Famine, affluence, and psychopathy

I recently read Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test. It’s an engaging, entertaining and interesting read, and I’d warmly recommend it to people who like that sort of thing. It’s a book about psychopaths. Apparently they’re everywhere, but don’t worry: most of them don’t go round killing people. Mostly they’re just charming, lacking in conscience and empathy, easily bored, promiscuous, irresponsible and a few other things. It’s a dimensional thing rather than a binary one, but he said that by a pretty reasonable classification about 1% of us are psychopaths. Most are men. Lots are in prison.

Reading a Jon Ronson book tends not to make you an expert on anything, but it did get me thinking. Many of my readers are probably familiar with Peter Singer’s paper ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’, in which he argues that rich people should give away most of their money to help save the lives of strangers in poor countries. Most people think it’d be terrible to see a child drowning in a shallow pond but not save it because you’d get your trousers muddy, and being surrounded by a crowd of equally callous onlookers doesn’t really get you off the hook. Peter Singer thinks blowing our disposable incomes on trivia when we could be saving the lives of strangers is much the same. Of course they don’t feel the same, but Singer doesn’t think that matters. Nor do I, really.

Now, the impression that I got from Jon Ronson’s book was that psychopaths are the sort of people who might see a kid drowning in a shallow pond and ignore it for the sake of their trousers. On the other hand, most of us seem to be the sorts of people who would hear of some children dying on the other side of the world and ignore them for the sake of something trivial. Maybe a nice new pair of trousers. Quite a lot of ink has been spilled trying to make excuses for us without excusing pond-ignorers, but maybe the psychopath analogy provides a more fruitful way of looking at it. My suggestion is that normal people stand to the kids in (at time of writing) Niger as psychopaths stand to the kids in the pond. If psychopaths are excused, so are we. If not, not.

One difference which I suppose is relevant is that if you’re not a psychopath and have a fully functional imagination you might be able to spot parallels between famine children and pond children and get appropriately worked up about the former. I guess that’s part of the point of those charity advertisements showing people suffering instead of just telling you about it. Maybe our failure to spot the parallels and engage our emotions consistently is culpable, so people who want to excuse the psychopaths but not the general public have a logical place to stand. But in any case, if there’s a reasonably common kind of person who would be as unmoved by a kid in the pond as the rest of us are by famine victims, then it seems kind of dense for the discussion of Singer’s arguments not to take them into account.

Chess in a dress

I’m bad at chess. One of the advantages of this is that when I play it against strangers on the internet I don’t get accused of cheating, but I’d still like to be better. It tends to surprise people how bad I am because I’ve always been pretty good at mathsy things. It surprises me too, but I think what’s killing my game is that I don’t take enough interest in what the other player’s thinking. As anyone who doesn’t suck at chess knows, that’s pretty important. If you’re too self-absorbed, they’ll have a plan and then catch you unawares with it, and you’ll lose. But now I may have hit upon a solution.

Regular readers will know that a while ago I read and enjoyed a book about psychological research into differences between men and women. If I remember rightly, she said (among other things) that when people imagine themselves as being of a particular gender they adopt the psychological traits they think people of that gender tend to have. One of the traits people in my country tend to associate with women is seeing things from other people’s point of view. Empathy, sympathy, emotional intelligence: whatever you call it,  the chances are that on some level a 21^st century Briton like me will think women are better at it. This is meant to work even if you've read and been broadly persuaded by a book suggesting the stereotypes may be largely unfounded. So if I want to be better at chess, I just need to write a first-person story from a woman’s point of view, and then use my magical mindreading skills to rumble my opponents' plans. Those strangers on the internet won’t know what hit them.

Now, I can imagine someone pointing out that the best chess players in the world are mostly men, and at the very highest level they’re all men. Presumably there’s something men are good at which outweighs the women’s ability to read minds. Well, one thing is that the technique makes you assume the traits you think women have, not the traits they actually have. Men may be actually just as good at mindreading as women are, but as long as I think women are better, if I think myself feminine I should become better. Another thing is that even if male dominance in chess is caused at least in part by psychological differences between men and women, these differences might benefit the men in obsessively learning openings and practising, rather than making them better players practice-hour for practice-hour. So I don’t think my hypothesis should be dismissed out of hand.

I did think I might be able to get in touch with my telepathic side by wearing a dress when I play, but it was suggested to me that this might actually draw attention to my maleness, since I’d be thinking ‘I’m a man in a dress’. I don’t know which way this effect would go, so I should probably test the hypothesis using the story method, which I understand is more standard. I’ll test the dress method too though, because if it works then it might catch on and top players would need to turn out in drag to stay competitive. That’s a turn of events for which I wouldn’t mind being responsible.

