If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:
Frequently, in this space, I will talk about some aspect of modernity which has only been a feature of the world for the last few decades, and then contrast it with the way things were done for thousands of years prior to that. Making, what I feel to be the obvious point, that thousands of years of doing things one way should make us doubt whether we have suddenly stumbled on the correct way of doing things in just the last 20-30 years, particularly if the new way is the exact opposite of historical norms. I don’t think I have ever argued that it absolutely proved that modern ideology was wrong, more that it was a piece of evidence which people give insufficient weight to, as in no weight at all, when it probably should be one of our weightiest considerations.
Recently Boonton, a frequent commenter on the blog sent me an email and pointed out a different way of looking at it. One which deserves to be considered. With his permission, here’s a quote from that email:
Check out The funnel of human experience. So in terms of human experience 1/2 of all human experience happened after 1309. This is a consequence of our large population. Leave our population closer to 10B for a while and this date will advance much faster than time. If you imagine a future where we are spread out among the solar system with, say, a few hundred billion in population and the experience funnel will get even closer to the present moment very fast.
How does this fly with the ideology of conservatism? Conservatism privileges human experience (Burke I think called it Democracy for the dead) but that only works well if population growth remained roughly linear. With exponential growth experience becomes newer. It will be the norm eventually that not only will most present living humans live most of their lives connected to global social media, but most of human experience was lived that way rather than not. What trumps what then? Does a hundred billion human-lives (say of 75 years) living in information rich media count as much as a paltry few million human-lives lived under, say, ancient Greek conditions? Consider the time will come when the majority of humanity will have lived it’s life with SSM as a norm. Will you deflate present experience and inflate past experience to counter that? Say tell ten billion people living in Asian cities that their experience-years are equal to 1/1000th of the experience years of ancient Egyptians? Or will experience be democratic, making conservatives the least historically oriented of all ideologies?
I had previously seen the article he referenced, but I don’t know if I just skimmed it or if I had read it but not quite recognized the implications. But after Boonton’s explanation I realized that it was a very interesting and also very valid point. A potentially better way of looking at things in the same way that looking at GDP per capita is a better than looking at a countries total GDP if you want to talk about how well off someone is in a particular country. (See for example Nigeria and Norway, similar GDPs, vastly different on a per capita basis.)
To restate what I think Boonton and the original article are getting at, if we want to define what’s normal or what works for human societies, we shouldn’t just look at the length of those societies we should also multiply it by the number of humans in those societies. Thus despite modern humans being around for 50,000 years, half of all human experience, as Boonton says, has happened since 1309. And if we go all the way back to the original article, it claims that “15% of all experience has been experienced by people who are alive right now.” Because “50,000 years is a long time, but 8,000,000,000 people is a lot of people.”
Let’s say we make this switch from years to “human experience years” (HEYs) when considering how much weight to give something. How does that change the point I’m constantly making about historical deference? Well I think on certain things it actually makes the point stronger. Boonton mentions same sex marriage (SSM), so let’s start there.
This may have been a bad place for him to plant his flag. Yes SSM is now legal/normal in a lot of places, particularly if you include things like civil unions which aren’t quite marriage, but are close enough. It’s legal in most of Europe, most of South and Central America, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. That’s an impressive list, but when you consider that it’s not legal in China, India, almost all of Southeast Asia, or Africa outside of the one country, and further consider the population of all those countries, then switching from years to HEYs doesn’t strengthen the argument for SSM and may in fact weaken it.
At this point, I think it’d actually be interesting to run some numbers. Let’s be as liberal as possible on the number of people who are experiencing SSM as the norm, and say it’s all of Europe, and the entirety of the Americas. Using this liberal standard we have the following populations:
- North America: 579 million
- South America: 423 million
- Europe: 739 million
- South Africa: 57 million
- Australia: 25 million
- New Zealand: 5 million
- Total: 1.828 billion
The total population of the world is 7.7 billion meaning that there’s just shy of 6 billion people who live in countries where it’s illegal and 1.8 billion who live where it is legal. Which means that currently every year that passes the weight of HEYs where SSM is not normal increases. Now perhaps in the next decade or so that will switch. India just decriminalized homosexuality in 2018, which is an obvious first step towards SSM, but there’s still a long way to go, and while that’s happening the disparity continues to widen, not shrink. Also it should be pointed out that the population growth in the countries where it’s not legal is projected to be greater than in those countries where it is. Meaning we could actually see this gap widen at an even faster rate in the future.
One could argue that putting all the people where it’s legal on one side of things and all the people where it’s still illegal on the other side of things is far too crude, since there are certainly people in India and China who view it as normal, just as there are people in America who still think it’s not normal. Perhaps, but breaking it down further would be difficult. And it’s very unlikely that SSM supporters form a majority in any of the countries where it’s still illegal, recall that as recently as 2008 they weren’t even a majority in California.
Now, of course, when people, particularly educated Westerners, imagine the future, they never imagine that in the great and limitless destiny which awaits us that SSM would still be illegal anywhere. For example, it’s hard to imagine a modern science fiction author writing a book where the illegality of SSM is a “feature” of future. They would only include it if they were imagining a dystopia. And thus most people, like Boonton, imagine that despite HEYs being currently against normalization and despite the weight of this steadily getting greater, that when we eventually spread out through the solar system, and perhaps beyond, the weight of HEYs will be in favor of normalization, thus they’re willing to start backing HEYs over normal years now.
Perhaps, but perhaps not. I understand that if you believe in the inevitability of progress and further believe that the normalization of SSM is an example of that progress, why it may seem inevitable. (Though I have questioned this inevitability repeatedly.) I further understand that on top of this there are many other arguments for the eventual universal normalization of SSM, and I’m not trying to speak to all of them, I am only saying that, thus far, and for the foreseeable future, using HEYs in place of years still points in the other direction.
But can HEYs always be directly substituted for years? In some cases I’m sure they can, and that it’s beneficial to do so, but I think there are also fairly significant differences between HEYs and years which need to be acknowledged. To understand these differences we need to dive into this idea of normality. What does it mean for something to be normal as opposed to abnormal? I can think of four ways to define normality in this context.
