For an example of an obvious case of homo sapiens being led into things against his best interest consider smoking.
Sure. People have smoked a variety of dried plants (including but not limited to tobacco and marijuana) for a very long time. Much, much longer than advertising has been around. So, what’s the “best interest” here, who decides what it is, and who “leads” people into something against their best interest?
Note, by the way, that if you honestly can’t say who decides what’s in a person’s best interest (other than herself, of course) then the phrase “It is extremely rare that smoking is in anyone’s best interest” doesn’t mean anything.
Ideally I would measure best interest compared to the human utility function, but we do not have the luxury of a fully unpacked utility function. In the mean time I’ll just go with (length of life x happiness) - (very large number x atrocities committed). As to who leads someone against their best interest, that would be advertisers as the agents of companies who wish to sell people things. Some advertisers also move people towards their best interest. The point is that the best interest of the buyer and the best interest of the seller are rather disconnected and intersect rather randomly. The best interests of the people being sold to are far less relevant to the people doing the selling than the amount of money a person can be persuaded to spend.
Edit: I feel like this would be a good place to put a chart of cigarette usage by % of population over the years. At current time, 42% of people smoking have tried to quit over the last year. I feel like this is fairly conclusive: these people are acting against their own self interest
Have you read any behavioural economics? These are rather central things to the theory and there are books out there that can explain this a lot better than me.
Also, we’re getting sidetracked again. I thought the whole advertising thing was just a useful example to talk about the original disagreement about charity vs giving to political parties.
As to who leads someone against their best interest, that would be advertisers
It doesn’t look like you’ve read my post. Who leads this guy, for example? People like him have been doing this for hundreds of years at least.
Have you read any behavioural economics?
Yes, I have. I understand how people can be influenced. I still don’t understand how someone is going to decide what is in, for example, my best interest.
No-one decides what is in the best interest of a singular person except that person. This kind of stuff is only really applicable to large populations where you can shift the conditions to raise or lower usage by 10% by raising barriers against harmful activities and lowering them for beneficial activities. By raising barriers I mean for example increasing the cost of cigarettes through taxes while increasing knowledge by printing cancer statistics on packaging, an effective strategy that the UK has been using for a while now. Applying it to singular people involves far more direct intervention than most people are willing to deal with and tends to cause problems. I am essentially espousing soft paternalism.
That guy is smoking a tobacco cigar in India I assume? He is influenced by the people around him who don’t know how much damage is done by smoking, by the ready and cheap availability of the thing he wants to smoke, by the physical addictiveness of the plant, by the status change associated with smoking (positive or negative) and by his own state of knowledge about the effects of his actions. People like him have been doing this for hundreds of years and it was a reasonable choice given the knowledge they had because no-one knew that it was dangerous and caused cancer. Now the knowledge exists, and it has become clear that it is a bad choice. It has negative utility.
I did read your post. I couldn’t figure out where what you were getting at. I was honestly wondering if you were trying to use Socratic method on me or something. Your point was not clear to me, it still isn’t. Could you clarify?
No-one decides what is in the best interest of a singular person except that person.
Empirically that’s not true. There is a large number of laws and regulations, for example, which claim to exist in my best interest—from the seat-belt laws to the FDA.
Applying it to singular people involves far more direct intervention than most people are willing to deal with and tends to cause problems. I am essentially espousing soft paternalism.
So are the, ahem, implementation difficulties are the only reason why you espouse soft paternalism and not hard? If applying “this kind of stuff” to individual people didn’t cause problems, would you have issues with it?
Your point was not clear to me, it still isn’t.
My point, stated bluntly, is that no one is qualified to judge what is in a person’s best interest except for that very person. And given that it fails on the individual level, it fails on the aggregate level as well.
A side theme here is that I highly value autonomy and am quite suspicious of paternalism.
Ah, right you’re talking about the specific practical implementation of these things. My bad. I don’t have a better model than the current one kicking about, that’s for sure. The ideal of the current model in my country (the UK) is that the scientific community figures out what things are unambiguously helpful and unambiguously harmful and legislation is enacted to maximise and minimise those activities. More ambiguous things don’t tend to get legislation enacted. That the actual implementation of the model falls short in a number of ways is obvious and unfortunate, but I don’t know enough about the subject to propose a better solution. If you have one I would be interested to hear it.
If applying “this kind of stuff” to individual people didn’t cause problems, would you have issues with it?
For it not to cause problems people would have to be fine with an outside force making a large number of their decisions for them. It appears to be an inherent human trait to dislike excess meddling by any outside force so I’m not entirely sure that such a population exists. This may simply reflect a western view of looking at things though, my knowledge of the mindset of Chinese people for example is obviously insufficient.
I would still have one issue with it even if people didn’t mind being meddled with. Hard paternalism implies bans on things, hard rules that are not allowed to be broken. There are almost always situations where the reasons behind a rule do not apply. With hard paternalism a person would be prohibited from doing something even when it made sense in that specific situation.
no one is qualified to judge what is in a person’s best interest except for that very person.
You’ve been blunt with me so I’ll do you the same courtesy. People are bad at judging what actions maximise their own best interest. I believe that a majority of people are highly effected by the environment in which they make their decisions and can be induced to make different decisions, good or bad, through clever manipulation. Most people do not have the knowledge to deal with manipulation like this in an effective manner. It is an asymmetrical fight, because advertisers can apply whole departments of people and the latest knowledge of neuroscience to manipulating the inherent biases of the human brain while normal people devote very little or no time to countermeasures. As the knowledge and money base of advertising increases I would expect people to be more and more swayed.
I will give some specific examples and predictions to bring this back to earth. If healthy food was cheaper and as easy to prepare as unhealthy food, a country would have a healthier populace of a lower weight and live longer. If soft drinks high in fructose and other simple sugars were advertised less, diabetes rates would drop. Some examples of things known to work: When cigarettes were made expensive and the health effects well known such that people who decided to smoke were regarded as silly, cigarette use decreased so did lung cancer (after an appropriate time lag). If pension payments are made automatic as part of a pay cheque and employees simply have to check a box to opt out, employee pensions savings increase.
