Value Competition

Kahan and Our Town: Thoughts on Making Science Wars Gentler

As one who for whatever reasons gets very bothered by what comes across to me as poor science driven by ideology I'm a big fan of Dan Kahan, whose work--though hardly without its own ideological overtones--strikes as a really excellent effort to (among other things) sympathetically explore motivated reasoning by both conservatives and liberals, as explored in this Chris Mooney post on a recent Kahan study on climate change.

What follow are a few brief Kahan-inspired thoughts on making "science wars" over the use and misuse of scientific analysis less hostile and more constructive.  The context is my own community, in which I've run for the school board in 2006, and will be running again in 2012.  In both cycles, science-related conflicts have been one feature of the local landscape.  One purpose of the reflections is to reflect on my emotions and what has inflamed them and calmed them, with the hope that doing so may be useful at least for myself as I prepare to enter the electoral lists again.

The first thought is directed at those of us who find themselves/ourselves agitated by what they/we perceive as biased, flawed use of science by the other side: If at all possible, do your own independent, separate analysis on the same or a different issue, rather than simply criticizing the other side.  Having done so, you are much less likely, I think, to be locked into a defensive, "the other side is grossly misusing science" mindset.

A story as to how that can work from my past experience: There was an issue in 2005-2006 over the effectiveness of the school district's efforts to detect and remove non-resident students.  I was unhappy about claims that a responsible analysis of data would show there was not a problem of any real magnitude.  In classic "science warrior" fashion, I couched my objection as itself grounded in science: I didn't necessarily believe there was a big problem, but I strongly objected to what I perceived as misuse of science to show there was not one.  What made me less agitated was the following: A town official who wanted to pass an anti-fraud ordinance persuaded me to do my own study suggesting there could be a substantial number of non-resident students in the system.  Through feeling qualms at the leaps, the uncertainties, and the arguable unfairness of my own study, I became less agitated and righteous in my feelings.  Even as I campaigned against him, I found myself respecting the incumbent board member who had carried out the analysis that had originally driven me around the bend.

The second thought is for those of us whose scientific analysis is being emotionally criticized by some for defects and for failing to respect proper boundaries between facts and values: Whether or not the critics come up with their own alternative analyses as suggested above, consider doing your/our own alternative study, either publicly or for oneself and one's team.  Such a study could be highly useful for oneself or members of one's team to the extent we/they are too full of righteous passion tied up in defensiveness about being criticized by the other side. 

The issue I have in mind: There is a current "science wars" stir in my town related to data analyses of test scores before and after a partial deleveling in one middle school grade and to a study of college readiness that used grades and level placements as indicators of readiness.  The study strongly bothered people concerned about the "correlation does not equal causation" point that putting students in higher levels (or deleveling), much less giving them higher grades, is not shown to be good policy by the data. 

I feel myself to be responsible for the controversial studies as an incumbent board member.  I think there is a good case that all of us who, whatever the nuances of our feelings, were not deeply bothered by the work as it was generated internally and then presented publicly--for me, for my board colleagues, and our district administration--not to say it is the responsibility of the other side that was greatly agitated by the work to come up with their own analyses.   Rather, I believe those of us on the inside should strongly consider doing our own independent studies.   That would not necessarily be a corporate project--board member A may feel differently from board member B, who in turn feels differently from administration--which leads to its own tricky problems.  But it does make sense, I believe, for those of us who are insiders to reflect as individuals or with others by coming up with our own alternative analyses of what we did originally.

A final optimistic thought on the science wars writ large and writ small: For all the unpleasantness of the politically-charged passions that may arise, lucky is the country and the town in which people's energies are channeled into doing science and questioning it.   I've spoken with a church friend about her experience on a school board in a nearby community in which value-laden science wars are absent and the everyday reality is one of patronage and perks.  Compared to what she experiences as a board member, I feel extremely lucky to be in a community where civic-minded people with strong moral and political values and a strong commitment to scientific analysis--people like the board member I described running against in 2006, the administrators who did the college readiness and effects of deleveling studies, and a community member who criticized those studies and who is now joining me in my 2012 run for the board--are a major part of the scene.  

One may hope for a more forgiving, gentler way to discuss the ties that bind science, ethics, and politics.   One may also be very grateful to the other side for its passions, its skills, and for being different from oneself and in doing so making oneself better.  

 

 

 

Carol Gilligan at Paduano: Reflections on the Possible Darwinian Logics of Gendered Ethics of Care and Duty

After just writing a conference paper the other week on five forms of selective altruism that can be related to the work of Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, Adam Smith, and Carol Gilligan, it was a very pleasant surprise to learn that Gilligan was coming to the Paduano seminar.  (The others on my list were unavailable, as one of the seminar organizers quipped to me.)

