And while natural world enchantment evokes humility in the face of non-human forces that feel unknowable and uncontrollable, social world enchantment evokes hubris in the face of social forces that feel knowable and controllable.
I agree but maybe jdnym isn't wrong. For example, some people seem pretty sure they know how to end discrimination and inequality. Conservatives have many social ills they think they can address too.
Not trying to provoke, but do you not consider your carbon tax recommendation an attempt to control social forces? Or are you saying, “I’ve tried, I know!”😁
An Alcorn hypothesis, inspired by Arnold Kling's various blogposts about Dunbar's Number, evolutionary psychology of cooperation in early human bands, and challenges of cooperation within complex modern societies:
(Dunbar's Number i= several dozen people.)
a) In some contexts of rivalry or competition between organizations, whose membership does not exceed Dunbar's number, behaviors will tend to be regulated informally by an intense thicket of norms that mimic the social psychology of early human bands. For example, think of college sports teams and greek-letter orgs on campus.
b) These norms will be excessively controlling (and so partly dysfunctional) in two ways:
-- The norms will be overkill because the stakes are low compared to the survival stake that fostered intensive norms in early human bands. For example, members internalize norms of collective punishment of individual wrongdoing: players who are punctual must run laps while the player who is tardy watches. For another example, on women's teams and in sororities, norms emerge that bar members from dating anyone who was previously in a relationship with a teammate.
-- The norms are at odds with liberal principles of individual accountability in civil society. Moreover, it is questionable whether the norms improve team performance at all. For example, time and energy for symbolic collective punishment have opportunity costs, given that practice time is finite.
c) The dysfunctional norms emerge naturally and constitute an equilibrium because they are hard-wired in evolutionary psychology and are activated in Dunbar's Number contexts of intensive internal cooperation and rivalry versus other orgs or teams.
It doesn't help that, in our mass media age, people feel a kind of social imperative to have a proxy-opinion on so many subjects beyond their real life experience.... or even interest. Many people would perhaps find an opt-out - whereby it would not seem socially inept to say, in relation to this or that 'issue', "I haven't got the faintest idea" - would come as a relief.
It's not just social complexity it's parasocial complexity. This is crucual, the Nature of our social relation changes in tandem with their scope and complexity, which goes way beyond our natural ability to manage or just cope with it.
Arnold, I think you over-estimate the extent to which the world has been "disenchanted". I hear all the time, "Everything happens for a reason." People who say this do not mean everything has a natural materialistic cause. They mean that something, perhaps a deity, perhaps the universe itself, that has a sort of consciousness and a plan, that we all fit in that plan, that it is in some ultimate sense good. We can take comfort that it is all for the best, even if we don't know how. People are simply unwilling to give up that feeling.
I am starting to think that "Economics, psychology, and other social sciences" have given up even trying to understand and have devolved into a modern form of astrology. They create imaginary check box groups containing individuals with total overlapping distributions of characteristics, like unintelligent to smart, weak to strong, etc. They then use these as principle components in analyses using statistical packages they don't understand to obtain p-hacked results they desire. Astrology also got "valid" associations between a 2-D image of stars and human affairs.
DEI destroys understanding, because it excludes all cultural values and only considers XY chromosomes and those few genes which determine skin color. You can't describe an N-Dimensional shape in N-x Dimensions -- even a simple cone requires an infinite number of 2-D sections to be correctly described (see "Conic Sections" in any mathematical textbook).
Economics used to be believable, but it seems to have given up on calculus and dynamics, which miss the significances of supply/demand markets as feedback systems whose stability requires supply response times to be faster that demand response times. They don't realize that regulatory time delays on things like "permissions and permits" can send a market into unstable oscillations along the lines of those we observe in California in our housing markets, supplies of building materials from sand to wood, production of solar grade silicon in the USA, or even providing desalinization in So. California, notoriously short of water.
I tend to make broad generalizations, which don’t apply to all people. Like right now. I’m outside, in Downtown Pittsburgh, enjoying a nice day. I don’t have to keep a constant eye on my phone. But some people do. It’s going to rain soon, so I’ll go back to humble domicile and relax, probably look at my phone more there.
To Dr. Kling's point, Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" (1970) is worth a skim on the rate of change overwhelming our ability to process it. This is yet another argument for keeping the dead hand of government to a minimum. For example, even the experts in AI likely have no idea where it will end up. Yet, dodgy lawyers who look good in a suit (aka politicians) can't wait to interfere and extract their toll.
Staying off of social media would greatly help. The pre social media internet, before 2004, before MySpace, gave us plenty of access to information. Not listening to news coverage of events that are beyond our control would also be a good thing. The headlines would tell us all we need to know. Limiting our time on our smartphones would also help (cough cough).
