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Also, this one with Agnes Callard (my wife's favorite living philosopher) about aspiration.
After you wrote this I was trying to think who my favorite living philosopher would be. C. Thi Nguyen is 1 of my 3 candidates, and apparently he did a talk w/ Callard. I haven't watched it but now I'm going to.
We're in real trouble if the group-individual model is correct. [...] Things aren't true just because it would be easier if they were.
I'm worried that you've got both the diagnosis right and the commentary on the diagnosis right.
Many of the "that's a problem for future Homer" problems are reasonably well covered by extreme versions of time preference.
I assume you're right about this too, but I consider it to be tantamount to an epicycle. I find the underlying generative model of TD much less plausible than my ~model where the unified self is basically an illusion. You can make the math work, but what, practically, has been achieved? You wind up with a lot of Tim-problems.
To be clear, I don't know what to do about any of it -- maybe there's nothing to be done? Maybe assuming coherent identities through time is the best one can do in terms of law / political economy, the way I suspect that, practically speaking, property rights is the best you can do, despite the obvious shortcomings of that formulation?
But it does help me think about the world in a way that seems (to me) more useful.
The idea that we could want different things than we currently do (and can even want to want different things) is hard to grapple with in a rigorous way, but that's what you're getting at.
Yup. That and more.
The L.A. Paul "vampire" construction is exactly the issue, and complicated in exactly the way she lays out. Beggars easy analysis. A good recommendation for many reasons.
It's a tricky problem. There's no bright dividing line between forcing someone to change for their own sake vs changing for the sake of the person doing the forcing.
That's the trickiest version of the problem; but taking a less tricky variant (e.g., metabolic health) I'd say most of the Western world is defined by preferences we have at time t that we ourselves repudiate at time t+delta, where delta is small. We commit our future selves to fates they will curse us for. [1]
Now aggregate this problem across millions, as you pointed out earlier. It renders praxeological analysis absurd, although it's absurd for other reasons too.
[1] Interesting thought experiment: imagine you are not a singular agent, but some collection of personas. Model the preferences of the different components of you (sampled at some rate) over time. What are the preferences of the "group" and how do members of the group act in opposition to each other?
Most of this in my mind falls into the category of identity-theoretic problems which is not simple aggregation, which economics (and most everything else, in fact) chokes on. Simple example:
Tim wants heroin. He gives Burt $100 and gets heroin. It is fantastic for a little while! And then Tim's life goes to shit. Not all at once, but little by little. But even in the very short term, Tim who wakes up the next day and has to go to his job suffers from the behavior of Tim the night before.
So what can we say about this? I don't even know what sense the standard economic narrative would make of it -- Tim's utility increased, else he wouldn't have bought the heroin, it is tautologically true, therefore it was utility-enhancing? Something about temporal discounting?
But this to me is the most obvious nonsense. Every sensible person knows that Tim is worse off after this trade. Zero people who are not deeply mentally ill would say "if I was Tim's dad I'd want him to get the heroin" which is a pretty good way to pragmatically assess bullshit from sense. A notion of "free" in which an alcoholic is free to drink himself to death in the grips of his compulsion needs amendment, to say the least. And much "freedom" has a similar bouquet when you zoom in a bit.
So there's something needed that when we say "Tim" we're really talking about a gradient of beings through time, loosely described as "Tim" from the outside, and that there's no such thing as talking about what's good for Tim in a way that means much. Good for Tim-at-time-t perhaps; but then the calculation of Tim's utility becomes an exercise in integration; or else we consider Tim as a vector and his utility function as vector components? Presumably there is work on this someplace.
Anyway, similar logic around this aggregation idea. Who are we talking about, exactly, wrt how "the rich" and "the poor" of countries X and Y benefit from trade? Assessed when, and how? Simple and intuitive language is insufficient to the task, perhaps because the metaphysics of the issue are complicated and horrifying to entertain.
That's what I think, anyway.
Ah. Yeah, that makes sense. CA would seem to refute the former. The latter seems impossible to adjudicate in the abstract, at least if you consider the entire ecology.
