Those interested in Wansley’s post on “pain-free” animals will enjoy this conversation between Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins. One particularly interesting intersection between evolution and utilitarianism is that once you believe that humans evolved from other animals, it’s incredibly difficult to believe we’re a morally or philosophically exceptional species, so the utility of humans must be weighed equally with that of other animals.
More memory tricks
The holy grail of memory research has been called the Marilyn Monroe experiment. The experiment might involve implanting a pleasant memory of the experiment’s eponymous sex symbol in some lucky scientist’s brain. If we could implant memories, then that would be a strong indication that we had indeed found, and understood on a practical level, the physical mechanism of memory.
We aren’t there yet, but there are ideas about how we might try to implant fear memories in lab rats. It’s not quite as glamorous, but it’s a first step towards the true Marilyn Monroe experiment. I think the practical effects of our mastery of learning and memory almost cannot be overstated. I’ve posted before about memory erasure; combining that ability with the ability to implant memories makes us absolute masters of our own identity.
That may have seemed like a strange statement to make, so let me attempt to justify it. It’s clear to me that one’s memories are substantially definitive of identity, but I understand that others don’t quite feel the same.
Consider the teletransporter thought experiment from Derek Parfit. Imagine a transporter as in Star Trek that destroys every atom of your body, but as it does so records it and transmits the information to a similar machine on Mars that recreates the same atom-by-atom pattern.
Here’s the question: would you die if you entered the teletransporter? It’s tough to say. Imagine instead the machine didn’t destroy the original copy? Now it’s even tougher to imagine that you’re really the one on Mars. But consider the private subjective experience of the “you” on Mars. One moment he or she is entering the teletransporter, and the next he or she is standing on Mars. Those experiences are perfectly consistent with what you’d expect if you just moved very quickly between the two.
And that’s really the crux of the argument — the evidence we have is consistent with, for example, being killed every night and replaced with a clone of ourselves with the same memories. It’s a strange thought, but the implications are big.
If we could arbitrarily erase and add memories, we could reshape our self-image however we wished. That’s an important and potentially dangerous fact that I think we need to watch out for.
Last post on sports
This post, the last of three looks at sports in American society, focuses on little league sports.
Charles Wheelan argues that the reason youth sports have grown increasingly serious over time is that they are zero-sum, so they tend toward arms race “collective irrationality”. Basically, if all the other kids are playing for 3 club teams in the off season, you don’t make the team come fall unless you sign up for 3 as well. This arms race, claims Wheelan, leads to early injuries (mostly repetitive stress injuries from all the extra practice) and carries large time/energy opportunity costs.
He also seems to complain that the arms race shifts the focus away from raw talent and toward preparation or practice:
But no one alone can stop what is going on in youth sports. That’s the insidious part of an arms race or a price war. If you are the only family who pulls your kid out of winter Little League, then he is going to do poorly relative to other kids who play year-round. And if your child really is exceptionally talented, then he will have no shot at a scholarship or other success that he may deserve from a talent standpoint.
This argument isn’t very good - if anything, I think rewarding hard work rather than the luck of the genetic draw is a point in the arms race’s favor. But Wheelan’s other arguments about the dangers of this trend in youth sports are more persuasive. At the end of the post, he hints at a solution, drawing comparisons between the little leagues and college and professional sports (which have rules to combat the arms race effect):
Ironically, our professional athletes are protected from the arms race. The agreement between the Major League Baseball owners and the Players Association stipulates that spring training cannot begin more than 33 days prior to the start of the season. The collective bargaining agreement between the National Football League owners and the Players Association limits off-season workouts to 14 weeks, with no more than four workouts per week and no contact. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) limits the number of hours that college athletes can practice, both in season and out of season.
I’m not sure, however, that a similar solution would work for youth sports. The MLB, NFL, and NCAA have the advantage that they can act unilaterally; the particular league just has to agree on a limit and teams and players are forced to adhere to it. But one of the reason the arms race exists in youth sports is that there are lots of leagues, some seemingly existing solely to give off-season athletes a venue to play and keep their skills sharp. Maybe middle and high school leagues could try to prohibit their players from playing in club leagues, but this seems difficult. I’m also not sure it would achieve the desired effect, since wealthier athletes could still work with private coaches or go to the gym on their own.
