Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 95

Murder Equivalents, by Bryan Caplan

Economists are often accused of believing that everything -
health, happiness, life itself - can be measured in money.
What we actually believe is even odder. We believe that
everything can be measured in anything.
--David Friedman, Hidden Order Economists' have long struggled to get non-economists to put a dollar value on human life.  We've almost completely failed.  No matter how high the dollar value you use, non-economists hear callous minimization of human suffering.  Is there any way to quantify the magnitude of Awful without seeming awful yourself?

I say there is.  From now on, let us measure each horror in "Murder Equivalents."  The Murder Equivalent of X, by definition, is the number of ordinary murders that would be just as bad as X.  The concept allows for the reasonable possibility that some deaths are less bad than a normal murder.  The Murder Equivalent of an accidental death, for example, might only be .5  The concept also allows for the reasonable possibility than some deaths are worse than a normal murder.  The Murder Equivalent for a death by terrorism, for example, might be 2.  A terrible war that lays a country waste might be twice the number of deaths from war crimes, plus the number of civilian deaths, plus .5 times the number of soldier deaths, plus one per $10 M in property damage. 

Logically, this re-scaling is no better than a sophisticated Value of Life calculation.  Psychologically, however, it's far better.  Comparing something to murder doesn't sound callous.  Nor does it minimize the badness.  It only puts the world in perspective.  Many salacious front-page horror headlines are clearly less bad than one murder.  Thinking in terms of Murder Equivalents would help diffuse such distractions, reducing the risk of costly crusades against relatively minor problems.

Yes, I know that many people will angrily reject any metric that potentially implies their gut emotional reactions are unreasonable.  As usual, I'm working at the margin.  How can we get more people to think numerately about the horrors of the world?  Murder Equivalents is the best idea I've got.

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What I Fail to Realize, by Bryan Caplan

I'm a fallible human being, so when people say, "Bryan, what you fail to realize is..." I listen closely.  Precisely what do I fail to realize?  I'd really like to know.

Most of the time, though, I'm sadly disappointed.  The things I allegedly "fail to realize" tend to be smack dab in the middle of my class notes and publications.  Latest example: Many critics of my cosmopolitan and open borders stance have faulted me for "failing to realize" that normal human beings value their group identities.

The reality is that I've been vocally affirming the political importance of group identity for over a decade.  Check out my undergraduate and graduate course notes on voter motivation, this article, my posts on the Respect Motive, or my effusive praise for the expressive voting model.  My punchline of American partisanship, for example, is that the data shows:

1. Strong evidence for group-interested voting, with race being the main
group of interest.
2. Self-interest plays a marginal role at most.

I even give my graduate Public Choice students this essay assignment:

Consider another country
and/or historical era with which you are familiar. Write a case study of its politics that
weighs the explanatory power of the SIVH [Self-Interested Voter Hypothesis], group-interest, and ideology.

How can I grasp the massive political effects of group identity, but remain a cosmopolitan and open borders advocate?  Simple.

First, I think the effects of group identity are not only massive, but massively unjust.  There's nothing wrong with eating traditional food or wearing a celebratory hat.  But humans' love of our own group is a fundamental cause of unjust treatment of outgroups.  Love of family has the same risk, but since the evils of nepotism are widely acknowledged, the downside is minor.  Love of broader group, in contrast, runs amok.  As I explained a while back:

Despite its mighty evolutionary basis, almost everyone recognizes moral strictures against familial favoritism.  Almost everyone knows that "It would help my son" is not
a good reason to commit murder, break someone's arm, or steal.  Indeed,
almost everyone knows that "It would help my son" is not a good reason
for even petty offenses - like judging a Tae Kwon Do tournament unfairly
because your son's a contestant.

