Month: April 2022

The Complexities of Society

The Complexities of Society

Posted on by jabittan
I have a hard time debating and arguing with friends about how to think about society. A large reason why is because, at best, I often find myself making the argument of, “well, maybe?”  Politics is a never ending attempt to answer the question of who gets what and when. We have scarce resources like money, roads and infrastructure, and influence and fame. These things are distributed across individuals with deliberate decisions and sometimes seemingly by random chance. Occasionally we step in to try to change these allocations, to provide greater rewards and incentives for those who pursue certain resources and goals over others, and punish those who deviate from courses we find appropriate. But figuring out how people will react to any given decision and figuring out which levers will lead to which outcomes is nearly impossible. I almost always find myself unsure exactly that the changes people advocate for will really have the desired impact or that the problem they identify is really caused by the root cause they suggest. I often find myself saying, “well, maybe” but having a hard time convincing others that their thoughts should be less certain.
 
 
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker discusses the complexities of society when writing about how hard it is to identify a single factor that has lead people to become less violent over time. Especially in WEIRD societies, there is a lot of evidence to demonstrate that people are less violent today than they used to be, but it is hard to point to a single (or even a few) key factor and explain how it (they) reduced human violence. As Pinker writes, “a society is an organic system that develops spontaneously, governed by myriad interactions and adjustments that no human mind can pretend to understand.”
 
 
The best social science experiments that we can develop and the best models from social science only manager to explain about 40% of the variance that we observe across societies. We cannot singularly point to racism, inequality, or the percent of high school graduates and understand a given social outcome. We can see correlations, but rarely do we see a correlation that explains anywhere close to 50% of the differences we observe between desired and undesired social outcomes. We are unable to point to a given factor (or even a handful of given factors) and confidently say that we have identified the most important or the clear driving factor(s) that determine(s) whether someone is a success or a failure, whether a society is peacefully democratic or violently autocratic, or whether a society’s economy will boom or bust.
 
 
This is why I am so frequently stuck with, “well, maybe,” as a response to so man of my friend’s arguments. When a friend or family member is convinced that people need to change one thing in order to make the world a better place I remember that the best social science models explain less than half the variance. So pointing to a single factor and claiming that the world would be dramatically better if we changed that factor doesn’t feel convincing to me. Maybe it would have an impact, but maybe it wouldn’t. The complexities of society prevent us from ever being certain that a single change or a single decision will ever have the intended outcome we expect or hope for.
Theory of Mind is Underrated

Theory of Mind is Underrated

Posted on by jabittan
Sometime when infants are around three years old they begin to recognize that the other human beings in their lives are similar to themselves. Whether it is their parents, care takers, or other kinds that they interact with, typically developing children around three will begin to understand that others have the same feelings and emotions that they have. Infants begin to develop what we call theory of mind. It is a momentous and underrated step in human development.
 
 
I seem to be experiencing the world. To me, it feels like there is a conscious individual inside my head who has thoughts, feelings, desires, emotions, joys, pleasures, fears, and experiences of physical phenomena (as an aside, the idea of a single conscious self is up for debate). But I can’t prove that any other person has conscious experiences of the world in the way that I feel as though I do. I can see other people who appear to be virtually exactly like me. I see other people who react in ways I would expect myself to react if I was in a similar happy, scary, or boring experience. I can create a reasonable and testable theory which suggests that other people do indeed have conscious experiences of the world even though I can never fully prove it. This is theory of mind, and this is what three year old toddlers do when they start to realize that other people don’t like being hit, don’t like when someone takes their stuff, or would be happy if someone shared a piece of cake with them.
 
 
This is a phenomenal super power and without realizing it, we apply this power in most of the ways we think about the social world. In WEIRD countries it underlies our moral and social contracts. As Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature, “I experience pleasures and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same.” This humanist philosophy develops from our earliest ages and influences how we understand the world. If we were not able to think about others and infer that they have a mind and have the same experiences as we do, our social interactions would be dramatically different, and peaceable democracies might not be possible.
Steven Pinker On Morality

Steven Pinker on Morality

Posted on by jabittan
According to Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, morality comes from our ability to reason and our need to cooperate together. Without interactions and dependence on other human beings, we wouldn’t have a sense of morals. We would only have our individual self-interest. However, humans live in complex social groups within complex social communities and we have to live and work together for survival and general life satisfaction. As Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler argue in The Elephant in the Brain, social and political tribes drove the evolution and need for large rational brains, which Pinker argues allow us to reason from a point of mutual unselfishness, ultimately creating our ideas of morality.
 
