On revolts, the middle class, and the inherited furniture of belief
First and longest of the weekly memo series Alyssa wrote during a SIAI summer internship under Michael Vassar. Drafted as a sprawling brainstorm over six days — she kept editing and resending the file as it grew — it works through more than two dozen questions about who actually steers political and economic life, where today’s “common sense” came from, and why mass beliefs about progress, productivity, freedom, and class lag the underlying reality by decades. The opening notes (“holy crap, this is half the length of my AGI-09 paper already…”) are kept as-is for color.
Note to self: I get the impulse occasionally to just destroy whatever I’m working on if I notice some flaw in it. In this case, I obviously shouldn’t listen to it; maybe I can use that to train myself out of it.
Holy crap. This is half the length of my AGI-09 paper already, and I just wrote it in a few hours without even really trying. Longer than my AGI-09 paper now. I can feel my brain stretching to accommodate it. I’m going to get carpal-tunnel at this rate; maybe I should invest in speech-to-text software.
What is it that makes the political elite care about the desires of one group versus another group? Centuries ago, the most common mode was for the nobility to simply not care about the well-being of the peasants at all, except insofar as bad conditions for the peasantry led to things like revolts and mass starvation that made life more unpleasant for everyone.
Related question: what makes a group of people more likely to revolt against the rulers?
People won’t usually revolt against the rulers, as long as they see the rulers as the alpha males of their own tribe (Milgram experiment). If your tribe is at war against another tribe, this increases feelings of group identification and so discourages revolt (Orwell’s theory).
The key to getting the masses to revolt is, then, forming your own tribe, and being good enough at propaganda to persuade the people to look to you as their leader, and look to the nominal leader (the king or whoever) as the enemy.
The Republicans are like this much more than the Democrats nowadays, I think — they say that they are loyal to “America”, and they say it more loudly and fervently than the Democrats do (a weakness of the Democrats that Obama tried to counter), but their actual loyalty seems to be much more heavily tilted towards the Republican tribe than to whoever is actually in charge. Palin’s “real Americans = rural rednecks” crap and all that. (35% of Texans favor secession, mostly Republicans — Daily Kos .)
Orwell’s theory was that the “middle” group enlists the lower class on their side, but I don’t think that the middle class, in the US or in any other modern country, would be able to act coherently of their own volition. It’s more like a small cadre of intellectual elites, who come from the middle-upper classes but who make up a tiny percentage of it (Founding Fathers of America for the Revolutionary War, Southern aristocracy for the Civil War, representatives of the Third Estate and Enlightenment thinkers for the French Revolution, Bolshevik and Menshevik ideologues for the Russian Revolution, etc.), act coherently of their own volition, and then get everyone else to act in sync with them by various tricks.
Is the middle class in any modern country simply too large to take collective action of its own volition? The rich and powerful take effective collective action of their own volition in cases where they agree on what should be done (Reagan revolution, cutting capital gains taxes, Bush tax cuts, etc.), but the rich and powerful is a small enough group that you can (in some cases, anyway) get from anyone to anyone in two leaps (you know a guy who knows them). The rich and powerful also seem to be much less localized than the working class or middle class (this applies to the intellectual elite as well). My friends, your friends, Obama’s friends, and Thiel’s friends, to a first approximation, live all over the country (with localized clusters in various cities). The vast majority of a middle-class person’s friends live within twenty miles of their house (although the percentage is going down with the advent of the Internet). I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you needed ten or more handshakes to get from one average person living here to one average person living in Boise. This would have been even more true in ancient times (the knights went on crusades; the peasants seldom ventured more than twenty miles from home). You can get all of your friends together and protest the local Wal-Mart opening, but very few people get all their friends together to protest the Iraq war spontaneously, without being part of some larger movement.
All of this makes sense; nobles in ancient times and congressmen in modern times were much more heavily influenced by the upper elite than the lower classes, because the elite could effectively mobilize both itself and the lower classes, while the lower classes couldn’t mobilize anything.
Why, then, are politicians in the US so driven by the need to appeal to the middle class? It seems reasonable that, although US politicians aren’t middle-class themselves, they inherited a lot of their values from the middle class.
How is it that South American feudal lords, who employ peasant hand labor to harvest crops, can possibly compete in price with crops produced by modern, mechanized equipment?
Labor costs in places like South America are much cheaper than in first-world countries where most heavily mechanized farms are. The general rule is that costs are 70% labor and 30% capital, so labor costs, in addition to being significant in and of themselves, are the primary determinant of other costs (e.g., things like hotel rooms are much cheaper in South America, making them attractive for tourists).
There may also be some crops which are, effectively, only growable via large amounts of hand labor.
Prediction: the growth of corn is highly automated. Suppose the blurbleberry tree needs to be hand-picked, and so requires much larger amounts of labor. As it stands now, suppose that paying peasants $1 an hour is roughly cost-competitive with machinery. As places like South America and India develop, the cost of labor will go up, but machinery will become more widely available. Eventually, supposing that Solow’s theory is true and that less-developed countries grow faster than developed ones, South America and the US will equalize and both will have highly mechanized farms. However, blurbleberries will still require labor, and the only available labor will cost $10 an hour rather than $1 an hour. Hence, you will see a popular distinction emerge between “crops which are labor-sparing and cheap” and “crops which are labor-intensive and expensive”, much more so than is the case today.
Back in the ye olde days, membership in the upper class was very largely inherited, much more so even than today. You would expect from this that the average nobleman would have an average-population distribution of skills, as there was no easy way to get kicked out of the nobility if you were the local lord’s oldest son, and the nobility didn’t grow fast enough to allow for the entrance of large numbers of new people at any given time.
Conjecture: because of this, the vast majority of nobles simply weren’t effective rulers, even compared to the much-maligned modern political elite.
On the other hand, perhaps the world was simpler back then and the levers to manipulate it were more obvious.
The levers to manipulate the market were more obvious, but the levers to manipulate people probably weren’t, and nobles should have lacked social skills as much as they lacked technical skills.
We don’t seem to see presidents today who are actually, clinically insane, while we had kings who were actually clinically insane (e.g., George III), so maybe things really have been getting better.
To what extent was the ancient nobility influenced by people who were not actually nobles but who had wormed their way in by virtue of high levels of skill in whatever? We have Rasputin, famously. And the French political elite was successfully infiltrated by Laplace.
Where did middle-class ideology come from?
The Prussians designed it to a nontrivial degree, with the idea that the schools should train all the commoners to not think for themselves and to be obedient worker cogs in the army, factories, and so forth.
Were the masses more rebellious or independent before the beginning of modern education? The peasants certainly weren’t, but there was an ever-larger gap forming between peasants and the aristocratic elite (the old middle class, the bourgeoisie), and that class was much more independent than the peasantry or the modern middle class.
