Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 98

The Age of Em: Reply to Robin, by Bryan Caplan

Here's my reply to Robin's reply to my criticisms of The Age of Em.  I'm the main text; he's in first-level blockquotes; I'm in second-level blockquotes; he's in third-level blockquotes.

1. Robin only pretends to dodge
philosophy of mind. .. He tacitly accepts an extreme version of "Ems are
just as human as you or me" - and builds the whole book on this
assumption. The tell-tale sign: The Age of Em says vanishingly little
about the lives of biological humans during the Age of Em! .. he seems
so wedded to this philosophical (not social scientific) position that he
can't even feign agnosticism. What would feigning look like? Split the
book evenly between discussion of the lives of biological humans during
the Age of Em and ems during the Age of Em.

These are complaints about language and emphasis. On language, since
I'm constantly applying human and social sciences to ems it would have
been quite awkward to use any other than our usual language for
describing people. It is hard to imagine a readable book where words
like "people" are constantly replaced with phrases like "machines that
act like humans but do remember I'm not making any philosophical claims
here." On emphasis, very little happens to biological humans during the
em era, so equal emphasis would mean a very short book. That conflicts
with my goal of showing just how much I can say about this scenario.

I'm not advocating awkward language.  My point is that Robin barely discusses what is, by normal standards, the most important aspect of the Age of Em: The lives of biological human beings.  My explanation: Despite his claims of agnosticism, Robin thinks biological humans will be unworthy of his interest once trillions of ems exist.  This makes sense if ems are literally conscious.  Otherwise, not.

Robin's explanation - that "very little happens to biological humans during the em era" - is bizarre.  On his own account, biological humans become fabulously wealthy people of leisure almost overnight.  That's a big deal in itself, with far-reaching social and political implications.  How happy will humans be?  How many kids will they have?  How will status games change?  What will happy to partisanship?  Religion?   

3. Robin has a bizarre definition of
"marginalized" .. biological humans .. They'll be outnumbered, and
perform little "hands-on" work. But they'll be fabulously wealthy and
ultimately in charge." .. 5. Robin's conclusions only sound "taboo"
because he's using language strangely. .. Robots will "dominate" us no
more than rank-and-file workers "dominate" shareholders.

As I mentioned in a previous post, many have reacted to talks I've
given by complaining about humans no longer being at the center of
action, even when they understand that biological humans could for a
while own most of the em world, and thus direct how spare resources are
spent. I used words like those people use to acknowledge their concerns.

In Robin's scenario, such concerns are silly.  Does it make sense to feel bad for GM's majority shareholders because they don't personally assemble cars? 

4. Contrary to Robin's suggestion,
there's near-zero correlation between income and conservatism. ..
"subsistence farmers tend to have values more like those of
poor/conservative people today." .. Robin could say he's defining
"conservatism" in a technical or apolitical way. But when you're writing
for an audience, the author rightly bears the burden of highlighting
non-standard usage.

In that context I had just cited studies on strong correlations between the culture and wealth of nations,
and I had just explained in quite some detail the kind of
"conservatism" I meant there. It is true that I didn't mention
explicitly there that the word "conservatism" is used in many different
ways. But the book would be a lot more tedious if every time I
introduced and used a term I explained the many other ways people have
used that term.

My complaint is not just that "conservatism" is used in many ways, and Robin picks one.  My complaint is that "conservatism" is primarily used in one way that isn't Robin's way, leading to confusion.  This is a symptom of the unfortunate diary-like style of The Age of Em - the fact that you have to pre-understand Hansonian thought in great detail to grasp what he's saying. 

7. Robin's efforts to calm readers' fear of the future consistently backfire. Example:

Readers of this book may find near
subsistence wages to be a strange and perhaps scary prospect. So it is
worth remembering that such wages in effect applied to almost all
animals who ever lived, to almost all humans before a few hundred years
ago, and for a billion humans still today. Historically, it is by far
the usual case.

Imagine a middle-class American's child
is destined to earn a subsistence wage. Would it make the parent feel
better to hear, "No big deal, your child will face the same fate as
almost every animal who ever lived, almost all humans before a few
hundred years ago, and a billion humans today"? No, even worse!

Saying something is "worth remembering" just means that it may change
how you think about that thing; it is not the same as saying "don't
worry." It isn't my job to make readers like the age of em, but it is my
job to make sure they keep important considerations in mind.

This looks like motte-and-bailey to me.  Robin routinely tries to paint the Age of Em in a favorable light.  Here's one memorable instance.  When you point out that his arguments are unconvincing, he protests he's merely trying to describe the future accurately, however awful it may be.  A few days latter, he resumes his advocacy.

10. Robin's argument against the Terminator scenario is much weaker than it looks. His words:

A reasonable hope is that ordinary humans
become the retirees of this new world. .. ems may be reluctant to
expropriate or exterminate ordinary humans if ems rely on the same or
closely interconnected legal, financial, and political systems as
humans, and if ems retain many direct social ties to ordinary humans.

The problem: As Robin explains, in one
human year, ems experience millennia. So even if each generation of ems
only has a .5% chance of expropriating humanity, the chance of
expropriation per human year is around 40%.

Bryan misreads me as trying to offer more reassurance than I can. I
was clear that even if humans survive the year or two that comprises the
age of em, I can say little about what might happen after that. "A
reasonable hope" is quite different from "don't worry." I would be
remiss if I didn't at least point readers in the direction of a
reasonable hope, even if I can offer few guarantees.

