DISQUS

Actually, I do think many cases of pointing out cognitive dissonance are dishonest and wrong.

This is because the relationship between speech and knowledge is very complex. When someone says a sentence S, it's almost never the case that they mean the propositional content of S! This is because S is nearly always false as stated -- there will be a host of unspoken qualifications necessary to make it true.

For example, if someone asks you how to turn on the light, and you say "flipping that light switch will turn on the light", this sentence is wrong. For it to be actually true, you need to add a host of qualifications to it: the wiring needs to still be intact, the power must currently be on, the bulb needs to be un-burnt-out, and so on, ad infinitum. (This is called "the qualification problem" in AI research, and it's a very serious technical obstacle!)

Of course, because it's practically impossible to state all the qualifications, we never do. This makes "Socratic muggings" possible: in a dialogue, we have to assent to technically false propositions, because otherwise we can't get started. So someone arguing in bad faith can start taking your statements literally in order to derive an absurd conclusion, in order to force the psychological process of cognitive dissonance to kick in. So, as a matter of practical rhetoric, you can get people to give up beliefs for bad or insufficient reasons.

Of course, it's also the case that we all do believe many things for insufficient reasons, or which are false. So some uses of dialectic leading to contradiction are justified.

You don't have to give it up -- you've got freedom of speech! But as a practical matter, it's up to us, not our audience, to craft effective, honest and persuasive messages.

This means it's up to us to take our speech communities into account. E.g., if we're among moral philosophers, they probably won't mind abstract moral reasoning -- they won't come in with the expectation that we're advancing a stalking-horse. OTOH, if we're starting a critical discussion with someone who disagrees with us but is reasonable, then ostentatiously engaging in practices that indicate good faith is sensible. Establishing a history of not being a jerk is what lets us deploy rhetorical moves that look similar to tricks jerks often use.

Of course, I'm not getting at your real point, which is to figure out the obligations that ideal listeners have towards a speaker. Partly, this is because I don't know what properties an ideal listener has! Do they have finite time and attention? If so, how much? Are they obliged to be rational? How hard do they have to work to understand our message? How much interpretive charity should they exercise? Even, are they obliged to listen at all? It seems like there are lots of sensible answers to all of these questions, with each combination of answers entailing different norms of discourse. So it seems like even in the ideal (as opposed to the practical), we have to pay attention to the norms of the particular community we're in, and adapt to that.

"But people are very, very resistant to morality talk that isn't an addendum to a policy position, for reasons I don't entirely understand."

It's pretty simple, actually. Morality talk, unmoored to a policy position, is often used as a form of dishonest rhetoric aimed at exploiting cognitive dissonance. The strategy works like this: make an abstract moral claim untied to any particular example, and then get the guy you're arguing with to agree that good people agree with that claim. Then, once they've agreed with your principle, you spring a specific policy on them, which a) they disagree with, and b) follows from your moral principle. At this point they have to either agree with you or admit they're bad people.

Unsurprisingly, this makes people very angry. (Really, the surprise is that the other Greeks took as long to poison Socrates as they did.) So of course when you just engage in moral talk, even the possibility that you're engaging in Socratic jackassery can lead people to tune you out right from the beginning. Laying down your policy cards up front means that you can't pull this style of gotcha on them, and so they are more likely to take your moral claims as good-faith arguments.


"It helps, though, to remember the ultimate goal-- coverage for everyone."

As an aside, no, this isn't the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is good health for as many people as possible. Medicine and health care is a tool for maintaining good health; it's not an ultimate goal in and of itself.

Concretely, suppose you have the choice between two scenarios: in the first, most people biked to work and ate a healthy diet, but we had the same care than we do now. In the second, we leave car culture and diet unchanged, but transplanted the French health care system here (which is probably the world's best). We'd have better health outcomes than in the first, than the second, so we'd be morally obliged to pick the first. This means that morally speaking, full coverage can't be an end.

"We redistribute out of a desire to fix structural imbalances that unduly harm some."

"Fixing structural imbalances" is overwhelmingly unlikely to be the reason why most people support transfers. We can see that this, because when we make a list of things that promote structural inequality in the US -- such as the War on Drugs, the poor quality of public schools, regressive schemes of taxation and benefit, unfair systems of policing and criminal law -- we see that there's very little constituency for fixing those problems.

