A brief look at the Easterlin Paradox

 I've been reading the original Easterlin paper * because it looked cool. I have a few thoughts. I haven't looked at the literature, but I'm confident that someone else pointed this out in the 50 years since the paper was published.

The paradox is basically that while the rich are happier than the poor, people don't get happier as they get richer.

Now when you look at Eaterlin data, it sure looks like there is a paradox.

This is the table for the interpersonal comparisons, as you can see, the poorest report a happiness rating of 1.8/4 with 16% saying they're very happy, while the richest report a happiness rating of 2.8/4, and 44% saying they're very happy.

Now let's look at the intrapersonal data.

As you can see, as incomes rise, reported happiness remains flat. I have some thoughts on explanations, but we can talk about those later. What I'm more interested in, is the damn graphs.

Let's look again at the relationship between happiness and income.  People's happiness generally increased by 0.2 points for every $10,000. I'm assuming that the "less than 10,000" group is 0 to 10,000, and I would expect people with incomes of $0 a year to be very different from those who make $5,000. I expect way much more heterogeneity from this group than the others. The life cycle data starts from 10,000 anyway, so we can safely ignore it. I'm also ignoring incomes higher than $50,000. Why? Because they go up to 75,000 which is a $25,000 increase. And the $75,000 goes up to infinity??? Is this where the meme that happiness peaks at $75,000 comes from?

So we're stuck with the 10,000 to 50,000 groups. We have a 0.2 increase from 10-20k to 20-30k. The same increase for the 20-30k group and the 30-40k group, and a 0.1 decrease from going up to the 40-50k income group from 30-40k. This gives us a mean increase of 0.1 increase per $10,000. The longitudinal data shows that the sample started from an income of about $12,000 in their 20s, and ended up with maybe $22,000, I'm eyeballing it so a bit unsure. 

This gives us an increase of $10,000 maybe $15,000 from ages 22 to 55. We would expect a 0.1, maybe 0.15 increase in happiness, so for example the happiness line would go from 2.3 or to 2.4 or something. This doesn't show in the data. But the y-axis is way too big to see it. It starts from 0 and goes up to 4, but in our rich-poor data, it starts from 1.8 and goes up to 2.8. And when I exclude the less than $10,000 and the more than $50,000 populations. We would have a happiness line that goes from 2.1 to 2.4, a measly 0.3 increase. It's not too surprising when your ginormous y-axis doesn't show that. 

I'm not saying that by zooming in we would find the hidden solution to the paradox, but the paradox itself is, from looking at this dataset, exaggerated. And the fact that the 40-50,000 group is 0.1 points less happy than those 10,000 poorer, is evidence for the "there is nothing going on, bad nongranular dataset produces funny results sometimes" hypothesis.  Although I would love to download the dataset and tweak it in R to see what's going on, I don't know how to use R. 

*This isn't actually the original, which was published in 1974, this is another one that was published in 2001, which includes his hypotheses for the paradox.

Wealth, compound interest, and race

In my opinion, the best argument for what is called "systemic racism" is the compound interest argument and it goes as follows. Due to a long history of racist policy, even if the policies have ended, disparities would persist because wealth is intergenerational, and past investments grew greatly in size. And banning blacks from owning certain properties, or getting certain jobs, means they have less to give their children, compared to whites. This strikes me as plausible.

I tried estimating the size of intergenerational wealth transfer and then compared it to the size of the black/white wealth gap. There are other effects of racism unaccounted by this, like black-owned property being less worthwhile due to antiblack sentiment. But I don't think this is relevant.

About 20% of people inherited wealth. The amount is usually 10k-50k, although some of it is much higher sometimes. I will assume that the average is $50,000 and that all those who inherited are white. I will also assume that the whole gap is due to racist policies.

To rectify this, you want to transfer about $50,000 to 20% of the black population or $10,000 to 100% of them. (10k is 20% of 50k). You can even play around with it and create a 1% of millionaires or something.

Regardless, this works up to be about 400 billion. There are 40 million US blacks, so this is $10,000 per person.

Unfortunately, the black/white wealth gap is a staggering $164,000. ($188,000 for whites and $24,000 for blacks). This wouldn't change it greatly. 

In the Atlantic article, Coates says that we should take the entire difference in wealth and assume it's all due to racism, this is ridiculous and innumerate. I will ignore it.

