This article from The Conversation, which quickly went viral around the world, argues that those concerned with animal welfare would do better to eat grass-fed beef than bread, because by doing so they would avoid the crushing and poisoning of vast numbers of mice and other small animals in the production of wheat (and presumably other grains or pulses). It is a thought-provoking claim and it might even be right, but the argument seems to have serious holes that I have not seen addressed in any of the comments. (Warning: I have no particular knowledge of farming, so I’m just applying common sense as an alternative.)

The author points out that a lot of land, particularly in Australia, is not fertile enough to be used for any agricultural purpose other than light grazing by livestock or wild animals like kangaroos. In that sense the resulting meat represents a free lunch; if the land were not used for grazing it would not produce any food for humans. Crucially, when the animals are grazed they do not need to eat grain produced on farms that crush and poison mice. But grazing on grass is not all that cows raised for meat generally eat, and I expect it is mostly not what any additional cows we produce will eat. Wikipedia informs us:

Prior to entering a feedlot, cattle spend most of their life grazing on rangeland or on immature fields of grain such as green wheat pasture. Once cattle obtain an entry-level weight, about 650 pounds (300 kg), they are transferred to a feedlot to be fed a specialized diet which consists of corn by-products (derived from ethanol production), barley, and other grains as well as alfalfa. Feeds sometimes contain animal byproducts[3] or cottonseed meal, and minerals. …

In a typical feedlot, a cow’s diet is roughly 95% grain. …

The animal may gain an additional 400 pounds (180 kg) during its 3–4 months in the feedlot.[citation needed] Once cattle are fattened up to their finished weight, the fed cattle are transported to a slaughterhouse.

So there’s one big problem with the argument – not all, but a large share of the meat you eat in beef is just repackaged intensively farmed grains. The rule of thumb in biology is that about 90 per cent of the energy or biomass content is lost as you move up each so called ‘trophic level’ from plants to herbivores to carnivores. If that were the case here then you would need to feed a cow 10kj of grain to get 1kj of meat. Given that the livestock in feedlots are being rapidly stuffed full of calories the efficiency is probably much higher, as they won’t live for long enough to use up much of the energy on their own metabolism. If we guess that in fact the conversion has a 50 per cent efficiency, and that the cow was two thirds edible meat on entering the feedlot, then to get 100kj of meat at the end we needed approximately 100kj of farmed grains. Any benefit then would then only come from the higher protein and fat content of the meat relative to the carbohydrate packed grains that went in.

I think our doubts should go further though. Grazing cattle on land that is not suitable for other agriculture is the low hanging fruit for beef production – if the land does not have other productive uses we don’t give up anything to stick cattle there. For that reason we should expect such land to be used as much as possible for that purpose already. Eventually, as the stock of livestock grows, we should expect to exhaust the flow of foliage growing on this kind of land. Then where are they to go? We could stick them on land that doesn’t supply much grass for them to eat (or grassland where the foliage is already being fully grazed by cows). [1] But in that case what are the additional cows to eat? The likely answer is the cheapest form of calories we know how to produce: intensively farmed grains like wheat and barley.

Has humanity reached the point where otherwise wasted grassland is fully occupied? Supporting evidence for this is the common claim that higher demand for livestock among a growing Asian middle class is driving up grain prices. If additional cows were largely fed by grass, that wouldn’t be an issue. It is quite possible that if you as an individual switch from bread to beef both more cows will be slaughtered and more mice poisoned as a result of the extra grain needed to support the cows. If the cows were largely grain-fed then it would be many times worse for the mice.

The article has another notable weakness in that it only denominates the number of deaths by protein production. Protein is an important macronutrient but not the only thing we care about getting from our food. Indeed protein deficiency is exceeding rare amongst those wealthy enough to contemplate eating beef. If you denominated the number of lives lost by energy content, then wheat, being mostly carbohydrate, would come out looking a lot better than the 25 mice poisonings to each cow slaughter quoted in the article. The article  is also basically irrelevant when judging the treatment of poultry or pigs.

Further, the piece ignores the starvation and predation of small wild animals on land in the absence of intensive agriculture. Probably that isn’t such a large concern as there would be far fewer such animals than there would be mice during plagues, but it deserves consideration. Finally, the quality of life of grazing cows or indeed field mice isn’t mentioned, only their deaths. I am not sure whether such creatures have good or bad lives, but it seems to be a crucial issue for those sincerely concerned about their welfare.

It isn’t possible to say with any certainty that grains are better than beef from an animal welfare point of view, but the effects of our actions here are more complex and need deeper analysis than a short op-ed can provide. The huge popularity of the piece is more likely because it allows those who don’t care or think about animals at all to superficially stick it to vegetarians and claim they were right all along (by pure luck presumably), rather than because its claim really stands up to scrutiny.

UPDATE: This piece attempts to quantify the deaths from different sources of food and produces the opposite conclusion, though the figures for mice killed in harvesting are rubbery and may not apply to the ‘marginal field’.

[1] We could also graze or place them on highly fertile land that was previously used for crops, but that would be inefficient and unprofitable if you could raise more cows just by having intensively farmed crops and feeding cows the resulting grains elsewhere.

“In forming my view that school functions in part to help folks accept workplace domination, I rediscovered the view of the ‘76 book Schooling In Capitalist America:
Schools produce future workers; … schools socialize students to accept beliefs, values, and forms of behavior on the basis of authority rather than the students’ own critical judgement of their interests.”

School Attitudes

“The Israeli raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.

…
The purpose of the convoy was not primarily to bring aid to desperate Gazans, but to call attention to the Israeli blockade and turn world opinion overwhelmingly against it—as Greta Berlin, a leader of the Free Gaza Movement, made clear before the ships set sail. By this standard, the incident could not have gone better. The flotilla was bait, and Israel took it—a classic triumph of civil disobedience over state power. So it doesn’t really matter that the “humanitarians” on the ship immediately resorted to violence: what the world will remember is that Israel’s first impulse was direct confrontation with civilians bringing aid, regardless of the effects on either the ship’s passengers or its own reputation. This revealed a greater moral obtuseness than firing missiles into civilian areas in the middle of a war. It’s not always the bloodiest incidents that evoke the strongest reaction and bring the most lasting consequences.”

Interesting Times: Israel Takes the Bait : The New Yorker

“In an ultimately futile act some have described as courageous and others have called a mere postponing of the inevitable, existentialist firefighter James Farber delayed three deaths Monday. “I’m no hero,” Farber said after rescuing the family from a house fire on the 2500 block of West Thacker Street, and prolonging for the time being their slow march toward oblivion.

“Like any other man, I am thrown into this world, alone and terrified, to play a meaningless role in an empty life…. Though the cause of the fire remains unknown, and can perhaps never truly be known, sources close to the investigation said that no foul play is suspected, only the haphazard, amoral processes inherent in nature itself.

“I tried to explain to them that what I did was really nothing more than an expression of despair, and thus absurd, but they just kept saying ‘thank you, oh my God, thank you, thank you so much,’” Farber continued.”"

Existentialist Firefighter Delays 3 Deaths

“Why don’t there exist companies that explicitly sign contracts with individuals or other entities for a fee, which would handicap the entities in some way that cannot be easily overturned and consequently give them negotiating leverage as a result. One example I can think of is pertaining to wealthy individuals in California and other US States with Community Property laws. Given the high divorce rates in the US, it would be prudent for such individuals to have as tight prenuptial agreements as possible prior to getting married, to minimize financial loss in the event of a divorce and also to avoid financially incentivizing one’s spouse to initiate a divorce with a promise of a financial windfall.

The individual in question could sign a contract with this company stating that if they were to get married without a bullet proof pre-specified prenuptial agreement, the company could lay claim to half their net worth immediately after the wedding were registered. Ideally, the individual in question could sign such a contract when they were single or not seriously seeing anyone with the intention of getting married.”

Less Wrong: Taking the awkwardness out of a Prenup – A Game Theoretic solution

Here’s the challenge: can anyone develop a complete theory of discrimination that makes sense?

Let’s say we know a racial group (or any group) is statistically different on characteristic X. When is it OK to discriminate on that basis if X is something you care about? When, if ever, should we choose to deny ourselves the use of that info? Does it matter what X is as long as you care about it? Does it matter how you get information about these groups and how reliable your information is?

I’m assuming mere errors cannot be justified. The hard question is figuring out when, if ever, using information accurately is a bad thing. We should consider groupings all the way from the fully involuntary (gender/race) through traits that are voluntary to display (sexuality) and ones that are chosen in the usual sense of the word (political opinions, religion, career, obesity).

It’s that if the poorest families spent as much money educating their children as they do on wine, cigarettes and prostitutes, their children’s prospects would be transformed. Much suffering is caused not only by low incomes, but also by shortsighted private spending decisions by heads of households.

…

We asked to see Jovali’s parents. The dad, Georges Obamza, who weaves straw stools that he sells for $1 each, is unmistakably very poor. He said that the family is eight months behind on its $6-a-month rent and is in danger of being evicted, with nowhere to go.

The Obamzas have no mosquito net, even though they have already lost two of their eight children to malaria. They say they just can’t afford the $6 cost of a net. Nor can they afford the $2.50-a-month tuition for each of their three school-age kids.

“It’s hard to get the money to send the kids to school,” Mr. Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed.

But Mr. Obamza and his wife, Valerie, do have cellphones and say they spend a combined $10 a month on call time.

In addition, Mr. Obamza goes drinking several times a week at a village bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine. By his calculation, that adds up to about $12 a month — almost as much as the family rent and school fees combined.

I asked Mr. Obamza why he prioritizes alcohol over educating his kids. He looked pained.

Other villagers said that Mr. Obamza drinks less than the average man in the village (women drink far less). Many other men drink every evening, they said, and also spend money on cigarettes.

“If possible, I drink every day,” Fulbert Mfouna, a 43-year-old whose children have also had to drop out or repeat grades for lack of school fees, said forthrightly. His eldest son, Jude, is still in first grade after repeating for five years because of nonpayment of fees. Meanwhile, Mr. Mfouna acknowledged spending $2 a day on alcohol and cigarettes.

If this story is typical it’s possible that worldwide we are investing far less in human capital than we should. If these parents are too short sighted or poor to invest in their children’s health and education, why can’t somebody else with more money step up and help the kids out? The government and non-profits sometimes fills this gap by subsidising education with taxes and donations. But where those groups are investing too little or in the wrong ways, an outsider cannot take advantage of the opportunity to help those who are getting insufficient education while turning a buck. It is very peculiar that I could easily take my savings and profitably invest them in a construction project, a business or an invention while if I wanted to invest in a person’s education it would be a great challenge. The poor have few or no assets against which to borrow money and would not be keen to take on debts that could get out of control. To level the playing field between these kinds of investments, why not allow people to sell a stake in their future earnings just like new companies sell a stake in their profits to attract investors? Alex Tabarrok explains:

The Unincorporated Man is a science fiction novel in which shares of each person’s income stream can be bought and sold.  (Initial ownership rights are person 75%, parents 20%, government 5%–there are no other taxes–and people typically sell shares to finance education and other training.)

The hero, Justin Cord a recently unfrozen business person from our time, opposes incorporation but has no good arguments against the system; instead he rants on about “liberty” and how bad the idea of owning and being owned makes him feel.  The villain, in contrast, offers reasoned arguments in favor of the system.  In this scene he asks Cord to remember the starving poor of Cord’s time and how incorporation would have been a vast improvement:

“What if,” answered Hektor, without missing a beat, “instead of giving two, three, four dollars a month for a charity’s sake, you gave ten dollars a month for a 5 percent share of that kid’s future earnings?  And you, of course, get nothing if the kid dies.  Now you have a real interest in making sure that kid got that pair of shoes you sent.  Now it’s in your interest to find out if he’s going to school and learning to read and write.  Now maybe you’ll send him that box of old clothes you were thinking of throwing away.  Under your system you write a check and forget about the kid, who’ll probably starve anyway.  Under our system, you’re locked into him.

