Tag: outcomes

Equal Treatment in an Unequal Society

Equal Treatment in an Unequal Society

Posted on by jabittan
Inequalities cannot be solved simply by establishing new standards, criteria, and rules that will apply equally to everyone. When inequality exists, creating new policies and laws designed to be more equitable in how they treat everyone can have the effect of locking in inequality. Such rules can inadvertently give inequality the appearance of fairness and institutional approval.
Matthew Desmond demonstrates how this has happened within housing markets across the country in his book Evicted. For decades, discriminatory housing policy was the norm in our country. At times in our past it has been explicitly authorized in laws and statutes. At other times, it has been openly, yet unofficially, practiced. Today, explicit housing discrimination still exists, but it at least has to be hidden under innocuous motives or carefully crafted lies. Implicit housing discrimination, however, with no one feeling as though they are being discriminatory, is still common and open.
Desmond argues that the history of racial discrimination in housing markets has created a system that perpetuates the inequalities that discrimination deliberately fostered, while appearing race neutral. He writes, “landlords and property management companies … tried to avoid discriminating by setting clear criteria and holding all applicants to the same standards. But equal treatment in an unequal society could still foster inequality.” Applying universal rules in a system that has been shaped and defined by inequalities does not mean that discrimination goes away. It means that it is codified and approved though seemingly eliminated.
When black people have been incarcerated for years following discriminatory and prejudiced practices, they will be overly burdened by legal denials of housing. When housing policies have driven black people toward eviction at disproportionately higher rates than other groups for centuries, then denying someone on the grounds of prior evictions will disproportionately impact black people. The result is that the discriminatory practices that once existed openly and deliberately to harm minority groups for the benefit of the majority will continue, but with the presentation of authority and fairness under the law. This is how ostensibly equal treatment under the law can have such unequal impacts for people in an unequal society.
Ownership of Land

Ownership of Land

Posted on by jabittan
“The most effective way to assert, or reassert, ownership of land was to force people from it,” writes Matthew Desmond in his book Evicted. This line feels like it could be from a book written about the Trail of Tears, about any number of American atrocities toward indigenous populations of the Americas, or about European colonialization. But the line is about modern evictions from rental properties across the Untied States.
I don’t think the idea of connecting modern evictions with our nation’s history of forcing Native Americans from their land was intentional in Desmond’s book, but I think it is an interesting and insightful angle through which we can view evictions and the American housing crisis. People need reasonable and safe places to live. Research has demonstrated how important the places where you live and grow up can be for your life outcomes. Our troubling history of taking land from Native Americans shows that we have always known this and it reinforces the lessons that current research is presenting. Additionally, the abandonment of native populations and the economic challenges that tribes across the country face today show how long lasting dislocation from property and housing can be.
American public housing projects have often not gone well. Providing housing via market mechanisms is generally much preferred to government provided housing, but for those on the lowest end of the socioeconomic scale, this option often become exploitative, exclusionary, unhealthy, and dangerous. Poor people often have to live in slums that can do more to set them back than help them find a way to get ahead. And when they can’t get ahead, they face eviction, with the powerful landowners forcing them from the lousy housing they were at one point able to attain.
The power dynamics of renters and owners is important to acknowledge. Landlords can evict tenants, and low income tenants quickly realize that a landlord can make their life difficult if they speak out about the slum conditions they live in. The people living on the land have to deal with terrible conditions, and risk being forced from the land if they speak up. Just as Native Americans had to accept the terms of the powerful American Government, tenants have to accept the terms of land-owners, no matter how unreasonable they may be.
I recognize that land owners have rights. I also recognize how terrible renters can be and how terrible they may treat the property of the land owner (I currently live in a house that was once a rental and we are still dealing with the costs of careless renters and neglect). However, my efforts to connect Desmond’s writing with the way Native American’s were treated is a deliberate attempt to show that a power imbalance can be more harmful for renters than landlords. I don’t have a great solution, but I think it is important that we recognize the opportunities for exploitation that arise for our nation’s lowest SES members in a market system of providing low-income housing. It is also important that we recognize the great harms that exercising power and forcing people from land can have, as demonstrated through the darkest moments of our nation’s past. We should do all we can to avoid leaving another bitter legacy of power and eviction in our wake.
Adverse Childhood Experiences

