Month: April 2022

An Age of Nationalism & An Age of Ideology

An Age of Nationalism & An Age of Ideology

Posted on by jabittan

In The Better Angels of Our Nature Steven Pinker presents an idea from Historian Evan Luard which frames the conflicts of the early 20th century against the conflicts which followed. Luard argues that the world transitioned from an Age of Nationalism to an Age of Ideology following the United States engagement in WWI.

Pinker writes, “Luard ends his Age of Nationalism in 1917. That was the year the United States entered the war and rebranded it as a struggle of democracy against autocracy, and in which the Russian Revolution created the first communist state. The world then entered the Age of Ideology, in which democracy and communism fought Nazism in World War II and each other during the Cold War.”

This is a helpful, broad overview of recent human history and the two major wars that still play major roles in our collective memories. However, it isn’t a perfect explanation and framework for understanding our history. While it is possible that humanity moved in a direction of ideology relative to a framework dominated by nationalism, it leaves us with an incomplete picture that is too final in its treatment of nationalism and too strong in its treatment of ideology.

Nazism was centered around the idea of an ethno-nationalist state. It is hard to argue that it was not a continuation of nationalism and was more focused on ideology. Democracy was (and still is) highly tied to specific nations, as was (and is) communism. The ideologies may have been the leading banners, but the nation states were still the leading actors. Ideology is a broad concept, and when you dig below the surface, few people truly have a consistent or well pieced together ideology. Even for large ideologies like democracy or communism – relative to fascism which I would argue acts more as a catchall term for bad governance – people have trouble truly defining what ideologies mean and represent. People tend to have strong identities and weak ideologies.

Nevertheless, we can see that there was a change between the first and second world wars, a change that took place in the later half of the 20th century as Pinker notes based on Luard’s writing. In the case of the 20th century, I would argue it was not a change from nationalism to ideology, but a change in what were the most salient aspects of nationalism. Humans shifted from conceptualizing a nation based on loyalty leadership and familial bloodlines to conceptualizing a nation based on collective efforts of governance.

Characterizing the world in terms of broad ages will necessarily miss nuances like the ones I tried to tease apart here, but they help us see that what applied in the past may need to be adjusted before being reapplied to the present or future. That is the case with viewing history as an Age of Nationalism transitioning to an Age of Ideology.

Great Powers Wars

Great Powers Wars

Posted on by jabittan
“Countries that slip in or out of the great power league fight far more wars when they are in than when they are out,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature.
 
 
When we try to study the history of armed conflict we have to look at more modern examples of war and project backwards. We don’t have to go too far into the human past to start running into problems with records. Writing systems have been around for a while, but that doesn’t mean that everything that was written down was preserved and saved to today. It also doesn’t mean that since the time that humans developed writing systems humans have been recording wars and violent conflicts. Warring political factions and state based (however loosely you define a state) coalitions have likely been engaged in violent conflicts as far back as humans have organized themselves into political units, but can we tell if violent conflicts have gotten more or less common over history?
 
 
Pinker argues that conflicts have gotten less common throughout human history, especially in more recent history. Studying great powers helps us see that. Historically, humans are better record keepers when part of a major political unit. Great powers are better at documenting what they do, so their wars and conflicts are more likely to have been recorded and more of those records are likely to have survived to today. The evidence, as shown by Pinker’s quote, is that great powers fight more than minor powers. This means that studying the great powers gives us a good sense of the frequency of violent conflicts between political entities throughout history.
 
 
When we study great powers we see that violence has declined over time. The two wars of the 1900s were outliers. They were immense great power conflicts, and while great powers fight more than lesser powers, they generally have fought less and less over time. While it often doesn’t feel like it, war is becoming less common in human history. We are better at recording and documenting war, and evidence shows that we turn to war with less frequency than we did in the past.
Sunk Costs and Public Commitment

Sunk Costs & Public Commitment

Posted on by jabittan
The Sunk Cost fallacy is an example of an error in human judgment that we should all try to keep in mind. Thinking about sunk costs and how we respond to them can help us make better decisions in the future. It is one small avenue of cognitive psychology research that we can act on and see immediate benefits in our lives.
 