Never mind "guarantees."  My argument above implies biological humans are likely to be wiped out one year into the Age of Em as Robin describes it.  Is my argument wrong?  If so, why? 

Bryan's last two objections, on economics, are the ones I take most seriously.

8. Robin greatly overstates the quality
of life for ems. .. Why wouldn't ems' creators use the threat of
`physical hunger, exhaustion, pain, sickness, grime, hard labor, or
sudden unexpected death' to motivate the ems? Robin elsewhere talks
about `torturing' ems, so why not?" .. Modern systems of slave labor -
see Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany - used pain freely, because the
penalty for quitting was death.

I was careful not to claim that ems would not be slaves. I just
suggested that we didn't have good reasons to expect most being slaves.
Most people in history haven't been slaves, even when competition has
been strong. There are still some slaves in the world today, and they
aren't known for being spectacularly productive workers due to frequent
use of torture and pain. Nor were Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany
slaves known for stellar productivity. We have a larger literature on
motivating workers, and threats of pain only seem to be useful for the
most routine and physical of labor.

As I said, this large literature focuses on motivating workers who are free to quit.  If workers aren't free to quit, terror is an effective motivator - even for complex tasks.  Again, read the history of the Soviet nuclear program.  Stalin's top scientists worked in the shadow of death.  Since they couldn't flee, they worked like dogs to give him nuclear weapons, and reached their goal rapidly.  Just one example, but a powerful one nonetheless.

I agree Soviet and Nazi slaves' productivity was normally low, but the reason is simple: Their labor camps did not prioritize productivity; their main aim was crushing hated enemies, not maximizing output.

Historic slave systems did often augment negative incentives (torture, death) with positive incentives (better treatment, cash).  But there's a simple economic story: When slave-owners have imperfect information about slaves' productivity, high quotas lead to lots of counter-productive punishments.  Threatening to execute everyone who falls below the 90th-percentile of output, for example, requires slave-owners to kill 90% of their slaves.  Information about ems' productivity, however, should be much more accurate, especially since most descend from a small number of exceptional humans.  These are ideal conditions for heavy use of negative incentives.

When you seek workers to be
creative, think carefully, take the initiative, or persuade and inspire
others, you mostly seek other motivations. Our best analogy for ems
should be the few hundred most productive people in the world today, and
threats of pain are not remotely what motivate them. Who thinks torture
would make them more productive overall in the long run?

If they're not free to quit, I think exactly that. 

9. Robin's arguments for his single
craziest claim - global GDP will double every "month, week, day, or even
faster" - are astoundingly weak. .. In the real world, however, there
are literally hundreds of bottlenecks that radically retard this kind of
growth. Politically, something as simple as zoning could do the trick.
.. the most favorable political environments on earth still have plenty
of regulatory hurdles .. we should expect bottlenecks for key natural
resources, location, and so on. .. This alleged "concrete clue" is
nothing compared to the bona fide "concrete clue" that almost all
fantastic claims are false. And the idea that the global economy will
start doubling on a monthly basis is fantastically fantastic. This has
to be the least Bayesian part of the book: We start with a claim with a
near-zero prior probability, make a couple of flimsy arguments, and
somehow end up with a high posterior probability.

One could have similarly argued that fundamental growth bottlenecks
must prevent the previous observed huge jumps in growth rates, such as
from foraging to farming, or farming to industry. And plausibly related
obstacles did prevent those eras from starting as soon as they
might have. But eventually obstacles were overcome. No doubt our current
economy tolerates many delays that would have to be cut to enable much
faster growth, and the em economy won't start as early as it might
because of regulatory and other delays. My book is mainly about what
happens once those obstacles are overcome. Does Bryan really think such
obstacles could never be overcome?

To make global GDP double every month, you don't have to overcome some bottlenecks.  You have to overcome an accelerating series of bottlenecks.  The bigger and faster the changes you seek, the more obstacles you meet. 

Even when doing so might
quickly allow a city or nation to dominate the world? His "near-zero
prior" seems to come not from any fundamental analysis but, from his
strong reliance on intuition;

Whatever you call it, I'm exercising common-sense skepticism.  When someone predicts huge changes, I scoff unless they have overwhelming evidence in their favor.  So should we all.

I suspect he would have similarly assigned
a very low prior to manned flight in 1850, or to space flight in 1900.

Technically, there was manned flight in 1850.  More to the point, there's a world of difference between predicting specific technological advances, and claiming they'll quickly and constructively revolutionize society.  I can believe there's a 1% chance ems will emerge in a century.  That's not crazy.  But it is crazy to think the emergence of ems will lead global GDP to start doubling on a monthly basis.  For that, a conditional probability of one-in-a-million is generous.

Robin may protest he's simply applying standard growth theory to a novel situation.  A better description is that he's mechanically applying standard growth theory to an unprecedented situation the model was never designed to handle.

But as I said above, I expect many others agree with his intuition,
and I thank him for saying explicitly what others only think.

Not just "many others."  I predict at least 95% of empirical growth economists would agree with me.  Indeed, I'd be surprised if Robin could find any empirical growth economist with no prior affiliation with futurism or science fiction who'd view his conditional growth prediction as plausible.

