Good Entropy

Explaining Socialism’s Moral Decay, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

I’m now finishing up a new introduction for a reissue of Eugen Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future. In writing it, I identified three distinct answers to the question: “How could a movement founded to liberate workers from capitalist oppression end up shooting them in the back when they tried to flee the Workers’ Paradise?”

1. The Actonian “power corrupts” story

2. The Hayekian “worst get on top” story

3. The Richterian “born bad” story

Here’s my summary:

Lord Acton and F.A. Hayek have inspired the two most popular explanations for the crimes of actually-existing socialism. While Acton never lived to see socialists gain power, their behavior seems to perfectly illustrate his aphorism that, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For all their idealism, even socialists will do bad things if left unchecked. Hayek, with the benefit of hindsight, suggested a slightly different explanation: Under socialism, “the worst get on top.” On this theory, the idealistic founders of socialism were gradually pushed out by brutal cynics as their movement’s power increased.

Richter’s novel advances a very different explanation for socialism’s “moral decay”: The movement was born bad. While the early socialists were indeed “idealists,” their ideal was totalitarian. Their overriding goals were to engineer a new society and a New Socialist Man. If this meant treating workers like slaves – depriving them of the freedom to choose their occupation or location, forbidding them to quit, splitting up families without their consent, and imposing draconian punishments on dissenters – so be it.

continuing on this post https://gentropy.org/blogs/2009/10/02/intuitive-differences/
I have a friend that has a predisposition to believe conspiracies. I have the exact opposite bias. I rarely see any indication of conspiracy.

Makes for a fair amount of disagreement.

Just-as-good Medicine » American Scientist

That decrementally cost-effective innovations are so rarely described in the health-care literature suggests that medicine is distinct from most other markets, in which cost-decreasing, quality-reducing products are continuously being introduced—think IKEA, Walmart and the Tata car. Several reasons may explain this “medical exceptionalism.” First, there is fundamentally a lack of incentives both for physicians to control costs, especially under a fee-for-service regime, and for patients to demand less expensive treatment when insurance shields them from the direct costs of care. Second, medical “bargains” frequently come with health risks, and trading health for money strikes some as vulgar, regardless of ratio. The inherent ethical unease that decrementally cost-effective innovations can elicit poses a serious public relations and marketing challenge.

From Mounting evidence links language pathway to autism

FOXP2 codes for a protein that regulates the expression of other genes. Last year, an international group of scientists identified one of its targets, contactin-associated protein-like 2 (CNTNAP2). They also found that certain common variants of CNTNAP2 tend to crop up in people with specific language impairment, a developmental disorder.

CNTNAP2 was an exciting find because three independent teams had recently published that common variants of the gene up the risk of developing autism.

“I think the evidence now that CNTNAP2 is involved [in autism] is quite good,” says leader of one of the teams, Aravinda Chakravarti, professor at the McKusick Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. “We’re now interested in finding the molecular basis of this.”

In unpublished data, Chakravarti says he’s found that CNTNAP2 is over-expressed in a small number of postmortem autistic brains.

Geneticists have discovered many different autism-related variants of CNTNAP2, a massive gene spanning 2.3 million base pairs. “Disruptions in the front end of the gene [usually] mean you’ll get a more severe disorder, like full-blown autism or severe expressive language delay,” notes Martin Poot, research associate professor of medical genetics at the University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

Intuitive differences: when to agree to disagree
13Kaj_Sotala29 September 2009 07:56AM

from here

Two days back, I had a rather frustrating disagreement with a friend. The debate rapidly hit a point where it seemed to be going nowhere, and we spent a while going around in circles before agreeing to change the topic. Yesterday, as I was riding the subway, things clicked. I suddenly realized not only what the disagreement had actually been about, but also what several previous disagreements we’d had were about. In all cases, our opinions and arguments had been grounded in opposite intuitions:

* Kaj’s intuition. In general, we can eventually learn to understand a phenomenon well enough to create a model that is flexible and robust. Coming up with the model is the hard part, but once that is done, adapting the general model to account for specific special cases is a relatively straightforward and basically mechanical process.
* Friend’s intuition. In general, there are some phenomena which are too complex to be accurately modeled. Any model you create for them is bristle and inflexible: adapting the general model to account for specific special cases takes almost as much work as creating the original model in the first place.

You may notice that these intuitions are not mutually exclusive in the strict sense. They could both be right, one of them covering certain classes of things and the other the remaining ones. And neither one is obviously and blatantly false – both have evidence supporting them. So the disagreement is not about which one is right, as such. Rather, it’s a question of which one is more right, which is the one with broader applicability.

As soon as I realized this, I also realized two other things. One, whenever we would run into this difference in the future, we’d need to recognize it and stop that line of debate, for it wouldn’t be resolved before the root disagreement had been solved. Two, actually resolving that core disagreement would take so much time and energy that it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.

The important thing to realize is that neither intuition rests on any particular piece of evidence. Instead, each one is a general outlook that has been formed over many years and countless pieces of evidence, most of which have already been forgotten. Before my realization, neither of us had even consciously known they existed. They are abstract patterns our minds have extracted from what must be hundreds of different cases we’ve encountered, very high-level hypotheses that have been repeatedly tested and found to be accurate.