First, normality could be descriptive. If we’re saying that it’s “normal” for humans to do X, we could just be describing the fact that a certain percentage of people do X, and that this percentage is above some commonly agreed upon threshold for whether something is common enough to be considered normal, a percentage far less than a majority, maybe even as low as 1%. We don’t think it’s normal for people to stick pencils up their noses because while some people do it, the percentage isn’t high enough or the occurrence often enough for it to pass our normality threshold. But this definition of normality doesn’t help us much in determining whether something which wasn’t normal should be made normal, or whether something which was normal should be made abnormal. It can only give us a normality snapshot, taken at a specific time. Also it leads to questions of whether something like stealing is “normal”, certainly lots of people do it, enough to for it to be above our normality threshold, and yet it’s still illegal. Which brings us to our next way of viewing normality.
Second, normality could describe what works. However high the percentage of thieves is in our community, we don’t consider it normal because if we did, society would break down at least in the realm of property rights. This is the conservative position, we don’t change things because if you do they will stop working. For example every so often people question whether property rights are important, and from that, they try to establish a new definition of normal, which could be less about stealing and more about eliminating the concept of ownership all together. And yes, it all sounds good, but millions of deaths later, it turns out that property rights and ownership were important after all. I know that there are probably a few people who feel that nothing should ever change. But of course some things are going to change. In the dawn of time it probably wasn’t obvious that property rights make things run more smoothly. But that changed. The question is how fast should things change? And also how do we know when a given change will be better? Which all leads to the next definition of normality.
Third, what’s normal at any given time changes through experimentation. Similar to the second definition, normality is our current best guess at what works, but this adds the idea that there’s probably something that works better out there, and eventually we’ll find it and switch. Normality is never static, it changes from one generation to the next, as humans constantly try out new things. As you can see this definition of normality leads naturally to prioritizing HEYs over normal years. The more people there are experiencing “life” the more experiments are being run and the more likely you are to come up with something different which works better. We’ll get back to a discussion of experimentation in a second, but first we need to consider one final way of defining normality.
Fourth, “normal” is what we’ve evolved to accept as normal. If we were bees we would consider it normal that every winter all the males die off, and the rest of the bees stand around and use their wings to create warmth for the queen while occasionally suicide squads of fellow bees are sent off to fetch some stored honey. If we were a male emperor penguin our normal winter would consist of huddling in a circle while we protected an egg and drained down our fat reserves. Instead as a human I consider it normal to light a fire (or its modern equivalent) and stay inside a shelter while I eat stored food (okay the stored food is a stretch, but everything’s close enough that no “abnormal” flags are raised). The question we have to address is does evolution drive normality or is it the other way around? I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around, as external normality changes an organism has to adapt/evolve to survive the new conditions (presumably this involves some shift to experiencing it as normal) or they die. Which takes us back to the idea of experimentation.
Technology is rapidly changing our environment. In the past when change was more gradual we might have been able to rely on evolution to create a new experience of normal to match the new environmental normal. Which is not to say there weren’t sudden changes historically, just that when those happened most of the evolution happened through massive death. I think we’re hoping to avoid that with the current sudden changes. The key point being that things are moving too fast for evolution to provide the answer. All of our experimentation has to be cultural rather than genetic.
This is very important when debating whether to pay more attention to years or HEYs. Seven billion people undergoing all manner of selective pressure is much better than a million individuals in a very narrow environment if you’re hoping to maximize beneficial adaptive mutations. Accordingly, if this is what we’re aiming for then HEYs are superior. Importantly, evolution can operate at the level of an individual (or more accurately at the level of a gene.) So having more individuals (genes) is better. The problem is, I don’t think the same thing can be said of culture. We aren’t seven billion cultures all experimenting with what works best, we’re not even millions of small tribes experimenting with what works best. If anything technology is leading to fewer cultures, not more.
As an aside you may feel that this contradicts my frequent assertion that tiny political niches are proliferating, since what are those tiny niches but small cultures. The problem I see there is that these niches aren’t (yet?) in true competition. There’s no nation of Bernie Sanders supporters competing with a nation of neo-cons which is in further competition with a nation of libertarians. Perhaps there should be. Perhaps there will be. Certainly I could see it as something which fans of HEYs over years might support.
Returning to the idea of there being only a few cultures, let’s once again look at SSM. The very speed of its adoption and how quickly opposition for it went from expected, even for Obama, to a good way to lose your job speaks to the unity of Western culture. This is not what it looks like when one set of behaviors out-competes another set of behaviors, this is what it looks like when an idea reaches a critical mass within a significantly monolithic culture. And if that’s the case then HEYs have not brought us greater knowledge or effectiveness because the “experiments” aren’t sufficiently independent. The years each human experience are essentially identical. Even if you think this claim is overbroad you still have to ask at what level are experiments being performed, at the level of a culture or at the level of an individual? And how do we determine the success of these experiments? To put it another way the triumph of an idea is more likely the beginning of the experiment than its end.
Of course now that we’re firmly in the realm of discussing behavior as experiments we have lots of tools for deciding whether any given experiment is a good one. To begin with a good experiment needs a control. This is exceptionally difficult when you’re talking about reality. As people frequently mention you can’t create a clone of America where everything’s the same except there’s no social media. And it’s even hard to compare one time period to another. As an example the Economist just did a special report on children, and opened by mentioning that 30 years ago children would engage in unstructured play for hours on end, spent most of that time outdoors, largely unsupervised, and there was almost no time in front of computers. But for children today all of that is basically the exact opposite. Now say we are confronted with some distressing (or beneficial) new trend among children, which of the above is causing it? Or are none of them? Or maybe it’s all of them. It’s extremely difficult to tell.
