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A Cowen-Caplan dialogue
Bryan cites one from years ago, but in reality we reprise it in many different forms, about every three days or so:
Tyler: People like to think they're special, but we're all pretty much the same.
Me: No we're not. Some people are really great; others are simply awful.
Tyler: That's just the kind of thing people say to make themselves feel special.
Me: You don't really believe that.
Tyler: Do too.
Me: What if we use the metric of your willingness-to-pay to spend an hour with a person? There are a few awesome people you would pay thousands of dollars to meet. But you'd pay hundreds of dollars to avoid an hour with most people.
Tyler: [3-second hesitation.] Well, it's not clear why that should be the relevant metric.
Me: But it's your metric!
Tyler: What's so special about my metric?
Me: What's so special about it? By definition, that metric captures everything that you think matters. And by that very metric, people are not "pretty much the same." They're incredibly different.
It's funny how Bryan thinks he can cite my actions as evidence against the correct belief. That's absurd; for instance I also don't act as if determinism is true, but citing that doesn't settle the matter. I sometimes describe Bryan's most basic world view as the belief that what is good is very very good and what is bad is very bad indeed. I am more likely to see endowment effects at work.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 27, 2008 at 07:58 AM in Sports | Permalink
Comments
You're going to have to define "pretty much the same" because otherwise you are pretty obviously wrong.
http://heightdifferentials.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Posted by: josh at May 27, 2008 8:05:37 AM
Surely Brian's point is that whatever you say, you really feel (rather than think) people aren't very much the same. This is revealed by your actions rather than your words. Your come back about determinism is a cheeky sidestep because whatever you believe cognitively, it is not possible to feel as though you do not have free will and thus to act as though you do not have it. Your actions betray your feelings not your beliefs.
Obviously this dialogue is a bit odd because it's not clear what you both mean by people being the same or being awful. More specifically, it's not clear that people cannot be more or less the same in important respects but be different quality company.
Posted by: Finnsense at May 27, 2008 8:22:33 AM
Do the same thing to Bryan, find a point/person you disagree on, argue whether one of you is very bad and the other is very good, agree that neither is true, and conclude that people are pretty much the same. Voila!
"I knew a guy stories don't count" -- Russ Roberts
Posted by: David Zetland at May 27, 2008 8:28:49 AM
Bryan is right - your acting as if you don't think determinism is true is evidence you don't think determinism is true, and similarly your acting as if some people are special is evidence that you think some people are special.
Posted by: Robin Hanson at May 27, 2008 8:49:23 AM
Robin, I can't help but act as if I think determinism is false...
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at May 27, 2008 9:00:55 AM
I'm not sure I see Robin's point.
How would you act if you did think determinism was true? What would you do differently? I have no idea. Probably just shrug and get on with life, same as always.
What behaviors would give away a person who is acting as though he believes determinism is true? How would you distinguish that from the sort of things people might do anyway?
I'm aware of Ted Chiang's short story What's Expected of Us, but it doesn't really settle the issue. [Nature 436, 150 (7 July 2005)]
Posted by: at May 27, 2008 9:08:51 AM
Why must there be only one relevant metric?
Isn't the idea that all people are "pretty much the same" close enough to a universal claim that any contradictory evidence disproves it? If we can find one significant dimension in which people vary, couldn't that justify claims of specialness?
"People" seems a very complex subject. What single metric could possibly cover its entirety?
Posted by: John Stepp at May 27, 2008 10:07:40 AM
Michael Jordan was pretty much better at one facet of life than I am. That of being Micheal Jordan.
Maybe that cost him in other areas of life. Trying to be Michael Jordan cost me in a lot of areas of life. Or, maybe there are some people who get all positive tail ends of the bell curve in a lot of facets of their life.
We all have roughly the same time in the day, so what makes some people great is probably compounding of small edges over time.
On the other hand, even folks we think must be "simply awful" often get married. Somebody thinks they are pretty great.
Posted by: Andrew at May 27, 2008 10:14:49 AM
I sense the need for an economists cage match.
Posted by: Vincent Clement at May 27, 2008 10:18:39 AM
Holy crap, my first post and I'm going to go up against Bryan AND Robin. Never claimed to be a bright man.