The idea of soft paternalism is to discourage bad decisions while still allowing them to be made. It is to make the right thing to do, the easy thing to do. The barriers against bad decisions are intentionally low such that anyone with a good reason can circumvent them. This allows policy makers to improve people’s lives en mass without actually curtailing any specific person’s autonomy very much. This has the useful side effect that if a bad decision is made by the government people can route around it with comparative ease.
By the way, that pattern of highly valuing autonomy and intense suspicion of government intrusion is something I find extremely common in US Americans, but is comparatively rare in my country the UK. I would be interested to talk to you about possible causes if you’re up for it. My immediate thought is that the US government has given people more reasons to distrust it but I would much rather know your thinking, seeing as you live there.
We don’t live in an idealized environment where our society is ruled by benevolent philosopher-kings or run by bodhisattva mandarins. The government consists of elected politicians and unelected bureaucracy of civil servants—all of them human, always prone to mistakes, not always having the best intentions, corruptible by power, having their own incentives, etc. etc. The question of the appropriateness of soft paternalism has to be evaluated in the context of real political systems where the chances of the paternalistic tools being misused or abused are high.
Yes, people are bad at judging what’s in their best interests, but there’s no one who is better. There are lots and lots of examples, historical and more recent, of situations where some authority decides it knows what’s better for the people—and then it turns out that isn’t the case at all. So the next authority (or even the same one) says sorry, carts out the corpses, cleans up the mess a bit, and then says “ah, but now we certainly now what is best for you!”. Rinse and repeat...
In the same vein you posit that regular people are defenceless against advertisers, but they are defenceless in the same way against government propagandists as well. In fact, paternalism legitimises the idea that people are sheep in need of a leader, they cannot be trusted to arrange their own affairs. Infantilising the populace is a very seductive political technique.
pattern of highly valuing autonomy and intense suspicion of government intrusion is something I find extremely common in US Americans, but is comparatively rare in my country the UK.
You can probably google up discussions of this topic, it’s not an uncommon one. Off the top of my head I can come up with:
Genetics: the subset of the population that had… difficulties with the King and the Parliament actually left the UK—and a large part of these rabble-rousers landed in the US.
More genetics: the US is a country of immigrants—almost all Americans descend from ancestors who decided to leave their country and their government. That is indicative of high autonomy and not trusting your (former) government much :-)
Population density: the higher it is, the more unity and cohesion the country needs and enforces. If you have family homesteads situated miles from each other, they don’t need to agree on much.
History and traditions: the UK had centuries to instill obedience to authority into its population, the US started as a colony which didn’t like its metropolis much :-/
The US political elite hasn’t been able to perfect that patronising look that goes so well with the proper upper-crust accent :-P
My immediate thought is that the US government has given people more reasons to distrust it
From the American perspective, the situation over the pond looks like an unmitigated disaster. Between the ever-present cameras, the ASBOs, the terrorist-sympathisers legislation, etc. things are looking bloody awful over there...
To be quite honest I’d trust my government to do soft paternalism but not yours.
Do you know what’s fascinating? We have an almost identical view of your country from over here, what with the rampant abuse of power among policemen, the massive online data mining, the gun crime, the bizarre and aggressive politics where shouting louder seems to be considered legitimate. And the tv news, it’s just astounding. I’ve watched Fox and it is just bizarre, with people actually shouting at guests, belittling respected experts who were asked onto the show, cutting their mike when they start to disagree. Anyone who tried that here would be out of a job in short order. CNN may be better but they are still hilarious in a number of ways. That filibustering doesn’t get a politician voted out instantly was originally shocking to me.
I could go on for a long long time. Suffice to say, the UK is actually doing pretty good. We have a few problems but they aren’t the ones you’ve head about in the news. The ever present cameras have not been abused and are generally only used when a crime happens to have been committed in front of them (assault, burglary ect). The ASBOs are no worse than the worse rednecks or people from the ghettos. Also, terrorist-sympathiser legislation? I don’t remember that.
We have a few problems but they aren’t the ones you’ve head about in the news.
Tell that to the girls from Rotherham. Or does that not count as “in the news” since your news media refused to report on it while is was happening? Not to mention the people attempting to blow the whistle on this back in 2001, were promptly prosecuted for hate speech.
the massive online data mining [by the US],
(..)
The ever present cameras have not been abused and are generally only used when a crime happens to have been committed in front of them (assault, burglary ect).
I was not trying to say that the idea I had of the US was an accurate one, nor that the UK was some sort of paradise where nothing wrong happens. I was pointing out the general distortion one can expect by relying on news media for an idea of a country. Rotherham for example is a highly charged emotional subject. Trying to get an accurate idea of the actual situation just from exceptions like that is a bit pointless. It works about as well as using the situation in Detroit to judge a whole country
One is a recording in a public place where there is no expectation of privacy, the other is the cataloguing of everyone’s entire backlog of conversations on the internet, including private ones and in some cases encrypted ones. Aside from both fitting the emotional impression of overreaching security state I don’t see that the two are particularly comparable. The potential for abuse is certainly different. Unless there is some abuse case of the cameras that i’m not aware of?
Edit: The US data mining is a lot more comparable to the UK data mining. I believe they are similar. It may just be a failure of my creativity, but I can’t actually think of a situation where cctv footage could be abused to convict an innocent man. Conversely, abuse cases abound for largescale data mining.
I can’t actually think of a situation where cctv footage could be abused to convict an innocent man.
