Author: Rick Weber

“There’s Nothing Morally Wrong With Not Wanting to Work Hard at School”

Rick Weber Comments, Economics, Philosophy , , , ,

That’s a point I agree with in an opinion piece I recently stumbled across.

And it relates to a larger point that’s been brewing in my head the longer I hang around campus. Most of these kids simply shouldn’t be here. They don’t want it enough, and they really don’t need it. There’s nothing wrong with the fact that they don’t want to work hard enough to make school a valuable experience. College is a distraction for most kids who really should be getting work experience instead.

I’d love to live in a world where people valued education and pursued it for its own sake. I’d love to find out my garbage man is a lover of classic Russian literature. But I actually live in a world where people value schooling which they pursue for credentials. And any education they get along the way is an accidental byproduct. The one things students seem to learn is how to flatter their professors. Sure, they learn while they’re at school (how can you be 18 and not learn something?!), but I’m far from convinced that they learn because of school.

The trouble is that the one thing schools have been effective at teaching students is how important school is. Is it so important that nearly a quarter of “amusement and recreation attendants” should have bachelor’s degree or higher? I won’t argue that carnies should be high school drop-outs like in the good old days. But if I had the choice between one who passed my class (with a C+) and one who spent an extra couple years learning how to make sure a bolt is tightened properly, I know who I want operating my teacups.

As a society, we’re fooling ourselves. We’ve set up a system where we convince kids that they need a degree to live a good life, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as college graduates go on to uncritically hire college graduates. That leaves an unsustainable tension: most students (rightly) don’t want to work hard at school, but they want to go to school. “Society” wants them to work hard at school, but doesn’t want to deny anyone a degree. At best we end up wasting everyone’s time. At worst, we set kids up for failure then leave them with student loans. In either case we erode standards and diminish the signalling value of school along with the educational value. We need someone to go into high schools to tell kids that there’s nothing morally wrong with opting out of college entirely.

Departments of Higher Education should have mystery shoppers

Rick Weber Economics, Law , , , ,

As you know, I teach at a SUNY campus. As you can imagine, the views I express here are only my own and certainly not those of any authority figure in the bureaucracy I live in or the higher ed industry more broadly. My union would be mortified.

In my opinion–coming from a limited perspective within the sausage factory–the problem we’re facing is that universities are good at education and bad at credentialing (at least when there’s a significant demand for the signal value of a degree). This has lead to a host of problems–Baumol disease, growing administrative expense, all sorts of cultural unsavoriness, declining standards, grade inflation, etc.

Education just happens. You can’t plan for it. You don’t do x amount of philosophy and then you’re enlightened. But a navel-gazing, consequence free environment with a culture of inquiry is a fine place for education to happen.

Credentialing on the other hand is a common pool with the usual problems. It doesn’t have to interrupt the educational component of the university, but when actors in this setting follow the basic economic logic of their situation enrollments (and budgets) expand and the nature of the good produced by schools shifts from unquantifiable to commodity.

In such a setting there is a strong case to be made for regulation. At the very least to manage the common pool resource of the signal value of a bachelor’s degree, but more ideally to ensure students aren’t simply learning to minimize cost while navigate a bureaucracy.

Of course, NOL readers know that regulation is never easy and comes with many problems of its own. In fact, many of the problems I see in the industry are the natural bureaucratic outcome of such regulation (particularly as I sit here avoiding the work I’ve got to do making my tenure packet more closely resemble a checklist version of the guidelines my campus gave me. God I hate this!). For a taste of how this mess is currently killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, check out BadAssessment.

How do we improve the regulatory quality? Mystery Shoppers!

My industry is disciplined through:
* direct state regulations,
* marginal nudges through strings-attached financing,
* “self”-regulation through quasi-public regional accreditation and much-less-public discipline-specific accreditation,
* direct consumer experience,
* U.S. News (and similar) rankings, and
* Peter Theil and other critics complaining about how the education system is broken.
My proposal could be done at any of these levels, but to my knowledge is only actually done at the statistically invalid level of direct consumer experience.

Governments could invent many students and their traits and send copies of these students to a sample of online programs. Teams would manage sets of students and gather data. With several of these students taking different paths through each school the agency could learn something useful about the school as a whole–is it a degree mill? How does the actual student experience compare to other schools? Are there pitfalls that might put vulnerable groups at a disadvantage?

Peter Theil could do it more aggressively and generate an upper-bound estimate on the bullshit in the industry.

The College Board or U.S. News would probably turn it into a new costly margin of competition between schools, but that’s probably an improvement over what we’ve got now.

To my knowledge, nobody is doing this. In my opinion, given the stakes and the size of the industry, it’s worth approaching this from many directions. Mystery shoppers would certainly be a more direct evaluation than the hundreds of pages of sacrificial paperwork we’re currently using.

The Lesson to Unlearn

Rick Weber Culture , ,

Paul Graham writes:

In theory, [classroom] tests are merely what their name implies: tests of what you’ve learned in the class. In theory you shouldn’t have to prepare for a test in a class any more than you have to prepare for a blood test. In theory you learn from taking the class, from going to the lectures and doing the reading and/or assignments, and the test that comes afterward merely measures how well you learned.

In practice, as almost everyone reading this will know, things are so different that hearing this explanation of how classes and tests are meant to work is like hearing the etymology of a word whose meaning has changed completely. In practice, the phrase “studying for a test” was almost redundant, because that was when one really studied. The difference between diligent and slack students was that the former studied hard for tests and the latter didn’t. No one was pulling all-nighters two weeks into the semester.

Even though I was a diligent student, almost all the work I did in school was aimed at getting a good grade on something.

This, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with the education system. Forget governments, unions, misunderstandings, standardization, Baumol Disease and all the rest. The big problem is that the signal value of school subsumed the educational value. It’s Campbell’s Law.

The rest of the article is worth the read.

