Now, there isn’t a perfect consensus on these issues. For probability, there’s the debate between Bayesians and frequentists. I may think the Bayesian perspective is superior, and points to a specific understanding of randomness as a subjective phenomenon (so randomness and uncertainty are really the same thing).
Funny how the adoption of a particular framework of probability theory, for pragmatic reasons can prove something about reality.
[Paragraph extorting the reader to practice heroic responsibility.]
Don’t impose this kind of responsibility on someone else. I’ve heard “take responsibility” used as a command far more often than I’ve heard it used as a motto.
Edited to “You can’t really impose this kind of responsibility on someone else. It’s compatible with constructive criticism, but not with blame.” to try to make the point clearer.
Of course, if looked at the kind of responsibility that is compatible with blame, you’d notice it’s a lot more in line with the common sense notion of the term.
Well, yes, and I think that’s mostly unfortunate. The model of interaction in which people seek to blame each other seems worse—that is, less effective for meeting the needs and achieving the goals of those involved—than the one where constructive criticism is employed.
The blame model seems something like this. There are strong social norms which reliably distinguish good actions from bad actions, in a way which almost everyone involved can agree on. These norms are assumed to be understood. When someone violates these norms, the appropriate response is some form of social punishment, ranging from mild reprimand to deciding that they’re a bad person and ostracizing them.
The constructive criticism model, on the other hand, assumes that there are some common group goals and norms, but different individuals may have different individual goals and preferences, and these might not be fully known, and the group norms might not be fully understood by everyone. When someone does something you don’t like, it could be because they don’t know about your preferences, they don’t know about a group norm, they don’t understand the situation as well as you and so fail to see a consequence of an action which you see, etc. Since we assume that people do have somewhat common goals, we don’t have to enforce norm violations with punishment—by default, we assume people already care about each other enough that they would have respected each other’s wishes in an ideal situation. Perhaps they made a mistake because they lacked a skill (which is where the constructive feedback comes in), or didn’t understand the situation, your preferences, or the existing norms. Or, perhaps, they have an overriding reason for doing what they did. Social punishment (even the mild social punishment associated with most cases of blame) often doesn’t fix anything and may make things worse by escalating the conflict or creating hard feelings.
If you discuss the problem and find that they didn’t misunderstand or lack a necessary skill or have an overriding reason that you can agree with, and aren’t interested in doing differently in the future, then perhaps you don’t have enough commonality in your goals to interact. This is still different from the blame model, where sufficiently bad violations mark someone as a “bad person” to be avoided. You may still wish them the best; you simply don’t expect fruitful interactions with them.
That being said, there are cases where you might really judge someone to be a “bad person” in the more common sense, or where you really do want to impose social costs on some actions. Sociopaths exist, and may need to be truly avoided and outed as a “bad person” (although pro-social psychopaths also exist; being a sociopath doesn’t automatically make you a bad person). However, it seems to me as if most people have overactive bad-person detectors in this regard, which harm other interactions. I don’t think this is because easily-tripped bad-person detectors are on the optimal setting given the high cost of failing to detect sociopaths. I think it’s because the concept of blame conflates the very different concepts involved in cheater-detection/sociopath-detection and situations where less adversarial responses are more appropriate.
First I don’t think conflating blame and “bad person” is necessarily helpful.
Sociopaths exist, and may need to be truly avoided and outed as a “bad person” (although pro-social psychopaths also exist; being a sociopath doesn’t automatically make you a bad person).
The most case is what is traditionally called “being tempted by sin”, e.g., someone procrastinating and not doing what he was supposed to do.
Since we assume that people do have somewhat common goals
However, not entirely common goals. A group of people can all agree that something must get done while each one also wants to get the most credit for the least amount of work. And don’t get me started on situations where most of the participants are only there for a paycheck, a.k.a., the real world.
The blame model seems something like this. There are strong social norms which reliably distinguish good actions from bad actions, in a way which almost everyone involved can agree on. These norms are assumed to be understood. When someone violates these norms, the appropriate response is some form of social punishment, ranging from mild reprimand to deciding that they’re a bad person and ostracizing them.