I'd be more careful about statements like your last sentence. My wife reads books on her phone. You want to limit that? Is email bad? I get limiting daily news but none? What about opinion columns and other "news" that is less immediate? What about Kling's substack? Like daily news, I'm rather sceptical there isn't some social media that isn't good in small amounts. Can that help keep us connected with family and friends we can't see very often?
Ironically, now that that Facebook has less from my friends and more ads and other junk, I find it not at all addicting. In fact, I can't look at it very long at all and the longer I look, it seems the longer between looks.
Substack isn’t social media. You can go outside and get fresh air and ignore your phone depending on your disposition and place in life. Read it while sitting down.
My suggestions are never meant to be taken as written in stone and only interpreted one way. That’s the problem with posting an observation online. I’ve jumped to conclusions plenty of times.
"Of course, “primitive people looking at nature” might just as easily connote a similarly high degree of sophistication, knowledge and insight even though primitive people lacked DNA analyses and electron scanning microscopes to reveal the unknown in nature. They knew enough to survive, flourish, and pass along knowledge to their descendants. And although we may not yet have the DNA analyses and electron scanning microscopes that will reveal previously unknown secrets of human culture, it is still struggle enough to grasp the immense amount of high-quality work on this topic that has been bequeathed us. I’m quite pleased enough just to encounter ideas that are new to me but have been on the printed page for decades and even centuries. And so I would suggest retaining some measure of respect for those who have gone before us."
This is a good point. To the extent causal theories and new practical techniques were developed (I'm not suggesting that everyone was a natural philosopher/budding scientist, but some where) there must have been a tremendous sophistication of thought involved, since the thinker couldn't just rely on hundreds of years of experimentally verified and codified scientific knowledge.
I see this in a drop off in specificity in fiction/literature, about nature.
Ditto generally in the culture, there's barely a cursory knowledge of plants - which once were part of the store of common knowledge - whether it was the flowers of the field or hundreds of trees of the forest, or the plants that people grew or gathered for eating, or even the somewhat degraded but still vibrant garden club culture that was once the norm for ladies.
This (rather integral) subject is one on which there is now near-total ignorance except as a niche interest a la the master naturalists or native plant societies - where you will find mostly grey heads.
And while natural world enchantment evokes humility in the face of non-human forces that feel unknowable and uncontrollable, social world enchantment evokes hubris in the face of social forces that feel knowable and controllable.
Social forces do not appear controllable to me.
I agree but maybe jdnym isn't wrong. For example, some people seem pretty sure they know how to end discrimination and inequality. Conservatives have many social ills they think they can address too.
Not trying to provoke, but do you not consider your carbon tax recommendation an attempt to control social forces? Or are you saying, “I’ve tried, I know!”😁
An Alcorn hypothesis, inspired by Arnold Kling's various blogposts about Dunbar's Number, evolutionary psychology of cooperation in early human bands, and challenges of cooperation within complex modern societies:
(Dunbar's Number i= several dozen people.)
a) In some contexts of rivalry or competition between organizations, whose membership does not exceed Dunbar's number, behaviors will tend to be regulated informally by an intense thicket of norms that mimic the social psychology of early human bands. For example, think of college sports teams and greek-letter orgs on campus.
b) These norms will be excessively controlling (and so partly dysfunctional) in two ways:
-- The norms will be overkill because the stakes are low compared to the survival stake that fostered intensive norms in early human bands. For example, members internalize norms of collective punishment of individual wrongdoing: players who are punctual must run laps while the player who is tardy watches. For another example, on women's teams and in sororities, norms emerge that bar members from dating anyone who was previously in a relationship with a teammate.
-- The norms are at odds with liberal principles of individual accountability in civil society. Moreover, it is questionable whether the norms improve team performance at all. For example, time and energy for symbolic collective punishment have opportunity costs, given that practice time is finite.
c) The dysfunctional norms emerge naturally and constitute an equilibrium because they are hard-wired in evolutionary psychology and are activated in Dunbar's Number contexts of intensive internal cooperation and rivalry versus other orgs or teams.
see also Robin Hanson today in quillette
Thanks for the pointer.
It doesn't help that, in our mass media age, people feel a kind of social imperative to have a proxy-opinion on so many subjects beyond their real life experience.... or even interest. Many people would perhaps find an opt-out - whereby it would not seem socially inept to say, in relation to this or that 'issue', "I haven't got the faintest idea" - would come as a relief.
It's not just social complexity it's parasocial complexity. This is crucual, the Nature of our social relation changes in tandem with their scope and complexity, which goes way beyond our natural ability to manage or just cope with it.