I thoroughly enjoyed her presentation and the questions yesterday afternoon.  I felt myself some distance closer to appreciating rather than being disturbed by the cross-currents of moral passion and moral skepticism that run through modern politics and science and that I felt both in Gilligan (advocating an ethic of care that simultaneously is its own form of passionate moralism and a form of questioning passionate moralism) and in her questioners (e.g., a man asking whether the ethic of care properly understood suggests opposition to abortion, a woman asking about early-appearing differences between boys and girls). 

CG's account of a gendered split, coming at a young age for boys and at adolescence for girls, between an ethic of care and an ethic of rights-duties made me wonder about various Darwinian stories one could tell about the split and their relative merits...

Story 1: "The split is in some key ways advantageous for men.  Allowing that it has serious negative psychic and practical repercussions for them, it also gives them the figurative and all too often the literal whip hand in human affairs.  For women, for children, and for society, on the other hand, the consequences of the split are clearly negative, even it contributes to reproductive success for people who follow the approved gender scripts.  The question is whether we can join together to overcome a painful split that in the end is harmful for all--very much including men--in favor of a better way of life that liberates people to live in plurality and that elevates democracy over patriarchy."

Story 2: "The split is against our interests as individuals.  We would be richer, fuller, happer people if we did not find ourselves occupying boy-man rights-duties roles or girl-woman care-nurturing roles.  But it is important in raising children to have a friendly opposition between the two ethics.  Just as the opposition between liberals and conservatives makes modern democracies work, the opposition between a male ethic of duty and a female ethic of care has made human child-rearing work for millennia.  The split, painful as it is, is in the interests of children and of society.  One can improve how the split plays out in people's lives, but one needs to respect its underlying logic for our children and our species even as one laments its limiting effects on men and women as individuals."

Story 3: "The split and its associated gender hierarchy is desirable in Darwinian reproductive terms for parents, children, and society as a whole.  More than that, it makes sense at psychic and practical levels.  In order to resolve basic issues of leadership in as effective a way as possible, it makes sense to have people perform their core activities in gender-mized groups--families--with an "A" gender in the family that is the default leader though not necessarily the leader in a given case and a "B" gender that is the default follower though not in all cases.   Making gender hierarchy less rigid may be very useful, but the fundamental idea of gender hierarchy makes sense in evolutionary and practical terms, disturbing as it also is to part of our moral sensibilities."

Story 1 is more or less Gilligan's; Story 2 is what I was spinning out as I was listening to her; Story 3 is one that I just spun out. 

I'll forbear comment on the normative merits and demerits of the stories in favor of a note or two on their scientific issues.  For Story 2, there is an interesting theoretical-practical issue as to how evolution has succeeded in getting us to overcome our individual inclinations toward union in the interest of a split that helps the collective; my quick take is that the problem is not such a big one, since Story 2 relies on an effect on one's offspring that fits fine into mainstream Darwinian reasoning.  For Story 1, the reliance on a split between what works in Darwinian terms and what is actually good for individuals and the species strikes me as fine in theoretical terms.   For Story 3, there is an issue with how the collective benefit of clear leadership works its will on the assigned followers; that doesn't seem like a big problem, though, given a linkage in followers' and leaders' reproductive success through families.  

In other words, all three stories strike me as fine in Darwinian terms, much as they all may reasonably raise hackles for other reasons.  Person A may be bothered by a tendency toward complacency and resignation in Story 2, while Person C worries about demonizing and lack of common sense in Story 1, and Person B is annoyed by what feels like chauvinist piggery in Story 3.  All fair enough--but on the face of it I don't see a basis for A, B, or C trashing their disfavored stories as poor science.

 

 

Pinker's New Book

The Better Angels of Our Nature is excellent.  Three reasons why:

1) Pinker's ability to combine his broad argument about the ongoing pacification of the species with telling details is admirable.  For an example of the latter, consider Figure 7-14 on p. 411, showing the overall decline in homicides of intimate partners in the US from 1976 to 2005, along with a much sharper decline in male than female victims, and P's concise and reasonable explanation of the graph on pp. 411-412;

2) P's defiance of the norm that one argues by poor-mouthing the situation of one's own side is refreshing.  It's nice to read a book that decisively rejects the "Things should be at least 50-50 our way, and we've got much less than 50 so give us more!" style in favor of "Peace and reason are winning, and that's wonderful!";

3) Related to #2: P's confidence reinforces the case for the humanitarian values he espouses: Why torture or execute if the bad guys are pathetic figures on the wrong side of history?  Why not be tolerant, mellow, and reasonable?   Why not, indeed?