Also note that part of why it’s difficult to tell is that this wasn’t a shift by some children, allowing us to collect data on current children whose upbringing didn’t change, and still behave exactly as they did 30 years ago and compare. The entire culture shifted. What this means is we’re not running a lot of experiments we’re running one and if we’re lucky increasing the N. Which, to be clear, is not entirely without value, but it’s less valuable than people imagine. Of course there are probably some children out there who live as children did 30 or more years ago, but generally for that to be the case there’s something else going on, meaning that their value as a control is limited by all sorts of confounders, they’re probably religious, almost certainly rural, and my guess would be the education level would skew low as well.
Beyond the lack of a good control for these experiments with reality there is a lack of replication, and here is where I take the most issue with privileging HEYs over years, and specifically privileging modern experience over historical experience, because historically conditions changed much less quickly. Back then, if my grandfather “ran an experiment” and my father “ran an experiment” and I “ran an experiment” we’re probably all doing it under relatively the same conditions. Extend that out to 100 generations and we call the experiments which have replicated “tradition”. But these days I can run an “experiment” vastly different from anything my grandfather would have tried and only superficially similar to something my father might have tried.
To put everything in terms of a metaphor, imagine life is like a video game. For a long time you’re playing the same video game over and over again. Sure things change, but new rules for this video game are introduced very slowly. Mostly it’s the same game and you play it hundreds of times. It’s not that crazy of an assumption to imagine that you’d end up with some pretty good optimizations. You’d be as close to winning the game as it was possible to be. (Though remember this video game is crazy difficult.) Now imagine that changes start happening with greater and greater rapidity, until people start to question whether it even deserves to be called the same game. Given this, what’s the best strategy?
That’s hard to say, but it’s not crazy to argue that a good strategy would incorporate skills from previous versions, even if the game is on version 119 and version 120 is going to be released tomorrow. And it’s also not crazy to argue that it’s a bad strategy to ditch all the skills picked up in previous versions and focus entirely on trying out the crazy powers made available in version 119, particularly if it’s about to be replaced with version 120. Yes it’s somewhat helpful that a lot more people are playing these later versions, but as I mentioned there’s less variety to their strategies than one might expect. Also what does it mean to play and win the latest versions of the game? The win condition used to be producing offspring, but people seem to think that’s less important in the latest version of the game. All of which is to say it’s hard to know if something was a winning strategy in version 119 if no one manages to finish it before version 120 is released.
To close, I’d like to provide a concrete example of what I mean. I recently listened to an episode of Planet Money that was about synthetic drugs. You could say that they’re a new feature of the latest version of the game. Perhaps they require a new strategy. Fortunately if you’re looking at HEYs, then all of this should be okay, depending on how you count we’ve got millions if not billions of people playing the latest version. Someone is definitely going to experiment with synthetic drugs, and we’re all going to be provided with the results. Everyone will play the game better, and all of this will be accomplished more effectively because there are so many of us.
Except that’s not what happened. Despite, according to Planet Money, the first overdose being “national news” it keeps happening. (Planet Money includes a further six examples.) And, spoiler, this is just synthetic cannabinoids we’re talking about. If we move on to synthetic opioids (also just made available in the latest version of the game) then the harm goes through the roof. Also, the idea that someone might not know about the danger becomes much harder to argue. This is not because there weren’t a lot of HEYs being dedicated to trying out new ways to play the game. We tried all sorts of experiments including, most notably, OxyContin, where we experimented with making opioids time release. We also experimented with having the government pay for it if you were poor. These experiments didn’t lead to a better way of playing the game they lead to a lot of overdose deaths. But as I pointed out in a previous post, while these new strategies didn’t work, a strategy dating from the very earliest versions of the game still works pretty well, just avoid drugs all together.
In the end it appears that we have two things that are both increasing: the number of people who are experiencing life (players) and the number of things it’s possible to experience (the version of the game) and given that because of a commonality of culture, many people can end up acting like only a few people, but, because of the power of technology, a few people can end up changing things for many people. I’m not at all sure that our ability to play the game is getting any better, and it may, in fact, be getting a lot worse.
I’ll tell you one other thing that’s new in version 119, asking for donations for one’s blog. But fortunately I’m running a different experiment every week. Maybe this is the one that will work, if so donate here.
A quibble, a steel man, and a perspective:
Quibble – “What this means is we’re not running a lot of experiments we’re running one and if we’re lucky increasing the N.” This isn’t dramatically different from what is done in any age. Since 100 generations probably takes us back to the time of Christ or earlier, we’d need to reject Christianity as probably too new if that’s the threshold. So the criticism, ‘conservatism is too vague’ is justified if you generalize it in any way, since nobody had TV or cell phones when my grandparents were born, let alone at the time of the Founding Fathers. So what’s the threshold for accepting something new?
Honestly, it’s highly ironic to claim the American founding as a model for conservative thought on any principle of ‘respect the past for its own sake’, since the founding was by nature revolutionary and experimental in multiple senses. Everyone accepts a certain amount of recent innovation, but maybe people define that differently.
Steel man – There was once a popular phrase, ‘there’s no such thing as a black swan’ even though there were humans alive who knew about black swans. Past cultures didn’t have broad search capabilities, and lots of useful data was obviously lost. Meanwhile, what survived wasn’t always an improvement on what came before. Things might have survived and become a tradition that arose out of circumstances that grew under their own power, not because they were useful or represented progress. For example, after trying to ban alcohol, the US inadvertently institutionalized certain innovations in organized crime. Saying, ‘this is a time honored tradition our grandparents grew up with’ is obviously stupid.
This is not dissimilar to a feminist making a similar point against institutionalized patriarchy. Sure, it’s entrenched, but that’s not a valid argument for protecting it. Not everything from the past survived because it was good/adaptive/beneficial to society. It’s one thing to say, ‘let’s throw out everything that came before’. It’s another to say, ‘this thing looks obviously bad; we should figure out how to get rid of this one specific bad thing’.