As I see the blame model is about enforcing skin in the game after the fact. When something objectively bad happens, e.g., a bridge collapses, profits collapse, a car accident, it’s necessary to enforce skin in that game on those whose decisions were responsible for bringing it about, i.e., make the person responsible for a risky decision bear the downside risk, especially if he would have received the benefits if it had succeeded, e.g., a CEO who decided on a risky strategy and would have gotten a big bonus if it had succeeded should also bear a cost for failure. Of course, in the question of who is responsible social norms might be relevant, e.g., if two cars collided in an intersection, the person who ran the red light is the one responsible.
First I don’t think conflating blame and “bad person” is necessarily helpful.
OK, yeah, your view of blame as social incentive (skin-in-the-game) seems superior.
The most case is what is traditionally called “being tempted by sin”, e.g., someone procrastinating and not doing what he was supposed to do.
I agree that imposing social costs can be a useful way of reducing this, but I think we would probably have disagreements about how often and in what cases. I think a lot of cases where people blame other people for their failings are more harmful than helpful, and push people away from each other in the long term.
And don’t get me started on situations where most of the participants are only there for a paycheck, a.k.a., the real world.
It sounds like we both agree that this is a nightmare scenario in terms of creating effective teams and good environments for people, albeit common.
However, even when the primary motive is money, there’s some social glue holding things together. I recommend the book The Moral Economy, which discusses how capitalist societies rely to a large extend on the goodwill of the populace. As mutual trust decreases, transaction costs increase. The most direct effect is the cost of security; shops in different neighborhoods require different amounts of it. This is often cited as the reason the diamond industry is dominated by Hasidic Jews; they save on security cost due to the high level of trust they can have as part of a community. Some of this trust comes from imposing social costs, but some of it also comes from common goals of the community members.
The Moral Economy argues that the lesson of the impossibility theorems of mechanism design is that it would not be possible to run a society on properly aligned incentives alone. There is no way to impose the right costs to get a society of selfish agents to behave. Instead, a mechanism designer in the real world has to recognize, utilize, and foster people’s altruistic and otherwise pro-social tendencies. It is also shown empirically that designing incentives as if people were selfish tends to make people act more selfish in many cases.
So, I will try and watch out for blame being a useful social mechanism in the way you describe. I’m probably underestimating the number of cases where imposed social costs are useful precisely because they don’t end up being applied (IE, implicit threats). At present I still think it would be better if people were both less quick to employ blame, and less concerned about other people blaming them (making more room for self-motivation).
Funny how the adoption of a particular framework of probability theory, for pragmatic reasons can prove something about reality.
I found this bit ammusing:
Edited to “You can’t really impose this kind of responsibility on someone else. It’s compatible with constructive criticism, but not with blame.” to try to make the point clearer.
Of course, if looked at the kind of responsibility that is compatible with blame, you’d notice it’s a lot more in line with the common sense notion of the term.
Well, yes, and I think that’s mostly unfortunate. The model of interaction in which people seek to blame each other seems worse—that is, less effective for meeting the needs and achieving the goals of those involved—than the one where constructive criticism is employed.
The blame model seems something like this. There are strong social norms which reliably distinguish good actions from bad actions, in a way which almost everyone involved can agree on. These norms are assumed to be understood. When someone violates these norms, the appropriate response is some form of social punishment, ranging from mild reprimand to deciding that they’re a bad person and ostracizing them.
The constructive criticism model, on the other hand, assumes that there are some common group goals and norms, but different individuals may have different individual goals and preferences, and these might not be fully known, and the group norms might not be fully understood by everyone. When someone does something you don’t like, it could be because they don’t know about your preferences, they don’t know about a group norm, they don’t understand the situation as well as you and so fail to see a consequence of an action which you see, etc. Since we assume that people do have somewhat common goals, we don’t have to enforce norm violations with punishment—by default, we assume people already care about each other enough that they would have respected each other’s wishes in an ideal situation. Perhaps they made a mistake because they lacked a skill (which is where the constructive feedback comes in), or didn’t understand the situation, your preferences, or the existing norms. Or, perhaps, they have an overriding reason for doing what they did. Social punishment (even the mild social punishment associated with most cases of blame) often doesn’t fix anything and may make things worse by escalating the conflict or creating hard feelings.
