Kaldor-Hicks redistribution is not Lindy

The Kaldor-Hicks argument is that a change in government policy which makes some people better off and some people worse off, should be pursued if the now-better-off people could in theory compensate the now-worse-off people. That is, the change should be enacted if it creates value. The compensation does not actually have to be paid. Changes which create value will make society better off, such as automation or trade liberalisation. If there is no systematic bias, then the winners and losers from various changes will tend to be random. If many Kaldor-Hicks improvements are made, then over time everyone will tend to become better off.

However, the Kaldor-Hicks argument does not work for redistribution. Consider a person from a poor background, who is intelligent enough to become a doctor but cannot afford the training. They work for many years in a menial job, saving enough money to train as a doctor. They are finally able to pay for their training and earn a higher salary. This is inefficient. One argument is that the state should pay for their training, without requiring the money to be repaid. That way, the person can start their work as a doctor much earlier, increasing their lifetime earnings. "Society as a whole becomes better off." However, this is not sustainable. In the short run, the total resources in the society increase, as the person provides their services as a doctor, and earns more money. In the long run, the extra resources are likely to be consumed, rather than reinvested into further training.

Why were the person's parents unable to pay for the training? Because, despite being presumably of similar intelligence to their offspring, they were spendthrift. The quality of spendthriftiness was presumably also inherited by their offspring. "Society" can divert resources into such a family, but over the long run they will be destroyed.

There is a Lindy alternative, which is that the person borrows money to pay for their training, and repays it out of their increased productivity.

Exception to this argument: state funding for eugenics such as embryo selection. At least in this case, improvements to intelligence are permanent, even if no improvements to spendthriftiness are made.

Genes don't "exist"

Chromosomes exist, you can see them with a microscope. "Genes" are an abstraction. A gene is simply a section of a chromosome, but there is no objective dividing line between one gene and another. A gene can be split up ("chromosomal crossover") when the chromosome divides. A "gene" can refer to a deletion, an absence, where one person has no base-pair where one is normally found.

Cultural evolution versus rational thinking

Previously: Truth versus utility

The rarity of suicide and the rarity of anti-natalist belief are good examples of the unimportance of argument. People who commit suicide have fewer children; suicide (during reproductive age) is selected against more strongly than perhaps anything else in life. I find David Benatar's arguments in "Better Never To Have Been" compelling, but almost nobody else does. Perhaps the arguments are bad, but regardless, a predisposition to believe them is selected against. Some people are literally incapable of believing them. I don't just mean stupid people, who are incapable of comprehending them, and benefit from this inability. The inability to believe something can be beneficial to people regardless of intelligence.

Cultural evolution doesn't work by selection of inherited "particles" of culture (memes as "units" of culture don't exist). Nevertheless, cultural evolution clearly happens, for example languages have evolved (there is a family tree of languages).

In "The Fatal Conceit", Hayek makes an evolutionary argument for how people invent their traditions and practices. People don't invent them deliberately by careful argument; rather the practices evolve because they benefit the people who carry them out. Hayek uses the word "tradition" but "practice" might be better. Hayek points out how much of human action is unthinking, automatic, traditional: "rationalists" may try to optimize their actions through introspection and argument, but they miss 99% of what they do.

In evolution, reasons and designs exist but not necessarily in anyone's mind. Daniel Dennett calls them "free-floating rationales". It can be difficult or even impossible to work out what they are. There are numerous "paradoxes" in evolution, where no one knows why something evolved, but we presume there must be a good reason.

Hayek uses his evolutionary argument to argue against socialism and central economic planning. This argument is difficult to make, because it is inevitably unconvincing even if it is true. It is unconvincing to say "it must be good to do things this way, but we don't know why": people demand evidence a particular practice is good. People are not used to applying evolutionary arguments to politics.

Religion is an excellent example, because we know the outcome is good -- religious people have more children -- but we can't explain how it works. Religion may seem an irrational, boring waste of time, but it is not.

Richard Dawkins invented the idea of memes to explain religion. He portrays religion as a parasite, which hijacks humans like a virus, to spread its ideas. Many religious ideas are highly optimised to spread, and to resist careful examination for truth. However, Dawkins completely fails to engage with the fact that religion is good for human fitness. Religious people have more children. Therefore, religion is not a parasite but a symbiote.