Adverse Childhood Experiences

Posted on by jabittan
In $2.00 A Day, authors Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer write about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and how they can contribute to and create a reinforcing cycle with poverty and homeless. Citing a study from the late 1990s the authors write, “When … researchers surveyed more than 17,000 people from San Diego – most of whom were middle-class and had gone to college – they found alarmingly high rates of ACE exposure. Sixty-four percent reported at least one adverse childhood experience; more than a third had experienced two or more such events.”
This finding is alarming, and one that I would expect to have either remained constant since the late 1990s or increased. People across the United States, the research suggests, are living with past traumas that they may or may not have fully worked through and processed. The majority of people in the United States have suffered at least one ACE (if you extrapolate to the whole population), and over a third had experienced more than traumatic event as a child. Edin and Shaefer go on to write, “exposure to jut one ACE seems to negatively affect a child’s life chances, but what about the effect of multiple and repeated occurrences? The ACE researchers reported that ACEs were not only unexpectedly common, but their effects were found to be cumulative.”
ACEs negatively impact an individuals life as they grow older. This can be seen in individuals who have trouble managing daily stress, have trouble forming trusting relationships, or in those who develop dangerous addictions. All of these negative consequences can impact the economic, social, physical wellbeing of the individual, and can have impacts of the lives of their family, friends, and communities. As the number of ACEs in an individual’s life increases, the consequences also seem to increase, creating deeper problems.  An individual with relationship and financial problems could find themselves in an insecure living arrangement, and if they have children, that could increase the ACE risk for that child, potentially recreating the cycle.
It is important that we as a society recognize the seriousness of ACEs. Children can hardly be blamed for the situations they find themselves in, but these situations can have life-long impacts on their behaviors, psychologies, and life outcomes for which we may blame them as adults. Failing to truly address ACEs and improve the lives of children by reducing the numbers of ACEs that any child may face, means that we will be living in the ongoing cycle of ACEs leading to worse life outcomes, increasing the chances of more ACEs for children in the future, leading to still more negative life outcomes in an ACE doom loop. Its clear that we cannot put the responsibility on individuals who have faced multiple ACEs to right their lives and stop this cycle on their own. It will take compassion, concern, and effort from those who were lucky enough to grow up without debilitating ACEs to make a difference.

Motivations and Results

Posted on by jabittan
Yesterday I wrote about Quassim Cassam’s suggestion that virtues are teleological and that as a result motivations are also teleological. However, that may not actually be correct, and that may not actually be the argument that Cassam puts forward.
Cassam writes, “there is no reason to suppose that epistemic vices are rooted in a desire for ignorance. Epistemic vices may result in ignorance but that is not the same as being motivated by a desire for ignorance.” Cassam is maintaining a consequentialist view that epistemic vices systematically obstruct knowledge. It is a consequentialist argument in the sense that the outcome of particular behaviors and ways of thinking are likely to hinder knowledge, and we can understand those ways of thinking and behaviors as vices based on their consequences.
Cassam continues, “the closed-minded needn’t lack a healthy desire for knowledge but their approach to inquiry isn’t conductive to knowledge. There is a mismatch between what they seek – cognitive contact with reality – and how they go about achieving it.”
From this point it is hard to argue that motivations are also teleological and consequential. Limiting our thinking to just epistemic motivations, we can see that someone may not be motivated by trying to prove what they already believe is correct or motivated by a prejudice against certain information and opinions, yet can still end up obstructing knowledge, developing epistemic prejudices, or being closed-minded.
The idea of a thought bubble is a useful demonstration. Few of us would say that thought bubbles are good for us and most of us would acknowledge that they obstruct knowledge by trapping us in an information ecosystem where everyone we know and interact with holds the same beliefs and views. But few of us ever really escape thought bubbles. We don’t necessarily aim to be closed-minded and chose to only surround ourselves with people who think the same as us, but our time, attention, and energy is limited. We cannot always go about finding people outside our place of work, our religious communities, or our families to obtain drastically different views than our own. We only have so much time to watch the news, read books, and seek out information about the minimum wage, the causes of WWII, and new cancer therapies. Thought bubbles are an unavoidable outcome of the huge amount of information available and our limited ability to focus on and develop knowledge of any specific thing.
We may not be motivated to obstruct knowledge. We truly be motivated by finding more knowledge, but environmental factors, other decisions that we have made, and potentially just ignorance of how to improve our information ecosystem could prevent us from eliminating or avoiding an epistemic vice. Our motivations in these instances cannot be thought of teleologically. Judging them by the outcome alone misses many of the factors beyond our control that influenced where we ultimately ended up and whether we developed epistemic vices. What motivations serve us well in some situations may turn out to be epistemic vices that hinder knowledge in other situations. While outcomes may end up similar, there does seem to be a true difference between making an error that hinders knowledge and deliberately hindering knowledge out of a motivation to hold on to power, prestige, influence, or prior beliefs. 
Motivations, Virtues, & Vices