 
Sunk costs pop up all over the place. Are you hesitant to change lines at the grocery store because you have already been waiting in one line for a while and might as well stick it out? Did you start a landscaping project that isn’t turning out the way you want, but you are afraid to give up and try something else because you have already put so much time, money, and effort into the current project? Would you be mad at a politician who wanted to pull out of a deadly war and give up because doing so would mean that soldiers died in vain?
 
 
All of these examples are instances where sunk cost fallacies can lead us to make worse decisions. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker writes, “though psychologists don’t fully understand why people are suckers for sunk costs, a common explanation is that it signals a public commitment.” In the examples above, changing course signals something weak about us. We are not patient and not willing to stick out our original decision to wait in one grocery store line relative to another. We are not committed to our vision of a perfect lawn and are willing to give up and put in cheap rock instead of seeing our sprinkler system repair all the way through. And we are not truly patriotic and don’t truly value the lives of soldiers lost in war if we are willing to give up a fight. In each of these areas, we may feel pressured to persist with our original decision which has become more costly than we expected. Even as costs continue to mount, we feel a need to stay the course. We fail to recognize that sunk costs are in the past, that we can’t do anything to recoup them, and that we can make more efficient decisions moving forward if we can avoid feeling bad about sunk costs.
 
 
Tied  to the pressure we feel is a misperception of incremental costs. Somehow additional time spent in line, additional effort spent on the lawn, and additional lives lost in battle matter less given everything that has already passed. “An increment is judged relative to the previous amount,” writes Pinker. One more life lost in a war doesn’t feel as tragic once many lives have already been lost. Another hundred dollars on sprinkler materials doesn’t feel as costly when we have already put hundreds into our landscaping project (even if $100 in rock would go further and be simpler). And another minute in line at the grocery store is compared the to the time already spent waiting, distorting how we think about that time.
 
 
If we can reconsider sunk costs, we can start to make better decisions. We can get over the pride we feel waiting out the terrible line at the grocery store. We can reframe our landscaping and make the simpler decision and begin enjoying our time again. And we can save lives by not continuing fruitless wars because we don’t want those who already died to have died in vain. Changing our relationship to sunk costs and how we consider incremental costs can have an immediate benefit in our lives, one of the few relatively easy lessons we can learn from cognitive psychology research.
Street Gangs, Militias, Great Power Armies, & Game Theory

Street Gangs, Militias, Great Power Armies, & Game Theory

Posted on by jabittan
As we are learning with the War in Ukraine, understanding Game Theory is important if we want to understand why war breaks out, how long and how deadly a war will be, and how a war will come to a conclusion. Game Theory helps us think about the decision-making of the parties involved in a war and the incentives and risks that they face. Television pundits, journalists, politicians, and policy analysts are all engaging in game-theoretic evaluations of the current conflict in Ukraine to help think about a way that Russia could leave Ukraine without completely destroying the country and its population.
 
 
While much of the world has recently been thinking about Game Theory in the context of two large warring nations, the most basic way to think about and understand game theory is usually a two person situation known as the prisoner’s dilemma.  Conceptualizing Game Theory in this basic format gives us a framework that we can use to understand larger conflicts and dilemmas where parties have to make decisions anticipating the outcomes of their choices, the responses and choices of their opponents, and the subsequent reactions and decisions of everyone else along the way. The simple framework from a two person prisoner’s dilemma scales well.
 
 
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker writes about Game Theory and how size doesn’t seem to matter when we think in a game-theoretic way. He writes:
 
 
“The same psychological or game-theoretic dynamics that govern whether quarreling coalitions will threaten, back down, bluff, engage, escalate, fight on, or surrender apply whether the coalitions are street gangs, militias, or armies of great powers. Presumably this is because humans are social animals who aggregate into coalitions, which amalgamate into larger coalitions, and so on.”
 
