Respecting People with Different Beliefs

This post has a similar message to The Stigma Against Being Wrong

At my brother’s wedding last weekend, I shared a table with some good, interesting people. During the course of the conversation, one of them asked another, whom she had just met, what his religious beliefs were. He gave the standard American Protestant response, that God and Jesus were real, and so were Heaven and Hell, and you would go to one or the other based on whether you believed Jesus was God, and was resurrected from the dead, and you pledged your life to him. The questioner asked, “what about people who never hear the message?” To which he replied, “if they just look around at life, they’ll know. Because how did it get here?” The questioner responded, “Well it’s all evolving, isn’t it?” To which the person being questioned said, “I don’t see how that’s possible. After all, everything tends to break down over time, not get more complex.”

At this point in the conversation, I was itching to jump in. He was getting close to a concept in thermodynamics called entropy, but was under a common misconception. In a nutshell, entropy is the measure of whether energy is usable or not. Over time, energy goes from a low entropy state to a high entropy state, and the higher the entropy, the less usable the energy. But this does not mean that everything breaks down over time. While the energy is in transition from low entropy to high entropy, all kinds of complex processes can happen.

Our computers do all kinds of complex things like play games and generate text documents, by taking in electricity, low entropy energy, and converting it into heat, high entropy energy. Life takes in food, low entropy, and releases high entropy heat, and by doing this it is able to metabolize and think and exercise and heal and reproduce. The Earth’s biosphere has low entropy energy coming in as sunlight and geothermal heat from the mantle, and releases high entropy energy as infrared light radiating into space. This energy cycle powers most of what happens naturally on Earth, including evolution. Evolution works perfectly well in the context of thermodynamics, because although the organisms become more complex over generations, the overall entropy of the thermodynamic system they are a part of increases.

But I said none of this, and when the person asking the questions turned to me for my expertise as a physicist, I said no. I wasn’t going to gang up on this guy and try to talk him out of his beliefs. Especially not here at a wedding, where everyone was happy and getting along. But oh man, I was so eager to tear his misconceptions to pieces, that the only way to keep myself from the temptation was to put up my hand and shy away, saying, "no, no!" It wasn't dignified, and a more mature thinker would have been able to decline with grace, but it was what I needed to do in the moment to keep things peaceful and positive.

In the end, we are all human. We are all wrong about many things. We may become wiser and gain knowledge, but we will never be perfect. It is liberating to realize that other people's beliefs really aren't that important; it's how we act that matters. So when we meet someone who has different beliefs from us, even if we are experts and they are not, there is no need for us to correct them. Instead, we should respect them, and allow them to have their own beliefs, trusting that if and when they are ready, they will seek out a deeper understanding of the subject of their own free will.

Building an Economics View: Basic Needs

Building an Economics View:
The Purpose of the Economy
Problem-Solving Mindset
Production and Distribution
Motivations and Incentives
Inequality

I’ve recently noticed that when people say things I disagree with about economics, I find myself tempted to reply with an angry rant. I have no idea why any reasonable person would say something so obviously incorrect, so I feel it must be because they are a bad person, and I treat them as such. But when the fire dies down and I look at what I have said, I realize this is counter to my own philosophy of assuming people are good and peacefully allowing them to disagree with me. This suggests that the problem lies with me, not them.

So what is going on? When I think about it, I realize I’ve been through this before. This anger is a result of cognitive dissonance between my intellectual pride and evidence that one of my views is not well thought out. When I examine my views of economics with a clear head, I find an incoherent jumble of ideas mashed together from all kinds of different sources. One moment I will say something capitalist, the next something socialist, and the next something anarchist, without any notion of how they might fit together or contradict. Clearly this is no good.

With this realization, I have decided to do with economics what I have done in the past with religion and morality, and that is to break apart my crumbling views, sweep aside my cultural influences, and start over from a clean slate. This time, though, I am going to write up the process here on A Scientist’s Fiction, so that you, dear readers, may see my thought process as I go.

The first step, when constructing a view, is to define what we’re talking about. What is economics? The first thing that comes to mind is money, but that is an emergent feature of economics in practice. At a more basic level, economics is the study of the production and distribution of resources. It would be good to have a term that means a specific rule, tradition, or regulation that affects how things are produced and distributed, so let’s call those economic mechanisms. An economic system is a collection of economic mechanisms that work together as a whole.

There are two parts to economics. The first is to study economic mechanisms and systems to find out how they work and what they do. But before we do that, we need to ask ourselves what separates a good economic system from a bad one, or in other words, for what purposes we are producing resources.

About a year ago, we did a series on morality, in which I argued for a version of Utilitarianism that can be summed up as “more good is better.”  Good is defined in another post as the perceptions we get through our moral sense, which is the same kind of sense as our most well-known five senses. The moral sense can be stimulated by circumstances, actions, states of being, etc. These things are not themselves good or bad, but take on a level of goodness when they are paired with someone's moral sense. In line with Deontology, everyone's individual good is equally valid. This gives us a context in which to construct our economics views. We are looking for systems and mechanisms that do as much good for as many people as possible.

