The Captured Perspective

In my last post, I pointed to a blog by psychologist Paul Bloom in which he tried to make a psychologically supported case for indulging the simple pleasures of life more, and retraining less (an obviously version of his argument). And yet, I (and a few of the commentors) felt a little underwhelmed by his argument, even though we liked the general project. Before going onto my own response to his argument, I want to lay out a quick hypothetical, and get your thoughts.

Recent evidence on car purchasing from Haper’s Index shows the interesting fact that 1/3rd of all individuals who own a full hybrid Toyota Prius also own a gas guzzling SUV. Tyler Cowen calls this portfolio theory. Ryan Sager calls it moral self-regulation.

So here is the hypothetical. You have a friend at work who drives a Prius. Over the course of the year, you two have become quite close friends and you are especially drawn to his/her ecological responsibility.

One Saturday night, he invites you and your boy/girlfriend over for dinner. When you arrive at his house, you see parked next to his mini-Prius a 10 mpg Hummer H2. You are shocked that your ‘green auto’ friend also owns one of the least fuel-efficient cars on the market.

Over the course of drinks, he mentions one of four explanations for the combo of vehicles in his garage:

1. “It is my spouse’s car, and I really don’t like how s/he owns it.”
2. “We used to have 2 SUV’s, but are making an effort to be more green and replaced our other SUV last year. Our carbon footprint dropped so much!”
3. “We really like both cars… so different, but they fit such different aspects of our personalities”
4. “I am really into off-road riding and the Hummer is great for getting around in the trecherous driving up in the mountains.”

My question is, which of these things is most likely to quell your astonishment at this purchase? Would you, or would you not pass judgment regardless of their explanation? Is there something else s/he could say besides these? Does s/he need to say anything?

In an interesting blog in the NY Times yesterday, Yale Psychologist Paul Bloom poses the following question: should we strive to live life as happy pigs or sad Socrates? In other words, should we lean into out short-term tendencies to seek pleasure, or should we err on the side of rational control? Bloom goes onto make his case for indulging the short terms pleasures that we often feel guilty about pursuing (cue happy pig rejoicing). He writes:

But what about short-term pleasures, like eating cake, drinking beer, or having sex? … These feel good, but if your long-term goals have to do with dieting, sobriety or chastity, you might regret them later. So there is a different dilemma: Do you live a good and happy life or do you satisfy your immediate appetites? …
You can see this as an internal battle between two individuals residing in the same body: one who wants to be thin, sober and chaste, the other who wants to eat, drink and fornicate. It’s the long-term self who is probably reading this now; this is the self that chooses to go to the therapist and read self-help books, working to thwart the short-term self when it comes to life in the presence of temptation.We shouldn’t underestimate the short-term self, though. It is not necessarily evil and not necessarily stupid. Sometimes the long-term self should stay out of its way.

He concludes with the following, “People are better off if their multiple selves establish a truce, respecting one another’s different strengths, and working together to satisfy shared goals.“

Bloom makes some good points in the article, and I think his project of developing a lived philosophy which integrates the relative merits of both pleasure and restraint is a good one. But how does Bloom get to this point, and does he really tell us anything which gives clarity to these types of ‘paths diverging in a wood’ moral decisions.

Let’s start by addressing the reasons he posits in support of both restraint and pleasure.

In making a case for the former, he argues:

1. “People who succumb to short-term impulses often do awful things, such as driving drunk or beating up their children.”
2. In addition, while not horrible thing in themselves, he also suggests that sometimes there are better things to do than approach pleasure. To take one of his examples, “perhaps there are better things to do today than go to a horror movie.”

