Metablog

I grew up religious. My family went to Mormon churches, Baptist churches, charismatic churches, and fundie churches. I became an atheist at 16. But I miss churches. I miss a big group of people getting together, open to newcomers, organizing to help those who need help, providing facilities for all sorts of other activities. There are all sorts of good functions provided by a church that have nothing to do with religion. Well, except for one thing.

People don’t like doing those things. To get people to provide the money to have buildings like that, and to run the programs like that, and to pay the people in charge of it all, you have to manipulate them, because there are no honest methods that would work. Because people aren’t that charitable. Sure, they’re charitable, they’re just not that charitable. You pretty much have to couch requests for money in moralizing terms. (Any Unitarians out there know if it works the same way for you? I would suspect so.)

Or maybe the problem is that without grandiose visions, there’s not enough motivation for some people to become ministers and church leaders unless they’re religious, or spiritual. Or that the meme is just not viral enough.

But whatever the cause, I do miss churches. I should try out the local Unitarian church, and see how spiritual they are. Maybe they’re relatively secular. God knows most big Baptist churches are.

Overcoming Bias has an interesting post about inequality.

Consider that “sibling differences [within each family] account for three-quarters of all differences between individuals in explaining American economic inequality” and that “eliminating income inequality within all nations would reduce global income inequality by no more than one-third.” So why do we talk mainly about financial inequality between a nation’s families, when each of these other six inequalities is arguably larger?

Good question.

It’s weird how intellectual allegiance works. I had a scary experience yesterday. I was just reading along, forming a rough opinion of how much I agreed with the arguments. In general, I’m fairly favorable to them, but I worry that that’s just because I identify with the anti-IP culture of internet geeks. But then there was this one section I was much more skeptical about, concerning some attitudes toward government in general or something. All of a sudden the authors mention some other thinker who supports that idea, one that I generally respect and agree with, and who knows much more than me about the relevant issues.

At that point, my valuation of the arguments jumped. And if you’re a person who tries to overcome bias, the fact of this jump is pretty disturbing. First, I knew that it had no rational basis at all. (Edit: By my description, this is arguable. But take my word in this case.) But more importantly for me, it just revealed how much I had been evaluating all the other arguments using the same kind of credence. It hit me, pretty hard, the extent to which the subconscious* processes that comprise our judgment take into account tribal allegiance, and how that allegiance doesn’t have any consistent relationship to truth over humanity in general.

* I don’t agree with the expansive view of the subconscious espoused by many, but I don’t think the conscious mind is as powerful as it believes itself to be. Introspection, beyond direct perceptions of feelings and beliefs, is black-box deduction. We form theories of our motivations based on observing our emotions and their temporal relationships with external events and internal beliefs.

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While reading some provoking comments on another interesting post over at Overcoming Bias, I found a link to an even more provoking essay by Robin Hanson.

You are a body with a mind. Your mind is the result of activity in your brain, and your body was grown from a single cell following the instructions of your genes, which you acquired from your parents. Your parents acquired their genes from their parents, and so on back for billions of years. (The few genes not acquired from parents were created by random mutations.) The fact that you have certain genes and not others was determined almost entirely by a fierce competition between genes to create better “survival machines,” i.e., creatures that perpetuate and spread those genes. The genes that produced you are not a random sample from all possible genes; they are some of the few genes that, so far, remain in this competition.

[...]

Our genes do not care whether we experience more pleasure than pain. Our genes only care that we anticipate both possibilities, so that they can control us via our passions, i.e., our preference for pleasure over pain. When our bodies are no longer capable of reproducing, or of helping those who share our genes reproduce, our genes literally do not care if we live or die. Our genes will happily shorten our lifespans, or give us great pain, if that will help those genes to reproduce. Our genes will also lie to us to promote their goals, such as by making us think that our happiness depends more than it does on our success. Our genes can indeed be cruel masters.

[...]