Probably not important

Consider this sentence:

            PN       PN is probably not true.

Sentences can be true even if they’re probably not, at least on some readings of ‘probably’. I’m intending ‘probably’ in one of those ways. It sounds Moore-paradoxical to say ‘P but probably not-P’, but Moore-paradoxicality isn’t inconsistency. So the instance of the sloppy T-schema for PN...

            T-PN   PN is true iff PN is probably not true.

...doesn’t entail a contradiction. Maybe it’s true but probably not true. Contrast the instance of the sloppy T-schema for L:

            L          L is not true.

            T-L      L is true iff L is not true.

T-L does entail a contradiction, so L is paradoxical. T-PN doesn’t, but that’s not the end of it. First, note that there’s another way PN could go: it could be untrue though not probably. This might be because it was probably true, or because its truth and untruth were equiprobable. So it might be true, and it might be untrue. Which is it?

A fairly reasonable-sounding principle of indifference might say its truth and untruth were equiprobable. In that case it isn’t probably untrue, which means it isn’t true. But if the equiprobability was itself probable, then its consequence that PN isn’t true would seem to be probable, which means PN is true, which is a contradiction. So the equiprobability isn’t probable. What are the other credible options?

Maybe PN is probably not true. But this means it’s true. So if PN is probably probably not true, then it’s probably true. That doesn’t sound a very delicious combination.

The other possibility is that PN is probably true. In that case it’s not true. So if it’s probably probably true then it’s probably not true. Yuk again.

Can this lot even be made consistent? Here are the entailments:

            Probably true → untrue

            Probably not true → true

            Equiprobable → untrue

If the disjunction of probably and equiprobable is probable, then PN is probably untrue, but this contradicts the disjunction being probable, since the options are exclusive. So the disjunction is not probable, so probably not must be at least 50% probable. But if it’s exactly 50% probable, then given the entailments, PN is equiprobably true and not true. But this makes equiprobable true, which we’ve established is not probable. So suppose probably not is probable. This means PN is probably true, which is a contradiction. So the improbable equiprobable must be true. But if something must be true, then it’s probable. So the disjunction is probable after all, and that led to a contradiction. So dialetheism must be true. But if dialetheism must be true, we can reject some of the above reductio reasoning. So some contradictions are true, but possibly not this one.

The Dalai Lama and me

Everyone knows you shouldn’t take internet personality tests seriously, but I don’t know any other easy way of measuring how rightwing I’m becoming, so every so often I take the Political Compass test. You answer a questionnaire and it rates you on two scales: libertarian-authoritarian and socialist-capitalist. Then it puts you on a graph with various other people like Stalin, Silvio Berlusconi and Nelson Mandela so you can see how you compare. I don’t think they got Stalin to take the test though, so putting him in the socialist/authoritarian quadrant must have been an educated guess. What puzzles me is that no matter how rightwing I feel like I’m becoming, it always plonks me firmly in the libertarian socialist corner next to the Dalai Lama. I’m not surprised about the libertarian thing but I’m puzzled about the socialism. It’s not like I want to collectivize the means of production or put a 99% income tax on the top 1% or anything like that anymore. I’ve got three explanations for why they still count me as such a leftie.

One is that the test is badly designed. They either ask unrevealing questions or have a lousy algorithm for turning the information into an assessment of how rightwing I am. I think the second is more likely: the questions look divisive enough to me.

The second is that you just can’t tell how rightwing someone is by getting them to fill in a questionnaire. When I first took Simon Baron-Cohen’s empathy test and landed deep in the autistic zone I was a bit taken aback, but then it was pointed out to me that asking people whether they can read minds isn’t a foolproof way of finding out if they can. Maybe political views are like that: people assess their views on the basis of slogans like ‘free trade is fair trade’ and shibboleths like abortion, but this assessment might not be borne out by the positions they take on specific issues when they arise.

The last explanation is that I’m really not that rightwing, and that’s because becoming more pragmatic with age just can’t make you that rightwing. I think there are three reasons to support economic liberty which are often conflated, although it’s not clear to me they even overlap. One advantage is that free markets are often the most efficient way of getting the people what they want and need. Another is that economic freedom is a kind of freedom. The third is that capitalism distributes more goods to the most productive people. It seems to me that only the third is particularly up for debate in terms of its factual basis, but the only one I place much value on is the first. I’m not much fussed about who is most deserving, and much as I like Robert Nozick I’m willing to restrict people’s economic freedom a fair bit if it gets the needy what they need. If banning me from paying you £2 an hour to serve fast food is what will raise most children out of poverty then I’m happy to take the hit. The arguments from efficiency, freedom and desert really are distinct, and as far as I can tell they’re quite independent of each other and only one is much good. So why do we keep voting for such rightwing people?