Perspective – huge amounts of scientific knowledge have been discovered in recent years. We do (and fund) a lot more science than in generations past. Meanwhile there’s a certain replication crisis, which is compounded by the fact that many researchers build upon others’ research that might have been invalid to begin with. It’s a complicated topic, but let’s start with these two observations:
1. More experimental experience has accelerated progress in ways that are obviously greater than if we’d continued at the pace of Newton’s or even Einstein’s day. The world would be poorer but for rapid development in science. More experience is good, and we should expect to gain a lot of new knowledge running more experiments at the same time. The opportunity for advancement is huge.
2. With rapid innovation, we also observe a significant amount of false information is created. We probably won’t discover what is legitimate for many years or decades to come, which should give us some pause when implementing the newest ideas broadly. That shouldn’t invalidate #1, above, out we lose all the benefits, but it should still be a topic of interest and concern.
3. Peer-reviewed professional science is more stringent than politics, culture, and many other fields of human inquest.
To clarify, I wasn’t saying you claimed the American founding should be respected on the general principle of ‘respect the past’. But it is an argument I’ve heard many conservatives make.
Controlled experiments/trials are ideal however but they are very time consuming and difficult to conduct. Sociologists and economists are always hunting for ‘national experiments’ where some fluke set of events caused a pretty good case of a test and control sample to happen. However the reality is in the lifetime of the universe we cannot achieve all knowledge by this method. Controlled experiments only compare the impact of one or two variables at a time while holding thousands constant via random selection. Time and resources are limited so must deploy them very strategically.
I think Bayes Theorem is more helpful here. In Bayesian statistics, nothing ever gets fully proven or disproved. New evidence only increases or decreases the odds you place on conditional statements. “RW Richy is an honest man to do business with” is a statement I’ll put a high probability on given I don’t know anything about him as a businessman. If I do some business with him and he is honest, I’ll raise those odds. If I hear other people’s experiences I’ll likewise keep adjusting my odds. He very well might be playing a long game building trust for a long period of time putting himself in position to strike.
Society not blowing up by a few million people living with SSM for a few decades is going to tell me the odds that the cost is zero or very, very low is high. Millions getting killed only shortly after a somewhat serious attempt to rewrite property from scratch tells me the odds of it being a high cost idea is very high. There no doubt will be some truths that elude me. Maybe it just takes 100 years of people dying before a nirvana for trillions that will last thousands of years is achieved. I think the odds of that are low, but if I’m making thousands of calls like this no doubt some of those things will be missed. We have an example, the Greeks only had a brief experience with democracy before it fell apart and the Romans briefly had Republican rule before it fell into tyranny. This lead many thinkers to believe you couldn’t build a seriously large nation or empire on it but the US and other nations has demonstrated that to not be quite a clear cut truth.
I agree that Bayes is useful, and as I said in the other reply I mostly think that from a Bayesian perspective people give insufficient weight to tradition as evidence.
Also I don’t think I ever argued that SSM was going to “blow up” society. I’m more worried about a very subtle erosion of things which compounds.
Finally, I am an exceptionally honest person when it comes to business! 😉
Here is the problem. Let’s say you have a strong hunch something will be bad. Absent any more evidence it might be clear very early that thing is very bad or as you say it might end up ‘very subtle’. So that’s a big range of bad. But at this point we can say some of that range seems off the table. That unavoidably undercuts an argument against SSM.
Consider another example. Say we all believed tomatoes are poison. To eat one is death. Some chap comes along and says we are wrong. We don’t buy him. He eats one, we wait for him to die, he doesn’t. A few other people do as well. They don’t.
You can still fall back on tomatoes having some bad effects. Perhaps they cause tooth decay in large amounts., for example. But the problem here is if you are very anti-tomato ‘very subtle’ is not of much help. If tomatoes do cause tooth decay, for example, we would probably shrug and say don’t eat so many or brush your teeth after. Such a ‘very subtle’ effect can usually be counted for without much effort.
I think the concern is that HEYs are weak at detecting long-run impacts. They’re great at detecting low-probability events, because a billion Asians might tell you something about the effects of cell phone usage on the human brain (well, the Asian brain; any generic variability to Africans or Central Americans wouldn’t be known from Asian data alone). But it can’t tell you what it does to their grandchildren in the same way long experience does.
Take lead, for example. What’s the long term impact of low level exposure to environmental lead? After decades of research, we’re starting to see some evidence it might be a problem. Depending on your reading of the literature, it might be a huge problem. It’s also not too difficult to fix, it seems.
The problem is that we didn’t find out about this issue until decades later. It was clear that higher levels of exposure to lead was poisonous, which is why it was banned from gas and paint. But we didn’t clear out the low level stuff from the soil back then because we didn’t know about the persistent long term impact.
I think this is similar to conservative objections to political issues. Their arguments against SSM appear to run along these lines most of the time. It’s a week argument, because at least with lead we knew high levels were dangerous, so it made sense to extend caution to low levels. With SSM, it’s not like we saw warning signs with civil unions that predicted greater issues with full marriage. But then, we didn’t run the experiment for very long. Still, we’ve run it for about as long as we have most cell phone usage. Shouldn’t the concern over SSM match that of smartphones, at least?
I think there are two axis: You have HEYs and you have rate of technological change. I don’t think it actually takes that long to determine whether something is beneficial or not. But it is difficult to hit a moving target. These days things are moving so fast from a historical perspective that even with a lot more HEYs I think we’re falling farther behind. Which is to say determining whether something new is bad or good doesn’t take that long, but it takes longer than we’re being given. Even with more eyeballs on it.
As far as the founding (and I understand you’re not claiming that I’m deifying it) I think there are three things to say there:
1- I think they were extraordinarily lucky. It’s hard to think of another revolution with anywhere near the success.
2- They did draw on a lot of the past and a lot of failure modes in crafting things. So while the revolution was fairly recent, experiments in democracy have been going on for a long time.
3- There is every chance that the American Republic won’t be a long term success, that it will turn out to have been (from a historical perspective) relatively short-lived.
As far as your Steelman I largely agree. The point I made at the very beginning of the post was that I’m mostly arguing about not giving traditional behavior enough weight, since as far as I can tell the people you’re talking about don’t give it any weight.