Motivations, Virtues, & Vices

Posted on by jabittan
Virtues are teleological. At least the argument that Quassim Cassam puts forward in his book Vices of the Mind relies on the suggestion that our virtues are defined by their actual outcomes and results in the real world. Cassam specifically looks at epistemic vices in the mind and demonstrates that epistemic vices systematically obstruct knowledge, where epistemic virtues systematically lead to an increase in knowledge. If the outcome of a particular way of thinking is more likely to increase the generation, transmission, and retention of knowledge, then it is a virtue, but if it is more likely to hinder one or more of those aspects of knowledge, it is a vice.
From this base, Cassam argues that our motivations are also teleological. Virtues and motivations are connected, and both are understood by the ways they actually shape and influence the world. Cassam writes, “every virtue can be defined in terms of particular motivation, and the goodness of the virtue is at least partly a function of the goodness of its particular motivation.”
I think this puts us in an interesting place when it comes to our motivations and whether we think we are virtuous or not. Initially, to me, motivations felt like they would be more deontological than teleological. As though motivations would be an intrinsic quality where they were defined as good on their own and rather than in reference to their ends and the outcomes they produce. But on closer consideration I think that Cassam is correct. Certain motivations underpin certain behaviors, and behaviors can have systematic results in the real world, giving us a teleological view of our initial motivations.
As an example, Cassam quotes Oklahoma University Professor Linda Zagzebski by writing, “an open-minded person is motivated out of a delight in discovering new truths, a delight that is strong enough to outweigh the attachment to old beliefs.”  In this example, motivations associated with discovering new truths, learning, and developing more accurate views of the world lead to the virtue of open-mindedness. These motivations, like the virtue they build into, systematically lead to more knowledge, new discoveries, and ultimately better outcomes for the world. Conversely, a motivation to hold on to old beliefs, to not have to adjust ones thinking and admit one may have been wrong, serves as a base for closed-mindedness. These motivations, along with the vice of being closed-minded, systematically inhibit knowledge, discovery, and progress. From this example, with the quote from Cassam in mind, we can see that virtues, vices, and motivations are teleological, capable of being understood as having consistent, if not univariable, positive or negative outcomes in our lives. Just as we can think of something being a virtue if it generally leads to positive outcomes, we can think of our motivations as being virtuous if they too lead to positive outcomes.
When we consider the motivations we have in our lives, and if we have motivations to become virtuous people, we can think about whether our motivations will systematically lead to good outcomes for ourselves and our societies. It is possible to hold motivations that may be beneficial for us while producing negative externalities for society. We can examine our motivations just as we evaluate our virtues and vices, and try to shift toward more virtuous motivations to try to systematically increase the good we do and the knowledge we generate. Few of us are probably motivated to be closed-minded, arrogant, or to hold any other epistemic vice, but our motivations may lead to such vices, so it is important that we pick our motivations well based on the real world outcomes they can inspire.
Systematically Obstructing Knowledge