Pinker's book is as good as it is partly because it should cause readers of almost all persuasions to disagree with at least parts of it.  Three things I disagree with:

1) P suggests that the good Enlightenment of Locke, Hume, the American Revolution, Kant, etc.  embodies the true spirit of modernity and that bad phenomena that have occurred over the last few hundred years such as the Terror, Marxism, Communism, and fascism are atavistic in one way or another and contrary to a basically benign ethos of modernity.   I disagree.  Ideology that is rationalizing as well as demonizing seems to me much more of a distinctive problem of modernity than an aberration from modernity.  After reading P, I remain a believer that modernity as it has developed over the past few centuries involves (among other things) a strong ratcheting-up of ideological moralism that fuses the traditional groupishness of human beings with a rationalized "our values are better than yours" stance.  That rationalized groupish ideological moralism can be found, it seems to me, in the good groups as well as the bad groups of modernity, in classical liberals as well as fascists, in liberals and conservatives as well as Marxists, ultra-nationalists, and Communists.   A view of modernity as Faustian seems to me right; our modern ratcheting up of moralism to include rationalized rather than supernatural ideological value systems brings us a great deal of good in both practical and moral terms--as P very nicely chronicles--but it also risks much.  

2)  P implies--to me at least--that enlightenment can be universal at some point.  I disagree.  I believe that even if the whole world becomes Sweden and Sweden itself becomes the most advanced liberal suburbs of Stockholm, there will still be more disciplined and reasonable people and less disciplined and reasonable people in all countries; that members of certain socially salient groups, such as middle class people and working class people, will on the average be closer to or further away from the rule of reason and nonviolence; and that those who are more peaceful and reasonable will owe that desirable state partly to a group-based sense of moral superiority to their less disciplined and reasonable compatriots.  

3)  P implies--to me at least--that the right substitute for theistic religion is a faith in humanitarian values and human enlightenment over time.   I disagree.  As a politics, belief in humanitarian values and human progress is an agenda I'm very happy to subscribe to.  As a modern religion, though,I would plump instead for a yin-yang faith in opposites and in competing and complementary values in oneself, society, and the cosmos.  If a modern religion of progress and humanity is identified with the political left or center-left, it is too sectarian and too prone to its own demonizing moralism.  If it is identified with three cars in every garage and everyone a college grad, it is too materialistic and mundane to be satisfactory as a religion, much as it may be an estimable practical politics.  If it is identified with the feats of Darwin, James Joyce, Steve Jobs, and other modern gods it is too elitist, too little in touch with the part of the religious impulse that raises up the lowly and humbles the exalted. 

 

 

Was Obama Helped or Hurt by Race-Based Voting in 2008?: What Science Can and Cannot Say, Part 2

Three suggestions on how one might try to actually answer the above question, as opposed to providing red (or blue) meat for ideological warriors:

1.  In the spirit of Nate Silver, look at 2008 polling comparing Obama vs. a generic Republican to Hillary vs. a generic Republican.  As opposed to the high-tech "science porn" of the paper cited in the previous post, the low-tech approach of doing head-to-head polling comparisons has considerable merit as a way to try to answer the underlying question.  (One issue: In my view, both Obama and Clinton were better than average Dem. candidates relative to the Kerry/Gore/Dukakis/Mondale average or below average Dem. candidate.  There is thus a problem with priors on candidate quality driving one's results to some degree; the problem of priors is not nearly as bad, though, with polling compared to the paper's technique, where the reader's priors drive everything.)   

2.  Use demographics and other factors to claim in advance (no peeking at the results first!) that certain states, counties, or regions are logical baselines for an average swing from 2004 to 2008, and then look at whether the overall swing was bigger or smaller than in these "neutral" areas.   For example: my state of NJ is prima facie not a bad choice for that purpose, given its fairly nationally representative proportions of blacks and Latinos and lack of strong home state effects in 2004 and 2008; of course it also has some issues (a pretty strong 2000-2004 shift to the Republicans presumably related to 9/11 would be expected to lead to some Dem. bounceback in 2008 regardless of the candidate; the fairly deep blue quality of NJ makes Dem. gains harder all else equal; the ultra-dense quality of the state might go along with a pro-diversity, anti-racism vote being especially strong; the relatively high level of racist Google searches in the state might lead one to guess the other way).   The NJ Kerry and Obama percentages in 2004 and 2008 (just looked them up):  53.6 and 57.3--up 3.7.  The national Democratic percentages: 48.3 and 52.9--up 4.6.  So if NJ is a good "neutral" baseline, race-based voting helped Obama slightly, by the about 1 point difference between the larger national Dem. bump and the smaller NJ bump.  Intuitively, that feels about right to me.  (It would be interesting for someone (not me!) to try to develop a "neutral baseline" analysis in this setting or another one...perhaps our friends in poli sci are already on this particular case.)