Why do humans have such big brains, which are so devoted to a dream world of abstract ideas and feelings that have so little direct relation to personal survival and reproduction? Our best theory at the moment is that this dream world is produced by sexual selection, much like the large and colorful and otherwise useless tail of the peacock. [...] The theory is that we similarly have “mating minds”, i.e., minds that are designed in large part to impress potential mates and allies. When we display to observers how agile and creative we are at love, humor, talk, story, art, music, fashion, sport, charity, religion, and abstract ideas, we show those observers that we have high quality genes, with few bad mutations. Having such minds also helps us to judge the quality of others’ genes from their displays.

Cheerful, eh?

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“Darwin”, of DarwinCatholic, (h/t Gene Expression) writes here about a Business Week piece on the ethics of selective abortion using genetic screening for various disorders.

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This comment thread at unfogged was what sparked my musings about the absence of psychology in blogging, and its further development has given me an idea about why there’s a lack. I think it’s because for really helpful advice to be taken and given, you have to have a good, close relationship with the person or people you’re asking advice from. And because of the chicken-egg problem, a blog focusing on personal advice won’t be able to garner the trust and familiarity needed to take off. Plus, many blogs act as strong demographic selectors on their commenters, and people in similar life situations and of similar intellectual proclivities are going to be able to give better advice to each other than people with less in common. A more narrowly focused, non-ideological blog certainly wouldn’t do that as strongly. And the idea of the Unfogged post, of encouraging commenters, even regular ones, to post with a different pseudonym whenever they want to contribute an anecdote or ask a question that they don’t want associated with their main pseud for some reason, is a good one. People have already occasionally done this at Unfogged (and do it at other blogs, I’m sure,) but the practice was rare enough to not rise to the status of convention, and thus there was a small barrier that held back a considerable number people from asking advice over the months. (”Over the months”—heh, it’s internet time nowadays, baby!)

Robin Hanson, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others have started a new blog, called Overcoming Bias. I highly recommend it.

Six nuclear targets that, if hit, could effectively end civilization. (From Michael Anissimov.)

Charity sure doesn’t get a lot of love. Many Unfogged commenters don’t like the idea much. (Though more express support.) It’s so frustrating to combat the cynicism of those who think there’s not any hope for people productive rational debate. Take, for instance, comments from SomeCallMeTim:

Particularly when we’re talking about something that has been widely discussed, like abortion, people lining up on different sides have at least slightly different baseline principles. And those baseline principles are themselves contingent on a certain series of assumption about facts and the way those facts relate to other facts, and so on. You can’t really overcome the tendency because you often aren’t trying to overcome one opinion, but a host of them, the vast majority of which never get brought up in the debate for reasons of time, etc.

I think we disagree about the (a) the existence of common priors, (b) how willing we are to change our common priors, and (c) how deeply rooted and, at the same time, contingent belief in a set of common priors really is. I think you’re looking for a coherence, stability, and factuality to beliefs that simply doesn’t exist, for any of us. Debating or arguing is really much more about finding out the shape of a possible deal, with the understanding that, like any deal, someone may pull out down the line when his perceived interests change.

What can you say to that? Perhaps a study that trains people in debating productively, then pits those people in discussions with ideological separated people and see if their position changes more than a control group? Maybe there’s some easier way to test the issue using existing data? Someone call Steven Levitt.

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Having participated in a couple of discussions in the past day or two, my experience has really driven home, once again, my belief that most people are really terrible at debating. So I decided to write an article about the biggest problem I saw. (I completely gave up on the discussion at Alas, a Blog. The commenters ginmar and Q Grrl especially were guilty of the faults I describe there. Also, I’m not resentful in particular about these discussions, they just happened to be the most recent ones I’ve had that have led me to think about these issues, and thus, to write this post. Also, I’d like to say that LizardBreath is already a quite good follower of the advice I give in the third section of the article, though of course there’s always room for improvement.)

You should really, really go read it now. It’s also right over there on the sidebar, so if you ever want to link to it, you know where to find it.

I remember reading somewhere (don’t feel like googling) that people who spend time in “enemy” forums, like liberals posting at Red State or whatnot, tend to solidify their prejudices about the other side, and rarely really gain a more naunced and sympathetic understanding of their opponents’ positions. I wonder if the dynamic I describe in the article is at least part of the mechanism behind this.