…the real benefit comes about when those ‘evil, selfish, horrible corporations’ get involved.  How long will it take for a business to realize that there’s a huge profit to be made in those hundreds of millions of starving children?…Imagine a world where a bank gives a loan to a corporation to build a school, hospital or dormitory.  Not because its the right thing to do; who cares!  They’d do it because it’s the profitable thing to do.  And because of that, my system, not in spite of greed and corruption and incorporation, but because of it, will work better than yours in any time period with any technology you choose.”

By selling equity rather than taking a loan the lender need not worry about the risk of default, and the borrower need not worry about crippling debt or bankruptcy should their earnings be less than expected. The equity owners will have a good reason to make sure kids are getting a good education and staying healthy and so can partly compensate for the failings of parents and governments.

So, why not?

Added: An interesting discussion over at Aid Watch.

“Edcuation in Nigeria where I live has no practical returns for many young people apart from a tremendous turnover of unemployed graduates. Also the quality of the education does not allow these children to graduate with any useful skills so again the important question comes up, why not splurge on beer which has an immediate utility than spend so much in proportion on something that has not proven itself as an investment.

Education in developing countries has to change so that people can see practical returns to their investment. That sit in class and listen all day model won’t work in Nigeria. Parents will only send their students to school is it represents a practical investment with immediate returns. The only way to do it is to inject entrepreneurship into their curriculum.”

The problem with queue rationing is the incentive it creates or more precisely the incentive it doesn’t create. If everything were rationed by queues, nobody would have any reason to work and create wealth. The road to riches would not be providing services others want, it would be standing in a queue somewhere achieving nothing. Everyone would be impoverished because you would have to wait forever in queues for increasingly scarce goods nobody has a reason to make. This isn’t so much a problem when only a few goods or services are rationed with queues, but the time people waste waiting in lines and the reduced incentive they face to work and produce wealth is still totally unnecessary. Why motivate people to spend half an hour pointlessly driving around a parking lot when you can instead motivate them to stay back and work for another half an hour?

When queues are just waiting lists that don’t actually require you to stand around somewhere (like waiting lists for some types of surgery in Australia) you avoid wasting people’s time but lose any redistribution to the poor and no longer prioritise people who are willing to endure the most queuing. If the resource is needed urgently by some, the unavoidable wait can be very costly to them.

Rather than redistibute resources to the poor by expanding the use of queues, we would do better to price ration everything and deal with equality using cash transfers to the poor. At my university for example, we could raise the price of peak hour parking until queues were eliminated and compensate all students equally by using the extra revenue to offset compulsory student amenity fees.

By punishing them regardless, we preserve the value of our passports and appear to be less slavishly supportive of Israel than we would otherwise. Any harm we dish out to Israel in response probably proportionally reduces the harm to us from our passports losing credibility by discouraging other countries from forging them. We give them good reason to ensure that any use of Australian passports does not become public (which is the only time when it harms Australia). Punishment also means that they will be less inclined to use the passports frivolously, but rather only when truly necessary. In fact, even if we cared as much about Israel’s interests as much we did about our own, it would be optimal if we could transfer all the costs we incur from their abuse of our passports onto the Israelis, so long as punishment were free. Then they would only use the passports when the total benefit outweighed the total cost, or to put it another way, they would only exploit our passports in ways we would approve of them doing so if they asked.

If transferring the harm to Israel is costly to us (that is, it is not offset by reduced harm to us), the optimal amount of punishment is less than the harm we incur. This is simply because when the price of something (in this case passing on the right incentives to people) goes up you should use it less.

If Israel already cares about Australia’s welfare and the punishment is costly, then punishing them with the full amount of harm that we suffer would result in a suboptimal exploitation of Australian passports from our perspective. This is because Israel would ‘double count’ the harm: once when we suffer it, and again when we suffer the costs of imposing the punishment. The more they already care about us, the lower is the optimal amount of costly punishment. Finally, if they care about us as much as about themselves and punishment is free, it doesn’t matter what we do.

In a similar analysis punishing BP for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico can be a good idea, even if it were an accident.

“This grew into the modern catechism: rape is not about sex, our culture socializes men to rape, it glorifies violence against women. The analysis comes right out of the gender-feminist theory of human nature: people are blank slates (who must be trained or socialized to want things); the only significant human motive is power (so sexual desire is irrelevant); and all motives and interests must be located in groups (such as the male sex and the female sex) rather than in individual people. The Brownmiller theory is appealing even to people who are not gender {362} feminists because of the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Since the 1960s most educated people have come to believe that sex should be thought of as natural, not shameful or dirty. Sex is good because sex is natural and natural things are good. But rape is bad; therefore, rape is not about sex. The motive to rape must come from social institutions, not from anything in human nature. The violence-not-sex slogan is right about two things. Both parts are absolutely true for the victim: a woman who is raped experiences it as a violent assault, not as a sexual act. And the part about violence is true for the perpetrator by definition: if there is no violence or coercion, we do not call it rape. But the fact that rape has something to do with violence does not mean it has nothing to do with sex, any more than the fact that armed robbery has something to do with violence means it has nothing to do with greed. Evil men may use violence to get sex, just as they use violence to get other things they want.

I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal surrounding rape, the effort to stamp it out.

Think about it. First obvious fact: Men often want to have sex with women who don’t want to have sex with them. They use every tactic that one human being uses to affect the behavior of another: wooing, seducing, flattering, deceiving, sulking, and paying. Second obvious fact: Some men use violence to get what they want, indifferent to the suffering they cause. Men have been known to kidnap children for ransom (sometimes sending their parents an ear or finger to show they mean business), blind the victim of a mugging so the victim can’t identify them in court, shoot out the kneecaps of an associate as punishment for ratting to the police or invading their territory, and kill a stranger for his brand-name athletic footwear. It would be an extraordinary fact, contradicting everything else we know about people, if some men didn’t use violence to get sex.

Let’s also apply common sense to the doctrine that men rape to further the interests of their gender. A rapist always risks injury at the hands of the woman defending herself. In a traditional society, he risks torture, mutilation, and death at the hands of her relatives. In a modern society, he risks a long prison term. Are rapists really assuming these risks as an altruistic sacrifice to benefit the billions of strangers that make up the male gender? The idea becomes even less credible when we remember that rapists tend to be losers and nobodies, while presumably the main beneficiaries of the patriarchy are the rich and powerful. Men do sacrifice themselves for the greater good in wartime, of course, but they are either conscripted against their will or promised public adulation when their exploits are made public. But rapists usually {363} commit their acts in private and try to keep them secret. And in most times and places, a man who rapes a woman in his community is treated as scum. The idea that all men are engaged in brutal warfare against all women clashes with the elementary fact that men have mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives, whom they care for more than they care for most other men. To put the same point in biological terms, every person’s genes are carried in the bodies of other people, half of whom are of the opposite sex. Yes, we must deplore the sometimes casual treatment of women’s autonomy in popular culture. But can anyone believe that our culture literally “teaches men to rape” or “glorifies the rapist”? Even the callous treatment of rape victims in the judicial system of yesteryear has a simpler explanation than that all men benefit by rape. Until recently jurors in rape cases were given a warning from the seventeenth-century jurist Lord Matthew Hale that they should evaluate a woman’s testimony with caution, because a rape charge is “easily made and difficult to defend against, even if the accused is innocent.” The principle is consistent with the presumption of innocence built into our judicial system and with its preference to let ten guilty people go free rather than jail one innocent.

Even so, let’s suppose that the men who applied this policy to rape did tilt it toward their own collective interests. Let’s suppose that they leaned on the scales of justice to minimize their own chances of ever being falsely accused of rape (or accused under ambiguous circumstances) and that they placed insufficient value on the injustice endured by women who would not see their assailants put behind bars. That would indeed be unjust, but it is still not the same thing as encouraging rape as a conscious tactic to keep women down. If that were men’s tactic, why would they have made rape a crime in the first place?

As for the morality of believing the not-sex theory, there is none. If we have to acknowledge that sexuality can be a source of conflict and not just wholesome mutual pleasure, we will have rediscovered a truth that observers of the human condition have noted throughout history. And if a man rapes for sex, that does not mean that he “just can’t help it” or that we have to excuse him, any more than we have to excuse the man who shoots the owner of a liquor store to raid the cash register or who bashes a driver over the head to steal his BMW. The great contribution of feminism to the morality of rape is to put issues of consent and coercion at center stage. The ultimate motives of the rapist are irrelevant.”

Ultimately the conscious motivation of rapists is an empirical question and some rapists could get enjoyment from wielding power over others. But as Pinker describes, the prima facae case has to be that desire for sex is an important factor in the occurrence of rape. Few people are sadists, and if power achieved through violence were the only goal, rape would only be one of many options.

Looking at it from an evolutionary point of view rather than the conscious motivation the rapist perceives themselves as having, the fitness value a person’s genes gain from their carrier potentially making a woman pregnant is huge compared with any gains from improving their carrier’s self image. For that matter, ‘power’ should only be enjoyable to have when it is useful. It might therefore be satisfying to know you have the ‘power’ to force someone to have sex with you if the alternative is not being able to have sex at all, but someone who must use violence is less ‘powerful’, impressive or high status than someone who can get sex from willing partners. There are surely few if any social benefits from having others think you are ‘powerful’ or threatening because you are a rapist; others are much more likely to avoid you and make your life difficult. For this reason it would be extraordinary if rapists preferred raping to having consensual sex.

Why should it be legal to scratch a dog behind the ears (as long as it’s free to move away), but illegal to engage in sexual acts with a dog (as long as it’s free to move away).

“I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me,” – Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It’s terrifying to think of the risks I run cooking for myself every night without a license: “A cook is a person that prepares food for consumption. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Canada this professions requires government approval (examination after 3 years apprenticeship).”

Why shouldn’t polygamy and polyandry be legal forms of marriage? Are they so inarguably inferior family structures?

Stress seems very bad for your happiness and health, but is largely acceptable and unregulated compared to drugs/gambling/obesity/other vices. What explains the difference?

“Obeying is low status, so how do we convince people to obey?”

“Things not only could be worse, they always were.” – David Brin

“An anonymous math department chairman reports on his own strategy for cutting down on the workload. He believes that one of the most important determinants of a successful career is luck. So each year, he randomly rejects half the applicants without even reading their folders. That way, he eliminates the unlucky ones.”

“I could spend the rest of my life having this conversation. Please try to understand before one of us dies.” – Basil Faulty

“Making yourself happy is not best achieved by having true beliefs, primarily because the contribution of true beliefs to material comfort is a public good that you can free ride on, but the signaling benefits and happiness benefits of convenient falsehoods pay back locally, i.e. you personally benefit from your adoption of convenient falsehoods.”

“I am not an object. I am not a noun. I am an adjective. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way. At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change.” – John K Clark

“The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.” – Daniel Dennett

“After controlling for initial health conditions, we find that happiness extends life expectancy. 10 percent increase in happiness decreases probability of death by four percent, and this effect is more pronounced for men and younger people. Marriage decreases mortality and this effect appears to work through increased happiness.”

“I remember in an Australian Human Rights Law class a girl tried to say that a mother who is studying at university and has a child has a FUNDAMENTAL human right to a car. I dropped my pen.”

It is frequently claimed that across the developed world there is a persistent gender pay gap which is unjustified by the relative productivity of male and female employees (for example, here and here). This is presumably because business managers and owners underestimate the (market) value of the work done by women. Women undervaluing their own work or being bad negotiators would not be much of an explanation if businesses assessed productivity correctly; competition between potential employers would bid up the wages of women regardless.

Most people oppose the wage gap because they oppose gender discrimination. But if women are such a bargain to hire, it’s also clearly a chance for employers to make free money. This is a message businesses are more likely to be receptive to. The one non-sexist firm in a market of sexist firms would make a killing! So rather than frame the wage gap as an issue of moral condemnation, why not present the wage gap as an error that businesses can profit from correcting? A few possible reasons:

• Campaigners want to seem idealistic and opposed to sexism more than they actually want to solve the ‘problem’.
• The pay gap is in fact justified by productivity differences, and if the reasoning above were known more widely this would soon become obvious.
• Campaigners on the issue don’t understand economics.
• The campaigners care about the issue because they oppose discrimination, and they assume others (should) feel the same way.

