How to spot a rationalization
April 20, 2011 17 Comments
In this week’s video blog, I talk about why it’s important to be able to spot your own rationalizations, and tricks to help you do so:
With a fixed happiness “baseline,” what’s the point in trying?
April 15, 2011 14 Comments
One of the most striking findings from the booming new field of happiness research has been that people have fairly sticky baselines. With only a few exceptions, people tend to return to the same level of happiness over time, regardless of what happens to them — even extremely good events like winning the lottery, or extremely bad events like becoming a paraplegic, only seem to bump people’s reported happiness up or down for a limited time, before they start to drift back to their baseline. (Dan Gilbert is one of the leading happiness researchers right now; I highly recommend his book, Stumbling on Happiness. Here’s a NY Times review of it that discusses some of the relevant issues.)
That leads to a puzzling question: If people seem to end up just as happy when things don’t go as they wished, then why knock ourselves out striving for the outcomes we think will make us the happiest? Why not just shrug and say “que sera, sera,” abandoning our pursuit of our goals, on the reasoning that we’re going to end up roughly as happy no matter how things turn out?
Giving up certainly seems like a bad idea, intuitively. But how do we reconcile that with the evidence? I’ve been able to come up with three possible reasons why it’s still a good idea to keep striving for happiness despite the empirical evidence that it doesn’t make much difference:
(1) It’s possible that the people who say they’re equally happy even though their circumstances seem objectively worse are not, in fact, equally happy. That is, maybe they have lowered their expectations of what maximum happiness is, so that even when they rate their happiness an “8” their scale is actually squished compared to the scale of better-off people who rate their happiness an “8”. Illustration:
So let’s say Person A seems to be worse-off than person B, but they both rate their happiness an 8. Well, person A’s 8 is roughly equivalent to person B’s 5.5, but person A doesn’t know it because she thinks the maximum level of happiness possible is roughly what person B would consider a 7.
(2) It’s also possible that the reason why the people who didn’t get what they wanted are just as happy, on average, as the people who did get what they wanted, is that a lot of people are wanting the wrong things. If you reason more carefully than the average person does about what’s going to make you happy, then it makes sense that when you get what you’re pursuing you actually will be happier than other people are when they get what they were pursuing. For example, I am pretty confident that I wouldn’t be much happier with an income of $200,000 than I would be with an income of $60,000. The evidence suggests that’s true of most people, and yet most people don’t realize it — so there are a lot of people out there making sacrifices for a higher income that isn’t actually making them happier.
(3) There’s a lot of evidence that your happiness immune system (the one that convinces you you’re happy even though you didn’t get what you want) only kicks in when you’re stuck, when you don’t have any chance of changing the situation anymore. For example, in one of Gilbert’s studies, he allowed photography students to choose one of their photos to turn into a framed print. Half of them were given the option to change their mind later; the other half were told their choice was final. The latter group was significantly happier with their choice than the former group.
Or to use another of Gilbert’s examples:
“The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped. This is the difference between dating and marriage, right? I mean, you go out on a date with a guy, and he picks his nose; you don’t go out on another date. You’re married to a guy and he picks his nose? Yeah, he has a heart of gold; don’t touch the fruitcake. Right? You find a way to be happy with what’s happened.”
Knowing you have the option to switch means that you’re always wondering if the grass might be greener on the other side of the hill; having no option to switch means your natural happiness immune system kicks in and reassures you that, no, the grass probably wasn’t greener over there anyway. So if I were to give up striving for any particular outcome, my back-up system might not kick in, because I would always have the uncomfortable knowledge that I could improve things if I tried.
Pulling levers, killing monsters: the lure of unpredictable rewards
April 12, 2011 8 Comments
In an interesting recent TED Talk, video game designer Tom Chatfield explained how his field has honed the art of dispensing rewards at precisely the right rate to keep people hooked on the game. Chatfield used a simple quest as a case study: you kill a monster, you earn a pie, and your goal is to collect 15 pies. Simple, silly, but this is more or less the template used by a huge number of video games, if you boiled them down to their essentials.
