[extropy-chat] RATIONALITY: 537 Economists Criticize Bush and Kerry

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Hal Finney wrote:
> See <http://www.openlettertothepresident.org/> and 
> <http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_comment/release_bc04_economists.html>.
> 
> 
> Eliezer wrote:
>> 
>> By far the greatest determinant of your choice of political party is
>> the party your parents belonged to.  95% correlation.  That's human
>> nature for ya.
> 
> I am genuinely surprised at the suggestion that 95% of economists end up
> with the same ideological position after their studies.  I suppose it's
> possible, though.  It would be interesting to here what someone like
> Robin Hanson would say about this, having recently gone through an econ
> PhD program.

I don't know if the statistic applies to 95% of economists.  It's for the
general American population.

> I would have guessed that there would be quite a bit of ideological 
> influence by the teachers and colleagues.  Harvard probably graduates 
> quite a different ideological mix than U of Chicago.  Of course it's 
> difficult to trace out cause and effect here.

You could take a sample of the students as they entered, then check their
political allegiance again after graduation.  We can count those who become
libertarians to check how much of that is rationality and how much is peer
pressure and random drift.  Though unfortunately libertarianism is nowhere
near as good an indicator as would be the case in, say, atheism.  Maybe
instead we ought to count the students who become atheists and see where
their political allegiance goes.

> But in the context of my puzzle about whether study of political and 
> economic issues is worthwhile and will bring you closer to the truth, 
> this 95% result is just as discouraging.  Apparently I can expect that 
> as a result of years of study, I will hold the same views I do now, only
> I'll have better grounds for them!

Again, the statistic is for the general population.  As for the notion of
having "better grounds" for the same position you started out with, that,
from a rationalist perspective, is ridiculous.  The only possible way to
improve the goodness of your opinion is to change your opinion, unless the
facts themselves have changed.

> Well, I'm being facetious.  If two people of opposite ideologies both 
> get economics degrees and hold to their positions, then at least one of 
> them in some sense has moved farther from the truth.  He has taken in 
> information that should have converted him to the other side, and has 
> perverted it, distorted it, and forced it to fit into his ideological 
> preconceptions.
> 
> It's like the puzzle that Bryan Moss offered: which is better, to hold 
> an unjustified true belief or a justified false one?  I thought that was
> a good question and not easy to answer.  But I do think that if your
> course of study only further entrenches you in a false belief, it was
> not to your benefit.

Agreed.

>> If nothing else, study would tell you which ideas are universally
>> agreed to be stupid.  This helps.  A lot.
> 
> That's true, but it doesn't seem to go to the heart of the paradox.

A paradox?  Why do you see a paradox when looking at facts?  Your model of
reality must be producing the wrong predictions, if it takes real-world
facts and names them paradoxes.

>> We've clashed over this before, Hal, and my position remains the same
>> as last time:  Advanced rationality is a massively interdisciplinary
>> science and a high-level martial art, and one who has not mastered the
>> skills will use their intelligence to defeat itself.  It takes a hell
>> of a lot of rationality for someone to transcend political silliness.
>> Why would you expect it of macroeconomists?  Rationality is not their
>> specialty.  They're just, like, macroeconomists.  When it comes to
>> politics, most economists' brains switch off just like most people's.
>> But you can probably get a fair amount of agreement from
>> macroeconomists on consequences, so long as they're not allowed to say
>> "good" or "bad", just flatly describe probable consequences.  You can
>> get even more agreement if you ask them about past outcomes in similar
>> cases instead of futures, and if you don't tell them which candidate
>> is endorsing which policy.
> 
> I don't particularly remember clashing with anyone on this issue, but 
> what you say makes sense here.  However doesn't it actually strengthen 
> the conclusion that for the average person, not an advanced rationalist,
> study of political and economic issues is not going to move him closer
> to the truth, when it comes down to the final decision between
> alternative policies?  Doesn't that strike you as a paradoxical result?

Paradoxical?  Of course not.  It strikes me as being more or less what I
would expect, though I do not claim it as my advance prediction.

My conclusion is that it takes both rationality and knowledge; both facts
and the ability to be swayed by facts.  The more rational you are, the less
the crushing weight of evidence needed to force you to choose between
finally admitting the obvious to yourself or losing your self-respect.
Science is a method for accumulating such massive evidence that even
scientists cannot ignore it.  This is the distinguishing capability of a
scientist; a nonscientist will ignore it anyway.

I aspire to rationality, and not scientism, because I aspire to greater
speed than the social process of science.  Not greater long-run power, mind
you, but faster speed.  I aspire that it should not take so much evidence
to shake me loose of my delusions as it takes to shift an entire academic
field.  Before the social process of science can confirm a hypothesis, some
individual scientist must be rational enough to hypothesize it.

Though I'm not just trying to do better than someone else, of course.  I'm
trying to pare down the necessary weight of evidence to the pure Bayesian
minimum, to attain the inertialess mind, to step just as far as I ought to
step and no further on seeing every incoming piece of evidence, to fight
with the forces of fact instead of giving them battle, to willingly follow
trails of evidence wherever they lead, rather than demanding that someone
else shake me loose of my preferred opinion.

I have yet to read such poetry from macroeconomists, nor those other
average scientists from whom you expect such great feats of rationality.
They might agree with the poetry if asked, but they have not said it
spontaneously, nor practiced the art.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence