2013 : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?
TWO Responses reproduced here:
1. On Chinese Eugenics
2. On "a measure of what we call "fat tails"" and the
- Immoral scientific communty
3. On Free Will
China has been running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China's ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end.
When I learned about Chinese eugenics this summer, I was astonished that its population policies had received so little attention. China makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies.
For generations, Chinese intellectuals have emphasized close ties between the state (guojia), the nation (minzu), the population (renkou), the Han race (zhongzu), and, more recently, the Chinese gene-pool (jiyinku). Traditional Chinese medicine focused on preventing birth defects, promoting maternal health and "fetal education" (taijiao) during pregnancy, and nourishing the father's semen (yangjing) and mother's blood (pingxue) to produce bright, healthy babies (see Frank Dikötter's book Imperfect Conceptions). Many scientists and reformers of Republican China (1912-1949) were ardent Darwinians and Galtonians. They worried about racial extinction (miezhong) and "the science of deformed fetuses" (jitaixue), and saw eugenics as a way to restore China's rightful place as the world's leading civilization after a century of humiliation by European colonialism. The Communist revolution kept these eugenic ideals from having much policy impact for a few decades though. Mao Zedong was too obsessed with promoting military and manufacturing power, and too terrified of peasant revolt, to interfere with traditional Chinese reproductive practices.
But then Deng Xiaoping took power after Mao's death. Deng had long understood that China would succeed only if the Communist Party shifted its attention from economic policy to population policy. He liberalized markets, but implemented the one-child policy —partly to curtail China's population explosion, but also to reduce dysgenic fertility among rural peasants. Throughout the 1980s, Chinese propaganda urges couples to have children "later, longer, fewer, better"—at a later age, with a longer interval between birth, resulting in fewer children of higher quality. With the 1995 Maternal and Infant Health Law (known as the Eugenic Law until Western opposition forced a name change), China forbade people carrying heritable mental or physical disorders from marrying, and promoted mass prenatal ultrasound testing for birth defects. Deng also encouraged assortative mating through promoting urbanization and higher education, so bright, hard-working young people could meet each other more easily, increasing the proportion of children who would be at the upper extremes of intelligence and conscientiousness.
One of Deng's legacies is China's current strategy of maximizing "Comprehensive National Power". This includes economic power (GDP, natural resources, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, owning America's national debt), military power (cyberwarfare, anti-aircraft-carrier ballistic missiles, anti-satellite missiles), and 'soft power' (cultural prestige, the Beijing Olympics, tourism, Chinese films and contemporary art, Confucius Institutes, Shanghai's skyscrapers). But crucially, Comprehensive National Power also includes "biopower": creating the world's highest-quality human capital in terms of the Chinese population's genes, health, and education (see Governing China's Population by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winkler).
Chinese biopower has ancient roots in the concept of "yousheng" ("good birth"—which has the same literal meaning as "eugenics"). For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children. The current "gaokao" exams for university admission, taken by more than 10 million young Chinese per year, are just the updated version of these imperial exams—the route to educational, occupation, financial, and marital success. With the relaxation of the one-child policy, wealthier couples can now pay a "social fostering fee" (shehui fuyangfei) to have an extra child, restoring China's traditional link between intelligence, education, wealth, and reproductive success.
Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more "next-generation" DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.
The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.
There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect—and hope—that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world's most populous country depends upon it.
My real worry is the Western response. The most likely response, given Euro-American ideological biases, would be a bioethical panic that leads to criticism of Chinese population policy with the same self-righteous hypocrisy that we have shown in criticizing various Chinese socio-cultural policies. But the global stakes are too high for us to act that stupidly and short-sightedly. A more mature response would be based on mutual civilizational respect, asking—what can we learn from what the Chinese are doing, how can we help them, and how can they help us to keep up as they create their brave new world?
How Fat Are the Fat Tails?