As a game designer, you don’t want to give your player a pie every time he kills a monster. That would quickly get boring and the player would lose interest. But you also don’t want to give him pies so rarely that he gives up out of frustration. So what’s the ideal reward-rate? From looking at their data on the behavior of hundreds of millions of players, game designers have figured out that giving people a reward about 25 percent of the time will keep them playing the longest.
(As an interesting side note, Chatfield explains that the ideal reward-rate fluctuates depending on how close the player is to meeting his quota of pies: “When people get to about 13 out of 15 pies, their perception shifts, they start to get a bit bored, a bit testy. They’re not rational about probability. They think this game is unfair. It’s not giving me my last two pies. I’m going to give up.” So to compensate for players’ skewed perception of probabilities which kicks in around 13-out-of-15 pies, game developers often change the reward rate at that point, increasing it from a 25 percent chance of getting a pie after killing a monster to a 75 percent chance.)
You’ve probably heard of this phenomenon in the context of casinos, where the unpredictability of rewards is what keeps people sitting in front of slot machines, feeding in their chips and pulling a lever for hours on end. But it was originally rats, not humans, whose lever-pulling addictions revealed the power of what psychologists and animal trainers now call “variable-ratio schedule reinforcement.” Psychologist B. F. Skinner, in his 1940’s and 50’s experiments on rats, found that rats who were given a food pellet after pulling a lever a fixed number of times would quickly abandon the behavior if the pellets stopped coming on schedule. But rats whose food pellets appeared after a random number of pulls were hooked — they would continue pulling the lever even if it had been ages since they last received a pellet, always hoping that this time, they’d get their reward.
“A variable schedule is far more effective in maintaining behavior than a constant, predictable schedule of reinforcement,” wrote animal trainer Karen Pryor in Don’t Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training. In fact, a variable schedule can actually motivate the animal to perform their task not just longer, but better:
“If I were to give a dolphin a fish every time it jumped, very quickly the jump would become as minimal and perfunctory as the animal could get away with. If I then stopped giving fish, the dolphin would quickly stop jumping. However, once he animal had learned to jump for fish, if I were to reinforce now the first jump, then the third, and so on at random, the behavior would be much more strongly maintained; the unrewarded animal would actually jump more and more often, hoping to hit the lucky number, as it were, and the jumps might even increase in vigor.”
I’ve personally noticed the motivating appeal of unpredictable rewards when dieting. If you step on the scale every day, assuming you’re sticking to your diet, you’ll see an overall downward trend over time. But on any particular day, your weight might not be lower than the previous day’s reading — it might even be slightly higher. That’s because your weight fluctuates naturally from day to day, within a pound or two, depending on whether you’ve eaten recently, whether you’re retaining water, and so on. Even though the expected value of the decline per day is fixed as long as you stick to your diet, on any given day there’s nevertheless some noise, some uncertainty about whether you actually are going to see a lower number than you did the day before — and if you do, you get a little hit of endorphins.
Why is this better than your weight going down by a predictable amount every day? Because if you know for sure what number you’re going to see on the scale tomorrow morning, you start to take that fact for granted, and by the time tomorrow rolls around there’s no jolt of endorphins when you actually do step on the scale. Of course, there would always be the incentive that if you don’t stick to your diet you won’t see that pleasurable decrease on the scale. But in general, the promise of reward is a bigger motivator than the threat of punishment – especially because, if you know for sure you aren’t going to see a lower number on the scale, you may just avoid the scale altogether.
The motivational power of variable rewards may also be the key to explaining a more modern mystery: why I can’t seem to stop checking my damn email every few minutes. Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational, explains:
If you think about it, e-mail is very much like trying to get the pellet rewards. Most of it is junk and the equivalent to pulling the lever and getting nothing in return, but every so often we receive a message that we really want. Maybe it contains good news about a job, a bit of gossip, a note from someone we haven’t heard from in a long time, or some important piece of information. We are so happy to receive the unexpected e-mail (pellet) that we become addicted to checking, hoping for more such surprises. We just keep pressing that lever, over and over again, until we get our reward.
