Concerning his recent book, How to Change Your Mind, which touts the value and potential of psychedelics.
As I wrote earlier, I am not convinced that taking a trip inside your head is a useful way to expand your mind. Think of our culture as something like a vast archaeological mound. When they are excavating a site where humans have lived for thousands of years, you know how at the top layer they find the artifacts of the most recent inhabitants, and below that are those of inhabitants from a couple hundred years before, and so on, all the way down?
Well, all of humanity has this enormous mound. It’s unfathomably big, and getting bigger all the time (think of all the YouTube videos that are being posted while you’re reading this.)
There are so many ways to explore the mound. You could be like Tyler, and travel the world, reading books, walking through various cities and villages, sampling the street food. Or you could develop deep knowledge about a sport or a craft.
With all those ways to delve into the mound and explore it, I can’t get excited about using a drug that takes some of your sensory experiences and memories and plays them back to you in “shuffle” mode.
As for searching for meaning, I have a joke. There are people who struggle with the existential problems of finding purpose and meaning in their lives. We can label them “seekers.” There are other people for whom such problems are not salient. We can label them “grandparents.”
The grandparents that I know seem to have found peace of mind. There is something very calming about having descendants that you can look forward to watching and maybe guiding a bit as they find their way in the world.
There seems to be a trend toward greater social anxiety and more people expressing political hostility. There could be many reasons for this, but I wonder if part of it is a decline in the proportion of people who are counting on grandchildren.
Greg Ip writes,
Messrs. Posner and Weyl argue these companies’ advertising-based businesses elevate quantity over quality. Content on Netflix Inc., which is subscription based, is a lot better than videos on YouTube, and as a result earns about 10 times as much per minute per viewer. If digital companies treated users as employees and paid them, it would improve the quality of online content while massively boosting labor income.
Ip gives favorable coverage of their book Radical Markets. David Henderson’s review is more mixed. I was sent a review copy, and I had a negative reaction, which I limited to one relatively minor criticism. Ordinarily, I try to avoid reviewing a book that I hate, but when it receives a lot of favorable coverage I become less inhibited. It’s time to unload on this one.
1. The writing is just atrocious. They make it difficult to extract the ideas from the fluff and rhetoric.
2. The title, Radical Markets, is a 180-degrees head-fake. What they actually advocate is radical despotism. That is, rather than try to improve markets by going out as entrepreneurs and doing things better, they play the role of fantasy despot. They want to back their experimental notions not with “skin-in-the-game” entrepreneurship but with state power.
3. For example, if Weyl and Posner think that social media would be better if companies paid users for data, then they should start a social media company that operates that way. If their intuition is correct, then this will be more efficient than the way that Facebook and Google operate, and the new competitor will eventually come out the winner.
4. In fact, my intuition is the opposite. I think that social media would be improved if the users paid the companies. But when I articulated that idea, I did so in an essay entitled Let’s Compete with Facebook. I explicitly rejected government intervention. In fact, the main purpose of the essay was to argue against fantasy despotism.
If I had anything nice I could say about Radical Markets, I would. But I haven’t felt so compelled to unload on a book since Phishing for Phools.
Here, I am going to give my views on (a) how the conscious mind and the unconscious mind relate; and (b) the state of the economy today and how it got there. I am going to choose a roundabout approach, based on two dreams. I had these dreams and remembered them while I was in the middle of reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your mind. The dreams occurred the night after I wrote the previous post. As of this writing, I am somewhat farther along in the book, but still not finished. My theory of dreams is that they allow the unconscious mind to play with stuff that they have picked up during the day. Continue reading
Russ Roberts recently interviewed Pollan.
I will have finished the book by the time this post goes up. Meanwhile, the WSJ reviews an autobiography of the late John Perry Barlow. The review includes,
Barlow writes that his first acid trip, in 1965, was possibly the most important experience he ever had. “I went someplace overwhelmingly different that night and, to a large extent, I have stayed there throughout the rest of my life.”
According to Pollan, the research on psychedelics is consistent with this. He quotes researcher Roland Griffiths as saying that if you do a controlled experiment in which the experimental group receives a psychedelic, “70 percent will say they have had one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives.” Pollan also mentions Barlow as one of the notable people who took LSD during the 1960’s phase of research. But Pollan is most interested in the latest phase, which began in the 1990s.
