What if everyone had equal money ?

My instinct is to say, "this isn't fair". Someone just starting out doesn't deserve as much as someone who's invested years of their lives in something. Someone who works longer hours, or does a more difficult job which required more training, deserves a greater reward since they've expended more effort.

Of course, this doesn't mean any level of inequality is potentially fair and that it should be subject purely to market forces, because that's stupid. For one thing, I'd be highly skeptical of claims that CEOs really work a thousand times harder than their underlings, and even more skeptical that they actually need that money. Why take such a large slice of the pie that could be given to employing more people ?

More importantly, money does not act as an incentive under all conditions. There's no point paying someone a salary too low for them to live on; if they're constantly struggling just to keep treading water, they're not going to become more determined to swim harder : they will, eventually, just sink. Improvement takes willpower, yes, but it also takes simple resources. Without providing those, people will simply remain trapped, not because they're lazy but because they have no spare energy left for anything beyond basic survival.

I could go on. In short, it's nice to reward people for doing extra work, provided everyone is earning enough that they have a chance to do extra work in the first place.

But what about just giving everyone equal pay ? I've long been curious about the effects of a maximum wage, but this is one way of cutting the Gordian Knot without any problems of deciding what's fair. I instinctively dislike it, but I also can't ignore the evidence : for one company, its seems to be working, and working very well.

Price had an idea. He had read a study by the Nobel prize-winning economists Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, looking at how much money an American needs to be happy. He immediately promised Valerie he would significantly raise the minimum salary at Gravity. After crunching the numbers, he arrived at the figure of $70,000. He realised that he would not only have to slash his salary, but also mortgage his two houses and give up his stocks and savings. 

Since then, Gravity has transformed. The headcount has doubled and the value of payments that the company processes has gone from $3.8bn a year to $10.2bn.

A major caveat is that the headline says "everyone" but the text says "minimum salary". Price himself takes the minimum, but I can't find out if everyone gets this or not. I get the impression that they do, but it's hard to be sure. Certainly not everyone was happy about it :

Two senior Gravity employees also resigned in protest. They weren't happy that the salaries of junior staff had jumped overnight, and argued that it would make them lazy, and the company uncompetitive. This hasn't happened.

I cannot imagine why it would make them uncompetitive. Price's pay cut pays for a bunch of new employees who earn a very decent wage. No cost to the company and a strong incentive for new recruits. How is that "uncompetitive" ? Except in that two senior staff resigned, of course, but that seems like an artificial, self-fulfilling problem : and a self-solving one, in that it opens two new positions. The unanswered question is what those two employees were earning. Did Price just raise everyone up, or did he also reduce other people's pay besides his own ?

In any case, the benefits to the staff seem a result only indirectly from equality, in that there's now more money to spread around, but more from simply giving them enough to live on.

Rosita Barlow, director of sales at Gravity, says that since salaries were raised junior colleagues have been pulling more weight. "When money is not at the forefront of your mind when you're doing your job, it allows you to be more passionate about what motivates you," she says. Senior staff have found their workload reduced. They're under less pressure and can do things like take all of the holiday leave to which they are entitled. 

Price tells the story about one staff member who works in Gravity's call centre. "He was commuting over an hour and a half a day," he says. "He was worried that during his commute he was going to blow out a tyre and not have enough money to fix that tyre. He was stressing about it every day." When his salary was raised to $70,000 this man moved closer to the office, now he spends more money on his health, he exercises every day and eats more healthily.

"We saw, every day, the effects of giving somebody freedom," Price says. He thinks it is why Gravity is making more money than ever. Raising salaries didn't change people's motivation - he says staff were already motivated to work hard - but it increased what he calls their capability. "You're not thinking I have to go to work because I have to make money," Rosita Barlow agrees. "Now it's become focused on 'How do I do good work?'"

It should also be mentioned that Price could easily afford to take the pay cut, being a millionaire by this point already. Fair play to the guy for admitting this isn't an easy decision, but that he did it at all is pretty damned awesome. More innovations like this, please.

The boss who put everyone on 70K

In 2015, the boss of a card payments company in Seattle introduced a $70,000 minimum salary for all of his 120 staff - and personally took a pay cut of $1m. Five years later he's still on the minimum salary, and says the gamble has paid off.

Shut up and think for yourselves

A very nice summary of how group conformity may or may not work. Based on experiments in which people were asked to judge the length of a line, with the group being stooges except for a single real participant, some generalisations :

• People may conform in their behaviour but not in belief. They may go along with a group verdict but not really believe it.
• Group composition is essential. Even a single dissenting voice can encourage others to disagree. Groups of science/engineering students apparently suffer much less from conforming to obviously wrong group decisions.
• Group conformity may be in part the result of wider contemporary culture.
• Conformity saturates. Add too many voices in support and people may get suspicious : it seems that it really is difficult to fool all of the people all of the time.
• People follow each other's opinion more when the task is difficult.
• Privacy reduces conformity, presumably by reducing the fear of being judged by the group.

