It is entirely reasonable to believe that Obamacare is terrible policy that will hurt more people than it helps. Your inability to grasp that anyone has this belief does not mean that everyone who disagrees with you is a venal, amoral wretch; it means that you have been blinded by confirmation bias and your own lack of empathy...
Similarly, it is entirely reasonable to believe that Obamacare is good policy that will help more people than it hurts. The fact that you think otherwise does not mean that the law’s supporters are too stupid to be allowed near sharp objects. It means that they are valuing different things—expanded coverage over innovation, for instance—or else that their assessment of the probability that various things will go wrong is different from yours.
The fact that you think otherwise does not mean that the law’s supporters are too stupid to be allowed near sharp objects. It means that they are valuing different things—expanded coverage over innovation, for instance—or else that their assessment of the probability that various things will go wrong is different from yours.
Either of those two things can be sufficient to make it advisable to prevent access to sharp objects. While the language sounds nicer, “valuing different things” and “assessment that various things will go wrong is different” would seem to incorporate “evil” and “stupid” quite comfortably.
IME, the latter are subsets of the former, and therefore require more evidence to pick out reliably.
I don’t think they are subsets. I think the latter are value/emotion laden terms which promote confrontation with the evil and stupid, and a “go Raiders” kind of team spirit with those on whose side one finds herself. The former are relatively value free descriptions of how different sides of the question occur, and as such are appropriate if you are trying to advance rational understanding.
The teams the Raiders play against are not actually evil, even if you are a Raiders fan and use violent and hostile language. They are just other teams.
Yes, “evil” and “stupid” are value-laden terms. Yes, they are emotion-laden terms. Yes, they are often used for no other reason than tribal signaling. Agreed, the Raiders’ opponents (football, right?) are not evil.
I can’t tell if you’re actually claiming that there are no evil or stupid people in the world. You don’t say it explicitly, but it seems to me an implicit assertion in the fact that you chose to make the statements you did.
If you are, I disagree with you about that.
As for being subsets… evil people value different things than I, but not everyone who values different things than I is evil. Stupid people make different assessments that various things will go wrong than I do, but not everyone who does that is stupid.
“valuing different things” and “assessment that various things will go wrong is different” would seem to incorporate “evil” and “stupid” quite comfortably.
So both work. But they have such different effects on the person you are debating with, and for most of us, they have a different effect on ourselves and how we see reality. Choose the “evil” and “stupid” labels, and you close off rational discussion, or at least you do your part in closing it off, you may well have help from the other people in the discussion.
If the goal of policy debate is to settle on good policies, you do not want to choose the “evil” and “stupid” labels.
So both work. But they have such different effects on the person you are debating with, and for most of us, they have a different effect on ourselves and how we see reality. Choose the “evil” and “stupid” labels, and you close off rational discussion, or at least you do your part in closing it off, you may well have help from the other people in the discussion.
The problem that I am alluding to is that the quote attempts to persuade via an implicit false dichotomy and also subtly equivocates between the concepts “don’t use excessively judgemental language” and “do not exercise judgement” for the purpose of catchy persuasiveness.
While this quote is an interesting quote, and one that argues for a position I probably approve of, it is not an especially rational quote. The reasoning is not especially impressive. It’s also far too free with “it is entirely reasonable to believe”. That usage relies on and conveys a norm that actively sacrifices epistemic rationality for the purpose of signalling egalitarian ‘level headed’ attitudes.
The quote gets straight to the point about how many many MANY people treat the debate between Obamacare and not-Obamacare. I have personally heard and read writers on BOTH sides accusing the opposite side of obvious and blistering stupidity, in fact I have seen both stated just today. I have been accused of immorality because of my position in this debate and have wanted to accuse those I argued against of immorality. The quote addresses a very real situation that brings out the irrational in us, that in my opinion, helps us all to be “more wrong.”
Meanwhile, only someone who has succumbed to the partisanship, which in my opinion is easy to succumb to, would be unable to recognize the intelligence and general competence of those they disagree with. Neither Michelle Bachman nor Barack Obama would benefit at all from being kept away from sharp instruments, yet that is the kind of language this question brings out even on a board dedicated to making us “less wrong.”
