I’ve previously argued that public deploring is exceedingly arbitrary. The “outrages” we hear about on the news – the outrages that “We cannot tolerate!” – are usually no worse than dozens of other problems that we barely acknowledge or discuss. In my words:
When I witness the unbearable arbitrariness of deploring, two unsympathetic types of explanations come to mind.
First, people’s negative emotions depend far more on the vividness of the evil than its badness. A hundred stories about celebrity harassers would upset the world far more than ironclad statistical proof that 10% of celebrities harass. Indeed, it’s likely that one detail-rich story about a celebrity harasser would upset the world more than the best statistical study ever performed.
Second, people’s negative emotions are intensely social. People don’t want to rage alone. They want to get mad with their friends and countrymen. So when a new round of ugly stories pop up, almost no one asks, “Is this really the best target of our collective anger?” Instead, they jump on the bandwagon. Who cares where we’re going, as long as we’re united in negativity?
As examples, I name the crusades against chemical weapons and sexual harassment. I don’t see why chemical weapons are worse than the endless alternative methods of mass murder, and I don’t see why sexual harassment is worse than the endless alternative ways of mistreating employees and co-workers.
Yesterday, however, renowned rationalist Scott Alexander defended the basic rationality of the conventional view. Unlike most people, however, Scott doesn’t try to defend conventional priorities. Instead, he finds a hidden wisdom of effective deterrence lurking beneath the surface. Scott:
I have a different theory: people get upset over the violation of already-settled bright-line norms, because this is the correct action if you want to use limited enforcement resources efficiently.
Imagine a town with ten police officers, who can each solve one crime per day. Left to their own devices, the town’s criminals would commit thirty muggings and thirty burglaries per day (for the purposes of this hypothetical, both crimes are equally bad). They also require different skills; burglars can’t become muggers or vice versa without a lot of retraining. Criminals will commit their crime only if the odds are against them getting caught – but since there are 60 crimes a day and the police can only solve ten, the odds are in their favor.
Now imagine that the police get extra resources for a month, and they use them to crack down on mugging. For a month, every mugging in town gets solved instantly. Muggers realize this is going to happen and give up.
At the end of the month, the police lose their extra resources. But the police chief publicly commits that from now on, he’s going to prioritize solving muggings over solving burglaries, even if the burglaries are equally bad or worse. He’ll put an absurd amount of effort into solving even the smallest mugging; this is the hill he’s going to die on.
Suppose you’re a mugger, deciding whether or not to commit the first new mugging in town. If you’re the first guy to violate the no-mugging taboo, every police officer in town is going to be on your case; you’re nearly certain to get caught. You give up and do honest work. Every other mugger in town faces the same choice and makes the same decision…
The police chief’s public commitment solves mugging without devoting a single officer’s time to the problem, allowing all officers to concentrate on burglaries. A worst-crime-first enforcement regime has 60 crimes per day and solves 10; a mugging-first regime has 30 crimes per day and solves 10.
But this only works if the police chief keeps his commitment. If someone tests the limits and commits a mugging, the police need to crack down with what looks like a disproportionate amount of effort – the more disproportionate, the better. Fail, and muggers realize the commitment was fake, and then you’re back to having 60 crimes a day.
I happily grant that Scott’s story is logically possible. But I see minimal real-world relevance of his thought experiment. Sticking to his example:
- In the real world, muggers can become burglars.
- In the real world, deterring muggers more requires deterring burglars less. Zero-tolerance for muggers means a free hand for burglars.
- In the real world, mugging and burgling are not equally bad. If authorities choose to prioritize one, it will be because of vividness and herding, not actual badness.
To be fair to Scott, he does argue that his model successfully explains the standard approach to both chemical weapons and sexual harassment. But I find neither of his analyses convincing:
This looks to me like what’s happening with chemical weapons. The relevant difference between chemical weapons and conventional weapons is that the international community made a credible commitment to punish chemical weapons use, and so far it’s mostly worked. People with chemical weapons expect to be punished for using them, so they rarely get used. If there are some forms of atrocity that are easier with chemical weapons than with conventional ones – ie a dictator with a limited arms budget can kill more people with a choice between chemical and conventional weapons than they can when restricted to conventional weapons alone – then the taboo against chemical weapons saves lives. And so when a dictator tests the limits by trying a chemical weapon, it’s worth responding to that more forcefully than if they used conventional weapons to commit the same massacre. You’re not just preventing the one attack, you’re also acting to enforce the taboo.
