It often seems that when you see a paper presentation followed by a discussant, the discussant’s two minute summary of the paper is clearer than the author’s twenty minute presentation. Somehow it just isn’t OK for the author to spell it out as simply as the discussant is allowed to. And as the post points out, written work is worse.
David_J_Balan
I didn’t know about that. Thanks! Belichick also seems to be something of a cheater cheater pumpkin eater, so I guess he’s just willing to take help from wherever he can get it.
But there has to be some irrationality in there somewhere. That is, if you place your job at risk by not buying IBM even when it is not the best choice, it has to be either that the person who gets to decide whether or not to fire you has wrong ideas, or that the people that person needs to satisfy have wrong ideas. So in the football example, if it’s not the coaches, it has to be someone else, most likely the fans.
I think that’s right. More broadly, the “unfavorable joint distribution of attributes retards adoption of good ideas” phenomenon doesn’t apply when the limitations imposed by the joint distribution can be easily gotten around one way or the other. That’s why I suspect it is most at play when one of the scarce attributes is actually the willingness to entertain doing the things that would be necessary to escape the constraints imposed by the other scarce attributes.
The paper clearly tries to take all relevant strategic considerations into account. I can’t personally vouch that he succeeds. But I haven’t heard of his result being overturned on technical grounds. That is, I haven’t heard of anyone else coming along, doing a similar analysis, and concluding that coaches actually go for it on fourth down the correct amount. For this reason, I doubt that the problem is a technical flaw in his analysis.
I think that’s about right. But both sports talk radio and political talk radio fall into the “abstract thinking” category.
Probably the best examples involve instances of judging the wisdom of a decision made under extreme uncertainty based on how it came out. So the decision to try to steal a base was praiseworthy if the runner was safe but foolish if the runner got thrown out, and things like that. More broadly, the phenomenon is very strong opinions based on limited or misinterpreted evidence. For example, there are a couple of pitchers on the Yankees right now where there is a big debate about whether they are better suited to be starting pitchers or to be relievers. People have incredibly strong opinions about this on the basis of next to no information, and they regard those opinions as being altogether vindicated in each individual instance where the pitcher does well in their preferred role.
It’s true that it can be rational to fire someone who doesn’t buy IBM if the decision not to buy IBM constitutes evidence that worker is of low quality. But I don’t think that’s the case here. I think that if a football coach got fired for going for it on fourth down more often than most, he would have been fired because of that decision itself, not because going on fourth down represents a signal that he’s just generally a bad coach.
Anything we do to just about anything has implications for other people (present and future). And hopefully we have a decent moral framework for dealing with that (and if we don’t that’s a whole ’nother problem). But I don’t see how it applies to nature in particular, and the point of the post was to identify reasons (if any) for a privileged place for nature.
Clearly nothing is perfectly “uncontaminated.” You can’t entirely escape the world which formed you. The question is whether there is something that gets you some decent part of the way there, and it seems to me that nature has that property. This does not mean that it is the only thing of value in the world, and it does not mean that people who don’t regard it as a value should be ignored.
I agree that special moral issues arise when you are talking about valuable items to which property rights can’t be assigned for one reason or another, and that nature is an important example of that.
Other commentors have said something similar, and you may well be right about this, I’m certainly not enough of a historian to know. However, the main point of the post remains: a lot of people today have what I think are pretty bad reasons for giving a privileged place to nature, and I have offered an alternative one that I think has more going for it.
Economists, and particularly economic historians, definitely still take Adam Smith very seriously, though I don’t know to what extent that is for anything like the reason discussed in the post.
If people just plain like nature, that alone is a good reason for there to be nature. That’s true for just about anything (that doesn’t harm others). The question is whether nature is deserving of some special status or protection (maybe nothing is deserving on such protection and there should be only as much of it as arises under free markets, but that’s another argument). I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that nature is a world completely apart and that we bring none of our baggage with us when we enter it. But I do think that I can be more relaxed and confident that my experience is genuine and that I’m not being played in the woods than I can in Disney World, that this is of special value, and that this is precisely the kind of thing that the market tends to under-provide since no profits can be made from it.
If there was something that could get you out of your own biases, if only for a little while, that would be even better! But I sure don’t know how to do that.
Good point.
We have a lot of bad impulses that one way or another are the legacy of our monkey origins. The trick is to get better at not giving in to them, and part of that is recognizing that they exist.
Good point, and great link.
Robin, I don’t see any disconnect here. I certainly did not mean to suggest that parents shouldn’t be paternalistic towards their children. Of course they must be, though there is room for legitimate argument about how much paternalism is really necessary, and I think often less is better than more. The point of the post was simply to point out that people often disguise cruelty as justifiable paternalism, and that that’s bad. Same idea with government paternalism. I think there is a real necessary role for it, but it is susceptible to abuse. As I argued in our debate, in times and places where the abuse was very severe, we would have been better off getting rid of it altogether. But in decently well-functioning societies, that’s not the case. And if we got even better at limiting the abuses, I’d probably be in favor of even more paternalism.
The full quote is even better:
“That’s the way Max Power is, Marge. Decisive. Uncompromising! And rude!”