Regardless, the small transfer might still be still worth it. Because calculating an amount and giving it to the aggrieved would greatly weaken many attempts to use past wrongdoings (e.g. Slavery) to justify much more destructive policies to rectify the issue. But it depends on convincing blacks that this is just and proper, which might prove difficult.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/  

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22320272/inheritance-money-wealth-transfer-estate-tax

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-the-least-powerful-force-in-the-universe/

https://www.vox.com/2014/5/23/5743056/you-can-be-a-beneficiary-of-racism-even-if-you-re-not-a-racist 

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/12/08/the-black-white-wealth-gap-left-black-households-more-vulnerable/

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/03/consider-reparations.html 

How to keep sane while living in an insane world?

I wrote this for r/exmuslims when I was a teenager, it received a warm welcome. I deleted it to clean up my digital footprint, but I don't dislike it so I archived it here.

TL;DR 

For people who left Islam, but still live in Muslim majority countries or with their parents, Islam has a clearly large negative effect on their wellbeing. It sucks. But it doesn't have to suck that much. 

Until you get out and start living independently, you would have to deal with this living situation without losing your mind. You would have to fake prayer, bite your tongue till it bruises, and eat in the bathroom during Ramadan. 

I didn't go crazy, I survived. I'm probably privileged in many ways you (dear reader) aren't, but if you can't follow most of my advice, follow some. If not, try to use this kind of thinking to improve your own life. 

I greatly enhanced my wellbeing while living in an insane society by creating a bubble. I did that in two steps.

(1) Purging many of my dislikes by; disengaging from most of the things that anger/frustrate me (e.g. news, non-family religious folks, and most of the mind-numbing social chitchat), ignoring how stupid/intolerant people are being, and mentally disengaging when I'm forced to do something I don't want to, like going to the Mosque or reading the Quran.

(2) Filling most of my free time with joy and fun by; getting more online friends with similar interests, and engaging in many of my hobbies (e.g. classical or psychedelic music, post-modern literature, sitcoms, and pretentious French films). If you don't have enough hobbies to fill your time, get some more.

One day, you will get out and your life will become much better. Till that day, work your ass off, keep safe, and perfect your bubble.

Introduction

 In What Life Experience Taught Me About Religion Bryan Caplan says

...when I was a teen-age atheist. My response, from age 15-19 or so, was to wage a one-man intellectual war on religion. I didn’t just object to religious claims that happened to come my way. I was on search-and-destroy mode, vainly trying to argue every crucifix-wearer onto the path of reason.

Life as a teen-age atheist led me to grossly exaggerate the lifetime burden religion was going to impose on me. At least in the modern U.S., once you leave home and build your own life, religion will probably leave you alone if you leave it alone. In fact, even if you want to crusade against religion, you’re going to have to make an effort to find people who don’t just run away to talk amongst themselves.

During my first year of apostasy, Like Caplan, I perfectly modeled the angry Dawkins-Hitchens anti-theist teenager, my attempts at changing minds, while sometimes successful by nudging people to take on less extreme positions, has been largely futile. I seriously considered spending my life fighting the ills of religion, but a combination of being scared about getting killed and my discovery of far bigger societal ills led me to change my mind. 

It's easy to go mad when the world around you is mad, but the adage of "put your own oxygen mask on first" applies. Since most of your success will be in your 40s or 60s depending on your goal. For now, keeping sane, keeping healthy, and getting good grades or career capital are your highest priorities. This post is about keeping sane. More advice about the others here.

Keeping sane

I remained sane while living in one of the worst countries in the world, while being financially dependent on my religious parents. I was able to do this because I built a bubble, a small corner in the world where only the beautiful, sublime, and fun are allowed. I will explain how I did it. Most of these are appropriated from this blogpost.

1. The world is mad. Stop paying attention to it except in special circumstances. This includes your God-loving uncle and the 9 PM news. Your time is better spent doing something you like. More here.

2. If you can't control something, don't worry about it. Parents forcing you to pray? Fake what you can and deal with the rest, this too shall pass. Detaching, while not advisable long-term, is an excellent short-term strategy. 

3. Consider most of your problems in the long term, you can't wear shorts? Then wear long pants and reduce your need for shorts. More here.