If the wage gap were real and could be demonstrated (for example by studies showing businesses with a greater proportion of female employees were more profitable), businesses should be falling over themselves trying to employ more women, just as businesses work hard to save money and be efficient in lots of other ways. In doing so, they ought to drive the wages of women up until there were no free profits to be made just from employing more women. I can only see a few ways an ‘unjustified wage gap’ could persist for long:

• The pay gap is unjustified but this cannot be convincingly demonstrated and no business has yet thought to try the ‘employ more women’ model.
• Almost all businesses owners, managers and potential competitors for those positions are sexists who are biased against women and manage their businesses based on these intuitions rather than profit maximising principles they think up.
• The ultimate customer actually values the same product less if it is produced by a woman. In this case there really is a difference in the productivity of men and women from the business’s point of view, though this is still due to sexism.
• Almost all businesses owners, managers and potential competitors for those positions are sexists who are willing to sacrifice profit just to maintain a wage gap.

None of these seems likely to me. By contrast the reasons women might be less productive employees on average are all reasonable: the possibility of pregnancy, a greater likelihood of working part time, lower dedication to one’s career and a preference for low wage professions.

We also have the mystery of why politicians, the media and business groups don’t just call the campaigners out on their silly strategy and the basic implausibility of a gender pay gap as outlined above. Perhaps looking cynical about this issue is just too dangerous so they must all go along with the idea that the pay gap makes sense. Lucky I’m not worried about my reputation, so I can tell you this.

Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday

New Age terrorists develop homeopathic bomb

Phantom traffic jams

“The ability to make accurate generalisations about categories of ideas, objects, practices, etc is naturally useful and regarded as a sign of intelligence. But in the Western world the same skill naively applied to categories of people (races, cultures, genders, classes) is a faux pas at best and condemned at worst.”

How to Name a Volcano

First World Problems

ThinkGeek :: 2001 A Space Odyssey – Monolith Action Figure

“Put 30 billion euros in unmarked bills in a bag by the gate of the Icelandic embassy in London, and we’ll turn off the volcano.”

“Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error.”

“Intellectuals don’t talk about sports or politics. We talk about other people talking about sports or politics” and more wisdom from Jeff Ely

Follow the UK election horse- race betting market style!

“A world where vampires lay down their fangs and run a firm that buys blood from willing sellers might be great to live in but isn’t nearly as entertaining to watch as a story of eternal conflict. A clever compromise is just not going to gross a billion dollars any time soon.”

The factions typically keep their members in line by threatening them with expulsion for two years if they vote against the group’s instructions. In this preselection vote the power-brokers insisted on seeing their member’s ballots to confirm they were obeying orders. For everyday decisions this sort of checking with the threat of punishment is sufficient to keep everyone in line. It’s not worth being thrown out of an influential group to alter a trivial decision. But as every student of game theory knows, there are two situations in which cooperation in a repeated game is especially difficult to maintain: final rounds and very important rounds. In the final round of a series of games there is little reason to cooperate because there will be no more opportunities for cooperation and the other side has no opportunity to punish you for defecting. Similarly, if one round is much more important than all the others the temptation to defect (act selfishly) is large, because the costs of punishment or non-cooperation in future rounds is small by comparison to the gains possible from defection in this round.

Decisions about preselection are far and away the most important ones made by party members and they occur very infrequently. Unsurprisingly then, for most faction members the threat of expulsion from the faction for two years was insufficient to deter them from voting for the candidate they preferred rather than the one their faction told them to. No decisions of comparable importance would be made in the next two years anyway. They may have also anticipated others doing the same calculation and realised the faction would be unwilling to expel half of their members for defecting. The trade-off was only in favour of  unconditional cooperation for the careerists who benefit a great deal from showing absolute loyalty to their political tribe.

Given that ALP factions in lower house seats are primarily set up to influence these preselection battles, it’s somewhat ironic that they are precisely the decisions they have the most trouble controlling. They could perhaps keep their members in line with a stronger punishment (a longer period of expulsion, expulsion from a whole social group, surrender of a bond, etc) but then it’s not clear why anyone except the careerists would want to join in the first place. Really the factions are much less influential than their member numbers alone would make them seem.

In unrelated news, congratulations to blogger and social scientist Andrew Leigh for winning preselection in the ACT seat of Fraser. I hope you are as productive a politician as you were an academic!

In his decades at Yale, Long has seen many faculty-student romances. Most turn out fine, he says, but others are destructive to students. “I think we have a responsibility to protect students from behavior that is damaging to them and to the objectives for their being here.”

Faculty-student liasons repugnant at Yale

Al Roth suggests this ban is because many find such relationships ‘repugnant’ while the Deputy Provost says it’s to prevent something which is destructive to  some and interferes with their objectives at Yale, presumably academic ones. How can we tell who is right? Well we can be pretty sure the Deputy Provost hasn’t got the right explanation. The number of activities which are destructive to some students and sometimes interfere with academic pursuits are numerous. Socialising and drinking in general would qualify and so would all relationships whether with faculty or other students. To my knowledge there is no call whatever to ban these things on the same basis. What’s more it is far from clear why undergrad-faculty relationships should on average reduce an undergrad’s success at university. Older and successful partners are more likely to help and motivate students to reach their level of education and also provide access to networks of intelligent people to help with their career.

Given this we have to turn to another explanation, and our general aversion to mixing relationships characterised by ‘dominance’ with those characterised by ‘sex’ as described by Steven Pinker, would have to be a good candidate.

Will Wilkinson has more.

If the process is competitive, as is the case for most job selections, this means everyone tries very hard to signal effectively and the threshold for apparent competence rises. This is an arms war so overall nobody benefits except the employer who get a more credible signal of dedication and interest in the job. When a process is not competitive, as where people work to meet a deadline in order to seem competent, lots of people will work hard to finish something just before a deadline to avoid looking like they couldn’t do so. If deadlines make it easier for a group to coordinate or you need to overcome personal time inconsistency, this is useful.

This helps explains our caution in telling others about the things we apply for. If we fall on the bad side of the threshold we don’t want them to know we even tried. If we are risk averse with our reputations, this helps explain our reluctance to apply for jobs that we might not get or flirt with people who might reject us, even when we use only a little time and effort in the attempt. It probably contributes to the distress of a divorce or breakup; a marriage that is just short of a divorce can look OK from the outside but if your wife leaves you for all a distant onlooker knows you were a terrible husband. The less effort can substitute for underlying quality when we especially care about the signal we’re going to send, the more threatening a threshold.

These effects should be greater for people who don’t know us well relative to people who do know us well, but in some cases our certification of competence will also be important to our close friends.

Any other consequences of these thresholds you can think of?

“My prediction: Once a few thousand cloned humans are walking the earth, sneering at clones and people who want them will become as gauche as sneering at IVF babies and people who want them.”

Bryan Caplan on cloning

At least the Japanese can video conference when their bullet trains break

In my last post I discussed the short and medium run effects of increased trade and specialization on a society’s robustness. What is the effect over decades?

Complexity through new technology and specialisation, enabled by interpersonal and international trade, increases the productivity and productivity growth in an economy. Changes in productivity accumulate exponentially over time so in the long run they dominate any other impact. There are two ways this greater productivity can be used: in a purely Malthusian economy (which would include all of the world pre-1800 and the poorest parts of Africa today) all of the extra efficiency goes towards increasing population density while incomes remain roughly constant; in a modern post-Malthusian economy it mostly goes towards making each person richer.

When complexity results in greater population density and unchanged near-subsistence incomes, a society may be more or less vulnerable to collapse than it was before. A disturbance of similar magnitude is just as harmful for each person. The greater number of inputs makes disturbances more frequent, but the larger size of the economy allows greater diversification which is a buffer against some kinds of industry specific shocks. A larger economy can come up with more innovations as there are more people to do experiments and solve new problems. In the views of some historians complexity in subsistence income societies has resulted in the collapse of many large and sophisticated empires through history, so this is some evidence that the net effect is towards greater fragility. If our concern is not the harm a disaster inflicts on each person or the probability of a society collapsing, but rather population falling below an absolute number, which is the case when we worry about human extinction, a higher population is surely better. A disaster has to be much more severe to take the world’s population from 7 billion to zero than from 100 million to zero.

When a society uses complexity to make each person richer it is also unclear clear if it is more vulnerable than before. Though reliance on many inputs would suggest any single good or service is more likely to be disrupted, each person has a bigger ‘buffer zone’ before their income falls low enough to threaten their survival. If every person in Australia found their income halved tomorrow, we could continue surviving comfortably; when the same happened to countries in 1750 were halved, famine, riots and a cascading collapse of law and order were frequent outcomes. A rich society has other advantages that make it more robust. It can afford to stockpile more goods for security or add redundancy to any supply chain to make disruptions less frequent. It will also have more capital, idle labour and land which it can potentially reallocate to make more of anything it is struggling to obtain. A rich society, like a high density society, will have a greater capacity for innovation and problem solving and will foster some people who specialise in that task specifically. As in the Malthusian case, a richer society produces more kinds of goods across more places and sometimes in more varied ways, and this diversification makes it more resistant to shocks to any specific process. As modern industrial society is the first post-Malthusian civilization, the fate of historical empires may not have so much to teach us about the impact of complexity on robustness today.

The picture isn’t all rosy. Though more resources are available to cover for any problems, it is possible that the more complex production techniques familiar to rich countries are hard to scale up (or down) in the short term, and the specialised skills and machines found in complex economies may not be as easily reallocated to different tasks as more basic ones. The time necessary to create the physical and human capital necessary to open a nuclear power plant is probably greater than that for a traditional coal plant; a shovel can be applied to a greater range of tasks than a dental drill. The skills and technologies found in rich societies may also be less adapted to disaster scenarios than those found poorer ones. For example, nobody I know would be able to grow all their own food.

Though there are things about modern societies which make them more robust and others which make them less robust, I think the overall movement is clearly towards robustness. At a guess, rich societies today even with their 20 varieties of mobile phone charger and ‘just in time’ supply chains, are more resilient in the fact of disasters than any others in history and they will become more so the more complex and rich they get. Complexity in the financial system probably contributed to the 2008 financial crisis but after decades of productivity gains a recession is much less painful now than in the 1930s. Then many people went without food, today people tough it out without Wiis. At the other end of the spectrum, any very crowded and poor country which relies on complex technology to get its necessities is probably the most vulnerable to disaster in history.

Related thought from George Monbiot. He is more pessimistic than me.

Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs – Phillip Tetlock

“From his perspective as a pyschology researcher, Philip Tetlock watched political advisors on the left and the right make bizarre rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. (Liberals were sure that Reagan was a dangerous idiot; conservatives were sure that the USSR was permanent.) The whole exercise struck Tetlock as what used to be called an “outcome-irrelevant learning structure.” No feedback, no correction.

He observes the same thing is going on with expert opinion about the Iraq War. Instead of saying, “I evidently had the wrong theory,” the experts declare, “It almost went my way,” or “It was the right mistake to make under the circumstances,” or “I’ll be proved right later,” or “The evilness of the enemy is still the main event here.”

Tetlock’s summary: “Partisans across the opinion spectrum are vulnerable to occasional bouts of ideologically induced insanity.” He determined to figure out a way to keep score on expert political forecasts, even though it is a notoriously subjective domain (compared to, say, medical advice), and “there are no control groups in history.” – The Long Now Foundation”

Short run effects

There is a compensating benefit to trade which increases stability which complicates the situation: unexpectedly low production in one place can be made up by unexpectedly high production in another. To give us some context I’ll consider robustness of food supply, one of the most important production and distribution processes for a society’s stability. For simplicity I’ll imagine three kinds of disruption: local crop failure (a local 30% output shortfall), global crop failure (a randomly distributed 30% output shortfall globally) and a halving of trade (from war, protectionism or natural disaster for example).