Robin has helped me more than anyone else to internalize Bayesian thinking.  I'm flabbergasted, then, at how un-Bayesian his growth predictions are.  If "Technology X will cause global GDP to double" doesn't deserve an extraordinarily low prior probability, what does?  And what evidence has Robin produced to justify raising that prior above the microscopic level?

(1 COMMENTS)

Robin Hanson's The Age of Em: A Succinct Assessment, by Bryan Caplan

I've criticized Robin Hanson's Age of Em for being needlessly confusing.  To avoid being subject to the same charge, here is my succinct assessment.

1. Robin Hanson is a brilliant, delightful thinker, and I'm glad he wrote the book.

2. Futurism - especially futurism informed by social science - deserves much higher status and vastly more intellectual attention.

3. Artificial intelligence will be important in the future.

4. While it's possible to bypass philosophy of mind and simply describe the future role of AI, Robin's whole analysis tacitly assumes an extreme version of "ems are just as human as you or me."  If he were really agnostic, roughly 50% of the book would have focused on the lives of biological humans during The Age of Em.  The true share is more like 2%.

5. In practice, the difference between ems and generalized AIs will be
modest, because we'll pre-select robot-like humans to emulate.  Talking
about ems' love lives and religiosity is silly.

6. Robin describes the Age of Em in lurid language, then wonders why readers are afraid.  How does he expect readers to react when he tells them that "ordinary humans" will be "sidelined" and "earn zero wages," while the "vast majority of people will live at the subsistence level"?

7. In plain English, however, Robin's description of his scenario is very bright.  Biological humans will enjoy immense prosperity.  If simulated humans are conscious, their lives will be hard, if not hellish.  But why would mere simulations be conscious, anyway?

8. As long as AIs are psychologically robot-like, biological humans will remain in charge of politics and business.  Biological humans won't be dominated, expropriated, or exterminated by their own creations.

9. However, if AIs are psychologically human-like, ems will probably do terrible things to the first generation of biological humans to meet them.  Since the ems subjectively experience years in a single objective day, a small risk of em-human conflict per em generation yields a very high risk of em-human conflict per human generation.  Over time, moreover, this risk is likely to rise, because the ems would, within a few of their own generations, develop a radically separate identity and social network, creating preconditions for ugly - and plausibly genocidal - group conflict.  Remember: In Robin's scenario, the ems vastly outnumber the humans, even though the humans have the lions' share of the wealth.  And the humans no longer contribute anything to the global economy; they're true rentiers.

10. No matter what happens with AI, the global economy will never double in size annually, much less monthly.  There are too many political, economic, technological, and social bottlenecks.  In any case, the extraordinary claim that the economy will double on a monthly basis requires extraordinary evidence that Robin definitely does not possess.

(3 COMMENTS)

What's Wrong in Robin Hanson's The Age of Em, by Bryan Caplan

[Note: The Age of Em (in italics) refers to Robin's book.  The Age
of Em (not in italics) refers to the hypothetical future era when whole-brain
emulations become practically feasible.]

While I'm thrilled that Robin Hanson has published his first book, and have high hopes for the social science of futurism, The Age of Em greatly displeases me.  If he rigorously reasoned from his premise - whole brain emulations - I could just suspend my technological disbelief.  Unfortunately, the reasoning simply isn't very rigorous.  When someone asks me, "Show me the greatness of Robin Hanson," I have to look elsewhere. 

Granting Robin's technological premise, here are the book's main weaknesses, roughly in the order they appear in the text.  Some of my criticisms arguably bolster Robin's hopes for the future; my point, in each case, is simply that Robin is making big literally false or deeply misleading statements.

1. Robin only pretends to dodge philosophy of mind.  His words:

[M]ost who discuss ems debate their feasibility or timing, ponder their implications for the philosophies of mind or identity, or use them to set dramatic stories. Such discussants usually ask: is it conscious? Is it me? Is it possible? When will it come? How can it enrich my story?

In this book I instead seek realistic social implications--in what sort of new social world might ems live?

Steering clear of philosophy of mind seems like an excellent way to bypass deadlocked debates and break new ground on a separate set of issues.  Unfortunately, Robin doesn't actually do this.  Instead, he tacitly accepts an extreme version of "Ems are just as human as you or me" - and builds the whole book on this assumption.  The tell-tale sign: The Age of Em says vanishingly little about the lives of biological humans during the Age of Em!  Or as Robin tells us early on:

(If you can't see the point in envisioning the lives of your descendants, you'd best quit now, as that's mostly all I've got.)

To me, and I believe almost everyone else, my "descendants" are the biological humans.  To Robin, in contrast, my "descendants" are ems.  Frankly, he seems so wedded to this philosophical (not social scientific) position that he can't even feign agnosticism.  What would feigning look like?  Split the book evenly between discussion of the lives of biological humans during the Age of Em and ems during the Age of Em.

2. Robin exaggerates how dramatically humans have changed over time:

The problem is, the future will probably hold new kinds of people. Your descendants' habits and attitudes are likely to differ from yours by as much as yours differ from your ancestors. If you understood just how different your ancestors were, you'd realize that you should expect your descendants to seem quite strange. Historical fiction misleads you, showing your ancestors as more modern than they were. Science fiction similarly misleads you about your descendants.

I don't read much historical fiction, but I have read a lot of fiction from earlier eras.  And contrary to Robin, I see a largely constant human nature.  Characters in Shakespeare seem as credible to me - nay, more credible - than characters in modern fiction.  Ancient Roman historians make as much sense to me - nay, more sense - than modern historians.  The same goes, in my view, for cross-cultural research.  As the Roman poet Terence (195/185-159 BC) put it, "I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me."