The article nicely stresses all the variables, so we definitely shouldn't expect the same results in all circumstances. It would be interesting to see if those who refused to conform were just instinctively contrarian or actually had better judgement. I can think of a great many people who would make the world a much better place if they stopped trying to think for themselves, because they're just no good at it. 

Asch Conformity Experiment | Simply Psychology

By Saul McLeod, updated Dec 28, 2018 Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform. He believed that the main problem with Sherif's (1935) conformity experiment was that there was no correct answer to the ambiguous autokinetic experiment.

Review : 1917

I knew almost nothing about this movie when I went to see it, but I came out wanting more WWI movies. It's an absolutely superb piece of storytelling and filmmaking and deserves its three Oscars.

This is the movie Dunkirk wanted to be. In fact, everything Dunkirk does wrong, this film does right. And everything Dunkirk does right, this film does better. Dunkirk suffered partly from pointless non-linear storytelling but mainly from forgetting to show the epic scale of the unfolding disaster. No-one sane could accuse 1917 of either of these problems.

In fact, 1917 is just about the most linear film ever made. Cunningly shot and edited so as to appear as one* gigantic continuous takes, it sticks to the protagonists like glue. This in itself helps build the sort of unrelenting tension that Dunkirk did largely through music (which this film also excels at, with a fantastic score that's at times tense and othertimes dreamlike). You'd think this might only feel exhausting, but it doesn't : it feels immersive. I almost felt that we were being shown an edited version of a 360-degree video, and if the camera happened to pan around, it would see more of WWI going on in every direction.

* Okay, two, since there's a brief gap when a character falls unconscious.

As for epicness, 1917 spits in Dunkirk's eye. I don't just mean the action sequences or the battles, though those are undeniably spectacular : from the race through a near-obliterated city beautifully illuminated by almost strobe-like flares, to the thousands of luckless soldiers going over the top. Those are essential. But what really adds to the immersion is that it's epic in other ways, like the vast hellscape that is No Man's Land. I briefly wondered just how much of northern France the producers had turned into the sort of scene that inspired Tolkein's Mordor. When I say "hellscape," I'm not kidding - but neither do the artists ram the death and destruction and gore in your face - it's simply there, all around you, in a very matter-of-fact sort of way. This continuous, panoramic and obsessive attention to detail has paid off in spades.

Is it perfect ? Yes, or at least so close as makes no difference. While you can easily spot where the cuts happened if you like that sort of thing, you can only do so through commmon sense - e.g. if a truck comes between the viewpoint and the protagonists, that would be an obvious point to give the poor guys a break. At least, I presume they didn't actually film this in two hours... but they might as well have done. There are precisely zero points where the cut spoils any sense of continuity. Zero. If I was feeling uncharitable, I might say there was one scene where I found the appearance of some characters a bit off, like it wasn't obvious where they'd been hiding a few moments before.

But that's it. That's my only breath of criticism for the whole movie. In every single other way the movie is perfect. The characters are real, vividly realised and believable. Neither the action nor tension nor anything else are overdone : it's emotional without being manipulative, and feels no need for any silly tricks to make you warm to characters before sending them to an unpleasant demise. Characters experience danger, risk, and suffer, without feeling like overblown superheroes. You might think, "gosh, he was luck to survive that !" but you never think, "he should be dead by now." In short, it's got realism absolutely nailed. 10/10 from me.

Be the bee

Bees can count to four and understand the concept of zero. But they can also do another neat trick : they can perceive an object using one sense and they recognise it using another

In the light, but barred from touching the objects, bumblebees were trained to find rewarding sugar water in one type of object (cubes or spheres) and bitter quinine solution in the other shape. When tested in the dark, bees preferred the object that was previously rewarding, spending more time exploring them. Bumblebees also solved the task the other way around. After bees learned to find a particular shape in the dark, they were tested in the light and again preferred the shape they had learned was rewarding by touch alone.

Dr. Solvi cautions: "This doesn't mean bees experience the world the same way we do, but it does show there is more going on in their heads than we have ever given them credit for."

Fair enough. But, just as it seems unlikely a small fuzzy flying furball with compound eyes would experience the world in quite the same way as a relatively hairless bespectacled astronomer, so it seems that they may not be so different either. As octopus experience the same sort of optical illusions that fool humans, so bees demonstrate a fundamental similarity : they possess, at some level, mental representations of the world. Are they conscious of it, however dimly, even if only in a barely-coherent dreamlike state ? Do they imagine translating tactile sensory input into mental images ? We don't know, and likely can't know. But the simpler statement that they do experience the world seems safer.

Bumblebees can experience an object using one sense and later recognize it using another

How are we able to find things in the dark? And how can we imagine how something feels just by looking at it? It is because our brain is able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved by different senses.