Self-sufficiency but no trade: Imagine a world where there is no trade in food between regions. Each region has to aim to produce enough food to feed itself. Each region has to worry about a bad season and regional output can be very variable and if they don’t produce enough food, they will starve. Given this they will aim to produce more food than they need and stockpile lots of grain in order to make a famine very unlikely. They are nonetheless more vulnerable to local shocks than if they could buy food from elsewhere in these emergency scenarios. A global shock has the same impact. However such a situation is not at all vulnerable to trade disruption as nobody relies on trade.

Self-sufficiency and trade: Imagine that in this world trade was suddenly opened up so that all regions could trade with one another. Initially production patterns do not change, so each region is still dedicating the same resources to food production and has the same distribution of expected outputs. In the case of a global supply shock, trade will help a little if a region can get by for a while on a low food supply; those regions with an especially bad crop failure can buy from those regions with a more mild failure. But local crop failure can now be covered with imports from other regions which had bumper crops that year. Vulnerability to trade disruption is no greater now because no region relies on trade except when there is a local crop failure and previously they would have been ruined in that situation anyway. This situation is much more robust than the previous one

No self-sufficiency but trade: Now over time people adapt to this new trade and some regions start producing a lot of food and others start producing less food. In a market system this concentration and specialisation will be based on comparative advantage. Local crop failure is only an issue when trade also fails. Assessing vulnerability to global failure is hard. The total global expected output and stockpiles of food would probably go down a bit over this time. The ‘law of large numbers’ means less excess capacity or stockpiled food is necessary to keep the same risk of famine as existing in scenario 1 because total global food production is less variable than local food production. However, specialization between regions makes food cheaper making stockpiling cheaper and allows us to produce most food in the regions with the least variable output. Compared to self sufficiency and trade we are more vulnerable to trade disruption.

As we can see, self sufficiency and trade is unambiguously the most robust of the three options, but it is ambiguous which of ‘self-sufficiency but no trade’ and ‘no self-sufficiency but trade’ is the worst. That will depend on how frequently local crop failures, global crop failures and trade disruptions occur and how harmful each is.

What can we do?

If we can have both lots of trade and some back-up systems appropriate for a non-trade world we will be especially robust.

A subsidy for local production to make you less reliant on trade, but open trade when local output falls short is a possibility, though it would be costly and useless against global failures as other countries will proportionally reduce their production. Robin Hanson proposes among other things that previously agreed prices be allowed to rise in emergencies, which gives private parties a reason to maintain excess and robust local production capacity if a supply shock seems likely. The more lucrative opportunities to price gouge during disasters a society commits to having, the more robust it will be.  The subsidy of stockpiles which are only released in a disaster would increase robustness to all kinds of failure, even those where law and order break down. To avoid crowding out other stockpiles or more robust production methods, government stockpiles should commit to sell at high prices rather than give the stockpile away.

In my next post I’ll consider long run effects of trade and complexity on robustness and explain why restrictions on trade or any other policy which reduces productivity growth would be counterproductive.

Harriet Harman’s push for longer maternity leave is undeniably positive for mothers who want to return to the same employer, and it can help women maintain a career foothold after motherhood. But such policies can be harshly counterproductive for women in general, as they prompt employers to avoid hiring or promoting younger women at all.

…

…if mothers do well out of the current system, their right to take maternity leave can still have a detrimental impact on their employers. Take the example of a London secondary school, which recently appointed an energetic young head with a glowing reputation. But within four years the school was failing so badly that it had to be taken over. Part of the problem was that the new head had had two pregnancies, with two long spells of maternity leave, and then struggled to combine caring for two small children with a demanding full-time job. Although undoubtedly skilled, in practice she was unable to properly perform the role for almost four years. The school had, in effect, been headless.

…

The strongest evidence of this problem comes from Sweden—often cited by advocates as offering the ideal system, with long parental leave, the right to work part-time, time off for sick children and so forth. Yet several studies by Swedish economists have shown that family-friendly employment policies has been the cause of the glass ceiling for women, not the solution to it. The pay gap in Sweden fell from 33 per cent in 1968, before generous maternity protection was first introduced, to 18 per cent by 1981. But it has been rising gradually ever since then. The reason? Onerous maternity protection leads the private sector to systematically avoid hiring women, who then mostly work in the less well-paid public sector.

The sad result is that the more generous the maternity rights, the less likely women are to reach the top. A 2009 paper by Swedish economist Magnus Henrekson confirms that women are much more likely to reach top executive positions in Anglo-Saxon countries—and especially the US, which has only 12 weeks’ unpaid maternity leave—than in Scandinavia. Other research finds that maternity leave of around three to four months helps women’s employment, but that longer periods lead to what economists call “statistical discrimination” against women collectively. Forcing fathers to take paternity leave, meanwhile, has done little to change sex-roles in Scandinavia, while the vast majority of Swedish mothers were against sharing parental leave with their spouses in surveys carried out before the change was introduced.

The basic problem is that businesses are reluctant to employ women who might have kids because they are then likely to leave the firm or do a lousy job. The result is that women are less likely to be put into important positions where they acquire specialised and hard to replace knowledge and skills. That is to say, most highly valued professions.

Apparently this is bad because it increases the gender wage differential and is ‘unfair’ for women who do not intend to have children but are discriminated against as though they will.

There are two extremes we can use to investigate this dynamic.

If the men and women involved do not have any private knowledge about whether they will want to leave their career to care for children in the future or not and are unwilling to commit right away, then actually there is no problem to correct. It is inefficient for people who might drop their careers soon to be in certain kinds of jobs. At the extreme this is obvious: nobody would suggest NASA should be indifferent to the level of commitment someone has to their career before beginning to train someone as an astronaut. For many positions, a long-term and guaranteed commitment to the position is an important qualification. To ignore commitment, even if it made it easier for some female astronauts to be indecisive about having kids, would just be too costly. If in fact women are much more likely to choose to abandon their careers for children, then it is efficient to employ fewer of them in jobs for which commitment is especially valuable.

If a women values both obtaining such a job and having children (or maintaining the option to do so in the future), she could achieve this by compensating her employer with lower wages than men or childless women. This may go some way to explaining women’s lower wages.

Alternatively, let’s imagine everyone knows perfectly well whether they will want to leave their jobs to raise children or not, but their potential employers do not. In this case we have a problem called ‘asymmetrical information‘ which could lead to ‘adverse selection‘ if employers cannot find a way to distinguish between these two groups. If potential employees cannot credibly signal when they are members of the career-committed group or not, people will end up in jobs mismatched to their level of commitment; the career-committed group will be discouraged from working (they will get lower wages than their productivity would call for); and the uncommited group will be encouraged to work more than they should (because they will over their lives get higher wages than their productivity calls for). Fortunately people who are career committed and do not intend to have children can indeed signal this to potential employers through sterilization or, less drastically, through contractual commitments such as fines for having children while in the employment of a firm. If we don’t see such signalling, this presumably means people don’t know their future plans, can signal their level of commitment effectively in other ways or that such methods are impossible (fines are not possible to recover or sterilization can be undone).

Either way, it seems there is nothing a government or do-gooder could do here to improve the situation except facilitate people’s ability to credibly signal their intention to have children or not.

If the fact that women are more inclined to take time off from their careers to raise children and do other non-market labour is judged an unfortunate burden for them (the opposite of the truth in my view given parents in partnerships report preferring caring for children to work), then the best thing would be to redistribute money to women by charging them lower taxes or offering more generous welfare. To be consistent hopefully though they would also be charged through taxes for their higher life expectancies!

Should we change parenting gender norms?

A friend of mine also suggested this:

It would make sense for the government to offer very generous paternity leave, more generous than anything women got. This would help coax more men into become stay-at -home fathers and to leave women as the bread-winners. This would have two advantages: in the long term breaking down genderstyped contraints about work/parenting in society; secondly making it harder for employers to reject women in lieu of a man, if they suspect the woman’s going to leave to have a baby, because men would be just as likely to do the same.

Assuming this paternity leave were successful at coaxing men into becoming stay-at-home fathers, though the story above suggests this is unlikely, would this be beneficial? If gender stereotypes are such that even women who are committed to their careers or men who are committed to being stay-at-home fathers were unable to do so, it might. The above would suggest that women who are truly sure they don’t want to have children are able to display this to potential employers when it is important. But it’s harder for a woman to prove that her husband will look after the kids until he does so so reducing gender norms could be useful for a women in that situation (though it would also increase their number and perhaps the aggregate cost). Potential stay-at-home fathers could be prevented from following their ambition by the disrespect of  friends and family or being unable to find a partner who wants a career instead. Reducing gender norms helps with the first. But increasing preferences diversity within genders makes finding a compatible partner harder: if all women want children and all men want careers it is easier to find a partner who wants the opposite to you than if half of each gender wants each option.

Making both genders equally likely to care for kids also has the downside that it will increase job-commitment mismatch by making it harder for anyone to guess ahead of time who will be committed and who will not.

Given that both market and non-market work (housework and child rearing) has to be done, it’s possible that we’re better off socialising each gender to enjoy a different job. That way nobody need suffer a task they dislike. While in theory we could pick men and women at random and encourage them to value one or the other task, it is easier to socialise genders as a group; messages are easily targetted and made persuasive for gender groups in a way impossible for randomly chosen groups. This benefit is smaller if innate preferences or aptitude for market and non-market work are strong and cut randomly across gender lines (something I know little about).

“Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.” – Carl Sagan

Exciting breaking news from the LHC!

Past reasons:

Carl Sagan on Earth

Why existential risk is the most important thing

Reasons to care

Unless you’re really smart. In that case, you can go out and show just how brilliantly smart you are by forwarding strange positions no mediocre wit would feel smart enough to defend. Nick Bostrum, busy signalling his superior smarts with an unusual but consistent worldview, swims against the current of his day and proposes these fairly unusual answers to the most serious problems humanity faces: Death, Existential Risk, Suffering and Mediocre Experiences. If you knew you were going to (have the chance to) be born again in the year 3000, I think these are just the issues you would want us to start dealing with seriously now, not most of the nonsense we ostensibly do to help the future. Or you could just save some money (PPT) for them instead, if you care.

Lucky we have some really smart people: to show us how smart they are, sometimes they go out and say really outlandish but important things.

“This famous novel [Lord of the Flies] suggests that only our “civilized” rules and culture keeps up from the fate of our “savage” ancestors, who were violent dominating rule-less animals.  But though this may be true regarding our distant primate ancestors of six or more million years ago, it is quite unfair slander regarding our face-painting forager ancestors of ten thousand or more years ago.

While our kids are segregated into schools where light monitoring lets them terrorize each other and form dominance hierarchies, forager kids are mixed among forager adults, who enforce their strong social norms against violence and domination.  At school, our kids are rated and ranked far more often than most adults will tolerate, even though this actually slows their learning!”

I particularly liked this (hopefully true) story from the comments:

Effectiveness and Cost-Benefit of Influenza Vaccination of Healthy Working Adults Vaccine Conclusion Influenza vaccination of healthy working adults younger than 65 years can reduce the rates of ILI, lost workdays, and physician visits during years when the vaccine and circulating viruses are similar, but vaccination may not provide overall economic benefits in most years.

Cost benefit of influenza vaccination in healthy, working adults Conclusion: This cost benefit analysis based on the results of the LAIV trial provides additional evidence that influenza vaccination may provide both health and economic benefits for healthy, working adults.

Influenza Vaccination Among Healthy Employees: A Cost-Benefit Analysis The cost of vaccination programmes exceeded the benefit from averted infections. Optimal vaccination strategies for healthy adults need to be planned individually with minimal loss of working time.