I agree that chemical weapons rarely get used. But has the chemical weapons ban actually reduced total number of war deaths? On the contrary, it probably increased total war deaths because (a) chemical weapons aren’t especially cheap or effective, and (b) the ban was the key rationale for the Iraq War. Furthermore, the mere fact that almost no one reflects on this distinct possibility confirms that the ban derives from vividness and herding, not shrewd deterrence strategy.
The sexual harassment situation seems like the same dynamic. We can’t credibly demand our elites are never jerks to their subordinates – jerkishness is too vague a concept, there’s too much of it around, and it’s just not really an enforceable norm. But we have sort of credibly demanded our elites don’t sexually harass their subordinates, and it seems like we might be getting enough of a coalition together to enforce this in a lot of cases. If we can solidify this into an actual social norm, such that the average elite expects to be punished for sexual harassment, then elites will stop sexually harassing their subordinates and we won’t have to keep calling the whole coalition together all the time to enforce the punishment.
This is a more promising case for Scott: Governments that can’t kill their enemies with gas will simply bomb them, but sexual predators that can’t harass probably won’t switch to asexual emotional abuse. But again, the obvious question to ask is: Has the taboo on sexual harassment actually raised overall job satisfaction? It’s possible, but how many people with strong feelings on the subject have ever perused the numbers? And this is an especially strange position for Scott to take, because he’s blogged extensively on the vagueness of romantic-sexual norms. There’s probably stronger agreement that “Bosses who publicly scream at employees are jerks” than “Bosses who date employees are presumptive sexual harassers.”
All this aside, the fundamental question is not whether selective extreme reactions to chemical weapons or sexual harassment has done some good, but whether it was the best possible use of the moral energy and resolve employed to fight them. As far as I can tell, Scott claims nothing like this. True, that’s a high bar. But almost no normal person even pretends to try to meet it. Instead, they pick their targets in exactly the way my original piece described: vividness and herding. If you lose sleep over Moloch, isn’t this precisely what you should expect humans to do?
READER COMMENTS
Hazel Meade
Jun 20 2018 at 4:38pm
I don’t think it is vividness or herding. It’s going after the low-hanging fruit of norm development. There are some issues where we’re right around the critical mass necessary to achieve consensus – and those issues will return a disproportionate utility gain if you can push them over the edge into consensus. or vice versa – issues where not enforcing the norm could result in a loss of the consensus underpinning the norm. Sexual harassment and chemical weapons qualify, but conventional weapons doesn’t. There’s virtually no chance anyone is going to ban conventional weapons since that would essentially mean banning warfare itself, but if people start getting away with chemical weapons use, governments might start using them a lot more – so there’s a high utility in keeping that norm enforced.
mobile
Jun 21 2018 at 6:24pm
Banning conventional weapons would also mean that only unconventional weapons could be used to enforce the ban.
Patri Friedman
Jun 22 2018 at 7:06pm
“There are some issues where we’re right around the critical mass necessary to achieve consensus – and those issues will return a disproportionate utility gain if you can push them over the edge into consensus. or vice versa…”
Consider the dynamics of this, however. Those who care about a given issue have incentive to portray that issue as being “right around the critical mass”, in order to get people on their side to spend their limited outrage. Meanwhile they want to portray, to the other side, that the other side is on the wrong side of history and sure to lose and shouldn’t bother to try. We should thus be highly skeptical of those recruiting support by claiming their issue is uniquely timely.
Alessandro Sisti
Jun 20 2018 at 6:36pm
Isn’t herding something people do when they enforce norms? There are good points in this post, but I’m not sure how we’re supposed to distinguish between “herding” as a bad thing and “norm enforcement” as a good thing. I would imagine they’re often one and the same.
Colin
Jun 21 2018 at 10:42am
I agree with your premise. My best current example is from Canada (where I live). After much pressure from the media and activists our federal government started the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry. The basic truth is that indigenous women are 6 to 7 times more likely to be murdered than non-indigenous women. But what is rarely mentioned is that indigenous men are murdered at the same increased rate compared to non indigenous men, and 3 times higher than indigenous women.
The harm is by focusing on women the solutions seem to be gender based, even though the difference between indigenous men and women is the same as for non-indigenous men and women.
People respond better (vividness / herding ) to women being killed. There is the possibility that solutions found and implemented may help, but by ignoring the men, we may miss the factors that are more general. Indigenous communities are poorer, more rural, have higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, less education. None of those issues are gendered, but ignoring them and casting the issue as gendered makes the inquiry exercise mush less useful.