 
Our coalitions are large and complex, but they are still organized around humans. Our social nature is predictable, meaning that Game Theory can apply in any human coalition, regardless of size. Quite often our large coalitions, especially coalitions that employ violence, are ultimately lead by a single individual who can command the decisions to use violence. This all contributes to Game Theory’s application across two people interactions, high school gangs, or armies comprising hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Game Theory helps us understand the decision-making of all the groups, regardless of their complexity and size.
The Poisson Nature of War

The Poisson Nature of War

Posted on by jabittan
When we look back at history and explain why the world is the way it is, we rarely attribute specific causes and results to chance. We don’t say that a group of terrorists happened to choose to fly planes into the World Trade Center on 9/11. We don’t say that a new technology happened to come along to advance the economy. And we don’t say that a war between two countries happened to break out. But in some ways it would make more sense for us to look back at history and view events as chance contingencies. Steven Pinker argues that we should do this when we look back at history’s wars.
 
 
Specifically, when we take a statistical view of the history of war, we see that wars follow a Poisson distribution. When we record all the wars in human history we see lots of short intervals between wars and fewer long gaps between wars. When we look back at history and try to explain wars from a causal standpoint, we don’t look at the pauses and gaps between wars. We look instead at the triggering factors and buildup to war. But what the statistics argue is that we are often seeing causal patterns and narratives where none truly exist. Pinker writes, “the Poisson nature of war undermines historical narratives that see constellations in illusory clusters.”
 
 
We see one war as leading to another war. We see a large war as making people weary of fighting and death, ultimately leading to a large period of peace. We create narratives which explain the patterns we perceive, even if the patterns are not really there. Pinker continues,
 
 
“Statistical thinking, particularly an awareness of the cluster illusion, suggests that we are apt to exaggerate the narrative coherence of this history – to think that what did happen must have happened because of historical forces like cycles, crescendos, and collision courses.”
 
 
We don’t like to attribute history to chance events. We don’t like to attribute historical decisions to randomness. We like cohesive narratives that weave together multiple threads of history, even when examples of random individual choices or chance events shape the historical threads and narratives. Statistics shows us that the patterns we see are not always real, but that doesn’t stop us from trying to pull patterns out of the randomness or the Poisson distribution of history anyway.
Random Clusters

Random Clusters

Posted on by jabittan
The human mind is not good at randomness. The human mind is good at identifying and seeing patterns. The mind is so good at patter recognition and so bad at randomness that we will often perceive a pattern in a situation where no pattern exists. We have trouble accepting that statistics are messy and don’t always follow a set pattern that we can observe and understand.
 
 
Steven Pinker points this out in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature and I think it is an important point to keep in mind. He writes, “events that occur at random will seem to come in clusters, because it would take a nonrandom process to space them out.” This problem of our perception of randomness comes into play when our music streaming apps shuffle songs at random. If we have a large library of our favorite songs to chose from, some of those songs will be by the same artist. If we hear two or more songs from the artist back to back, we will assume there is some sort of problem with the random shuffling of the streaming service. We should expect to naturally get clusters of songs by the same artist or even off the same album, but it doesn’t feel random to us when it happens. To solve this problem, music streaming services deliberately add algorithms that stop songs from the same artist from appearing in clusters. This makes the shuffle less random overall, but makes the perception of the shuffle feel more random to us.
 
 
Pinker uses lightning to describe the process in more detail. “Lightning strikes are an example of what statisticians call a Poisson process,” he writes. “In a Poisson process, events occur continuously, randomly, and independently of one another. … in a Poisson process the intervals between events are distributed exponentially: there are lots of short intervals and fewer and fewer of them as they get longer and longer.”
 
 
To understand a Poisson process, we have to be able to understand having many independent events and we have to shift our perspective to look at the space between events as variables, not just look at the events themselves as variables. Both of these things are hard to do. It is hard to look at a basketball team and think that their next shot is independent of the previous shot (this is largely true). It is hard to look at customer complaints and see them as independent (also largely true), and it is hard to look at the history of human wars and think that events are also independent (Pinker shows this to be largely true as well). We tend to see events as connected even when they are not, a perspective error on our part. We also look just at the events, not at the time between the events. If we think that the time between the events will have a statistical dispersion that we can analyze, it shifts our focus away from the actual event itself. We can then think about what caused the pause and not what caused the even. This helps us see the independence between events and helps us see the statistics between both the event and the subsequent pause between the next event. Shifting our focus in this way can help us see Poisson distributions, random distributions with clusters, and patterns that we might miss or misinterpret. 
 