It's no sin to win

The Independent had a nice commentary recently on how Labour needs to accept that its only successful leader of recent years was Tony Blair. Yes, he made mistakes, but for the Labour Party not to also learn from his successes is insane. This in particular rings true :

...it doesn’t matter how disastrous the Conservative leader, how utterly crazy the policies they’re trying to foist on the country, the Conservatives still win elections – unless Tony Blair or Harold Wilson or Clement Attlee is leading the Labour Party.

And it also seems that people tend to forget successes more easily than they do mistakes. A harsh lesson for progressives of all stripes : once you change people's expectations, once they start to take things for granted (as they absolutely should), you can't keep reminding them of how things used to be. People adjust very quickly indeed to what's currently normal; all the effort you expend to secure improvements are quickly forgotten. The question is almost only ever what comes next. People are also quicker to punish mistakes than they are to thank you for achievements.

Hence when it comes to pure political practise, Tony Blair has few equals. If there's anyone you want to listen to about restoring Labour to power, it's Labour's most successful leader. Leave your moral outrage at the door and concentrate on what you actually need to do to win.

EDIT : The Guardian also provides a similar commentary, noting that the tendency to prefer failure to success is peculiar to Labour and not found in the Tories. Moreover, the public do not share this weird perversion. It's good to see that at least some left-wing journalists realise that success does actually matter. Whether this indicates a wider change remains to be seen, but if the Labour Party itself continues to prefer defeat to imperfections, it's doomed to perpetual mediocrity. How thin does progressiveness and moral righteousness look when a party actively denies itself power !


In his recent speech at King's College, Blair outlined a number of important themes :

Labour is in permanent activist mode. Whereas the Tories presume they're going to govern, Labour somewhat subconsciously tends think of itself as a giant campaign group. Worse, it's not a very astute one. There's nothing wrong with wanting to promote one's own moral stance, but Labour tends to view actually persuading Tory voters as being a sort of sin : the Tories are the enemy to be defeated, not people to win over. They wouldn't want those sort of people to vote for them anyway. So instead, Labour only tries to fire up people with a pre-existing liberal/left bias. This is of course largely pointless, since you don't get to record how passionate you are when voting - it's pure numbers that matter.

You have to meet people where they are. Yes, you can seek to convince them of the moral righteousness of your position, but you can't expect miracles. Support for the hard left has only ever been a minority position; refusing to deal with anyone who doesn't agree with you on everything is stupid. Refusing to accept measurable, demonstrable progress because it's not perfect will only mean you achieve no progress. You may not like people's conservative tendencies, but that's just tough on you. You have to formulate policies they can accept, not the extreme ideals which will send them running in the other direction. And you have to debate with people who hold views you don't like. You can disagree with them, but you can't dismiss them : politicians have to accept the legitimacy of the opposition's ideas and their appeal to the public.

Labour needs to be very careful about fighting a culture war. Immigration is the current big issue. If Labour tries to deflect this to something else, like transgender rights, it will lose. As per above, this simply isn't an issue that people are widely concerned with right now, because it affects a miniscule fraction of society. Now, this is not to say that Labour can't advocate for transgender rights, but it cannot make a show of it, or make it the main focus of its strategy. It has to remain a side-issue, because Labour must deal with the existing political reality before it can begin to think about shaping a new one.

Leadership means saying no to your own supporters. He describes the last manifesto as being not merely unconvincing, but actually wrong - a construct of the "leadership" saying yes to every single policy the activists put before them. It's important to listen to pressure groups and trade unions and the like. But the job of the party leadership is to reconcile what its activists want with what the general public as a whole can be persuaded to accept. The leadership should be having the same conversations with its core supporters as with the public at large, not telling different things to different people. Leadership has to be seen to be in charge, not held hostage to every idealist. The Corbyn strategy of negotiating a new Brexit deal and then having a referendum on it was fundamentally flawed.

Party membership is currently a mixed bag. There are many enthusiastic members who are an asset, but currently there are many of the hard left who are not. Leaders who become surrounded by fanboys lose touch with the wider public they have to court. It's not good for a party to be dominated by its most extreme diehards because these people are out of touch by definition.

Assessing support for individual policies is a fallacy. People do not vote on policies separately but in aggregate. In principle they can could like every single policy in a manifesto but still dislike the whole thing, which is what they vote on. Labour has to have a vision for the future, a framework to tie everything together. It has to go back to first principles and formulate a philosophy on which to act. An "incredible" manifesto is not a good idea; people don't like Utopianism.

Labour needs to be radical, not moderate. (The Guardian has a related piece about how the Tories have at least accepted a changing reality whereas the left has not). Yes, removing Jeremy Corbyn and installing someone more sensible would have helped a great deal at the last election, but possibly not at the next one. Society and technology are changing rapidly, and that isn't going to slow down. But, at the same time, being in the centre does not mean a party cannot be radical. Centrist policies can still propose radical changes to address problems; extremists do not have a monopoly on being radical. The Liberal Democrats ? He says for a while it looked like they might become "the real deal", a party of government... but then they reverted to being the Liberal Democrats. A strong centrist party hasn't been on offer for some time.