Here we run into a problem. Economic mechanisms do very specific things. If “good” is different for everyone, how is it possible to know what kind of economic system will maximize it? What we need is an environment where people can pursue good in whatever form it takes for them. This is the motivation for the idea of basic human rights. The United States Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but I am going to be pedantic and say it should have been the pursuit of a good life, because there are other forms of good besides happiness. The measure of an economic system, then, is how easy it makes exercising these rights to as many people as possible.

Some people believe that human rights are a government responsibility, and economics has nothing to do with it. But that view is misguided. If someone does not have enough food, they do not have liberty, because they must spend all of their energy to get food, rather than pursuing a good life. Sure, some people may find good lives by the same actions that get them food, but even for them there is no liberty if there is no choice.

In order for someone to be free to fully exercise their fundamental rights, they require a basic set of needs to be met. What are these basic needs? Well, in order to pursue a good life, people need food and water, shelter, healthcare, transportation, and information. With these five needs covered (I count food and water as one), people have all that they require in order to pursue their own good, whether that be to earn money and live in more luxury, to volunteer for service projects, to plant and tend a personal garden, to contemplate the nature of existence, or any of a billion other ways for people to find meaning in life.

But what determines how much of the five basic needs is enough? After all, a person can live, albeit uncomfortably, on one meal a day. This question is not easy to answer, but at the very least, people should not have to spend energy worrying about how they are going to remain healthy and whether they will have sufficient options available for pursuing purpose. Perhaps we will examine this question more deeply in the future.

We now have a foundation for our views: an economic system or policy is good in proportion to the percentage of people to whom it provides sufficient food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, and information. Of course, a system that adequately provides all of these things to everyone will have its own problems, and maybe we'll have a discussion about them in the future, but for now it makes sense to focus on the problems we face right now.

You may notice that we have not actually talked about any particular economic system or mechanism yet. That is because if we hadn't set up the moral foundation, we would have no way to evaluate it. I am not sure where this series will take us from here, but that is the beauty of constructing a new view. Maybe we will talk about work and purpose. Maybe we will talk about taxation and redistribution. Maybe we will talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the market. Whatever it is, it will be explored in the spirit of curiosity and of making the world better for everyone.

What is Good?

About a year ago, we did a series on morality, and concluded with Utilitarianism as a meta-ethical framework by which to decide which personal moral system is most appropriate for each circumstance. But when talking about Utilitarianism, I made the same mistake that most Utilitarian advocates make, and that is to define good by a word that means something else. Whether this word is happiness, pleasure, fulfillment, wellbeing, eudaimonia, or, in my case, satisfaction, it feels too limiting, like we’re shifting the definition of good to mean something else. So today, I am going to explain what I mean by “good,” and in the future, I will simply call it “good,” rather than any of those other less satisfactory labels.

We start by observing that we feel that some things are worthy of happening more than others. These things can take the form of circumstances, actions, attitudes, and plenty of other types of things. When presented with two of these things, we will judge one to be better than the other. Unless we are contemplating philosophy, this judgment is made by observing how we feel about it, and this feeling is stimulated by the comparison, just like our vision is stimulated by the light entering our eyes, and our hearing is stimulated by the sound entering our ears. In other words, we have a sense of right and wrong.

You might think, like a lot of philosophers throughout history, that having a sense of good means we must be perceiving some objective good that is out in the world and is independent from our perception. But there is no reason to believe our perceptions always show us objective things. For instance, the objects we see have no color, they just reflect different wavelengths of light. The colors come into being when our brains interpret the signals from the wavelengths of light enter our eyes. Similarly, good is not an inherent property of the circumstances, actions, etc. that exist in the world, but comes into being as the interpretations our brains make of those things. So then what is good? Good is when the sense of good is stimulated.

But there’s a problem that immediately jumps out at us. Different people perceive different things as good and bad. We see this all the time. People argue and fight because they disagree about whether something is good or bad.

There are three approaches to resolving this. The first is to look for universal moral goods, things that cause everyone’s sense of good to signal the same thing. The idea is that these are truly good, and everything else is conditional. The second approach is Relativism, the idea that there is no real good or bad, and it just depends on your point of view. The third approach is Deontology, which says everyone’s sense of good is equally valid, and no one’s good should be given more weight than anyone else’s. Building upon Deontology, we get Utilitarianism, which says when you add up everyone’s individual good, we get an objective total good.

One person’s sense of good is most strongly stimulated by learning about the universe. Another’s is most strongly simulated by training their body and working together with a team to rise through competitive ranks. Another’s is by doing work with their hands that has practical value to those around them. Deontology and Utilitarianism say that none of these are good intrinsically, but they are all good when paired with the people they are good for.