 
All of these factors are part of probability and statistics which our minds have trouble with. We like to see patterns and think causally. We don’t like to see larger complex perspective shifting statistics. We don’t like to think that there is a statistical probability without an easily distinguishable pattern that we can attribute to specific causal structures. However, as lightning and other Poisson processes show us, sometimes the statistical perspective is the better perspective to have, and sometimes our brains run amok with finding patterns that do not exist in random clusters.
Steven Pinker Quotes Lewis Richardson on Indignation

Steven Pinker Quotes Lewis Richardson on Indignation

Posted on by jabittan
I have written in the past about outrage and how I believe that outrage is often more about ourselves than it is about the thing that has outraged us. Quite often we find ourselves incredibly mad about a situation that barely involves us or barely impacts our lives in any meaningful way. We might be outraged that Will Smith smacked Chris Rock on live TV. We might be outraged that a state has implemented new laws which make it harder for women to obtain abortions. And we might be outraged over a new tax that has been passed. But often, the actual impact on our lives of these types of events is negligible. Will Smith may have ruined our TV viewing night, we might not like the idea that abortions are harder for some people to obtain, and we might not like that our taxes have gone up a bit, but in all reality, few of these things will truly matter to us personally. Unless we were the person who got smacked, a woman who needed an abortion, or truly living in a position where any possible increase in taxes would bankrupt us, we don’t truly have a reason to be outraged.
 
 
Lewis Richardson, a mathematician and early influencer of research on peace, seemed to think the same about indignation. Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, quotes him as saying, “indignation is so easy and satisfying a mood that it is apt to prevent one from attending to any facts that oppose it.” Again, indignation, like outrage, is more about the individual than about the thing itself. Indignation is easy. It takes no effort to simply dislike something strongly. Indignation makes us feel that we are correct and so superior to others and other points of view that we do not even need to engage with them in a serious manner.
 
 
Something may be truly unacceptable. Something may actually be outrageously awful. But it is rare that we should draw a line in the sand and state that something is so unequivocally wrong and awful that we don’t even need to engage with other points of view. We don’t need to make our outrage or indignation more a marker of us than a disapproval of the outrageous and awful thing.
Learning from Patterns in History

Learning from Patterns in History

Posted on by jabittan
It is not enough to simply know history. Knowing history simply fills your brain with a bunch of facts. If you want to do something useful with the history that you know, such as learn from it to inform your decision-making, then you have to understand that history. Learning from history and understanding history means making connections, discerning patterns, and generalizing to new situations.
 
 
Steven Pinker writes about this in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature:
 
 
“Traditional history is a narrative of the past. But if we are to heed George Santayana’s advisory to remember the past so as not to repeat it, we need to discern patterns in the past, so we can know what to generalize to the predicaments of the present.”
 
 
If we want to make decisions about how to govern ourselves, about what we can expect if global warming intensifies, and about our economy, then it is helpful to look at patterns, trends, and outlier events of the past and understand them. We have to use statistics, test hypothesis against the data, analyze causal structures, and attempt to fit current situations into context using historical precedent. None of this is easy, and the science isn’t always exact, but it does help us better understand both what came before us and where we are currently. Patterns are what we learn from, and identifying real patterns rather than fluctuating noise is a complex but useful process.
 