A couple of ideas come to mind immediately:
-- Just like reading all your email is likely to turn up something that sounds bad, tracking all your movements is likely, just by chance, to turn up something that looks suspicious; you may have been seen near a known drug dealers’ den, or bordello, or you often visit a person who has been convicted of a crime, or you have been seen near children’s playgrounds too much.
-- Use of the CCTV footage to catch you in a lie—bearing in mind that everyday human life involves telling necessary lies every so often. This can make you look really bad—oh, no, he lied to his wife about where he was, maybe he had an affair. He lied in his political speech—who knows what he was doing in back alleys back then?
-- Using the CCTV to capture images of something that would be embarrassing in public. Of course, you would have to make a mistake to show something private in public, but CCTV has the effect of greatly expanding the effect of such mistakes. Imagine someone caught on camera in bondage gear, or kissing a member of the same sex (or just cheating on their spouse). Or wearing a symbol of a sports team that is accused of being racist.
-- Taking a CCTV image out of context
Of course, you’re being too narrow by asking for a conviction; these can be used to damage someone without convicting him of anything. Driving a politician out of office or blackmailing someone is not convicting him, after all.
I was not trying to say that the idea I had of the US was an accurate one, nor that the UK was some sort of paradise where nothing wrong happens. I was pointing out the general distortion one can expect by relying on news media for an idea of a country. Rotherham for example is a highly charged emotional subject. Trying to get an accurate idea of the actual situation just from exceptions like that is a bit pointless. It works about as well as using the situation in Detroit to judge a whole country
You seem to be arguing that the UK is much better than the US in this regard. In fact similar forces are involved in creating both Detroit and Rotherham. On the other hand, the US wasn’t covering up Detroit’s crime statistics and prosecuting people who tried to blow the whistle.
The potential for abuse is certainly different. Unless there is some abuse case of the cameras that i’m not aware of?
How so. I can’t think of an abuse case for email reading that doesn’t also apply to the CCTV cameras.
Well I’m not arguing that. The UK doesn’t seem to be structurally much better than the US, I’m no even sure how I’d go about measuring that. Although it is a bit naive to say that the US (or rather the Detroit police force) isn’t covering up some of Detroit’s crime statistics. So far as I’m aware almost any metric used to allocate reward and punishment will eventually be gamed.
Jiro has some nice CCTV camera abuse cases. Online information gathering takes all those abuse cases quite a bit further. Instead of possibly one lie or falsehood or case of wrong/politically damaging information you can probably choose from dozens if you have access to a politician’s online data. Same abuse cases, more ammunition against an average person.
Suffice to say, the UK is actually doing pretty good.
Does it, now? Ignoring the minor matters like recent riots or how you managed to drop considerably below Ireland in GDP per capita, didn’t you recently almost lose a large chunk of the country? And while the scurrying at Downing the week before the referendum when the poll results came out gets full marks for amusement value, it does seem that a bit less than half of all Scots have a problem with trusting Whitehall to do what’s best for them.
terrorist-sympathiser legislation?
Evidently in the UK it’s a crime to write bad poetry about martyrdom.
Consider the probability of almost any other country allowing a free and uninhibited referendum for a section of that country to split off. Texas for example, or Sicily. Consider what it implies about the health of the democratic process that the Scots could vote an independence movement into majority of their government, then have a free and unmolested referendum without one bullet fired and only a modicum of political fuckery. I think that’s a pretty good showing all things considered. Don’t a lot of countries have some ethic group that distrusts the central government? It’s hardly an exceptional situation.
Regardless, the point was not to start a cross Atlantic pissing match over whose country is worse. The point is to show you that the picture you have of the UK is likely so distorted as to be essentially useless. Consider the picture I painted of the US, consider how inaccurate it likely was. That is at least the scale of the mismatch between your map and the territory of the UK. To call the 6th largest economy in the world an unmitigated disaster is plain wrong, the place comes up near the top in nearly any objective measure you care to name.
The point is to show you that the picture you have of the UK is likely so distorted as to be essentially useless.
That’s interesting. Are you quite sure my map is distorted or maybe I just have a different baseline and different framework to look through? How would one tell the difference?
It could be a different framework or baseline, but I find it more likely that you’ve been given incomplete data. I’m assuming you’ve gotten most of your information from news stories and articles? Unfortunately I can’t think of a way to fully check without physically visiting the country to see if it matches or not. The next best thing would be watching some boring bbc news coverage, but even that would be mildly sensationalist by comparison to normal life. You can’t go by my experience because I’m not a fully trustworthy source, despite my attempts at rationality.
Comparative statistics maybe? Figure out what objective measures you’d expect the UK to do well or poorly on based on your current map then look them up. See if there are any US cities you do know that turn out to have similar measures then use the comparison to update based on the new information. Seems like the best bet anyway.
The next best thing would be watching some boring bbc news coverage, but even that would be mildly sensationalist by comparison to normal life.
The same is true of the US. The difference is that Americans have a lower tolerance for “government doing bad things to other Americans”, whereas your attitude seems to be “it doesn’t count unless it happens to someone I personally know”.
There’s a difference in the magnitude of the sensationalism and the professionalism of the news between the two countries. The UK is rather lucky in that regard.
My attitude is that the magnitude of the individual wrong has to be multiplied by the number of times it actually happened to be properly understood. The actual physical threat of terrorism, for example, is largely irrelevant in my reckoning of the country. Last time I did the math it turned out to kill less than 10 people a year on average in the UK. I had a look down the NHS data for death rates and found multiple diseases I’d never even heard of that killed more people, so I decided that terrorism itself was largely unimportant. The reaction to terrorism is the only part that has relevance. I have a similar attitude about most overblown societal problems. The news may be attempting to convince my lizard brain that the world is spectacularly unsafe but the actual statistics suggest I live in one of the safest countries in the safest period of human history.
Edit: Forgot to specify that it was the TV news that was good. The papers can be pretty variable, from good to terrible.
A variety of bits, Midlands is the major area where I haven’t been.