Pollan also quotes a skeptic, Paul McHugh, who wrote that what trippers experience “are sadly familiar symptoms doctors are called to treat in hospitals every day.” The terms are “temporary psychosis” or “delirium.”
My cynical take is that if you have bad memories of a dissociated state, it is temporary psychosis, and if you have exalted memories, it is psychedelic. I’ve talked before about my personal Minsky cycle. I can recall the “Ponzi phase” culminating in temporary psychosis, and my memories of that could not be worse. I have no desire to try to induce anything like it by taking a drug.
My wife has a saying, “I prefer my bike stationary.” That is, she is content to ride a stationary bike in the gym, where she does not have to deal with the many obstacles that could cause her to fall off a bike while riding outside. Similarly, I will say that I prefer my psychedelic experiences vicarious. If someone else wants to explore “higher consciousness,” that’s fine for them. I’ll stick with ordinary consciousness as long as I have a choice.
1. Jonah Goldberg talks about his Suicide of the West with Ben Shapiro. I recommend both the book and the vidcast. It reminded me that my essay on “micro-morality and macro-morality” owes a debt to Hayek that I failed to articulate.
2. John Carryrou talks about his Bad Blood with Nick Gillespie. I recommend the book a bit more than the vidcast, although the latter does make a nice effort to get into a couple of the questions that I posed in my endorsement of the book.
And while we are on Theranos, I liked this sentence from a commenter.
After reading Carreyrou’s book, I am inclined to view Theranos more as an extreme point on a smooth distribution than as an one-of-a-kind outlier, otherwise the displayed level of credulity is difficult to explain even given a lot of people’s fervent wish for a female Steve Jobs.
The book, Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy Wilson, has been around a while (2002). Some of the studies and methods pre-date the awareness of replication issues. But I still find it very stimulating. Note that Hanson and Simler refer to Wilson’s work and to the book.
There are all of these views about a divided brain. Daniel Kahneman talks about system 1 and system 2. Ian McGilchrist (recent econtalk with Russ Roberts) talks about the left brain as a set of maps and the right brain as having a sense of the territory. Wilson talks about the adaptive unconscious and the conscious brain.
Wilson’s point is that what we mean by our “self” is the conscious brain. But a lot of information is processed and decisions are made by the unconscious brain. The conscious brain is not the executive making all the decisions, nor is it a spectator/commentator without influence. It is somewhere in between.
I am interested in the overall question of moral behavior. My current thoughts are these:
1. The simplest moral heuristic is simply “Do what you observe other people doing.” If other people are driving between 65 and 70, then do that. If the sign says that the speed limit is 55, then that introduces some dissonance, but you still are probably better off doing what other people do.
2. If you don’t do what other people do, then you are defecting. If everyone defected a lot, then we probably could not have a workable society. But if nobody ever defected, then there would never be any improvement at all.
3. Moral life consists of choosing between obeying the simplest heuristic or defecting. I would say that to the extent that you are unable to make those decisions consciously, you lack moral capacity.
4. But our conscious brains can rationalize all sorts of behavior. Our instinct is to disguise or deny behavior that might make us look bad. We go so far as to disguise it or deny it to ourselves.
5. Be careful what you believe about yourself. Going back to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, she seemed to believe that she was another Steve Jobs. This gave her a license to fire anyone who told her something she did not want to hear. It’s now obvious that she treated constructive critics as if they were hopeless malcontents, but ex ante that was harder to see. Making the opposite mistake–treating a hopeless malcontent like a constructive critic–can also be costly.
The book is Why Liberalism Failed. I wrote this:
This being 2018, Deneen also points to the electoral successes of Donald Trump and the Brexit plebiscite as signs that the liberal order has lost its appeal with the general public. But these less-than-overwhelming victories did not clearly rest on the above failures of liberalism that are Deneen’s concerns. The featured cause in the Trump and Brexit campaigns was control over immigration. The issues of government agency over-reach, economic inequality, liberal arts education, and climate change played little or no role in either.
Although the book makes many good points, overall I didn’t think that the dots were well connected.
John Carreyrou’s book on Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes. The title is Bad Blood. Recommended by Patrick Collision.
These days, I find myself pondering issues of morality and ethics a lot. We are all flawed. How do some of us manage to avoid going downhill and becoming really bad?
This book raises many questions. How could so many people have been fooled? It seems like a lot of the people she fooled were male. We’re they vulnerable because she was a woman?