For these reasons I think the quote is right on target, where the target is encouraging people to choose to be more rational about something which is virtually a basilisk in its ability to bring out the irrational in people.
how many many MANY people treat the debate between Obamacare and not-Obamacare
I wouldn’t know, beyond my expectation that the behaviour patterns match the political behaviour I expect of humans. I would certainly expect some of the humans to execute the behaviours that the author of the quote opposes.
I understand that there is a government shutdown in the US prompted by political conflict over a proposed healthcare-related redistribution of wealth. Neither of these things are especially familiar to me. Coming from one of the countries with publicly funded universal health care it is a little harder to see what the fuss is about.
The US government shutdown was something of a surprise when my facebook started talking about it. If the analogous situation occurs here (‘supply’ is repeatedly blocked) it triggers a double dissolution and everyone gets sent back to the polling booths to elect some politicians who can make a functioning government. I can at least imagine (and predict) that when the legislative process has resulted in a stand-off with a touch of brinkmanship the polarization on the issue would become more pronounced and the ‘other side’ would accused of additional immorality for not submitting this side’s power play as they clearly ought to. (Did that last addition happen by the way? I have more or less assumed that it would but my curiosity seeks calibration.)
To reiterate, I don’t disagree with the motivation of the author of the quote. I can also see the value of using details of the quote for their persuasive purpose with a political-but-redeemable target audience. It remains irrational political rhetoric but it is at least political rhetoric that is a level or two closer to the surface.
For these reasons I think the quote is right on target, where the target is encouraging people to choose to be more rational about something which is virtually a basilisk in its ability to bring out the irrational in people.
At very best it can be said to be advocating a new irrationality that is both less irrational and more palatable than the one being opposed. I suppose encouraging people to believe “Pi = 3” is an improvement over them continuing to believe “Pi = 4″… it’s approximately 6 times less wrong! I still wouldn’t call it exemplary mathematics.
the polarization on the issue would become more pronounced and the ‘other side’ would accused of additional immorality for not submitting this side’s power play as they clearly ought to. (Did that last addition happen by the way? I have more or less assumed that it would but my curiosity seeks calibration.)
If the polarization has become more pronounced, I haven’t noticed, but I’m not really sure what that would even look like at this point. But, yes, there’s a lot of the predictable “this situation is your fault for refusing to accept the conditions we’ve set for relaxing this situation!” going on.
Confirmation bias is an odd choice. I think I can see where she’s coming from—people assume members of their respective political outgroups to be inherently malicious, and form their judgments of specific actions accordingly—but the assumption of malice does all the work there.
Hostile attribution bias seems like a better fit to me, maybe with a dash of outgroup homogenity.
I suspect innovation gets shifted more than it gets reduced, and there are forces pushing innovation up.
To the extent Obamacare subsidizes medicine more than it is already subsidized, and if it has a net cost > 0, then it does, it should encourage innovation. Some of the shift and/or additional innovation will be how to game the system more effectively, which is presumably a low-value outcome for society. But some of it will be how to provide care that this system will pay for, perhaps more innovation towards the afflictions of those who will gain access to medical care that did not previously have as much access, and so on.
If it shifts money away from drug makers, but it puts in more money on net, then there is lower innovation on the drug side and higher innovation where the new profits are to be made.
To the extent Obamacare subsidizes medicine more than it is already subsidized, and if it has a net cost > 0, then it does, it should encourage innovation.
This will only happen if being innovative is favored by the subsidies and the people deciding who gets subsidies can tell improvements apart from change for the sake of change.
By lowering prices for drugs, for example, more people can afford them but pharmaceutical firms have lower profit incentives to find new drugs. The medical device tax, furthermore, will help fund Obama care but also reduce incentives to develop new medical devices.
Depends on the price elasticity of demand. If you widen the access to the thing by lowering the price, it’s possible that you might make more profit than someone who has fewer customers who they make a lot more profit per customer off of.
Setting a price isn’t necessarily a decision made with respects to the interests of one company. Not knowing precisely how the marketing groups for medical goods in the US are set up, beyond that they’re pretty abusive, I don’t care to argue that one way or the other though.