 
To demonstrate, Pinker writes, “if I appeal to you to do something that affects me – to get off my foot, or not stab me for the fun of it, or to save my child from drowning – then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours.” All humans are self-interested, which conflicts with our social lives. We all want to act in our own self-interested ways, but we have to cooperate with others and work with others to get what we desire or need for survival. Therefore, you must demonstrate that your interests go beyond simply your own self-interest in order to get people to respect you, respect your interests, and to cooperate with you. Pinker continues, “I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not.” To work together we have to find ways in which our interests align. I may have to pay you to do some physical effort that I don’t want to do. I may have to agree to respect your property if I want you to respect my property. I may have to give up some level of individual rights if I don’t want you to abridge liberties of mine. “Mutual unselfishness is the only way we can simultaneously pursue our interests,” Pinker writes.
 
 
What Pinker argues, flowing from this discussion of mutual unselfishness, self-interests, and social cooperation, is that our morals are not given to us by a supernatural power and that our morals do not exist separate from humans. Morals are created through human rationality and through our ability to recognize that we have individual feelings and preferences, and therefore other people who are like us probably have the same capacity for all the feelings, emotions, preferences, and desires that we have. Our morals exist because we have to work together, to interact in social groups and organizations, and to rely upon institutions to order our relationships and collective efforts.
 
 
Pinker writes, “Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.” By interchangeability of perspectives Pinker is referring to the human ability to consider that other people have thoughts and feelings and the human ability to imagine or adopt other perspectives. Positive-sum games are situations where everyone is made better through cooperation. By all working together and combining inert pieces of material, we can create a house which which shelter us, keep us warm in the winter and shaded in the summer, and will give us a place to meet and hang out. The total value of the house is greater than the individual value of each component piece. Much of our world is structured around positive-sum interactions that occur when we cooperate through mutual unselfishness. Our morals derive from our ability to reason and help us harness these positive-sum moments. But it all comes back to our desire to pursue our own self interests while having to compromise as part of a larger social group.
Knowledge Paradigms

Knowledge Paradigms

Posted on by jabittan
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker explores the role that science, reason, and rationality played in mankind’s journey to become less violent. Throughout the long run of human history we have become less violent, less impulsive, more rational, and more considerate of others. Most humans alive do not live in small warring tribal bands. Most humans do not commit violent acts in the name of a deity. Most humans do not kill their neighbors for their own personal gain. Becoming smarter, Pinker argues, helped us become more peaceful in all of these areas. Becoming less impulsive and more thoughtful of how we relate to others has been a slow human process, but has played out in many important ways that contribute to the reduction in violence. We gained more knowledge about the world and pacified ourselves.
 
 
Pinker explores what enabled us to become smarter and what shifts in knowledge institutions played an important role in humans changing the ways we think. Science is one of the big factors that Pinker explores and he suggests that becoming more scientific, believing in objective inquiry rather than divine revelation, put people on a path toward peace. About science and knowledge he writes,
 
 
“Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge – not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time.”
 
 
The values within science represent an important shift in an approach to human knowledge. Knowledge from a deity is absolute and cannot be challenged. Recognizing that our knowledge is instead limited, subject to revision and updating in the face of new information, and based on objective reality and not the word of authority or divine spirits is a departure from much of human history. It is uncomfortable to live with uncertainty and questions we have no way to answer, but it also makes us more peaceful. It makes us more considerate of the world, less sure of our selves, and less willing to follow leaders who encourage violence for dubious reasons.
 
 
Pinker continues, “though we cannot logically prove anything about the physical world, we are entitled to have confidence in certain beliefs about it.” Moving forward in human history, this is an important lesson we need to continue to think about. We don’t have all the answers about the physical world and we have even fewer answers about the human social world. We need to acknowledge that there is information we can be confident about even if we cannot prove every aspect of a scientific theory or belief. We need to recognize that we are fallible and cannot have complete confidence in our own beliefs and worldviews. We have to be willing to learn and update our beliefs. Doing so is the only way we can continue to exist and cooperate as a peaceful species.

Evaluating Our Post Truth Moment

Posted on by jabittan
During the Trump Presidency I frequently heard people saying that we now live in a “post truth” society. People simply believe what they want to believe, the former President included, and reality or veracity of information no longer matter. All sources of knowledge were valid, as long as the source provided the information we wanted to believe.
 
