Don't Take Advice from Fiction

A lot of our biases come, I think, from expecting real life to be like fiction. For example, when we have negative opinions on important subjects, we tend too much to expect that we should explicitly and directly express those negative opinions in a dramatic conversation scene. We should speak our mind, make it clear, talk it through, etc. This usually a bad idea. We also tend to feel bad about ourselves when we notice that we avoid confrontation, and back off when from things we want when we encounter resistance. But such retreat is usually for the best.

Robin Hanson, "Biases Of Fiction"

Wasteful Signaling: The Time Dimension

I think about this a lot: you’re young, you come from a smart, wealthy family, you’re somehow supposed to show that you’re successful quite quickly. Banking, law, consultancy allow you to do this; engineering, science and entrepreneurship less so. Your friends expect it, your parents, your potential mates do ... So we see so many talented people very quickly having to signal how smart they are but that may not be the longest-term social productivity.

Tyler Cowen, quoted in "Lunch with the FT: Tyler Cowen", by Josh McDermott

Game Theory

If you lack the willpower to resist your kids' rent-seeking on an issue, magnanimously give them what they would have extracted from you under duress.  You won't get your way, but at least you won't blatantly reinforce their bad behavior.

Bryan Caplan, "10 More Things I Learned in My First 10 Years of Parenting"

Compared to What?

Nothing is easier than the proof that something human has imperfections. I'm amazed how many people devote themselves to that task.

Thomas Sowell, Q&A session (25:07-25:16)

History Teaches Anything

Policy makers are as likely to use history as a way to validate their preconceptions, or endorse existing plans, as they are to scour it objectively for ideas. [...]

The late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called this susceptibility “history by rationalization.” What politicians are falling prey to is what psychologists call “confirmation bias,” whereby people tend to both seek out and trust only information that corroborates their judgments. And policy makers have lots to choose from. Billions of words have been written about historical events, offering modern-day thinkers plenty of material to convince themselves of the wisdom of their thinking.

Jordan Michael Smith, "Did a mistake save the world?"

Disdain Fictional Fiction, Demand Fictional Nonfiction

Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and saccharine romances in which everyone lives happily ever after. But when it comes to science, these same people say, "Give us schmaltz!" They expect the science of human beings to be a source of emotional uplift and inspirational sermonizing.

Steven Pinker, interviewed by Steve Sailer

A Two-Step Model of Political Opinions and Affiliations

I think a lot of people go along with Democratic economic policies largely because they've already decided to be Democrats based on social issues. As Knepper points out, social issues are relatively easy to have clear, unwavering views about. Given the choice between memorizing and repeating a few slogans to sum up the mainstream Democratic positions on economic issues, or reaching your own conclusions on those issues by soberly weighing the smartest arguments on all sides, many people just don't have time for the latter, no matter how much more intellectually honest it would be.

Yet people would rather feel a sense of clarity than uncertainty on the major issues of the day. So, when they don't have time to master those issues, they develop shortcuts, like saying their side cares, and the other side doesn't care — or, only cares about the wrong people. That approach is simplistic but powerful enough to be able to explain almost any political divide. Given that Republicans are the party of social and economic conservatism, and that their social conservatism is blatantly uncaring, socially liberal voters have a readily available shortcut for taking a stand on Republican economic policies: just as Republicans' social policies show that they don't care about women, blacks, gays, immigrants, etc., their economic policies show that they don't care about the middle class (or the poor), and that they only care about the rich (or corporations).

It's not just that many voters are socially liberal and prioritize social issues, causing Republicans to lose a portion of the electorate every Election Day based on those issues. Of course, that's true, but Republicans have a broader problem: their positions on social issues are turning off many voters from the very idea of agreeing with them on any issue.

John Althouse Cohen, "How can Republicans Win after 2012?"

Role Specialization and Jealousy

Role specialization is a robust way to limit jealousy. If dads have different parental roles than moms, then my kids could like me best as a dad, and their mom best as a mom, and I less have to fear that they will substitute her for me. If I teach a particular course well, then my students can like me for being good at my course, and others for teaching their courses well, and I need less fear that few students will want me to teach them.

Robin Hanson, "On Friend Jealousy"

Style of Learning Shapes Performance

The courses in medical school can be approached in two different ways. The ideal approach is the pyramid method: the student masters the basic concepts in the early courses to build the foundation layer and then adds concepts from subsequent courses to build more layers. This approach makes it easier to learn advanced topics because the student remembers the underlying fundamentals. This approach also improves the higher levels of learning: application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

Unfortunately, only a minority of medical students use that approach. The alternate approach is memorize and forget. [...] This approach addresses only the lowest level of learning: knowledge.

In later years, the medical students who used the memorize and forget approach never master the concepts underlying all of medicine. Instead of understanding diseases and integrating that knowledge with information on the various ways patients present when sick, they memorize the commonest patterns of diseases. When a pattern memorizer encounters a patient that doesn't fit the pattern, the patient is in trouble. The physician will shoe-horn the patient into a wrong pattern or request many diagnostic tests or consults or refer the patient to another physician (who may be equally clueless). The lack of thorough understanding of health and disease underlies the mediocre performance of many physicians.

MingoV, comment on "Learning and Retention in Medical School" by Bryan Caplan

A Tax on Bullshit

I am for betting because I am against bullshit. Bullshit is polluting our discourse and drowning the facts. A bet costs the bullshitter more than the non-bullshitter so the willingness to bet signals honest belief. A bet is a tax on bullshit; and it is a just tax, tribute paid by the bullshitters to those with genuine knowledge.

Alex Tabarrok, "A Bet Is a Tax on Bullshit"

Taking Honourary Authorship a Little Too Far

One of the authors on the paper, the most distinguished of the several cardiologists, actually died before the study began. Yet that hasn’t stopped him being an author on a recently published letter that he cannot have read in response to another letter that he cannot have read about a paper that he cannot have read.

Richard Smith, "A successful and cheerful whistleblower"

Lob der Faulheit

Wenn die Jugend unerfahren ist, so kommt das daher, daß sie niemals wirklich gefaulenzt hat. Der Fehler unserer Erziehungsmethoden ist, daß sie sich der großen Zahl wegen nur an die Mittelmäßigen wenden. Für einen Geist, der sich entwickelt, gibt es keine Faulheit. Ich habe niemals mehr gelernt als an jenen langen Tagen, die einem Zuschauer leer erschienen wären, und an denen ich mein unerfahrenes Herz beobachtete wie ein Parvenu seine Bewegungen bei Tisch überwacht.

Raymond Radiguet, Den Teufel im Leib, S. 102

Easy vs. Hard

When people say that something is wrong, they are almost always right. When they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

Tucker Max (quoted here)

Two Visions of Power

Contemporary controversies revolving around differences in the very conception of power often go back to centuries-old differences in the visions of man and social causation. Whenever one individual or group can change the behavior of another, then the former has power over the latter, as power is conceived by J. K. Galbraith, Gunnar Myrdal, Laurence Tribe, or other modern thinkers in the tradition of the unconstrained vision. Those with the constrained vision reject this conception of power, when behavioral changes are made in response to a quid pro quo, and conceive of power as the ability to reduce someone's pre-existing options. The result may be the same in both cases, whether achieved by threat or reward, but the constrained vision is not a vision of results but of processes.

Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions, pp. 190-91

Another Reason to Teach Statistics in School

Until they understand statistical concepts, people seem inevitably drawn toward essentialism. Essentialism in the history of biology led to typological concepts of species, race, characters, and developmental stages, all of which explained variation in terms of deviation from the ideal type. We now appreciate that populations transform according to statistical rules, not typological rules.

John Hawks, "J. Barnard Davis and the variation within races"

Über Mustererkennung

Die Arbeit eines Fußballexperten besteht darin, Ereignisse, die zum Teil mit Zufall zusammenhängen, hinterher als unvermeidliche Folge von Fehlentscheidungen des Trainers darzustellen.

Harald Martenstein, "'Dies ist das wahre Geheimnis des Fußballs'"

Big Identity

A common failure mode in human reasoning is to become too attached to theory, to the point where we begin ignoring the reality it was intended to describe. The way this manifests in ethical and moral reasoning is that we tend to forget why we make rules – to avoid harmful consequences. Instead, we tend to become fixated on the rules and the language of the rules, and end up fulfilling Santayana’s definition of a fanatic: one who redoubles his efforts after he has forgotten his aim.