3. Robin has a bizarre definition of "marginalized":

Just as foragers and subsistence farmers are marginalized by our industrial world, humans are not the main inhabitants of the em era. Humans instead live far from the em cities, mostly enjoying a comfortable retirement on their em-economy investments. This book mostly ignores humans, and focuses on the ems, who have very human-like experiences.

Suppose foragers and subsistence farmers owned 90% of the industrial world's financial assets, housing, and so on.  Even if they were never CEOs or served on boards of directors, we would not call them "marginalized."  Why?  Because though they are outnumbered, they are fabulously wealthy and ultimately in charge.  The same goes for biological humans in Robin's scenario.  They'll be outnumbered, and perform little "hands-on" work.  But they'll be fabulously wealthy and ultimately in charge.  Or so it would seem - and Robin makes little effort to show otherwise.

4. Contrary to Robin's suggestion, there's near-zero correlation between income and conservatism.  His words:

Foragers tend to have values more like those of rich/liberal people today, while subsistence farmers tend to have values more like those of poor/conservative people today. As industry has made us richer, we have on average moved from conservative/farmer values to liberal/foragers values...

Robin could say he's defining "conservatism" in a technical or apolitical way.  But when you're writing for an audience, the author rightly bears the burden of highlighting non-standard usage.  On standard definitions, it's far more accurate to say that rich people and societies are more socially liberal but more economically conservative.

5. Robin's conclusions only sound "taboo" because he's using language strangely.  His words:

This book violates a standard taboo, in that it assumes that our social systems will mostly fail to prevent outcomes that many find lamentable, such as robots dominating the world, sidelining ordinary humans, and eliminating human abilities to earn wages.

In plain English, Robin predicts that biological humans have a great life in The Age of Em. Robots will "dominate" us no more than rank-and-file workers "dominate" shareholders.  That's a very comforting vision of the future, except perhaps for sci-fi fans.

6. Robin greatly overstates the difference between his "em scenario" and the "generalized AI scenario."  How so?  The Age of Em makes
numerous arguments by analogy: Since humans typically do X in situation
Y, and ems are copies of humans, ems will also typically do X in
situation Y.  But he also keeps telling us that only a tiny
hand-picked sub-sample of humans will be copied.  The obvious question:
Why wouldn't ems largely be copies of the most "robot-like" humans -
humble workaholics with minimal personal life, content to selflessly and
uncomplainingly serve their employers?  This in turn implies that most of Robin's "detail" is roughly the opposite of what would really happen.

7. Robin's efforts to calm readers' fear of the future consistently backfire.  Example:

Readers
of this book may find near subsistence wages to be a strange and
perhaps scary prospect. So it is worth remembering that such wages in
effect applied to almost all animals who ever lived, to almost all
humans before a few hundred years ago, and for a billion humans still
today. Historically, it is by far the usual case.

Imagine
a middle-class American's child is destined to earn a subsistence
wage.  Would it make the parent feel better to hear, "No big deal, your child will face the same fate as almost every animal who ever lived, almost all humans before a
few hundred years ago, and a billion humans today"?  No, even worse!

8. On his own terms, Robin greatly overstates the quality of life for ems.  His words:

Yes,
"poor" ems spend a large fraction of their time working. But such ems
need not suffer physical hunger, exhaustion, pain, sickness, grime, hard
labor, or sudden unexpected death. Widespread use of automation makes
most jobs at least modestly mentally challenging. As most ems are poor,
em poverty does not inflict the same pain of low social status that it
does in societies such as ours where most people are rich. Ems could be
assured of very high-quality entertainment during leisure time, and of a
comfortable indefinite retirement when they were no longer competitive at work.

The obvious question: Why wouldn't ems' creators use the threat of
"physical hunger, exhaustion, pain, sickness, grime, hard labor, or
sudden unexpected death" to motivate the ems?  Robin elsewhere talks
about "torturing" ems, so why not?  And of course, the best way to make such threats credible is to enforce them out without mercy. 

To be fair, Robin does say:

It
is possible that stronger punishment involves direct pain, and this has
often happened in the distant past. But the extreme rarity of this
practice today suggests that pain is not very useful as a motivator for
workers in advanced industrial jobs, and so is also only rarely useful
for em workers.

But again, Robin misses the obvious retort: If employers tried using pain to motivate free
workers, the workers would quit.  Modern systems of slave labor - see
Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany - used pain freely, because the
penalty for quitting was death.  Even Stalin's nuclear scientists feared execution if they failed to produce a nuclear bomb in a timely manner - and as you'd expect, this fear was a powerful motivator.

9.  Robin's arguments for his
single craziest claim - global GDP will double every "month, week, day,
or even faster" - are astoundingly weak.  Yes, Argument #1 has superficial
appeal:

Special three-dimensional (3D) printers have been
created that can print about one-half of their components in about 3
days of constant use (Jones et al. 2011). If the other half could be
made just as fast, a 3D printer could self-replicate in a week. If the
other half of the parts for a 3D printer took ten times longer to make,
then a 3D printer could self-replicate in 5 weeks.

Together,
these estimates suggest that today's manufacturing technology is capable
of self-replicating on a scale of a few weeks to a few months.