The Perils of Metaphorical Thinking
April 6, 2011 11 Comments
(cross-posted at Rationally Speaking)
For an organ that evolved for practical tasks like avoiding predators, finding food, and navigating social hierarchies, the human brain has turned out to be surprisingly good at abstract reasoning. Who among our Pleistocene ancestors could have dreamed that we would one day be using our brains not to get an apple to fall from a tree, but to figure out what makes the apple fall?
In part, that’s thanks to our capacity for metaphorical thinking. We instinctively graft abstract concepts like “time,” “theories,” and “humor” onto more concrete concepts that are easier to visualize. For example, we talk about time as if it were a physical space we’re traveling through (“We’re approaching the end of the year”), a moving entity (“Time flies”) or as a quantity of some physical good (“We’re running out of time”). Theories get visualized as structures — we talk about building a case, about supporting evidence, and about the foundations of a theory. And one of my favorite metaphors is the one that conceives of humor in terms of physical violence. A funny person “kills” us or “slays” us, witty humor is “sharp,” and what’s the name for the last line of a joke? The “punch” line.
Interestingly, a lot of recent research suggests that these metaphors operate below the level of conscious thought. In one study, participants who were asked to recall a past event leaned slightly backwards, while participants who were asked to anticipate a future event leaned slightly forwards. Other studies have shown that our metaphorical use of temperature to describe people’s demeanors (as in, “He greeted me warmly,” or “He gave me the cold shoulder”) is so deep-seated, we actually conflate the two. When people are asked to recall a time when they were rejected by their peers, and then asked to estimate the temperature of the room they’re sitting in, their average estimate is several degrees colder than that of people who were asked to recall being welcomed by their peers. And in one study that asked participants to read the dossier of an imaginary job applicant and then rate his or her personality, participants who had just been holding a hot object rated the imaginary applicant as being friendlier, compared to participants who had just been holding a cold object.
Another classic example is the “morality is cleanliness” metaphor. We talk about people having a clean record or a tarnished one, about dirty dealings and coming clean. And of course, religions are infused with this metaphor — think of baptism, the washing away of sin. One clever study published in Science in 2006 showed how deep-seated this metaphor is by dividing participants into two groups: those in the first group were asked to reflect on something virtuous they’d done in the past, and those in the second group were asked to reflect on a past moral transgression. Afterwards, each participant was offered a token gift of either a pencil or a package of antiseptic wipes. The result? Those who had been dwelling on their past wrongdoing were twice as likely to ask for the antiseptic wipes.
Associating the future with the forward direction and the past with the backwards direction seems pretty harmless. But cases like “morality equals cleanliness” start to suggest how dangerous metaphorical thinking can be. If people conflate dirtiness with immorality, then the feeling of “Ugh, that’s disgusting” becomes synonymous with the judgment, “That’s immoral.” Which is likely a reason why so many people insist that homosexuality is wrong, even though they can’t come up with any explanation of why it’s harmful — any non-contrived explanation, at least. As the research of cognitive psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown, people asked to defend their purity-based moral judgments reach for logical explanations, but if they’re forced to admit that their explanation has holes, they’ll grope for an alternative one, rather than retracting their initial moral judgment. Logic is merely a fig leaf; disgust is doing all the work.
Although I haven’t seen any studies on it yet, I’m willing to wager that researchers could demonstrate repercussions of another common metaphor: the “argument is war” metaphor, which manifests in the way we talk about “attacking” an idea, “shooting down” arguments, and “defending” a position. Thinking of arguments as battles comes with all sorts of unhelpful baggage. It’s zero-sum, meaning that one person’s gain is necessarily the other’s loss. That precludes any view of the argument as a collaborative effort to find the truth. The war-metaphor also primes us emotionally, stimulating pride, aggression, and the desire to dominate — none of which are conducive to rational discussion.
So far I’ve been discussing implicit metaphors, but explicit metaphors can also lead us astray without us realizing it. We use one thing to metaphorically stand in for another because they share some important property, but then we assume that additional properties of the first thing must also be shared by the second thing. For example, here’s a scientist explaining why complex organisms were traditionally assumed to be more vulnerable to genetic mutations, compared to simpler organisms: “Think of a hammer and a microscope… One is complex, one is simple. If you change the length of an arbitrary component of the system by an inch, for example, you’re more likely to break the microscope than the hammer.”