4. Conform when you have to, but if you can get away with it don't. Appearing respectful to people who matter (employers, parents, teachers) is a good idea. But others disliking you, if not costly, is inconsequential. You can live if kids in your class, your co-workers, and your extended family dislike you, but it's harder if your parents or boss do.

5. If you don't have friends, or don't like your current friends, get new friends. If you don't live near awesome people, find them online.

6. Do things you enjoy most of the time. If you can't, do things you enjoy with the time you control. If your first priority is getting out, spend most of your non-study/work time doing what brings you joy.

7. Get good grades. One of the best ways of getting out is by getting an education abroad, this becomes much easier with good grades. It also makes your career options more flexible due to more opportunities.

8. Expand your intellectual circle. There are books, podcasts, videos, blogs, and courses on everything from Art history to Zoology. Learn as much as you can.

9. Exercise and eat well, those will keep your mood up and will be beneficial long-term.

10. Finally, and I promise I'm not adding this to get an even 10, volunteer your time and money to do good. Many charities have remote volunteer-ships, and you could do a lot of good and learn a bunch by helping them. You will also sometimes feel good about it, which is nice. 

Here are some relevant links to volunteering.

https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/becoming-a-virtual-volunteer-4138357

https://www.volunteermatch.org/search?v=true&k=&sk=&na=&partner=&usafc=&submitsearch=Search&advanced=1

You could also help some of your favorite charities just by emailing them and offering your services, whether it's The Humane League, the Alliance to feed the earth in disasters, or the Against Malaria foundation.

Kittens and altruism

I saw a kitten when I was coming out of the grocery store. She seemed friendly so I picked her up. I couldn't believe what I was touching, her skin was covered in dried mud and her spine was horribly protruding.

I looked around and didn't find a mother or any person for that matter. I took her to the sidewalk so cars won't hit her and left.

I got into my car, and as I was getting out of parking, I found her in the middle of the street. As I was getting out of the car a man also got out of his own car. We looked at each other, he murmured something and suggested I take the cat to an empty lot. I picked the kitten up, put her in my car, and drove away.

I couldn't stop thinking about how if the man wasn't there, or if the cat didn't block me, I would have left her to die. Social motives are surprisingly strong.

She better now.

UPDATE: She died 3 days later.

Gaming Metaculus

 On Jan 19 2021, I joined Metaculus and made my first predictions. I was prompted after successfully forecasting how long my brother will stand in a queue (my median was 55 minutes, he took 53), and then after going to the website, they had a bright mode that was easy on the eyes.

One of my first predictions was that the inauguration of Biden would be on the 20th of Jan. I looked up Wikipedia and in the last 20 inaugurations almost all were on that date, and the edge cases didn't seem to apply. I thought 95% was a good estimate.

The community forecast was also 95%, but before choosing it I saw it came with +50 and -150. That was too high of a loss so I played with the numbers for a while

A 99% confidence came with +55 and a massive -323. 

Going to 90% decreased my gains to +44, and reduced the potential loss to -70. 

I choose 90%

I realized that what I was doing was making decisions based on Karma, rather than what I thought about the world. I heard that before I thought, and then I remembered it was Goodhart's Law I was thinking about. I continued doing this for a few questions, I went to questions that were resolving soon and choose forecasts that provided good Karma. (less than -5 and more than +15).

I calculated that if I answer ~50 questions I would get 1000 points easily and get ranked. 

I thought that was a bad thing, mainly for two reasons.

1. Because of honesty/integrity stuff.

2. Because I liked forecasting as a concept and I wouldn't want one of the major hubs filled with blind-karma optimizers. 

I'm not sure if the existence of blind-karma optimizers would distort the forecasts, they might create too much noise or something, but I'm very unsure what the effects are.

I'm not sure what could be done, but if anyone can easily get many points by sliding a scale, it seems that something should be done.

 

Surprising convergance and veganism

Related: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/omoZDu8ScNbot6kXS/beware-surprising-and-suspicious-convergence

it's unlikely that veganism is the best diet for animal welfare and for the environment and for individual health and for taste. Mainly because when you're optimising for one thing (reducing harm to animals) it's unlikely you would also find the best way to eat healthy, or have the best taste.

In other words, from the set of all possible diets, searching for the global optimum for one factor, is unlikely to lead to the global optimum for all other factors.

So for veganism, it is conceivable that is has lower carbon footprint than regular diets, but it would be surprising if it had the lowest footprint of all possible diets.