As far as your final point about science. While I worry about science as well I’m mostly concerned about the pace of cultural change. I think we obviously have (despite replication problems) gotten way better at doing science.
Well if you say democracy in Greece and Republicanism in Rome were short lived periods that fell apart really fast when they got really big (say less than 100 years), then you would have a point if you argued in the 1700’s that society needs some type of authoritarian set up hence either monarchy or tyranny were the best possible setup. But the experience of the US demonstrates that isn’t the case. If the US blew up tomorrow it would still nonetheless demonstrate that you could have a democratic-republican form of gov’t that could last a pretty long time (the US is younger than many nations but actually pretty above average in terms of continuous governments…on a part I think with many monarchies). In other words the “I told you so” argument of monarchists would be a hard argument to make at this point in our experience than if the US had barely made it ten or twenty years.
To clarify, my point was that the argument, ‘we should give strong weight to tradition because gradual change is preferable to sudden change’ is incompatible with the reality of the historical experience of the US founding. We would not have a USA through any kind of conservative movement. Conservatives don’t do violent revolution where they replace the monarchy with a new form of government.
(Some similar forms may have been tied in the distant past, but that’s irrelevant. Would you want to do surgery with only the surviving documentation of two failed physicians from 2000 years ago?)
Meanwhile, I do see conservatives making this argument, which is reading their philosophy into history in a way that is incompatible with the actual events. I’m not saying this invalidates conservatism, or that the founding should be viewed as any other revolution might be. It was unique and distinctive, and seems to have started a tend toward constitutional democratic republicanism in a way that the French revolutions never did. But it was not, at its heart, conservative.
Giving strong weight to tradition IMO is not the same as advocating gradual change. In fact it can mean quite the opposite. After the French Revolution monarchists didn’t want a gradual rolling back off republican gov’t, they wanted an immediate restoration of the monarchy.
Sure, but usually it is. In the case of the French revolution, the argument was to return France to the same monarchy the rest of Europe had, and the same government they’d just discarded. Since they didn’t see the previous murderous regime as legitimate anyway, it would have been a little bizarre for them to characterize return to monarchy as abrupt.
Are things moving fast or perhaps things feel like they are moving fast because we are raking up experience faster than we did in previous times? The thing is a HeY is still a long year lived by someone.
Example, a quick search tells me clocks were invented in the 1300’s. We are now at a point where nearly a majority of HeY were lived in a world with clocks while clock’s represent only a small portion of the total generations of human experience. If you’re wondering if there are dramatic consequences for many, many generations of humans to live with clocks, the jury seems still out. If you want to know what the consequences are for having clocks exist, well odds are we probably already have seen all of the major ones and almost all of the minor ones. The possibility that would be left is a “stealth generational time bomb” that seems unnoticeable despite billions of HeY happening but suddenly explodes out of nowhere once the magic number of generations is hit, regardless of the population size of the generations.
In terms of causality this seems very subtle and rather unlikely, although we can’t rule it out entirely.
The science point was an analog to historical/HEY data. If we run into problems with rapid development in a more stringent field, we should take those lessons to heart, and then some, in less stringent fields.
The total population of the world is 7.7 billion meaning that there’s just shy of 6 billion people who live in countries where it’s illegal and 1.8 billion who live where it is legal. Which means that currently every year that passes the weight of HEYs where SSM is not normal increases
This is indeed true, but it nonetheless undercuts the case against SSM. Consider an experimental new drug. A pharma company does a clinical study, puts 1,000 people on the drug and 1,000 people not on it and watches them for a year. We gained 1000 human-years of experience on the drug but the study alone also added 1000 human-years of experience not on the drug (to say nothing of the 8B or so people in the world who were not taking the drug during the last year thereby adding experience off the drug faster than any study could ever possibly hope to catch). However we aren’t trying to learn anything about not taking the drug, we want to know what happens when people take the drug. Let’s say humans have been around 100,000 years. Maybe, just maybe NOT taking the drug causes us all to get super powers in year 100,001. Odds are very slim of that. However since we know little about the drug seeing what happens to those 1000 who take the drug for a year will provide us with a huge amount of information and reason to shape expectations for the future. If a year later no one has had any bad effects, only good, we have powerful reason to guess that’s going to continue into year 2 and 3 and beyond. Of course there’s some gain in more time. I would say after 100,000 years of no super powers, the odds of avoiding this new drug will NOT cause super powers is very high. Say 99.9999%. After only a year of seeing how the drug works on 1000 people, I’d guess the odds that the drug will continue to work after a year is also high, but more like 90% or 95%. More time does cause me to adjust my odds, but there’s a huge diminishing return here. A one year study will provide me with a lot more certainity, a 100,000 year study will add to my certainity, but not 100K times more.
Nearly two billion people raking up decades with SSM bieng legal will quickly provide us with a great amount of reason to believe SSM is harmless or nearly harmless to society despite the claims of critics. Six billion people adding another few decades of not having SSM isn’t going to add much evidence to anything to say about banning SSM in itself.
Now, of course, when people, particularly educated Westerners, imagine the future, they never imagine that in the great and limitless destiny which awaits us that SSM would still be illegal anywhere. For example, it’s hard to imagine a modern science fiction author writing a book where the illegality of SSM is a “feature” of future. They would only include it if they were imagining a dystopia.
You’re right, but I don’t think you can easily imagine a plusible sci-fi story where SSM is illegal in some future society because of their experience with SSM in the past and this is a positive. I mean sure you can do anything in a story so you can write up something like “well we discovered in 2050 parents started tossing their babies out of windows but in 2060 a oddball court case made SSM in a small nation and all in the sudden the baby tossing stopped. Since 2061 a single baby has never been tossed out a window!”. Yea you can write that but it wouldn’t quite ring true with anyone. Likewise I could imagine a sci-fi story where this worked for a non-human alien type society but could you sketch out a plausible sci-fi story with real sounding humans (or human like aliens)?
