Every little bit doesn’t count

Right after writing a post on cynical explanations of human behaviour I read Yvain over at Less Wrong:

“Interesting new study out on moral behavior. The one sentence summary of the most interesting part is that people who did one good deed were less likely to do another good deed in the near future. They had, quite literally, done their good deed for the day.

In the first part of the study, they showed that people exposed to environmentally friendly, “green” products were more likely to behave nicely. Subjects were asked to rate products in an online store; unbeknownst to them, half were in a condition where the products were environmentally friendly, and the other half in a condition where the products were not. Then they played a Dictator Game. Subjects who had seen environmentally friendly products shared more of their money.

In the second part, instead of just rating the products, they were told to select $25 worth of products to buy from the store. One in twenty five subjects would actually receive the products they’d purchased. Then they, too, played the Dictator Game. Subjects who had bought environmentally friendly products shared less of their money.”

…

This does not prove that environmentalists are actually bad people – remember that whether a subject purchased green products or normal products was completely randomized. It does suggest that people who have done one nice thing feel less of an obligation to do another.

This meshes nicely with a self-signalling conception of morality. If part of the point of behaving morally is to convince yourself that you’re a good person, then once you’re convinced, behaving morally loses a lot of its value.”

The implication is that when someone chooses to do something ‘good’, it will often simply crowd out something else good they would have done later. If people are buying green cleaning products, they may also be slacking on household cleaning.

How then can we increase aggregate do-goodery? Giving people more opportunities to do good will not work. In fact giving people opportunities to do insubstantial feel-good things, like giving ‘gold coin’ donations or not using plastic bags, may ultimately be harmful as they provide satisfying alternatives to more effective but costly actions. Instead we need to raise the standards people feel they need to meet in order to consider themselves halfway decent people. Next time someone performs a token act of goodness in front of you, give them a look as if to say ‘is that all’.

To truly know yourself, watch your actions not your feelings

Related to: Murder (Meteuphoric), Just how many people are you, anyway?, Do we give because we care for others or for our image?

When I propose cynical explanations for human altruism towards anyone other than close friends and family – usually something along the lines that people want to justify the belief that they are good with minimal sacrifice – others are very reluctant to accept them. I suspect the main reason for this is that most people feel that they themselves really do sincerely care a lot about the welfare of others. How then can cynical explanations of human behaviour be correct?

Insofar as the feeling of caring and the resulting belief that ‘I care’ is your yardstick, it is true that people are compassionate all the time. However, when I ask what people really care about, I don’t mean to ask what the conscious part of their minds thinks and feels they care about; I want to know what their mind as a whole really sets as its high priority goals in the world.

In this sense of ‘care’ it is entirely possible for people to be wrong about what they care about.  This is nothing exceptional. We have all sorts of delusions about ourselves because humans in the past who had scrupulously accurate beliefs about themselves were not very successful. A well-known example is that far more than 50% of people think they are above average at almost everything, probably because those who accurately assess their qualities have trouble convincing others to be friends and partners. It is often socially advantageous to look as though we believe and feel things that we really don’t, and as a result we may know ourselves less well than our friends, who don’t have to maintain such illusions about us.

A simple way to check if your beliefs about your values are correct is to watch your actions as if you were another person looking on and see if they are consistent with what you say you value. Using this method, do we observe that humans care much about the welfare of strangers where it isn’t necessary to bolster their image?

The central fact to note here is that most people spend the vast majority of their time pursuing their own interests rather than the interests of people they don’t know well. Charitable donations amount to a few percent of GDP, and volunteering to only to an average of a few hours a month. What charitable behaviour exists does not in general seem organised to maximise the benefit to others. People give to groups because they are nearby and good at nagging or generating a ‘warm glow’, not because they do research which suggests they do the most to satisfy the needs and wants of others. Organizations that scrutinise the efficacy of charities, like GiveWell, are notable by their general absence. International aid seems remarkably ineffective, but there is no mass movement to improve it. Opportunities to really help others, by earning as much money as you can then giving it all to a ruthlessly efficient wellbeing enhancing organisation find almost no takers. A lot of ‘altruistic’ behaviour is a clear variation on what people would like to do anyway – running public entertainment events, writing songs, publishing blogs and wearing clothes in solidarity are far more popular than unpleasant but important work. If humans really cared about others’ welfare as much as they think they do they would surely dedicate far more time and effort to their interests and be more interested in determining whether their sacrifices were as effective as possible at helping them.