Cost-Benefit Analysis of a Strategy to Vaccinate Healthy Working Adults Against Influenza Results Vaccinating healthy working adults was on average cost saving, with mean savings of $13.66 per person vaccinated (95% probability interval: net savings of $32.97 to net costs of $2.18), with vaccination generating net savings 95% of the time. The model was most sensitive to the influenza illness rate, the work absenteeism rate due to influenza, and hourly wages. In the worst-case scenario vaccination was not cost saving. Vaccination also generated net costs to society during years with a poor vaccine–circulating virus strain match. In all of the other sensitivity analysis scenarios, vaccination was cost saving. Conclusion Influenza vaccination of healthy working adults on average is cost saving. These findings support a strategy of routine, annual vaccination for this group, especially when vaccination occurs in efficient and low-cost sites.

Economic Analysis of Influenza Vaccination and Antiviral Treatment for Healthy Working Adults Results: In the base-case analysis, all strategies for influenza vaccination had a higher net benefit than the nonvaccination strategies. Vaccination and use of rimantadine, the most cost-beneficial strategy, was $30.97 more cost-beneficial than nonvaccination and no use of antiviral medication. Conclusions: Vaccination is cost-beneficial in most influenza seasons in healthy working adults.

Short answer seems to be maybe (three votes yes, two vote no), though these studies seem to focus primarily on saved work days. I more worried about avoiding feeling horrible for a few days. There are also the benefits to my friends and family who are each slightly less likely to catch the flu (or have to care for a sick Rob!) if I am vaccinated. Given we partially ration healthcare through government here, there are also the benefits to other sick people who can get more access to medicine if I am not competing with them in a queue (a small benefit as flu is unlikely to drive me to the doctor). Unfortunately my earning power is quite low at the moment (so a day off is less economically costly), but presumably my ability to study hard now will increase my future earnings so there is a cost to down-time.

Combining all of this, it seem more likely than not that getting a flu jab is socially efficient. Which is just as well, because at just $20 I’d decided to get it even if it wasn’t!

We hereby propose an apocalyptic scenario of greenhouse gases vented from the Earth’s crust and mantle because humans undertook Stevenson’s MTEC macroproject,as a prototype of these additional existential risks. Since humans are currently without means of escape from the planet (the state-of-affairs likely to persist for at least several decades and probably much longer), and their Macro-engineering experiment meets with misfortune, they will perish as a species due to the excessive heat possibly Venuforming the Earth, i.e. permanent locking in the runaway greenhouse heating. Of course, it is possible that the Earth-biosphere continues to function and that subsequently, owing to the atmosphere’s increased perennial warmth10 and the aerial fertilization of expelled CO2, vegetation will be caused to flourish. Surface life forms must thereafter endure much different solar ultraviolet radiation (UVR): under heavy cloud cover the scattered UV component of sunlight—often termed “skylight”—is seldom less than 10% of that under a clear, blue sky; very heavy storm clouds canal most eliminate terrestrial UVR even in summertime.”

“A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov. The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”

I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet but the first few minutes of Geoengineering: Global Salvation or Ruin? looked good.

“Although the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review is supposed to include all aspects of the strategy and doctrine that govern the use of U.S. nuclear weapons, it once again will not consider one crucial question: What would be the long-term consequences to Earth’s environment if the U.S. nuclear arsenal were detonated during a conflict?

This isn’t a question to be avoided. Recent scientific studies PDF have found that a war fought with the deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals would leave Earth virtually uninhabitable. In fact, NASA computer models have shown that even a “successful” first strike by Washington or Moscow would inflict catastrophic environmental damage that would make agriculture impossible and cause mass starvation. Similarly, in the JanuaryScientific American, Alan Robock and Brian Toon, the foremost experts on the climatic impact of nuclear war, warn that the environmental consequences of a “regional” nuclear war would cause a global famine that could kill one billion people.

Their article, “Local Nuclear War: Global Suffering,” PDF predicts that the detonation of 100 15-kiloton nuclear weapons in Indian and Pakistani megacities would create urban firestorms that would loft 5 million tons of thick, black smoke above cloud level. (This smoke would engulf the entire planet within 10 days.) Because the smoke couldn’t be rained out, it would remain in the stratosphere for at least a decade and have profoundly disruptive effects. Specifically, the smoke layer would block sunlight, heat the upper atmosphere, and cause massive destruction of protective stratospheric ozone. A 2008 study PDF calculated ozone losses (after the described conflict) of 25-45 percent above mid-latitudes and 50-70 percent above northern high latitudes persisting for five years, with substantial losses continuing for another five years. Such severe ozone depletion would allow intense levels of harmful ultraviolet light to reach Earth’s surface–even with the stratospheric smoke layer in place.”

How much can we count on enlightened self-interest to protect us from a nuclear disaster? This discourages states from deliberately starting a nuclear war, but makes triggering such a war a tempting and easy target for any crazy person or group who actively wants to destroy civilization. And there remains the ongoing prospect of an accidental conflagration, aptly demonstrated by a series of near misses over the last 50 years.

“In the Fall 2009 issue of Daedalus, Tom Schelling explains cogently why a world without nuclear weapons would not necessarily be safer world. After all, we cannot dis-invent nuclear weapons, which means that the possibility of rearming will remain; and existing nuclear powers can be expected to have rapid rearmament plans in place, should conflicts arise, to ensure that they are not left exposed should their adversaries rearm. The first to rearm might, after all, have an incentive to undertake a preemptive nuclear strike in the absence of deterrence. Thus, ironically, complete nuclear disarmament could increase the risk of  nuclear war.

Schelling’s article is a direct and persuasive response to a series of op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, by what Schelling terms the “unexpected combination” of Henry Kissinger, William J. Perry, George Schultz, and Sam Nunn, who advocate for complete nuclear disarmament (see, e.g., here and here).

Schelling’s 2005 Nobel Prize lecture focused on the fortuitous but seemingly durable “taboo” that has surrounded the use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The lecture can be read here, or viewed here.”

This seems an obvious point that someone who has spent their life working on nuclear strategy should be well aware of. My standard explanation for conspicuous oversights like this is that noticing and talking about them makes the speaker look like a cynic, while ignoring the problem and advocating total nuclear disarmament makes them seem nice and idealistic. However, Schelling’s point makes him seem analytical and intelligent. Why would a bunch of generals and international relations gurus want to come across as nice rather than smart?

Alternatively the proponents of nuclear disarmament, even those who understand game theory, might be stuck in fuzzy far mode (primed here by: “self-control; ends; over-confident; theory/trend-following typical unlikely unreal global events; abstract, schematic, context-free, goal-related features; desirable risk-taking acts, central global symbolic ideal moral concerns“) and so prevented from thinking about the situation concretely and strategically.

Is Schelling on to something? If so, why does this problem go ignored?

Added: Maybe there is no first strike advantage for big nations.

“II. POSSIBLE VS. EXISTING

A. God’s Coin Toss

The crux of the matter can be described by a “God’s Coin Toss” experiment [3,6]. Suppose that God tosses a fair coin. If it comes up heads, he creates ten people, each in their own room. If tails, he creates one thousand people, each in their own room. The rooms are numbered 1-10 or 1-1000. The people cannot see or communicate with the other rooms. Suppose that you know all this, and you discover that you are in one of the first ten rooms. How should you reason that the coin fell? Leslie and Bostrom argue as follows. Before you look at your room number, you should think that since the coin was fair the chance of heads was 1/2. Now if the coin was heads, then of course you would be in one of the first ten rooms. However, if the coin was tails, the chance to be in one of the first ten rooms is 1/100. Thus, according to Eq. (2), you should now believe that the coin was heads with probability 0.99. The alternative argument runs as follows. Before you look at your room number, you should think that the probability of heads is 0.99. There are one thousand possible people who would be right with that belief, whereas only ten would be right with the belief in heads. When you look at your room number, you should then update your probabilities using Eq. (2). The result is that in the end you think the chance is 1/2 that the coin was heads. Another way to say the same thing is that there are ten ways to have the coin heads and you in a room in the first ten, and ten ways to have the coin tails and you in a room in the first ten, and thus the chances for heads and tails are equal. The difference here hinges on whether one considers possible people in the same ways that one considers actual people. If instead of flipping a coin, God creates both sets of rooms, then Leslie and Bostrom and I all agree that you should think it much more probable that you are in the large set before you look at your room number, and equally probable afterward. Treating the two possibilities in the same way as two sets of actual observers implies the Self-Indication Assumption: the existence of a large number of observers in a possible universe increases the chance to find oneself in that universe.

I will argue below that the equal treatment of possible and actual observers is correct.

…”

Perhaps violent video games keep violent people on the couch where they can’t hurt anyone. Perhaps pornography sexually satisfies men who would otherwise be tempted to sexually assault someone. Perhaps having child porn on hand reduces the motivation of more moderate paedophiles to actually assault children in real life.

Working out whether the ‘example or complement effect’ or the ‘substitution effect’ dominates is an empirical question that is impossible to resolve from the armchair.

For preferences that are easily satisfied, there is good reason to think the substitution effect can be big and the ‘example effect’ small:

“Berl Kutchinsky, studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined. … Richard Green too has reported that both rapists and child molesters use less pornography than a control group of “normal” males. … Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies, and studies by other investigators—female as well as male—essentially found similarly that there was no detectable relationship between the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes. No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography—by any definition—has had a cause-and-effect relationship towards ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women.”

Steven Lansberg finds similar results from the roll-out of porn on the internet, and finds violence goes down in response to violent films, at least in the short run:

What happens when a particularly violent movie is released? Answer: Violent crime rates fall. Instantly. Here again, we have a lot of natural experiments: The number of violent movie releases changes a lot from week to week. One weekend, 12 million people watch Hannibal, and another weekend, 12 million watch Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

University of California professors Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna compared what happens on those weekends. The bottom line: More violence on the screen means less violence in the streets. Probably that’s because violent criminals prefer violent movies, and as long as they’re at the movies, they’re not out causing mischief. They’d rather seeHannibal than rob you, but they’d rather rob you than sit through Wallace & Gromit.

Maybe there is an example effect from video games though:

The current issue of the journal Psychological Bulletin addresses this issue with no fewer than four articles, beginning with a new meta-analytic review credited to eight researchers from the U.S. and Japan. They found unambiguous evidence that such games are a “causal risk factor” for increased aggression and decreased empathy among the people who play them.

Their analysis “yielded strong evidence that playing violent video games is a significant risk factor for both short-term and long-term increases in physically aggressive behavior,” writes Iowa State University psychologist Craig Anderson, the paper’s lead author. This connection was seen “regardless of research design or conservativeness of analysis,” and was true for both men and women, older and younger players, and those in Eastern and Western nations.

Though not a strong one, protests Andy McKenzie:

The most recent meta analysis (abstract here) finds that the longitudinal causal effect of playing violent video games after adjusting for initial aggression and sex has an r value of 0.152, for a percentage variance explained of only 2.31%. The authors of this study argue that small effect sizes can have high practical significance if they accumulate over time or if high proportions of the population are exposed. That may be; it’s hard to say. But we do know this: 2.31% variance explained is not a particularly large effect size.

These are complex questions that require plenty of data to resolve. When a campaigner tries to sell you a simple example or substitute story, be skeptical.

Yes:

SIA Doomsday – Meteuphoic

Very Bad News – Overcoming Bias

Multiverse theory proven right – Robert Wiblin

The Doomsday Argument and the Number of Possible Observers – Paper

SIA on other minds – Meteuphoric

God’s Coin Toss – Robert Wiblin

Sleeping Beauty Problem – Paper

Avoiding doomsday – a proof of the self-indication assumption – Less Wrong

The Simulation Argument and the Self-Indication Assumption – Paper

Maybe:

Self-Indication Assumption Doomsday argument rebuttal – Wikipedia

Sleeping Beauty Problem – Wikipedia

SIA won’t doom you – Less Wrong

Our place in the Universe – The Big Questions

An Empirical Test of Anthropic Principle’s Great Filter – Less Wrong

It’s not like anything to be a bat – Less Wrong

No:

Clones In Their Jammies, and Other Variations – Cheap Talk

Betting and Probability: A Curious Puzzle – Cheap Talk (especially see the comments)

Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic – Paper

Analysis of the SIA by Milan M. Ćirković – Paper

Michael Anissimov is understandably exasperated:

“It’s sad how the people who invented the nuclear bomb and spent their careers dealing with the threat of it are now screaming about the risk of terrorist nuclear weapons, and no one under the age of 40 is listening. Few people over 40 are listening either, but the numbers seem better there. (Obama, most notably.) Perhaps it will take a nuke going off in one of our major cities before people wake up. There’s this thing called a boat that lets you bring a payload right up to the coast without too much trouble.