Goodbye Rudy

Aside Rick Weber Economics , ,

In 2008 I found myself at SJSU study economics as an undergrad. That was the big turning point that landed me on this blog.

A lot of people insist that was a fantastically interesting time to study economics, what with the global financial sector crumbling and society at large humbly learning a lesson in allowing markets to discipline irresponsible risk taking. (Right? Isn’t that what happened?). But for me, what was fascinating was the intellectual framework that allowed you to dig into the root causes. The SJSU econ department was a fantastic place for me to start building up that framework.

Fall 2008 was professor Rudy Gonzalez’s last semester before retirement and my second semester in that program. I took advantage. Rather than four discrete classes (Law & Econ, History of Economic Thought, Labor Econ, and Public Choice) I essentially had a 12 credit class in Economics broadly understood. It was the most intellectually fruitful semester in my economics career.

Rudy was the sort of freewheeling professor I try to be. He set a tone. In Rudy’s classes I learned the most in the gaps between the stuff for the exam. My classmates and I came out of his classes debating concepts and engaging with ideas. This was the semester I wrote my best joke: The Physiocrats. I learned a lot from studying for those exams, but the best stuff was in the digressions.

I think my students hate it when I digress. They’ve been trained by a lifetime of standardized tests and the empty promise that ambition is as simple as uncritically ticking off the right boxes: take these classes in this order, get a degree, then get a job (whatever that means). There’s a lot of lip service to the importance of education, but now education is a commodity. Bricks to be stacked mechanically.

In Rudy’s class, education was a process of enlightenment. Knowledge wasn’t an assembly of bricks, but a garden–different bits of knowledge growing and complementing one another, fertilized with jokes and stories.

It was in his class I decided I wanted to be an economics professor. He also gave me a copy of the paper that convinced me of anarchism. I’m still trying to share a taste of the excitement I got in his class with my students. It’s an uphill battle, but I’m glad I’ve had the chance to fight ignorance with economics and humor.

Goodbye Rudy. You will be missed.

Second Nature

Rick Weber Liberty , ,

Michael Pollan gets me. Highly edumacated middle class white guy whose in to food and gardening. Last year I read Omnivore’s Dilemma and became convinced that Pollan occupies essentially the same position as me (challenging my preconceptions): the humble anarchist. Pollan has a sense of emergence, and skepticism of the beneficiaries of government policy. He might not take public positions as an anarchist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t see Ol’ Spooner’s ghost whispering in his ear.

This Christmakwanzakkah I read an older book of his. Second Nature is his record of the same experiences I’m currently going through as a gardener. This is from way back in 1991, and in it gives some evidence that he might be an epistemological anarchist:

As it happens, the etymology of the word true takes us back to the old English word for “tree”: a truth, to the Anglo-Saxons, was nothing more than a deeply rooted idea.

p. 159

Here he is appreciating emergent order in markets:

More than a work of art, I like to think of the garden as if it were a capitalist economy, inherently unstable, prone to cycles of boom and bust. Even the most prosperous times contain the seeds of future disaster. A flush year in the perennial border usually means lean times ahead; now spent, the perennial need dividing and won’t peak again for two years. Unless pruned in spring, my asters, phlox, and delphinium willput out way too many shoots, a form of herbaceous inflation that will cheapen all their blooms come summer. Wealth is constantly being created and destroyed in the garden, but the accounts never blanace for very long–a shortage of nutrients develops in this sector, a surplus in that one, the value of water fluctates wildly. Who could hope to orchestrate, much less master, so boisterous an assembly of the self-interested? The gardener’s lot is to try to get what he wants from his plants while they go heedlessly about getting what they want. …

The garden is an unhappy place for the perfectionist. Too much stands beyond our control here, and the only thing we can absolutely count on is eventual catastrophe. Success in the garden is the moment in time, that week in June when the perennials unanimously bloom and the border jells, or those clarion days in September when the reds riot in the tomato patch–just before the black frost hits. It’s easy to get discouraged, unless, like the green thumb, you are happier to garden in time than in space; unless, that is, your heart is in the verb. For the garden is never done–the weeds you pull today will return tomorrow, a new generation of aphids will step forward to avenge the ones you’ve slain, and everything you plant–everything–sooner or later will die. Among the many, many things the green thumb knows is the consolation of the compost pile, where nature, ever obliging, redeems this season’s deaths and disasters in the fresh promise of next spring.

p. 131-2

Pollan is showing as a great an ability to appreciate the market as a process as any Austrian economist.

Computational Economics is the Right Perspective

Rick Weber Economics, Liberty, Philosophy , ,

Here’s a vastly oversimplified picture of mainstream economics: We pick some phenomenon, assume all the context into the background, then build a model that isolates only the variables specifically relevant to that phenomenon.

Once you’ve simplified the problem that way, you can usually build a formal mathematical model, make a few more (hopefully) reasonable enough assumptions, and make some strong ceteris paribus claims about your chosen phenomena.

That’s a reasonable enough approach, but it doesn’t shed much light on big picture issues. I’m interested in root causes, and this “reduce things to their component parts” approach doesn’t give enough of a big picture to find those roots.

How do we broaden our perspective? One approach is to return to the more “literary” approach of the pre-Samuelson days. A bit of philosophy of science has me convinced that the primary flaw of such an approach is rhetorical. Written and mathematical arguments leave some assumptions in the background, but the latter is more convincing to a generation of economists trained to be distrustful of natural language (and too trusting of algebra).

As a pluralist, I think we should use as many approaches as we can. Different schools of thoughts allow you to build different imaginary worlds in your mind. But the computational approach isn’t getting enough play. I’d go so far as saying agent based modeling is the right form of mathematics for social science.

What does this mean? In a nutshell, it means modelling processes, simulating those processes, and seeing how interactions between different agents leads to different sorts of outcomes.

A common trope among Emergent Order folks is how ants are individually stupid but collectively brilliant. Neoclassical economics runs into the opposite problem: individually brilliant individuals who get trapped in Prisoners’ Dilemmas.

