Value Competition

Creativity in Art, Technology, and Business

Jan Lourie, an artist who combines computer-rearranged, fractalized photos with other images into "metaprints" that sometimes resemble cubist renditions of buildings and sometimes work from other traditions, (in one print that I particularly liked, a Chinese water painting), gave a talk yesterday at Dana Library on creativity.  My RBS colleague Lee Papayanopoulos moderated, and recruited me and my colleagues Faroborz Damanpour and Farrokh Langdana to comment. 

 http://lp.rutgers.edu/metaprints

She focused on a 1937 conference featuring the French mathematicians Henri Poincare and Jacques Hadamard, in which they speculated on a subconscious process by which creativity arises to the surface, juxtaposing that conference with 1930s Freudians, a Herbert Simon paper, John Searle-like questions on whether creativity is involved in certain situations (for example, if someone finds a randomly-generated series of notes that corresponds to a work by Bach and recognizes it as excellent), and questions about the nature of the creativity involved in a business discovery like just-in-time inventory (could it involve an analogy to a surgeon's just-in-time team?). 

Lots of interesting things were said by all; invoking poster's prerogatives, I focus on my own reactions.  Since Jan's presentation fit very well into value competition themes, I was very happy to riff on how one could try to analyze the subconscious creative process alluded to by Hadamard and Poincare in terms of calculative and cultural centers of reason.   I claimed that that combination could be used to analyze what was going on in the J-I-T case (analogical, pattern-oriented reasoning plus calculation) and in Jan's own art (quasi-algorithmic logic ciombined with an overall pattern sense); I closed with an effort to draw in self-other themes a la Freud and their connection to creation.  (The thought I had in mind but didn't express involved the degree to which effective as opposed to ineffective creativity, for all of its association with individuality bursting free from social constraint, also involves a close alignment with certain social norms.)

My day-after question for myself: My remarks implicitly assumed that the same calc-culture, self-other framework that can be used to analyze optimal incentives in business and politics can also be used to analyze optimal incentives in art (and also, though I wasn't making that point, in science and technology).  I think that's true, but I also think that a lit crit analysis of how lit works or a physics analysis of how atoms work will wind up being quite different from a management analysis of how firms work.  The production of truth and beauty may well prove to be quite comparable to the production of the good, but there will also be more than a few differences that any decent future theory will have to have some good takes on.

 

Stich on Morality and Cognitive Science, part 4

Stephen Stich's final lecture on the Nicod website deals with moral intuition: http://www.institutnicod.org/lectures2007_outline.htm 

S focuses on research done by Daniel Kelly on disgust and by Joshua Knobe on intentionality to argue that moral intuition is a poorly designed or "kludgy" system that is not merely frequently dysfunctional in modern conditions as opposed to hunter-gatherer conditions (the Peter Singer position), but was always a patchwork whose results were and are dubious.  Kelly's work suggests that poison avoidance and parasite avoidance responses have been co-opted over the course of the evolution of human ultra-sociality into morally-charged, negative responses to outsiders with different cultural norms and to certain kinds of behavior associated, possibly irrationally, with impurity or contamination.   Knobe's research deals with judgments of intentionality.  He has found that people usually consider predictable harm to the environment resulting from profit-seeking intentional, while finding predictable benefit to the environment from profit-seeking not intended.   Additional Knobe results: An ad using an intimate interracial couple was judged to be intentionally encouraging interracial  sex, while an ad using a potted plant was not judged to be intentionally encouraging office plants; a predictable violation of a Nazi racial purity law resulting from profit-seeking was judged to intentionally violate the law, while a predictable fulfillment of the obnoxious law resulting from profit-seeking was not judged to intentionally fulfill the law.  S asserts that Knobe's work indicates the patchwork and morally questionable nature of judgments of intention, given that subjects viewed the interracial ad and the purity-law violating company as acting intentionally even while rejecting racial separation as a norm.

Although I'm inclined to agree with S about the kludginess of disgust, I have more of a John Mikhail, Universal Moral Grammar sense about judgments of intention following an implicit complex logic analogous to that of language.  For judgments of intention, I don't have a VC line as to a need for opposing sides; my intuition is that high variation across and within individuals between harsh and lenient judgments of intentional conduct is highly useful, but I'm fine with a UMG-type uniformity or near uniformity in judgments of whether certain side effects are intentional.  I think S and Knobe are right that there is no single type of intentionality judgment.  The "double effect" logic of judgments of intention in trolley problems as studied by Mikhail is different from the "internalize the negative externalities of self-interested action" logic I see in Knobe's environmental scenarios; both the trolley and environmental logics are different from the "unmask partisanship" logic I see in his ad scenarios; all three logics are different from the "non-exigent rule violation" logic I see in his purity law scenarios. 