Unmitigated disaster or just kind of average?
See, that’s what I mean by different baselines. It looks like to you life is fine as long as you or your friends aren’t dragged off in chains and sent to the salt mines. Of course UK is a first-world Western European country with all that it implies. It’s not Zimbabwe. But then by similar criteria places like, say, post-Stalin Russia were also “kind of average”. For the great majority of people life just went on and nothing terrible happened. Unless you were part of specific social groups, things looked fine.
I’m not saying that the UK is on the verge of tranforming into an Ingsoc society, but from the individual freedoms and civil rights point of view, it has considerably degraded and is looking pretty bad. Of course if you don’t care about such things much, well, you don’t care about such things much.
I do care about such things, about as much as I care about the total prosperity of the group. In my utility function they are approximately equal. I am worried about the erosion of civil rights, not because they are being misused much now or because of any inherent beliefs about human rights but because of the potential for abuse later down the line. The way I see it laws that give a particular position unrestricted power without independent checks and counterbalances are problematic in the long term. As time increases to infinity the probability that such power will be abused tends to 100%. That is, eventually a particularly misguided or sociopathic or mentally ill person will eventually end up in that position.
It’s also why I think large scale data mining is more dangerous than CCTV cameras. To abuse CCTV you need to change the laws to make new things illegal, you can’t do it as one person. To abuse data mining all that is required is for the head (or sub head) of intelligence to get the records of every current and prospective politician then threaten to leak certain uncomfortable details at key times. Most people have something online that would interfere with political election. Too much power in one person with too little oversight. The potential for abuse is huge.
Apologies about my manner this past while. I’m still getting used to people attacking my ideas without attacking me. Historically the two have been correlated in other webforums and I’ve not yet convinced my brain to give up the link. You know, I’m curious about what your favoured policy is. You don’t like soft paternalism, what system do you go in for?
because of the potential for abuse later down the line.
I think we are in agreement about that.
It’s also why I think large scale data mining is more dangerous than CCTV cameras.
It’s a false dilemma, there is absolutely no reason why we must have one or the other and so must choose the lesser evil. We can choose none. Of course, in reality it seems we will get both.
I don’t expect there is significant difference in large scale data mining between the US and the UK. The NSA and MI5 are best buddies :-/
To abuse CCTV you need to change the laws to make new things illegal
Nope. You only need to to see compromising (not necessarily illegal) information. If you capture footage of a minister going to visit his mistress, that’s not illegal but that’s useful blackmail material.
Apologies about my manner this past while.
No apologies necessary, that has been a pretty polite debate (by the internet standards, at least :-/) so far.
You don’t like soft paternalism, what system do you go in for?
I hesitate to declare allegiance to a particular system, but my favoured direction is allowing people to do stupid things and then reap the consequences. I think autonomy trumps optimality.
I agree with every point you just made, good catch on the false dilemma. Apart from the last one, I hold small reductions in autonomy which give medium sized or greater increases in optimality to be allowable. I suspect this difference may stem from a divergence in upbringing and culture.
Out of curiosity, how does allowing people to do stupid things work exactly? Zero tax on alcohol? Cigarettes advertised openly and sold at market rate? What does the implementation look like and what consequences do you expect?
Haha, oh you rapscallion. But seriously, freedom can be used to argue for almost every angle of any possible debate. Freedom from taxes, freedom from bandits (by way of increased taxes) ect. I can’t really model it except as a cross between an applause light and a mental category masquerading as something implicit. In a very real sense I never knew what freedom looked like in the first place. It is a chimera.
One should not miss an opportunity to properly use a pithy phrase :-P
Your question is way too broad, though—I’m sure you’re capable of imagining a world with zero taxes on alcohol, for example. What do you mean? To foreclose unproductive avenues, I’m neither an anarchist nor a big-L libertarian—I do not seek to do away with the state.
Um. Allowing people to go climb mountains just because they are there? Allowing people to marry who they damn well please? Allowing people to play or avoid lotteries?
Huh, I was expecting no speed limits on certain roads or shops that sold dangerous drugs legally or even just the reversal of what I was saying about cigarettes earlier. Without a tax on cigarettes you necessarily end up with packs of cigarettes for 80p. Then again you did say you were hesitant to declare allegiance so I’ll not push you about it. It is kind of puzzling to have an idea torn down but not be told what the tearer would rather replace it with though, normally they go hand in hand. I am not used to that.
It is kind of puzzling to have an idea torn down but not be told what the tearer would rather replace it
Future is uncertain and I am not wedded to ideological absolutes. I have a good idea of the direction I want to go, but not so much about the place where I would stop.
For example, I want a smaller, weaker government compared to what we currently have, but I don’t know how small and weak until we try some experiments and see how they turn out (not that I’m holding my breath). Testing by reality is paramount and I see little use in imagining grand social structures—that killed enough people already.
You have chosen examples where the status quo is a restriction. Lumifer has chosen examples where the status quo is no restriction. That is, you have both chosen examples that point in your respectively favoured directions.
I’m not sure I have on all the examples. Cigarette price hikes are status quo, as are (kinda) soft drinks but the rest don’t seem to be. The no speed limits for example is illegal in most countries apart from Germany with the Autobahn. Interfering with food prices and availability to massively favour healthiness is not done in any country that I’m aware of. It certainly couldn’t be called status quo or else crisps would cost £3.50 while healthy microwavable meals would be £1.
“Intentionally low” barriers have this way of expanding when the people who put the barriers in place either find they don’t work to keep people away, or stand to benefit from making the barrier stronger.
Also, you’re still forcing your decision on people who are poor enough that they can’t afford to get across the barrier easily. (Whether that happens, of course, depends on the exact barrier used.)
You’re right and yes, I am. That’s the downside really. Policy debates should not appear one sided and all that. The upsides appear to outweigh the downsides from where I’m sitting. I just haven’t come across a better system yet and I don’t plan on waiting generations for AI to find an answer for these questions.