That’s true, but the vulnerable complexity of a microscope isn’t the only kind of complexity. Some systems become more robust to failure as they become more complex, because of the redundancies that accrue — if one part fails, there are others to compensate. Power grids, for example, are built with more power lines than strictly necessary, so that if one line breaks or becomes overloaded, the power gets rerouted through other lines. Vulnerability isn’t a function of complexity per se, but of redundancy. And just because an organism and a microscope are both complex, doesn’t mean the organism shares the microscope’s low redundancy.
Abstinence-only education is a serial abuser of metaphors. There’s one particularly unlovely classroom demonstration in which the teacher hands out candies to her students with the instructions to chew on them for a minute, then spit them back out and rewrap them. She then collects the rewrapped candies in a box and asks a student if he would like to pick one out and eat it. Disgusted, of course, he declines. The message is clear: no one wants “candy” that’s already been tasted by someone else.
In this case, there’s a similarity between the already-chewed candy and a woman who has had previous lovers: both have already been enjoyed by someone else. It’s evident why the act of enjoying a piece of candy diminishes its value to other people. But it’s not evident why the act of sexually enjoying a woman diminishes her value to other people, and no argument is given. The metaphor simply encourages students to extrapolate that property unquestioningly from candy to women.
I came across a great example of misleading metaphors recently via Julian Sanchez, who was complaining about the way policy discussions are often framed in terms of balancing a scale. People will talk about “striking a balance” between goods like innovation and stability, efficiency and equality, or privacy and security. But the image of two goods on opposite ends of a balance implies that you can’t get more of one without giving up the same amount of the other, and that’s often not true. “In my own area of study, the familiar trope of ‘balancing privacy and security’ is a source of constant frustration to privacy advocates,” Sanchez says, “because while there are clearly sometimes trade-offs between the two, it often seems that the zero-sum rhetoric of ‘balancing’ leads people to view them as always in conflict.”
Sometimes, the problem with a metaphor is simply that it’s taken too literally. More than once in a discussion about the ethics of eating animals, someone has told me, “Plants want to live just like animals do, so how can vegans justify eating plants?” The motivation for this point is obvious: if you’re going to be causing suffering no matter what you eat, then you might as well just eat whatever you want. I thought it was risible when I first heard it, but astonishingly, this argument has appeared in the New York Times twice in recent memory — once in December 2009 (“Sorry Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too”) and then again in March 2011 (“No Face, but Plants Like Life Too”). The articles employ a liberal amount of metaphorical language in describing plants: They “recognize” different wavelengths of light, they “talk” and “listen” to chemical signals, and a plant torn from the ground “struggles to save itself.”
It’s evocative language, but it doesn’t change the fact that plants lack brains and are therefore not capable of actually, non-metaphorically wanting anything. In fact, we use the same sort of language to talk about inanimate objects. Water “wants” to flow downhill. Nature “abhors” a vacuum. A computer “reads” a file and stores it in its “memory.” Since our ancestors’ genetic fitness depended on their sensitivity to each other’s mental states, it feels very natural for us to speak about plants or inanimate objects as if they were agents with desires, wills, and intentions. That’s the kind of thinking we’re built for.
In fact, even the phrase “built for” relies on the implication of a conscious agent doing the building, rather than the unconscious process of evolution. Metaphors are so deeply embedded in our language that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to think without them. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as we keep a firm grasp — metaphorically speaking — on what they really mean.
“They love it when you shuffle the words around.”
April 3, 2011 5 Comments
The TV show “Community” is set among the goof-offs and layabouts of the fictional Greendale Community College, but each individual episode uses that setting to stage a high-concept satire or parody, of anything from conspiracy theories to narcissistic directors to mafia movies. One of their recent episodes satirized political elections — an easy target, admittedly, and one that’s been shot at plenty already, but I thought Community’s take was a particularly fun one, because of the silly heights to which they took things.