Eric S. Raymond, "Evaluating the Harm from Closed Source"

"Natural" Property Rights as Libertarianism's Root Mistake

One gets the sense that libertarians are unwilling or unable to acknowledge that property rights are the product of institutions and legal norms; instead, they think of rights to property as natural, immutable, inherent, whatever. And when it is pointed out that property relations form a matrix of domination and power relationships in the private sphere, the libertarian response seems to be that this is No One’s Fault or Problem, since of course one can do with one’s property as one pleases. The idea that property rights are merely instrumental toward other goods and ends is apparently off the radar. (As is the idea that power is, more generally, distributed unequally.)

Rob Hunter, comment on "Fuck Me or You're Fired!" by Chris Bertram

Ulysses and the Knifemongers

If a sophisticated agent had access to an effective private self-control device, she would take advantage of it, reducing the value of a government intervention. However, we find it unlikely that fully effective self-control devices can be found in this context. Market-provided self-control mechanisms are probably undercut by the market mechanism itself: although firms have a financial incentive to provide self-control to agents, other firms have a financial incentive to break it down. For example, if a firm developed a self-control shot that causes pain when the consumer smokes, another firm has an incentive to develop a drug that relieves these effects for agents who temporarily want to get rid of their commitment. Other problems arise in contracting setups. If there are ex post gains to be made, the future self might want to renegotiate today's contract. But even if there are none,17 there is an ex post incentive to cheat on the contract: smoking is hard to verify in court. This leaves us with privately provided self-control mechanisms like betting with others or becoming involved in situations where it is very difficult to smoke, but these mechanisms are likely to run into enforcement problems similar to those discussed above.

Jonathan Gruber and Botond Köszegi, "Is Addiction 'Rational'? Theory and Evidence", Quarterly Journal of Economics 116,p. 1286

On Metaconfidence

Those who don’t know the past are doomed to over-trust experts.

Seth Roberts, "The Next Time a Top Economist Predicts Disaster…"

Obvious but Unfashionable

If you tax ice cream, people will be less obese, which is good, but they will also be enjoying less ice cream, which is bad.

Tim Harford, "The weighty problem of road and fat taxes"

Umso schlimmer für die Theorie

Einmal besichtigen wir Siedlungen für die Arbeiterschaft, Krankenhäuser, Schulhäuser etc. Der Herr vom Bauamt, das ich um die offizielle Gefälligkeit gebeten hatte, ein Adjunkt, der uns mit einem amtlichen Wagen an alle Ränder der Stadt fuhr, verstand die Fragen des Gastes nicht, erläuterte von Siedlung zu Siedlung dasselbe, während Brecht, anfänglich verwundert über soviel Komfort für die Arbeiterschaft, sich mehr und mehr belästigt fühlte durch eben diesen Komfort, der Grundfragen nicht zu lösen gedenkt; plötzlich, in einem properen Neubau, fand er sämtliche Zimmer zu klein, viel zu klein, menschenunwürdig, und in einer Küche wo nichts fehlte und alles glänzte, brach er ungeduldig die Besichtigungsfahrt ab, wollte mit der nächsten Bahn an die Arbeit, zornig, daß eine Arbeiterschaft auf diesen Schwindel hineinfällt; noch hoffte er, das sei nur in dieser Schweiz möglich, Sozialismus zu ersticken durch Komfort für alle.

Max Frisch, Tagebücher 1966-1971, S. 23-24 (Abschnitt "Erinnerungen an Brecht")

It Depends on whether You Were Born to

In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn. That's OK; he's a songwriter, after all, and he needs simple choices like that in his songs. But nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot - how escapes can go off at half-cock, how you can leave the suburbs for the city but end up living a limp suburban life anyway.

Nick Hornby, High Fidelity, p. 136 (ch. 11)

Lizenz zum Töten

Um Böses zu tun, muß der Mensch es zuallererst als Gutes begreifen oder als bewußte gesetzmäßige Tat. So ist, zum Glück, die Natur des Menschen beschaffen, daß er für seine Handlungen eine Rechtfertigung suchen muß.

Macbeths Rechtfertigungen waren schwach - und es zernagte ihn sein Gewissen Und auch Jago ist ein Jagnjonjok - ein Lamm. Die Phantasie und Gesteskraft der shakespearischen Bösewichter machte an einem Dutzend von Leichen halt Denn es fehlte ihnen die Ideologie.

