prior probability

Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov has just published a beautiful short essay in the journal Science in which he reviews a new game-playing algorithm called AlphaZero, a chess program that programs itself! Below the fold is an extended excerpt from his excellent essay: Continue reading →

That beautiful quote is from “King of the Night” (see video below), a short but poignant documentary about Imad Khachan, the owner of Chess Forum, the last remaining chess shop in New York City. (Hat tip: Kottke.)

Sorry to rain on everyone’s H.W. parade, but here is my three-part eulogy for one of the most morally despicable presidents of all time:

1. Sara Boboltz, via Huff Post: George H.W. Bush White House Once Ordered Drug Buy from Teen for Presidential TV Stunt.
2. Peter Eisner, via Newsweek: Manuel Noriega, the Invasion of Panama, and How George H.W. Bush Misled America.
3. Wikipedia: The 1991 Uprisings in Iraq.

H.W. also bequeathed to us the American with Disabilities Act, a law that has generated (and continues to generate) enormous and unnecessary amounts of federal litigation. So, excuse me for asking, but why are we celebrating this disgraced politician, who made so many callous and costly decisions?

Note: This post concludes our review of Tyler Cowen’s new book “Stubborn Attachments.”

Although we have expressed deep skepticism about moral discourse (especially utilitarian or consequentialist theories of ethics), we have also taken the position that if we must talk about moral duties towards future generations, we should replace population utilitarianism with an intertemporal golden rule. To sum up our argument thus far, the golden rule combines the best elements of Kantian reasoning (universality) with Humean logic (mutual self-interest). In fact, when it is stripped down to its essential elements, the golden rule can be reformulated in terms of “reciprocal altruism,” a pattern of behavior initially described by Robert Trivers (one of our intellectual heroes) in which an actor (the benefactor) confers benefits on another actor (the recipient) with the expectation that the recipient will repay the benefactor’s generosity in the future. Or in plain English: you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.

But what about our intertemporal golden rule? Can reciprocal altruism work across generations? In our view, the answer is, “It depends.” Specifically, the viability of any form of intertemporal reciprocal altruism will depend on our implicit degree of belief that future generations will also act in the best interests of yet more distant generations. That is, instead of paying us back — a physical impossibility, since we won’t be around in the distant future — we act as if future generations will “pay it forward”! Stated this way, our approach to population ethics resembles the theory of indirect reciprocity in evolutionary biology. (See image below.) There exists an entire body of literature on indirect reciprocity (see here, for example), beginning with Richard D. Alexander’s classic book “The Biology of Moral Systems,” which was first published in 1987, so our idea can’t be too far-fetched. In any case, now that we have laid out our theory of intertemporal reciprocity (i.e. our intertemporal golden rule), we hope that Tyler Cowen and others will one day reconsider their utilitarian approach to population ethics. In the meantime, you should definitely read “Stubborn Attachments” for yourself, for this book is well written and is full of beautiful insights; then be sure to tell us what you think.

Credit: Martin A. Nowak

Note: This is our penultimate post reviewing Tyler Cowen’s beautiful new book “Stubborn Attachments.”

Thus far, we have focused on only one aspect of Tyler Cowen’s new book: the novel claim that we may owe moral duties to future generations. But we haven’t said anything about Professor Cowen’s overall thesis. According to Cowen, we have a moral obligation to support institutions and pursue policies that promote long-term sustainable economic growth. Stated at this high level of generality, it’s hard to disagree with this thesis. Nevertheless, we now wish to raise three fundamental objections to Cowen’s pro-growth thesis: (a) Cowen’s “sustainability” caveat is an exception that could swallow up his pro-growth rule, (b) Cowen’s ethical theory is superfluous, and (c) if we must talk about ethics or morality, then our proposed “intertemporal golden rule” makes more sense than standard forms of population utilitarianism do. Let’s discuss each of our objections in turn:

(a) Define “sustainable”

Why must Cowen qualify his laudable goal (economic growth) with such vague and slippery concept as “sustainability”? We are certainly not the first to question this oxymoronic concept (see here, for example), but Cowen doesn’t engage or respond to this critical literature. Worse yet, his blind and unqualified insistence on “sustainable” growth condemns his entire project to a pointless exercise in intellectual masturbation. Consider our “excessive” use of fossil fuels. If we continue to use such sources of energy at current rates, there won’t be any fossil fuels left over for future generations to use. So what? Presumably, the sooner we deplete our stock of fossil fuels, the sooner we will create or discover innovative (and cleaner) alternatives to them! In short, either you are pro-growth or you are not.