Normality
1. I’m not sure there’s a huge distinction between normality as ‘what people do’ versus ‘what works’. For example, a certain amount of theft seems to be normal. On top of that it may actually work. Stores could shoplift proof their inventory, but they don’t because customers don’t want to shop for underwear under the same security you shop for $10K diamonds. A cynic might note, fairly, a society of zero theft would be quite novel and might have some nasty consquences we don’t expect (see the series Black Mirror which has plenty of stories about the consquences of near universal tech watching us).
3rd item: Yes over time circumstances may change. Maybe something about the earth’s position made it so that pyramid building happened to be very good 5K years ago but since then it’s not. Antartica was good land to farm, until it got covered by ice now it’s not. But many of these things can go back and forth. Sometimes summers are extra hot, sometimes extra cold. If you go from years to decades to centuries those changes even out. So yea 100B people doing something for a year might seem to work great, but it only works because that year had a hot summer and if you looked at 1M people doing that thing for 500 years you’d see it only works in hot summers. But the experience clock is running fast so this might only save chronological experience for a bit. Do something for ten years and you can probably rule out a hot summer effect. Do something cross the globe and for even shorter time and you probably can do since some parts will get a hotter than usual summer and others the opposite.
One area I think you could add is multiple generations. Maybe something needs to be done for X generations before it’s impact is seen. So in that case a few hundred thousand people doing something for ten generations may say a lot more about 10B doing it for two.
I think I hit a lot of your points in previous replies. But I think you make a great point right at the end. Imagine that the whole point of all species is to turn resources into offspring. Then things that disrupt that are only going to be detected once that has had a chance to happen. Exactly as you say, I’m in part arguing that “Maybe something needs to be done for X generations before it’s impact is seen.”
Now whether turning resources into offsrping is still the point for humans is a whole different argument. One which I think I’m going to touch on next week.
But if you’re talking about running out or ruining some resource, then clearly that’s tied more to HeY. 100B people may deplete oil reserves in a generation while 2B people might take 25 generations (assuming oil consumption is held constant at present day technology). It also wouldn’t be hidden but quite linear. All along the way we could measure the problem getting worse as, say, new oil deposits become harder to find and are less easy to work than previous ones.
I’m really having a hard time mapping out how a ‘generational time bomb’ effect could plausibly happen. For example, suppose you say SSM may cause some problem in generation 10 but will have no visible impact before that. Could generation 9 ban SSM and then let generation 10 ‘reset’ the counter to buy another ten generations? To make sense that would imply over 9 generations some ‘something’ builds up and at the critical tenth generation it comes out and does its harm. But if ‘something’ is building up then it should be able to be measured, just like one would measure depleting oil reserves above.
One year of experience is not always equivalent to another. Because long term effects aren’t revealed by massive numbers of short term experiments. For example, if a quadrillion people eat nothing but sugar for a week, that mathematically looks like 20 trillion years of human experience, but it’s qualitatively different from, and will give us different expectations than, if two hundred people try to live their whole lives eating nothing but sugar.
This is partly why we do phase IV clinical trials. Most approved drugs get to market only having individuals who have been exposed for a couple of months, perhaps a year. The longest is probably oncology, where it’s unethical to take a patient off a drug that’s working for them. Even that’s usually only a few patients.
Post-approval surveillance allows us to pick out problems the short term experiments weren’t designed to answer. Prior experience suggests that the longer our experience with an intervention, the less likely we are to find these unexpected issues. The point is that the two different types of data give different types of information.
Don’t disagree with anything here. I would add, though, that if we were betting it matters a lot that nothing bad happens after a week.
First, it is well known in cancer that many drugs are harmful over time. It is totally unethical to give chemotherapy to a person who doesn’t have cancer and cranks argue that ‘chemo is poison’. But time does matter. If you delay progression in a 65 year old for a decade, you may very well save their life in the sense that you’ve shifted them from an early death to a death they would have had had they never gotten cancer. AIDS drugs cause side effects like higher blood pressure which matter over the course of decades, but, of course, those are decades most with AIDS wouldn’t have.
Second, in terms of “what could go wrong” it is much easier for things to go wrong sooner rather than later. Consider your local Wal-Mart. Suppose you randomly started eating things on the shelves. A lot of things are going to make you sick immediately…plastic toys, detergent, makeup etc. Some will kill you almost immediately (motor oil, antifreeze). Some of the things may harm you only after long periods of consumption (potato chips). It’s no guarantee but if you were told that random product X didn’t cause you any problems after eating it for a week, the odds of it being very bad for you go down a lot.
Third, this is where theory has to come into play. If A causes B immediately, that is a pretty simple story. If A causes B after a long period of continuous use, that means some transmission mechanism must exist.
In other words, I give you arsenic and you die. No great mystery. I give you a cigarette and you cough but don’t die. After 20 years, though, you do die. How did this happen? Clearly each cigarette over that time had to build up something to trigger your death. Maybe tar accumulated, maybe the damage from each cigarette. If you trace backwards from your death, you must be able to find something that accumulates over time so that a single dose doesn’t kill you but does contribute to the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
To put it another way, if I keep adding straw to your camel’s back and eventually it breaks, it’s clear how each strand of straw contributed to the breaking of your camel. But if I keep adding straw to some other camel on the other side of the world, it’s pretty hard to see how you can blame your camel’s broken back on me.
There are many instances of threshold events that don’t show up until it’s too late to do anything about them. Your examples seem good. Since I’ve little familiarity with camels, though, consider the case of a suspension bridge.
Say you weren’t an engineer, and I asked you how much weight a certain suspension bridge could hold. You wouldn’t be able to tell much based on looking at the apparent strain on the bridge. You might reason your way from the tensile strength of the individual wires (if known) to project a combined strength for the bridge. But there’s much you don’t know and might not think to look at (such as the strength of anchor points, bedrock, certain concerning stress points, etc.). Your answers might look silly to an actual engineer who knows how to determine bridge strength.