Expanding coverage and lowering prices are two different issues.
You can be in favor of one and not the other.
Big Pharma was in favor of Obamacare. The made a deal. Obama didn’t choose to implement effective price cutting policies such as allowing reimportation of drugs. Then Big Pharma spend millions for advertisements to promote Obamacare.
(1) Blackmail—Obamacare harmed them, but big Pharma was told by Democrats that if they didn’t support it the Democrats would pass something that harmed them even more. The medical device industry didn’t support Obamacare and as a result they got hit with a special tax in the final bill.
(2) Reduced competition—Obamacare makes it harder for other firms to enter the pharmaceutical industry.
As far as the medical device tax goes, I agree that it’s worth repealing it.
In total it’s however zero sum for spending on healthcare. The tax pays for tax rabates for health insurance. Money payed into the health insurance system gets spend on medicial expenditures.
You assume that money is the only reason for people to to develop new medical devices. People could also do so because it helps people. Because the technology is awesome. Any number of other reasons. There is ample evidence that creative workers are DE-incentivized by money.
If money IS the only incentive, then reduced profits on device A might cause them to expand by developing device B.
Money isn’t the only incentive but it is an important one especially for publicly traded companies. You need lots of money to develop and test new medical devices.
There is ample evidence that creative workers are DE-incentivized by money.
If this were true then companies that succeed in producing new, creative high tech products would pay their most creative employees very little. We don’t observe this.
If this were true then companies that succeed in producing new, creative high tech products would pay their most creative employees very little. We don’t observe this.
Have you seen the music industry recently? ;) [/not sure if serious]
I meant that I wasn’t sure if I was being serious or not.
The people who make the most money in the music industry aren’t necessarily the ones doing the best creative work. For one, “ability to sell records” is imperfectly correlated with music quality, the people that are most visible might not even be all that responsible for the music in the first place, and the revenues from sales can end up distributed in all different ways. There might be composers writing songs that turn into hits when other people perform them who end up getting paid peanuts for doing it. I just don’t know.
You assume that money is the only reason for people to to develop new medical devices. People could also do so because it helps people. Because the technology is awesome. Any number of other reasons.
There are only limited resources available, including the creativity and time of engineers, and we need a way to allocate them over our (virtually) unlimited needs. If we’re not going to use a market to make those sorts of decisions, what should we do?
It may seem heartless to pass over a drug which could ‘only’ save a few thousand lives, but even if you can’t put a dollar price on human life there’s still an opportunity cost in other lives which could be saved by using medical resources more effectively. A functioning healthcare market ought to look something like triage; people who gain the most benefit from medical attention will receive prompt and effective service, while some people are unfortunately going to have to be turned away.
While true, people who are too stupid to be allowed near sharp objects have preferences and make choices that are not quite random. It is often (but not always) the case that given several alternatives, one can reliably predict towards which one most stupid people will gravitate.
Citation, or at least a clear example, needed. I can probably construct two policy alternatives, and predict which will be attractive to people who identify with a given political tribe. Then I suppose I get to call one of those options the “stupid” one based on my own value system.
Please tell me that isn’t the sort of thing you mean.
I have met people with what I consider to be very irrational political views (in that they are little more than clusters of rote debating points never subjected to analysis). Outside of the well-worn habitual responses their politics would dictate they regurgitate, I have no idea how they would choose on an issue they had never encountered before.
Maybe stupidly (because they aren’t in the habit of reflective thought), but maybe less so (because without a knee-jerk political reaction ready to hand, they might take a few seconds to think).
I will go so far as to agree that in too many cases, simple answers will be favoured over complex questions, and instant gratification will be favoured over longer-term advantage.
Please tell me that isn’t the sort of thing you mean.
Your wish is my command! No, that isn’t the sort of thing I meant.
I meant this quite literally and without a preference for the Magenta party or the Cyan party. Given two alternatives and the way they are presented in the popular media, it is often (but not always) possible to predict the preferences of the low-IQ crowd. The end.
That issue is different from political tribalism.
Having said that, I haven’t run any reasonably controlled experiments so at this point it’s just my opinion without data to support it.