Labour needs a sweeping overhaul. In its entire existence it's been in power for barely a quarter of the time. It desperately needs to accept reality : it only ever wins as a centre-left party. It cannot continue with schoolyard activism but needs to want to actually govern, with all the associated tough choices that go along with that. The risk to Labour is not so much that it will collapse utterly, but that it will remain perpetually too big to fail but too small to ever win. A new centrist coalition could be an option. There are many forms this could take - it needn't be anything so rigorously formalised as an explicit alliance. Progressive politics is in trouble internationally, but its demise is far from inevitable.

Building better bridges

We all know polarisation is bad, that's so obvious as to be hardly worth stating. One difficulty is that there are extremists on all sides : there are vegans who see no irony in issuing death threats, entitled brats who break down in tears because they only have two hundred thousand instagram followers, far right lunatics who hate immigrants, far left communists who want the state to run everything. You can't really make sensible compromises with people who think slavery is a good thing or who believe all bankers should be cooked and eaten. There's no point trying.

But extremists are rare almost by definition. Most vegans are perfectly ordinary, most people can cope without hordes of admirers, most of the left and right don't want to destroy the entire system. The tip-of-the-iceberg cliché would seem to be appropriate here, or possibly the squeaky wheel that gets the grease : the vocal minority are most prominent, but do not really speak for the vast and silent majority. Even fewer of the loudmouths are prepared to do anything more than write a strongly-worded blog post about whatever it is they think they want, which is why things continuously feel as though they're about to collapse but seldom actually do. Such people exert an influence not that dissimilar to terrorism, in that the real danger comes from attempting to placate them, rather than in any actions that they themselves might actually perform. Especially dangerous is to reduce difficult actions to a mere vote. Anyone can cross a box and easily absolve themselves of responsibility. Thus do we get whole societies doing things they don't really want to do.

A recent study of Americans suggested Republicans vastly overestimate the proportion of Democrats who are atheist or agnostic at 36% - four times the reality. In turn, Democrats estimated 44% of Republicans made more than $250,000 (£192,000) a year. Only 2% do.

Surely some of this is due to simple ignorance and random guessing. I haven't got a sodding clue what the average Republican earns or what proportion of Democrats are godless heathens, and why would I ? That's not the sort of thing anyone ever talks about. But I'd probably guess much lower values, especially for the Republican salary : almost a quarter of America earning $250k per year ? That makes no sense. I'm actually a bit surprised the value went that way : my stereotype is more of a county-yokel redneck type, rather than a business tycoon.

Research suggests polarisation can increase voter turnout, which may encourage political leaders to further sharpen divisions. The media, propagandists, and foreign agents can profit from fanning these flames. It all creates the impression of two deeply disconnected groups in societies around the globe - the left and the right.

Which is surely the worst possible way to increase voter turnout, short of threatening to whip everybody.

Prof Anne Wilson, a psychologist at Canada's Wilfrid Laurier University, says: "Misjudgements of the other side aren't arbitrary: people are more likely to overestimate the proportion of opponents who hold the more extreme or unflattering views linked to their party. But we also see blindness to common ground."

As an example, she says the portrayal of US gun control as a "two-sides" issue obscures shared beliefs. This includes strong support among both Democrats and Republicans for background checks and a higher minimum age for gun owners. Common values about child rearing, health care, or civic responsibilities are also found.

What about all those measures suggested to build bridges ? Merging groups on an equal and fair footing, finding common values and suchlike ? Do they actually work ? Reassuringly, yes.

But some of our research, led by Mina Cikara, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, found that when people are shown images suggesting the social networks of different groups are quite overlapping, empathy for members of the opposing group increases. "Seeing a picture indicating that these people share social ties was enough to shrink respondents' empathy gap," says Prof Cikara. 

In studies, we have created new groups in the lab from a simple flip of a coin. We had people join a team that included members of their own racial group, as well as members of another race. Within minutes, participants showed lower levels of racial bias.

I don't dispute the article's advice to be self-aware of how the manipulative techniques for polarisation can affect us as individuals. But I would say unless such advice reaches people en masse, a more practical step to fight hyperpartisanship would be to forbid media sources from taking sides. Do not ban opinion pieces or any particular views. Just prevent any outlet from falling into its own echo chamber - insist that it represents a broad range of political opinions. You have only to compare the BBC, which is mandated to follow this directive, to the British tabloids, which are not, to see how successful this can be. Is the BBC perfect ? No. Is it fifteen million orders of magnitude better than the tabloids ? Yes.