Computational economics starts with models that are more like ants than homo economicus. Agents are essentially bundles of heuristics/strategies in an out-of-equilibrium world. But these competing (and cooperating) strategies can interact in interesting ways. Each agent is a part of all the other agents’ environment, so the mix of strategies is a function of the success of the strategies which is a function of the mix of strategies in the environment.

In essence, computational economics starts from what the mainline economists have long recognized: human society is a complex, interwoven, recursive process. The world is, essentially, a sort of meta computer with a complex web of programs interacting and evolving. We don’t need to assume in any sort deus ex machina (that’s a bit of an overstatement, but we haven’t got time to explore it this week), we just need replicating entities that can change over time.

Such a view, to my mind, provides an end run around rationality assumptions that can explain the brilliance of entrepreneurship (without making heroes out of the merely lucky) as well as the folly unearthed by Behavioralist economics (without the smugness). We’ve always known it. It’s all just evolution. But the methodology hasn’t made its way into the main stream of economics. If there are any undergrads reading this on their way to a PhD program, let me know in the comments so I can point you in some interesting directions!

Nomic-nomics?

Rick Weber Culture, Law, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , ,

Perhaps the coolest thing I’ve found on the Small Internet so far is the game Nomic. From where I found it:

Nomic was invented in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber. It’s a game that starts with a given set of rules, but the players can change the rules over the course of the game, usually using some form of democratic voting. Some online variants exist, like Agora, which has been running since 1993.

It’s a game that’s about changing the game. Besides offering a tempting recreational opportunity, I think this could be formalized in such a way to make it rival the Prisoners’ Dilemma (PD) in shedding light on the big social scientific questions.

The PD is a simple game with simple assumptions and a variable-sum outcome that lets it work for understanding coordination, competition, and cooperation. One of my favorite bits of social science is Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation project. It’s basically a contest between different strategies to an iterated PD (you can play a variation of it here). That the “tit for tat” strategy is so successful sheds a lot of light on what makes civilization possible–initial friendliness, willingness to punish transgressions, and willingness to return to friendliness after punishing these transgressions.

A fantastic extension is to create a co-evolutionary simulation of a repeated PD game. Rather than building strategies and pitting them against each other, we can be totally agnostic about strategies (i.e. how people behave) and simply see what strategies can survive each others’ presence.

The evolutionary iterated PD is about as parsimonious a model of conflict/cooperation as we could make. But there is still a lot of structure baked in; what few assumptions remain do a lot of heavy lifting.

But if the structure of the game is up for grabs, then maybe we’ve found a way to generalize the prisoners’ dilemma without assuming on extra layers of complexity.

Of course, the parsimony of the model adds complexity to the implementation. Formalizing Nomic presents a formidable challenge, and getting it to work would surely create a new

But even if it doesn’t lend itself to simulation, it strikes me as the sort of exercise that ought to be happening in classrooms–at least in places where people care about building capacity for self governance (I’ve heard such places exist!).

Let’s play!

A bit of stage setting, then let’s start a game in the comments section. I get the impression that this game is nerdier than Risk, so you’ve been warned (or tempted, as the case may be).

The basic premise is that are mutable rules and immutable rules (like Buchanan’s view of constitutions). Players take turns to propose rule changes (including transmuting rules from a mutable to an immutable state). As part of the process, we will almost surely redefine how the game is won, so the initial rule set starts with a pretty boring definition of winning.

We’ll use Peter Suber’s initial rules with some variations to suit our needs. The rules below will be (initially) immutable.

117. Each round will happen in a new comment thread. A new round cannot start until the rule change proposed in the previous round has been voted on. If technical problems result in having to start a new comment thread, that thread should include the appropriate reference number and it will be understood to be part of the same comment thread.

I will take the first move to demonstrate the format in the comments section.

118. The final vote count will be determined after 24 hours of silence. Players may discuss and cast votes, and change their votes. But after 24 hours of no new comments, the yeas and nays will be tallied and the outcome determined accordingly. In cases requiring unanimity, a single nay vote is enough to allow a player to start a new round without waiting the full 24 hours. The final vote will still occur (for purpose of calculating points) after 24 hours of silence.

Despite being numbered 118, this rule will take priority over rule 105.

119. Anyone who is eligible to comment is eligible to play. If it is possible to start a new round, anyone may start that round. In the event that two people attempt to start a round at the same time (e.g. Brandon and I post a comment within a couple minutes of each other) priority will be given to whichever was posted first and the second comment will be voided.

120. The game will continue until someone wins, or everyone forgets the game, in which case the winner will be the last person to have had their comment replied to.

My Back to the Land Movement

Rick Weber Culture, Liberty ,

Of course there’s no such thing as a Golden Age–some forgotten time in the medium-past where things were unambiguously better. The past is full of backwards savages and hard living. And even so, you can’t go home.

But I’ve got this suspicion that back in my day the Internet was better. It didn’t take itself too seriously, and so was actually worth while. But at some point in the last decade (maybe earlier) things changed for the worse. The Internet, like all the rest of the world, just isn’t what it could be–what it should be!

I’m being at least a little hipstery here–it was cool before it was cool, but now it’s uncool because it’s popular. But the truth is, the crappiness that is Facebook is just a reflection of a large swath of consumers. And I’m allowed to opt out.

Sitting on the Internet at the start of 2020, I feel like I’m sure I would have in 1970. Everything is bullshit and I don’t want anything to do with it. I want to buy a school bus and drive to some part of the country nobody cares about and start a farm. Of course the truth is, I really have no business going back to the land. I’ve taken up gardening as a hobby and learned that it’s hard.

But I do have this imagined past on the Internet I can attempt to go back to. I’m going to make an effort to return to the Internet of the early 2000’s. The Internet that Craigslist (for example) still protects–simple, excellent, and not trying to eat the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to use the Big Corporate Internet. I’m only imagining my packets being sent via artisinal servers lovingly tended to by ye olde sysadmin.