Nationalism, in contrast, is widely seen as an acceptable excuse for horrific crimes against outgroups.  Do you plan to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent foreign civilians? 
Just say, "It will save American [German/Japanese/Russian/whatever]
lives" - and other members of your tribe will nod their heads.  Do you
want to deprive millions of foreigners of the basic human rights
to sell their labor to willing buyers, rent apartments from willing
landlords, and buy groceries from willing merchants?  Just say, "It's
necessary to protect American jobs" in a self-righteous tone, then bask
in the admiration of your fellow citizens.

Second, justice aside, group identity has bad effects on those who seriously embrace it.  A life well-lived revolves around the appreciation and pursuit of merit.  Intense group identity undermines both.  People who cherish their group identities have trouble assessing merit objectively; they naturally overrate their own group, and underrate outsiders.  And the more obsessed you are with your group's merit, the less you focus on the merit that really counts: your own. 

Third, despite its massive political effects, commitment to group identity is shallow.  While it governs people's political behavior, only a small minority are willing to pay a high personal cost for identity.  As I've explained before, identity is all about lip service:

How can I say that?  By noting the stark contrast between how much people say
they care about community, and how lackadaisically they try to fulfill
their announced desire.  I've long been shocked by the fraction of
people who call themselves "religious" who can't even bother to attend a
weekly ceremony or speak a daily prayer.  But religious devotion is
fervent compared to secular communitarian devotion.  How many
self-styled communitarians have the energy to attend a weekly patriotic
or ethnic meeting?  To spend a few hours a week watching patriotic or
ethnically-themed television and movies?  To utter a daily toast to
their nation or people?  Indeed, only a tiny percentage of people who
claim to love community find the time for communitarian slacktivism.

You could argue that coordination costs explain the curious shortage of intentional communities. 
But nothing stops secular communitarians from matching the time
commitment of suburban Catholics.  Well, nothing but their own apathy. 

The
lesson: While individualists do tend to neglect mankind's craving for
community, they err on the side of truth.  Actions really do speak
louder than words.  And actions reveal that people are far less
communitarian than they claim.

Contrary to my critics, then, I'm well-aware that group identity is a mighty force in the world.  What my critics fail to realize, though, is that group identity is only a mighty force because politics distills lamentable but largely inert human emotions into political poison.





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Johnson Bet, by Bryan Caplan

I have bet Daniel Filan $100 at even odds that Gary Johnson will receive less than or equal to 5% of the 2016 U.S. Presidential popular vote. I hope to lose, since I (a) consider Johnson far less bad than either Clinton or Trump, and (b) think a high Johnson share reduces the risk that the GOP goes even further down the path of anti-foreign bias.  But since the odds are even, I obviously expect to win.

Filan has prepaid me, so if I lose I will pay him a gross of $200.

Update: In the comments, Matthew Moore writes:

What private / different information are you using here,
Bryan? Pretty much every model and market I can find is substantially
over the 5% mark, e.g.:

538's three models have Johnson at 7.3, 8.7 and 5.7

Ladbrokes are offering 150/1 for Johnson to *win*.

Pivit.io predictions net out at 95% chance of >5%

Why are you so relatively pessimistic? What information is missing from these markets?

Answer:

I discount the polls because several insiders have confessed to me that Libertarian Party candidates do much better in polls than actual elections. 

I discount the betting markets because extremist bettors seem to noticeably tilt the odds for extreme long-shots.  This is stable due to moderate transaction costs and thin markets: If Johnson's expected vote share is 3%, a market prediction of 6% is not a major money-making opportunity.

Update #2: Bill Friedman has made the same bet with me.

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The Huemer-Caplan Exchange, by Bryan Caplan

Publication of Michael Huemer's lost works continues.  Today, we have the 1992 Huemer-Caplan correspondence on his philosophical system, which concludes with my ultimately successful effort to convert him to anarcho-capitalism.

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Huemer's Letter to Brian Doherty, by Bryan Caplan

Next in the early unpublished writings of Michael Huemer, we have this long letter to Brian Doherty, who subsequently wrote the wonderful Radicals for Capitalism .

