Slate Star Codex
Abridged

Be­ware Iso­lated De­mands For Rigor

Au­gust 14, 2014

I

From Iden­tity, Per­sonal Iden­tity, and the Self by John Perry:

There is some­thing about prac­ti­cal things that knocks us off our philo­soph­i­cal high horses. Per­haps Her­a­cli­tus re­ally thought he couldn’t step in the same river twice. Per­haps he even re­ceived tenure for that con­tri­bu­tion to phi­los­o­phy. But sup­pose some other an­cient had claimed to have as much right as Her­a­cli­tus did to an ox Her­a­cli­tus had bought, on the grounds that since the an­i­mal had changed, it wasn’t the same one he had bought and so was up for grabs. Her­a­cli­tus would have quickly come up with some er­satz, watered-​down ver­sion of iden­tity of prac­ti­cal value for deal­ing with prop­erty rights, oxen, lyres, vine­yards, and the like. And then he might have won­dered if that watered-​down vul­gar sense of iden­tity might be a con­sid­er­ably more valu­able con­cept than a pure and philo­soph­i­cal sort of iden­tity that noth­ing has.

Okay, but I can think of some­thing worse than that.

Imag­ine Her­a­cli­tus as a cat­tle rustler in the Old West. Every time a rancher catches him at his ne­far­i­ous busi­ness, he pa­tiently ex­plains to them that iden­tity doesn’t exist, and there­fore the same ar­gu­ment against pri­vate prop­erty as made above. Flum­moxed, they’re un­able to think of a re­sponse be­fore he rides off into the sun­set.

But then when Her­a­cli­tus him­self needs the con­cept of sta­ble per­sonal iden­tity for some­thing – maybe he wants to de­posit his ill-​gotten gains in the bank with cer­tainty that the banker will give it back to him next time he shows up to with­draw it, or maybe he wants to bribe the sher­iff to ig­nore his ac­tiv­i­ties for the next while – all of a sud­den Her­a­cli­tus is will­ing to tol­er­ate the watered-​down vul­gar sense of iden­tity like every­one else.

(ac­tu­ally, I can think of some­thing even worse than that, which is a TV west­ern based on this premise, where a rov­ing band of pre-​Socratic des­per­a­does ter­ror­izes Texas. The cli­max is no doubt when the hero strides onto Main Street, re­volver in hand, say­ing “There’s a new sher­iff in town.” And Par­menides gruffly re­sponds “No, I’m pretty sure that’s im­pos­si­ble.”)

At its best, phi­los­o­phy is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary pur­suit that dis­solves our common-​sense in­tu­itions and ex­poses the pos­si­bil­ity of much deeper struc­tures be­hind them. One can re­spond by be­com­ing a saint or mad­man, or by be­com­ing a prag­ma­tist who is will­ing to con­tinue to par­tic­i­pate in human so­ci­ety while also un­der­stand­ing its the­o­ret­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions. Both are re­spectable ca­reer paths.

The prob­lem is when some­one chooses to apply philo­soph­i­cal rigor se­lec­tively.

Her­a­cli­tus could drown in his deeper un­der­stand­ing of per­sonal iden­tity and be­come a holy mad­man, es­chew­ing ma­te­r­ial things and tak­ing no care for the mor­row be­cause he does not be­lieve there is any con­sis­tent self to ex­pe­ri­ence it. Or he could en­gage with it from afar, be­com­ing a wise scholar who par­tic­i­pat­ing in earthly af­fairs while draw­ing equa­nim­ity from the re­al­iza­tion that there is a sense in which all his ac­com­plish­ments will be im­per­ma­nent.

But if he only ap­plies his new the­ory when he wants other peo­ple’s cows, then we have a prob­lem. Philo­soph­i­cal rigor, usu­ally a virtue, has been de­based to an iso­lated de­mand for rigor in cases where it ben­e­fits Her­a­cli­tus.

A fair use of philo­soph­i­cal rigor would pre­vent both Her­a­cli­tus and his vic­tims from own­ing prop­erty, and thus ei­ther col­lapse under its own im­prac­ti­cal­ity or usher in a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new form of eco­nomic think­ing. An iso­lated de­mand for philo­soph­i­cal rigor, ap­plied by Her­a­cli­tus to other peo­ple but never the other way around, would merely give Her­a­cli­tus an un­fair ad­van­tage in the ex­ist­ing sys­tem.

