Commencing ramble:
By example, because as a teacher, I'm well aware that a narrative is more effective learning in many cases:
Standard reactionary line:
Women prefer the life of a homemaker-mother to that of a working mother or single person.
Standard PUA line:
Men find fertility-cues the MOST attractive...WHR + facial symmetry.
IF you parse this line as saying
ALL Women prefer the life of a homemaker-mother to that of a working mother...
OR
ALL Men find fertility-cues the MOST attractive...WHR + facial symmetry.
Then...
1. You're wrong
2. You end up with a particular notion of how society ought to be ordered.
I find this to be a largely natural, and nearly completely wrong way to look at the world.
The important issues is variance.
If we parse the above as saying
MOST Women prefer the life of a homemaker-mother to that of a working mother...
or
THE MEDIAN Woman prefers the life of a homemaker-mother to that of a working mother...
Then...we're in the realm of sane positions. I happen to believe that both of the above are true. On the other hand...neither of the above preclude the existence of, say, 40%, or 0.4% of the population that is naturally happier as a working mother or as a single, childless woman.
In short...the difference between ALL and MOST is enormous when it comes to policy implications. Since ALL is basically an insane position...we need to address the MOST question.
I will admit to being quite attracted to sexy, fertile-looking women. I've dated girls who are solid 9+s on ANYONE's scale. But they were fundamentally boring. I have very little interest in standalone sex...but rather seek a two-sided connection around the sexual experience. Furthermore, I'm so intellectually pushy/dominant in person, I get bored in weeks with girls who are not deeply independent. Furthermore...I'm deeply devoted to the topic of ethics...it having consumed a large amount of my thinking for the last 30 years. Hence...the people I choose to sleep with, I filter first on brilliance / ethics / super-confidence... and second on looks / femininity. I will and have turned down "8s" for more interesting 6s.
Ditto, my whole family reeks of (supported) hyper-confidence. Generally, through time, we've been better than the local bottom 90% on attractiveness (measured by romantic attachments) and physical activity/sports, and better than the bottom 99.99% on intelligence related tasks. Suggesting that my 150+ IQ, high confidence, physically active (lesbian) sister should defer to a man on damn near anything is insane. Ditto my harvard physics ph.d. girl-cousin. etc.
The question, once you consider variance is much more interesting.
1. Do we prefer a society that is super-comfortable for the median 67%, and far less pleasant for the outliers...
OR
2. Do we prefer a society that screws with the comfort-level of the median, by reminding them that everyone is NOT like them, but which allows the tails of the distribution, 3 or 4 or 5 sigma out on various characteristics to find places.
I am deeply committed to vision #2.
People are different...along many axes. Heck...it's unusual to find a person who isn't 2 sigma out on one of the first 20 axes you check them on.
That gets interesting though, when you find people who are 4+ sigma in directions that disgust us.
The religious line that gays should avoid gay sex seems to me insane, and completely ignorant of variance in human nature..
Sex is a huge drive in most people. According to Athol Kay, it's pretty much nuts to ask a (married) man and a visiting woman living in the same house for a few weeks to avoid sex. Asking a healthy human being who has different drives to avoid those drives for their whole life? That's crazy.
Ok...what about crazier situations?
Suppose someone has a greater-than-average enjoyment from nicotine. Should they be expected to not smoke?
Harder:
Suppose someone has a 5-sigma variance, and unlike the rest of us men who would just have sex with a 16yo in a heartbeat (if she wanted/could be convinced, and it wasn't illegal)...his real interests run to 8yos. That's what really gets him hard. (I have an 8yo daughter, if it helps with my reasonableness in asking the question). Suppose such a person concludes that to actually have sex with an 8yo would be harmful to said 8yo, and doesn't want to do that, because they're a good human being with highly unusual built-in drives. What should they do? And what should we do with them? I am personally a huge believer in using computer-generated pornography to allow them to fill their needs...and watching them closely besides. I prefer this solution to (a) locking them up forever (b) pretending that they don't have strong drives like the rest of us (c) asking them to just not have those drives.
The question is...how do you deal with variance.
The answer is: NOT by assuming there isn't rather large amounts...or trying to kill/disenfranchise anyone different from me.
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7 comments:
Let me try to get past my normal immediate death spiral whenever I see an interesting question.