I'm not trying to be caustic, because there are circumstances where such reactions are sensible. In every case I can think of, it's something like:
- field {x} assumes a bunch of context that starts to seem so obvious that nobody bothers even thinking about it or talking about it any more
- practitioners in field {x} do legit science, conditioned on those assumptions
- a body of evidence accumulates that becomes canon
All well and good. But a person might reasonably say: well, what if you challenge the original assumptions in step 1? What if you operate outside the given ubiquitous context?
Some of the more egregious anti-fat hysteria that swept up the cardiometabolic health space in the 90s especially is an example of this. (Okay, you've shown fat is terrible in these ways; but what if you're not also living a toxic modern lifestyle, then how bad is it?) Some of the excesses of financialization and fiat money that you're no doubt familiar with might be considered another [1].
Point is, there may be some anti-vax equivalent to this pattern that has a reasonable basis. If so, I'd like to hear what it is.
[1] It's also worth noting is that the responses to legit critique often turn just as pathological as the original problem. Any bitcoiner with a brain should be able to rattle off an infinite number of examples.
Interesting. Say more about this.
Those are really good caveats and seem to get at the heart of the matter. I don't hear them made much, but I'm probably not in the places where they would be made. The level of public discourse is substantially lower, surprise surprise.
That's kind of the thing I had in mind when I made my original comment. Something like:
- Suckistan has vast swathes of granola reserves
- Suckistan elites trade all the granola to California and make mad profits
- from this trade, the elites get super rich
- using their newfound wealth, Suckistan elites do an even better job securing the granola trade and oppressing the rest of the populace
Based on this scenario, a reasonably intelligent person might defensibly say any of these things:
- trade worked out great for the market participants
- the fact that Suckistan is rife with corruption is their own political issue
- at least they got to trade granola, some of them having capital is better than nothing
- if Suckistan doesn't use its granola profits to modernize, that's on them
That seems basically true, but also incomplete. If I was a Suckistan peasant, I don't know that I'd view the granola export industry as a great deal for my future prospects. If I banned together with my fellow countrymen and overthrew the elites, I'm not sure what I'd want our next move to be, either.
I mean, having all of us become enlightened and wise and producing great institutions out of the ashes, and making an equitable division of our nation's granola resources before unleashing flourishing trade would be nice, but again, that's generally not the world we find ourselves in.
Anyway, I've hijacked your post. But that's the context behind my question.
Wrt bad institutions: this is close to the heart of it. There's many examples of a thing that, within a limited view, is "correct" but when applied to extant ecologies, turns out bad. One argument is that the world is wrong somehow, that if only people were different, than the thing would work and it would be better. Isomorphic to No True Scotsman.
Except the world isn't different, it is as we find it. So broad swathes of arguments are just ... dumb. They don't survive contact and are consequently not worth taking seriously. If your tx doesn't work in humans it's a waste of time to perseverate on how well it works in mice.
Wrt comparative advantage, I may be making the error @SimpleStacker mentioned and assumed the existence of CA meant that all international trade was to be desired in all cases. Or put differently, I may be arguing against a position for CA that nobody actually holds.
that international trade is always good on net. (Though unfortunately, many people with a shallow understanding of economics take it that way.)
Ah, I am one such. I thought the "official" Econ view was that trade was always beneficial.
Since you apparently believe that the institution of science writ large is all conspiracy and bunk, at least wrt vaccines, and the process of science includes about a zillion papers having been written, with methods reported, etc., I'm curious about the epistemology by which you read one book that accords with your pre-formed views and decide that it, and nothing else, is the source of truth to be relied on?
And in fact I'm curious about your larger epistemology, since at the beginning of the story you've already arrived at the position stated above. How?
Does this really hold, though, when you take everything into account, in practice?
I'm thinking of countries that sell their natural resources and never develop, and then, some years later, they are despoiled of resources, and a handful of elites live in armed compounds with their harems.
I understand the logical argument. I'm calling into question the empirical results.
I think if we ever found ourselves in this position, you would appreciate my appreciation, even if I'm unable to express it well in a SN comment. And if I did nothing other than eat half your can of tuna, you would feel let down.
Perhaps we shall find out one day. Set a can of tuna aside, please.
