it’s not obvious to me that children are a good investment
I think you’re engaging in nirvana fallacy. Children are not a good investment compared to what?
Again—let’s take a medieval European peasant. He has no ability to accumulate capital because he’s poor, because his lord will just take his money if he notices it, and because once in a while an army passes through and basically grabs everything that isn’t nailed down. He doesn’t have any apprentices because peasants don’t have apprentices (and apprentices leave once they learn the craft, anyway). He certainly has friends, but even his friends will feed their family before him when the next famine comes. So, what kind of investments into a non-starving old age should he make?
I don’t know that we have access to facts. Everything is interpreted. Everything is a model.
OK. There were 3,932,181 births in the US in 2013 giving the birth rate of 12.4 / 1000 population (source). Tell me what kind of model is that, which theory does this piece of information critically depends on.
Because humans engage in hyperbolic discounting.
Yes, so? They still plan their retirements.
Because the rate of climate change during the Pleistocene would have made long term forecasting difficult.
Huh? Can you, um, provide some links?
The idea that people aren’t, by nature, optimal decision makers is one of the core ideas of LW.
We’re not talking about optimal decisions. We’re talking about not screwing up. Humans are the most successful species on this planet—they are capable of not screwing up sufficiently well.
status … it seems to be the thing that people care most about after short term economic incentives
Evidence please. People certainly care about status, but I don’t think that people always care about money first, status second, and everything else after that.
On the other hand, if you don’t believe in facts, what counts as evidence in your word? 8-/
it’s not obvious to me that children are a good investment
I think you’re engaging in nirvana fallacy. Children are not a good investment compared to what?
Again—let’s take a medieval European peasant. He has no ability to accumulate capital because he’s poor, because his lord will just take his money if he notices it, and because once in a while an army passes through and basically grabs everything that isn’t nailed down. He doesn’t have any apprentices because peasants don’t have apprentices (and apprentices leave once they learn the craft, anyway). He certainly has friends, but even his friends will feed their family before him when the next famine comes. So, what kind of investments into a non-starving old age should he make?
He can buy jars of salt and bury them. His children, if they survive, may feed their own children rather than him in the next famine. A network of friends and a high standing in the community are at least as valuable to him as investing resources in birthing and raising children who probably won’t see adulthood. He can become an active and respected member of the church. The church is probably a better bet overall since there’s a decent chance his own kids will die, but the church will probably survive.
I’m not an expert on 14th century investment opportunities, I just find the idea that children are clearly the best selfish investment incredible. If children are such a good investment, why did we need a modest proposal? And why are the rich, who retirements are not in doubt, so desirous of children? Why does king Priam need 50 sons? He’s the king of a city. What fears does he have about retirement?
I don’t know that we have access to facts. Everything is interpreted. Everything is a model.
OK. There were 3,932,181 births in the US in 2013 giving the birth rate of 12.4 / 1000 population (source). Tell me what kind of model is that, which theory does this piece of information critically depends on.
The ones digit of that number is almost certainly wrong and I’m not particularly confident about the next two. Believing that number relies on an enormous number of assumptions about the bureaucracy that generated it. Now my model of the world tells me that the bureaucratic system that calculates the birth rate in the U.S. is fairly trustworthy, compared to say the system that manages elections in Russia, but that trust is totally a function of my model of the world. The data you gather depends on your methodology. Some methods may be better established and may have more evidence in support of them, and the data they gather may really seem reliable, but we also thought that the earth was standing still for a very long time.
Fact just isn’t an epistemological category that I have, and it’s not one that I find useful. There are only models. Some models are more descriptive and better than others, some are more supported by evidence. But there aren’t facts, there are no fixed points that I’m 100% sure are true. I consider my knowledge that 2+2=4 to be close to certain as anything just about anything else I believe, but I hesitate to call it a fact. I have that belief because it’s always been true in the past and my brain has learned that induction is reliable. I could be convinced that 2+2=3, and if you believe something only because you have evidence to support it, then you must have a model that translates between the evidence and the belief.
Because the rate of climate change during the Pleistocene would have made long term forecasting difficult.
Huh? Can you, um, provide some links?