Normally, I immediately see the first couple levels of sensible things to say on both sides, see that they more or less cancel out, and give up because while I'm reasonably bright I'm also very lazy and trying to write the great american goblin invasion novel.
(go read it at veilwar.com!)
Okay. That out of the way:
Let's imagine that there's a sane, reasonably goodhearted and brilliant dictator. What's he got in mind? He's unlikely to promote a maximal liberty course. But he probably agrees with Aretae that variance is the key issue.
He'd be working the problem from the other end. Rather than trying to create a situation that is most comfortable for an admitted weirdo like Aretae, he's going to want to create an environment that's most suited to his needs.
That might entail keeping the left side of the bell curve happy. But he is no more likely than Aretae to view the world through the lens of "all." We can imagine societal rules structured to make things pretty nice for everyone near the center of the bell curve on social preferences, intelligence, sexual orientation. We've seen these in history. We can imagine tweaking the rules to make things better for those a little further out the right end of the curve - +2, +3 sigma for intelligence, ambition - we've seen that too.
I think a really smart dictator would try to make things comfortable for a population that is slightly smarter than the one he actually has, but not too much.
The thing is, though, 4 sigma outliers are by definition rare. Does it make any sense for society as a whole to make accommodations for people who are at best one out of a hundred thousand? Especially considering that someone who has a 170 IQ should be expected to be able to make his own adaptations to the society around him - a society that he can (one hopes) perceive more clearly than most anyone else?
In my experience, up to about +2 sigma IQ it is just more of the same. Not qualitatively different than the average. It's further out that you start seeing real qualitative differences. And that's really my only outlier - on sexual orientation, social preferences, and many other things I'm pure vanilla. Which I suppose is odd. But I think that the same is true on any axis. Far enough out, and you get to a point where the cumulative increase leads to identifiably and seriously different.
Like Aretae's pedo example. 16, 15, 14, 13, and now you're getting into pre-pubescent, and something that is honestly different than likin' em young.
I guess it boils down to what's the optimum amount of variance that you tolerate, and uncomfortable you make the outliers to keep things nice for the 99+% that are within the bounds.
OK, here's my ramble:
And the old chestnut about genius making its own rules - there's an element of truth to that in that the genius can figure out the loopholes in standard rules and make a life that better suits his proclivities. He also generally has a higher societal value - he contributes in ways that other subjects/citizens cannot, which gives him some social capital to spend. He probably also has a higher tolerance for other's disregard.
I know a lot of my friends are amazed that I found a 6-figure job that allows me to work from home and do next to nothing most of the time. But hey, I figured out how to get it. And I spent my twenties failing so repeatedly and so thoroughly that I have never recovered the arrogance I used to have because I thought I was so damn smart.
I'd like for a world where Aretae is happy as much as the next guy. But I don't think the world has a special obligation to make him happy, and in fact I think he likely has - if not unique, rare - ability to create a comfortable place for himself in it.
We owe it to the ones who are not so bright, not so easily able to encompass the odd, not so flexible of mind to not constantly flaunt our differences. People in the SCA I once knew called it "freaking the mundanes" and it's basically a really obtuse way of being rude and self righteous. The mundanes are the ones that make it possibly for us to live the lives we want.
Different isn't necessarily better. Usually, it's just different. And often enough it actually is worse.
Perf,
I'll grant you that different is usually worse...that's my line. And I'll grant you that the SCA "scaring the normals" (that's what they called it over here on the west coast) are usually just being assholes.
I don't expect the world to conform to me. Indeed, I'd be shocked if it came close. However...I'm strongly inclined towards the position that a world that recognizes the huge variance htat there actually is...and doesn't just ask the +1-sigma independence, -1 sigma maternalness woman (my current estimate for the point at which marriage/kids is a net cost) to bend over and the start poppin out the babies. Instead we accept that she isn't fit for that role, and she could instead be a lawyer, or an engineer.
Nice to see you here again, poking your head above water.
Just because I have to ride my hobby horse:
Successfully purging coercion would do basically all those things. And I'm pretty sure that amounts to perfectly strict property enforcement.
(Right, that should do.)
"he's going to want to create an environment that's most suited to his needs."
Academically, I think the best method is to figure out what the ideal would look like, and then compromise backward until you find realism. This minimizes the compromises, which essentially means it finds the perfect solution, as long as you do the logic right.