Were there any places where Prussian-style education was not instituted, and a country still managed to modernize? It would be interesting if you could get the benefits of all of modern technology without the drawbacks of such a large percentage of the population effectively wasting their lives.
There seem to be very few examples of countries industrializing without absorbing memes — and thus the idea of public schools — from Germany, probably because Germany had been so tremendously successful. Even Japan, as xenophobic as it was, imported their education system wholesale from Prussia; I believe the Japanese were largely collectivist and conformist even before then.
We shouldn’t see anything like this today, even though countries are still industrializing, because there’s much more of a global memespace. The Khmer Rouge being largely composed of French-educated intellectuals, and all that.
How did Germany and Italy unify in the middle of the nineteenth century?
It would be unthinkable today for a large number of independent countries, even ones with a common culture such as the nations of South America, to actually give up their sovereignty to some shared collective. The closest thing we have is the European Union, which has some power, although not very much.
If I remember correctly, both unifications were done largely through wars of various sorts.
But then, why did so many people feel like they were part of this new, coherent country? The Germans invaded the French very successfully in 1940, but the French never stopped thinking they were French in favor of being German. Poland even more so, although the Germans tried to make them think they were German, with a considerable amount of force.
There was some degree of belief in national unity among the Germans and Italians, but that couldn’t possibly have come out of nowhere.
Crazy idea: maybe, if you were good enough at propaganda, you could convince most of the nations in Africa that they were really part of the United African States (or whatever). You then march in, overthrow the government, and take over, and the people all love you. Surely, even a moderately competent, ordinary fascist dictatorship would be better for Africa than years of bloody coups and interminable wars between factions.
Why does nobody try to move their business to Africa to exploit ridiculously cheap African labor?
Come to think of it, why are there so few successful large businesses that come out of Africa? There are a few, but not many, and most of them are from South Africa .
What about South Africa makes it, by far , the most prosperous country on the continent? The Europeans may have exerted an unusually large amount of influence (the Boers and all that), which probably did some good.
There are obviously plenty of small businesses within Africa, some of them more or less successful (particularly the ones with foreign customers due to the favorable exchange rates, like piracy and Nigerian scamming). So, what happens to a business when it tries to grow larger?
Lots of small businesses need capital to expand, so maybe capital is simply unavailable.
Another idea: once a business grows large enough, you can’t directly supervise all of your employees; you have to rely on branch managers or middlemen. Maybe there’s something about Africa that prevents that from happening, and so prevents large organizations from forming.
On the other hand, you have large numbers of tribal militias (reminiscent of the People’s Front of Judea ), and some of them are quite large and still manage to function moderately effectively.
Why are there so many useless government bureaucrats?
Nobody in the government cares very much about wasting the government’s money, so there’s no incentive not to hire as many bureaucrats as possible.
Crazy idea: expand corporate accounting to include the expected NPV of all revenue generators and recurring expenses. E.g., as soon as a large company hires a new employee (not a replacement employee), it should immediately list in a book somewhere the NPV of all future payments, taxes, insurance, etc. that the new employee is expected to require. Conversely, if a company has five project development projects, each with a 20% chance of success, it should immediately list in a book somewhere the NPV of expected revenue for all five, multiplied by 0.2. People might actually pay attention to costs if they were shoved in their faces (e.g., we’re paying two million dollars to hire this guy!).
General idea: people are much less scared by recurring costs than by one-time costs. The one-time cost of getting an iPhone is perhaps $200. The actual cost of getting an iPhone is $900, as you’d have to pay $30/mo. for a data plan for two years, but nobody would ever tell you that it cost $900 even if asked. Marketers, of course, know all about this and exploit it shamelessly.
I don’t think this is because of hyperbolic discounting. It’s more like — to the extent that people have a sense of numbers at all, they look at numbers at face value, not at face value times length of time, so $30/mo. looks to be much less than $3,600/decade. I wonder how easy it would be to convince the average American that person A was better off than person B because person A made $50K/year while person B only made $2K/week.
How is it that bribery came to acquire a bad reputation? In the seventeenth century, people saw what we would now call bribes as natural and normal.
It’s possible that someone looked at the evidence and saw that a government minus bribes works better than a government plus bribes, but this seems unlikely given how scarce rational thought is.
A more likely theory is that governments which allow bribes still exist, but are now poor and weak (third world), and so we don’t notice them much.
This seems to be a good general explanation for why lots of things were adopted: people didn’t come to the conclusions they have now through rational debate and discussion, it’s just that, if A is more effective than B, then people who use A will outcompete people who use B until people who use B effectively disappear (or move out of our sight, like Cameroon).
Paul Graham seems to be at least somewhat wrong in Mind the Gap : a large percentage of increasing American inequality really is due to the rich corrupting the government and using their power to loot the country (this is probably a larger percentage than the inequality caused by wealth shifting to the most productive; startups are a small percentage of the economy).
Why does a government minus bribes work better than a government plus bribes? Bribes reduce the extent to which the government is biased in favor of rich people. All else being equal, maybe a fairer distribution of services is better because of decreasing marginal utility. Suppose a poor person and a rich person both want a government license to start the same business. If the rich person gets the license, his net worth may increase by 1%, a trivial amount. If the poor person gets it, it may increase his net worth 1000%, improving his quality of life enormously.
From whence comes the human tendency to think that more of the same is usually a good idea?
It’s possible that, for whatever reason, lots of people are or were in environments where movements down for any given individual are more frequent and severe than movements up. The average hunter-gatherer couldn’t become more successful than some upper bound, but he could get sick, break his leg, starve to death, get eaten by a tiger, etc. This would make it rational to exhibit a bias towards the status quo.
Crazy idea: maybe ambition correlates with being more hopeful of things getting better than fearful of things getting worse. If you assume that things can get better as well as worse, it makes sense to try all kinds of crazy things (crazy in the sense that a middle-class person would say “you’re crazy”, not actually crazy), so long as they have a large upside and not that much downside. This would also explain in some degree why there are so few ambitious people.
Human neurology is largely based on pattern-recognition, so it’s possible that it’s easier to develop a reaction of the type “matches previous pattern = good, doesn’t match = bad” than a reaction of the type “matches pattern A = good, matches pattern B = bad”.
What specific things have we inherited from the past, which it’s blatantly obvious make no sense at all, but which people today still do out of “tradition”? In large part, pretty much anything associated with social conservatives, which is probably why social conservatives tend to be on the losing side of history for the past century or two. This seems to be associated with conservatives banning stuff because they personally wouldn’t want to do it, as opposed to banning stuff because it actually damages them (drugs, prostitution, stem cell research, gay marriage, abortion, etc.).
Why is there no public database allowing you to quickly find correlations between stock prices and things that people think are correlated? It’s not like there’s a shortage of statistics ( Yahoo Finance ).