II

A while ago I wrote a post called Mil­i­tary Strikes Are An Ex­tremely Cheap Way To Help For­eign­ers which was a re­sponse to a Matt Ygle­sias post called the op­po­site. Ygle­sias was op­posed to “hu­man­i­tar­ian” mil­i­tary in­ter­ven­tion (think the air strikes on ISIS going on right now, jus­ti­fied under the cause of pre­vent­ing a geno­cide) and his ar­gu­ment was that this was ex­tremely cost-​ineffective com­pared to just giv­ing the money to GiveWell’s top-​rated char­ity – at the time he was writ­ing, malaria pre­ven­tion.

I ar­gued he was wrong about his num­bers. But I also ar­gued he was un­fairly mak­ing an iso­lated de­mand for philo­soph­i­cal rigor.

Once you learn about util­i­tar­i­an­ism and ef­fec­tive char­ity, you can be­come the holy mad­man, do­nat­ing every cent you have be­yond what is strictly nec­es­sary to sur­vive and hold down a job to what­ever the top rated char­ity is.

Or you can be­come the worldly scholar, con­tin­u­ing to frit­ter away your money on things like “hot water” and “food other than gruel” but ap­pre­ci­at­ing the effective-​utilitarian per­spec­tive and try­ing to make a few par­tic­u­larly im­por­tant con­ces­sions to it.

Or you can use it to steal other peo­ple’s cows. This is what I ac­cused Matt Ygle­sias of doing. Pre­sum­ably there are lots of gov­ern­ment pro­grams Ygle­sias sup­ports – I sug­gested PBS – and he would never dream of de­mand­ing that we de­fund them in the hopes of do­nat­ing the money to malaria pre­ven­tion. But if for po­lit­i­cal rea­sons he doesn’t sup­port air strikes, sud­denly that plan has to jus­tify it­self ac­cord­ing to rig­or­ous cri­te­ria that no gov­ern­ment pro­gram that ex­ists could pos­si­bly pass.

Gov­ern­ment spend­ing seems to be a par­tic­u­larly fer­tile case for this prob­lem. I re­mem­ber hear­ing some con­ser­v­a­tives com­plain: sex ed­u­ca­tion in pub­lic schools is an out­rage, be­cause my tax dol­lars are going to sup­port some­thing I be­lieve is morally wrong.

This is, I guess, a de­mand for eth­i­cal rigor. That no one should ever be forced to pay for some­thing they don’t like. Apply it con­sis­tently, and con­ser­v­a­tives shouldn’t have to pay for sex ed, lib­er­als shouldn’t have to pay for wars, and lib­er­tar­i­ans shouldn’t have to pay for any­thing, ex­cept maybe a $9.99 tax bill yearly to sup­port the po­lice and a min­i­mal court sys­tem.

Ap­plied con­sis­tently, you be­come the holy mad­man de­mand­ing ei­ther total an­ar­chy or some kind of weird sys­tem of tax ear­marks which would ac­tu­ally be pretty fun to think about. Or the worldly scholar with a strong ap­pre­ci­a­tion for lib­er­tar­ian ideas who needs a re­ally strong foun­da­tional jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for spend­ing gov­ern­ment money on things that a lot of peo­ple op­pose.

Ap­plied in­con­sis­tently, you’re just steal­ing cows again, com­ing up with a clever ar­gu­ment against the pro­grams you don’t like while de­fend­ing the ones you do.

III

But this is the sort of un­couth be­hav­ior we ex­pect of po­lit­i­cal par­ti­sans. What about sci­ence ?

Sup­pose there are sci­en­tists on both sides of a con­tro­ver­sial issue – for ex­am­ple, econ­o­mists study­ing the min­i­mum wage. One team that sup­ports a min­i­mum wage comes up with a pretty good study show­ing with p < 0.05 that min­i­mum wages help the econ­omy in some rel­e­vant way.

The Sci­ence Czar (of course we have a sci­ence czar! We’re not mon­sters!) notes that p < 0.05 is re­ally a shoddy cri­te­rion that can prove any­thing and they should come back when they have p < 0.01. I have a huge amount of sym­pa­thy with the Sci­ence Czar on this one, by the way.

Soooo the team of econ­o­mists spends an­other five years doing an­other study and finds with p < 0.01 that the min­i­mum wage helps the econ­omy in some im­por­tant way.

The Sci­ence Czar notes that their study was cor­re­la­tional only, and that cor­re­la­tional stud­ies suck. We re­ally can’t show that min­i­mum wages are any good with­out a ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial.