Another example is that of smoking and cancer. You really can’t detect individual mutations leading from healthy to cancerous cells. We know, from long careful experience, that the two are linked. And that was only after decades of research and having a very strong effect size. The problem is that this isn’t just a threshold impact, it’s a statistical one as well. Probability plays a role, but the longer you smoke the higher the probability you’ll get cancer.
For both of these cases, we can’t graph a smooth line from initial stress to catastrophic failure. This does to other fields as well, such as ’08 financial crisis and Italian fascism.
I work in clinical trials. If I were legally allowed to bet on the outcome of the drugs I work on, I would not ever put money down after looking at outcomes one week, month, or year in. That would be dumb.
In retrospect the link between cigarettes and cancer wasn’t very mysterious at all. Look at the graph on:
http://www.rapidshift.net/how-scientific-causation-came-to-be-solidified-in-the-tobacco-use-vs-lung-cancer-death-rates-era-relevance-to-climate-skeptics-now/
Tobacco use took off after 1910 and lung cancer took off after 1930. To be fair if we were in 1933 it might be hard to notice since the take off in lung cancer might have just looked like noise. The decades since, though, would have reinforced the concern.
“I work in clinical trials. If I were legally allowed to bet on the outcome of the drugs I work on, I would not ever put money down after looking at outcomes one week, month, or year in. That would be dumb.”
Ahhh but we aren’t asking does SSM ‘work’. We are asking is it harmful. If we were in 1930 asking if the rise in tobacco was harmful, we’d have cause to be concerned. We’re at that point now with SSM or beyond and we aren’t seeing anything. Of course there are some differences, unlike tobacco SSM is unlikely to ever be more than a niche impacting maybe at most 5% of the population while there was a time when a majority of the population were smokers.
I think the question of “does it harm?” implies some amount of theory that demands immediate evidence. It’s not impossible that harm could be lucking silently, invisible but will erupt in, say, 50 years when you have entire generations of adults who grew up never knowing a world without SSM. But as I pointed out the options are getting slimmer each year that goes by.
Your analogy with the bridge is worth considering. But there I think a failing is that the bridge moves through time. You keep pounding on the bridge decade after decade and metal fatigue might become a random event that increases in probability as time goes on. But what if all bridges were torn down and rebuilt at least every half century? In effect that’s what happens since every generation ages out, dies and new generations take the place of the old. Unless we find a way to stop aging, there’s no much point in asking what 100 years with SSM will be like. It will never be seen since people only live about 75 years or so and are only really active in the adult world for maybe 50.
As to SSM, I agreed on a previous comment that there’s no empirical evidence of societal harm/concern. The logical leap required to create that harm applies to too many other innovations most people don’t find concerning. I’m not saying there’s no harm from SSM, I’m saying that strictly following the evidence or logic doesn’t lead us to a hypothesis of harm. Yet you seem to want me to agree to evidence that is simply not knowable right now. No twenty years of experience gives us any information about what happens 25 years in. It’s perfectly fine to say, “Sure, you can hypothesize harm, but the burden of proof is on the harm hypothesis side”, because it is. There’s no reason, then, to argue that long term latent effects must have precursors we would detect, both because you don’t bear the burden of proof, and because the above examples are clear refutations of that argument.
Take smoking/cancer. Sure, you could argue that people ought to have seen the link twenty years in, as the data started pouring in. But nobody in that link you sent me was looking at the smoking/cancer angle until nearly twenty years later (1950’s), when the effect was dramatic. The link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer is one of the strongest in epidemiology, and yet it still took decades of additional data collection, first for scientists to hypothesize that link, and then again to establish it empirically. It’s easy to look backward and say, “they should have seen it.” It’s harder to look forward at the sea of possibilities and ask which specific correlations are real and which are spurious. Especially when everyone around you in the 1930’s is not asking why you smoke, given the dangers they don’t know about yet, but rather why you DON’T smoke. “It’s obviously good for your mental and physical health, after all.” We know now they were wrong, but they didn’t, regardless of when a trend starts appearing that we can pick up on later with hindsight.
In fact that’s exactly the point. If they didn’t pick up on such an obvious link back then without 40+ years of data behind them and an incredibly strong effect size, why would we pick up on other harms soon after a trend begins to show up?
Meanwhile, for an individual with cancer (my original point was about individuals, but whatever, the research angle matches it as well) the point stands that your physician can’t do some test and say you’ve smoked your way 37% to cancer. That’s not because this test hasn’t been invented, but because that’s not how cancer works. As I said above, it’s a threshold event tired to a statistical trigger. Sub-threshold, you’re fine and we can detect no harm (oversimplified a bit, but still true at more complicated levels of analysis). Then one specific event randomly triggered by one cigarette, and suddenly you’re dying of lung cancer. We know the trigger was the cigarette smoking. But we can’t draw a smooth line of evidence showing mounting harm.
Thus, threshold events are real. And their triggers are often very difficult to prospectively identify, even if after the fact it’s easy to see what caused them. (Again, the ’08 crisis comes to mind. If you predicted that, you made lots of money. Very few people made money off the crisis, though.)
Finally, I feel like you took the analogy of the suspension bridge with an unknown weight capacity and changed it into a different analogy that makes your gradualism point while ignoring the original reason for bringing it up. If you want to know the load bearing capabilities of a suspension bridge, pounding on it and using it year after year isn’t going to tell you that. Those things tell you about endurance, but not load bearing capacity. The only ways to determine that are either knowing the underlying governing physics, or by testing it to the breaking point. You can’t know, after putting 500 tons on the bridge whether it will support another 1000, or whether it with snap at 501 tons based solely on observation, since nothing observable changes once the bridge is under initial tension until catastrophic failure.
Please note, I agree that many long term impacts are cumulative and gradual, along the lines of what you consider to be most likely. I’m just saying that many effects are not like that, and it’s important not to argue based on an assumption of gradualism when the person you’re talking to is assuming/allowing for threshold effects. In the case of SSM, it’s sufficient to lay the burden of proof on the side arguing harm. If you abandon this and instead argue threshold effects aren’t real, you’re distracting from a winning argument by adopting a losing argument.