SaveyourSelf
Jun 21 2018 at 11:01am
I think this phenomenon makes more sense in the context of survival. Violence is the greatest of all evils, as it is the most obvious and direct way to decrease lifespan. Violence and survival are nearly opposites, but not quite. Anyway, the easiest and most effective way to reduce risk—of violence or anything else—is through diversification. Another way to say the same thing is that nothing predicts success in a violent contest better than numeracy, coordination, and timing.
The reflexes—for that is what I think they are—that Bryan routinely deplores—pun intended—such as outrage and intolerance reliably result in the rapid assembling of people and coordination of their intention in the moment. In other words, it’s a survival reflex that produces numeracy, coordination, and timing against a threat.
Bryan frequently espouses himself as “rational” and is unapologetically derogatory toward any other kind of mental functions. In a peaceful world, he is likely correct. The reactions he derides are barely restrained violence. They are the thing that leads to riots and needless injury. And violence or even threat of violence in anything other than self defense or justice, is evil.
That said, in a high risk environment, it gives me a small amount of sadistic pleasure to note that Bryan would—rationally, of course—not survive long, since he has so thoroughly cleansed himself of such base devices.
nobody.really
Jun 21 2018 at 12:49pm
Is this the sequel to “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”?
So suddenly there’s a surge in the town’s labor supply without any surge in labor demand. (Heck, with the decline of muggings, there may even be a decline in people employing parking lot security.) Unemployment surges; the mayor loses the next election; and the new mayor fires the police chief….
nobody.really
Jun 21 2018 at 12:52pm
Ok, more seriously, I see many dynamics at play here. I’ll mention two: novelty-induced anxiety, and category outrage.
Novelty-induced anxiety. People can feel greater anxiety about the novel than about the familiar, even when evidence suggests that the risks are no greater. Recall all the anxiety about the risks posed by microwave ovens? Similarly, radiation from nuclear power plants makes people anxious, even when it’s largely contained, while coal’s residual radiation doesn’t provoke the same reaction. Trump correctly observes that your immigrant neighbor might attack you, while ignoring that your NON-immigrant neighbor is more likely to attack you. As the Music Man observed, the presence of anything new—even a pool hall in River City—can be turned into a threat.
Thus, we may express greater outrage about NEW problems than about familiar ones.
Category outrage. When we conclude that some element in a category is outrageous, we may tend to regard every other element in that category as outrageous. Arguably this failure to distinguish risks can lead to sub-optimal allocations of outrage.
For example, my friends dutifully acknowledge that we must respect the rights of Westboro Baptist Church to march around military funerals with signs saying “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates Fags,” yet they can barely contain their outrage that a baker would decline to bake a cake for a gay couple.
But some of the judgments regarding “misallocated outrage” reflect a judgment based on a static analysis, not a dynamic one. Arguably it makes more sense to look at the appropriate allocation over time.
To take the obvious example: For centuries the US countenanced more racism than we currently do. Now, plenty of people had rational arguments against discrimination based on race, but those arguments didn’t seem to provoke a lot of social change. What provoked change was outrage—first regarding Confederate defection, then regarding the (suddenly televised) abuses of Jim Crow. And when you harness outrage to achieve your objectives, you may overshoot your target—just as using your car’s momentum to get over a snow ridge may result in your car going far beyond the ridge. I may regard the result as excessive—but I don’t know how we could have made the progress we have without harnessing outrage. In short, what may seem sub-optimal from a static view may be optimal from a dynamic view.
Note, significantly, that MLK Jr did NOT traffic only in outrage, but also in love. Arguments grounded in love have two of the qualities of arguments grounded in rationality: They do not lend themselves to such excesses. And they don’t seem to motivate a lot of social change without the added support of outrage.
Today we find this dynamic throughout Christianity. Some churches emphasize an almost antiseptic message of Christ’s love—“love your neighbor,” “love your enemy.” Others emphasize the outrage of Christ’s wrongful trial and execution, wallowing in references to suffering and blood and “passion.” Yet, from my viewpoint, churches that wallow in Jesus’s suffering are not notably churches that exhibit the most compassion for the suffering of others. Rather, compassion tends to be the hallmark of the love-your-neighbor churches.
Why? One thesis: The love-your-neighbor churches tend to associate themselves with the affluent (even as their financial circumstances decline). They haven’t adopted a scarcity mentality. In contrast, other churches identify with the down-and-out, and have a definite scarcity mentality. They emphasize Jesus’s unjust suffering as a proxy for their members’ victimhood. And in an us-vs.-them world, they can’t concern themselves with the victimization of others.
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