Response to John Carter's Reponse to My Response to John Carter's "The Truth Hurts"

I think that's the right number of responses

J.C.’s original post is here. His response to my comment (along with my comment) is here.

Beginning new content…. now.

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Maybe.

(I'm an economist, a pretty good one I like to think, so that's about as sure as I can be here :P)

There are two relevant variables here, however, cost (pain) and benefit. I think your analysis is holding benefits fixed, and fairly high, and focusing on the costs alone. That is a pretty common mistake, even among economists I am sad to say, but a mistake none the less. Let's consider the genie and the ambulatory adipose acrolith.

Sure, when the cost is zero, having a more fit and toned body is better. So if the only wish the genie grants (I am here imagining blue Richard Simmons emerging from the lamp) is "better physical health", sure that's what wish for. If there were other options, probably not so much; not having diabetes might be higher on the list for our subject. But if costs are zero, that means opportunity costs must be zero, i.e. no other wish options. The situation is literally "all else being equal, would you like to stay fat or have a skinny body for as long as you can maintain it?"

That tells you very little about how much benefit or value our subject assigns to "fit and healthy body". It just tells you that it is positive and nonzero. That is not nothing, but honestly it is pretty close.

Now, a normal economist¹* would suggest the genie then do a bidding operation to see how much our subject is willing to pay to become skinny. At some point you get X dollars, presumably below the price for liposuction, and that's the value our subject assigns.

That might be surprisingly low, however. If our subject is say 75, how much is a hot body worth? How long can they keep it? How many hips are they going to shatter using it? There are health benefits to being thin, and definitely improvements over being super obese, but not infinite benefits, and they might not matter much marginally.

Perhaps more relevant to applying this analogy to reality, one has to ask "Wait... do I get my money back if the genie fails to make me thin?" You might suddenly want to see if this strange little blue man in nylon shorts and a red afro can actually change someone's body shape in a meaningful way before you start peeling off 20's. The expected value of your payment is what matters, and if you are not 100% sure your money is going to buy you a bangin' booty, you are going to be willing to pay less to find out.

So where are we? Well, not everyone values everything the same amount, even if they all value them at some positive amount. For a given price (or pain level) some people will take the deal and some won't, depending on how they value the outcome. Regardless of what some young tart says, there are definitely things that taste every bit as good as skinny feels, especially as you get older and looking sexy is less valuable. Once you introduce uncertainty around the actual outcomes, paying that price seems less desirable still. Even holding the pain and aversion to pain constant.

When it comes to truth, it gets worse. Knowing the truth might actually have a net negative value, even beyond the cost of acquiring it. See Cassandra for the extreme version, but consider the actual functional value of knowing, say, that the '69 moon landing was faked. Not only was there a cost of reconsidering everything you thought you knew, and enduring the scorn of all you tell about it, being called all the nasty names, etc. but then… what the hell do you do with that information? How does it benefit you in the slightest? If anything, it makes you more miserable, especially if the other people who believe the landings were fake are wrong about why. Nothing makes a person more miserable than the feeling that everyone on their team is a moron that makes them look bad².

Now, maybe the knowledge of fake celestial travels makes you question all sorts of things, and you discover lots of truths, and eventually you realize that miserable way things work beneath the layer upon layer of odious lies and vile falsehoods. Then what? If you are alone, the answer might just be “end thyself.” If you can find other people who agree, and who care about the truth for itself and what it can do for humanity, maybe you can get enough together and vote for change, overthrow a government, or just move the hell out to some isolated place and live together away from all the crazies as much as possible.

The³ downside is that all that requires each person to act in ways that are negative benefit if other people don’t too. You have a public goods problem, where so long as everyone cares about truth truth is useful, but if only one or two care it is a net loss. So you have to get a lot of people essentially providing a good to everyone else for free at a loss to themselves until you have enough momentum for it to be self sustaining.

That does happen! Not terribly infrequently, really, but it is a bit tough to get going when all the pressure pushes the other way. There is a lot of pressure too, because almost everything you can know the truth about is useless. I have argued before⁴, that one of the big downsides of (democratic) politics is that it requires us to have an opinion on many issues that do not affect us at all.

In effect, it creates anew the problem that markets solve through division of knowledge: having to know more than a human can learn to deal with life. Markets say “You don’t need to know how to make the compute you are writing on, you just need to know how to do something well enough that you can trade for a compute someone else made.” Politics say “We are voting on whether or not to allow foreign ships to dredge US ports and rivers. You know what that is, the costs and benefits, and all that, right? RIGHT?!” We get by through trusting our elected officials… for all that’s worth.

So, with all the uncertainty of what is true, and whether knowing what is true will actually help us, is it really that surprising that people don’t care to find out? That they happy jump on the bandwagon and cheer along as the current thing gets eaten by lions? Does it really have to do only with the cost of acquiring knowledge and truth as opposed to not knowing what to do with it once you have it?

Now, am I saying this is good or desirable behavior? No, not at all. We should care about truth, justice, and something that isn’t “The American Way!” that I can’t think of because I dislike Superman but goddamn that has been seared into my brain. We shouldn’t be surprised that it obtains, however, because most humans are not built to care about vast truths beyond what their tribe likes and how they are going to get food, water and shelter for their family. Those of us that sit, or jog, around thinking “Yea, that’s nice… but is it true?” are the very weird ones, every bit as weird as the people who get up before the ass crack of dawn to go to the gym.

We don’t want to misdiagnose this, because misdiagnosing the problem has consequences beyond not being able to persuade people. It changes the landscape of what is a possible way to structure society. We in the USA became rather too enamored of our experts, science and democracy and gave the government way too much power over our lives. Instead of being allowed to live our lives and make decisions primarily about the things around us while ignoring the distant and unmanipulable, we decided nothing was out of our reach and we should start to elect people to fix everything. The problem was the subsequent choice: learn enough about everything so that we can intelligently choose the right experts and government officials to make decisions for us, or continue to ignore everything and choose based on warm fuzzy feels while letting the officials make whatever choices they feel like.

Guess which one we picked.

Of course we did, because we as a species are incapable of choosing differently in that situation. As a result we are ruled by conformists and the sociopaths who punish them for stepping out of line.

The solution to the big problem is not to make people more tolerant to discomfort and thus willing to learn, because they won’t be willing or able to learn as much as they need anyway. The solution is to take away the government power that voting citizens are unable to control at the best of times, and periodically employ in homicidal fits like a monkey with a minigun.

You aren’t going to improve the monkey’s aim, even if you carefully explain he is right handed by left eye dominant. He just isn’t capable. The trouble is that now the monkey has the damned gun, and getting it away is going to be a neat trick. It might have to wait till after he has perforated everyone including himself, at which point we just hope some future generation sees the mess and says “Wow… nothing bigger than a .22 for monkeys from now on!”

1. I say normal economist because, well, who the hell thinks like that?

2. Ok, maybe nothing is a bit of a stretch, but still.

3. Hah… THE….

4. I thought in my piece about how politics is evil, but apparently not.