Where'd my social status go?

In Western societies, social status of an individual is determined mainly by her job. Naturally, the perceived status of a job is correlated with income and education it requires, though not perfectly: college professors are better educated than corporate CEOs and New York City waste collectors make about the same as New York City firefighters, for example. What's interesting to me is that some jobs change their social status over time, sometimes dramatically. For example, over the past few decades, the jobs of a high school teacher, postal worker, flight attendant or airline pilot lost a great deal of their (initially very high) status. The job of a film actor, on the other hand, moved from extremely low to extremely high status over the first fifty years of its existence. I don't know what causes these shifts or if the causes are uniform. Just pointing out the obvious.

Mourning our dead

Question: Is the fact that religious people weep at funerals evidence of their covert atheism? If they truly and wholeheartedly believe that their loved ones simply moved on to a better life, why are they crying?

The standard answer is that they mourn a heartbreaking loss--their loved ones might still exist somewhere, but they'll never see them again, at least not in familiar circumstances.

For my own subjective feelings, there's a difference. I would feel a lot better than I actually do if I were deeply convinced that my grandmother and my uncle have simply gone on a trip somewhere, even if they were never coming back. And it does seem to me that believers mourn their dead the same way that unbelievers do: as if the dead were no longer present, here or anywhere else. But maybe it's just me.

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics

Think about this: In each strategic interaction between humans there exists a set of actions such that, for each of the participants, the action he chooses is the best one possible for him, taking into account everyone else's actions. This fact is astonishing in of itself; but what's even more incredible is that a fact like this happens to be an immediate consequence of an obscure and highly technical theorem of topology. Physicist Eugene Paul Wigner wrote a famous essay titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences;" but it seems that mathematics is unreasonably effective not just in the natural sciences but in pretty much anything we can think of.

You cannot be a writer if you're unable to think like people you don't like

One of the things that happen to you when your beliefs function as a signal of group loyalty rather than as means of trying to estimate truth is that you're unable to think like your enemies. If your beliefs are signals of how much you care about those who agree with you, then whenever you're summarizing opposing views you are doing it not to discover or describe actual reasons that people who disagree with you have for their beliefs, but to show those who belong to your camp how much you hate and despise those who don't. To put it shortly, the reason you're summarizing opposing views is not to describe but vilify them.

One of my favorite (due to its extremity) case studies of this type of thinking is a Polish Catholic publicist and blogger, Tomasz Terlikowski. It's very instructive to read his polemical pieces. He's completely unable to try and figure out why it is that people may disagree with him on ethical matters, and thus unable to faithfully portray beliefs he's attacking. As a result, he's attacking not actually existing beliefs, but ridiculous strawman constructions designed to show how depraved he thinks his enemies are. It's inconceivable to him that any decent, intelligent person could possibly disagree with Catholic ethics, and thus, in his mind, those who do disagree with it must be stupid and/or intentionally destructive. And so in his essays he assumes that pro-choice advocates simply enjoy killing babies, that all that proponents of assisted suicide want is to relieve themselves of the burden of having to care for their old relatives, that people who advocate for gay rights see it mostly as a means of completely destroying society as we know it, etc.

As I said, Terlikowski's essays are instructive as a very extreme case of inability to "put yourself in someone else's shoes." The down side is that they're truly horrible to read: they are an ungodly mixture of bad writing, bad reasoning and breathtaking, hateful arrogance. (Think Phil Donahue but about 15 IQ points stupider and 10 Wild Turkey shots meaner. Or save yourself some trouble and just think of Bill O'Reilly straight away.) What is incredibly entertaining to read, however, is Terlikowski's fiction. He wrote a novel titled "Operation Shroud" ("Operacja Chusta"). The novel isn't entertaining because it's good; on the contrary, it is I think a strong contender for the title of the worst novel ever written in Polish. But as opposed to spectacularly bad essays, spectacularly bad fiction can be fun to read.

Operation Shroud is "theological-fiction." It's set in second half of the 21st Century Europe in which true Catholicism is persecuted by politically correct and ethically nihilist institutions, both state and religious. At any rate, what it's about isn't as interesting as what makes it so bad. One of the major reasons is that Terlikowski's characters are completely ludicrous. Nothing about them feels like real human beings; they are mostly just carriers of different opinions. And, unsurprisingly, Terlikowski's villains are even less of real people than his protagonists. They are nothing more than caricatures. Which makes sense: since Terlikowski cannot conceive of the possibility that a good-natured and intelligent person would have views different than his own, the villains in his book are either complete, drooling idiots or bona-fide, card-carrying psychopaths--hardly an interesting character study material either way. Terlikowski manages to make even those villains that convert to the side of good look uninteresting: there's nothing about their conversion that feels like an actual inner struggle; since the beliefs they've started out with are nothing but vile stupidity, all they need to do in order to discard them is to "open their eyes" and poof, their old evil self is gone, just like that. There's absolutely no reasoning process or emotional struggle behind the conversion; it's just something that happens, like larva turning into a butterfly.

The entire point of my rant is this: you can't be a good writer if you're unable to think like people who aren't you, including people you disagree with, people you don't like, people who don't share your values, people who are capable of doing things you could never do. You don't need to transform into those people; you can still disagree with them, dislike them, despise them or what have you, but you need to be able to understand them. You need to be able to see why they are the way they are and do the things they do. That's the only thing that will make your characters believable. Shakespeare clearly didn't like Edmund's character in King Lear but boy, did he understand him. And so do we. Since Terlikowski doesn't understand people who disagree with him, his fictional characters that he doesn't like are completely incomprehensible.