(b) Spare us your moral lectures

While we agree with Cowen’s overall objective (economic growth), why does Cowen feel compelled to support his economic growth thesis in the metaphysical language of ethics and morality? I am intensely skeptical of most “ethics talk” since I am a moral pluralist, and while I agree with Cowen that we should support institutions and industrial policies that promote economic growth, there is no moral obligation to do so. If there were, we would have a moral duty to condemn hunter-and-gatherer societies and convert them into capitalists.

(c) Just say no (to population utilitarianism)

If, however, we must talk about ethics or morality, then let’s appeal to man’s self-interest instead of trying to create a new man. For the reasons I gave in my previous three posts, let’s return to the golden rule and discard population utilitarianism once and for all. That said, we must still explain how the golden rule could work intertemporally. We will address this key question and conclude our review of Stubborn Attachments in our next post.

Credit: Abu Khairul Bashar

Note: This is part six of our review of “Stubborn Attachments.”

We restated Tyler Cowen’s “six critical issues” and discussed three of these issues in our previous post. Here, we shall consider the other three issues: rules, rights, and common sense morality.

4. Rules

Cowen asks, “Can we make a fundamental choice to think in terms of rules and principles per se? … Or are we caught in the trap of always worrying about the exceptions and thus we end up back with rules as a useful fiction? In other words, do moral rules have “independent power” (i.e. are such rules self-enforcing), or are they just “useful fictions.” For our part, we agree with Cowen that, even if rules are just useful fictions, we should think in terms of general rules. (How could we not, since moral obligations are always expressed in terms of rules or general principles?) And this is the reason why we prefer our Intertemporal Golden Rule approach to population ethics. The golden rule is not plagued with exceptions and caveats as most moral rules are. More importantly, the golden rule, however it is formulated, does not require massive amounts of good will or an all-powerful moral leviathan. Rather, its efficacy is based on man’s self-interest and simple Humean notions reciprocity! (Cf. Robert Trivers’s theory of reciprocal altruism.)

5. Rights

Cowen blends his population utilitarianism with metaphysical rights: “I’m not going to derive rights deductively from scratch, but I do believe in (nearly) absolute human rights.” In other words, Cowen is not going to bother to explain where these natural rights come from, nor will he bother to specify what these natural rights consist of, he is just going to conjure up a set of Kantian rights out of a magic hat to avoid any nasty outcomes that population utilitarianism might engender. (As an aside, we often speak of Kantian duties” but we can use the terms rights and duties interchangeably, since duties always imply the existence of rights, and vice versa, rights imply duties.)

Although we sympathize with the notion that “individuals have rights” (to borrow Nozick’s famous formulation), where do these natural rights come from, and what do these rights consist of? These are precisely the questions that Cowen leaves unanswered! Again, this is one of the virtues of our Intertemporal Golden Rule. Its efficacy does not depend on the existence of metaphysical rights. Instead, as we mentioned above, the genius of the golden rule is that is based on the notion of “reciprocal altruism”, i.e. self-interest.

6. Common sense morality

Cowen closes his list of “six critical issues” with the importance of common sense morality. In brief, any theory of population ethics that is incompatible with most people’s moral intuitions is a worthless theory. (And to his credit, Cowen correctly notes that utilitarian theory “appears to suggest an extreme degree of self-sacrifice” when taken to its logical conclusion.) In any case, this is the beauty of our Intertemporal Golden Rule approach to population ethics. The golden rule is such a familiar and common sense moral principle that it appears in many religions and cultures. More fundamentally, it is a moral principle that is grounded in self-interest and reciprocal altruism, and that is probably why the golden rule is consistent with our common sense morality.

But how can the golden rule or reciprocal altruism work intertemporally? How could future generation ever hope to “pay us back” if those generations don’t even exist yet? Also, we have yet to address the main thesis of “Stubborn Attachments.” We will return to these questions in our next two posts.

Trivers (1971)

Note: This is part five of our review of Tyler Cowen’s new book “Stubborn Attachments.” Also, we won’t be blogging this weekend, so our next post will appear on Monday (12/3).

As we mentioned in our previous post, Tyler Cowen identifies “six critical issues” in the introduction to “Stubborn Attachments,” six fundamental questions that any theory of population ethics must address. The issues are time (how to weigh the interests of future generations), aggregation (how to aggregate conflicting preferences), radical uncertainty (how to predict ex ante the long-term effects of our decisions), and the role of rules, rights, and common sense morality in population ethics. We also introduced the idea of an “intertemporal golden rule,” i.e. the possibility of a Kantian approach to population ethics. Now, let’s evaluate our Kantian approach in light of Cowen’s laundry list of issues.