I measure a slightly reduced autonomy in areas of obvious harm to be a lesser downside than increased death rates.
My immediate thought is that the US government has given people more reasons to distrust it but I would much rather know your thinking, seeing as you live there.
It goes back too far for that. I would suggest it goes back to distrust of the British colonial government. A country formed by rebelling against the government is going to end up distrusting government more.
I was thinking more about events during the lifetimes of people actually alive today. Being taught about the struggle against the British from a young age would count.
However, I’ve just realised that this entire line of reasoning is extremely speculative and my probability of being right is small. Probably best to scrap the line of discussion.
I feel that’s a major issue you’ll have to face.
Sure. People have smoked a variety of dried plants (including but not limited to tobacco and marijuana) for a very long time. Much, much longer than advertising has been around. So, what’s the “best interest” here, who decides what it is, and who “leads” people into something against their best interest?
Note, by the way, that if you honestly can’t say who decides what’s in a person’s best interest (other than herself, of course) then the phrase “It is extremely rare that smoking is in anyone’s best interest” doesn’t mean anything.
Ideally I would measure best interest compared to the human utility function, but we do not have the luxury of a fully unpacked utility function. In the mean time I’ll just go with (length of life x happiness) - (very large number x atrocities committed). As to who leads someone against their best interest, that would be advertisers as the agents of companies who wish to sell people things. Some advertisers also move people towards their best interest. The point is that the best interest of the buyer and the best interest of the seller are rather disconnected and intersect rather randomly. The best interests of the people being sold to are far less relevant to the people doing the selling than the amount of money a person can be persuaded to spend.
Edit: I feel like this would be a good place to put a chart of cigarette usage by % of population over the years. At current time, 42% of people smoking have tried to quit over the last year. I feel like this is fairly conclusive: these people are acting against their own self interest
Have you read any behavioural economics? These are rather central things to the theory and there are books out there that can explain this a lot better than me.
Also, we’re getting sidetracked again. I thought the whole advertising thing was just a useful example to talk about the original disagreement about charity vs giving to political parties.
It doesn’t look like you’ve read my post. Who leads this guy, for example? People like him have been doing this for hundreds of years at least.
Yes, I have. I understand how people can be influenced. I still don’t understand how someone is going to decide what is in, for example, my best interest.
No-one decides what is in the best interest of a singular person except that person. This kind of stuff is only really applicable to large populations where you can shift the conditions to raise or lower usage by 10% by raising barriers against harmful activities and lowering them for beneficial activities. By raising barriers I mean for example increasing the cost of cigarettes through taxes while increasing knowledge by printing cancer statistics on packaging, an effective strategy that the UK has been using for a while now. Applying it to singular people involves far more direct intervention than most people are willing to deal with and tends to cause problems. I am essentially espousing soft paternalism.
That guy is smoking a tobacco cigar in India I assume? He is influenced by the people around him who don’t know how much damage is done by smoking, by the ready and cheap availability of the thing he wants to smoke, by the physical addictiveness of the plant, by the status change associated with smoking (positive or negative) and by his own state of knowledge about the effects of his actions. People like him have been doing this for hundreds of years and it was a reasonable choice given the knowledge they had because no-one knew that it was dangerous and caused cancer. Now the knowledge exists, and it has become clear that it is a bad choice. It has negative utility.
I did read your post. I couldn’t figure out where what you were getting at. I was honestly wondering if you were trying to use Socratic method on me or something. Your point was not clear to me, it still isn’t. Could you clarify?
Empirically that’s not true. There is a large number of laws and regulations, for example, which claim to exist in my best interest—from the seat-belt laws to the FDA.
So are the, ahem, implementation difficulties are the only reason why you espouse soft paternalism and not hard? If applying “this kind of stuff” to individual people didn’t cause problems, would you have issues with it?
My point, stated bluntly, is that no one is qualified to judge what is in a person’s best interest except for that very person. And given that it fails on the individual level, it fails on the aggregate level as well.
A side theme here is that I highly value autonomy and am quite suspicious of paternalism.
Ah, right you’re talking about the specific practical implementation of these things. My bad. I don’t have a better model than the current one kicking about, that’s for sure. The ideal of the current model in my country (the UK) is that the scientific community figures out what things are unambiguously helpful and unambiguously harmful and legislation is enacted to maximise and minimise those activities. More ambiguous things don’t tend to get legislation enacted. That the actual implementation of the model falls short in a number of ways is obvious and unfortunate, but I don’t know enough about the subject to propose a better solution. If you have one I would be interested to hear it.
For it not to cause problems people would have to be fine with an outside force making a large number of their decisions for them. It appears to be an inherent human trait to dislike excess meddling by any outside force so I’m not entirely sure that such a population exists. This may simply reflect a western view of looking at things though, my knowledge of the mindset of Chinese people for example is obviously insufficient.
I would still have one issue with it even if people didn’t mind being meddled with. Hard paternalism implies bans on things, hard rules that are not allowed to be broken. There are almost always situations where the reasons behind a rule do not apply. With hard paternalism a person would be prohibited from doing something even when it made sense in that specific situation.
You’ve been blunt with me so I’ll do you the same courtesy. People are bad at judging what actions maximise their own best interest. I believe that a majority of people are highly effected by the environment in which they make their decisions and can be induced to make different decisions, good or bad, through clever manipulation. Most people do not have the knowledge to deal with manipulation like this in an effective manner. It is an asymmetrical fight, because advertisers can apply whole departments of people and the latest knowledge of neuroscience to manipulating the inherent biases of the human brain while normal people devote very little or no time to countermeasures. As the knowledge and money base of advertising increases I would expect people to be more and more swayed.
