Keeping up with the FITs, 3/9
Noah Smith and Andrew Gelman; Scott Alexander on rationality; Robert Wright on Ukraine; Jonathan Turley on non-government censorship; Stephen Kotkin on Ukraine
Noah Smith interviews statistics methodologist Andrew Gelman. Hard to excerpt, but here is one point Gelman makes.
I looked at a much-publicized study of the effects of early childhood intervention on adult earnings, and under reasonable assumptions about possible effect sizes, the bias in the published estimate can be larger than the true effect size! And this has implications, if you want to use these estimates to guide cost-benefit analyses and policy decisions (see here: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/07/20/nobel-prize-winning-economist-become-victim-bog-standard-selection-bias/).
Gelman has other interesting comments throughout, especially at the end.
I feel like what I’m missing is an idea of what anti-rationalism means. What’s at stake here? What are we arguing about when we argue about rationality?
Let me try: Rationality is the attempt to hold beliefs that can be impersonally justified using logic and observation.
My beliefs about inflation, whether right or wrong, are rational. My choices of dancing and bike-riding as hobbies are not rational, in the sense that you probably could not talk me out of them using logic and observation.
In Responsible Statecraft, Marcus Stanley of the Quincy Institute assesses the pros and cons of the devastating economic sanctions imposed by the West on Russia. “If the possibility of lifting sanctions were linked to clear diplomatic goals, they could create a powerful incentive for Moscow to reach a peace settlement and boost the negotiating leverage of the Ukrainian government in talks,” he writes. But he lays out several negative consequences that could ensue “if sanctions are open-ended and long term, aimed at provoking regime change in Russia rather than linked to a diplomatic process to end the war in Ukraine.”
Is current U.S. policy rational? Not by my definition. I am afraid that too many in America and Europe favor fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.
Despite my strong support for Ukraine and condemnation of Putin, it is important for advocates of civil liberties and free speech to be vigilant in calling out such abusive measures. It is during wartime and periods of social discord that the greatest abuses can occur for those with dissenting or unpopular views.
. . .The First Amendment is not the full or exclusive embodiment of free speech. It addresses just one of the dangers to free speech posed by government regulation. Many of us view free speech as a human right. Corporate censorship of social media clearly impacts free speech, and replacing Big Brother with a cadre of Little Brothers actually allows for far greater control of free expression.
To those who argue that the First Amendment need not apply to private-sector actors, I would say “It’s the cultural norms, stupid.”
I strongly recommend Peter Robinson’s podcast with Stephen Kotkin. Kotkin’s strongest belief is that Russia and China will not converge to American-style democracy or anything close. So we have to think in terms of a West that is special. He has many insights along the way. He ends up saying, “the only threat to America is America.”
Arnold;
Your definition of rationality is not an effective one. When people discuss whether Putin is making decisions rationally or not, they mean 'does he have a stable cost-benefit analysis?' This includes all sorts of values and expectations, including the desire to experience pleasure (like riding a bike) or avoid pain (even being deprived of a tantalizing steak dinner). When these same people say he is being 'irrational' and then tie it to mental health, they are asserting that decision making is being conducted in an unstable and internally inconsistent fashion.
What you mean is something else - about the incorporation of public and private (personal/local) information, integration of private and local preferences, and values into collective decision making. This is akin to the primacy of supposed secularism - the only sound basis for communal argumentation is (in this model) to be communal, verifiable, falsifiable truth.
One major failure in the defense of rational public decision making is the notion that this can be applied universally and scale independently. You acknowledge that an individual can make individual decisions on the basis of personal preferences which cannot be put on a public footing. The same is true of groups at any scale. They can make decisions rationally and yet use information that isn't verifiable outside their own boundaries.
In fact, much of the poverty of secularism is the notion that universal falsifiable public truth is anywhere near sufficient for daily decision making. It is not, and that inadequacy requires a surreptitious importing of considerations out-of-bounds. This violation is distributed unequally and ultimately represents a major breach of trust because it must be denied, ignored, and covered to maintain the semblance of secularism which violently represses all other claims to legitimate preference.
It is possible to define ‘rationality’ more broadly but, given that you define it as holding *beliefs* on a certain basis, your *preferences* for dancing and bike-riding as hobbies cannot be *rational*, because they are not *beliefs*. (There are some beliefs in the vicinity; for example, presumably you believe that you enjoy dancing. That belief is rational and is a partial basis for choosing to spend some of your free time dancing.) Once you have confined "rationality" to beliefs, you should do the same for "irrationality," in which case your preferences are also not *irrational*.