In David Sloan Wilson's book "Darwin's Cathedral", Wilson argues that religion benefits the group because it promotes cooperation. Someone is less likely to defect in private if they think God is watching them.

We co-evolve with our beliefs and practices. In the example of religion, as religion evolves to benefit us, we evolve a capacity for religion. In the example of anti-natalism, we evolve to be unable to believe something.

Inductive versus probabilistic reasoning

Deductive arguments have a poor track record. Even if the argument is sound, the premises may be wrong, or the argument may not map well to the real world.

But inductive reasoning does not much appeal to deductivists. It sounds wishy-washy and doesn't produce the certainty that deductive reasoning appears to give. This is because so-called inductive reasoning is not how most people reason in the real world.

The classic inductive argument goes: The sun has risen 100 times before, therefore it will rise again tomorrow. Expressed in deductive terms, the implicit inductive premise is "if something has happened a lot in the past, it will probably happen again tomorrow". That's reasonable, but the key word is "probably". So the argument would be better expressed as "The sun has risen 100 times before, therefore it will probably rise again tomorrow." If we make the argument stronger "The sun has always risen before, therefore it will definitely rise again tomorrow", that's false.

The problem with this sort of reasoning is, like Laplace's rule of thumb, it ignores our detailed knowledge about the world. Like Laplace's rule of thumb, it's just a rule of thumb.

If the sun has risen a thousand times before, we do not just estimate the probability of it rising tomorrow as one in a thousand. We can be much more confident, because we understand that "sunrise" is a term for the sun moving above the horizon, as the earth orbits the sun in a solar system. For the sun to fail to rise tomorrow, something extraordinarily improbable would have to happen. For example, the sun would have to explode, in a way we did not predict.

In practice, we can use our knowledge about the sun to predict that it will engulf Mercury & Venus, and render Earth uninhabitable, in about five billion years.

Inductive reasoning should be replaced by probabilistic reasoning.

Distributed thinking

You can have a new idea, but you may not see all the ramifications of it. Other people will take your idea and reprocess it, reformulate it, improve it.

You can find forgotten ideas in old books, or several recent ideas and combine them, synthesise them.

You discuss ideas with other people and process and reprocess them.

You cannot read all books, but you can discuss them with other people, and often learn enough to avoid reading the book.

Old books become out-of-date; you rewrite them so people today can understand them; you improve them.

A mass of people and libraries constitute a computing, information processing machine which is superior to a single person trying to work it all out on its own.

Indiscriminate violence against groups

Greece migrant crisis: Islanders strike over crowded camps. BBC, 22 January 2020.

"Strikes and protests have been held on the Greek islands of Lesbos, Samos and Chios over the government's handling of migrants arriving from Turkey.
Banners on the Lesbos municipal theatre proclaimed: "We want our islands back".
Another read: "No more prisons for human souls in the North Aegean."
North Aegean Regional Governor Kostas Moutzouris said on Wednesday he was "annoyed" that Greek islands had been "turned into places of concentration and detention" for thousands of people around the world.
In Samos town, the refugee camp is in the olive groves on a hill just a few minutes' walk from the town centre.
It is common to see migrants hanging around on benches at the seafront.
Migrants live in tents at the camp on the Greek island of Samos."

Why haven't locals taken matters into their own hands? Locals should form a secret society to shoot migrants landing on their shores as soon as they step off the boats, if not before.

Similarly, a reconquista of the streets requires a secret society to attack members of high-risk groups who enter civilised areas, even before they commit crimes. This is criticised as unjust, punishing the collective for the actions of individuals, but it is effective and has been used successfully historically. In the above case, it is not even a response to actions, but a means of holding territory.

Similarly, reprisals against a group are an effective means of deterring individual crimes.

Favela world

Devin Helton and BAP agree: the central problem of politics is the unceasing growth of third world slums.

Humans don't optimise for increasing living standards, they optimise for procreation. Humans who aren't willing to sacrifice living standards and civilisation for more children will be replaced by those who do.

This leads to the unceasing growth of favelas. Favelas are parasitic on civilisation: they appear on the edges of cities. They do not grow their own food or produce much (apart from a rich source of votes for a certain sort of political entrepreneur).