I will give some specific examples and predictions to bring this back to earth. If healthy food was cheaper and as easy to prepare as unhealthy food, a country would have a healthier populace of a lower weight and live longer. If soft drinks high in fructose and other simple sugars were advertised less, diabetes rates would drop. Some examples of things known to work: When cigarettes were made expensive and the health effects well known such that people who decided to smoke were regarded as silly, cigarette use decreased so did lung cancer (after an appropriate time lag). If pension payments are made automatic as part of a pay cheque and employees simply have to check a box to opt out, employee pensions savings increase.
The idea of soft paternalism is to discourage bad decisions while still allowing them to be made. It is to make the right thing to do, the easy thing to do. The barriers against bad decisions are intentionally low such that anyone with a good reason can circumvent them. This allows policy makers to improve people’s lives en mass without actually curtailing any specific person’s autonomy very much. This has the useful side effect that if a bad decision is made by the government people can route around it with comparative ease.
By the way, that pattern of highly valuing autonomy and intense suspicion of government intrusion is something I find extremely common in US Americans, but is comparatively rare in my country the UK. I would be interested to talk to you about possible causes if you’re up for it. My immediate thought is that the US government has given people more reasons to distrust it but I would much rather know your thinking, seeing as you live there.
A few general points.
We don’t live in an idealized environment where our society is ruled by benevolent philosopher-kings or run by bodhisattva mandarins. The government consists of elected politicians and unelected bureaucracy of civil servants—all of them human, always prone to mistakes, not always having the best intentions, corruptible by power, having their own incentives, etc. etc. The question of the appropriateness of soft paternalism has to be evaluated in the context of real political systems where the chances of the paternalistic tools being misused or abused are high.
Yes, people are bad at judging what’s in their best interests, but there’s no one who is better. There are lots and lots of examples, historical and more recent, of situations where some authority decides it knows what’s better for the people—and then it turns out that isn’t the case at all. So the next authority (or even the same one) says sorry, carts out the corpses, cleans up the mess a bit, and then says “ah, but now we certainly now what is best for you!”. Rinse and repeat...
In the same vein you posit that regular people are defenceless against advertisers, but they are defenceless in the same way against government propagandists as well. In fact, paternalism legitimises the idea that people are sheep in need of a leader, they cannot be trusted to arrange their own affairs. Infantilising the populace is a very seductive political technique.
You can probably google up discussions of this topic, it’s not an uncommon one. Off the top of my head I can come up with:
Genetics: the subset of the population that had… difficulties with the King and the Parliament actually left the UK—and a large part of these rabble-rousers landed in the US.
More genetics: the US is a country of immigrants—almost all Americans descend from ancestors who decided to leave their country and their government. That is indicative of high autonomy and not trusting your (former) government much :-)
Population density: the higher it is, the more unity and cohesion the country needs and enforces. If you have family homesteads situated miles from each other, they don’t need to agree on much.
History and traditions: the UK had centuries to instill obedience to authority into its population, the US started as a colony which didn’t like its metropolis much :-/
The US political elite hasn’t been able to perfect that patronising look that goes so well with the proper upper-crust accent :-P
From the American perspective, the situation over the pond looks like an unmitigated disaster. Between the ever-present cameras, the ASBOs, the terrorist-sympathisers legislation, etc. things are looking bloody awful over there...
To be quite honest I’d trust my government to do soft paternalism but not yours.
Do you know what’s fascinating? We have an almost identical view of your country from over here, what with the rampant abuse of power among policemen, the massive online data mining, the gun crime, the bizarre and aggressive politics where shouting louder seems to be considered legitimate. And the tv news, it’s just astounding. I’ve watched Fox and it is just bizarre, with people actually shouting at guests, belittling respected experts who were asked onto the show, cutting their mike when they start to disagree. Anyone who tried that here would be out of a job in short order. CNN may be better but they are still hilarious in a number of ways. That filibustering doesn’t get a politician voted out instantly was originally shocking to me.
I could go on for a long long time. Suffice to say, the UK is actually doing pretty good. We have a few problems but they aren’t the ones you’ve head about in the news. The ever present cameras have not been abused and are generally only used when a crime happens to have been committed in front of them (assault, burglary ect). The ASBOs are no worse than the worse rednecks or people from the ghettos. Also, terrorist-sympathiser legislation? I don’t remember that.
Tell that to the girls from Rotherham. Or does that not count as “in the news” since your news media refused to report on it while is was happening? Not to mention the people attempting to blow the whistle on this back in 2001, were promptly prosecuted for hate speech.
Do you see the problem with this juxtaposition?
I was not trying to say that the idea I had of the US was an accurate one, nor that the UK was some sort of paradise where nothing wrong happens. I was pointing out the general distortion one can expect by relying on news media for an idea of a country. Rotherham for example is a highly charged emotional subject. Trying to get an accurate idea of the actual situation just from exceptions like that is a bit pointless. It works about as well as using the situation in Detroit to judge a whole country
One is a recording in a public place where there is no expectation of privacy, the other is the cataloguing of everyone’s entire backlog of conversations on the internet, including private ones and in some cases encrypted ones. Aside from both fitting the emotional impression of overreaching security state I don’t see that the two are particularly comparable. The potential for abuse is certainly different. Unless there is some abuse case of the cameras that i’m not aware of?
Edit: The US data mining is a lot more comparable to the UK data mining. I believe they are similar. It may just be a failure of my creativity, but I can’t actually think of a situation where cctv footage could be abused to convict an innocent man. Conversely, abuse cases abound for largescale data mining.
A couple of ideas come to mind immediately:
-- Just like reading all your email is likely to turn up something that sounds bad, tracking all your movements is likely, just by chance, to turn up something that looks suspicious; you may have been seen near a known drug dealers’ den, or bordello, or you often visit a person who has been convicted of a crime, or you have been seen near children’s playgrounds too much.
