Scott Alexander on causal density

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He calls it the omnigenic model.

the sciences where progress is hard are the ones that have what seem like an unfair number of tiny interacting causes that determine everything. We should go from trying to discover “the” cause, to trying to find which factors we need to create the best polycausal model. And we should go from seeking a flash of genius that helps sweep away the complexity, to figuring out how to manage complexity that cannot be swept away.

I prefer the term “causal density,” which James Manzi introduced in Uncontrolled. Many economic phenomena are characterized by causal density. Unfortunately, the mainstream approach is to “sweep away the complexity” by coming up with the simplest possible model that might explain some phenomenon.

Did you two visit the same country?

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First, I read Anne Applebaum.

Hungary’s ruling party respects no restraints of any kind. It has gone much further than Law and Justice in politicizing the state media and destroying the private media, achieving the latter by issuing threats and blocking access to advertising.

Then I read David P. Goldman.

And then we have Viktor Orban, who has governed Hungary for eight years, long enough for the voters to get to know him, with an enormous popular majority. . . . Mr. Orban’s opponents claim that he has put his thumb on the scales by using state institutions to build media support for the government, but no one says that he has falsified votes or intimidated opponents. Opposition politics in Hungary is open and uninhibited.

The Hazony Question, of nationalism vs. transnationalism, is salient in both pieces. Applebaum’s piece speaks to the dangers of nationalism, with one group using the power of the state to deny status to other groups. Goldman’s piece speaks to the dangers of transnationalism, with unelected officials injecting themselves into internal affairs.

Adult marshmallow-test winners do better

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William H. Hampton1\, Nima Asadi and Ingrid R. Olson write.

Participants engaged in a delay discounting task adapted from O’Brien et al. (2011). In the task, participants were asked to make choices between a smaller sum of money offered now versus a larger sum of money (always $1,000) offered at five different delays.

They then use this variable along with other variables to predict the person’s income.

The results of each model were quite consistent, with occupation and education paramount in each case. On average, the next most important factors were zip code group and gender. While zip code group was highly associated with income, it is worth noting that our data do not adjudicate directionality. Logically, a person’s income is more likely a determinant of where they live than vice versa. Nonetheless, zip codes are a useful proxy for socioeconomic status, which is also related to income (Winkleby et al., 1992). As our zip codes were binned by average income, the association between zip code and income is not surprising, but does suggest that the individuals in our sample had incomes roughly representative of the incomes from their respective zip code group. Regarding gender, we found that males earned more money than females, a result consistent with a corpus of research on the gender wage gap (Nadler et al., 2016). The fifth most important variable was delay discounting, a factor closely related, but distinct from impulsivity. Although previous research had indicated that discounting was related to income (Green et al., 1996), it was unclear to what extent, relative to other factors, this variable mattered. Interestingly, delay discounting was more predictive than age, race, ethnicity, and height

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Oy. It would be nice to be able to cite their comment that “delay discounting was more predictive than age, race, ethnicity, and height.” But the flaws I perceive in the study are just too fatal to allow me to do that.

1. Most of the variables that they use to “predict” income are not plausibly exogenous to income. For that matter, it is possible that your level of income helps determine your willingness to delay receiving money, so even their key delay-discounting variable is plausibly endogenous.

2. When you compare the strength of different predictors (hardly ever a valid exercise), measurement error is everything. A variable that is measured unambiguously will do much better than a variable that is measured subject to errors, even if the latter variable has more influence in reality. So gender has the advantage of being unambiguous*, while self-reported ethnicity can be ambiguous.

*all right, some people insist that gender is ambiguous, but I don’t think those people find their way to this blog.

Handle on the right wing

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He comments,

A reactionary then is in favor of radical change to reestablish and restore the status quo ante. Instead of just being yesterday’s conservatism, reactionaries seek to ideologically justify and explain the practical basis for the wisdom undergirding the prior regime. And what naturally accompanies that project is the attempt to explain the root causes of what went wrong with the new system and why it resulted in such atrocious excesses and led to political and economic catastrophes.