In
the real world, however, there are literally hundreds of bottlenecks
that radically retard this kind of growth.  Politically, something as
simple as zoning could do the trick.  Robin will naturally appeal to
selection - the em economy will launch in whatever country has the most
em-positive regulatory environment.  But the most favorable political
environments on earth still have plenty of regulatory hurdles - especially for
technologies that pose a threat to reigning powers.  And politics aside,
we should expect bottlenecks for key natural resources, location, and
so on.  As an engineer, I'm sure Robin's heard of Murphy's Law.  Furthermore, if ems are bad at any crucial task, biological humans have to take up the slack, in their usual sluggish meat-space way. 

Robin's Argument #2 has no appeal at all:

Another
way to estimate the economic growth rate of the next era is to assume
that the next era will grow faster than our industrial era by a factor
similar to the factor by which our era grows faster than the farming
era, or by which the farming era grew faster than the forager era. Th is
method estimates a roughly 1 week to 1 month economic doubling time for
the next era. While this is admittedly only a weak clue regarding
future growth rates, we should not ignore it as it is one of the few concrete clues available.

This alleged "concrete clue" is nothing compared to the bona fide "concrete clue" that almost all fantastic claims are false.  And the idea that the global economy will start doubling on a monthly basis is fantastically fantastic.  This has to be the least Bayesian part of the book: We start with a claim with a near-zero prior probability, make a couple of flimsy arguments, and somehow end up with a high posterior probability.  I'd like to be more charitable, but I can't.

Lest you
think Robin is just speculating about economic growth in the Age of Em, here's his punchline: "For a concrete
estimate to use in the rest of this book, based on all of the above, I
choose an economic doubling time of 1 month."  Personally, I'd be amazed
if an em economy doubled the global economy's annual growth rate. 
Which would be awesome, of course.

10. Robin's argument against the Terminator scenario is much weaker than it looks.  His words:

Because
ordinary humans originally owned everything from which the em economy
arose, as a group they could retain substantial wealth in the new era.
Humans could own real estate, stocks, bonds, patents, etc. Thus a
reasonable hope is that ordinary humans become the retirees of this new
world. We don't today kill all the retirees in our world, and then take
all their stuff, in part because such actions would threaten the
stability of the legal, financial, and political world on which we all
rely, and in part because we have many direct social ties to retirees.
Yes we humans all expect to retire today, while ems don't expect to
become human, but em retirees are vulnerable in similar ways to humans.
So ems may be reluctant to expropriate or exterminate ordinary humans if
ems rely on the same or closely interconnected legal, financial, and
political systems as humans, and if ems retain many direct social ties to ordinary humans.

The
problem: As Robin explains, in one human year, ems experience
millennia.  So even if each generation of ems only has a .5% chance of
expropriating humanity, the chance of expropriation per human year is
around 40%.  If Robin's general picture is correct, what the ems see as the end of age-old human dominance will
happen right before the eyes of the Age of Em's first generation of humans.  With fire and blood.

P.S. Is there a contradiction between Criticism #5 and Criticism #10?  No.  Criticism #5 says existing humans would be pleased to live in the Age of Em as Robin describes it.  Criticism #10 says existing humans would be horrified by the Age of Em as the logic of Robin's position suggests it would unfold. 

P.P.S. Fortunately, per Criticism #6, Robin's analogies between humans and ems are largely spurious.  If ems ever came into being, they'd be heavily selected for docility and pose no serious threat to mankind even in the long-run.  So despite everything, I hope the Age of Em comes.  I just think it's astronomically unlikely.

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Regret and the Status Quo, by Bryan Caplan

Zeelenberg et al's "The Inaction Effect and the Psychology of Regret" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2012) opens with a fascinating fact:

A study of verbal expressions of emotions in everyday conversation revealed that regret was the second most frequently named emotion (only love was mentioned more frequently; Shimanoff, 1984).

The piece then reviews earlier findings:

One of the central issues in current regret research concerns the question of whether people regret the actions they have taken more than the actions they have foregone (i.e., inactions). Because of the large number of studies showing that outcomes achieved... through action lead to more regret than do the same outcomes achieved through inaction [ton of cites] Gilovich and Medvec (1995) nominated this as "the clearest and most frequently replicated finding" (p. 380) in this domain.

[...]

Gilovich and Medvec also found instances in which inactions were regretted more than actions. However, these authors studied the temporal pattern of regret and showed the existence of an inaction effect for long-term regrets: When looking back, people experience most regret over the paths not taken. Hence, Gilovich and Medvec argued that, over time, a number of psychological processes decrease the regret of actions taken and bolster the regret of actions forgone. Kahneman (1995) argued that the short-term and long-term regrets that Gilovich and Medvec investigated were actually two different types of regret: hot regret, which is the direct emotional reaction to the outcome, and wistful regret, which is the less intense emotion "associated with pleasantly sad fantasies of what might have been" (p. 391). In a recent publication, Gilovich, Medvec, and Kahneman (1998) agreed on the existence of hot and wistful regret, thereby restating the fact that, ceteris paribus, actions produce more hot regrets than do inactions.