Why the idea of 'snowflakes vs gammons' is bad for us

Historians may puzzle over how the UK's Brexit debate sometimes resembled a battle between snowflakes and gammons. "Snowflake", used dismissively to suggest younger generations might melt if confronted with the harsh realities of life, was readily applied to the stereotypical urban Remainer.

It's good to be useless

Yes ! This !

We store knowledge in webs of associated information. When new information comes in, it gets embedded into the existing web, making connections with everything that is associated with it. So, if you’re trying to understand how something works, you activate the knowledge you have about that thing and the more knowledge you have, the more easily you understand it. And what’s really cool about this is that you don’t have to be able to recall it for this to work. So that means that even though I might not remember what I learned in the third grade during that awesome unit on fish, I could more easily appreciate and understand the exhibits at the new aquarium in St. Louis. I could understand and elaborate on what we saw in the exhibits and explain things to my 3-year-old son. Weeks later, I probably remember those exhibits better than I would have if they had been isolated bits of information with no existing knowledge.

I can't think of anything to add. I just wanted to quote this to archive it.

The Learning Scientists Blog

I've seen a steady stream of memes like this one on my Facebook news feed. Understandably, students are frustrated when they enter the "real world" and feel as though they weren't adequately prepared for some of the practical life skills they needed...

Science beyond science

Rather than doing each one individually, here's a summary of a selection of the latest batch of "we have no idea what consciousness is" posts. Recently I was very impressed with the way philosopher Bernardo Kastrup dealt with the stupid idea that consciousness is a mere illusion, that we just think we're thinking but not actually thinking. Unfortunately I have less praise for his other musings, which seem, by and large, strange and pointless.


First, in this essay he goes on at length about why he doesn't like panpsychism, the idea that everything has some rudimentary form of consciousness. Since no-one has ever been able to explain how subjective experience arises from objective physical processes, panpsychists posit that consciousness itself is a base property like charge or mass. Thus an electron can be said to possess some very rudimentary awareness. Consciousness, in this view, simply is.

This of course ducks the question and doesn't explain anything at all. That's not to say it isn't true, but if we resorted to saying, "it's a fundamental property of nature" whenever we found anything we couldn't explain... well, it'd make my PowerPoint presentations a lot shorter.

To be fair, Kastrup takes a novel angle of attack on panpsychism by looking at the double-slit experiment. If subatomic particles don't have discrete locations, then what happens to their consciousness when they pass through a slit ? It's a good question, but I'm not seeing how this helps. We already know we don't understand either consciousness or wave-particle duality, so it seems a bit weird to say that this splitting constitutes any kind of a difficulty.

Where I think he goes really wrong (but again he does it in an interesting way) is to blur the lines between panpsychism and idealism - the notion that everything is part of a greater consciousness, that we are all, in effect, shards in the mind of God (or subroutines in a computer program if that's your thing). Whereas panpsychism is an attempt to reconcile the different natures of awareness and physicality by allowing both to exist, idealism goes a step further, saying that this can't be done. Although the problem of getting subjective consciousness out of objective matter has stumped humanity since the dawn of time, there's no problem going the other way around. While so-called illusionists say that there's no such thing as consciousness, idealists go to the opposite extreme and say there's no such thing as matter.

Kastrup says that quantum effects blur the distinctions between panpsychism and idealism :

Panpsychism is physically coherent only if the quantum field is conscious as a whole, as a unitary subject. And because the field doesn’t have spatial boundaries, panpsychism implies universal consciousness and fails to explain our own personal subjectivities. 

Leaving aside the thorny issue of what the "quantum field" actually is for now, it would seem very strange for Kastrup to dismiss panpsychism because of its problem of universal consciousness and then embrace idealism, but that's exactly what he does.

There is nothing absurd about this theory; the common impression that there is is just a knee-jerk reaction of our current intellectual habits. As a matter of fact, the theory is arguably the most parsimonious, internally consistent and empirically sound view yet devised. Importantly, as I have extensively discussed elsewhere, idealism—unlike panpsychism—can explain how our private, personal subjectivities arise within universal consciousness.

Maddeningly that's the end of the post, and he links only to a book. So he essentially refuses to tell us why idealism is any better than panpsychism despite having argued himself into the corner of saying that it's basically the same thing. Never mind that idealism says "it's all a dream", which explains everything and nothing.

Personally, I think it's more useful at this stage to keep panpsychism and idealism separate : we just don't understand enough about quantum effects to incorporate them yet. I'd define things as follows :

• Panpsychism : the notion that the consciousness is a fundamental property than can be possessed by pretty much anything.
• Idealism : the notion that there are no physical substances, only manifestations of subjective awareness; everything is a sort of objective illusion.
• Eliminativism/illusionism : everything is materialistic and consciousness doesn't actually exist at all in any sense.
• I don't know the technical term for it, but the much more common idea that consciousness exists and is non-physical but can only arise from specific, complex physical processes.