I’m hardly an expert on this, but searching for Pleistocene climate variation gives results like this:
“In addition to the well known millennium-scale stadial and interstadial periods, and the previously recognized century-scale climate events that occur during the Allerod and Bolling periods, we detect a still higher frequency of variability associated with abrupt climate change.”
“The seasonal time resolution of the ECM record portrays as aspect of the climate system that consistently and frequently chnages between glacial and near-interglacial conditions in periods of less than a decade, and on occassion as rapidly as three years.”
The idea that people aren’t, by nature, optimal decision makers is one of the core ideas of LW.
We’re not talking about optimal decisions. We’re talking about not screwing up. Humans are the most successful species on this planet—they are capable of not screwing up sufficiently well.
We are specifically talking about the claim, “Would you seriously argue that people choose to have children as a reasonably optimal selfish way of guaranteeing that they continue to have enough to eat once they’re no longer capable of working?”
I am not making the argument that there are no advantages to having and raising children from a retirement perspective. I am making the argument that it is unlikely that people choose to have children in order to obtain those advantages. I am making the argument that the decline in birthrate in unlikely to be due to people adjusting the number of children they have as part of a retirement plan. The success of a species has very little to do with the ability of individual members of that species to plan in such a way as to maximize their own well-being. Ants are collectively one of the most successful organisms in the world, but they certainly don’t engage in long term planning.
Indeed it the success of the human species that I would cite as evidence for my assertion that human behavior is more closely linked to genetic self-interest than to personal self-interest. Cultural and social success is a huge factor in genetic self-interest. There’s a reason that humans have large brains and devote so many resources to processing social relationships and facial cues. We have equipment for obeying social mandates. We understand them intuitively. We don’t have have intuitive equipment for making long-term predictions, since that was selected for.
status … it seems to be the thing that people care most about after short term economic incentives
Evidence please. People certainly care about status, but I don’t think that people always care about money first, status second, and everything else after that.
I consider the word of a Nobel Prize-winning game theorist and economist to qualify as “evidence” on the topic of aggregate human behavior. If you don’t consider the opinions of experts evidence, what qualifies?
If children are such a good investment, why did we need a modest proposal?
Because, like with all investements, the future is uncertain, returns are not guaranteed, there are occasional crashes, and a lot of general variability.
And why are the rich, who retirements are not in doubt, so desirous of children?
Because children are not only investments in one’s old age, they are useful for many other purposes (e.g. dynastic). And, of course, the rich have the same hardwired biological urges. Besides, sometimes children are just a side-effect that the rich or the powerful don’t care much about (see e.g. Ottoman sultans).
Fact just isn’t an epistemological category that I have, and it’s not one that I find useful. There are only models.
So how you choose between different models, then? If there are no facts, what are your criteria? Why is the model of lizard overlords ruling the Earth any worse than any other model?
You use expressions like “because it’s always been true in the past”, but what do you mean by “true”?
aspect of the climate system that consistently and frequently chnages between glacial and near-interglacial conditions in periods of less than a decade, and on occassion as rapidly as three years
I am not sure this interpretation of the data surivived—see e.g. this:
Here it is shown that in general, the flickers seen in ECM records probably reflect the highly non-linear response of electrical conductivity as ice approaches acid/base neutrality, rather than significant changes in the climate system.
...
I am making the argument that it is unlikely that people choose to have children in order to obtain those advantages.
Yes, and would you like to present some evidence in favour of that argument?
I am making the argument that the decline in birthrate in unlikely to be due to people adjusting the number of children they have as part of a retirement plan.
Do you have an alternative explanation for the decline in birthrate in mind? You have previously said that people just followed the lead of the elites, but why did the elites reduce their birthrate?
my assertion that human behavior is more closely linked to genetic self-interest than to personal self-interest.
I haven’t been following the subject closely, but didn’t the idea of group selection ran into significant difficulties? My impression is that nowadays it’s not considered to be a major evolution mechanism, though I haven’t looked carefully and will accept corrections.
We don’t have have intuitive equipment for making long-term predictions
Well, um, I do X-) On which basis do you decide what kind of “intuitive equipment” humans have?
If you don’t consider the opinions of experts evidence, what qualifies?