Luck­ily, the gov­ern­ments of every coun­try in the world are to­tally game for split­ting their coun­tries in half and in­sti­tut­ing dif­fer­ent eco­nomic regimes in each part for ten years, so after a decade it comes out that in the ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial the min­i­mum wage helped the econ­omy with p < 0.01.

The Sci­ence Czar wor­ries about pub­li­ca­tion bias. What if there were a lot of other teams who got all the coun­tries in the world to split in half and in­sti­tute dif­fer­ent wage poli­cies in each of the two ter­ri­to­ries for one decade, but they weren’t pub­lished be­cause their re­sults weren’t in­ter­est­ing enough?

Every­thing the Sci­ence Czar has said so far makes per­fect sense and he is to be com­mended for his rigor and com­mit­ment to the job. Sci­ence is re­ally hard and even tiny method­olog­i­cal mis­takes can in prin­ci­ple in­val­i­date an en­tire field.

But now sup­pose that a team shows that, in a sam­ple of six restau­rants in Po­dunk Ohio, there was a non­signif­i­cant trend to­wards the min­i­mum wage mak­ing things a lit­tle worse.

And the Sci­ence Czar says: awe­some! That solves that de­bate, min­i­mum wage is bad, let’s move on to in­ves­ti­gat­ing nom­i­nal GDP tar­get­ing.

Now it looks like the Sci­ence Czar is just a jerk who’s re­ally against min­i­mum wage. All his knowl­edge of the stan­dards of sci­en­tific rigor are going not to­wards bet­ter­ing sci­ence, but to­ward worser­ing sci­ence. He’s not try­ing to cre­ate a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new sci­en­tific regime, he’s tak­ing pot shots.

I see this a lot in med­i­cine. Some­one jumps on a new study show­ing the se­le­nium or chromium or plu­to­nium or what­ever cures can­cer. It is brought up that no, re­ally, the med­ical com­mu­nity has in­ves­ti­gated this sort of thing be­fore, and it has al­ways been found that it doesn’t.

“Well, maybe the med­ical com­mu­nity wasn’t in­ves­ti­gat­ing it the right way! Maybe the in­ves­ti­ga­tors were bi­ased! Maybe they didn’t ran­dom­ize right! Maybe they used a pop­u­la­tion un­usu­ally sus­cep­ti­ble to cancer-​getting! Ninety per­cent of med­ical stud­ies are wrong! Those twenty ex­per­i­ments show­ing a lack of ef­fect could be total bunk!”

Yes, maybe these things hap­pened in each of the twenty stud­ies that dis­agree with you.

Or maybe they hap­pened in the one con­trar­ian study you are get­ting so ex­cited about.

IV

The un­holy com­bi­na­tion of iso­lated de­mands for philo­soph­i­cal rigor and iso­lated de­mands for sci­en­tific rigor is iso­lated de­mands for mathematical-​statistical-conceptual rigor, ie the sort of thing this blog has been talk­ing about all week.

I have al­ready been made fun of for how many dif­fer­ent things I am metaphor­i­cally com­par­ing IQ to – speed, blood pres­sure, comas – so I guess it can’t hurt to add an­other ex­am­ple I only thought of today. How about crime? It’s usu­ally mea­sured by crime rate – a made-​up sta­tis­tic that com­bines sub­fac­tors like arson (maybe higher when fire in­sur­ance pays out bet­ter), prop­erty dam­age (maybe higher dur­ing pe­ri­ods of eth­nic ten­sion and fre­quent riots) and theft (maybe higher when in­come in­equal­ity is worse). There is as­sumed to be a Gen­eral Fac­tor Of Crime (pre­sum­ably caused by things like poor polic­ing, dark al­leys, bro­ken fam­i­lies, et cetera) but I would be ex­tremely sur­prised if any­one had ever proven Be­yond A Shadow Of A Doubt that the fac­tor analy­sis works out here.

When Cosma Shal­izi says he’s not sure about the fac­tor analy­sis in IQ, I have no quar­rel with him, be­cause Cosma Shal­izi’s re­sponse to every­thing in the world is to glare at it for not being suf­fi­ciently sta­tis­ti­cally rig­or­ous.

But when other peo­ple are to­tally happy to talk about speed and blood pres­sure and comas and the crime rate, and then sud­denly switch to a po­si­tion that we can’t talk about IQ at all un­less we have a per­fect factor-​analytical proof of its obey­ing cer­tain sta­tis­ti­cal rules, then I worry they’re just out to steal cows.