As for his reasons to avoid deliberate ‘rational’ control, and indulge pleasures, he offers the following:

1. “(Sometimes) it’s the long-term self that’s misguided. It can become committed to belief systems that have immoral consequences. Terrorism and genocide, for instance, are typically deliberate choices, not acts of passion”
2. “Sometimes we deprive ourselves of perfectly good pleasures, including those involving love and companionship, because of the decisions of the long-term self. Think of the workaholic who never sees his children, or the anorexic who denies herself the pleasure of food.”
3. “Pleasures reflect a form of safe practice — or, to use a more common term, a form of play. Some play is physical: It is a useful skill to be able to attack and defend yourself skillfully, and you get better at it the more you practice, but real fights are risky and painful, and so certain animals, including us, are constituted to take pleasure in play fighting, going through the moves of combat with someone we like, holding back so that nobody is hurt.”
4. Building off this last point, he suggests “Even seemingly perverse pleasures have meaning; they have been shaped by natural selection to solve problems that we might not be consciously aware of.” He suggest this should reframe the way we see hedonism, and specifically in a way that is decidedly less negative.

Looking across these points, Blooms seems to be suggesting that we will be less happy in the short-run if we don’t indulge, and also perhaps worse off in that such activities might in fact be evolutionarily adaptive, and thus serve some functional purpose. But what determines when we ought to do one system (pleasure v. restraint) over the other?

Enter work on moral psychology.  Jonathan Haidt’s research lends insight on how individuals think about moral matters, and specifically suggests that humans think morally in terms of the following five foundations: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity, 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect and 5) purity/sanctity. Haidt makes the case that liberals classically tend to activate the first two, and see the last 3 as being significantly less valid foundations for moral action. In contrast, conservatives tend to activate all 5 in some way or the another.

Moving back to Bloom, at an individual level he seems to push for a lack of restraint, unless it (1) harms people, or (2) is in some sense unfair. As such, he seems to be thinking of morality like a classic liberal. But is this the right approach, or should other foundations be activated? How do we know what is the ‘right’ approach… what are the ‘shared goals’ which our pleasure and restraint sides can jointly agree upon?

It is at this point that empirical psychology fails us in its in ability to move us beyond the descriptive to the normative. Even after answering Bloom’s question (how did we evolve and what does this mean about the functionality of our hedonistic desires) and the questions of Haidt (what moral foundations do people activate when making decisions), we still do not have a good sense of how to mix the perfect cocktail of moral motives, and how they should interact as we decide when to be happy pigs, and when to be sad Socrates. This is the personal dilemma of the social scientist– knowledge of empirical causality does not necessarily lend clarity in identifying the things that one ought to want to cause. In the next post, Ill try to take us beyond this point and outline a theory of ethics which builds off, while not claiming complete dependence upon the social sciences.

“On the right, there are those who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.”

Barack Obama 9/9/09

I’m not sure this is such a right-wing idea since it would be accomplished by raising taxes and regulating insurance markets. But it is a good idea. Here’s why.

It seems like there are two complaints with our current health care system.

The first is that we are spending too much on health care. This is a funny problem to have. We never get this with food or cars or anything. In those markets when people spend too much they start buying less smoked salmon and more potatoes or less Acuras and more Hondas. Or maybe they keep driving the old clunker. These decisions are made on a person-by-person basis. The funny thing about health care is that nobody feels like they are paying for it. Everyone understands, after a two-year campaign to beat it into our skulls, that we spend too much on health care. But few feel like they use too much.

There is too much psychic distance between consuming these services and paying for them. Doctors get paid by health insurers, health insurers get paid by employers, and the employers pay them by not paying us. Since folks never see the money they never miss it. The normal means of cost control, people thinking about how much they can afford, is gone. It’s people at Medicare, Aetna, or some new government agency who look at the costs but regular folks in Grand Rapids who decide whether or not to consume the service. If we want to save money on health care, we need to use less of it. Since we’d like to use infinity amount of health care, it’s either markets or rationing keeping us below that bound.

This comes up because our health insurance system is not really risk pooling so much as obfuscation. When every office visit (even the predictable one) is paid for by “insurance,” the only effect is to trick people into thinking they’re not paying for their own health care. But somebody has to pay for it. And that somebody is everybody. We pay in the form of lower wages and higher taxes. Insurance ought to be for the unexpected. If people know they’re going to use a certain amount of health care we’d be better off if they just saved the money and paid the doctor instead of the employer giving to the insurance company which will in turn give it to the doctor for us.