Eight years ago, I showed, using twenty million pieces of data from socioeconomic variables (about all the data that was available at the time), that current tools in economics and econometrics don't work, whenever there is an exposure to a large deviations, or "Black Swans". There was a gigantic mammoth in the middle of the classroom. Simply, one observation in 10,000, that is, on day in 40 years, can explain the bulk of the "kurtosis", a measure of what we call "fat tails", that is, how much the distribution under consideration departs from the standard Gaussian, or the role of remote events in determining the total properties. For the U.S. stock market, a single day, the crash of 1987, determined 80% of the kurtosis. The same problem is found with interest and exchange rates, commodities, and other variables. The problem is not just that the data had "fat tails", something people knew but sort of wanted to forget; it was that we would never be able to determine "how fat" the tails were. Never.
The implication is that those tools used in economics that are based on squaring variables (more technically, the Euclidian, or L-2 norm), such as standard deviation, variance, correlation, regression, or value-at-risk, the kind of stuff you find in textbooks, are not valid scientifically (except in some rare cases where the variable is bounded). The so-called "p values" you find in studies have no meaning with economic and financial variables. Even the more sophisticated techniques of stochastic calculus used in mathematical finance do not work in economics except in selected pockets.
The results of most papers in economics based on these standard statistical methods—the kind of stuff people learn in statistics class—are thus not expected to replicate, and they effectively don't. Further, these tools invite foolish risk taking. Neither do alternative techniques yield reliable measures of rare events, except that we can tell if a remote event is underpriced, without assigning an exact value.
The Evidence
The story took a depressing turn, as follows. I put together this evidence—in addition to a priori mathematical derivations showing the impossibility of some statistical claims—as a companion for The Black Swan. The papers sat for years on the web, were posted on this site, Edge (ironically the Edge posting took place only a few hours before the announcement of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers). They were downloaded tens of thousands of times on SSRN (the Social Science Research Network). For good measure, a technical version was published in a peer-reviewed statistical journal.
I thought that the story had ended there and that people would pay attention to the evidence; after all I played by the exact rules of scientific revelation, communication and transmission of evidence. Nothing happened. To make things worse, I sold millions of copies of The Black Swan and nothing happened so it cannot be that the results were not properly disseminated. I even testified in front of a Congressional Committee (twice). There was even a model-caused financial crisis, for Baal's sake, and nothing happened. The only counters I received was that I was "repetitive", "egocentric", "arrogant", "angry" or something even more insubstantial, meant to demonize the messenger. Nobody has managed to explain why it is not charlatanism, downright scientifically fraudulent to use these techniques.
Absence of Skin in the Game
It all became clear when, one day, I received the following message from a firefighter. His point was that he found my ideas on tail risk extremely easy to understand. His question was: How come risk gurus, academics, and financial modelers don't get it?
Well, the answer was right there, staring at me, in the message itself. The fellow as a firefighter could not afford to misunderstand risk and statistical properties. He would be directly harmed by his error. In other words, he has skin in the game. And, in addition, he is honorable, risking his life for others not making others take risks for his sake.
So the root cause of this model fraud has to be absence of skin-in-the game, combined with too much money and power at stake. Had the modelers and predictors been harmed by their own mistakes, they would have exited the gene pool—or raised their level of morality. Someone else (society) pays the price of the mistakes. Clearly, the academics profession consists in playing a game, pleasing the editors of "prestigious" journals, or be "highly cited". When confronted, they offer the nihilistic fallacy that "we got to start somewhere"—which could justify using astrology as a basis for science. And the business is unbelievably circular: a "successful PhD program" is one that has "good results" on the "job market" for academic positions. I was told bluntly at a certain business school where I refused to teach risk models and "modern portfolio theory" that my mission as a professor was to help students get jobs. I find all of this highly immoral—immoral to create harm for profit. Primum non nocer.
Only a rule of skin in the game, that is, direct harm from one's errors, can puncture the game aspect of such research and establish some form of contact with reality.
*
I don't think that there is Free will. The conclusion first hit me in some sort of primordial ooze of insight when I was about 13-years old, and that conclusion has only become stronger since then. What worries me is that despite the fact that I think this without hesitation, there are times that it is simply too hard to feel as if there is no free will, to believe that, to act accordingly. What really worries me is that it is so hard for virtually anyone to truly act as if there is no free will. And that this can have some pretty bad consequences.