Opinions are not evidence, they are opinions. Argument to authority is, notably, a fallacy. I call things which qualify “facts”.
Fact just isn’t an epistemological category that I have, and it’s not one that I find useful. There are only models.
So how you choose between different models, then? If there are no facts, what are your criteria? Why is the model of lizard overlords ruling the Earth any worse than any other model?
You use expressions like “because it’s always been true in the past”, but what do you mean by “true”?
My primary criterion is consistency. On a very basic level, I am an algorithm receiving a stream of sensory data. I make models to predict what I think that sensory data will look like in the future based on regularities I detect/have detected in the past. Models that capture consistent features of the data go on to correctly control anticipation and are good models, but they’re all models. The only thing I have in my head is the map. I don’t have access to the territory.
And yet I believe with perfect sincerity that, in generals my maps correspond to reality. I call that correspondence truth. I don’t understand the separation you seem to be attempting to make between facts and models or models and reality.
aspect of the climate system that consistently and frequently chnages between glacial and near-interglacial conditions in periods of less than a decade, and on occassion as rapidly as three years
I am not sure this interpretation of the data surivived—see e.g. this:
Neat. Thanks.
The article you link seems to go out of its way to not be seen as challenging my basic claim, e.g. “Having said this, it should be reemphasised that ice-core chemistry does show extremely rapid changes during climate transitions. The reduction in [Ca] between stadial to interstadial conditions during D-O 3 in the GRIP ice-core occurred in two discrete steps totalling just 5 years [Fuhrer et al., 1999].”
Indeed it the success of the human species that I would cite as evidence for my assertion that human behavior is more closely linked to genetic self-interest than to personal self-interest. Cultural and social success is a huge factor in genetic self-interest.
I haven’t been following the subject closely, but didn’t the idea of group selection ran into significant difficulties? My impression is that nowadays it’s not considered to be a major evolution mechanism, though I haven’t looked carefully and will accept corrections.
I’m not sure how group selection is related to material you’re quoting. Cultural success and social success refer to the success of an individual within a culture/society, not to the success of cultures and societies.
If you don’t consider the opinions of experts evidence, what qualifies?
Opinions are not evidence, they are opinions. Argument to authority is, notably, a fallacy. I call things which qualify “facts”.
I mean, it’s sort of a fallacy. At the same time when I’m sick, I go to a doctor and get her medical opinion and treat it as evidence. I’m not an expert on the things that humans value. I don’t have the time or energy to background to perform experiments and evaluate statistical and experimental methods. Even trusting peer review and relying on published literature is a series of appeals of to authority.
On a very basic level, I am an algorithm receiving a stream of sensory data.
So, do you trust that sensory data? You mention reality, presumably you allow that objective reality which generates the stream of your sensory data exists. If you test your models by sensory data, then that sensory data is your “facts”—something that is your criterion for whether a model is good or not.
I am also not sure how do you deal with surprises. Does sensory data always wins over models? Or sometimes you’d be willing to say that you don’t believe your own eyes?
two discrete steps totalling just 5 years
At this rate of change we are not talking about climate. The ice core data essentially measures certain characteristics of dust in the atmosphere. Even in recorded history we had things like volcano eruptions causing a “year without summer”. It’s not like glaciers can noticeably react to weather/climate abnormalities on a scale of years, anyway.
group selection
When you said “more closely linked to genetic self-interest than to personal self-interest” did you mean the genetic self-interest of the entire species or did you mean something along the lines of Dawkins’ Selfish Gene? I read you as arguing for interests of the population gene pool. If you are talking about selfish genes then I don’t see any difference between “genetic self-interest” and “personal self-interest”.
is a series of appeals of to authority
Kinda, but the important thing is that you can go and check. In your worldview, how do you go and check yourself? Or are “streams of sensory data” sufficiently syncronised between everyone?
On a very basic level, I am an algorithm receiving a stream of sensory data.
So, do you trust that sensory data? You mention reality, presumably you allow that objective reality which generates the stream of your sensory data exists. If you test your models by sensory data, then that sensory data is your “facts”—something that is your criterion for whether a model is good or not.