But it could be the case that we care about all these and that on aggregate, veganism is the best diet.

I.e. if our utility function looks like this F(animal welfare + environment + individual health + taste) assuming we care about these equally (we don't) I could imagine veganism as one of, or even the, best.

Made up numbers below

Diet X: 10A + 10E + 10H 10T = 40

Veganism: 8A + 7E + 7H + 5T = 27

Regular diet: 2A + 4E + 5H + 9T = 20

Healthiest diet: 4A + 4E + 10H + 6T = 24

Where A= animal welfare, E= Environment, H= Health, and T= Taste.

I don't think animal advocates usually believe in this, but in the naive version of "Veganism is the best diet on all factors." And that makes me wary of other claims they make like how it's better because plant-based diets reduce antibiotic resistance and ditto pandemics. Or that going vegan may be better in the long-term because of moral circle expansion.

However, this should make us cautious, not dismissive. A small update against self-serving claims is justified, but complete dismissal risks ignoring factors that make animal advocacy higher on the importance scale.

This video reduces bias by 19% after two months

In Debiasing Decisions: Improved Decision Making With A Single Training Intervention they found that a 30-minute video reduced confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, and bias blind spot, by 19%.

The video is super cheesy, and that makes me suspicious. But the large effect size prompts me to believe.

It should be noted that playing a 60-minute "debiasing" game debiased people more than the video. 

I tried finding tests for these biases so that I can do it myself, but I didn't find any.  :(

The rest of this short post is random thoughts about debiasing.

I tried finding tests for these biases so that I can do it myself, but I didn't find any. This made me worry that we don't have standardized tests for biases, which strikes me as bad. Although I didn't spend too much time looking into it.

I don't think training people to reduce 3 biases a time is a good way to go, since we have 100s of biases. If we use a taxonomy like Arkes (1991) (strategy-based, association-based, and psychophysical errors).  Maybe we could have three interventions for each type of bias? But it's not clear how you would teach people to avoid say association-based biases by lecturing about it.

You could nudge them in small ways. From Arkes (1991)

For example, subjects in their third study were presented with the story of David, a high school senior who had to choose between a small liberal arts college and an Ivy League university. Several of David's friends who were attending one of the two schools provided information that seemed to favor quite strongly the liberal arts college. However, a visit by David to each school provided him with contrary information. Should David rely on the advice of his many friends (a large sample) or on his own 1-day impressions of each school (a very small sample)? Other subjects were given the same scenario with the addition of a paragraph that made them "explicitly aware of the role of chance in determining the impression one may get from a small sample" (Nisbett et al., 1983, p. 353). Namely, David drew up a list for each school of the classes and activities that might interest him during his visit there, and then he blindly dropped a pencil on the list, choosing to do those things on the list where the pencil point landed. These authors found that if the chance factors that influenced David's personal evidence base were made salient in this way, subjects would be more likely to answer questions about the scenario in a probabilistic manner (i.e, rely on the large sample provided by many friends) than if the chance factors were not made salient. Such hints, rather than blatant instruction, can provide routes to a debiasing behavior in some problems

 In Sedlmeier & Gigerenzer they taught people Bayes by using frequencies rather than probabilities. E,g. Instead of saying (1% of people use drugs and they test positive 80% of the time while non-users 5% of the time), you say From 1000 people, 10 use drugs, 8 drug users test positive, while 50 non-users test positive). 

It seems to work.

If it's really hard, we should target really bad, really harmful biases. 

From here

..many of the known predictors of conspiracy belief are alterable. One of these predictors is the tendency to make errors in logical and probabilistic reasoning (Brotherton & French, 2014), and another is the tendency toward magical thinking (e.g., Darwin et al., 2011; Newheiser et al., 2011; Stieger et al., 2013; Swami et al., 2011). It is not clear whether these tendencies can be corrected (Eckblad & Chapman, 1983; Peltzer, 2003), but evidence suggests that they can be reduced by training in logic and in probability specifically (e.g., Agnoli & Krantz, 1989; Sedlmeier & Gigerenzer, 2001). The current findings suggest that interventions targeting the automatic attribution of intentionality may be effective in reducing the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.

Perhaps finding out which are the worst biases, and what are the best interventions for them are would be useful. But increasing the effectiveness of changing beliefs is potentially dangerous, so maybe not.