A precedent for this, with world socioeconomic data, is available at Gapminder .
Hedge funds, investment banks, and so forth probably have something like this for internal use. Although they obviously wouldn’t release their software to the public, I’m curious as to why people leaving these firms don’t try and do this independently (obviously most people wouldn’t, but I would think that someone would).
To what degree are finance people actually selected for less initiative? The worlds of banking and VC overlap somewhat, but the worlds of banking and entrepreneurship don’t seem to overlap at all. Bankers seem to look down on smaller businesses within their own industry (“boutiques”) even if the people working there get paid as much as they do. Banking, despite its newness as the sector of the economy to be in, seems to be relatively old-fashioned in this sense, in that the largest businesses win due to economy of scale ( High-Res Society ).
Paul Graham seems to be wrong to a certain extent about finance paying young people market wages ( After Credentials ); a huge percentage of the effective compensation paid to entry-level finance people is in the form of the seven-figure salaries they’ll get (or that they think they’ll get) ten years down the line.
Finance and entertainment seem to share some common characteristics, namely: there are a small number of really highly paid people, a much larger number of entry-level people working for comparative peanuts, a highly stressful and competitive work environment, and a high entry-level turnover rate. This is produced by the representativeness heuristic, which is produced by the really-highly-paid people at the top, which is produced by the ability to actually measure performance. Is this what all industries will inevitably turn into, as our performance-measuring capability improves? In software, we already have a number of highly visible, REALLY highly paid people (Brin, Page, Joy, Gates, Ellison, Omidyar, etc.); will we get twenty gajillion young people slaving away for peanuts to make their fortune in software? Maybe we won’t in software specifically, as everyone knows that the big money is in entrepreneurship, and the possibility of opening up a new company (as opposed to competing for a fixed number of positions at old companies) might make it less zero-sum.
Maybe we are seeing this in software, to a somewhat lesser extent, with lots of programmers getting medium-pay jobs at big companies when young and then slowly dropping out of the industry ( NYT, 1998 ).
Where will all the people who used to be in the WTA go?
It seems obvious that the WTA is softening down the transhumanist message and becoming more about politics (e.g., all of the last three discussions, and probably a majority of the last ten discussions, on wta-talk were about politics). People don’t tend to change their views just because one organization that they’re loosely affiliated with changes its, and if anything, more people are becoming interested in transhumanism as technology progresses and the meme spreads further.
On the other hand, people have a very-well-known tendency to want to join organizations which share their interests.
So, what organization will people join that’s more explicit about advocating transhumanism? There’s our cluster, but we don’t really have a “recruit random interested people” philosophy or a strong public presence. There’s the Less Wrong cluster, but that’s obviously more strongly tilted towards rationality and philosophy than future technology.
Speaking of Less Wrong, how often is it that one person, by virtue of being a good enough writer to attract a large audience, has started a self-sustaining group blog? I can’t think of any other examples off the top of my head. It seems like it would be rather difficult to do, under ordinary circumstances, because most people aren’t proactive enough to spend time writing stuff — perhaps the kind of people who are smart enough and unconventional enough to be attracted to Eliezer’s writing also possess higher-than-average initiative? That seems to make sense.
This is obviously a somewhat personal question, but how is it that Martine can keep broadcasting her history anywhere and everywhere?
Martine has said that the upper class simply doesn’t care about TG stuff that much, and given how much money she makes I’m inclined to believe her, but there seems to be a nontrivial amount of meme sharing between the middle class and the upper class, and we both know what the middle class is like.
I might be socially oblivious enough for it to be plausible that I’m annoying people and not noticing, but you can’t start from the middle class and become that successful and remain that socially incompetent.
So far as I can tell, she doesn’t have any contact with the rest of the TG community at all, which is odd considering how much she cares about it (she’s written a book on gender, has just finished a twenty-five-page essay on it , and mentions it in speeches all the time even when the topic is unrelated).
Rich and powerful people obviously have more leeway than the rest of us, but I don’t think Martine’s that rich and powerful as such things go, especially compared to the kind of people she talks to; if I remember correctly, she owned only around 3% of the drug company she founded back during the 90s.
Whence cometh the current fad for interdisciplinary research in academia?
This fad has been around for a while ; it trickled down to textbooks I remember using in middle school, so it’s probably at least a decade old. It’s not a fad so much as an intellectual movement, something like communism, except not as broadly applicable (but still pretty broadly applicable).
In accordance with my usual heuristic about how people act, and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I’m discounting the hypothesis that people in academia actually systematically reasoned out that interdisciplinarity wins on average.
A more plausible hypothesis, given the representativeness heuristic, is that there were one or two spectacular successes of interdisciplinary thinking which everyone has since tried to copy, but I can’t think of what these would be, and if they were sufficiently famous (a) I would probably have heard of them and (b) advocates would probably be reminding everyone of them in an effort to convince them.
A heuristic I’ve recently acquired is that if everyone is advocating for side A, and nobody is advocating for side ~A (I’ve never heard anyone argue that disciplinary barriers should be strengthened), it’s possible that (a) people used to advocate for ~A, and stopped, and nobody noticed that they stopped, or (b), since everyone already knows ~A, nobody wants to read an essay about how ~A is true or advocate for ~A, because it’s boring and doesn’t tell you anything new. Maybe there’s something there.
The fad seems to be driven in large part by a need to water down research groups in technical subjects with subjects that, as studied currently, are largely BS. Maybe it’s being advocated by humanities people who want to have more influence? That seems plausible.
Maybe it’s also tied to the postmodernist “there’s no real right and wrong, all viewpoints are equally valid”, in that the interdisciplinary advocates say something like “there is no real way to study any given topic, all fields are equally valid at studying everything”. It seems like a way of dodging the question, like the whole “nature/nurture” debacle. The standard answer to “is it nature or nurture” is now either “both” or “it’s more complex than that”, but most people actually don’t go beyond “it’s more complex than that” to try and actually answer the question and figure out what the complexities are; they just treat “both” as if it’s a final answer, a curiosity stopper, and then shout it from the rooftops. “Which kinds of experts do we need” is a valid question, but people don’t seem to be trying to actually answer it — they just say “more kinds than we have now” or “all of them” or an equivalent thereof as the standard party line.
Did the current meme of “diet and exercise are good for you” actually come about through rational examination of the evidence?
So far as I can tell, it really does seem to be the case that the evidence supports the hypothesis. Humans were designed by evolution to get a certain amount of exercise, and so it’s plausible that we don’t work as well when we don’t. Similarly, evolution designed humans for a certain diet, and it’s not surprising that this diet doesn’t coincide with which foods are cheapest to produce and sell by industrial food manufacturers.
Still, the whole obesity/fitness thing seems to be so highly politicized that I doubt anyone looking at it now would have their opinions formed by the evidence directly; they’d probably have their opinions formed mostly by listening to some advocate with a megaphone.