1. The role of time and discount rates

Tyler Cowen begins his laundry list of fundamental questions by asking, “How should we weight the interests of the present against the more distant future? … [D]o we have reasons to weight the present more heavily simply because it is the here and now?” Well, it turns out that the present is more heavily weighted than the future in almost every human endeavor, including business, economics, and law, fields in which future cash flows are “discounted” to their present value as a matter of course. Yet, as Cowen notes, this standard practice is based on a morally questionable assumption, the implicit idea that the future declines in moral importance with the simple passage of time. But whether they like it or not, population utilitarians like Cowen must commit themselves to this assumption as well. Why? Because utilitarian approaches are ultimately probabilistic in nature, requiring us to estimate or predict ahead of time what the most likely consequences or effects of our decisions will be. By contrast, a Kantian approach to population ethics can hold time constant, requiring us to treat all persons, including unborn or contingent ones, with equal value and respect.

2. Aggregation and social choice

As Cowen notes, “Aggregation refers to how we resolve disagreements and how we decide that the wishes of one individual should take precedence over the wishes of another.” Or in the context of population ethics, how can we resolve intertemporal disagreements between present and future generations? Any utilitarian approach to population ethics will require some voting rule or procedure to aggregate and resolve these types of intertemporal disagreements, but whatever aggregation method we choose, there is a fundamental problem with utilitarianism. Population utilitarians like Cowen must commit themselves to the primacy of the interests of future generations. Again, why? Because absent a world-wide catastrophe or extinction event, there will always exist much more people in the future than in the past! Simply put, even if the human population on Earth were to stabilize or even decline over time, more and more people will continue to be born into the world. Our Kantian approach, by contrast, is invariant to the number of people who exist or who might exist in the future. Unlike utilitarian approaches, our theory of intergenerational reciprocity does not depend on the number of people who might exist in the future relative to the number of people exist now.

3. Radical uncertainty and epistemic modesty

To his credit, Cowen openly acknowledges the problem of uncertainty: “how can we pretend to assess good and bad consequences as a product of our actions? How can we make any decision at all without being morally paralyzed and totally uncertain about what we are doing?” This problem is not just a minor blemish on utilitarian approaches to population ethics and to morality generally; it is a mortal wound, a fatal blow! How so? Because the further we attempt to peer into the future, the more uncertain the future becomes. It is one thing to imagine what the world will be like in 2020 A.D. (two years hence) or in 2060 A.D. (52 years hence), but no one has any idea what the world will be like a thousand or five hundred or even one hundred years from now. How, then, can we predict the most likely consequences of our decisions given this radical uncertainty? Our intertemporal golden rule, by contrast, is more much epistemically modest and is thus better suited to deal with such radical uncertainty. The validity of the golden rule does not depend on what picture of the future you happen to believe in. Simply put, the content of such Kantian moral precepts will remain stable and unchanging regardless what beneficial or harmful innovations the future brings and regardless how many natural or manmade disasters occur in the future.

Because this post is already too long, we will consider the remaining three items in Cowen’s laundry list of issues in our next post.

Source: Andrew Thatcher, et al.

Credit: The Economist

Note: This is part four of our review of Tyler Cowen’s new book “Stubborn Attachments.”

We now find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma! On the one hand, we have resolutely dismissed utilitarian theories of population ethics. (To sum up, consequentialism is always going to be a non-starter until population utilitarians like Tyler Cower or Derek Parfit discover a crystal ball that allows us to predict the long-term effects of our decisions, or until they are able to at least provide us with a non-circular definition of “utility” or “welfare” or whatever else we are supposed to be maximizing.) But at the same time we wish to accept the truth of Cowen’s Axiom: the idea that we may owe moral duties to future generations. How can we reconcile this difficult dilemma? Why not formulate a Kantian theory of population ethics: an “intertemporal categorical imperative” or, better yet, an “intertemporal golden rule”?

Perhaps the most famous formulation of the golden rule appears in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus says, “do unto others what you would have them do unto you …” (Matt. 7:12). [See also below (left) for another famous formulation of this moral principle by Hillel the Elder, pictured below (right).] However this maxim is worded, the golden rule, the idea that you should treat others as you yourself wish to be treated, is a familiar and common sense moral principle. It not only appears in many religions and cultures; it also satisfies the two main criteria of Kantian morality: universality and reversibility. My suggestion, then, is this: an intertemporal golden rule. After all, if the traditional golden rule can be extended spatially across borders and cultures, why can’t we also extend it temporally across generations?

Now then, regardless of which moral precept you prefer (Kantian duties or Humean consequences), Tyler Cowen identifies “six critical issues” that any theory of population ethics must contend with, including such conundrums as intertemporal discounting (i.e. how should we weight the interests of the present against the more distant future) and intertemporal social choice (i.e. how should we aggregate the conflicting preferences of different generations). We will restate these important issues and evaluate our proposed intertemporal golden rule in light of them in our next two posts.

More here.