Also note, my personal belief is that SSM is, ultimately, harmful. However I don’t come to that based on empirical evidence or strict logic. I come to that because I believe in modern prophetic claims to Divine Revelation, and those revelations warn against normalization of SSM. I don’t fault anyone for disagreeing with me, and accept that the burden of proof clearly lies on my side. I also don’t see this as a conclusion we would/should come to without direct revelation from God. Partly because the logic/evidence on my side is so poor, and partly because otherwise what is revelation any good for?
If you say, “I don’t believe in your prophets”, then that’s fine and I totally understand. If you say, “I interpret those Bible verses differently”, then I’m not surprised since there are many valid interpretations to much of the Bible. That’s part of the argument in favor of continuing revelation in the first place.
If you say, “you’re wrong about what you think you know”, then whatever. Your subjective opinion about my subjective experiences doesn’t hold much weight with me, sorry. No hard feelings, as I can disagree with you and not hold it against you personally. Especially if I’m saying something like, “I don’t expect you to agree with me unless you accept that this person you don’t know has direct access to God.” Let’s say the burden of proof on that one also lies with me.
Or maybe with God?
I respect your belief that SSM is ‘ultimately harmful’ but that does beg the question. What do you mean by that? Tossing God into the equation can allow a lot of ‘help’ in your belief. For example, perhaps nothing bad will happen for 1000 years but then God will send down locusts because he’s angry we didn’t stop SSM even though he gave us 10 centuries. In that case SSM can be said to have caused harm, but kind of like winning the argument by taking hostages. I would guess your belief is that revelation prohibits SSM because of some systemic harm we aren’t aware of yet but God would like us to avoid. (not unlike God telling us not to put 501 tons on the bridge because he knows the limit while maybe our engineers don’t).
You are right, I did toy around with your bridge analogy a bit. One reason is I’m just really not familiar with how engineers address the issue of capacity. But another reason is that the bridge snapping is a pretty much a present moment harm. Either the bridge snaps today when you drive the truck over it or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t no harm done. If tomorrow your double sized truck causes it to snap, then that’s harm. So from that perspective if SSM causes harm we should have evidence of it now, otherwise it doesn’t.
The bridge analogy may work if you reformulate it as invisible harm. Driving a truck over it today won’t cause it to snap, but driving a truck over it thousands of times will sooner or later cause it to snap but until that moment there will be no evidence of the impending problem.
In that sense SSM I come back to:
1. Unlike bridges, humanity is renewed with each generation. That 50 years of truck driving may cause the bridge to snap becomes pretty much irrelevant if every 50 years the bridge has been completely rebuilt.
2. Probabilities here are on our side. As more experience piles up, the odds of a hidden harm go down. They never go down to zero but those advocating harm must articulate that they recognize their predictions are not panning out and acknowledge their argument gets weaker each passing year. I will hold the door open for them but they must acknowledge if they haven’t made it to the party 3 hours after it started we are fair to say it’s looking like they aren’t showing.
I think we have 3 tools to consider in acquiring knowledge:
1. Experiments – controlled ‘studies’ where other variables are held constant and a single or few variables are tested rigorously.
2. Bayesian – Beginning with initial probabilities and adjusting them as new bits of evidence filter in, even though much new evidence is happening in an uncontrolled manner.
3. Theory with falsification as Karl Popper laid out. You knock a glass of the table, it falls and breaks. You knock several glasses off and don’t knock several others. Only the ones you knock fall and break. You conclude knocking glasses off will cause them to fall. A theory of gravity, though, means you don’t have to endlessly knock lots of different things off the table to see if it applies to forks, plates, salt and pepper shakers. Rather than saying we can’t know anything about SSM until it’s been done by some unknown generations of people of unknown population, we can lay out theories and see if their predictions hold up. For example, an argument against SSM was that it would somehow cause heterosexual couples to not marry and somehow raise children in some less effective manner. But for that to follow then one would have to measure some change in marriage, divorce, childbearing rates after SSM is introduced and you don’t get thousands of years. If it doesn’t appear within 10 or 20 that theory is falsified.
All our tools provide different types of information, but not exactly the kind that will answer the specific questions we often want. For example, historical data is important to help us understand questions that require long term data sets. HEYs help us pull out information about low frequency events. Some questions don’t give us ready answers by any method of data collection. Especially if we’re dealing with questions of long term impacts to rapid recent innovation.
SSM seems to fall directly into this bucket. Long term historical data doesn’t really cut it. HEYs don’t tell you what happens years in.
The only thing we have to go on (for now) is logic. And there doesn’t appear to be a good logical argument that we should expect long term negative results from SSM legalization. You could argue low birth rates, but it’s not like gay people are deciding between traditional marriage and SSM. They’re looking at SSM or celibacy. The argument about culture could be made either way.
The only other way we could know what will happen long term would be if we had some way of knowing the future.
In my experience, most people who argue that SSM will produce long term negative impacts do so from a religious perspective. If God says something bad will happen, He probably knows what He’s talking about. Convincing the general public that God has made such a declaration is the burden of SSM opponents.
Well I’m unaware that God has ever said anything clear about SSM and the long term development of society, even taking the Bible literally. I agree we don’t *know* the future but we can make valid statements about the dynamics most likely in play and those less likely in play. I would say arguing that SSM will bring about dire consequences becomes exponentially more difficult should nothing be detectable a decade or two after implementing it.
Note in the above example I gave about randomly eating stuff found on Wal-Mart’s shelves. Most things that are harmful will be clearly harmful very quickly (motor oil) after you consume them. Some stuff is harmful after long periods of consumption, let’s say cake. But this harm is so much less dramatic. A lot of harms from eating cake every day could be mollified by rather modest adjustments in other behaviors (brushing your teeth right after, increasing exercise a bit, deploying some intermittent fasting ). Usually this doesn’t apply to things that present their harm immediately. You can’t, for example, easily do something to offset the harm of drinking motor oil barring science fiction levels of technology.