Does any of this have anything to do with the VC framework, as opposed to Mikhail and I both being lawyers and hence protective of the intention-oriented logic of our discipline?   I think so, in the following way.   One line, espoused by Joshua Greene, is that intricate reasoning is the property of utilitarianism, with deontological approaches like Kant's amounting to rationalizations of gut feelings.  In addition to countering my lawyer's intuition that non-rational choice, non-utilitarian reasoning exists and is important, Greene's line is contra-VC, since VC as I currently see it involves a deontological part of the brain in competition with a utilitarian part, with both sides employing reasoning and appealing to self-oriented and other-oriented emotions.

Stich on Morality and Cognitive Science, part 3

In his third Nicod lecture, Stich deals with psychological egoism and altruism: http://www.institutnicod.org/lectures2007_outline.htm 

The basic argument: Some philosophers, including Bentham and Mill, have worried that if people are psychologically egoistic, acting solely on the basis of their own pleasures and pains, cooperation is fragile and always vulnerable to being undermined because of its instrumental rather than intrinsic nature.  One may counter this concern--as Sober and D.S. Wilson do--by taking the position that humans are likely intrinsically rather than extrinsically concerned with the welfare of others, given that intrinsic concern for others is a more reliable, cost-effective mechanism to implant in human beings through evolution than instrumental concern.  Or one may counter the concern about egoism--as Stich and Sripada do--by taking the position that instrumental concern for others related to one's own feelings can be just as firmly rooted as intrinsic concern; S concludes by suggesting that egoistic concern for others associated with emotion is more appealing morally than concern detached from feeling. 

A value competition take: VC relies on the conjecture that human beings are constructed in a way that makes it comparatively easy and low-cost to inculcate in them feelings (which may be either intrinsic and thus altruistic per S or instrumental) that lead them away from promoting their own welfare to promoting that of others (or to inaction), if and only if these "altruistic" feelings or values are combined with "egoistic" or "self-oriented" feelings that lead them to overcome inaction to promote their own welfare.   The underlying argument for why that is so could presumably be put in evolutionary terms a la Sober and Wilson; it can also be put in terms of an economic model of optimal individual decision under uncertainty, with optimality viewed from the perspective of society.   None of this in VC strikes me as in any basic conflict with S, or Sober and Wilson; the difference is that VC is more preoccupied than S or Sober and Wilson appear to be with the value of egoistic feelings that motivate people to work harder than would otherwise be the case.

Stich on Morality and Cognitive Science, part 2

Stich's argument in his Nicod lecture 2 http://www.institutnicod.org/lectures2007_outline.htm :  Whether moral disagreement is fundamental rather than dependent on lack of rationality, impartiality, or information by one or more parties to disagreement is an important philosophical issue.  A body of research (Richard Brandt on Hopi acceptance of children playing with small animals in a way that causes them extreme pain and American aversion to such play; Richard Nisbett on different attitudes and physiological responses to honor-related scenarios in "honor cultures" such as the US South and non-honor cultures such as the US North; Doris et al on more honor-oriented and individual-sacrificing responses among Chinese than among American respondents; Henrich et al on different levels of sharing in economic games in different cultures) suggests that moral disagreements are in fact fundamental.  In any case, whether that empirical evidence is persuasive or not, a plausible evolutionary theory of norm acquisition (Sripada and Stich) relies on the idea that people who grow up in environments in which different norms prevail will make different judgments even under ideal conditions; Saunders' criticism of Sripada and Stich for failing to acknowledge how their model of norm acquisition can support rationally-generated moral judgments is fair enough, but such rationally-generated moral judgments are themselves subject to fundamental disagreement, given different socially-acquired norms.    

I find Stich's affirmative empirical case for fundamental moral disagreement in this lecture considerably less compelling than his critical empirical case for blurring the moral rule-conventional rule distinction in his first lecture.  Apart from that secondary point, my main value competition reaction to his espousal of fundamental moral disagreement is to urge that the empirical and theoretical focus be broadened from cross-cultural fundamental disagreement to intra-cultural and intra-individual fundamental disagreement.  If VC is right, we would expect the latter kinds of fundamental disagreement; in fact useful variation across individuals and groups within a culture, especially a complex one like that of the contemporary US, is likely to be considerably greater than variation across cultures.  That is, the "Americans think it's disgusting to eat dogs and Koreans don't" kind of across-the-board cross-cultural variation, real as it is, likely pertains to matters less significant than topics like adultery as to which we should per VC expect even greater differences in attitudes (referring to actual attitudes, not necessarily to expressed ones) within cultures than across cultures, and should also expect fundamental moral disagreement (likely repressed) within a given individual.