Fortunately, I’m not sure the youth sports arms race is so bad. Real arms races (you know, with nukes) are pernicious in part because they’re involuntary and basically one dimensional. The country with the most nukes gets to wield a lot of power over other countries, regardless of whether they’d like to participate in amassing weapons or not. Youth sports, though, aren’t like that: kids don’t have to live their lives (and hence judge their success) along the competitive sports dimension. They have the option to opt out of the arms race and choose some other kind of success (academic, artistic, social, etc.) instead.
If anything, the arms race in youth sports should open up opportunities for other activities. If everyone is practicing 5 hours a day to make the basketball team, competition for the school’s oboe spot probably isn’t as fierce. A country who’s threatened militarily can’t say, “you may have your nukes, but I will choose cultural victory” (Civ3 anyone?). Sports might be zero-sum, but life isn’t. Kids’ lives aren’t as unidimensional, and a youth sports arms race just means it’s time for parents and kids to look for what kinds of opportunities have opened up as a result of all the focus on competitive athletics.
Guiltless chicken and beef
New Scientist magazine has an article about creating “pain-free” animals. According to the magazine, Adam Shriver is a philosopher arguing we should consider it as a more ethical way to eat meat.
I think among college students today there’s a sense that society will be moving in a vegetarian direction in the coming decades, even if they aren’t vegetarians or think the idea is silly. Still, it’s hard not to be repulsed by the conditions of factory farms, and engineering pain-free animals would seem like an ethical thing to do. My guess, though, is that a lot of people would still find this solution repugnant.
First, I suspect there’s a general unease with any sort of genetic engineering. I’m not sure if that owes to science fiction stories or just evokes memories of crude medical experimentation. But, in addition to that, I actually think our moral disgust at factory farms is based on a deeply visceral sympathy with things that have faces.
It reminds me somewhat of the race of house-elves in Harry Potter; many seem to want nothing more than to be obedient and faithful servants. Hermione can’t believe that and insists on organizing a sort of liberation movement for them. Even though they seem authentically happy as servants, her visceral disgust at that desire can’t be overridden. My bet is that we’d have a visceral disgust at farm factory conditions even if animals were engineered to be content with their lives.
Rationally, though, it seems like this is in fact the ideal way to go. It would be best if we could engineer them to be overjoyed, and still keep them as inexpensive as possible to care for. That would be the utility maximizing thing to do, I suppose, but it certainly grates against our intuitive moral sentiments.
There’s a broader interesting conversation to be had around the creation of beings who delight at seemingly awful conditions. Whether it’s food that delights at the prospect of being eaten or workers excited by cleaning sewage performing monotonous work, it’s a very real future possibility.
I think it’s unlikely that humanity will move in a generally vegetarian direction for some time, and pain-free animals might be a good way make eating meat more ethical. But it does raise a bunch of really tricky philosophical questions if we wish to remain coherent in our moral beliefs.
Sports continued
The second take on sports comes from Derek Sivers’s re-hashing of a few years’ old talk by Kurt Vonnegut. Sivers and Vonnegut say that people have trouble reconciling the dramatic twists and turns of a story or movie with the more meandering and mundane experience of everyday life. We walk out of a Sunday matinee-showing and wonder where the montage-friendly ups and downs are in our basically normal lives. As Vonnegut says:
… because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.
Sivers pushes this to, “That’s why people invent fights. That’s why we’re drawn to sports. That’s why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.” I’d go further to say that it’s not just that we want variety (lots of ups and downs), but that we want intelligibility in the form of a coherent narrative that structures the otherwise arbitrary events in our life.
This explanation says little about why we care about sports more now than before, but I think when you listen to breathless commentators describing a game winning shot or look at the variety of emotions at the end of a close little league game - from tears and stern father-son post-mortems to jumping high fives and the hugs of proud parents - it definitely seems like sports are a place we look for the interesting narrative arcs missing in our actual lives.
What’s strange to me is that Vonnegut (or Shivers) seems to think that the stories are the actual root of our desire for drama and coherency in our real lives, that its our exposure to the stories themselves that makes us “pretend there is drama where there is none”. To me, it seems more likely that both sports and fiction are symptoms of the same aspect of our being. We come out of the womb desperate for something to make sense or explain what the hell we’re doing here, and I think that’s what drives us to either look for meaning or escape the exhaustion of its search in sports and fictional stories.
