I think for most of the examples given, the headline concept is not the main reason people might not immediately agree. for example:
it is in fact true that the expected impact of one vote or one decision to not eat meat is tiny in the grand scheme of things. on the other hand, if you persuade thousands of people to become vegan, or play a pivotal role in a political campaign, this is a much larger impact. some people prefer to take big effective actions, rather than tiny actions that add up across many people (and some other people prefer the opposite). none of this has anything to do with the IVT
people worry about the tax bracket thing because they don’t understand how tax brackets work, not because they don’t know how continuous functions work. also I struggle to imagine any adult in the US, who knows what it means for a function to be continuous and differentiable, and has ever filed taxes in their life, to not know how tax brackets work.
some people prefer to take big effective actions, rather than tiny actions that add up across many people
Like the OP says, I have heard people say that not eating meat has no effect because production decisions are made in large chunks. That isn’t about a preference for big actions.
I mean, it’s probably true in the same way that “my vote will probably not change the election” is probably true. most people value a 1/1000 chance of saving 1000 chickens at way less than a 100% chance of saving one chicken. for meat production in particular, the connection between you choosing not to eat meat and less meat being produced is more tenuous than for elections. imo the main reasonable arguments for not eating meat are either deontological/signalling (it is bad to do immoral things, it is bad to be a hypocrite, etc), or fdt style arguments (I am not deciding just for myself, but for many people who use the same decision strategy); incidentally, these are imo also the main reasons to vote.
I very much know how continuous functions work and precisely what differentiability is, and I have filed taxes, but I would probably need a refresher on tax brackets to be sure I had everything right...
I have a similar comment: it seems to me the problem is not that people don’t have these fairly obvious concepts, it’s the unobviousapplication of these concepts to real world cases. Eg the three examples given for the Intermediate Value Theorem are not entirely obvious instances of it, and it’s not obvious that the IVT completely solves them.
I think some people don’t have those concepts, and some people know those concepts at a shallow level but haven’t integrated them into their worldviews. And for people who have them deeply, they assume these concepts are so obvious that it can’t possibly be the reason other people are confused (instead they must have a deeper disagreement, or are trolling). Whereas I tend to believe that the world is full of more trivial mistakes.
But I don’t have strong evidence that I’m right here. The nature of unknown knowns also means that, to the degree I’m right, it’s harder to discuss than usual.
One indirect piece of evidence is an anecdote recounted by Thomas Shelling in the preface to the 1980 edition of The Strategy of Conflict. The anecdote suggests that we may overestimate people’s familiarity with seemingly obvious concepts.
The book has had a good reception, and many have cheered me by telling me they liked it or learned from it. But the response that warms me most after twenty years is the late John Strachey’s. John Strachey, whose books I had read in college, had been an outstanding Marxist economist in the 1930s. After the war he had been defense minister in Britain’s Labor Government. Some of us at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs invited him to visit because he was writing a book on disarmament and arms control. When he called on me he exclaimed how much this book had done for his thinking, and as he talked with enthusiasm I tried to guess which of my sophisticated ideas in which chapters had made so much difference to him. It turned out it wasn’t any particular idea in any particular chapter. Until he read this book, he had simply not comprehended that an inherently non-zero-sum conflict could exist. He had known that conflict could coexist with common interest but had thought, or taken for granted, that they were essentially separable, not aspects of an integral structure. A scholar concerned with monopoly capitalism and class struggle, nuclear strategy and alliance politics, working late in his career on arms control and peacemaking, had tumbled, in reading my book, to an idea so rudimentary that I hadn’t even known it wasn’t obvious.
Schelling’s specific point actually feels relevant to me and a blindspot among (at least some) rationalists or EAs when they talk about “conflict” vs “mistake” theory. I’ve recently thought about the “conflict vs mistake theory” framing some more, and think it misses out a lot of the learnings that are standard in, eg, negotiation classes or bargaining theory, or international relations/game theory writ large.
I think a lot of the time a better position is something roughly like: “I have my interests and intend to pursue mine own interests to the best of my ability. I respect you as an agent with your interests and willing to pursue yours. Sometimes our interests come into conflict, and we take actions detrimental to each other. However, it is implausible that our interests are directly opposed, and there are often plausible gains from trade.”