Given two alternatives and the way they are presented in the popular media, it is often (but not always) possible to predict the preferences of the low-IQ crowd.
This is the exact opposite of what I’ve observed in various true-lift models I’ve done for various purposes. Lower IQ tends to correlate more with lower-informedness, and low information voters are highly susceptible to noise, which makes predicting them a pain. Things like the order of the names on the ballot can have an effect on their vote.
Generally, higher information voters are much easier to predict, especially if you have any indications of their voting history.
The whole well-established and rather large field of marketing is preoccupied with predicting and manipulating the preferences of people.
There doesn’t seem to be much difference between persuading people to buy a particular brand of shampoo and persuading people to support a particular political issue (or vote for a particular candidate).
Megan McArdle
Either of those two things can be sufficient to make it advisable to prevent access to sharp objects. While the language sounds nicer, “valuing different things” and “assessment that various things will go wrong is different” would seem to incorporate “evil” and “stupid” quite comfortably.
IME, the latter are subsets of the former, and therefore require more evidence to pick out reliably.
I don’t think they are subsets. I think the latter are value/emotion laden terms which promote confrontation with the evil and stupid, and a “go Raiders” kind of team spirit with those on whose side one finds herself. The former are relatively value free descriptions of how different sides of the question occur, and as such are appropriate if you are trying to advance rational understanding.
The teams the Raiders play against are not actually evil, even if you are a Raiders fan and use violent and hostile language. They are just other teams.
Yes, “evil” and “stupid” are value-laden terms.
Yes, they are emotion-laden terms.
Yes, they are often used for no other reason than tribal signaling.
Agreed, the Raiders’ opponents (football, right?) are not evil.
I can’t tell if you’re actually claiming that there are no evil or stupid people in the world.
You don’t say it explicitly, but it seems to me an implicit assertion in the fact that you chose to make the statements you did.
If you are, I disagree with you about that.
As for being subsets… evil people value different things than I, but not everyone who values different things than I is evil. Stupid people make different assessments that various things will go wrong than I do, but not everyone who does that is stupid.
Whoa, hey! Let’s not be hasty.
So both work. But they have such different effects on the person you are debating with, and for most of us, they have a different effect on ourselves and how we see reality. Choose the “evil” and “stupid” labels, and you close off rational discussion, or at least you do your part in closing it off, you may well have help from the other people in the discussion.
If the goal of policy debate is to settle on good policies, you do not want to choose the “evil” and “stupid” labels.
The problem that I am alluding to is that the quote attempts to persuade via an implicit false dichotomy and also subtly equivocates between the concepts “don’t use excessively judgemental language” and “do not exercise judgement” for the purpose of catchy persuasiveness.
While this quote is an interesting quote, and one that argues for a position I probably approve of, it is not an especially rational quote. The reasoning is not especially impressive. It’s also far too free with “it is entirely reasonable to believe”. That usage relies on and conveys a norm that actively sacrifices epistemic rationality for the purpose of signalling egalitarian ‘level headed’ attitudes.
The quote gets straight to the point about how many many MANY people treat the debate between Obamacare and not-Obamacare. I have personally heard and read writers on BOTH sides accusing the opposite side of obvious and blistering stupidity, in fact I have seen both stated just today. I have been accused of immorality because of my position in this debate and have wanted to accuse those I argued against of immorality. The quote addresses a very real situation that brings out the irrational in us, that in my opinion, helps us all to be “more wrong.”
Meanwhile, only someone who has succumbed to the partisanship, which in my opinion is easy to succumb to, would be unable to recognize the intelligence and general competence of those they disagree with. Neither Michelle Bachman nor Barack Obama would benefit at all from being kept away from sharp instruments, yet that is the kind of language this question brings out even on a board dedicated to making us “less wrong.”
For these reasons I think the quote is right on target, where the target is encouraging people to choose to be more rational about something which is virtually a basilisk in its ability to bring out the irrational in people.
I wouldn’t know, beyond my expectation that the behaviour patterns match the political behaviour I expect of humans. I would certainly expect some of the humans to execute the behaviours that the author of the quote opposes.