That last one is an example of dualism, but a very particular sort - not the Descartian version in which conscious was posited as a distinct "substance". Reading the Meditations, I found it interesting how literally Descartes seemed to take that : the Descartian ghost is more like another variety of ordinary matter than anything truly different.

But I digress. In a second post Kastrup attacks materialism. At least, coming from an idealist, this is a bit more self-consistent. But he forgets that few, if any, materialists are so literal as to believe that all things must have physical substance - it's only the extremist fringe who think we're not really thinking. The vast majority accept that there are non-physical components that they may or may not think they can explain  - they are dualist, albeit in a very limited sense. So when he says, "our very sentience contradicts materialism", there is no kind of amazing revelation here. Everyone knew this already. That's the whole problem !

More bizarre is his claim that sentience contradicts evolution. He has a truly odd way of reasoning this :

All chains of cause and effect in nature [according to materialism] must be describable purely in terms of quantities. Whatever isn’t a quantity cannot be part of our physical models and therefore—insofar as such models are presumed to be causally-closed—cannot produce effects. According to materialism, all functions rest on quantities.

I know of no reason why this would be. If you can't quantify it, it can't affect you ? That's as daft as illusionism; I can't quantify how annoyed I am by astrology or homeopathy but it definitely affects me. I have no problem with the claim that we can't construct scientific models of non-quantifiable properties (which is not to say that we can't make any models at all), but to say "and therefore it can't be a thing" is pretty stupid. That's not what materialism says, except for a handful of lunatics. I call straw man.


The author of Why Evolution Is True gets pretty irritated by all this, but hasn't done their homework, and thinks Kastrup is a panpsychist. They clearly lean towards the stronger aspect of materialism, which is fine, but I have no truck with their claim that panpsychists are simply "nuts"*. Certainly consciousness might be a product of complex material interactions. But to say that this "explains" anything is missing the whole point. How does the non-physical arise from the physical ? That's the issue. Saying, "it just does" is not satisfactory, and is at best a description, not an explanation. "Panpsychism of the gaps" ? Hardly. It's the same mystery there's always been. No-one has moved any goalposts, we've simply been trying to work out where they are. As with so-called AI, I haven't heard a single thing that suggests materialists have made the slightest progress in understanding consciousness. All they do and have ever done is find ever-more elaborate ways of saying, "consciousness is affected by external reality". Slow clap for that.

* Look, no-one is saying that everything has the same kind or level of consciousness. An electron need not have the same rich inner life as a philosopher, or experience pain or emotion - which is what the WEIT author seems to presume.

Or in other words, all of the possibilities for consciousness have crazy implications. Their problems are different, but they're no less weird and difficult for that.

That's why I've linked at the end an article by the notorious Deepak Chopra. Yes, he may well be a nutter, but I tend to agree with what he's written here at least. I reserve judgement on how mysterious consciousness really is or whether it requires a new kind of science to understand, but I'm fully sympathetic to the view that it's an everyday miracle : it is qualitatively different from anything observable, defies analysis, yet demonstrably exists. I think it's entirely credible to suggest a scientific revolution could be lurking here, even without having the foggiest idea of what shape that could take, or, equally, to say that it's something forever beyond our comprehension.

Physics Must Evolve Beyond the Physical

Deepak Chopra Contemporary physics finds itself pondering questions about mind and consciousness, an uncomfortable area for theorists. But historically, key figures at the founding of quantum theory assumed that reality was composed of two parts, mind and matter, which interacted with each other according to some new laws that they specified.

The unfairness of fairness

I would define meritocracy to be concerned with how rewards are bestowed. A meritocratic system rewards labour in accordance with how difficult it was to perform, and grants employment opportunities based on an assessment of who's most likely to be successful in a given role. The great virtue of this is that it ignores all social classes. Race, class, wealth, age, gender - none of these matter, only how well you perform the task required.

This is incomparably fairer than a class system which rewards unrelated and often imaginary factors. But it is not, in itself, a complete definition of fairness. There are several ways a meritocracy can be implemented unfairly, or so as to have unfair consequences (some of these may be related or just variants of each other) :

1. When it is concerned solely with how to respond to ability which has already been achieved, not with how to achieve ability in the first place. That is, when it rewards only actual, expressed ability, and makes no attempt to bring forth latent ability.
2. Likewise, when rewards and success are taken to equate directly with merit, thus bestowing more rewards for having rewards, not for accomplishment. E.g. when paying people differently for doing the same job on the grounds that one is more experienced, even if they don't actually do a better job; or people who are famous for being famous, or respected for being authority figures - an escalating series of rewards decoupled from continuous achievement.
3. When differences in rewards are set poorly, either in one or across multiple sectors. That is, someone climbing one career ladder may have to work extraordinarily hard to reach the next rung, which may itself be far below other rungs in other careers that are far easier to reach.
4. When it neglects any and all other factors. The extreme form of this is Plato's Republic, in which children would become the property of the state because parental ability mattered more than parental rights.
5. When wealth is deemed to be the whole measure of success, especially when a meritocratic system is perceived to exist but not actually employed. This leads to a belief that those at the top only got there through sheer innate genius, and that those at the bottom do not deserve further advancement.
6. When there is no safety net. Some people are literally unable to work through no fault of their own, but as per point 5, lack of ability doesn't mean they are worthless. Without a safety net of some kind, this punishes people for things over which they have no choice or control.
7. Conversely, rewarding people for things they are naturally very good at with little or no effort on their part is similarly unfair (though it would seem to be difficult to account for how much effort each individual applies).