For a time I thought I cared about human welfare in general, but looking at my actions I simply cannot justify the belief that I really do. I don’t seem willing to substantially sacrifice my welfare for other people far away.

For those who find this disheartening, take solace that there is a bright side to human behaviour. We do reveal a great deal of care for close friends and family by making substantial sacrifices for their welfare. There are good selfish reasons to act that way which might more closely explain our patterns of behaviour – it’s hard to get anywhere in life without a reputation for decency and loyalty to close associates – but at least on first glance we don’t have glaring evidence in front of us that care for friends and family exists in our minds alone.

The fact that our circle of compassion is so limited is unfortunate given that opportunities to do the most good in the world today require that we care for those who are dissimilar to us and far away in space and time.

Why do we want the illusion that others already trust us?

Katja Grace observes that in certain personal relationships it is not acceptable to actively seek out people’s reputations in order to decide whether to trust them or not.

Why do good businesses encourage you to seek out their reputations, but not reliable potential friends or partners?

How is it advantageous, even for the trustworthy, to want their partners to act as though they trust them a great deal so soon after meeting them? This signal of unconditional trust would surely not actually affect the other person’s willingness to stop trust if the partner did turn out to be unworthy, so it is surely a hollow signal. I would expect the trustworthy to encourage inspection of their reputations, and in so doing make it undesirable to insist that others not scrutinise your record as this would indicate you had something to hide. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain – if their record is good the other person will truly end up trusting them rather than acting as though they do.

Perhaps even the trustworthy want some freedom from scrutiny so that they have the option to engage in some untrustworthy behaviour, and are willing to sacrifice their ability to scrutinise their partners in order to get that freedom? Perhaps we all have some past bad behaviour in our records and, being risk averse, are more fearful something bad will come out than hopeful good things will be revealed?

The important questions

With so many unimportant questions around to distract us, it’s important to be reminded of those that really matter. What are they? Here are my suggestions:

What are the risks to there being any future for Earth originating conscious life and how can they be most effectively reduced?

Is it safer for humanity to grow its economy and population faster or slower now?

How can we increase the number of happy consciousnesses that exist, without low incomes and crowding harming them?

How can we change the functioning of brains/uploads in order to improve experiences of all conscious life, without reducing people’s motivation to work to increase the number of happy beings?

How can we make the subsistence lives of future creatures on the space colonisation frontier enjoyable without interfering with their life-expanding activities?

What rules and institutions will maximise the benefit conscious beings get from revolutionary technologies like uploads, AIs/robots and molecular nanotechnology?

Why don’t we see any other intelligent life in space?

What institutions and metainstitutions reliably produce decisions that increase welfare?

Is politics a productive activity for the truly compassionate? Usually not.

Would we collectively be better off with a lot less of this?

Related to: Why politics is inefficient compared to institutional and technological innovation.

Arepo over at Felicifia does a cost-benefit analysis and suggests that “engaging in developed world politics is a selfish waste of time.” I agree with his reasoning and would suggest that most people involved in developed nation politics, although they believe they are involved because they care about the welfare of others, are a combination of non-utilitarian, naïve, power/status hungry and mostly enjoying themselves by signalling their idealism, intelligence, moral values and tribe loyalty.

As political tussles are competitive, near zero-sum games, increasing the number of hours a nation collectively invests in political campaigning is almost completely unproductive, assuming the new recruits have a similar ideological distribution to those already involved. Indeed those political disputes drain limited resources away from welfare-enhancing activities. As in a defensive military build-up, if all sides could just agree to ‘disarm’ they would get roughly the same outcome while wasting less of their limited resources. What’s more, due to the median voter effect actual policy differences between alternative governments in functioning democracies will tend to be small (this varies a bit depending on the political system). An alien arriving on Earth would surely remark that extraordinary amounts of time and effort were going into negligible differences in outcome.

The evolutionary psychological explanation for why we find it hard to keep our involvement in politics to sensible levels is simple: throughout our evolutionary history political struggles were fought between coalitions of at most dozens of people, with big stakes for whether the tribe would thrive and who would hold power within it. In such small-scale fights the extra efforts of one person could indeed swing the outcome and a failure to be involved at all would lower your status and make it harder to attract a good mate. In other words, those who didn’t have some irrational obsession with politics – be it at the office or national level – didn’t have many descendents.