Zeelenberg et al.'s original contribution: They show that inaction leads to more regret than action as long as action is the normal response to prior events.  As a general rule, doing something abnormal and failing is the perfect storm of regret.  Details:

[T]here may be many situations that clearly call for action. In fact, the supposition that actions are more abnormal than inactions seems to be contradicted by game-theoretical research showing that people often base their decisions on a simple win stay-lose change heuristic (e.g., Macy, 1995). Likewise, research in consumer psychology often shows that people only take action when a prior experience was negative. For example, in their study on brand switching, Tellis and Geath (1990) demonstrated that consumers primarily switch brands after a negative experience; after positive or neutral experiences consumers tend to remain inactive and stick to their chosen brand. Furthermore, indirect support for this reasoning comes from the colloquial expressions that one should never change a winning team and that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. These sayings suggest that one's decision to take action or not might be based on earlier outcomes. The sayings also imply that action should follow a negative prior outcome or event: Fix it when it is broken, and change a losing team.

Taken together, the above leads us to propose that negative prior outcomes can induce a tendency to act and, consequently, make action more normal than inaction. If so, this would imply that in the case in which negative prior outcomes demand action to be taken, an inaction effect should be found; that is, actions foregone are regretted more than actions taken. Thus, if after experiencing a negative outcome, one does not take action to prevent further losses, one would feel intense regret if these losses do occur (e.g., asking oneself, "Why didn't I do anything?"). However, if one did take action to prevent further losses but was unsuccessful, the regret will be less intense (e.g., saying to oneself, "At least I tried!").

The authors run five experiments to test their revisionist theory.  They seem to be right five times out of five.  From the write-up of the Experiment #5:

This experiment reveals, as do the previous ones, that the effects of action/inaction on counterfactual emotions are very much contingent on what is known about prior outcomes.

The general lesson: As Nathaniel Bechhofer often insists, regret is endogenous.  When inaction is normal, trying and failing leads to the most regret.  When action is normal, however, doing nothing and failing leads to the most regret.  When the FDA has a perceived responsibility to actively protect us, approving bad drugs leads to regret (and blame).  But in an alternate universe where the FDA has a perceived responsibility to let people make their own decisions, delaying good drugs would lead to regret (and blame) instead. 

A little shock doctrine, anyone?

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What's Right in Robin Hanson's The Age of Em, by Bryan Caplan

Today is the official release date for Robin Hanson's first book, The Age of Em . 
In far mode, I'm delighted.  Robin is one of my favorite minds in the
universe, a perpetual motion machine of intellectual delight.  I've long
been worried that he would never write a book; now he's put my fears to
rest. 

In near mode, however, I'm frustrated by the uneven quality of the book.  Robin makes many excellent points, but he interweaves them with overconfident claims that range from speculative to insane.  While The Age of Em embodies most of my guidelines for worthy non-fiction, it still reads like a diary.  If you don't already know Robin's thought well, the book is simply hard to follow.  And while he doesn't quite preach to the choir, his efforts to connect to readers who don't read sci-fi are perfunctory at best.

For release day, though, let me focus on the highlights.  The Age of Em embodies a new idea, or even a new genre: hard social science fiction.*  In ordinary hard science fiction, authors try to make their stories consistent with known laws of physical science.  Robin tries to make his analysis consistent with known laws of social science as well.  The goal is to nudge social scientists to think more about the future, and futurists to think more about economics, sociology, psychology, and beyond.  What would really happen if we could fully digitize existing human minds?

While Robin applies a wide range of social science, the Malthusian model is the eye of the storm.  For biological human beings, the model has been a colossal failure for centuries - not to mention a perennial rationale for savagery.  But once we can copy human minds like software - and conveniently upload them into robots and virtual reality - the Malthusian model finally comes into its own.  (In a weird way).

Thus the introduction of competitively supplied ems should greatly lower wages, to near the full cost of the computer hardware needed to run em brains. Such a scenario is famously called "Malthusian," after Thomas Malthus who in 1798 argued that when population can grow faster than total economic output, wages fall to near subsistence levels.

Note that in this section we are assuming that enough ems are willing to copy themselves to fill new job openings, and that they have not organized to avoid competing with each other. We shall consider these assumptions in more detail in the section "Enough Ems".

Note also that having em wages near subsistence levels should eliminate most of the familiar wage premiums for workers who are smarter, healthier, prettier, etc., than others. Because ems can be copied so easily, even the most skilled ems can be just as plentiful as any other kind of em. While wages vary to compensate for the costs of training to learn particular tasks, wages do not compensate much for other general differences. This should greatly reduce wage inequality (although not necessarily wealth inequality), and increase the relative fraction of workers hired that are of the types that earn higher wages today. For example, if today we hire fewer lawyers compared with janitors because lawyers are more expensive, in a similar situation ems hire more lawyers and fewer janitors.

Another virtue of the book is that Robin's powerfully defends the intellectual value of futurism.  If the past is worth studying, so is the future:

If the future matters more than the past, because we can influence it, why do we have far more historians than futurists? Many say that this is because we just can't know the future. While we can project social trends, disruptive technologies will change those trends, and no one can say where that will take us. In this book, I've tried to prove that conventional wisdom wrong, by analyzing in unprecedented breadth and detail the social implications of minds "uploaded" into computers...

And whatever flaws the book has, you can't accuse Robin of wishful thinking. 

My most basic method in this book is to focus first on expectations, rather than on hopes or fears. I seek first what is likely to happen if no special effort is made to avoid it, instead of what I might prefer to happen, or what I might want to warn others to avoid. It is hard to speak usefully about which directions to push the future if you have little idea of what the future will be if you don't push. And we shouldn't overestimate our ability to push.

[...]