-- Use of the CCTV footage to catch you in a lie—bearing in mind that everyday human life involves telling necessary lies every so often. This can make you look really bad—oh, no, he lied to his wife about where he was, maybe he had an affair. He lied in his political speech—who knows what he was doing in back alleys back then?
-- Using the CCTV to capture images of something that would be embarrassing in public. Of course, you would have to make a mistake to show something private in public, but CCTV has the effect of greatly expanding the effect of such mistakes. Imagine someone caught on camera in bondage gear, or kissing a member of the same sex (or just cheating on their spouse). Or wearing a symbol of a sports team that is accused of being racist.
-- Taking a CCTV image out of context
Of course, you’re being too narrow by asking for a conviction; these can be used to damage someone without convicting him of anything. Driving a politician out of office or blackmailing someone is not convicting him, after all.
Ah, I see it was a failure of my creativity, cheers.
You seem to be arguing that the UK is much better than the US in this regard. In fact similar forces are involved in creating both Detroit and Rotherham. On the other hand, the US wasn’t covering up Detroit’s crime statistics and prosecuting people who tried to blow the whistle.
How so. I can’t think of an abuse case for email reading that doesn’t also apply to the CCTV cameras.
Well I’m not arguing that. The UK doesn’t seem to be structurally much better than the US, I’m no even sure how I’d go about measuring that. Although it is a bit naive to say that the US (or rather the Detroit police force) isn’t covering up some of Detroit’s crime statistics. So far as I’m aware almost any metric used to allocate reward and punishment will eventually be gamed.
Jiro has some nice CCTV camera abuse cases. Online information gathering takes all those abuse cases quite a bit further. Instead of possibly one lie or falsehood or case of wrong/politically damaging information you can probably choose from dozens if you have access to a politician’s online data. Same abuse cases, more ammunition against an average person.
Does it, now? Ignoring the minor matters like recent riots or how you managed to drop considerably below Ireland in GDP per capita, didn’t you recently almost lose a large chunk of the country? And while the scurrying at Downing the week before the referendum when the poll results came out gets full marks for amusement value, it does seem that a bit less than half of all Scots have a problem with trusting Whitehall to do what’s best for them.
Evidently in the UK it’s a crime to write bad poetry about martyrdom.
Consider the probability of almost any other country allowing a free and uninhibited referendum for a section of that country to split off. Texas for example, or Sicily. Consider what it implies about the health of the democratic process that the Scots could vote an independence movement into majority of their government, then have a free and unmolested referendum without one bullet fired and only a modicum of political fuckery. I think that’s a pretty good showing all things considered. Don’t a lot of countries have some ethic group that distrusts the central government? It’s hardly an exceptional situation.
Regardless, the point was not to start a cross Atlantic pissing match over whose country is worse. The point is to show you that the picture you have of the UK is likely so distorted as to be essentially useless. Consider the picture I painted of the US, consider how inaccurate it likely was. That is at least the scale of the mismatch between your map and the territory of the UK. To call the 6th largest economy in the world an unmitigated disaster is plain wrong, the place comes up near the top in nearly any objective measure you care to name.
That’s interesting. Are you quite sure my map is distorted or maybe I just have a different baseline and different framework to look through? How would one tell the difference?
It could be a different framework or baseline, but I find it more likely that you’ve been given incomplete data. I’m assuming you’ve gotten most of your information from news stories and articles? Unfortunately I can’t think of a way to fully check without physically visiting the country to see if it matches or not. The next best thing would be watching some boring bbc news coverage, but even that would be mildly sensationalist by comparison to normal life. You can’t go by my experience because I’m not a fully trustworthy source, despite my attempts at rationality.
Comparative statistics maybe? Figure out what objective measures you’d expect the UK to do well or poorly on based on your current map then look them up. See if there are any US cities you do know that turn out to have similar measures then use the comparison to update based on the new information. Seems like the best bet anyway.
The same is true of the US. The difference is that Americans have a lower tolerance for “government doing bad things to other Americans”, whereas your attitude seems to be “it doesn’t count unless it happens to someone I personally know”.
There’s a difference in the magnitude of the sensationalism and the professionalism of the news between the two countries. The UK is rather lucky in that regard.
My attitude is that the magnitude of the individual wrong has to be multiplied by the number of times it actually happened to be properly understood. The actual physical threat of terrorism, for example, is largely irrelevant in my reckoning of the country. Last time I did the math it turned out to kill less than 10 people a year on average in the UK. I had a look down the NHS data for death rates and found multiple diseases I’d never even heard of that killed more people, so I decided that terrorism itself was largely unimportant. The reaction to terrorism is the only part that has relevance. I have a similar attitude about most overblown societal problems. The news may be attempting to convince my lizard brain that the world is spectacularly unsafe but the actual statistics suggest I live in one of the safest countries in the safest period of human history.
Edit: Forgot to specify that it was the TV news that was good. The papers can be pretty variable, from good to terrible.
Is there, really?
Apologies, I meant the TV news. The papers can be pretty terrible
Um, I’ve been to the UK multiple times and some of my relatives lived there for a while :-/
Which bits did you visit? How did things seem while you were there? Unmitigated disaster or just kind of average?
A variety of bits, Midlands is the major area where I haven’t been.
See, that’s what I mean by different baselines. It looks like to you life is fine as long as you or your friends aren’t dragged off in chains and sent to the salt mines. Of course UK is a first-world Western European country with all that it implies. It’s not Zimbabwe. But then by similar criteria places like, say, post-Stalin Russia were also “kind of average”. For the great majority of people life just went on and nothing terrible happened. Unless you were part of specific social groups, things looked fine.
I’m not saying that the UK is on the verge of tranforming into an Ingsoc society, but from the individual freedoms and civil rights point of view, it has considerably degraded and is looking pretty bad. Of course if you don’t care about such things much, well, you don’t care about such things much.