 
Without taking the time to look at the past through a lens of data and science we leave ourselves open to misunderstandings of history. We will identify patterns that don’t actually exist, we will fail to put our current moment in the appropriate context, and we will be guessing as to what we should do next. By examining history and teasing out the patterns through statistical analysis, we hope to be able to make better decisions based on true historical precedence. We may still get things wrong, we may not use a large enough data set (or may not have a large enough dataset), we may not be able to generalize from the historical data to our present moment, but at least we are thinking carefully about what to do based on what the data of the past tells us. History is a story on its own, but with science it is a series of patterns that we can examine to better understand what has happened in the past and what may be to come in the future.
Counter-Enlightenment Goals

Counter-Enlightenment Goals

Posted on by jabittan
When I think about  The Enlightenment I think about rational thinkers making their best attempts to examine the world free from bias. I think of individuals who pursued new knowledge and truth and believed that life should be organized around reason. Many of them probably failed to live up to such goals, but their aspirations were virtuous in the sense that they attempted to live their lives not according to their own desires and pleasures but according to what science could show them was true and accurate about the physical world and man’s place within it.
 
 
Today, these Enlightenment values still exist and are with us, but they have dwindled to an extent. Science can tell us what is accurate and what is true. Reason can tell us what is good for ourselves, our society, and our planet. But neither can tell us how we should find enjoyment in our lives, how we should appreciate art and beauty, or what and who we should love. We can use statistical analyses, research surveys, and other tools of science and reason to determine a course of life that is likely to maximize certain values, but science and reason cannot pick the values we chose to maximize. There is something else, some intangible sense of a life worth living, of what we naturally gravitate toward and resonate with that science cannot answer for us. This is part of the heart of the counter-Enlightenment.
 
 
“A child of the counter-Enlightenment, then,” writes Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, “does not pursue a goal because it is objectively true or virtuous, but because it is a unique product of one’s creativity.”
 
 
American individualism is in many ways a product of this form of counter-Enlightenment. It is clear that drinking less, not smoking or vaping, driving less expensive vehicles, and exercising daily are good for us. It is clear that doing these things are likely to help us live healthy lives that are not overly financially burdened. But for many people, doing so is boring, hard, and unrewarding at an individual level. We want to be able to enjoy life with a vice or two. We want to have an expensive and unique car, even if it financially pushes us to the brink. We don’t want to spend all our free time exercising when there are such great TV shows and movies to watch and such great desserts out there to try. We are not motivated by what is objectively true, statistically likely to lead to a life that is healthy and financially stable, and what might be considered virtuous. We are motivated by what we can do to set ourselves apart, what we can do to be a uniquely creative individual, by what we can do to live a pleasurable and interesting life. The counter-Enlightenment fuels us to make decisions that rationally seem counterproductive to living a long, healthy, and successful life. But if we consider that our goals is to maximize our unique, entertaining, and creative life choices, then much of what we chose to do begins to make sense. We do not have Enlightenment goals, but rather our own counter-Enlightenment goals for life.
On Ego - A Response to a Comment from Philip

On Ego – A Response to a Comment from Philip

Posted on by jabittan
Philip asked me some thoughts about ego in a recent comment. Several years back I read and wrote about Ryan Holiday’s book Ego is the Enemy and it has been fundamental in shaping how I see and understand myself within our complex social world. In addition to Ego is the Enemy, Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s book The Elephant in the Brain and Daniel Kahneman’s work in Thinking Fast and Slow dramatically shape the way I understand the idea of the self, how we think, and the role of ego in our lives. Here are some of my thoughts on ego, and some specific responses to questions that Philip asked.
 
 
First, Philip said that he sees, “ego as a closed loop of sort, independent of the acting self.”
 
 
I wouldn’t agree with Philip on this point, but that is because I reject the idea of an independent acting self. Yuval Noah Harari is a great person to read on meditation and the idea of the self. If you ever try meditating, you will quickly learn that you don’t truly have control over your thoughts. This suggests that we don’t have an independent self that is doing the thinking in our minds. “Thoughts think themselves,” Harari has said, and if you meditate, you will understand what he means. Thoughts frequently pop into our head without our control. Ego, and the kinds of thoughts we associate with ego and megalomania, are all just thoughts swirling around in what appears to be a chaos of thoughts. Given the nature of thought, I don’t think we should think of ego as anything independent of the other thoughts within our mind.
 
 
Second, Philip says, “if you are in a state of security, you can choose not to act on ego.”
 