I think we all assess a probability as to whether determinism is in fact true. As long as that probability is less than 1, it makes rationale sense to act as if it is not true. Therefore, acting as if it is not true should not be construed as evidence that one finds determinism false, only that the probability is less than 1.
As an aside, I notice my probability assessment jumps up a great deal after I've done something incredibly stupid.
Posted by: Ron Barlin at May 27, 2008 10:19:00 AM
Tyler, if you're married, have you tried telling your wife that she's not particularly special? Or have you pointed out to your payroll/HR department that there's really not much difference between you and, say, any randomly selected teenager, migratory farm worker, convenience store clerk or construction laborer?
Posted by: Killer Sheep at May 27, 2008 10:23:58 AM
I think Tyler found an argument he can't completely lose. Yes, Tyler, you're special.
Posted by: M. Hodak at May 27, 2008 11:00:16 AM
I'm with the Unnamed Commenter above -- what does it mean to "act as if you don't believe that determinism is true"? If you knew for sure what was determined, and tried to stop it, then such a statement would make sense; but most determinists don't actually think they know precisely what it is that is determined.
Posted by: Sean Carroll at May 27, 2008 11:09:52 AM
Bit of a daft argument without defining terms, methinks. Biologically speaking, humans are all very much alike in that they all work in the same way.
On a human level, people can be very, very different. Even if all the 'undamaged' ones have much the same fundamental (biological/genetic) drives and motivations, the human brain is such a complex system that these manifest themselves in dramatically different behaviour.
Posted by: Dave R. at May 27, 2008 11:11:56 AM
Catching someone in an apparent contradiction is not the same as proving that person wrong. At best it demonstrates that they are not the best person to be debating.
I agree that the metric is not a good one to measure the specialness of a person. I wonder though whether a better metric would be to have a large group of people assess their willingness to pay for an hour with that person, and then average.
As far as I can tell, though, there's no such metric that would rate someone with Ebola very highly: Nobody wants to spend an hour with them (and many would pay quite a lot not to), and you can't even sell their organs for much money. Nevertheless, most of us would instinctively say that such a person is no less special than anyone else. If Bryan were to catch Ebola (god forbid) would he thus be forced to rate himself less special as a result?
Posted by: John at May 27, 2008 11:52:02 AM
This is pretty good I think this is a solvable semantic argument.
Tyler: People like to think they're special, but we're all pretty much the same.
I think Tyler means two things, everyone thinks they are more special than they are because of a pervasive bias. Generally people are going to be wrong about how special they are and Tyler includes himself in this and assumes that he is overestimating his own specialness.
Me: No we're not. Some people are really great; others are simply awful.
This is true but I think Tyler's issue is that you can't be a reliable judge of whether your preferences for others are great.
Tyler: That's just the kind of thing people say to make themselves feel special.
It is.
Then it goes from there. Some people are probably special but it is really hard to tell if you are special because the belief that you are special is so powerful.
Posted by: Michael Foody at May 27, 2008 12:05:01 PM
Wait a minute. There seems to be money on the table in this game. Maybe I can not manage to be really awesome (if the offer goes to over a million I might surprise myself); however for a hundred dollars an hour or more I damn well can be horribly, excrutiatingly intolerable.
Who is paying - Brian or Tyler?
N.B. I am an ordinary creature that responds to incentives, just like somone special - and I am somewhat peculiar.
Posted by: David Heigham at May 27, 2008 1:22:38 PM
You both talk way too much and think too little.
Posted by: Jason at May 27, 2008 2:29:24 PM
Tyler: how would you "act as if determinism is true"? As far as I can tell it's not even coherent to not think that determinism is true and every way of acting is a subset of acting as if determinism is true.
Posted by: michael vassar at May 27, 2008 2:49:12 PM
By definition, that metric captures everything that you think matters.
Idiocy. Why in the world does my willingness to spend money to meet someone measure how "special" they are?
I wouldn't pay to meet a great athlete, for example, or most Nobel scientists for that matter, despite thinking that these people are quite special. Why? Because I wouldn't expect to gain anything much from the meeting. What would I have to show for an hour with Tiger Woods? I don't even play golf, yet I consider him quite special.