All quiet on the Curry front

Sorry if you've been looking for my posts about Curry's paradox from a while back. I've taken them down because I'm writing a paper about that sort of thing, and taking them down seemed a good idea.

Robo economicus

A common criticism of economists is that their theories work if people behave like perfectly rational preference-maximisers but not if they behave like people. My understanding is that this criticism is a load of baloney, because economists are well aware that people don’t always behave as homo economicus would, it’s still a useful idealisation with genuine predictive and explanatory power, and economists study how much and in what ways the idealisation differs from the reality. Perhaps I’m wrong about this. I doubt it though, because if the criticism was justified then the rational thing would be to write a paper pointing it out and scoop the Nobel prize, and nobody’s done that.

This said, economists do seem to be better at explaining things than they are at predicting them, and maybe if people behaved more like the idealisations then economic behaviour would be easier to predict. My suggestion is that we make a lot of artificially intelligent robots that really do behave like that, give them a bunch of money and release them into society.

Part of the beauty of this is that economies would become more predictable. The other part is that we could programme the robots to have the preferences we have but aren’t rational enough to maximise even when we have the means to do so. If we want more hospitals built, we could entrust their construction to corruptible, fallible humans, or to incorruptible, infallible, single-minded robots. The hospitals would be built as efficiently as possible, and as an added bonus the robot would be delighted.

I’ve long wondered why the government can’t stimulate the economy by pumping a load of money into international development, so the world gets developed by the invisible hands of the profit motive instead of by the sporadic largesse of the notoriously self-obsessed, myopic and capricious general public. I’m sure there’s a reason we can’t do this, or we’d have done it. But even if governments can’t create a market for that sort of thing, I don’t see why a rampaging rabble of rich rational robots couldn’t. It that pays the piper calls the tune.

The problem of transobject identity

Yesterday I finished reading the first volume of David Armstrong’s Universals and Scientific Realism for the first time. It’s fun, interesting and short. I recommend it, even though some of the arguments probably aren’t the kind of thing you can get away with nowadays. Armstrong is dealing with the problem of how different things can be the same in some respect, and he argues that nominalism, Platonism and trope-theory either don’t explain what needs explaining or lead to explanatory regresses. Since these are bad things, he adopts a theory of immanent universals, which are repeatable things which crop up in different objects. If two particulars are both negatively charged, that’s because there’s a thing, negative charge, which is in both of them. I wouldn’t say I was convinced, but he makes the case pretty well.

Now, when I was reading it, I noticed a parallel between the problem Armstrong is addressing and the problem of transworld identity. Armstrong wants to know how different things can share properties, and the problem of transworld identity is about how different possible worlds can share inhabitants. Some issues in one debate have corresponding issues in the other, and this gives rise to analogies between the positions. I think at one point Armstrong even calls the thing he’s trying to explain ‘generic identity’.

Transworld identity gets explained by the worlds having either strictly identical things in them, or suitably similar things in them. Generic identity gets explained by particulars having strictly identical universals in them or suitably similar tropes. The ‘no explanation needed’ positions are magical modal realism, which reifies worlds but not possibilia, and ostrich nominalism, which reifies objects but not properties. (Both were named by their opponents.) Another parallel is that people disagree about whether particulars are bundles of properties or something besides their properties, and they also disagree about whether worlds are fusions of their inhabitants or something besides their inhabitants. The bundle theory of particulars is typically most plausible to trope theorists, and the fusion theory of worlds is typically most plausible to counterpart theorists.

When you spot a parallel between two debates it can help you in at least two ways. One is that the analogy can help us understand the more mysterious debate better. Our thinking about time became clearer when we realised it was a bit like space, and our thinking about modality became clearer when we realised it was a bit like time. I’m not sure whether we’ll be helped much in this way here: space and time really are quite like each other, whereas the relationship between a world and its inhabitants seems quite unlike the relationship between a thing and its properties, at least if the bundle theory isn't right.

The other way analogies between debates can help is more promising though. There’s some pressure to hold analogous positions in analogous areas, because a good argument for one position will often correspond to a good argument for the other. This way of killing a large number of birds with a small number of stones is particularly useful for people like me who like to make their minds up about things. For example, shortly after I came round to counterpart theory about de re modality I came round to stage theory about persistence. I’ve never really had a view about property ontology before, but maybe now I should have another look at trope theory.