Favelas are populated by people who are willing to live at the highest possible density. They sacrifice everything for procreation, including producing beautiful buildings (their buildings are as cheap as possible: everything is sacrificed to make more of them). They occupy land that could otherwise be occupied by civilised people. They are a major source of crime, being proximate to civilisation.

What is the solution? The land must be confiscated and the people destroyed. Favelas will naturally appear and grow unless they are actively stamped out. We need a reconquista of the streets, violence against favela dwellers who enter the civilised areas and even those who don't.

Ways in which false beliefs can be good for you

• Religion makes you have more children. 
• Positive ethnocentrism: if you believe that your group is "special", you are more likely to defend it.
• Negative ethnocentrism: if you "other" other people and groups, you can promote your group cohesion and more successfully defend your territory.
• Meaning, purpose and transcendance: If you believe life has meaning you are more likely to procreate.
• Suicide: if you believe suicide is morally wrong you are less likely to do it.
• Group moral beliefs: belief in morality is one way in which groups can regulate behaviour.

(Previously: Ways in which true beliefs can be bad for you)

Refuse to believe what isn't useful

I've previously written that truth and utility are not the same.

Corollary: you shouldn't believe things which are bad for you.

Moral claims that white people "should" pay reparations to black people can be refuted on moral grounds, or on the correct grounds that morality doesn't exist. But they can equally well be refuted by saying "No." Refusal is refutation. People who believe in the importance of truth will say that action is not argument or refutation. But they beg the question by assuming that truth is more important than utility. This belief in the "importance" of truth is a moral belief, and therefore wrong. It is more efficient to say "I am not going to believe that because it does not benefit me. I am not going to bother arguing with you, or thinking about it to convince myself. I am not going to do it."

Contrary to popular belief, you can choose what you believe.

Corollary: most people already do this. Most people's beliefs are determined by what is good for them. People whose beliefs are determined by what is good for them will tend to out-compete people who prefer to believe what they think is true. Ordinary people are not obsessed with philosophy.

In Donald Hoffman's talk "Do we see reality as it is?", he describes computer models which indicate that people who perceive reality in a way which increases their fitness, tend to outcompete people who perceive reality accurately.

Ways in which true beliefs can be bad for you

• Knowing how to build a nuclear reactor, which then explodes. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
• Disbelief in god when non-believers are killed. Disbelief in the socially dominant ideology when this is punished by society. Even if no one believes it, revealing non-belief can be fatal.
• If you accurately know your own abilities, you may not take risks which would be good for you. You may be less confident which could be bad for you.
• Self-deception and the having of emotions can be good for you. Instead of faking an emotion, you have it for real, and use this to get what you want.
• Anti-natalism. If you don't believe life has a purpose, you are less likely to procreate.

Truth versus utility

Instrumental and epistemic rationality tend to be correlated, because there is an objective world. Concepts are mental tools: don't ask if a belief is true, ask if it is useful.

Scientific theories are concepts, tools. The epistemic way to evaluate a scientific theory is to see how accurate its predictions are. This is epistemic rationality.

But the instrumental way to evaluate a theory is to see how adaptive believing it is. Is believing it good for your genetic fitness?

These are not the same. Science is a commitment to truth, but that is not necessarily good for you. Accurate predictions are not the same as utility.

Anti-white rhetorical technique

The claim is sometimes made that it is impossible for black people to be racist, because racism is an exercise of power, and white people have all the power.

This is nonsense, and obviously so. Of course it is possible for a black person to assault a white person for no reason other than his race. Racial bigotry does not have to be complicated.

The specific claim that racism is always an exercise of power is as wrong as the claim that rape is about power (instead of sexual pleasure and the evolutionary imperative towards reproduction). Racism can be simple bigotry.

The specific claim that white people have all the power in a nebulous "structural" way is false. Power is not held by "white people" as a class. One white person can have less power than one black person.

The claim that only whites can be racist is really a rhetorical technique to get white people to shut up and accept racism against them, whether it be personal bigotry and violence, or a political attempt to take money and property from white people as a class, or "positive discrimination" and "affirmative action" against white people.

Publicly identifying it as purely a rhetorical technique and not a serious idea robs it of some of its power.