3.  Try to tease out a high-tech answer by exploring the shape of the race-based voting function.  One might be able to interpret the data to support a conclusion that the function is not linear but parabolic, with high racism areas much more anti-Obama and high anti-racism areas somewhat more pro-Obama, or the reverse, with the function being hyperbolic rather than parabolic.  One might  then maneuver to make an argument that the shape of the function plus the number of areas in the different categories warrants a conclusion that Obama was helped or hurt by race-based voting.  I defer to those with better tech skills than my own, but I'm dubious this will work without making some assumptions about a baseline, as in #2 above.

Was Obama Helped or Hurt by Race-Based Voting in 2008?: What Science Can and Cannot Say

        A recent paper by a Harvard Ph.D. student illustrates how science can fail to answer the question (hat tip: Tyler Cowen).   The paper's method: Use Google searches using the N-word as a proxy for racism; areas with the highest level of such searches (e.g., West Virginia) are about 5 points less for Obama than areas with the lowest level of such searches (e.g., Laredo, TX) when other factors are controlled for; conclude, "The estimates imply that racial animus in the United States cost Obama three to five percentage points in the national popular vote in the 2008 election."

     Hardly.  100% of the work of the conclusion is based on one's priors; the method has no value whatsover in determining whether Obama was helped or hurt in 2008 by race-based voting.  The author may be correct; so may a reader who thinks that Obama was helped overall by race-based voting from voters in places like the Virginia and North Carolina suburbs, places considerably more important than West Virginia where he was likely hurt.

        Since this is an academic blog rather than a rant-blog, I will not rant here.  I will instead say that the paper just noted is a good example of how science can be applied in a way that amounts to porn for red advocates, blue advocates, and those like myself who are emotional about the misuse of science as a tool for ideological advocacy.

Madison versus Marx

A self-criticism: Over the past years that I've worked on trying to develop a better understanding of how value competition can enhance and detract from social welfare, I've been motivated in considerable part by a desire to vindicate Madison over Marx.  That is, it seems to me that the Madisonian emphasis on avoiding the control of any one faction is right and the Marxist emphasis on working class (or any class) solidarity and victory is wrong.  Normatively, I may be right or I may be wrong.   But scientifically, my sense is that a good modeling of politics will model the failure as well as the success of Madisonian fragmentation and the success as well as the failure of Marxist solidarity.  More specifically, it now seems to me that the model of altruistic and competitive preferences that I've developed to analyze optimal and suboptimal outcomes is in formal terms equally compatible with a Marxist and a Madisonian interpretation.  A Madisonian read of the model is that if group-opposing/dissenting/altruistic values are held by less than 50% of the group and are weaker than group-supporting/egoistic values, those altruistic values are worth strengthening.  That strikes me as very likely the case most of the time in the real world, but the issue is an empirical one; the formal model does not equate with Madison being right.  A Marxist read of the model is that if group-supporting/competitive values are held by less than 50% of the group and are weaker than participation costs, these competitive values are worth strengthening.  Though my intuition is that unduly weak competitive values are probably a less pervasive problem than unduly weak altruistic values, that is only an empirical guess; logically, the model is just as compatible with Marx as with Madison. 

Whether or not my model of optimal political outcomes is a good one, my intuition is that a good model of politics (or family of models) will have the property of being formally compatible with both a pro-fragmentation and a pro-solidarity normative perspective.   In other words, good political modeling I believe will be parallel to economic modeling of market success and failure through supply-demand curves, the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Coase Theorem, etc.; the models, at least taken together, do not tilt as a formal matter in a pro-market or anti-market direction but are interpretable in both ways.

Robert Wright's Next Book

The Evolution of God is very good as a critical but sympathetic guide to the Abrahamic religions and their scriptures.  I would like to see Wright's next book be something that the current one isn't, namely an argument for God as a plausible scientific hypothesis.  That hypothetical book would challenge those of us who are secular in a way that his current book and related NYT op-ed don't, as Daniel Dennett points out in today's letters.  