What made the Small Internet great was the artisinal content. Weird stuff made and shared by weird people. That stuff is still out there. The Big Internet filters still capture it sometimes. But the marketers have gotten to the filters that used to serve us so well. Reddit just isn’t the same as a Conde Nast property.

One move I’ve made is to join MetaFilter, a social media site that goes back to 1999! So far it’s been a delightful place (without sucking me in the way Reddit used to). Hitting the random button brought me Where’s Wallace–an homage to The Wire, which is still worth re-watching. A more recent post introduced me to an excellent advent calendar that brought more new and weird things across my radar.

Why should this experiment matter?

Partly this is an act of civil society. It’s not all markets and government out there. We’ve got this space to share and improve our public spaces. The Internet is one of those spaces and my Small Internet project is sort of like making an effort to walk through my neighborhood instead of just going back and forth from the freeway.

It’s also an exercise in questioning implicit assumptions in how I engage with this part of the world.

I like Stephen Wolfram‘s notion of exploring the computational universe for useful programs. You don’t even need to take a metaphorical leap in applying the idea to media consumption habits. There’s a lot more “content” (facts, opinions, entertainment, editorial judgement, comments sections, provocations, etc.) out there than I can (or want to) deal with. So I have to choose some sort of filter. Once upon a time, Facebook was a great filter, then Reddit, but now I want to try something different.

I don’t exactly know what I’m looking for yet. But I’m going to wander off into the computational universe in search of a better Internet, less encumbered with the interests of behemoths and more closely tied with serendipity, good humor, and those weird human things that made the back-in-my-day-Internet so much better.

Generic Thanksgiving Post

Rick Weber Comments, Culture ,

Addendum: I wrote this post this morning, hit post, and returned to my oven. The apple pie was pretty good, the pecan was better. The stuffing and gravy were great.

While my oven pre-heats, let me give my top(ish) three things I’m thankful for:

  1. My dog Lola. This sweet little pooch entered my life this January and she’s absolutely melted my heart. Here we are on her first camping trip:

2. Capitalism. Yeah, you knew what you were signing up for when you came to this URL. For all the problems with giving any humans any authority at all, even our half-assed American capitalism does a pretty decent job of allowing me the opportunity to have a literal feast every Thanksgiving.

3. The little Internet. Not all that’s online is Google, Facebook, or Amazon. There are still cool little pockets of the Internet where a few dozen weirdos get together and make something beautiful.

I recently learned about the tildeverse a community of communities of people sharing a common web-connected computer like in ye olden days of pre-Google internet. Back before it was the Information Super Highway. Back before it ruined democracy by allowing humans to act like humans at scale. Playing around on an under-powered server is a pretty niche hobby, but there are tons of these long tail groups out there.

The friendly communities that create forums, the weird projects, the sync-tubes; the beautiful bubbles: these are the places that keep that old spirit of the Internet alive. The Internet giants are scary, but they’re not the only game in town; I’m deeply thankful for that.

Also stuffing. And gravy.

Happy Thanksgiving! Be excellent to each other!

Some more borderline fraud from the higher education industry.

Link Rick Weber Culture, Current Events, Economics , ,

From the Wall Street Journal: For Sale: SAT-Takers’ Names. Colleges Buy Student Data and Boost Exclusivity

The title pretty much says it all: the College Board is selling data about test-takers (i.e. high school students) to colleges who use that to market to a wider pool of applicants. That wider pool often includes students who don’t stand a chance of getting in to the schools that are now marketing to them, but the marketing gives the false impression that the school wants them.

Joe Six-pack Jr. takes the SAT, fills out a survey, and that survey goes into a database. Some school that normally ranks near the middle of the pack buys a piece of that database, including Joe’s data. They send him a brochure and a letter that looks like it was written specifically for him (and he doesn’t know any better) so Joe, figures he’s being recruited. Instead of just applying to his local state schools, now he shells out an extra $50 to apply to Middling University. They summarily reject his application because his SAT scores were 1100 and they’re only accepting students who scored above 1300. MU now looks a little bit more prestigious in the rankings (which means their current administration can take credit before jumping ship to take a higher paying job at a school looking to also increase in the rankings). The College Board gets paid. The administrators get paid. The U.S. News rankings get a little less useful for incoming students, but they don’t know that. On the other hand the rankings get a little more important for decision makers at schools. And Joe Jr. is funding this whole mess despite being a) the least informed, and b) the least well funded player in this whole mess.

Thoughts on ‘For Method’

Rick Weber Books, Liberty, Philosophy , , , ,

Our project hasn’t seen much public-facing action, but it’s still happening. For my part, I have (so far) read Lakatos’s lectures that were meant to form the basis for his joint project with Feyerabend.

Before I jump into it, let me start with my favorite quote:

The social sciences are on a par with astrology, it is no use beating about the bush. (Funny that I should be teaching at the London School of Economics!)

Imre Lakatos, p. 107 For and Against Method

These lectures were an entertaining evisceration of some old (and still prevalent) superstitions about the functioning of science, plus Lakatos’s own view on how science actually works. I think his picture (which I’ll describe below) is a pretty good one, but doesn’t actually solve the demarcation problem.

The Big Question (TBQ) is this: how do we separate good science from bad? Lakatos presents three main schools of thought (besides his own):

  1. Demarcationism — a set of schools of thought that share a belief in something like an objective answer to TBQ.
  2. Authoritarianism — the belief that there are some people who can identify good science, but can’t necessarily enunciate their positions.
  3. Anarchism — which argues (according to Lakatos) that there is no good or bad science.

He quickly rejects the various flavors of Demarcationism. These schools of thought are either logically impossible (e.g. inductivism), inconsistent with the history of science, and/or too subjective. They’re popular caricatures of science–cartoons with heroic scientists battling ignorance, limited only by funding. But they aren’t true.