Th is book violates a standard taboo, in that it assumes that our social systems will mostly fail to prevent outcomes that many find lamentable, such as robots dominating the world, sidelining ordinary humans, and eliminating human abilities to earn wages. Once we have framed a topic as a problem that we'd want our social systems to solve, it is taboo to discuss the consequences of a failure to solve that problem. discussing such consequences is usually only acceptable as a way to scare people into trying harder to solve the problem.

If anything, Robin suffers from "sweet grapes" - trying to convince readers
that however scary the future sounds, we'll like it once we have it.  As I'll soon argue, however, he makes this task needlessly difficult by stubbornly sidelining the welfare of the creatures his readers actually care about: biological humans!

* Termed coined by Alex Tabarrok, if I remember correctly.





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Exclusion: The Uncanny Moral Valley, by Bryan Caplan

Suppose the people of group X are a blight on society.  They may not be uniformly bad, but statistically speaking, they're trouble.  Perhaps they're criminals.  Perhaps they're parasites.  Perhaps they're bad voters.  Whatever the specifics, they're proverbially "screwing up America" (or whatever your country happens to be).  What should be done?  Here are some remedies, in descending order of brutality.

1. Murder.  Round up the members of group X and wipe them out.  If they make any converts, murder them, too. 

2. Sterilization.  Round up the members of group X and destroy their ability to have children.  This does nothing to reduce their current poor behavior, but - in the absence of rapid conversion - ensures group X will eventually become extinct.

3. Exclude.  Enact immigration restrictions to keep members of group X out of your country.  This does nothing to undo the harm that group X currently inflicts.  Nor does it prevent the harm future generations of X will inflict.  But it does effectively contain the social damage group X inflicts.

4. Brainwash.  Subject members of group X, or perhaps just their children, to mandatory "re-education" to suppress - or at least dilute - their identity. 

5. Censor.  Forcibly silence members of group X to prevent them from spreading their identity by speaking or writing.

6. Disenfranchise.  Deny members of group X the right to vote so the political system ignores their wishes.

Mercifully, the first two measures - murder and sterilization - are now extremely unpopular.  Indeed, groups inclined to mass murder and forced sterilization now top our lists of people who are a blight on society.

The last three measures - brainwashing, censorship, and disenfranchisement, are only slightly more accepted.  Sure, people tolerate a little propaganda in public schools.  But at least in democracies, curricula avoid blatantly disrespecting students' group identities - even if their group is widely seen as a blight on society.  Censorship is even less prevalent.  A few hate speech laws aside, democracies let people speak their minds - even if their minds are twisted and evil.  And in modern democracies, the mildest measure on my list - disenfranchisement - is nigh unthinkable.  Everyone deserves a say in their government, right?

Lest you conclude toleration has triumphed, however, note that virtually every country enthusiastically uses method #3 - exclusion.  Contrary to anti-immigration propaganda, existing restrictions are very strict; that's why human smuggling prices are so high and only a tiny fraction of would-be migrants actually come.  Countries don't just bar criminals or suspected terrorists.  "Cultural differences" alone are a common rationale for exclusion.

It's tempting to say, "Civilized countries avoid draconian policies in favor of milder approaches," but that's flatly false.  Countries avoid both draconian and mild approaches, while using method #3 to the hilt.  If you doubt exclusion is harsher than brainwashing, censorship, or disenfranchisement, just ask yourself: How many would-be migrants would decline a green card if they were warned, "If you come, your whole family must attend weekly citizenship classes," "If you come, you have to keep your beliefs to yourself," or "If you come, you can't vote."  Indeed, it's unclear that sterilization is harsher than exclusion.  Plenty of Third Worlders and refugees would gladly go under the knife to get a green card.

It's similarly tempting to insist, "Countries belong to their citizens, so their citizens have the right to decide who can come.  Our land, our rules."  But this doesn't explain popular aversion to brainwashing, censorship, and disenfranchisement.  Families and private clubs do more than restrict membership.  They also routinely tell their members what to think, silence dissent, and restrict the right to vote.  If collective property justifies the former, why not the latter?

In videogames and robotics, designers have long noticed an "uncanny valley."  Human beings readily relate to simple stick figures.  Human beings readily relate to fellow human beings.  But semi-realistic depictions freak us out.

When modern human beings ponder ways to deal with allegedly unpleasant out-groups, an analogous uncanny moral valley emerges.  Everything from murder to denying the vote seems abhorrent.  Except, of course, for immigration restrictions, which almost everyone accepts without shame despite the immense harm they inflict on hundreds of millions of innocent people.

What's going on?  I see a severe case of "out of sight, out of mind."  Immigration restrictions don't bother us much because the people we harm aren't here yet.  All of the other measures, in contrast, have visible targets.  This also explains, of course, why immigration debates focus so much on amnesty for current illegal immigrants, rather than higher quotas for legal immigrants.  The former group feels more human than the latter.

How can we intellectually resolve the illogic of the uncanny moral valley?  The consistent authoritarian route, of course, is to say, "Since is draconian exclusion is a great idea, so are vigorous brainwashing, censorship, and disenfranchisement."  The consistent civil libertarian, in contrast, says, "Since even mild brainwashing, censorship, and disenfranchisement are unacceptable, so is exclusion," perhaps combined with the bon mot that authoritarians - trigger-happy to impose collective punishment - are the leading group X that blights society. 