Briefly: the school dean has just learned that vice president Joe Biden is coming to visit Greendale that afternoon (as part of his folksy-yet-progressive “Biden’ Time Talkin’ ’bout ‘Teachin'” tour around America’s colleges), and that Biden wants to meet with the student body president. Greendale has none, because no one ever bothered to elect a student government, so the dean decides to hold some last-minute elections.
Annie Edison, the fresh-faced idealist, jumps at the chance to run for student body president so that she can make some much-needed changes around the school, like cleaning up the black mold that’s been taking over the stairwells. In response, cynical Jeff Winger decides to run against her — not because he cares about politics, or about Greendale, but simply to prove to her that politics is a charade.
The campaign scenes will be familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a political debate.
Annie: “I just want to clean up Greendale.
Jeff: “Are you saying Greendale is dirty?”
(audience boos at Annie)
Annie: “Well — of course it’s dirty. Everyone knows that.”
Jeff: “I don’t, Annie. I think it’s clean. I think it’s the cleanest school in the entire country.”
(audience cheers for Jeff)
Eventually, the debate degenerates into two candidates trading catchphrases:
Magnitude: “Pop-pop!”
Leonard: (blows a raspberry)
Magnitude: “Pop-pop!”
Leonard: (blows a raspberry)…etc.
Not a bad representation of the elevated level of political discourse in our country, really.
Anyway, one of the jokes that struck a chord with me was something Jeff says when the candidates are asked what they’ll do if elected.
Jeff: “What will I do if elected? Well, Dean, these people don’t want me to say what I’ll do. (dramatic pause) …They want me to do what I’ll say!”
(cheers from the audience)
Jeff (smugly, to Annie): “They love it when you shuffle the words around.”
I’ve long been suspicious of rhetorical devices. Of course, just because someone uses one, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re trying to pull a fast one on me, but it does instantly put me on my guard. And the swapping-words trick is one of my particular pet peeves. I’ve noticed it not only in speeches, but in idioms in general, which serve as a kind of folk-wisdom for our culture.
You might assume that the fact that certain idioms get passed on time after time might constitute some evidence for them being true — it’s not unreasonable to imagine a kind of Darwinian selection of idioms, in which the accurate idioms survive and get passed on, while the inaccurate ones die out. But the picture becomes more complicated when there are other factors influencing an idiom’s survival besides its accuracy. For example, whether it sounds good.
And there is something about that word-swapping pattern that mimics the sound of wisdom. I can think of a number of other examples off the top of my head — for example, “It isn’t about the size of the dog in the fight. It’s about the size of the fight in the dog!” Or, “Happiness isn’t about being with the one you love. It’s about loving the one you’re with.” But of course, mimicking the sound of wisdom isn’t the same as being true. So it’s helpful to learn to recognize the sound of mimicry, and take an extra hard look at the statements it’s coming from.
In closing, I also have to include this bonus clip of the election coverage from this episode of Community. Troy and Abed provide a pitch-perfect satire of the fast-paced but inane patter of news networks covering the electoral race:
Troy: This election’s becoming a real horse race! According to our polls, the campus is almost evenly divided. Now keep in mind, the margin of error on this thing’s about 98 percent.”
Abed: “Could be higher. We don’t even know how to do margins of error. We talked to two people at a vending machine.”
What’s my ethical system? A disambiguation.
April 1, 2011 13 Comments
Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism
A friend of mine recently asked me what system of ethics I subscribe to. For all that I’ve thought, read, and talked about ethics over the years, I still have trouble answering that question clearly and coherently. This time, at least, I had the useful realization that my difficulty discussing this in the past is partly due to the fact that there are several ways of interpreting the question, each of which leads to a different answer from me.
I’m sure I’ll write a lot more about each of these topics in the future, but for now, I want to share a brief disambiguation. Even if your answers to these questions are different from mine, it still might be helpful for you to break down your own answer along these or similar lines.