If you're a neuroscientist, you might be able think there's free will if you spend your time solely thinking about, say, the kinetics of one enzyme in the brain, or the structure of an ion channel, or how some molecule is transported down an axon. But if you devote your time instead to thinking about what the brain, hormones, genes, evolution, childhood, fetal environment, and so on, have to do with behavior, as I do, it seems simply impossible to think that there is free will.
The evidence is broad and varied. Raising the levels of testosterone in someone makes him more likely to interpret an emotionally ambiguous face as a threatening one (and perhaps act accordingly). Having a mutation in a particular gene increases the odds that she will be sexually disinhibited in middle age. Spending fetal life in a particularly stressful prenatal environment increases the likelihood of overeating as an adult. Transiently inactivating a region of the frontal cortex in someone and she acts more cold-hearted and utilitarian when making decisions in an economics game. Being a psychiatrically healthy first-order relative of a schizophrenic increases the odds of believing in "metamagical" things like UFOs, extrasensory perception, or literalist interpretations of the Bible. Having a normal variant of the gene for the vasopressin receptor makes a guy more likely to have stable romantic relationships. The list goes on and on (and just to make a point that should be obvious from this paragraph, but which still can't be emphasized too frequently, lack of free will doesn't remotely equal anything about genetic determinism).
The free will concept requires one to subscribe to the idea that despite there being a swirl of biological yuck and squishy brain parts filled with genes and hormones and neurotransmitters, nonetheless, there's an underground bunker in a secluded corner of the brain, a command center containing a little homunculus who chooses your behavior. In that view, the homunculus might be made of nanochips or ancient, dusty vacuum tubes, of old crinkly parchment, stalactites of your mother's admonishing voice, of streaks of brimstone, or rivets made out of gumption. And, in this view of behavior, whatever the homunculus is made of, it ain't made of something biological. But there is no homunculus and no free will.
This is the only conclusion that I can reach. But still, it is so hard to really believe that, to feel that. I am willing to admit that I have acted egregiously at times as a result of that limitation. My wife and I get together with a friend for brunch who serves some fruit salad. We proclaim, Wow, the pineapple is delicious. They're out of season, our host smugly responds, but I lucked out and was able to find a couple of good ones. And in response to this, the faces of my wife and I communicate awestruck worship—you really know how to pick fruit, you are a better person than we are. We are praising the host for this display of free will, for the choice made at the split in the road that is Pineapple Choosing. But we're wrong. Genes have something to do with the olfactory receptors our host has that help out in detecting ripeness. Maybe our host comes from a people whose deep and ancient cultural values include learning how to feel up a pineapple to tell if it's good. The sheer luck of the socioeconomic trajectory of our host's life has provided the resources to prowl around an overpriced organic market that plays Peruvian folk Muzak.
It is so hard to truly feel as if there is no free will, to not fall for this falsehood of accepting that there is a biological substrate of potentials and constraints, but that there is homunculus-ish separation in what the person has done with that substrate—"Well it's not the person's fault if nature has given them a face that isn't the loveliest, but after all, whose brain is it that chose to get that hideous nose ring?"
This transcends mere talk of nose rings and pineapples. As a father, I am immersed in the community of neurotic parents frantically trying to point our children in the direction of the most perfect adulthoods imaginable. When considering our kids' schooling, there is a body of wonderful research by a colleague of mine, Carol Dweck that we always cite. To wildly summarize and simplify, take a child who has just done something laudable academically, and indeed laud her, saying, Wow, that's great, you must be so smart. Alternatively, in the same circumstance, praise her instead with, Wow, that's great, you must have worked so hard. And saying the latter is a better route for improving academic performance in the future – don't praise the child's intrinsic intellectual gifts; praise the effort and discipline they chose to put into the task.