My generation is too interested in webcomics, MMOs, perpetual left-right political warfare, and gosh-wow technologies to care about the real risks right in front of us.”

I’m afraid I must plead guilty as charged. When I wrote the post ‘what questions really matter‘ I put existential and catastrophic risk reduction first on the list for these reasons, but since then have had nothing original to say on the topic. I am probably not the only person who feels like they should do more about existential risk but never gets around to it. Whatever ails me may go some way to describing the incredible dearth of research on the topic, and the lack of responses to existential risk posts by Roko Mijik and Michael Anissimov.

Maybe I am a victim of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Many people have strong views on tribal political topics like unions and immigration, so it’s much easier to strike up a conversation about that than it is a complex issue like existential risk that most people have never heard about and do not understand. For a combative writer like me it’s hard to get passionate writing about even very important things so long as other people don’t care to argue about them. Dissecting the bad ideas of other people I know contributes little to the progress of humanity but is nonetheless an inviting way to spend the evening compared to coming up useful ideas nobody cares about. Ultimately, existential risk analysis just doesn’t provide me with many opportunities to prove my intelligence and confidence to other people, especially women. If it were a good way to signal that, my subconscious would probably drive me to write about it much more often.

In the near-far psychological divide, existential risk is naturally as ‘far’ an ideal as you can get. Existential risk doesn’t feel like something that threatens me right now; rather it feels very much like a concern for strange beings I know little about who might exist far away in space and time who would be denied the opportunity to exist hundreds of years in the future. To motivate myself to work on reducing existential risk, I need to make it a near concern more than a far value. An analytical project with a short term pay-off would help. For example, Katja’s analysis of anthropics and existential risk attracted a big response because it allowed people to sink their teeth into a specific analytical question in anthropics rather than asking them to dwell on the fate of far off future generations. The sorts of ‘far values’ political and religious movements which attract a lot of people provide people with good opportunities to show off their good features and network with a useful group. They also provide simple goals, regular positive feedback, a sense of urgency and tap into as many human moral instincts they can – not just concern about pleasant outcomes but also about fairness, sanctity, authority and group loyalty.

So here are some things that would help me and others focus:

• A more narrowly defined analytical problem in existential risk to make progress on.
• Smart readers who understand existential risk and care to argue about it.
• Female (or male) groupies who are impressed by analysis of existential risk.
• The chance to network with impressive and high status people who also care about existential risk.
• Regular positive feedback and people around me often who care about the same cause.
• A belief that existential risk is a threat right now rather than one in the far future.

The Sleeping Beauty problem: Some researchers are going to put you to sleep. During the two days that your sleep will last, they will briefly wake you up either once or twice, depending on the toss of a fair coin (Heads: once; Tails: twice). After each waking, they will put you to back to sleep with a drug that makes you forget that waking. When you are first awakened, to what degree ought you believe that the outcome of the coin toss is Heads?

First answer: 1/2, of course! Initially you were certain that the coin was fair, and so initially your credence in the coin’s landing Heads was 1/2. Upon being awakened, you receive no new information (you knew all along that you would be awakened). So your credence in the coin’s landing Heads ought to remain 1/2.

Second answer: 1/3, of course! Imagine the experiment repeated many times. Then in the long run, about 1/3 of the wakings would be Heads-wakings — wakings that happen on trials in which the coin lands Heads. So on any particular waking, you should have credence 1/3 that that waking is a Heads-waking, and hence have credence 1/3 in the coin’s landing Heads on that trial. This consideration remains in force in the present circumstance, in which the experiment is performed just once.

I will argue that the correct answer is 1/3.

Do you agree that the correct answer is 1/3? If so, you have just used the Self-Indication Assumption, which says “Given the fact that you exist, you should (other things equal) favor hypotheses according to which many observers exist over hypotheses on which few observers exist.” This seems very intuitive in the case above, but it can be taken to less obvious extremes.

For example, let’s imagine we have two remaining theories about the nature of the universe. One says that the universe is big: it contains a trillion galaxies. The other suggests the universe is even bigger than that: the universe contains a trillion trillion galaxies. We haven’t yet taken any scientific measurements that could distinguish between these two theories, so each is an equally good explanation for the world as we see it. But wait… we do have some evidence on the question: we exist! If we chose 1/3 in the coin tossing case, by analogy we should say that the theory which results in a trillion trillion galaxies is a trillion times more likely than that which only implies a trillion galaxies. The situation is exactly the same: observers will more often be right if they choose beliefs which imply that many such observers exist, in this case the belief that the universe is really really big.

As it happens we do have just such a theoretical debate about the nature of the universe! One interpretation of results in quantum physics says that the universe is constantly splitting into different worlds:

In many-worlds, the subjective appearance of wavefunction collapse is explained by the mechanism of quantum decoherence. By decoherence, many-worlds claims to resolve all of the correlation paradoxes of quantum theory, such as the EPR paradox and Schrödinger’s cat, since every possible outcome of every event defines or exists in its own “history” or “world”. In layman’s terms, there is a very large—perhaps infinite—number of universes, and everything that could possibly have happened in our past, but didn’t, has occurred in the past of some other universe or universes.

If the many worlds interpretation is correct, the universe is much much much bigger than in any other interpretation of quantum physics. If you are a ‘thirder’ you should now assign a higher probability to the many worlds interpretation than you did before in proportion to how many more observers would exist in the ‘many worlds’ universe than in the ‘single world’ universe.

Detractors of the Self-Indicating Assumption such as Nick Bostrum consider this the ‘reductio ad absurdum’ which shows it must be somehow wrong. As far as I can tell, this is baseless. The only reason they have for rejecting the conclusion is that it seems absurd on its face, but the ‘argument from personal incredulity’ is a weak one, especially on a topic like anthropics which humans did not evolve to think about easily.

If we had good evidence that the universe was actually small, this line of argument might be in conflict. But even before developing this theory we had good reason to think the universe was huge, and other reasons to think it could be even bigger than that! Both theory and experiment neatly point in the same direction: the universe is even bigger than you can imagine.

Join the debate about SIA Katja Grace has kindly started over at Meteuphoric.

Are we getting happier and more satisfied? Yes, says the giant World Values Survey:

Data from the Values Surveys show that during the past two decades, the Subjective Well-Being index rose in 77% of the countries for which a substantial time series is available. Figure 3 shows the changes observed on the SWB index in all 52 of these countries (with an average of 17 years between the earliest and latest surveys). Contrary to the belief that happiness re-mains constant, SWB rose in 40 countries and fell in only 12,with a median increase of .35 on this index. Putting it in an intuitively more meaningful form, the average percentage of people in these countries saying they were ‘‘very happy’’ increased by almost 7 points. The probability that these increases are due to chance is negligible. A paired t test between the earliest and most recent data for countries with at least a 10-year range of data yields a 0.0001 probability of this rise being ob-served under the null hypothesis of constant global happiness,t(42)53.99.

Why? We’re rich, and rich people tend to be liberal and have more freedom:

We hypothesized that economic development, democratization, and increasingly tolerant societies have contributed to a growing sense of freedom and control. In keeping with this interpretation, the public’s sense of freedom increased in 79% of the countries for which a substantial time series is available from the Values Surveys. This is an overwhelming trend—fully as strong as the global trend toward rising SWB, with which it is closely linked. As the regression analysis in Table 2 demon- strated, a rising sense of free choice is by far the most powerful factor driving rising SWB. By itself, it explains 30% of the changes observed on the SWB index. The fact that the people of most countries experienced a growing sense of free choice from 1981 to 2007 seems to be the core reason why SWB has risen. Figure 4 shows how both the sense of freedom and SWB levels increased in most of these countries from the earliest available survey to the latest one and shows that the two have a strong tendency to rise and fall together (r 5 .71)

More freedom correlated with more satisfaction and happiness

Confirming the findings already reported, economic growth and per capita GDP explained 50% of the country-level differ- ences in SWB (Model 4.1). However, as Sen (2001) argued, the crucial impact of economic development is that it increases freedom of choice. Adding our measure of free choice to the regression increased the explained variance in SWB from 6%to 15% among individuals and from 50%to 71% among countries, while also reducing the impact of the economic variables. A sense of free choice affects people’s SWB more as a property of their society than as an individual characteristic: A person’s SWB is as more affected by the general atmosphere of freedom in the society in which one lives than by one’s individual sense of freedom. As societies become wealthier, threats to survival become less pressing, and people become more tolerant of gender equality and social diversity and give higher priority to self-expression. An index measuring whether one would accept people of another race, immigrants, or homosexuals as neighbors shows a significant positive effect at the country-level: People living in more tolerant societies tend to be happier, regardless of their own beliefs (Model 4.3). More open social norms concerning the role of women, ethnic diversity, and alternative lifestyles give people more freedom of choice in how to pursue happiness, and tolerance of diversity increased substantially during the past quarter century. For example, the proportion of respondents claiming that homosexuality is never justifiable fell from 33%in 1981 to 16% in 2005–2007 in the countries for which data are available from both periods. Discriminatory attitudes toward women or racial minorities showed similar downward trends in most countries….

Some cultures are consistently happier

The findings presented here are consistent with the interpretation that economic factors have a strong impact on SWB in low-income countries, but that, at higher levels of development, evolutionary cultural changes occur in which people place increasing emphasis on self-expression and free choice, leading them to increasingly emphasize strategies that maximize free choice and happiness (Inglehart, 1997; Inglehart & Welzel, 2005). In recent years, economic growth, democratization, and these changing cultural strategies actually seem to have raised happiness levels in much of the world. The evidence indicates that these factors were conducive to happiness mainly through their common tendency to increase human freedom, as human development theory argues. Figure 8 shows a path analysis of this causal sequence. As it indicates, democratization and rising social tolerance contributed even more than economic development to a growing sense of free choice and thus to rising levels of happiness. Here, our findings support Easterlin’s (2005) contention that research on happiness should not just focus on economic growth, but also on noneconomic aspects of well-being. Economic growth makes a positive contribution to SWB, but it is the weakest of the three main factors.

Derek Bok, who just wrote The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being, because of a focus on the US, is less enthusiastic about economic growth, and instead focuses on security and alleviating the suffering of the sick:

Whether this is really the case or not, I’m not sure. What is interesting is that this possibility goes totally unexamined by the campaigners and the rest of the film.

If the balance of evidence did suggest that this was the situation animal welfare campaigners faced, does anyone think that they (or we) would decide to ignore the issue in the hope that doing so would make the Japanese more likely to abandon the slaughter? Unlikely. Sometimes we want to (be seen to) fight something we dislike more than we actually want it to stop.

Can anyone think of similar examples?

Some possible examples of this effect:

• A great concentration of feminist activism is found on Western university campuses and in related professions where women are already found in larger numbers and have great freedom.
• Environmentalists work hard to be extra green in their own actions, when greater gains might be found by redirecting their effort to changing the behaviour of others.
• Social justice crusaders often try to reduce inequality or poverty in their own country, even when it is rich and egalitarian by international standards.
• Economists write a lot about the policies of the countries they live in, even though most good economists live in countries with relatively sound economic policy (because of the concentration of policy expertise).
• Rationalist, scientific and skeptic groups work hard to ensure they are especially rational and their beliefs are especially accurate, even when they are already much more rational and scientific than the general population.
• The most rabid and best funded civil liberties organisations are found in countries where civil liberties are already comparatively well protected.
• Religious services are usually delivered to believers rather than to non-believers.

