May, 2008
Paternalism and Overconfidence
I've long wondered about issues like this — especially "overconfidence". See Overcoming Bias for comments.
Posted by Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias
Paul Graham tries to explain paternalism:
Parents know they've concealed the facts about sex, and many at some point sit their kids down and explain more. But few tell their kids about the differences between the real world and the cocoon they grew up in. Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a new crop of 18 year olds who think they know how to run the world.
Don't all 18 year olds think they know how to run the world? Actually this seems to be a recent innovation, no more than about 100 years old. In preindustrial times teenage kids were junior members of the adult world and comparatively well aware of their shortcomings. They could see they weren't as strong or skillful as the village smith. In past times people lied to kids about some things more than we do now, but the lies implicit in an artificial, protected environment are a recent invention. Like a lot of new inventions, the rich got this first. Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up out of touch with the world. Suburbia means half the population can live like kings in that respect. ...
One thing adults conceal about sex they also conceal about drugs: that it can cause great pleasure. That's what makes sex and drugs so dangerous. The desire for them can cloud one's judgement ... Older societies told kids they had bad judgement, but modern parents want their children to be confident. This may well be a better plan than the old one of putting them in their place, but it has the side effect that after having implicitly lied to kids about how good their judgement is, we then have to lie again about all the things they might get into trouble with if they believed us.
If parents told their kids the truth about sex and drugs, it would be: the reason you should avoid these things is that you have lousy judgement. People with twice your experience still get burned by them.
Paul also suggests that innocence promotes learning:
Innocence is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you're going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you're better off learning it last. Otherwise you won't bother learning much more.
Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't.
This has some intuitive appeal, but it is puzzling — why exactly would learning that the world is a brutal place make one less interesting in learning more about that world? Wouldn't learning help one to avoid brutality?
Can a libertarian account deal with worries about manipulation?
(See also my previous post, with a link to a paper by Roger Clarke.)
Posted by David Hodgson at The Garden of Forking Paths
Can a libertarian account deal with worries about manipulation? -
I want to take up the libertarian cause by responding to two points made by Joe Campbell in his comments on Haji’s “The Manipulation Argument”. First, he says “no libertarian account has successfully illustrated the key to free human action,” and suggests that a libertarian response to worries about manipulation can be no better than a compatibilist response; and he criticises agent causation as being a “primitive unanalyzable concept”.
I’ve been trying to develop a libertarian account that does focus on how and why human action is free and that can deal with manipulation worries, as well as with Galen Strawson’s responsibility argument. One article, an edited version of which was published in Times Literary Supplement last year, was the subject of some discussion on this website, but this discussion tended to skate over the main arguments. (The article was written in part as an answer to Galen Strawson’s argument, and since he as philosophy editor for TLS okayed it for publication, I was encouraged to hope he saw it as having some merit.) I also published an article (“Making our own luck”) to similar effect in Ratio in September last (which I can’t put on the internet until next September), and another on the role of consciousness in Philosophy Now in Jan/Feb this year.
The (bare) gist of my position is that, given our circumstances and laws of nature, the way we are provides available alternatives, inconclusive reasons (and how they appeal), and unconscious tendencies, and also the capacity to decide between the alternatives on the basis of the reasons; and what we do is what we decide in exercise of that capacity. The constraining effect of the way we are is limited to determining alternatives, reasons and unconscious tendencies, and our decisions are not otherwise constrained by any distinguishing features of the way we are (we are all alike in respect of our capacity to decide): to this extent, we are truly responsible for our decisions. That applies whether the way we are is due to manipulation and/or natural causes and/or prior decisions.
I support this by arguing (1) that conscious experiences can make a positive contribution to decision-making; (2) that this contribution is not one wholly determined by rule-based processes; (3) that we can respond to whole feature-rich gestalt experiences that cannot engage as wholes with rules or laws of any kind; and (4) that the role of consciousness (and its advantage) is to enable us to contribute this response to decision-making.
This may be seen as a kind of agent causation, but I would suggest it is far from being primitive and unanalysable.
The focus in the free will debate at present is so much on compatibilism and incompatibilism that there seems to be little concern about what I see as of central importance, namely the role of consciousness in decision-making, and especially in plausible reasoning. So I would really appreciate comments that squarely address the arguments of these articles, particularly the four points listed above. And if anyone would like to investigate my arguments further, they could look also at an in Philosophy in 2001 which first introduced my gestalt argument, and another in Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2002 which has the fullest exposition of it.
Technology and academia
Stupidity of Dignity
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at Evolution Blog
That's the title of a truly excellent article by Stephen Pinker for The New Republic. The subject is the 500+ page report by the President's Council on Biotheics attempting to define what human dignity actually is. I despair of selecting just a few quotes, since the whole article is superb, but I will give it a try beneath the fold.
Although the Dignity report presents itself as a scholarly deliberation of universal moral concerns, it springs from a movement to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine.
The report's oddness begins with its list of contributors. Two (Adam Schulman and Daniel Davis) are Council staffers, and wrote superb introductory pieces. Of the remaining 21, four (Leon R. Kass, David Gelernter, Robert George, and Robert Kraynak) are vociferous advocates of a central role for religion in morality and public life, and another eleven work for Christian institutions (all but two of the institutions Catholic). Of course, institutional affiliation does not entail partiality, but, with three-quarters of the invited contributors having religious entanglements, one gets a sense that the fix is in. A deeper look confirms it.
And later:
Despite these exclusions, the volume finds room for seven essays that align their arguments with Judeo-Christian doctrine. We read passages that assume the divine authorship of the Bible, that accept the literal truth of the miracles narrated in Genesis (such as the notion that the biblical patriarchs lived up to 900 years), that claim that divine revelation is a source of truth, that argue for the existence of an immaterial soul separate from the physiology of the brain, and that assert that the Old Testament is the only grounds for morality (for example, the article by Kass claims that respect for human life is rooted in Genesis 9:6, in which God instructs the survivors of his Flood in the code of vendetta: “Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God was man made”).
The Judeo-Christian — in some cases, explicitly biblical — arguments found in essay after essay in this volume are quite extraordinary. Yet, aside from two paragraphs in a commentary by Daniel Dennett, the volume contains no critical examination of any of its religious claims.
How did the United States, the world's scientific powerhouse, reach a point at which it grapples with the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century biomedicine using Bible stories, Catholic doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegory?
How indeed. This should serve as yet another reminder that the sort of religion that takes its scriptures seriously and wishes to impose its views on others is not some straw man concocted by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. It is is the real thing, and it has a depressing amount of support and power in our society.
The head of the committee is Leon Kass. How crazy is this guy?
Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a “mortal danger,” he writes, in the notion “that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it.” He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties. Sometimes his fixation on dignity takes him right off the deep end:
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone — a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.
And, in 2001, this man, whose pro-death, anti-freedom views put him well outside the American mainstream, became the President's adviser on bioethics--a position from which he convinced the president to outlaw federally funded research that used new stem-cell lines.
One time, when I was in college, I walked out of the cafeteria holding a soft-serve ice cream cone. After a few licks I decided I was full and didn't really want the cone. That was when I noticed an obviously friendly dog walking toward me, eyeing my ice cream with obvious desire. So I knelt down and extended it toward him, figuring he would take a lick or two. Instead he opened his mouth to a truly impressive degree, and took the entire cone in his mouth, nearly taking off two of my fingers with it. He then chewed it up and swallowed, while I watched in awe. Obviously doggy didn't have a problem with sensitive teeth.
Seriously, how does it even occur to someone to be offended by people eating ice cream cones in public, or to liken the process to what a cat does? This guy is out of his mind, and yet he has the ear of the President.
One more excerpt, from Pinker's conclusion:
The sickness in theocon bioethics goes beyond imposing a Catholic agenda on a secular democracy and using “dignity” to condemn anything that gives someone the creeps. Ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago, the panic sown by conservative bioethicists, amplified by a sensationalist press, has turned the public discussion of bioethics into a miasma of scientific illiteracy. Brave New World, a work of fiction, is treated as inerrant prophesy. Cloning is confused with resurrecting the dead or mass-producing babies. Longevity becomes “immortality,” improvement becomes “perfection,” the screening for disease genes becomes “designer babies” or even “reshaping the species.” The reality is that biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex, entropy-beset human body. It is not, and probably never will be, a runaway train.
Well said! Now go read the whole article.
Enemies of thought
by Colin McGinn
My son Bruno told me yesterday that he'd just been watching a video of me on Youtube. Eventually it became clear what this video was of: a discussion I participated in a few years ago at the Philoctetes Centre in New York about evolution, consciousness, and the meaning of it all. I hadn't even remembered that it was being filmed, but it's a mark of our digital times that it has now shown up on the internet to be accessed by my son 3000 miles away. But that's not the point I'm most interested in making here; because Bruno observed that the scientists present were generally disagreeable and closed-minded (he actually used a much stronger word to describe them). And he's a scientist himself--a doctor (ENT). This prompted me to ponder who is more deplorable among us: the superstitious zealots who limit their knowledge to what the Bible tells them or the scientists who are unable or unwilling to take any question seriously which has no scientific answer--which includes most of the questions I as a philosopher spend my time on. Specifically, several of those present hated my bringing up the point that we have no good scientific theory of how consciousness evolved in the first place (or how it arises in the brain of every human being at some point or another--and not just human brains). Why are people so incapable of stepping outside the narrow world-view of their specific range of expertise--either the Bible or their particular scientific discipline? Is it fear, narcissism, laziness, bloody-mindedness?
Modes of Philosophizing
Richard at Philosophy, et cetera has an interesting link to this piece at Eurozine, which reports a round table debate between Jonathan Barnes, Myles Burnyeat, Raymond Geuss, and Barry Stroud on the "Modes of Philosophizing". Should all philosophers necessarily study logic (for example)?