“What’s my ethical system,” then, could be interpreted any of the following ways:
1. What ethical system am I most comfortable with intellectually? Act utilitarianism. This system holds that in any given situation, you should do whatever will maximize expected utility over all sentient beings. There are some tricky questions involved (for example, are you maximizing the sum of total utility, or the average? How do you take into account the utility of future beings?). Nevertheless, utility is the only good which I think it makes sense to care about — if you told me “We should try to pursue/avoid result X, even though it won’t affect anyone’s utility,” that wouldn’t make any sense to me intellectually.
2. What ethical system am I most comfortable with emotionally? Some mishmash of act utilitarianism + rights theory. Even though my emotional intuitions usually accord with act utilitarianism, there are some cases in which I simply don’t like the action that act utilitarianism prescribes. For example, I tend to feel that people have a “right” to autonomy even if you knew that they would end up happier if you forced them to make a certain choice. I also tend to feel that people have a “right” to know the truth about certain things, even if you knew that it would make them less happy overall.
But I don’t have any justification for my feelings about those situations, nor do I think any such justification exists — I don’t think the concept of a “right” makes any sense except as a convention we all choose to respect. So I’m still trying to figure out how to reconcile my strong overall preference for act utilitarianism with my strong emotional inclination to discard it in cases like these.
3. What ethical system do I think is “correct?” None. I’m pretty much an error theorist when it comes to ethics, which means that I think ethical claims (e.g., “Causing gratuitous suffering is wrong”) can’t be said to be true or false the way empirical claims (e.g., “Poisoning the well will cause gratuitous suffering”) can. That doesn’t imply that ethical claims are entirely meaningless. Clearly ethical claims can express emotions like disgust and outrage, and a kind of prescriptivism, i.e., “Don’t do X”.
But in my experience, people making ethical claims tend to also believe they are making a factual claim about a property (“wrongness”) that some act has, and that’s where the “error” in “error theory” comes in — I don’t think that properties of rightness and wrongness exist, objectively, in the world. The explanation that most closely matches my views on this is J. L. Mackie’s, laid out in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. So the preferences I laid out in #1 and #2 are just that — preferences.
4. What ethical system do I actually follow on a day-to-day basis? Some mishmash of #2 + weakness of will + selective apathy + social pressures and habits. I’m not perfect, even by the standards of the system of ethics I myself have chosen. There are plenty of relatively easy things I could be doing to reduce suffering in the world which I am not doing, mainly out of inertia and the knowledge that society won’t judge me harshly for not doing them. I can and intend to remedy this gap, to some extent, but there’s no clear answer to the question of how high a standard to hold oneself to.
The mirror paradox
March 31, 2011 26 Comments
Have you ever wondered why mirrors flip your image horizontally, but not vertically? It’s one of those curious things that doesn’t actually seem curious at first — it seems perfectly natural. But that’s simply because we’re so used to it. Once you reflect on it (sorry!), it becomes much less obvious why that’s the case.
After all, a mirror doesn’t know or care which way is “up” — in fact, there is no such thing as “up” built into the world. It’s just a term we have for a direction pointing away from some plane we’ve designated as the “ground,” and we only bother to define these concepts because we humans happen to be very concerned with gravity and its effects on us. The light bouncing off of a mirror, one assumes, has no such concerns — it could care less about our concepts of verticality and horizontality. But then why is there this asymmetry in the way a mirror reflects our image, turning us around left-to-right but not top-to-bottom?
The first step towards an answer is to realize that the question is flawed. The mirror doesn’t actually reverse your image either left-to-right or top-to-bottom — it reverses your image front-to-back, that is, along the axis perpendicular to the mirror. Imagine you had a hollow Halloween mask, and you turned it inside out. That’s exactly what a mirror does: it “turns you inside out,” so that you’re facing the opposite direction without having been rotated.
But if the mirror is just flipping our image front to back, why does it look like we’re being flipped left to right? It’s because the left and right sides of our bodies are almost identical. So the inside-out person you see in the mirror looks a lot like what you would see if someone created a clone of your body and rotated it 180 degrees so it was facing you. That’s why you have the strong feeling that the mirror is rotating you in the horizontal plane, even though it’s actually just turning you inside out.