I do care about such things, about as much as I care about the total prosperity of the group. In my utility function they are approximately equal. I am worried about the erosion of civil rights, not because they are being misused much now or because of any inherent beliefs about human rights but because of the potential for abuse later down the line. The way I see it laws that give a particular position unrestricted power without independent checks and counterbalances are problematic in the long term. As time increases to infinity the probability that such power will be abused tends to 100%. That is, eventually a particularly misguided or sociopathic or mentally ill person will eventually end up in that position.
It’s also why I think large scale data mining is more dangerous than CCTV cameras. To abuse CCTV you need to change the laws to make new things illegal, you can’t do it as one person. To abuse data mining all that is required is for the head (or sub head) of intelligence to get the records of every current and prospective politician then threaten to leak certain uncomfortable details at key times. Most people have something online that would interfere with political election. Too much power in one person with too little oversight. The potential for abuse is huge.
Apologies about my manner this past while. I’m still getting used to people attacking my ideas without attacking me. Historically the two have been correlated in other webforums and I’ve not yet convinced my brain to give up the link. You know, I’m curious about what your favoured policy is. You don’t like soft paternalism, what system do you go in for?
I think we are in agreement about that.
It’s a false dilemma, there is absolutely no reason why we must have one or the other and so must choose the lesser evil. We can choose none. Of course, in reality it seems we will get both.
I don’t expect there is significant difference in large scale data mining between the US and the UK. The NSA and MI5 are best buddies :-/
Nope. You only need to to see compromising (not necessarily illegal) information. If you capture footage of a minister going to visit his mistress, that’s not illegal but that’s useful blackmail material.
No apologies necessary, that has been a pretty polite debate (by the internet standards, at least :-/) so far.
I hesitate to declare allegiance to a particular system, but my favoured direction is allowing people to do stupid things and then reap the consequences. I think autonomy trumps optimality.
I agree with every point you just made, good catch on the false dilemma. Apart from the last one, I hold small reductions in autonomy which give medium sized or greater increases in optimality to be allowable. I suspect this difference may stem from a divergence in upbringing and culture.
Out of curiosity, how does allowing people to do stupid things work exactly? Zero tax on alcohol? Cigarettes advertised openly and sold at market rate? What does the implementation look like and what consequences do you expect?
That is likely :-)
In the usual way. Have you forgotten what freedom looks like?
Haha, oh you rapscallion. But seriously, freedom can be used to argue for almost every angle of any possible debate. Freedom from taxes, freedom from bandits (by way of increased taxes) ect. I can’t really model it except as a cross between an applause light and a mental category masquerading as something implicit. In a very real sense I never knew what freedom looked like in the first place. It is a chimera.
One should not miss an opportunity to properly use a pithy phrase :-P
Your question is way too broad, though—I’m sure you’re capable of imagining a world with zero taxes on alcohol, for example. What do you mean? To foreclose unproductive avenues, I’m neither an anarchist nor a big-L libertarian—I do not seek to do away with the state.
I’ll be narrow then: what are some specific examples of policies that allow people to be stupid (or smart) and reap the consequences?
Um. Allowing people to go climb mountains just because they are there? Allowing people to marry who they damn well please? Allowing people to play or avoid lotteries?
Huh, I was expecting no speed limits on certain roads or shops that sold dangerous drugs legally or even just the reversal of what I was saying about cigarettes earlier. Without a tax on cigarettes you necessarily end up with packs of cigarettes for 80p. Then again you did say you were hesitant to declare allegiance so I’ll not push you about it. It is kind of puzzling to have an idea torn down but not be told what the tearer would rather replace it with though, normally they go hand in hand. I am not used to that.
Future is uncertain and I am not wedded to ideological absolutes. I have a good idea of the direction I want to go, but not so much about the place where I would stop.
For example, I want a smaller, weaker government compared to what we currently have, but I don’t know how small and weak until we try some experiments and see how they turn out (not that I’m holding my breath). Testing by reality is paramount and I see little use in imagining grand social structures—that killed enough people already.
Fair doos, it’s been nice talking to you. Considering how active you are I’m sure we’ll run into each other again
You have chosen examples where the status quo is a restriction. Lumifer has chosen examples where the status quo is no restriction. That is, you have both chosen examples that point in your respectively favoured directions.
I’m not sure I have on all the examples. Cigarette price hikes are status quo, as are (kinda) soft drinks but the rest don’t seem to be. The no speed limits for example is illegal in most countries apart from Germany with the Autobahn. Interfering with food prices and availability to massively favour healthiness is not done in any country that I’m aware of. It certainly couldn’t be called status quo or else crisps would cost £3.50 while healthy microwavable meals would be £1.
Unless I’ve misunderstood you?
Well, given the free speech laws of the UK (or rather lack thereof) I think your existing laws are bad enough.
True but irrelevant. I am not making a comparison between the UK and US laws.
“Intentionally low” barriers have this way of expanding when the people who put the barriers in place either find they don’t work to keep people away, or stand to benefit from making the barrier stronger.
Also, you’re still forcing your decision on people who are poor enough that they can’t afford to get across the barrier easily. (Whether that happens, of course, depends on the exact barrier used.)
You’re right and yes, I am. That’s the downside really. Policy debates should not appear one sided and all that. The upsides appear to outweigh the downsides from where I’m sitting. I just haven’t come across a better system yet and I don’t plan on waiting generations for AI to find an answer for these questions.
I measure a slightly reduced autonomy in areas of obvious harm to be a lesser downside than increased death rates.
It goes back too far for that. I would suggest it goes back to distrust of the British colonial government. A country formed by rebelling against the government is going to end up distrusting government more.
I was thinking more about events during the lifetimes of people actually alive today. Being taught about the struggle against the British from a young age would count.
However, I’ve just realised that this entire line of reasoning is extremely speculative and my probability of being right is small. Probably best to scrap the line of discussion.
How about, being immersed in a culture where the standard story is of a noble rebel fighting against an oppressive government?