For example, Falsificationism (which is alive and well, half a century later, in the minds of many practicing scientists) tells us that scientists are only swayed by disconfirmatory evidence. But in practice scientists tend to ignore anamolies (i.e. disconfirmatory evidence) with the hope that they’ll be explained away later–and they tend to be swayed by confirmatory evidence in spite of Falsificationist priors.

All told, Demarcationists run into the problem of not being able to come up with a theory that doesn’t make significant errors such as classifying Newton as bad science.

On the far side of the spectrum are anarchists. Far from believing in any formula, criteria, or line in the sand, they say TBQ misses the point entirely. There isn’t such thing as “good” science or “bad” except from the perspective of whatever the current orthodoxy says. For the objective-truth-seeking philosopher, science ultimately boils down to “anything goes!”

For Lakatos, the anarchists have basically surrendered in the face of the demarcation problem. But it’s not clear to me that Lakatos hasn’t joined them. He’s got his progression criterion (more on that later), but can we really pin that down in any objective way? Motterlini seems to think Feyerabend thought Lakatos was really an anarchist after all, and I’m inclined to agree based on what (little) I’ve seen. Lakatos offers heuristics, but makes no guarantees that any formula will work reliably.

Let me come back to Authoritarianism after describing Lakatos’s theory of research programs.

A research program is (if I’m understanding this correctly) basically a mix of scientific framework and community. Austrian Economics is a research program comprised of a common theoretical view (with some disagreements), a network of citations, and a social network across space and backwards through time. Austrian Econ contains smaller programs within it: entrepreneurship, political economy, history of thought, capital theory, etc.

Any given research program (RP) may look relatively “good”(ish) or “bad” at any given time, but the future is always uncertain. I wouldn’t bet money on it, but how am I to prove that astrology won’t turn out to be true at some point? It’s the Grue problem writ large.

What we can evaluate is whether an RP is “progressing” or “degenerating.” In the former case it’s gaining predictive power. In the latter case it’s turning into an ad hoc mess in the face of evidence.

It’s up to individual scientists to make the entrepreneurial [my word, not his] decision to invest some effort in whichever program they think is promising. The natural move would be to join a progressing RP. But there might be an opportunity to save a degenerating RP.

In other words, Lakatos wants to describe what science is doing, but he wants to avoid making value judgements about unknown futures. Rather than draw a demarcation line he instead offers a way to ask if a RP is going in the right direction (right now or retrospectively).

Let’s digress a minute and consider objective reality. Putting aside Cartesian skepticism, it seems reasonable to take the existence of an objective universe as a basic axiom. But just as surely, that objective universe has far more complications than humanity will ever be able to fully account for. The universe has more dimensions than us; what did you expect? In considering science’s ability to grasp objective reality, we have to understand that there’s always going to be some degree of (radical) uncertainty, even at the best of times.

“Good” science is that science that gets us closer to capital-T Truth. But we’ll never be in the omniscient position necessary to conclusively judge a bit of science as actually being good or not.

I think Lakatos and I share a sense that there is this objective reality that we can move towards. I think we also share an understanding that this objective reality is fundamentally inaccessible. I also share his position that the demarcationists are wrong. But I’m not ready to give up on the anarchists or the authoritarians.

Authoritarians basically argue that although there is good and bad science and that they can identify them even if they can’t explain how. Lakatos deals mostly with the uglier side of this school of thought, but misses a nicer side. That nicer version, ironically, includes him telling us things like astronomy is more valid than astronomy. To be fair, he hedges by acknowledging that the future is always uncertain… maybe in 1000 years astrology switches from a degenerating body of knowledge to a progressive one.

Hayek’s notion of tacit knowledge applies to scientific knowledge. The tacit knowledge of scientists allows them to tell future scientists things like “don’t even bother with alchemy.”

Still, just because you know something, doesn’t mean it’s right. We all “know” that Roman soldiers spoke with English accents because that’s how they’ve always been portrayed in movies. Try imagining Gladiator with Italian accents; it doesn’t work!

Sometimes authorities give us useful advice like distinguishing between astronomy and astrology. But sometimes they turn out to be wrong (after encouraging us to pursue eugenics in the meantime).

Authority is a useful guidepost, and represents the (current) structure of knowledge. I am not willing to give up my own authority because when it comes to economics, I know it’s not a matter of “anything goes!”

Reading Lakatos, I can’t quite settle on a camp between the anarchists and authoritarians. The anarchists are literally correct, but the authoritarians are able to actually make bets on a reality I think exists.

We’re all in the position of the blind men and the elephant. When someone tells me an elephant is like a tree, I think it behooves me to a) accept that as evidence about what the world is like, and b) take it with a grain of salt. The bumper sticker version of my stance might be “the Truth is out there… and its bigger than you think.”

So what about Lakatos? It’s all a bit rusty at this point so please push back in the comments. But here’s my tl;dr:

  • Don’t trust anyone who tells you they’ve got the formula for “good science.”
  • The way science actually works (as opposed to the mythology we’re taught in high school science) is that RP’s build up complex bodies of knowledge around a few core postulates. Normal science is concerned with attacking the knowledge that isn’t in that core.
  • Scientific progress (e.g. the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics) isn’t an Occam process… we’re not eliminating anomalies, but changing the set of anomalies we deal with.
  • The mark of bad science is adding ad hoc theory that hand-waves away anomalies but doesn’t generalize to describing novel facts (if Nasim Taleb were in the audience, he’d be shouting via negativa! right now)

Link: The Most Controversial Tree in the World

Link Rick Weber Current Events, Law , , , , , ,

https://psmag.com/ideas/most-controversial-tree-in-the-world-gmo-genetic-engineering

Tending an ecosystem is hard. With all the interconnections it’s impossible to do just one thing. We should absolutely be skeptical of calls to engineer the environment from the top down, but we should also recognize that we’ve already been unintentionally doing so.

