Friday, March 29, 2013

Something I find very weird

People who treat identities associated with political ideology, religion, or a particular ethical perspective the same as they treat identities associated with things like race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, or sex.

For all intents and purposes the former involves a selection process and the latter doesn't (obviously you can select into a sex or race if you want to, but I think we can safely ignore that simply as a matter of numbers and also because ultimately that's probably just a realignment with an underlying orientation that you can't select into or out of).

Now, the point that there is a selection process is very different from the claim that you have full control over these outcomes. I'm using "selection" here as economists use it, and of course you don't always have full control.

But in any case, a judgment of an identity you can select into or out of seems enormously different from a judgment of an identity that you can't select into or out of. The principle difference being, of course, an evaluation of the selection itself.

You can't very well rail against the fact that half of humans have penises and half have vaginas. You can't very well blame someone with a penis or a vagina for that (or for anything that having those things entails). But if a selected identity is in anyway blameworthy (and certainly not all are - but certainly some are), of course you can attach blame to someone that selected into it!

Why would anyone even think to treat the two as the same?

The exception, of course, is if you're a hard core determinist... but in that case why do you care so much about any of this anyway? We who either are not determinists or who have no idea what to think of questions like that but choose to live under the convenient fiction of rejecting determinism should not be conflating identities that you can and can't select into. In other words: if you're entertaining the very idea of a selection process, you ought to acknowledge these things are different. If you're not willing to entertain the idea then it seems like a moot point.

25 comments:

  1. Generally speaking, selected identity is stronger. Cognitive dissonance. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Why would you assume that attaching blame is what's relevant to how one treats identities?

    Go back to your previous post, commenting on my quote on the small number of conservatives among social psychologists. The fact that people are to some degree self-selected as conservatives means that conservatives can be expected to be different in some ways from liberals. But the fact that humans have been selected by evolution for reproductive success means that women, whose role in reproduction is very different from that of men, can be expected to be different in some ways from men.

    In either case, a difference between the percent of a profession that is a member of one group or another could be explained either by the differences between members of the group or by discrimination for one group and against another. Your comment would make sense only if the main justifiable reason for discrimination was blame--to punish people for something morally wrong with them. I don't that's a likely conjecture in the case of either social psycholgists or Harvard mathematicians.

    And, going back to Harvard mathematicians, you write in an earlier post:

    "the problem with Summers wasn't that he "blamed the victim" (although I guess he sort of did), but that he was spitballing on an issue he had no expertise in (did he really think nobody had thought of this possibility before?!) and which had already been investigated and rejected as a driving force."

    Meaning that it was clear that innate differences between males and females had no role? Summers didn't suggest that they were the only, or even the chief, explanation for the phenomenon he was discussing--as best I recall, he put them third. What is your basis for regarding that as an obviously false claim, which is what your "and rejected" seems to imply?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. re: "Why would you assume that attaching blame is what's relevant to how one treats identities?"

      Well depends on the identity, right? I will attach blame for a hateful environment to someone who identifies as a homophobe. That is absolutely relevant to how I treat people who identify that way. We could also of course think of other words besides "blame" to fill in here, of course.

      re: "Your comment would make sense only if the main justifiable reason for discrimination was blame--to punish people for something morally wrong with them."

      No. Why do you say this? There are lots of reasons for differences besides just individual differences and discrimination. I've listed several (unless by differences you're not talking about innate differences - I'm very unclear about what you're trying to say here).

      re: "I don't that's a likely conjecture in the case of either social psycholgists or Harvard mathematicians."

      I agree. I think the other things I mentioned are the far more likely explanation. That's why I mentioned them! :)

      re: "Meaning that it was clear that innate differences between males and females had no role? Summers didn't suggest that they were the only, or even the chief, explanation for the phenomenon he was discussing--as best I recall, he put them third. What is your basis for regarding that as an obviously false claim, which is what your "and rejected" seems to imply?"