The author of this article points out several of these, but confounds the meritocratic ideal with its all too flawed real-world implementation. No alternative reward system is proposed, because there isn't one - rewarding the combination of quality and quantity of work done is the only sensible system we've come up with. So when he rightly points out...

On average, children whose parents make more than $200,000 a year score about 250 points higher on the SAT than children whose parents make $40,000 to $60,000. Only about one in 200 children from the poorest third of households achieves SAT scores at Yale’s median. Meanwhile, the top banks and law firms, along with other high-paying employers, recruit almost exclusively from a few elite colleges.

... I think here he has a very legitimate point (see 1 and 2 above). While my instinct is to say that meritocracy is about employment (productive labour), not education (training), there are certainly grey areas - especially when an education a) costs money to the student and b) has limited resources. How do you decide who to admit in such a case, knowing that the experience will bestow greater abilities and opportunities on those enrolled ? Taking those who are already best qualified to succeed would seem sensible and fair, but that risks denying the less able any further chance to advance. And one cannot ignore the simple fact that experiences unavoidably cost money. The risk is of creating an elite who are genuinely more able and talented than the rest, but only because of their greater financial resources, not because of their innate characteristics. Such a situation would be a perverse meritocracy indeed.

I will not attempt to answer that hugely difficult question - the dynamics of social mobility are horrendously complicated. However, I will say that when the author goes on at length about the effects of the working conditions of the elite, I think he's (to large extent) confusing meritocracy with good old-fashioned greed.

Parents... sign their children up for an education dominated not by experiments and play but by the accumulation of the training and skills needed to be admitted to an elite college. Where aristocratic children once revealed in their privilege, meritocratic children now calculate their future—they plan and they scheme, through rituals of stage-managed self-presentation, in familiar rhythms of ambition, hope, and worry.

The contest intensifies when meritocrats enter the workplace, where elite opportunity is exceeded only by the competitive effort required to grasp it. A person whose wealth and status depend on her human capital simply cannot afford to consult her own interests or passions in choosing her job. Instead, she must approach work as an opportunity to extract value from her human capital, especially if she wants an income sufficient to buy her children the type of schooling that secured her own eliteness. She must devote herself to a narrowly restricted class of high-paying jobs, concentrated in finance, management, law, and medicine. Whereas aristocrats once considered themselves a leisure class, meritocrats work with unprecedented intensity.

Elite managers were once “organization men,” cocooned by lifelong employment in a corporate hierarchy that rewarded seniority above performance. Today, the higher a person climbs on the org chart, the harder she is expected to work. Amazon’s “leadership principles” call for managers to have “relentlessly high standards” and to “deliver results.” The company tells managers that when they “hit the wall” at work, the only solution is to “climb the wall.”... The capacity to bear these hours gracefully, or at least grimly, has become a criterion for meritocratic success.

Elite workers, for their part, find it harder and harder to pursue genuine passions or gain meaning through their work. Meritocracy traps entire generations inside demeaning fears and inauthentic ambitions: always hungry but never finding, or even knowing, the right food.

Look, if you don't want to work any harder, don't climb the ladder. Don't play the game. Plenty of people get buy without reaching the top; we can't all be chiefs or there'd be no Indians. If you have enough to satisfy you, why crave more ? Why not enjoy what you have, rather than joining the rat race and sacrificing meaning and happiness for mere wealth ? "Meritocracy" has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with exactly how hard one has to work to earn top dollar - it only says, implicitly, that those earning the most should work the hardest. It says nothing at all about the absolute standard of this, or even the scaling between different jobs.

Of course, there may well be other, much more important factors at work than simple personal greed. A far worse trap is that any kind of financial reward that gives more than mere survival may require outlandish levels of performance, thus compelling even those who would willingly opt to remain lower down the financial ladder to climb its greasy rungs out of sheer necessity. Again, that particular meritocracy is unfair, but completely unrelated to the basis of meritocracy itself.

Another factor is cultural : believing that those who earn more are somehow better. This is closer to being a problem with the meritocratic ideal - closer, but still no cigar. Intrinsically, those who earn the most must be the best at what they do in a meritocratic system. But does that automatically make them happier people ? Of course not - and it certainly doesn't mean that they're superior in anything other than one narrow field. So this drive to achieve more and more of what one doesn't need may be a problem of a meritocratic system, but only partially so - I think it's better described as a cultural misunderstanding.

