I haven’t been blogging much lately, but John Lanchester’s boneheaded review of Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain seemed to demand a response. But I see that Robin himself has saved me the trouble with his devastating refutation here.
This does remind me that I never fulfilled my intention to review the The Elephant myself. This fell through the cracks because I’d accumulated substantial notes while reading it, lost my notes, decided to search for them before reviewing, and then sort of fell temporarily out of the blogosphere for a while. But it is a genuinely terrific book; my lost notes contain a long list of minor quibbles, but the bottom line is that I learned a lot (about others and about myself) and had a lot of fun along the way. There was never a moment when I wanted to put this book down.
The book, for those who have somehow managed not to hear about it, is about the hidden motives for human behavior — the motives we hide from each other, and the motives we hide from ourselves. The table of contents promises to enlighten us about how hidden motives drive our body language, laughter, conversation, and our choices in consumption, art, charity, education, medicine, religion and politics — and the book delivers on those promises with a heady mix of sparkling logic and striking evidence. There are plenty of fun facts you’ll be repeating at cocktail parties, and plenty of deep insights that will make you smarter forever.
I saw the blog post title and was all excited for a scathing rant about how party loyalty has infected the brains of the Republicans currently in Congress.
But this was good too.
Only Republicans? A reasonable person with an opposing bias could make the same claim and offer as much evidence as you.
We are all biased individuals, that’s not the problem. The problem is in not acknowledging them.
Steve, how do you take notes while reading a book? (Paper/pencil, what kinds of things do you write down, etc.) Might seem like a stupid/basic question, but I’ve never been taught how to do it nor seen anyone do it.
I have not come across this before, but I will certainly read it. I recently finished “Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)”by Tavris and Aronson, about how we deal with cognitive dissonance with often disastrous effects and would recommend that also.
I hope you find those notes someday, so we can hear about those quibbles. :)
Having now read both links, each has some validity.
From the New Yorker review, a couple of points. It was said that 90% of activity could be traced back to some sort of signaling. This was interpreted as being able to explain 90% of behaviour with this one tool. Now, it is possible that 90% of activity contains some tiny element of signalling, so can be “traced back to” this, but signalling could be almost useless in explaining this 90% of behaviour. If that was intended it was very poorly expressed. I think it was intended to say that 90% of behaviour could be explained by signalling, which I think is clearly the “overreach” that Hanson claims is not happening. It reminds me of claims such as “90% of communication is non-verbal”, which really gets my goat.
On the wider point of economic overreach and comparison to physical sciences, Hanson is wrong.
“He thought that “the economic approach is a comprehensive one that is applicable to all human behavior.” and “If this argument is correct, the economic approach provides a unified framework for understanding behavior that has long been sought by and eluded Bentham, Comte, Mark, and others.” (emphasis mine)
This is claim that economics is a framework for understanding. That clearly means we should use this approach to explain interactions, which is very different from claiming that they are based on these factors.
The claim fo the physical sciences is very different. All motion may come down to physics but no physicist claims that we should use this as a framework for understanding complex behaviour. This distinction is very important and Hanson has got it wrong. He uses the example “Those physicists go too far. They say conservation of momentum applies exactly at all times to absolutely everything in the universe….”
Indeed they do, but they have never said we should use this as framework for understanding arm movements in people, where as economists have said that.
In short, both articles suffer from the same problem. They oversell their premise to make a point.
Steve, off-topic, but are you ever going to post about your views on the natural numbers again? I’ve been waiting for about five years for you to do so, because years ago I got you to agree that the natural numbers and the real numbers are on equal footing as far as technical results go: the second-order theory of real numbers is categorical just as the second-order theory of natural numbers is cateorical. Natural numbers can be defined by quantifying over sets of real numbers, just as real numbers can be defined by qualifying over sets of natural numbers. And there are models where R is standard and N is nonstandard, just as there models where N is standard and R is nonstandard.
So given all that, I still haven’t heard a reason from you for why the natural numbers are more special than the real numbers.
You might enjoy reading some of B.F. Skinner’s works. There is real insight.
Also off topic: Once upon a time we had a discussion about standards for evaluating social policy—specifically, are people better off having more absolute wealth, or more relative wealth? If I recall correctly, Landsburg favored absolute wealth. Yet when pressed, Landsburg acknowledged that he would not like living in a neighborhood in which his best economic option would be to abandon teaching and writing and simply mow lawns for his fabulously rich neighbors. That is, Landsburg expressed concern for status as well as absolute wealth.
This comes to mind as the NYT publishes Thomas Edsall’s essay, “Why Don’t We Always Vote in Our Own Self-Interest?. Part of Edsall’s answer is that people have “last place aversion”:
In short: Yes, people care about the One Percent. But in anxious times, people care more about Whichever Percent is Just Below Themselves.
@Keshav Srinivasan #7
Mathematical logic is an area I’ve always felt I should read up more on, and what you and Steve are discussing here is interesting (I remember feeling more or less the same way, when you had that exchange 5 years ago). Do you have a recommendation for a place to look at these things?
@Steve Given that you where thinking of responding the the Lanchester review I’m wondering if you have any general rules for when it’s worth it to “argue with flat earthers”. Pretty sure I’ve been guilty of both over and under doing this at various times.
#9 “Among the findings of this group of researchers: people “making just above the minimum wage are the most likely to oppose its increase.”
I strike ridden UK in the 1970’s the phrase “eroding the differentials” was commonly used by the unions to prevent this sort of thing.
#10. Arguing with flat Earthers is almost always going to have no effect on the individual concerned. My hope in doing that sort of thing on a blog or similar is that some other, less committed readers may be persuaded. The flat Earther has already chosen to ignore so much evidence that it is not possible to convince them – they will simply ignore your evidence and counter with some so-called evidence of their own. Doing such a thing for entertainment is OK as long as failure to convince is not seen as your fault.
@Jonathan Kariv What do you mean by “these things”? Do you mean mathematical logic in general? If you know nothing you can start with the book “Gödel Escher Bach”. Or do you mean the things me and Steve were talking about, regarding second-order logic? Second-order logic is discussed in relatively few books, but two of them are Stewart Shapiro’s book “Foundations without Foundationalism: The Case for Second Order Logic” and Steven G. Simpson’s book “Subsystems of Second-Order Arithmetic.” You might also look up Frege’s theorem and neologicism, because neologicists discuss second-order logic a lot.
By the way, here is the comment thread where I stated and proved a bunch of technical results to show Steve that there is no basis on which to conclude that the natural numbers are objectively real and the real numbers are not:
http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/09/13/simple-as-abc/#comments
In addition to my comments in that thread, see also the comment I linked to in comment 18.
@Keshav I meant the things you and Steve talk about regarding second order logic. I’ll look for the Shapiro and Simpson books and the other references you mention (Frege’s theorem and neologicism). Thanks
@Jonathan Kariv It would also be fruitful to look at the work of Solomon Feferman concerning “predicativity given the natural numbers”. Feferman believed, like Steve, in the reality of the natural numbers but was skeptical of the power set of the set of natural numbers.