From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 02:40:38 MDT
At 12:27 AM 7/12/2003 -0400, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
>... The gross inconsistency between beliefs and actions does not indicate
>that "what people believe they want" is not "what they really want", it
>means that people are grossly inconsistent in ways that have been subject
>to natural selection on heritable variations.
I have agreed several times that the mere inconsistency does not by itself
imply what people "really" want. I agree again now.
>... when you start telling me that people do not really want what they say
>they want, I become worried for several reasons.
>One, you're assuming that wanting-ness is a simple natural category, which
>distracts attention away from the task of arriving at a functional
>decomposition of decision-making into a surprisingly weird evolutionary
>layer-cake with human icing on top.
Doesn't your claim that people do want what they say they want assume just
as much simplicity of a natural category?
>Two, you're setting off people's cheater-detectors in a way that invokes
>an implicit theory of mind that I think is oversimplified, false-to-fact,
>and carves the mind at the wrong joints; ...
I hope you are not blaming me for people's cheater-detectors having the
wrong implicit theory of mind.
>Three, you're making a preemptive philosophical judgment ...
I'm making a judgement, but I'm not sure what you mean it is "pre" to. It
is post consideration of many issues, but surely pre to more consideration.
>Four ... Congratulating yourself on a tough-minded view of human nature
>... it is *not*, historically speaking, a reliable heuristic. Now you
>plan to tell people that nobody really cares about altruism, and that all
>idealism is a lie and a patina. I think this is just as damaging as
>telling people that the only possible rational action is to defect on the
>(iterated!) Prisoner's Dilemma. ... if it were true, I would tell you to
>go ahead and report it no matter the consequences. ...
I said from the start that under my hypothesis self-discovery about our
self-deceptions may not be good for people (given what they really want)
and that evolution has built us to avoid it. I have not embarked on a
publicity campaign here; I am having a discussion among a few colleagues.
>Five, there's no good reason to mess with points 1-4 - they are totally
>extraneous to the real substance of your theory. You can declare yourself
>to be studying "adaptive gross inconsistencies in moral belief and real
>actions", and get the benefit of intersection with both evolutionary
>psychology and experimental psychology, without ever needing to take a
>stance about what people "really" "want", or presuming a particular
>functional decomposition of the mechanisms involved. Modularize away
>those contrarian points...
I agree we can consider these issues separately, but I am really interested
in what people really want; it is basic to normative analysis, which
economists do a lot of.
>>... We've seen how people behave if briefly informed. We haven't seen
>>your ideal of fully informed post-upheaval choice.
>
>When have we seen how people behave if briefly informed? How can you
>briefly inform someone of something they don't believe to be true?
For example, in the area of disagreement, we can see how people respond to
being privately persuaded that persistent disagreement is irrational - they
continue to disagree. We can see that people who are privately informed
that they probably over-estimate their own abilities soon continue to do so.
>>... There are huge and long traditions in economics and philosophy,
>>among other places, discussing how to describe what people "really" want. ...
>
>... I have to say that I was not surprised by my brief survey - it looks
>pretty much like what I expected. Is there any particular area or result
>of which you worry I am ignorant?
In economics it goes by the name of "social welfare analysis".
>... For example, if I present people with an explicit choice *apparent to
>the subject* of being moral or appearing moral, I would guess that they
>would choose being moral, as they would be unable to do otherwise and
>retain their self-respect. On the other hand, the more distant the
>dilemma from conscious perception in those terms, the more I would expect
>evolution's puppet strings to have opportunities to take over. ...
I think we can agree here.
>>>People die saving unrelated children. Is that a lie?
>>That is a pretty rare phenomena. ...
>... The mechanisms of true altruism are, in fact, there, operating as
>independently executing adaptations, and can be exposed given the right
>context.
This conclusion seems a bit of a leap from the mere rare phenomena.
>But if I had a genie built using your definition of "wanting", I would
>never, ever make a wish to it.
You would apparently also not wish for it to make you happy, or to make the
choice you would make if you were privately informed.
>>Corporations, and other organizations can have behavior that is very much
>>like individual self-deception. So its too bad that you reject such
>>examples, as they are much easier to analyze.
>
>Er... it looks to me like they're easy to analyze because they're simpler
>yet unrelated phenomena, i.e., deliberate deception rather than
>self-deception. Why would anyone construe it otherwise?
I had in mind examples that look much less like deliberate deception. A
corporation (or non-profit org) can start out with principles that it
declares, and that the top individuals in it believe it follows, but market
selection pressures can end up making it violate those principles. It
might be company policy not to pollute, or to always tell the costumer the
truth, but the company may not give individual employees the incentive to
follow those policies. Those low level employees may engage in deliberate
deception, but the corporation as a whole is may be better described as
engaging in self-deception. The CEO may not realize that the incentives
are off, but that is because he has not paid sufficient attention to such
issues. Each person may think it is someone else's job to deal with that
problem. And the corporate PR department may be even less away of
incentive issues than most parts of the company.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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