P.S. If you see Team Caplan here at GenCon, please say hi. :-)

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Is It Really Conscious?, by Bryan Caplan

In The Age of Em , Robin Hanson tries to sidestep philosophical questions, especially, "Would your Artificial Intelligences (AIs) actually be conscious?"  But if you seek to evaluate the world of the future, everything revolves around this infamous philosophical challenge.  Suppose AIs perfectly simulate thoughts and feelings even though they experience neither.  If so, claims about their "welfare" are nonsense.  Giving up human welfare to "make AIs better-off" is nonsense on stilts.  And valuing a world with trillions of AIs and zero humans over the status quo could well be the greatest normative error ever made.

Faced with this hypothetical, most AI optimists reply, "Sure, if AIs were dead inside, you'd be right.  But that's a big if.  Why should we even take the idea seriously, much less believe it?"  Rather than rehash the p-zombie literature, let's start from first principles.

1. No one literally observes anyone's thoughts and feelings but his own.  I can see my own happiness via introspection - even with my eyes closed.  When I look at other people, I can see smiling faces, but never actually see their happiness.

2. This gives rise to the classic Problem of Other Minds.  How, if at all, can you justify your belief that anything besides yourself has thoughts and feelings?  Since you never observe others' thoughts and feelings directly, you can only know them by inference.

3. This is no trivial inference, because the world is full of things that suggest thoughts and feelings even though virtually everyone is virtually sure they don't have thoughts and feelings.  Take a diary.  It claims to have thoughts.  It claims to have feelings.  But that's not enough to convince us it has thoughts and feelings.  In fact, there's nothing a book could say that would convince us it's conscious.

4. The same goes for a long list of things: Movies, t.v. shows, tape recordings, audio files, runes carved on stone.  Whatever they show, whatever they say, you'll interpret as mere appearance of consciousness, not the real deal.

5. The same applies for things that provide contingent output: Choose Your Own Adventure novels, single-player videogames, Ouija boards, thermostats.  When you increase the difficulty level in a Chess game, you don't wonder if the computer or program will start to think thoughts and feel emotions.  

6. Many of the things we're virtually sure aren't conscious express more complex thoughts and feelings than the typical human.  Like War and Peace .  Many of the things we're virtually sure are conscious express far simpler thoughts and feelings than the typical human.  Like a mouse.

7. The vast majority of things that never express thoughts and feelings don't seem conscious to us.  Even things that look visibly human, like people in long-term comas.  If we learned that a monk had once
taken a vow of silence, however, his subsequent failure to speak would
not make us doubt his continued consciousness.  If he publicly took a vow of expressionlessness, similarly, his subsequent lack of facial expressions would barely change our minds about his inner states.

8. At this point, there are two ways to swiftly and permanently end contemplation of the Problem of Other Minds.  The first is solipsism - to say either, "I have no idea if anything other than myself is conscious" or even "I alone am conscious."  The second is materialism - to say either, "I have no idea if anything, including myself, is conscious" or even "Nothing is conscious."  Both views are so absurd there's little point arguing with convinced adherents.

9. Any sensible position on the Problem of Other Minds, then, must begin with a clear affirmation that (a) you are definitely conscious, combined with (b) some way of inferring that other things are conscious, even though (c) many unconscious things closely mimic conscious things.

Most of the AI enthusiasts I've encountered think the Problem of Other Minds is simple: If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck; if a machine acts like it has thoughts and feelings, it has thoughts and feelings.  But how can this simple solution be right when the world is already full of duck calls?

In the near future, I'll offer my solution to the Problem of Other Minds - a solution that strongly suggests AIs are no more conscious than Choose Your Own Adventure Novels.  Maybe I'm wrong.  But I'm not wrong to claim AI fans' impatient responses to the Problem of Other Minds need a lot more curiosity and a lot more work.

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Tolstoy, Hypocrisy, and Puritanism, by Bryan Caplan

This summer I'm reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace for the third time.  It's the greatest novel of history's most patiently observant novelist, and every reading unearths further greatness.  This time, I was struck by this passage exploring puritanism and hypocrisy.