 
But do we really live in a post truth society? I am not so sure that truth no longer matter. I am also not sure that what we are seeing with people choosing to believe things that cannot possibly be true is actually new. What seems to have happened during the Trump Presidency is that numerous people became dramatically attached to Trump, the identity he represented, and the cultural values he reflected. They agreed that they would not validate or recognize any information that ran against what Trump said or that was politically damaging for him. People chose to exercise political power over the veracity of information. That is disconcerting, but it isn’t really anything new in humanity. We hadn’t seen it in the United States at such a high level (at least not in my 30 year life-time) but humanity has seen such behavior in the past.
 
 
In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker writes, “faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, and the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty – all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.” The post truth moment we lived through included knowledge grounded in many of the fields that Pinker suggests we discard and also mirrors past human experiences of deriving knowledge from such fields. Trump was not the only authoritarian to claim that something was right (and to believe it himself) simply because it came from him or was something he said. Trump was elected on the dogma that a good business person was needed to run the government like a good business and the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty played a role in many people feeling that Trump’s electoral victory (or demise) was inevitable.
 
 
And all of these things have been seen in the past. Pinker writes, “the history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.” We were afraid of the post truth moment that Trump fueled, but it was nothing new and on the other end we seem to be doing a better job of tying our knowledge and beliefs to empirical facts and data. Despite the upheaval of Trump’s four years in office, for almost all of us, our success in society is dependent on accurate interpretations of reality, not on illusions and beliefs born out of faith, tradition, or pure desires of how we want reality to be. In some large and concerning ways truth may take a back seat to our own desires, but for almost all of us, our daily lives still depend on accurate information.
Autocracy, Democracy, Risk, & Benefit

Autocracy, Democracy, Risk, & Benefit

Posted on by jabittan
How often do you pick up trash along the street when you are out for a walk? If you are like most people, you probably see trash, think that someone should do something about it, and keep on walking. If you were to pick up the trash you and everyone else would benefit, but you alone pay the price of removing the trash. It may be unpleasant to pick up someone else’s water bottle. It may be expensive to pick up a TV along the side of the road and recycle it. Even though these costs are small, they are real and when a single individual pays the costs, the fact that the benefit extends not just to the individual but to other people doesn’t make up for those individual costs. The fact that others will benefit in some ways makes the individual costs harder to go through with.
 
 
The little example of the cost and benefit of picking up trash extends to larger contexts, like disposing of an autocrat. To explain how democracies have helped people become more peaceful in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker shows how democracies can overcome the individual cost problem that I demonstrated. Pinker writes, “in a dictatorship, the autocrat and his henchmen have a strong incentive to stay in power, but no individual citizen has an incentive to depose him, because the rebel would assume all the risks of the dictator’s reprisals while the benefits of democracy would flow diffusely to everyone in the country.”
 
 
A transition to democracy, away from an autocracy, can be difficult and violent, but once you get there, society can be much more peaceful. Opposing an autocrat, as Pinker notes is dangerous. Everyone may despise the ruler and believe that things would be better without them, but taking action on their own is difficult. The costs of overthrowing the ruler are potentially life or death, making it hard for any single individual to oppose the autocrat.
 
 
But once you get past an autocrat, once enough people have joined together and once a country has democratized, peace can be more achievable. In a democracy, ousting bad leaders is easier and doesn’t have as many individual costs. The benefits are still there for everyone, but the individual costs have been reduced or eliminated, making peaceful transitions more likely. Violence within democracies comes at a cost to the individual, shifting dramatically from the arrangement in an autocracy. Ultimately, the risk and reward imbalance that individuals face is part of what helps keep autocrats in power, just as it keeps trash along the side of the road.
Idea Plugging

Idea Plugging

Posted on by jabittan
“No one is smart enough to figure out anything worthwhile from scratch,” writes Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker argues in the book that one reason why humans in Western European Nations became less violent during the Enlightenment was because humans started writing, sharing information at greater speeds, and recombining important and interesting ideas in new ways. A greater sharing and combination of ideas spread anti-torture and anti-violence messages. The human ability to take existing ideas and build on them is what fueled this process, and it is interesting to think about on its own.
 
 
Pinker writes, “the human mind is adept at packaging a complicated idea into a chunk, combining it with other ideas into a more complex assembly, packaging that assembly into a still bigger contrivance, combining it with still other ideas, and so on.” This process occurred in Western European Nations with great thinkers sharing ideas, writing about the ideas of others, and taking one idea from one context and applying it within another context in a new permutation. Through this process people became more democratic, reconsidered the role of the state, and reduced the role of violence in organized society.
 