To me, the linked article raises interesting questions about the sort of common law restrictions on GMO that seem reasonable. Default infertility seems like an efficient Coasian compromise for industrial GMO. But the case of the American chestnut seems like an exciting opportunity to reverse an ecological tragedy.

This case seems like a good polar opposite to Jurassic Park on the spectrum of GMO threat/promise.

Against Ideology

Rick Weber Culture, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics , , , , , , ,

Since first dipping my feet (brain?) into philosophical waters I’ve realized that the world has more dimensions than my mind. Many more. Which means insisting on a consistent philosophy is, in all likelihood, a recipe for disaster.

This isn’t to say I’ve got an inconsistent philosophy, or that I’m ready to throw up my hands and say “anything goes!“. But like a good bridge, my philosophy is full of tensions.

I can’t derive everything back to the Harm Principle (a principle I like), recognition of subjective values (which I’m on board with), or some notion of a social utility function (which I do like as a rhetorical crutch or skyhook, but am unwilling to take with me more than arm’s length from the whiteboard).

Instead, I’ve got a smorgasbord of mental tools–ethical notions (“don’t kill people!”), social science models (prisoners’ dilemma, comparative advantage)–that I try to match appropriately to the situation.

This puts me in the unfortunate position of requiring a great deal of humility. But as it will say on my tombstone: worse things have happened to better people…

I approach the world with libertarian priors. At the end of the day, I’m a left-libertarian anarchist. But Jonathan Haidt’s work has convinced me that my priors say more about me than the world. To be sure, libertarianism brings something important to the table, but so do other views.

Recognizing the importance of ideological pluralism lets me use my ideology like a lever instead of a bat–a tool instead of a weapon. And hey, what’s more libertarian than pluralism?!

As a centuries-long-run prospect for a meta-utopia I’m still staunchly libertarian. Go back in time 500 years and you’ll be told democracy is a pipe dream. I think we’re in a similar moment for the ideas of radical freedom, self-determination, and decentralization of power I’d really like to see put into practice. But imagine going back in 500 years, convincing everyone you’re a powerful wizard, then implementing democracy all at once. I don’t think it’d work out very well. Hell, I’m not even sure about going back in time 3 years to run that experiment! Similarly, flipping the An-Cap switch tomorrow would probably be 100 steps forward, 1000 steps back. Without the appropriate culture in place, good ideas are likely to backfire.

Still, I’m a libertarian anarchist by default and want to see the world move in that direction. But in the short-medium run I refuse to be dogmatic.

I get a lot out of my ideological priors, but I get more by refusing to slavishly follow them at all costs. Yes, the greatest good will be served in an anarcho-capitalist world (I think). But it’s a long trip from here to there. Sustaining that equilibrium will require a cultural shift that hasn’t happened yet–and ignoring those informal institutions is likely to lead to something more like feudalism than utopia. In the mean time, I say move towards greater freedom and avoid getting bogged down in partisanship.

So I’ve got a long-run goal: radical federalism and maximal freedom. But how do we get there? What are the short- and medium-run goals?

Simply to make things better while encouraging people to engage in voluntary interactions that create value, especially by building up social capital networks.

My Austrian-subjectivist priors are in tension with my rationalist-utilitarian instinct. But I think we find a way out by considering policy effects on future generations. Tyler Cowen suggests pursuing policy that promotes long run economic growth.

The big caveat is that although GDP is the best available metric to pursue, GDP is an imperfect measure. Figuring out “GDP, properly understood” adds a layer of complexity that makes policy evaluation all the more difficult. Which is part of the controversy with my recent posts on pollution taxes.

For example, after the end of slavery, total leisure time increased which would decrease measured GDP. But clearly a proper accounting of productivity would discount the initially higher GDP by the cost of forced labor. Similarly, we have to refine our notion of measured* economic well-being to account for things left out of the old methods–like household consumption, leisure, black markets (side note: the war on drugs is a waste!), human capital**, and ecological assets that fall outside the private property system.

Addendum for the left: what’s best for the world’s poorest people is a worthy addition to Cowen’s policy. And it’s an addition that also tends to push us towards libertarian arguments (like liberalization of immigration policy).

Unfortunately, I’m a rationalist by default which means I have to work at my epistemic humility. I’m constantly tempted to see the world as more legible than it really is. I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t know could fill a library. But the world is much more complex than any functional team of smart people could handle, let alone a lone economist–even if he happens to be one of few who really do get it.

One of my favorite arguments is the Austrian-libertarian point that “if we knew what people would do with their freedom, we wouldn’t need it.” For example, the reason to allow someone to start new businesses isn’t because we know that it’s going to make things better. Instead, it’s because market innovation depends on decentralized, crowd-sourced experimentation. We don’t say “oh, this Steve Jobs guy is about to improve our lives,” because if we could do that (we can’t) then we could instead find a less costly way to get the same outcome (we can’t do that either). 

This line of reasoning also applies to policy. There are some easy cases–there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit in occupational licensing. But society is a complex system, so you can’t do just one thing. Any one policy change ripples through the system and creates unintended consequences. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should do nothing. But my conservative friends are right that we shouldn’t go too fast. In any case, we’ve got more tensions that require me to listen to a wider range of ideological voices due to my cognitive limits.

A particularly interesting policy question is to what extent we should (not) take account of the impacts of American (Canadian, European, Chinese, etc., etc.) policy on non-Americans.

Here we find another tension. On the one hand, surely being accidentally born into a particular geography doesn’t give you greater moral weight than others. On the other, even if we want American policy to help Haitians, there’s a knowledge problem exacerbated by distance.

I think the appropriate response is a friendly and open federalism. Local issues should be handled locally. We should be neighborly. We should resist the temptation to centralize power. 

But we should also take advantage of large-scale governance structures (private or public) to deal with large-scale issues. Match the scale of governance to the scale of the relevant externalities.