I understand that there is a government shutdown in the US prompted by political conflict over a proposed healthcare-related redistribution of wealth. Neither of these things are especially familiar to me. Coming from one of the countries with publicly funded universal health care it is a little harder to see what the fuss is about.
The US government shutdown was something of a surprise when my facebook started talking about it. If the analogous situation occurs here (‘supply’ is repeatedly blocked) it triggers a double dissolution and everyone gets sent back to the polling booths to elect some politicians who can make a functioning government. I can at least imagine (and predict) that when the legislative process has resulted in a stand-off with a touch of brinkmanship the polarization on the issue would become more pronounced and the ‘other side’ would accused of additional immorality for not submitting this side’s power play as they clearly ought to. (Did that last addition happen by the way? I have more or less assumed that it would but my curiosity seeks calibration.)
To reiterate, I don’t disagree with the motivation of the author of the quote. I can also see the value of using details of the quote for their persuasive purpose with a political-but-redeemable target audience. It remains irrational political rhetoric but it is at least political rhetoric that is a level or two closer to the surface.
At very best it can be said to be advocating a new irrationality that is both less irrational and more palatable than the one being opposed. I suppose encouraging people to believe “Pi = 3” is an improvement over them continuing to believe “Pi = 4″… it’s approximately 6 times less wrong! I still wouldn’t call it exemplary mathematics.
If the polarization has become more pronounced, I haven’t noticed, but I’m not really sure what that would even look like at this point. But, yes, there’s a lot of the predictable “this situation is your fault for refusing to accept the conditions we’ve set for relaxing this situation!” going on.
I suspect that for this situation to develop as it has, polarization must be very near saturation in the first place.
There’s even we’re not going to let you relax the situation until we get what we want, i.e., the Republican controlled house has been passing bills to fund parts of the government, e.g., national parks, medical research and the Democratic controlled senate is refusing to consider them. Furthermore, the president has been closing things even when it would cost less to keep them open, even going so far as to order privately run parks that lease government land to close.
Confirmation bias is an odd choice. I think I can see where she’s coming from—people assume members of their respective political outgroups to be inherently malicious, and form their judgments of specific actions accordingly—but the assumption of malice does all the work there.
Hostile attribution bias seems like a better fit to me, maybe with a dash of outgroup homogenity.
In what way does expanding coverage reduces innovation? If anything more coverage means a bigger market for innovations.
I suspect innovation gets shifted more than it gets reduced, and there are forces pushing innovation up.
To the extent Obamacare subsidizes medicine more than it is already subsidized, and if it has a net cost > 0, then it does, it should encourage innovation. Some of the shift and/or additional innovation will be how to game the system more effectively, which is presumably a low-value outcome for society. But some of it will be how to provide care that this system will pay for, perhaps more innovation towards the afflictions of those who will gain access to medical care that did not previously have as much access, and so on.
If it shifts money away from drug makers, but it puts in more money on net, then there is lower innovation on the drug side and higher innovation where the new profits are to be made.
This will only happen if being innovative is favored by the subsidies and the people deciding who gets subsidies can tell improvements apart from change for the sake of change.
By lowering prices for drugs, for example, more people can afford them but pharmaceutical firms have lower profit incentives to find new drugs. The medical device tax, furthermore, will help fund Obama care but also reduce incentives to develop new medical devices.
Depends on the price elasticity of demand. If you widen the access to the thing by lowering the price, it’s possible that you might make more profit than someone who has fewer customers who they make a lot more profit per customer off of.
In situations where this is the case, the company in question doesn’t need to be ordered by the government to do this.
Setting a price isn’t necessarily a decision made with respects to the interests of one company. Not knowing precisely how the marketing groups for medical goods in the US are set up, beyond that they’re pretty abusive, I don’t care to argue that one way or the other though.
Expanding coverage and lowering prices are two different issues.
You can be in favor of one and not the other.
Big Pharma was in favor of Obamacare. The made a deal. Obama didn’t choose to implement effective price cutting policies such as allowing reimportation of drugs. Then Big Pharma spend millions for advertisements to promote Obamacare.