      I thought it was second. I don't hold all that much against Summers. People got upset because they thought it shouldn't have been on the list. They're probably right on that. But there's certainly nothing implausible about innate differences in ability. It's just that among the plausible explanations this one doesn't seem worth mentioning.

      You seem to think I'm arguing that biological differences are irrelevant. I don't think I've ever argued that. I certainly don't think that.

      Delete
    2. "People got upset because they thought it shouldn't have been on the list. They're probably right on that. "

      No. They are probably wrong--it's one plausible explanation. And the reason they got upset wasn't that there are good arguments against it, but that rejection of innate differences—especially by race and gender—is part of the secular religion of their culture. Not doing it shows you are a bad person and has nothing to do with whether there are good arguments for the orthodox position.

      Do you disagree? Do you think that the response to publicly arguing that blacks on average have lower IQ's than whites, or that women are genetically less likely to be geniuses than men, would only antagonize people if they had good arguments against the position or you were offering bad arguments for it? Aren't these obviously cases where what is going on is not that people have good reasons to believe the views are wrong--although both of them might be--but that they regard people who publicly defend those views as violating norms, hence being bad people who deserve to be punished? And isn't that obviously what was happening in the Summers case?

      Delete
  3. A couple points to add.

    -If this is starting with Haidt, why sneak "determinism" at the end. No one actually believes that 100% of political beliefs are caused by genes, but 30-50% is a fair reading if you agree with people like Haidt. And then the problem is completely symmetrical, not just something you can throw aside as a "moot point."

    -The more nuanced justification of diversity is that it is instrumentally useful because having lots of different perspectives lead to better decision making/etc. But then this rapidly gets conflated with racial diversity, not political diversity. This isn't a straw man, see here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Difference-Diversity-Creates-Societies/dp/0691138540/

    -Libertarians are often instructed to remove publications from their CV when applying to many jobs. And economists are probably a bit better than other fields. Here is an anecdote from another field: http://www.volokh.com/2013/03/17/since-were-talking-about-ideological-diversity-in-the-academy/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. - Meh - forget genes. I worry sometimes about sub-atomic particles. But then I just pretend I have no reason to worry about that. I'm usually successful at getting myself to think about something else.

      - I agree on your second bullet for racial and political diversity.

      - I've always wondered if I should take my QJAE pubs off for certain purposes, but ultimately that seems cowardly to me. I think if I did something like an NSF grant I might strip down to relevant publications, but that seems like a different issue.

      Delete
    2. Genes are the causal factor in race. If they are a causal factor for political ideology (though not nearly as one-for-one), then it's at least in part the same thing. Flip references to sub-atomic particles doesn't get you around that.

      Delete
    3. ???

      I'm going big and wondering if any free will at all is illusory - wondering if your remaining 50-70% is deterministic too.

      I just tell myself it isn't.

      Right it's in part the same thing. I think I said that didn't I? I never said it's 0% genes.

      You know the literature better than I do, but this 30-50% figure sound wacky. Most ideological perspectives around today weren't relevant 100, 200, 300 years ago. How can such a perspective be 30-50% determined by genes? What I expect you mean is that personality traits and ways of thinking about the world are 30-50% determined by genes. Sure, but that seems like a very different claim.

      Delete
    4. Haidt's never really been all that appealing to me, but I haven't looked into him in any detail either.

      I wonder - do you know how he accounts for ideological migration over a person's life? That's very common after all.

      Delete
    5. Then you don't even know the argument. According to Haidt, there are different foundations of morality with different weights. They color how we perceive political arguments and cluster together, but there is a spectrum. Conservatives balance the five foundations more or less, libertarians emphasize liberty/oppression, and liberals emphasize equality/fairness.