Well, what's wrong with that? Nothing if that research simply produces value-free prescription— "'You must have worked so hard' is a more effective approach for enhancing academic performance than 'You're so smart.'" But it is wrong if you are patting the homunculus on the head, concluding that a child who has achieved something through effort is a better, more praiseworthy producer of choice than a child running on plain raw smarts. That is because free will even falls by the wayside when considering self-discipline, executive function, emotional regulation and gratification postponement. For example, damage to the frontal cortex, the brain region most intimately involved in those functions, produces someone who knows the difference between right and wrong yet still can't control their behavior, even their murderous behavior. Different versions of a subtype of dopamine receptor influences how risk taking and sensation seeking a person is. If someone is infected with the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii, they are likely to become subtly more impulsive. There's a class of stress hormones that can atrophy neurons in the frontal cortex; by early elementary school, a child raised amid the duress of poverty tends to lag behind in the maturation of the frontal cortex
Maybe we can get to the point of truly realizing that when we say, "What beautiful cheekbones you have," we are congratulating the person based on the unstated belief that they chose the shape of their zygomatic arches. But it's not that big of a problem if we can't achieve that mindset. But it is a big one if when, say, considering that six-year old whose frontocortical development has been hammered by early life stress, we mistake his crummy impulse control for lack of some moral virtue. Or to do the same in any other realm of the foibles and failures, even the monstrosities of human behavior. This is extremely relevant to the world of the criminal justice system. And to anyone who would say that it is dehumanizing to claim that criminal behavior is the end product of a broken biological machine, the answer must be that it is a hell of a lot better than damning the behavior as the end product of a rotten soul. And it is equally not a great thing to think in terms of praise, of good character, of good choice, when looking at the end products of lucky, salutary biology.
But it is so difficult to really believe that there is no free will, when so many of the threads of causality are not yet known, or are as intellectually inaccessible as having to automatically think about the behavioral consequences of everything from the selective pressures of hominid evolution to what someone had for breakfast. This difficulty is something that we should all worry about.
***
Over more drinks and more meals that I care to remember, I have argued with colleagues and friends about the existence of free will.
Drawing on recent findings in neuroscience, about delayed conscious awareness of actions and reactions, but also on a determinist view of causality, most of my conversationalists have insisted that there is no such thing as free will.
For my part, looking at events in ancient and recent history and reflecting on the sometimes surprising conscious life decisions made by others and myself (Martin Luther!), I argue with equal vigor that human beings have free will and that exercising it is what distinguishes us from other animals.
Of course there are various compromises possible: Daniel Dennett-type views that we should act "as if" there were free will and treat others the same way; William James; 'My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will:" Or Daniel Kahneman's implication that System 1 is automatic, while System 2 involves conscious reflecting.
But I've come to the conclusion that the belief or lack of belief in free will is not a scientific matter. Rather, to use the term created by the historian of science Gerald Holton, we are dealing here with 'themata'—fundamental assumptions that scientists and other scholars bring to the work that they do. And as such, the existence or the denial of free will, like the question of whether human nature is basically universal or inherently varied, is not one that will ever be settled. And so I have stopped worrying about it.
What should we be worried about? Pick your poison, or poisons. There's no shortage: just read the front page of any major newspaper or watch the network and cable news shows. And if you are concerned that you haven't worried about the right things, or enough things, stop fretting. There are surely others who have it covered.
Ever since the phrase "the age of anxiety" entered the lexicon, each generation has claimed they have more to worry about than the previous one. But the fact is, anxiety is part of the human condition. It's the price we pay for having brain that makes predictions about things that haven't happened, the ability to see a future that is not necessarily foretold by the past.
Though we are an anxious species, we aren't all equally anxious. We each have our set point of anxiety—a point towards which we gravitate. Ever notice how short lived is the calm that results from eliminating a source of worry? Get rid of one, and pretty soon something else takes its place, keeping each of us hovering around our special level of worry.
Anxiety can be debilitating. But even those who don't have an anxiety disorder still have stuff circling through their synapses that sometimes interferes with life's simplest chores. We don't necessarily want to get rid of anxiety altogether, as it serves a purpose—it allows us to focus our energy on the future. What we should worry about is finding some way to use rather than be used by our anxiety.
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