How might that work?   In the book and the op-ed, Wright refers to the possibility that a divine presence arranged the algorithms of natural selection, presumably including the "non-zero-sumness" of reciprocal cooperation that Wright rightly regards as a central feature of the way history and evolution work.  My skeptical response is, "How could it be any different?"  That is, if the algorithms of natural selection, including the logic of reciprocal cooperation, have to be what they are regardless of the universe you're in, I don't see a case based for God based on those algorithms.  But if I'm persuaded that non-zero-sumness is like physical constants that could be anything but have to be just so for matter to coagulate as it actually does, then an advocate for God as a plausible hypothesis has an "isn't it amazing that things are so neatly arranged morally as well as practically in our universe" argument that a good scientific Bayesian has to engage.

Personally, I'm a skeptic about the "isn't the moral order wondrous" argument; my prior is that the algorithms of natural selection and non-zero-sumness--and the humbler algorithms of value competition that I try to tease out--are universe-invariant like math, not universe-variant like physics.  But I'm less than confident about that prior, and would love to read a book by Wright that tries to persuade me that I'm wrong.

Live Long and Prosper?

Nicholas Wade's NYT article on the prospects for life-extending drugs made me wonder about a passing claim in the article that evolutionary biologists are skeptical on theoretical grounds about life extension.  My outsider's sense of natural selection leads me the other way; life extension seems like an area in which there could indeed be twenty-dollar bills on the ground.  A mutation that produced long life without a proportional increase in reproduction would be selected against, and a mutation that produced shorter life with more children per year would be selected for, all else equal.  If in the days of old there were indeed elves living for thousands of years or Methuselahs living for 969 years, a newly-rising race of shorter-lived men would outcompete the long-lived group, which is one way to interpret Tolkien, the Bible, and other myths of a lost golden age.   

Of course, it's possible that the individual boon of life extension would be a curse for society, with stagnant oldsters dominating everything and little new getting done.  I'm fairly optimistic on that score.  Excessive leverage seems to me a bigger problem with human civilization than insufficient leverage, and a society of longer-lived people seems like a better bet to deal with risk in a way that will sustain the society than a society of shorter-lived people.   If that's right, the results of biological evolution can be improved upon at the social as well as the individual level.

If biological evolution leaves plenty of twenty-dollar bills lying around for individuals and perfectly competitive economic markets leave none, I'd say value competition is in between.   Cultural watchmakers aren't as blind as Darwinian ones, but they aren't as sharp-eyed as Rolex.

Value Competition and the Dichotomy between the Good and the True

My "Building Better Agents" paper positions value competition as a scientific/scientistic movement; so do a lot of my posts on this blog.  On reflection, though, I wonder whether VC is not better seen as a potential form of self-assertion by normative disciplines like management, law, and applied psychology and ethics.  These disciplines suffer from a persistent sense of inferiority to scientific disciplines, based on the blurriness and arguable incoherence that attends their normative, do-gooding mission.  VC may be understood as a way to stand up for these disciplines--"incoherence is good!"--as well as an effort to give them a more scientifically plausible way to talk about their mission.

Falsification and Confirmation

For a human science to work well, it should be able to negate as well as to affirm the strongly held moral preconceptions of the scientist.   I strongly agree with Marvin Harris's criticism in Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture of the Hegelian dialectic in its original form and in its modified forms in Marx and Levi-Strauss as failing under this criterion.  But it also seems to me that Harris's own "cultural materialism" fails under the same criterion.  The absence of an economic analysis of whether particular forms of social stratification are or are not conducive to social welfare allows an anthropologist using cultural materialism to see the world as an endless demonstration of exploitation in action if he is so inclined, just as an anthropologist using Marx's dialectical materialism can.  By comparison, economic analysis with its constant variations on the themes of market success and market failure usefully challenges strong believers in both regulation and markets, in both equality and inequality.   At the same time, economic analysis helpfully offers the possibility of confirmation to believers.   Economists with strong value commitments--such as Milton Friedman with his libertarianism or John Maynard Keynes with his statism--can do fine work that supports their predilections. 

One way to think about value competition is as a subset of economics that deals with collective decision, especially political decision backed by compulsion.  For all their very considerable value, public choice analyses of collective decision that assume rational, self-interested actors are subject to the criticism that they fail to take into account the ambivalence and complexity of human motivation.  By trying to do so, a value competition analysis has something to offer to those with more hopeful beliefs about collective action than appear warranted based on an assumption of rational self-interest.  Because a value competition analysis can also come up with the conclusion that collective decisions and agents vested with discretion will diverge from optimality, the method also has something to offer those skeptical about collective action.  Given that duality, the method has the ability to usefully discomfit both believers in politics and skeptics about politics.