Alexander Solschenizyn, Der Archipel Gulag, S. 172 (Erster Teil, Kap. 4)

Irrational Rationality

When you think about cosmology, ancient Rome, the nature of world government, or starving folks in Africa, it might feel like those things matter to you. But in terms of the kinds of things that evolution could plausibly have built you to actually care about (vs. pretend to care about), those far things just can’t directly matter much to your life. While your beliefs about far things might influence how you act, and what other people think of you, their effects on your quality of life, via such channels of influence, don’t depend much on whether these beliefs are true.

Robin Hanson, "What Use Far Truth?"

To Be Productive, Be Confident

I used to wonder, enviously, how he could write so much, especially given his drinking, his travels, his public appearances and his demanding social life. He told me once that a writer should be able to write with no difficulty, anytime, anywhere—but actually, not many writers can do that. I think part of the reason why he was so prolific—and the reason he had such an outsize career and such an outsize effect on his readers—is that he was possibly the least troubled with self-doubt of all the writers on earth.

Katha Pollitt, "Regarding Christopher"

The Risk of Trying Hard

[I]f you work hard and fail, there's the presumption that you're innately not very talented. If you don't work hard and fail, you can credibly preserve the belief or illusion that had you only put forth 100% effort, it would have worked out.

Ben Casnocha, "The Risk of Working Hard"

A Reeducation

Enduring a flue alone in an apartment has always included a certain psychedelic aspect, it seems to me. But it is a psychedelia of the body, not the mind. A sustained, sapping fever is a reeducation in the true weight of a blunt human collection of arms and legs, of a lollipop head wobbling on a wooz neck, and in the sensation of a throw pillow's scrape against ribs as sensitive as a lover's lips.

Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City, p. 231 (Ch. 12)

Well, There's a Figure of Speech for That One

Herman Kahn observed that the Hans Christian Andersen story about the emperor's clothes was psychologically flawed. It was impossible to believe, Herman said, that people committed to the wonderfulness of the clothes would instantly reverse course and accept that the emperor was naked, just because somebody pointed out this obvious truth. People truly committed to beliefs don't get turned around that easily. At a minimum, they would have furiously denounced the little boy who blurted out the nakedness news

David Seligman, "Trashing 'The Bell Curve'"

Are IQ Tests Biased against Non-Western Populations?

IQ, as measured by IQ scores, is a decent measure of the cognitive skills that you need in order for technical innovation or more routine science and engineering. It’s generally useful in modern technical civilization. Populations with low average IQ produce very few individuals that are good at innovation. Very few. If there were one or a few kinds of intelligence that were not measured well by IQ tests, but allowed people with low IQs to accomplish remarkable things - you’d think we would notice. We know that they don’t invent railroads or transistors or penicillin: what comparably important and useful things have they done?

Gregory Cochran, "The Only Game in Town"

Graphic Anarchy

Serious works of economics or statistics tend to be written in a serious style in some version of plain academic English. [...]

Serious works of social science nowadays use all sorts of data display, from showing no data at all, to tables, to un-designed Excel-style bar charts, to Cleveland-style dot and line plots, to creative new data displays, to ornamental information visualizations. The analogy in writing style would be if some journal articles were written in the pattern of Ezra Pound, others like Ernest Hemingway, and others in the style of James Joyce or William Faulkner.

Andrew Gelman, "Standardized Writing Styles and Standardized Graphing Styles"

Akademisches Marketing v. Chr.

Die Griechen hatten weder in ihren Thorien noch in der Praxis viel für Mäßigkeit übrig. Heraklit hat behauptet, daß alles sich wandelt, Parmenides hingegen erklärte, daß nichts sich verändert.

Bertrand Russel, Philosophie des Abendlandes: Ihr Zusammenhang mit der politischen und der sozialen Entwicklung, S. 70 (5. Kap.)

The Asymmetric Interpretation of Advice

I will here offer a bit of meta-advice. The single thing that has surprised me most about serving on evaluation/selection committees is the heterogeneity of criteria that individuals on committees have. There is a direct asymmetrical implication for how you should parse advice: when people talk about what matters to them and what they personally take into account, listen closely; when they talk about what doesn’t matter, regard any implication cautiously until it plainly aggregates.