Arnold, I think you over-estimate the extent to which the world has been "disenchanted". I hear all the time, "Everything happens for a reason." People who say this do not mean everything has a natural materialistic cause. They mean that something, perhaps a deity, perhaps the universe itself, that has a sort of consciousness and a plan, that we all fit in that plan, that it is in some ultimate sense good. We can take comfort that it is all for the best, even if we don't know how. People are simply unwilling to give up that feeling.
Cf. "I am spiritual but not religious."
Very selective in who you engage with on this comment thread.
I am starting to think that "Economics, psychology, and other social sciences" have given up even trying to understand and have devolved into a modern form of astrology. They create imaginary check box groups containing individuals with total overlapping distributions of characteristics, like unintelligent to smart, weak to strong, etc. They then use these as principle components in analyses using statistical packages they don't understand to obtain p-hacked results they desire. Astrology also got "valid" associations between a 2-D image of stars and human affairs.
DEI destroys understanding, because it excludes all cultural values and only considers XY chromosomes and those few genes which determine skin color. You can't describe an N-Dimensional shape in N-x Dimensions -- even a simple cone requires an infinite number of 2-D sections to be correctly described (see "Conic Sections" in any mathematical textbook).
Economics used to be believable, but it seems to have given up on calculus and dynamics, which miss the significances of supply/demand markets as feedback systems whose stability requires supply response times to be faster that demand response times. They don't realize that regulatory time delays on things like "permissions and permits" can send a market into unstable oscillations along the lines of those we observe in California in our housing markets, supplies of building materials from sand to wood, production of solar grade silicon in the USA, or even providing desalinization in So. California, notoriously short of water.
"There are many ways in which a cheater may appear to be a cooperator, and vice-versa."
Economic analysis is helpful in separating pseudo cooperators from real ones.
I tend to make broad generalizations, which don’t apply to all people. Like right now. I’m outside, in Downtown Pittsburgh, enjoying a nice day. I don’t have to keep a constant eye on my phone. But some people do. It’s going to rain soon, so I’ll go back to humble domicile and relax, probably look at my phone more there.
To Dr. Kling's point, Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" (1970) is worth a skim on the rate of change overwhelming our ability to process it. This is yet another argument for keeping the dead hand of government to a minimum. For example, even the experts in AI likely have no idea where it will end up. Yet, dodgy lawyers who look good in a suit (aka politicians) can't wait to interfere and extract their toll.
Staying off of social media would greatly help. The pre social media internet, before 2004, before MySpace, gave us plenty of access to information. Not listening to news coverage of events that are beyond our control would also be a good thing. The headlines would tell us all we need to know. Limiting our time on our smartphones would also help (cough cough).
I'd be more careful about statements like your last sentence. My wife reads books on her phone. You want to limit that? Is email bad? I get limiting daily news but none? What about opinion columns and other "news" that is less immediate? What about Kling's substack? Like daily news, I'm rather sceptical there isn't some social media that isn't good in small amounts. Can that help keep us connected with family and friends we can't see very often?
Ironically, now that that Facebook has less from my friends and more ads and other junk, I find it not at all addicting. In fact, I can't look at it very long at all and the longer I look, it seems the longer between looks.
Substack isn’t social media. You can go outside and get fresh air and ignore your phone depending on your disposition and place in life. Read it while sitting down.
My suggestions are never meant to be taken as written in stone and only interpreted one way. That’s the problem with posting an observation online. I’ve jumped to conclusions plenty of times.
you wrote smartphone, not social media.
"Of course, “primitive people looking at nature” might just as easily connote a similarly high degree of sophistication, knowledge and insight even though primitive people lacked DNA analyses and electron scanning microscopes to reveal the unknown in nature. They knew enough to survive, flourish, and pass along knowledge to their descendants. And although we may not yet have the DNA analyses and electron scanning microscopes that will reveal previously unknown secrets of human culture, it is still struggle enough to grasp the immense amount of high-quality work on this topic that has been bequeathed us. I’m quite pleased enough just to encounter ideas that are new to me but have been on the printed page for decades and even centuries. And so I would suggest retaining some measure of respect for those who have gone before us."
This is a good point. To the extent causal theories and new practical techniques were developed (I'm not suggesting that everyone was a natural philosopher/budding scientist, but some where) there must have been a tremendous sophistication of thought involved, since the thinker couldn't just rely on hundreds of years of experimentally verified and codified scientific knowledge.
I see this in a drop off in specificity in fiction/literature, about nature.
Ditto generally in the culture, there's barely a cursory knowledge of plants - which once were part of the store of common knowledge - whether it was the flowers of the field or hundreds of trees of the forest, or the plants that people grew or gathered for eating, or even the somewhat degraded but still vibrant garden club culture that was once the norm for ladies.
This (rather integral) subject is one on which there is now near-total ignorance except as a niche interest a la the master naturalists or native plant societies - where you will find mostly grey heads.