Alexandr Chakroff

If you’re interested in understanding human conceptions of morality, you owe yourself some time to read Alexandr Chakroff’s dissertation. I know, no one actually reads dissertations any more and you’re a very busy person so certainly I’ll do my best to summarize key points below but I think that you’ll enjoy the read more than you expect for two reasons. One, Chakroff is a student of Joshua Greene. Greene is… well, I’m not entirely a fan but he’s become fairly famous for his work in moral judgment. At some point I’ll write up my thoughts on his engaging book, Moral Tribes. Second, Chakroff is more principled about designing experiments than Jonathon Haidt. There are places where Haidt inserts himself by “thinking hard” about a problem and then pronouncing an answer (e.g. the six categories in his moral foundations theory). Chakroff avoids this as much as possible by taking a data scientists view. What he loses in detail, he gains in clarity.

To demonstrate this principled approached, let me use as an example the first experiment from his dissertation. The purpose of the experiment is to see explore the structure of the moral domain across as diverse sample of humanity and it was structured as follows.

  1. Generate a cross-cultural list of sample moral violations. Participants were recruited through Mechanical Turk and individually asked to brainstorm as many moral violations as possible. The set of participants was almost gender balanced, represented a wide range of political orientation, and drawn from North American and India. Duplicate or vague responses were removed leaving 550 items in the list.
  2. General a cross-cultural set of moral judgments on these violations. Again, Mechanical Turk is used and participants are asked to rate the severity of 90 violations drawn randomly from the above list.
  3. Principal Components analysis on the resulting rankings. The algorithm extracted two principal components of significance.
  4. Intuition gathering. Participants from Mechanical Turk were presented with violations showing either high rankings in the first component or high rankings in the second and asked questions about those violations and the hypothetical agents involved.

The two components that Chakroff extracts do reinforce earlier results of Haidt. There was a well publicized result showing differences in moral reasoning between American liberals and conservatives, particularly in the categories that Haidt related to purity judgments. Chakroff shows a similar drift in his two categories.

Category one consists of harmful acts. These are “acts that directly and negatively impact others’ welfare” and corresponds to the individualizing grouping in moral foundations theory. Judgements of violations in this category depend on the situational context of a given problem and on the intent of the agents involved. Those guilty of category one violations are not trusted to refrain from further such violations (though they can be forgiven) but are not anticipated to commit category two violations.

Category two consists of impure acts. These are “acts that deviate from normative behavior, without necessarily hurting others” and corresponds to the binding grouping in moral foundations theory. Violations in this category are attributed to internal factors of the violating agent. While similar themes (food, sex) appear across different cultures, the particulars of the rules are local to each culture. Those guilty of category two violations are judged defective and not trusted to refrain from either category two or category one violations. Once you’ve violated a normative rule, you’ve shown yourself to be an unpredictable agent and all bets are off.

Speech

Just got an answer to my question from the other day.

“Is some other purpose of the university that subsumes the need for credentials, that doesn’t conflict with the agreed restrictions on publicly funded organizations (e.g. the BBC), and that allows for a principled discussion on what is too extreme to be allowed?”

Marduk neatly shows why the second constraint is inappropriate and why my follow up question comparing universities to city governments is a category error.

Q. “And what is a public university if not a state entity?”
A. An autonomous charity for the furtherance of knowledge and education.

Universities may receive money from governments but that does not make it a sub-department of that government. Rather, it falls into the same grouping as foreign aid. Government grants can become the instruments of policy and oversight bureaucracy attached to it grows over time. This does not prevent us from rejecting the policy that universities are directly responsible to the government, and by extension the public at large.

Also from the same thread, StillGjenganger gives a succinct summary of the liberal view on speech in a pluralistic society that’s worth reading.

Fairness

A reputable casino succeeds by, among other things, offering scrupulously honest games of chance, the payout odds of which are unfair.

The games are honest in that the dice are not “loaded,” the wheel is not “fixed.”

The odds are unfair in that the expected value of the game to the two parties (the house and the player) are not equal.