Anti-men rhetorical technique

The claim is sometimes made that men should not be allowed to speak about women's issues. Only a woman can truly know what it is like to be a woman, because of her lived experience. Knowledge and empathy/imagination are deemed worthless.

The same claim is made regarding race.

One wonders what is the point of women explaining to men what it is like to be a woman, if men will be incapable of understanding, and are not allowed to make any use of such knowledge.

An implication of this is that women should refrain from opining about masculinity and men's issues.

This style of thought is pernicious because anything can be deemed a "woman's issue" and men told to shut up about it, even if it concerns them. For example, whether a woman has an abortion or not concerns and affects the father, who may wish to keep the child, or who may not want to keep and pay for it.

This is really a rhetorical technique, and its aim is to tell white men to shut up. It is an attempt to define the terms of debate to make them completely one-sided. Publicly identifying it as purely a rhetorical technique and not a serious idea robs it of some of its power.

Ignore bad people's emotions

When resolving a dispute, one should not give much weight to someone's expressed emotions. One can pretend to be upset as a way to getting what one wants. Trivers' theory of evolutionary self-deception says that the most effective way to fake being upset is to really be upset. That is the purpose of emotions: a person is motivated by their emotions because those emotions are real.

So a third party mediator should not try to distinguish between a person who is faking an emotion, and someone really experiencing it.

When Larry Summers gave a speech about differences between men and women, an MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins said "I felt I was going to be sick", "my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow", "I just couldn't breathe, because this kind of bias makes me physically ill". She had to leave the room because otherwise "I would've either blacked out or thrown up."

Hopkins was clearly deliberately trying to damage Summers' career, and genuinely experiencing these emotions.

A person claiming to experience these emotions likely really is experiencing them, and that's unfortunate, but such behaviour should not be rewarded and reinforced.

Politicisation and legalisation of manners

Manners are about not making other people feel uncomfortable. The rules of manners are voluntary and negotiated -- maybe you want to make someone feel uncomfortable. Sometimes it might be impossible to avoid making one person uncomfortable without making another person uncomfortable.

There is a trend in political correctness aim to replace voluntary manners with power.

A transexual might make the novel claim that it is bad manners to call a male-to-female transexual "he". Someone who disagrees may refuse. Both parties are free to disassociate from the other. (What if they are not free to disassociate, for example colleagues? Whose rule of manners should be followed? The socially normal one, of course, whichever that is.)

What if someone claims it is bad manners not to remember to use her bizarre pronouns (per, em, xyr, vis)? Clearly this is not reasonable disagreement, but an attempt to impose claims about manners as an exercise of power. The sole purpose of the novel claim about manners is to exercise power.

One could publicly campaign to try to make one's novel claim about manners considered the default, correct choice, in a dispute between colleagues mediated by a Human Resources department. This is the politicisation of manners.

One strategy is to enlist the power of the law: to make it illegal not to obey bizarre whims about pronouns. This is the legalisation of manners: to make what was previously the voluntarily negotiated norms of human interaction, a matter for the law.

It is good manners to refer to a male-to-female transexual as "she", even though "she" is not really a woman. Good manners does not require "she" should be allowed to compete in female sporting events.

The Gettier Problem, Relativism, and Bayesianism

A naive definition of knowledge is "justified true belief". To have knowledge, you must believe something. That belief must be true otherwise it is not knowledge. And it must be justified. If your beliefs are true by accident, it is not knowledge.

Edmund Gettier came up with a thought-experiment to criticise this definition. You look through a window and you see your friend Bob sitting with his back to you in an arm-chair. You believe "Bob is in the room". But in fact the figure in the armchair is an effigy, not Bob. However, Bob is in the room, hiding behind a curtain. Your belief is justified and true, but it does not appear to be knowledge. It is true by luck. The justification and the truth are not connected.

The probabilistic view sidesteps the Gettier problem. Beliefs are probabilistic. You see the effigy and you increase your subjective probability that Bob is in the room. But you know you could be wrong. You also believe that the figure in the chair is Bob. You could make bets about it. As it happens, you win the former bet but lose the latter bet. Tant pis.