Graph of the day

The above is taken from a paper by Norton and Ariely. The authors conducted a survey in which they asked a representative sample of Americans a series of questions about income distribution in the United States. They asked people what they think that distribution actually looks like (this is the "Estimated" part of the graph) as well as what they think it should like (the "Ideal" part), and then pitted the results against the distribution as it actually is. The results are interesting. First, voters are deeply ignorant about the income distribution (they think it's much more egalitarian than it actually is). Second, they think that in a perfect world, the income distribution should be even more egalitarian than their erroneous perceptions of it. And third, there are no significant differences in those beliefs and desires between Democratic and Republican voters. This third finding is extremely surprising to me.

The law of small numbers

I've written once before about a quite common belief that small samples behave just like large samples do. Some time ago I was watching a tennis match which would have been extremely close if not for the fact that one of the players was getting the short end of the stick in terms of bad referee calls. The announcers noticed it but didn't think it was important because, they said, refs aren't biased but simply make random mistakes so "in the long run it all evens out" (i.e. you'll get about as many erroneous calls in your favor as you will against you).

The total number of points an average tennis pro will play during his entire career is a rather large sample, so the claim about things "evening out" is probably true. Still, it's meaningless, even if true. It doesn't matter what happens in the large sample of all the points a player will play during his career; what matters is what happens in a number of small subsamples of those points that we call "matches." The number of points played in a single match is small enough that random mistakes do not have to even out. Or, thinking about it in a slightly different way, even though the total number of points you'll play is large, some of those points will matter a lot more than others. Very close encounters can be decided by five or six key points going one way or the other. If you get unlucky and the refs make five bad calls that cost you a Wimbledon final, what does it matter that at some point in your career you will get five bad calls going in your favor, if those calls are unlikely to be as meaningful?

Just when you thought the Internet couldn't surprise you anymore

catsthatlooklikehitler.com

You can't choose not to signal

Thinking about signaling behavior is extremely depressing. It's bad enough to realize that so much of human behavior and beliefs have different purposes than the face value. What's worse is that it's very hard to find someone you can share your thoughts with. Taking our beliefs and behaviors at face value (especially those beliefs and behaviors that we consider "noble") is a very strong social norm, and there's a good reason for it. A lot of our behavioral norms serve to sort people into those that can be trusted to reciprocate if you do them a favor and those that cannot, and self-deception about those norms is part of how the sorting is done. This means that if you question, or even analyze those norms, most people that you choose to talk to about it will react with distrust or even outright hostility. They'll figure you for someone who's likely to shirk from their social responsibilities, and think that all your elaborate talk about signaling behavior is simply a way for you to rationalize your own selfishness.

1954

Leopold Tyrmand's Dziennik 1954 (or "Diary 1954") is hands down one of the best books I've ever read. It really is a shame it's never been translated into English. It's an incredibly insightful account of daily life in a totalitarian state, less dramatic than The Gulag Archipelago, but in its own way terrifying. It chronicles the first three months of 1954 in the life of an aspiring writer who lives in Warsaw.

The book offers an immensely interesting look into the daily routine of someone who is trying to survive in stalinist Poland while being in profound moral opposition to the cruel regime but completely unable to outwardly express that opposition for fear of career- or even life-ending retribution from the authorities. But on top of vivid description, Tyrmand's book offers some truly great analysis. It's full of incredibly insightful observations about how the system works. For example, it explains why communist propaganda was so crude and obnoxious, even though it was relatively easy for the authorities to make it just a little bit more friendly and attractive to the consumers without risking much. The crudeness wasn't due to incompetence; it was purposeful, because the goal of propaganda was not to persuade people but to demoralize and intimidate them.

But the most powerful insight of the book (or, at any rate, the most powerful one to me) was an observation that living in a totalitarian state robs everyone of their identity by making it impossible for anyone to define themselves by themselves. Everyone, whether collaborating with the regime or opposed to it, is forced to define their very own self relative to the system they live in. You can't live in communism and simply ignore it. There is so much injustice, cruelty and lies at every corner of your life that it is impossible for you to not think about it; almost every thought you have is a thus a reaction to something you've seen, heard about or read that you viscerally disagree with. Whether you like it or not, your entire inner life becomes a constant polemic with the communist monstrosity surrounding you; there are almost no thoughts left that are entirely your own. Communism robs you of your thoughts. That realization was extremely painful to Tyrmand; he repeatedly complains that even his diary, which is supposed to be the most intimate, personal form of writing, talks about the horrible reality of stalinism more than anything else. There is a great scene in the book that shows exactly how stalinism devours everyone's soul, even those who hate it. Tyrmand is riding a bus with his girlfriend Bogna (not her real name), a high school senior (I think she's 18 at the time but don't remember for sure). Bogna is talking high school gossip, being all loud and cheerful and youthful. As their bus drives by the infamous Rakowiecka Prison, a place where thousands of innocent people were being held, tortured and executed without charges, Bogna bursts into a particularly loud fit of laughter because of something she's talking about that she thinks is funny. Tyrmand gets infuriated by her lack of sensitivity, yells at her for laughing out loud and reminds her that behind the walls they've just passed innocent people are being tortured as they speak. Bogna looks at him incomprehensibly and then blurts out: 'You know what? You're nuts. You're just as insane as they are. All you ever talk about is what the communists are doing.'

Things depend

xkcd comments on using unconditional probability in situations when what's relevant is conditional probability:

Happens all the time. How many times have you heard someone say "Sure, the probability of winning the lottery may be very small... but someone wins it nonetheless!" Or take a more ominous example: Alan Dershowitz's claim, made during O. J. Simpson's trial, that since less than 1 in a 1000 women abused by their partners are also killed by them, the fact that Simpson abused his wife doesn't make it much more likely that he killed her. Makes me wonder how many people were falsely convicted or acquitted because of erroneous arguments like this not having been exposed.