Systematically Obstructing Knowledge

Posted on by jabittan
The defining feature of epistemic vices, according to Quassim Cassam, is that they get in the way of knowledge. They inhibit the transmission of knowledge from one person to another, they prevent someone from acquiring knowledge, or they make it harder to retain and recall knowledge when needed. Importantly, epistemic vices don’t always obstruct knowledge, but they tend to do so systematically.
“There would be no justification for classifying closed-mindedness or arrogance as epistemic vices if they didn’t systematically get in the way of knowledge,” writes Cassam in Vices of the Mind. Cassam lays out his argument for striving against mental vices through a lens of consequentialism. Focusing on the outcomes of ways of thinking, Cassam argues that we should avoid mental vices because they lead to bad outcomes and limit knowledge in most cases.
Cassam notes that epistemic vices can turn out well for an individual in some cases. While not specifically mentioned by Cassam, we can use former President Donald Trump as an example. Cassam writes, “The point of distinguishing between systematically and invariably is to make room for the possibility that epistemic vices can have unexpected effects in particular cases.” Trump used a massive personal fortune, an unabashed bravado, and a suite of mental vices to bully his way into the presidency. His mental vices such as arrogance, closed-mindedness, and prejudice became features of his presidency, not defects. However, while his epistemic vices helped propel him to the presidency, they clearly and systematically created chaos and problems once he was in office. In his arrogance he attempted to bribe the prime minister of Ukraine, leading to an impeachment. His closed-mindedness and wishful thinking contributed to his second impeachment as he spread baseless lies about the election. 
For most of us in most situations, these same mental vices will also likely lead to failure and errors rather than success. For most of us, arrogance is likely to prevent us from learning about areas where we could improve ourselves to perform better in upcoming job interviews. Closed-mindedness is likely to prevent us from gaining knowledge about saving money with solar panels or about a new ethnic restaurant that we would really enjoy. Prejudice is also likely to prevent us from learning about new hobbies, pastimes, or opportunities for investment. These vices don’t always necessarily lead to failure and limit important knowledge for us, as Trump demonstrated, but they are more likely to obstruct important knowledge than if we had pushed against them.
Consequentialism

On Consequentialism

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Vices of the Mind, Quassim Cassam argues that patterns of thoughts and mental habits that obstruct knowledge are essentially moral vices. Ways of thinking and mental habits that enhance the acquisition, retention, and transmission of knowledge, according to Cassam, are moral virtues. Cassam defends his argument largely through a consequentialist view.
Cassam is open about his consequentialist frame of reference. He writes:
“Obstructivism is a form of consequentialism. … Moral vices systematically produce bad states of affairs. … The point of systematically is to allow us to ascribe moral virtue in the actual world to people who, as a result of bad luck, aren’t able to produce good: if they possessed a character trait that systematically produces good in that context (though not in their particular case) they still have the relevant moral virtues.”
I think that this view of epistemic vices is helpful. I know for me that there are times when I fall into the epistemic vices that Cassam highlights, and they can often be comforting, make me feel good about myself, or just be distractions from an otherwise busy and confusing world. However, recognizing that these vices systematically lead to poorer outcomes can help me understand why I should stay away from them.
Epistemic vices like scrolling through Twitter to look at posts that bash on someone you dislike are structurally likely to produce bad outcomes by wasting your time, making you more prone to distractions, and prejudicing yourself against people you don’t agree with. What you spend your mental energy on matters, and in the case of Twitter scrolling, you are allowing your mind to indulge in shallow quick thinking, closed-mindedness, and biases. It plays off confirmation bias, giving you the ability to only see posts that confirm what you believe or want to believe about a person or topic. It feels nice to bash on someone else, but you are reinforcing a limited perspective that might be wrong and rewarding your brain for being shallow and inconsiderate. In the moment it is rewarding, but in the long run it will lead to worse thinking, shorter attention spans, and biased decision-making that is hard to get away from once you have closed the Twitter tab. Consequentialism helps us see that the epistemic vices involved in Twitter scrolling, which feel harmless in the moment, are more likely to result in negative outcomes over time. The systematic nature of these epistemic vices, the consequences and outcomes of indulging them, is what defines them as vices.
Consequentialism, Cassam’s argument shows, can be a useful way to think about how we should behave. People who try to do good but experience bad luck and don’t produce the same good outcomes as others can still be viewed as morally virtuous. Even though in their particular situation a good result did not occur, those who practice moral virtues can be praised for behaving in a way that is systematically more likely to produce good. Conversely, people who behave in ways that systematically produce negative outcomes can be deterred from their negative behavior through social taboos and norms, even if a poor behavior might provide them with an opportunity to succeed in the short term. It is hard to take absolute stances about any position, but consequentialism gives us a frame though which we can approach difficult decisions and uncertainty by recognizing where systematic patterns are likely to lead to desired or undesired outcomes for ourselves and our societies.
Decision Weights

