Knowing versus Understanding

They aren't the same thing. As a while male, I know racism is wrong and I know constraining a woman's right to choose is wrong. But I cannot truly understand all the implications of these. Two examples from this week:

1. Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon talks briefly about a bill being considered in the Ohio legislature that would require women to get the permission of the sperm donor before getting an abortion. I know immediately this is a horrifying law and also that these types of laws generally do not get passed (except in South Dakota). But in writing about the practicalities, she points out that women will just get a male friend to vouch for being the father and:

Every woman reading this is taking a quick mental inventory of what man they could trust to do this without gloating about his power over you.

Yes. She's right and I didn't think of that right away. That's the difference between knowing and understanding. I know the proposed law is wrong, but I don't live with the knowledge that the people around me might democratically vote to take away my basic freedoms at any time, so I don't have this type of reflexive thinking. Althought I'd like to think I'd be the kind of person my female friends would think of as absolutely reliable in this spot. I wonder if they do.

2. Ta-Nehisi Coates has been mulling over the Gates' arrest in his own house in Cambridge. And also the death of Shem Walker in NYC. Two black men who were disrespectful to cops, but did nothing obviously wrong. One arrested, the other shot dead. I know being a cop is hard, they are almost always meaning well and I know it's best to always be respectful.

But I do not know what it's like to be a responsible, successful black person (man in particular, I suspect) and have to live one's whole life knowing this could be around the corner for you. One day you are part of the priviledged class -- you're successful, social responsible and doing it right. And the next day you're persecuted for your race. I feel like Dave Chappelle and Wanda Sykes have both done comedy on this theme. I find their routines funny and I feel like I "know" what they're talking about. But when TNC says he doesn't feel good with a cop like that holstering a gun around his kids, I realize I don't really understand.


Not understanding doesn't mean I can't be part of the conversation, nor that my opinion is totally invalid. Or even that I can't be right in an argument over policy even with somebody who really does understand. But as a priviledged white male, I have to remember that I don't really feel it the same way they do and that does matter sometimes.

Nativism, fiction, fantasy and politics.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
-- Kung Fu Monkey

A very common theme in fantasy is based around a world where some lucky fraction of the population has an innate ability to control magic. The same concept occurs in SF and comic book worlds with other kinds of special powers (especially mental powers like the Force). Usually the story begins with the protagonist discovering something that indicates that they are special and often then being contacted by a secret or semi-secret society for training and the story's adventures.

It's all fine and fun and the are a million ways to tell the story of growth and self-discovery from there. The meme's popularity suggests there's something pretty fundamental (adolescent?) about the idea of suddenly discovering that you are special and life isn't as ordinary and mundane as it seems.

But hiding under the concept is a very strong theory of nativism -- some people are born special. Those endowed with special powers can do things other cannot. This enables the story to be constructed as: something bad is going to happen and only the protagonist (you) can prevent it! If it didn't require specialness, then anybody could do it.

If the author needs to flesh out the world with other characters who share the specialness, then it will be necessary to figure out how to place the super-powered (magical) in the world. A question to face is then: why don't the super-powered run everything? What stops them from taking over the world and enslaving the non-powered? Often, this is set up as the thing the villian will do with their super-powers and the task of the protagonist is to stop them.

So you seem to find the super-powered ending up in certain kinds of roles. They might be hidden for fear of persecution (e.g., early X-men or Harry Potter) or perhaps they take on hidden, specialized advisory or problem-solving roles (Jedi in Star Wars, wizards in LoTR, most comic books). Some sense of duty or empathy towards the unpowered keeps them from exerting their dominance over everybody else. But it's also worth noting that the fiction worlds based on this idea are virtually never really democratic. At best they are democratic until trouble comes and then control is turned over to the super-powered elite to save everybody.

But even without evidence of magical superpowers, theories of nativist differences among people are everywhere as explanations of real-world phenomena. Given how much inequality exists in society, there's going to be a temptation to hypothesize that some fraction of the reason that some people end up at the high end is based on nativist differences (better IQ genes is the most popular version). Note that this is a lot like saying you're born with superpowers -- superpowers of intellect or related success-increasing traits.

I suspect this idea is what makes Randianism, objectivism and related forms of libertarian thinking so attractive to adolescents (and some never get over it). It's like discovering that you are Harry Potter, only instead of being a particularly powerful wizard, your power is in your ability to generally be on the winning side in our capitalist society. And if you want to push on that idea, well, why shouldn't the best and brightest own and run everything? Do you want imbeciles making policy decisions?

If you accept the logic of strong innate/nativist differences in ability, it's a tough logic to fight. One way is the "smart technocrat" concept, which is a lot like taking the best and brightest and making them the Jedi (wizards) of real society. Perhaps operating as stealthy bureaucrats who quiety solve problems and run things from behind the scenes (e.g., the Fed Reserve Chair).