Three takes on the seriousness of sports
21st century America cares a lot about its sports. 12 year old NBA-hopefuls play in 3 leagues at the same time while working with private coaches to try to land spots on their middle school basketball teams. Meanwhile, their parents are - embarrassingly - thrown out of their games for getting a little too into the action and cursing at the referees. That is, that’s when they’re not getting coaching for their own golf swing, delaying the actual playing as if they’re training for the PGA tour.
That isn’t to say it’s bad to care this much about sports - sports provide opportunities for exercise, community, and the internalization of some important values (being a team player or trying your hardest). I do think it’s important, though, to recognize that our current level of care is historically unique and not inherent to sports themselves.
I’ve recently read three pieces on the seriousness of America’s approach to sports. I’ll look at the first one in this post.
In an older issue of The Atlantic, Witold Rybczynski wrote a long article on the history of the weekend and its relation to our conception of leisure. A lot of the article turns around a quote from G.K. Chesterton about the three possible definitions of “leisure”:
The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.
Rybczynski’s thesis is that our approach to the weekend has transitioned from the third understanding of leisure to the first; that we are incredibly concerned about doing leisure “right”:
Most outdoor sports, once simply muddled through, are now undertaken with a high degree of seriousness. “Professional” used to be a word that distinguished someone who was paid for an activity from the sportsman; today the word has come to denote anyone with a high degree of proficiency; “professional-quality” equipment is available to—and desired by—all. Conversely, “amateur,” a wonderful word literally meaning “lover,” has been degraded to mean a rank beginner or anyone without a certain level of skill.
In general, I think his analysis is interesting, but I’m not sure I buy his explanation for why we’ve come to treat leisure in this way. Arguing that “technology has removed craft from most occupations,” Rybczynski claims that we’re so desperate to succeed at - rather than just play - sports because of “the desire to do something well”. That is, because we’re all just cranking widgets instead of whittling them, we focus on honing the best tennis backhand in the neighborhood to get the kind of self-esteem work used to offer.
Though computers and mechanization have certainly changed the way we work, I just don’t agree that technological advancement has removed the “job well done” feeling from work. Rybczynski says that fast food workers’ jobs now consist only of saying “Have a good day” and I think he’s right that there’s something significant about McDonald’s cashiers not having to worry about change addition and subtraction anymore. But it’s not that the “craft” element is gone. It’s just shifted: now service positions are even more about excelling in communication and interacting with customers. In the same way, teachers (who Rybczynski says now depend on mechanical aids, shirking their past “dramatic skills”) get to worry less about their chalkboard handwriting abilities and more about conveying the message they’re trying to teach.
Technology just hasn’t eliminated to subjective elements of work, so that can’t be the source of our growing seriousness about sports. I’ll talk about the other two takes on sports in the next posts.
Moral distance
Peter Singer is responsible for the following famous thought experiment.
Suppose you’re walking through the woods in a brand new and quite expensive suit. You pass by a pond and in that pond see a small child drowning. You could easily save the child by wading in, but doing that would ruin your suit. You walk by.
Have you done something wrong in this story? Most people think yes. Now consider another story.
You receive a letter from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation asking you to donate $500 to save the lives of several African children in desperate need. You feel bad for the kids, but have been saving your money for a new suit. You throw out the letter.
Have you done something wrong in this story? Now most people say no.
Of course there are a million ways to draw distinctions between the two situations, and you can imagine alternatives that are a bit conceptually closer (suppose there were many nicely-suited people standing around the pond and you still ignored the child). The point is to illustrate that physical distance dulls the twang of our heartstrings.
This point about physical distance seems to hold across people and cultures, and it seems a little strange. Philosophers have long pointed out the incoherence of these reactions — physical location is random or arbitrary, so why should it affect how much moral consideration we give to others?
Would you change this if you could? That is, if you could snap your fingers and make every human feel just as bad about starvation in Africa as they would about starving children in their own neighborhood. Peter Singer probably would; he’s often argued that we should give a far greater portion of our incomes to charity.
I wonder if we’d just be overwhelmed by the constant sorrow. Maybe that would force us to do more, but maybe it’s better for everyone if we do less. I think it’s a complicated issue at best.