I suspect that redistributive policies enjoy the popularity they do, because they give money to people who don't have it, and who would suffer harm without it. Giving money to hungry people so they can buy food is popular, because hunger is a simple harm which easily triggers the sentiment of empathy. (This contrasts with the complex causal processes underlying structural inequality.) I've got no evidence for this supposition, of course, but at least it's not immediately falsified by casual observation....

Hi Robin,

I think I phrased things in a way that misled you. It's of course true that someone with a consistent preference relation can prefer A to B at time t1 and B to A at time t2.

However, one of the possibilities I wished to draw attention to was the preference relation itself changing over time. This creates a significant difference once we start talking about counterfactual conditionals.

As a concrete example, consider something like a Becker-Murphy style rational addiction model. Here, we assume that the addict is engaging in intertemporal optimization of some utility function. One consequence of this model is that it's regret-free: if you ask rational addicts at some t2 > t1 if they would have preferred not to have started taking drugs at t1, they would say no, because they've chosen a dynamically optimal couse of action. On the other hand, we could also model addiction as something that changes a preference relation. This means that time-inconsistent behavior is now possible.

This then leads to differences in what sorts of treatments the model suggests. In a rational-addiction model, there are no treatments needed: an addict is already doing the optimal thing, and any "treatment" will merely reduce their satisfaction. On the other hand, with a time-varying preference relation, the model can advise you to keep drugs from an addict, because it is possible that the addict prefer counterfactually to be clean, while presently preferring to get high -- that is, the addict can regret their decision.

Coming to your question, I'm not saying "we shouldn't assume that people want their preferences to be complete and consistent." I'm saying, "It's impossible, as a matter of fact, for peoples' preferences to be complete and consistent. Therefore, any use of complete preferences must be justified either positively or normatively."

Note that calling something "standard practice" is not itself a justification! Most disciplines do have standard practices, and also have standard justifications for those practices. But we have to look at those justifications to see whether they actually apply to the situation at hand.

Here, I mean "positive" and "normative" in the sense of Friedman's "The Methodology of Positive Economics".

A normative justification is an argument that some other principle argues for using a particular analytical assumption. For example, a libertarian can argue that respect for individual autonomy means that we should analyze situations under the assumption that people are the ideal judges of their own welfare, and model this with complete, consistent preferences. As another example, J.S. Mill argued that envy is a destructive impulse, and therefore a preference that other people suffer should not count in a utilitarian calculus.

If we look at the rational addiction model, we see how it formalizes a libertarian ethos: we can see, mathematically, how the assumption that people are the best judges of their own good leads to no-interference conclusions, and how weakening that assumption can justify paternalistic interventions. But as an argument, it's not going to be terribly convincing to people who aren't libertarians. So if we want to actually rationally persuade people, we need stronger justifications.

A positive justification is some kind of evidence that the assumption of complete, consistent preferences is a safe analytical tool: that is, it is a calculational device whose use does not change the answer. Friedman advances such an argument for assuming profit-maximizing behavior in competitive markets, based on the loosely evolutionary argument that non-maximizing firms will go broke. (As an aside, algorithmic game theory is very useful as a way of making precise when Friedman's analysis holds. Very lovely!) But it's worth noting that his arguments don't scale down to a theory of individual decision -- we need to advance different arguments for that.

This is actually a normative, not descriptive, stance, and it's one with very strong and surprising consequences.

So, I was specifically talking preferences themselves, and not inferences about them from actions. For reasons of computational complexity, we know that preferences cannot possibly be complete in general. Likewise, peoples' preferences are endogenously-formed and change over time. These are both simply descriptive facts about preferences, and they both mean that we have no reason to expect that people have a stable, complete, preference relation. Which, of course, means we have no reason to expect that people have preferences that can be described with utility functions.

Therefore, if we want to do cost-benefit analysis, we have to have advance a normative theory of how people should want things and how they should make decisions based upon those wants. We need this in order to rule certain observed actions as irrelevant, and to rule others in, and then we need some deductions to fill in the gaps on what's left over, in order to get a preference relation that can be described with a utility function.