If you discuss the problem and find that they didn’t misunderstand or lack a necessary skill or have an overriding reason that you can agree with, and aren’t interested in doing differently in the future, then perhaps you don’t have enough commonality in your goals to interact. This is still different from the blame model, where sufficiently bad violations mark someone as a “bad person” to be avoided. You may still wish them the best; you simply don’t expect fruitful interactions with them.
That being said, there are cases where you might really judge someone to be a “bad person” in the more common sense, or where you really do want to impose social costs on some actions. Sociopaths exist, and may need to be truly avoided and outed as a “bad person” (although pro-social psychopaths also exist; being a sociopath doesn’t automatically make you a bad person). However, it seems to me as if most people have overactive bad-person detectors in this regard, which harm other interactions. I don’t think this is because easily-tripped bad-person detectors are on the optimal setting given the high cost of failing to detect sociopaths. I think it’s because the concept of blame conflates the very different concepts involved in cheater-detection/sociopath-detection and situations where less adversarial responses are more appropriate.
(Response also posted back to the blog.)
First I don’t think conflating blame and “bad person” is necessarily helpful.
The most case is what is traditionally called “being tempted by sin”, e.g., someone procrastinating and not doing what he was supposed to do.
However, not entirely common goals. A group of people can all agree that something must get done while each one also wants to get the most credit for the least amount of work. And don’t get me started on situations where most of the participants are only there for a paycheck, a.k.a., the real world.
As I see the blame model is about enforcing skin in the game after the fact. When something objectively bad happens, e.g., a bridge collapses, profits collapse, a car accident, it’s necessary to enforce skin in that game on those whose decisions were responsible for bringing it about, i.e., make the person responsible for a risky decision bear the downside risk, especially if he would have received the benefits if it had succeeded, e.g., a CEO who decided on a risky strategy and would have gotten a big bonus if it had succeeded should also bear a cost for failure. Of course, in the question of who is responsible social norms might be relevant, e.g., if two cars collided in an intersection, the person who ran the red light is the one responsible.
OK, yeah, your view of blame as social incentive (skin-in-the-game) seems superior.
I agree that imposing social costs can be a useful way of reducing this, but I think we would probably have disagreements about how often and in what cases. I think a lot of cases where people blame other people for their failings are more harmful than helpful, and push people away from each other in the long term.
It sounds like we both agree that this is a nightmare scenario in terms of creating effective teams and good environments for people, albeit common.
However, even when the primary motive is money, there’s some social glue holding things together. I recommend the book The Moral Economy, which discusses how capitalist societies rely to a large extend on the goodwill of the populace. As mutual trust decreases, transaction costs increase. The most direct effect is the cost of security; shops in different neighborhoods require different amounts of it. This is often cited as the reason the diamond industry is dominated by Hasidic Jews; they save on security cost due to the high level of trust they can have as part of a community. Some of this trust comes from imposing social costs, but some of it also comes from common goals of the community members.
The Moral Economy argues that the lesson of the impossibility theorems of mechanism design is that it would not be possible to run a society on properly aligned incentives alone. There is no way to impose the right costs to get a society of selfish agents to behave. Instead, a mechanism designer in the real world has to recognize, utilize, and foster people’s altruistic and otherwise pro-social tendencies. It is also shown empirically that designing incentives as if people were selfish tends to make people act more selfish in many cases.
So, I will try and watch out for blame being a useful social mechanism in the way you describe. I’m probably underestimating the number of cases where imposed social costs are useful precisely because they don’t end up being applied (IE, implicit threats). At present I still think it would be better if people were both less quick to employ blame, and less concerned about other people blaming them (making more room for self-motivation).