Beating evolution part 2
This post continues from one of my posts last week. I’m discussing Nick Bostrom’s article in What’s Next about areas evolution might produce beatable results. The first area was “changed tradeoffs,” and there are a few others.
The second area is “value discordance.” Don’t be scared by the name, it’s pretty simple: evolution doesn’t want the same things as we do. Natural selection designed humans for inclusive fitness. Inclusive fitness means your individual fitness and the fitness of your social partners weighted by how closely related you are genetically. That gives us a lot of cool things including all of the altruism we see in the world today.
But nowadays humans care about a lot more than that. We care about our happiness, knowledge, avoiding boredom and relationships with others. So evolution will never bring us strong contraceptives like vasectomies — they’re catastrophic for inclusive fitness! — but they might do an enormous amount to improve our quality of life.
Bostrom also offers boredom as an example. While boredom makes us more productive and forces us to learn new things, it also sucks. If we could dynamically lower our standards in a sense, then we might have much happier lives when isolated from novel stimuli. But there might be a broader sort of value discordance as well. Making humans broadly less violent across the world would be a great thing (as long as you got everybody), but when designing for inclusive fitness, a certain amount of violence is essential.
So that’s value discordance. There are actually a couple of others that I’ll address only briefly. Some things evolution is fundamentally unable to do like produce adamantium skeletons or diamond tooth enamel. The metals are too difficult to produce naturally.
Evolution also might be stuck in a local maximum. So while it might be beneficial if we had absolutely no appendix, it can be deadly to have a very small appendix. It’s far more difficult for genetic mutation to produce no appendix before producing smaller appendices. So in this case it seems that evolution is constrained by its method to the local maximum.
Lastly, natural selection operates slowly. There may be a beneficial mutation that has reached only some portion of humans. The ability to digest milk might be counted among these — many are lactose intolerant and most are malabsorbers, yet the ability to comfortably drink milk surely improves one’s life.
I think looking at these areas is fruitful in thinking about where we can find ways of enhancing ourselves as well as a novel way of thinking about evolution as a process. There seems to be a lot of room for improvement on evolution’s work, which makes me excited for the coming decades.
More on the future of newspapers
I know I know, I’ve posted about the future of newspapers before, but this article in the New York Review of Books got me thinking again.
One passage which caught my eye was:
The fall-off in ad revenues has been compounded by another phenomenon that newspaper executives would rather not discuss: their own greed. The relentless stress placed on acquisition and consolidation, which dominated the industry for decades, helped drain money out of newsrooms and into the pockets of shareholders. It also shifted the locus of decision-making from locally based citizens to distant corporate boards. Most harmful of all, efforts to build large media conglomerates have saddled newspaper companies with astounding levels of debt, much of it taken on to buy other newspaper companies.
That at least part of the problem comes from bad management makes me think more strongly that a bailout would be a terrible idea. Subsidies for newspapers would reward bad managers and crowd out potentially better managers with innovative approaches to news.
The article also covers a few alternative ways, some novel to me, for newspapers to continue to function (mostly to continue to profit despite the trend of readers away from print toward web versions):
- make consumers pay for online content
- web advertising
- syndicating content to handle the costs of global coverage
- enlisting philanthropists to set up endowments for newspapers
- other nonprofit models for news provision
- augment local public radio stations, so they can be better sources for local news
Wansley also wrote earlier about cities who are using Twitter to field complaints about potholes and other problems from citizens. You can imagine similar media being used for local news.
In sum - I don’t think there’s reason to worry about the plight of traditional newspapers. News is important and the future of newspapers as we known them are uncertain, but replacements are on the way.
Why so few women contributing to Wikipedia?
According to a survey cited by the Wall Street Journal only 13% of contributors to Wikipedia articles are female. Part of the gap is made up just by the gender disparity in readers of Wikipedia (68% are male), but that doesn’t come close to explaining why so few contributors are women.
Any ideas for why such a large disparity exists?
Ideas (assuming the survey was done correctly and there aren’t sample bias problems):
- Tooling around on the internet is more socially acceptable for men than for women (because it seems antisocial or because women are expected to do household chores?), so men are more likely to take the time to contribute articles.
- Society tries to encourage more aggressive behavior in men, which may help create people who care about enforcing their rightness on the world enough to correct an article.