I have something crazy in mind: I need some medical care. I see some advertisements. One doctor offers the best care in town. Maybe a PA or NP promises close to the same quality at a lower price. I call around and ask what it would cost to have my thing done. They give me their price. I pick the one I think is the best deal, because I know and care how much my consumption costs. To get to this point is tricky. It would take something like taxing employer provided health insurance (getting rid of this removes one roadblock between consumption and cost), a tax-free, rolling-over health savings account for most everything, and a high deductible health plan for emergencies. Throw in a no-discrimination-for-preexisting-conditions regulation and you’re starting to get there. The point is we need people to know and think about how much health care they buy.

I guess this raises the second problem with what we’ve got today; that of distributive justice. Some people are poor and because of their poverty they are unable to buy much health care. If we think poor people are too poor, maybe we should just give them money. Or maybe seed their HSA and pay their HDHP premiums. Just as food stamps help people eat without the need for government farms (except for farm subsidies, but let’s not go there) and a U.S Grocery Service, so too we can provide for the poor without resorting to tax-paid doctors and treasury-backed insurance plans. Sure this gives people extra incentive to be poor, but the same is true for any redistribution program. Given the choice between people dying in the streets and people suckling at the taxpayer teat, I guess the moral hazard is something we have to live with.

Though the incessant red-blue squabbling obscures it, the future does not have to belong to some point between status quo and government-provided care. This doesn’t have to be a one-dimensional problem.

I think games are the future of education.

-E.O. Wilson

In a provocative interview on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, eminent biologist E.O. Wilson makes the above prediction about the likely growing (read: all-encompassing?) role of games in the education of the future.  His logic goes something like this:

Wilson imagines students taking visits through the virtual world to different ecosystems. “That could be a rain forest,” he said, “a tundra — or a Jurassic forest.”

Wilson said that for the most part, we are teaching children the wrong way. According to the biologist, “When children went out in Paleolithic times, they went with adults and they learned everything they needed to learn by participating in the process.”

That’s the way the human mind is programmed to learn, Wilson said.

But he believes that today, virtual reality can be a steppingstone to the real world. It can motivate a child to exploration.

It’s an interesting point, and one that might be very likely given how we often fetish our technology (I know this tendency first hand … I have a Kindle), but is it the right path? Perhaps instead of games as THE future of education, how about games as a PART of this future?

I know I know, such muffled claims are less likely to gain the ears of the masses, but I believe that learning is too multidimensional to warrant a singular approach, not matter how good or glitzy. While I buy that experiences can motivate learning, is such experience-driven engagement the only type of learning that we think is valid? Even if our ancestors learned everything they needed by participating in the process (thus perhaps making it the easiest process), is this the only type of knowledge worth accumulating?

I am teaching a negotiations course for undergrad business students at Washington University in St Louis this semester. In the syllabus, I structure the course around theoretical knowledge accumulation, negotiation simulation (role played negotiations), and real world analysis (HBS cases and discussion). A video-game negotiations course would do a good job approaching the latter two goals (simulation and analysis), but would it build theoretical knowledge? Similarly, would analysis and simulation be hindered without this theoretical knowledge (an empirical question, I suppose)? And while I agree with Wilson that simulations might motivate engagement with theoretical material, they need not.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not against experiential learning as facilitated by the game medium. I even wrote about one such potential approach here. Still, I think the best pedagogical style has to provide multiple types of knowledge (tacit and theoretical), and then attempt to teach individuals to obliterate the boundaries between them over time. An education should help us to understand the world in frameworks, and yet simultaneously realize how such frameworks are but a limited way to access such realities. I would argue that this is best done through some combination of theory, simulation and experience, all the while developing the cognitive skill sets to move seamlessly between such abstractions.