It would be impossible to find out which was the more applicable one by means of regular debate. Each of us would have to gather all the evidence that led to the formulation of the intuition in the first place. Pulling a number out of my hat, I’d guess that a comprehensive overview of that evidence (for one intuition) would run at least a hundred pages long. Furthermore, it wouldn’t be sufficient for each of us to simply read the other side’s overview, once it had been gathered. By this point, we would be interpreting the evidence in light of our already existing intuition. I wouldn’t be surprised if simply reading through the summary would lead to both sides only being more certain of their own intuition being right. We would have to take the time to discuss each individual item in detail.

And if a real attempt to sort out the difference is hard, resolving it in the middle of a debate about something else is impossible. Both sides in the debate will have an opinion they think is obvious and be puzzled as to why the other side can consistently fail to get something so obvious. At the same time, neither can access the evidence that leads them to consider their opinion so obvious, and both will grow increasingly frustrated at both the other side’s bone-headedness and their own failure to properly communicate something that shouldn’t even need explaining.

In many cases, trying to resolve an intuitive difference simply isn’t worth the effort. Learn to recognize your intuitive differences, and you’ll know when to break off debates once they hit that difference. Putting those intuitions in words still helps understanding, though. When I told my friend the things I’ve just written here, she agreed, and we were able to have a constructive dialogue about those differences. (While doing so, and returning to the previous day’s topic, we were able to identify at least five separate points of disagreement that were all rooted in the same intuitive difference.) Each one was also able to explain, on a rough level, some of the background that supported their intuition. In the end, we still didn’t agree, but at least we understood each other’s positions a little better.

But what if the intuitive difference is about something really important? Me and my friend resolved to just wait things out and see whose hypothesis would turn out more accurate, but sometimes the difference might affect big decisions about the actions you want to take. (Robin’s and Eliezer’s disagreement on the nature of the Singularity comes to mind.) What if the disagreement really needs to be solved?

I’m not sure how well it can be done, but one could try. First off, both need to realize that in all likelihood, both intuitions have a large grain of truth to them. Like with me and my friend, the question is often one of the breadth of applicability, not of a strict truth or falsehood. Once the basic positions have been formulated, both should ask whether, not why. Assign some certainty value on the likelyhood of your intuition being the more correct one, and then consider the fact that your “opponent” has spent many years analyzing evidence to reach this position and might very well be right. Adjust your certainty downwards to account for this realization. Then take a few weeks considering both the things that may have led you to formulate this intuition, as well as the things that might have led your opponent to theirs. Spend time gathering evidence for both sides of the view, and be sure to give each piece of evidence a balanced view: half of the time you’ll first consider a case from the PoV of your opponent’s hypothesis, then of your own. Half of the time you’ll do it the other way around. Commit all such considerations in writing and present them to your opponent an regular intervals, taking the time to discuss them through. This is no time for motivated skepticism – both of you need to have genuine crisis of faith in order for things to get anywhere.

Not every disagreement is an intuitive difference. Any disagreement that rests on particular pieces of evidence and can be easily resolved with the correct empirical evidence isn’t one. If it feels like one of the intuitions is strictly false instead of having a large grain of truth to it, it’s still an intuitive difference, but not the kind of one that I have been covering here. An intuitive difference is also kind of related to, but different from, an inferential distance. In order to resolve it, a lot of information needs to be absorbed, but by both partners, not simply the other. It’s not a question of having different evidence: theoretically, you might both even have exactly the same evidence, but gathered in a different order. The question is one of differing interpretations, not raw data as such.

From Megan McCardle

In a discussion of the causes of the Financial Crisis:

Confirmation bias: The tendency to look for data that confirms your theory, rather than data that falsifies it. Yes, we all know how this works in politics, but it’s a much broader problem. People will repeatedly devise tests that give positive proofs of their theories, but much less often devise tests to falsify them.

And this harmonious chord from Hamming referencing Darwin:

Darwin writes in his autobiography that he found it necessary to write down every piece of evidence which appeared to contradict his beliefs because otherwise they would disappear from his mind.

The series of posts by these three authors illustrates, in microcosm, the melange of criticism commonly marshaled against mainstream science on intelligence in order to seem to discredit it without actually engaging its large interlocking body of evidence. Indeed, the criticism succeeds precisely by avoiding such engagement. There are two general strategies for avoiding the totality of relevant evidence: (1) create doubt about some small portion of it as if that isolated doubt nullified the totality of evidence, and (2) put unwelcome evidence off-limits by labeling it immoral or ill-motivated.

The game here is not to suppress discussion of genetic differences but to suppress knowledge of phenotypic differences. The latter make the former more plausible, so the specter of genetic causation is used as a club to beat back scientific knowledge about racial disparities in developed abilities, whatever their origins.

Original Article here
More thoughts by Linda S. Gottfredson

from The IQ Conundrum at Cato Unbound

This is the best quote I have heard in weeks. Part of a set of posts on things to unlearn from school as part of an Overcoming bias theme.

One of the most fundamental life skills is realizing when you are confused

from Two More Things to Unlearn from School

Asymmetrical Information: Its all about me

It’s all about me!

I was recently at the University of Chicago graduate school of business interviewing professors about their work, and got a chance to spend half an hour talking to Nick Epley, who is a psychologist. He’s done a lot of fascinating work, but one of the first things we talked about is a simple concept he didn’t invent: egotistical bias. We tend to use ourselves as a model for everyone else’s behaviour, even when doing so is wildly inappropriate. This is the source of

fundamental attribution error, among other things.

Is Wal-Mart Good for the American Working Class? – One last response, I promise. By Barbara Ehrenreich and Jason Furman