Pierre no longer suffered from moments of despair, melancholy, and loathing
for life as he had done. But the same malady that had manifested itself in acute
attacks in former days was driven inwards and never now left him for an instant.
"What for? What's the use? What is it is going on in the world?" he asked
himself in perplexity several times a day, instinctively beginning to sound the
hidden significance in the phenomena of life. But knowing by experience that
there was no answer to these questions, he made haste to try and turn away from
them, took up a book, or hurried off to the club, or to Apollon Nikolaevitch's
to chat over the scandals of the town.

"Elena Vassilyevna, who has never cared for anything but her own body, and is
one of the stupidest women in the world," Pierre thought, "is regarded by people
as the acme of wit and refinement, and is the object of their homage. Napoleon
Bonaparte was despised by every one while he was really great, and since he
became a pitiful buffoon the Emperor Francis seeks to offer him his daughter in
an illegal marriage. The Spaniards, through their Catholic Church, return thanks
to God for their victory over the French on the 14th of June, and the French,
through the same Catholic Church, return thanks to God for their victory over
the Spaniards on the same 14th of June. My masonic brothers swear in blood that
they are ready to sacrifice all for their neighbour, but they don't give as much
as one rouble to the collections for the poor, and they intrigue between Astraea
and the manna-seekers, and are in a ferment about the authentic Scottish rug,
and an act, of which the man who wrote it did not know the meaning and no one
has any need. We all profess the Christian law of forgiveness of sins and love
for one's neighbour--the law, in honour of which we have raised forty times forty
churches in Moscow--but yesterday we knouted to death a deserter; and the
minister of that same law of love and forgiveness, the priest, gave the soldier
the cross to kiss before his punishment."

Such were Pierre's reflections, and all this universal deception recognised
by all, used as he was to seeing it, was always astounding him, as though it
were something new. "I understand this deceit and tangle of cross-purposes," he
thought, "but now am I to tell them all I understand? I have tried and always
found that they understood it as I did, at the bottom of their hearts, but were
only trying not to see it. So I suppose it must be so! But me--what refuge is
there for me?" thought Pierre.

He suffered from an unlucky faculty--common to many men, especially
Russians--the faculty of seeing and believing in the possibility of good and
truth, and at the same time seeing too clearly the evil and falsity of life to
be capable of taking a serious part in it. Every sphere of activity was in his
eyes connected with evil and deception. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he
took up, evil and falsity drove him back again and cut him off from every field
of energy. And meanwhile he had to live, he had to be occupied. It was too awful
to lie under the burden of those insoluble problems of life, and he abandoned
himself to the first distraction that offered, simply to forget them. He visited
every possible society, drank a great deal, went in for buying pictures,
building, and above all reading.

Truly, read the whole thing.

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Huemer's "On Liberty and Philosophy", by Bryan Caplan

I've started scanning the early writings of my favorite philosopher, Michael Huemer.  I have quite a few in my possession.  First on the menu: his prize-winning graduate student essay, "On Liberty and Philosophy," which addresses the philosophical side of what I've called the libertarian penumbra.  One highlight:

The emotional significance of materialism is something more vague but probably more evident than its logical implications (or quasi-implications).  A world-view which reduces all of us to physical mechanisms essentially indistinguishable from mindless automata simply has the effect of undermining one's respect for human beings and sense of human dignity on an emotional level. Such a theory produces the feeling of being stranded in a universe devoid of meaning.

Huemer has asked me to include the following advisory label:

I think the essay contains some false statements about the
state of the field (including a mis-definition of "rationalism"),
which is unfortunate. However, the most important philosophical points are
nevertheless right and important...

[Y]ou should probably note that they're from
college, about 24 years ago, and that in the meantime, I've become nicer to
people like Brian Doherty, and better at spelling.

If the Brian Doherty reference puzzles you, stay tuned.