I am also not sure how do you deal with surprises. Does sensory data always wins over models? Or sometimes you’d be willing to say that you don’t believe your own eyes?
I don’t understand what you mean by trust. Trust has very little to do with it. I work within the model that the sensory data is meaningful, that life as I experience it is meaningful. It isn’t obvious to me that either of those things are true any more than the parallel postulate is obvious to me. They are axioms.
If my eyes right now are saying something different than my eyes normally tell me, then I will tend to distrust my eyes right now in favor of believing what I remember my eyes telling me. I don’t think that’s the same as saying I don’t believe my eyes.
group selection
When you said “more closely linked to genetic self-interest than to personal self-interest” did you mean the genetic self-interest of the entire species or did you mean something along the lines of Dawkins’ Selfish Gene? I read you as arguing for interests of the population gene pool. If you are talking about selfish genes then I don’t see any difference between “genetic self-interest” and “personal self-interest”.
The idea of the genetic self-interest of an entire species is more or less incoherent. Genetic self-interest involves genes making more copies of themselves. Personal self-interest involves persons making decisions that they think will bring them happiness, utility, what have you. To reiterate my earlier statement “the ability of individual members of that species to plan in such a way as to maximize their own well-being.”
is a series of appeals of to authority
Kinda, but the important thing is that you can go and check. In your worldview, how do you go and check yourself? Or are “streams of sensory data” sufficiently syncronised between everyone?
And I go look for review articles that support the quote that people care about social status. But if you don’t consider expert opinion to be evidence, then you have to go back and reinvent human knowledge from the ground up every time you try and learn anything.
I can always go look for more related data if I have questions about a model. I can read more literature. I can make observations.
If your model(s) and sensory data conflict, who wins? Which one do you trust more?
Since you’re saying you have no access to the underlying reality (=territory), you have trust something. I am not sure what do you mean by “meaningful”.
If my eyes right now are saying something different than my eyes normally tell me, then I will tend to distrust my eyes right now in favor of believing what I remember my eyes telling me.
Well, clearly that can’t be true all the time or you’ll never update your internal models.
Genetic self-interest involves genes making more copies of themselves. Personal self-interest involves persons making decisions that they think will bring them happiness, utility, what have you.
Ah, I see. So, basically, genetic self-interest is “objective” (and we can count the number of gene copies in the next generations), while personal self-interest is “subjective”. But how does the genetic self-interest work if not through the personal self-interest? Or do you posit some biological drives which overpower personal self-interest?
I can make observations.
Any particular reason you are unwilling to call your observations “facts”, by the way?
I think you’re engaging in nirvana fallacy. Children are not a good investment compared to what?
Again—let’s take a medieval European peasant. He has no ability to accumulate capital because he’s poor, because his lord will just take his money if he notices it, and because once in a while an army passes through and basically grabs everything that isn’t nailed down. He doesn’t have any apprentices because peasants don’t have apprentices (and apprentices leave once they learn the craft, anyway). He certainly has friends, but even his friends will feed their family before him when the next famine comes. So, what kind of investments into a non-starving old age should he make?
OK. There were 3,932,181 births in the US in 2013 giving the birth rate of 12.4 / 1000 population (source). Tell me what kind of model is that, which theory does this piece of information critically depends on.
Yes, so? They still plan their retirements.
Huh? Can you, um, provide some links?
We’re not talking about optimal decisions. We’re talking about not screwing up. Humans are the most successful species on this planet—they are capable of not screwing up sufficiently well.
Evidence please. People certainly care about status, but I don’t think that people always care about money first, status second, and everything else after that.
On the other hand, if you don’t believe in facts, what counts as evidence in your word? 8-/
He can buy jars of salt and bury them. His children, if they survive, may feed their own children rather than him in the next famine. A network of friends and a high standing in the community are at least as valuable to him as investing resources in birthing and raising children who probably won’t see adulthood. He can become an active and respected member of the church. The church is probably a better bet overall since there’s a decent chance his own kids will die, but the church will probably survive.
I’m not an expert on 14th century investment opportunities, I just find the idea that children are clearly the best selfish investment incredible. If children are such a good investment, why did we need a modest proposal? And why are the rich, who retirements are not in doubt, so desirous of children? Why does king Priam need 50 sons? He’s the king of a city. What fears does he have about retirement?