The downside of this approach is that some locales will do terrible things. “States’ rights” is a bad argument for slavery (or for anything else). But stepping in to make things better isn’t an unambiguous improvement. If there’s one thing to learn from America’s adventures in statecraft*** it’s that you can’t just force a country to be free.

Given that, we should be more open to accept the world’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Historically, our record is far from spotless. But there have also been humanitarian successes in moving people away from tyranny. 

We have a moral obligation to at least consider the well-being of everyone around the globe. And the lowest hanging fruit for actually making a positive difference is opening up our borders. Not to say there’s a simple answer, but the answer lies in the direction of freedom of movement.

How should we (according to me) go about deciding questions of public policy? We should opt to encourage the creation of value and reduction of costs (i.e. economic growth). But we should do so carefully and with open minds.

GDP growth is a worthy goal, but not for it’s own sake. John Stuart Mill wrote: 

“How many of the so-called luxuries, conveniences, refinements, and ornaments of life, are worth the labour which must be undergone as the condition of producing them?… In opposition to the ‘gospel of work,’ I would assert the gospel of leisure, and maintain that human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of their nature compatibly with a life filled with labour.”

Mindless insistence on measurable output overlooks important things like going to your kid’s little league game, grabbing a beer with friends, or quiet contemplation. And even if the people arguing for protecting the environment seem a bit silly, we’re wrong to ignore the importance of environmental externalities in affecting our standard of living. All of which is to say, Cowen is right that we need to carefully consider the shortfalls of how we measure economic growth, all while encouraging it.

Perhaps most importantly, we should relish a tension between consequentialism and principles. There are plenty of low-hanging fruits for libertarianism, but if we want to get the most out of this metaphorical tree we need to let a fear of bad outcomes encourage us to invest in civil society, informal institutions, and rich social networks so that freedom can expand without costing us inhumanity. I want to see the welfare state ended, but I’m willing to wait while we start by reducing barriers to entrepreneurship. I want to see taxes go away, but I’m willing to see a less-bad tax replace an egregious one.

We should reject the dogmatism that too often leads us to over-prioritize ideological purity. First, such purity can trap us in local optima (metaphor: a self-driving car programmed to never go east sounds like a good way to get from NYC to LA… till it gets stuck in a cul de sac somewhere). Second, that purity is an illusion. God’s true ethical system simply isn’t available to us–it’s more complex than our brains are–so why worry?

Post script: don’t take this to be an argument against libertarianism. Or a call to prioritize “pragmatism” over ideology or any other political values. I’m not trying to make a definitive argument abolishing ideology, I’m just gently pushing back. The key word here is tension. We can’t have tension between A and B if we get rid of A.

*Here’s another tension: I don’t believe we can actually measure economic well-being. I think we can make educated guesses based on well-thought out studies of observable proxy variables, but I believe in the impossibility of interpersonal utility comparison.

**A major pet peeve of mine is the conflation of education and schooling. Education, properly understood, is simply not measurable. We might find some clever proxy variables (for example, the Economic Complexity Index is my current favorite metric for productive capability–which overlaps capital and human capital accumulation).

***That’d be a good title for a comic book! If you know the right historian and/or international relations scholar, put them in touch with Zach Weinersmith!

For and/or Against Method, initial miscellany

Rick Weber Books, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , , , , ,

The past couple weeks I’ve been accumulating material related to our fledgling summer reading group. First I got For and Against Method, realized it was more for than against so I ordered the third edition of Against Method and also found the (apparently much shorter) first edition online.

I’m currently dipping my toes into For and Against, reading Lakatos’s lectures at LSE on the scientific method. I was expecting to be more interested in Feyerabend’s perspective, but so far I’m pleasantly surprised. Lakatos is an interesting guy, and the conversational tone of the (transcribed) lectures is delightful.

I’m not sure how we plan to do this reading group, so, anarchist that I am, I’m going to randomly lash out until something sticks! Here are some initial thoughts from Lakatos’s first two lectures:

  • Around pp. 24-25 he lays out the demarcation problem: we want a (set of) method(s) to separate good and bad science. Presumably, our method should stand up to its own scrutiny. If our method is L(t), taking theory t and returning “good” or “bad”, then L(L) should return “good”. To me, this looks Gödelian.
  • p. 26: “I remember when back in my Popperian days I used to put this question to Marxists and Freudians: ‘Tell me, what specific historical or social events would have to occur tin order for you to give up your Marxism?’ I remember that this was usually accompanied by either stunned silence or confusion. But I was very pleased with the effect.