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Robin's Turing Test, by Bryan Caplan

Robin recently tried an Ideological Turing Test for a subset of my critique of his Age of Em .  He understands me better than before, but there's still room for improvement.  "Correct" means Robin has described my view to a tee. 

Bryan sees sympathy feelings as huge influences on social outcomes.
Not just feelings between people who know each other well, but also
distant feelings between people who have never met.

Correct.

For example, if not
for feelings of sympathy:

1. Law and courts would often favor different disputants.

Correct.

2. Free workers would more often face harsh evaluations, punishments, and firing.

Correct.

3. Firm owners and managers would know much better which workers were doing good jobs.

Partly correct.  The primary issue is that firm owners and managers are squeamish about acting on their knowledge.  But if they were less squeamish, they would admittedly be more interested in acquiring knowledge.

4. The US would invade and enslave Canada tomorrow.

Incorrect.  There are also plenty of prudential reasons not to invade and enslave Canada.  My claim, rather, is that if the US could profitably invade and enslave Canada, it still wouldn't do it.  Indeed, few Americans would consider it.

5. At the end of most wars, the victors would enslave the losers.

Partly correct.  Most wars don't end in abject defeat of the losers.  But without sympathy, abject defeat would lead to slavery, yes.

6. Modern slaves would earn their owners much more than they would have as free workers.

Correct.  Workers' credible threat to quit has massive distributional effects.  How could it be otherwise?

7. In the past, domestic, artisan, and city slaves, who were treated
better than field slaves, would have been treated much more harshly.

Partly correct.  Domestic slaves were better treated because most people have greater sympathy for people they see every day.  (Field slaves' overseers saw them every day, too, of course, but overseers were selected for their lack of sympathy).  In contrast to domestic slaves, however, I think artisan and city slaves were better treated because of imperfect information about productivity.

8. The slave population would have fallen less via gifts or purchase of freedom.

Partly correct.  Sympathy explains most of the gifts, but with imperfect information there is a selfish reason to give slaves some positive incentives, which ultimately allowed some to purchase their freedom.

9. Thus most of the world population today would be slaves.

Incorrect.  There would have to be numerous major wars ending in abject defeat for large populations for this to happen.

Of course even if Bryan were right about all these claims, he needn't
be right in his confident opinion that the vast majority of biological
humans will have about as much sympathy for ems as they do for mammals,
and thus treat ems as harshly as we treat most mammals.

Actually, I expect we would treat ems worse than we treat non-human mammals - closer to the way we treat videogame characters.  The animal/machine divide mightily influences human feelings.  Check out every Twilight Zone episode where attitudes change on a dime once people realize that something that looks human on the outside is only machinery on the inside. 

This sympathy-driven view doesn't by itself predict Caplan's strong (and not much explained) view that ems would also be very
robot-like. But perhaps we might add to it a passion for domination -
people driven by feelings to treat nicely creatures they respect
might also be driven by feelings to dominate creatures they do not
respect.

It's even simpler.  Docile slaves are more profitable than slaves with attitude, because owners don't have to use resources to torture and scare them into compliance.  That's why owners sent rebellious slaves to "breakers": to transform rebellious slaves into docile slaves.  Sci-fi is full of stories about humans genetically engineered to be model slaves.  Whole brain emulation is a quicker route to a the same destination.  What's the puzzle?

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The Science of Homeschooling, by Bryan Caplan

While I'm homeschooling my elder sons, I've long wondered about how well it really works.  Sure, the critics are usually angry apriorists.  But advocates seem quick to repeat optimistic statistics without proper scrutiny.  What's really going on?