– Bob Lince

The above quote gives a neat example of a distinction I hadn’t considered with any rigor. One can be the most honest business person in the world without it being necessary for anyone you interact with to have their happiness increased. Nothing feels immoral about this individual as honesty is the chief virtue of commerce, yet something feels off. It is intuitive that people in the same circumstances and context ought to have similar access to the same outcomes and two people engaging in a game together feels like symmetric context. How does morality encode the distinction between the player and the house?

Fair seems linked to proportion so only one of Fiske’s frameworks support it. This is transactional, bourgeois morality. I’m not sure that the morality of the military and the nobility, of duties and obligations, carries a sense of fairness. There it may be more a matter of treating your subordinates equally for similar performance. The two might be roughly comparable if we consider them the same pattern only concerned with economic capital and social capital, respectively. Fairness on the commune is pretty tricky and is hard to distinguish from a simple ‘no shirking’ rule.

Ultimately, fairness in outcome is difficult and hard to measure when we want to take into account different contributions of input. So, if we lived in the world where we could set up our measurements on the input and automatically get fairness of outcome then we’d be very happy. However, the example given suggests that is not always possible and we’re forced to conclude again that the world is broken and/or evil with respect to our desired ideal.

Roles

When you sign a contract and accept employment, do you owe your employee a duty to act within the ideal role for that position or should you continue to act as yourself and trust that they can choose someone else if you fail to meet their requirements?

Consider choosing who to vote into office. The ideal politician has several skills that are unsavory. They may be called on to lie and bluff convincingly, to be flexible with promises, to betray prior loyalties, and to make choices that cut against the immediate desires of their constituents. They may be required to make choices against their own interests. We can consider three candidates. One has all of these qualities as a matter of character and indeed acts as our ideal politician out of unconscious habit. One is personally more admirable but is flexible enough in character to perform the role of the politician in all official contexts. A third is personally more admirable but inflexible. They may not make a superb politician by the standards above but they have complete personal integrity and are likely to do at least a mediocre job in office. It’s not clear who is strictly superior.

If you value most the job getting done then one or two would be best. One will be more practiced at the desired traits so will be the more desirable. If you are interested in your leader being a good person (having certain limits) then two or three is best. If you split between these two paths then you’ll end up with a contest between two and a one pretending to be a two. If the one is any good, it will be impossible to distinguish in this case. If you value authenticity above all else, the choice is between one and three and you’ll need to use different criteria (possibly the above) to break the tie.

That’s assuming it is even possible for us to truly inhabit a role. Here’s an article in the New York Times about a tattoo and the belief in human universals. There’s a leap that’s not obvious from some person did feel X to all people could feel X. It’s a leap I used to be comfortable taking but not any more. I think humanity is more complicated than that and you might need to change J, K, and L before you’re capable of X.

There’s another point specific to the politician example. How the leader acts will cause the team to follow. If you make it about the work, it will be about the work to the exclusion of the personal. If you make it about loyalty, it will be about loyalty to the leader even when the leader is blatantly and obviously wrong. If you make it about ambition, everyone will be aiming for a promotion. That’s the only way to get one but running that race you’re constrained to be a piece of the current system (and probabilistically won’t get what you want). I don’t know if revolution can occur within entirely within a system but a priori this seems like a contradiction.

Let me leave you with a song about a narrow gate from The Wire, a show the utterly lives up to expectations.

The Onion

The writers at the Onion are great at comedy. I treasure that my college had free copies of their latest on stands all across campus. Respect to the college students who gave us the Hobo-Merman wars but there’s a reason that the Onion is so persistent and so respected (and, no, it’s not just Peter Rosenthal). It’s because they’re good writers.

http://www.theonion.com/article/god-angrily-clarifies-dont-kill-rule-222

http://www.theonion.com/article/not-knowing-what-else-to-do-woman-bakes-american-f-221

(yes, this does tell you more about me than it does about the Onion. I don’t care, you should read it if you want and make up your own mind anyway).

Here’s an article that I truly hate. I have mixed feelings about sharing it – mostly because I’m new to this sort of thing. You don’t have to click through, instead you could accept this as a launching point for things that seem to need saying.

“Myself included”. As a rhetorical gesture to indicate you have a insiders perspective and the bravery to use it (potentially) against yourself this might be useful. I think it’s a cheap way out of including the type of rigor that doesn’t require disclaimers.

