sometimes sound like you're admitting, but sometimes rabidly attack with (sometimes a priori) arguments about how people will react to certain situations (i.e. pseudo- or long-run- rationally)

Re: Markets

[polishcyclist]

Firstly, please don't conflate me/my arguements with what other people are saying. Secondly, how about actually pointing this out rather than making a blanket (unspecified) condemnation?

Re: Markets

[paulhope]

Sorry about the conflation--I'll try extra hard not to do it, although I think in this instance I was pointing out a trait that I think is common to all the people mentioned. Can you explain to me where you differ from the others? That would help me keep you distinct in my mind

Re: Markets

[polishcyclist]

Okay, we’re not getting anywhere - you’re still accusing me of things I don’t see myself as doing. I don’t know how else I can say this: markets are not perfect, long run equilibriums can be imperfect, people aren’t always rational. There’s nothing incongrous with acknowledging this and believing that in most cases gov. intervention wouldn’t be helpful.

Re: Markets

[paulhope]

Ok, I had you wrong here. Sorry.

I guess my problem is that I don't see quite what the argument is against non-free-market systems if there's no implicit guarantee of optimality in the free market system. Noticing imperfects seems to leave the question of altering things as fundemental to the system as legal rights, etc., up for discussion and with room for improvement. And once those are up for discussion, smaller government actions seem possible to.

Am I right in thinking that your reaction to this is "Well, often government actions cause a lot of harm"?

Re: Markets

[polishcyclist]

Basically, yes. I am saying that I think I have a good idea of what works and what doesn't, but that we should decentralize (to state or local levels) as many system-framing decisions as possible while still maintaining a cohesive nation. This enables experimentation - trial and error to see what is possible/good/etc.

So, I am for experimentalism even though I think that gov actions cause alot of harm.

This might depend on too great a faith in our ability to learn from mistakes etc., but I don't see any other way of determining what is better/worse....

Technocrats

[paulhope]

b) (and this is more relevant to your peak/end point) even if people don't do a perfect job of assessing/evaluating their experiences, who else is going to do it? See central planning debate and how a technocrat has no access to the information needed to determine what people want. So, even if we are thrown off, how can anyone else step in to correct the situation?

Ok, so this was where I really disagreed with Hayek. Sure, the people on the ground have access to information that is not available to the technocrat in the sky.

The reverse, however, is also true. Do you disagree?

A good (Seb-speak) system will use both to the extent that they are useful.

I feel like whenever we talk about this you lock yourself into a false free-market/totalitarian dichotomy that gives you this all-or-nothing feeling about technocratic rule (why should the benevolent super-AI choose to be a totalitarian when other methods work better?) The free market system, as posited by laizze-faire Austrian economics, is a technocratic proposal about how to

Peaks

[paulhope]

Finally, again on the peak/end point, my intuition (I've done little cog sci reading) is that, if the discrepancy between the mean of the experience and the average to the peak/end is great, people would learn pretty quickly to distrust the peak/end average.Ok, I clearly haven't expressed the awesomeness that is the peak/end rule well enough

Experiments

[paulhope]

Anyway, my whole point with this account is that I distrust cog sci experiments that are abstracted from actual existence because they often fail to take change-over-time into account.

How much text can I throw at you?

This is the last point:

I get very confused when Friedman says he "distrust systematic studies" and you say you "distrust cog sci experiments." What does this mean? If you want to say that you're not going to take every "study" at face value, that's great. But I'm not sure there's really any alternative that works better. If you're right about people adjusting to be comfortable with more choices over time, then cog sci experiments, not any sort of anecdotal "common sense," are going to put the nails in that coffin

Numbers

[paulhope]

Thank you for your comments. As is tradition, I disagree with everything. :)

I'm going to break up my responses into single-topic chunks, as is my wont. (I like how it inflates the number of comments associated with a particular post...)

Firstly, I don’t think its fair for you to respond to criticism of attempts to mathemitize existence by calling it “fear of numbers”. Even on the note about systematic studies, I think that it’s a valid criticism that systematic studies tend to reflect (known and unknown) assumptions and biases in society - there’s lots of criticism of social sciences on this point.

Sure, systematic studies reflect biases and assumptions. But the comparison is being made to anecdotal evidence! Like, eyewitness testimony bogusness. The biases and assumptions come in at the interpretation and framing of data. But anecdotal evidence tends to be just a single data point made out to be more significant than it actually is, whereas a systematic study, when done well, uses a lot of data, analyzes it using pretty

Re: Numbers

[polishcyclist]

"Sure, systematic studies reflect biases and assumptions. But the comparison is being made to anecdotal evidence! Like, eyewitness testimony bogusness. The biases and assumptions come in at the interpretation and framing of data. But anecdotal evidence tends to be just a single data point made out to be more significant than it actually is, whereas a systematic study, when done well, uses a lot of data, analyzes it using pretty objectively solid and necessary techniques, and then comes out with a conclusion and a possibility of error. There's no comparison

Re: Numbers

[paulhope]

1: You’ve set up a straw man.

I didn't set this up, Friedman set this up. The context of the comment was literally "I am comfortable taking anecdotal evidence, I am uncomfortable with systematic studies." To the extent that you were defending him here, I think my response was warranted.

2: The world is NOT twofold and nor are man’s attitudes (contra Buber); Man’s world and attitudes are manifold. You’ve set up a false dichotomy; we don’t have choose to either go for systematic studies that produce TRUTH or else conjure ideas from thin air.

I'm not really sure what you mean here, partly because the word "manifold" never fails to throw me (I can never get through any Kant...:( ). What's my dichotomy? Are you sure you're not reading more into what I'm saying than what I'm saying?

4: There’s ample reason to be skeptical about whether systematic studies in social sciences progressively reveal a more accurate vision of the world, or merely iron out some distortions while introducing new, as yet unrecognized, biases/distortions/