The illusion wouldn’t be nearly as strong if our bodies didn’t have left-right symmetry. Let’s say you had a tentacle in place of your right arm. Then your mirror image wouldn’t look like a 180-degree rotation of yourself, because the tentacle would be on the wrong side. The mirror’s ability to make us feel like an image has been turned around only works with a symmetrical axis.
Another experiment you can do to drive this point home is to try lying down on the floor, on your left side, facing a mirror. Now your mirror-image will be lying on his right side with his left side on top, while you’re lying on your left side with your right side on top, creating the illusion that the mirror is flipping your image vertically, as opposed to when you were standing in front of the mirror and it looked like your image was being flipped horizontally. This proves that the nature of the illusion is different than we’d originally thought: it’s not that the mirror seems to rotate you horizontally rather than vertically, but that the mirror seems to rotate you around your symmetrical axis rather than your asymmetrical axis.
Four ways to define “rational”
March 29, 2011 11 Comments
In this week’s video, I explain what I mean by “rational,” and discuss some of the other meanings that people attribute to this often-ambiguous word.
Funding for which arts?
March 24, 2011 7 Comments
Jesse’s recent post, about how words like “art” don’t have universally agreed-upon, precisely-defined meanings, reminded me of a book I just read by one of my favorite bloggers, economist Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. He’s gotten a lot of media and internet attention in the past couple of months for his e-book The Great Stagnation, but the one I’m referring to is an older volume called Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding.
Good and Plenty makes the case that although the U.S. government ostensibly spends little on arts funding, compared to Europe for example, we also have huge de facto, indirect subsidies of art through copyright law and tax policies that encourage private giving. Those indirect subsidies are actually much more conducive to a thriving arts sector than Europe’s centralized funding, Cowen argues.
One of the many things I like about Cowen is his cheeky but serious way of challenging the ostensible reasons people have for their beliefs, or societies have for their institutions or laws. (This is something his friend and colleague Robin Hanson does even more persistently, by the way, over at another of my favorite blogs, Overcoming Bias.) The form of the argument is basically: You claim that the reason you do Y is because of X. But if you really believed X were the case, you would also do Z, which you don’t.
So in addition to the question of how we fund art, Cowen also asks why we’ve chosen to define “art” (for funding purposes, at least) to include certain things but not others. For example:
- What about fashion? Clothing design exhibits beauty and creativity just like sculpture, and a beautiful piece of clothing arguably has higher positive externalities than a beautiful sculpture (because the owner wears it in public, other people get to appreciate its beauty, unlike a privately owned sculpture which sits at home).
- What about sports? Many sports showcase stunning displays of grace and power, just like dance. And sports games, and seasons, have a lot in common with drama: protagonists, antagonists, triumph and defeat. “The drama in sports, of course, is real rather than staged, but presumably this should contribute to its aesthetic merit,” Cowen says.
- What about toys? “Most young children are deeply concerned with matters aesthetic,” Cowen says. “They are fascinated by colors, shapes, sounds, and textures… The toy presents the child with an aesthetic package, so to speak, which the child either loves or rejects. When children they love a toy, they are truly passionate about enjoying its aesthetic qualities.”
Yet our government doesn’t subsidize fashion, or toys, or sports (at least not for artistic reasons; local governments may fund stadiums and so on , but that’s for other reasons, like economic development). So that would seem to cast doubt on the reason people generally give to justify funding the arts — that they provide people with enjoyable and moving aesthetic experiences — since those reasons should also suffice to justify subsidizing things like sports and fashion and toys, which we don’t.
Of course, the big differences between the traditional arts and Cowen’s examples are that the former have (1) more cachet, historically, and (2) less commercial viability. But we still have to explain why we should spend the money to prop up the traditional arts when there are other sources of aesthetic enjoyment that don’t require any propping.
This is what happens when you fish for a pep talk from a mathematician
March 24, 2011 1 Comment
ME (whining at being unable to accomplish something): “Ugh, I feel so useless and pointless.”
MATHEMATICIAN: “Aw, you’re not pointless! You have lots of points. An infinite number, in fact.”
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