Relativism is the bizarre view that truths are relative to people, that there is no objective reality regarding certain issues. For example, the belief that a Bob is in the room is true for one person but not for another. This view is rarely thought through by the few who hold it, but probabilism sidesteps it, by clarifying that two people can hold different beliefs based on the evidence they have seen and their priors, but beliefs must be testable by objective reality to qualify as beliefs. Under probabilism, it is meaningless to have a belief you cannot bet on - you need some way of deciding the bet!

Laplace's rule of thumb

Laplace's rule of succession is only a rule of thumb. The idea is that since probabilities cannot be zero or one, if one has seen a hundred white swans and no black swans, one should not assign a probability of 100/100=100%. Instead, one assigns 100/101 = 99.01%. n/n+1, not n/n.

This is more sensible than assigning 100% because it is open to the possibility of error, and makes it possible to change your mind. If your prior probability is zero or one, no amount of evidence can change your mind according to Bayes' theorem.

However, in the real world, events are rarely exclusive. There are many alternatives to a hypothesis. We should not assign equal probability to the alternatives. For example, if you had only seen five white swans, there might exist red, green, blue, orange or black swans. According to a naive version of Laplace's rule, we would expect a random swan to be white with only 50% probability, assigning 10% each to red, green, blue, orange and black.

Clearly, a more sensible prediction for the colour of a random adult swan in Europe is more like 99% white, 1% black and close to zero for red, green, blue and orange, even if you have only seen fifty swans in your lifetime.

Popper versus Bayes

Popper thought he could turn inductive science into a deductive process. We only see white swans, so we form a theory that all swans are white, but we might turn out to be wrong. The theory can never be proved. Aha, says Popper, but it can be disproved. If we see a single black swan, that disproves the theory.

The problem is that one can never be sure of evidence. Perhaps the evidence is wrong and the theory is correct. One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. If I receive reports of black swans from Australia, maybe the reports are wrong, for a variety of reasons. Maybe all swans I have ever seen are in disguise. Maybe I am in the Matrix.

Another criticism of Popper's method is that his deductive claims are not very useful. If it is true that "not all swans are white", this does not help me make predictions. Such a statement says nothing about the probability that a given swan is black of white.

David Stove showed that criticisms of inductivism, that it doesn't live up to deductive standards, are misguided. They beg the question by assuming "deductivism", that only deductive arguments are valid. In fact, inductive arguments can be useful, with evidence supporting a conclusion despite not logically entailing it. Perhaps inductivism should be renamed "probabilism", or "Bayesianism".

The correct epistemology is Bayesian: knowledge is probabilistic. A correct epistemology covers everything: science is a subset of it. You don't have different epistemologies for different things. Therefore the practice of science should be probabilistic. What makes science special, then? It involves techniques of "epistemic hygiene" to increase our confidence in our beliefs. By carefully designing experiments, and using good statistics, we can increase the probability of a hypothesis by reducing the probability of alternative hypotheses.

Bayesianism makes one hyper-aware of the infinite number of hypotheses.

Group selection

I have written about group selection before.

The orthodox Darwinian position on group selection is that it does not happen. If an individual makes sacrifices for his group (a collection of people who are not sufficiently closely related), his altruistic genes will suffer and the non-altruistic genes of the group will flourish.

However, researchers like Michael Woodley, Ed Dutton, Bruce Charlton have written about the consequences of group selection and their benefits. For example, Charlton and Dutton in "The Genius Famine" argue that the genius is an example of group selection. Geniuses are anti-social figures whose inventions benefit the group, but not themselves. Geniuses typically do not reproduce. 

This is Bayesian evidence for the existence of group selection. Perhaps the logical argument against group selection is flawed.

Ebooks

Advantages

• Minimal marginal cost
• Minimal financial risk - you can't print too many
• Lightweight. You can carry a thousand books in your pocket for less weight than a paperback

Disadvantages

• Harder for people to peruse your bookshelf, or see what you are reading. Less chance for serendipitous discoveries

Neutral

• Can't lend them to other people, no second-hand market (bad for readers, good for booksellers)
• Piracy much easier (good for readers, bad for booksellers)
• Authors don't need a publisher, can easily self-publish through Amazon. Good for authors, bad for publishers, risk of Amazon establishing a monopoly (bad for authors)