Why would someone who doesn’t know you want to convince you to exercise more and eat less junk food? It seems to be a moral issue, in the same way that the conservative movement treats abortions as a moral issue and wants you not to get them. But we inherited the idea of abortions as bad, while we didn’t inherit the idea of junk food as bad.
Maybe it’s tied into the idea of modern, technological society as bad. A lot of people on the left are pro-environmental and don’t like the idea of big corporations, factories, etc., but it’s much easier to advocate the idea of getting rid of junk food (which benefits everyone) than getting rid of a factory or power plant (which benefits some people and harms others).
How is it that progress came to be seen as a generically good thing in our society (by most people, anyway)?
Given status-quo bias, and all the associated cultural baggage (people who take initiative and upset the status quo are villains, people who react and return the world to the way it was are heroes), you would think that most of our society would be anti-progress. Indeed, I think that people’s actual viewpoints are more anti-progress than their stated viewpoints.
Certainly, a lot of our fiction is anti-progress; we have numerous works like Lord of the Rings about how our ancestors were giants, and how the world is falling into decay, and how every generation is worse than the previous, and how things are lost instead of gained over time. I believe this goes all the way back to ancient Greece .
We established earlier that, even though the evidence is blatantly undeniable in favor of progress, very few people actually look at the evidence, and by the time people are old enough to see progress in action, their thoughts are mostly cached anyway.
Historically, things which have advanced society (various science things, various engineering things, new businesses, new products, etc.) have also made lots of people tremendously rich and famous. This seems like a reasonable solution; if person A wants to build a car factory to make himself rich, he can’t say “I want to build a car factory to make myself rich”, so he’ll say “I want to build a car factory to make your lives better”, and so he’ll have a general theory about how everyone should build car factories to make everyone’s lives better, and he’ll hire PR people as advocates, and so we get the ideology of progress and technological and economic growth and so forth.
What are the most plausible kinds of non-ultratechnology, long-term death spirals that modern-day Western democracies could fall into?
The credentialism death spiral, where people compete against each other on the basis of how much time they’ve wasted getting degrees, and so it takes longer and longer to get degrees until people are too old to accomplish anything useful after they’re done with schooling.
The depopulation death spiral, where people have fewer kids for whatever reason, which increases the pressure on the next generation to care for the elderly, which causes them to have fewer resources to devote to raising kids. This already seems to be happening to some extent in Japan and Russia.
The health care death spiral; if the cost of health care keeps getting larger as a percentage of GDP, then companies will eventually revolt and stop paying for workers’ health insurance, which would probably force the government to nationalize it, which would cause huge amounts of havoc.
The run-out-of-resources death spiral, which everyone knows about, but which has never actually happened to any of the gajillions of natural resources we use, and which I am therefore not particularly worried about. The one resource this seems plausible for is helium, as it escapes into the atmosphere and then into space, so we have no cost-effective way to get it back once it’s used.
The cronyism death spiral, in which the government becomes more and more corrupt, big-business-oriented, etc., until it can’t handle national emergencies when the next one comes along. (This happened to a high extent during the Great Depression; we seem to be somewhat lucky in that our leader figure was named Roosevelt and not Hitler.)
Near the end of Watchmen , Dr. Manhattan takes Silk Spectre to Mars; when he lifts both of them up on a huge, kilometer-high gizmo-thingy, she indignantly shouts at him to “put this thing down!”. She acts indignant , like she’s scolding someone at a cocktail party for not bringing enough juice or something, completely ignoring the fact that (a) she’s witnessing things which have never been seen before in the entire history of the human species, (b) she’s the second human, and the first normal human, to travel to Mars, which would definitely put her in the history books, and (c) she’s dependent on Dr. Manhattan second-by-second for things like oxygen. What do you call this sort of thing?
This seems to be the polar opposite of realizing that the world exists, in the sense that we talked about earlier: being so completely oblivious to the world that you don’t notice arbitrarily large changes in it.
This sort of complete obliviousness wouldn’t really be selected against in the ancestral environment, as the world was basically always the same, and the only variables were who you were and who the other people were.
I wonder if she would have reacted in the same way (not at all) if she had been teleported into a WWII Eastern Front battle or something. Such battles do have an effect on people (shell shock and all that); maybe it’s because a battle is actively harmful in an obvious way (limbs being blown off, etc.) as opposed to merely being neutral and highly unusual.
How have colleges gotten away with forcing so many students to drop out for so long?
According to you (I would be interested in third-party sources that talk about this), a majority of college students leave before completing a four-year degree because most colleges have some sort of math requirement, and the average person simply cannot pass a remedial math class.
Once I think about it, it’s not surprising how little-known this fact is; pro-college ideology in America is quite strong, and nobody would ever want to say something like “this section of the population is too stupid to go to college, so they shouldn’t”. You can say out loud that “our society undervalues prole occupations, and you can make really good money in a lot of them, so we should support more vocational training”, but I don’t think you can explicitly say that a large percentage of the population is just stupid.
This sort of thing might have actually been keeping our society from falling further into credentialism for the past thirty years; if most people who go into college drop out, it doesn’t matter how much pressure you put on high schoolers to attend, because such a large percentage of them will leave after a year or two anyway.
Still, I’m skeptical that an absence of math ability alone would be enough to hold back so many people from something that’s so highly valued in our society. So many people see themselves as “not good at math” that I think it would be fairly easy to start a political campaign against math requirements; you could argue things like “nobody really uses algebra anyway” and “we shouldn’t deny these people access to good jobs” and “this is a ploy by the elite eggheads to keep the masses down”. I can feel the speech writing itself already.
Maybe none of the people in power ever notice. Even if 30% of America has the cached historical fact “I dropped out of college because I couldn’t pass a math class”, this 30% of America is not going to be the group that becomes congressmen and lobbyists and so forth, and will probably have relatively little contact with the group that will.
Why is it that so few people employ the money-time equivalent heuristic?
This heuristic is obviously tremendously useful, not only for evaluating your own activities, but for evaluating whether something is fairly priced. For instance, suppose I get a $10 haircut that takes half an hour. This works out to $20 an hour, which seems reasonable for a semi-skilled worker, plus real estate and maintenance costs. The city bus costs $1; if twenty-five people get on the bus every hour, then the bus and bus driver together cost $25, which is also reasonable (city buses are also sometimes subsidized). Universities, by this measure, are horrendously expensive; at thirty people per class, the university is charging around $1,200 per person-hour, which is completely, utterly absurd for someone as well-paid as a professor (and possibly a minimum-wage teaching assistant). NY public schools, at thirty people a class, cost $400 a person-hour.
Using this heuristic, it’s completely and blatantly obvious that you get inflated prices in industries with monopolies or high barriers to entry, which I don’t think most people recognize intuitively.