Like­wise, if some­one were to just never ac­knowl­edge any sorts of groups of ob­jects ex­cept those that could be sta­tis­ti­cally proven to fall out into ab­solutely sep­a­rate clus­ters in which vari­ance within each clus­ter is less than vari­ance be­tween clus­ters, well, at least they would be fun to talk to at din­ner par­ties.

But when peo­ple never even begin to ques­tion the idea of dif­fer­ent cul­tures but make ex­act­ing de­mands of any­one be­fore they can talk about dif­fer­ent races – even though the two ideas are sta­tis­ti­cally iso­mor­phic – then I think they’re just out to steal cows.

So this is an­other tech­nique for avoid­ing Euler­ing – is your in­ter­locu­tor equally will­ing to apply their com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal ar­gu­ment to every­thing else.

I think if I hadn’t known any­thing about Bayesian prob­a­bil­ity, I would have ex­am­ined the Mc­Grews’ Bayesian ar­gu­ment for the Gospels by see­ing if it ap­plied equally well to Mor­monism, the con­trol group for Chris­tian­ity.

V

The old man stamped his boot in the red dirt, kick­ing up a tiny cloud of dust. “There’s a new sher­iff in town,” he told them.

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s im­pos­si­ble,” says Par­menides. “There’s no such thing as change, only the ap­pear­ance thereof.”

“Well then,” says the old man, “I reckon you won’t mind the false il­lu­sion of your sur­round­ings ap­pear­ing to change into a jail cell.” And he took out his six-​shooter and held it steady.

“Hold on,” said Thales. “We don’t want any trou­ble here. All is water, so all we did was steal a lit­tle bit of water from peo­ple. We can give you some water back, and every­thing will be even, right?” He ges­tured to a wa­ter­ing trough for horses on the side of the street, which was full of the stuff.

“Just so long as you don’t mind being sprayed with some very hard water from my squirt gun,” the old man an­swered, and the six-​shooter was pointed at the Mile­sian now.

“Ha!” said Zeno of Elea. “You don’t scare us. In order to hit Thales, your bul­let would have to get halfway to him, then half of the re­main­ing dis­tance, and so on. But that would re­quire an in­fi­nite num­ber of steps, there­fore it is im­pos­si­ble.”

“Sorry,” said the old man, “I couldn’t hear you be­cause it’s log­i­cally im­pos­si­ble for the sound waves en­cod­ing your speech to reach my ears.”

“We’re not even the same peo­ple as the guys who stole those cat­tle!” said Her­a­cli­tus. “Per­sonal iden­tity is an il­lu­sion!”

“Then you won’t mind com­ing to the cour­t­house with me,” replied the old man “to help the judge im­prison some other peo­ple who look just like you.”

The last of them, the tall one, said noth­ing. He just raised his re­volver in a fluid mo­tion and shot at the old man.

The old man saw it com­ing and jumped out of the way. The air was briefly full of bul­lets. Bang! Thales went down! Bang bang! Her­a­cli­tus! Bang bang! Par­menides and Zeno. Bang bang bang! The old man was hit in the arm, but still stand­ing. Bang bang bang bang…

It was just the old man and the tall one now. The tall one picked up his gun and fired. Noth­ing hap­pened. Out of bul­lets.

The old man smiled wryly, his six-​shooter still in his hand.

“I know what you’re think­ing. You’re think­ing – did he fire six shots, or only five? Well, you’ve got to ask your­self a ques­tion – do you feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?”

The tall one didn’t budge. “Man is the mea­sure of all things,” said Pro­tago­ras. “If I be­lieve you fired six shots, then by my per­sonal epis­temic stan­dards, you fired six shots.”

The old man didn’t say any­thing.

“You see,” the Sophist con­tin­ued. “Out of all of them, I alone was truly con­sis­tent. They all came up with clever the­o­ries, then aban­doned them when­ever it con­flicted with their self-​interest. I was more hon­est. I just said at the be­gin­ning that my self-​interest de­ter­mined truth, and so never suf­fered any temp­ta­tion to de­part from my po­si­tion.”

The old man took off the ban­dana cov­er­ing his face. “Man may be the mea­sure of all things. But I’ve taken your mea­sure, Pro­tago­ras, and found it want­ing.”

“Socrates?!” the Sophist gasped.

“The only truly con­sis­tent peo­ple are the dead, Pro­tago­ras,” he said – and squeezed the trig­ger.

 

Slate Star Codex Abridged