He has more to say, and he includes a link to his very long essay on Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option. In that essay, he writes,

it seems clear that a Benedict Option community should be one in which life in centered around frequent study, learning, and teaching. Like, say, a small ‘campus’ of connected, committed households in close proximity.

Peter Diamandis on futuristic education

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Like me, he is a fan of Neal Stephenson’s illustrated primer as described in The Diamond Age. Diamandis writes,

Your AI companion will have unlimited access to information on the cloud and will deliver it at the optimal speed to each student in an engaging, fun way. This AI will demonetize and democratize education, be available to everyone for free (just like Google), and offering the best education to the wealthiest and poorest children on the planet equally.

Alberto Mingardi on Hazony

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Mingardi offers more criticism of The Virtue of Nationalism.

I find Hazony’s view of European history troublesome. For one thing, saying that Hitler wasn’t a “nationalist” is, to use a euphemism, a far more controversial claim than he acknowledges. Let’s put it in this way: can you picture national socialism raising to power without Herder, Fitche, and all the other prophets of nationalism? I doubt it.

Indeed, one reading of Hitler’s vision is that he wanted to see Germany and Great Britain as cooperative hegemonic powers in a nationalist world order. It was Churchill who was the imperialist, in two senses of the term. First, he wanted to preserve the British empire. Second, Hazony uses the term imperialist to describe any philosophy that is based on a universalist ideology. For Churchill, that ideology was individual freedom and the values of Western Civilization.

What World War II does illustrate is that transnational institutions are not a solution to the problem of war. The League of Nations was helpless in the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, all of which took place in the run-up to the larger conflagration.

Since 1945, there have been numerous wars, in spite of (and in a few cases sanctioned by) the United Nations. Perhaps there are those who are willing to defend the UN by saying that things would have been worse without it. I do not claim the expertise to adjudicate that one.

Suppose we were to describe nationalism in terms of “negative liberty” or “the non-aggression principle” for national governments. Do whatever you want internally, as long as you don’t infringe on people outside your borders. This might be more reliably libertarian than a project of world government, even though it would leave some people imprisoned by their regimes.

Rebecca Henderson on disruption to organizational architecture

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Tim Harford writes, [link added]

The message of Henderson’s work with Kim Clark and others is that when companies or institutions are faced with an organisationally disruptive innovation, there is no simple solution. There may be no solution at all. “I’m sorry it’s not more management guru-ish,” she tells me, laughing. “But anybody who’s really any good at this will tell you that this is hard.”

The story is that if you are the market leader in widgets and someone inside your firm comes across a better widget, then you can adopt the innovation without any organizational stress. But if you are, say, a copier company and someone inside your firm comes across the components for a personal computer, you have no organizational mechanism for paying attention to the innovation and nurturing it along.

Read the whole thing (Harford is entertaining, as always), but be skeptical. Swiss watchmakers were in the watch business, so you wouldn’t think that digital watches would require total re-thinking from an organizational standpoint. But digital watches still eluded them.

Measuring violence

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John Arquilla writes,

I chose to search for what I call “big-kill” wars, during which a million or more die — soldiers and civilians. From 1800-1850, only the Napoleonic Wars surpassed the million-death mark.

. . .The troubling rise in big-kill wars in the first half of the 20th century was followed by an even more disturbing pattern in the second half: they doubled once again. There was nothing of the magnitude of World War II in sheer numbers of dead, but the million-mark in war deaths was steadily surmounted, mostly in societies in which such losses had staggering effects.

Pointer from Charles Chu (email newsletter). Steven Pinker can show a decline in violence by looking at the ratio of war deaths to total population. But is the increase in the denominator, not a decrease in the numerator, that is holding down that ratio.

Influential books

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A reader asks,

I would love to see your personal list of the top most influential books of the past 10 years (or so).

I have to approach this by working backwards: How has my thinking changed in the past ten years or so? Who influenced those changes? What books did they write?

The most important change is that I think of economics as embedded in culture. I note that culture evolves rapidly, at least in comparison with biological evolution. Economics really ought to be tied in with sociology, except that sociologists are so fixated on the oppression story.