Maybe this is caused by the middle-class-standard salaried job, where you don’t get paid by the hour, which decreases the intuitive, obvious relationship between time and work. Why would someone want a salaried job over a per-hour job?
One blatantly obvious reason is that a salaried job allows employers to screw over their employees more subtly; instead of paying them less, they simply quietly work them more hours for the same pay, which amounts to the same thing.
It seems to make some sense that there would be a relationship between skill level and method of pay. If you get paid by the hour, that implies that your skills are fungible (one hour is as good as another), and therefore probably fairly low-level (e.g., McDonald’s workers, or cashiers). A CEO’s job, on the other hand, is not fungible because of the varied nature of the work: there will be some tasks which are extremely valuable, some which are moderately valuable, and some which turn out to be worthless after the fact. People might therefore seek salaried work as an effort to shift their image of themselves from lower-class to middle-class.
How did “freedom”, “liberty”, and “democracy” become so corrupted in our society, to the point where the people who talk the most about “freedom” (Republicans) are the people who are most eager to get rid of it?
If I remember, the idea of “freedom” as a good thing first came from the Enlightenment-era thinkers of post-Renaissance Europe.
I wonder how many people in America realize that American memes are not universal — e.g., realize that, in the fairly recent past, people talked about rigid control of everyone by the state explicitly as a good thing, instead of talking about it explicitly as a bad thing and implicitly as a good thing.
Perhaps most people can visualize the idea of someone who is evil — a disutility maximizer who eats kittens for breakfast and also thinks that freedom or whatever is bad — but can’t imagine someone who is opposed to all the usual criminal things (murder, torture, theft, etc.) and also thinks that freedom or whatever is bad.
The American revolutionaries seem to have a high degree of influence over modern thought, much more so than other historical figures — maybe their talk about “freedom” and so forth filtered down to us in the form of words, but not in the form of actual ideas?
Maybe it’s just the old heuristic that the ideas associated with the winners dominate by virtue of being associated with winners; the more democratic and whatever countries won , and if Hitler had won we’d all be talking about how horrible freedom is.
Why don’t companies do a better job of actually making sure their employees are productive?
You pointed out earlier that middle managers in big companies are themselves from the middle class, and don’t have the meme that employees should be productive, making it impossible to distinguish productivity from non-productivity (as opposed to distinguishing obedience from rebelliousness).
However, the CEOs of sufficiently large companies should be reasonably smart, ambitious, capable of thinking, etc. It’s still entirely possible that they don’t know how to teach middle managers what productivity looks like, but it should be simple enough to encourage actual productivity by firing people who don’t make money and by rewarding people who do (what Jack Welch did). This allows you to improve without thinking about how to improve, in much the same way as evolution does.
It seems plausible that many CEOs would care more about the image of the company than how much money it actually makes or loses. People, even at the upper-class investor or board-of-directors level, are still more heavily influenced by affect than by numbers, and both direct compensation and stock options are much more directly linked to positive opinions (of the board and stockholders respectively) than actual earnings.
Did individual employees become more or less productive during the second half of the twentieth century? I don’t see any easy way to get good data on this. They obviously became more productive in certain sectors like software, but these results are hard to extrapolate.
Why does nobody bother to keep track of, or even mention, numbers about how many people die from what? I can’t just find a number about what percentage of deaths are from COPD or whatever; I have to calculate them myself.
It’s not like this is hard to do. The murder rate in the US is 0.0056%, and the death rate in the US is 0.827%, so about two-thirds of one percent of all deaths are murders. This is probably slightly larger than your actual probability of dying by murder, as the population is still expanding and murders happen disproportionately to the young.
The latter probably requires more explanation for someone not interested in statistics. (I didn’t read about this in a statistics book or whatever, I just discovered it, so if it has a name I don’t know what it is.) As a simple example, suppose that all people normally die at age 80, and that all murders happen to people of age 20. If the population is steady, then there are equal numbers of people of each age. Suppose that one percent of all deaths are murders. Let N be the number of people aged zero. Since all people die at age eighty, N people die every year, and so there must be 0.01N murders every year. Since the number of people of age 20 is N, 1% of them must die every year. Hence, your chance of dying by murder is 0% + 0% + 0% + … + 1% + 0% + … + 0%, or 1%, exactly the percentage of deaths that are murders.
However, suppose that the population is growing. Suppose that families only have kids when they are 30, and that each family has four kids (on average). The number of people of age X will be N·2 −X/30 , or (0.97716) X ·N. One percent of all deaths are still murders. However, the number of deaths every year is (0.97716) 80 ·N, or 0.1575N. The number of murders, therefore, is 0.001575N; the number of people aged 20 is 0.630N, so everyone’s chance of being murdered during their lifetime is 0.001575/0.63, or 0.25%, 0.6 dB lower than the percentage of deaths that are murders.
It’s possible that people deliberately avoid talking about it because they feel that actually putting a number on death is disrespectful, like you’re treating people as statistics or whatever. This is obviously no good for the victims involved, but most people wouldn’t realize that.
Do most people even have minimizing death as a goal? This seems to be a large difference between living in a world based on facts and living in a world based on anecdotes; in the former, something which will save a few thousand lives is qualitatively different from news about how man bites dog, while in the latter the two are pretty much the same.
Why hasn’t anyone run a propaganda campaign about the dangers of anecdotal thinking? So far as I can tell, love of anecdotal thinking (or personal-experience-based thinking, or whatever you want to call it) is probably the single largest thing preventing people from becoming more rational.
Your audience would have to understand the difference between an anecdote and an actual thought, which is definitely a minority of the population, but I don’t think it’s a very small minority. It’s certainly larger than the minority of people who know what a linear regression is ( actually know what it is, as in can explain the math behind it and why it’s important and so forth).
There should be some compact, easy-to-understand way to convey why anecdotes kill, but I’m having trouble thinking of one. It’s not like you can say “little pieces of anecdote crawl into your lungs and clog them up” or whatever.
Maybe it would be better, instead of talking about how anecdotes kill, to talk about how anecdotes create unfairness , which is probably easier to understand. If you say that “unfair distribution of resources caused an additional two million deaths in the previous decade”, it’s a boring statistic. But you could run stuff on how “people with condition A get treatment that’s so expensive to research and produce, you could use it to buy a jet, a yacht, and a country house, while people with condition B are simply left to die after a halfhearted attempt at curing them” (always avoid actual numbers!). “Why should the privileged few — those lucky enough to get their names in the papers — get the lion’s share of the medical research funding?” and all that. You could play up how the media showers coverage on a tiny fraction of victims, which gives people a villain to hate.
