High-decoupling vs low-decoupling or decoupling vs contextualizing refers to two different cultural norms, cognitive skills, or personal dispositions that change the way people approach ideas.
High-decouplers isolate ideas from each other and the surrounding context. This is a necessary practice in science which works by isolating variables, teasing out causality and formalizing claims into carefully delineated hypotheses.
Low-decouplers, or contextualizers, do not separate ideas from their connotation. They treat an idea or claim as inseparable from the narratives that the idea might support, the types of people who usually make similar claims, and the history of the idea and the people who support it.
Decoupling is uncorrelated with the left-right political divide. Electoral politics is the ultimate low-decoupler arena. All messages are narratives, associations, and vibes, with little care paid to arguments or evidence. High decouplers are usually in the “gray tribe” since they adopt policy ideas based on metrics that are essentially unrelated to what the major parties are optimizing for.
My community prizes high decoupling and for good reason. It is extremely important for science, mathematics, and causal inference, but it is not an infallible strategy.
Should Legality and Cultural Support be Decoupled?
Debates between high and low decouplers are often marooned by a conflation of legality and cultural support. Conservatives, for example, may oppose drug legalization because their moral disgust response is activated by open self-harm through drug use and they do not want to offer cultural support for such behavior. Woke liberals are suspicious of free speech defenses for rhetoric they find hateful because they see the claims of neutral legal protection as a way to conceal cultural support for that rhetoric.
High-decouplers are exasperated by both of these responses. When they consider the costs and benefits of drug legalization or free speech they explicitly or implicitly model a controlled experiment where only the law is changed and everything else is held constant. Hate speech having legal protection does not imply anyone agrees with it, and drug legalization does not necessitate cultural encouragement of drug use. The constraints and outcomes to changes in law vs culture are completely different so objecting to one when you really mean the other is a big mistake.
This decoupling is useful for evaluating the causal effect of a policy change but it underrates the importance of feedback between legality and cultural approval. The vast majority of voters are low decouplers who conflate the two questions. So campaigning for one side or the other means spinning narratives which argue for both legality and cultural support. Legal changes also affect cultural norms.
For example, consider debates over medically assistance in dying (MAID). High decouplers will notice that, holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off. People will only take the choice if its better than any of their current options. We should take revealed preferences seriously, if someone would rather die than continue living with a painful or terminal condition then that is a reliable signal of what would make them better off. So world A, with legal medically assisted death compared to world B, without it, is a better world all else held equal.
Low decouplers on the left and right see the campaign for MAID as either a way to push those in poverty towards suicide or as a further infection of the minds of young people.
I agree with the high decouplers within their hypothetical controlled experiment, but I am also confident that attitudes towards suicide, drug use, etc are culturally formed. Only high decouplers even attempt to separate the concept of giving something legal protection from giving it cultural support and they often don’t succeed. Politicians and voters almost never try.
In this sense, the low decoupling combination of the two is more rational. It’s close to an empirical law that political campaigns intertwine legal and cultural prescriptions. So in the context of highly politicized flashpoints, it’s not crazy for low decouplers to assume that a factual claim, legal proposal, or idea is dragging its associated cultural values, vibes, and history along with it, even if there is no explicit mention.
This doesn’t invalidate the arguments from choice and revealed preference made by the high-decoupler before, but it does point out something that is missing from their comparison of world A to world B: how did the law change between those two worlds? Campaigning to legalize MAID in a democracy inevitably means changing cultural attitudes towards it, even if the change is just from ignorance. This doesn’t clearly favor one position on MAID over the other, but the effect of cultural change could easily swamp the legal one.
High decoupling is still correct far more often than not, but democratic politics unavoidably attaches ideas to their associated narratives, groups, and histories. High-decouplers, among each other, can sometimes convince based purely on evidence, but low-decouplers know that pitches made to them always come in pairs. The cultural impact of campaigning to change a law should not always be separated from evaluation of the law’s impact.
I think this is oversimplified:
This is obviously true if somehow giving a person an additional choice is literally the only change being made, but you don’t have to be a low-decoupler to notice that that’s very very often not true. For a specific and very common example: often other people have some idea what choices you have (and, in particular, if we’re talking about whether it should be legal to do something or not, it is generally fairly widely known what’s legal).
Pretty much everyone’s standard example of how having an extra choice that others know about can hurt you: threats and blackmail and the like. I might prefer not to have the ability to pay $1M to avoid being shot dead, or to prove I voted for a particular candidate to avoid losing my job.
This is pretty much parallel to a common argument for laws against euthanasia, assisted suicide, etc.: the easier it is for someone with terrible medical conditions to arrange to die, the more opportunities there are for others to put pressure on them to do so, or (this isn’t quite parallel, but it seems clearly related) to make it appear that they’ve done so when actually they were just murdered.
Agreed on most of the above, but on this particular point:
I would expect the opposite there. If assisted suicide and stuff is legalized, I expect that to come with high standards of “There should be a notarized signature, multiple witnesses, a video from the person in question stating their intentions, and they walk into a building where some official people first take the person into another room and say ‘Are these men coercing you? We can have our security staff subdue them and bring in the police’”, etc., designed specifically to make it hard to cover up a murder like that. And the existence of that option should push a chunk of regular suicides in that direction, making it less plausible that someone would commit suicide in the “traditional” way where they give no one any warning, may or may not leave a note, etc.
I would expect the standards to be high while the practice is new and very controversial and the cases are few… and then gradually the process gets more streamlined.
Protests against assisted suicide are easy to coordinate; protests again removing 1% of the bureaucracy around it are not.
Do we really need 7 witnesses, or is 6 enough? It is okay if the doctor performing the suicide is also one of the witnesses? And his assistant is another one? How clearly must the person speak on the video? What if they can’t speak at all, is it fair to deny someone the “basic human right” of assisted suicide just because their ability to speak is impaired? What if taking someone to the next room would be logistically too difficult, e.g. because they are connected to some kind of life support? … Twenty years later, the doctor checks a box saying “the assisted suicide was done according to the law” on the form, signs it, and that’s it.
>> High decouplers will notice that, holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off. People will only take the choice if its better than any of their current options.
This is demonstrably untrue in cases of suicide. 70% of people who survive a suicide attempt do not attempt it again, so their decision to try is probably a bout of temporary madness / irrationality, and not an expression of stable well-considered preference for death over life.
It’s an interesting framework, I can see it being useful.
I think it’s more useful when you consider both high-decoupling and low-decoupling to be failure modes, more specifically: when one is dominant and the other is neglected, you reliably end up with inacccurate beliefs.
You went over the mistakes of low-decouplers in your post, and provided a wonderful example of a high-decoupler mistake too!
Aside from https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/choices-are-really-bad/ there’s also the consideration of what choice I offer you, or how I frame the choice (see Kahneman’s stuff).
And that’s just considering it from the individual psychological level, but there are social/cultural levers and threads to pull here too.
I think the optimal functioning of this process is cyclical with both high decoupling phases and highly integrated phases, and the measure of balance is something like ‘this isn’t obviously wrong in either context’.