People who have influenced me along these lines include Joseph Henrich, Deirdre McCloskey, Joel Mokyr, Douglass North, Kevin Laland, Matt Ridley, and others. Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success struck me the most. Kevin Laland’s Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony deserves mention. I am currently reading Pascal Boyer’s Minds Make Societies, which might end up deserving to be listed here. Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything fits in.

I am captivated by the sociological history spawned in David Hackett-Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, which is a masterpiece. For contemporary sociology/politics, I continue to recommend Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public. I often cite Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids on the socioeconomic divide that is now clearly visible.

For political economy, I have come to believe that liberal democracy is not an easy equilibrium to achieve. I was very much influenced by North, Weingast, and Wallis (Violence and Social Orders). I also was persuaded by Mark Weiner’s Rule of the Clan.

Another important change is that I have come to see economic modeling in the MIT style as a crippled way of dealing with the complexity of the real world. Influence has come from McCloskey, James Manzi, Edward Leamer, and others. Manzi’s discussion of “causal density” in Uncontrolled deepened my already-existing skepticism of regression modeling.

I got pulled back into macroeconomics by the episode of 2008 and beyond. I was drawn to heterodox views. Maybe Leamer’s Macroeconomic Patterns and Stories is the book that stands out the most. I came to better appreciate Hyman Minsky’s thinking by reading Randall Wray’s Why Minsky Matters.

Somewhat related, I have come to see American economics as “born bad.” Thomas Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers was the eye-opener there.

I have come to view political economy in terms of “This is your brain on politics,” with a lot of tribalism built in. Various anthropologists and psychologists contributed to this view. Also Robin Hanson. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind was an early influence.

I have come to view specialization and trade as the core of economics. No one book stands out (Adam Smith clearly falls outside “the last ten years or so”). As much as my views fit with the Austrian school, neither the classics of that tradition nor any modern works are directly responsible. I did enjoy Erwin Dekker’s The Viennese Students of Civilization, which probably counts as one of the books that nudged me to view economics as connected with sociology.

Emergent Ventures: first thoughts

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It is a Tyler Cowen project, with seed funding from Peter Thiel. The press release says that it is

an incubator fellowship and grant program for social entrepreneurs with highly scalable ideas for meaningfully improving society.

1. It definitely is not “Shark Tank.” I have only seen parts of a few episodes, but the entrepreneurs had very small ideas, and the sharks only cared about whether the entrepreneurs had made some progress and could demonstrate that the market had enough revenue potential.

2. In a brief podcast, when Tyler says that his comparative advantage is spotting talent, it almost made me spill my orange juice (I don’t drink coffee). If I had a dime for everyone who thinks that spotting talent is their comparative advantage, I could fund Emergent Ventures. I am not saying that Mercatus is bad at spotting talent, but are they better than Google or Andreessen, Horowitz, or Paul Graham, or. . .? I guess it depends on what domain you are talking about.

3. Maybe their slogan should be, “We’re looking for the next Robin Hanson.”

4. One way to come up with a moonshot is to think of a big, annoying problem to solve. Some possibilities that come to mind:

–the intellectual collapse of American education, including higher education and K-12.

–terrorism and the responses to terrorism

–potential use or mis-use of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence

5. Have I ever had a “change-the-world” idea? Back in October of 2000, I wrote,

Now, imagine that everyone in the world is given an “ethics rating” that is analogous to a chess rating. Maybe 2500 would be the highest, and 0 would be the lowest. Your rating would affect how you could use various technologies. “Ethical grandmasters” would be allowed to do advanced research in biotechnology and robotics.

Note the passive voice. It raises the question of who is going to create and control such an “ethics rating” system. The Chinese government? They seem inclined to implement such an idea, but they are not necessarily the ones I want to see doing it.

At the time, I assumed that I would initiate the ethics rating system by designating a few people as ethical grandmasters. They would in turn rate other people, and these would rate other people, until everyone had a rating. You can read the essay to see the idea sketched out a bit more. Note that as of the time I wrote the essay, I was still left of center, as you can see from the people I named as possible ethical grandmasters.

As I re-read the essay, I think that this qualifies as a moonshot idea. It might even be worth trying.