There can be good reasons for focussing one’s effort locally. Maybe it’s very hard for university feminists to get to the places where women are most oppressed, and maybe they’d be ignored there anyway. Maybe environmentalist organisations need to be especially pure to show it can in fact be done or avoid damaging accusations of hypocrisy. Maybe it’s very too hard to get non-believers to listen to a religious sermon let alone convert them.

However, these seem like post-hoc justifications for our locally-focussed actions, so we should at least be skeptical of them and double-check that they are true.

For example, while of course it’s costly to learn Hindi and travel to rural India, I would bet a feminist in a rich liberal could do more good for women (and humans for that matter) by getting a job and sending the money to a feminist organisation run by Indians in India (or locals in a host of other less liberal countries) than they could by working to improve the status of women in Europe, the US or Australia.

“Join in an amazing two week volunteer and adventure program in South America or the Fijian Islands this year. The first week will see you commuting via canoe to a remote Amazonian village or living with a host family in Fiji; where you will be restoring a primary school, teaching children English and helping to provide a village with access to fresh water. The second week you will be off on an Amazonian adventure trekking, fafting and exploring the unique biodiversity that the jungle has to offer. Or in Fiji, sail from island to island, snorkelling, swimming diving; the world is your oyster! Join us this year and make a difference.”

Such a trek is no more condemnable than any other adventure holiday, but it’s amazing people can get a warm fuzzy feeling out of it given it has to be among the most conspicuously cost ineffective ways of assisting poor people imaginable. Never underestimate our ability to deceive ourselves into thinking what is good for us is good for everyone else. All the more reason to watch your actions, not your feelings if you want to see what you really care about.

Now I wonder what we should make of the way so much foreign aid goes to pay expensive Western wages to get rich people to do what poor locals could do at a fraction of the cost.

Similar fun from Half Sigma:

I think the following quote from a NY Times article about the busy summers of affluent teenagers is especially ironic:

for example, Putney Student Travel, a private company, offers a five-week summer program of seminars at Yale and a trip to Cambodia to address poverty issues for $6,990

It costs how much to learn about poverty? Poor people manage to learn about poverty for free.

He is right that being able to understand how the universe operates is useful for working out what actions will help achieve your goals. For example, if you want to survive, knowing that food will keep you alive helps you to satisfy that desire. However, he goes on to claim that we should all necessarily converge on the same (moral) values and that people can be wrong about values in the same way they can be wrong about physical laws. He uses two maneuvers: incredulity that people value different things and the claim that all human moral values ultimately come down to a concern about experiences. Neither is convincing.

The fact that a person finds something astonishing is not sufficient reason to think that it’s wrong. If Sam really thinks that moral and scientific claims are the same, then this should be obvious; the fact that I am incredulous when I hear about quantum physics does not mean that the theory is bad at describing the universe. My incredulity tells you a lot about me, but not much about the laws of physics. And while I wish that all human moral values came down to a concern about the pleasure and suffering conscious beings experience (as mine mostly do), this just doesn’t seem to be true. People clearly do care about things other than conscious experience. I read an example of this thinking in the New Yorker just yesterday:

But let’s imagine, for a moment, that we had enjoyed ourselves for the past fifty years. Surely, trashing the planet is just as wrong if people take pleasure in the process as it is if they don’t. The same holds true for leaving future generations in hock and for exploiting the poor and for shrugging off inequality. Happiness is a good thing; it’s just not the only thing.

Even if we did only care about experiences, a sadist would like the suffering of others rather than dislike it, so that wouldn’t guarantee agreement!

Even if Sam were right that all humans had the same moral preferences, that would not be enough to say that they were ‘right’ in any universal sense. We could always imagine an alien species (or animal species) that valued different things. If the human and alien species met to discuss their moral preferences, it is not clear to what either side could appeal to work out which one of them was right. By contrast, if humans and aliens had different theories of physics, we could indeed find an authority which would satisfy both of us as to who was right; to be truly different the theories would have to make different predictions about some things we could observe in the universe. We could go out and make those observations and see which of the theories matched them most closely.

Sam disparages the analogy between moral preferences (stealing is wrong) and other preferences (food is delicious, this opera sounds good), but unless he can point to some observable authority all conscious beings would necessarily have to accept as the determinant of moral facts, the analogy seems much stronger than his one between scientific and moral claims.

More: Mind Projection Fallacy, Moral Anti-Realism

via Soft in the Middle : The New Yorker.

Are monopoly or incumbent profits being displaced by the greater price transparency the internet has created? What other impacts should we expect as information becomes cheap to obtain?

The Golden Rule says ‘do to others what you would like to be done to you’ which approximates to valuing other people’s preferences as much as you value your own –> value preferences in proportion to their intensity rather than who they belong to.

Rawl’s Principle of Justice says we should ‘decide how to organise society as if we didn’t know who in society we would end up being’ –> value the preferences of all people you might become in proportion to their intensity.

Admittedly they correspond to average utilitarianism, not total utilitarianism, but it’s a start!

Felicifia highlights

Ryan Carey on some intuitions that support utilitarianism:

“Imagine a world without consciousness. Can you see any way that any event could have value? I certainly can’t. Without any theological or cosmic kind of good and evil, none can exist without consciousness. Furthermore, in so far as events in our world are unconscious, they can surely not be said to be good or bad.

Now, imagine a world with a sole conscious being. It seems to me that all that we can demand of him is that he increase his own happiness. This will make the world the best place that it can be. For the world to be good, it must be good for someone (cf Mill’s proof) because value is something that exists only in our head. I’ll expand on that, but my main point is that a lone conscious being in a universe should demand of himself the maximisation of his happiness. He should try to ignore mental impulses to the contrary.”

Seth Baum mentions a book called The Myth of Morality supporting a sort of moral anti-realism called Moral Fictionalism:

For what it’s worth, my own meta-ethical views seem to correspond with the “moral fictionalism” developed by Richard Joyce in “The Myth of Morality”. I haven’t read this book closely, but there’s a nice review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1301.
The basic idea is along the lines of: morality probably does not actually exist, but it’s “nice” to pretend it does anyways. I would be surprised if morality was anything more than a figment of our imaginations. What else would it be? Technically this means e.g. nihilism is not actually wrong. But we might as well make up some sort of morality. This is the “fictionalism”: supporting a morality that we are pretty sure is a fiction. A good argument for utilitarianism can be found here: if nothing actually is right or wrong, then we might as well have enjoyable lives. Utilitarianism is then just the maximization of enjoyable lives.

For utilitarians like myself it’s worth signing up to the Felicifia forums – a number of bright people post over there.

Some data over at Super Economy suggests maybe I was still being too generous:

I have plotted the share of workers that are covered by collective bargaining agreements. This is better than the share of workers that are members of unions. In some countries, such as France, few workers are actually members of unions, but unions have the power to determine contracts for workers that are not members. There are huge differences across countries. In Sweden and France 90% of workers are covered by collective union agreements. In the U.S and Japan only 15% of workers have their wages determined by unions.

I also plot the share of factor costs that goes to labor (as wages and compensations). What you will notice is that this does not vary across countries.

The way the economy gets divided between capitalists and workers is virtually identical in weak union countries such as the U.S as it is in countries with powerful unions, such as France and Sweden.

If anything, American workers get a bigger share of the cake compared to European workers, that have to some extent been replaced by machines.

Italian workers get slightly less than other countries. The reason I believe is that they have a high share of self-employed, that do not fit nice in the capital-labor divide.

So are unions useless? Not entirely. Unions can raise the wage of some workers, but not at the expense of capital, but at the expense of consumers (other workers), or perhaps single “rent” earning industries (such as mining). This is good and well for those few workers, but does not work as a large scale program, since workers are just transferring resources from other workers.

Second, Unions seem to be better able to extract rent within the class of workers, from high skilled to low skilled workers, than they can do with capital, which is responsive. Whereas I.Q. and schooling are less elastic in supply, if capital earnings go down, investments in capital goes does, or perhaps re-located to other countries.

This simple graph can tell us a lot about the world, and is a powerful argument against the world-view of the left.

Because it was hard to tell how much of the union wage premium was coming at the expense of  other workers compared to capital owners and I was trying to be as generous to unions as possible, my analysis assumed that the union wage premium came at the expense of no one. Judging by the figure above, any union wage premium in developed countries must be coming entirely at the expense of other workers. The most unions can then do is redistribute income from high to low income workers within a country. In Australia the wage premium for high income workers was 6% and for low income workers was 12%. Continuing to assume unions induce no economic inefficiency at all (unlikely), their impact then at most be to increase by 6% the incomes of low income earners. If high and low income workers each took home half of wages to start with, their true increase in buying potential for low income earners would actually be 2.7%. In countries where unions only cover some workers, they won’t even be achieving that – because much of the wage increase will be coming expense of other poor non-unioned workers.

This greatly reduces our assessment of the relative importance of unions relative to variations in productivity growth. It also deals with the objection that unions are necessary for workers to be paid the marginal product of their labour and so for wages to track productivity growth; were this true, we would expect countries with strong unions to have a much higher share of wage income, which they don’t.

Added: Is there even a union wage premium in most countries?

Tiger Woods, who recently admitted to multiple extramarital affairs, said he is receiving treatment. David Duchovny, who plays a sex-obsessed professor on the TV show “Californication,” underwent rehab in 2008. Dr. Drew Pinsky has launched a reality series dealing with the subject.

Sex addiction talk seems to be everywhere. But mental health experts are split on what underlies such behavior.

Patterns of extreme sexual acting out are described variously by therapists as an addiction, as a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder or as a symptom of another psychiatric illness, such as depression.

The lines specialists draw between what is sexually normal or abnormal have long been in flux. Some behaviors, such as pedophilia, are almost universally considered abnormal and have been described in the DSM for decades. Homosexuality was once considered deviant, but that reference was dropped from the DSM decades ago.

Therapists who see patients — mostly men — with problems caused by repetitive sexual behaviors, whether sex with consenting adults, pornography or cyber-sex, said the addition of a hypersexual behavior category was long overdue.

“There is no doubt in my mind that this condition exists and that it’s serious,” said Dr. Martin P. Kafka, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard University who was a member of the DSM-5 work group on sexual disorders.

“There are definitely men who are consumed by porn or consumed by sex with consenting adults — who have multiple affairs or multiple prostitutes. The consequences associated with this behavior are very significant, including divorce, pregnancy” and sexually transmitted disease, he said.

Given how much people enjoying having sex, surely it’s our failure to have sex whereever the opportunity presents itself which is the peculiar behaviour demanding hand wringing by psychologists. If a man’s revealed preference is to have sex very often with as many people as possible, why not label his residual desire for a stable monogamous relationship as the pathology requiring a cure? If the man’s desire for a stable marriage is more than just a desire to fit in, such a man does indeed have competing desires that are hard to reconcile. However, as long as they only engage in consensual sex it’s not clear why the rest of society should side with one over the other. If ‘sex addiction’ made men so impatient it was impossible for them to plan to get the sex they want, I could see the problem. However, the results listed here not sexual frustration but rather divorce, pregnancy and STIs.

Why not instead praise sex addiction? Just think of the potential benefits to women who might otherwise struggle to find sexual partners! Desire for sex is after all one of  the primary reasons men strive to become educated, rich and impressive. If sex addicted men go out and get women pregnant and have many children out of wedlock, all the better for those children who get to live who otherwise might never have been given that chance! We might just as well choose to pathologise those who so desire a sexually exclusive relationship so much that they ruin their sex lives by staying married to people who no longer excite them, killing off their creativity in the process. If we took this diagnosis seriously most boys would surely qualify as mentally ill at some point during puberty.

If any condition in the new DSM is a result of imposing a particular set of values not clearly conducive to human welfare, surely sex addiction is it.

When we’re talking about famous men like Tiger Woods, we should be least surprised that they sleep around. Satoshi Kanazawa exaggerates but is on the right track:

In the very short time since I have been a “blogger” at Psychology Today, since February 2008, there have been numerous sex scandals of politicians, athletes, and other celebrities:  Eliot Spitzer;  Silvio Berlusconi; David Paterson; John Edwards; Mark Sanford; David Letterman, and now Tiger Woods.  This is nothing new.  The only puzzle is that some of them had to pay for the sex.  At least, Berlusconi, the only non-American on the list above, does not have to face the “outrage” and “disappointment” of his countrymen; in Europe, for some reason, people know that this is normal for politicians and other powerful and resourceful men.