Decision Weights

Posted on by jabittan
On the heels of the 2020 election, I cannot decide if this post is timely, or untimely. On the one hand, this post is about how we should think about unlikely events, and I will argue, based on a quote from Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow, that we overweight unlikely outcomes and should better alight our expectations with realistic probabilities. On the other hand, however, the 2020 election was closer than many people expected, we almost saw some very unlikely outcomes materialize, and one can argue that a few unlikely outcomes really did come to pass. Ultimately, this post falls in a difficult space, arguing that we should discount unlikely outcomes more than we actually do, while acknowledging that sometimes very unlikely outcomes really do happen.

 

In Thinking Fast and Slow Kahneman writes, “The decision weights that people assign to outcomes are not identical to the probabilities of these outcomes, contrary to the expectation principle.”  This quote is referencing studies which showed that people are not good at conceptualizing chance outcomes at the far tails of a distribution. When the chance of something occurring gets below 10%, and especially when it pushes into the sub 5% range, we have trouble connecting that with real world expectations. Our behaviors seem to change when things move from 50-50 to 75-25 or even to 80-20, but we have trouble adjusting any further once the probabilities really stretch beyond that point.

 

Kahneman continues, “Improbable outcomes are overweighed – this is the possibility effect. Outcomes that are almost certain are underweighted relative to actual certainty. The expectation principle, by which values are weighted by their probability, is poor psychology.”

 

When something has only 5% or lower chance of happening, we actually behave as though chance or probability for that occurrence is closer to say 25%. We know the likelihood is very low, but we behave as if the likelihood is actually a bit higher than a single digit percentage. Meanwhile, the very certain and almost completely sure outcome of 95%+ is discounted beyond what it really should be. Certainly very rare outcomes do sometimes happen, but in our minds we have trouble conceptualizing these incredibly rare outcomes, and rather than keeping a perspective based on the actual probabilities, by utilizing rational decision weights, we overweight the improbably and underweight the certain.

 

Our challenges with thinking about and correctly weighting extremely certain or extremely unlikely events may have an evolutionary history. For our early ancestors, being completely sure of anything may have resulted in a few very unlikely deaths. Those who were a tad more cautious may have been less likely to run across the log that actually gave way into the whitewater rapids below. And our ancestors who reacted to the improbably as though it were a little more certain may have also been better at avoiding the lion the one time the twig snapping outside the campground really was a lion. Our ancestor who sat by the fire and said, “twigs snap every night, the chances that it actually is a lion this time have gotta be under 5%,” may not have lived long enough to pass enough genes into the future generations. The reality is that in most situations for our early ancestors, being a little more cautious was probably advantageous for society. Today being overly cautious and struggling with improbable or nearly certain decision weights can be costly for us in terms of over-purchasing insurance, spending huge amounts to avoid the rare chance that we could lose a huge amount, and over trusting democratic institutions in the face of a coup attempt.
Availability Cascades

Availability Cascades

Posted on by jabittan
This morning, while reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, I came across an idea that was new to me. Harari writes, “Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. … Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it.”  The idea is that chaotic systems, like societies and cultures, are distinct from chaotic systems like the weather. We can model the weather, and it won’t change based on what we forecast. When we model elections, on the other hand, there is a chance that people, and ultimately the outcome of the election, will be influenced by the predictions we make.  The chaos is responsive to the way we think about that chaos. A hurricane doesn’t care where we think it is going to make landfall, but voters in a state may care quite a bit and potentially change their behavior if they think their state could change the outcome of an election.