This seems to map onto political approaches. In general, the Republican version says let competition work itself out and let the best and brightest have what they need to run the world the best. I would guess why they end up being the natural party of racists -- anybody who believes they are genetically superior to others wants the benefit of that superiority.

On the Democratic side, I think there's a number of different approaches to opposing the idea. The empathic "smart technocrat" (i.e., neoliberal) approach is one. A harder approach is to attack the underlying nativism directly.

In a generally laissez-faire society, competition (markets) will spread people out along a success continuum. The more successful will tend to have more resources and frequently as a result also have greater control over the political structure. If you are both strongly nativist and believe that success is well-predicted by innate differences, you should be ok with this since the better, smarter, more innately successful people will tend to be in charge.

But this fails if either innate differences are relatively small or success is strongly affected by non-innate factors (the phenotype does not always follow from the genotype). In either case, there is less reason to believe the set of genes among the successful is any more likely to predict future success than the sets of genes among the unsuccessful. From there, it is easy to argue in favor of democracy and for more equitable distribution of resources.

PGG

A recent letter to Nature looking at communal activities and whether/how/if they emerge from individual dynamics clued me in to some of the ideas in current research on this topic.

The model these authors use (and appears to be standard) is the Public Goods Game (PGG). In this, a group of actors each chooses to cooperate at some cost 'c' and the benefit of the cooperation is distributed across the whole group, both cooperators and defectors. Defecting is still the dominant strategy because you gain the benefit without paying the cost. The question is, how do you get a group to cooperate under these conditions?

One idea is that there are 'punishers' who identify and punish the defectors, making defecting no longer a viable strategy. The authors are tackling the question of how you get punishers into a community and come up with some conditions under which the most common stable equilibrium is a mix of cooperators and punishers.

Some points of basic difference in thinking:
* The PGG game is a nice extension to communal activities. And my idea of having enforced social norms seems to imply the existence of some sort of enforcer (punisher). How social norm enforcers get into the system seems more basic than my thinking.
* But it doesn't seem to consider the idea of competing communities. Those would seem to enforce a certain kind of punishment as well. If your community doesn't cooperate and gain the benefits, a neighboring community (tribe) will out-compete you.
* The PGG game also implicitly leaves the D-D cell as a very bad thing. I think this is the typical assessment, but it points out to me that maybe it's not that simple. In these games Defect is the opposite of Cooperate. But Compete is also the opposite the Cooperate. It's not synonymous with Defect, but it overlaps a lot. And groups who compete get global social benefits as well under certain conditions.
* Which leads me to think that Symmetry is maybe the key idea for me. You don't just need C-C outcomes, but the idea is that you want C-C and D-D outcomes and avoid the C-D cells. If you can make the case for this, then homogeniety of decision processes becomes high utility.
* The PGG model (and maybe most game theory) doesn't really dig into the idea of the individual decision arising from a series of cognitive operations. Nor is there any learning. I suppose you could say that learning to become a cooperator from being a defector is identical to replacement in their models. But if there are environmental context effects on learning, these might affect that process (i.e., change the replacement function). Both the idea of homogenizing cognition across individuals and the effect of reinforcement learning in symmetry-dominated groups (which will lead to C being rewarded over D and increase altruism) require doing some cognitive psychology on the actors.
* The issue of the virtuous D-D conditions may be complex. It seems to me to be the place where capitalism occurs -- competition for ideas, information, valuation seems to emerge from D-D interactions. I have a strong intuition that a high percentage of dyadic capitalist interactions are D-D. E.g., prices set on supply/demand rather than value to the purchaser, any "trading" that is based on estimates of future value (the transaction should only occur when the seller and buyer have different estimates). Is this an unusual idea? How common or useful are virtuous D-D interactions versus C-C interactions in capitalist interactions (buy-and-hold long from an IPO or bond is a C-C, you cooperate in providing capital, there's a communal gain from the investment growth and the rewards benefit all participators).
* The the communal action model of the PGG, D-D can be better than C-D if the group action has some non-linearity to it, e.g., it requires a certain number of C actors to gain the benefit. Then if some Cooperate but not enough to gain the benefit, it's a communal loss. This is a very minor version of the "virtuous D-D" where D-D > C-D.


The abstract from the Nature paper:

Social diversity promotes the emergence of cooperation in public goods games

Francisco C. Santos¹, Marta D. Santos² & Jorge M. Pacheco²

1. Institut de Recherches Interdisciplinaires et de Développements en Intelligence Artificielle (IRIDIA), Computer and Decision Engineering Department, Université Libre de Bruxelles, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
2. ATP-group, Centro de Fisica Teórica e Computacional (CFTC) and Departamento de Física da Universidade de Lisboa, Complexo Interdisciplinar, Av. Prof. Gama Pinto 2, 1649-003 Lisboa, Portugal

Correspondence to: Jorge M. Pacheco² Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to J.M.P. (Email: pacheco@cii.fc.ul.pt).