The ones digit of that number is almost certainly wrong and I’m not particularly confident about the next two. Believing that number relies on an enormous number of assumptions about the bureaucracy that generated it. Now my model of the world tells me that the bureaucratic system that calculates the birth rate in the U.S. is fairly trustworthy, compared to say the system that manages elections in Russia, but that trust is totally a function of my model of the world. The data you gather depends on your methodology. Some methods may be better established and may have more evidence in support of them, and the data they gather may really seem reliable, but we also thought that the earth was standing still for a very long time.
Fact just isn’t an epistemological category that I have, and it’s not one that I find useful. There are only models. Some models are more descriptive and better than others, some are more supported by evidence. But there aren’t facts, there are no fixed points that I’m 100% sure are true. I consider my knowledge that 2+2=4 to be close to certain as anything just about anything else I believe, but I hesitate to call it a fact. I have that belief because it’s always been true in the past and my brain has learned that induction is reliable. I could be convinced that 2+2=3, and if you believe something only because you have evidence to support it, then you must have a model that translates between the evidence and the belief.
I’m hardly an expert on this, but searching for Pleistocene climate variation gives results like this:
“In addition to the well known millennium-scale stadial and interstadial periods, and the previously recognized century-scale climate events that occur during the Allerod and Bolling periods, we detect a still higher frequency of variability associated with abrupt climate change.”
“The seasonal time resolution of the ECM record portrays as aspect of the climate system that consistently and frequently chnages between glacial and near-interglacial conditions in periods of less than a decade, and on occassion as rapidly as three years.”
Climate Change: Natural climate change: proxy-climate data
We are specifically talking about the claim, “Would you seriously argue that people choose to have children as a reasonably optimal selfish way of guaranteeing that they continue to have enough to eat once they’re no longer capable of working?”
I am not making the argument that there are no advantages to having and raising children from a retirement perspective. I am making the argument that it is unlikely that people choose to have children in order to obtain those advantages. I am making the argument that the decline in birthrate in unlikely to be due to people adjusting the number of children they have as part of a retirement plan. The success of a species has very little to do with the ability of individual members of that species to plan in such a way as to maximize their own well-being. Ants are collectively one of the most successful organisms in the world, but they certainly don’t engage in long term planning.
Indeed it the success of the human species that I would cite as evidence for my assertion that human behavior is more closely linked to genetic self-interest than to personal self-interest. Cultural and social success is a huge factor in genetic self-interest. There’s a reason that humans have large brains and devote so many resources to processing social relationships and facial cues. We have equipment for obeying social mandates. We understand them intuitively. We don’t have have intuitive equipment for making long-term predictions, since that was selected for.
I consider the word of a Nobel Prize-winning game theorist and economist to qualify as “evidence” on the topic of aggregate human behavior. If you don’t consider the opinions of experts evidence, what qualifies?
Because, like with all investements, the future is uncertain, returns are not guaranteed, there are occasional crashes, and a lot of general variability.
Because children are not only investments in one’s old age, they are useful for many other purposes (e.g. dynastic). And, of course, the rich have the same hardwired biological urges. Besides, sometimes children are just a side-effect that the rich or the powerful don’t care much about (see e.g. Ottoman sultans).
So how you choose between different models, then? If there are no facts, what are your criteria? Why is the model of lizard overlords ruling the Earth any worse than any other model?
You use expressions like “because it’s always been true in the past”, but what do you mean by “true”?
I am not sure this interpretation of the data surivived—see e.g. this:
...
Yes, and would you like to present some evidence in favour of that argument?
Do you have an alternative explanation for the decline in birthrate in mind? You have previously said that people just followed the lead of the elites, but why did the elites reduce their birthrate?
I haven’t been following the subject closely, but didn’t the idea of group selection ran into significant difficulties? My impression is that nowadays it’s not considered to be a major evolution mechanism, though I haven’t looked carefully and will accept corrections.
Well, um, I do X-) On which basis do you decide what kind of “intuitive equipment” humans have?