The perfect solution then becomes its own ideal, and you do various things with it, like plot paths from A to B or to try to introduce details of social progress ahead of its natural time.
The first issue is, "Ideal for what purpose?" I don't think there's much disagreement about this, though. Just...it should be checked.
You don't quite want 3+ sigma to find places.
The ideal is to exploit them ruthlessly - you want to extract the most out of them as you can.
It turns out the best way to do this starts by giving out autonomy. (For once, the science backs me up on this one.) Basically, the most productive workers are the happiest workers.
However, you do want to explicitly seek out and try to mine talent, basically because talent often doesn't realize it needs to find itself.
At the same time, the ideal would straight-up lie to the median. It would let them sleep and dream their egalitarian dreams. They care about status? Fine. Thing is, pretend status is exactly as satisfying as real status. (Compare pretend food.)
I've never noticed anyone to not just assume these things are impossible. They need to be checked, not only because they might not be impossible, but even if so, to find out exactly what's impossible about them.
Aretae, nice to be back. I instituted a radical information diet, and now, wonder of wonders, I have a little more time in my life. Feels... nice.
While I am sympathetic to your position - truly - there is something that keeps me from a wholehearted endorsement and leap into the left-libertarian happy fun party.
And that is my intuition that the long term effects on the mundanes of the types of policies you endorse and that have generally become more common (in most areas of life, unevenly) over the last century are not good.
You and I, Foseti and Devin, Alrenous - probably most of the readers of this blog - we likely could cope with any set of social technological changes that come down the pike, short of a complete collapse into violence and dogs and cats living together.
I don't feel that the average population, the middle of the curve, is quite so flexible. You yourself have argued that for most situations the traditional wisdom is likely the best course in nearly all cases. What happens, though, when the traditional wisdom is deprecated and only a few remember or can discover what it is? Traditional wisdom works best when it is common sense.
I don't think more than a few weirdos are prepared to face life as an iterated prisoner's dilemma and conducting game theoretic analysis on each life choice.
While I don't go so far as to advocate Charlton's mystical empire (and I say that with respect, there's a large part of my brain that likes it) I wonder if as a matter of policy something at least a little more traditional would make a great number of people, maybe nearly all, a fair chunk happier.
I still find the Formalist critique of modern government compelling - but we agree there, for the most part. My intuition about their solution is that the traditional limitations on the autocrat are no longer something we can actually count on. We no longer need an oppressive and large state government to implement ubiquitous surveillance.
Maybe we should just insist that everyone have their own nukes *and* convert to Russian Orthodoxy. Best of both worlds!
How not to deal with variance: one world government imposing one identical standard on everyone.
At the other extreme, you have anarcho-capitalism, whereby people are free to associate with whom they please. Including in ways that some third parties may find offensive. Including in ways that most third parties find offensive.
To a first approximation, people will be protected from involuntary abuse by their relationships e.g. family, friends, neighbors and hired professionals. Someone might be short on all of those, in which case they'd need to rely upon charity. Close relations have an incentive to get things right, since they have limited resources and close knowledge of the particulars. Professionals have an incentive to get things right, because incompetence will put them out of business.
Charities do not have as much incentive to get things right, since they live in a world of signaling and affiliation, just like our world of politics. At least charities sometimes do go under, but they are clearly second best.
I think that in the most efficient world, (that is, the world which pleases the most people the most amount, and greatly displeases the fewest people) many people would be outraged by many things that they will not be in a position to do anything about. In exchange, all of the things which matter to themselves personally, would be more or less to their satisfaction.
Our current political, democratic and/or propagandistic world is one in which peoples affiliative signaling emotions are coddled. It would be a better world if people dealt with problems with hard headed thinking, rather than knee jerks.
Haidt's moral foundations are sound in the world of personal relationships, but in the world of distant strangers, they are holdovers. We have 100-person morals in 100,000,000-person states.
Stephen Gustave, I think many anarchists don't appreciate that given completely free choice, many people would not choose to live as independently as self-selected anarchists would choose to live. And thus, some institutions would arise which would not be to the tastes of the self-same anarchists who presumably would endorse the starting point.
The 3 sigma outliers on lack of conscientiousness and low IQ might wind up in more "structured" institutions than they are in now.
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