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Abstract

Humans often cooperate in public goods games^{1, 2, 3} and situations ranging from family issues to global warming^{4, 5}. However, evolutionary game theory predicts^{4, 6} that the temptation to forgo the public good mostly wins over collective cooperative action, and this is often also seen in economic experiments⁷. Here we show how social diversity provides an escape from this apparent paradox. Up to now, individuals have been treated as equivalent in all respects^{4, 8}, in sharp contrast with real-life situations, where diversity is ubiquitous. We introduce social diversity by means of heterogeneous graphs and show that cooperation is promoted by the diversity associated with the number and size of the public goods game in which each individual participates and with the individual contribution to each such game. When social ties follow a scale-free distribution⁹, cooperation is enhanced whenever all individuals are expected to contribute a fixed amount irrespective of the plethora of public goods games in which they engage. Our results may help to explain the emergence of cooperation in the absence of mechanisms based on individual reputation and punishment^{10, 11, 12}. Combining social diversity with reputation and punishment will provide instrumental clues on the self-organization of social communities and their economical implications.

IPDG

In a standard "prisoner's dilemma" game, the payoff matrix is set up to make Defection the dominant strategy. The concept captures a lot of situations where you could choose to do something helpful to others (= Cooperate, in the IPDG) and if everybody cooperates, everybody wins. But in many of these situations, if everybody else is cooperating, you can personally maximize by Defecting. You gain the benefits of everybody else cooperating, but you don't bear the cost of cooperating.

Example: picking up litter. If everybody does it, the environment gets clean. But if everybody else is doing it, you can stop doing it and get the benefit of the clean environment (somebody else will pick it up) without doing the work. But, if everybody starts to Defect and you still Cooperate, now you get all the cost and no real benefit.

An interesting payoff matrix looks something like:
Coop/Coop: +1/+1
Defect/Coop: +2/-5 (and vice versa)
Defect/Defect: -1/-1

In these kinds of games, the math is pretty clear that absent external knowledge of what the other actor will do, you are best served to Defect. In iterated games where you have some knowledge over time of what the other actor does, the tit-for-tat strategy is optimal (do to the other person whatever they did to you last, but cooperate on the first trial).

The math implies a puzzle about why people engage in altruism -- why cooperate at all? Are people not rational? Or do they expect some return from their reputation -- if you cooperate and re-engage the same person later and they remember you, perhaps they'll cooperate back and you'll get a return on your invested cost. The math seems to depend on the probability of reciprocation.

Douglas Hofstadter, however, points out another reason to cooperate which he calls Superrationality. The idea is that if you know your opponent/partner is extremely insightful, you might both be able to reason in a way that leads to similar conclusions. E.g., you both realize the game is Defect dominant, so you'll both initially think to defect. But you both also realize that given that you will both choose the same option, you could safely cooperate knowing the other person will also find the reason to cooperate and you'll get to the C-C outcome.

Whether people actually think that way is one thing, but it does point out the value of symmetry in the game. Any time 2 actors choose the same action, the result is "fair" to both of them and optimal for them combined if they both cooperate. The payoff matrix described above is also designed to maximize the joint outcome in the C-C cell.

If we extend the IPDG beyond two-person interactions to think of the welfare of a collection of individuals (who each interact in pairs), it's clear that maximizing the community welfare is done by maximizing the number of C-C interactions. This is a situation where you personally maximize your utility by Defecting, but your community is maximized by Cooperating.

If we imagine a large number of competing communities out in the world, what is the optimal way for a community to out-compete other communities?

Two things that will help a lot are: (1) social norms defined in the community that encourage/require cooperation as much as possible and (2) in-group/out-group biases.

On (1), communities with strong social norms that require people to set aside personal gain and cooperate for communal benefit will out-compete more individualistic communities. In fact, for the specific payoff matrix above, you don't strictly need a cooperation/altruism directive, you can actually get the communal benefit mainly through symmetry. If you have a very homogeneous set of actors (who all think alike), they should tend to come to cooperate/defect decisions the same way and tend to end up in the C-C or D-D cells (which are community maximizing). Also, if there's any learning in the actors, experience with only C-C or D-D interactions will tend to reinforce Cooperating over Defection and the community will move towards general altruism.

On (2), it's obvious that if you want your community to out-compete other communities, you want to maximize Cooperation (altruism) within your community, but personally maximize utility outside and Defect (or at best tit-for-tat).

Curiously, this seems to imply that if you have many communities competing over a long period of time and success is related to how well your community structure maximizes outcomes, communities that construct very strong social norms, homogeneous thinking and strong out-group biases should tend to win. Does this provide insight into the prevalance of groups that organize around religions that are particularly controlling, nationalism (and strong cultural expectations) and even racism?