I have a challenging question to ask everyone actively involved in politics:

Imagine that at the last national election the other side had narrowly won. How much harm, in terms of reduced total experience of welfare, would actually have resulted compared to a narrow win for your side?

Things to keep in mind while assessing this: how different would outcomes actually be (don’t imagine either ideal or dystopian policies being implemented); how much harm would these changes cause in terms of reduced happiness or extra suffering experienced by those affected; be sure to value all people’s experience equally – don’t give your pet social group extra importance. Even when accounting for the above, people are pretty one-eyed about political issues they care about, so you should probably reduce your perceived benefit a bit in order account for this bias.

Having worked out this benefit, divide ‘my effort’ by ‘all of the effort people put into the campaign/party’ and make that proportion your contribution to the outcome. Next, estimate how much money you could earn if you put that effort into a job instead and determine how much good this money could do. For example, an hour’s wage or so (around $AUD25) can restore sight to someone in a developing country and preventing the death of a child through to adulthood costs around $US1000-2000 according to GiveWell.

Finally, compare these different benefits in order to work out if your country’s politics is the most compassionate thing you can be involved in.

If you determine that it is not and you decide to continue being involved, you can conclude that you are involved not out of sincere concern for the welfare of others but in order to fulfil your own personal preferences. This may or may not bother you depending on your philosophy.

P.S. In theory it’s best to consider one’s marginal impact on the outcome rather than one’s average contribution as here. However, in almost all cases the actual marginal impact of a single campaigner is zero (assuming the election is not won by a handful of votes), and very rarely it is huge (if your personal contribution changes the outcome). Using the average gives us some sensible medium between these two outcomes,

Don’t help refugees, you bastards

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says:

“People smugglers are engaged in the world’s most evil trade and they should all rot in jail because they represent the absolute scum of the earth,” he said. “People smugglers are the vilest form of human life. They trade on the tragedy of others…”

People smugglers help refugees try to get to Australia so that we will consider giving them asylum from whatever poverty or political persecution they are fleeing. While doing so they often offer refugees places in dilapidated and crowded boats: these boats aren’t coming back and the refugees presumably can’t afford good ones for a single brief trip. It is true that people smugglers rely on the presence of human misery for their business, but no more so than doctors or any other group whose work involves helping people with serious problems.

How can Rudd get away with, and indeed benefit from, this hyperbole? I think his reaction is accepted by the public because of this intuition raised by Katja Grace: someone who avoids anything to do with a suffering group is unlikely to be condemned for ignoring them, but someone who interacts with them, even a little bit, can be condemned if they don’t do an amazing job wholly at their own expense. Due to their interaction with asylum seekers people are condemned for failing to provide refugees with boats in good condition free of charge. But by refusing to have anything to do with these refugees, the Commonwealth of Australia avoids condemnation for failing to do the same, even though it is in a much better position to assist refugees than the people smugglers.

Were those who offered Jews a risky escape route from Nazi Germany for money the worst scum in the world? If you buy Rudd’s bluster, presumably he believes they were worse than the people who avoided interacting with them at all.

Immigrants don’t steal your jobs any more than your own children do

Reviewing the literature on the impact of immigrants on the economy, I’ve been impressed by the unanimity on the empirical question of whether immigrants increase unemployment or reduce wages in the receiving country:

“The main findings can be summarised as follows: Most studies suggest that immigration confers small net gains in terms of per capita output … Past immigration has had no obvious impact on native unemployment. It might even have been beneficial for the economy and for native employment to the extent that it acts as a source of flexibility.

Although much attention has been paid to the potential adverse effects of immigration on the labour market, migration may in fact confer a number of economic benefits to the host country. For the economy overall, it is harder still to determine with precision whether immigration induces net benefits or costs. A few studies, however, have attempted to do so and these typically find aggregate net benefits for the native population.” Immigration and Economic Consequences

“Our results indicate no detrimental effect of immigration. We find no support for the hypothesis that the absence of displacement effects is due to a response of native migration patterns.” Employment Effects of Immigration to Germany: An Analysis Based on Local Labor Markets

“Despite  the popular belief that immigrants have a large adverse impact on the wages  and  employment  opportunities of  the  native-born  population,  the literature on  this  question  does not provide much  support for  this  conclusion. Economic  theory  is  equivocal,  and  empirical  estimates  in  a  variety  of  settings arid using a variety of approaches have shown  that the effect of immigration on the labor market outcomes of natives is small. There is no evidence of economically  significant  reductions  in  native  employment.” The Impact of Immigrantson Host Country Wages, Employment and Growth

“Using regression analysis, Addison and Worswick found that “there is no evidence that immigration has negatively impacted on the wages of young or low-skilled natives.” Furthermore, Addison’s study found that immigration did not increase unemployment among native workers. Rather, immigration decreased unemployment.” The impact of immigration on the earnings of natives: Evidence from Australian micro data.