Meritocracy does reward achievement above all else, but only in a narrow and specific sense. It takes a much broader cultural aspect to transform, "pay those who work the hardest the most money of all" into, "only those who work hard are valuable people and everyone else deserves to suffer". So while I agree that there indeed enormous problems with making wealth into an endless terrible competition, I don't agree that this is the fault of adopting a meritocracy. On the contrary, I tend towards a belief that there are plenty of areas in which society would be much better if it were more meritocratic - giving more opportunities to children from poorer background (accounting for latent ability), punishing the most powerful rather than allowing the "famous for being famous" syndrome to run rampant. 

How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition

Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone-even the rich-miserable. Maybe there's a way out. Updated at 4:38 p.m. ET on September 4, 2019. In the summer of 1987, I graduated from a public high school in Austin, Texas, and headed northeast to attend Yale.

Shades of grey

A friend and I disagree over what constitutes a "natural" lifespan. He says it's the typical lifespan of an organism in its natural habitat. I say it's the organism's genetic (or otherwise innately determined) lifespan. A animal can get eaten by a tiger at at any point, but if you take all the tigers and other dangers away, it will still eventually die. That natural upper limit, the capacity the organism has evolved to allow, seems like a more sensible definition than incorporating highly variable environmental effects to me (though it's certainly an interesting question as to why some animals have evolved the capacity to live much longer than they usually do).

For example, he says that the natural lifespan of a human, i.e. living in a jungle, is about 40. But our genetic limit seems to be more like 100, and the things that get you in the jungle are random, unpredictable, and strongly individualistic. Stick me on my own in the jungle and I'll quite likely be dead within a week, but a survival expert may last many years. A survival expert with a bunch of specialist equipment will last even longer, and a whole team of well-organised survival experts may found an entirely new civilisation. Our lifespan, then, if we allow it to be defined by external effects, is also a function of other people and their associated knowledge. I don't call that especially natural.

The same applies to the animal kingdom. A young elephant without its matriarch may not last long in the Namibian desert where it needs to know the location of water sources, so its "natural habitat" would therefore have to constitute other elephants as well. Where do we draw the line ? Just because humans had to discover agriculture and building techniques, does that make them unnatural ?  If so, why should elephant culture be considered natural ? Then again, some people call anything human artificial and unnatural. And "natural habitat" is itself intrinsically variable. Animals move around - some of them migrate far more than we do, sometimes surviving where the habitat barely allows them to scrape through, sometimes living where they can thrive.

But this is really a relatively petty terminology problem over what constitutes "natural", or, as Terry Pratchett put it, "being assasinated is natural causes for a king." Perhaps it's better to forget the term "natural lifespan" altogether and instead speak of "innate lifespan" and "environmental lifespan".

Surely the same applies when it comes to behaviour (though I note that when we say "nature or nurture" in that context, we understand that "nature" means innate, not environment). We may  have some tendencies where are innately determined, and some which are environmental : there were no web designers around in 1457 for a very good reason. Likewise, and more importantly, behaviours that may be productive in some situations may be detrimental in others. Sometimes it's good to be individualistic, sometimes it's better to take a more collectivist approach.

Hobbes didn’t really think that we’re naturally evil. His point, rather, is that we’re not hardwired to live together in large scale political societies. We’re not naturally political animals like bees or ants, who instinctively cooperate and work together for the common good. Instead, we’re naturally self-interested and look out for ourselves first and foremost. We care about our reputation, as well as our material wellbeing, and our desire for social standing drives us into conflict as much as competition over scarce resources. 

For Rousseau, everything started to go wrong once humans perfected the arts of agriculture and industry, which eventually led to unprecedented levels of private property, economic interdependence, and inequality. Inequality breeds social division. Where societies had once been united by strong social bonds, the escalation of inequality soon turned us into ruthless competitors for status and domination. The flipside to Rousseau’s belief in natural goodness is that it is political and social institutions that make us evil, as we now are.

So both would seem to conclude that hell is other people. Or more accurately, but less quotably, hell is a bad way of organising people. I do not think the vast bulk of people are inherently good or inherently bad - if they were, everyday life would either be a heavenly paradise or an apocalyptic wasteland whether we've evolved to be suitable for it or not. It's generally neither. It rarely if ever becomes the former, but occasionally and catastrophically degenerates into the latter. There are extremists, the people who do nothing but help and the people who do nothing but hurt, but they are exceptions that prove the rule. Most people are neither impervious to their environments nor wholly products of it, but a blend of both. The question "are we inherently good or evil ?" is probably flawed - we can only ask how the environment affects our inherent tendencies, accepting the existence and complex interplay between both.

Hobbes vs Rousseau: Are We Inherently Evil or Good?

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that life in the state of nature - that is, our natural condition outside the authority of a political state - is 'solitary, poore, nasty brutish, and short.'