Jeremy Freese, "some advice re: advice" (emphasis in original)

Why Are Left-Wing Groups Such a Mess?

Building on ideas from the anthropologist Richard Shweder, Haidt and his colleagues synthesize anthropology, evolutionary theory, and psychology to propose six innate moral foundations: care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.

[...]

And the six moral foundations are central to how Haidt explains politics. The moral mind, to him, resembles an audio equalizer with a series of slider switches that represent different parts of the moral spectrum. All political movements base appeals on different settings of the foundations—and the culture wars arise from what they choose to emphasize. Liberals jack up care, followed by fairness and liberty. They rarely value loyalty and authority. Conservatives dial up all six.

For Occupy Wall Street, fairness seems to be the chief concern—as it appears to be for the Tea Party. Occupy's version opposes rich people taking money through cheating and exploitation. The Tea Party's restores karma by punishing laziness and cheating, Haidt has written, "and they see liberalism and liberal government as an assault on that project." But, as tonight's meeting shows, the right owns an advantage in creating effective groups: Far-left activists dial down "authority" to zero.

Marc Parry, "Jonathan Haidt Decodes the Tribal Psychology of Politics" (via)

On Being Drunk in a Foreign Country

Howard walked across the street and into the Windmill pub. Here he ordered and began drinking a perfectly reasonable bottle of red wine. His chosen seat was, he thought, in a neglected corner of the bar. But two minutes after he sat down, a huge flat screen that he had not noticed was lowered down near his head and switched on. A football game commenced between a white team and a blue team. Men gathered round. They seemed to accept and like Howard, mistaking him for one of those dedicated souls who come early to get the best seat. Howard allowed this misinterpretation and found himself taken up in the general fervour. Soon he was cheering and complaining with the rest. When a stranger, in his enthusiasm, tipped some beer down Howard’s shoulder, Howard smiled, shrugged and said nothing. A little while later this same fellow bought Howard a beer, saying nothing when he put it down in front of Howard and seeming to expect nothing in return. At the end of the first half another man beside him knocked glasses with Howardin a very jolly way, in approval of Howard’s random decision to cheer the blue team, although the game itself was still 0–0. This score never changed. And after the game finished nobody hit each other or got angry – it didn’t seem to be that kind of game. ‘Well, we got what we needed,’ said one man philosophically. Three other men smiled and nodded at the truth of this.

Zadie Smith, On Beauty, p. 305 (part 3, ch. 4)

There Is No Good Reason to . . .

"There is no good reason to" precedes all kinds of arguments for banning things I could well have good reason to want.

Eric Crampton, comment on his own post "Dog days of summer... this time with data"

Check for Inconsistencies

In general, people seem far more eager to collect respectable arguments for or against various specific regulations, than to consider the coherence of a pattern of regulations they endorse. They are satisfied to offer arguments for why janitors should have work hour limits, why musicians should not, why doctors should be highly regulated, and why car mechanics should not, all without much noticing or caring how much they treat similar cases differently.

This suggests that there is a lot of rationalization going on. That is, rather than choosing some principles and then consistently applying them, people instead pick various random policy positions and then search for justifications.

Robin Hanson, "Regulatory Differences"

Cocktail Party Bore

[S]tatistical and probabilistic thinking is a real damper on "intellectual" conversation. By this, I mean that there are many individuals who wish to make inferences about the world based on data which they observe, or offer up general typologies to frame a subsequent analysis. These individuals tend to be intelligent and have college degrees. Their discussion ranges over topics such as politics, culture and philosophy. But, introduction of questions about the moments about the distribution, or skepticism as to the representativeness of their sample, and so on, tends to have a chilling affect on the regular flow of discussion. While the average human being engages mostly in gossip and interpersonal conversation of some sort, the self-consciously intellectual interject a bit of data and abstraction (usually in the form of jargon or pithy quotations) into the mix. But the raison d'etre of the intellectual discussion is basically signaling and cuing; in other words, social display. No one really cares about the details and attempting to generate a rigorous model is really beside the point. Trying to push the N much beyond 2 or 3 (what you would see in a college essay format) will only elicit eye-rolling and irritation.

Razib Khan, "Why People Don't Care about Statistics" (emphases omitted)