Two possible reasons:
(1) Blackmail—Obamacare harmed them, but big Pharma was told by Democrats that if they didn’t support it the Democrats would pass something that harmed them even more. The medical device industry didn’t support Obamacare and as a result they got hit with a special tax in the final bill.
(2) Reduced competition—Obamacare makes it harder for other firms to enter the pharmaceutical industry.
As far as the medical device tax goes, I agree that it’s worth repealing it.
In total it’s however zero sum for spending on healthcare. The tax pays for tax rabates for health insurance. Money payed into the health insurance system gets spend on medicial expenditures.
Note: spending on healthcare =/= improvements in health
I don’t claim it does.
You assume that money is the only reason for people to to develop new medical devices. People could also do so because it helps people. Because the technology is awesome. Any number of other reasons. There is ample evidence that creative workers are DE-incentivized by money.
If money IS the only incentive, then reduced profits on device A might cause them to expand by developing device B.
Money isn’t the only incentive but it is an important one especially for publicly traded companies. You need lots of money to develop and test new medical devices.
If this were true then companies that succeed in producing new, creative high tech products would pay their most creative employees very little. We don’t observe this.
Have you seen the music industry recently? ;)
[/not sure if serious]
It was serious, but see this.
I meant that I wasn’t sure if I was being serious or not.
The people who make the most money in the music industry aren’t necessarily the ones doing the best creative work. For one, “ability to sell records” is imperfectly correlated with music quality, the people that are most visible might not even be all that responsible for the music in the first place, and the revenues from sales can end up distributed in all different ways. There might be composers writing songs that turn into hits when other people perform them who end up getting paid peanuts for doing it. I just don’t know.
There are only limited resources available, including the creativity and time of engineers, and we need a way to allocate them over our (virtually) unlimited needs. If we’re not going to use a market to make those sorts of decisions, what should we do?
It may seem heartless to pass over a drug which could ‘only’ save a few thousand lives, but even if you can’t put a dollar price on human life there’s still an opportunity cost in other lives which could be saved by using medical resources more effectively. A functioning healthcare market ought to look something like triage; people who gain the most benefit from medical attention will receive prompt and effective service, while some people are unfortunately going to have to be turned away.
While true, people who are too stupid to be allowed near sharp objects have preferences and make choices that are not quite random. It is often (but not always) the case that given several alternatives, one can reliably predict towards which one most stupid people will gravitate.
Citation, or at least a clear example, needed. I can probably construct two policy alternatives, and predict which will be attractive to people who identify with a given political tribe. Then I suppose I get to call one of those options the “stupid” one based on my own value system.
Please tell me that isn’t the sort of thing you mean.
I have met people with what I consider to be very irrational political views (in that they are little more than clusters of rote debating points never subjected to analysis). Outside of the well-worn habitual responses their politics would dictate they regurgitate, I have no idea how they would choose on an issue they had never encountered before.
Maybe stupidly (because they aren’t in the habit of reflective thought), but maybe less so (because without a knee-jerk political reaction ready to hand, they might take a few seconds to think).
I will go so far as to agree that in too many cases, simple answers will be favoured over complex questions, and instant gratification will be favoured over longer-term advantage.
Your wish is my command! No, that isn’t the sort of thing I meant.
I meant this quite literally and without a preference for the Magenta party or the Cyan party. Given two alternatives and the way they are presented in the popular media, it is often (but not always) possible to predict the preferences of the low-IQ crowd. The end.
That issue is different from political tribalism.
Having said that, I haven’t run any reasonably controlled experiments so at this point it’s just my opinion without data to support it.
This is the exact opposite of what I’ve observed in various true-lift models I’ve done for various purposes. Lower IQ tends to correlate more with lower-informedness, and low information voters are highly susceptible to noise, which makes predicting them a pain. Things like the order of the names on the ballot can have an effect on their vote.
Generally, higher information voters are much easier to predict, especially if you have any indications of their voting history.
Depressing but plausible :(
I suspect “the way they are presented in the popular media” is crafted with that in mind.
The whole well-established and rather large field of marketing is preoccupied with predicting and manipulating the preferences of people.
There doesn’t seem to be much difference between persuading people to buy a particular brand of shampoo and persuading people to support a particular political issue (or vote for a particular candidate).