Opinions are not evidence, they are opinions. Argument to authority is, notably, a fallacy. I call things which qualify “facts”.
My primary criterion is consistency. On a very basic level, I am an algorithm receiving a stream of sensory data. I make models to predict what I think that sensory data will look like in the future based on regularities I detect/have detected in the past. Models that capture consistent features of the data go on to correctly control anticipation and are good models, but they’re all models. The only thing I have in my head is the map. I don’t have access to the territory.
And yet I believe with perfect sincerity that, in generals my maps correspond to reality. I call that correspondence truth. I don’t understand the separation you seem to be attempting to make between facts and models or models and reality.
Neat. Thanks.
The article you link seems to go out of its way to not be seen as challenging my basic claim, e.g. “Having said this, it should be reemphasised that ice-core chemistry does show extremely rapid changes during climate transitions. The reduction in [Ca] between stadial to interstadial conditions during D-O 3 in the GRIP ice-core occurred in two discrete steps totalling just 5 years [Fuhrer et al., 1999].”
I’m not sure how group selection is related to material you’re quoting. Cultural success and social success refer to the success of an individual within a culture/society, not to the success of cultures and societies.
I mean, it’s sort of a fallacy. At the same time when I’m sick, I go to a doctor and get her medical opinion and treat it as evidence. I’m not an expert on the things that humans value. I don’t have the time or energy to background to perform experiments and evaluate statistical and experimental methods. Even trusting peer review and relying on published literature is a series of appeals of to authority.
So, do you trust that sensory data? You mention reality, presumably you allow that objective reality which generates the stream of your sensory data exists. If you test your models by sensory data, then that sensory data is your “facts”—something that is your criterion for whether a model is good or not.
I am also not sure how do you deal with surprises. Does sensory data always wins over models? Or sometimes you’d be willing to say that you don’t believe your own eyes?
At this rate of change we are not talking about climate. The ice core data essentially measures certain characteristics of dust in the atmosphere. Even in recorded history we had things like volcano eruptions causing a “year without summer”. It’s not like glaciers can noticeably react to weather/climate abnormalities on a scale of years, anyway.
When you said “more closely linked to genetic self-interest than to personal self-interest” did you mean the genetic self-interest of the entire species or did you mean something along the lines of Dawkins’ Selfish Gene? I read you as arguing for interests of the population gene pool. If you are talking about selfish genes then I don’t see any difference between “genetic self-interest” and “personal self-interest”.
Kinda, but the important thing is that you can go and check. In your worldview, how do you go and check yourself? Or are “streams of sensory data” sufficiently syncronised between everyone?
I don’t understand what you mean by trust. Trust has very little to do with it. I work within the model that the sensory data is meaningful, that life as I experience it is meaningful. It isn’t obvious to me that either of those things are true any more than the parallel postulate is obvious to me. They are axioms.
If my eyes right now are saying something different than my eyes normally tell me, then I will tend to distrust my eyes right now in favor of believing what I remember my eyes telling me. I don’t think that’s the same as saying I don’t believe my eyes.
The idea of the genetic self-interest of an entire species is more or less incoherent. Genetic self-interest involves genes making more copies of themselves. Personal self-interest involves persons making decisions that they think will bring them happiness, utility, what have you. To reiterate my earlier statement “the ability of individual members of that species to plan in such a way as to maximize their own well-being.”
And I go look for review articles that support the quote that people care about social status. But if you don’t consider expert opinion to be evidence, then you have to go back and reinvent human knowledge from the ground up every time you try and learn anything.
I can always go look for more related data if I have questions about a model. I can read more literature. I can make observations.
If your model(s) and sensory data conflict, who wins? Which one do you trust more?
Since you’re saying you have no access to the underlying reality (=territory), you have trust something. I am not sure what do you mean by “meaningful”.
Well, clearly that can’t be true all the time or you’ll never update your internal models.
Ah, I see. So, basically, genetic self-interest is “objective” (and we can count the number of gene copies in the next generations), while personal self-interest is “subjective”. But how does the genetic self-interest work if not through the personal self-interest? Or do you posit some biological drives which overpower personal self-interest?
Any particular reason you are unwilling to call your observations “facts”, by the way?