Stich on Morality and Cognitive Science

Extremely interesting videos and powerpoints of four lectures by Rutgers philosopher Stephen Stich are available at the following site:

 http://www.institutnicod.org/lectures2007_outline.htm

(Hat-tip to Will Wilkinson: http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/02/15/morality-a-kludge-of-kludges/#disqus_thread )

Stich's argument in lecture 1, much abridged: Research by Elliot Turiel and other psychologists that apparently showed a strong distinction between moral rules (don't hurt another child) and conventional rules (don't speak in class unless recognized first) has been effectively debunked by later work by Haidt and others that shows some groups (e.g., people in more traditional cultures and political conservatives) are less inclined to view rules as conventional rather than moral than some other groups (e.g., Westerners and political liberals).  Accordingly, the research does not make the case for a clear nomological distinction between moral rules and conventional rules, though S contends that  it may be possible to define how people think of moral rules in terms of a set of culturally familiar examples of rules and a prototype of how transgressions of these rules are dealt with.

A value competition take:  To the extent one adopts a VC view of a fundamental split in human beings between calculative and anti-calculative reason, one should also believe in a basic split (which might or might not reach the level of consciousness) between calculative conventional rules and non-calculative moral rules.   At the same time, VC suggests that the understanding of what is moral and what is conventional can usefully differ not only across cultures but also within a given culture.   Intra-cultural differences are likely not only between people adhering to different political ideologies, as Haidt's work suggests, but also based on other group affiliations (such as tax accountants working for the IRS versus those working for private clients), on individual temperament, and on the internal competition within a given individual between calculative and anti-calculative modes of reason.  Surfaced differences in judgment as to what is moral and what is conventional, though potentially detrimental to the degree they lead to group polarization, can be useful in society's development of an optimal balance between calculative conventional rules and anti-calculative moral rules.

Markets and Market Failures in Religion

Just as liberals tend to worry about economic market failures, conservatives tend to worry about cultural market failures.  One useful way to model that concern--for which I'm indebted to Christopher Young, a Ph.D. candidate in the Rutgers Division of Global Affairs  http://dga.rutgers.edu/about.html whose thesis committee I'm on--goes like this, and is worth reflecting on regardless of one's political predilections:

In a free market for religion in which consumers choose religious products from producers, the usual logic of eonomic exchange will result in producers making the product as cheap and as rewarding as possible to the consumer.  Unfortunately, given a self-interested human nature along the lines insisted upon not only by St. Augustine and much of traditional religion but also by much of neoclassical economics in both its pro-market and pro-regulatory wings, there are substantial negative externalities involved in that process of exchange.  Given a monopoly, religion that is demanding of self and hence socially useful can flourish.  But in a competitive religious market, consumers will not demand religious products that require self-sacrifice on behalf of others and the community. 

The model can be expressed in value competition terms: A useful balance in the basic internal opposition between egoistic and altruistic values can be lost as the result of a decline in social institutions, notably consensually adhered to religion, that support the latter type of values.  Balance can also be lost from a rise in social institutions, such as stock exchanges and for-profit corporations, that support the former type of values.

The model can also be countered in both value competition and rational choice terms.  A VC counter I don't find especially plausible is that social institutions are not important in affecting the balance between egoistic and altruistic values, since an optimal balance is strongly hard-wired in human nature.  A VC (and RC) counter I find more plausible is that religious institutions in a competitive market do as well at inculcating altruistic values as monopoly religious institutions.  The individual consumer of a religious product is buying affiliation with a group, and the consumer's desire to be viewed as a fit member by others in the group will motivate altruistic behavior and values on the part of the consumer. 

A policy implication of the RC and VC models and countermodels of religious markets: Contrary to what one might think, traditionalist conservatives have a significant reason to regulate religious leaders to see that their operations are not actually shams of one kind or another.  Liberals for their own reasons might well agree, making it plausible that at some point in the future there will be a deal struck between the sides for a kind of "SEC for religion," providing that the legal problems posed by the free exercise clause can be managed. 

Junot Diaz and Cathy Park Hong

...read at Rutgers-Newark yesterday: http://mfa.newark.rutgers.edu/writersatnewark0809.htm

A few value competition observations: Both writers rely on a tension between elite "MFA/MLA" language and immigrants' language.  That tension is useful in countering the "tyranny of MFA/MLA-speak" problem for creative writers (which is perhaps especially acute in poetry (Hong's field)), but creates a risk of writing that is a pastiche of MFA/MLA and immigrant argots rather than an effective fusion of them.  I was not convinced that Hong avoided that risk in her poems about Desert, an imaginary Las Vegas-like city, which juxtapose Borges/Calvino allusions and the Korean-American pidgin of the "Tour Guide."  Perhaps as a result of having read his novel previously (or perhaps even because of partiality toward him as a Rutgers graduate), I was convinced by the sparely-written passage that Diaz read of Oscar Wao facing his doom in the Dominican Republic in a field of sugar cane rustling like trifids.