These results are interesting only because the myth that immigrants ‘take jobs’ is so widespread. It is a peculiar myth – why would new people reduce the pool of productive jobs available? All countries have doubled their populations many times over due to childbirth and they never run out of productive work to do because there is no limited pool of work to be divided up. In Australia, huge population growth in the post war period corresponded with reliably low unemployment rates. Wherever people are willing to work for income, others are willing to invest and the legal system assists them in finding one another productive activities can be found.

Why then is the belief that immigrants deplete jobs so common that even a pro-immigration party in Australia would reduce its intake during a non-existent recession, despite immigrants actually acting as a free economic stimulus and creating jobs? The only good explanation I can see is anti-foreign bias. Humans are naturally tribal creatures and struggle to believe that economic interaction with foreigners can be beneficial to both parties. How else could people simultaneously believe that foreigners exhaust the pool of jobs but their own children don’t?

Given that immigration from dysfunctional to high functional countries may be the single cheapest way to improve the welfare of the world’s poor, this has to be one of the most pernicious myths about how to economy works.

Choosing the best status games for society

Fortuantely we now have more welfare enhancing status competitions than jousting. How much better might we do?

Humans have a natural impulse to compete amongst themselves for the esteem of those around them. Social status is a very desirable thing to have as it brings a person attention and power in groups, and attracts the most desirable associates and mates. Status is a free carrot that societies can dangle in front of their members to get them to act in certain ways. Reading the controversy about declining levels of women’s happiness in the Western world over the last few decades got me thinking about what status games are best for a society to set for its members.

Status games have a lot of inertia; it is difficult for individuals and even groups to change the prevailing status games, because refusing to play them is a signal that you are bad at the game and so reduces your status. High status people might be able to lead such change but are succeeding in the current games and so have little incentive to do so. Ignoring this inertia, let’s imagine that as social planners we could sit around a table and choose the ways in which people would compete to reveal characteristics that are desirable for associates: health, wealth, loyalty, bravery etc. What properties would our ideal status games have?

They would be enjoyable for the participants, productive for society and as egalitarian as possible.

1. Enjoyable for the participants.

People naturally enjoy some things more than others. If fighting in duels is what is necessary to ensure status, people may do it even if they find it extremely unpleasant. If duelling could be replaced with a sport that still required bravery, but didn’t result in death for the losers, that would improve the welfare of the participants at no cost to anyone else.

2. Productive for society.

Finding ways to play sport extremely well isn’t especially productive for the rest of society compared to finding better ways to alleviate poverty, raising large number of happy children and inventing useful things. If people are competing for esteem they may as well do so in ways that have the greatest positive externality for others.

A big unknown question for me is whether status competitions around conspicuous consumption are a net positive or negative. On the one hand they cause limited natural resources to be used up more quickly and otherwise result in environmental destruction. On the other hand, hard-working and productive people drive technological innovation, produce surplus for those they trade with and generate tax revenues that can be used to help others, among other things. Expect further posts on this difficult question.

3. As egalitarian as possible.

How can a zero-sum competition for status be egalitarian? It can’t, but some games produce more equal status distributions than others. In popular music and sport, for example, a handful of people attract extreme amounts of status and become huge celebrities while the majority of participants receive comparatively little esteem, an increasingly common situation Nassim Taleb has dubbed extremistan. Other competitions over incomes, kindness, artistic taste and parenting skill, are less dominated by a few very visible high status winners. My guess is that a more equal distribution of esteem makes for a happier population; it’s just not possible for a few people with extremely high status to get so much enjoyment from their status as to make up for the unhappiness they create for a large pool of low status people. In other words, status has declining marginal returns. What’s more, extremely low status people with few prospects of improving their lot will tend to violently reject the social order because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Witness that most violence is perpetuated by low status men with little hope of moving up the social ladder.