Even leaving possible language problems aside, would I necessarily gain from spending anhour with Albert Fert (French) or Peter Grunberg (German), who split the 2007 physics Nobel? I woldn't pay to meet them, yet have no doubt they are special.
Repeating for emphasis, this metric of "specialness" is idiotic.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at May 27, 2008 3:25:12 PM
Determinism cannot affect our actions, because whether free will exists or not (and I believe it does not), we perceive that it does. Regardless of whatever higher understanding we may fancy that we can grasp, we cannot escape our perceptions, therefore the ultimate truth or falsity of determinism is irrelevant.
Posted by: Noah Yetter at May 27, 2008 3:42:55 PM
Perhaps a cursory look at recently-published books by these two will help us get at the heart of the matter.
One central theme in "Inner Economist" is that people are motivated by incentives. This is a very general theme, and the thesis of the book applies it universally. Thus, people are "pretty much the same" in their motivations for actions: they're all just responding to the incentives they've been given.
In the first bit of "Myth of the Rational Voter", Dr. Caplan explores the vast differences in the policies that are good for the economy (those recommended by economists) and the perceptions of voters on those issues. Most voters not only are unaware of what the actual effects of the policies they claim to support are, but they are often incapable of actually getting the policies they want implemented! Clearly, there are significant differences in how people understand something as fundamental as supply and demand; economists understand these thing while the "typical voter" does not.
Going back to the dialog posted above, it seems to me that Dr. Cowen's point is that people are "pretty much the same" in what motivates their actions, while Dr. Caplan is arguing that people are fundamentally different in who they are. For example, some understand economics while others don't.
Certainly we can agree that they're both correct. :-)
Posted by: mravery at May 27, 2008 4:28:02 PM
A glass is usually part full and part empty.
I recently attended a small scientific conference on human evolution and the latest genome results, where the distinguished anthropologists John Tooby, a co-founder of evolutionary psychology, and Henry Harpending, a co-founder of genetic anthropology, squared off over this question of whether people are mostly the same or mostly different:
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080512_human.htm
So who is right? Is the human race uniform or diverse?
Well, they're both right. It all depends upon what you're interested in at the moment.
That's usually how it goes—the things that interest us the most, that get us most worked up, are those that are on the knife edge, that look different when viewed from different angles.
Let's consider a similar question that's remote enough that we can think about it without political biases getting in the way: Is the universe empty or full?
Outer space is famously empty. You can't get much emptier than space. By one account, the universe is about 0.00000000000000000000000000001 as dense as water.
And yet, outer space is also famously full of "billions and billions" of stars, as Johnny Carson used to say when parodying astronomer Carl Sagan. In 2003, a team of Australian astronomers estimated that there are 70 sextillion stars in the known universe. That's 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.
Now, it's perfectly reasonable to conceive of the universe both ways, depending upon what you need to think about at the time. The incredible emptiness of space is terribly important to understand if you are, say, contemplating an interstellar voyage. Nevertheless, to be frank, once you grasp that fact, it gets kind of boring to think about. So, astronomers spend more time thinking about the tiny fraction of space that isn't empty, those 70 sextillion stars.
Similarly, the Wikipedia article on Human Genetic Variation reports DATE, "Two random humans are expected to differ at approximately 1 in 1000 nucleotides …"
Well, that's not a very big number.
But Wikipedia goes on to say, "However, with a genome of approximate 3 billion nucleotides, on average two humans differ at approximately 3 million nucleotides."
Well, three million is a pretty big number. (It's not as big as 70 sextillion, but still …)
So, now we can see why, say, the African-American 7'-1" basketball player Shaquille O'Neal and the Lebanese-Colombian 5'-1" singer Shakira seem interestingly different.
Of course, probably they would not be very different at all compared to space aliens possibly living on a planet going around one of those 70 sextillion stars.
And if those aliens showed up in hostile flying saucers to conquer the human race, no doubt Shaq and Shakira and everybody else would team up to fight them off. Ronald Reagan said exactly this to the United Nations back in 1987:
"I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world."[Address to the 42d Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, New York]
But, we're not facing space aliens. So the differences between humans are interesting—and important.