To recap everything I have said in the last two years on this blog, men do everything they do in order to get laid (Read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV,Part V, Part VI).  This is mostly unconscious on the part of the men; they don’t necessarily know that they do everything they do in order to get laid.  They consciously think that they want to attain the highest political office in the state or in the country; they want to become a successful businessman and make more money than anyone else; they want to practice and play hard so that they can become the best in their sport; they want to make America laugh so that they become the most successful entertainer.  Men want to do these things because they are evolutionarily designed to compete and achieve, and, when they do, women seek them out as sexual partners.

Highly successful men have sexual affairs, not because they want to (if what men want mattered, all men would have a maximum number of affairs), but because women choose them.  As I have said again and again, sex and mating among humans and other mammals is an entirely female choice, not a male choice; it happens whenever and with whomever women want, not whenever and with whomever men want.  What men want doesn’t matter, because it’s a constant.  What matters is what women want.

Added: The Onion on fire.

More intelligent people are significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds. The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.

“General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions,” says Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.”

Intelligent people are more likely to be able to think of their own solutions to any problem and so it is natural and adaptive for them to put more faith in their own judgement over inherited rules and habits. This reminded me of Jon Haidt’s research on our evolved ethical instincts which found liberals were more likely to prioritise harm/care and fairness/justice as moral principles while conservatives valued those two as well as ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity equally. Loyalty, authority and sanctity evolved as rules which would ensure the smooth functioning of a society and the welfare of individuals within it. Liberals are usually less interested in using such rules to ensure the coherence of groups, but why? Looking at Satoshi’s evidence, it’s possible that because they are more likely to think up and embrace novel solutions to problems, they are more willing to expand the generalisable principles of care and justice to ensure social stability and cooperation, perhaps through a more expansive welfare system. Having gone through such a thought process they have less need for whatever specific rules and intuitions we evolved to ensure social stability in the ancestral environment.

Intelligent men embracing sexual exclusivity is probably a weak example of smart sincere syndrome. In near mode, men want sex and lots of it with lots of people. Just notice the Coolidge effect. In far mode though we value exclusive love. Intelligent men are more likely to suppress their near desire for sex and generalise their far value for exclusive love. Were there a long run in human evolution this impractical value would eventually disappear, as intelligent men are more attractive and have more to gain from embracing polygamy.

I am concerned about the threats and opportunities posed by 21st century science, and how to react to them. There are some intractable risks stemming from science, which we have to accept as the downside for our intellectual exhilaration and—even more—for its immense and ever more pervasive societal benefits. I believe there is an expectation of a 50% chance of a really severe setback to civilization by the end of the century. Some people have said that’s unduly pessimistic. But I don’t think it is: even if you just consider the nuclear threat, I think that’s a reasonable expectation.

If we look back over the cold war era, we know we escaped devastation, but at the time of the Cuba crisis, as recent reminiscences of its 40th anniversary have revealed, we were really on a hair trigger, and it was only through the responsibility and good sense of Kennedy and Khrushchev and their advisers that we avoided catastrophe. Ditto on one or two other occasions during the cold war. And that could indeed have been a catastrophe. The nuclear arsenals of the superpowers have the explosive equivalent of one of the US Air Force’s daisy cutter bombs for each inhabitant of the United States and Europe. Utter devastation would have resulted had this all gone off.

The threat obviously abated at the end of the cold war, but looking a century ahead, we can’t expect the present political assignments to stay constant. In the last century the Soviet Union appeared and disappeared, there were two world wars. Within the next hundred years, since nuclear weapons can’t be disinvented,  there’s quite a high expectation, there will be another standoff as fearsome as the cold war era, perhaps involving more participants than just two and therefore be more unstable. Even if you consider the nuclear threat alone, then there is a severe chance, perhaps a 50% chance, of some catastrophic setback to civilization.

There are other novel threats as well. Not only will technical change be faster in this century than before, but it will take place in more dimensions. Up to now, one of the fixed features over all recorded history has been human nature and human physique; human beings themselves haven’t changed, even though our environment and technology has. In this century, human beings are going to change because of genetic engineering, because of targeted drugs, perhaps even because of implants into their brain to increase our mental capacity. Much that now seems science fiction might, a century ahead, become science fact. Fundamental changes like that—plus the runaway development of biotech, possibly nanotechnology, possibly computers reaching superhuman intelligence—open up exciting prospects, but also all kinds of potential scenarios for societal disruption—even for devastation.

On the simulation argument:

One thing which struck me recently, and I found it a really disconcerting concept, was that once we accept all that, we get into a very deep set of questions about the nature of physical reality. That’s because even in our universe, and certainly in some of the others, there’d be the potential for life to develop far beyond the level it’s reached on earth today. We are probably not the culmination of evolution on earth; the time lying ahead for the earth is as long as the time it’s elapsed to get from single-celled organisms to us, and so life could spread in a post-human phase far beyond the earth. In other universes there may be an even richer potentiality for life and complexity.

Now life and complexity means information-processing power; the most complex conceivable entities may not be organic life, but some sort of hyper-computers. But once you accept that our universe, or even other universes, may allow the emergence within them of immense complexity, far beyond our human brains, far beyond the kind of computers we can conceive, perhaps almost at the level of the limits that Seth Lloyd discusses for computers—then you get a rather extraordinary conclusion. These super or hyper-computers would have the capacity to simulate not just a simple part of reality, but a large fraction of an entire universe.

And then of course the question arises: if these simulations exist in far larger numbers than the universe themselves, could we be in one of them? Could we ourselves not be part of what we think of as bedrock physical reality? Could we be ideas in the mind of some supreme being, as it were, who’s running a simulation? Indeed, if the simulations outnumber the universes, as they would if one universe contained many computers making many simulations, then the likelihood is that we are ‘artificial life’ in this sense. This concept opens up the possibility of a new kind of ‘virtual time travel’, because the advanced beings creating the simulation can, in effect, rerun the past. It’s not a time-loop in a traditional sense: it’s a reconstruction of the past, allowing advanced beings to explore their history.

On the direction of science:

At the moment, scientific effort is deployed sub optimally. This seems so whether we judge in purely intellectual terms, or take account of likely benefit to human welfare. Some subjects have had the ‘inside track’ and gained disproportionate resources. Others, such as environmental researches, renewable energy sources, biodiversity studies and so forth, deserve more effort. Within medical research the focus is disproportionately on cancer and cardiovascular studies, the ailments that loom largest in prosperous countries, rather than on the infections endemic in the tropics. Choices on how science is applied shouldn’t be made just by scientists. That’s why everyone needs a ‘feel’ for science and a realistic attitude to risk — otherwise public debate won’t get beyond sloganising. Jo Rotblat favoured a ‘Hippocratic’ Oath’ whereby scientists would pledge themselves to use their talents to human benefit. Whether or not such an oath would have substance, scientists surely have a special responsibility. It’s their ideas that form the basis of new technology.

On posthumanism:

Human-induced changes are occurring with runaway speed. It’s hard to predict a mere century from now, because what will happen depends on us — this is the first century where humans can collectively transform, or even ravage, the entire biosphere. Humanity will soon itself be malleable, to an extent that’s qualitatively new in the history of our species. New drugs (and perhaps even implants into our brains) could change human character; the cyberworld has potential that is both exhilarating and frightening. We can’t confidently guess lifestyles, attitudes, social structures, or population sizes a century hence. Indeed, it’s not even clear for how long our descendants would remain distinctively ‘human’. Darwin himself noted that “not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity”. Our own species will surely change and diversify faster than any predecessor —— via human-induced modifications (whether intelligently-controlled or unintended), not by natural selection alone. Just how fast this could happen is disputed by experts, but the post-human era may be only centuries away.

"Hi, I'm here to starve you to death."

When technology first started improving rapidly some people worried that eventually most workers, already on subsistence incomes, would be put out of work by machines and starve. Luckily the opposite happened. New inventions made some uses of labour obsolete, but there were always new even more productive uses for labour in making and maintaining the inventions. Productivity went up, and new births did not come rapidly enough to push down the marginal product of labour to subsistence level again, so each person became much richer. Machines were both substitutes and complements of human labour, but they were stronger complements.

While this has been the case for technological progress so far, there is no reason to assume it will remain the case in the future as our machines become more intelligent and can substitute for ever more human functions. Machines have so far added value to the jobs humans could do more cheaply than machines. However, if machines are invented which are better than humans at everything and cost less than a human subsistence income to maintain, humans could go the same way as the horse and buggy. The marginal product of labour would fall to zero because it would always be better value to employ more capital (robots) in production than to employ another person. Without a strong welfare state to redistribute income from the few increasing rich owners of capital and land to the vast bulk of humanity which relies on the product of its labour to survive, most of us would starve and die out.

You might think that with so much wealth being produced by these amazing machines it is inconceivable that rich capital and land owning humans would let their brethren go into poverty and starvation. History doesn’t offer us much comfort here. The sight of the masses scraping by on a subsistence incomes has not troubled elites much through human history, so why would it in the future? Famines often occurred through history while rich land and capital owners looked on with indifference.

Would the impoverished masses revolt and overthrow the whole market system? This has happened a few times in the past, but the powerful weapons the (robot) army will have in the future will probably make this impossible as long as the military remains loyal. The wealthy would have no reason to keep the poor alive at all by this stage anyway as they will have nothing to gain by trading with them.

This presents a tough thought experiment for non-consequentionalist libertarians and others who support the right to keep whatever you make. So far they have had the luxury that negative freedom and property rights have almost always led to higher wages for common folk. But if they really do believe as they claim that forcibly redistributing the product of labour and capital is evil theft, in the scenario above they would have to recommend watching most of humanity die out or subsist on the charity of a few ultra-rich overlords.

Those who don’t like the prospect of a mass human die-off would presumably want to terminate or at least ameliorate the market distribution of incomes. They might seek to strong robust redistribution programs from capital to labour in existing institutions. They may also want to change our governing institutions to make them less easily manipulated by rich elites, or give elites some incentive to maintain them. While capital owners would have more power than before, they might also be so rich that a welfare system to keep the rest of humanity alive wouldn’t bother them terribly. We might also want to more evenly distribute ownership of capital and land, perhaps through forced savings accounts and greater income equality.

Read more: Economics Of The Singularity

If the idea above has gotten you down, hopefully this will cheer you up:

A bunch of people not looking for a light switch.

A major function of a dance floor is to facilitate finding and attracting partners. When we meet new potential friends and lovers we usually want to learn a lot about them quickly in order to determine whether they are people want to bond with and to suss out their intentions towards us. Given how much bars, clubs and dance floors are used to meet new people, it is surprising that they are often poorly lit, crowded and noisy to the point where conversation is impossible. Strobe lights seem purpose built to ration what little we can see of others. This all makes it harder to work out whether another person is attractive to us or not, and to suss out how they feel about us. In other words, a club would be a terrible place to conduct a job interview. Why design them this way when a major purpose of dancing in the first place is in assisting informed mate selection.

Others can’t assess you as closely either. Of course, if you’ve got something to hide this is great, but if your concealed traits are positive this is no good at all. Shouldn’t such an environment attract an undesirable number of people with features they’d like to hide?

Dancing can occur in well lit, low volume, spacious locales, so why the switch to environments that mask our signals?

Such an environment does have the upside of making it possible to inconspicuously approach others; the rest of the dance floor can’t clearly see who you are approach, or if you are rejected, so each approach carries a smaller reputational risk. Perhaps it’s because we drink and spend more when we can’t have conversations, and enough people a just out with familiar friends? Perhaps we specifically want to deaden our standards? The less we know about the other person the more likely we are to find them acceptable partners for a single night at least. Perhaps drunk people are so transparent we hardly need the assistance of good lighting?

What do you think?