The best piece I've found so far is Kunzman and Gaither's "Homeschooling: A Comprehensive Survey of the Research" (2013, Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives).  Highlights:

V. Academic Achievement

The subject of homeschooler academic achievement has received much scholarly attention, but unfortunately most of this work contains serious design flaws that limit its generalizability and reliability. From 1990 to 2010 five large scale studies of academic achievement have been conducted under the sponsorship of HSLDA [Home Schooling Legal Defense Association] (Ray, 1990; Ray, 1994; Ray, 1997a; Ray, 1997b; Ray, 2010). These studies all rely for their data on samples of homeschoolers recruited for the purpose. Volunteers are asked to submit demographic data as well as the results of one or more group of standardized test scores, with promises made that the research will be used for homeschooling advocacy. These self-reported scores (from tests that are typically proctored by the parent in the home) are then compared against national averages and the results reported. In every case homeschooled students have consistently scored in the 80th percentile or above on nearly every measure.

The original studies are always clear that the data being presented do not reflect a random sampling of all homeschoolers, and that they do not control for key variables like race, SES, marital status, or parent educational attainment when comparing against national averages. Such caveats are critical, for the homeschooler sample obtained by this recruitment strategy is not representative of national norms, nor, indeed, of all homeschoolers. For example, in the most recent HSLDA-sponsored study, published in 2010, the sample of 11,739 homeschooled children came from families that were 95% Christian, 91.7% white, 97.7% married, 80% with stay-at-home moms, and 45.9% with incomes over $80,000 per year (Ray, 2010). Though such limitations are noted in the original studies, the less technical versions produced for popular consumption and the press releases put out by HSLDA habitually ignore such caveats and cite these studies as proof that homeschoolers outperform public schoolers by wide margins on standardized tests (Gaither, 2008b; Kunzman, 2009a).

Higher-quality studies find rather different results. 

First, homeschooling has opposite effects on verbal versus math scores:

Given this persistent corroboration across two decades we might conclude, tentatively, that there may be at least a modest homeschooling effect on academic achievement--namely that it tends to improve students' verbal and weaken their math capacities. Why? Answers here are only speculative, but it could be that the conversational learning style common to homeschooling and the widely-observed phenomenon that homeschoolers often spend significant time reading and being read to contribute to their impressive verbal scores, while math is not given the same priority (Frost & Morris, 1988; Kunzman, 2009a; Thomas & Pattison, 2008).

Second, as usual, what parents do is overrated:

[H]omeschooling does not have much of an effect at all on student achievement once family background variables are controlled for. This conclusion is implicit even in many of the HSLDA-funded studies, which consistently find no relationship between academic achievement and the number of years a child has been homeschooled (Ray & Wartes, 1991; Ray, 2010).

Third, as usual, who parents are is underrated:

[P]arental background matters very much in homeschooler achievement. Belfield (2005) found greater variance in SAT scores by family background among homeschoolers than among institutionally-schooled students. Boulter's (1999) longitudinal sample of 110 students whose parents averaged only 13 years of education found a consistent pattern of gradual decline in achievement scores the longer a child remained homeschooled, a result she attributed to the relatively low levels of parent education in her sample. Medlin's (1994) study of 36 homeschoolers found a significant relationship between mother's educational level and child's achievement score. Kunzman's (2009a) qualitative study of several Christian homeschooling families found dramatic differences in instructional quality correlated with parent educational background.

Kunzman and Gaither on college admission, the issue that most concerns me:

IX. Transition to College/Adulthood

[...]

[M]ost of this literature is quantitative, consisting for the most part of surveys of admissions officers. The consistent finding of such studies is that homeschooled applicants are accepted at roughly the same rates as their conventionally schooled peers, that admissions staff generally expect homeschoolers to do as well as or better than their conventionally schooled peers in college, and that while colleges and universities welcome homeschooled applicants, most do not go out of their way to provide special services or admissions procedures for homeschoolers (Duggan, 2010; Haan & Cruickshank, 2006; Jones & Gloeckner, 2004b; Sorey & Duggan, 2008). One qualitative look at attitudes of admissions officers at three institutions, however, found that many officers privately believe that homeschoolers are close-minded religious bigots, suggesting that what such individuals report on surveys might not always tell the whole story (Millman & Millman, 2008).

Unlike most of what I've read about homeschooling, Kunzman and Gaither isn't inspiring.  But it inspires confidence in its accuracy.

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