“Hyper-whiteness”. What the fuck. Please describe the cluster of traits that you believe this entails. Because it means very little to me and you seem to think it means something and you seem to think it means somethings bad and you won’t explain. This fails to pass a certain universal test in which the same thing might be described as hyper-sub-saharan-african or hyper-indian and we could draw similar meaningful conclusions.

Is a sense of entitlement unique to this subculture you’re trying to capture. Perhaps it’s a human universal or at lest something that appears in other contexts. You’re invoking an opposition to normality that may not exist.

Let’s play with definitions around the word contributor. Don’t ask me to defend rigid boundaries of insider/outsider but do forgive me for pointing out that your pedantic word play is unnecessary.

Nothing like cherry-picked speculative history.

“[Code is] the one true way”. This almost feels like a reasonable idea that you’re exaggerating so you can score points for your article.

At this point, I’m done. There are some poisonous open source communities. There are some personalities involved in open source that I truly hate. But this article does nothing to expose that truth. If this is the kind of writing accepted under Model View Culture then I find that I have little use for it. Perhaps you can take this as evidence that you can drop the publication if you have misgivings after reading it.

Prediction

It’s part of the human condition to worry about the future. How to accumulate resources to survive the lean times? And what if your concern is for more than yourself?

Perhaps you join Louis Theroux’s friends in Idaho. Or maybe you invest in the continued survival of the system and try to accrue enough capital to join the comfortable class. More likely you don’t get a choice but to sell your labor for the chance to do nothing with what time remains.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-different-cluetrain.html

Joy

Ursula Le Guin wrote a line in The Left Hand of Darkness that’s quite striking. “Joy, which is so different from laughter.” That’s true. I laugh a lot but joy is rare recently. It’s making me rethink my life – what it should be doing is making me act to change. But, too human, I find I have ingrained defenses against change.

I also have a particular habit of laughing when I hurt. Le Guin has another line, that we should find our selves moved to “cry as easily as laugh”. This doesn’t feel right. People will use your laughter against you but far easier and far worse to use your tears. We don’t cry because we don’t want our problems to get worse because crying is a signal that we’re near the brink. Crying let’s your opponent know that you are more tired than them. There’s an awful trust in tears.

If I believed the Internet were a safe place…

Morning Thoughts

I woke up this morning feeling worthless. There was a hole in my life that I couldn’t ignore. The curious fact that I produce nothing of value and no one would really miss me if I were gone. Perhaps for a while but they’d get over it. I told myself it wasn’t true but that didn’t feel very convincing. I told myself that it didn’t matter but it felt as if it did. I told myself I could change and do many things of great worth and it felt, skeptical, a worn out formula covering for the inescapable truth that none of us really change. We just keep treading the same ground and making the same promises and, look, you’re a few years older. The hole in your life will always be there.

Or

I woke up this morning with a particularly neurotic obsession. For some reason, pieces of my mind were trying to convince me that people have ‘worth’. Despite being relatively easily dismissed as a childish fear, it incessantly returned. The notion is absurd, what measure could reduce any person’s life to a single metric of value when doing so must necessarily compress all the myriad values of life into one form? It doesn’t mean anything to say the life of a 12 year old Bavarian school girl with good grades is worth more than a Canadian pilot who enjoys cooking Bolognese. That’s the grand lesson of existentialism. So the correct approach to my obsession is to deflect it like an annoying dog, offer it neither love nor hate and it will go away.

Or

Value is a legitimate output of your social-moral framework. If you’re proportion oriented then you believe that we can compare any two objects and probably believe that money is the ideal tool for the task. If I could calculate how much money would be paid for my life, I could know my value. To the hierarchy oriented then my value is my status. To feel better about myself, I should contemplate the group with whom I hold the greatest status. To the unity oriented, my value to my main group is the most important. This is different from rank in a hierarchy as the value tracks how well I carry out the rituals of the group and police its boundaries. Perhaps my feelings of worthlessness stem from being apart from my family and weakly obtaining social approval from a comparably tight knit group. To the equality oriented, value is meaningless! I don’t have to justify anything here. That’s implicitly what I’m invoking above and, you’ll notice, the only framework that I could have done so in. Lucky for me that my culture doesn’t encourage the other frameworks more aggressively.