Another angle you could try is to hammer on the message that delusions exist. This, by itself, is definitely a simpler message (although not as useful); it seems to be simple enough such that the average American could possibly actually understand it. I don’t think most people actually understand the idea of a delusion, or a hallucination; they think that these things always happen to “crazy people” and not to them. It seems that, for most people, whatever they see with their own eyes is the definition of real , and is therefore utterly beyond question. If someone thinks he saw an angel last night, in most cases he can’t be convinced otherwise — “But I know I saw an angel, it was right there in front of me, it spoke to me and everything and it felt so real ” and yadda yadda yadda. You could use simple, easy-to-understand statistics like “60% of people have experienced hallucinations” (by which we mean have seen things that don’t exist like ghosts and spirits and angels, but we don’t have to tell them that).
Heck, maybe we could mathematically prove that the fraction of the population with a severe delusion is greater than 80% (or something like that), by showing that the various religions contradict each other, and that therefore, no matter what religion is actually correct, X% of the population must be seriously deluded. We wouldn’t actually show this math in commercials of course, but it would be handy to have in case anyone in the intelligentsia ever wanted to argue with us. (Note: I don’t actually advocate us personally doing this, it would obviously be an enormous waste of resources; I’m just pondering feasibility.)
Why is everything medical invariably buried under a mountain of paperwork?
Other large bureaucracies (e.g., the military) have mountains of complicated paperwork, but their mountains of paperwork don’t seem to have gotten much worse over the past fifty years. Heck, the German military in 1914 had elaborate plans for mobilization and deployment of troops in case they got into a war with France or Russia, and that was almost a hundred years ago.
Maybe it’s just that the amount of paperwork scales with the square of the size of the bureaucracy (or whatever), and since the health care system takes up a larger and larger percentage of the economy, the paperwork keeps getting worse.
Bureaucrats like to increase the size of their staffs in order to make themselves more powerful, so perhaps more paperwork gives managers a justification for hiring more secretaries and whatever.
You would think that people would have some incentive to reduce paperwork to the minimum level necessary, as nobody wants to spend all of their time filling it out. Maybe the people who actually have to fill out the paperwork (doctors, patients) don’t overlap with the people who create it (middle-level managers). Or maybe paperwork lets middle-level managers feel like they’re doing something useful.
What is it that actually causes people to have much-higher-than-average status among the middle class?
Middle-class people get ordinary status by following social rules and not being jerks and by doing what they’re told and so forth, but everyone (or most people anyway) does that, so it can’t act as a filtering mechanism for very high status.
One of my aunts is as high as you can get within the US federal civil service (one level below Cabinet), and she does have more status than normal, but not really high status, of the kind that a movie star or whatever would have. I don’t think most middle-class people see the government or big companies as real (as in, see them as organizations that actually exert influence upon the world), as opposed to seeing them as holding tanks for people to fill up roles in. So, if employee #1 has literally a thousand times as much influence on the world as employee #2, most people will only notice a little bit. Then again, maybe my family is just weird; a lot of my relatives are lawyers and so forth, so maybe high ranks in government are less impressive to us.
Entertainment is obviously a huge component of it. Why is it that the media focuses so much on entertainment and entertainers? People in the media want to make money, so the obvious assumption is that people want to read about entertainers more than they do about chemical engineers or whatever, but I don’t think the actual work of entertainment is much more interesting than that of chemical engineering. Maybe it’s that (a) entertainers are seen by lots of people, so (b) people who go into entertainment are those who enjoy being seen by lots of people, so (c) these sorts of people will do all kinds of crazy stunts in order to attract people’s attention, so (d) there are many more scandals surrounding entertainers than chemical engineers, and so (e) if you write about the life of an entertainer, it’s simply much less boring because of all the nuttiness.
Actually, it seems like who gets their name in the paper could be a fairly reliable metric for status. People who read the paper are mostly middle-class, and the newspapers will try to adjust their stories reasonably closely to what people want to read most about, and which people you want to read about should be roughly proportional to how much status you assign them. This doesn’t imply that papers create status; although they obviously play some role, demand usually drives supply and not the reverse. The people who get their names most in the paper are obviously entertainers and various elected officials (as distinguished from appointed officials, who don’t seem to get nearly as much attention).
Damn. Now that I think about it, this would seem to imply that top-level high school and college athletes actually have status in the rest of the world (it’s patently obvious that they have status in high school and college), since one of the favorite things for local papers to report on is high school and college sports games. I remember when I got angry that the major local paper (circulation 90K) ran about thirty column-inches on the life history, goals, techniques, etc. of one specific high school basketball player. I can’t find any newspaper articles on Terence Tao , as crazily talented as he is, until after he got tenure at UCLA, even though there was an article about him in a mathematics education journal when he was nine . If the entire world, as opposed to the vast majority of the world, showed these ridiculous levels of favoritism towards non-nerds… it would really be on the level of “Cthulhu is standing over there and is about to eat you”, I think.
(Prompted by this Jessica Livingston interview , posted to Hacker News.) Why is it that any article about any female in computing, regardless of who they’re working for or what they’re working on, will always mention at some point the high male-to-female ratio in most technical fields? What is it about this topic that makes people want to come back to it over and over, no matter how many discussions they’ve had on it previously? Even though this article’s title is completely generic, the very first thought I had upon looking at it was “this will talk at some point about the dearth of women in programming or startups or something-or-other”, and lo, my prophecy was fulfilled.
I think the most likely hypothesis is Paul Graham’s theory : everybody and their dog has an opinion, and is generally not afraid to post it, so discussions grow exponentially.
Maybe my perspective is skewed on this to some degree. It’s been some while (at least a year) since I stopped asking myself the question of “which political tribe should I be a member of?” or “which memeplex should I ally myself with?” in favor of the question “would policy A be better than policy B?”, which I think is a good thing. There’s nothing explicitly political about women in computing — it’s not considered to be a government issue, at least in the discussions I’ve read — but since everyone is allowed to have an opinion on it, the Blue and Green parties invariably have opinions on it, and so people will get into political arguments about it because they identify themselves with the Blue and Green parties and want to spread their ideas.
How many young people have actual long-term goals?
Obviously, most people in general don’t have actual long-term goals, but it seems that young people in particular lack them. A truly tiny fraction (I would say < 0.1%) of the college students in America even apply for transfer to a place like Stanford or MIT, despite the obvious low costs and high benefits of doing so. An equally tiny fraction start startups despite the overwhelming economic advantage of doing so. A small, although not as tiny, fraction of people in PhD programs actually try to finish their dissertations and graduate as quickly as they can so they can move on to other things. I’m sure you could find other examples if you tried.
Maybe it’s caused by young people spending so much time in utterly rigid institutions. If you’re in seventh grade, it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how smart you are or how much skill you accumulate — your performance is capped at 100%. Perhaps more importantly, your life is pretty much the same whether your performance is 70% or 100%. I think it’s possible that we gradually train kids out of the idea that it’s possible to make a better life for yourself if you work hard at the right things (I was never trained out of the idea myself, but then, I was willing to ram my head against a brick wall for a solid ten years before getting anywhere).