 
I also wouldn’t agree with this point. In his Meditations, Aurelius writes about Epictetus, a slave and a pioneer of stoicism. Epictetus was not exactly secure, but he was able to put aside ego and focus on the present moment. His particular brand of stoicism has resonated with prisoners of war and involves the dissolution of personal ego for survival. We can put aside ego at any point, regardless of how secure we are.
 
 
Also pushing against Philips thoughts is Donald Trump. Certainly, at many points in his life, Trump has been secure in terms of money, fame, power, and influence. Yet Trump is clearly an egomaniac who is unable to set his ego aside and will pursue even the smallest slights and insults against him. I don’t think that a state of security is really an important consideration for whether we act in an egotistical way.
 
 
Philip’s third observation on ego is “as a self preserving mechanism, protecting you and helping you in motivating living the life you do.”
 
 
This is a view on our ego that I would agree with. When we think about how the mind works, I think we should always approach it from an evolutionary psychology standpoint. Very likely, our brains are the way they are because at some point in the history of human evolution it was beneficial for our minds to function in one way over another. There could be some accidents, some mental equivalents to vestigial organs, and some errors in our interpretations, but we probably didn’t develop many psychological traits and maintain them throughout generations if they were not helpful for survival somewhere along the way.
 
 
When we view the ego through this lens, it is not hard to see how the ego could help improve our chances of surviving and passing down our genes. If we are egotistical and think that we deserve the best and that we deserve larger amounts of resources, we will be more likely to advocate for ourselves and fight for a better lot in life. This could help our survival, could help us find a better mate, and could help ensure we pass more genes on to subsequent generations. Without the ego, we may chose to settle, we may be complacent, and we may not strive to pass our genes along or ensure that those subsequent genes have sufficient resources to further pass their genes into the following generation. Ego can push us to strive toward the higher salary, the fancier car, more exclusive golf clubs, and other things that are not really necessary for life, but could help ourselves amass more resources and help our kids have better connections to get into Stanford and ultimately find a spouse and have kids. Ego could certainly be antisocial and harmful for us and society, but it could also be important for genetic survival.
 
 
Philip’s fourth point is about a guy who is hurt because his wife forgot his birthday.
 
 
It is possible that an inflated ego is what made this guy upset when his wife forgot his birthday, but it could also be a number of other psychological or relationship issues between him and his spouse. He may have larger issues of self-worth and value independent of his ego. He may be codependent and perhaps need counseling to better manage his relationships with others. Or his wife could have just been having a bad day. This didn’t seem like a great avenue for discussing and understanding ego to me.
 
 
The fifth point that Philip brings up ties back to his third, by viewing ego as a “fairness calculator.”
 
 
I also think this could be a useful way to view ego and it also seems like it could be understood through a cognitive psychology perspective. We don’t want to feel like we are being cheated, yet we would be happy to bend the rules and cheat a little if we thought we could get away with it. This is a lot of what Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler discuss in The Elephant in the Brain. If we can signal that we are honest and trustworthy, without actually having to be honest and trustworthy, then we are at an advantage. However, if we suspect that another person is all signal and no actual behavior to back up those signals, then we may act in an egotistical way by being defensive and pushing back against the other. Ego does seem to help fuel this mindset and does seem to encourage a type of fairness calculator behavior.
 
 
The final point that Philip makes is that, “ego needs to be controlled in a civilized society.”
 
 
I think here Philip is also correct. We live in very complex social societies and ego helps us individually, but also has negative externalities. Ego certainly helped push Trump to the presidency and the history books, but I’m not sure the world was better for it. By pursuing our own self-interest and acting based on ego, we can damage the world around us.
 
 
Hanson and Simler would argue that much of these harmful effects of ego are moderated by our signaling ability. Hanson has said that his estimate is that up to 90% of what we do as humans is signaling, at least in rich countries like the United States. Signaling both helps us get ahead and tempers our ego. Overt displays are frowned upon, leaving less overt signaling as the way we display how amazing we are. An unchecked ego is going to break the rules for signaling, and unless it is Donald Trump in the 2016 election, such overt egotism will be punished. Ultimately, we do have to control ego because of negative externalities if we want to cooperate and live in complex social communities.
 
 
I hope this helps explain some of how I think about ego!