      I put together a reading list on the topic that I thought was fairly exhaustive (though the framing was to troll other libertarians, since you can use Haidt for that too): http://increasingmu.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/bibliography-for-haidtian-criticism-of-libertarianism/

      Delete
    6. Right but it's the morality that is ostensibly 30-50% genetically determined, not the political perspective, right? Presumably past political perspectives would have aligned differently on these moral dimensions.

      I was aware of everything you've said here.

      It still seems hard to explain ideological evolution with this, but I'm curious how one would.

      Delete
    7. That is the *mechanism* by which people perceive arguments differently. It doesn't matter that the specific questions are only a couple hundred years old.

      Delete
    8. "Most ideological perspectives around today weren't relevant 100, 200, 300 years ago. How can such a perspective be 30-50% determined by genes?"

      You are making a very common mistake--treating statements about correlation as if they were independent of the population they are statements about.

      To see why that's wrong, consider a claim such as "IQ depends more on genes than on environment." That has to be a statement about a particular population with a particular range of genetic variation and environmental variation. If we had a population where everyone was genetically identical, presumably reproducing by cloning, then all IQ variation would be due to environment. If we had a population where everyone was brought up in an identical environment, then all IQ variation would be due to genes. What the actual share is for a real population depends on how much each cause varies for it.

      Similarly here. In our current environment, some, in principle measurable, amount of political variation is explainable by innate characteristics. In a different environment the amount would be different--and, as you suggest, the alternatives people varied among would be different.

      Delete
    9. That's a good point.

      I guess the big question for me with the claim, though, is that the question of a person's politics is so parochial and plastic. My gene's haven't changed in the last 28 years, but my politics definitely have. Which was why I was asking if the point is that some underlying personality or moral orientation (for Haidt's case) is 30-50% determined, and then that that in turn contributes to a person's politics. That would make more sense to me.

      But you make a really good point.

      And even if genetic variation was persistent through several centuries, obviously if your environment becomes more nurturing and variable a different percentage will be explained (in that sense you don't even have to assume cloning).

      Delete
    10. It raises the point - not a new one, of course - that as our engineered environment becomes progressively more impressive, natural selection ought to start operating very differently.

      The reproduction of genetic material is fairly straightforward, and it's quite different from the reproduction of the technical environment that's a principal determinant of fitness today.

      Delete
    11. Humans are a long lived species, so natural selection operates pretty slowly.

      If that were not the case, birth rates in developed countries would be much higher than they are. Natural selection, after all, is selecting for reproductive success--success in getting copies of your genes into later generations. The simplest way of doing so is to produce as many offspring as you care capable of rearing to the point where they, in turn, can produce lots of offspring.

      Nobody I know is doing that--because our genes have not yet caught up with the various devices, most obviously non-procreative sex, by which we substitute our objectives for theirs, utility for reproductive success.
      Which suggests that you might not like the eventual result of natural selection operating differently in the modern environment. If it's possible to develop a true phyloprogenitive gene, it will eventually happen--and shortly thereafter everyone will carry it.

      Delete
    12. re: "If that were not the case, birth rates in developed countries would be much higher than they are."

      Unless the technology changes the nature of the selection process. This is the result in evolutionary unified growth theory models, after all. Natural selection operates differently depending on the existing technology.

      Delete
    13. I'm not sure I understand you--I was describing the effect on natural selection of a change in the existing technology. To the extent that humans are behaving in a way that doesn't maximize reproductive success, that's not natural selection.

      Are you familiar with _The Selfish Gene_ and Dawkins' metaphor of the revolting robots?

      Delete
    14. I'm familiar with The Selfish Gene - the argument, I haven't read it and am not specifically familiar with the revolting robots.

      Googling a little on what you've written on this in the past, I guess my concern with your discussion of the phyloprogenitive gene and applications to assumptions about human fitness is that there's more than one way to skin a cat when it comes to fitness. We could be like rabbits or rats or cockroaches - those hyper-reproductive traits are certainly selected for. But I don't see why that's the only way to think about maximizing fitness (which is really the concern here, rather than reproductive success). We could reproduce more slowly and insulate ourselves from threats to passing on our genes through the use of technology. Such a species could be highly fit, in its own way, amidst the rats and the cockroaches use the brute force approach. Right?