But wouldn't anything else negate the gift, deny the giver the pleasure of giving? I'm not enough of a giver to know.
When I think about what I'd like KK to say, it would be something like:
"A family in the Phillippines living in a shack opened their last can of tinned meat as a banquet for me. I regaled them with tales about my recent trip through their country, including some comical communication mishaps at a laundromat. I asked about their lives, learned about what each of them was doing, paid close attention to their answer. When I left the next day I gave them a postcard that I'd picked up in Malaysia of a place I'd visited the previous month, with a Haiku I made up commemorating the visit."
Actually I don't wish he'd said that, that's awkward and stupid, but you get the idea -- fuss over them, basically. Attend to them, make a point of making them feel special. And maybe he does that, and it's so obvious that he does that that he doesn't bother to note it, just like he doesn't note that he wipes his ass after he shits. But I wish he gave some indication of that sentiment.
Those are potent.
One thing I didn't like from TFA, either bc I don't like this about the narrative character KK comes across as, or bc he hasn't elaborated well enough, is the symmetry of it. Like, the events that have provokes such gratitude and wonderment are expressions of deep generosity -- and even sacrifice -- by the people in his tales.
He expresses gratitude toward the universe at large, and does it beautifully. But what of the people themselves? Is he proving worthy of their gifts? Does he discharge his debt, somehow? He does say this:
The weird thing is that I was, and still am, not sure whether I would have done what they did and let me sleep in the backyard. The “me” on the bicycle had a wild tangled beard, had not showered for weeks, and appeared destitute (my whole transcontinental trip cost me $500). I am not sure I would invite a casual tourist I met to take over my apartment, and cook for him, as many have done for me. I definitely would not hand him the keys to my own car, as a hotel clerk in Dalarna, Sweden, did one mid-summer day when I asked her how I could reach the painter Carl Larsson’s house 150 miles away.
So what, then? I read this and have almost a visceral reaction, feel the weight of what he was given, and the need to reciprocate, either directly to the person somehow, to make them feel the fullness of their actions, or more broadly, to the world. But he's silent on that account.
He views these beautiful gifts with wonderment, which is great, which is laudable, helping people to see the infrared of human kindness is a service. But it's not enough.
Thanks for asking. I'm noodling on a proper response to this as an update post. But here's something from TFA that's relevant:
In the Philippines a family living in a shack opened their last can of tinned meat as a banquet for me, a stranger who needed a place to crash. Below a wintry pass north of Gilgit in the Pakistan Himalayas, a group of startled firewood harvesters shared their tiny shelter and ash-baked bread with me when I bounded unannounced into their campfire circle one evening. We ended up sleeping like sardines under a single home-woven blanket while snow fell. In Taiwan, a student I met on the street one day befriended me in that familiar way to most travelers, but surprised me by offering me a place at his family’s apartment in Taipei. While he was away at school, I sat in on the family meals and had my own bedroom for two weeks.
I read this article like two hours ago or something, and I keep spinning through these visuals. I think: if one single of these things had happened to me -- if I'd been brave enough and adventurous enough to have had one single encounter of the calibre depicted here -- I'd be milking it to the end of time. It would be amongst the memories that flashed through my mind on my deathbed, I'm certain.
And yet to KK, that's Wednesday. No big. It's like KK has lived 10,000 worth of Elvis Mercury lives, because he chose to have them. He is Elon Musk and I'm the homeless guy sniffing glue and collapsing into my tent, thinking the wind is the voice of god.
I've been unemployed for coming up on three months, and some things have happened, but articles like the linked one remind me of what the ceiling is; and remind me of how easy it is to calibrate to some local context. And to wonder: is such calibration the cause, or the effect, of who we are?
To me, using the word "rational" to describe habitual behavior that makes a person hate themselves and their life for most of their waking hours is a curious practice that belies other uses of the word.
You can do it - we are doing it - but it lacks parsimony in the ways I think matter. Or rather: it's extremely parsimonious in a nonsensical way that breaks badly in complex settings. But beyond what I've already said, I have no crisp alternative.
The better formulation is probably in the realm of philosophy, as @Undisciplined mentioned previously.