This sort of credentialism, both direct and indirect, seems like a plausible explanation for why the leaders of society are all so old relative to earlier times, in addition to domination of the top-level positions by the Baby Boomer generation. It took Kevin Warsh about eleven years to work his way up from recent law school graduate to Federal Reserve Governor, which is unusually fast, but he didn’t get out of law school until he was 25. Obama took seventeen years to become president, but again, he didn’t get out of law school until he was 30, so he’s now 47.
What is it that makes things “cool” to most people? E.g., mercenaries, ninjas, pirates, and spies are all “cool”, and so there are tons of stories, movies, TV shows, and comic books about them.
One of the common threads that Eliezer noted is that, although all of the above actually do or did exist, none of them are people who you would ever actually expect to encounter. As soon as you start encountering something a lot in everyday life, it must no longer be “cool”.
All of the above are also known to be extremely dangerous occupations; perhaps this prevents the magic from going away. E.g., CSI has caused a huge surge of interest in programs to help people become forensic investigators. As soon as these people actually do become forensic investigators, they’ll start telling their friends and family that it’s nothing like what’s shown on TV, and interest will wane. With pirates, you don’t have to worry about pesky reality interfering with your fantasies, as you’d have to be utterly batshit insane to actually go out and become a pirate off the coast of Somalia.
It may simply be random, to a large extent. There seems to be a nontrivial amount of pressure on people to be interested in things that at least some other people they know are also interested in. If you’re interested in fixing airplanes, you’ll be discouraged from pursuing it instead of encouraged because nobody around you knows anything about fixing airplanes. So, once interested-in-X memes are generated by largely-random forces, they remain in place for a while through sheer inertia, and so the pool of interested-in-X memes at any given time will be largely random.
Why has nobody realized that welfare essentially doesn’t exist anymore?
In order to qualify for “welfare” (TANF) or food stamps nowadays, you need to be completely broke, without any income (even a single minimum-wage job is too much in most states ), and they’ll still kick you off after a certain number of months anyway.
This would seem to imply that the social classes in America are so stratified, that the average middle-class person complaining about welfare has never actually had a serious discussion with a poor person, at least in the thirteen years since Clinton signed PRWORA.
What advantage is it to the Republicans to not bother telling anyone that they’ve essentially axed welfare? Welfare reform was a battle that the Republicans won ; you would expect them to boast about their victory.
Maybe it’s not really to the Republicans’ advantage to declare victory, on the theory that, as long as a problem remains unsolved, you can use it as a reason for why people should vote for you. E.g., abortion has been legal for thirty-five years now, and we’ve had five complete Republican presidential terms since Roe v. Wade, and yet the Republicans in power don’t appear to be pressing hard for actually re-banning it.
It seems to be pretty universally recognized that this is depressing. Why don’t people actually try to avoid it?
Wow. Now that I think about it, this actually seems like a best case scenario — nobody gets divorced, nobody gets fired and goes bankrupt, nobody gets run over by a truck at age 40, they have enough money to actually buy a house.
I have a theory: just about any way of life will seem better if everyone around you is doing it, because a shared experience is more pleasant than a solitary experience. Suppose that you decide you don’t like the standard middle-class life, and so you’re going to go travel the world for a year. You’ll certainly have a much more diverse range of experiences, but the problem is that, assuming you have a typical middle-class range of friends, none of them will want to go travel the world with you, which makes the journey a lot more boring.
Maybe the middle class will actually start to break down under the pressure of modern technology. There’s obviously been a lot of financial pressure, which if anything is only getting worse, but this just tends to push people downward into the lower classes. Modern technology allows people with similar interests to congregate together and develop their own social hierarchies and so forth, which reduces the pressure on people to conform to standard middle-class values. It’s also plausible that broadband internet will finally kill television, which may allow more people to develop interests in the first place, as it’s kind of hard to have other hobbies when you spend thirty hours a week sitting in front of a glass tube.
I wonder how bad a situation has to be before people will actually take initiative to try and avoid it. Not that many people seriously tried to avoid getting drafted into the Army during the Vietnam war, although some did. The badness of ordinary life has come down a lot over the past century (e.g., none of us expects to wind up in anything as bad as Stalingrad), so maybe people nowadays, given the same level of difficulty, would actually take more initiative. On the other hand, maybe people nowadays have been trained that the way to solve problems is to call the grownups and tell them to fix it, instead of fixing it yourself.
In what sense are people today more childish than people in 1900?
I think that people today are more apt to seek permission from an authority before they can do something (see this Daily Mail piece for an example, relating to children). The government is much larger and more intrusive nowadays than it was in 1900; back then, the government was simply too small to do even a fifth of the things it does today, and so today we have more regulations, more licenses, more permits.
Why did the government become bigger and more intrusive? I think it’s plausible that people will naturally drift towards becoming more child-like if they’re allowed to; life is simply easier, in some sense, when you have some organization that can handle the difficult things for you, whether it’s your family, some corporation, the government, etc., and so people will seek out such organizations, and try to create them if they don’t exist. Hence, it slowly becomes the government’s job to stop A from happening, and then to stop B from happening, etc.
The Republicans give the impression of being against this, but I don’t think they are really. The Republican leaders are against the government moving in to support the poor and make their lives easier, and they try to project an image of rugged independence and whatnot, but they certainly aren’t against the government supporting the rich . It’s like the dynamic described in “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” ; the elite get cushy lives handed to them by the authorities, and the poor and middle class don’t (the poor to a higher extent than the middle class).
I wonder if this makes the elite, the upper class, more childish than the lower classes. I think the dynamic is something like: (a) the least childish among the middle class move up into the upper class disproportionately, (b) the longer you are in the upper class, the more likely it is that you’ll become childish, (c) children of the upper class are upper class themselves without ever having to work at it, so they’re even more childish, and so (d) you get an equilibrium amount of childishness depending on how easy it is to fall out of the upper class if you let your guard down. This would predict that the upper class became less childish relative to the rest of the population over the past thirty years, as nepotism started to matter less.
What is it that middle-middle-class people actually do during all of the hours when they are supposedly working?
The classic answer to this is meetings, but I get the impression that someone somewhere would get suspicious if there were so many meetings that most of the employees were occupied for four or more hours a day.
I suppose it’s possible that people just browse the Internet and waste time for most of the day; this seems to be most people’s default state in school, and school isn’t all that different from those kinds of working environments.
Writing long memos that just get skimmed over and then thrown in the garbage also seems plausible, as that’s pretty much what public school is about, and it’s easy for people to reason that, by golly, if this guy is writing all these reports then he must be doing something useful.