    “Much later I put the same question to a prominent scientist, who could not give any answer because, he said, ‘of course anomalies always spring up, but somehow sooner or later we always solve them.’ This is why, according to Feyerabend, who follows in Popper’s footsteps, all these criteria for intellectual honesty have one and the same function: they are empty rhetoric to frighten school children.” [emphasis my own]
    • Anyone here know something about rhetoric and the Greeks? Personally, I’m drawn to the notion that it’s all basically rhetoric. The term I prefer, though, is bullshit. Don’t get me wrong, by BS I don’t mean “wrong” or “bad” (per se). And for that matter, I don’t quite mean rhetoric either. It’s something like the sort of communication that goes on during a poker game.
      • You might be able to see that I’m going to be naturally sympathetic to Feyerabend who, apparently, preferred to think of himself as an entertainer than an academic philosopher. That’s part of the reason I’m reading Lakatos first. But I’m happy to see that a) Lakatos has a sense of humor, and b) He’s got a character endorsement from Feyerabend.
    • There’s good BS and bad BS. Bad BS leads to things like advertising campaigns and college accreditation schemes. Good BS leads to open minded learning. Good BS is what happens between grad students in a good program after midnight.
    • Good BS isn’t arbitrary, but it isn’t too tightly bound to reality either. You can’t send an astronaut to space on good BS, but you probably need good BS to come up with the idea in the first place.
    • I’m a materialist at the end of the day, and I believe in an objective external universe (though I can’t reject a Cartesian evil genius). But my map of that universe is highly impressionistic. I think anyone who’s map is more precise is either fooling themselves, or highly specific (i.e. they’re missing out on something).
    • Currently, I’m thinking rhetoric is for strangers and BS is for friends.
  • Lakatos talks about three basic groups: Militant positivists, anarchists, and elitist authoritarianism.
    • The positivists would be right if they were omniscient. In principle we could come up with theories that perfectly aligned with reality. And we could come up with a theory of theories that neatly separated the good from the bad. But the universe is more complex than our finite minds can handle.
      • Did you hear the one about the economist who was told about the latest brilliant new business? His response: “sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”
    • Lakatos’s view of the anarchists is that different theories are essentially all at the same level, but some get more support and others get less.
    • According to the elitists “there is a demarcation, but there are no demarcation criteria.”
    • I’m basically an elitist-anarchist with a heavy dose (I hope) of humility. There are better and worse theories (it’s not quite “anything goes”), and often (but not always) the elite are in the right position to pass (fallible) judgement. If a professional economist (ahem) says “Theory X is stupid”, then odds are good they’re correct. But it’s not guaranteed. Not even if all economists agree.
  • There’s no easy way out. Some science is good and some is bad, and there’s no algorithmic way to distinguish them.
    • It’s like the historians’ joke: “What was the outcome of WWII? Too soon to say.” We can extend the metaphor all the way back. It’s too soon to declare any specific outcome to the Big Bang. It’s surely the case that there will be some outcome (according to my materialist, even LaPlacian, priors), but predicting that outcome would require a computer bigger and more powerful than the universe.
  • Fundamentally, distinguishing good and bad science requires going out on a limb, taking a risk, making a judgment. All theories will ultimately be tested against objective reality, but nature isn’t always great about sharing her data and our methods (especially our language, which places the ultimate constraints on our ability to share and accumulate knowledge) prevent us from getting to 100%.

My understanding is that Lakatos will be building up to some notion of a more-or-less objective way to demarcate good and bad science. I believe there is good and bad science, but I’m skeptical of humanity’s ability to draw any sort of hard line separating the two. I think the evaluation of science is more like the evaluation of art than the evaluation of competing answers to a well defined mathematical question.

Sometimes science is more art than science…

Tying this in to my wheelhouse: science (as LaVoie has repeatedly told us) is in a similar position to market enterpreneurship (and also ants, which are amazing) and the Austrian insights apply: this is the sort of stuff that fundamentally only works in a decentralized, anarchic fashion. The ant queen is not actually a central planner. Entrepreneurship is decentralized social learning that central planning is no substitute for. And science is not so comprehensible that we’ll ever find some way to automate approval of grant proposals.

Learning is hard because we’re finite beings staring into an infinite abyss.

Dunbar’s Number

Rick Weber Culture, Economics, Liberty , , , , , ,

One of my favorite ideas in social science is Dunbar’s number: the cognitive limit to the number of relationships our brains can handle. It’s something like 150. That’s about the number of people our ancestors might have shared their tribe with 20,000 years ago.

Our sense of social propriety is tuned to dealing with people within our circle. Economics often seems counter-intuitive because it’s largely about how to interact with people outside that circle.

Here’s the example I use in class:

You’ve got a date tonight. You stop at a florist to pick out a bouquet and start wondering if maybe chocolate would be a better gift. Dark chocolate or milk? Or maybe something else. You think back to your economics classes and realize that if your date had $20 cash, they could buy this bouquet if it’s what they really wanted, or chocolates if that’s preferred. So when you knock on the door, instead of offering a bouquet, you hold out a crisp $20 bill.

What happens next?

If you aren’t dating an economist, you get the door slammed in your face.

So you run back to the florist, buy the flowers, run back, and nobody answers the door. Your date probably went to the bar with friends. You call a cab. When it pulls up to your door, the fare is $20. You just spent $20 on these flowers. You try to pay for your fare with the flowers.

What happens next?

The driver refuses and insists on cash.

So what’s better, flowers or cash? Is your date irrational, or the cab driver? Neither. Both are rational within the context they’re acting in. The driver is a stranger and market rules are appropriate. In this context, $20 is worth more than $20 worth of flowers. Maybe the cab driver wants flowers, but cash gives them the option to buy whatever best meets their needs.

You and your date were trying to cease being strangers. The cab driver is outside of Dunbar’s number, but your date would have (could have) been inside that inner circle. At that point, the signaling value of the flowers would trump the economic value of the cash.

Economics has a lot to tell us about how to behave with those inside and outside of our Dunbar’s number. But that dividing line calls for different rules on either side: the rules of family and neighbors on one side, and the rules of the market on the other.

I’m thinking about Dunbar’s number because I just finished a recent episode of EconTalk where they talked about a classic example from behavioral economics: An Israeli daycare, tired of late pickups started charging fines to late parents. Ironically, this resulted in an increase in late pickups that persisted even when the policy was reversed.

The daycare example is often trotted out to say “see! Sometimes adding an incentive backfires! Raising the price from $0 to $x increased the quantity of lateness demanded. People are irrational!” Of course it only takes about 5 seconds of thinking to realize that we aren’t holding all else equal here. As usual, there’s a lot of interesting stuff hidden in the ceteris paribus assumption.

The more sophisticated interpretation of this example is that attaching a price shifted parent’s interpretations of the norms. In my language: the inclusion of money in that interaction shifted the rules of behavior from those of neighbors to those of strangers.

(Roberts brought up an important point I hadn’t considered with this example: the price was too low. Prices communicate information about how onerous it is to produce a product, and that price told parents “it’s not a big deal if you’re late…”)

More generally, when we’re looking at some social scientific question, Dunbar’s number demarcates a point separating the assumptions we can make about sharing and monitoring–whether it’s about the practicability of communism (the real kind, not the kind with mass murder), corporate bureaucracy and firm size, or the tenability of informal institutions.