Games that promote extreme status highs and lows should be avoided.

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What does this have to do with declining women’s happiness? Before women’s liberation, women were strongly discouraged from putting a career before their family and could achieve status just by being good homemakers. The status game women face today actively discourages them from pursuing lives as home-makers without careers. In fact, women now feel pressure to have both of these things in order to achieve society’s esteem and fulfil their own aspirations. This is a difficult task indeed and may work against the natural tendency of some women to prefer child-rearing exclusively. Setting such a difficult status game violates principle one and in so doing may make women less happy. However, if they are inspired to work harder overall in both their family life and work, society may be compensated with extra positive spillover effects. Finally, the fact that the new standards are more difficult to meet means that the few talented women who manage to achieve them receive large amounts of status, perhaps producing a less egalitarian distribution of status among women.

If women are to be made happier society should look to setting them status games which they enjoy achieving and which many of them can succeed at. If we want to get more positive spillovers to society, we will encourage them to do a lot of whatever we think is most useful to others, be that increasing GDP or raising many happy children.

Do singularitarians worry about their retirement?

Ronald Bailey provides good coverage of the Singularity Summit over at Reason. I am mystified as to what is going on in Peter Thiel’s mind here:

Co-founder of Paypal, venture capitalist, and supporter of the Singularity Institute, Peter Thiel began his talk on the economics of the singularity by asking the audience to vote on which of seven scenarios they are most worried about. (See Reason’s interview with Thiel here.) The totals below are my estimates from watching the audience as they raised their hands:

A. Singularity happens and robots kill us all, the Skynet scenario, (5 percent)
B. Biotech terrorism using something more virulent than smallpox and Ebola combined (30 percent)
C. Nanotech grey goo escapes and eats up all organic matter (5 percent)
D. Israel and Iran engage thermonuclear war that goes global (25 percent)
E. A one-world totalitarian state arises (10 percent)
F. Runaway global warming (5 percent)
G. The singularity takes too long to happen (30 percent)

Thiel argued that the last one—that the singularity is going to take too long to happen—is what worries him. “The good singularity is the most important social, political, economic, and technological issue confronting us,” declared Thiel. Why? Because without rapid technological progress, economic growth in already developed countries like the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan is not going be enough to address looming needs. Without fast economic growth producing more wealth, Americans might be driven to saving 40 percent of their incomes and retiring at age 80.

Is it really sensible for futurists contemplating a massive and permanent change to human existence to be stressing about the welfare of a privileged group of retirees before it arrives? After all, poverty in old age is the norm through most of the world right now and even if baby boomers had to survive on low incomes from a modern developed country perspective, they would still be wealthier than most people alive, and far wealthier than most humans who have ever lived.

I can see two better reasons so many participants would have chosen G: the longer the singularity takes to arrive the higher the probability that some other unspecified catastrophe brings down humanity and prevents it from ever happening; they want to see the singularity happen and the longer it takes the more likely they are to die beforehand.

Chimpanzee game theory

Chimpanzees coordinate in a negotiation game.

A crucially important aspect of human cooperation is the ability to negotiate to cooperative outcomes when interests over resources conflict. Although chimpanzees and other social species may negotiate conflicting interests regarding travel direction or activity timing, very little is known about their ability to negotiate conflicting preferences over food. In the current study, we presented pairs of chimpanzees with a choice between two cooperative tasks—one with equal payoffs (e.g., 5-5) and one with unequal payoffs (higher and lower than in the equal option, e.g., 10-1). This created a conflict of interests between partners with failure to work together on the same cooperative task resulting in no payoff for either partner. The chimpanzee pairs cooperated successfully in as many as 78–94% of the trials across experiments. Even though dominant chimpanzees preferred the unequal option (as they would obtain the largest payoff), subordinate chimpanzees were able to get their way (the equal option) in 22–56% of trials across conditions. Various analyses showed that subjects were both strategic and also cognizant of the strategies used by their partners. These results demonstrate that one of our two closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee, can settle conflicts of interest over resources in mutually satisfying ways—even without the social norms of equity, planned strategies of reciprocity, and the complex communication characteristic of human negotiation.

Would anyone hazard a guess as to whether the low status chimpanzees just want more resources, or whether they also want a ‘fair’ or equal outcome?