Between these extremes, naturally, there lies a continuum of internally consistent positions.  Personally, though I'm far closer to the civil libertarian than the authoritarian, I draw a fine line between disenfranchisement and everything higher up the list.  As Jason Brennan powerfully argues in his forthcoming Against Democracy , democracy has only instrumental value.  Voting isn't about doing what you want with what you own; it's about doing what you want with what other people own.  And as poll taxes show, most people barely value the right to vote anyway; how many people would pay even $100 to vote this year?  The upshot: If group X is genuinely "screwing up society," depriving group X of the right to vote would be unobjectionable.  Anything harsher, though, is uncivilized.

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Why I Think I Win My Bets, by Bryan Caplan

I'm tempted to tell Scott, "You had me at 'Why Bryan Caplan wins almost all of his bets."*  But my story varies from his.  Scott begins:

Bryan almost always takes the consensus view in any bet.

Not really.  In general, I think "consensus views" on interesting questions tend to be innumerate and paranoid. 

Scott immediately adds:

The view a betting market would take, if one existed.

Betting market prices are hardly equivalent to "consensus views," though you could say betting markets reflect the consensus of the small subset of people willing to put their money where their mouths are.  But in any case, this is a circular explanation for why I win, because it doesn't explain how I ballpark a betting market position when there is no betting market.

Introspectively, two key practices account for most of my success.

1. I take the "outside view."  When predicting, I start with long-run averages, and presume the "latest news" is distracting trivia.  For example, when I made my unemployment bet with Tyler, I looked at all the unemployment data for 1948 to the present, and assumed the future would resemble the past.  As usual, it did.

2. I spurn hyperbole.  Human beings adore superlatives, but superlatives rarely apply to the real world.  So when I notice someone treating hyperbolic poetry as literal truth, I rush to wager.  For example, when John Podhoretz asserted that the Iran nuclear deal "effectively ensures that it will be a nuclear state with ballistic
missiles in 10 years," I smelled hyperbole, and tried in vain to entice him put some money on it.

In slogan form: I owe my track record to numeracy and normalcy.  Step back, calm down, look at the numbers, and target thinkers who say, "This time it's different." 

* How frequently do I really win?  See my 2016 bet inventory.

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Migration and Welfare in Maoist China, by Bryan Caplan

The welfare state is an appealing rationale for migration restrictions.  Normally, of course, it's a rationale for international migration restrictions.  In Maoist China, however, the urban welfare state swiftly became a rationale for restricting domestic migration from the countryside, enforced by mass deportation.  As Frank Dik��tter explains in his excellent new The Cultural Revolution: A People's History 1962-1976 :

As soon as the bamboo curtain came down in 1949, the new regime had started emptying the cities of entire categories of people described as a threat to social order and a drain on public resources.  Prostitutes, paupers and pickpockets, as well as millions of refugees and disbanded soldiers, were sent to the countryside, which became the great dumping ground for undesirable elements.  In the intervening years, as the household registration system imposed strict controls on the movement of people, a sometimes deadly game of cat and mouse developed... Migrant workers had no secure status, and risked expulsion back to the countryside at any time.  Once in a while, a purge would cleanse the cities of people without proper documentation.  Those who were caught were sent back to their villages, while hardened recidivists were dispatched to the gulag.

In 1958, at the height of the Great Leap Forward, as targets for industrial output were ceaselessly revised upwards, more than 15 million villagers moved to the city.  But three years later, with the country bankrupt, 20 million people were deported back to the countryside.

The welfare state connection:

Class background mattered a great deal in the socialist state, but ultimately the inability to earn a living was a far greater stigma.  Destitute members of society, in other words, were treated like pariahs.  The economy was in the doldrums, and the state wanted to reduce the number of people who represented a drain on its resources.  In many parts of the country the most vulnerable categories of people were sent into exile...

In Shanghai the authorities even envisaged reducing the population by one-third.  As early as April 1968, all retired workers and those on sick leave were ordered back to the countryside without pension or medical support if they lacked the proper class credentials.  A year and a half later, after more than 600,000 people had been deported, including students and other undesirable elements, a new plan proposed to increase the number of people earmarked for removal to a total of 3.5 million.  Half of all medical workers were to be sent off, as well as all unemployed and retired people.  Those suffering from chronic illness were added to the list.  Even prisons were to be relocated outside the city limits.  The plan was never fully implemented, but for years the population of Shangai stagnated around the 10 million  mark.

When people claim that deporting millions of illegal immigrants from the United States is "impossible," I always furrow my brow.  With totalitarian brutality, it's totally possible. 

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Euroteach, by Bryan Caplan

This summer, I'll be in Europe for a month, from June 16-July 16.  My activities:



1. Teaching Advanced Public Choice at the University of M��nster. Classes are on Monday afternoons and Tuesday mornings.  If you wish to audit, please email me.  The class will be taught in English, with my minimal German mixed in for comic relief.

2. Speaking at the IEA's THINK conference in London on July 2.



3. Speaking in Heidelberg on the evening of July 12.



If you want to meet up in M��nster or London, email me and perhaps we can work something out.  In Heidelberg, I'll only be available to hang out for an our or two after the talk.

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Multinationals Are Well-Managed in All Countries, by Bryan Caplan

One picture is worth a thousand words, courtesy of Bloom and Van Reenen's "Why Do Management Practices Differ Across Firms and Countries?" (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2010)



My earlier comments on this still-underrated piece here.

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