A plausible example of mistake theory inhibiting gains from trade is when (supposedly) Obama often tried to lecture Republican lawmakers about their mistakes, instead of taking their interests as a given and tried to negotiate more.
Broadly agree—I overstated my point; of course some people don’t have these concepts. But I think there is a big gap between having these concepts as theory (eg IVT in pure math) and applying them in practice to less obvious cases.
(Cf Wittgenstein thought that understanding a concept just was knowing how to apply it—you don’t fully understand it until you know how to use it.)
I think for most of the examples given, the headline concept is not the main reason people might not immediately agree. for example:
it is in fact true that the expected impact of one vote or one decision to not eat meat is tiny in the grand scheme of things. on the other hand, if you persuade thousands of people to become vegan, or play a pivotal role in a political campaign, this is a much larger impact. some people prefer to take big effective actions, rather than tiny actions that add up across many people (and some other people prefer the opposite). none of this has anything to do with the IVT
people worry about the tax bracket thing because they don’t understand how tax brackets work, not because they don’t know how continuous functions work. also I struggle to imagine any adult in the US, who knows what it means for a function to be continuous and differentiable, and has ever filed taxes in their life, to not know how tax brackets work.
Like the OP says, I have heard people say that not eating meat has no effect because production decisions are made in large chunks. That isn’t about a preference for big actions.
I mean, it’s probably true in the same way that “my vote will probably not change the election” is probably true. most people value a 1/1000 chance of saving 1000 chickens at way less than a 100% chance of saving one chicken. for meat production in particular, the connection between you choosing not to eat meat and less meat being produced is more tenuous than for elections. imo the main reasonable arguments for not eating meat are either deontological/signalling (it is bad to do immoral things, it is bad to be a hypocrite, etc), or fdt style arguments (I am not deciding just for myself, but for many people who use the same decision strategy); incidentally, these are imo also the main reasons to vote.
I very much know how continuous functions work and precisely what differentiability is, and I have filed taxes, but I would probably need a refresher on tax brackets to be sure I had everything right...
I have a similar comment: it seems to me the problem is not that people don’t have these fairly obvious concepts, it’s the unobvious application of these concepts to real world cases. Eg the three examples given for the Intermediate Value Theorem are not entirely obvious instances of it, and it’s not obvious that the IVT completely solves them.
I think some people don’t have those concepts, and some people know those concepts at a shallow level but haven’t integrated them into their worldviews. And for people who have them deeply, they assume these concepts are so obvious that it can’t possibly be the reason other people are confused (instead they must have a deeper disagreement, or are trolling). Whereas I tend to believe that the world is full of more trivial mistakes.
But I don’t have strong evidence that I’m right here. The nature of unknown knowns also means that, to the degree I’m right, it’s harder to discuss than usual.
One indirect piece of evidence is an anecdote recounted by Thomas Shelling in the preface to the 1980 edition of The Strategy of Conflict. The anecdote suggests that we may overestimate people’s familiarity with seemingly obvious concepts.
Thanks, this is helpful.
Schelling’s specific point actually feels relevant to me and a blindspot among (at least some) rationalists or EAs when they talk about “conflict” vs “mistake” theory. I’ve recently thought about the “conflict vs mistake theory” framing some more, and think it misses out a lot of the learnings that are standard in, eg, negotiation classes or bargaining theory, or international relations/game theory writ large.
I think a lot of the time a better position is something roughly like: “I have my interests and intend to pursue mine own interests to the best of my ability. I respect you as an agent with your interests and willing to pursue yours. Sometimes our interests come into conflict, and we take actions detrimental to each other. However, it is implausible that our interests are directly opposed, and there are often plausible gains from trade.”
A plausible example of mistake theory inhibiting gains from trade is when (supposedly) Obama often tried to lecture Republican lawmakers about their mistakes, instead of taking their interests as a given and tried to negotiate more.
Of course, conflict theory can inhibit gains from trade if it prevents people from coming to the negotiation table, or just not notice that bargaining is almost always a better option than war.
Broadly agree—I overstated my point; of course some people don’t have these concepts. But I think there is a big gap between having these concepts as theory (eg IVT in pure math) and applying them in practice to less obvious cases.
(Cf Wittgenstein thought that understanding a concept just was knowing how to apply it—you don’t fully understand it until you know how to use it.)
I’m not wedded to the tax example. For the other(s), I disagree, but unfortunately neither of us have enough data to resolve this.