But this is by no means a neutral move! For example, if we assume that everyone has a stable preference relation, then this commits us to the position that inalienable rights (ie, rights that we possess but cannot surrender) are a bad idea. This is because by hypothesis such surrenders can only occur as part of mutually-beneficial exchange, and so inalienability means that we will achieve less efficient outcomes. But, on the other hand, if we don't expect preferences to be stable over time, then strategies based on precommitment can be a good idea (and can be a bad idea in other circumstances).

You can't possibly mean (only) this, because this entails that you can't actually make policy recommendations.

Actual, physical, people do not have complete or consistent preferences. This means costs and benefits are not well-defined, because there's no reason to expect that a utility function exists which describes their actual preferences. Therefore, you need some notion of an ideal or formal completion of actual preferences in order to get a preference relation that we can derive a utility function from, before you can apply cost-benefit analysis.

That completion is where normative assumptions must be made.

Take ToJ, do the whole Rawls-style veil of ignorance social contract thing, but drop the utterly unmotivated difference principle. Result: you get a much more powerful argument in favor of J.S. Mill-style rule utilitarianism than Mill himself ever managed to produce. Since Mill's politics is basically Will's politics, there you go.

You can rationally appeal to popularity if you know that the populace in question is rational, because then you know their beliefs are rationally-founded. But actually, we know that actual human beings aren't Bayesian updaters, which means that we can't validly appeal to popularity.

Freddie, why should it? The point is that 1) it views politics as a matter of tribal affiliation, 2) that women's bodies and sexuality are viewed as a resource at the disposal of the tribe, to be used as a prize to keep the coalition together. These are fundamentally illiberal, anti-feminist ideas.

If you switch "Democrat" to "Republican", and "SEIU" to "Chamber of Commerce", Will's argument would remain essentially unchanged, because illberal ideas don't become good just because they are bipartisan.

Mark Kleiman apparently agrees with the lead essay, and is trying to figure out something to disagree with.

Of course, even though (or maybe because) Kleiman could well be the most knowledgeable person willing to call himself an opponent of drug legalization, he's still way, way more sane than the public discourse about drugs.

Likewise, Mike. It casts a serious shadow over TLF to have a poster who is a representative of an organization which exists mainly to lie to the public. This is a terrible shame, because so many of the other writers here are so good.

The business model for open source is incredibly simple: reduce the cost of goods complementary to your business's products.

So, if you run a business, you produce some goods and services, which you sell, and hopefully turn a profit on. These goods exist in a larger market, and are substitutes for some other products, and complements for some others.

Now, recall the definition of a "complement good". A complement X for a good Y is one for which buying more of X will *increase* the amount of Y bought -- think french fries and ketchup. If I buy french fries, I'll also want to buy ketchup to put on them.

A company like IBM makes most of its money on consulting services for other corporations, and from selling hardware. For them, software (like operating systems, web servers, and Java compilers) are complements -- if this stuff is free then people will be more willing to buy integration services from them, and hardware to run that software on.

And since software has a close-to-zero cost of reproduction, they can pay the fixed cost of development and send the price of software complements to zero for ALL their customers. That's often going to be a no-brainer from a business perspective. (The reason for open source rather than "give away proprietary for zero price" has to do with path-dependency, which I'll skip to keep this post short.)

Next, consider that there are hundreds of thousands of firms in the market, and for every single one of them someone else's software is a complement....

Philosophy is of critical importance to theoretical computer science (and vice-versa). In particular, nonstandard foundations of mathematics (like intuitionistic or category-theoretic formalizations) are of radical importance to computer science, basically because constructive proofs are algorithms. All that weird stuff like modal logic and possible worlds have direct applications to computer science. A friend of mine wrote a paper using modal logic to make writing distributed programs easier, as follows. Imagine your possible worlds to be computers on a network. If a program has a box type -- ie, is true at all possible worlds -- then you can safely run the code on any machine. If some part of it has a diamond type -- can only run at some particular world -- then you know that there has to be a communication link to that world And so on. This is all brutally practical stuff, and it is informed by some of the most bizarre logical machinery around.