When it comes to thinking about race —w hich is all about who your relatives are — it’s all, well, relative.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 27, 2008 5:41:01 PM
I think Bryan has fitted Tyler for a straw man argument through the metric he formulates.
Specifically, it is not clear why willingness to pay for a mere hour with a person is the appropriate unit for determining “specialness”. The brevity of an hour creates a false scarcity which is out of alignment with Tyler’s premise.
Bryan’s opening take on Tyler’s premise is that people like to think they're special, but we're all pretty much the same. Surely the logical extension of that premise is that while some people can be distinguished by some special attributes, they still bear far more common attributes than distinguishing attributes.
An hour with some big shot would be interesting, and could be expected to attract relatively large discrepancies in willingness to pay. But over longer periods – weeks, months, years, decades – I believe Tyler’s point would become self-evident.
Posted by: Brendan at May 27, 2008 9:01:31 PM
Unless Tyler actually does pay thousands of dollars for an hour of a person's time, or hundreds of dollars to avoid another particular person, then this is not evidence regarding Tyler's behavior, but evidence regarding Tyler's beliefs about his hypothetical behavior, if a particular market did in fact exist.
Posted by: Cyrus at May 28, 2008 7:49:15 AM
1) When it comes to the shared view of Caplan and Cowen, Oscar Wilde's quip leaps to mind: "An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." In short,to apply the Cowen metric to everything is to engage in philistinism . . . especially as it applies to the world of artistic creativity: literary, painting, sculpture, the theater, movies, and so on.
But then Bryan Caplan has stated at Econlog that he thinks Anye Rand is a great novelist! Whatever the ideological dogma of Rand amounts to, Atlas Shrugged shows her to be a third-rate writer: cardboard characters, wooden dialogue, and a half-disguised heavy-handed tract in the guise of a novel. And he has admitted, unlike other philistines, that he has had a "Randian contempt" for modern art. So do 80% probably of compulsive TV-watchers.
2) Are people equal?
It depends on the values on which they are being measured. In democratic countries, all citizens are equal as voters and should be equal before the law. Morally speaking, the most humble are often the most generous and courageous: the case, say, in Nazi-occupied Europe, when those who risked their lives to help Jews were from the working-class or peasantry . . . not the well-educated upper bourgeoisie. The same standard might apply to a father or mother or spouses.
Are they all equal in artistic, athletic, or professional talent or accomplishment? The question answers itself.
3) Why would anyone pay anyone else to spend time with them unless the payee is a journalist or writer? Or are we supposed to regard Caplan as a celebrity-worshiper . . . however he might define the celebrity in question?
Michael Gordon Aka, the buggy professor http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org
Posted by: michael gordon at May 28, 2008 10:27:07 AM
1) When it comes to the shared view of Caplan and Cowen, Oscar Wilde's quip leaps to mind: "An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." In short,to apply the Cowen metric to everything is to engage in philistinism . . . especially as it applies to the world of artistic creativity: literary, painting, sculpture, the theater, movies, and so on.
But then Bryan Caplan has stated at Econlog that he thinks Anye Rand is a great novelist! Whatever the ideological dogma of Rand amounts to, Atlas Shrugged shows her to be a third-rate writer: cardboard characters, wooden dialogue, and a half-disguised heavy-handed tract in the guise of a novel. And he has admitted, unlike other philistines, that he has had a "Randian contempt" for modern art. So do 80% probably of compulsive TV-watchers.
2) Are people equal?
It depends on the values on which they are being measured. In democratic countries, all citizens are equal as voters and should be equal before the law. Morally speaking, the most humble are often the most generous and courageous: the case, say, in Nazi-occupied Europe, when those who risked their lives to help Jews were from the working-class or peasantry . . . not the well-educated upper bourgeoisie. The same standard might apply to a father or mother or spouses.
Are they all equal in artistic, athletic, or professional talent or accomplishment? The question answers itself.
3) Why would anyone pay anyone else to spend time with them unless the payee is a journalist or writer? Or are we supposed to regard Caplan as a celebrity-worshiper . . . however he might define the celebrity in question?
Michael Gordon Aka, the buggy professor http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org
Posted by: michael gordon at May 28, 2008 10:28:17 AM