What kinds of titles and responsibilities are associated with these middle-class jobs? It seems like you would either have to have a lot of categories, or else a few extremely common categories, to hold all of the tens of millions of middle-class workers. There’s middle management, obviously. Various kinds of “analysts” and “representatives”. Maybe jobs which are productive and upper middle class on paper, but which actually aren’t, since the middle class tends to imitate the upper middle class?
What kinds of departments do all of these middle-class workers work in? It’s plausible enough that middle managers wouldn’t care about unproductive employees, but if an entire department is unproductive someone at the top is going to notice, and you would either have to have a lot of unproductive departments to pick up all the slack, or you would have to have unproductive and productive people mixed together, which doesn’t sound likely (eventually someone would notice the difference between the two).
Absolutely everybody and their dog says that people who try to start families under age 20 are more likely than not to fail, and while I don’t have any statistics on this, it seems that they’re right. Why wasn’t this the case a hundred years ago?
The age of majority, if anything, was older instead of younger (21 instead of 18). It does seem that the age of majority means less as you go further backward; e.g., Ben Franklin was apprenticed to someone until he turned 21, didn’t like it, ran away, and was wildly successful.
So far as I can tell, the smaller government and greater difficulties in communication meant that the world was much less interconnected. If you didn’t like it in New York, you could move a hundred miles away to Massachusetts, and the odds were fairly good that you’d never see anyone from your old town again. Hence, if you wanted to, you could just take a train or whatever to the next state and start a family there, and nobody would have any way of knowing if you were underage or your parents didn’t approve.
It might also be self-perpetuating to a certain degree. People seem to have had stronger family ties back then, and so if you had the support of parents, they could do a lot to make sure that you succeeded. Once the social norm is that young people fail, parents will tell their children that they will fail, won’t support them, etc., which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There’s also standard credentialism creep. It simply isn’t possible nowadays to make a living out of high school that would allow you to support a child, buy a house, etc., although it seems to have been as recently as fifty years ago.
I wonder what effects older children (greater inter-generation spacing) will have on our society. The Baby Boomer generation had children so late that the highest birth-rate year for Generation Y (my generation) is 1991, forty-five years after WWII ended. Maybe it will allow the Boomer generation to stay in power for an additional decade or two, since there are so few people after them to replace them? By the time people my age are forty, the average baby boomer will be in their late seventies, well after normal retirement age.
How good is the average person at modeling other people?
Theory: normal people are just bad at modeling other people, and the reason that nerds get pegged as being unusually bad at modeling other people is simply that nerds and non-nerds are different, and non-nerds vastly outnumber nerds. If you put one nerd with a group of a hundred non-nerds, the nerd won’t be able to fit in well or acquire lots of status, and so he gets pegged as “being bad at social stuff”. But if you put one non-nerd in with a group of a hundred nerds, if anything, he’d do worse , since pretty much everybody has at least some minimal non-nerd social knowledge, while not that many people have explicit technical knowledge.
Nerds may be bad at modeling other people relative to the improvements they gain in other skills with increased IQ, but that just means that people-modeling isn’t all that g-loaded; it doesn’t imply that it’s anti g-loaded.
I first realized this when I stumbled onto a group of interlinked, reasonably well-written articles on the Internet a few weeks ago. One of the things they discussed was lying about which college you went to, and the author said that, if you wanted to pull it off successfully, you had to keep track of all the things you said about college to everyone you met for years to make sure you didn’t contradict yourself. Heck, even I realize that people aren’t that diligent — absolutely nobody keeps track of everything said to them, and very few people actually take the time to evaluate the things that people say to see if they even make any sense at all. And this was said by someone who could write a dozen reasonably coherent, articulate pages that actually said some things that made sense, which definitely puts him above average in terms of intelligence and ability to model the world.
I think it’s plausible that a large amount (although certainly not all) of my social inability is caused by my lack of interaction with people who aren’t essentially my enemies by default, which means I’ll probably be substantially better by age 20 or whatever. I think that’s a reasonable goal to have.
What percentage of the population can actually think?
I’ve thought up a quick-and-easy test for this recently. Sit down in front of a desk, with a blank notebook and pencil, but no books, no computers, no telephones, no other people. Within ten minutes (or whatever), come up with an idea, in any subject, which (a) you didn’t previously have in your brain and (b) was never previously given to you. E.g., if you didn’t already have the idea in your head that Stalin was selfish, and you thought about what actions Stalin took during WWII, and you concluded that Stalin was selfish because his actions showed a pattern of favoring his own welfare more than the welfare of the hundreds of millions of people beneath him (except insofar as it contributed to his own), then this would qualify.
This sort of test has the advantage of being very broadly applicable, not biased in favor of Westerners or mathematicians or artists, and easy to do in your spare time.
I think that performance on this kind of test would go down with age; as you grow older, you accumulate more cached thoughts, and your brain loses neurons that enable it to do stuff like this.
This would probably correlate somewhat with IQ, but I doubt it would correlate extremely highly. IQ tests are largely based on pattern matching ability and the like, which is useful but not sufficient for generating original thoughts.
Why is it that you hear so much today about the police stealing shit simply because they can (e.g., Texas police seizures , New Rome, Ohio )?
You expect to see this kind of thing in poor African or third-world countries, but not in places like the US where the government and judicial system are actually reasonably functional.
Maybe this sort of thing happens everywhere, and people just don’t notice it? Embezzlement seems to be pretty common in a lot of first-world countries, although it’s definitely less common than just stealing shit from random people on the street.
It’s possible the media is biased towards reporting this kind of thing (sensationalism), but this seems at least somewhat unlikely; the media is generally allied with the government and the police are part of the government.
Maybe it’s caused by the unusually aggressive (relative to other first-world countries) US prosecution of the “war on drugs”. Pretty much all drug traffickers, at one point or another, carry large amounts of cash as payment for the drugs they just sold, and the police are legally entitled to seize this money, as it comes from illegal activity. This probably blurs the line between “innocent citizen” and “drug dealer”; if the citizen in question is carrying a large amount of cash, even if they aren’t actually guilty of anything, they’ll be associated with drug dealers by the affect heuristic, which makes judges and so forth less likely to be sympathetic.
Speaking of judges, have we considered trying to get a judge allied with Singularitarianism? Judges are the closest things we have to dictators in our society; their rulings have the force of law, and yet there’s none of the complicated rigmarole involved in getting a law passed through the legislative or executive branches. Lots and lots and lots of useful yet politically inexpedient things are done by judges (school desegregation, removal of anti-miscegenation laws, gay marriage, abortion, Miranda rights, banning mandatory school prayer, etc.) on the national scale, and it seems plausible that this extends to the local scale. It might even be worth it to have someone spend the ten years or whatever in top-14 law school followed by legal practice.