      I don't know exactly what Dawkins argues about technology. My understanding is that genes that generate organisms able to pass on the same genes are going to survive. You could to that by brute force or you could do that with genes that enable the creation of technology.

      These are substitute goods in the same objective function, to use econ speak. Hell, maybe even complements.

      I don't think I'd agree with you that a different objective is being pursued here. The objective of interest in natural selection is always and everywhere fitness. Human organisms no more have to be interested in a given gene's fitness than my cat the loves playing with string has to care about the interests of his genes.

      This is the whole point of Dawkins, right? It's not "our" objectives that matter. We can think we're pursuing whatever objectives we want to pursue. Fit genes will survive, whether it's through sheer reproductive advantage or a more complex mechanism.

      Delete
    15. So my point was if our capacity to use technology to perpetuate ourselves becomes a decisive factor in natural selection, it will be an interesting new world because technology does not follow the same laws of reproduction and distribution in the population that genes do.

      Genes ultimately will or will not reproduce themselves, but if they are enabled by technology - which follows a reproductive law all its own - a lot of interesting possibilities emerge.

      Delete
    16. I can't make any sense of what you are saying--perhaps you can explain when you have more time. Fitness is defined in terms of genes--technology is relevant only as one of the things determining how many copies of my genes make it. If I create great new technology to the benefit of my species but have no children (and don't do anything that increases the number of my siblings and other close relatives who have children), I am strikingly unfit--the genes that gave me my characteristics vanish from the gene pool.

      And I don't understand your "fit genes will survive, whether ... through" in the previous post. Does your more complex mechanism result in more copies of my genes in the next generation? It might if you are talking about extended reproductive success--keeping lots of my nephews and nieces alive, say--but it doesn't sound as though that's what you mean.

      Delete
    17. "Such a species could be highly fit, in its own way, amidst the rats and the cockroaches use the brute force approach. Right?"

      Species aren't fit or unfit, which I suspect explains your confusion. Evolution doesn't work for the good of the species, for the same reason that rational self-interest doesn't always work for the good of the society. If you are making our species safer and I am having children, it's my genes that show up in later generations, not yours. Hence later generations have the characteristics that led to my having children, not the ones that led to your producing great inventions.

      Delete
    18. re: "Species aren't fit or unfit, which I suspect explains your confusion. Evolution doesn't work for the good of the species, for the same reason that rational self-interest doesn't always work for the good of the society. If you are making our species safer and I am having children, it's my genes that show up in later generations, not yours. Hence later generations have the characteristics that led to my having children, not the ones that led to your producing great inventions."

      This is the point I've been saying, yes - the selection process changes when technology becomes a substantial factor in fitness. It's not going to be how genes reproduce themselves that's relevant - it's going to be how technology reproduces and diffuses itself. Other genes besides mine will survive based on the fact that my genes made and distributed technology that enhanced the genes of many other people besides myself.

      Now, is this process dependent on the survival of the generosity of a tech-gene like mine? Would it die out? You appear to think it might. I'm not so sure. I'm not convinced that the reproduction of scientific knowledge and technology is going to follow the same channels of genetic reproduction. If this modern technological enterprise is contingent on some specific genes then we may be in trouble. I'm not sure why one would think that it is.

      It does mean that the genetic composition of society could change dramatically - this, as I pointed out earlier, is the prediction of evolutionary unified growth theory after all.

      Delete
  4. You do realize right that outside of the U.S. age, ethnicity, race, etc. are often constructed quite differently, right? For example, race as a human classification has significant degree of variability cross culturally in other words. In fact one could argue that the American experience is the outlier here.

    ReplyDelete

All anonymous comments will be deleted. Consistent pseudonyms are fine.