 

This ties in with the note from Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow which I had selected to write about today. Kahneman writes about availability cascades in his book, and they are a piece of the feedback mechanism described by Harari in level two chaos systems. Kaneman writes:

 

“An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. One some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried.”

 

We can think about any action or event that people and governments might take as requiring a certain action potential in order to take place. A certain amount of energy, interest, and attention is required for social action to take place. The action potential can be small, such as a red light being enough of an impetus to cause multiple people to stop their cars at an intersection, or monumental, such as a major health crisis being necessary to spur emergency financial actions from the Federal Government. Availability cascades create a set of triggers which can enhance the energy, interest, and attention provided to certain events and bolster the likelihood of a public response.

 

2020 has been a series of extreme availability cascades. With a global pandemic, more people are watching news more closely than before. This allows for the increased salience of incident of police brutality, and increases the energy in the public response to such incidents. As a result, more attention has been paid to racial injustice, and large companies have begun to respond in new ways to issues of race and equality, again heightening the energy and interest of the public in demanding action regarding both racial justice and police policy. There are other ways that events could have played out, but availability cascades created feedback mechanisms within a level two chaotic system, opening certain avenues for public and societal action.

 

It is easy to look back and make assessments on what happened, but in the chaos of the moment it is hard to understand what is going on. Availability cascades help describe what we see, and help us think about what might be possible in the future.
Extreme Outcomes

Extreme Outcomes

Posted on by jabittan
Large sample sizes are important. At this moment, the world is racing as quickly as possible toward a vaccine to allow us to move forward from the COVID-19 Pandemic. People across the globe are anxious for a way to resume normal life and to reduce the risk of death from the new virus and disease. One thing standing in the way of the super quick solution that everyone wants is basic statistics. For any vaccine or treatment, we need a large sample size to be certain of the effects of anything we offer to people as a cure or for prevention of COVID-19. We want to make sure we don’t make decisions based on extreme outcomes, and that what we produce is safe and effective.

 

Statistics and probability are frequent parts of our lives, and many of us probably feel as though we have a basic and sufficient grasp of both. The reality, however, is that we are often terrible with thinking statistically. We are much better at thinking in narrative, and often we substitute a narrative interpretation for a statistical interpretation of the world without even recognizing it. It is easy to change our behavior based on anecdote and narrative, but not always so easy to change our behavior based on statistics. This is why we have the saying often attributed to Stalin: One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

 

The danger with anecdotal and narrative interpretations of the world is that they are drawn from small sample sizes. Daniel Kahneman explains the danger of small sample sizes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, “extreme outcomes (both high and low) are more likely to be found in small than in large samples. This explanation is not causal.”

 

In his book, Kahneman explains that when you look at counties in the United States with the highest rates of cancer, you find that some of the smallest counties in the nation have the highest rates of cancer. However, if you look at which counties have the lowest rates of cancer, you will also find that it is the smallest counties in the nation that have the lowest rates. While you could drive across the nation looking for explanations to the high and low cancer rates in rural and small counties, you likely wouldn’t find a compelling causal explanation. You might be able to string a narrative together and if you try really hard you might start to see a causal chain, but your interpretation is likely to be biased and based on flimsy evidence. The fact that our small counties are the ones that have the highest and lowest rates of cancer is an artifact of small sample sizes. When you have small sample sizes, as Kahneman explains, you are likely to see more extreme outcomes. A few random chance events can dramatically change the rate of cancer per thousand residents when you only have a few thousand residents in small counties. In larger more populated counties, you find a reversion to the mean, and few extreme chance outcomes outcomes are less likely to influence the overall statistics.

 

To prevent our decision-making from being overly influenced by extreme outcomes we have to move past our narrative and anecdotal thinking. To ensure that a vaccine for the coronavirus or a cure for COVID-19 is safe and effective, we must allow the statistics to play out. We have to have large sample sizes, so that we are not influenced by extreme outcomes, either positive or negative, that we see when a few patients are treated successfully. We need the data to ensure that the outcomes we see are statistically sound, and not an artifact of chance within a small sample.