 
We see these same processes take place all the time. We may be worried about being original today, but the truth is that almost all of our ideas and thoughts come from another context. What is original is how we take the various ideas and thoughts that we interact with and repackage them. I can think about Pinker’s thoughts of idea sharing and combine them with ideas of marriage and family policies from Joseph Henrich to reconsider the ways that changing marriage and family policies expanded social circles and fueled the sharing of ideas in the Enlightenment. None of these pieces may be new and original on their own, but I can take them in chunks and plug pieces of ideas into different situations and settings. This idea plugging creates novelty and new thoughts and ideas. We don’t figure it all out from scratch, we take existing building blocks and pieces and work them together in new ways.
Reading as a Technology for Perspective Taking

Reading as a Technology for Perspective Taking

Posted on by jabittan
Can reading make us less violent? Steven Pinker thinks that it can. Specifically, Pinker thinks that reading can expand our circle of empathy, getting us to think about more than just our own thoughts. Reading has a power to open new perspectives and invites us into the mind of another person for a long amount of time. We see what they think, we consider their thoughts and emotions, we imagine what we would do if we were in their situation and weigh our response against the response of the author or the characters they employ.
 
 
Pinker writes, “reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point.” Reading, whether we notice it or not, shifts our perspective and takes us out of our own narrow thoughts and self-interest. It gets us to consider that other people have different thoughts, but that they still think and feel the way that we do. This allows us to start building greater empathy. Pinker continues, “empathy in the sense of adopting someone’s viewpoint is not the same as empathy in the sense of feeling compassion toward the person, but the first can lead to the second by a natural route.”
 
 
I don’t know how much I agree that increasing literacy expanded people’s empathy and reduced violence, but I think it is an interesting argument. I think reading does have the ability to shift ones perspective and get people to consider more than their own self-interest. I’m sure there is a correlation between literacy and violence, but I’m sure it is a messy correlation with many conflicting variables. I would expect that there are other variables and factors that both make people less violent and make people more inclined to learn to read and read frequently.
 
Regardless of my doubts, I think greater literacy is a valuable thing. I think that encouraging people to see the world beyond their own lens and to take the perspectives of others is a good thing. The causal mechanism for how those two factors reduce people’s levels of violence toward others makes sense, even if I am still hesitant to say that is what explains the correlation. If there is a chance that increased literacy makes us less violent, then we should pursue that chance and study the impacts of our efforts to expand literacy so that we can better understand Pinker’s argument and hopefully have a less violent world.

A Downward Spiral of Dehumanization

Posted on by jabittan
My understanding is that modern humans, living on any continent with any ancestral history, have truly minor differences in genes. Whether we consider physical traits, intelligence, or other factors that we might contribute to genes, humans average out when you look at populations on a whole. This means that ultimately, we really are not any different from anyone else, regardless as to whether we live in the United States, Mexico, or on an Asian Pacific island.
 
 
But that doesn’t stop humans from discriminating against others or from insisting that the group of humans to which they belong is inherently superior to all other humans. We see this when we look at populations across the globe and how we respond to refuges in Syria, people in the Indo-China region devastated by floods and storms, and how we treat low-income minority groups in the United States. Decades and centuries of discrimination, exploitation, and dehumanization have a long reach and influence the way we see people and groups that are less successful than our own group.
 
 
Steven Pinker writes about this in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature and explores what it means for violence and for humanity as we try to move forward and become less violent as a species. “The philosopher Jonathan Glover,” Pinker writes, “has pointed to a downward spiral of dehumanization. People force a despised minority to live in squalor, which makes them seem animalistic and subhuman, which encourages the dominant group to mistreat them further, which degrades them still further, removing any remaining tug on the oppressors’ conscience.“
 
 
When this happens, oppressors feel justified in using violence, even in committing genocide, against those who have been discriminated. This downward spiral of dehumanization is like a self fulfilling prophecy, where a positive (in a negative way) feedback loop leads to more and more discrimination, less opportunity for the oppressed, and continually diminished well being for those who are discriminated against. And none of it is justified. It all stems from initial discrimination and minority status, not from actual genetic differences between peoples.
 
 
Another point that I think is important to note is that unfair treatment, or blatantly discriminatory treatment, becomes justified in this downward spiral of dehumanization. This is what happens in the United States when we dismiss real acts of violence against black people because a group of unhappy black people acted as a mob and vandalized buildings. We dismiss actual rights and legal protections of the individual because we devalue the group to which the individual belongs, justifying unfair and discriminatory behaviors.
 
 
There are largely no differences between humans. And saying that we dislike a group not because of racial differences but because of cultural differences is just as evil. Saying we dislike their inferior culture plays into the downward spiral of dehumanization. We discriminate against people because we feel threatened by them and their identity group. We discriminate to prop ourselves up, and we lean into a downward spiral of dehumanization to justify our discrimination.